workerscontrol.net

Mario Tronti is one of the founder of the theory of operaismo. One of the founder of the journal "Quaderni Rossi" with Raniero Panzieri, he left with other intellectuals the editorial group in 1963 to found the new journal "classe operaia" ("working class"). The main theorical differences that brought to the breakaway, regarded the interpretation of the working class behaviours. According to Tronti the refusal of work was to be considered as the main expression of the working class autonomy as the political strategy pre-exist in the spontaneous behaviours of the working class. The function of the party was to understand, express and organize it.

Goldman was born 1869 in Kowno (at the time Russian) and emigrated to the United States in 1885. There she saw the executions of striking workers subsequent to the Haymarket-Affair in Chicago, after this experience she got involved with the anarchist movement.

From 1906 till 1917 Goldman was editor of the anarchist magazine “Mother Earth”. Because of her political engagement she was repeatedly arrested and finally deported from the USA. Once back in Russia, she could directly witness the October Revolution. However she later took a critical position to its outcomes. 

As two of the founders of the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC), with Michael Barratt Brown, Ken Coates and Tony Topham were key influences on the development of the labour movement and politics during the period of raised worker militancy in the UK in the 1960s through to its decline in the 1980s.  Part of a generation of socialists who distanced themselves from the Communist Party both were signatories of The May Day Manifesto, a defining document of the ‘new left’ in Britain. Both maintained precarious relations with the Labour Party although Coates was also closely allied to Ernest Mandel and his wing of the Trotskyist movement while Topham was drawn towards Tito’s Yugoslavia with early publication (along with Fred Singleton) on its self-management system.

Born on March 5th, 1871, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew and participant in the Russian Revolution of 1905, was a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party in the joint Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

Next to Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg was the most important representative of the left-wing socialist, anti-militarist, and internationalist positions in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany before 1918. She was a passionate and convincing critic of capitalism as well as anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies within the Bolsheviki. She confronted the compelling logic of economic laws and political strategies with the utopia of a new world. According to Luxemburg, this new world needed to be created in spite of widespread despair, deprivation of rights, cowardliness and the corruption of power.

Paul Mattick archive in Englisch in the Marxist’s Internet Archives

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/index.htm

Richard Müller was one of the leading figures of the German Revolution 1918. Starting as a local union organizer he began to organize political strikes against WWI in 1916 with a group called "Revolutionary Stewards". This group had started as opposition within the German Metalworkers Union (DMV) and later became very influential for the movement of worker´s councils in 1918/1919.

Richard Müller himself was head of the "Executive Council of Workers´ and Soldiers´ Councils" in 1918, he wrote several influential texts on council socialism and industrial democracy.