American Cossacks and the Class Struggle: Socialism, Industrial Labor, and the Fight against State Policing, 1902–15

Between 1902 and 1915, socialist organizers concentrated in the municipal socialist hub of Reading, PA, forged one of the most extensive industrial union formations in the early century. They built and sustained a multiethnic movement that spanned the state—the heart of industrial capitalism in the U.S.—by unifying workers across multiple sectors and ethnic and racial boundaries through a mass anti-state police campaign. This paper explores the relationship between so-called municipal socialism, industrial unionism, and the development of socialist labor politics in the final years of the second International. It links localized and regionalized socialist anti-police organizing to global developments in anti-imperial resistance while it considers how socialists at the heart of industrial capitalism in the United States built durable political formations that would later prove decisive in the rise of worker education and the industrial unionism of the CIO era. Finally, the paper reconsiders municipal or “sewer” socialism as a project deeply intertwined with a political program that city lines could not contain.