This is a study of five key moments in the history of the British and Irish working class movements. John Foster applies some of the key insights of Soviet Marxist thinkers on language to the 1842 General Strike, the Councils of Action 1920, the Glasgow and Belfast General Strikes of 1919 and the 1972 UCS work-in on Clydeside.

JOHN FOSTER was born in 1940, he studied at Cambridge and subsequently lectured at Cambridge, Strathclyde and Paisley/UWS. He published Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution in 1974 followed by a series of monographs, jointly written with Charles Woolfson, on the 1971-2 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders dispute, the occupation of the Scottish Caterpillar plant in 1986 and the oil workers occupations of 1991-92. He has written widely on the national question in Britain and most recently contributed to the six-volume history of the TGWU/Unite. He was on the editorial board of Marxism Today 1967-85, was editor of Our History 1969-1985 and has been on the editorial board of Marx Memorial Library's Theory and Struggle since 2015.