Thesis on the Blairmore, Alberta Government

[Soseloshvili]

For any who don't know, the first Communist (or any sort of Socialist) government in the Western Hemisphere was the Communist Party of Canada's municipal government in Blairmore, Alberta, 1933-36.

It's a pretty important part of Socialist history, especially for Canadians, and recently I dug up this on it:

http://www.uleth.ca/dspace/handle/10133/530

It's a thesis by someone actually from Blairmore for the University of Lethbridge. The guy had access to people who were actually involved in the Communist government, and he goes really into depth about how and why Communism was seen as socially acceptable enough at the time to elect a Communist government.

I had to share this, it seemed like a really good find.

[Kléber]

There were Socialists elected to municipal office in the US long before then. Also in terms of real revolutionary governments, there was an anarchist-Communist uprising in Patagonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonia_rebelde) (southern Argentina) in 1921 that established a short-lived workers' regime. Going way back there were Quilombos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilombos) like Palmares (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmares_%28quilombo%29) which, while not exactly communist, were entirely revolutionary.

[Soseloshvili]

There were Socialists elected to municipal office in the US long before then. Also in terms of real revolutionary governments, there was an anarchist-Communist uprising in Patagonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonia_rebelde) (southern Argentina) in 1921 that established a short-lived workers' regime. Going way back there were Quilombos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilombos) like Palmares (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmares_%28quilombo%29) which, while not exactly communist, were entirely revolutionary.

Yes, there were, and there were Socialists elected to municipal positions before this too. But this was an entirely Socialist government. Every single member of the 1933 Blairmore government was a member of the Communist Party of Canada. This was the first time this happened in the Americas.

If you want to be general like that, I could claim the ad hoc union "government" which ran Winnipeg (the capital of Manitoba) for several months in 1919 was Socialist, but that wouldn't be exactly true.

The Blairmore government was the first entirely Socialist government in the Americas. Though people may have been elected to the occasional position, and occasional uprisings may have established something ressembling a government at one point or another, this was still the first.