ALLIANCE:
ARTICLES FROM KARL MARX AND
FREDERICK ENGELS ON THE USA AND IMMIGRATION -
FOUR ARTICLES:
TRANSCRIBED FOR THE WEB: FROM:
"Marx And Engels On the United
States"; Moscow; 1979; Serving As An Appendix to the August 2000
issue of Alliance: "On Immigration".
ARTICLE ONE:
Karl Marx: "THE SITUATION IN
NORTH AMERICA";
London, November 4, 1862
General Bragg, who commands the Southern
army in Kentucky-the other fighting forces of the South stationed there
are restricted to guerrilla bands-on invading this border state issued
a proclamation which throws considerable light on the latest combined moves
of the Confederacy. Bragg's proclamation, addressed to the states of the
North-west, implies that his success in Kentucky is a matter of course,
and obviously calculates on the eventuality of a victorious advance into
Ohio, the central state of the North. In the first place, he declares the
readiness of the Confederacy to guarantee free navigation on the Mississippi
and the Ohio. This guarantee only acquires import the moment the slaveholders
find themselves in possession of the border states. At Richmond, therefore,
it was implied that the simultaneous invasions of Lee in Maryland and Bragg
in Kentucky would secure possession of the border states at one blow. Bragg
then goes on to prove the right of the South, which is only fighting for
its independence, but, for the rest, wants peace. The real, characteristic
point of the proclamation, however, is the offer of a separate peace with
the North-western states, the invitation to them to secede from the Union
and join the Confederacy, since the economic interests of the North-west
and the South coincide just as much as those of the North-west and the
North-East are inimically opposed. We see: The South barely fancied itself
safely in possession of the border states, when it officially blabbed out
its ulterior object of a reconstruction of the Union to the exclusion of
the states of New England.
Like the invasion of Maryland, however, that of Kentucky
has also come to grief: as the former in the battle of Antietam Creek,
so the latter in the battle of Perryville, near Louisville. As there, so
here, the Confederates found themselves on the offensive, having attacked
the advance guard of Buell's army. The Federals owe their victory to General
McCook, the commander of the advance guard, who held his ground against
the foe's far superior forces long enough to give Buell time to bring his
main body into the field. There is not the slightest doubt that the defeat
at Perryville will entail the evacuation of Kentucky. The most considerable
guerrilla band, formed out of the most fanatical partisans to the slave
system in Kentucky and led by General Morgan, has been annihilated at Frankfort
(between Louisville and Lexington) at almost the same time. Finally,
the decisive victory of Rosecrans at Corinth supervenes, which makes imperative
the hastiest retreat of the beaten invasion army commanded by General Bragg.
Thus the Confederate campaign for the reconquest of the
lost border slave states, which was undertaken on a large scale, with military
skill and with the most favourable chances, has come utterly to grief.
Apart from the immediate military results, these struggles contribute in
another way to the removal of the main difficulty. The hold of the slave
states proper on the border states naturally rests on the slave element
of the latter, the same element that enforces diplomatic and constitutional
considerations on the Union government in its struggle against slavery.
In the border states, however, the principal theatre of the Civil War,
this element is in practice being reduced to nothing by the Civil War itself.
A large section of the slaveholders, with their "black chattels", are constantly
migrating to the South, in order to bring their property to a place of
safety. With each defeat of the Confederates this migration is renewed
on a larger scale.
One of my friends,(Joseph Wedemyer-Original footnote)
a German officer, who fought under the star-spangled banner in Missouri,
Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee in turn, writes to me that this migration
is wholly reminiscent of the exodus from Ireland in 1847 and 1848. Furthermore,
the energetic sections of the slaveholders, the youth, on the one hand,
and the political and military leaders, on the other, separate themselves
from the bulk of their class, since they either form guerrilla bands in
their own states and, as guerrilla bands, are annihilated, or they leave
home and are enlisted in the army or the administration of the Confederacy.
Hence the result: on the one hand, an immense reduction of the slave element
in the border states, where it had always to contend with the "encroachments"
of competing free labour. On the other hand, removal of the energetic section
of the slaveholders and its white following. There is left behindd only
a sediment of "moderate" slaveholders, who will soon grasp greedily at
the pile of money offered them by Washington for the redemption of their
"black chattels", whose value will in any case be lost as soon as the Southern
market is closed to their sale. Thus the war itself brings about a solution
by actually revolutionising the form of society in the border states.
For the South the most favourable season for waging war
is over; for the North it is beginning, since the inland rivers are now
navigable once more and the combination of land and sea warfare already
attempted with so much success is again possible. The North has eagerly
availed itself of the interval. "Ironclads", ten in number, for the rivers
of the West, are rapidly nearing completion; to which must be added twice
as many semi-armoured vessels for shallow waters. In the East many new
armoured vessels have already left the yards, whilst others are still under
the hammer. All will be ready by the farst of January, 1863. Ericsson,
the inventor and builder of the Monitor, is directing the building
of nine new ships after the same model. Four of them are already "afloat'.
On the Potomac, in Tennessee and Virginia, as well as
at different points in the South-Norfolk, New Bern, Port Royal, Pensacola
and New Orleans the army daily receives fresh reinforcements. The first
levy of 300,000 men, which Lincoln announced in July, has been fully provided
and is in part already at the theatre of war. The second levy of 300,000
men for nine months is gradually being raised. In some states conscription
has been done away with by voluntary enlistment; in none does it encounter
serious difficulties. Ignorance and hatred have decried conscription as
an unheard of occurrence in the history of the United States. Nothing can
be more mistaken. Great bodies of troops were conscripted during the War
of Independence and the second war with England (1812-15), indeed, even
in sundry small wars with the Indians, without this ever encountering opposition
worth mentioning.
It is a noteworthy fact that during the present year Europe
supplied the United States with an emigrant contingent of approximately
100,000 souls and that half of these emigrants consist of Irishmen and
Britons. At the recent congress of the English Association for the Advancement
of Science at Cambridge, the economist Merivale was obliged to remind his
countrymen of a fact which The Times, The Saturday Review, The Morning
Post and The Morning Herald, not to speak of the dii minorum
gentium, (Gods of minor peoples) have so completely forgotten, or want
to make England forget, namely, that the majority of the English surplus
population finds a new home in the United States.
K.Marx; Published in Die Presse No. 309, November
10, 1862
Transcribed by Members of Alliance
Marxist-Leninist (North America) for the WWW; :
August 2000;
From: "Marx & Engels on the
United States"; Moscow; 1979; p. 157-159.
ARTICLE TWO:
"THE CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL
IN THE UNITED STATES";
By Frederick Engels May 3, 1882.
Statistical data recently published
in various English journals show the immense speed with which
the concentration of capital is proceeding in the
United States of America. According to these data, Mr. Vanderbilt
of New York is the richest of the rich. This
railway, landed property, industrial, etc., magnate is estimated
to own (the Americans call it "to be worth") roughly $300 million
(1 dollar=4 marks 25 pfennigs). His property comprises $65 million
in United States Bonds, $50 million New-York-Central and Hudson-River-Railway
shares and $50 million other railway shares as well as enormous
land holdings both in New York and in the interior of the country. The
journals add with admiration that Mr. Vanderbilt could buy up several Rothschilds
and still remain the richest man in the world.
And the Vanderbilt family has amassed this gigantic fortune
in about 30 years! This is a case without parallel in history, writes the
Whitehall Review. We think so too.
Vanderbilt is followed in the list of plutocrats by:
Jay Goud, who is likewise a notorious railway swindler-
$100 million; Mackay, owner of silver mines, who initiated the agitation
for statutory bimetallism- $50 million;
Crocker 50 million;
John Rockefeller, a petroleum tycoon, but not a
petroleur-40 million;
C. P. Huntington-20 million;
D. 0. Mills-20 million;
Senator Fair-30 million;
ex-Governor Stanford- 40 million;
Russell Sage- 15 million;
J.R. Keene-15 million;
S. J. Tilden-15 million;
E. D. Morgan-10 million;
Samuel Sloan- 10 million;
Garrison-10 million;
Cyrus W. Field- 10 million;
Hugh J. Jewett- 5 million;
Sidney Dillon-5 million;
David Dows- 5million;
J. D. Navarro-5 million;
John W Garrett-5 million;
W. B. Astor-5 million.
Thus far the list, which is however
by no means complete. The number of American financial magnates is far
larger. And this fabulous accumulation of wealth is constantly accelerating
as a result of the enormous immigration into America. For this benefits
primarily the capital magnates, either directly or indirectly. Directly
because it causes land prices to rise rapidly, and indirectly because the
majority of immigrants tends to lower the living standard of the American
workers. The numerous strike reports which appear in fraternal newspapers
of ours published in the USA contain even now a growing proportion of strikes
fought to prevent wage reductions, and most of the
strikes aimed at wage increases are basically waged for the same reason,
for they are either brought about by the enormous price rises, or by the
absence of wage increases which usually take place in the spring.
Thus the stream of emigrants which
Europe at present sends every year to America merely helps to develop the
capitalist economy and all its consequences to the utmost, so that sooner
or later a huge crash is inevitable over there. The stream of emigrants
will then come to a halt or perhaps even turn back, i.e. the European worker,
and especially the German worker, will then be faced with the alternative-either
death from starvation or revolution! But once the alternative is put thus,
it means goodbye for those lucky fellows of the holy Prussian-German Empire.
And that moment is closer than most
people imagine. Even now it is difficult for the immigrants to find work
over there and the symptoms of an approaching economic crisis are becoming
more obvious, even a quite trivial cause at the critical moment is sufficient
to trigger off the crash.
Consequently we cannot share the pessimistic
view of the New-Yorker Volkszeitung, although we deplore
the emigration from Germany no less than does the Volkszeitung
and are equally convinced that it will at first lead to a considerable
worsening of the position of the American workers, and although in common
with the Volkszeitung we should like to see the German workers
concentrating their efforts exclusively on the improvement of their position
in Germany. We must after all take the existing circumstances into account
and - since these, owing to the short-sightedness and greed of our opponents,
increasingly preclude development in a truly reformative sense - therefore
consider it our duty, in spite of all panic-mongers, to prepare the minds
for a revolutionary course of events.
Social revolution -
that is the only solution to this conflict, which has been brought about
by the enormous concentration of capital on the one hand and the increasing
poverty of the masses on the other.
Written on May 3, 1882; published in Det Sozialdemokrat
No.21 May 18, 1882.
Transcribed by Members of Alliance
Marxist-Leninist (North America) for the WWW;
August 2000.
From: "Marx & Engels on the
United States"; Moscow; 1979; pp.257-258;
ARTICLE THREE:
From "APPENDIX TO THE AMERICAN
EDITION OF:
"THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING
CLASS IN ENGLAND";
By Frederick Engels
Extract:
"But while England has thus outgrown
the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries
have only just attained it. France, Germany, and especially America, are
the formidable competitors who at this moment - as foreseen by me in 1844
- are more and more breaking up England's industrial monopoly. Their manufactures
are young as compared with those of England, but increasing at a far more
rapid rate than the latter; but curious enough, they have at this moment
arrived at about the same phase of development as English manufacture in
1844. With regard to America, the parallel is indeed most striking. True,
the external surroundings in which the working class is placed in America
are very different, but the same economical laws are a work, and the results,
if not identical in every respect, must still be of the same order. Hence
we find in America the same struggles for a shorter working-day, for a
legal limitation of the working time, especially of women and children
in factories; we find the truck-system in full blossom, and the cottage-system,
in rural districts, made use of by the "bosses" as a means of domination
over the workers. At this very moment I am receiving the American papers
with accounts of the great strike of 12,000 Pennsylvanian coal-miners in
the Connellesville district, and I seem but to read my own description
of the North of England Colliers' strike of 1844. (ORIGINAL
NOTE IN MOSCOW EDITION: This reference is to a miners' and iron
and steel workers' strike in Pennsylvania from Jnauary 22 to February 26,
1886 in which more thatn 10 thousand participated. During this strike the
workers' demands for higher wages and better working condtions were partially
satisfied.) The same cheating of the work-people by false
measure; the same truck-system; the same attempt to break the miners' resistance
by the Capitalists' last, but crushing resource, the eviction of the men
out of their dwellings, the cottages owned by the companies.
There were two circumstances which
for a long time prevented the unavoidable consequences to the capitalist
system from showing themselves in the full glare of day in America. These
were the easy access to the ownership of cheap land, and the influx of
immigration. They allowed, for many years, the great mass of the native
American population to "retire" in early manhood from wage-labor and to
become farmers, dealers, or employers of labor, while the hard work for
wages, the position of a proletarian for life, mostly fell to the lot of
immigrants. But America has outgrown this early stage. The boundless backwoods
have disappeared, and the still more boundless prairies are fast and faster
passing from the hands of the Nation and the states into those of private
owners. The great safety-valve against the formation of a permanent proletarian
class has practically ceased to act. A class of life-long and even hereditary
proletarians exists at this hour in America. A nation of sixty million
striving hard to become - and with every chance of success, too - the leading
manufacturing nation of the world-such a nation cannot permanently import
its own wage-working class; not even if immigrants pour in at the rate
of half a million a year. The tendency of the capitalist system towards
the ultimate splitting-up of society into two classes, a few millionaires
on the one hand, and a great mass of mere wage-workers on the other, this
tendency, though constantly crossed and counteracted by other social agencies,
works nowhere with greater force than in America; and the result has been
the production of a class of native American wage-workers, who form, indeed
the aristocracy of the wage-working class as compared with the immigrants,
but who become conscious more and more every day of their solidarity with
the latter and who feel all the more acutely their present condemnation
to life-long wage-toil, because they still remember the bygone days, when
it was comparatively easy to rise to a higher social level. Accordingly
the working-class movement, in America, has started with truly American
vigor, and as on that side of the Atlantic things march with at least double
the European speed, we may yet live to see America take the lead in this
respect too.
Written on February 25, 1886; Published in the book:
F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
New York, 1887;
Transcribed by Members of Alliance
Marxist-Leninist (North America) for the WWW;
August 2000;
From: "Marx & Engels on the
United States"; Moscow; 1979; pp. 281-282,
ARTICLE FOUR:
"THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AMERICA";
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION:
OF THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING
CLASS IN ENGLAND;"
Frederick Engels
Ten months have elapsed since, at
the translator's wish (Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky), I wrote the Appendix
(see above article in this web-page-Editor Alliance) to this book; and
during these ten months, a revolution has been accomplished in American
society such as, in any other country, would have taken at least ten years.
In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this
one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the
word, in America (NOTE: An English
edition of my book, which was written in 1844, was justified precisely
because the industrial conditions in present-day America correspond almost
exactly to those which obtained in England in the 1840s, i.e. those which
I described. How much this is the case is evident from the articles on
"The Labour Movement in America" by Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling published
in the March, April, May and June issues of Time, the London monthly.
I am referring to these excellent articles with all the greater pleasure
because it offers me an opportunity at the same time to reject the miserable
slanderous accusations against Aveling which the Executive of the American
Socialist Labour Party was unscrupulous enough to circulate. - Engel’s
note to the separate printing of 1887. Translated from the German.)
(ORIGINAL MOSCOW EDITION FOOTNOTE:The
reference here is to the slanderous charges made against the British socialist
Edward Aveling by the Executive of the Socialist Labour Party of North
America, which indcluded several Lassaleans. Aveling was accused of having
submitted forged accounts to the Executive when he was touring America
in September-December 1886 for propaganda purposes , with his wife Eleanor
(Karl Marx's Daughter) and the German socialist Wilhelm Libenicht. Engles
corresponded on this issue for several months and helped Aveling prove
the absurdity and slanderous charactar of these charges. The Socialist
Labor Party of North America was formed at the Unity Congress in Philadelphia
in 1876, by the merger of the American sections of the First International
and other socialast organisations in the USA. Most of its members
were immigrants (chiefly Germans) who had little contact with the Maerican-born
workers. There was a struggle inside the party between teh reformist leaders,
who were mostly Lassalleans, and the Marxist wing headed by Marx's and
Engels' comrade-in-arms Friedrich Adolph Sorge. The party procalimed as
its programme the fight for socialism; but did not become a truely revolutionary
Marxist mass party owing to the sectarian policy of its leaders who ignored
the need for work in the mass organisations of the American proletariat)
that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such
as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic;
and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which
could never take root on American soil. And yet, at that moment, the coming
class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes
of the Pennsylvania coal mines, and of many other trades, and especially
in the preparations, all over the country, for the great Eight Hours' movement
which was to come off, and did come off, in the May foilowing. (The
reference is to the general strike in the USA which began on May 1, 1886
and continued several days under the slogan of struggle for an eight-hour
working day. The strike involved the chief industrial centres - New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago,, Louisville, Saint Louis, Milwaukee and Baltimore,
and ended with nearly 200,000 workers winning shorter working hours. The
employers however launched a counter-attack. On May 4 a bomb was thrown
at a police squad in Chicago, and the police seized this opportunity to
use arms against the workers and arrest several hundred people. Court proceedings
were instituted and harsh sentences meted out to the leaders of the Chicago
working-class movement. Four of them were hanged on Novemebr 1887. In the
following years the gains of the May 1886 strike were reduced to nought
by the capitalists. In commerating this strike the International Socialist
Workers' Congress held in Paris in 1889 adopted a decision on the annual
celebration of May Day by the workers of the world).
That I then duly appreciated these
symptoms, that I anticipated a working class movement on a national scale,
my "Appendix" shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short
time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread
with the rapidity of a prairie-fire, would shake American society to its
very foundations.
The fact is there, stubborn and indisputable.
To what an extent it had struck with terror the American ruling classes,
was revealed to me, in an amusing way, by American journalists who did
me the honor of calling on me last summer; the "new departure" had put
them into a state of helpless fright and perplexity. But at that time the
movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of confused
and apparently disconnected upheavals of that class the suppression of
negro slavery and the rapid development of manufactures, had become the
lowest stratum of American Society. Before the year closed, these bewildering
social convulsions began to take a definite direction. The spontaneous,
instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast
extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent
with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due to the same
causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct
class of American society; a class of -practically speaking - more or less
hereditary wage-workers, proletarians. And with true American instinct
this conscious-ness led them at once to take the next step towards their
deliverance:
The formation
of a political workingmen's party, with a platform of its own, and with
the conquest of the Capitol and the white House for its goal. In May the
struggle for the Eight Hours' working-day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee,
etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of
Labor by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labor
Party organized in all great centers, and the New York, Chicago and Milwaukee
elections. (Original Footnote: During
the preperations for the municipal elections in New York in the autumn
of 1886, a United Labor Party was founded to rally the workers for joint
political action. The initiative belonged to the New York Central Workers'
Union - an assocation of New York trade unions formed in 1882. Similar
parties were organised in many other cities. Led by the new workers' parties,
the working class achieved substantital success in the elections in New
York, Chicago and Milwaukee: Henry George, the United Labor Party candidate
for Mayor of New York City, recieved 31 per cent of the votes; in Chicago,
the adherents of the Labor Party recieved 31 per cent of the votes; in
Chicago the adherents of the Labor Party succeeded in getting ten Party
members elected to the Legislative Assembly of the state: one senator and
nine members of the Lower Chamber. The Labor Party candidates to the USA
Congress was short of only 64 votes. In Milwaukee the Labor Party had its
candidate elected Mayor of the city, one to the Senate and one to the US
Congress.) May and November have hitherto reminded the American
bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of US bonds; henceforth May
and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American
working class presented their coupons for payment.
In European countries, it took the
working class years and years before they fully realized the fact that
they formed a distinct and, under the existing social conditions, a permanent
class of modern society; and it took years again until this class-consciousness
led them to form themselves into a distinct political party, independent
of, and opposed to, all the old political parties formed by the various
sections of the ruling classes. On the more favored soil of America, where
no mediaeval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements
of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth century, the
working class passed through these two stages of its development within
ten months.
Still, all this is but a beginning.
That the laboring masses should feel their community of grievances and
of interests, their solidarity as a class in opposition to all other classes;
that in order to give expression and effect to this feeling, they should
set in motion the political machinery provided for that purpose in every
free country - that is the first step only. The next step is to find the
common remedy for these common grievances, and to embody it in the platform
of the new Labor Party. And this - the most important and the most difficult
step in the movement - has yet to be taken in America.
A new party must have a distinct positive
platform; a platform which may vary in details as circumstances vary and
as the party itself develops, but still one upon which the party, for the
time being, is agreed. So long as such a platform has not been worked out,
or exists but in a rudimentary form, so long the new party, too, will have
but a rudimentary existence; it may exist locally but not yet nationally;
it will be a party potentially but not actually.
That platform, whatever may be its
first initial shape, must develop in a direction which may be determined
beforehand. The causes that brought into existence the abyss between the
working class and the capitalist class are the same in America as in Europe;
the means of filling up that abyss are equally the same everywhere. Consequently,
the platform of the American proletariat will in the long run coincide,
as to the ultimate end to be attained, with the one which, after sixty
years of dissensions and discussions, has become the adopted platform of
the great mass of the European militant proletariat. It will proclaim,
as the ultimate end, the conquest of political supremacy by the working
class, in order to effect the direct appropriation of all means of production
- land, railways, mines, machinery, etc. - by society at large, to be worked
in common by all for the account and benefit of all.
But if the new American party, like
all political parties everywhere, by the very fact of its formation aspires
to the conquest of political power, it is as yet far from agreed upon what
to do with that power when once attained. In New York and the other great
cities of the East, the organisation of the working class has proceeded
upon the lines of Trades' Societies, forming in each city a powerful Central
Labor Union. In New York the Central Labor Union, last November, chose
for its standard-bearer Henry George and consequently its temporary electoral
platform has been largely imbued with his principles. In the great cities
of the North-west the electoral battle was fought upon a rather indefinite
labor platform, and the influence of Henry George's theories was scarcely,
if at all, visible. And while in these great centers of population and
of industry the new class movement came to a political head, we find all
over the country two widespread labor organizations: the "Knights of Labor"
(Original Footnote: The
Knights of Labor (The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor) - an American
workers' organisations founded in Philadelphia in 1869. It was a secret
society up to 1878. Its members were mostly unskilled workers, including
Negroes. Its aim was the establishment of cooperatives and the organisation
of mutual aid, and it took part in a number of working-class actions. But
its leaders were in fact opposed to the workers' participation in the political
struggle and adopted the class collaboration stand. They opposed the 1886
general strike forbidding its members to take part in it; however the rank
and file joined in the strike. After this, it began to lose its influence
among workers and by the end of the 1890's it disintegrated.)
and the "Socialist Labor Party", of which only the latter has a platform
in harmony with the modern European standpoint as summarised above.
Of the three more or less definite
forms under which the American labor movement thus presents itself, the
first, the Henry George movement in New York, is for the moment of a chiefly
local significance. No doubt New York is by far the most important city
of the States; but New York is not Paris and the United States are not
France. And it seems to me that the Henry George platform, in its present
shape, is too narrow to form the basis for anything but a local movement,
or at best for a short-lived phase of the general movement. To Henry George
the expropriation of the mass of the people from the land is the great
and universal cause of the splitting up of the people into Rich and Poor.
Now this is not quite correct historically. In Asiatic and classical antiquity,
the predominant form of class oppression was slavery, that is to say, not
so much the expropriation of the masses from the land as the appropriations
of their persons. When, in the decline of the Poman Republic, the free
Italian peasants were expropriated from their farms, they formed a class
of "poor whites" similar to that of the Southern Slave States before 1861;
and between slaves and poor whites, two classes equally unfit for self-emancipation,
the old world went to pieces. In the Middle Ages, it was not the expropriation
of the people from, but on the contrary, their appropriation
to the land which became the source of feudal oppression.
The peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or villein,
and made liable to tribute to the lord in labor and in produce. It was
only at the dawn of modern times, towards the end of the fifteenth century,
that the expropriation of the peasantry on a large scale laid the foundation
for the modern class of wage-workers who possess nothing but their labor-power
and can live only by the selling of that labor-power to others. But if
the expropriation from the land brought this class into existence, it was
the development of capitalist production, of modern industry and agriculture
on a large scale which perpetuated it, increased it, and shaped it into
a distinct class with distinct interests and a distinct historical mission.
All this has been fully expounded by Marx (Capital, Part VIII: "The
So-Called Primitive Accumulation"). According to Marx, the cause of the
present antagonism of the classes and of the social degradation of the
working class is their expropriation from all means
of production, in which the land is of course included.
If Henry George declares land-monopolization
to be the sole cause of poverty and misery, he naturally finds the remedy
in the resumption of the land by society at large. Now, the Socialists
of the school of Marx, too, demand the resumption, by society, of the land,
and not only of the land but of all other means of production likewise.
But even if we leave these out of the question, there is another difference.
What is to be done with the land? Modern Socialists, as represented by
Marx, demand that it should be held and worked in common and for common
account, and the same with all other means of social production, mines,
railways, factories, etc.; Henry George would confine himself to letting
it out to individuals as at present, merely regulating its distribution
and applying the rents for public, instead of, as at present, for private
purposes. What the Socialists demand, implies a total revolution of the
whole system of social production; what Henry George demands, leaves the
present mode of social production untouched, and has, in fact, been anticipated
by the extreme section of Ricardian bourgeois economists who, too, demanded
the confiscation of the rent of land by the State.
It would of course be unfair to suppose
that Henry George has said his last word once for all. But I am bound to
take his theory as I find it.
The second great section of the American
movement is formed by the Knights of Labour. And that seems to be the section
most typical of the present state of the movement, as it is undoubtedly
by far the strongest. An immense association spread over an immense extent
of country in innumerable "assemblies", representing all shades of individual
and local opinion within the working class; the whole of them sheltered
under a platform of corresponding indistinctness and held together much
less by their impracticable constitution than by the instinctive feeling
that the very fact of their clubbing together for their common aspiration
makes them a great power in the country; a truly American paradox clothing
the most modern tendencies in the most mediaeval mummeries, and hiding
the most democratic and even rebellious spirit behind an apparent, but
really powerless despotism - such is the picture the Knights of Labor offer
to a European observer. But if we are not arrested by mere outside whimsicalities,
we cannot help seeing in this vast agglomeration an immense amount of potential
energy evolving slowly but surely into actual force. The Knights of Labor
are the first national organisation created by the American working class
as a whole; whatever their origin and history, whatever their shortcomings
and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution,
here they are, the work of practically the whole class of American wage-workers,
the only national bond that holds them together, that makes their strength
felt to themselves not less than to their enemies, and that fills them
with the proud hope of future victories. For it would not be exact to say
that the Knights of Labor are liable to development. They are constantly
in full process of development and revolution; a heaving, fermenting mass
of plastic material seeking the shape and form appropriate to its inherent
nature. That form will be attained as surely as historical evolution has,
like natural evolution, its own immanent laws. Whether the Knights of Labor
will then retain their present name or not, makes no difference, but to
an outsider it appears evident that here is the raw material out of which
the future of the American working-class movement, and along with it, the
future of American society at large, has to be shaped.
The third section consists of the
Socialist Labor Party. This section is a party but in name, for nowhere
in America has it, up to now, been able actually to take its stand as a
political party. It is, moreover, to a certain extent foreign to America,
having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immigrants,
using their own language and for the most part, little conversant with
the common language of the country. But if it came from a foreign stock,
it came, at the same time, armed with the experience earned during long
years of class struggle in Europe, and with an insight into the general
conditions of working-class emancipation, far superior to that hitherto
gained by American workingmen. This is a fortunate circumstance for the
American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate, and to take
advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years' struggle
of their European class-mates, and thus to hasten on the time of their
own victory. For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the
ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially
the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe,
the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. In so far
this party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement.
But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign
garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect
the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must
go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to
do that, they must above all things learn English.
The process of fusing together these
various elements of the vast moving mass - elements not really discordant,
but indeed mutually isolated by their various starting-points - will take
some time and will not come off without a deal of friction, such as is
visible at different points even now. The Knights of Labor, for instance,
are here and there, in the Eastern cities, locally at war with the organized
Trades Unions. But then this same friction exists within the Knights of
Labor themselves, where there is anything but peace and harmony. These
are not symptoms of decay, for capitalists to crow over. They are merely
signs that the innumerable hosts of workers, for the first time set in
motion in a common direction, have as yet found out neither the adequate
expression for their common interests, nor the form of organisation best
adapted to the struggle, nor the discipline required to insure victory.
They are as yet the first levies en masse of the great
revolutionary war, raised and equipped locally and independently, all converging
to form one common army, but as yet without regular organization and common
plan of campaign. The converging columns cross each other here and there:
confusion, angry disputes, even threats of conflict arise. But the community
of ultimate purpose in the end overcomes all minor troubles; ere long the
straggling and squabbling battalions will be formed in a long line of battle
array, presenting to the enemy a well-ordered front, ominously silent under
their glittering arms, supported by bold skirmishers in front and by unshakable
I reserves in the rear.
To bring about this result, the unification
of the various independent bodies into one national Labor Army, with no
matter how inadequate a provisional platform, provided it be a truly working-class
platform - that is the next great step to be accomplished in America. To
effect this, and to make that platform worthy of the cause, the Socialist
Labor Party can contribute a great deal, if they will only act in the same
way as the European Socialists have acted at the time when they were but
a small minority of the working class. That line of action was first laid
down in the Communist Manifesto of 1847 in the following
words:
"The Communists" - that was the name we took at the
time and which even now we are far from repudiating - "the communists do
not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
"They have no interests separate and apart from the interests
of the whole working class.
"They do not set up any sectarian principles of their
own, by which to shape and model the proletarian movement.
"The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class
parties by this only:
I. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the
different countries they point out, and bring to the front, the common
interests of the whole proletariat, interests independent of all nationality;
2. In the various stages of development which the struggle
of the working class against the capitalist class has to pass through,
they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a
whole.
"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically
the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of
all countries, that section which ever pushes forward all others; on the
other hand, theoretically, they have, over the great mass of the proletarians,
the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions,
and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement."
(Manifesto Of The Communist Party; Collected Works; Volume
6; Moscow; 1976; p.497;
"Thus they fight for the attainment of the immediate ends,
for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working-class; but
in the movement of the present, they represent and take care of the future
of the movement ".
(Manifesto Of The Communist Party; Collected Works;
Volume 6; Moscow; 1976; p.518)
That is the line of action which the great
founder of Modem Socialism, Karl Marx, and with him, I and the Socialists
of all nations who worked along with us, have followed for more than forty
years, with the result that it has led to victory everywhere, and that
at this moment the:
mass of European Socialists, in Germany
and in France, in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, in Denmark and Sweden
as well as in Spain and Portugal, are fighting as one common army under
one and the same flag.
London, January 26, 1887 Frederick Engels
Published in the book: F. Engels, The Condition of the
Working-Class in England in 1844. New York, 1887;
Transcribed by Members of Alliance
Marxist-Leninist (North America) for the WWW;
August 2000.
From: "Marx & Engels on the
United States"; Moscow; 1979; pp. 283-290.
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