The Labor Movement in the United States of America - Part 9
Some further observations on the last years of the 1st International
The formation of the party between 1871 and 1883:
caught between Marxism, Lassalleanism and Anarchism
The history of political parties in the United States began as far back as the 1820s with the Working Men’s Party. However, this path was soon abandoned, and the mass of workers from the few existing industries, dockyards and artisan workshops dedicated themselves to building trade union organizations, which promised an effect defense of living and working conditions. A very rich history, which we have described in the party work reports presented at the general meetings. On the political level, however, the results are poor, and the American working class goes through the disappointing experiences of cooperativism, collaboration with bourgeois parties, various moralist movements, up to involvement in the 1861-65 war of secession.
The War from this point of view marks a watershed. The need to assume a political role, to fight effectively in the name of the whole class, is felt and translates into the attempt to transform a union body, the National Labor Union, into a real party. The experiment is of short duration but the increased class participation that results, favoured also by the eight hours movement, is instrumental in paving the way for a more modern political movement of the class. Above all, it will make possible the activity of the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International.
Party and Trade Union
A characteristic of the labor movement in the United States over much of its history has been a separation, a lack of connectedness between its economic and political components, between the party and the trade unions. For the Marxist school it is essential to define the roles and establish the correct relationship between these two manifestations of the movement.
This important question was often considered in the debates of the First International, which had been constituted as an association of generic workers’ organizations. However, at its Conference in London, held between 17-23 September 1871, it stated:
“Considering the following passage of the preamble to the Rules: ’The economical emancipation of the working classes is the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’;
“That the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association (1864) states: ’The lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour... To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes;’ “That the Congress of Lausanne (1867) has passed this resolution: ’The social emancipation of the workmen is inseparable from their political emancipation’; “That the declaration of the General Council relative to the pretended plot of the French Internationalists on the eve of the plebiscite (1870) says: ’Certainly by the tenor of our Statutes, all our branches in England, on the Continent, and in America have the special mission not only to serve as centres for the militant organization of the working class, but also to support, in their respective countries, every political movement tending towards the accomplishment of our ultimate end – the economical emancipation of the working class’; “That false translations of the original Statutes have given rise to various interpretations which were mischievous to the development and action of the International Working Men’s Association;“In presence of an unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation on the part of the working men, and pretends to maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political domination of the propertied classes resulting from it;
“Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;
“That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes; “That the combination of forces which the working class has already effected by its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for its struggles against the political power of landlords and capitalists, “The Conference recalls to the members of the International: “That in the militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its political action are indissolubly united”.Marx dealt with the question in a very decisive way in a letter to his American disciple Bolte, dated 23 November 1871:
“The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.“On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.
“Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands.”Lassalleanism and Marxism
The question had already been posed by the first authentic representatives of Marxism from the moment they set foot on American soil. The first among many, Joseph Weydemeyer, had fought a bitter battle against the utopian illusions of Wilhelm Weitling, reasserting correct organizational models for working class organization, defence, and for taking power.
When, a year later, the General Council of the First International was moved to America, the programme of “authoritarian communism” would continue to be advocated by its new General Secretary, Marx’s loyal friend and follower, Friedrich Sorge.
The stance taken by the Lassallean faction, highly influential at the time and with a significant presence within the International, was very different. According to them, economic struggles were necessarily doomed to failure because they were dictated by immutable economic laws. Instead of trade unions they believed organisations of tradesmen should be created, which emulated the earlier precedents of Weitling and Owen, and which concentrated on building an alternative economy based on mutual aid, self-sufficiency and cooperatives. To install this economy on a larger scale, which would require cheap credit and State aid, the workers were urged to support Lassallean candidates at elections. Slowly the remaining citizens would be persuaded of the validity of their programme,and more and more voters would come around to the idea, until finally political power was achieved. Meanwhile, by conducting election campaigns at city, State and national level, they could gain access to public finances. This vision of a municipal and national state socialism, appealed especially to artisans and the self-employed.
Clearly the co-operativist veneer concealed what was substantially an individualist perspective, and its inter-classist appeal would thus attract small proprietors as well. These would include the adherents of the Greenback movement, who supported monetary reform, and it was no accident that the Lassaleans would support them as well.
Of the Greenbackers, so-called because of the color of the paper currency, Sorge would write: “They wanted (and still want) to abolish gold and silver currency and exchange it for paper money in necessary quantities, which would be redeemable only against very low-interest-bearing state bonds; in other words, it would be practically unredeemable. How this idea could find such a wide circulation just after the war during which the working classes, indeed the majority of the population, often suffered heavy losses through the fluctuating rate of exchange (during the war paper money dropped to two fifths of its nominal value) is a riddle to anyone who forgets that it is a well-understood interest of the possessing classes to divert the workers from their own interests, to lead the workers’ aspirations in the wrong direction; not to allow the labor organizations to grow strong, to weaken them”.
Opposing the Lassallean faction, from the standpoint of their much more comprehensive and complex vision, the Marxists advocated a very different kind of political organization. The goal of the political party for the Marxists was to conquer political power.
Both Marxists and Lassalleans were agreed at this stage that political organisation involved organising in the electoral sphere. In this they were opposed to the anarchists who rejected any political manifestation of the working class.
But it would actually be in the United States, where the franchise was first extended to broad strata of the working class, that the first cracks in the optimistic thesis of a ‘peaceful’ way to working class power via elections, making use of the working classes numerical strength, would start to appear.
As the vanguard of the working class, the Marxists were quick to notice this, and by 1876, at the Union Congress in Philadelphia they noted that “The ballot box has long ago ceased to record the popular will, and only serves to falsify the same in the hands of professional politicians”. Given the presence of an “enormous amount of small reformers and quacks” in this “middle class Republic”, and “Considering, That the corruption and mis-application of the ballot box as well as the silly reform movement flourish most in the years of presidential elections, at such times greatly endangering the organisation of workingmen”, party members and workingmen were invited to abstain from the ballot box and direct their efforts towards organising themselves.
If the notion that conquering working class power through the ballot box still remained, bolstered by the great strides forward made by the party in Germany, it nevertheless could only have any chance of success if there was a mass base to build on, which had both a clear sense of its own class identity and interests, and the resolution and determination to pursue them.
Such a base, the Marxists believed, could only be achieved through long and patient work in the trade unions, and within the sphere of mass campaigning organisations based on the trades unions. The process of building up these organisations, which would also involve fighting for reforms to improve working class living standards and conditions, would serve as a necessary training ground. The evident reluctance of the ruling classes to concede any legislative reforms which improved the condition of the working class, with every step along the way a gruelling struggle for the basic necessities, would open the eyes of the workers and urge them towards an ultimate political solution.
The unemployment struggles of 1873 temporarily lessened the internal conflict within the International but the ultimate failure of these struggles would be used by the Lassalleans to bolster their notion that the only effective solution was action on the political plane (which for them meant using the electoral process) directed towards gaining concessions from the State as regards their demands for co-operative forms of labour organisation, most of which were entirely compatible with capitalism.
The Marxists replied that the demonstrations of the unemployed should be continued, for they secured relief for homeless and hungry families, stimulated workers to think along socialist lines, and presented opportunities for bringing home to the workers the message that only socialism could end the exploitation of the masses. Moreover, when political action was undertaken, it had to be based on the working class and not, as the Lassalleans advocated, as part of a coalition of whatever groups were prepared to join in their campaign for state aid to cooperative enterprises.
Unprepared to abide by the International’s resolutions, the Lassalleans split from the International in 1874 and established the Workingmen’s Party of Illinois in the West, and the Social-Democratic Workingmen’s Party of North America in the East. Their failure in the 1874 elections would however force them to accept the importance of trade union organisation at later party conventions.
The Influence of the Party in Germany
In Germany, meanwhile, the two workers’ parties, the General German Workers’ Association and the Marxist influenced, pro-International ‘Eisenacher’ party, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, were moving towards reconciliation. In 1874, even before their eventual merger a year later, the two parties had reached impressive dimensions, polling in that year 350,000 votes in the elections and returning nine deputies to the Reichstag.
At the famous Gotha Congress in 1875, the two parties would work out a program they considered mutually acceptable, and join together to form the Social-Democratic Party.
In America Sorge was very impressed with the program for the Gotha Congress, drawn up by Liebknecht, which stressed the primary importance of organizing workers into trade unions (indeed one reason Sorge was ousted from General Council of the International in the fall of 1874 was because of his outspoken support for Liebknecht).
But it was the successes of the German workers’ parties at the polls which would impress socialists in the United States, and by the fall of 1875, socialist unity was the predominant issue in both Marxist and Lassallean circles.
In his historic Critique of the Gotha Programme, originally drafted at the time of the Unity Congress in 1875, Marx heaped much gall on the sugary “unity”, and condemned the many concessions made to the Lassalleans. In the period of the Anti-socialist laws in Germany (1878-1890), which were introduced after two anarchist attempts on the life of the Kaiser, Marx and Engels had been emphatic about not criticising the Lassalleans in the German party in public, although engaging in a vigorous polemic with them via internal party circulars and letters. Only in 1891, when the Gotha Programme was finally abandoned at the time of the Halle Party Congress, did Engels finally feel compelled to issue Marx’s critique for publication, considering it to have ‘far-reaching significance’ in its settling of accounts with Lassallean economic principles and tactics.
In the United States, however, the battle between the two factions would come very much out into the open.
The ‘Iron law of wages’
Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and the letter to Bracke which accompanied it of May 5, 1875, and Engel’s letter to Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, are readily available and provide a very comprehensive analysis of Lassalleanism. We will therefore restrict ourselves here to merely providing an overview of Lassalle’s doctrine, sufficient to provide a backdrop to the uneasy relationship between the so-called ‘political’ (Lassallean) and ‘trade union’ (Marxist) wings of the socialist movement in the United States in the seventies and eighties.
In the substantially Malthusian ‘Iron law of wages’ Lassalle held that workers’ wages would always oscillate around a bare minimum since any temporary improvement in wages would inevitably produce a higher birth rate amongst workers. This would then increase competition for jobs and bring wages back down again. Conversely, if wages sunk too low, the birth rate would go down, emigration would increase and wages would creep back up again. According to Marx on the other hand, as outlined in the first volume of Capital, wages were more or less determined by the relative proportion of the industrial reserve army to those in work, which meant, for example, that wages could potentially rise during a period of increased birth-rate if a contemporaneous boom was employing extra workers in a still greater proportion, and if workers had sufficient strength to impose the rise.
If one important consequence to be drawn from Marx’s analysis was the importance of linking up the struggle of the unemployed proletariat with the employed proletariat, another was that trade union activity was necessary and could produce important results.
Lassalle’s view of the worthlessness of economic battles would actually lead him to oppose the repeal of the anti-combination laws, and this would be branded by Marx as particularly pernicious since it did not just follow from Lassalle’s mistaken theory of the ‘Iron law of wages’, but expressed his refusal to accept and encourage the direct expression of working-class self activity.
The ‘Iron Law’, which deemed any working class defensive action as entirely useless, implied there was left but one alternative to the worker, and in particular to artisans or skilled craftsmen: they should become entrepreneurs themselves, set up their own cooperatives, and since they did not possess capital, the state should provide it. As one of Lassalle’s biographers commented, Lassalle wasn’t so much a Marxian (although he thought he was) as a Hegelian. “He does not think in terms of a class struggle. What he wants is not the socialist State, but the social State; not the State of oppositions but the State of compromises”.
Lassalle’s view reflected the class relations in Germany at the time; a country where the pace of capitalist development had been slowed down by a canny landed aristocracy which used its highly elaborate and all encompassing state structure (endorsed on a philosophical level by the Hegelian professors, who were State employees themselves) to bind both the bourgeoisie and proletariat to its requirements by means of state planning and social reform, with the state operating as the ultimate arbiter while at the same time playing off the different classes against each other. And perhaps Lassalle was to some extent an unwitting dupe in this drama. Bismarck was only too happy to appear as an aristocratic ally of the oppressed workers against the bourgeoisie, and adapt elements of Lassalle’s programme to the needs of the class he represented. And by combining these elements with the work of the conservative monarchist Rodbertus, who was briefly Prussian minister in 1848, Bismarck would forge a formidable weapon to destabilise the rising workers’ movement: ‘State Socialism’.
Lassalleanism, with its notion of workers setting up co-operatives funded by the State, would all too readily lend itself to the notion that any State, rather than a workers’ State in particular, could enact socialist reforms.
And since it was very much the particular contradictions of Bismarck’s Germany that were thus reflected in Lassalle’s ideas, their survival on American soil would very much depend on them being taken up by his disciples in the German émigré community.
The Formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the U.S.
On the occasion of Sorge’s resignation from the International in 1874, Engels wrote to him on September 12: “with your resignation the old International is anyhow entirely wound up and at an end. And that is well. It belonged to the period of the Second Empire, during which the oppression reigning throughout Europe prescribed unity and abstention from all internal polemics to the workers’ movement, then just awakening” (Sept 12-17, 1874).
The time had come to form a class party. The Workingmen’s Party of the United States would arise as the first Marxist party in the United States two years later, and would be mainly composed of sections and ex-sections of the First International. In fact it was very much a case of a handover from the one to the other and the founding unity congress of the new party took place within a week of the congress which had formally dissolved the International, and at the same venue in Philadelphia.
Within the new party, after various attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, the earlier controversies that had raged between the Lassallean and Marxist factions inevitably broke out again. The language and ideas of the new party platform were Marxist, and were indeed mainly drawn up by Sorge, but it was nevertheless the result of a compromise. If it adopted the trade union policies of the International, it was obliged to accept the Lassallean request that a national instead of an international organization be established. On the key issue of political action and trade unionism, the platform took the position: “The political action of the party is confined to obtaining legislative acts in the interest of the working class proper. It will not enter into a political campaign before being strong enough to exercise a perceptible influence”. The view that an organisation of workers in economic organisations needed to be in place before an effective battle could be mounted in the political sphere was supported by the old members of the International (Sorge, McDonnell, Otto Weydemeyer, and Speyer).
The national executive committee, eventually to be located in Chicago and dominated by the Lassalleans, opposed this line and a resolution was passed empowering it to permit local sections to enter political campaigns when circumstances were considered favourable. In addition, despite the objections of Sorge and the other Marxists, the platform endorsed the Lassallean principle of governmental transfer of industrial enterprises to producers’ cooperatives.
While the Lassalleans’ insisted on the inherently conservative nature of the trade unions, and that the party’s fight to win political power effectively made the unions redundant, the Marxists insisted that there was no conflict between trade unionism and political action, and that the two actually complemented each other. To be sure, the trade union viewpoint tended to be narrow, but it was not inherently hostile to socialism and, with the party’s guidance, the trade unions could be brought to see that improvements such as higher wages and shorter hours, while important, would not fundamentally solve the problems of the working class under capitalism. The struggle for these immediate demands was however important, both to better the conditions of the working class and to train them in the movement for socialism.
The Marxists could point to clear evidence of adhering to this position in their practical work. Increasingly strong connections had been established between the Marxists and Ira Steward and the Eight Hour League (‘The Boston Group’) after the latter had split from the Greenbackers in 1872. Sorge had mailed Steward manuscript copies of translations of complete sections of Capital, including the complete section “The Working Day”, and Steward informed Sorge that he and George E. McNeil, the spokesman for the New England labor movement and fellow leader of the eight-hour movement, were greatly impressed by what they had read and wanted to familiarize Americans with it. In Sorge’s words, “with the help of the Old Internationalists, the leaders of the Boston Eight Hour League were induced to enter the Workingmen’s Party. This gave rise to well-justified hopes for expanding the party and its principles in the New England states. The Executive in Chicago, the West, had no comprehension of the situation and through its clumsiness forced the new Englanders out again”.
The objections of the Marxists to the party engaging in premature electoral campaigns would be ignored and the party’s Lassallean-dominated executive committee along with its pro-Lassallean corresponding secretary, Philip Van Patten, pressed on regardless. New Haven would accordingly nominate a ticket in the fall election of 1876 and it was soon followed by sections in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Chicago, all in defiance of the official platform. When the electoral results showed that the socialist candidates in New Haven, Chicago, and Cincinnati had gained a large vote and that six Party members had been elected in Milwaukee, the Lassalleans were more than ever determined to ignore the official regulations. They mounted an intensified attack on the Marxist view that political action should await the formation of strong trade unions.
The Lassalleans now felt strong enough to try and deprive the Marxists of their control of the party’s English speaking organ, the Labor Standard, which was under the editorship of the Marxist J.P. McDonnell. Various dirty tricks, including manipulation of funds and control of the printing press were deployed to try and remove this important mouthpiece from the Marxists, but it continued to advocate a pro-union stance, which it backed up with the publication of articles by Engels, giving news of trade union activities and labor struggles in Europe.
Whilst all this was going on the great uprising of 1877 broke out, and further successes at the polls in 1877 appeared to confirm the Lassallean perspective on the value of electoral intervention. Over the opposition of the former internationalists, the Lassalleans summoned a special convention (Sorge, McDonnell, Weydemeyer, and Speyer would refuse to attend) in Newark, New Jersey, on December 26, 1877, where the “political action” socialists gained complete control of the party. The Labour Standard was stricken from the list of the party’s organs and, in Sorge’s words, ‘a thorough cleanout of the rest of the Internationalists took place (…) the statutes, the program, and the name of the organization were changed and manipulated after the famous overseas model’. The Socialist Labor Party was born.
The ‘famous overseas model’ which Sorge referred to was the German SDP, and he would further comment that “It is well known that at the German unity congress in Gotha the Lassalleans stamped their program and tactics with their coloring and their ideas, but that the Eisenachers, the German Internationalists, soon took over the leadership of the later admirable development of the Socialist Party of Germany. In the United States the situation was reversed. At the unity congress in Philadelphia the American Internationalists for the most part enforced their views (even though they were in the two-to-five minority). After a short time, however, they saw their views weakened, ignored, and finally completely changed by the new party and its representatives. The Old Internationalists saw the danger in this process within the new organization during the years 1876-1878. Their warnings and protests were answered arrogantly or not at all. Under these conditions they viewed their activities as pure Sisyphean labor. So they withdrew more and more, mostly into the trade unions, and so cleared the field for the pure socialistic agitation of the younger immigrants who occupied and ruled it from then on” (Sorge).
Sorge, McDonnel, Weydemeyer, and Speyer would thus withdraw from the party to join with Ira Steward, George E. McNeill and George Gunton in forming the International Labor Union.
Since we have already referred to this organisation in the last chapter of this study in Communist Left No. 44/45, we will merely add that one of the instructions which the Hague Congress issued to the General Council of the International, when the latter moved to New York City in 1872, was that it should concentrate on establishing, precisely, an international labor union. According to P.S. Foner, “Although its life was only five years and it did not survive 1882, the International Labor Union is important for what it represented and what it attempted to do. It was the first great effort to organize all unskilled workers in one union and by uniting them with the trade unions of skilled workers to achieve nationwide labor solidarity irrespective of nationality, sex, race, creed, color, or religion”.
The Socialist Labor Party
The now renamed party, reorganised mainly with a view to conducting political campaigns, met with considerable success at the polls during the Spring and Fall elections in 1878. The vote in Chicago in the spring election was about 8,000 and two socialist aldermen were elected. In the following Fall the Socialists in Chicago elected four members to the legislature, one senator and three assemblymen. By the beginning of 1879, the party had grown to about 100 sections in 25 different states, with a total membership of 10,000, and the election success continued. But this was to be the high water-mark. The Marxist warnings about a precipitate rush into electoral politics without sufficient preparation and without trade union support would soon be proved correct. The Socialist vote in the autumn elections in Chicago in 1879 fell from 12,000 to 4,800 and the “political action” socialists were quick to attribute this to the recovery of the economy. As Philip Van Patten, the party’s national secretary would put it: “The plundered toilers are rapidly being drawn back to their old paths, and are closing their ears to the appeals of reason. They are selling their birthright for a mess of pottage by rejecting the prospect of future emancipation in their greed for the trifling gains of the present”. But, Lassallean though he was, he would equally now make a concession to the Marxists, declaring “The only reliable foundation today is the trade union organization (…) And while political efforts of a spasmodic nature will often achieve temporary success, yet the only test of political strength is the extent to which trade union organization backs up the political movement”.
He was indeed correct to say that the party’s electoral successes were in no small part due to the support they had received from the trade unionists, and in areas where this was lacking the results were dismal. In Chicago, where the party had its most resounding electoral successes, Albert R. Parsons, founding member of the International Labour Union and also elected president of the Amalgamated Trade and Labor Unions of Chicago and Vicinity, had been a key instigator in the forging of a formal alliance between the trade unions and the Socialist Party.
The split in the SLP
In 1880, the organized Socialist movement split into two irreconcilable factions; this event, as well as being due to the differences already described, was accelerated by two events that occurred in that year.
The first involved a socialist candidate in the local elections in Chicago being fraudulently deprived of his seat by the election judges, evidencing that the bourgeoisie could manipulate the electoral machinery of democracy to obtain the results it desired.
The second event was the split in the Socialist Party prompted by the manner of participation in the presidential elections of 1880. The majority was in favour of an alliance with the gGreenbackers, who called for government credit to fund producers’ co-operatives, a request analogous to what the Lassaleans were calling for, and thus of interest to sections of the Socialist Labor Party.
The Greenback movement, which for many years “had led a quiet life in the Far West”, reappeared in a new form in the late 1870s. According to Sorge: “knowing full well that they could not find a large following in the industrial East without major concessions to the workers, they added a few labor demands to their program – it was only on paper anyway – and with this induced the SLP executive to enter the alliance with them and send a strong delegation to the greenbackers’ nominating convention in Chicago during the summer of 1880” (…) “ironically enough, by the time the Socialists had made up their minds to work with the Greenback-Labor coalition, the workers had already left the movement”.
Indeed, the result of the Executive’s alliance with the greenbackers was the walkout of the Chicagoans, who in Sorge’s estimation were “the strongest and most active group of progressive workers, who rejected any kind of alliance with the ‘reformers’.” This group with Albert Parsons at their head, and taking the trade unions with him, proceeded to nominate their own independent candidates in the local elections and the party was greatly weakened by their secession and its consequences, which would involve anarchism being seen as a viable alternative.
The Workers Militias
A further reason for the split had been the position the executive had taken towards the ‘Educational and Defensive societies’ (Lehr und Wehr Vereine) which had been organised by the socialists of Chicago and Cincinnati.
Although these workers’ militias, mainly composed of members of the SLP, had started to form in 1875 they became much more widespread in the wake of the repression following the Great Strike of 1877, during which the combined forces of the police, territorial militias and the federal army launched violent attacks against the workers. In Chicago workers had been targeted for particularly brutal repression due to their highly organised support for the strike. At a meeting of the furniture workers “the infamous Chicago police broke in, dispersed its members, killed one union official, and laid the groundwork for the bitter and justified hate of the Chicago workers for the nightstick [truncheon] heroes” (Sorge). After 1877 great fortified armouries were built in the large industrial cities, and the minds of military men were quickly directed towards methods of riot control and numerous pamphlets were issued on the subject.
For several years it wasn’t very wise for workers who wanted to keep their jobs to join trade unions, or support radical movements; many were forced to sign a pledge they wouldn’t join the unions, or even support the eight-hours movement. The inevitable result was that the workers’ movement was forced underground. Sorge viewed the demise of the International Labor Union as partially conditioned by the workers’ need for secrecy; especially in the company enclaves in which “whole towns – landed property, houses, schools, churches, everything without exception – belonged to the factory owners, which in such places ruled as despotically as the Czar of Russia”.
Enormous pressure was being applied to workers, their organizations and the movement in general, up to and including physical violence and killings, and this meant that many workers viewed armed self-defence and consequently armed political action – and the Paris Commune was still fresh in people’s minds – as a reasonable response. Many saw the secret organisation in the workers’ militias, the acquisition of arms and the drilling in the woods, as preparation for the forthcoming final battles with capitalism – the revolution – in which they meant to meet the police with guns and bombs.
The national executive committee of the party was opposed to these essentially military organisations. According to Van Patten, in his report to the convention: “As they carried the red flag and acknowledged their socialistic tendencies the public were informed that the socialists were determined to accomplish by force what they could not obtain by the ballot”.
In 1878 all members of the SLP in these clubs were ordered to leave.
The sponsors of the military labor organizations resented this interference of the executive committee, and when the convention assembled they moved for a vote of censure against the latter. The motion was adopted by a small majority after a heated debate. On the whole, however, the convention was dominated by the moderate rather than the radical elements, and the latter soon developed an open dissatisfaction with the party administration.
The Social Revolutionary Clubs
In November 1880, a number of members of the New York sections of the party left the organization and formed a Social Revolutionary Club, which adopted a platform modelled in the main after the Gotha programme of the German Social Democratic Party, but interspersed with some violent anarchistic phrases. The leading spirit of the new movement (according to an early history of American socialism by Morris Hillquit) was Wilhelm Hasselmann, who had been one of the representatives of the Lassallean party in the unity negotiations at the Gotha Congress, and had been described by Engels in a letter to Sorge as having visibly discredited himself, along with the other Lassallean deputies, in the Reichstag. It was after his expulsion from the German party in 1880, following a joint declaration against Bebel and parliamentarism, that he would emigrate to the United States and agitate for the Social Revolutionary Club in New York. Soon other revolutionary clubs sprang up in Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, all cities with a large immigrant population who were particularly receptive to anarchist ideas after the experiences of repression in their homelands and the new and bitter experiences since their arrival in the United States. Of greatest significance were the Chicago clubs of which Paul Grottkau, August Spies, and Albert R. Parsons were the leading members.
“A national convention of Social Revolutionary Clubs was held in Chicago in 1881. The meeting was called by the New York club, which had participated in a London congress, where efforts were made to revive the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) –the so-called Black International – the organization of anarchists founded by Bakunin. Returning from the London convention, where they had affiliated their club with the IWPA, the New York Social Revolutionaries brought back with them the doctrine of “propaganda by deed”. They advocated conspiratorial action and individual terror against the ruling class as the only way to rouse the masses to revolt”.
“The 1881 convention of the Social Revolutionary clubs did not result in a unified organization, but a name – the Revolutionary Socialist Party – and a platform were adopted. The platform urged the organization of trade unions on “Communistic” principles and asserted that aid should be given only to those unions which were “progressive” in character. The platform also denounced the ballot as “an invention of the bourgeoisie to fool the workers” and recommended independent political action only in order to prove to workers “the iniquity of our political institutions and the futility of seeking to reconstruct society through the ballot.” The chief weapon to be used in combating the capitalist system was the “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights” (Foner).The features of the new movement continued to fluctuate between a radical socialism and an out and out anarchism.
A faithful expression of the heterogeneous movement was Johann Most, a disciple of Dühring and translator of an abbreviated (but appalling, according to Marx) version of Das Kapital. Elected twice to the German Reichstag, and twice incarcerated for ‘riotous speeches’, in 1878, immediately after the enactment of the 1878 anti-socialist law, he was expelled from Berlin.
In London he started to publish Die Freiheit (Freedom) which even if considered as a semi-official organ of the SPD, smuggled illegally into Germany, soon became a vehicle for Most’s anarchist views, especially after his expulsion, along with the aforementioned Wilhelm Hasselmann, from the SPD in 1880.
In a letter to Sorge of 19 September, 1879, Marx says that while Bernstein (Aaron, uncle of Eduard) and others had criticised Most’s paper for being “too revolutionary”, he and Engels “reproach him because it has no revolutionary content but only revolutionary phraseology. We reproach him not for criticising the German Party leaders, but first for making public row instead of conveying his opinions to them, as we do, in writing, i.e., in letters”. In another letter Engels characterises Die Freiheit’s content as ‘empty shrieking’, and he considered Most’s ambition to be to publish “the most revolutionary paper in the world, but this is not achieved by just repeating the word revolution in every line”.
In 1881, after publishing an article glorifying the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and calling for the deed to be emulated, Most was imprisoned and sentenced to hard labor for 16 months. It was shortly after he had served out this sentence that Most arrived in New York.
The great mass-meeting arranged for Most’s reception in the large hall of the Cooper Union Institute in December 1882 turned into a veritable ovation for the “victim of bourgeois justice,” and his tour of propaganda through the principal cities of the country in the early part of 1883 resembled a triumphal procession.
To quote Foner again: “Most helped pave the way for a congress of American anarchists at Pittsburgh in October, 1883. Twenty Six cities were represented at this convention where the International Working People’s Association was formed. Most, Parsons and Spies were its outstanding delegates”.
This new anarchist movement, reborn on American soil with a more pro-union stance, would prove an outlet for the workers’ anger and revolutionary sentiments, within the narrow limits of individualism and voluntarism.
After the events of Haymarket in 1886, the bourgeois state would bring the full weight of its repressive apparatus down on the worker’s movement.
We will trace the sequence of events leading up to those events in a subsequent chapter, and also plot the later course of the Socialist Labor Party as it navigated its way through these events.