The Labor Movement in the United States of America

Translated from a presentation at the party meeting in Viareggio on June 2006

The point of departure: Servants and Slaves

The story of the American labour movement, or, to be precise, of the labour movement in the United States, starts in the colonial period, at the time of the birth and development of those first settlements that would later evolve into colonies, and which at the end of the XVIII century would free themselves from the mother country.

It is important not to forget that the society founded on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean had behind it a social, economic and political history that it shared with the countries of the Old World, and in particular with England, which had emerged from the Middle Ages quite a while before, creating the social and political foundations for the development of bourgeois society and for the establishment of the capitalist system. These foundations were the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the enclosure of the common land, the development of the mercantile bourgeoisie and the rise of the country as a commercial and maritime power. Thus the American Colonies were populated by colonists who had already left the legacy of the Middle Ages behind them, and an entirely un-mediaeval atmosphere predominated there. The founders of the colonies, above all in New England, incarnated the most unscrupulous aspect of the English bourgeoisie, which precisely in those years was preparing to deal the final blow to the old absolutist and monarchist regime.

One of the reasons the English Crown favoured the colonisation of North America in the 16^th and 17^th centuries was certainly as an outlet for the surplus population and in order to alleviate the social tensions arising from poverty and unemployment, which in their turn were a by product of the development of society in a bourgeois direction. As far back as 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert had favoured colonisation as a means of alleviating demographic pressure. Others would portray it as a means of getting rid of ‘undesirable elements’.

The composition of the colonies was therefore very heterogeneous. Apart from the band of puritans referred to in the history books (concentrated mainly in New England) there was a conspicuous number of criminals, prisoners and of every other conceivable type of refugee from the law. To these was offered the possibility of escaping justice by emigrating to America, but on arrival in the New World they were expected to pay the cost of their transatlantic passage with their labour. This possibility of acquiring extremely low cost labour attracted the attention of many rich English families who moved to America with the intention of acquiring land and benefiting form this labour.

In fact, it soon became clear to everybody that none of the riches discovered by the Spanish in Mexico and Peru existed in the in the area in which the English were staking their claim. Captain John Smith would write: “Nothing is to be expected thence but by labour”. Thus the profits to which the English investors aspired would be obtained by cutting down forests and cultivating the soil rather than from mining. America would bring great profits, wrote the Virginia Company in 1616-17 to prospective investors, in the measure that ‘more hands’ were made available.

But where would these hands come from? The Indians could be captured and forced to work as slaves but escaping was easy, and in such cases they had the unpleasant habit of returning to their tribes and returning to remove their former master’s scalp in lieu of severance pay. Hence the governor of New Amsterdam (the city founded by the Dutch, which later became New York after passing to the English Crown) issued an order, much to the displeasure of those who hoped to gain massive profits in double-quick time, that native Americans had be paid a salary.

Thus there commenced a propaganda campaign amongst European workers (there weren’t enough convicts) conducted mainly in the British Isles but also in Germany, where William Penn, the magnate who would found Pennsylvania, would go on his preaching tour. In fact enticing people to leave wasn’t that difficult: in England in the 1600s most workers were living in the direst poverty, in conditions which were as desperate as much from the health point of view as from hunger, which perpetually haunted them. The worker was also subject to laws which, in substance if not in form, treated them like slaves: there was a maximum but no minimum wage; the worker wasn’t allowed to abandon his employer at will, and there were stringent penalties for ‘vagabondage’, that is to say, the measures directed against those peasants who, deprived of their land, hadn’t immediately flocked in to join the city slums; and, of course, it was strictly forbidden to ‘conspire’ with other workers to defend oneself against the rapacity of the employers. In the other European countries capitalism was less developed, but continuous wars, big and small, made life just as unpleasant over most of the continent.

Therefore the propaganda was lent a willing ear. The cost of the voyage, however, at £.6 to £.10, represented an enormous sum for a proletarian and it was simply too much. Thus there developed the system of contract servitude known as indentured labour. By this means the individual who embarked for the New World would serve as a bonded labourer for a number of years, usually from two to seven, but generally the latter. During this time he would receive no pay and was prohibited from abandoning his place of work. He did however have the right to be fed and lodged and to receive an indemnity at the end of his service, supposedly enough to start a new independent life when the contract expired, and even enable him, maybe, to go out and exploit indentured labour himself. That was the theory anyway but the reality wasn’t quite so rosy. One study shows that only 20% of indentured servants actually managed to settle a piece of land or become an artisan. None of them struck it rich because the all of the wealth was flowing into the hands of the big landowners and merchants, and it was they who became richer and richer during the colonial period. The other less fortunate 80% might simply die (many of them), return to England or else end up amongst the mass of poor whites, who lived from hand to mouth, sleeping where they could, without property (and therefore without a vote), and without any prospects.

The contracts were drawn up at the point of embarkation and retained by the ship’s captain, who sold them on arrival in America to recuperate the cost of the voyage and to derive an ample profit. To take advantage of this business companies soon set up branches in the two biggest settlements on the East coast, namely, the Massachusetts Company of New England, run by puritans who soon made it independent from London, and the Virginia Company, which instead continued to depend directly on the mother country. The puritans of Massachusetts, who were anxious to preserve their community’s religious and moral purity, were suspicious of this influx of people of not always exemplary morality; besides which it was mainly free men, who could afford the cost of their passage, who went by preference to New England. Indentured labour, on the other hand, was the principal source of labour power in the Centre (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) and particularly in the South (the colonies of Virginia and Maryland to begin with, then the Carolinas), at least until the end of the 17^th century.

Another aspect of the journey about which the emigrants were generally ignorant concerned the voyage itself; like the slaves making a similar, if longer, journey in identical ships many would die before reaching their destination. Conditions below decks were terrible, and amongst the things that had to be contended with were terrible hygiene, excessive promiscuity, sickness, food that was rotten and inevitably in short supply, and contaminated water. Survivors would tell how to keep from starving they had to eat mice and rats, which were bought and sold on board ship. There were even cases of cannibalism on journeys that turned out to be longer than expected. And on top of it all the survivors were often compelled to pay the travel costs of their deceased shipmates, paying the ship’s captain in the form of additional years of service.

Emigration to the New World guaranteed a constant flow of English paupers along with a lesser number of Germans, Irish and other nationalities. By 1770, along with half a million African slaves, a quarter of a million indentured servants had arrived in America and at least 100,000 of them had been transported against their will (either as convicts or kidnapped in their home port, the latter often children, who were captured in the cities of Great Britain in much the same way as the slaves in Africa, who would end up dying like flies). This means that at the time of the War of Independence out of the 2.5 million inhabitants, most of whom were farmers, the vast majority of the labour force was unfree. In the South, slaves soon replaced white servants: they didn’t go off when their contracts expired (nor would they have known where to go) and they cost half as much to maintain.

This wasn’t actually the case to begin with. Even if brought to America by force, it seems that the Africans as well were also indentured servants, freed when their contract expired. Thus the number of free Africans in the South was by no means insignificant even before the Civil War. Only around 1660 did the Slave Codes start to take effect in various colonies, laws which transformed servants into slaves: henceforth children born to slaves became the property of the mother’s owner, and for two centuries the slaves were deprived of their rights as free men (to meet and to vote, standing as witness, freedom of movement, right to bear arms, etc).

Mind you, the white servants weren’t much better off, on the contrary, some maintain that their situation was even worse. In fact a master, who was interested in keeping his slaves healthy since they constituted his capital and would remain such for the rest of their lives, might not be interested in the health of his servants, who would sooner or later leave; and for whom, if crippled, blind or ill on the expiry of their contract, the master wasn’t held responsible. A similar destiny, by the way, might easily befall those apprentices who, ending up with a greedy or cruel master, were exposed to dangers, harsh punishments and malnutrition and might not even end up learning a trade. Servants who married without their master’s permission were punished as adulterers, and their children deemed to be bastards.

From the 18^th century onwards, England, whose incredible economic ascent had begun, put severe restrictions on emigration to ensure there was sufficient manpower for its own nascent manufacturing industry. Thus, throughout the 1700s, waves of immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, including significant numbers of skilled craftsmen, would supplement the Anglo-Saxon elements disembarking on the Atlantic coast. In general, a new system of servitude known as the ‘redemptioner’ system was used. This was characterised by variable lengths of service according to the servant’s qualifications and skills, the nature of the job and related to the consequent length of time required to accumulate the sum necessary for him to redeem himself from servitude. These variations meant many different types of servant would arise with an overall tendency toward prolongation of the duration of contracts (often because many of these emigrants brought their families with them) but without altogether ruling out the possibility, which had attracted so many of these emigrants in the first place, that one day they would own a piece of land and be able to work it on their own account.

Without the system of bonded labour, however arbitrary and harsh it may have been, the colonies in the Centre and the South would have found it very difficult to get properly established.

At the mercy of their masters, who could be extremely cruel, servants would often abscond, whites and blacks frequently running off together to live with the nearest Native American tribe. The chronicles also tell of organised revolts by white servants, such as the one in Virginia in 1661-62 and the famous Bacon Rebellion, also in Virginia, in 1676, when the rebellion would include white servants, slaves and emancipated slaves, and small farmers. At least 40 revolts have been documented during the colonial period alone. Of these both the one around Charleston in 1730, which was particularly widespread, and the Stono Rebellion nine years later, also in the Charleston area, were both slave revolts. In the course of the latter, more than 200 slaves burned down houses and killed various slave-owners, sparing only those who had treated them decently. They had managed to obtain firearms, but before their march to freedom – which they sought in Florida – was concluded, they were overpowered and massacred by the white militia. This rebellion would endure long memory of the Southern slave holders giving them sleepless nights for many years to come.

Despite the laws outlawing them, there are numerous reports too of these labourers going on strike to obtain better living and working conditions. It was common for the white semi-slaves to run away; the punishment, along with flogging and other physical punishments, was an extension of their period of servitude. In the case of a revolt, which also occurred in the North (notably the one in New York in 1741, in which blacks and whites fought side by side) repression was ruthless. But brutal repression and exemplary punishments didn’t remove the danger of insurrections, which arose out of the real conditions of these first forced proletarians, and some concessions would eventually be made around food and clothing, etc. In the North, in any case, where slavery had never really suited the bourgeoisie, fear of slave revolts spread to all classes and many began to propose that slaves be substituted with free workers.

In Virginia, on the other hand, where forced labour suited the planters very well, the constant fraternisation of these workers across the divide of skin colour began to be viewed as extremely worrying, and they decided to take measures to combat it. In 1705 a law was passed that notably improved the condition of the white servant, the main measure being an improvement in the endowment the master had to render on termination of the contract (provisions, money and a gun); an endowment which had dropped considerably from the 1681 level: in fact up until that point 50 acres of land had been allotted as well. And it is from this period that we can trace the birth of a phenomenon which would be assiduously cultivated by the ruling class over the century that followed, racism; a sentiment which was actively propagated amongst the lowest strata of the white proletariat, corrupting them with a few miserable privileges which allowed them to feel somehow superior to their coloured co-workers and giving them cause to fear their own possible decline into a condition even worse than their own.

The servants had more rights than the African slave: as well being allowed to stand witness they had legal status and could take legal action. They therefore had a real prospect of being fully integrated into society with full rights. It was for this reason that workers of this type continued to flood into the Colonies, amounting to half of all emigrants before Independence. African slaves were utilised as workers in workshops and shipyards, usually hired out for a number of months or years to the industrial capitalist. But there was still a growing need for free labourers, above all in the North. Indeed if slave labour was economical convenient on the plantations, where there was work to be done throughout the year, this wasn’t the case in industry where the requirement for labour suffered from extreme seasonal oscillations. If servants and slaves both had to be fed, clothed and housed even in the off-season, the free labourer could simply be sacked. And, as we have seen, slaves and servants represented capital, which was lost if they took themselves off. Clearly great advantages attached to free labour, as Adam Smith would himself admit in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The Eighteenth Century: Birth of the Urban Proletariat

Whereas in the Colonies of the North an economy was forming based mainly on small commercial production, essentially agricultural and craft based, with a few exceptions such as the shipbuilding and construction industry, those in the South were developing the system of great plantations which required a large and ever growing mass of labourers. In order to satisfy the demand for labour, which the influx from Europe was unable to satisfy, it was necessary to obtain immigrants from elsewhere. Alongside the white component there started to appear, from the second half of the 1600s, the African slave. The indigenous peoples, as had already become evident in the colonies of Latin America, had proved not to be suitable as slaves for numerous reasons. Not that this prevented them from being enslaved, and in 1730 25% of slaves were in fact Native Americans.

The Black slaves were forcibly imported from Africa by the Royal African Company (the first ever shipment – of 20 – were put ashore and sold by a Dutch man-o’-war in 1619), and the South’s vital need to ensure itself a massive supply of labour would predispose it to frame the previously mentioned Slave Codes, which differentiated the figure of the African slave from that of the white servant by gradually increasing the formers obligations until their period of service became virtually unlimited. Africans, after all, were always involuntary immigrants, and it wasn’t therefore necessary to treat them well to encourage others to follow in their footsteps: their bondage was permanent, not just limited to a few years; usually they were non-Christians; it was convenient to treat them as non-citizens, without the concomitant citizen’s rights; finally, the colour of their skin set them apart and made it easy to the implement the Slave Codes. Thus did slavery, in its North American guise, come into being.

The greatest concentrations of African slaves became localized in the tobacco plantations of Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland and in the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. The working conditions of the black slaves were obviously harsh, but they weren’t that much better for the whites, who were subjected to severe restrictions even though officially ‘free’. Labour was regulated by ancient English laws which restricted the mobility of labourers, who had no power over their contracts, not even whether they worked or not. There was therefore the obligation to work, prices and wages were fixed by local laws, and both masters and servants were prohibited from making any adjustments to them. The period for apprenticeships was fixed at seven years, and often taking up another trade was prohibited as well.

But the regulations could not stop economic development, only slow it up.

In the mostly self-sufficient communities of New England the quality of craft production was deteriorating: in fact with so much land available it was very easy for badly treated workers to simply abandon their trade and become independent farmers. Thus rustic craft production arose, with the peasant farmer in the little puritan villages turning his hand to pretty much anything during the long boring winters.

From the beginning of the 18^th century, as the villages expanded into cities and as a certain specialisation of labour, favoured by generally high levels of education, became justifiable, the crafts began to assume greater importance. Whilst European products were still those most in demand, artisans and craftsmen started to be needed again, above all in the cities of the Centre and the North. The South, meanwhile, remained predominantly autarchic and rural.

Immigration started to rise again, part of which was composed of artisans who unlike indentured servants paid their own passage, and who often brought with them a small nest egg with which to set up in business in an environment which promised a lot more than their mother country. Naturally enough the first types of organisation formed by these craft workers were identical to the ones they had left behind in Europe, namely the guilds. Already in 1648 the coopers and cobblers of Boston had organised themselves in such a way, with the declared aim of establishing strict professional rules and thus of maintaining a craft monopoly within a few hands. Setting rates of pay and establishing the rules governing apprenticeship, the guilds only really developed in the great cities of the Central North, and even there it was with difficulty due to the social fluidity of the New World. The bakers came to an agreement amongst themselves to refuse to make bread, given the cost of flour, if official prices fell too low: and this led, in 1741, to what is held to be the first strike in American history. But in fact it wasn’t so much a fight between workers and bosses as a reaction by artisans and small masters against the regulation of prices by the authorities.

In fact, on the few occasions that workers acted in their own interests and took action seperately from the masters and master craftsmen, it was almost always prompted by a wish to eliminate competition from black labour, whether slave or free. What they achieved, or caused, was the abolition of slavery in the Centre-North. In the South, on the other hand, where the black population was far more numerous, they only succeeded in excluding the latter from the highly specialised trades.

Another struggle that left its mark on the chronicles of colonial America is that of the black chimney-sweeps of Charleston in 1761. Contemporary accounts relate, rather peevishly, that, “they had the nerve, after reaching an agreement amongst themselves, to increase the normal rates, and to turn down work if their exorbitant demands were not satisfied”. The slaves on the plantations could not, of course, resort to such measures; for them, same as for the indentured servants, the only effective form of protest was collective rebellion, it was either that or running away. The newspapers of the period give full and detailed accounts of the dramatic results of both these choices. Slave rebellions were nevertheless rare before the 18^th century, although becoming more frequent later on as the number of slaves increased, as they became more familiar with the environment increased and as better communications became established.

Following the events described above, relating to the first century of slavery, there was an explosion of revolts in the crisis-ridden period which led up to the colonial rebellion and independence. These took place from 1765 onward, in the wake of an extremely hard fought rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 (which the authorities only managed to repress with much difficulty) and of other rebellions which would tear through the Caribbean like a hurricane over the ensuing years.

Thus the slaves in the North American colonies would take advantage of the growing rift between the imperial and colonial ruling classes and revolts would break out pretty much everywhere: in Virginia (1767), New Jersey (1772), South Carolina and Massachusetts (1774), New York, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina (1775), and South Carolina (1776).

The Working Class Before Independence

Summing up the key characteristics of the proletariat in America in the period before Independence isn’t easy. Certainly there was an enormous difference between the standard of living of the Black slave on the plantations and the specialised worker in the Northern cities. The difference was such, indeed, that it would be perpetuated for a long time to come and become a defining characteristic of American society. But even amongst the free workers there existed a heterogeneity linked to geographical origin, class, race, religion, to the various types of proletarian employment and to the uneven economic development in the various parts of the country, which, along with the notable distances between the cities and the difficulties of communication, made it difficult for class consciousness to emerge. Such was also the case in the cities in which, in the seventeen hundreds, the various types of worker started to congregate.

A second important characteristic of American society at the time was its contiguity with the agrarian world; a world in which land wasn’t an object of speculation as in contemporary Europe but where it was there for the taking, for whoever wanted it.

A third feature, linked to the preceding ones, which distinguished the North American environment from the European was the relatively high lwages paid to the free workers. Despite repeated attempts to regulate wages, these still remained between around 30 and 200% higher than in England; and this was the case from the very beginning: even in 1639 there were complaints that if wages weren’t lowered, “the servants will become masters, and the masters servants”. But it was not just the remunerative side of things that European travellers would remark upon. They would also have cause to note, often with barely concealed disgust, the extreme familiarity between employees and bosses; this, too, an American peculiarity which would endure until the birth of large scale industry, and indeed, in a certain sense, one which has been customary amongst ‘yanks’ up to the present day.

But the life of the wage earner in colonial America certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light. The comparison above, as well as being made with the awful conditions of the European wage earner of the time, only held good when there actually was work. During periods of unemployment the worker was often unable to prevent his children from starving, or himself from ending up in jail. Real wages were often reduced by a high rate of inflation as well. If prices dropped the courts would order the workers to accept a proportional reduction in wages, if they rose, the same courts would set a cap on wages; and to ask for a raise was to risk being punished with a hefty fine, something which was far from uncommon during periods of economic upturn, or in the sparsely populated towns. If on the other hand the bosses offered more, in order to attract labour, it was still the workers who were punished by the courts. The employers’ associations, who would display a level of hypocrisy that would come to define the American bourgeoisie, maintained that such measures served to ‘save the American worker from himself’, it being taken as said that the worker, with money in his pocket and a bit of free time, would inevitably engage in activities which were ruinous to his physical and moral health.

Strikes and trade unions were strictly prohibited under laws dating back to 14^th century England, (we will see how it was not until the 1720s that the legal obstacles to the workers’ economic struggles were removed, although the bourgeoisie would still be able to count on the continuing support of the judiciary, the police, the national guard, the army and private police forces in their battles against the workers, and moreover to a greater degree than normal in the Western democracies). This prohibition has been described by an English historian as a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie and the public powers to keep the proletariat in its place and in a state of permanent poverty. Adam Smith himself would confirm that “whenever the government attempts to deal with the conflict between masters and workers, its counsellors are always the masters”. And he added: “There are no laws preventing agreements to lower the price of labour, but a great number that prevent any agreement to raise it”.

Of the actual struggles that took place between free proletarians and masters very little is known, both because not many of them occurred and because contemporary accounts are somewhat reticent. In 1636 a Maine ship owner announced that his workers and sailors had “mutinied” because he hadn’t paid their wages: the struggle took the form of a mass walk out. Five years later, also in Maine, we hear about carpenters engaging in a work-to-rule, protesting about the lack of food. Still in the same period there is the first lock-out in American history, when a Gloucester ship owner ordered his determinedly combative workers to stop work and take themselves off.

The first sector to be industrialised, and consequently to have a working class which to a certain degree was concentrated in one place, was the ship yards, and it was here that the trial of strength of the nascent North American bourgeoisie with its English and Dutch competitors would commence. Although carpenters predominated, it was an industry in which most types of craftsmen were required. Wage labour however was slow to develop within the remaining crafts and areas of production. The manufacture of consumer products was the prerogative of lone artisans, who would work from home and occasionally emerge to sell what they had produced in the surrounding countryside, or exchange it for agricultural products, either for personal consumption or to sell in the towns. There wasn’t really much of a market to speak of: every farm was highly self-sufficient and amongst the roles performed within the peasant household were those of carpenter, spinner, weaver, candle-maker, shoemaker and smith. Leaving aside the crafts based in the shipyards the skills most in demand were those relating to mills and foundries, to barrel-making and saddle-making, to carriage building and to the manufacture of metal and glass objects.

As demand rose, the artisan found he could only increase his output by associating his activity with the labour of others. For £.10 to £.20 he could purchase a contract servant, and have him work for seven years or so in exchange for board and lodging and a few items of clothing. Although acquiring or hiring an African slave was a possible alternative we have already seen how in actual fact it was the free labourer who would come to replace the contract servant, especially in the Central North.

Given the composition of the labour force, the trade union agitations of the seventeen hundreds consisted more than anything of lock-outs of artisans demanding better retribution for their independent labour: thus was the case in 1684 for the New York street cleaners, in 1741 for the caulkers in Boston, and in 1770 for the coopers in New York. In the case of the latter they would be tried and ordered to pay heavy fines and the ones working for the local authority were sacked. Historians generally refer to the Philadelphia Printers’ Strike in 1784 as the first real strike of wage earners in North America; but there was also a struggle that took place in the colonial period, that of the New York tailors in 1768, which could also credibly claim that distinction.

We cannot as yet say that permanent trade unions existed. Specialised workers continued to meet in societies they shared with master artisans and small masters. These were mutual aid societies that only rarely concerned themselves with wages and hours; and if they did, it was only to plead for better laws, often with corporative objectives.

But workers were in great demand, and a clear sign of this is the number of advertisements for skilled workers. The earliest ones date from 1715, whereas we have to wait until 1770 before the first employment bureau is founded, in New York City.

Thus did the American working class arise, fostered by the decline of indentured labour and by the arrival of free workers from Europe. From the very start these workers would fall into two clearly defined groups: the specialised workers, equipped with a trade learnt in an artisan’s workshop and with specialised tools, and the manual labourers, the non-specialised, who neither possessed the knowledge nor the ability relative to a given trade, and who had their muscle power alone to sell.

Translated from a presentation at the party meeting in Viareggio on June 2006

Intermezzo on the American Revolutions

We consider it useful here to insert an excerpt from a party text of 50 years ago. As well as acting as confirmation of the views presented in the current work, it provides a good example of our methodology, which doesn’t represent history in a mechanical way, as a succession of events in which the economic substructure and political class power are always harmoniously aligned and travel along in parallel, but as a complex dialectic between the two, which can sometimes even appear inverted, but which over a longer timescale, and over a larger geopolitical area, necessarily see the laws of economy reasserted.

From: Russia in the Great Revolution and in Contemporary Society. Turin Interfederal Report, Sitting I, in Il Programma Comunista, 1956/12.

“American Abolitionist Revolution.”

“We have already had cause to reflect upon the American national revolution of the late 17th Century. Marx drew a parallel between this war of independence, which he called the signal for the French-European revolution which straddled the two centuries, and the war of secession between the Northern and Southern States, which he expected to signal a proletarian social movement in Europe, but which didn’t happen due to the wars of 1866-71.

“The war fought by the New England colonies to free themselves from the English was a war of independence but can’t really be considered a national revolutionary war like those in Europe, in Italy and Germany, etc. The racial factor was lacking insofar as the colonies were composed of mixed nationalities, although mainly that of the metropolitan State, and it was above all economic and commercial factors which prompted them to seek political emancipation.

“Much less can such a war be said to be a bourgeois revolution, insofar as capitalism didn’t arise in America out of local feudal or dynastic forms – there was no aristocracy or clergy to speak of there – and on the other hand the country it rose up against, England, had been completely bourgeois since the 16th-17th Century, when it had radically overthrown feudalism.

“The theory of class struggle, and that of the historical series of analogous modes of production which all human societies go through, should never be conceived of as banal and formalised symmetries; they should never be applied before arriving at an ‘Engelsian’ understanding of how to deploy dialectics.

“Always when referring to North American independence the Marxist school repeatedly noted how pre-1789, still feudal France, sympathised in a very concrete way with the rebellion against capitalist England; which had to then compensate itself by joining the anti-revolutionary coalitions, finally winning at Waterloo with the feudal Holy Alliance.

“In the case of the Civil War of 1861-65 the factors at stake aren’t national liberty or even race in any significant sense. The Northern States fought to abolish the enslavement of Negroes which was diffused throughout the South and defended by it, but it wasn’t a rebellion of the Negroes, who for the most part fought in the Southern formations alongside their masters. It wasn’t a case of a rebellion of slaves launched to abolish the slavery-based mode of production, which would then be succeeded by the aristocratic form with serfdom in the countryside and the free artisan in the towns. There is nothing in it comparable to the great historic transition between these two modes of production, which occurred at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and with the rise of Christianity and the barbarian invasions, both of which were conducive to the abolition, in law, of the ownership of human beings.

“In America the industrial bourgeoisie didn’t conduct a social and revolutionary war to wrest power from a feudal aristocracy, which had never existed in America, but in order to provide for a transition from forms of production which were extremely backward compared to the form from which bourgeois society historically has arisen: it wanted to replace production carried out on the basis of slave labour with wage labour, or with artisans and free peasant farmers, whereas the European bourgeoisies had only needed to fight to eliminate serfdom, much more modern and less backward than slavery.

“This shows that a class is not “predestined” to carry out one specific task in the transition from one social form to another. The American bourgeoisie didn’t have to devote its energies to abolishing feudal privileges and serfdom, but had to liberate society from a more backward form based on slavery.

“There is in this example an analogy with the task of Russian proletarian class, which wasn’t to pass from the capitalist to the socialist form, but to clear the way for historical transition before that, for the jump from feudal despotism to mercantile capitalism; without this impacting detrimentally on the doctrine of the class struggle between wage earners and capitalists, and of the succession of the socialist to the capitalist form, through the efforts of the modern wage earning class.

“The landowners in the South were beaten in the 1865 revolution by the industrial bourgeoisie, even though more backward in historical terms than the feudal nobles because they were slave owners, and though more modern than them because a mercantile social network already existed. The Northern bourgeoisie didn’t hesitate to take on the ‘regurgitated’ task of liberating the slaves, which had been absolved elsewhere by very different classes; by the feudal and Germanic knights, or by the apostles of Judea.

“It may be objected that this historical tidying up operation didn’t leave the capitalists in the North with any further revolutionary tasks to perform. But if the South were to have won the Civil War, which was not beyond the realms of possibility, then on the one hand the task would still have remained for the future, and on the other, the bursting out of American capitalism as it headed towards becoming world super power would have been very different”.

The Working Class and the War of Independence

It isn’t the object of this work to describe the War of Independence fought by the thirteen colonies which were later unified in the United States of America; a war which Americans call a ‘Revolution’, although in fact it was a civil war which did very little to revolutionise the system of production, apart from redistributing to the wealthiest section of the American bourgeoisie the profits which had previously been due to the Crown. It is worth however sketching out the main features of an event which changed the political landscape, and which over the ensuing decades would therefore influence the character of the North American worker’s movement.

The urban bourgeoisie, by now definable as autochthonous, was less and less prepared to allow the possibilities for expansion of the internal market to be mutilated by British colonialism, which had imposed a monopoly on trade, making the purchase of its own goods obligatory and blocking the development of indigenous manufacturing in order to reduce competition with its own industries (with some productive activities expressly forbidden, like hat making). England was the only permitted export destination for American commodities, which also had to be transported there on English ships. Imports, whether from England or elsewhere, could only arrive via English ports. From 1763 settlements to the west of the Appalachians were prohibited (which infuriated the Southern planters) and in 1764 the minting of money and the founding of local banks was forbidden (which increased pressure on the Northern merchants).

These restrictions on the local economy, which caused low pay and frequent bouts of unemployment, also impacted naturally enough on the proletariat. In the ensuing years, following England’s victory over France in the battle for supremacy in North America, the Crown, in order to offset the enormous debts it had occurred as a consequence of the war wouldn’t hesitate to impose a range of taxes, and these would hit everyone to a certain extent. Thus the English would unite the different classes in their resentment towards the mother country, with the notable exception of the colonial aristocracy, of course, who had more to fear from the people than from higher taxes.

From thence arose the continuous friction which would eventually lead to the Colonies rebelling against the mother country. There was no need in America for an economic and social upheaval to clear the way for a new mode of production; there was just the English bourgeoisie’s need to suffocate at birth any competition in the realm of commerce and industrial production. The battle was between two bourgeoisies, but obviously once it had got started it was difficult to be sure just where such a wide-ranging rebellion might lead. However, from a social point of view, the conditions that might have justified a major clash between the classes didn’t really exist, as shown by the fact that the franchise was quite widespread in the Colonies even before the war, although not amongst the workers, nor amongst the small landed proprietors. Neither was there much social conflict to speak of, the sole exception being Pennsylvania perhaps. Almost everywhere the workers constituted such a small percentage of the population that a revolution was unthinkable; and in the countryside, if the slaves in the South are excluded, the figure of the agricultural labourer was virtually non-existent. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had already carried out their revolution in the previous century, in England.

The citizen-soldier who formed the basis of the continental army was a peasant farmer, and indeed more than 90% of the colonials made a living off the land at the time of the war; but already a glimpse of the future could be seen in the cities. As commercial and trading centres, the ports of the North and South could boast a social structure that was much more varied than the countryside. In particular, there had developed the classes of free and of impoverished labourers, who often lived a hand to mouth existence. Out of 100 male workers in a typical big port, 15 were forced labourers in some form or another (slaves or servants), 25 were sailors and 40 artisans; another 5 made a living from various trades such as merchants, shopkeepers, officials and those in the professions. Then there were the women, who in the cities were already working outside the home in large numbers and in low paid, unskilled jobs. More or less everyone was paid in cash. But in the cities the general framework was now in place, and besides all the other urban activities and the presence of the wealthy classes, there also existed a large number of people who didn’t work and who lived a precarious existence on the margins of society: vagabonds, beggars, fugitive servants and slaves, widows and orphans, thieves and prostitutes, all of whom now constituted a good third of the urban population.

The artisans, the most important component of the city population, frequently educated, and proud of their craft and social position, didn’t welcome the Crown’s attempts to regulate the colonial economy, a process which was intensified after the Seven Years war (known in America as the French and Indian War) ended in 1763, and which provoked a severe depression in the cities in the early seventies. They were joined in their opposition to the mother country by the sailors, the Dockers and all the professions linked to the sea and the shipyards. More and more, these workers were to be found lounging in the taverns while the American ships rotted, empty, in the docks.

It was therefore the workers in the urban centres who would be the most active in the disturbances of the revolutionary period. The sailors in particular were full of resentment towards the Crown because of the atrocious way they were treated by the Royal Navy; most of them having been recruited with a bang on the head. They would form a subversive multi-ethnic and multi-racial force which was connected along the length and breadth of the Atlantic coast. The workers often had to cope with the pressure of competition from soldiers seeking work in their spare time, and that, incidentally, would be precisely what caused the first bloody confrontation, the so-called “Boston Massacre”. At other times they were forced to toil on military works for starvation wages. Probably the view was widespread amongst the workers that they would benefit from the reduction in imports connected to the dispute with the mother country: there would be more work; a prediction which in fact proved correct.

And yet the aggregations that played a determining role in spurring on the undecided strata of the bourgeoisie towards rebellion, the “Sons of Liberty”, were actually interclassist bodies, composed of artisans, skilled workers, small traders, shopkeepers and professionals, and in certain cases small farmers. As usual, it was the bourgeois intellectuals who provided the leadership, but often they merely articulated the mood of the lower classes, and in any case they were well aware that of all the various components of the rebellion it was the workers who were the most dependable. These radicals, mainly from Boston, made links with the artisans and the workers via a network of taverns, and artisans’ and mutual aid societies, disseminating a political vision which encompassed the opinions of the poorer classes, and anticipating the legitimate participation of artisans and workers in political activity. The middle and upper strata of the urban bourgeoisie, and of course the big landowners, were on the other hand far from convinced of the need for struggle and, as partners, they were never to be trusted, distributed as they were across the two warring camps. It is worth recalling that women were also active in the struggle, forming what was probably the first auxiliary corps in history, the “Daughters of Liberty”.

Groups arose which supported the “Sons of Liberty” amongst the workers in Ireland and England; they urged the rebels to persevere in their boycotting of English imports, even if major unemployment in England was the possible result.

During the first half of the 1770s, workers and artisans took advantage of the weakness and indecision of the bourgeoisie and conquered strong positions for themselves; something which for members of their class was unthinkable until then. In cities like New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, the workers’ representatives participated, on a par with the planters and the bourgeoisie, in the political organs that gradually filled the power vacuum left by the English. It was a phenomenon which took various forms, and spread to the rest of the colonies. In Boston, workers, artisans and peasants formed an association which managed to take over the city government. The merchants of the city complained that “at these meetings the lowest mechanicks discuss upon the most important points of government with the utmost freedom”. In Philadelphia, too, the “mechanicks” succeeded in expressing their strength and in 1770 held the first political meeting specifically reserved for the members of their class. In 1772 they organised a party, the Patriotic Society, to promote their candidates and their programme. By the middle of 1776, the “mechanicks” controlled the city.

After the Boston Massacre, in which the five people killed by the English soldiers were two sailors, a ropewalk worker, an apprentice and an artisan (emblematically it seems it was the coloured sailor, Crispus Attucks, half Black and half American Indian, who led the unarmed revolt) the watchword of the artisans/workers’ organisations was ‘arm for the inevitable conflict’. This meant the formation of a militia (the famous ‘Minute Men’), the gathering of arms and munitions, military training and, in the cities where English troops were stationed, the creation of a highly effective espionage system.

The first battles at Lexington and Concord, in 1775, were actually won thanks to the prompt mobilisation of the Minute Men, equipped with information about troop movements via their spy network. Following the news of the victorious battle, insurgents immediately took control of New York City, and the same happened in many other cities in the centre and South. Each time it was the Sons of Liberty who took the active role whilst the bourgeoisie tended to present the rebellion as a request, with weapons in hand, for reparation of wrongs suffered. It was the workers’ component of the rebellion which supported the most radical leaders (Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Christopher Gadsden) and got them to pronounce decisively for independence. Paine was convinced that it wasn’t possible to both remain faithful to George III and preserve liberty; independence would generate a democratic form of government and make America “an asylum for mankind” and “a haven of refuge for the oppressed peoples of the world”: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”.

Despite the resistance of the bourgeois conservatives, who didn’t want the struggle to lead to independence, the Committee of mechanics in New York instructed its delegates to vote for independence at the Continental Congress; and, in the home of a bricklayer called Graaf, Thomas Jefferson would draw up the historic Declaration of Independence. The Congress assembled in Philadelphia was however slow to take up the demand for independence; a hesitation which didn’t depend so much on any residual loyalist scruples, but rather on the presence of the popular armed masses, which had started to administer sound thrashings to the English troops. What would replace British despotism? Would the rich merchants sitting in Congress be able to continue enriching themselves, or was the way being cleared to anarchy and the rule of the lower orders? In fact, the Massachusetts masses had created an army, and Congress was asked to adopt it. Yes, but who would lead it? The solution came with the nomination of a Southern slave-holder, George Washington, who although a man of little military experience nevertheless managed to reassure the landowners, slave-holders and rich merchants; and to set their minds at rest regarding the peril of a social revolution and assaults on their property.

As the war spread, mobilisation would increasingly extend to the countryside and the hold of the propertied classes fatally increased. The working class and the artisans were strong in the cities but on the scale of the country as a whole they only constituted a small minority, and their political clout was bound to be reduced. But their decisiveness in the early stages was fundamental in propelling the ‘revolution’ towards Independence.

The workers willingly enrolled in the continental army and their class was the most highly represented within it; the inducement held out to the indentured servants was freedom, and if this caused some tension between the masters and the military authorities, such tension was soon alleviated by the compensation paid to the masters for time lost. For the blacks such possibilities didn’t exist. Only in the North were free blacks accepted into the army, although only after much prevaricating, and in general they acquitted themselves very honourably. Many Southern States on the other hand forbade their enrolment.

This was the colonies’ weak point, particularly of those in the centre and South, and it didn’t take the English long to exploit it. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, officially granted freedom to the slaves and servants of rebels who put themselves at the disposal of the English army. This certainly wasn’t because the English were in any way progressive, as evidenced by the fact that loyalist slave-holders would be insured against their slaves escaping, a prospect which meanwhile terrified the rebels, who nicknamed George III the “King of the negroes”. In fact all a proprietor needed to do to ensure that his escaped slaves would be returned was to declare he was on the side of the King.

Despite this, despite the ignorance and isolation of the great mass of slaves, the number of escape attempts multiplied over the course of the war, and tens of thousands of men, women and children – basically anyone capable of pointing a gun – presented themselves at the army quarters of Her Britannic Majesty. It is calculated that out of the 567, 000 blacks, both slaves and freemen, estimated to be living in the colonies at the outbreak of the war, around 100,000 presented themselves in this way: a real exodus which would have certain repercussions. And these in fact were only a small proportion of the slaves which had abandoned the plantations. Others had died in the attempt or been recaptured by the rebel troops. Not many were put to death, because the fact of the matter was they were still valuable merchandise.

Of those who reached the English lines, many died of hardship, mainly succumbing to illnesses encouraged by the terrible conditions in which they were held. When the English army abandoned Chesapeake Bay, only 300 out of the 2,000 blacks previously welcomed were still alive and capable of departing. And what is more, since the English had no vested interest in whether the ex-slaves died or not, they treated them even worse than the old masters: extremely hard work in conditions that no white would have tolerated, meagre rations, and horrible living conditions were their lot. Only very few of them were issued with weapons, although when given the opportunity they fought extremely well. How the English viewed the blacks became clear during the siege of Yorktown in 1781. Between 4,000 and 5,000 slaves had given Cornwallis their backing in the hope of earning their liberty. The siege meant there were serious food shortages, but instead of the remaining rations being divided up fairly amongst everybody, the slaves were given the food that had gone off; the putrid meat and the worm-holed biscuits. When even that was gone, the blacks were driven into no-man’s-land between the English and rebel barricades. And once they reached the rebel lines, what became of them then? The fact is, that rarely happened, because the greater part of these poor wretches died of hunger and illness, dragging themselves back and forth between the opposing armies who competed at keeping them at bay. Thus the black slaves who had fought in the great “Revolution”, for liberty and all the other principles that fill the history books, could only conclude that liberty certainly wasn’t on the agenda for them.

Apart from a few staunch patriots, the wealthy bourgeoisie didn’t contribute much to the war at all. They were more concerned to risk as little as possible and make sure they found themselves on the winning side. Indeed, as is their custom, merchants and manufacturers would continue to conduct a roaring trade during the war, angering even Washington himself who called them “murderers of our cause”.

Estimates of the forces on the two fronts differ quite substantially. According to one reliable estimate, a fifth of the colonists were actively opposed to the patriots. John Adams instead divided the population into thirds, and estimated one was in favour, one against and one neutral. The revolutionary leaders baptised these fellow citizens with the name “Tories” to emphasise their aristocratic origins and also to make the war of independence more resemble a popular uprising. But loyalism in general derived not so much from class interests as from complex social considerations, with often those who belonged to a minority remaining faithful to Great Britain. In New England, for example, the Anglicans, who were victimised and discriminated against by the Congregationalists, remained close to the Crown, whilst in New York and in Pennsylvania it was mainly the ethnic minorities, menaced by the rigidity of the protestant culture of English derivation, who defended the government in London. The political alignments also reflected wider tensions within the social structure. In the colony of New York the tenant farmers were against the idea of revolution insofar as their masters, the aristocrats and big landowners, had sided with the rebels. Similarly the smallholders in the west of North Carolina, who were unhappy with the conduct of that colony’s officials, and who had rebelled against them in the previous decade, protested by taking a loyalist stance. Even in the South there was no lack of planters ready to defend “liberty” whilst their slaves, in the rare cases they could make a choice, took the part of the English.

But remaining neutral would become increasingly difficult in what had effectively become a civil war, and many were forced to choose which side they would fight for. In fact, the forces in play would remain throughout more or less in a state of equilibrium. Washington, in any case, never had more than 20,000 troops at his disposal, and at certain points it was a mere 5,000. Both sides used the native Americans, who however tended to support the English, and with good cause. The rebels had to repress the loyalists by every means, thereby contradicting the very “liberty” they claimed to be defending (ironically it was actually the Sons of Liberty who were at the forefront of this repression): those not on the side of the revolution were traitors, subject to oppression, sequestrations, deportation, and imprisonment, whereas the English didn’t make provision for the same crime, although from a legal point of view they would have had a certain justification, seeing as how it was a case of their subjects rebelling. A large number of Americans therefore had Independence imposed upon them against their will, and hundreds of thousands would head for England; or to Canada, where after the war ended they would form the English speaking component of that country.

In a situation where the opposing armies were more or less in a state of equilibrium, the advantage the continental army had was the ease with which it could replace casualties and deserters, and also the fact it could engage in a guerrilla war. The English could only find replacements for their troops with great difficulty, and, considering their distance from the mother country, at great expense. The victory was only in small part due to the patriots, devoted to the cause though they undoubtedly were. On several occasions the continental army risked possible annihilation, and continued to exist only thanks to the help of France and Spain, who saw the war as a convenient way of bleeding the old enemy. It was the arms and provisions supplied by the French which allowed the victory at Saratoga (1777), not to speak of the victory at Yorktown (1781), in which a determining role was carried out by the French land troops and naval blockade which enabled the capitulation of Cornwallis’s troops.

Even if American society at this time was composed mainly of the petty and micro bourgeoisie, the bulk of the army was made up of proletarians, and it was their spilled blood which was the price of Independence. When a law was enacted in Connecticut making conscription obligatory for all men between 16 and 60 years old, excluded from its provisions were officials, priests, students and professors of Yale, blacks, those of mixed race, and native Americans. Those who were able to find a substitute, or who could pay five pounds sterling, were also exempt. And “Revolutionary” America would have no qualms about reinstating the practice which had aroused so much hatred against England: forced enrolment.

The war didn’t manage to stifle class conflict for long. Soon there was a general and inevitable rise in prices (in Philadelphia they rose by 45% in one month), and proletarians were furious to see the same people who had got out of fighting by paying for substitutes ignoring the laws that fixed commodity prices, whilst taking advantage of the freeze on wages. There were petitions, threatening mass meetings and riots. In Philadelphia sailors struck for an increase in wages and troops were called in to crush the protest and jail the strikers. This was nothing new: back in 1777 the militia had been used to repress the movement of the tenant farmers in the Hudson River Valleys (New York), who had taken Independence to mean the appropriation of land from the absentee landlords. But many of the latter, although they were aristocrats, had seen which way the wind was blowing, and after steering a middle course had finally sided with the rebels. And the lands of the loyalists were taken over by “patriotic” businessmen. In 1781 a large contingent on the rebel side, the Pennsylvania Line, mutinied. After having repelled the officers, killing one, they marched on Philadelphia where the Continental Congress, the ruling body of the revolutionary power, was in session. The crisis was resolved thanks to Washington’s cautious approach and the contentious issues, including that of back pay, were resolved.

And yet the revolution was not without social consequences which improved the situation considerably for the proletariat: the enunciation of the principles of individual liberty and equality, even if with limited objectives, had clear implications for the future conditions of slaves and servants. White indentured labour was already in decline, caused by the difficulty of keeping the flow of new arrivals constant; a difficulty which increased every time there was war in Europe.

Slavery was abolished in New England in the years after the war, and prohibited in the territories north of the Ohio River. In the central colonies it disappeared more gradually, but by the beginning of the 19th century only few slaves remained. In the South, of course, where the mass of slaves were concentrated, ‘the peculiar institution’ still remained firmly in place. But there was the feeling that it was nevertheless an abnormality that would soon have to be put right.

The sale of the great estates of the loyalists didn’t represent, as might have been expected, an agricultural reform. On the contrary, they were distributed amongst the magnates who headed the new federal State, who, as well as considerably enriching themselves, now had land they could rent out.

Apart from a few nobles who stolidly maintained their links with the Crown, there weren’t major displacements amongst the American ruling classes after independence was won: George Washington was from the start the richest man in the country, and Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc, didn’t lag far behind him. Other progressive measures were the reform of the inheritance laws, a notable extension of suffrage (though not in all States), the abolition of restrictions on landed property, and the westward expansion.

Over the next decades the discontent that originated in the class conflict in the East was channelled westwards, towards the ‘savages’ who were unwilling to surrender their ancestral land without a fight. But even after territories were wrested from them to the West, mainly the strip to the south of the great lakes (from Ohio to Illinois), the settler’s life would not be painless, since they would now become the object of the attention of the great speculators. Those pioneers who did manage to stake their claims had to fight on three fronts: against the Native Americans; against the State which required custom duties and taxes; and against the speculators who got them into debt, and often managed to take their land and convert them into tenants.

Despite the romanticised oleographs of the frontiers, most of the colonists lived on the edge of subsistence, and by the mid 1780s the situation had become explosive. The merchants and wholesalers had been trying to re-establish large-scale commerce with Great Britain, but the English merchants were no longer giving credit and were insisting on payment in cash. The former therefore had to request payment in cash from the retail traders, who in their turn then demanded immediate payment by the smallholders. Along with uprisings in Maryland, South Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the revolt in Massachusetts, led by the war hero Captain Shay, and other veterans of the War of Independence who had lost their properties due to debts and taxes, served as a wake-up call to the Confederation’s politicians. Samuel Adams would sign off a Riot Act which prohibited all gatherings of more than 12 armed persons, and empowering sheriffs to kill rioters. Thus even Adams, the champion of the right of the people to rebel, would end up by saying: “in monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death”. But the local militias would refuse to fire on the rebels, and the so-called Shay’s rebellion was only suppressed by a private army financed by the wealthy merchants of Boston, prefiguring the Pinkertons of the next century. There are undoubtedly certain features of the class struggle in the United States that are distinctly American.

If the Founding Fathers had thought that business would proceed on its way undisturbed if each State attended to its own affairs, then evidently they would have to think again. They would accordingly come to the realization that strong central government was needed to maintain order amongst the rebel slaves, the dissidents and the Native Americans. In 1787 they would have to reconvene at the Constitutional Convention and produce a Constitution which went beyond empty rhetoric and really reflected the interests of the classes which had urged separation from the mother country. Other important measures were those which aimed at preventing new territories from cutting adrift from the thirteen ex-colonies, a prospect which was more than likely given the social and economic situation.

The Constitution, which was approved in 1787, illustrates the complexity of the American system and helps us understand some of its distinctive features as they exist today. Whilst it was designed to defend the interests of a small elite of rich magnates (“Those who own the country ought to govern it” John Jay had said), it didn’t neglect the intermediate classes, such as the artisans, small farmers and professionals, who towards the end of the century formed an ample layer of the population (for example, half the population of New York). These classes formed a buffer, an insulating layer between the big bourgeoisie and the strata of the destitute, and of proletarians and quasi-proletarians: blacks, manual laborers, specialized workers, apprentices, farm laborers, native Americans and poor peasant farmers. In this way, better than in all other capitalist countries at that time, and indeed subsequently, it would be possible to exercise social control with a minimum of force and simply by using the Law, along with an immoderate use of nationalist and patriotic propaganda. Of course this masterpiece of social peace (which would not, however, be entirely without interruptions) was founded on the immense wealth of the country being snatched from the Native Americans, with preparations being made to take it in its entirety in the long run.

At the end of the 18th century it seemed as though the American people were well on their way to social equality, whilst the last vestiges of feudalism, which continued to linger in England, not least the monarchy, had been swept away forever. The great revolutionary slogan – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – hypocritical though it was, was interpreted by proletarians as authorization of their wish for a future of decent wages, bearable working hours, and humane living conditions. And on the other hand the great invention of the America war of independence was precisely the brilliant rhetoric of ‘Liberty’. Every class and every social layer, from the peasant farmers of the Hudson Valley to the coopers of Philadelphia, from the sailors of Boston to the traders in debt to England, from indentured servants thirsty for land to the skilled craftsmen of New York, all of them saw in the achievement of Liberty the solution to all their problems, the opening of a new world of wealth and well-being.

But such would not be the case. In the general transformation of the society that had arisen after the war the struggle would become more and more restricted to the two fundamental classes of the capitalist system of production, the working class and the class of capitalists. The other components of society were destined to decline, even if at certain times they would still play an important role.

A presentation at the January 2007 party meeting in Sarzana [RG97]

From Independence to Secession

The average American, in the decades after the War of Independence, was the very epitome of self-sufficiency and versatility, capable of driving a plough, fixing a wheel on his cart, repairing his own boots and weaving on the familial loom. But the famous Noah Webster, who wrote in 1785 that it would remain such “so long as there is a vast tract of fertile land to cultivate,” was wrong. Already there were the first signs of those enormous changes that would turn small holders and artisans into wage labourers.

Three interdependent forces characterise this epoch making transformation, this real industrial revolution: the market, transportation and manufacture. In the process we will witness the bourgeois revolution in the United States drawing to a close, having achieved a politico-economic transformation which would only be completed in the second half of the 19^th century.

The revolution in the market, already well underway by the 1780s, would remove the incentive to produce articles for direct personal use, encouraging instead the production of commodities for sale. This meant, for the farmers with small and medium sized holdings throughout the country and for the planters in the South, transferring capital and human resources from subsistence agriculture to that of products that could be sold on the market, in other words, cereals for the small farmer and industrial scale cultivation of tobacco and cotton for the planter. For the rural artisan the commercial revolution marked the end of the age of the itinerant worker, when the norm was to visit the farms in order to exchange the articles he had made for agricultural products. The artisan in the town, meanwhile, was compelled to employ more apprentices and specialised workers in order to produce enough to sell and to keep the shelves well-stocked. At any rate the novelty was the prominent role which money was assuming as the means of effecting exchange, and as regulator of social relations.

The revolution in transportation went through several phases. First there was the development of the road network, including the toll roads which started to appear in the 1790s. Around 1820 the great canal building projects got underway, creating a network of navigable canals into the interior. And in the decade that followed, a railway network began to take shape. All these arterial routes had the effect of extending the market and of stimulating the industrial revolution. The new means of transport meant rural America was inundated with manufactured articles which had traditionally been produced in the home. Demand from the country was stimulated and this prompted the supply from the city. One consequence of this was an excess of manpower in the country: manpower that was rendered available for use in the nascent industries.

In its early days the industrial revolution can’t be identified with the rise of the factory system. In fact, even if the factory represented, then as now, the most visible manifestation of manufacture as a system of production, it still only constituted a relatively small part of the industrial scene before the Civil War. In 1860 wage-earners in small firms and workshops still outnumbered those in factories, and the vast majority still used manual tools rather than machinery powered by water, steam or other kinds of energy. The industrial revolution of smoky factories and deafening machines was still in its infancy in pre-war America.

Actually by 1860 none of the revolutions we have mentioned had yet run their course; each of them had developed in an irregular way, geographically as well, taking off much faster in the North, and later on, in the Midwest, than in the South, which never became industrialised to a significant degree.

Any reliable account must bear in mind that the independent homesteader, the cultivator of his own land was, at the turn of the 18^th Century and for many years thereafter, the backbone of the Union. In 1790, nine out of ten Americans lived off the land, and even in 1860 it was still 8 out of 10. The economy of the small farmer was based on self-sufficiency: as well as tilling the soil and stock raising, and related agrarian industries, other activities such as spinning and weaving were carried out inside the family unit. Still in the 1840s the quantity of woven goods produced in the home surpassed the amount produced in the textile mills, and these woven goods were used to acquire necessary products such as objects made from metal, and tea, etc. Things were acquired by bartering for them and there was very little money in circulation: it was rare, jealously guarded, and only there to be used when there was no alternative, such as paying taxes, in some States, and acquiring land for ones children.

Pioneer tradition indeed dictated that males leaving home would be provided with a parcel of land and females with a dowry. Initially finding new land wasn’t that difficult, you just ploughed it up and got on with it; but when, at the beginning of the 19^th Century, land in the Atlantic States started to run out, the solution had to be either reducing the amount of land you distributed to your sons (and a certain minimum amount was needed if they were to live off it), or finding it elsewhere, and elsewhere meant the West. Thus there was the first wave of emigration, in order to search for land beyond the Appalachians. In the North there was the populating of the States of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, extending up to the most northerly of the lakes; in the centre, Tennessee and Kentucky; in the South the movement was towards the Gulf, across what would become the States of Mississippi and Alabama, and as far as ex-French Louisiana.

An important consequence of agricultural development west of the Appalachians was a big increase in cereal production, partly destined, insofar as a surplus existed, for the market. But the markets were now at some distance from the new zones of production, and the need arose to equip the country with an adequate infrastructure. This was achieved in the first half of the 1800s, as we have seen, even if on the eve of the Civil War the greater part of transportation down the valleys of the Ohio to the Atlantic ports (mainly New York and Baltimore) was still carried by river down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then by sea across the Atlantic. In the South the development of transportation was very inferior with respect to the North, and for this reason the farmers in the South were a lot poorer than their counterparts in the North; a factor which also gave rise to the ‘poor whites’ of the South.

Developments in transport also had the consequence of breaking down production in the home due to the ever lower prices of industrial goods. Barter on the other hand became increasingly difficult, and more and more farmers were forced to produce for the market. Farming was becoming mechanised, but machines cost money. Those who didn’t manage to increase their productivity to certain levels had to sell their land and move into commerce or, in many cases, become wage labourers. The most immediate effect of all this was the growth of the cities.

Between 1820 and 1860 the country’s population would increase by 230%, from under 10 million to just over 30 million, an average increase of 2.8% per annum. At the end of this period less than one American in five lived in urban centres of over 8,000 inhabitants. But the growth of cities was tumultuous, if one considers that their populations increased by 800%. But immigrants, who are generally linked to urbanisation, played a smaller role than one might in this demographic explosion. In 1860 there were only around 4 million, and considerably more than half of these had arrived between 1846 and 1857, when the urban boom was drawing to a close, and only half of them settled in the city. In actual fact the urbanisation of this period derived mostly from the natural increase of the city’s inhabitants and from internal migrations. The drift between town and country therefore maintained a kind of equilibrium until the 1850s. This was not the case with immigration, with successive waves arriving from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The main increase occurred in 1846-7, when the number of immigrants rose from 82,000 to more than 142,000. From then on there was a regular increase until a pre-war maximum of 267,000 individuals was reached in 1851. From then until 1858, despite slowing up slightly, the rate of immigration never fell below the 1847 figure; and in just those 11 years around 2 million Europeans would disembark onto American shores. In 1860 emigrants would make up a third of the inhabitants of the 40 main urban centres.

But far from constituting a problem, the immigrants found themselves in a situation which could absorb their labour power: the development of the industrial revolution. Before the immigration explosion at the end of the ‘40s, industrial and craft activities were the prerogative of white males who had been born in the country, as much in the North as in the South. Working women were to be found mainly in domestic service or in non-specialised activities within the textile industry, as well as in a few other unskilled trades. The relatively few immigrants were divided into English and German skilled workers on the one hand, and unskilled Irish workers on the other.

The black freemen were concentrated in the ports, sometimes it seems in the skilled trades as well, and in the building trades. In the South, of course, slaves considerably outnumbered black freemen although there were some who worked as craftsmen and artisans in the cities. The Skilled labour of the slaves was essential in the tobacco industry and in the steelworks of Virginia, but they were nevertheless employed in far greater numbers in what was then contemptuously referred to as “nigger work”; in activities considered menial, dirty or unpleasant, or at least beneath the “dignity” of the white man, such as that of the barber and the butcher. Most commonly, slaves were assigned to unskilled activities of various kinds. In any case, what was “nigger work” to some might be much sought after by others, and just as the native white workers sought to exclude slaves from skilled work, so did immigrants try to exclude black freemen from unskilled work, even resorting to violence.

The heavy influx of immigrants in the middle of the century transformed the ethnic composition and occupational composition of the labour force in both halves of the country. White natives held on to the better paid, so-called “respectable” trades. Women and immigrants found jobs in the declining semi-skilled trades, and the Irish replaced ‘the Yankees’ in the textile industry. The Blacks and the Irish divided up the unskilled work. What had been an ethnically homogeneous working class in the 1850s had become a heterogeneous and polyglot mass.

Early Industrial Development

At the time of the War of Independence, only very few productive activities, such as those in the iron and steel and shipbuilding industries, were conducted on a large scale. Most manufacturing activities, such as in the woollen industry and indeed in the iron and steel industry, were held back by competition from England where there was an abundance of low cost skilled labour and appropriate infrastructures in place. Since, because of the war, trade had been paralysed, the transport infrastructure destroyed and many of the most flourishing districts laid waste, the recovery and economic reconstruction would be slow and based on agricultural activities to begin with.

On the other hand, the rapid growth in the population, which rose from 4 to 31 million between 1790 and 1860, along with improvements in transportation would enormously expand the domestic market for manufactures, and despite significant competition from English exporters it would offer significant opportunities to American entrepreneurs. In an initial phase these ventures would combine to profit from domestic labour, as in the case of shoemaking, where the capitalist was able to reduce costs and sell his shoes at low prices over a considerable area.

But as the new century dawned, it would be the textile industry, above all in New England, which first developed along the lines of the English factories, through its use of machinery powered by steam and by water. Whilst gradually bringing about the disappearance of domestic labour, it was the first industry to bring large numbers of workers together in genuine factories. The cotton industry would really start to take off in the latter years of the 18^th Century in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts to the North of Boston. The two areas were different in certain key respects; to the North of Boston the industry relied on the labour of women who came from the farms of New England. Normally they were young unmarried women who would often spend only a very brief part of their lives earning a wage, which would usually go towards funding their wedding day. They were accommodated in model lodging houses built by the Company and were subject to rigorous rules of conduct. This was the famous “Lowell System”, admired by foreign visitors for the intellectual, cultural and sanitary regime it bestowed on its workers. In Rhode Island, on the other hand, they adopted a system resembling the English one, of employing entire families, including children, without any regard for the quality of their family life. These two areas constituted the greater part of the cotton industry, although there were some factories in New Jersey and around Philadelphia as well. In the same areas a woollen industry, also mechanised, developed too, although this would develop much more slowly. We should mention, in any case, that production of cotton and woollen textiles in the home remained relatively high until the middle of the 19^th Century.

Other industries which developed were those of sugar-cane processing, metallurgy, the making of metal articles and tools, and the production of other objects without any particular craft tradition. In other sectors, the growth of the factory system occurred much later on in the period currently under consideration, that is, between the end of the War of Independence and the outbreak of the Civil war.

The nascent American manufactory had the advantage of setting out from a situation in which production was highly standardised, allowing complex assemblages to be constructed using interchangeable components. Early progress in this field was made in the production of small arms, but by the middle of the century the technique was being applied to clocks, locks, agricultural machinery and equipment, and sewing machines. Many of these products, which could now be assembled by unskilled workers, were beginning to replace the imported versions of the same goods, which required highly specialised labour. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, American industry was in a position to exhibit a number of devices and procedures which were technically in advance of the English; and European engineers suddenly realised there was something to be learned from their trans-Atlantic rivals. And this was all the more remarkable considering the small scale of American industry at the time, both compared to England and taking into account the size of the country.

In 1860, if in New England only 1 citizen in 8 was employed in some kind of manufacturing activity (not just in factory work), elsewhere the figure was even lower: 1 in 15 in the middle states, 1 in 48 in the West, and 1 in 82 in the South. Thus one can safely say that up until the time of the Civil War the United States of America was predominantly an agricultural country.

In the major towns of Massachusetts up until the 1830s and 1840s, most of the industrial labour was therefore supplied by women. We have seen how in the South, in the iron and steel industries, slaves were also used as well, but since these had to be acquired or hired from their proprietors, they weren’t ever as competitive as the better organised “free” labour in the North.

Apart from the iron and steel industry in Richmond, most factory workers weren’t a part of the urban proletariat as the new industries were situated in small country towns, where it was easier to harness water power. But even in these towns the extent of factory production was still far from the levels that would be achieved after the Civil War. Indeed in 1860 the labour power employed in industry, in two important urban centres like Lowell (Mass.) and Lynn, was still no more than a third and a half of the total, respectively, and they were special cases. In none of the other fifteen most important cities did the level of proletarian concentration in big industry even approach that. If in Newark (New Jersey) it was as high as 25%, in cities like New York and St. Louis it was less than 10%. The era of the industrial city hadn’t yet begun.

The greater part of production still consisted of handmade goods, and was produced in small and medium sized workshops. Within this stratum of small producers, relations of labour had barely changed over the past centuries, and as in the European countries which had still not been revolutionized by big industry, there was the proprietor of the workshop (the master), the skilled worker (the journeyman) and the apprentice.

The artisan was equipped with a set of typical tools of his craft, enabling him to make the finished product. The masters were proprietors who did everything, from maintaining relations with their customers and ordering raw materials, to keeping the accounts. In addition they planned the work, supervised their young apprentices, and worked alongside their subordinates. For the most part they were ex skilled workers, expert workers formerly paid by the day or on a piece work basis, depending on the craft. These journeymen in their turn had been apprentices, who had started in the trade when still adolescents and spent from three to seven years learning the secrets of the craft under the tutelage of their master. The apprentice didn’t receive a salary, just food and lodging and little else; in general his family provided the rest. They could be punished by the master when they were insubordinate, although they could seek redress by appealing to the authorities. Between the age of 18 and 21, an apprentice was promoted to journeyman. He would receive a suit of clothes and a set of tools of the craft as recognition of his formal admission into the craft brotherhood. For the first time he had a right to a salary, even if often not very much, and not necessarily guaranteed in the long term. In the most fortunate cases journeymen were aspiring masters, who worked with alacrity to put aside money so they could set up on their own, even if it involved taking over their former boss’s concern.

The rhythms of work resembled those in rural activities. When orders were irregular, the periods of inactivity were often spent discussing a whole range of subjects. Pre-industrial revolution artisans were relatively well-read and with a rich intellectual life.

The industrial revolution in North America was preceded by a period between the 1820s and 1840s in which the craft workshop underwent major changes. The first important transformation was an increase in the number of people employed in the workshop, rising to a few dozen or so and threatening the traditional equilibrium between the three roles just described. The consequence was richer proprietors, less and less hope for the journeymen of setting up on their own (we can date the precocious death of the “American Dream” to this period, with its subsequent existence a mere mirage for the overwhelming majority of proletarians) and apprentices seen more and more as low cost labour rather than as future artisans. There then followed the transformation of the mode of working typical of the factory, whether through the introduction of machinery, or by sub-dividing the working process into a number of simple phases, allowing non-specialised, and therefore cheaper and easily replaceable, labour to be taken on such as women and children. Finally, there was a reduction in the typology of products. All these changes had as their consequence an increase in production and a lowering of the costs of production. These changes also dealt a blow to domestic production, which even if it was less costly, and symbolic of the most virulent capitalist exploitation, had nevertheless become less productive that the factory.

It is worth recalling that the initial phase of this process, that is, up to the 1850s, was extremely slow; and same was the case as regards the mechanisation of agriculture. The process, furthermore, happened in a very selective way, depending on the sector: more slowly among the blacksmiths, bakers and butchers, more quickly among the tailors, shoemakers and carpenters.

In any case, up until the outbreak of the war there were still far more craft workshops than capitalist enterprises. The issue, of course, presents itself in a very different way if the total mass of products is taken into account.

Despite everything, a lot had changed. The pre-industrial world of self-sufficient peasant farmers and independent craftsmen was receding into a past that could never return. The accelerating commercial revolution pushed systems of exchange based on barter to the margins of the economy, and loosened the bonds that had tied generations of Americans to the land. The first stirrings of the industrial revolution created a new stratum of proprietors who were no longer master craftsmen but entrepreneurs, determined to make money in an economy of savage and no holds barred competition. Even a working class was coming into being, and even if it wasn’t yet an army of out and out factory slaves, its component elements were becoming increasingly dependent on wages alone, whilst gradually losing any craft ability and becoming subjected to a rigid pace of work and set hours. It was a transformation whose beginnings may be traced back to the 1820s, to that period later known as the ‘Era of Good Feelings’. The happy age for the small, free American producer would become an American myth.

Workers’ Associations

Mechanics’ and artisans’ associations had emerged in the last quarter of the 18^th Century, often as clandestine committees formed in the period of the War of Independence, or as friendly societies. The oldest was the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York dating back to 1785. These groups reflected the consciousness of a community traditionally split across innumerable crafts, but one becoming increasingly aware of its common interests. Amongst their aims were the following: applying pressure to politicians, such as when tariffs were being set, and decisions being taken about public works; keeping members informed in writing, or by word of mouth, about markets and what commodities were around; putting unemployed members in contact with proprietors who needed manpower. The wealthier associations built their own meeting houses in the town centres, and participated with great pomp and ceremony in all the civic celebrations and grand occasions.

These institutions also tended to regulate the internal life of the craft, establishing rates and charges, salaries and codes of conduct. In Boston, for example, anyone who employed apprentices who were too young was liable to pay a fine of $10, whereas anyone who convinced an apprentice to abandon another workshop for his own had to stump up $30.

Initially the associations which lasted longest were the typographers’ and shoe makers’ societies. Other ones, although they didn’t last as long, seemed ever ready to re-emerge at the first opportunity. Their mortality was principally determined by the efforts of the bosses to have the members of these organisations condemned as ‘conspirators’, and by the preparedness of the courts to go along with them. The original scope of the craft societies was above all to maintain, rather than improve, wages and working conditions, keeping them at the point where they would still undercut other workers in order to safeguard their own members’ interests; clearly an aristocratic attitude, which would be slow to disappear from the American workers’ movement.

The revolution in the market which took place at the beginning of the 1800s – with many workshop proprietors becoming small entrepreneurs and an increase in the average number of people in each workshop, more in certain sectors than in others to begin with – also had repercussions on these associations, which would start to diversify, with some of them supporting the proprietor’s line and others, in their tone and composition, taking a more worker orientated line. Only the latter type would focus on the defence of wage levels and working conditions, rather than on upholding a generic solidarity. What is more, the former organisations began to put up their subscriptions to levels which the day labourers couldn’t afford. Above all, the workers began to realise that fellowship of the old type was no longer enough: preventing the proprietors from reducing them to poverty in the first place was as important as mutual support to deal with such poverty after the event, once the workers’ families had already been affected.

But even if this process, as always in such cases, differed from one trade to another, from one city to another and involved U-turns and brusque accelerations, the general outcome may be summed up in the experience of the New York Typographical Society. Whereas in 1809 it had approved a resolution which stated “ between employers and employed there are mutual interests”, eight years later it discovered that an employer member had been conspiring with other employers to break the union. After expelling him, the society amended their constitution and excluded employers because “Experience teaches us that the actions of men are influenced almost wholly by their interests, and that it is almost impossible that a society can be regulated and useful where its members are actuated by opposite motives and separate interests. This society is a society of journeymen printers, and as the interests of the journeymen are separate and in some respects opposite to that of the employers, we deem it improper that they should have any voice or influence in our deliberation. (…) That when any member of this society shall become an employing printer he should be considered without the limits of the Society and not to vote on any question, or pay any dues in the same.”

The craft regulations and customs were steadily eroded by the new economic environment and by the end of the 1820s we can say they were finally defunct.

Give the absence of the guilds and the relatively lack of apprentices, the first trade union organisations had an ‘aristocratic’ character, and were composed solely of skilled workers. They were merely temporary associations set up to achieve immediate ends: in 1778 the New York typographers joined together to demand a three dollar wage increase, and since their demands were met, they saw no reason to continue meeting. The first strike dates back to 1786, six years before the foundation of the first permanent trade union, and on that occasion the strikers, the Philadelphia typographers, also won. In the years that followed there were a number of other struggles, and the bourgeoisie was starting to get frightened. With the workers showing increasing determination and effectiveness the proprietors were not slow to respond, applying increasingly decisive strategies in proportion to the means at their disposal. To the workers it therefore soon became apparent that mounting a successful struggle required a permanent organisation, with regular meetings, a strike fund, and a plan of action to prepare for future battles.

The transition to a trade union structure was therefore fiercely opposed by the proprietors, who were often able to obtain court orders prohibiting union activity. But even if this approach was not formally repudiated until 1842, it never really prevented struggles from breaking out in any case, although it did put obstacles in their way and served as a means of carrying out vendettas against smaller, less well-organised proletarian organisations. As a matter of fact, new laws regarding the trade unions were never enacted. English Common Law was used instead, which defined conspiracy as when two or more people came together to damage the interests of a third, or that of the general public. After the first verdicts in the courts had been passed, these would then be used as precedents in subsequent cases. In order to control the working class, the republic, born out of a difficult and bloody struggle (fought above all by workers and peasants as we have seen) for liberty, equality and the “pursuit of happiness”, would casually appeal to a law which had been passed in hated England in 1349, the Statute of Labourers, which was enacted, in the interests of the employers, to force workers who had survived the Black Death to work for wages set by law.

But it is not until 1792 that we have what may be considered the first permanent trade union, the Philadelphia shoemakers’ organisation, which would battle on, against all the odds, until 1806. Their example was quickly followed by analogous initiatives in Boston, Philadelphia and Providence, and then by many others, to a degree, in every other city. Nevertheless, despite the advent of permanent trade unions, many organisations would disband after a strike, whether they were successful or not.

The two opposing classes meanwhile started to define themselves and clarify their respective identities from a theoretical point of view, with the rising bourgeoisie certainly much more prolific in this respect. Adam Smith was one of the principal sources of American bourgeois ideology during this period, an ideology which would eventually develop into the postulate of free labor, which even now, reduced to an empty illusion, gets between our feet today. The ideal society, supposedly, is one in which there is a minimum of political interference in the market and in production, the dynamics of which are supposed to naturally favour the attainment of economic independence on the part of the farmers and the workers, if, that is, they are sufficiently diligent and industrious. In short, it is the theory of ‘the self-made man’: everyone has the possibility of making money (how is irrelevant), after all, where there’s a will there’s a way… What is more, Free Labor is considered the founding ideology of the Republican Party, which would form as such in the mid 1850s.

Another important tendency was reformed Protestantism, which spread from the valleys of the North across the entire Union between 1790 and the 1850s. Evangelical fervour, which produced a plethora of sects which still infest the country today, claimed to exert a moralising influence, but of the sort that didn’t conflict with the ambitions of the nascent bourgeoisie, and with the requirement of efficiently run workshops.

It was phenomenon – which we won’t go into here – which had repercussions on the two national parties: the Whigs (predecessors of the Republicans) and the Democrats. Already the two parties displayed those marked differences which would characterise them in the years to come. The Whigs supported intervention from central government, to establish protective tariffs, construct infrastructures and create an efficient national banking system. Obviously they had the support of the financial and manufacturing bourgeoisie, and of the workers’ aristocracy, which welcomed the development of public education and welfare provision. The Democrats, on the other hand, detested federal intervention and were highly suspicious of it. They drew their support from the Southern planters, but were also supported by the commercial bourgeoisie of the North, by professionals, and by the poorest proletarians and immigrants. In response to the workers’ struggles of the 1830s they ended up making demands which were of interest to proletarians, such as the abolition of the militias and imprisonment for debt, but never demands that significantly favoured the working class, such as a reduction in working hours or a minimum wage.

On the contrary, both parties, when faced with the rise of the first trade unions, sought refuge in the theory of free labor, which translated into trade union terms meant every individual was equivalent to every other, bosses included. A theory, incidentally, which at the time had been welcomed with open arms by every country in Europe, and was being used to prohibit the trade unions by law. To the Whigs, the trade unions were ‘plunderers’, to the Democrats, they were ‘monopolists’ – as were the big entrepreneurs, true, but ‘much more dangerous’. The law of supply and demand, according to bourgeoisie theoreticians and politicians, set the level of wages and it was considered inviolable. The same went for the sacred doctrine of ‘freedom of contract’, which gave every man the right to work for as many hours a day ‘as he chose’. The transatlantic bourgeoisie, in considering workers united in trade unions as the type of association which wanted to bend the poor entrepreneur, alone against all, to its will, was no different from its European counterpart.

The Situation of the Working Class

The dream of the Journeyman, of the skilled worker, was to live a dignified, not needlessly extravagant, life, whose professional course ran from apprentice to artisan; a life crowned with the acquisition of a house for his family, by participation in professional and civic organisations, and with the setting aside of a sufficient sum to ensure a comfortable old age. But this not unreasonable objective was not always achievable; not through any lack of industriousness on the part of the worker, but because the economic scene was becoming ever more erratic with the development of the capitalist economy. At the beginning of the 1820s shoemakers and tailors were earning between $6.00 and $8.00 per week, that is, between $2.00 and $4.00 less than the typesetters, carpenters and other craftsmen in the so-called ‘respectable’ trades. The periodic recessions in the next thirty years, the worst of them in the 1830s, had the effect of lowering wages across the board. In the 1850s there was a revival: in 1860 average wages were a third higher than in 1850, and almost back to pre-crisis levels. But there had been created a major differentiation between the different sectors, and wide wage differentials.

In the cities of the Midwest, which were developing at an unusual pace thanks to the lack of labour power keeping wages high, things were better, at least to begin with. In 1820, almost a third of the workers in Cincinnati owned their own homes, possibly the highest percentage in the country. But by 1838 the situation had changed, and the rate had fallen to 6%, falling to 5% by 1850. In the same period the wealth of the highest strata of the population went up from 70% in 1838 to 80% in 1860.

Other data also gives us an idea of the state of the working class at this historic juncture: at the beginning of the period an average family needed around $330 per annum to avoid poverty, a sum that only unskilled workers lacking work for long periods found difficult to scrape together. Thirty years later, the required sum had risen to $500 ($600 in New York), whilst wages, in the best of cases, remained unchanged. The proletarian masses in the cities were struggling to survive; very different from the dignified life to which the journeymen had aspired!

Outside the big cities, and sometimes in them, those who were able to kept a vegetable plot, hunted or fished. Others raised pigs or even cattle if possible. If they had a spare room they rented it out to a single worker, although extremely cramped conditions were the norm in the big cities. In such circumstances it was therefore not surprising that every resource was exploited, including the labour of children and adolescents; labour which, like domestic labour, was very poorly remunerated, but added to other income could make the difference between pauperism and a dignified poverty.

In the South the situation of white proletarians was invariably worse. But at the bottom of the social scale, living and working in the worst conditions of all, were the free black workers. For they, as well as having to put up with the usual exploitation by the bourgeoisie, were ostracised by white workers, who thought forcing black workers out of the productive process was the best way of getting more work for themselves. Often the workers and the proprietors in the skilled trades used their organisations to promote legislation which eliminated black competition, forcing blacks into ever more unpleasant jobs, even when they had a trade and work experience. But once having being forced into unskilled and usually temporary work, as dock hands or builder’s labourer, they still wouldn’t be left in peace: first white workers, who had lost their jobs during the depression at the beginning of the 1840s, then starving immigrants, who flocked into the cities a few years later, would spark off racially motivated revolts and engage in various forms of intimidation in the cities of both North and South. For instance, bitter struggles would take place in Philadelphia in 1841 and 1849, when even the contractors would be intimidated by the mob, composed mainly of Irishmen, until blacks were more or less banned from working in the docks. The same occurred in the South: in New Orleans the Irish would arrive and replace black people in one of their most traditional occupations, as restaurant waiters.

The free black population certainly didn’t always suffer in silence, but their counter-offensives were nevertheless bound to fail: as opposed to slaves, who could count on the influence and protection of their owner, there was little they could expect from their employers. In the 1850s, thanks to the economic boom and to the antagonism which was building up between the North and the South, the situation slightly improved in the North, and blacks would begin to reappear in the ports and on the building sites, but the majority would still remained stuck in the most menial occupations; a situation which, a century and a half later, hasn’t really changed that much, although the only laws governing it now are the ineradicable laws of capitalist economy.

Presented at the May 2007 party meeting at Parma

In search of an independent role

The revolutionary soldiers on returning to their homes would find them heavily mortgaged and their families deeply in debt. Local power was concentrated in the hands of rich merchants and the landed gentry, who were busily enriching themselves speculating in land, treasury warrants and paper money. As well as major uprisings, such as Shays’ Rebellion, in response to really extreme situations, there was a growing conviction among the lower social classes that they might have won the war, but they hadn’t ‘won the peace’. Political action by these classes was held back as it was almost impossible for them to gain parliamentary representation, their right to vote being restricted by property qualifications, initially absent only in Pennsylvania.

Action taken by the working classes therefore developed in two directions: on the one hand the fight for suffrage, which sought to achieve representation in parliament to defend their interests; on the other, support for Thomas Jefferson, who was championing the approval of the so-called Bill of Rights, which consisted of ten amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing ‘the citizen’ a number of safeguards, such as freedom of the press, religion and assembly, the right to bear arms and protection from summary and arbitrary justice. It was claimed that the conquests of the War of Independence would thereby be defended from the ‘authoritarian’ tendencies of the federalists (Whigs) who, along with Hamilton, were even suspected of wishing to reintroduce the monarchy.

In fact, even then the federalists were already the party best suited to drive the economic development of the country forward in a capitalist direction, with a program that advocated a rationalization and centralization of the economy, a central bank, and measures to develop manufacture and commerce. But in the particular conditions of post-revolutionary America their initiatives were clearly premature.

Pressure from the lower classes was the decisive factor in the eventual victory of the Republican Democrats (ancestors of the present Democrats), with Jefferson becoming president in 1800. This party (for it is during these years that parties were formed in the United States) would hold onto power almost without a break until the outbreak of the Civil War. The Bill of Rights would be passed in 1791, in part thanks also to the French Revolution, which would rouse the spirits of proletarians, artisans and radicals; and also due to the increasingly blatant corruption of the federalists. And if opposition to the class in power was generally peaceful, it should be remembered that the mass of the people had recently fought a bloody war, and had learnt to use arms.

In ensuing years, thanks to the economic power concentrated in their hands, federalist circles opposed all initiatives by the Democrats, and this confirmed the latter among the working masses as its most effective defender. Thus the Democrats managed to obtain the keen support of workers and craftsmen, who joined new organizations, inter-classist but with a strong proletarian presence, which were called Democratic Societies or Republican Clubs. It was from these organizations, which were active around the last decade of the century, that support for the French Revolution emerged. But they also set about promoting suffrage, and popular education with schooling for all. Even if these societies soon disappeared, proletarian support for the Democrats continued, to the extent that workers strongly supported them during the war against England in 1812, even enrolling in the army and navy and in the corveés to build New York’s external fortifications.

From a trade union perspective, however, as we have seen, the labor organizations were generally weak and of short duration. This situation didn’t change until around 1819-1822, when a deep and widespread economic depression produced major unemployment in the big cities, destroying what little trade union associationism the class had managed to express up to that point. In 1823 there was a recovery, but throughout the twenties the workers’ circumstances were extremely difficult, prompting contemporary commentators to say that the condition of the slave was far superior. In 1829 there was another crisis followed by widespread unemployment. That proletarians were not in a strong position became evident through the spread of so-called ‘yellow dog contracts’ (chiefly amongst female workers), in which the worker signed a document agreeing not to engage in trade union activity, and if he or she did, “to forfeit to the use of the company the amount due to us at that time”. Since wages were often paid twice a year this clause had a major impact. And along with this there was already the widespread use of blacklists, the lists of workers who hadn’t behaved as their bosses wished, and who would no longer be able to find work, a least in the same State or same industry.

First organized economic movements

As early as 1823, signs of a proletarian awakening were all around. In March 1823 in New Orleans a group of printers organized themselves into a trade union, prompted by the “low ebb to which the fraternity has been reduced by not receiving regular pay from their employers”. Soon workers in various trades in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and other cities were organizing and putting forward demands for increased wages and shorter hours, and threatening to strike if their terms were not met. The process of unionization continued till the end of the decade and in 1827 there the crowning moment occurred with the foundation of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations in Philadelphia. This wasn’t just a new union but an inter-category union which represented a higher level of class consciousness, involving a recognition by it members that everyone, regardless of their trade, had common problems that could only be solved by struggling together, in a united effort of all proletarians, as a class, against the common enemy. It was framework which united workers under one roof, prefiguring the Camere di lavoro and trade union federations of the future; and it is in fact from this date that the American trade union movement is usually considered to have got underway.

The Mechanics’ Union arose out of the ten-hour movement, which would spread like wildfire between 1825-1835 although it was already in existence before the first permanent unions were formed. Indeed as far back as 1791 the Philadelphia carpenters had gone on strike for a ten-hour day and for overtime pay.

The most important demand to be raised in the course of that decade was therefore the limitation of the working day. As a rule the working day was from dawn to dusk and yet, inhuman as these hours were, they only represented the minimum, and the entrepreneurs had no scruples about extending them. In Paterson, New Jersey, for example, a factory regulation required women and children to start work at 4.30 in the morning; in the factories of Peterboro, and at other places in New Hampshire, the custom arose of using artificial light, so that work could start an hour before dawn; a practice the workers called “the creation of two evenings in one day”.

In 1828, again in Paterson, the first recorded factory strike in the USA took place, and this too was linked to working hours: In response to the proposal to move the lunch hour from 12 to 1, the operatives, mainly children, went out on strike. As one observer stated, the children were afraid that if they assented to the change “the next thing would be to deprive them of eating at all”.

And a few years before, around 1825, a number of sailors and carpenters organizations, and builders’ unions, had launched a fierce struggle for the reduction of the working day in Maine and Baltimore.

There were a lot of isolated struggles, defeated due to lack of communication between the various local organizations. They had to struggle not only against the influence of the masters, but also against public opinion. Hypocritical attempts was made to persuade the workers that the ten hour day would be bad for them; it would “exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices, by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time, to which we [the employers] are anxious to inure them,” and it would “expose the Journeymen themselves to many improvident temptations and improvident practices”. Trade unions, said the employers, were “un-American” (a term still used today): they had been brought over from Europe by foreigners who carried with them “a spirit of discontent and insubordination to which our native Mechanics have hitherto been strangers”. If allowed to grow, these combinations of labor would injure all classes, inasmuch as they gave an artificial and unnatural turn to business and tended “to convert all its branches into monopolies.”

There were a lot of isolated struggles, defeated due to lack of communication between the various local organizations. They had to struggle not only against the influence of the masters, but also against public opinion. Hypocritical attempts was made to persuade the workers that the ten hour day would be bad for them; it would “exert a very unhappy influence on our apprentices, by seducing them from that course of industry and economy of time, to which we [the employers] are anxious to inure them,” and it would “expose the Journeymen themselves to many improvident temptations and improvident practices”. Trade unions, said the employers, were “un-American” (a term still used today): they had been brought over from Europe by foreigners who carried with them “a spirit of discontent and insubordination to which our native Mechanics have hitherto been strangers”. If allowed to grow, these combinations of labor would injure all classes, inasmuch as they gave an artificial and unnatural turn to business and tended “to convert all its branches into monopolies.”

In the Spring of 1827 workers in Philadelphia were stimulated by reading a pamphlet which invited them to raise the level of their political and trade union struggles, and to organize libraries, reading rooms and a labor press, etc. The pamphlet concluded by calling for action to establish the ten-hour day throughout the city. The carpenters were quick to respond to the call and, commenting on the anonymous authors of the pamphlet, they stated “they believe that all men have a just right, derived from their creator, to have sufficient time in each day for the cultivation of their mind and self-improvement”. Other workers in Philadelphia viewed the strike as their own, saying that “thousands yet unborn” would reap the advantage. The strike was defeated but it taught the workers that only united action of all workers could win the battle against the employers. Hence, in the fall of 1827, fifteen unions would form the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, with the aim of averting “the desolating evils which must inevitably arise from a depreciation of the intrinsic value of human labor”.

This federation of trade unions, which survived until 1831, dedicated much of its energy to political action and inter-category solidarity. Its example was followed in 1831 by the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen. This, too, arose out of the struggle for the reduction of the working day, evidently an aspect of the workers’ condition on which there was no difficultly in reaching agreement. But if by now the ten-hour day had been won in New York and to some extent in Philadelphia, in New England the workers still worked from dawn to dusk.

The New England Association first convened in Boston in February 1832 and drew up a constitution. One of its first provisions was that all of its members, except working farmers, should pledge themselves to work only ten hours a day with no reduction in wages. Since it was quickly realized that it would be impossible to enforce this provision, a war chest was set up to relieve any member thrown out of work for abiding by the pledge. But it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the $20,000 which the employers had put aside to break the Boston ship-carpenters strike for the shorter working day. Soon this organization, too, would turn to political action. But its most important contribution to the labor movement in the United States was the fact that it made the first attempt to include every group of workers in a single organization – factory workers, laborers, and skilled mechanics. The true union, the founders of the Association believed “should embrace every citizen whose daily exertions from the highest Artist to the lowest laborer are his means of subsistence.”

While economic demands were of interest to proletarians mainly insofar as they addressed particular circumstances, the popularity of the struggle for the ten-hour day among workers remained more or less constant, and would play a central role in encouraging their association. As we have seen, Boston was the scene of two strikes in the building trade, in 1825 and 1830, in pursuit of this aim. In 1833 it was Baltimore’s turn, and two years later the Boston workers resumed hostilities, this time supported by 16 trade associations from the General Trades Union (GTU). But this time resistance also came from within, from the master craftsmen, small employers who had been admitted to the GTU. The latter assembled a committee charged with assessing the chances of success of a general strike, which produced a report recommending that struggles should be conducted by each trade separately!

Despite this ‘friendly’ advice the workers pressed on with their plan for a general stoppage in all sectors, and on May 1^st, after some sectors had gone ahead anyway, a well-attended meeting was held in Julien Hall in Boston. Resolutions declaring the natural right of workers to “dispose of our time in the way we deem conducive to our happiness” served as introduction to the main speaker, Seth Luther who in a passionate speech stated that it was unacceptable that “any man or group of men could claim (…) that we should grind away as we have done until now under the old system of labor relations”. The new system of “republican” labor, boding moral and cultural relief to the worker – he assured an enraptured public – was within its grasp. Luther’s words, reprinted and distributed throughout the North-East as the “Ten Hours Circular”, would trigger an explosion of strikes which was unequalled until the great railway disputes of 1877. The struggles spread South, to Philadelphia and beyond, and to the West, as far as Cincinnati. By the end of June many local strikes had ended in success, their objectives obtained, and the workers found they had all the more reason to celebrate the 4^th of July that year. And yet in Boston, the city where it had all began, the employers and big merchants would somehow manage, for the third time in ten years, to get the better of the movement.

In the winter of 1836-37 the ships carpenters won the ten-hour day for reparation works, then in 1840 for the building of new ships. In New York, as in New England, the movement for the reduction of the working day revealed a lively fighting spirit, and achieved major results. In some workplaces the ten-hour working day had been obtained by 1832 and by 1836 by the whole of the shipbuilding sector. In Philadelphia, after some limited successes in 1833, there was a successful general strike. Likewise in Baltimore where at the start of 1836 the General Trades Union sent to the United States Congress the first memorandum calling for the ten-hour working day in all public works, but without success. It was then the turn of the stonemasons to enter the ten hours struggle. Certainly there would have been other major successes if the crisis of 1837 hadn’t hit the workers’ organizations, setting them back for several years. But in any case the movement survived and this was important for workers’ morale in these difficult times.

At a meeting in Boston In 1832, the merchants and ship-owners decided to “discourage and rein in the illegal craft associations, formed to restrict the freedom of individuals regarding their hours of work”, laying stress on the “noxious, corrupting tendency of these associations, as well as the senselessness of their requests, especially where skilled workers are highly regarded and well remunerated”. Eventually they decided not to take on qualified workers who were members of the associations, and to boycott any master craftsman who employed these workers. The New York merchants – and at the time almost all ship-owners were merchants as well – approved similar resolutions, lamenting the fact that the workers “are idle for two or three of the day’s most precious hours”. A Boston newspaper wrote that “to remain idle for several hours, during the most fruitful hours of morning and evening, will certainly lead to intemperance and ruin”. The employers didn’t confine themselves to meetings and to the boycotting of the workers’ resolutions, but had recourse also to much sharper weapons, in pressing for the intervention of the courts, the police and the militia.

In 1829 workers involved in the construction of the Chesapeake-Ohio canal were arrested for going on strike, although they were released soon afterwards. In 1833, in Geneva in the State of New York, some cobblers were charged with conspiracy and thrown into Gaol. In 1836, In New York, twenty one tailors who had gone on strike were tried and fined between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars each; the honorable judge declared that “this isn’t simply a conflict between workers and entrepreneurs, but a struggle on which depends the harmony of the entire union”. And in the same year there was the City mayor, even more ‘practical’ in his approach, who called out the militia against Dockers who were on strike for an increase in wages and a reduction of hours, forcing them back to work at the point of a gun. And analogous events took place in Philadelphia.

In the meantime, however, the movement had assumed such impressive dimensions that it was attracting the attention of the politicians. Almost every week workers met together in packed assemblies in the major cities and industrial districts of the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine. Strikes were very much the order of the day when President Martin van Buren enacted the famous Ten Hours decree, which the shipyards in Washington enforced on April 10 1840 with the announcement: “By order of the President of the United States is instituted from today a working day of ten hours in all public establishments”. Van Buren’s decree was the first legal measure favoring the workers of the United States, and the first official recognition of their demands.

Political Struggle

Towards the end of the 1820s the worsening of workers’ living conditions, and the declining position of craft labor described earlier, gave rise to a broad worker’s movement across the North-central States. Discontented with the ideology of ‘free labor’, workers began to look for alternative explanations and possible ways to defend themselves from a real attack that was underway which was undermining the living and working conditions of proletarian families. Thus out of this wish to avoid falling victim to the greed and egotism of the bosses did both political and trade union associations arise. Bourgeois historians refer to this wide-ranging and multi-faceted movement as “radicalism”, but in fact it was a feverish bustle of actions, theorizations, experiences, betrayals and partial intuitions which formed a kind of womb in which the embryo of the American working class, and its consciousness, was gestating.

The immediate problems requiring attention were clear to all: low pay, which was steadily decreasing even further, and intolerably long hours, with its inevitably debilitating consequences. A number of intellectuals turned their minds to these problems, some from the bourgeois class but many from the proletariat, generally skilled workers who were well-read and with good communication skills. Amongst these can be named Seth Luther, John Commerford, William Gilmore and John Ferral; all workers’ leaders who combined enlightenment ideas with knowledge of recent innovations in the realms of science, technology and political economy. There was also Thomas Skidmore, who saw the solution to social problems as lying in the distribution of the land.

Most interesting are the positions of William Heighton, a cobbler born in England: he formulated an elementary theory of value, which “derives from the labor of the working class”, a class within which he included unskilled workers, which was quite an advanced position for the time. And maybe it was partly due to him that Philadelphia, the city where he worked, was characterized then and later by its trade union organizations which accepted these pariahs of the working class, who elsewhere were highly discriminated against, along with women, children and afro-Americans. According to Heighton, the ills of American society derived from the greed of the land-grabbers following the War of Independence who, having taking the levers of power into their hands, created laws which favored the exploitation of wage labor. What constituted the workers’ weak point was their lack of knowledge and culture. According to Heighton, the process of capitalist production, which he called the “system of individual interest and competition”, and which according to Adam Smith resulted in the production of opulence and wealth for all, brought only misery and no prosperity to the worker.

But none of these radicals can really be considered socialist. None of them launched an attack on private property, or envisaged a society without classes. And neither were the employers condemned en bloc, but only the greediest and the most powerful members of their class. What is more, apart from Heighton, none of them took into account the weakest strata, such as the unskilled workers, women, children, and afro-americans both enslaved and free. These radical thinkers, even if for the most part expressions of the world of labour, didn’t move beyond the realm of discussion and the attempt to explain the new social relations; with the non-scientific methods available, they attempted to make sense of the new world taking shape around them with the cultural baggage of the enlightenment thinkers and the new science of economics. They were neither revolutionaries nor trade union activists, but they still played a role, sometimes unintentional, in the rise of the workers associations in the first decades of the 19^th Century.

The Working Men’s Party

The emergence of the North American labor movement, with the contents we have just described, appeared initially then with the formation of the Working Men’s Party in Philadelphia in 1828. After this and other political organizations, which were ambitious yet lacked substance and had little following within the class, there followed the season of trade unionism, which began in 1833 with the foundation of the General Trades’ Union of New York. In a few years the movement had grown and spread along the entire Atlantic coast and into the Mid West, only to be brought to a standstill, as we have seen, by the 1837 economic crisis. The vacuum left by trade unionism would be filled, for seven miserable years, by petty bourgeois political wheeler-dealers and evangelical preachers. Class struggle on a large scale only resumed towards the end of the 40’s when the economic upturn and the influx of immigrants injected new blood into the labor movement; a revival which continued until the Civil War. But the struggles rarely managed to break out from the immediate circles in which they were arose, nor leave behind them a lasting organizational inheritance. In a class whose members were replaced at a very rapid rate, only rarely did class experience crystallize into a consciousness which could be transmitted in a temporal and geographical sense. Proletarians would therefore be easy prey to bourgeois ideology, namely, free laborism, the renunciation of organized trade unions, the influence of the church, and indifference to the slavery question.

Slavery in the South was a good symbol of class divisions which existed among the white rulers as well, but the workers were rather lukewarm about opposing it. For many slavery was a last defense against having to do the really unpleasant jobs, and was a system which by keeping the blacks segregated and subjugated enabled the poor whites to identify with the rich, giving them a false sense of equality with the bosses. But slavery, in actual fact, created some very real problems for the white proletariat. The slaves used in industry kept wages low, and could also be used to break strikes, as happened in 1847 in the Tredegar iron works in Richmond, when white strikers were sacked and replaced with slaves. The labor movement in the South was always very weak, and all too often its only aim was to exclude blacks from manufacturing activity.

In the field of politics, too, the working class was strongly conditioned by external factors. Whereas in Europe the right to vote was obtained only after long struggles throughout the 1800s, in the United States the movement for universal suffrage between 1815 and 1840 managed to extend the electorate to 80% of the adult male population. Thus there wasn’t that focus on politicization which had brought European workers together, nor did workers’ parties of any great significance arise. Thus on the eve of the industrial revolution political affiliation didn’t really reflect membership of a class, or only to a negligible degree. And for the same reason the class consciousness of the American proletariat remained at a much lower level compared to his brothers and sisters across the Atlantic.

The movement which first devoted itself to objectives which were common to the class as a whole, and which therefore avoided being dominated by the parties and ideology of the bourgeoisie was the agitation for the ten-hour day, which started around the end of the 1820s. In the summer of 1827, the skilled workers of Philadelphia, straightaway after the defeat of a strike of building workers for a reduction in the working day, packed into an assembly called by William Heighton. It was on his initiative that the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations was formed, which began by confederating all the unions in the city. At a general meeting of the Mechanics’ Union in 1828 Heighton’s proposal to form a Working Mens’ party was upheld. It was an example followed a year later by the radicals in New York. Here, in the one city where the ten hour working day had been won, they were spurred on to political activity by an offensive on the part of the employers to overturn this victory. A committee was formed by Thomas Skidmore which continued to meet even after the danger had passed. The committee soon took the decision to participate in the municipal elections of 1829 under the banner of the Working Men’s Party.

In New England, the extreme length of the working day had become an obsession for the workers since the mid 1820s: twice in five years the builders of Boston had been defeated in strikes for the ten-hour day. They looked to a solution in the political party. But, after a brief spurt of activity at a local level it fizzled out before the end of the year, along with those in New York and Philadelphia for that matter. Not so the question of working hours: at a meeting in Providence in the Autumn of 1831 “the absolute and unconditional right” of capital to fix working conditions was rejected, and a subsequent meeting in Boston was set for the following February, which would generate the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Working Men.

These organizations shouldn’t however be judged by today’s standards. Particularly In the countryside and in the small towns they were “workers’ parties” in name alone, consisting rather of small groups hurriedly thrown together in response to elections, and disbanding immediately afterwards. Many were led by failed professional politicians attempting to re-launch their careers, or entrepreneurs, young lawyers etc., looking to get into politics. In the larger cities, on the other hand, the influence of the crafts sector was usually quite considerable. Often the executive bodies included skilled workers, and these introduced into their platforms demands which were genuinely radical and proletarian, as well as ones which were moderate and rather far-fetched. The most common demands were for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, of having to participate in the territorial militia, of forced labour; and the calls for a less costly legal system, fairer taxation and for rights of pre-emption for the payment of wages in case of bankruptcy. Sometimes there were calls for an improvement in the urban infrastructure, for the water and sewage systems enjoyed by the wealthy districts to be extended to the workers’ areas. A constant theme was protection for the small craftsman and the small farmer who directly cultivated his land from the greed of the big industrialists and speculators, and calls for ‘a republican education’ for children.

The Working Men’s Party, however, was a shooting star in the night-sky of politics. They had good results in Philadelphia in the 1828 elections, and did even better in the following year, obtaining over 30% of the vote. But by 1830 the movement there was entirely defunct. Similar favorable results were obtained in New York in 1829, but there, too, within two or three years internal divisions had brought the party to a premature end. Dilettantism, isolation, and the careerism of many of the leaders were the factors which would bring about the disbanding of these proto-organizations.

And if the parties of the bourgeoisie and the landlords were also in a certain sense a novelty at that time, they certainly had no lack of political talent, or resources, and enjoyed greater opportunities in terms of spreading their influence and gaining a following.

The national-republican journalists made common cause with the evangelical preachers in defining the members of the Working men’s party as “infidels” and “Jacobins”. The democrats were more cautious, hoping to reap the harvest which the Workers’ Party had sown; before long they had radicalized their language and inserted measures in their programme supporting debtors and the reform of the militia, along with other initiatives which attracted workers votes towards their party.

One of the reasons for the failure of the Working Men’s Party was the inactivity which other workers’ organizations, namely the co-operatives and the unions, fell into at the time, which discredited themselves mainly due to their leaders getting involved in political wheeler-dealing. An abiding consequence of this was a certain diffidence of the workers towards any political alternatives to the two main mass parties.

Presented at the September 2007 party general meeting in Genoa

Trade union activity resumes

We saw how the early 1830s were characterized by renewed trade union activity, partly owing to a general worsening in working class living standards. A large number of banks seemed to pop up from nowhere following the destruction of the Central Bank by Andrew Jackson; banks which flooded the country with paper money and triggered a serious inflationary spiral. We recall that the North had always been the stronghold of the pro-centralization “federalist” party, which advocated strong federal government and the creation of a powerful Union Bank; objectives which, especially to begin with, served commercial and later industrial interests in the North. The interests of the South were instead better represented by the “democratic” party, which supported decentralization and maximum autonomy for the individual states, fearful that the central government could end up in the hands of a financial oligarchy. In addition this party defended the interests of agriculture against those of other economic sectors and small enterprises against the large. These objectives were shared not only by the farming population in the South, but also by a large part of the popular masses in the North, composed in the main of small-holders and artisans.

Between 1834 and 1836 the general price index rose by 25%, and prime necessities much higher. In 1836 a bushel of wheat cost $12 compared to $5 two years earlier. Rents rose from $25 to $40 over the same period. Furthermore, the jobs of skilled workers were being threatened by an inexorable and ever-growing division of labor. Added to which the employers, emboldened by the crisis, became increasingly strict in the workplace, blatantly ignoring the wage levels set by the professional associations.

The hatters in Baltimore and the carpenters in New York were the first to react. In 1833 they launched an agitation which ten years earlier would have been a purely local affair, whereas now that the Working Men had managed to link up the working class in different areas and different professions, it had a much wider impact. The skilled workers in both cities, by now well on the road to building bona fide trade unions of their own, put their hands in their pockets. The tailors and building workers of New York contributed $300 to the carpenters’ strike fund and the printers met to discuss the possibility of going out in sympathy. In the same city, a month after these unprecedented events, the General Trades Union (GTU) was formed, the first city-wide confederation of skilled workers, precursor of the future trades’ councils and the Italian Camere del Lavoro. The example was followed in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, before crossing the Appalachians and spreading to the workers of Louisville, Cincinnati and other cities in the Midwest.

This trade union phase of the working class movement was more restricted geographically than the political phase which preceded it, but its influence was more deeply felt among broader sections of the urban proletariat. None of the trade unions admitted women yet and only those in Philadelphia allowed unskilled workers to join, but all of them experienced growth as workers from the most difficult and worst paid trades joined up. Thus more privileged workers such as jewelers and goldsmiths joined unions on a par with those working at the loom and established bonds of solidarity. In 1835 the General Trades Union of Philadelphia numbered no fewer than 53 sections, three times more than the old Mechanics’ Union, and one more than its counterpart in New York. It is estimated that across the entire country between a fifth and third of all workers joined these federations, the highest figure before the Civil War.

Struggles were particularly fierce in the sectors where women predominated. Female wage labor was concentrated in only a few sectors of production such as textiles. Despite the fact they were easier to blackmail than men, women often proved to be far more militant and courageous; and even if their bitter struggles often ended in defeat, they managed to win a fair few battles as well. In certain cases they received solidarity from the male workers’ associations, in Philadelphia for instance, but in general male workers, white male workers, that is, were not in favor of women entering the trades for reasons analogous to those behind their ostracism of black workers, slave or free. The New York tailors addressed the 1,600 strong Tailoresses’ Society with the disparaging comment that “the physical characteristics of women and their moral sensibilities” meant they were more suited to domestic activities. The National Trades Union, an assembly of town-based trade unionists which met annually between 1834 and 1836, prepared a report on female labor in 1836. Although it supported the unionization of all female workers, the report’s outlook was gloomy, predicting a future in which women’s labor and mechanization would “render male labor superfluous”. The brutal conclusion was that the employment of women “must be gradually eliminated”. Faced with opposition from a still immature male labor movement, along with objective difficulties in the labor market (the work of women was in general less physical and there was a high turnover rate, not least because women sooner or later tended to get married and leave the factory, which also resulted in a lack of deeply rooted traditions of struggle) opportunities for the unionization of women were obviously severely restricted.

Male trade unionism had a better time of it. In fact, is difficult in fact to think of a better advertisement for workers’ associations than the strikes of 1835. These awakened the combativeness of workers in trades with no previous tradition of struggle, and which joined the GTU. The existing trade unions gained an influx of new members, ranging from poor immigrants to evangelical Christians, and started to co-ordinate their activities across different cities. Printers, shoemakers and carpenters held national meetings to agree on the regulation of apprenticeships, to fix uniform wage rates and to adopt membership cards that allowed migrant workers the possibility of transferring their union membership across different localities.

Few improvements were gained, however, as most of their attention and energy was absorbed by the struggle to keep up with inflation, which gave rise to a wave of strikes: in 1836 the New York workers stopped working on at least ten occasions and the Philadelphia workers went out on strike even more often. These strikes were made possible by GTU funds and by extraordinary expressions of solidarity by the individual trade unions. Even if the local trade union remained the principal weapon of solidarity and struggle, efforts to build national organizations continued. But the improvement of canal and railroad transportation made it easier for employers to attack the local trade unions through blacklists and the shipment of scabs from one area to another. The workers understood well enough that if wages were lower in one part of the country the bosses would be compelled by the laws of competition to reduce wages elsewhere. Workers in some trades were successful in their attempts to build larger national trade union networks, but none of these would last for long. One of them was the National Trades Union, referred to above.

The strike wave of 1836 triggered the inevitable response from employers. In New York and Philadelphia the employers formed their own associations, which set themselves the task of defeating strikes and destroying the unions. The bosses in New York were particularly successful in their campaign, receiving the backing of judges and the police. The owner of a stone-cutting firm in New York won a suit for damages against striking workers; clothes dealers got twenty workers jailed for conspiracy, the honorable judge declaring that “this isn’t simply a conflict between workers and entrepreneurs, but a struggle on which depends the entire harmony of the union”. While judges plied their dirty trade in the courthouses, battles were being fought in the streets: swarms of policemen were sent in to repress striking dockworkers who were calling for wage increases; when, after long and repeated clashes, the strikes still continued, the city’s mayor did not hesitate to send in the militia, forcing the workers back to work at gunpoint. It was a similar story in Philadelphia, where the unsuccessful attempts to repress longshoremen prompted the mayor to have the union leaders arrested and thrown into jail. In both cities there was a very decisive response from the workers with a demonstration of at least 30,000 workers in New York, which was an entirely new phenomenon. In Philadelphia it was immediately decided to allow longshoremen to join the GTU, who up to then had been excluded because they were unskilled.

In fact these were not the first occasions that the employers had called on the judiciary, police and militia to intervene. In 1829 construction workers on the Chesapeake-Ohio canal were arrested after they went on strike, and then shortly after released. And we have already mentioned the shoemakers of Geneva in New York State, who were arrested for conspiracy in 1833 and slung into jail. Only in 1842 did the Supreme Court of Massachusetts declare that these old conspiracy laws, of English origin, did not apply to the trade unions.

At this point it is worth recording the significance of the militia. In colonial America the militia was based on the tradition of the fyrd, an institution of the European Anglo-Saxon tribes which imposed military service on all free men. It was employed against Native Americans in the period when British regular forces were not yet in place. During the American Revolution, the militia, known as the minutemen, made up the bulk of the American military forces and it also functioned as a reserve force from which regular soldiers could be recruited. The militia would carry out a similar role during the War of 1812 against the British and during the American Civil War, after which it would fall into disuse. But in most of the States volunteer units were formed, drawing on the better off strata (i.e. from those who could afford to pay for a uniform) and these were placed under the control of the State governor. In the 1870s and 1880s these units would be become known as the National Guard, and the State governors would use them to repress workers’ strikes; indeed we will see how this corps, under their new name, would be used ever more frequently by the bourgeoisie as an instrument of repression.

Meanwhile intellectuals and political radicals were rather worried by the turn of events: despite the undeniable gains made in the period between 1828 and 1836, they feared that the strike wave of “might degenerate” into an endless cycle of strikes, which would distract attention away from the “higher” aims of “social reconstruction”, that is putting a brake on the “competitive frenzy” (their definition of capitalism) and building alternatives to bourgeois institutions. In the summer of 1836 radicals started to warn about the dissipation of energy and “waste of resources” that trade union struggles represented. The crisis meant they had an attentive audience.

Illusory alternatives

The crisis of 1837 dealt a tremendous blow to trade union activity. Production virtually ground to a halt and thousands upon thousands of workers were cast into the ranks of the unemployed. By January 1838 there were 50,000 unemployed in New York alone, with an additional 200,000 defined as “in utter and hopeless distress with no means of surviving the winter but those provided by charity”. It was the same story in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and other manufacturing cities.

With a third of the working class unemployed and most of the others working only part-time, the trade unions of the 1830s would disappear, one after the other. This included the National Trades Union and its associated labor newspapers. Of course this process was accelerated by an offensive on the part of the employers, who saw an opportunity to smash the workers’ movement. So, notwithstanding a few magnificent cases of intransigent resistance, the bosses would win the day, and by 1839 wage cuts ranging from 30 per cent to 50 percent had been forced on the workers.

In these circumstances alternatives to direct action against the bosses would gain a hearing not only among the radical petty bourgeoisie but also among workers. Some claimed that the only solution lay in prayer and spiritual comfort; others that the workers could still elevate themselves mentally, despite what the factory system was doing to their body and spirit.

Some saw the origins of the people’s suffering in the nature of capitalism: a few capitalists had taken control of the means of production and used this control not for the welfare of the people, but for their own profits. Whenever these profits stopped, they shut down production, throwing thousands out of work, and misery would spread throughout the land. The solution, according to this school of thought, lay in a new social order that would abolish all types of slavery and oppression by restoring control over productive forces to the people. Only such a society could usher in an era of universal freedom, peace and harmony in place of war, discord and suffering. To achieve the new social order all that was necessary was for the rich and powerful to endorse the scheme and support it financially; all could then participate in the building of the new communal co-operative society. These were the visions of the Utopian Socialists, in particular the American disciples of two great European thinkers, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

We have already covered this phase of proletarian history on numerous occasions since, and a masterly critique can be found in the early writings of Marx and Engels, so we won’t dwell on it here. But suffice to mention that the influence of the Owenite movement in America can be traced back to 1825, when it was greeted with much enthusiasm and a certain degree of success. Numerous colonies were immediately established in several States but these soon failed, and none of them survived beyond 1828. Owen returned to America in 1845 on a speaking tour, and that was about it.

But whereas Owen intended to abolish private property so that technical progress could be exploited in the workers’ interests rather than serving only to increase employers’ profits, Fourier intended to preserve it, preaching a return to the land and condemning industrial production as the worst of all evils. The ideas of Fourier, who never set foot in America, were supported there by his disciple Albert Brisbane. In 1843 several colonies known as phalanxes or phalanges were founded, but all of which, with a couple of exceptions, closed down by the end of the year. Despite the failure of the utopian colonies the influence of utopianism as an ideology continued to exert a certain influence over the working class. What had nevertheless become clear was that a new social system couldn’t be introduced from scratch, bit by bit, and powered only by the force of conviction.

Producers’ (rather than consumers’) co-operatives first appeared in various cities in the early 1830s. They would soon be swept away in the impending crisis but the firm conviction remained among many workers that the only way to improve their lives was through new forms of production and distribution, and this would pave the way for a revival of the co-operative movement in the 40s and 50s. In the minds of the theorists like Blanc in Europe, co-operativism would slowly supplant, by force of example, the bourgeois economic system; but as far as the workers were concerned its value lay instead in the degree to which it resolved their immediate problems.

As in the case of the utopians, we have also already criticized (with particular reference to the history of the English labor movement) the co-operative phase that the working class passed through at a certain, primitive, stage in its development, a critique that need not be repeated here. Like the utopian colonies, In America the co-operative movement met with failure as well. This was particularly true of the producers’ co-operatives, whose weak point was their chronic lack of capital, which held back investment and rendered them less able to resist the ruthless competition of individual producers, who didn’t hesitate to sell below cost to wear down their resistance.

The consumers’ co-operative movement arose a bit later, at the height of the crisis, but only really took off in 1845, when the Working Men’s Protective Union was founded in Boston. This initiative, soon taken as a model for hundreds of other similar associations, had as its principal aim the acquisition of the necessities of life at lower prices for its members, who also benefited from sickness provision and old-age insurance. These co-operatives fared better than the others, lasting up to the outbreak of the war; but in the end they too were undermined by the same forces which had brought the others to their knees. Some of the movement’s theoreticians would express their disgust at the “meanness” of the workers, who only seemed interested in saving a few dollars.

The second great evangelical revival of 1840-43, which gained a broad following within the proletariat, symbolized the idealistic vulnerability of the workers. Huge numbers of “missionaries” traveled through town and countryside to ensnare people experiencing difficult times, partly with inspirational words, but also with the sweet smell of hot soup. The prophets of the new word convinced poverty-stricken workers that Christ had brought hard times to punish the sins of the world, but that he was preparing better times ahead and salvation for those who mended their ways; and the churches filled up.

Naturally abstinence from alcohol was requirement. But sobriety was not a monopoly of the religious movements; trade union activists had also been advocating it over the previous decade. Certainly the knowledge of the negative effects of alcohol, the pressure exercised by the employers who wanted a sober workforce and the enforced frugality of the economic crisis all favored the condemnation of alcohol. The most important of the organizations promoting temperance was the Washington Temperance Society, founded in 1840, which would eventually boast a membership of 3 million, chiefly drawn from the proletariat. Even if these figures are exaggerated we are talking about two to three times more proletarians than were in trade unions at the height of the struggle seven years previously. The Washingtonians also carried out mutual aid and benefit activities, and yet, above all in the North, they had raised liquor to the rank of the workers’ number one enemy, worse even than the greedy banks and exploiting bosses.

Another important reformer was George Henry Evans, former supporter of Skidmore, who elaborated a program of agrarian reform. The plan of the Agrarians or National Reformers, as they were known, essentially consisted of dividing up public land into 160 acre plots and distributing them to every family that requested one. The territories would then be enriched by urban centers equipped with structures useful to the community, supporting both leisure activities and the local economy. In these centers exchange would take place directly without mediation. National Reform was for the antebellum generation what co-operativism was for the generation before. Evans believed that thanks to the vast expanses of land available in the West, the proletariat could escape the destiny of the worker in Europe, where the land was completely under the control of a few privileged landowners. Land reform would bring so much prosperity in its wake that society as a whole could be changed. “And all this,” he concluded,” can be obtained by a simple vote, if the workingmen throughout the country will unite”. Even though the movement, composed of proletarians who wanted to become small farmers, contained utopian aspects, it had links with the labor movement: the rich, bourgeoisie and landowners couldn’t join and were recognized as enemies. Thus the National Reform Association (NRA) formed in 1844, was not a trade union organization but rather a reformist initiative, even if the boundary between it and trade unionism was often blurred. Its supporters recognized the right to strike, even if they did not consider it a weapon that was useful to them in obtaining their particular aim. In any case this movement would still constitute the most important element within the labor movement in the 15 or so years before the Civil War. The structure of the NRA was akin to a modern party, with local sections and due-paying members, periodic conferences, and its own press. The Association also took root in the Midwest, full as it was of subsistence farmers and workers of peasant extraction, where its influence was felt mainly in the cities it took to issuing rallying cries on behalf of co-operation and the ten-hour day.

Despite profound differences between them, Owenites, Associationists (Fourierists) and Land Reformers were all agreed on one thing: the workers would be able to resolve their problems only after they had realized their programs. The first two movements would even publicly condemn the efforts of workers to obtain a shorter working day, arguing that “a mere shortening of hours of labor” would only convert them “from twelve and fourteen to ten hour slaves”. And the same went for wages. Since it was the system itself that was to blame for everything, the mass of the workers had first to understand that nothing short of the abolition of capitalism made sense. Evans took a slightly different position: his movement supported the struggles on behalf of the workers’ claims but at the same time tried to convince them that nothing would last unless land reform was achieved.

These ideas did not just remain on paper. The utopians joined workers’ organizations and took part in their meetings, with the aim of convincing workers that the attempt to obtain a better standard of living in the present society was a waste of their energy. Hopes for a better future lay elsewhere. Impassioned orators often succeeded in making converts, sometimes even managing to carry entire trade union organizations into the co-operativist and reformist camps.

The latter, reformists or utopians, failed to understand something which for Marx was immediately obvious: the capitalist “evil” they were trying to exorcise was actually historically favorable, insofar as it laid the material foundations for the advent of communist society. It wasn’t a matter of “creating” communism through a sheer act of will, irrespective of the existing political and economic forces, but rather a case, using the class’s movement for material survival in the face of its daily difficulties as leverage, of refining the weapons needed to conquer political power, that being the essential instrument required for “the Reversal of Praxis”, in order to “free” society from the bottlenecks of capitalism.

Economic revival in the 1840s

With the economic revival in 1844, evangelists and temperance leagues lost their hold over the workers. But something of it remained within the class, a moralistic approach to the social question. In the small towns a kind of Christian Laborism took hold, in the big cities it took various forms including Nativism, that is, the assertion of the superiority of Americans born in American (although, blacks and the real Native Americans of the country were, needless to say, not included in this exclusive club). This was the new spirit of the times, which would smooth the path to the ideology of “Free Labor”. There were few major battles in these years and what struggles there were tended to focus on the length of the working day.

The country’s pace of development was quickening. Between 1840 and 1860 the numbers of workers in manufacturing sector doubled, while the value of what they produced in the same companies quadrupled. The railway network increased tenfold and there was a similar growth in the population of the urban centers. By now no-one could seriously believe that capitalist development could be arrested. The workers’ movement would slowly begin to pick up again. The big difference compared with ten years previously was that the initiative no longer lay in the hands of the apprentices, the small craftsmen, and the skilled workers in small semi-industrialized enterprises, but with the working class in the factories, who now started to make their voice heard. Meanwhile, many from the class which had sent De Tocqueville into such raptures, the small farmers, were now facing ruin and starvation, and had little option but to head for the nearest city to offer their labor power for sale. Without embarking on the long and hazardous journey to the West, the workers were unable to escape their class and be anything other than workers for life: the American proletariat was becoming permanent.

In New England at the start of the period, labor in the first large factories was primarily female, as were the Female Labor Reform Associations, which emerged from 1845 along with numerous journals. These were organizations of a cultural and political nature, whose scope was to work in favor of female labor at a number of levels; and if required they also functioned admirably as trade union organizers. Another aspect characterizing the working class of New England was that it had not benefited from the improvements that had been conceded elsewhere on working hours; the great majority of its members still worked from 12 to 14 hours per day. Even those who had enjoyed a reduction had been driven back, with the crisis, to working “from dawn to dusk”.

It must be immediately stated that in the period in question, the movement for the reduction of the working day aimed primarily at the imposition of new limits by statutory means. If in 1840 President Van Buren had conceded the 10 hour day to federal employees, obtaining it in private enterprises would prove considerably more difficult. The strategy principally involved the attempt to organize mass pressure on legislators, in order to oppose the control that corporate bosses had over them. Thus commenced activity based on petitions and of support, granted or denied, to parliamentarians depending on their attitude regarding the reduction of working hours in the factories.

The principal outcome of the mobilization was the birth in 1844 of a combative organization named the New England Workingmen’s Association. Founded on the activism of propagandists devoted to the cause, it was soon won over by Fourierists, which meant that little was achieved on either the trade union or legal level. Fortunately the decline of the utopians was already well under way, and by the end of 1845 the Association was again in the hands of the workers whose primary objective was the reduction of working hours. The results, however, were slow to come, and within the movement it was attempted to make use of direct struggle with the weapon of the strike, a course of action which was followed above all by textile workers. But the movement’s weakness was such that at the end of 1846 it devoted itself solely to petitions.

This instrument was not totally ineffective. Although the first States to grant the 10 hours were New Hampshire (1847), Maine and Pennsylvania (1848), the gain remained more symbolic than anything else, in that the law allowed, at the strong insistence of the bosses’ organizations, local bargaining to determine overtime rates. In practice the worker was forced to sign a contract requiring him to work more than 10 hours; those who did not sign were not engaged and ended up on the blacklist. In practice, therefore, it changed nothing, but from the historical perspective it was certainly an achievement, because there was strong working class resistance to the contracts, even if at the end of the day, the bosses won almost everywhere.

The New England Workingmen’s Association once again fell into the hands of the utopians, and in 1848 it closed its doors. The Female Labor Reform Associations succumbed to the same fate. There were further tough fights in Pennsylvania, but in the course of the 1850s, although many States formally granted the 10 hours, the laws were always ineffective, either because contracts allowed for exceptions, or because they simply did not include penalties for failure to implement them. The movement for the 10 hour day was not however without consequences, and a general reduction of working hours occurred: while in 1830 the average working day in America was 12 and a half hours, 30 years later it had fallen to 11 hours. This was no small gain and it was not conceded through the benign attitudes of the bosses but achieved by the workers using all the means at their disposal, in a situation of extreme objective weakness.

The issue of the working day also affected the South: in 1853, in Georgia alone, a law was approved that limited the “dawn to dusk” working day by granting the customary meal breaks, which is to say 10-11 hours. This was, however, an exception, with no similar law being approved anywhere else in the South until after the Civil War.

Fresh Immigration and the Slavery Crisis: The “Negroes who vote”

The Irish, who started to arrive in big numbers in the years after 1846 to escape the Great Famine, first tended to group together in ethnic and Catholic associations rather than in class-based organizations. In future they would swell the ranks of the unions with honor, but until the Civil War they were more interested in simply finding a job than in struggling to improve their conditions. However, the Irish always remained tied to those organizations that had been created by their compatriots who had arrived in America in the preceding decades.

Just as the Protestant Americans, including workers, formed the basis for the development of the Republican Party, so the Irishman was already on the side of the Democratic Party. The division was also an issue for public schools, where the teachers warned against the Papist conspiracy and described the Irish as uncouth. In 1844 there was a violent confrontation between Protestants and Irish immigrants in Philadelphia, with 16 deaths; the city, which had seen the workers themselves fighting side by side just seven years earlier in the General Trades Union (GTU), now burned with sectarian hatred. This was a situation that set the movement back a generation, and which made fraternization between proletarians impossible. The new organizations were also easily redirected towards hatred of immigrants, who were accused of driving down wages. Orators were heard who even defined the trade unions as superfluous and the cause of divisions, incapable of reforming society compared to the potential of nativist politics.

It seems paradoxical that this period of working class history has been defined in the USA as the era of “humanitarianism”. The explanation arises from the fact that, in a moment in which the workers were divided by ethnic differences, in which factory production was being revolutionized by the introduction of machines, in which most work was being carried out by women and children, the recovery of a genuine class movement was difficult and thus there was plenty of scope for solutions proposed by bourgeois reformists. We have seen how nativism took hold of the local proletarians.

The National Reform Association took advantage of the return of trade unionism between the end of the 40s and the start of the 50s. This rebirth can be ascribed to two different groups of proletarians. One consisted of German emigrants, many refugees following the revolutions of 1848, who united with their compatriots of earlier generations; they were not, however, similar to them in mentality, being far more radical and internationalist, and they created societies of free thinkers and a lively and nonconformist press. Initially, they expended much energy on sustaining the revolutionaries who returned to their country to struggle against monarchy.

The Germans were the most advanced layer within the class, and remained as such for a while. The typical German emigrant was a highly specialized artisan, who hoped to live better in the new world, exploiting his trade. Thus it was not long before shoemakers, tailors, typographers and other categories of workers formed craft trade unions which then came together in similar confederations to the civic societies that existed in the 1830s.

In many cities he German workers accounted for the most active part of the working class movements. From the start, they were inspired by communist doctrine whether that of Marx and Engels or that of (from 1846) that of Weitling, who visited the country several times and who founded a workers’ newspaper and organizations there. But Weitling did not truly believe in trade union struggle, which he utilized only in order to unite workers behind his cooperativist projects and in general behind a utopian communism, which after a short while alienated the following it first attracted. In 1851 Joseph Weydemeyer, a revolutionary communist friend of Marx and Engels, arrived in America, entering into polemics with Weitling, and demonstrating that “revolutionary cooperativism” only served to divide the workers, besides being a mere utopia. The most important thing on the immediate agenda for the working class movement was the struggle to defend day-to-day needs; but the political struggle was equally important. Economic and political reform was needed; but to achieve these objectives the first requirement was the class’s organization and unity. Therefore, enough of organizations comprising only Germans.

In 1853 a mass meeting was called in New York. The address proclaimed: “Only if all the trades are united and agitate in unity behind a common plan will it be possible to overcome all of the many causes that bring workers down to the level of beasts of burdens. Forwards, for a broad association of workers, not just to struggle for higher salaries and political reform, but also for the creation of a platform capable of uniting all proletarians for the good of the working class. All workers must take part in the meeting. Rise up like a single man. All for one, one for all”.

The meeting, which took place on March 21, 1853, and in which around 800 German workers took part, founded the Amerikanischer Arbeiterbund [American Workers’ Federation]. The union, which set an example for joining forces, was open to all trade unions, of whatever origin, trade, particular characteristic, and also to individual workers, without limitation according to nationality, belief or specialization, because they recognized that the scope of the union was to defend workers’ conditions by all means against the attacks of the bosses, who were also ready to use all means necessary. In addition, the Federation proclaimed its organizational independence of all existing political parties.

The example was followed in the same year by English-speaking workers. But the initiative was short-lived, and the ALU did not last much longer. The problem was that the craft-based unions in general were not interested in the other workers, and only went into action when their own sectional interests were in danger. Weydemeyer, who obviously also participated in the New York-based Communist Club, managed to keep the ALU alive until 1860; but the times were not yet mature. Nevertheless, the initiative had the merit of approaching the workers from earlier waves of immigration to that of the recently arrived Germans, a resource which proved fundamental for the trade union and political growth of the workers’ movement in North America.

The other group of unionized workers was the artisans. For these, wages were not the primary issue: wages at the end of 1840s had risen for more specialized workers. But working conditions continued to deteriorate, to the point that many missed the passing of the master craftsmen of earlier times, who respected the conventions of the craft, and did not hire people lacking skill and affiliation. If on the one hand this attitude included an element of racism, given that the non-specialized were mainly Irish (“Negroes who vote”, they were called in the South), the result in reality was the definitive break with inter-classist mutual aid associations, and the formation of pure workers’ unions, even if for the time being women, Negroes and non-specialists were excluded.

The latter, being left out of trade unions, deprived of any class consciousness and in general too poor to have qualms, often constituted the gangs of scabs whom the bosses used to break strikes. On August 4, 1850 at New York, there was a confrontation between police and scabs, and two workers lay dead in the tumult, the first victims of working disputes in America.

The American Party

The strong wave of immigration also had the effect of giving rebirth to the anti-Catholic sentiment of the native workers. A xenophobic movement was born from this tendency, The American Party, called the “Know Nothings”, which gradually asserted itself in these years, and which in 1854 scored major successes in local administrative elections. But, aside from predictable measures against the immigrants, the movement also had an agenda that was of interest for the workers, similar to that of the Working Men in the 1830s: abolition of debtors’ prisons, extension of public education, prohibition of the employment of children under 15 years of age who did not attend school for at least 11 weeks per year, etc. The movement later proved to be an intermediate stage that would lead the workers to support, a little later, the anti-slavery crusade of the Republican Party. This repositioning was due to the widespread fear among the workers that the planters in the South, with their millions of slaves and the intention to extend slavery to the new territories in the West, constituted an even greater menace to their own living conditions than that presented by the immigrants. This tendency, and the movement for “Free Soil”, hugely popular in the Midwest, formed the backbone of popular support for the Republican Party before (with Lincoln’s victory) and during the war.

The Homestead Act, which drew on the same grassroots movements as the National Reform Association, was one of the warhorses of the Republicans, even if they were far from constituting that brake on capitalism which George Henry Evans believed would take place.

The workers’ movement held out through the highs and lows for the rest of the 1850s. National and central associations arose, which were however hard hit by the depressions of 1854 and 1857. The first was the National Typographical Union (1852), followed in the same year by the national union of glassblowers and then, in 1851 and 1854, the cigar-makers. 1854 saw the turn of the hat makers, who collaborated closely with their European comrades, above all with the English, as was the case with the calico printers. In 1855 railway workers and train drivers organized themselves, in 1853-56 the shipyard workers who had formed strong union sections in California; in 1850 and 1858 spinners, in 1856 decorators, in 1858 blast furnace workers (Sons of Vulcan), in 1857 miners, in 1859 mechanics and blacksmiths, whose national union was recognized by Congress. In the same year ironworkers organized themselves, also forming production cooperatives in various localities. It is estimated that by 1860 there were 26 national trade unions in the USA.

On the other hand a good two million foreigners disembarked in search of work in this decade alone, an enormous figure compared with the existing population; leading them to occupy positions that were opened up despite the crises by increasing mechanization and division of labor, which demanded less and less professional development. In 1860, in the large cities of the North, a third of the typographers, half of those in the construction industry, and nearly three quarters of shoemakers, tailors and carpenters were born abroad. In the face of this avalanche of unskilled labor, more conscious of their own origins than the class to which they belonged, even the Irish started to rise to the level of semi-specialized activities.

The Situation Down South

South of the Mason-Dixon Line, which, by separating Pennsylvania from Maryland, was viewed as the border between North and South, the situation was very different, in that trade unionism remained at a minimal level until the end of the Civil War. The reason for this was that the working class was almost non-existent, because there was scarcely any industrial production, and the class was concentrated only in small firms, little more than artisanal, in commerce, in the ports, and in very rare cases within industries in some of the larger cities, such as the Tredagar iron works in Richmond. After all, there were no really big cities; the economic and cultural spirit of the South was in the countryside, vast flatlands alternating with extensive wild or wooded areas, where millions of slaves produced the wealth that allowed a few thousand families to live in the lap of luxury.

We have already described the rise of slavery in North America in the first part of this work, and we have also touched upon the differences between slave labor and waged labor from the Marxist economic point of view in a previous work (Capitalist development and the American Civil War, in Communist Left n. 21-22, 2005/6). However it is worth recalling a few aspects of this social situation and the production in the Southern States in order to understand the differences that manifested themselves also in the class struggle.

In the South, agrarian production was dominant. The products included all those of traditional agriculture, but in these times the primary and fundamental materials for sustenance were, for various reasons, mainly produced locally; above all around half way through the century it was the Midwest that became the principal supplier of meat and grain to the States of New England, whose population was growing rapidly. The wealth of the South, therefore, did not derive so much from conventional agrarian foodstuffs but from high value products which, by their nature, lent themselves to export: sugar cane, tobacco, rice and, above all cotton, “King Cotton” which, thanks to the invention of the cotton gin (which made human labor extremely productive) soon spread across virtually all of the Southern States from the end of the eighteenth century. It was precisely in these decades that the number of slaves tripled, and the phenomenon was certainly not stopped by the prohibition on the importation of slaves in 1808. The South’s prosperity in the 1850s exceeded that of anywhere else on Earth, and the profits were such as to warrant cultivating cotton on any available plot of land, however tiny, putting self-sufficiency in foodstuffs in danger.

Cotton was produced on plantations that employed huge numbers of slaves, who labored under the direction of supervisors; the latter, in general very well paid, were tasked with achieving their assigned production quotas, whatever the cost, and to this end did not save the slaves any kind of abuse. The lash was the instrument most used to convince the slaves to adapt to the wishes of the supervisor, and not infrequently slaves died from mistreatment. The owner did not complain, so long as the quotas were achieved. Certainly, the slave was an expensive item of fixed capital, but not one to be regretted if, having produced for many years, the cost had been amortized (as the owner would put it). They tended to save as much as possible on maintaining the slaves: in 1822 the annual cost of a slave, all included (food, clothing, safekeeping etc.) was less than 10% of the wages of a white worker paid at the minimum level necessary for survival. In 1856 a traveler observed that the diet of a working slave was worse, quantitatively and qualitatively, than that of a prison convict.

Many slaves accepted this oppression, resigned to a condition that the masters’ own religion, which the slaves themselves had embraced, held as being decided by the mysterious designs of God. But the majority of slaves struggled over two centuries by all means imaginable to win back their freedom, that very freedom which, in its hypocrisy, the dominant class boasted (and boasts) about at every turn. Of course, this was not a struggle that could take the form of a trade union struggle, but the resistance that these human beings conducted to shake off the (not metaphorical) chains was no less hard and determined than that of white proletarians, even if surely more desperate. We would commit a historical injustice if we did not refer, in addition to what we have reported elsewhere, to the individual and collective acts of these our unfortunate comrades, who often struggled more for mere survival than for better working conditions.

Responses to the system could be individual or collective. The slave who attacked the supervisor, killed or wounded him, and who made his escape, was not rare. Often, rather than fleeing into the woods with the certainty of being captured (usually they did not have any knowledge of the surrounding environment), he committed suicide. Many cases are reported of parents who committed suicide after killing their children in their sleep to spare them the hell of slavery.

Another form of struggle, closer to that of trade union struggle, consisted in collective refusal to work as a protest against whipping and other brutal punishments. Typically the slaves fled into the woods or swamps, letting the owners know that they would only return on condition that injustices done would be remedied, obviously without reprisals. But it is difficult to renounce freedom once it has been experienced: sometimes the slaves did not come back and, in the areas suitably distant from inhabited centers and difficult to discover, they created small communities. Or else they fled northwards; tens of thousands of slaves undertook the dangerous journey of thousands of kilometers towards the States in which slavery was no longer legal. It was an extremely arduous journey, in that it was only possible to move by night, in unknown territory, through forests and swamps, eating roots and berries and with dozens of rivers to cross by night. In this venture they were assisted in the last years before the war by the so-called “Underground Railroad”, a network of a large number of pathways which led from the border States of the South to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and from there to Canada, the only place in which the slaves felt genuinely safe from the expeditions of the bosses’ emissaries, who were sent to take them back.

The fugitive slaves who remained in communities in the South often organized expeditions against the plantations, liberated other slaves and supported revolts. At least 250 revolts of more than 10 slaves are recorded in the two centuries of the history of slavery in America, but it is a figure that is certainly below reality. Southern society was organized in a paramilitary fashion because of the need to control the Negroes with force of arms. The owners of slaves never felt safe, above all after the revolts in Santo Domingo, which had led to the establishment of an independent Negro republic, Haiti. A few strikes in the pre-war period were organized as slave insurrections. Among the most famous and effective was that of Vesey, a free slave who organized thousands of slaves for an insurrection that should have started in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and which was crushed at the start by the treason of a few. The conspirators distinguished themselves by their dedication and heroism, which surprised their own oppressors. The largest revolt, over which the planters lost sleep for decades, was that of Nat Turner, who led an uprising of the Negroes of the plantations in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831; the revolt was only annihilated thanks to the combined intervention of the State militia and Federal troops, even though the rebels only had hand-weapons available.

The consequence of these events was on the one hand an upsurge in laws passed on slavery (for example, teaching them to read and write was prohibited), against supporting runaway slaves, and restrictions on the emancipation and rights of freed Negroes. But limitations on exploitation were also enacted, imposing a maximum of 15 hours on the working day in summer, and 14 in winter. Even though these seem inhuman working hours, the slave-owners continued to ignore them.

Things were not much better for the white population that did not own slaves. It is calculated that there were half a million slave-owners, even if only a thousand were truly wealthy; if you add in their families, the slave-owners amounted to about three million, while the white population was a good nine million. Therefore, two-thirds of the white population did not draw any benefit from slavery; on the contrary, they were in some respects oppressed. In fact, the slaves were so cheap that landowners did not consider hiring whites, who had greater needs, while there was little room for the other trades given the level of development of southern society. Even where there was a definite need for specialized labor (above all in the 1850s) slaves were ever more often used (“leased out”) and trained in the required skills. German immigrants who arrived in the South, in particular skilled artisans, soon left because of the competition from slaves or the low wages that were on offer.

Not that the use of slaves as workers was advantageous: in passing from the field to the factory the slaves did not succeed in acquiring sufficient specialist skills. They could be bought, but now the rigidity of fixed capital became, in many cases, unsustainable. Forced labor has never been as productive as “free” labor. Sooner, rather than later, the South would certainly have had to confront the choice of liberating some of the slaves and favoring immigration, or else renouncing industrial development.

How did the propertyless whites fare? The majority of the six million who did not own slaves lived in conditions of destitution, farming tiny plots of land at the margins of the large estates, land that was by now used up by industrial farming; they were regarded as the poor whites. Even those few who lived on waged labor were on the breadline, earning between 50 and 70% of the pay that could be earned for the same work in the North.

The weakness of trade unionism among these workers is therefore no surprise. Workers at the Tredagar iron works were again brought to trial and convicted for a strike in 1847. Unfortunately, then, most trade union activity by the workers in the South was directed at preventing the employment of slaves in specialist trades, in particular metalwork. But the same logic of excluding the slaves led the workers, gradually, to understand that the definitive solution would actually have been the abolition of the “peculiar institution” itself: the start of the 1850s saw the drawing together of an alliance between workers and slaves, an alliance which, by also winning the support of the few but strongly abolitionist colonies of German immigrants, began to preoccupy the lords of the slave-holding estates.

Towards the end of the 1850s therefore, the narrow southern oligarchy risked soon being confronted with a class war, a preoccupation that is evident from the local press of the time. The dilemma, as seen above, was serious. Keeping the slaves outside of the factory would have meant the rise of a free working class, by nature hostile to the planters. Allowing the slaves to work as industrial laborers would have weakened the slave system, because experience showed that the slaves employed in industry soon became agitators for emancipation, apart from which there was a growing understanding that, on balance, slave labor was not a cost-effective option. The choice that was taken was therefore to impede the South’s industrial growth by all means available; a myopic choice, which gave the planters a little breathing space, but which would be paid at a high price in the course of the war.

It was observed that “each free worker who goes south is another nail in the coffin of slavery”.

The Northern Working Class and Slavery

The attitude of the working class of the Northern States to the institution of slavery, which held four million human beings in shameful material and spiritual conditions, was not always straightforward and coherent. In principle, no-one in the workers’ movement disputed the fact that slavery was a disgraceful institution, which among other things contradicted the principles of the bourgeois revolution, and in particular the Declaration of Independence of 1776. A document produced by the trade unions of Massachusetts in 1830 hoped that “the infamous stain of slavery, which mars the good reputation of the country, will be erased; and that our comrades are not only declared free and equal, but are also able to enjoy that freedom and equality to which they are entitled by nature”. At this time the northern bourgeoisie was no longer “enlightened” and abolitionist, but for the most part undertook lucrative business with the southern planters, whether selling manufactured goods, dealing in cotton and other products, or directly supplying them with slaves, even if by now only as contraband. It was the so-called alliance between the “Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash”.

Here and there spontaneous initiatives were taken, such as the Female Anti-Slavery Society of the workers in Lowell, MA, in 1832. In 1836, the Working Man’s Association of England, close to the Chartist movement, directed an appeal to American workers because it was engaged in a campaign against slavery. Examples which did not have the hoped-for consequences.

Traditionally the workers were tied to the Democratic Party, which was, among other things, in favor of accepting immigrants, contrary to the more conservative Whigs. Alignments on contrary positions could bring about a split in the party. Another cause of hesitation was fear, obviously fomented by the democratic press of the North, that a sudden emancipation would have caused an influx of millions of freed slaves onto the labor market, which would have driven down the price of wage labor. It was an argument that took hold on the least qualified layers of manual labor, in those years the Irish; also because their own Catholic church did not hesitate to fight against the abolitionists, as disciples of a tendency presented as an “English import”.

On the other hand in these first years the abolitionists were little concerned with the workers, while for their part the trade unions did not give much attention to the question, not to say tended to ignore it. Moreover, many workers believed that there was no great difference between the slavery of the lash and the slavery of need and misery. The disciples of the National Reform and Evans himself invited workers to forget about the slaves and struggle for Reform, which would have, once achieved, resolved all the problems. But a meeting of the New England Workingmen’s Association in 1846 disowned this, and reflected that “slavery must be eradicated in America before the working class will obtain the hoped for improvements”. Their position was the one that would be expressed by Marx several years later in “Capital”: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”.

These were positions that were going to become more widespread within the economic and political organizations of the proletariat, but which struggled to penetrate the broad masses of workers, at least until midway through the 1850s.

As we have seen, there was a certain resistance on the part of the workers to abandoning the Democratic Party. But on the other hand the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming the party of the slave owners, and therefore increasingly a party of the South. In order to maintain their political power the slave owners had to extend slavery to the new territories, to avoid becoming the minority in Washington; this resulted in the aggressive politics in the West, above all at the expense of Mexico. Other political victories were the repeal of the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). The former resulted in a rush of thousands of pro-slavery Missourians into the newly created territory of Kansas, determined to tilt the fine constitutional balance in favor of the pro-slavery South. In response, northern abolitionists sent free soilers, leading to prolonged violence (“Bleeding Kansas”).

In their paranoia, justified by the inevitable and necessary decline of their own laws of capital, the slave owners came to idealize slavery as the ultimate form of American society, to be introduced also in the North; something that could not fail to increase the number of proletarians who joined the ranks of the abolitionist movement. Moreover it began to occur to the workers that, given that the slaves in the South were starting to enter skilled trades (which, as we have seen, was not a great success, but at the time this was not evident), their wages would be recalculated based on the cost of the labor of a Negro slave.

The Republican Party was born in 1854 in Wisconsin, through the work of leading lights of the trade union movement. Among their distinctive positions were opposition to the extension of slavery and support for the free soilers; with respect to the Whigs, they presented themselves as much more progressive and close the working class, but also made a favorable impression on the growing frontier population. Moreover, maintaining the Whig position on protectionism and the central bank, the party soon attracted the interest of the northern industrial and financial bourgeoisie. The defense of protectionism, and therefore of high tariffs on imports, obviously meaning European manufactured goods, was definitely favorably regarded by the manufacturing bourgeoisie of New England; but it was also an old warhorse of the Whigs, which the Republicans took up in order to win the workers over to their side. They put forward the idea that duties were primarily designed to protect American workers against the competition of cheap foreign labor. If they were not used to increase the prices of foreign manufactured goods before they reached the American market (or so they argued), the American industrialists would have no choice but to drive down wages to European levels in order to beat off the competition. The Republican politicians therefore had the bare-faced cheek to present themselves as defenders of the rights of workers, while actually defending the interests of big industry.

At first the bourgeoisie was slow to align itself, and some sectors, especially mercantile, remained loyal to the Democratic Party and the South. Drawing in sections from the decomposing Whigs, the part of the Democratic Party that represented the pioneers and small farmers, together with a good section of the industrial proletariat, the Republican Party rapidly gained strength, and achieved a great result in the presidential elections of 1856, even if it was not victorious. Prominent among its supporters in the proletarian camp were immigrants, especially workers of German and Scandinavian origin, who largely resented the influence of Weydemeyer and his Communist Club. In the successive years these same elements grew stronger, and in 1860 the Republican Party, supported by a bourgeoisie that increasingly understood that slavery was an obstacle to the country’s capitalist development, presented itself in the elections as the party of free labor; its champion was Abraham Lincoln, the “son of workers”. Nevertheless, it was above all the split in the Democratic Party into two major sections, one pro-slavery and one representing the farmers of the West, which delivered victory in the presidential elections to the Republicans.

General meeting January 2009

The North American Working Class and the Civil War

Another crisis

In 1857 another serious economic crisis occurred. The crisis unleashed demonstrations by the unemployed; for the first time the trade union movement put forward the demand for public works in a number of cases. The return of the crisis was accompanied by the establishment, in a large number of trades, of strike and trade union committees of a permanent nature, some of them even on a national scale.

The situation of discontent and the consequent struggles demonstrated the true nature of “free labor” for the working class. Not a single bourgeois apostle of “free labor” endorsed the demand for public works to increase employment, and in the winter of slump of 1857, those who supported private initiatives to help the unemployed were few and far between. The most eminent Republicans considered the two measures as unjustified interventions in free markets, which would have decreased proletarians’ “desire to work”: as can be seen, bourgeois rhetoric is always the same and does not sparkle with originality. Some tame journalists came to assert that a brief period “of hardship” was what was needed to bring “dissolute” workers back into line, workers who foolishly squandered their wages, keeping their families in poverty in the good times, and then, when things went bad, had the nerve to ask for public assistance. The same pen‑pushers showed their disgust for the workers when, in the course of the upturn of 1858, they moved on from demonstrations of the unemployed to holding trade union meetings. One of them wrote that “the vast majority of t he working class is a free, happy and independent class”.

No‑one would have said this, judging by the agitation that was developing in the footwear‑producing cities of New England. Apart from inadequate wages, the discontent arose from the speed‑ups following the partial mechanization of the productive process. The stitching machines had to be concentrated in the factory, and this eliminated home workers from the process; added to which all of the upstream and downstream stitching operations had to be accelerated to keep pace with the machines. The workers in Lynn and its surroundings reacted, reviving the labor union and demanding wage increases; confronted with the bosses’ refusal, in 1860 a good 10,000 workers went on strike in eastern Massachusetts. As if by magic, ethnic differences disappeared; in one city, which had been a nativist stronghold, Irish workers marched side‑by‑side with protestant comrades for the entire winter.

As a result of the trade union discrimination with regard to women, both inside the factory and outside, and of the separation from home workers, the strike was defeated and in April the workers returned to work. In reality it was not a complete defeat: what the bosses resisted most was union recognition. Some recognized it, others only conceded wage increases, others still resisted more. Thus here and there the factories started to reopen, and in the end strike was fatally finished.

But the strike took on a significance that went beyond the single event, forming a link between the past and future of the class: the radical belief that had inspired the movement thirty years earlier was turned in orators’ slogans with all its vehemence against “the oppressors of the workers” who “forged the chains of slavery and clasped them to proletarians’ wrists”. But it was also, for the first time, a strike by factory workers, not by apprentices or workers in artisan workshops, or by domestic employees and laborers, as in the past; it was the first major strike to mark the passage between artisan production and large‑scale industrial production. The strikers did not only have to confront the bosses, but also the militia, who after just a week were mobilized to escort the wagons that carried raw materials for work by strikebreakers. Not a single shot was fired, and there were no victims this time. The workers showed extreme care in preventing intemperate behavior within their ranks, to the point of prohibiting the sale of alcohol in certain zones and quarters, something that was also recognized in the bourgeois press. But the military presence anticipated much harder times, which were ushered in for workers involved in mass strikes during the so‑called “golden age”.

For the time being, economic struggles attenuated in the great mobilization for the Civil War, which the workers took part in with enthusiasm, and often with the blessing of the bosses. The main motivation was not the thirst for justice for the slave, but more often the fear that slavery threatened free labor. The justifications for the war were shared by natives and Germans, less so among the Irish who, because of their lower social status, did not see how things could get any worse for them with the victory of the South. In the absence of a class party, proletarians fell prey to the preaching of evangelicals and “free labor” activists. Other themes designed to win the support of proletarians for the war were the promise of speeding up the process of gaining citizenship, and land for all in the West. Proletarians therefore enlisted and fought, also to the point of self‑sacrifice in the early days.

The war closed a period of infancy for the workers’ movement, which left many problems open. Women, non‑specialized workers, and, at least in the South the blacks, were still discriminated against from a union perspective. Moreover the class had not succeeded in setting up a political movement that could represent it outside the bipartisan system. However, doubts about the causes of oppression had at least been overcome: no longer did workers see one sole cause in particular, such as the master, the factory boss, the financier, or even alcohol. After 1835 it was clear that oppression resulted from the system of production, and that the only defense, if not the solution, was the class union.

A union which almost succeeded had been broken by the crisis of 1837 and by the penetration of bourgeois propaganda in the form of protestant evangelical preaching, utopianism, “free labor” ideology and ethnicity, the latter unleashed by the strong waves of immigration following the crisis. There was much left to do, but now it was the war that made its voice heard above all the others.

Volunteers for the front

The antislavery attitude of the American proletariat was confirmed in taking a position on secession, first hidden and then openly realized, initially by South Carolina and then by the other Southern States. The workers who gathered in meetings and conventions of various sizes and importance proclaimed their wish to maintain the country in its entirety, and their disgust with the Southern slaveholders, at times expressing the same sentiments towards the northern profiteers. Delegates from the Southern States, such as Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky also participated in the workers’ assemblies and spoke out against secession, declaring the world of labor’s loyalty to the Union.

Therefore it is no surprise that the first to respond to Lincoln’s appeal for the recruitment of volunteers were indeed workers of all trades. Workers from Lowell made up the first corps for the front, followed by Wisconsin lumberjacks. The De Kalb regiment, entirely comprising German employees, departed for the front on 8 July 1861, followed not far behind by the “Garibaldi Guard” comprising Italian workers from New York, the “Polish Legion” and an Irish company, also from New York. Workers represented nearly half of the Northern armies, while, as we have seen, at the time they were a numerical minority of the population of the 34 states; the Senate later calculated that between 500,000 and 750,000 workers had left the factories of the Northern States to become soldiers.

Since the total number of factory workers was less than a million, it was a drain on resources which put various productive sectors in difficulty, footwear in particular, with factories that actually had to close precisely when orders were increasing disproportionately. Therefore the participation of the working class in the war was fundamental for the North’s victory, and remarkable when compared to the low numerical weight of the class compared to the total population; it repeated a phenomenon that had already occurred at the time of the War of Independence, although at the time the class was numerically insignificant.

The most conscious part of the class, the trade unionists (of the time!) and members of the Communist Club of New York were particularly active; William Sylvis, who had already distinguished himself as the leader of the iron molders’ union, organized the regiment that was the first to hasten to the defense of Washington, threatened by the Southern counter‑offensive. Eminent socialists such as Willich, close friend of Marx, Rosa, Jacobi and Weydemeyer achieved high rank in the hierarchy of the Union army. Apart from their enthusiasm these workers and socialists, who, despite often being born abroad were ready to give their lives for the ideals that the North was defending, boasted a considerable military experience acquired in 1848 or, as with many Italians, in Garibaldi’s army; experience which was lacking in the rest of the population.

The abolitionist enthusiasm was not limited to American proletarians; also across the Atlantic the defeat of the South was regarded as an objective for workers’ progress. “It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes,” wrote Marx in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association (1864) “but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic”.

And yet the blockade imposed by the Union navy on the Southern ports in 1862 started to be effective, and ever less cotton reached English spinning mills. This brought about a crisis in the sector and a consequent high level of unemployment (more than 30% in the large manufacturing centers); but contrary to the expectations of the slaveholders, no voice was raised by workers’ representatives for an intervention in favor of the Confederacy. On the contrary, even if many workers in England did not have the vote, their meetings and rallies expressed themselves against intervention with such clarity that the government did not dare to interfere in the conflict.

Many historians are agreed in considering that this English non‑intervention was the main cause of Lincoln’s change of course in the debates on slavery: in fact, during the first year of war he had not dared to take a single measure against the “property” of the slaveholders in the areas under Union army occupation; on the contrary, he had disowned those generals who had freed the slaves. In 1862, however, he approved a series of measures in favor of the slaves, culminating in the Proclamation of Emancipation of January 1, 1863; for a deeper analysis of these aspects and all others relating to the Civil War, see Capitalist development and the American Civil War, in “Comunismo”, n. 56, July 2004.

Workers and Copperheads

The workers, therefore, were not against the war, especially at the start, nor even against conscription, but rather against its class character, which meant that it was the poor who enlisted, while the rich could sit back in the rear and enrich themselves further. The law on conscription, adopted in 1863, was discriminatory: one could avoid enlistment by finding a substitute, or by paying a tax of $300. This was a sum representing more than a year’s wages for a proletarian, but acceptable to a bourgeois: and certainly there was no shortage of unemployed proletarians who accepted the exchange to guarantee their families’ survival.

Discontent spread across large layers of the proletariat, but the revolt against conscription of July 13, 1863 in New York, a few days after the start of the compulsory draft, does not seem to have been purely a workers’ movement, although in some cases the social boundaries were wearing thin. It was undoubtedly the result of “Copperhead” propaganda, the name given to the “Peace Democrats”, a faction of the membership of the Democratic Party in the North, who were against the war, and who often acted as a Southern fifth column. The turmoil caused serious destruction of goods in the city, and the death of more than 400 people, many of them blacks. But after a careful investigation the Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association of New York, which included typographers, carpenters, woodworkers and hatmakers, rejected the reconstruction of the events that attributed responsibility for the turmoil to the workers. After having accused a section of the bourgeoisie as the instigator, a document concluded: “The workers of New York did not revolt. A few ruthless and dissolute men, who oscillate between the penitentiary and the dark dens of crime, are not the representatives of the workers of the metropolis”.

But in reality the Copperhead propaganda did not fail to take hold on just a small part of the class, which was rightly unhappy about the war. Indeed, everything showed that the poor were becoming even poorer, and the rich even richer. After a brief period of crisis due to the loss of the Southern markets, and a good $300 million in now unrecoverable credit, the situation changed for the bourgeoisie when the government started to issue orders for military supplies. A new class of millionaires was born, whose fortunes were in large measure the fruit of the terrible corruption of the entire history of America. We have spoken of “shoddy” cloth, which fell to pieces in the rain; but also rifles which exploded in the soldiers’ hands, sand in place of sugar, rye as substitute for coffee, shoes with cardboard soles are some of the grossest and rarely prosecuted examples of the love of country of a bourgeoisie which piled up wealth while it cynically sent the proletariat to the massacre. This is not the place to go into the details about this epic of unbridled profiteering, which also took advantage of the Homestead laws, with land that almost always ended up in the hands of speculators and railroad companies, and the speculation in paper money, which rapidly devalued.

At the same time the living conditions of the proletariat worsened quickly and drastically. Speculation and inflation drove up the prices of foodstuffs, clothing and rents at persistent rates, while salaries stayed the same or increased only imperceptibly. The prices of manufactured goods increased during the war years at an average of 100% per annum; but if you look at the basic necessities, these increased in price even more strongly: a liter of milk, which cost 1.5 cents in 1861, cost 10 cents in 1861, and the same applied to butter, meat, coal etc.

The bosses’ offensive also promoted the approval in 1864 of the Contract Labor Law, which legalized contracts made abroad for importing manpower; by virtue of this law imported workers could not be recruited into the army, and found themselves, once they arrived, in the condition of servants employed in colonial times. These workers were often used, before the law was repealed in 1868, as scabs to wear down strikes.

Wartime strikes

As ever, the working class does not undertake struggles because it is impelled by a rebellious spirit, but because it is forced to do so to defend its living and working conditions. Even more so in a country at war where, while we have seen with how much unscrupulousness the bourgeoisie took every opportunity to make profits, by legal or illicit means, proletarians took up the cause of the war as their own, and were certainly not happy about interrupting production. But neither could they accept being literally reduced to hunger by a class, the bourgeoisie, which certainly did not set an example of patriotism (except of course being patriotic in words when they had to persuade hundreds of thousands to slaughter each other, while paying a devalued soldier’s wage, among other things). Thus, by and by, as prices increased without wages following them, and without the government doing anything to remedy the situation, recourse to economic struggles became inevitable.

When strikes occurred, the bosses, as one would expect, did not hesitate to dust down their hypocritical patriotic rhetoric, above all in sectors directly tied to military activity, which were especially numerous close to the front. How can we produce boots, coal, bullets or caps if the workers go on strike? The Union generals did not fail to reply to these heartfelt appeals in the states where their troops were operating, prohibiting workers’ organization, forbidding pickets, protecting scabs, and drawing up blacklists. And for those who did not adapt and dared to go on strike, they were far from reluctant to make arrests without trial, deportations of entire families, or forced return to work at bayonet‑point.

The Copperheads did not hesitate to fan the flames of discontent, but it is unclear to what extent they had lost their influence over the attitudes of open class dissatisfaction among groups of workers, which we would still support today. The Copperheads would have had greater success if it had not been for Lincoln himself, who seems to have intervened to prevent the most serious injustices. Thus Lincoln again had the support of the workers for the reelection of 1864, beating the Democrat McClellan.

The war came to an end in the spring of the next year with the defeat of the Southern armies. Strengthened by the knowledge that they had made a decisive contribution to victory, Northern workers did not fail to remind the dominant class what they expected for the future. Among the resolutions adopted on the occasion of a mass rally in Boston on November 2, 1865, one declaimed: “We rejoice that the rebel aristocracy of the South has been crushed, that… beneath the glorious shadow of our victorious flag men of every clime, lineage and color are recognized as free. But while we will bear with patient endurance the burden of the public debt, we yet want it to be known that the workingmen of America will demand in future a more equal share in the wealth their industry creates… and a more equal participation in the privileges and blessings of those free institutions, defended by their manhood on many a bloody field of battle”.

The worst years were 1861 and 1862; already in 1863 it began to seem clear that the workers had bargaining power which could be exploited to take back from the bosses at least part of what had been taken away during the wartime emergency. Production was at full speed and it was not easy to find workers. Strikes began to multiply, with much higher levels of success; moreover, after victorious strikes it was normal for a union structure to remain in place, and this was especially true for the sectors with a high female presence, like those of cigar and clothing manufacture. It is calculated that in 1864 around 200,000 workers joined unions, a little under 20% of the entire industrial workforce. At the same time there was a notable push for the creation of national unions, even if with very varied characteristics: alongside the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which declined the strike weapon, there were very combative unions, like that of the National Union of Iron Molders, led by William H. Sylvis.

Sylvis was a great trade union organizer. The first problem to be confronted
was funding, which was to be ensured with annual contributions made with the
issuance of personal membership cards. This was needed to manage funds for
strikes, strategically important in the long union struggles. He set up a record
of members and centralized organization; among the principles that guided him
were the alliance with the blacks, equal pay for men and women (to be admitted
into the trade unions), the union’s political autonomy and international
workers’ solidarity. He fought against spontaneous and unprepared strikes, which
dissipated energy and were almost always defeated. Sylvis, practically always
penniless, travelled across the length and breadth of the country to create the
organization (ten thousand miles, using the means of the time), and was the
founder and first president of the National Labor Union. His work inspired many
national unions of the time, which followed his example to grow
organizationally. He died in poverty in 1869 (the family did not even have
enough money for his funeral) at the age of 41, having become the
International’s representative in America. He remains one of the great figures
of the American workers’ movement.

The bosses’ counter‑offensive was not late in coming. We have already spoken of blacklists, lockouts, “yellow dog” contracts, and the importation of European contract labor for strikebreaking; we have also recalled the use of the army, locally, to force workers to return to work. A further resource for the bosses was the employment of convicts, whom they paid at 10‑15% of the union rate. In New York an entrepreneur moved a foundry to Sing Sing; he was defeated thanks to the struggles led by Sylvis, but in many other cases the unions did not manage to block the maneuver. Many states approved laws that limited the right to strike and unionization, and those who took part in pickets received six months in jail. Other laws conferred on railway companies, and subsequently also those in the minerals and iron and steel sectors, the right to create private police forces, thereby legally establishing territory outside of the laws of the State, despotic statelets within the largest democracy in the world. There were also states that passed more progressive laws, but the difference in this case was that the laws were all disregarded.

While the national unions, with few exceptions, were not very effective during the war years, the working class found its point of contact and organization in the struggles within the Trades Assemblies, which brought together all unions in a given locality. These did not have their own funds, but carried out various networking, political, propaganda, boycott and training activities. An example is the action that took place in the course of the iron molders’ strike in San Francisco. Knowing that the bosses had enlisted strikebreakers in the East, the representatives of the city’s Trades Assembly sent representatives to meet them to explain the reasons for their strike; when the ship docked in San Francisco the strikebreakers refused to work under these conditions and joined the union. The bosses acknowledged he defeat and conceded wage increases.

The dynamism of the Trades Assemblies is also demonstrated by the attempt that they themselves initiated to create a national organization: their position, which allowed the embrace of a wider scope than that of a single trade, clearly showed that this was the path to follow to strengthen the workers’ movement. The initiative concluded with the founding of the Industrial Assembly of North America (1864), which was however very short‑lived because of the weakness and inadequate penetration of the national trade unions within the class.

The National Labor Union

The failure of the Industrial Assembly did not erase from the class the awareness that isolated efforts conducted locally could not in any way resolve the huge problems that afflicted the American proletariat. The idea of setting up a structure, an organizational tool, capable of conducting struggles in defense of the interests of the working class, also beyond the scope of pure demands, therefore began to make inroads among the most enlightened representatives of the proletariat: a Labor Party. We have seen how associations with political scope had been born in the 1830s (Working Men’s Party) and 1840s (National Reform Association), but whose objectives were derived more from the imagination, often utopian, of the personalities who supported them, rather than being based on an analysis of the general situation of the working class, which by now also had a history spanning several decades and experience that it could refer back to.

In Europe the experience of parties was already advanced, and the many German immigrants, who were highly active in the country’s proletarian organizations, certainly contributed to the development of the idea of a modern party in America. Moreover the International Working Men’s Association, or First International, had come into existence in 1864, and started to make itself known outside of Europe.

In 1866 some leaders of large unions, including Sylvis, agreed to convene a national Convention to take place on August, 20 in Baltimore. On this day the 60 delegates, who represented local, national and international unions, Trades Assemblies and Eight Hours Leagues, were greeted with a huge banner that read, “Welcome Sons of Toil – From North and South, East and West”. Around 60,000 workers were represented, for the most part from the east, but also from Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit. Louis, Detroit.

Most of the work was carried out by committees on various questions. The report of the Committee on Unions and Strikes was important: while it defined strikes as damaging for workers, and to be pursued only when all other methods showed themselves to be inadequate, it exhorted the most widespread unionization possible, of skilled as much as of unskilled workers, and the creation of unions and union sections wherever possible in all sectors, in addition to the wider internationalization of existing unions. Since, given their status, the unskilled would have had difficulty in joining many existing trade unions, the Committee proposed the creation of a Workingmen’s Association that they could join, which would be represented in the national congresses.

Political activity was debated by the Commission on the Eight Hour Workday and Political Action: left the option of participating in the activity of political parties to local decision. The proposal was criticized by the delegates because its acceptance would have made the congress a political organization. At this point the representative of the German workers of Chicago intervened, who, while denying that the existing parties could advance workers’ interests, asserted that a new party of labor had to be established. Amid applause from the audience, the proposal was included in the Commission’s report.

Other resolutions were adopted, even if those of the two Commissions received
more attention: in reality the Convention raised all of the substantial issues
for the American workers’ movement that would remain valid for many years to
come.

It proclaimed the boycott of the products of prisoners’ labor so long as they did not receive normal wages. It demanded the improvement of workers’ living conditions and the clearance of slums. It wanted the creation of technical schools, libraries, high schools; the granting of land to individual settler communities; support for the workers’ press: the creation of cooperatives; support for working women.

There is a letter about this from Marx to Kugelmann, dated October 9, 1866, which reads: “I was exceedingly pleased at the American workers’ congress, which took place at the same time in Baltimore. The watchword there was organization for the struggle against capital, and, remarkably enough, most of the demands I had put up for Geneva were put up there, too, by the correct instinct of the workers. In fact it was thanks to taking a position on the 8‑hour workday by the Convention that the Geneva Congress of the International, which took place just two weeks later, transformed the demand into the “general platform of the workers of the whole world”.

There were however shortcomings in the Convention’s resolutions that would contribute towards shortening its life. The first error was really the lack of consideration for the strike weapon: even if the class had recently suffered a series of defeats, this had reinforced the solidarity which had brought about the Convention itself; while the class had little experience with arbitration, which was to substitute for the strike, the resolution hindered agreement on measures for mutual financial aid in the case of prolonged struggles. The other serious shortcoming lay in having carefully avoided the question of black proletarians, having addressed, however timidly, the question of women. Besides this, no organization capable of functioning came out of the meeting. Sylvis, who had not been able to participate owing to his poor health, was very critical on these last points.

The organizational aspects were improved at a subsequent Convention, in Chicago in 1867, but the National Labor Union as such really only saw the light of day in 1867, when Sylvis was elected its president. In just a few months the number of members ran into hundreds of thousands, thanks to a promotional tour by the president.

The Years of the First International

General meeting September 2009

The cooperative movement

At the Baltimore Convention of 1866 a general issue was also discussed, which concerned the inadequacy of the union struggle in defending the working class from the poverty in which it was being held, with its ups and downs, by the bourgeoisie. Even when successes occurred, the relief was only temporary, either because of the high costs of the struggle, or because the bosses soon started to erode the real value of the economic gains.

It was necessary to find a new weapon for better defending the workers, one that would allow them to raise themselves up from the state of degradation in which many often found themselves. Cooperativism came to be seen as such a weapon. But, even if this was passed off as new, it was not; indeed, its efficacy had already been shown to be very marginal by previous experiences, most notably in the United Kingdom.

Cooperativism developed particularly in the years immediately following the Civil War, both in the realm of production and that of consumption. The producers’ cooperative that had most success was that of the ironworkers, set up in New York State with the involvement of Sylvis. For the first six months, 35 ironworkers earned, through wages and profits, considerably more than their colleagues who were dependent on individual companies. Its success encouraged the birth of other cooperatives across the whole country, which in 1868 united in an association.

But it was soon clear that the outside world imposed laws that could not be ignored, and which shaped any kind of economic activity, including that of cooperatives. The laws of competition soon constrained the cooperatives to become increasingly competitive, which required the gradual abandonment of cooperative principles. The cooperatives’ members demanded ever greater profits, and to achieve this it was necessary to reduce wages, increase working hours and disrespect the rules requested by the labor union. Rather than representing a touchstone that the bourgeoisie would have had to imitate, the cooperatives gradually became the inspiration for the bosses’ offensive against the workers.

Cooperatives in other trades, such as the carpenters and typographers, were short‑lived. They were regularly denounced by the press as examples of French communism, and the industrialists sold below cost to prevent them from creating a market for themselves; in addition, the management was often not up to the job; but the main difficulty was that of finding capital, the lifeblood of the society in which they had to operate. The cooperatives had to convince the owners of capital to invest in ventures whose declared purpose was the abolition of the system of wage labor. The bankers, of course, asked for high rates of interest, and before long the entire cooperative movement, or rather that part which did not go completely bankrupt, degenerated into joint stock companies more interested in profit than the emancipation of labor. As a result the cooperative movement, defeated in theory by Marxism, and in practice by experience in all countries, was even less fortunate in the United States than elsewhere, which also applied to consumer cooperatives.

One consequence of the unfortunate fate of the cooperatives was that many union leaders convinced themselves that the problem lay not in the impossibility of the coexistence of incompatible forms of production, or the fact that cooperation was condemned to assume every characteristic of openly capitalist production – but in the fact that the bankers did not provide funds. The objective therefore had to be a monetary reform that would allow the workers to leave their condition of wage slavery, with the State providing them with funds at interest rates fixed by law. We do not want to provide a critique of the movement for monetary reform at this point, since it did not last long and would not subsequently have any appeal within the American proletariat. Though at the time, it was one of the factors that distracted workers and leaders from the union struggle, the sole defense, if only partial, against the arrogance of the bosses.

Political action

The need for political action had become evident once it was understood that this was the only way to obtain lasting regulatory improvements; among these the very possibility of forming labor unions had to be definitively and clearly affirmed, and therefore defended against established power. The miners were highly active. They managed to impose less savage terms on the organization of work and on the safety provisions in the mines, which claimed hundreds of victims every year. Another aspect of general interest that lent itself to political activity was the eight‑hour movement, of which we will say more later; another problem was the importation of Chinese labor power, which tended to reduce minimum salaries to intolerable levels.

The National Labor Union moved in the direction of setting up a true Labor Party, also because local experiences of political initiatives, sometimes improvised, as in Massachusetts, had given rise to encouraging election results, at the expense of the Republican Party, which was still posing as the defender of the working class. But the triumph of the view that the solution to all ills lay in monetary reform (a view also shared by Sylvis), and the growing penetration of professional politicians attracted by the rich reserves of votes in working class districts, meant that the working class gradually detached itself: at the 1872 Congress only one delegate in four represented the working class; there would be no others in which representatives of the workers would take part.

But despite its short existence, the National Labor Union constituted an important stage in the development of class consciousness in the American proletariat. First of all it had reunited the forces dispersed across a nation that was starting to become large. It was one of the very first organizations to demand wage equality for women, and had women among its leaders; it was the first organization with African-American delegates; the first to have a powerful lobby in Washington, which asked for the creation of a Ministry of Labor. It fought for the eight‑hour day, for better work‑related legislation, against the massive allocation of land to the railroad companies and for a greater allocation of land to those who could work it. It was the representative of the International in America, and sent delegates to its congresses. Its most serious weakness was in placing all its hopes in monetary reform, to be achieved through electoral struggle, while it overlooked actual union activity, which lost it the sympathy of the class. A class which was showing itself ready for political action independent of the principal bourgeois parties.

The eight hours

The struggle to reduce working hours came to unite the workers over and above professional and geographical boundaries, and therefore making them receptive to political action. We have seen how, since the 1830s, the rallying cry of the ten‑hour day had mobilized broad layers of proletarians, with partially positive results in the 1840s. In reality there were however already milieus within the working class that had no intention of contenting themselves with the ten‑hour day, even if this had been won.

In the 1850s the expectation of the eight‑hour working day won over one labor union after another, and only the war succeeded in temporarily stopping North America’s proletarians from demanding it. Though not entirely, since in 1863 the bourgeois press denounced the popularization of this objective, which was blamed of course on “immigrants”. Though it is probable that foreign workers often had a greater class consciousness and were therefore highly active, this was not the case with all of them: it was true for the Germans, but not for the immigrants from undeveloped countries, such as the Italians, who were often brought in precisely as scabs and to break strikes. The refrain that the most radical rallying cries emanated from abroad is one that the American bourgeoisie revives every time it finds itself in difficulty confronted with workers’ agitation, to be able to persecute one part of the class undisturbed, in order to terrorize all of it.

In reality, however, the principal leader of the struggle for the eight‑hour day was a thoroughly American member of the Machinists and Blacksmiths Union, Ira Steward. Steward, who came from Boston, was convinced that it was impossible to obtain a reduction in the working day with union struggles within a specific trade or locality. According to him, it was necessary to struggle to obtain a federal law on the eight‑hour day: it was possible to reach local accords, but they would exclude the majority of the class, dividing its power. The labor unions, by contrast, were not disposed to concentrate all their energy on this one objective, which for Steward, conversely, amounted to one that would have moved all of the problems confronting the class towards a resolution. For this reason, in 1864 he contributed to the foundation of a specific organization, the Workingmen’s Convention, later called the Labor Reform Association, whose declared aim was the eight‑hour day, considered to be the first step towards the emancipation of the American working class. In the same year, in Europe, the recently founded International took a similar position.

The movement for the eight‑hour day rapidly spread throughout the land, and also had a decent following among farmworkers. Its importance became evident after the war, when the demobilized soldiers started to fill city streets in search of employment. Marx writes in Das Kapital: “The first fruit of the Civil War was an agitation for the eight‑hour day – a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California”.

Therefore, at the Baltimore Convention of 1866, the enthusiasm for the rallying cry of the eight‑hour day was high, as can be recognized from the resolution: “The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained”.

As we have seen, the movement was successful, and such was the show of force and organization that on June 25, 1868, the Federal government approved a law for the eight‑hour day for its own employees. In addition, six States and numerous municipalities approved legislation to establish the eight‑hour day. But, even though the workers initially thought they had won, it was not difficult for the bosses to circumvent the law, as indeed was the case with the ten‑hour day, which was disregarded almost everywhere in these years. In fact, one of the arguments of the trade union agitators was that, even if the law for the eight‑hour day had not been passed, at least it would have promoted observance of the older law for ten hours. Not only did the private bosses not apply it, but also the State and Federal departments, when they conceded it, reduced wages in proportion, and this also continued even after President Grant, on two separate occasions, specified in later legal regulations that the reduction in working hours should not have entailed any reduction in pay.

It was soon realized that by relying only on the vote and moral pressure simply brought about legal regulations that no bourgeois felt bound to respect. The period between 1868 and 1873 therefore saw a wave of struggles for a true eight‑hour day; and in many cases these struggles delivered the desired results, city by city, trade by trade, factory by factory. However, as had often happened in the past, all of these gains were wiped away by the crisis of 1873.

But the movement for the eight‑hour day had not been useless. The understanding of the fact that the struggles extended beyond cities, beyond States, beyond all frontiers, including trades, would remain in the memory of the American working class, fluid and unstable though it was; they could bear precious fruits – it was only a matter of knowing how to keep these safe. Regulatory and legislative gains could be achieved, but only if the exercise of organized force by as large a proportion of the proletariat as possible was linked to political action. And the political action had to be independent, freed from the traditional parties.

Female labor

Even though it was openly recognized that, regardless of how hard men’s conditions of life and work might have been, those of women were systematically worse, trade unionism in the first years after the war still ignored women, when it did not assume attitudes of open hostility to their confrontations. Women in work, it was said, only worsened the situation created by post‑war unemployment.

On the other hand, it was precisely the war that allowed women to enter productive activities that were traditionally “masculine”, including factory work in various sectors. In many cases they were war‑widows, or the wives of invalids. And the bosses were hesitant about discarding them, as their output was practically identical to men while they cost roughly half as much to employ.

The problem was a serious one for the labor unions, since in the meantime the average pay had fallen to very low, unsustainable levels. The rallying cry was therefore the unionization of female workers, which women certainly did not oppose. However, there were few labor unions ready to accept them into their ranks, and in many cases female unions therefore had to be established, including those for tobacco, clerical, dressmaking, umbrella, textile and shoe workers etc.

This time the workers gave their support, helping with organizational activity, providing leaders and orators, and also helping with the collection of funds or through solidarity strikes when necessary; because of course the bosses, while quite happy to pay less money for female work, became furious when female workers dared to raise their heads and demand less onerous conditions. In fact the demand, also supported by male workers, was for equal wages for equal work.

This positive attitude also emerged from the start within the National Labor Union, which promised support for the “daughters of labor of this country” at the 1866 Baltimore Convention. Two years later a woman leader would be elected deputy secretary of the Union. This made an impression on Marx, who wrote to Kugelmann on December 12, 1868: “Great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labor Union’ in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included)”.

An attempt to get suffrage organizations also accepted within the Union did not succeed: there were few workers ready to accept complete equality of rights; in effect, it would have meant a political contamination of an organization that had to maintain the unity of proletarians on the level of struggle for economic demands. On the other hand female organizations found a strong defender in the National Labor Union, at least insofar as, and to the extent that, it was strong itself. The Union’s decline left women on their own: in 1873 their conditions were no better than they were ten years earlier, and only a couple of national trade unions had accepted them with full rights, among around thirty that existed at the time. There was still everything to do for trade union organization among America’s working women, and many years of hard struggle would still be needed before all gender-based differences disappeared in trade union organizations.

African-American workers

At the end of the war the dilemma faced by all Americans, but above all proletarians, was what was to become of Americans of African origin. After a bloody war, which was allegedly fought to free them, someone proposed that perhaps it would be simpler to return them to slavery to overcome the post‑war problem of their sudden availability on the labor market. Others proposed sending them back to Africa; in effect a movement for “return” was born, which also brought about the establishment of a new State on Africa’s Atlantic coast, Liberia, which still today boasts a flag with a star, one, and stripes, almost identical to that of the USA.

But of course, the North American bourgeoisie was far from wanting to lose the rich reserve of cheap labor that the African-Americans provided. Up until now, these were present in the North in small numbers, but in the South they constituted the great majority of the industrial proletariat, which, even if in the early stages, was above all concentrated in port cities and in some other industrial centers, which were slowly recovering after the destruction of the war and in spite of the northern boycott. Therefore the negro proletariat was not so much an issue for the bosses as for the white working class, which feared its competition, just as it had feared that of the Irish, and then of the Italians, and all of the waves of emigration that took place in the century that followed.

Delegates to the Baltimore convention of the NLU were divided on the attitude to take towards the African-Americans, so much so that Sylvis had to intervene: “If we can succeed in convincing these people that it is to their interest to make common cause with us (…) that will shake Wall Street out of its boots”, and to those who wanted to decline the offers of collaboration that the African-Americans were advancing, he replied: “The line of demarcation is between the robbers and the robbed, no matter whether the wronged be the friendless widow, the skilled white mechanic or the ignorant black. Capital is no respecter of persons and it is in the very nature of things a sheer impossibility to degrade one class of laborers without degrading all”.

But the 1866 convention did not debate the question, thus forcing Sylvis and others to draw up an appeal addressed to American trade unionists, published by the NLU in 1867: “Negroes are four million strong and a greater proportion of them work with their hands; the same can’t be said for any other people on earth. Can we afford to reject their proffered cooperation and make them enemies? By committing such an act of folly we would inflict greater injury on the cause of labor reform than the combined efforts of capital could furnish (…) So capitalists north and south would foment discord between the whites and blacks and hurl one against the other as interest and occasion might require to maintain their ascendancy and continue their reign of oppression”.

As we shall see, in the years that followed, despite commendable attempts by some labor unions and leaders, the discord between white proletarians on the question inhibited the growth of the entire union movements, and the consequences would be felt for decades.

After the Civil War, the African-American proletarians of the South would discover that their newly acquired liberty was not much different from their lost slavery. The plantation owners were still the bosses, and the old restrictions that limited the rights of “free” African-Americans were still in force. Things did not go better with the “carpetbaggers”, rapacious investors arriving from the North to profit from the advantageous conditions for speculation and exploitation of labor. Even if they had celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation, the African-Americans of the South demanded a material basis for their freedom, beyond civil and political rights: a demand exemplified by the slogan “40 acres and a mule”; as much as would have sufficed, in the conditions of the time, to guarantee a family’s survival. An agrarian reform, in short, which could easily be achieved with lands expropriated from the landowners, and which the radical Republicans attempted to realize during the so‑called “Reconstruction”. But after a few years the radicals lost the leadership of the party, and the African-Americans who managed to have land allotted to them were a tiny minority.

President Johnson, who was opposed to the radicals, instead promulgated the black codes, which substituted the old slave codes and resembled them to an impressive degree. These codes limited the right of blacks to rent land, acquire arms, or to move freely; they imposed prohibitive taxes on whoever among them wanted to start independent activity, especially if non‑agrarian; and they allowed the bosses to take the sons of ex‑slaves as “apprentices” if they were shown to be “unsuited” as parents. The African-Americans were not allowed to give courtroom testimony against whites; if they left work they could be put in prison for not having respected their contract; whoever was found without work could be arrested and fined $50. He who could not pay the fine was “rented out” to anyone in the county who could pay the fine. African-Americans could also be fined for making offensive gestures, failure to respect the curfew, or possession of firearms. In short, a degree of personal control over the African-Americans established itself, which was indistinguishable from slavery.

A section of the bourgeoisie was defending the African-Americans, at least in these years: the abolitionist movement and, as mentioned, the radical Republicans, who represented the industrial bourgeoisie and who, as we have explained better elsewhere, opposed Johnson’s policies. However, these radicals, before losing the power they held in parliament, only succeeded in getting the right to vote for African-Americans, while the agrarian reform did not happen because also in the North, it was taken as an attack on private property, hard to accept even for Republican landowners.

The workers’ movement did not have an unequivocal position: even if its own press often praised the radicals’ initiatives, the sympathy of large sections of the workers was with the Democrats, who were traditionally closer to the class’s needs. But the African-Americans were not disposed to giving their vote to the enemies of the radical Republicans, who at the time were the only ones to defend them. It was the Democrats who took advantage of this situation, in finally bringing the Reconstruction to a close in 1878.

In the workplace the attitude of workers towards the African-Americans was even worse, more or less the same one that occurs every time that large numbers of workers pour into production from other parts of the country or from abroad. Discrimination got to the point that some labor unions ordered their members to refuse to work alongside African-Americans. The question was presented at the 1867 convention, and again in the following year. Despite the attempts to avoid it, the fact that in the meantime negro workers had taken part in fierce trade union battles, and that they had formed organizations even at State level, meant that the 1869 Convention of the NLU adopted a resolution for the organization of Negro workers. But the resolution had little effect in the factories, and discrimination continued. Not seeing their interests being defended by the NLU in reality, African-American workers set up the National Colored Labor Union, whose political perspective was to support the Republican Party, of which it soon became a mere appendage among blacks.

After a few years the army that had been in control of the South would be withdrawn and sent against strikers in the North struggling against the reduction of wages; the African-Americans were thus left dependent on their ex bosses: the process reached its conclusion in 1877, during the presidential contest between Hayes and Tilden, when, in exchange for a clear path to the presidency, Republicans gave southern Democrats full freedom to treat blacks as they saw fit.

The International

An intense relationship between the European proletariat and that of America had existed since the time of the Civil War when, especially in England, the organized working class mobilized in favor of the anti‑slavery North. On the American side of the ocean the most active had been German immigrants, who had stayed in contact with the mother country.

Sylvis was among the leaders who understood the importance of ties to the International. There were also contacts between similar unions on both sides of the Atlantic. Sylvis asked the labor unions to inform workers yearning to leave their mother country that America was not what was being promised by recruiters; besides, they had to understand that immigrants were almost always used to break strikes.

The motion to affiliate to the International was repeatedly carried at conventions of the NLU, but the decision was always put back. Even after Cameron, the NLU’s emissary to Europe, had made his report to the 1870 convention, it was decided that the International’s program was too advanced (but perhaps that meant too revolutionary) for the USA. While in Europe such a program was inevitable because of the prevalent despotism, America’s problems, it was argued, were not about the type of government but rather, poor administration; “the correct administration of the fundamental principles on which the government is based” should have sufficed. And here the typically American conviction emerges: that of being in a special country, a kind of Promised Land, part of a chosen people; a conviction that even today has permeated through all levels of society, and which is the worst ideological poison.

Even Sylvis, who had died two years earlier, had acknowledged a difference in conditions between the workers of the two continents. But he also knew that “the war of poverty against wealth” was the same everywhere in the world, and that the proposals of the International for cooperation with the NLU were based on questions that concerned American workers as much as Europeans. Nevertheless, and despite repeated declarations of intent, affiliation to the International was never to be approved.

But there was not only the NLU. Sections of the International were established in a number of cities: the first affiliation, in 1867, was that of the Communist Club of New York, founded in 1857 by Sorge and others. The sections invited workers’ organizations, i.e. the labor unions, to affiliate in their turn, but the invitation did not achieve much success. Most of the following was among bourgeois reformers, a fact that only created problems within the sections: Sorge himself had to work for the expulsion of sections that were only interested in female suffrage, free love, the achievement of socialism with a referendum, and similar nonsense. On the other hand in these years the American sections of the International were highly active in backing the struggle of the Irish against English occupation and in support of the Paris Commune and, after its defeat, persecuted Communards. These struggles also saw a lot of African-American workers taking part in demonstrations. In 1873 sections of the International were, moreover, active in struggles by the unemployed.

Thus, even if only on the margins, the International made its presence felt within the working class in these years which heralded a new crisis and the long depression that followed. What did not happen, and would always be the problem within the American working class, was the welding together of revolutionary political consciousness and the power of workers more or less organized into union structures. Petty-bourgeois opportunism could also play its part in preventing such a convergence by keeping African-Americans, women and unskilled workers at arm’s length from the organized ranks of factory workers.

The long depression

Thanks to labor union activity real wages and employment had increased in the period 1865‑73, despite the depression that followed the Civil War. The collapse of the Jay Cooke bank in September 1873 rang the death‑knell not just for the bourgeoisie, which saw the destruction of its loans system (the stock market slumped, the stock exchange shut up shop and by the end of the year there were at least 5,183 bankruptcies), but also and above all for the proletariat, which would have to pay a higher price even though, of course, it was not in the least responsible for the complete anarchy within the economic system.

The most immediate consequence was unemployment: already by the end of 1873 25% of the labor force was unemployed. The situation would remain wretched until 1878, when 20% were still permanently unemployed, 40% worked less than 6‑7 months per year, and only 20% were in regular employment, but with salaries cut by up to 45%, this often meant little more than a dollar a day.

Few labor unions managed to resist the impact of the tempest that had been unleashed: of the 30 national labor union only 8 or 9 survived through to 1877, and these with extremely reduced numbers. The bosses, from a position of strength, made use of all the old ways to wear down working class militancy. Lockouts, blacklists, “yellow dog” contracts, everything was acceptable in order to break the organizations and the spirit of the proletariat and impose their conditions, in general a return to the more ruthless past. The trade unionist was hunted down, and once caught, destined to the most extreme poverty.

There were exceptions, labor unions that resisted, or even grew stronger, thanks to a better position in the production process, such as the iron and steel foundry workers who united in the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers Union. Another category that flourished was the miners. But these remained exceptions against a landscape of social desolation. Until 1878, when the Knights of Labor took on a national significance, there was no national organization capable of coordinating the few cases of worker militancy, which were however not entirely lacking.

Also those who were in work, therefore, did not do well: in the textile industry, wages fell by 45%, likewise for the rail workers and all categories, even if official data is sparse. Also, because there was often no agreed wage, everyone sold their labor singly to the boss who stated the wage he considered appropriate on a “take it or leave it” basis, that is at the lowest supportable level. It is true that there was also some reduction in the price of essentials, and real wages fell less than the percentages mentioned above, but the tragedy also extended to the enormous numbers of unemployed, in the best cases dependent on those who had the good fortune to be in work. Whereas the others struggled in the darkest misery. In New York, for example, in the first three months of 1874, more than 90,000 workers were registered homeless (a phenomenon that has far from disappeared on today’s opulent American streets); they were known as revolvers, because they came in and went out of special buildings just to sleep, where they were packed in like animals and were only admitted for one or two days per month. Yet even this miserable charity was judged by the bourgeoisie to be “too generous”, because it could “weaken independence of character and reduce confidence in self‑help”; the whole thing, concluded one newspaper, “is completely communist”. Evidently the specter that was haunting Europe had also taken to sending shivers down the spines of the Yankee bourgeoisie.

Of course, there was the option of going west. But how? To do what? Modest as the prospects were, one needed a small amount of capital for the journey, for the animals and the tools, assuming that free land was available in the first place, after the rail companies had grabbed vast territories, and the first allotments of land had been made in previous years based on the Homestead Act. Besides, the factory worker knew nothing about agriculture. Heading west in search of work proved to be useless, because the opportunities were far fewer than the labor supply, even in the less distant cities of the Midwest, such as Chicago, St. Louis or Cincinnati. The rest was entirely agrarian. Many, by contrast, decided on another direction, back to old Europe or to South America. In 1878 a ship heading for South America sank with its cargo of emigrants from the United States; an hour after the news had reached Philadelphia there was already a crowd of unemployed wanting to take the place of the workers who had just drowned.

Even in this dire situation, a proposal for loans to help unemployed families to occupy and cultivate public lands was shelved in Congress for being too communist. One newspaper wrote: “Our workers must resign themselves to being no better off than their European equivalents. They must be content to work for low wages… In this way they will advance to the condition in life that the Lord is pleased to assign them”.

Socialists and the struggles of the unemployed

Sections of the International were at the heart of the struggles of the unemployed that were unleashed in the first year of the crisis. Already in October 1873 the IWA Federal Council of North America distributed a manifesto proposing to proletarians the objectives for which they should struggle, after being organized and setting up delegates on a territorial basis: “1) Work should be given to all who are capable and desirous of working, at normal wages and based on the eight‑hour day; 2) money or goods should be paid to proletarians and their families in real difficulty, sufficient to sustain them for a week; 3) no‑one should be allowed to be evicted from their homes as a result of non‑payment of rent, from the 1st December to 1st May 1874”.

Meetings and conferences multiplied, always attended by large numbers of proletarians, with slogans that the New York Times did not hesitate to describe as “decidedly communist”. The trade unions also placed themselves at the leadership of the movement, and demonstrations were numerous, followed by petitions in the various cities of the Union. In some cases there were successes, like in Chicago, where it was possible to get a committee responsible for helping the victims of the great fire of 1871 to pay out money that had been saved for the benefit of the unemployed; it goes without saying this committee was not enthusiastic about the solution, and only the menacing pressure of thousands of demonstrators below the windows convinced the managers. However, at the start of 1874 the movement began to be ignored by the politicians, and after a few mass beatings on the part of the police its initial vigor was dissipated; in the autumn of the same year it was practically over.

If the sections of the International had been united, perhaps the disintegration of the movement could have been avoided. But the socialist movement was far from being a homogenous body. The German workers, who continued to arrive in America as a result of the repression that followed the end of the Franco-Prussian war, brought with them the divisions that existed in Germany between Marxists and Lassalleans, and the crisis only sharpened the conflict between these two spirits of the movement in America.

The fundamental question concerned the path to be followed for organizing the working class. For the Lassalleans, the disintegration of the labor unions was further proof that the only direction was to organize proletarians on the political level; demonstrations by the unemployed served no purpose for them unless it was an instrument for accelerating the birth of a labor party.

Of course, the Marxists did not reject political activity; but, apart from obviously considering all forms of class struggle to be political, they maintained that the times were not yet mature enough for the formation of a party. The trade unions, they countered, are the crucible of the workers’ movement, and it was the task of sections of the International to help them to recover and re‑establish themselves. In this sense the struggles against unemployment had to be supported because, apart from the direct benefits that they could be derived from them for proletarians in difficulty, they helped in the acquisition of a first class consciousness, and demonstrated the importance of the class’s organization.

The marxists’ activity had some immediate successes, which favored a reconciliation, in the sense that the Lassalleans started to rethink their attitude towards the unions. But these successes were little exploited, also because of the immaturity of the local communists: the Germans tended to see the movement as if it were like that in Germany, without grasping the differences, which were not few. “The Germans”, Engels wrote to Sorge on November 29, 1886, “have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way, as something which has got to be learnt off by heart but which will then supply all needs without more ado. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action. Added to which they learn no English on principle. Hence the American masses had to seek out their own way”.

However, the reconciliation did take place, and it was formally agreed in July 1876, when the delegates of 19 American sections of the International met in Philadelphia and dissolved the International Workers’ Association. We have analyzed the events of the International in general elsewhere, which, having transferred its central headquarters to America in 1874, did not appear anymore suited in this form to the tasks it had given itself, while in Europe strong nationally based socialist parties were developing rapidly. It is worth reading the final declaration of the conference.

“To the members of the International Workers’ Association.

Fellow working men,

“The International Convention at Philadelphia has abolished the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, and the external bond of the organization exists no more.

“‘The International is dead!’ the bourgeoisie of all countries will again exclaim, and with ridicule and joy it will point to the proceedings of this convention as documentary proof of the defeat of the labor movement of the world. Let us not be influenced by the cry of our enemies! We have abandoned the organization of the International for reasons arising from the present political situation of Europe, but as a compensation for it we see the principles of the organization recognized and defended by the progressive working men of the entire civilized world.

“Let us give our fellow-workers in Europe a little time to strengthen their national affairs, and they will surely soon be in a position to remove the barriers between themselves and the working men of other parts of the world.

“Comrades, you have embraced the principle of the International with heart and love; you will find means to extend the circle of its adherents even without an organization. You will win new champions who will work for the realization of the aims of our association.

“The comrades in America promise you that they will faithfully guard and cherish the acquisitions of the International in this country until more favorable conditions will again bring together the working men of all countries to common struggle, and the cry will resound again louder than ever: Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

A few days later, in the same city, the socialist organizations met to found a new party, called the Working Men’s Party of the United States, the word “socialist” evidently still being too bold. In its platform it adopted the attitude of the International towards unions, conceding to the Lassalleans that the organization would remain national. Nevertheless the peace was short-lived and the polemics soon resumed along the same lines.

The Molly Maguires

An idea of the workers’ conditions and of the heterogeneity of the situations facing the humans put to produce in the new world according to the rules of the capitalist mode of production, due to the variety of climates and origins, can be drawn from the brief story of the Molly Maguires, a phenomenon that was more picturesque than significant, but which remains an episode of fully fledged class struggle, even in its simple spontaneity.

According to legend the movement took its inspiration from a woman of this name, who was a leader of the Free Soil Party, a clandestine party in Ireland that threatened landowners who were guilty of over-exploiting, if not expelling the poor peasants from the land: the penalty was always the same, death.

The movement emigrated to the United States with so many Irish who moved in the 1850s: only the Irish could take part, and it took the name of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The declared aim was that of a fraternity of mutual aid, but it soon became clear that the methods used in Ireland were also applied in the USA, and in particular in the coal-producing areas of Pennsylvania, where the majority of Irishmen were concentrated.

For sure, the working conditions in the mines were such as to breed resentment towards the bosses and their henchmen. Pay was low: the supervisors were always looking to swindle the miners, who did piece‑work, based on weight; there were no safety measures and miners died in their hundreds every year, not to speak of the abuses suffered by all workers in common.

The Molly Maguires were also active as union leaders, and it seemed that apart from the bosses they also had as targets the union leaders, who were considered cowardly. One of the unions involved in the “long strike” of 1875 was led by them.

There remains little clear evidence on the activity of the Molly Maguires, other than the view from the bourgeois press. And few rose up to defend them when many workers, accused of being leaders of the movement, were arrested and tried for the homicides that occurred in the 1860s and 70s. And to tell the truth many historians deny that an organization of this name ever existed in the United States. The whole investigation is based on the testimony of a bosses’ spy from the Pinkerton Agency, and from carefully instructed witnesses. Nonetheless, during the trial the inconsistency of the evidence presented was abundantly obvious, though this did not save the accused miners from the gallows. In the book of one historian, published a century later, we read: “The investigation and the trials of the Molly Maguires constituted one of the most open renunciations of legality in American history. A private company initiated the investigations by means of a private investigations agency; a private police force arrested the presumed culprits; the mining company’s lawyers incriminated them. The State restricted itself to providing the courtroom and the hangman”. A newspaper of the time summarized the profile of the accused well, and implicitly revealed the reason for their persecution: “What have they done? When the price set on their work was not going well for them they organized and declared a strike”.

Thus it was a campaign orchestrated to terrorize the miners’ union movement. Perhaps the best epitaph is in the tribute paid thirty years later by Eugene Debs: “They all protested their innocence, and they all died game. Not one of them betrayed the slightest evidence of fear or weakening. Not one of them was a murderer at heart. All were ignorant, rough and uncouth, born of poverty and buffeted by the merciless tides of fate and chance. (…) To resist the wrongs of which they and their fellow-workers were the victims and to protect themselves against the brutality of their bosses, according to their own crude notions, was the prime object of the organization of the ‘Mollie Maguires’. It is true that their methods were drastic, but it must be remembered that their lot was hard and brutalizing; that they were the neglected children of poverty, the products of a wretched environment (…) The men who perished upon the scaffold as felons were labor leaders, the first martyrs to the class struggle in the United States”.

Just a few weeks after the last hanging, in June 1877, the great railroad strike would break out.

Employees’ struggles

The American working class did not did not take the attack on employment and wages brought about by the depression lying down. It was the most prolonged depression yet seen. The struggles were decisive, above all in the textiles, mining and transport sectors. These struck terror in the boss class, which knew very well the living conditions of the working class, and had fresh in its memory from just a few years ago what the Parisian proletariat had been capable of doing. The specter of communism, even before it entered the minds of the workers, stirred the worst nightmares of the bourgeoisie.

The first struggles of a significant size were those that occurred at Fall River Massachusetts, following an attempt by the bosses to reduce wages by 10%. More than three thousand workers took part in the strike, which at first had a positive outcome; however in autumn the bosses went on the offensive against an exhausted working class, which after eight weeks of strike had to surrender unconditionally.

In the same year of 1875 there was a long strike among the miners of Pennsylvania, (“The long strike”), and this also was defeated by a combination of hunger, State intervention, and judicial ruthlessness. But the division of the workers in two unions, who held different positions, also influenced the defeat, as did the determination of the bosses, who prepared the attack for three years, which then succeeded. The union leaders were described as “foreign agitators, members of the Commune and emissaries of the International”; and the union as a “despotic organization, before which the poor worker must bend his knee like a dog on the leash, surrendering his own will”.

But the most significant event of these years, which left a permanent dread in the memory of the bourgeoisie, was a series of strikes that manifested themselves in the course of 1877, in the final period of the economic crisis, which, due to its broad scope and duration has received various names. “The Great Strike of 1877”, “The Great Railroad Strike”, “The Great Upheaval”.

It all started on July 16 at Martinsburg, West Virginia, when it was learned that the local railroad company had lowered wages by 10 percent, the second reduction in eight months. The workers had no more leeway: many were unemployed, huge numbers only worked a few hours, the payment of wages was sometimes delayed by months, hunger was their families’ constant companion. The bosses wanted, among other things, to destroy the workers’ unions which, apart from being few in number and small, were extremely submissive and anything but combative; the union leaders were on blacklists, negotiations with the Unions were not accepted, and the Pinkerton spies were so active that the workers even avoided speaking among themselves.

The great upheaval was in reality preceded by a period of apparent inertia among the workers. The managing director of one of the railroad companies wrote on June 21, “The experiment of cutting back wages has proved successful for all the companies that have done it recently, and I have no reason to fear that there can be agitations or resistance on the part of the dependents if this is carried out with the necessary firmness on our side and if they realize that they must accept willingly or leave”. Even on the day of the Martinsburg strike itself the Governor of Pennsylvania affirmed that the State had not known the calm of this period for years. Within a few days the State would be at the center of the revolt.

On July 16, 40 railroad workers went on strike and blocked a goods train. The police did not succeed in getting them to back down. The next day a detachment of the militia arrived. In the attempt to allow the train to depart the first clash took place, and a worker was killed by a soldier. At this point the soldiers desisted, also because they did not find anyone willing to maneuver the train, and withdrew.

Now the strike spread along the entire line, the Baltimore & Ohio, all the way to Baltimore in Maryland. The Governor, being disappointed by the National Guard which, largely composed of railroad workers, fraternized with the strikers, turned to President Hayes asking for Federal troops to be dispatched: the President satisfied this request. It was the first time that Federal troops had been used to repress a strike in peacetime on the metropolitan territory of the United States. General French, in command of the troops, arrested the strike leaders and informed Washington that everything was now tranquil. But the General was mistaken. The strike had already extended to the rest of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, to the bargemen, miners and other categories, all united by the inhuman living conditions and the bosses’ attack. At Baltimore the workers sought to impede the departure of the soldiers, who opened fire, killing 12 and injuring many others.

Repression was detailed: whoever attempted to win over a scab was immediately arrested; any group of workers who attempted to stop a train became a target for the fire of the soldiers. On the 22^nd, after arrests and killings, with the army joining in the action along with private troops, militia, police, press and courts, the strike on the Baltimore & Ohio was broken.

But meanwhile the strike extended: the railroad workers of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and California were brought to a halt by the strike.

At Pittsburgh the struggle was especially hard: the workers refused a ridiculous agreement by a yellow union, and organized themselves in a secret union, the Trainmen’s Union, one that finally embraced all categories of railroad workers, and not just the drivers, often jealous of their own interests. The tactics were similar in this struggle to those adopted at Martinsburg. The Governor decided to send the Philadelphia militia, counting on a certain local rivalry. The maneuver worked, with the soldiers firing on the people that did not back off, causing 20 dead and 29 injured. In the face of this massacre, rather than being discouraged, the crowd grew with the influx of workers of all trades, also from the surroundings, and also the local militia; the anger was uncontainable, buildings and rolling stock were set alight; the troops had to withdraw. There were also 11 deaths in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Hayes asked the troops to protect Washington. The press sounded the alarm: “Pittsburgh ransacked (…) in the hands of men controlled by the diabolical spirit of communism” wrote the New York World. Newspapers, clergy, public functionaries: they all denounced the strike as a new Paris Commune: “an insurrection, a revolution, an attempt by communists and vagabonds to subjugate society, to put American institutions in danger”. The newspapers openly called for the spilling of blood. The strikers, declared the New York Tribune, only understand the logic of force; therefore it is useless to show mercy towards “the ignorant rabble with greedy mouths”. For the New York Herald the crowd “is a savage beast, to be cut down”. The New York Sun recommended a diet of lead for the starving strikers, while The Nation called for the use of snipers. And from this period the infamous utterance from billionaire Jay Gould: “I would give a million dollars to see General Grant as dictator or emperor”.

Despite this, after Pittsburgh the militia, wherever it was utilized, fraternized with the strikers and proved useless, if not counter-productive.

In Chicago a street battle between police and strikers on the 26^th ended with 12 workers slashed to death; the workers subsequently prevailed for a few days, then to give up in face of the reunited forces of reaction.

The recently reconstituted Working Men’s Party had had scarce contacts with the railroad workers before the strike. But from the first days it was highly active in the attempt to extend the struggle both geographically and across categories. Apart from supporting the struggles it also attempted to provide them with subjects of general interest, such as the eight‑hour day and the abolition of anti‑union laws. In Chicago it played a leading role. In St. Louis the party managed to organize the strikers directly: on the 29^th, even though some of the bosses had conceded the requested wage rises, the strike was total, and the workers were in charge of the city.

But reaction did not hold back, and the combined forces of the bourgeoisie, which raised $20,000 to arm a force of one thousand mercenaries, of the militia, the mounted police, Federal troops and other volunteers had the upper hand over the proletarians: their quarters were devastated, tens of their leaders arrested and condemned to huge fines and custodial sentences. On August 2 the strike ended.

As was to be expected, given the level of organization of the American proletariat, the Great Strike ended in defeat. Not entirely however, because in many cases the bosses indeed conceded wage increases, or withdrew the threatened wage cuts. But for sure, the average American worker had learned at least two fundamental lessons: in the first place they understood the great power that the class was able to exert when it moved in unison; and moreover that this great power could come to nothing without an organization that gave it continuity, networks and the ability to resist. This provided the decisive impetus towards the formation of national labor unions, capable of moving great masses and of supporting strikers for prolonged periods, thanks to the number of contributing members.

The political consequences, however, were less profound, because of the low level of penetration of the Working Men’s Party in the class. Experience which Marx instead hoped would consolidate, as he wrote in a letter to Engels dated July 25, 1877: “What do you think of the workers in the United States? This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labor party in the United States. There are moreover two favorable circumstances. The policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favor of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers. Thus a fine mess is in the offing over there, and transferring the centre of the International to the United States might, post festum, turn out to have been a peculiarly opportune move”. Engels replied by direct return of post: “It was a pleasure, this business of the strike in America. The way in which they threw themselves into the movement is unequalled on this side of the ocean. Just 12 years have passed since the abolition of slavery, and the movement already reaches such levels”.

Unfortunately, from a political point of view, the hopes of our masters would not come true.

The bosses had also drawn their lessons: the workers can be very dangerous when their conditions become insupportable. But, far from becoming compassionate, the bosses learned the need for a permanent army deployed in the country, to have a militia available under the control of the most eminent capitalists, private police, also for the purposes of espionage, of the so‑called armories in which they could entrench themselves in difficult moments, a type of stronghold which, in the years that followed, were built in the center of all American cities, and which still today are visible with their thick walls and shooting embrasures and, who knows, perhaps they are still usable.

Signs of independent political action

The long crisis created within the proletariat the widespread belief that the trade unions were incapable of responding fully to their problems and resolving them. On the other hand the rapid disintegration of the political parties formed under the leadership of the National Labor Union had the same effect with regard to the independent political work. For some years, therefore, the working class wavered between the disinterest and lukewarm support for movements that had very little in common with its own class objectives.

One of the political movements that sought to attract workers’ sympathies for electoral purposes was “greenbackism” which saw the solution to all ills in the precipitous issuance of paper currency and other economic measures; a movement that was above all based on farmers and the urban petty bourgeoisie. The Working Men’s Party exhorted workers in 1876 not to be seduced by this “novelty” and its own sections not to get involved in the campaigns of the Greenback Party. It repeated a resolution adopted at the congress of the American sections of the International that took place in Philadelphia in April 1874. Another important resolution on political action rejected “any cooperation or connection with the political parties formed by the propertied classes, these being called Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Liberals, Farmers’ Associations (Grangers), Reformers or whatever other name they have decided to adopt”. The socialists reproached the Greenbacks’ movement for not taking any interest in the workers in its program, while they showed complete disinterest for the southern negroes, even though they were a component of the proletariat which, particularly in these years, was coming back under the yoke of landowners thanks to the deplorable compromise between Republicans and Democrats.

Following an electoral reversal in this very year, the Greenback Party raised its demands favorable to the workers, merged with the newly formed United Labor Party to create the Greenback-Labor Party and, even if the Working Men’s Party continued to keep its distance, it obtained more than one million votes in the elections of 1878. An ephemeral victory which, even if followed by some appointments at local level, did not succeed in avoiding the break‑up of the movement that occurred in 1882.

In 1876 we left the Working Men’s Party reunited, but already in the grip of polemics between Lassalleans and Marxists. The former maintained that, if the workers did not have even the few cents needed to join the Party, how could they pay for the much more expensive union card? And wouldn’t this have been in competition with the Party? And if the unions could resolve the workers’ problems, what purpose did the Party serve?

The Marxists replied in their newspapers that, even if the unions were not large enough to include all the workers, it was however the task of the socialists to favor their strengthening. As regards the usefulness of the Party, they argued that “The Party is useful for all. It can do the work that the unions are currently unable to do. It can agitate and study questions of economics. It can combat past errors. It can make understand the need for unity and action. It can prove itself as the party of intelligence and wisdom, help all labor unions, work for the advancement of the class, which can only be achieved in class organizations. It can invite the masses to join their unions and drive them towards centralized action. If we want to favor the arrival of a better future we have to work for a better present. Let’s try not to be stupidly egotistical just because our party is not the entire workers’ movement. It is only the vanguard”. (Labor Standard, January 6 1877.)

But the defeat of the strikes of 1877, rather than demonstrating how great was the potential (which had not yet fully manifested itself) of the working class, induced the Lassalleans to reinforce their belief that the only weapon that could succeed was that of the ballot box. Why do you want to struggle with the strike when militia, troops, courts and the rest of the enemy array come to frustrate the result? Only by conquering central political power, obviously by means of the ballot box, is it possible to aspire to a socialist society. Strengthened by this conviction the Lassalleans convinced many sections to throw themselves into the arena of electoral politics; and in fact in the local elections of 1877 there were encouraging results in many important cities. In the Newark convention of the Working Men’s Party (on December 26) the Lassalleans took control of the movement, changing its name to the Socialist Labor Party and rewrote its program. The principal aim of the party was henceforth the mobilization of the class for political action. The new motto was: “Science the Arsenal, Reason the Weapon, Ballot the Bullet”.

There were also electoral successes in 1878, which however proved ephemeral in the following year. Elsewhere successes were principally driven by the party’s Marxist wing, which had mobilized the unions over which it exercised an influence; where the Lassalleans were in a clear majority the electoral results were always disappointing. In 1880 a split in the party became inevitable, and the occasion was the attitude towards the presidential elections. The majority decided to join the Greenbackers while the Marxist wing decided to support independent socialist candidates. Other groups took various decisions, from conservative unionism to terrorism.

The workers’ movement was moreover “revived”, in its anarchistic component, little developed up until this moment, through the arrival of numerous socialists expelled from Germany by the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878. Thus numerous social revolutionary clubs were founded, which would be federated n 1881 in a Revolutionary Socialistic Party, which took classic anarchist positions, despite the name.

The International Labor Union

Despite the long depression of the 1870s, and the drastic drop in the number of members that followed, the union movement did not disappear; the recovery that occurred in 1878, and which exploded a year later, unlike the analogous situations that followed the previous crises, found an embryonic proletarian organization ready to start up again for the defense of wage earners’ conditions. And there was ample need for this: the crisis had swept away the majority of gains of the period that followed the Civil War, with working hours that often exceeded 10 hours a day, up to 12‑13 hours in many productive sectors, above all in those where unions were absent and among non‑specialized workers. Wages had been reduced to the point that still in 1883, after various years of recovery and victorious struggles, they were lower than in 1870.

There were 18 national unions in 1880, and half of them came into being before the crisis. In the following years these unions saw a rapid increase, even if at first the absolute numbers remained low, below 50,000 members in 1883, while it is not possible to calculate how many members there were in all the unions, including the local ones; but certainly very few in 1877‑78.

The need for unions and coordination, understood thanks to recent experiences, was partially satisfied in these years by the rise of Central Councils and Trade Assemblies, precursors of structures like Italian Camere del Lavoro and the French Bourses du Travail, even if much more informal; socialists of the Socialist Labor Party, which led the workers also on the political level, played a primary role in these, taking part in struggles to block reactionary legislation that was being tightened to annul regulatory and political conquests from the preceding years, such as the abrogation of the law on conspiracy.

Obviously these initiatives could not be considered eternal, and the need for more organized and permanent structures was strongly apparent. Moreover the Trade Assemblies were limited in their activity almost exclusively to specialized workers. The effort to overcome this limitation was assumed, in this period, by two organizations, the International Labor Union and the Knights of Labor.

Despite its short life, the International Labor Union is important as the first major attempt to organize all non‑specialized workers in a single union, then to merge them with the specialized unions in a national solidarity movement unconfined by nationality, gender, skin color, religious belief and politics. Its birth dates back to the start of 1878, and resulted from the agreement of the leaders of the International, disgusted with the “political” cravings of the Lassalleans, and the leaders of the eight‑hour movement, with the slogan, “Fewer hours and more wages”. The avowed objective was the constitution of a mass workers’ organization aiming to abolish the wage system.

The ILU’s goals are recorded in its “Declaration of Principles”: “The wage system is a despotism under which the wage‑worker is forced to sell his labor at such price and under such conditions as the employer of labor shall dictate (…) That as wealth of the world is distributed through the wage system, its better distribution must come through higher wages and better opportunities, until wages shall represent the earnings and not the necessities of labor; thus melting profit out of existence, and making cooperation, or self‑employed labor, the natural and logical step from wages slavery to free labor (…) That the first step towards the emancipation of labor is a reduction of the hours of labor, that the added leisure produced by a reduction of the hours of labor will operate upon the natural causes that affect the habits and customs of the people, enlarging wants, stimulating ambition, decreasing idleness and increasing wages…”.

It is inconceivable that Marxists, led by Sorge, really held that the reduction in working hours and the increase of wages were the condition for a transition, and moreover a painless one, to socialism. In the writings that have reached us Sorge does not make any pronouncement on the issue, but even if the two conditions mentioned above are certainly progressive in the struggle for socialism, the aim for which the socialist followers of Ira Steward united was certainly the creation of a mass organism, capable of raising and defending the entire working class, in which the socialists could expound their action of propaganda and agitation. Beyond this it is necessary to remember that at the time other far more inauspicious political movements, such as the Greenbackers and Monetary Reform had a certain following in many proletarian strata.

The International Labor Union also understood the need to open up to the southern negroes. But its strength principally came from non‑specialized workers in the textile sector, above all women. And it was among the textile female workers of New England that the Union achieved most of its successes in the years 1878‑80.

In the following years, however, successes were lacking, and the organization lost strength, finally ceasing to exist in 1883. But the experience that it had gained did not get lost and would be precious within the Knights of Labor.

Some further observations on the last years of the 1^st 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.

The Knights of Labor

The origins of the Knights of labor date back to the days of the National Labor Union; established 1866. The organization, however only began to have a broader existence many years later. In 1869, after the break‑up the previous trade‑union, the order was founded in Philadelphia by a small group of Garment workers as the ‘Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor’. At the basis of their organization was the belief that the precious trade-unions had failed because of their lack of secrecy. Thus the structuring of a secret society began, accompanied by extravagant titles for people who had become adept at the heights of the organization, Great Master Worker (general secretary, first filled by Uriah Stephens), Venerable Sage, Unknown Knight, Worthy Foreman, etc.

At the time there were many unions with pompous titles for their leaders and their members conducted elaborate ceremonies. None came close, however, to the rituals of the Knights of Labor. When a candidate was invited to join them (and up to 1878 this person could only be a salaried worker). They would attend a secret meeting in which the person would first have to answer three questions: 1) Do you believe in God, creator and father of us all? 2) Do you obey the universal rule of God, so you will have to earn your bread with the sweat of your brow? 3) Do you wish to make a solemn oath of secrecy, obedience and mutual assistance?

The candidate was then asked to commit himself to the laws and regulations of the order, as well as to «defend the life, interests, reputation and family of all the authentic members of the Order: help and assist the Brothers, employed and unemployed, unfortunate or in disgrace, and procure work, guarantee a just remuneration, relieve discomfort by inviting others to help them, so that all the brothers and their families can receive and enjoy the rightful fruits of work and exercise their art».

After the oath, the new member was taken to the Sanctuary Base, the meeting room, to receive instructions from the Worthy Foreman. Here they were explained that the organization of the workers was made necessary because, in every productive sector, capital «unites and, consciously or not, crushes the many prospects of the workers, trampling into dust the poor of humanity». However, the Knights of Labor did not advocate for «any conflict with the legitimate enterprise of, nor antagonism with capital». They only neglected the rights of others «and sometimes even violated the rights of the defenseless». To prevent such violations, they intended «to create a healthy public opinion of labor (the only creator of value), and how right it was that it received the full, fair share of the value of capital created». They would therefore have supported all the laws aimed at “harmonizing the interests of labor and capital (…) and also those laws aimed at mitigating the harshness of employment”. Though they did not approve of general strikes, if it were “rightly necessary to solicit the oppressor, we will protect and help every one of our initiate who could receive harm, and, as far as possible extend our help to all sectors of honest labor”.

After being instructed on the objectives of the Knights of Labor, the candidate was entrusted to a Venerable Sage; who explained to them the secret organization of the Order, controls, passwords, and teach the meeting dates. The meetings, often held in the woods, were called by writings on sidewalks or fences that could only be understood by initiates. Until 1897 the name of the Order was never spoken and was called “Five stars” because they signed with five asterisks.

Utopianism and Religion

To better understand the objective of the Knights of Labor. It will be Useful to follow the thought of U. Stephens, who was among the founders of the Order and a Master Worker until 1878. The word “solidarity” was fundamental; the labor movement had to be powerful and unified to face the strength of organized capital. The only working-class organization capable of dealing with the power of capital would have been the one that had united the workers of all trades, and had universal objectives”.For him, the unions were too narrow, both in composition and scope. Instead of uniting all the workers, they excluded the unskilled, Blacks, and other worker groups. Since, according to him, all workers had common interests, they should logically belong to a single association and be united by bonds of “universal brotherhood”. A unity to be achieved through the application of three principles: secrecy, cooperation and education. Secrecy served three purposes: it would protect the worker from persecution by the master who was hostile to the unions; it would prevent the discovery of the workers’ plans by the masters; and finally, secret rites would emphasize for the adept the importance of the organization he had just joined. In the secret of the meeting rooms, all differences of trade, religion, nationality, race and politics disappeared.

On the other hand, Stephens was not satisfied with the improvements that could be achieved within the wage‑based system; an important goal of the Knights of labor was to achieve “a complete emancipation of wealth producers from the enslavement and suffering of paid slavery”. Through cooperation, the Knights of Labor could guarantee better living conditions, and gradually replace capitalism.

A deeply religious inspiration was at the base of the Order; in the very words of Stephens: “The association must base its claims on something higher than participation in profits and wages and the reduction of hours and labor fatigue. These are nothing more than physical effects and goals of a coarser nature and, even if they are fundamental, they are only the starting point for a higher, more noble cause. The ultimate reason, the true reason, must be based on the highest and most divine nature of man, his noble capacity to do good. Excessive effort and limited pay reduce, obtundate and degrade these divine faculties, in the likeness of which man was created so that, according to the plan of his Creator, he could always exhibit them”.

It was for various activities including not so much struggle as education, that the eradication of prejudices and antagonisms that divided the working class was made possible; education also played a key role to ensure the accomplishment of the Knights of Labor’s own goals, both in the short and in the long term. In this sense, the meetings were very active, and political economy a relevant field of discussion and training, also in view of the participation of the members in political life. Stephens’ aim was therefore to unite all the workers in a general mass organization without distinction of creed, sex, or race. “I don’t pretend to possess prophetic powers – it seems Stephens said – but I see in the future an organization that will cover the world. It will be composed of men and women of every profession, creed and color”.

Surely Stephens’ vision was very progressive compared to the workers’ organizations of the time, as these were the ones that survived, locked in narrow horizons of category or even factory; nor did the topics discussed go beyond the purely trade union ones such as wages and working conditions. The Knights of Labor were a structure that was more suited to the party form, without however having the theoretical and material basis; Stephens’ thought could therefore be ascribed to the rich category of utopianism. The consequences of the birth of the Knights of Labor, especially in the years that followed his retirement, was much greater and different from that prophesied by its theorists.

In the early years, only proven clothing workers, in particular the cutters, were admitted to the sections of the Order. Their meetings resembled in all respects normal trade union meetings. However, employers were also included in these groups of workers. Although the bourgeoise component could not exceed a quarter of the workforce in each section, with the exception of bankers, doctors, coupon cutters and liquor producers, who were considered non‑productive members of a society; which reflects the idea of the founders, that there was a fundamental commonality of interests between employers and workers, even if the bourgeois component could not exceed a quarter of the staff of each section, provided that the bourgeois actually participated. Women were admitted only starting in 1882, while Asians, especially the Chinese, were not accepted. The rules of the working class remained valid until the Order extended to the coal and steel industries of Western Pennsylvania, during the long depression. Only then did the Order begin to take hold of the class.

Aims and Methods

The Knights of Labor remained in the shadows for several years not so much for their secrecy as for their poor penetration into the working class. It was the years of the depression that slowly made them rise in popularity among workers. Between 1873 and 1875 their activity extended from Philadelphia to the neighboring States and towards west of Pennsylvania, an area of iron and steel mines.

It was an irregular growth: Groups of workers joined and then often left when they understood that the Knights of Labor did very little to help them gain better wages. The nature of the organization made it look like a national organization at a time when the traditional trade unions were being put into crisis and vanished because of the depression. However, since until 1878 the Knights of Labor did not have a platform, a statute, or any list of principles to inspire them, their activists (called “preceptors”) could promise the workers concerned that all their problems would be solved by a strong organization; since the accession was often followed by bitter disappointments, departures were as frequent as arrivals.

In any case there was still growth: at the end of 1877, following the great railway strike, the Knights of Labor were present in 8 States, from Illinois to Massachusetts, to West Virginia; by 1880, the number of States concerned had risen to 26. During the strike individual members of the Order acted militantly, while the Order itself had only recommended moderation, peaceful methods and isolation of the most radical elements. The need for rules and an organizational structure worthy of the name was felt as the organization expanded. The abandonment of their secrecy seemed prudent as it was a weak point in the image of the Order and made proselytism and union action difficult.

At a convention in 1878 a “Preamble and Declaration of Principles” was drafted. These would remain the only programmatic document of the Order throughout its entire history.

After denouncing the danger and aggressiveness of the great capitalists, for their tendency to impoverish and degrade the working masses. The document states that this unjust accumulation, and the powers that derives from it, must be cured if one wants to fully enjoy the blessings of life. A task that only workers can perform.

The document continues: “We have established the Order of the Knights of Labor, with the aim of organizing and directing the strength of the workers’ masses not as a political party”, even if when voting support should be given to candidates in favor of measures “that can only be achieved through legislation”, regardless of which party they belong to.

Among the aims of the order the most significant were: II. To ensure the workers can fully enjoy the wealth they create and sufficient free time to develop their skills.

In order to guarantee these results, the Order asked of the State: III. A statistical Office to know the real conditions of the working masses; IV. That public land is reserved for those who work it; V. The abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor; VI. Measures for the health and safety of workers; VII. Recognition, by incorporation, of trade unions and the like; VIII. A wage to be paid each week by law; IX. Abolition of the contract system in public entreprises; X. The establishment of compulsory arbitration; XI. The prohibition of the employment of children under 15 years of age; XII. The prohibition of the employment of forced labor; XIII. a progressive taxation; XIV. Creation of a national monetary system; XVI. Prohibition of import of contract workers from abroad; XVII‑XVIII. Nationalization of all important services and a currency valid throughout the country.

The Order pledge commitment to: XIX. Create cooperative institutions that could overcome the system of wages; XX. Guarantee equal salary for equal work for men and women; XXI. Eight hours of work a day; XXII. Persuade the bosses to accept arbitration, so that sympathetic relations can be established and strikes would become superfluous.

At this point it is worth remembering that the term “arbitration” for a long time in the United States had a different meaning from that which is attributed to it today. At that time it meant “employment contract”, any agreement reached by collective bargaining. It was not easy, in those times of trade union battles, really worthy of the name, to force employers to negotiate, something in which the yellow unions then became masters, with very different results from those achieved in those heroic times.

In reality the strike was abhorrent, and the reference to appropriate legislation to improve the living conditions of the working class says a lot about the warlike nature of the Order.

The proposal to organize the whole class remained, as did the program to abolish “gradually” wage slavery, with methods that were not only inadequate, but counter productive.

A governing body was established, the General Assembly, which in theory had total power. Even if the Order appeared to be highly centralized in its statutes, in reality the local assemblies and sections were autonomous and acted as they pleased. This meant that they moved according to the real needs of the trade unions and fighting structures that were present locally, and therefore often along very different theoretical lines from the Order’s leaders. A conflict between the base and leadership of the Order soon became apparent. While the real proletarians did not need to be taught that conquests were only achieved through strikes and other types of direct action, the leadership only repeated how futile strikes were, and that only through self‑employment could lasting victories be achieved. «Strikes could not solve the problems of the working class», the 1879 successor of Stephens, Terence V. Powederly said in 1882, because «strikes cannot change the apprenticeship system, a strike cannot change unfair rules in the administration of justice; nor can a strike regulate the law of supply and demand, because if it blocks supply it also cuts demand, with workers losing their jobs and thus their purchasing power».

Clearly questionable considerations, generated by the defeats of the seventies, but on the basis of which the management called for funds to be allocated to create cooperatives rather than in support of trade union struggles. A consultation mechanism was also devised that was so complicated that it was impossible to support a strike. For example, since 1886 no strike could take place if at least two thirds of the votes were not reached in a secret ballot; strikes could only take place after a member of the executive committee had attempted arbitration, and the strike had to be called by the same executive. But all this was not enough to convince the members of the uselessness of the strikes; also because, if in the seventies the struggles were resolved in defeats, the thing began to change in the eighties. Even the bosses understood it, and they did not hesitate to lock themselves up and fire members of the Knights of Labor. No less insecure was the Order’s attitude towards the trade unions. From the beginning Stephens defended the idea of a large general association, considering the trade associations historically outdated; but eventually groups organized by category were admitted within the Order. In the following years, the positions on this subject fluctuated several times, reflecting the contrast between the ideas of the management and the need for organization of the proletariat. In the end, the acceptance of trade union federations prevailed, also thanks to the emergence of a rival organization, in 1881, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, which would become the A.F.L. after a few years.

Shortly after the convention that approved the “Declaration”, in 1882, the Order became public by presenting itself openly to the workers of America and informing them of its objectives. Initiation ceremonies and rituals were abolished. The Order saw its membership grow rapidly: from just over 9,000 members in 1878 to over 28,000 in 1880, jumping to almost 52,000 in 1883; but this was only the beginning.

The Class meets the Knights of Labor

Yet the situation in those years was not entirely favorable. In 1883, a new depression had begun and the class struggle was coming to terms with a series of defeats. The real take‑off would take place following two events that took place in 1885, the success in boycotts and the victorious strikes against three railway companies of Jay Gould, one of the “robber barons”, unscrupulous plutocrats, such as Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, who represented the rapacious and ruthless capitalism of America at the end of the century.

The boycotts consisted in the refusal of the members of the proletarian organizations to buy from companies, newspapers, shops that took positions or acted against their interests. They also worked to keep the workers together when a strike could not be declared or to continue a minimum of mobilization after a strike had failed. It was a wave of activism that managed to force some companies to change their attitude towards workers’ organizations.

The Knights of Labor, however, obtained the great leap in the organization’s membership thanks to their role in the strikes, a weapon that the leaders did not like but that they had to grasp and brandish under the events and pressure of the working class.

Of all the robber barons, Gould was by far the most hated, Marx calls him “the sprawling king of railways and fraudster of finance”. His union philosophy was summed up in the phrase: «I can hire half the working class to kill the other half». He also boasted of his habits of hiring workers on starvation wages, and keeping them at that level as long as he needed them.

In 1883 the Knights of Labor successfully led a telegraph strike, some of whom were employees of Western Union, a railway company controlled by Gould. The trade unions of the company had been brutally repressed and the workers forced to sign demanding oaths. This, however, drew the Orders attention, who focused their attention on a number of categories of railway workers; mainly workers not represented in the strong unions, who protected the drivers, firemen, brakemen and drivers. When in February of 1885, Missouri Pacific Railroad and other companies in the South‑West reduced the wages of the workers in workshops and warehouses by 5%, after having lowered them by 10% in the previous October, the response to the change was immediate and extended to the whole railway systems of Texas, Kansas and Missouri. The local sections of the Knights of Labor, were ready to support the strikers and the support of the unions of the other categories was decisive. Freight traffic in the region came to a complete halt, and all that was left for Gould to do was take back all the wage cuts.

The main consequence of the resounding victory was the rise in the prestige of the Order, which resulted in the joining of thousands of individuals and entire local workers’ societies. Gould did not resign himself, and tried to hit the Order’s members that were more active among the railwaymen, firing them and closing the workshops. The answer was a further mobilization in the whole railway sector that threatened a repeat of the 1877 uprising. Which did not take place because Gould was as smart as to understand that it was time to radically change his attitude: he even claimed to believe in worker unionism and arbitration, and that he had been misunderstood by ill‑intentioned people. The previously dismissed trade union activists returned to their posts, and the company made promises to not use discriminatory tactics against them. For the first time a workers’ organization had been treated on an equal footing to the most powerful of capitalists in the country.

Once again, the success resulted in a wave of enrollments into the Order: sections were born everywhere, and the number of members increased. Between July 1885 and October 1886, membership increased from 110 000 to 700 000 (some estimates say one million). At last the humiliations received by the class during the past depression were canceled by that imposed on Gould by the KL. The Knights of Labor summarily forgot its series of failures, even important ones, dealt in the previous two years. A mere increase in numbers negated the humiliations experienced by the working class during the last depression due to the Orders unconvincingly combative attitude.

Sections of the Order were established in other parts of the world as well; Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland and even in non‑Anglo‑saxon countries such as France, Belgium, Italy, and of course Canada.

The Attitude Towards Minorities Within the Working Class

Although the Knights of Labor had as characteristic the attitude to accept all workers, without distinction of sex, race or nationality, the attitude towards Asians, and in particular the Chinese, was quite different. Grandmaster Workman Powderly stated that Asians could not become members of the Order, and that they should not even reside in the United States. Representatives of the Order even dared to argue before Congress that the Chinese should be expelled from the country. These Representatives however claimed credit for passing an anti‑Chinese law in 1882. Some of the Order’s membership on the west coast even boasted of fomenting xenophobic terrorism. Claiming responsibility for the Rock Spring Wyoming attack on a Chinese community by white miners, killing dozens and setting houses ablaze. Instead of denouncing them, Powderly attacked the Chinese workers, and blamed them for causing the violence, while deploring violence in general.

A reaction came from workers within the Order who did not admit that, under the banner of the Knights of Labor, such atrocities were committed against proletarians with whom they shared struggles, roil and misery. A minority within the Order’s Executive committee tried to pass a resolution that allowed the organization of Chinese sections (they had already been organized to fight in New York, and Philadelphia). A majority of the membership did not allow it, while admitting the existence of mixed sections. On the other hand, the Chinese had shown that they were capable of expressing combativeness, as in the case of the strike that resulted in higher wages by hop‑gatherers in California; the strike was successful because, when the bosses tried to replace the Chinese with blacks, they refused to become scabs.

Taking up a position of the National Labor Union, dating back to 1868, point XX of the 1878 Order’s Declaration of Principles stated: “Guarantee equal pay for equal work for both genders”. However, at the same time there was no provision for women to join the Order. The solution to the problem dragged on until in 1881 a completely female section was established. The question was concluded in 1882 with an amendment to the Statute. The influx of women soon became significant, largely due to women being excluded from all other unions. In 1886 women were estimated to make up 8‑9% of the members. Women soon provided significant contributions to the Order: as well as being determined in the struggle, they actively participated in pickets, humiliated scabs and gave moral and labor support to other strikers. Women were so significant that Powderly had to admit they were “the best men in the Order”. Despite their uncertain beginnings, the Order soon began inviting women to meetings, where their input had the same weight as the men, and much like them were listened to.

There was just as much resistance towards Black workers as there had been for Chinese and women workers from within the Order. So much so, many of the leaders were opposed to organizing them. This attitude betrayed the Order, as black and white workers held common interests within the workplace. Both groups of workers had to defend themselves from the arrogance of their employer. The Order’s attitude towards black workers worsened considerably in the years of its decline.

The Knights of Labor in Action

The sheer size of the human mass that put their trust in the Order, was a never before counted number of proletarians, and would be one of the characteristics of the epic of the Knights of Labor. It was not a fully unfolded potential, as the leadership of the organization used this mass almost always unwillingly. The leadership was never in tune with the real needs of the class, and always found itself for some reason in conflict with its own base. Often the Order was in conflict with officials closest to it. This is because, as we have seen, the ideology of the Knights of Labor did not appreciate the trade union struggle. Rather preferring to hope for cooperation as a model of a future society, and education as a means to achieve it.

Conferences and libraries were favored, even in the most important centers, there was often a “Temple of Work”. where much of the social and cultural life of the community took place. Though nothing bad, cultural activity tended to replace direct action in defense of the proletariat’s conditions. “Basically ours is an educational organization. Our holiest mission, to which we should devote our efforts in the years to come, is to propagate sound economic doctrine… We ask nothing more [of our members] than to study the truths of social and economic science. And when they have studied the lesson well, then action”.

The workers’ base, however, did not see education as a function of a distant future, but as a guide for action in the struggles that they had to support on a daily basis. Powderly considered the struggles for wages “a short-sighted job”, which aimed to “earn a few extra cents a day”. “Talking about reducing working hours is also a waste of time. What you earn by reducing working hours will be recovered by the bosses in another way”. The immediate and sure way had to be cooperation, even if it had long proved to be a utopia in various experiences, even on American soil, as we have seen. And talking about it during the era of the development of large corporations was either madness or betrayal.

The energies invested in the cooperative programs took away precious energy from the real struggle. Anti‑union prejudice was widespread, theorised by elements linked to Lassallian socialism. Despite this fact, trade unions had to be permitted admission into the Order. The trade unions, it was said, would be made obsolete by the widespread introduction of machines; they were therefore incapable of effectively fighting the then nascent monopolistic capitalism. The industrial revolution would have reduced, thanks to the specialization and simplification of the process, the number of workers needed. And because of this also a need for the trade unions. Moreover, the strictly economic, categorical and local horizon of the trade unions would have also made the struggle ineffective. Since the members of other trade unions could have continued to work, carrying out the tasks of the strikers. The unions were only interested in immediate improvements; higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions. As was said at a General Assembly in 1884: “Our Order foresees a radical change, while the unions (…) accept the industrial system as it is, and try to adapt to it. Our attitude is instead of war on the current system”.

The outdated trade unions were to be replaced by territorial bodies, with indefinite class boundaries. Within which everyone would receive the necessary education to put an end to the ailments of wage servitude. Such incorrect conclusions, but consistent with the bourgeois nature of the leadership within the Knights of Labor. Who were intolerant of the realities and needs of the proletariat, represented by the semi‑skilled and unskilled, black, women and immigrant working masses.

The confusion of the union form with the party form was already historically outdated. Although there were few trade unions in the 1880s, thanks to Marxist propaganda, they contemplated in the future of the class “radical changes in the current system”, and worked for “bringing about change”. Clearly it was a question of framing the workers’ vanguards around the communist political program, without renouncing to unite all workers into economic struggles. On the contrary, every time the Order would succeed in imposing their utopian and inter-class convictions, they would damage the solidarity within the struggles of the class. Only Marxism had succeeded in correctly set up the dialectical relationship between the levels of class consciousness and action, at the political and trade union levels. We can already anticipate that this connection, achieved through glorious events in Europe, was never able to take place across the Atlantic.

Very significantly, while the leaders insisted on minimizing the importance of the trade union struggle, and that lasting solutions could only come from political action, in section meetings it was forbidden to talk about politics, a subject that clearly was reserved for the leadership: an anticipation of Stalin’s “Bolshevization”. Of course, the prohibition had little effect, often where the Order was strongest, delegates would be elected to various positions as representatives of the State. Contrary to the bombastic statements on principle, the political action of the Knights of Labor as a unified organization was almost non‑existent.

Start of decline

The beginning of the end of the Knights of Labor can be dated to 1886, the year in which they reached peak membership. Boss Gould was not at all resigned to surrendering to the workers, despite the promises of the previous year. Wages were not brought back to the levels before the strikes, and trade unionists were discriminated against and persecuted. So the workers of the South‑West Railway went on strike again; but the more specialized labor (drivers, conductors, etc.) did not join as they had done the year before. This was a weakness from the beginning. But the strike was not lost yet. That is, until Powderly came on stage in person: while he acted as great negotiator, Gould continued his anti‑worker action, with all means at his disposal. In the cities where the strike took place, the struggle was very fierce. Each side lead with their typical instruments: the workers with boycotts and picketing, and the bosses with a large deployment of public and private armed forces, trained judges, and scabs.

While the bosses were much better organized than in 1877, and intervened with greater unity and effectiveness, the workers did not find in the Knights of Labor the support they could, and should have had: while the sheriffs, the militia and the private troops beat, imprisoned and killed dozens of workers, the Order could do no better than to preach peace. Waiting messianically for the Great Master Worker to convince Gould to negotiate. In the end, betrayed by privileged labor, abandoned by the leadership (obviously those of the lower ranks took to the streets with the workers), persecuted by the forces of law and order and masterly reaction, the workers gave in; the strike was defeated, and the workers also had to endure the revenge of Gould. He did not rehire most of the strikers (all registered with the Knights of Labor), putting them on blacklists that made them undesirable to other employers. The only one who felt relieved was Powderly.

A few months later the same Grand Master Worker performed another betrayal against the striking workers of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Perhaps worse because he intervened with all his pomp just when the bosses were about to give in. Suddenly he ordered the workers to abandon their eight‑hour request and return to work. After an initial loss, the workers refused to obey, and Powderly threatened them with expulsion from the Order. Of course, the bosses learned, and their attitude changed from resigned to bellicose as they interrupted negotiations with representatives of the struggling workers. In short, the strike was defeated, and the bosses took advantage of it to ask the workers to resign from the union if they wanted to continue working. Which at the time, to tell the truth, many wanted to, at least as far as the Knights of Labor was concerned. At a meeting the workers adopted a resolution in which they explicitly accused Powderly of having played the bosses’ game in full. To which the interested party replied: «You can’t play lightly with the laws of business», and «the men who have accumulated capital are not our enemies. Otherwise, a worker today, could become the enemy of his companion tomorrow. After all, what we all try to learn is how to acquire capital and use it in the right way». Evidently, Powderly expressed the thought of the overwhelming majority of the General Executive Board in the Knights of Labor, which always rejected his resignation.

End of Working Class support

The anti‑union attitude of the Order’s leadership did not change during the years of rapid growth of the movement, and this attitude would be the main cause in their decline, as the trade unions strengthened and united in a strong Federation.

The occasion for an irreparable split in the Order with the working class, rather than with the Unions, was the tolerance of an attitude of betrayal on the part of a structure within the Order towards the Cigar-makers union: while these (6,000 workers) were on strike, the union linked to the Knights of Labor offered labor at lower salary compared to the demands of the strikers; all when the struggle seemed to have defeated the resistance of the employers.

This behavior of a section of the Order was only the last of a long series, and served to alienate many who were sympathetic to the Knights of Labor, both from the member unions and individual workers: both began to leave the Order, especially after a Richmond General Assembly in October 1886. By July 1887 the number of members had already fallen from 700,000 to just over 500,000, falling to about 220,000 by mid 1888.

Historians sum up the reason for the decline of the Order essentially:

  1) The harsh opposition of the bosses, especially when the organization, as the case was with the Order, tended to unite all workers, without distinction of trade, qualification, race, sex, religion and nationality.

  2) The difficulty of keeping together an organization so heterogeneous in composition, purpose and meaning.

  3) The type of organizational structure the order utilized. While it was suitable to move many workers from different locations in mass actions, the Order was unable to follow adequately the particular daily problems of specific trades and cities. 

The inevitable conflict between the Leadership and the base membership over the minutiae of every action the Knights of Labor undertook, resulted in tactics and strategies almost always contrary to the true interests of the struggling proletarians. Moreover, more and more non‑worker elements were taking their place at the highest levels of the organization, which, as we have seen were admitted freely into the Order.

The imposition of a non‑proletarian orientation of the struggles lead to workers fighting simultaneously against the bosses as well as the leadership of the Order. Each time Powderly invited the strikers to get rid of the “radical elements”, and to reassure the bosses of their willingness to live in perpetual peace with capital. The defeated workers, in addition to returning to work under the hard conditions they had fought against (provided they had not been blacklisted, which was often the case for militants in the Knights of Labor.), were also forced to leave the organization.

This attitude of renunciation reinforced the arrogance of employers. Which provoked fierce outburst of anti‑worker sentiment, particularly in the southern States, where class struggle concealed itself under racism, which regained in its vigour: There were many attacks, murders and lynchings. All culminating in an assault of hundreds of armed whites on a community of striking blacks, leading to the massacre of at least 30. Powderly, who never denounced the massacres in the South, boasted that «the labor movement has never been respected as at this time».

What mattered most was “harmonious relations” with the bosses and the Catholic Church, thanks to a relentless struggle against radical elements in the Order. At the 1887 Convention in Minneapolis, Powderly dedicated his intervention to the question of “anarchy within the Order”. Attacking the sections that had taken a stand in favor of the Haymarket martyrs he also accused them of endangering the entire Order, only because they demanded the commuting of death penalty sentences in favor of imprisonment. This attitude earned him open accusations of “moral cowardice” from a large number of sections, as well as applause from the bourgeois press. By now, Powderly’s only political line was the hunt for anarchists, and purging the Order of unfaithful elements; that is, the officials who, at any level, adopted class union initiatives.

This sparked an exodus of trade unions and territorial sections towards the only existing alternative, the American Federation of Labor. This emptied the Knights of Labor of their proletarian component, leaving behind only a miserably small bourgeois section, increasingly focused on their educationist and conciliatory vision. Gradually the Order was reduced to mostly small rural centers, and a majority of the membership was self‑owning farmers. By 1893, the number of members was 73,000. The Order scraped along in an agony that came to an end towards the end of the century.

A Balance Sheet

Certainly the first thing that can be said is that the Order of the Knights of Labor was prominent during a given period in the history of the American labor movement. This is in spite of the Order’s leadership and ideology of false emancipation. Its end was determined by the conflict between this bourgeois approach and the defense of the real needs of the working class.

The Knights of Labor, despite their own actions, succeeded in channeling the natural tendency towards brotherhood between the exploited and the need for a single organization during a time of great growth in the militancy of the working class. One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason for the success of the Knights of Labor in organizing so many workers and creating so many sections, compared to the unions that preceded them, was that previously it had been difficult to put together a sufficient number of proletarians of the same trade locally, due to the intrinsic characteristics of North American society and its capitalism. The Order overcame the problem by creating inter‑branch sections accepting semi‑specialized, non‑specialized and day labor, as well as being open to women and blacks. The word “He who strikes one, strikes all” ignited large masses of the working class throughout the country. When the Order was at its height the rapacious monopolistic capital of the USA, in those years in full development, found itself for the first time successfully challenged with strikes, boycotts and a minimum of political action.

However, the leadership of the Knights of Labor succeed in a very short time in destroying both a vast national structure that had no precedent, as well as the morale and hope of a generation of proletarians; who had nevertheless succeeded in expressing the need for a general organization of the class. The negative experience the Order led to the search for ways different and more straight from those preached by politicians, bourgeois trade-unionists, priests and intellectuals. The class was now ready to accept the socialist verb, which in those years was coming to America from Europe.

Together with the organisation of the Knights of Labor, vanished forever its search for praise from the masters and the intolerance never sufficiently hidden towards the workers’ struggle. But with that left, to return only after several decades, the positive aspects of the movement, which did not find acceptance in the A.F.L., first of all the opening to all proletarians. The trade jealousies, which put groups of workers in contrast, and above all the exclusion of large proletarian masses, returned to be common. Conditions which would have given the bourgeoisie a divided proletariat which, in the following years, would have been easily tied to the necessities of the national economy, of the bourgeois wars, of deprivations in the greatest capitalist crisis in history.

The Era of the A.F.L. Begins

The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions

1881 was a fateful year for the American labor movement. After a brief prologue in Indiana, a congress was held on November 15 in Pittsburgh, attended by 107 delegates from various trade unions, representing almost half a million proletarians. The congress had been convened to respond to the need to combine the many forces that had arisen from the working class in a structure that would coordinate them in order to obtain greater effectiveness from the struggles for demands, and to conduct agitation on particular issues of interest to the class.

The newly established structure, which gave itself the name of “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada”, and which intended to be inspired by the English Trades Union Congress, from the beginning discussed an aspect that would be central for the years to come: some delegates proposed that only trade associations should be admitted to the federation; a choice in this sense would have excluded all non-organized workers, especially non-specialized workers, who included a large number of women and Blacks. The proposal was rejected by a large majority.

“Whereas, a struggle is going on in the nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between capital and labor, which must grow in intensity from year to year and work disastrous results to the toiling millions of all nations if not combined for mutual protection and benefit. This history of the wage-workers of all countries is but the history of constant struggle and misery engendered by ignorance and disunion; whereas the history of non-producers of all ages proves that a minority, thoroughly organized, may work wonders for good or evil… Conforming to the old adage “In union there is strength”, the formation of a Federation embracing every trade and labor organization in North America, a union founded upon a foundation as broad as the land we live on, is our only hope” (Foner P.S., 1947-94. History of the labor movement in the United States. Vol.I).

The Platform set out numerous principles, both trade union and political, to be defended, first of which was the abolition of child labor; from the beginning, however, it was clear that the fundamental objective of the participants was to effectively defend wages and working conditions against an increasingly aggressive capital. As F. K. Foster, the first secretary, said: “The growing power of associated capital must be fought by associated labor. Federation is the motto of the future”.

The Clash with the Knights of Labor

In its early years, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada had a difficult life. Its member unions gave it little importance, nor were they generous in granting funds; the Federation produced little more than statements that remained on paper. The K.L. still seemed like they were up to the task of defending the interests of the proletariat. Even in 1884 Secretary Frank Foster had to admit that no progress had been made in attracting the major unions, in political/legislative action, in the unification of the workers’ movement. But at the same convention two resolutions were expressed that would have profound effects on the future of the American workers’ movement: the establishment of Labor Day, as a celebration of labor, and May Day, as a celebration of the 8-hour struggle; both understood as abstention from work, hence as general strikes of the whole class.

The initiatives received an enthusiastic response from the class: while Labor Day would be held on the first Monday in September, it was decided that the 8-hour timetable would come into effect on May 1, 1886. The first goal was achieved without major problems: within a few years many States accepted it as a public holiday, and it became a national holiday in 1894.

The path of the initiative for the eight hour day was not so simple, as we saw in the previous chapter. But the fact that the Federation was the advocate of this initiative made its reputation within the trade union movement rise again. At the same time the K.L. did their best to alienate it, with increasingly anti-worker and collaborationist attitudes, as we have described above.

The turning point was the occasion of a hard struggle of the New York cigar workers: in 1886 the employers decided to apply a salary cut of 20% in the whole sector. The Cigar Makers’ International Union, affiliated with the K.L., refused the cut, and as a consequence the owners decreed a lock-out in 19 factories. After 4 weeks the struggle was about to be won, with the owners offering advantageous proposals. But in New York there was another union, the Progressive Union, that was also affiliated with the K.L., which the International Union had never had good relations with because of their poor positions. In this case, the Progressive Union came forward, offering the bosses jobs on a reduced salary, with the sole condition that only its members were hired.

Needless to say, the International Union appealed to the central organs of the K.L.; but the anti-union positions prevailed, giving justification to the Progressive Union. The immediate consequence was that all over the union world it was understood that one could not continue to work with the K.L. if they wanted to lead struggles successfully, and they began to look around for other ways to build a greater unity in the union field.

A conference was convened on May 18, 1886 in Philadelphia, whose participants represented nearly 400,000 organized workers. They prepared a document which basically called for the autonomy of the individual trade unions. A document, however, that could allow the K.L. a continuation of its central role; However, at an assembly held in Richmond in October, the leadership of the Order, drunk on the power and majority in the assemblies it enjoyed, rejected all demands and ordered the Cigar Makers International Union to choose between staying in the Order or remaining in the union. At that point, many union leaders, apart from the one in the crosshairs, understood that there was nothing more to do: the arrogance of the leading and more reactionary part of the K.L. would sooner or later hit everyone, and they began an exodus that was then defined as a “mortal wound” for the Order.

The leaders who had organized the Philadelphia conference convened all unions in Columbus, Ohio on December 8, 1886. The convention decided to unite all the trade unions present, about fifty national and local, into a federation, which took the name of American Federation of Labor. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions transferred all personnel and means to the new organization, and ceased to exist as such. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the new organization.

The First Steps of the A.F.L.

So, as was to be expected, the new organization brought in a dowry of many characteristics from the old organization. The preamble of 1881: “a struggle is going on in the nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between capital and labor» had displeased public opinion outside the unions, and some hoped for a greater spirit of concord between capital and labor; but the moment was particularly hot, after the Haymarket attack and the bosses’ offensive that followed, the preamble remained in the new statute, after a unanimous vote.

For the rest, there were no major innovations; attention was paid to emphasizing the autonomy of the individual unions, and that the members all belonged to the class of salaried workers, in open polemic with the recent past.

The new Federation did not have an explosion of membership as had been the case for the K.L., but it grew in a regular and uninterrupted way. The 13 national unions that founded the A.F.L. in 1886 had become 40 in 1892; many were small, but some were also important, such as those of foundry workers, carpenters, printers, iron and steel workers, and cigar makers. However, the first years were hard, both for President Gompers and for the union activists, who dedicated themselves to their apostolate without any salary or reimbursement, risking everything, often even their lives, to defend a principle of social justice in which they believed. Here it is not possible to tell even succinctly the epic of these heroes of the workers’ movement, who found themselves operating in the presence of the most ruthless and bloody capitalism of the time, supported without hesitation by an equally bloody structure of the State.

Despite the difficulties, one of the key points of the union policy defended by Gompers was the exclusion from the union of any element that was not a pure wage earner. In this he even referred to Karl Marx, who he had read in German (he had learned the language on purpose); the non-worker elements, whose support on the other hand was considered valuable, could not be admitted to run the union. In addition, their presence tended to distract the proletarians from the immediate problems they were facing; this had been one of the causes of the K.L.’s failure, and the A.F.L. should not fall back into it.

In the following years Gompers would have denied the existence of class struggle, but in that first period of growth of the Federation it was not so. In the first issue of The Union Advocate, the official organ of the Federation, in June 1887, Gompers writes:

“Life is at best a hard struggle with contending forces. The life of the toiler is made doubly so by the avarice of the arrogant and tyrannical employing classes. Greedy and overbearing as they are, trying at nearly all times to get their pound of flesh out of the workers, it is necessary to form organizations of the toilers to prevent these tendencies more strongly developing, as wealth is concentrating itself into fewer hands to prevent engulfing and drowning us in an abyss of hopelessness and despair”.

Gompers therefore did not believe the doctrine defended by Powderly and others that the interests of capital and labor could coexist in harmony. At that time, instead, he maintained that it was impossible to have harmonious relations «with cruel and iniquitous employers and companies who think more of dividends than of human hearts and bodies (…) The production of profits is the primary and constant object of the capitalistic system».

The first consequence of these considerations was a total and unconditional support of the use of the strike weapon, this was also a very clear break from the tradition of the Order.

But there is more in the early Gompers of the AFL’s green years. One of the Federation’s objectives, he declared in 1887, was the emancipation of the working class from the capitalist system. In this sense the refusal to support political movements was not based on an uncritical refusal to have any relationship on a political level, as was the case in the following decades, but a political critique of the individual movements, as it was in the those years against the movement and ideas of Henry George.

Gompers, however, did not disdain to maintain relations with the political representatives of the European proletariat, contacts that raised his prestige without compromising his freedom of movement at home. A prestige that would bring him to the international limelight on the occasion of the resumption of the eight-hour campaign.

Continuation of the Fight for 8 Hours

The bosses’ counter-offensive following the events of May 1886 had caused a stop to the agitation for the reduction of the working day, but it certainly had not erased the dream that the goal represented in the minds of the American proletarians. In the two following years the workers had rebuilt their organizational structures and were ready to relaunch the struggle. At the A.F.L. convention of December 1888 it was decided that the organizational efforts would focus on the date of May 1, 1890, as a day of struggle for the conquest of the 8-hour working day; in the meantime, there would be preparatory mobilization days all over the country. The slogan was to be: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”.

The A.F.L. immediately understood that agitation would be an important springboard for the Federation. And so it was: the mobilizations of 1889 were so successful that they had repercussions across the Atlantic. On July 14, 1889, on the occasion of the centenary of the French Revolution, the representatives of European socialism met in Paris to found the II International, where, among other things, it was decided to adopt May 1, 1890 as the date for an international strike, in the wake of the successful American mobilization.

In the meantime Gompers reconsidered the tactic to be adopted; the Knights of Labor had disdainfully rejected the offer of collaboration, and the line he decided to follow was to strike only those categories whose unions were certain of success, and to follow the others in time, in the wake of the former. A tactic that was perhaps understandable, but impaired a strategically fundamental fact, that of making proletarians feel that they belonged to a class which, if united, possessed invincible strength. The choice fell on the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, who at the time were the backbone of the construction industry.

The international strike on May 1 was a success in all the industrialized countries where it was called. Engels was moved by it:

“The eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it [the International] is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed. If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!” (Preface to the 1890 German edition of the “Manifesto”).

The strike in America went well beyond the most optimistic expectations: the carpenters won the 8 hours in 137 cities, and in other situations they obtained a reduction of the working day to 9 or 10 hours. But what was more important was the effect of galvanizing the class: while in 1889 union membership increased by 3000, in 1890 it increased by 22000. The success extended to other categories, which obtained the eight hours, and membership exploded in practically all the unions of the A.F.L. Another effect was the raising of the international prestige of the Federation.

The Knights of Labor on the other hand, as had been the case in 1886, after rejecting as we have seen any kind of collaboration because the proposal was according to them “extraneous to the workers and radical”, had as a consequence the continuation of the loss of members and influence on the class; with anger they saw the center of gravity of the workers’ unionism moving towards the unions of the Federation, but instead of reacting by changing their attitude they continued to move away from the class with sectarian attitudes, when not openly collaborative.

Samuel Gompers

In the first years of life of the A.F.L., the statements of principle, usually in person by President Gompers, were generally acceptable. Among them was the unity of interests of all workers all over the world, and therefore more so the American ones. Unfortunately, these statements did not correspond to the practice of the Federation. Of course, it was the individual unions that chose how to behave, but in the face of certain general principles, it was simply a matter of enforcing them. This was not the case. In fact, we will see how in the following years, and for most of his presidency, Gompers committed himself to fighting the most sacrosanct cornerstones of class unionism.

It is not in our habits when telling the story of the class, and generally the whole story, to referring to individual characters, large or small, in accordance with our fully Marxist revolutionary principle that individual characters do not decide, do not determine, do not create anything, but are only vectors of historical and economic needs, no matter by what words, symbols or clowning these needs are achieved. The higher on the social scale, the more illustrious they are, and the more insignificant they are on the historical level, the less they affect the true events of history, unless by event one considers making senator a horse or a mafioso, a perversion, the name of a courtesan. So we are not impressed by these “battilocchi”, poor puppets with no real decision-making power, often conscious of this or, in the most pathetic cases, convinced that they are really creators of history.

In Gompers’ case it is not easy to talk about the American workers’ movement at the turn of the century without following him and his stances. As we will see Gompers personifies the corruption exercised by the ruling class over the working class, and his stances are emblematic of aristocratic syndicalism that in every important development has been the most valuable tool of social preservation, more than the militia, the army, the Pinkertons, and the judges, from then until today.

The first thing you can say about Gompers is that he has taken on all positions, but that he had not been faithful to any of them whenever it suited him. If a continuity can be recognized, it is that he has always made the most suitable choices to keep the president’s chair, which he never lost, from the foundation of the Federation in 1886 to his death in 1924, except for a short period when he was not re-elected after successfully fighting against the attempts of the socialists to influence the unions.

Another aspect of continuity in his presidency is the fact that he never bothered to stick to the constitution of the A.F.L., nor to the deliberations of the congresses, whenever it suited him, and the choices he considered the most suitable, were invariably the most conservative, nationalist and collaborative.

He was basically a bureaucrat, an opportunistic bureaucrat, who adapted his behavior to the specific situation. Thus, when he wrote to the International, he appeared to be a passionate radical, while when he spoke in front of an assembly of businessmen, he gave them the comforting feeling of being a solid conservative. In a moment of radicalization of the movement, fighting against the monopolies and the government, Gompers was able to represent their radical feelings; but when the movement was defeated, and the unions were forced to give in to the triumphant bosses, he did not hesitate to repudiate every single word spent only a short time before.

Gompers was smart enough to understand that during the early years of the A.F.L. he was dealing with workers who had lived through the hard battles of the 1880s, who were influenced by socialist propaganda and the principles of solidarity among the workers that the K.L. had actually defended. To attract these workers to the Federation it was necessary to convince them that the Federation did not reject the class struggle, nor the final goal of a new social system, and that therefore it maintained all the positive characteristics of the Order while rejecting those that were leading it to its inglorious end. Of course, all of it was expressed in a sufficiently vague and generic way, to the point of being practically incomprehensible.

Which Union?

Of the K.L.’s positions, one aspect that had initially been absorbed and shared by proletarians was the defense of industrial unionism, as opposed to trade unionism, generally linked to skilled workers. So in the early years Gompers became a convinced defender of the industrial union, and tried to shape the Federation in this sense.

But the individual unions, or rather their leaders, did not agree at all on this line, which was certainly progressive but which threatened the autonomy of many Unions and many positions. Gompers did not take long to understand that on that way he would have risked losing his job in a short time. He was equally fast in abandoning the project, to become a convinced supporter of the organization by trade, the Trade Unions. Not only that, in doing so, he also began to support another position, of no small importance in the strategy of class struggle: the autonomy of the trades. This ridiculed any pseudo-radical statement: in fact, any trade union could laugh at it, violating with impunity any principle that could be written or enunciated. When Gompers made his outbursts, in so far as they were generic, everyone agreed; but it had to be clear that what mattered was to defend the interests of the skilled workers, and that «the tragic mistake of K.L. should not be repeated by uniting in the same union skilled and non-skilled workers».

Therefore, from the very first steps of the American Federation of Labor there was a conflict between workers’ solidarity and the narrow-mindedness of the trades, between the principles on which it was founded, which stated that the federation pursued the organization of all workers, without distinction of ability, color, gender, religion and nationality, and the principles enunciated and practiced by the heads of trade unions, in substantial defense of the skilled workers, the vast majority of whom were white, male and born in America. A conflict that would have influenced the A.F.L.’s policy towards women, Blacks and immigrants.

In theory women had equal rights to men, but in practice it was quite different. In the first place, women’s tasks in factories were generally non-skilled, which excluded them from the majority of trade unions, which formed the nucleus of the A.F.L. Moreover, the female workforce was on average very young, and most of the girls soon married and left the factory to take care of their families; therefore, capable and experienced trade union leaders hardly emerged. On the other hand, given the times, male executives often had difficulty operating among women. It must be added the ungenerous attitude of the male workers themselves, who often did not hide the fact that it was not wrong that women earned half as much as men. In cases where women were organized, almost always in the factories there were two trade unions, one male and one female, which fought together and negotiated with the bosses, but then different wage conditions emerged, with great dissatisfaction on the part of the female workers who were invariably discriminated against.

However, there were also substantial struggles, such as that of the
clothing workers in Troy, New York, in 1891, which ended with complete
success. But on the whole the unions federated in the A.F.L. were
reluctant to accept the resolutions adopted at the conventions, which
called for the organization of female workers.

The situation did not present itself in a very different way for colored workers, even if the behavior of the A.F.L. in its first years was better in this sense.

In fact, the Federation never failed to support the need to organize Blacks as well; an appeal that was little heeded, especially in the South. The solution, considered temporary, was to organize them in separate unions, waiting for better times. In reality, as time went by, this temporary solution became the ideal one of unionizing the black labor force. On the other hand, Gompers, in defending these workers and their integration into the union, used not only the humanitarian and therefore moral argument, but also a very practical one: if black workers were left to themselves, how could white workers blame them if they were found against them in struggles, perhaps employed by the bosses as blackmail weapons or as scabs?

This attitude of the Federation led to an unprecedented success in New Orleans, in October-November 1892, when a general strike in the city was called: the membership was as many as 25,000 workers in struggle, black and white, belonging to 49 unions. The employers’ provocations, which tended to put whites against blacks, were unsuccessful, and the strikers remained firm and peaceful, sure of their numbers and the complete blockade of the city’s activities. The bosses had to capitulate, and negotiate at the same table with the black delegates.

In spite of the progressive trade union policy of its early years, the A.F.L. failed to lay the foundations for an effective integration of Blacks, and also of foreign workers who were arriving by the millions, because it could not overcome, except in isolated cases, the prejudice of possession of specialization for access to its unions; not only were Blacks not skilled, they did not even have access to specializations, and this pushed them back into the limbo of the unorganized. In the end, the Federation’s capitulation to racism was consecrated in the 1894 Convention

A separate case was the attitude towards Asian workers. As it had been for the K.L., Gompers never hid a real aversion to the Asians, mainly Chinese, who had arrived in large numbers to work on the railway lines, who worked in terrible conditions and dropped like flies. An aversion that took simply racist colors, and that not only implied the non-acceptance in the unions of these misfortuned people, but also demanded their expulsion; an attitude, however, that within many years would not have spared even the immigrants of Eastern Europe, regardless of whether or not it was officially proclaimed.

Homestead

The year 1892 was the richest in bloody conflicts in the entire history of the American labor movement. In addition to New Orleans, an important but peaceful strike despite the efforts of the bosses, there was a very hard-fought switch-men strike in Buffalo, in the mining areas of Tennessee and Idaho, and in the steel mills of Homestead on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The latter was particularly bloody and had an international prominence.

Homestead’s skilled workers belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the strongest union in the country, which had also taken a strong position in the steel mill. In 1889 Carnegie, the “Robber Baron” who owned the plant, tried to reduce the union’s strength by proposing a twenty-five percent wage reduction and individual contracts. To cope with the strike that followed, the company hired policemen and tried to bring in scabs, but the maneuver failed, and the mass picketing repelled the sheriff’s troop. The company had to sign a three-year contract, which expired in 1892.

As the deadline approached, the company again made proposals for strong wage reductions; this time, however, the proposals had a provocative purpose, the intention to provoke the clash was practically declared, and with the clash the goal was to destroy the union and its power in the factory. For this purpose the company, led by Henry Clay Frick, had carefully prepared itself: it had greatly increased production in the previous months, had built a sort of wall around the factory, had hired as many as three hundred Pinkerton mercenaries. Pinkerton, with its 2,000 agents on permanent duty and 30,000 reserves, had a force greater than that of the federal army itself in peacetime.

Frick issued an ultimatum, according to which if the union did not accept its terms by June 24, the company would deal with employees as individuals. Four days later, 800 workers were fired; on July 2, the entire workforce had been expelled: technically, it was a lockout rather than a strike. It was a clear declaration of war. The 3,800 workers voted by a large majority for an all-out strike: it should be noted that there were only 800 skilled workers, the others were unskilled and not part of the union, but they were rightly afraid that once the skilled workers and their union would be defeated, it would be their turn, as they had much narrower margins between wages and poverty.

The workers consequently prepared themselves for the war declared by the management of the steelworks: after voting for the strike they were organized into three divisions, one per 8-hour shift; the divisions were organized militarily. The important positions were therefore constantly manned. An efficient communication service kept the contacts between the departments and the organizational center. The roads leading to Homestead were blocked, while strikers ensured order (bars were closed) and the functioning of services, by issuing specific orders.

On the night of July 5, Pinkerton’s troops (who were supposed to take possession of the factory, now called “Fort Frick” by the strikers) arrived near the city of Pittsburgh, and were put on barges that were supposed to take them up the river inside the factory. The activity did not escape the union’s lookouts, who immediately telegraphed the Homestead strike committee. At 4 a.m. a siren sounded the alarm and the Pinkertons found a crowd of 10,000 people waiting for them on the banks of the river, the strikers and their families. Many of them were armed, some with rifles or pistols, others with spiked clubs, stones, sticks. The Pinkertons were all well armed with Winchester rifles. When attempting to disembark they were invited to give up, then, inevitably, the shooting was unleashed: as always in these cases everyone blamed the other side for the first shot. Surely the Pinkertons fired on the crowd on the shore, hitting many workers in the pile; then the shooting started, which lasted a day. In the end the mercenaries found themselves in an exposed position with no chance of escape. They had to surrender and go ashore between two wings of an angry crowd, there had been a very high number of wounded on both sides, as well as nine dead among the strikers and seven among the Pinkertons. The Committee had to work hard to make them pass unharmed, or almost unharmed, through the crowd; but the beatings, which seems not to have been spared, did not kill any of them.

The clash was widely reported in the press, which as usual treated the strikers as murderers and communists, but in the eyes of the other workers of the country, especially those who had some experience of hard struggles, the actions of the Pinkertons did not require much explanation, and the strikers received strong support; in addition, two other Carnegie plants struck in solidarity, even if they already had a new contract. Everyone had understood that more than wages, union freedom was at stake.

The company had a well articulated plan to break the strike, of which the Pinkertons and the militia were only the first moves. The next move was the unleashing of the courts against the strikers: with the most fanciful accusations the strikers were imprisoned, and then released on bail of $10,000. When, of course, the money ran out, many of the accused, including a large part of the strike committee, either remained in jail until the trial, or absconded. Even though in the end not even one of the strikers could be convicted, this massive action led to a great weakening of the strike, which lasted 4 and a half months.In the following days the strikers were the masters of the camp; the town was peaceful, everything was working, and the sheriff had not been able to find a foothold to request the National Guard mobilize. Nor did it seem that this was the Governor’s intention. Instead, on July 12, unexpectedly (only for those who believe in the impartiality of the institutions), the militia arrived in town, who occupied the factory and prepared to allow the influx of scabs. However, it was not easy to find them: many were not willing to do so, and were brought to the factory under false pretenses, and moreover, although laborers could be replaced, it would have been much more difficult, and it was, to replace the specialized.

A further complication came from an attack on Frick by a young anarchist; Frick was only wounded, but this fact gave further breath to the anti-workers’ gazettes, as one can easily imagine, even though the committee distanced itself from the attack.

There is no evidence that the A.F.L. had actively participated in the struggle; relieved by the union’s renunciation to launch a boycott of Carnegie products, which would have involved the entire unionized class, the Federation decided, on November 12, to launch a “Homestead Day”, for fundraising, for December 13: too little, and too late, on November 20 the strike had ended.

On the 18th the non-skilled had asked permission to return to work, which was granted by the committee; by then the situation was no longer sustainable, especially for the non- skilled. The management took some, refused others, on its own terms. After two days, even the skilled capitulated: of 800 of them, only 200 had remained to vote, many were ashamed, many had left to look for work elsewhere. But no one had broken the solidarity of the struggle, no one had shown up at the gates during the strike. Nevertheless, the majority in favor of returning to the factory was only by a few votes. The management of the steelworks gave them the same arrogant treatment, even though they were happy to take back the skilled workers they so badly needed.

The union, the Amalgamated, continued to exist, but was excluded from the most important steelworks, and almost completely lost its meaning and membership. It was not possible to involve the whole sector, which would have brought the bosses to their knees; it had not been replied with a preparation comparable to that organized by Frick; it hadn’t been addressed the class in an organized way if not too late, and this because it was not clear what was at stake. This was not understood by the A.F.L. either, which had its faults even if at the time it was not the Leviathan organization that it later became. The only positive side was the solidarity and tenacity of the Homestead workers, skilled and not, union members or not, Americans and immigrants: nobody betrayed their comrades by going back to work. Frick himself had to admit it in a letter to Carnegie: «The firmness with which these strikers held is surprising». A potential that Amalgamated was unable to exploit to rebuild a more militant, more open industrial union (after 1892 they continued to exclude Blacks), better equipped structurally to challenge monopolistic capital.

The Struggles of the Miners

While the country focused on the very hard struggle in the steel industry, equally bloody battles took place in other States. Among them were those of the miners in Idaho and Tennessee.

In the mining district of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the Consolidated Miners’ Union was formed in 1890, which brought together several small miners’ unions. Its tasks were the coordination of relief activities and support for strikers, as well as the direct management of strikes. In 1891, a strike that had been very successful extended the unionization to the whole region, with the consequence that all mines paid union wages.

A fact little appreciated, as you can imagine, to the owners, who responded by forming their own association, the Mine Owners’ Association, or M.O.A. Already in January 1892, M.O.A. announced a new salary grid, which basically provided for a 25% reduction in wages. Considering it a first step in an attempt to wipe out the union, the union rejected the proposal, and M.O.A. decided to expel the union members from work, which was tantamount as a lockout. The mines remained closed for months, then gradually activity resumed partially thanks to the arrival of scabs collected among the farmers of the State by armed guards unleashed on the countryside. The strikers had managed to keep most of the scabs away from the mines thanks to the support of the population and an efficient action of peaceful persuasion on the scabs themselves, which in large numbers passed between their ranks. In July, however, the situation had not improved, when they heard of the victorious battle of the Homestead workers against the Pinkerton mercenaries. The discovery that a union secretary was in fact a Pinkerton agent infiltrated by the M.O.A. eventually contributed to the inflammation.

On July 11 it was then decided to take action, and an armed clash broke out between workers on the one hand, and deputy sheriffs, Pinkertons and scabs on the other. The clash was resolved when a cart full of explosives was thrown against the mine, causing it to collapse and forcing its defenders to surrender. The battle continued for a few more days, resulting in the departure of the scabs.

Naturally the bosses reacted in the usual way, appealing to the authority, the governor, who responded promptly declaring the existence of an insurrection, and sending 1500 soldiers, partly National Guard and partly Federal Army. As many as 600 strikers were arrested and thrown into prison on punitive conditions. The scabs returned and the mines reopened. But the trials that were held in August, also thanks to adequate support from the A.F.L., led to the release of almost all those arrested. When they got out of jail, they discovered that the strike had actually been won, because in spite of everything the owners could not make the mines work, and they decided to capitulate.

This resounding victory had as a predictable consequence the foundation, in May 1893, of a federation of miners’ unions of the West, the Western Federation of Miners.

The other great miners’ struggle took place at the opposite end of the continent, in the northeast of Tennessee. The motive was different, and concerned the use of convicts’ labor.

It had become common practice for the State to rent prisoners to private businessmen who managed them and made them work according to the criteria they arbitrarily decided, without any control by authorities. The use of prisoners on plantations, in buildings, in mines, was such a lucrative activity that many innocent people, especially Blacks, were imprisoned to provide hands for businessmen. In the years until 1891, public opinion, led by trade unions, had managed to force many States to abolish the forced labor of convicts for private individuals. But in a fair number of southern States, including Tennessee, the system continued to flourish.

In April 1891 the miners of Briceville, in Anderson County, refused a contract that prohibited strikes for labor complaints, granted authority to the coal weight controller appointed by the company in place of the existing one, appointed by the miners as a result of specific struggles, and provided that the pay was attributed through “vouchers” valid only for purchases in the company’s store: the last two points among other things were contrary to State law. On July 5, the executives brought in a shipment of forty convicts, who dismantled the miners’ homes to erect a fence.

Ten days later in a mass gathering the miners decided to act before the arrival of the bulk of the convicts. Three hundred armed miners advanced towards the fence, demanding the release of the convicts. Officers and guards had to surrender, and the miners escorted prisoners and jailers to the train station, where they sent them back to their home town, Knoxville.

Then the miners wrote to the governor explaining the reasons for their action, aimed at protecting their families from hunger and misery. The governor responded by sending three militia companies and other convicts to Anderson County. This time as many as two thousand miners were concentrated in a small army that surrounded the mine where the convicts were, and for the second time they and their guards, without injury, were accompanied to the station.

Irreducible, the governor commanded for a third identical mission as many as 14 militia companies (600 men). The miners were offered a truce, with the prospect of a repeal of the forced labor law; but the power of the companies obtained that the result was the opposite, with more repressive powers to the governor. The miners decided to resort to mobilization again, and with night actions, their faces covered with handkerchiefs, they freed many convicts, then set fire to the installations they had built. Most of the mines decided to give in, the miners were rehired, they had the controller of the weights of their choice, and better rules in the contracts. It seemed as if everything was going well, but the owners were not willing to give in, and the scene of the little army armed to the teeth was repeated in the summer of 1892; but also the guerrilla action of the miners was repeated. Until in a mine the guards refused to surrender and shot at the miners, wounding several of them. This triggered the reaction of the miners, who once again organized a force that besieged the mine and started a real battle; a battle that was ended by another small army sent by the governor. Even if in the end, thanks to numerous arrests (a real manhunt that also resulted in workers killed by the governor’s thugs), the militia managed to tame the revolt (which, however, had a revival in 1893), the system of renting prisoners ended up in disrepute even before public opinion, and shortly after was abolished in Tennessee.

The 8 Hours Movement Is Back

The reduction of working hours had been for many years the main objective of the workers, or at least the only objective really able to make them fight together. As early as the 1830s and 1840s, reformers’ associations had lobbied for laws to be passed for the working day of ten hours first, and then eight‑hours; but even in cases where these laws were passed, they remained dead letters, or almost dead letters. Even in industries where, thanks to strikes and negotiations, the hours were reduced, the bosses had taken back the concessions at the first opportunity; on the other hand, if the eight‑hour system had not been adopted everywhere, the companies that had accepted it would have been at a disadvantage compared to the others.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, an organization that would later become the American Federation of Labor, adopted a resolution saying, “From May 1, 1886, the eight‑hour time shall be the legal working day”.

A resolution passed by the Federation itself in December 1885 recalls that the idea of the eight‑hour general strike was born from the failure of other methods. The resolution recalled that it would be futile to expect the introduction of the eight hours by legislation, and that the unified demand to reduce working hours, supported by a solid and decisive organization, would be more effective than any law.

The call for a general strike was based on the concept that “in their attempt to reform the dominant economic situation, workers must rely only on themselves and their power”.

There was little support from existing organizations for the May 1st strike movement. The federation that had set the date of May 1 as the deadline was so weak that when it came to having a response from members on the project in question, only about 2,500 voters voted. Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor, opposed the May Day strike from the outset. In a secret circular of December 15, 1884 he had proposed that instead of striking, members would be invited to write a brief composition on the eight‑hour problem at all Knights meetings, which was to be sent to the newspapers on the occasion of Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1885!

The anarchists initially claimed that the eight‑hour turmoil was a compromise with the wage system. Their newspaper, the “Alarm”, declared: “It is a lost battle and… even if the eight hours were accepted the wage‑earners would not benefit from it”. In the end, however, the anarchists, especially in Chicago, understood that they had to stay with the struggling workers and made a fundamental contribution to the movement.

However, the idea of the eight‑hour general strike had struck the imagination and awakened the hopes of hundreds of thousands of workers and, despite opposition from national leaders, the unrest spread from one place to another throughout the country. Local Knights of Labor organizers, despite the center’s protests, formed new local sections based on the eight‑hour question; as we have seen, given the poor connection between center and base, the negative attitude of the leadership was not felt at the base, and the eight‑hour unrest was one of the components of the KL’s resounding success between late 1885 and the first half of 1886.

Powderly himself will also complain about it later:

In the first half of 1886 many of the new sections began to approve motions in which they invited the central assembly to fix the date of the strike for the eight hours on May 1, 1886; then they sent them to the Grand Master Workman of the Order, who immediately realized the serious danger for the organization that was represented by the ignorance of the new members gathering so quickly in the new sections. They had been induced by unfounded assertions to subscribe; and many organizers contributed to feed the illusionin order to obtain ‘great advantages’”.

At this point Powderly deliberately tried to sabotage the movement. In a secret circular to the local sections of the Knights of Labor he wrote: “The direction of the Order has never fixed May 1st as the date of a strike, and it never will. On the first of May, no section of the Knights of Labor must strike for the eight hours with the idea to obey the orders of the direction, because such an order has never been, and will never be, given”.

All the excitement represented a kind of class conflict that Powderly abhorred. The hostility of the KL leaders did not succeed in stopping the strike, nor was it able to prevent the wide participation of the local sections of the Order in it, but it was of very serious damage to the unity and effectiveness of the movement.

The activity in preparation for the strike became massive in March and reached its peak in April. There were a considerable number of strikes for the eight hours in advance of the set date, the request for the eight hours was also included in the struggles that had other objectives and there were massive demonstrations throughout the country. The movement had its strengths in major industrial cities, Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, Baltimore and Milwaukee; to a lesser extent in Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Washington.

Already before the end of April, almost a quarter of a million workers were involved in the movement; about thirty thousand had now obtained the eight‑hour day or at least a time reduction. At least 6,000 were already on strike in the last week of April, and in the same month it was estimated that no less than one hundred thousand were ready to go on strike to impose their demands.

However, the movement actually proved to be more extensive than expected. By the second week of May, participation had reached 350,000 workers, 190,000 of whom were directly affected by the strike. 80,000 struck in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, 9,000 in Baltimore, 7,000 in Milwaukee, 4,700 in Boston, 4,250 in Pittsburgh, 3,000 in Detroit, 2,000 in St. Louis, 1,500 in Washington, and 13,000 in other cities. It has been calculated that nearly 200,000 workers managed to get the eight‑hour day without wage reduction after the big strike on May 1; but the others also got a substantial time reduction.

In Milwaukee, well in advance of May 1, a vast worker’s agitation began. In February 1886 the local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, against the will of the direction of the Order, organized the League for the eight hours, which the local unions joined the following month. The pressure was reinforced by a mass gathering of three thousand people.

As May 1 approached, the struggles extended to all industrial categories. The agitation led to a work of deterrence against all the factories, and soon a peaceful crowd had gathered in the streets of the city. The governor, alarmed, sent three militia companies, which were obviously welcomed with stones. The next day, May 3, the troop confronted the crowd, and after a warning that no one heard, fire was ordered, following an explicit order from the governor. The crowd dispersed, leaving six dead on the ground; it was the end of the eight‑hour movement in Milwakee, and the workers returned to work under the same conditions as before.

But in those days not in all cities had the result been so tragic, despite the acrimony of the bosses. In general the agitation was a success: in New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Washington, etc. the strikes had a very large participation, even if often the workers took the opportunity to include salary increases in the demands.

In Troy, New York State, there were 5,000 strikers for the eight hours, including 2,000 stove factory workers and all construction workers. 300 railroad workers of Italian origin went on strike for the increase in wages, and, “once stopped working, they tied red handkerchiefs to picks and shovels and marched all together along the railroad to the place where another team was working, whom they persuaded to join the strikers”.

In several cities, of course, the eight‑hour movement failed to expand, as in Boston.

Although in many cases in the following years the bosses unleashed offensives to recover what was then granted, often with success, the general strike of May 1, 1886 represents a turning point for the American workers’ movement, especially for the consciousness acquired on that occasion of the strength that the united class can express and exercise; this gave rise to an unprecedented push for affiliation to trade unions. Those struggles, because of the Haymarket events, remain a historical reference point for the entire working class worldwide, a warning about how ruthless and unscrupulous the bourgeoisie can be when frightened by the force expressed by the united class in struggle.

The movement of May 1, 1886 produced an extraordinary echo throughout the world. In just a few years the first of May became an international working class day.

Haymarket

The heart of the movement was Chicago. The Knights of Labor as well as trade unionists and anarchists in the city, having abandoned the primitive hostility, all supported the Association for the eight hours that led the unrest for the strike. Throughout the month of April there was a series of major demonstrations. Everyone was certain that, with the combativeness shown by the workers and the excellent organization, the movement would be successful.

But also the opposite side was prepared. More than a year earlier, newspapers had already reported that the city’s businessmen had set up paramilitary groups by arming their employees, and that the National Guard had been expanded. “In just one of the large companies there is an organization of 150 young men armed with Remington breech-loading rifles, who conduct regular exercises. And this is certainly not an isolated case”.

On the eve of the strike, a “Times” correspondence from Chicago said:

In the last forty‑eight hours various members of the Commercial Club have paid almost two thousand dollars in order to equip the First Regiment of the National Guard of Illinois with a machine gun; the idea had been proposed Tuesday evening during the exercises and the inspection to the regiment. This was immediately adopted when it was pointed out that in case of revolt such a weapon would be valuable in the hands of the soldiers.

By May 1, in Chicago, the movement had managed to obtain large concessions: one thousand brewers had reduced their hours from sixteen to ten, and as many bakers, who previously worked from fourteen to eighteen hours, had obtained the ten‑hour day. A good part of the workers in the furniture factories obtained the eight hours with an increase of twenty‑five percent in the hourly wage; 1,600 textile workers got a ten hours salary, working eight hours. A reduction in hours had also been imposed in some companies producing shoes, canned goods, tobacco and cold cuts, but many more were the workers who were preparing for a very bitter struggle: among them 4,000 bricklayers and labourers, 1,500 brick kiln workers, 1,200 metalworkers, slaughterhouse workers, carpenters, coopers, woodworkers for building, shoemakers, upholsterers and mould makers.

On May 1, 30,000 workers went on strike, and perhaps twice that number participated or attended the demonstrations. About 10,000 Bohemians, Poles and Germans employed in sawmills and lumber yards paraded through the streets of the city with the band and flags preceding them. Perhaps because of the number of demonstrators there were no violent clashes with the police.

By May 3, more and more groups of workers had joined the strike. A correspondent from “John Swinton’s Paper” wrote jubilantly: “It’s the real eight‑hour boom and we’re getting one victory after another. Today all the canned meat factories of Union Stock Yards have surrendered… The workers are mad with joy at this great victory”.

That day, locked out McCormick employees held a mass assembly in front of the factory. The workers had already been out of work for three months. They were desperate. August Spies was haranguing the crowd on the movement for eight hours when the factory siren sounded and the scabs came out, having finished their day’s work. Immediately a field battle broke out, with stones, bricks, fists, sticks. A few shots were fired. Then the police arrived and, opening fire on the crowd, killed four workers in a few minutes and wounded even more.

The atmosphere became again hot, and the next day there were several clashes between the demonstrators and the police. The anarchists invited the workers to arm themselves, with an inflamed flyer entitled “Revenge!”. Many mass meetings were scheduled that evening, including a rally at Haymarket Square to protest against police violence.

At the Haymarket rally on May 4 there were only about 1,200 people present, actually peaceful and apparently had not followed the warlike invitation of the anarchists; when it started raining only 300 remained. The last speaker was finishing his speech, when to everyone’s amazement a squadron of 180 policemen entered the square; the crowd was ordered to disperse. While the speakers were getting off the stage, a bomb was suddenly thrown that exploded in the middle of the policemen, killing one of them and wounding almost twenty (five of them died shortly after). The police closed ranks again and opened fire on the crowd, killing several bystanders (it is not known exactly how many) and wounding at least 200 of them.

A period of popular hysteria followed. Excited by the press, ordinary citizens attributed all the blame to the workers’ agitators, anarchists, socialists. The “New York Times” wrote:

Since the times of the war of rebellion (the Civil War) no disturbance of peace has ever moved the feelings and public opinion at this point as much as the murder of policemen perpetrated by anarchists in Chicago on Tuesday night. We use the word murder with the perfect awareness of its meaning. It is foolish to call this act of crime “tumult”: everything proves that it is a calculated murder, deliberately planned and carried out in cold blood”.

The wave of anger and fear caused by the Haymarket events was used against the workers’ movement in general. Thanks to a still naive and gullible public opinion, the enemies of the workers’ movement had a free hand in the repression of what until then had been a winning and non‑violent offensive, if not defensively so. The mayor of Chicago Harrison issued a proclamation in which he declared that, since the gatherings, marches and other such things were “dangerous” in the conditions of the moment, he had ordered the police to disband all meetings or gatherings. The police set up their nets, and within two days no less than fifty alleged radicals’ gatherings were raided and those who were even vaguely suspected of affiliation to radical groups were arrested.

Most of the arrests had taken place without a warrant and for some time no specific charges were even filed against the accused. Years later, the chief of police admitted that the police had used all the most traditional equipment to persecute representatives of the workers’ movement: invention of secret societies, confessions extracted with the third degree and torture, finds of fake guns, dynamite, bayonets, various bombs, etc..

Of the hundreds of workers arrested, eight were chosen for trial, chosen not for the political profession (they were all anarchists), but for the fundamental role played in the success of the struggle: eight workers’ leaders who were tried and sentenced to death; four were later hanged (a fifth died in prison, officially for suicide), although there was no evidence that they had anything to do with the incidents. Sorge thus recalls their torment:

They died as men on November 11, 1887. None of them, except one who was speaking from the stage, was present in the square when the bomb was thrown. The chronicle of the trial is that of a shameful farce, in which judge and jury did nothing but satisfy the demands of the city bourgeoisie who demanded a bloody revenge on the protagonists of the eight‑hour struggle. In 1893, the remaining prisoners were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld. In the reasons for the pardon it was recognized that: “the documentation of this case shows that the judge conducted the trial with malicious ferocity… page after page the judge’s insinuating notes were made with the intention of leading the jury to their own prejudice… there is no such episode in the whole story”.

The organized labor movement itself did not know how to behave, and the most reactionary lines prevailed: the KL came to publicly attack the defendants, the AFL asked for clemency only for aversion to capital punishment, and not to make martyrs of the anarchists.

The Reaction

The movement was faced with a very harsh reaction, which took its cue from the hysteria over the Haymarket events and used the techniques already tested against the strikes in the Southwest System. In fact within a week the unrest ceased and the workers returned to work while the bourgeoisie deployed all its police and militia forces.

The formation of employers’ associations aimed to keep under control, or rather to make the union practice disappear, became a rising tide. In September, one of the most valuable journalists in the field of workers’ struggles wrote: “Since last May, many large companies and employers’ associations have resorted to all kinds of exceptional expedients to break up the workers’ organizations, which had acquired so much strength in the last two or three years. Thomas Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, said, “Give the workers and strikers a bullet diet for a few days and then you’ll see how they welcome this bread.

To take just two cases among the many, the association of shirt manufacturers in Jamesburg, New Jersey, suspended two thousand employees after they had been found to be members of the Knights of Labor, and for the same reason the silverware manufacturers in New York, Brooklyn and Providence formed an association and suspended two thousand workers. Thousands of them were not only fired but also put on blacklists to prevent them from finding employment elsewhere. The Iron‑Clad Contract (later known as “Yellow‑Dog Contract”), which forced workers to swear that they would never join a workers’ or trade union organization, became a widely demanded requirement for employment.

Lockouts became a common costume. The entrepreneurs who in 1885 and in the first months of 1886 had given in to the claim of the 8 hours hastened to re‑establish the working days of 10‑12 hours. Those who protested were branded as anarchists, and therefore “murderers”, in the light of the propaganda financed in the newspapers by the bosses. The most affected were the trade union activists, who invariably ended up on blacklists.

Naturally, the most devastating effects were felt on the Knights of Labor, who at the beginning of 1886 had, according to some sources, more than a million members: a fifth of them dissolved in a few months, beginning a decline that would soon be accomplished, as we have already seen. A decline due to the attacks of the employers, in part, but above all due to the contradictions within the Order, which had proved to be absolutely unsuitable to lead great workers’ struggles. All the strikes conducted by the KL after the Haymarket events were resolved in failures.

For some time the movement for solidarity and defense of workers was silenced, but within less than ten years it would rise again, demonstrating its unstoppable strength. For years a new organization, which had learned the lessons of KL’s failures, was already developing and would take its place, not as a short-lived phenomenon as had happened to previous national trade union federations, but as an organization destined to remain, for better or for worse, in the history of the American workers’ movement to the present day, the American Federation of Labor.

13 – The great crisis of 1893

On May 4, 1893, the National Cordage Company that just five months earlier announced 100% dividends on its shares, declared bankruptcy. A general collapse in the stock market came after, and soon the country found itself in the most serious economic crisis of its history up to that point: bank assaults, company bankruptcies, widespread unemployment were inevitable and predictable consequences. During the year, 642 banks and more than 16,000 companies went bankrupt, 22,500 miles of railways were placed under receivership. Thousands of stores, factories and workshops closed down and thousands more reduced their activities drastically.

Unemployment

Hundreds of thousands of workers were thrown out of work. At the end of the year it was estimated that for every 5 million employed workers there were about 3 million unemployed with no means of support. For each unemployed there were 2 to 5 people depending on him. Between 1893 and 1897, that very number always sat between 3 and 4 million. In a country that had about 65 million inhabitants, only 22 million lived in urban areas. These numbers alone are a representation of the dramatic condition of the proletariat in the “land of the free”, where the ruling class unscrupulously condemns to starvation those that in the previous years made the US enrich itself at a rate that was unparalleled in the capitalist world.

In addition to the inevitable and widespread misery that can be imagined and that is routine in capitalist society nonetheless, in the United States, more than anywhere else, the phenomenon that saw masses of workers moving long distances in search of work developed. Those who the bourgeois contemptuously called “vagabonds” or “hoboes” were actually migrants – very young on the average – reacting in this way to a crisis that would have periodically recurred in the following decades. However, the new destinations did not always guarantee a job for the masses. The latter were often flooding the places in which there was rumoured to be work, in the hope of finding one. In those years, the only relief came from charitable organizations, municipal governments, and especially from the strongest and most forward-looking unions. No help came from State administrations during the 1893‑97 depression period.

But that aid was not enough as it reached only a minority of those in need. An International Labour Conference, a conference of union representatives including foreign union leaders, was therefore convened in Chicago. Gompers, as chairman, delivered the opening speech. Although he still proclaimed himself a socialist, he was careful not to attack the capitalist system, blaming instead some unidentified «rich landowners in our country». Since the latter did not see a problem in workers starving, it was up to the government to «provide the means for the men and women of our country to survive». He then listed a series of measures that he believed would solve the problem. He called for public works in the cities, improvement of the major communication routes (roads, canals, etc.) in the various States, construction of a canal in Nicaragua and improvement of the navigability of the Mississippi at the federal government level. In other times Gompers could have aimed at the White House as his program was 40 years ahead of the Roosevelt New Deal!

The Conference produced three committees that took on different tasks of agitation and propaganda, but it was soon clear that nothing good could have come out of simple requests based on common sense. To move the waters a showdown was needed, and since no one proposed to mobilize the workers that were still employed (certainly blackmailed and frightened but also full of rage as hourly wages collapsed nonetheless and returned to what they were in the beginning of 1893 only in 1900), it was decided to mobilize the unemployed in mass demonstrations. The unemployed were even organized in specific unions, immediately recognized by the AFL.

The demonstrations, generally of large numbers although often attacked and disbanded by the police and its batons, had some local effect in pushing the municipalities to provide jobs – obviously very underpaid – to local unemployed. For the bourgeoisie that was a bargain. Generally, bachelors got only vouchers to eat and sleep, and fathers of families little more. For example, in S. Francisco the luckiest unemployed were allowed to sweep the streets for two and a half days a week for $1.40, when the average hourly wage before the crisis was 15 cents.

In spite of these cautious and stingy handouts, the wealthier strata of society had a problem with it. In Cincinnati, the bourgeoisie came to form a committee that objected to the aptness of the public jobs the unemployed were employed for. The jobs were deemed to be superfluous, a waste of taxpayers’ money, communistic in principle, and demoralizing to those receiving aid. Of course, these are to be considered as pathological outbreaks of the bourgeoisie, but they only ended up exasperating the spirits involved. In January 1894, at a large mass gathering at the Madison Square Garden in New York, even the good Gompers let very revolutionary words slip out of his mouth: «Let the conflagration light up the outraged skies! Let the red Nemesis burn the infernal clan, and chaos end the slavery of man!» Although he regretted those words soon after, that language reflected the sentiment of the masses, and he, as we have previously mentioned, tended to adapt to situations without any modesty.

Despite Gompers’ brazen and subversive expressions, the federal government did not feel the need to come to the aid of the unemployed and the destitutes, and not a penny was disbursed to them. On the other hand, the federal government did not hesitate to invest millions of dollars in armaments and military training. This is nothing new as the bourgeoisie has its priorities and it is precisely the times of crisis that push the former to equip itself with powerful armaments, while the proletariat is considered a “disposable” component of production.

The Coxey’s Army

In the meantime, a singular phenomenon was taking place. Masses of unemployed were moving towards Washington, some by train, some by waterways, some on foot, to demonstrate their discontent for the state of the country and to seek answers to the grievances arising everywhere. What was baptized by its originators as the “Army of the Commonwealth in Christ”, better known as “Coxey’s Army”, saw more than 10,000 men go on a journey that for many – meaning those who came from the other side of the country (California, Texas, Arizona) – was a long and very hard one. With no organization nor provisions, they begged for hundreds or thousands of miles. The movement was born in the fall of 1893 in Massillon, Ohio, on initiative of one Jacob Sechler Coxey, a theosophist in religion with populist political ideas. He was also a wealthy owner of a stone quarry and a horse farm. As a populist he thought it was the duty of Congress, and of the entire government, to alleviate social distress. He therefore published a proclamation in which he announced his intention to force, if necessary, those in power to do something for the poor. According to his plan, the unemployed would be employed in public, government jobs that would be financed by issuing paper money (he had a past as a greenbacker) that the States would repay, without interest, in 25 years. In addition, the federal government would issue an additional500 million for a federal road construction project. In short, another precursor to F. D. Roosevelt.

In order not to make the proletarians that were still working struggle, the A.F.L embraced Coxey’s cause, and in fact many leaders of the movement were also trade unionists. The movement’s participants reached Washington on May 1, 1894, after receiving support from the communities they passed through, happy to help them continuing their journey. In the East however, the reception was colder and the “Coxeyites” began to encounter problems with the police and population. So the armies began to thin out, as more and more participants decided to return to their homes.

Less than a thousand reached Washington. As planned, “General” Coxey led his followers through the streets to the foot of the Capitol. Here, in contravention of the law, he headed to the lawn to harangue the crowd, but was immediately arrested and put in a cell for twenty days. In addition, he paid a $5 fine for trampling on the grass. It is in this inglorious and somewhat comical way that Coxey’s march on the capital ended.

Hope travels by train

But American workers were not intimidated by the cowardly attack of the owners and fought back whenever they had the chance. In those years, a shining example of that came from the miners, with mixed fortunes. In February 1984, in Cripple Creek, Colorado, miners working in the gold mines went on strike when the owners tried to reestablish the ten hours work day. As usual, the struggle was tough as the workers went against thousands of mercenaries, policemen, militia and scabs, but after five months they returned at work preserving their eight hour work day.

Less fortunate was the struggle of 180,000 bitumen mine workers in four States, a number ten times greater than the members of the United Mine Workers. The struggle lasted “only” eight weeks but it was trounced by a lack of resources that made it not possible for it to last any longer. The blow the union suffered on that occasion was felt for many years. Right here, it is impossible to list all the miners’ struggles in Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. They were all very hard fought and often counted deaths and injuries among workers in particular. Desperate proletarians struggled against police, militia, scabs, Pinkerton mercenaries, judges, press even in the certainty of defeat.

It was clear the only possibility to fight back was to achieve a higher level of unity. The latter would make up for the difficulties of the situation by concentrating the few still valid forces in the interminable battle that is the one against capital. Therefore, a conference was called in Philadelphia for April 28, 1894. All the important trade unions and union federations participated, starting with the AFL and the Knights of Labour. A fine document came out of it, but no operational decisions that would turn the declamations of struggle and unity into action. Yet, while the importance of labour unity was being discussed, the benefits of achieving it were passing before the very eyes of the entire class. A new railroaders’ union, the American Railway Union, was born on the principle of unity among all workers in a set industry, realizing the industrial union. In a short time, the American Railway Union managed to rack up victories that, up until that moment, the railroaders had not dared to hope for. It was now evident that the model for a unified American labour movement was the one of the industry union, unifying skilled, semi‑skilled and unskilled workers.

Eugene Victor Debs

By the early 1890s, railroaders were unionised into five Brotherhoods. Only the train drivers’ one had a record of fighting for further demands, while the others, each in a different trade, had originally mutual aid purposes. In fact, the railroader profession was a very dangerous one as every year more than two thousand workers died on the job and thirty thousand were injured in various ways. Wages varied from 957 dollars a year for the train drivers – true aristocrats in the industry – to 575 for the guards, 212 for the brakemen, 124 for the labourers. The wages of the majority of the workers were below subsistence level. Deaths at work were defined by companies as “Acts of God”, or the result of “carelessness”. In reality, the responsibility was to be attributed to the greed of the companies. They were constantly reducing their staff by imposing double shifts on the remaining workers who, therefore, lacked sleep and suffered fatigue.

There was no coordination among the Brotherhoods. Each Brotherhood acted on its own, allowing the railroad companies to sometimes pit them against each other, therefore neutralizing them. Moreover, they represented only a small minority of the railroaders, ignoring the semi‑skilled and unskilled, and even trying to get black workers thrown out of work. Many amongst the skilled workers were not members also, and by 1893 there were about one hundred thousand members in total, one‑tenth of the North American railroad labour force.

Debs’ preaching started to catch on not so much with the Brotherhood leaders, who feared a drastic reduction in union officials, but with the base, which pushed for cooperation. Thus, in 1886, the orchestrated action of train drivers and stokers resulted in a few victories over the companies. A good start but insufficient in the toughest circumstances without the collaboration of the other categories.

Stokers, to whom Debs belonged, proposed a federation of the brotherhoods which was in fact founded in 1889, with the high‑sounding name of Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railway Employees. Unfortunately, despite good intentions, the organization did not get rid of some of the defects typical of the brotherhoods such as petty squabbles and the exclusion of blacks. These defects led to the complete failure of the initiative in 1892.

Shortly after the dissolution of the Supreme Council, a strike of switchmen in Buffalo, upstate New York, was a clear demonstration of how weak the struggling proletarians were if the brotherhoods would persist on the path of separatist policies.

As Buffalo deputies, sympathetic to the strikers, refused to intervene, the governor sent the militia in. The latter was put under the command of a general that was also an official of the railroad in question. Switchmen from the rest of the State went on strike in solidarity, but the opposition made of militia, police and scabs was such that the swingmen alone could not make it. Even as a special conference was called, the brotherhoods refused to strike, implicitly decreeing defeat.

The American Railway Union

However, the defeat left a tangible legacy. The base understood the importance of joining forces, and this awareness quickly resulted in the formation of a new organization open to all railroaders. The process came to an end on June 20, 1893 as the American Railway Union was founded. Admitted to the A.R.U. were all the white employees of the railroads, with the sole exclusion of high‑ranking officials. All workers in some way connected with the railroads were also included, such as miners, longshoremen, etc., as long as they were employees of the railroad companies. The absence of black members was a serious deficiency of the union, determined by a general underdevelopment of the union movement, not yet matured in that sense. A proposal for their admission was put to a vote, but it was rejected 113 votes to 102. Quite different was A.R.U’s attitude towards women. In addition to being admitted, it was declared that «when a woman does a man’s job, she must receive a man’s pay», a statement very ahead of its time and not to take for granted.

Stated purpose of the A.R.U. was to act in a unified manner whenever the rights of its members were threatened. Under Debs’ presidency – he started the publication of Railway Times, the bimonthly A.R.U.’s official organ that became popular among railroaders – there was a consistent migration of workers to the new union, even the specialized one such as the train drivers that came from the old brotherhoods. However, specialized workers were a minority among the new members as the majority was constituted by those workers who had not been organized until then, either because they were not admitted in the brotherhoods, or because they were kept away by the high dues required. To be a member of the A.R.U., one dollar a year was enough.

But the real takeoff in membership occurred after the resounding victory of the Great Northern Railroad strike, during the spring of 1894. After a series of wage cuts (we must remember that the company was in the midst of an economic crisis) the 9000 workers of the company decided to strike together, with no exception, despite the brotherhoods recommending to take the cuts. Faced with the compactness of the workers, the company opted not to make use of scabs (to whose recruitment the brotherhoods had collaborated). Faced with the sympathy of the population and farmers, although damaged by the strike, after 18 days the company capitulated, giving in to all the strikers’ demands. There could have been no better demonstration of the importance and effectiveness of the industrial union over the obsolete trade unions. In the weeks that followed, A.R.U.’s membership increased at the rate of 2,000 new members per day. One year from its founding, the A.R.U became the single largest union in the United States, with 150,000 total members (the entire AFL counted 175,000 members and the K.L. 70,000), while the old brotherhoods combined had less than 90,000 with their numbers steadily declining.

On the owners’ side, things were quite different, of course. The A.R.U. was the greatest threat railroad companies had ever encountered. They created the G.M.A. (General Managers’ Association) to implement a program of gradual wages reduction on all routes, as wages were “equalized” towards the bottom. In August 1893, as many as 58 companies met in Chicago to orchestrate their attack on the workers, just as the A.R.U. was starting to operate. The G.M.A. represented the owners of 410,000 miles of railroads, with 221,000 employees and a total capital of $2 billion. It was an adversary endowed with virtually infinite and inexhaustible resources, plus of course influences on local and national politics that the proletarians did not have. Its components soon realized that the new union represented a mighty obstacle to their plans, and started planning an attack in order to destroy it. In the spring of 1894, the opportunity came. The latter originated in the small town of Pullman, 12 miles south of Chicago and now absorbed into the metropolis.

The Pullman strike

Perhaps more than any other labour struggle occurred since the end of the Civil War, the Pullman strike, or the “Debs Rebellion” as the newspapers called it, shook the nation to its core. The strike exposed the harshness of the working-class conditions; it clearly demonstrated the role of the federal government in supporting the capitalists as they attempted to crush the labour movement with no mercy or compromise.

The Pullman Company was in the business of building luxurious railroad cars, and the establishments were based in the “Model Town of Pullman, Illinois”. Everything inside the town was owned by Pullman: houses, stores, streets, everything. The employees lived in Pullman’s houses, paying rents that were more expensive than the ones in neighbouring towns. They shopped in his stores and paid him for all their supplies with deductions made directly from their paychecks.

Following the crisis of 1893, wages (of those who had not been laid off) were cut several times, with reductions of 25, 33, 50 and in some cases 70%. During the year, the company still paid dividends of 9.5% to its shareholders, as it did in previous years. But rents and other life expenses of the proletarians were not reduced and soon their disposable wage was reduced to insignificant amounts. A worker who received a monthly wage of a mere 2 cents framed and hung his check on a wall instead of spending it. In many more aspects the workers were kept in servitude, although Pullman used to call them “my children”.

In March and April the workers began to organize sections of the A.R.U. Although they were not actual railroaders, the fact that the company owned and worked on a few miles of railroad authorized them to join Debs’s union. In a few weeks 4,000 company employees – almost all of them – joined the union.

In early May, an internal committee was created to present to the owners a series of grievances that needed to be addressed, such as rent reductions, wages at pre‑crisis levels and the elimination of various workplace abuses. Pullman granted nothing and a few days later three members of the internal commission were fired, despite the fact that there had been a no‑firing commitment. The event inflamed the workers, already worn out by their limited means. In a heated meeting the commission voted unanimously for the strike, despite the presence of A.R.U. officials preaching calm and asking for more time to clarify the situation.

On May 11, 1894, 4000 workers ceased work, and the few hundred who did not were sent away by the ownership, which shut down the establishment with no deadline in mind.

A strike committee was formed, and 300 workers were assigned to guard the establishments to defend them from vandalism. Strikers were hopeful as they expected to get the support of the now powerful A.R.U but in reality, the union had neither called nor authorized the strike. But being the strikers members of the A.R.U., Debs made a personal visit to verify the situation, and after several days of meetings with the workers he realized that the struggle was fully justified.

For a month the workers pulled through with the support of the Chicago working class. On June 12, the first national convention of the A.R.U took place right in Chicago and after the Pullman’s workers spoke a boycott of the company’s cars was proposed. Debs’s behaviour is described by one of his biographers: «On that occasion Debs used all the forms of control he had in his powers as president of the assembly. He resorted to all his skill, eloquence, and influence to prevent a resolute and obstinate confrontation but all was in vain… workers decided it was time to teach Pullman the leech a lesson… not a single sleeping car was to be touched until Pullman had come to an agreement with his workers… Debs refused to approve the motion. The union leadership even tried in every way to ward off any solidarity strike, but when Pullman arrogantly refused arbitration saying that “there was nothing to submit to arbitration”… the boycott proposal was resubmitted; when the delegates telegraphed to their places of origin for instructions, they realized that the overwhelming majority was in favour of the boycott and therefore voted unanimously for its implementation».

The boycott began on June 26th 1894, when those in charge of switching several lines leading out of Chicago refused to move the Pullman coaches, and for that got immediately dismissed. As a result, others that were working on the same lines stopped working in protest. Soon several Chicago lines were immobilized. What Debs was not expecting was committees and groups of railwaymen coming from everywhere to announce that their local sections decided to strike in support of the Pullman workers. Soon, each of the twenty‑six railways leading out of Chicago were paralysed. All continental lines stopped, except the Great Northern, which had no Pullman sleeping car.

The struggle spread to twenty-seven States and territories. It is estimated that 260,000 railway workers joined the strikes, almost half of whom were not members of the A.R.U. According to some estimates, 500,000 workers – others report over 660,000 – stopped working because of the strike.

The praetorians of the G.M.A arrive

At the moment the boycott was announced the G.M.A intervened. It did so not to resolve the dispute, nor to help Pullman but with the sole declared purpose of completely destroying the American Railway Union. At no time the General Managers’ Association showed interest in negotiating for a peaceful resolution of the dispute, nor in making any concession to achieve social peace.

G.M.A’s first move was to let it be known that anyone guilty of refusing to conduct his duties, or of leaving his jobs at the instigation of the A.R.U. would have never found work in any railroad company represented by the G.M.A again. However, those who would work in place of the strikers could count on a lifelong protection and job. These measures led to the spread of the strike as well, for when a switcher was fired for joining the boycott, his entire team would go on strike. Thus, the boycott soon turned into an actual strike.

The Association hired scabs from all parts of the country and from Canada, but couldn’t prevent the blockage of most rail traffic. In fact, it was impossible to replace the more than 250,000 strikers who were struggling all over the country, from north to south, from the east to California. The Pullman strike was the first, true national strike in US history. A strike that, since the railway companies were much hated for their stinginess, gathered support and solidarity from broad strata of the population. The Brotherhoods sided with the owners and even organized the strike-breaking, but they were generally disavowed by the base and many sections went over to the A.R.U.

On July 2, the G.M.A. had to admit that railroads were completely blocked and the companies alone could not beat the struggling workers: «It is now up to the government to handle the problem». Two days later a cheerful statement declared: «As for the approach of the railroad companies to this struggle, they are out of it. The fight is now between the U.S. Government and the American Railway Union, and let them handle it».

Shortly after the strike began, the Post Office in Washington was informed that the mail was blocked in the West because of the boycott of Pullman cars. Of course, it could have been decreed that mail should travel on trains with no Pullman cars until the strike was over, but from the beginning the government was determined to render a decisive service to the railroad companies in their attempt to annihilate the new railroad union. This “miracle” in favour of the companies was due to the fact that Richard Olney, General Attorney of the United States, was the one entrusted to handle the crisis. Before joining the Cleveland cabinet, for 35 years he was connected with the companies and was still managing one. Moreover, he was a member of the G.M.A., and had substantial personal investments in the railroad industry as well. So much for conflict of interest!

Olney got to work determined. He appointed other trusted figures from the establishment to handle the police and judicial aspects of the dispute, all of whom were also on the companies’ payroll.

On the basis of judicial quibbles that would not stand up to the most benign of criticism, an injunction was issued. The latter prohibited any activity that could disrupt the free movement of trains and commodities between States, anti strike-breaking propaganda included. Those violating the injunction would be guilty of criminal conspiracy, which would result in considerable prison sentences. In essence, the right to strike was suspended as appeared evident to all. The Chicago Times had to admit that it was «a menace to liberty… a weapon at the disposal of capitalists… the purpose of the injunction was not so much to prevent any obstruction to the movement of trains as a pretext for Federal Army’s intervention».

The State of Capital

Immediately following the injunction, the A.R.U. executive met to decide what was to be done. On the one hand, it was clear that any attempt to disregard the injunction would result in a citation for contempt of court and an immediate conviction by the judge. Nor would the benefit of a trial by jury be granted. On the other hand, obeying would have represented the defeat of the strike and the destruction of the union, as well as unemployment for thousands of workers as the owners had vowed. The final decision was to go on with the struggle.

On July 2, Olney received from his emissaries requests for the troops to enforce the injunction. The next day, thanks to a direct order from President Cleveland, troops from Fort Sheridan were sent off to Chicago. They arrived on July 4, in time for Independence Day.

Cleveland and Olney weren’t concerned at all with the legal aspects of the decision to send the federal troops. Under the Constitution, the president has the power to send troops into a State to protect it from violence, but only at the request of the State legislature or the governor. However, Cleveland enforced Civil War rules that never were applied in peacetime. The Governor of Illinois, Altgeld, was not even informed of the decision, surely because they knew that, in his opinion, the situation did not require such drastic measures.

Mind you, Altgeld was ready to use the militia, which in fact he had already used days before to maintain order, but in many cases the militia was recalled because there was no need for it. As Altgeld protested against the White House’s decision, the responses were evasive while the newspapers unleashed a smear campaign against him, calling him an “anarchist”, “enemy of society”, “threat to the American Republic”.

Thus, on July 4, 12,000 federal soldiers entered Chicago, greeted by the boos of the population. Up to the troops’ arrival, the strike in Chicago had continued without the slightest incident. But despite the union calling for calm, in the next four days there were clashes and destruction. Railroad equipment, cars were destroyed and a large fire broke out. Although the anger of the strikers and the unemployed was well justified, it seems that the first acts of violence were triggered by layabouts – present in large numbers among the demonstrators – hired by the companies and police officials. That the workers had a small part in the clashes, according to numerous testimonies, does not serve as justification, but to remind us once again that the bourgeoisie is ready to do anything to defend its profits. Despite reports non being very alarming, the newspapers filled their front pages with hysterical headlines about an impending revolution, anarchists from Europe invading the U.S., relentless and indiscriminate destruction in order to terrify public opinion and justify any repressive measure. A minister of God went so far as saying, «Soldiers must use their rifles. They must shoot to kill». And that is what the soldiers did. 25 workers were killed, and 60 were seriously wounded. Dozens more were killed in six other States.

The intervention of federal troops nor the sabotage operated by the Brotherhood’s officials stopped the strike. As clashes came near to an end, on July 10, Debs and other A.R.U. officials were jailed for conspiracy to prevent interstate trade. They were released the following day and arrested again a week later, this time for contempt of court. The injunctions effectively turned any union activity that was related to the strike into an act of insurrection, justifying arrests, imprisonment, use of force and even the use of firearms on unarmed crowds. In the meantime, the union headquarters were ravaged by the police and the workers found themselves alone, with no information besides the false one spread by the regime’s press.

Facing the injunctions, a weapon wielded with ease by the State, Debs understood that the match was lost unless the entire working class intervened in support.

In fact, at the last moment it seemed that the Chicago workers were giving the strike a last push, one last aid. They enthusiastically supported the strike. On June 30, the Trades and Labour Assembly, a civic trade union association – a sort of Chamber of Labour – offered the strike the strength of its 150,000 members but at the time Debs considered the proposal too drastic. As the conflict escalated, the pressure for a general strike throughout the country continued to stack. However, time was lost and troops and judges were given the time to consolidate their positions. Nevertheless, 25,000 non‑railroad workers from Chicago went on strike.

At the request of the Chicago unions, the head of the American Federation of Labour, Samuel Gompers, arrived in the city for a conference with other national union leaders. A committee of Chicago cigar workers asserted the necessity of a nationwide general strike, since the A.R.U. struggle regarded the welfare of all workers.

Between one arrest and another, Debs participated in the conference, but his attitude was not clear. What seems to have been his position was to finally ask for a solidarity general strike, but only if the companies refused to rehire the strikers in exchange for the end of the boycott. His was a renunciatory choice, that came late in any case. It was a choice made from a position of extreme weakness. At this point, it was easy for Gompers and the other union leaders to reject this action in a situation of a virtually defeated strike. Instead, they issued a statement intimating immediate and unconditional return to work. This attitude was more a confirmation of AFL’s nature than a betrayal, as the AFL had more interest in its business side than in the true defence of the class. An attitude that endeared the companies and the owners in general, and that was favoured by the entry of the Brotherhoods into the AFL (objective that Gompers pursued for years). At the same time, it got rid of a union that, because of its industrial nature and the success it had achieved, never sat well with the A.F.L, as Gompers himself admitted years later.

The strike ended on July 18, the day after the A.R.U. leadership was ultimately jailed. The union never recovered from its disastrous defeat. With its leaders in jail and its members completely demoralized, unemployed and blacklisted, it quickly disintegrated. From its remains the Social Democratic Party was later formed, precursor of the Socialist Party of the United States.

Class struggle and “prudential unions”

The least that can be said of the Pullman strike, one that had a reach never seen before, is that it made the mass of American workers see with their own eyes, in all of its evidence, the role of the government as one of the protectors of the interests of the capitalist class. Moreover, it became clear that monopolies could be defeated only by the utmost unity and organization on the union level. A single union, no matter how strong, could not defeat the joined forces of owners, State, and union opportunism.

Thus, the essence of trade unionism and of AFL itself can be summed in a few precepts: a) trade union action must never seriously challenge big companies and government, and thus avoid direct confrontations with both b) one must ally oneself with capitalists and politicians that believe in the politics of “live and let live” towards trade unions; c) one must reach agreements with the owners on terms that will keep trade unions alive, even if that means further crushing the living conditions of the semi‑skilled and unskilled workers.

But what happened in Pullman and in the States in which the strike had spread had a significance that transcended mere union tactics. Events showed a substantial difference between the American situation and what was happening in Europe. French, German and English workers, to name those in the most industrialized countries with a tradition of proletarian organization, lived in countries with strong governments accustomed to administer central power. Apart from revolutionary moments, not a few in fact, those workers very rarely felt State repression in the way American workers were subjected to. Open repression was almost never employed. Even in Bismarkian Germany, the killing of workers or unionists was a rare phenomenon. In England, the Peterloo massacre of 1819 was still looked at as a national calamity.

On the other hand, the US that enjoyed limited governmental intrusion on all levels, found itself to be singularly intolerant of organized labour movement. The US ownership was one that believed in social Darwinism, with the jealousy of power that distinguishes the parvenu. An ownership that amassed immense fortunes with a rapidity unprecedented in history, constituting a class insecure like it was never seen before. A class that was as ready as ever to turn to State force in its crises with the organized labour movement which it despised. And the government force, whether local, State or federal, never failed to make its decisive contribution. Any struggle, whether a mass struggle or an industrial struggle, was subjected to cause injunctions and violence against the workers, whose struggle was not one to change society but only for better wages, working hours, living conditions and union rights. This, in turn, determined methods of struggle that required a willingness to use as much violence in return. So much so that both before and after Pullman, the union struggle required adequate supplies of food and savings, but also weapons and ammunition so that a minimum chance of success was ensured. We had such examples in disputes we have reviewed and we shall see more of it in the course of the bloody history of the labour movement in the United States.

With the Pullman strike, the first, real revolutionary situation was created, with the working class ready to struggle to the extreme because it was not willing to suffer any longer. A working class that was ready to unify the struggle across the immense country that is the United States of America. However, never before was so tangible the importance of the presence of a conscious class leadership. One ready to take the battle to a higher level, the political one. In the best case scenario, the unions, like the A.R.U., were good at their job but were afraid to go all the way and support the healthy spontaneity of the proletariat’s struggle. In the worst case scenario, they were part of the opposing front. They were ready to boycott the struggle as soon as it showed some weakness, or even organize strikebreaking and act as informers for the owners.

14 – The American Federation of Labour takes shape

The AFL and the class

In the years at the turn of the century, miners distinguished themselves as one of the most combative sectors of the working class in the United States of America. We have spoken of the violent clashes that inevitably accompanied any trade union struggle in the sector, for the brutality and ruthlessness of the mine owners. It was therefore triumphant, to say the least, the news coverage of the victory of the United Mine Workers in the strike of 1897 that appeared in the working class press; it was the first that the union obtained as a national organization. Over 200,000 mine workers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had gone on strike on July 4, 1897, crippling 70 percent of the country’s coal production. For 12 weeks the miners resisted without deflecting, and on September 4 the struggle ended with a resounding victory for the miners; on January 18, 1898 in Chicago, a contract was signed with the bosses. A contract that was the first national agreement that an important sector settled with its employees. A fact that surpassed in importance the immediate result of the struggle, which was also not of little importance: there would have been an increase of 33% in wages compared to those of 1893, and the eight‑hour working day was definitely recognized.

The American Federationist of October 1897 wrote, «The victory of the miners is an encouragement for all workers». In fact, the U.M.W. went from 8,000 members before the struggle to 117,000 in 1900.

But the managers of AFL did not show great enthusiasm. And one can understand why. The leaders of the Federation were concerned that the victorious struggle of the miners would show that the miners’ union represented industrial trade unionism, a trade unionism that united specialized and non‑specialized workers of all faiths, colours and nationalities. It was not the trade unionism that characterized AFL. On the contrary, just at that time AFL was moving more and more in the direction of an opposite trade unionism, which aimed at organizing mainly specialized workers. This built its organization on the trade rather than on the productive sector, and which was indifferent, if not hostile, towards unskilled or semi‑skilled workers, black workers, women, and immigrants.

For the leaders of the AFL, the history of the workers’ movement during and immediately after the crisis of 1893 had shown conclusively that an efficient trade union federation should be founded on a basis of trade unions. This would unite in the first place the most specialized workers, the most decisive of the unionised, who would remain in the organization both during times of full employment and during the depressions. The idea that trade unionism could be obsolete for them was unacceptable. On the contrary, the experience of recent years, according to them, showed that it was unionism supported by the Knights of Labour and the American Railway Union that was not good enough; a type of unionism based on the concept of uniting all workers in a productive sector in a single union, without discrimination on specialization, race, creed, colour, gender or nationality, had proved inadequate to overcome the economic crisis. Trade unionism, on the other hand, according to this interpretation, had proved to be able to survive crises and to recover when they ended.

In fact, the AFL grew in those years, reaching almost 800,000 members in 1901, but there were several million excluded workers, in particular: black people, immigrants, women, those who with a slang term were called underdogs, the weak, the defeated.

The AFL and the “underdog”

In those years, the management of the AFL constantly received protests about the discrimination against black people. To which Gompers invariably replied that it was not true, and that the trade unions that excluded black workers did not even have the right to belong to the Federation, all topped off by blusters made at rallies. But the declarations of principle meant nothing if in practice, as it happened, there was discrimination, and the AFL did nothing to prevent it, but if anything, it favoured it.

In its early years, the Federation demanded from unions who wanted to join that they remove any reference to skin colour from their regulations. But in the following years, while the rule persisted formally, the same AFL advised the new members to remove from the statute the reference to the exclusion of Black workers, but then to introduce it in the admission procedures, so that in fact black people could not be admitted. Later on, unions that mentioned the restrictive rule in the statute began to be accepted. This reached a point where some unions that had removed it, even if formally only, felt authorized to reintroduce it (apertis verbis).

On the other hand, the absence of an explicit exclusion certainly did not mean acceptance of black people. There were a thousand ways to keep them away: registration fees were too high, special licenses were required, black workers were forbidden to do their apprenticeship, etc. Moreover, since most black workers were not specialized, they were de jure excluded from trade unions. As a result, at the beginning of the century only about 40,000 black people were members of unions affiliated with AFL, half of whom belonged to United Mine Workers. In addition, most of the black workers were organized separately, in colour sections, or, as they used to say with another slang term, in Jim Crow sections; which in turn were discriminated against within the union because they were denied representation in the central levels.

For Gompers there was nothing wrong in all this, as it was only a matter of recognition of an existing social situation: while «the AFL does not intend to deny the Negroes the right to organize themselves, nor does it claim that the existing social barriers can be forgotten». The fault of the scarce presence of black people in the unions affiliated to the AFL «is mainly the fault of the Negroes themselves, because too often they have let the bosses manoeuvrer them against their own interests and against those of the white workers». While this hypocritical statement highlighted the real attitude of the AFL towards black people, it was also a false statement: the alleged scabbing of black workers, flaunted at every push, was based on the fact that the bosses always tried to use, importing it from afar, black labour whenever a struggle put them in crisis; but every time, when black workers were informed that there was a strike, the vast majority either went home or joined the workers in struggle.

The exclusion of black workers from trade unions had as a logical adjunct also a discriminatory attitude on the part of the employers, favoured by the trade unions themselves. In fact, in the ’90s the black workers who possessed some specialization gradually decreased due to the combined action of masters and unions (to the point that white workers were interested in expelling them from the specialized trades to take their place), and more and more they found themselves in non‑specialized activities in the railways, construction, and ships.

As a consequence, in the years at the turn of the century black workers were in the lowest positions in the various sectors of production. No matter in which sector, they received lower wages than whites for the same work; but usually it was not the same job, they were given the toughest, unhealthiest and dirtiest jobs. Even when they were in the unions they received little protection, to the point that many unions tolerated that black workers could work longer and for lower wages.

However, the racist attitude was more widespread among the management of trade unions and the AFL than among workers. In fact, even in the racist South, they soon realized that the policy of separation was mainly in the interests of the bosses. They benefit to have the class separated so as to keep wages low, thanks to the competition that would inevitably develop between the different opposing components. A significant example was in Galveston, Texas, in 1898, when 2300 black dockworkers went on strike for a wage increase; their place was offered to white workers, who refused «at any price… We support the Negroes in their demands, and wish them success». A success there was not. After four weeks of struggle the strike was stopped by the intervention of the militia, killings and arrests: routine matters.

Other underdogs

Not very different was the attitude of the management of AFL and most trade unions towards workers born abroad during the 90s. It was an attitude of racism, contempt and declared hostility, as well as a reactionary policy aimed at hindering the entry of immigrants into the country and trade unions. But even if the AFL had wanted to be more willing to organize these workers, this would have been made very difficult if not impossible by the fact that the vast majority of them were unskilled or semi‑skilled. On the other hand, the problem did not arise, because the AFL managers were certainly not interested in organizing the large numbers of workers who arrived continuously in those years from all over the world. For Gompers (himself born abroad) it was a problem of “racial purity”. In addition to the basic fact of the difficulty of organizing foreigners, in the decade 1890‑1900 the country of origin of the immigrants had changed: from the «willing and intelligent of northern and western Europe» they had moved to the hordes of «servile and degraded southern and eastern Europe, marked by crime, disease, poverty, filth, and slave‑like attitude to work for almost nothing and live on even less». These derelicts included Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Romanians, etc. And they often carried with them an even more terrible characteristic: many of them, instead of being good citizens who loved democracy, were anarchists or socialists. The AFL could do without them.

This explains the campaign conducted by the Federation to reduce or eliminate immigration from those cursed countries. For example, subjecting them to a literacy test, even if in their own language. An initiative of the leaders who, to tell the truth, met a strong opposition within the Federation itself, so that Gompers had to withdraw it.

But, despite the fact that the leadership of the Federation cooperated in its crusade against immigrants with reactionary organizations, the ruffians of the South, the racist nativists, and other such initiatives, its effect on the influx of immigrants was very little. Not least because the big business, whose economy was growing at a higher rate than that of all industrialized countries, was not at all sorry for the arrival of cheap labour. However, this attitude was able to make life difficult for them. It kept them away from the unions with a thousand subterfuges, not least the raising of registration fees, up to $100, a very high figure for a newly arrived and poorly paid labourer.

The situation of women in the union was not very different from that of black people and immigrants. The trade unions kept them at a distance, even though very few prohibited their membership in their statutes. However, with expedients similar to those adopted with black people and immigrants, they actually made their membership impossible or almost impossible. If they accepted them, they did so only for jobs at the lowest levels, effectively preventing them from any kind of professional ascent. And the AFL, in the name of an unsympathetic non‑interference in the affairs of individual trade unions, did little or nothing to change their attitude. The women, they said, remained little in the world of work, as soon as possible they got married, had children and left work; then they stayed in the factory to support themselves until marriage. Why should the union spend money and energy to organize them? This was an old excuse, which may have had some foundation half a century before, but which was no longer valid. Large numbers of women had entered the world of work in the last decade of the century, and most of them lived off their work, often keeping others dependent on them. But thanks to the obstructionism of trade unions they were paid very badly, both because they did badly paid jobs and because they received lower wages than their male comrades for the same work.

If the situation was hard for white women, it was even harder for black women, who associated the two types of handicaps: if white women received 25 to 50% less for the same job as a man, black female workers could be paid between a third and a half less than white women; often they did not even know how much the pay was, they were simply used to accept any condition.

As Gompers said on one occasion « AFL maintains as one of its cardinal principles of the trade union movement that workers must organize, unite and federate, regardless of faith, colour, gender, nationality or political opinion». These beautiful proposals were reiterated in all the conventions of the Federation. Only that they had nothing to do with reality. Occupied almost exclusively in non‑specialized or semi‑specialized activities, black people, foreigners and women were not interesting for the organizations that formed the backbone of the AFL. In fact, their membership was usually hindered, as we have seen, in a thousand ways.

In the years following 1895, the fundamental characteristics of the American Federation of Labour were traced, and remained virtually unchanged until the 1930s. During these years the main objective of the AFL was the consolidation of an “aristocracy of labour”. In spite of the periodical proclamation of the most sacred principles of solidarity, AFL aimed to organize above all the specialized workers, giving up pertinaciously to organize the non‑specialized. In fact, it worked to prevent the organization of the overwhelming majority of the working class.

Why was this attitude taken, when after the early formative years the trend had been quite different? Surely an important push came from the decline of the Knights of Labour. Until that moment Gompers had to reckon with an organization that, with all its faults, had the merit of actually welcoming all the proletarians, without making any distinction. Therefore, he had to show that his AFL was no less in terms of solidarity. But after the fall of the K.L. there was no choice but unions affiliated to the Federation, so it was enough to keep the commitment in words, while nothing prevented him from transgressing it in deeds.

On a somewhat broader level, and seen from a distance, the AFL policy was a fundamental component of a program of class collaboration with monopoly capital, in which safety and well‑being for specialized workers was obtained at the expense of the unskilled and unorganized. We will see how its leaders will go hand in hand with the trusts. Indeed they will become the most strenuous defenders of them, so that their trade unions will obtain welfare zones in the backrooms of the mega monopolies. In exchange, they agreed to do absolutely nothing to organize the overwhelming majority of workers that the monopolies themselves exploited, and above all immigrants, black people and women.

We will see how this aristocracy will operate in North America against class combativeness, receiving the contempt of all Marxists, starting with Marx and Engels who had already described it as a consequence of the exploitation of other peoples by the metropolitan capital, which Lenin would later call imperialism. And it is Lenin himself, in an introduction to Imperialism in 1920, who condemned the phenomenon with words that cannot be misunderstood: «This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the “Versailles” against the “Communards”». Elsewhere (Left Wing Communism), the working class aristocracy is branded as «corporatist, petty, selfish, sordid, interested, petit-bourgeois, of imperialist mentality, enslaved and corrupted by imperialism».

15 – Capital and Labour at the Dawn of the New Century

The New Century and the “Age of Good Feeling”

American capitalism enters the new century in the grip of euphoria. The crisis of the ’90s is a memory and now the word to use to describe the present is “prosperity”.

Frederick W. Taylor has already written the first in a series of books and articles that illustrate his doctrine of “scientific management” of production: simple and repetitive operations, requiring less training, and therefore less specialization, measuring operations with the chronometer, linking the worker’s salary to the performance in relation to the “scientifically” established time; in this way the profit can increase to the maximum possible levels.

Despite the depression, the United States had emerged as the first industrial power in the 1890s. Already in 1890, they were the first producers of iron and steel; in 1899 they became so for coal. At the same time, the export of capital also grew. Small companies were being wiped out by ever larger and fewer corporations.

The United States was also a world power militarily, and in the last years of the century an empire had been built, thanks to the war with Spain, in Central America and the Pacific, as well as controlling politically and economically many Latin American countries.

For the working class, however, there was not much reason to be happy. The crisis of the ’90s had had a very hard impact on the living conditions of the proletariat, and there were not many fruits of the “unprecedented prosperity” they could enjoy. In 1900 wages were still 10% lower than before the crisis of ’93; nevertheless, this was an average, so while some more specialized trades had recovered their losses, wages were very low for the large working mass; of course for those who worked: six and a half million workers did not work a whole year, and two million of them for less than six months. This is a fact that makes the drama of the working-class condition in the golden age of American capitalism. The official statistics of almost a century later that give 1.4 million unemployed for 1900, or 5% of the labour force of 27 and a half million, as usual, do not make the reality of the working class situation, which is better described by the previous data from the 1901 work of a government commission. So, as we often demonstrate in our work on the history of the working-class movement, the bourgeoisie in retrospect tries in every way to describe the story that its mode of production has shaped as a story with few jolts and a lot, a lot of happiness for everyone.

The figure is then made even more dramatic, if such a thing is possible, by the trend in the cost of living, which in the same period had increased by at least 10% for food, and even more for rent and coal (the figure, from a 1904 study, reports 16% for food between 1896 and 1903, and for the same period 40% for coal and kerosene, and 20% for rent). In 1902, while the World Almanac listed 4000 millionaires in the USA, in the same country, out of 80 million inhabitants, 10% lived in poverty, inadequately fed and clothed, and in miserable homes. And, as far as the working class is concerned, the lowest in the ranking were the miners: it is not surprising that in the following years this will be the most combative category.

The picture is completed by terrible work shifts: the bourgeoisie had recovered in the decade the concessions on the 8‑hour day: the typical working day was 10 hours, but it was often much longer, for up to 7 days a week, as in the steel industry, where free Sundays were alternated with weekends with a tremendous 24‑hour shift “to recover”. The same situation of regression in the working-class condition was evident with respect to child labour and women.

Another aspect that is not secondary concerns working conditions: no protection from risks, and therefore very high mortality in industrial activities, railways, mines, in addition to that, less documented, due to unhealthy working environments. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, where 500 Italian and Jewish girls who had recently immigrated worked, killed 145 of them because of the lack of escape routes, and of any fire precautions.

It comes as no surprise, then, if in the same years the workers’ movement, measured on the participation in the unions, showed a vigorous recovery: from less than half a million members in 1897, the unions in 1904 counted more than two million; and of course the lion’s share belonged to the AFL, which gathered in its unions 80% of the members. The number of strikes also increased more than twice as much during the period, strikes that in the majority of cases were successful.

During the ’90s, and especially towards the end of the decade, the willingness to reach collective agreements with trade unions on key issues such as wages and hours spread in certain sectors of industry. The most important of these agreements was between the owners of the mines and the UMW. Part of this willingness on the part of the employers was due to the desire to avoid conflicts during the Spanish-American War (1898‑1900), a period in which the lucrative State orders were not to be jeopardized. But even after the war the capitalists hesitated to create conditions that could endanger the river of profits that entered their pockets, and collective agreements became very frequent.

But there was another reason for this attitude of the bosses. It was the period of great development of monopolistic capital; in 1898 alone the capitalization of industrial concentrations doubled compared to the previous year. Monopolies in formation needed to control production and prices, and in this they suffered from competition from entrepreneurs not reached by the monopoly; it was therefore vital that these companies joined the monopoly, and, if this was not possible, they had to be crushed and taken out of the way. Here came into play the union, which could be the instrument to achieve the result. With this idea in mind, towards the end of the century the owners began to recognize the closed shop: on the basis of a contract between an employers’ association (a very representative case was that of construction) and the union, the former undertook to hire only union members (or to submit their choice to the union); in exchange the union guaranteed that none of its members would work for companies outside the employers’ association. Associating this control of the workforce with an increasing control of raw materials, the employers’ associations managed to put companies that did not want to submit to the monopoly into bankruptcy. The unions went so far in some cases as to inducing to strike the workers of those companies. The trade unions, generally the ones belonging to the AFL, thus became an instrument in the hands of the capitalists, who, by controlling the market, managed to put together enormous profits. In exchange for these services, the capitalists gave, temporarily, to the trade unions, crumbs of the rich profits.

The trade unions considered the concentration in monopolies to be positive: in this way it would have been easier to make collective agreements, while many small entrepreneurs would have been forced to compete to the bone primarily through the reduction of wages. But, apart from the fact that the advantages for the workers were reserved almost exclusively to those who were already well‑positioned in production, i.e., skilled workers, nobody mentioned the continuous increase in the cost of living, which almost cancelled wage increases. Nor was it remembered that, in many already-monopolistic mass-production industries, this idyll did not exist; not to mention the fact that, in parallel to the closed shop, there was still a great deal of real hostility towards the union, with the consequences that we have seen of brutality, lockouts, mass layoffs, blacklists, etc.

Blissful in their rosy vision of the business world, the AFL leaders did not see, or did not want to see, the dark side of the working-class condition, which concerned not only the lower strata of the class. They spoke of the “Age of Good Feeling” between capital and work, and they envisaged only idyllic relationships between two components that materialistically can only be violently opposed.

They would soon change their minds. The concessions to the unions were only temporary. A monopoly, once consolidated, no longer needs the union to bring down competition. On the contrary, it soon becomes ruthless in crushing unions, just as it had been for capitalists out of line. The so‑called peaceful relations between employers’ associations and trade unions could only end sooner or later; they would be replaced by the clash over the open shop.

The Open Shop

Even if some sectors of the bourgeoisie showed interested openings towards the trade union movement, the majority of the employers did not forget that their most important goal in that historical phase was destroying the trade union movement, either physically or by making it harmless. The resumption of the offensive was favoured by the crisis of 1893, and eventually the growth of the union was only a further incentive to mobilize for the crusade against unionism. When in 1902 U.S. Steel destroyed what was left of Amalgamated Iron Workers, a union whose previous defeat in the Homestead strike we have already described, employers’ associations began to flourish everywhere. The watchword was the open shop, which was in theory the denial of the closed shop: employees should not be forced to join trade unions, which therefore should not have any power in the company; this was in accordance with the much flaunted American myth of individual freedom, for which both workers and bosses count for one; a rule that, besides being in itself unfair, was never respected in the first place by the bosses, who, as in this case, did not hesitate to agree to fight the workers. But the real and not very hidden purpose of these associations was to ban the unions from the factories altogether, and to achieve this goal they only hired workers who were not union members and who committed themselves not to join unions, expelling those who didn’t; not to mention the other persecutory measures of which we have had plenty of examples in the course of this narrative.

The image of the worker victim of oppression was contrasted with that of the aggressor and oppressor: it was the employer who suffered from tyranny and oppression; he was the victim of the despotic power of the unions which, taking advantage of the blind obedience of their members, wanted to abolish the “natural” right to freedom of enterprise. By leveraging American individualism, this hammering propaganda succeeded in shifting public opinion support from the worker to the boss. But despite the successes at the local level, the open shop movement had no organization and leadership at the national level.

Soon the employers’ associations were joined by the Citizens’ Alliances, open to anyone who was not part of a trade union, a kind of duplication in reality, open to all citizens.

Finally, the need to centrally coordinate the activities of these bodies led the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which had been created with technical tasks, to take on this responsibility; this took a much more political stance, warning that «if Gomperism [sic!], the laws for the 8 hours, the boycotts, etc.…are not halted, the United States will have to face a reign of terror, which will make the French Revolution look like a tea room».

Other associations were created, under various names, but all with the same objectives. During the first decade of the century they were very active in boycotting trade unions and their activities, giving economic support to companies lined up for the open shop, finding scabs, boycotting newspapers that did not sympathize with them, bribing trade unionists, managing blacklists, paying infiltrated spies, Forcing workers to sign “yellow dog” contracts, making propaganda by painting trade unionists as vermin and corrupt, and trade unionism as “un‑American”, using police, militia and private agencies to break strikes, using the courts to weaken unions, and organizing powerful lobbies against labour law. In short, the usual soup, but this time generalized and used with a wealth of means. A single agency of private agents had 35,000 agents available to take action in a very short time, spies with professional skills suitable to be infiltrated; later it became known that many trade unionists, even senior executives of AFL, were on the NAM payroll.

Not all capitalists were in agreement: some believed that it was worthwhile to conquer social peace, and thus make the workers forget the union, by granting pleasant working environments, incentives, or even company shares; others had developed “company unionism”, founding company unions that did everything but organize workers’ struggles. But the pressure to join the anti‑worker associations was strong, to the extent of intimidation.

Initially the unions gave little credit to these initiatives, but towards the end of 1903 it became clear that the campaign for the open shop was producing very harmful effects for the workers’ movement. The trade unions tried to defend themselves, especially through their press, but it only reached a minority of the population, which, by the way, was the one that needed least convincing. In fact, the campaign for the open shop was successful, not by destroying the unions, which was impossible, but by stopping their growth, which had been impetuous until 1904. It increased the number of strikes defeated; in the trust-abiding companies, the union, already weak, disappeared almost completely, with the exception of the railroads; collective bargaining on a large scale decreased substantially.

The blame for all this, however, was not only for the open shop campaign. Other forces had been at work, inside and outside the workers’ movement, to deprive the trade unions of the economic and militant force necessary to defend the class from the offensive.

The National Civic Federation

One of these, and perhaps the most important at the time, was the National Civic Federation, whose birth and purpose we have written about before. We should, however, return to the subject because the NCF was an important presence in the first decade of the century, and also because it indirectly provides us with a measure of the degree of corruption and domestication to which union leaders had already arrived.

“Our experience has convinced us – said a Federation spokesman in 1903 – that the best way to control workers’ organizations is to guide them, not to oppose them. We are also convinced that conservative elements of all unions can exercise this control if they are guided and assisted in the most appropriate way”. Unions that could not only keep workers within reasonable limits about demands and actions of struggle, but that would also constitute a barrier against the various forms of radicalism. In short, an open attempt to control the movement by bringing the leaders to participate in a program of class collaboration, thus taking away from the class vigour, militant spirit, combativeness, political perspectives.

There were certainly conflicts between workers and bosses; but they were avoidable conflicts, because in America there were no classes (for them), and therefore it was not obvious that there was class struggle like in Europe. In the United States there were only “misunderstandings” between bosses and workers. The purpose of the NCF was precisely to avoid the occurrence of these “misunderstandings”, with meetings, conferences, banquets.

Even without seeing the Federation at work, it would have been enough to examine its composition to understand how it would work, and for whom. Of the three main components, trade unions, entrepreneurs and the public (today we would say “civil society”), we saw that they had mainly enlisted the most right wing union leaders who had already shown a good attitude to boycott strikes that they did not like. The entrepreneurs were represented by lawyers and big business officials, all with well‑known anti‑union background, and in any case the vast majority of them representing the biggest trusts (steel, oil, railways, etc.), and certainly not small companies. However, the defenders of the Federation attributed its alleged impartiality to the third component. But on closer examination here too were executives or former executives of companies, bankers, trust lawyers, even a former US president, Grover Cleveland, who had sent troops to break the Pullman strike, and bishops and university professors who were also the favourites of the open shop movement for the positions they had taken previously. In fact, even if the trade union component had been less corrupt and willing to make the capitalists happy, the NCF could only be completely controlled by the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie enlightened only by its desire to nullify combativeness by the working class, and to nip any revolutionary ambitions in the bud. Nothing substantial separated the NCF from the defenders of the open shop, if not empty declarations and more devious methods to control the working class. The role of the NCF became clear from the very beginning, on the occasion of the US Steel strike.

The main union was the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers, a trade union that included only a minority of the 148,000 employees of U.S. Steel, a huge newly formed trust. The policy of the trust was to exclude the union from new plants where it was not yet present, and to tolerate it in older plants, under certain conditions. It was clear to the union that its absence from a number of plants could lead to its general decline.

Negotiations for the new contract in some U.S. Steel plants began in the spring of 1901. The union, through President Shaffer, asked that the agreed wage scale be applied to all the factories of the trust together with the official recognition of the Unions. The other party accepted the proposal only for those factories where the union was already present.

The strike began in two factories and then extended to 62,000 workers by August. Shaffer relied on the support of other trade unions, particularly miners and railroad workers, for whom it was obvious that the trust of J.P. Morgan, owner of U.S. Steel, would deal with them after the steelmakers. Less obvious was the support of Gompers.

Shaffer was a member of an NCF Committee, but he had been chosen reluctantly; NCF Director Easley could not stand him, in agreement with Gompers, who was irritated by the criticism that the Amalgamated leader had addressed to the AFL leadership, especially in defence of industrial unionism, which, as we have seen, Gompers disliked. The leaders of the NCF did not like the fact that Shaffer counted on the support of other unions, including the solidarity strike, obviously held in dislike for the unpredictable consequences it could unleash. So in July, President Hanna wrote to John Mitchell, then president of the United Mine Workers Association, as well as Vice President of the AFL and member of the NCF, asking him to “work” to block the movement, adding that “the task of the responsible union leaders” was to resolve the conflict before Shaffer took “desperate measure”.

There were meetings attended by Morgan himself, who promised, shamelessly lying as was later proved, that even if it was not possible immediately, within two years agreements could be signed for all plants. Shaffer was persuaded by the NCF shysters to trust Morgan, but this was not the case for the Amalgamated executive committee, because the proposal effectively excluded the union from most of the steel factories and guaranteed better conditions only to a minority of skilled workers.

At that point, U.S. Steel resorted to scabs. The union appealed to Gompers to convene a meeting of the representatives of all unions to call solidarity strikes in other categories related to the activities of the steel industry, in particular railroad workers and miners. But Gompers refused, saying that it would be “a sign of weakness”. In reality, the subtle corruption resulting from the involvement of high‑ranking trade unionists in the NCF was beginning to bear fruit.

The steelworkers immediately understood that nothing good would come from that side. On the contrary, the members of the NCF Conciliation Committee went to great lengths to convince the union leaders that the solidarity strike requested by Shaffer was madness; and they succeeded, with the exception of the miners, despite Mitchell’s opposing pressure. The miners were for solidarity, but Mitchell managed to prevent any action.

So alone, without a penny paid into the resistance fund by the AFL, and weakened by the ancient resentment of the unskilled workers towards the trade union, the steelworkers had to resign themselves to the defeat, definitive this time after that of ten years before. The NCF had clearly shown what was the task it could perform in an anti‑worker’s key, and what was the use of the money that the capitalists had invested in it.

The result for steelworkers? A study by a State commission showed that, in 1910, a third of the 153,000 blast-furnace and rolling‑mill workers worked seven days a week, and a fifth of them had a working time of 84 hours and more per week, 12 hours a day including Sunday. Working conditions were below the average American industrial standard, and wages were barely enough to support an average family.

The NCF at work

The effects of the crawling corruption exerted by the NCF was also evident during the strike of the anthracite miners in Telluride, in eastern Pennsylvania, who lived and worked in terrible conditions. We will not go into detail here about a strike that involved nearly 150,000 workers, and lasted from May 15 to October 23, 1902. In short, the miners put in place exemplary combativeness and solidarity, resisting all the instruments we know of put in place by the bosses. Mitchell, the president of the UMW trade union and an important member of the NCF, did everything he could to prevent the extension of the strike, and to make them accept a final agreement that, if it granted important improvements to the miners, was enormously below the goals that the strength they had shown and the sacrifices they had endured could conquer. In reality, it was an only provisional agreement, which, among other things, did not include the recognition of the union and provided for the open shop regime.

If some workers were dazzled and flattered by the fact that their representatives sat at the same table as the bosses, that they dined together, well dressed and revered, for the majority, this closeness was not at all welcome. The opposition within the Unions, among many executives, and also in the working-class press was always strong, and manifested at all conferences and assemblies.

1 – If, as the defenders of the NCF claimed, there was an identity of interests between capital and labour, why did they continue to fight each other, and by such notorious means?

2 – Within the Federation there was a lot of emphasis and talk about the responsibility of big business to recognize trade unionism. In short, the bosses, thanks to the intercession of the NCF, had to repent. This shifted the commitment of the trade union leaders, and therefore of the struggles, at least to the point in which the leaders could influence, from direct struggle to endless negotiation.

3 – Collaborating in the same organization with the most ferocious bourgeoisie and company managers, who had fought the workers with all means, the union piecards allowed them to marshal themselves as philanthropists, unjustly misjudged. Instead of fighting them, they found good reasons to excuse or even defend their anti‑union activities, often attributing responsibility for clashes to workers who would listen to radical elements that would deceive them. In short, the base, who knew those characters and their minions well, was difficult to be convinced to accept this version, and accused the managers in the NCF of not representing them.

4 – The Federation said it wanted to show the public opinion a more enlightened and realistic image of the demands of the unions, but it was careful not to tell the almost constant refusals of the bosses to sit at the negotiating table with the representatives of the organized workers.

5 – The NCF worked to settle disputes quickly, but this did not mean that the closures were favourable to the workers, on the contrary, usually the workers obtained almost nothing, and everything was resolved in heavy pressure on the piecards who were part of the Federation to use all their influence to stop the strikers. And then invite them to dinner.

It is therefore clear that the aim of the Civic Federation, not even so much hidden, was to act as a long arm of the large corporations to keep the discontent of the working class at bay, attracting on its side with various forms of corruption, material, cultural, psychological, the most right‑wing leaders of the class, a process that would become increasingly institutionalized in the following years. All this while the initiative was cloaked in an image of generosity, philanthropy, good and sincere intentions, and instead tried to instil in the class the poison of inter-class collaboration and disorganization.

The spreading discontent in the movement in those years, initially controlled by the AFL piecards, exploded in 1904, when a New York subway strike was fought with all the most evil means by the transport company, whose manager was a certain Belmont, who at the same time held the position of President of the NCF. The good thing is that the bonzes of the NCF lovingly supported his leadership for the next three years of his mandate, despite the violent protests of the rank and file.

The fight against the NCF within the AFL continued in the following years, but by now the Federation’s task had been accomplished, in the lasting yoke of the union leaders to the interests of the big corporations.

“Business Unions”

In February 1901 an interesting article appeared in an Atlantic City trade union magazine on “Business in the Management of the Union”. It read: «Unions are more and more being based on business principles, and are more and more being managed by business-minded leaders who operate according to business methods. The more complete the mastery of these principles, the greater the success attained». A few years later, something similar appeared on the organ of the bricklayers’ union: «In practically every trade today we have one strong organization of labour, with large funds, and more than that, able businessmen and more and more conservative field general at the helm, with the unions conducted in a business‑like and conservative manner».

The original reason for the presence of managers with management skills was to enable unions to function effectively and efficiently as compact, well‑financed and organized instruments in the daily struggles of the working class against the enemy of all time. And indeed, an efficient trade union organization became increasingly vital for the survival of trade unions in the United States, especially in the years after 1873. The main innovations of “managerial” trade unionism were: centralized control of the organization, especially during strikes; subsidies for illness, unemployment and death; high membership and annual fees. From the very beginning, there were often managers who were so obsessed with the accumulation of reserves as an end in itself that they became the sole objective of the union; they were managers who consequently became reluctant to allow struggles, which would affect the reserves, accumulated with great care. But as long as the main purpose of this trade unionism remained the creation and maintenance of organizations capable of successfully fighting for the improvement of members’ wages, hours and working conditions, prudent management of funds was inevitable and even necessary.

Unfortunately, this business unionism, or managerial unionism, which at the turn of the century increasingly permeated and guided many unions, began to mean the application of the ethics of the businessman to the workers’ movement – an ethics that justified the use of position and influence for the enrichment of union leadership, as well as increasing profits for the bosses. The overwhelming majority of union organizers were willingly faced loss of job, and incurred discrimination and other risks, even serious ones, in order to organize their fellow workers for the struggles. The only reward they could aspire to was success in terms of follow‑up and class dedication as a result of their activity. A generous spirit that never left the class, on both sides of the Atlantic.

But another spirit was emerging within the class, represented by the kind of union leader who saw the development of the workers’ movement as a lush business through which to get rich, and in any case as an end in itself.

We have seen how during the ’80s and ’90s of the 19th century the unions had to sustain a very hard and systematic attack by the bourgeoisie. Spies infiltrated and wrecked entire sections; trade unionists ended up on blacklists and could no longer find work. Those who presented themselves to the boss to represent the category for trade union demands were very often thrown out of work and put on the blacklist. In the face of this employers’ offensive, the AFL trade unions considered it necessary to delegate the authority to organize and represent workers to professional organizers, who did not have to depend on the company to survive. They were called “walking delegates”, who were organizers and inspectors, salaried by the union, who were sent where and when there was an urgent need to organize the workers. By carrying out this activity full‑time they usually had an authority that overshadowed that of the local delegates elected from the base among their fellow workers.

Soon, the capitalists realized that this new type of union organizer was no longer subject to intimidation and persecution; they resolved to adopt the other more logical alternative tactic: buy him out, or at least try to do so. They didn’t always succeed: many union organizers were dedicated and honest, often had spent years working in the sector, which they knew well, and perhaps they had carried out that activity for free as workers elected by department committees.

But there were also those who, like the managers described above, saw that activity as a simple job, with which one simply tries to earn as much money as possible. And since they were not distracted by any form of idealism, they were also the ones who most easily moved up the union’s hierarchical ladder to positions of greater responsibility. Managers, according to the criterion that responsibilities and experience should be paid proportionately, received between $5,000 and $8,000 per year, plus expenses; in practice, 10‑15 times the average worker’s salary in the industry. But it was the extra income, which could be worth ten times more, that made them richer. Foner describes a series of incomes that were currently being established and rarely pursued.

– Income derived from robbing union treasuries. Managers often collected large amounts of cash for dues, subscriptions or otherwise, and almost never deposited them in bank accounts or kept books.

– The payment of large sums of money by employers for preventing or calling off strikes, negotiating “reasonable” contracts and neglecting contract clauses, favourable for the workers. It is evident that even a small saving of a few cents per hour allowed the capitalist enormous savings if multiplied by many thousands of hours, especially in big companies, and therefore a rich bribe to the piecard was a very profitable investment.

– Income derived from cooperating with employers to form monopolies in their particular trade. As we have seen above, the union could be of great service to capital also in calling strikes, in companies resistant to the call of the monopoly. This kind of support extended (sometimes with written contracts!) to the management of workers, who could be induced to abandon the unwelcome companies and employed into those of the monopoly, and other such favours. It was not uncommon for the trade unionist to obtain a stake in the company, with a quota of shares representing the bribe, in his or his wife’s name.

– Revenues from the sale of labels (today we would say logo) of the union. The logo meant that the product came from a company approved by the union, with the consequence of a favourable reception from the working class, and also the guarantee of not being subjected to boycott, which as we have seen was in those years a weapon of struggle of no little value.

– Sale or rental of “work permits”. Managers did not always want to increase the number of union members, for fear of losing control. The “work permits” were a temporary grant of membership status to work in a closed shop industry; sometimes the buyers were just workers, other times the same industrialists. At the end of the granted period the permit expired. Of course, the costs, which was money that entered without control into the pockets of the managers, were always borne by the proletarians in need of work.

We could continue with a thousand examples of small and large corruption, but what matters is that this state of affairs generated a trade union leadership that was less and less performing the task it was supposed to do. Gradually, their greater commitment was concentrated on maintaining power in the organization, on fraction struggles, on the hoarding of the money so shamefully earned.

Even what we could call “Law and Order Service”, and which the American unions had baptized, with a touch of humour, “Entertainment Committees”, in the late ’90s began to be made up of gangsters, and increasingly served to protect the bosses and their interests, rather than helping the strikers against Pinkerton agents and scabs.

The trade union was therefore turning into a company, with company logic, with company prospects, with managers who behaved with the same logic and prospects as those they were called to fight. Although worker combativeness was determined by much greater conditioning, this transformation, and above all its rapidity, in this in advance of European trade unionism, made it easy for the bourgeoisie overseas to control the class and overcome the serious social crises that would follow in the next half century.

The American Labour Union

In the West, the scene in those years was filled above all by the struggles of the miners who, united in the Western Federation of Miners, opposed the mine owners in a decisive way, and adapted to the violence put in place by the class enemy.

The bourgeoisie had fielded all the instruments at its disposal, which we have already described on several occasions, against the miners, who carried out the most dangerous activity ever, even at a time when safety measures were practically absent in all workplaces.

In 1903 a strike began in Colorado, with several demands, the most important of which was the 8‑hour day, vital for mine workers. As a matter of fact, a law had been passed in 1899, but the bosses didn’t care, and even managed to have it declared unconstitutional. In 1902 a referendum had confirmed the law with an overwhelming majority of votes, and a governor, J. H. Peabody, had been elected and committed to support the result of the referendum. But the law did not pass the legislative assembly, thanks to pressure from the mining lobby.

While the workers were preparing to respond with the only truly effective weapon, the governor sent militia troops to prevent picketing; the strike then began uphill for the workers, who soon became the object of a real persecution: the military arrested and deported outside the State all those they considered dangerous for social peace, according to them, that is the leaders of the strike, although they had not committed any crime. And when the matter was brought before the court, the military did not hesitate to intimidate the judges themselves, who obviously did not feel like endorsing blatantly illegal behaviour. Those who were not deported were locked up in makeshift stockades or “bull pens”, to suffer the most terrible conditions of detention; and this treatment was also dispensed to sympathizers of the strikers, including journalists. The strike officially ended in 1907, but in fact by the end of 1904 it had ended with the complete crushing of the union; this despite the fact that it had extended to Idaho and to the workers who were members of United Mine Workers, a union that belonged to the AFL.

The defeat was mainly due to the unscrupulous use of all the tools, legal and illegal, that the bourgeoisie could field; but an important component of the defeat was the absence of any help from the strong unions of the East, gathered under the aegis of the AFL. Gompers refused even to mention the ongoing struggle of this union that, unlike his own, was open to all workers in the sector, and had completely democratic decision-making mechanisms, in which the rank and file had no difficulty in making its voice heard.

16 – The Industrial Workers of the World

A summary and a balance sheet

At the end of the 19th century, the dominant form of organization in the American workers’ movement was that of various independent trade unions. Each of which brought together and organized autonomously on a local, State or, increasingly, national basis all the workers who carried out a given work process, i.e., trade unionism or craft unionism.

In the last decade of the century and in the early 1900’s there was a strong quantitative development of trade-unionism in the United States: the total number of union members increased from 447,000 in 1897 to 2,072,000 in 1904. At the same time, the American Federation of Labour grew steadily in importance: the number of its members went from 278,000 in 1898 to 1,676,000 in 1904, and in that year 80% of all those who were members of a trade union belonged to the AFL

But despite this growth, which seen separately appears imperious, the AFL at the beginning of the century only included less than 20% of American manual workers; the rest, with a few commendable exceptions, remained completely unorganized.

But what is more important is the fact that the AFL is mainly composed of unions of specialized, skilled workers, employed in the construction industry and in small businesses, such as print stores, tailors, shoemakers and barber shops. Also, in the mass production industries – steel, mechanics, chemicals, textiles, clothing, glass and shoes – the members are almost exclusively the specialized workers of these industries. Thus, in those very years of growth, the inability of the AFL to establish any effective control over the large mass‑production industries; and the impossibility of facing, on the basis of the organizational principles of trade unionism, the consequences for workers of the concentration of ownership and the mechanization and standardization of production that increasingly characterize American capitalism, provided that it had the will. In the parts preceding this one we have given ample documentation of the early passage of this Federation of Trade Unions in the field of monopolistic employers, at least as far as the highest-ranking officials are concerned.

The high mechanization and automation of the factories makes the skill and ability of skilled workers (and their tools, until now a symbol of their trade and pride) less and less important since, thanks to the introduction of new machines, unskilled or semi‑skilled workers (not specialized or semi‑specialized) can now perform work tasks following a very simple and quick training, very different from the long years of apprenticeship that specialized workers had to go through to gain their tradesman certificate. It is significant the change in the composition of the workforce that takes place in those years. From 1870 to 1900 the number of employees grew from 12 to 29 million; but at the same time the fraction of women employed (who are usually destined to unskilled jobs) rose from 1/8 to 1/5 of the total. Also, the number of boys from 10 to 15 years old grows to 1,750,000. In immigration the supremacy passes from England and Germany, countries that generally supplied workers with professional skills, to Austria-Hungary, Russia and Italy, and the extraction of newcomers is mainly peasant.

It is the workers who come from these countries, whose sphere of needs is reduced and are therefore satisfied with lower wages, which make up the lowest state of the working class, the unskilled worker that the new production processes can use.

The impossibility for organizations based on the principles of craft unionism to cope with these massive transformations that took place in the most advanced industrial sectors is demonstrated by the case of the steel industry, and we have seen how the employers managed to crush the workers’ resistance and the unions themselves in a few years at the turn of the 20th century.

In the end, in the hope of survival, the unions begin to give in systematically to every request from employers; and from this point on, their existence ultimately depends on whatever interest the bosses may have in keeping them alive. We have seen how for a trust, for example, keeping a trade union alive and, consequently, the cost of the workforce high, can be a way to force independent producers to join; or, keeping the wages of a small minority of the skilled workforce artificially high through appropriate agreements with trade unions, becomes the way to keep the wages of the majority of workers at a starvation level.

Once accepted this condition of subordination to the company, the trade unions not only necessarily become more conservative and bureaucratic, they completely change their function and devote themselves to insurance and welfare activities, acting against the employers only to defend the corporate interests of the working-class aristocracy.

Innovation in the organization

Not all unions had undergone this transformation: some unions had modified their structure in order to organize not only workers who performed a certain task, but an entire industrial sector. These new industry-based organizations, industrial unions, maintained many of the characteristics of the previous labour organizations from which they emerged. In fact, they were formed not so much under the push of the mechanization of the production process, with the consequent replacement of skilled workers with unskilled ones, but rather under the push of the process of concentration and trustification of property.

Therefore, these first industry-based organizational structures are obtained by combining the bargaining skills of skilled workers belonging to different trades; they arise through a process of aggregation (amalgamation) of different craft unions in order to oppose the unity of all workers in a given industrial sector to the unity of the employers.

Industrial unions that are born from scratch and that organize within them both skilled and unskilled workers – in order to prevent the bosses from using the latter as scabs – maintain the organizational principle of division by trade and are therefore realized with hybrid and contradictory elements. This was the case with the American Railway Union, formed in 1894 under the impetus of Eugene V. Debs, and ended prematurely after the defeat of the Pullman strike; although it included all those who worked on the railway lines, skilled and unskilled, men and women, with the sole but notable exception of Black workers, the ARU did not differ substantially in its structure from other industrial unions. In fact, its local sections were organized on a trade basis, and were united in a federation on each major railroad network. These federations, in turn, were unified in the national organization. The distinctive character of the new organization was its policy of unified action whenever the rights of any member were threatened. But the most significant example of industrial unionism was given, for those years, by the Western Federation of Miners, an organization that played a large part in the formation process of the Industrial Workers of the World and that for years coordinated and directed the very hard class struggle supported by the miners of the West.

As a consequence of these transformations the importance of skilled labour and its contractual strength declined considerably; this made easier and more frequent the attempts of the Mine Owners Association to replace it with green hands (workers without any handicraft skills) in order to break the strikes and eliminate the presence of WFM from the mines.

From the need to oppose a more compact front to the attack of the bosses, including the unskilled workers, the idea was born to create a larger organization that would include all workers of the West, the Western Labour Union, which we have already had occasion to talk about.

All these first experiences in the field of industrial unionism had led to a considerable departure from the fundamental organizational principle of the AFL, the complete autonomy of each craft union; but this did not yet mean a complete abandonment of the organizational principles of trade unionism and a complete opposition to the AFL On the contrary, more or less all these industrial unions had remained for some time affiliated to the AFL The Western Labour Union itself, to emphasize that it did not intend in any way to create an organization opposed to the AFL, allowed the unions that came to be part of it to maintain their ties with the larger federation. Even when the WLU, under the impetus of Debs, was transformed as we have seen into the American Labour Union, it was immediately made clear that the new organization did not intend «to oppose the American Federation of Labour, or invade its jurisdiction or create rival unions». Debs himself, while making it clear that «the Western movement could not be allowed to retreat and return to the American Federation» continued to hope that «one day the two progressive forces will be able to unite in the work of redemption that must be accomplished».

During the strikes of 1903 and 1904 the Western Federation of Miners had to suffer the toughest attack on its existence it had ever received. And all the normal means of resistance of a union – strike funds, union shops, etc. – had not served much purpose in the face of the violence used by the mines’ managers with the help of the State political authorities.

The repression had been enormous. Several areas of Colorado, in particular Cripple Creek, had been placed under the military control of the «State militia directly in the pay of the corporations…freedom of speech was strangled, the press gagged and the right to habeas corpus suspended by military imperialism». Haywood describes these events as follows; a total of 42 miners were killed, 112 injured and many illegally arrested and deported to other States under threat of death if they returned.

But in the face of this military attack against the class, the AFL, after having maintained a real conspiracy of silence about what was happening, did nothing other than to call for a fundraising by rejecting any more incisive forms of solidarity. By now it was clear that the closed form of trade union was no longer suitable to defend the working class from the attack of the employers; on the contrary, it had favoured the establishment of class collaboration between working class aristocracies and employers. The AFL had even officially reconfirmed, in 1903, the old organizational scheme, forcing important organizations to move away from it. The reactionary role now played by the AFL was crowned by the abandonment of the anti‑imperialist attitude held years ago: in 1904 the Cigar Makers Union (Gompers’ union) – affiliated with the AFL – refused to organize Filipino workers for fear that this would help the independence movement in the Philippines.

Also on this level the prestige of the AFL suffered a serious blow. And by now even Debs was convinced that “only when the moon had turned into green cheese would the Socialists be able to change the AFL, full to the brim of capitalist influences, into a revolutionary workers’ organization”. By now it was clear to everyone that a workers’ trade union organization with some chance of success had to make a qualitative leap in two main directions, one of an organizational type – large industrial unions, open to all workers without any distinction and united in a large federation – and one of a political type – the rejection of any theorization of common interests between the exploited class and the exploiter class.

A new general organization of the working class

It is not surprising, therefore, that the appeal launched in November 1904 by a group of six supporters of industrial trade unionism for a meeting to be held in January 1905 to «discuss ways and means to unite the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles, regardless of any general labour organization, past or present, and only restricted by such basic principles as will ensure its integrity as a real protector of the interests of the workers» was accepted.

The appeal was extremely innovative, since it was not limited to the hope for an organizational renewal of the workers’ movement, it placed for the first time on the level of class struggle claims that did not consider the existing social and political conditions as a limit. In fact, it expressed the conviction that «division by professions and political ignorance were condemned to a rapid end» and that the working class was able “if properly organized, both in the industrial and political fields, to take possession and run the country’s industries for its own interests”.

The Convention of January 2, 1905 was attended by 23 people, representatives of eight organizations: American Labour Union (ALU), Western Federation of Miners (WFM), United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE), Brewery Workers Union (BWU), Switchmen’s Union, United Metal Workers (UMW), Bakers’ Union, Switchmen’s Union and American Federation of Musicians (AFM), plus a few individuals. Two leaders of the Socialist Party did not show up, accusing the initiative of creating a rift in the class, and of making it more difficult to bring the AFL to the correct class positions, expelling its most conservative leaders. Of course, that this was impossible was now so obvious that no one was so worried about absences.

The conference elected William D. Haywood as permanent president, and over the next three days discussed and deliberated on how to build a new organization based on industrial unionism, class unity, class struggle; as a result, there was the adoption of a document called the Industrial Union Manifesto.

The Manifesto reviewed all the crucial points of the workers’ condition in the capitalist society of the time, in the light of the experiences arising from the struggles of the last three decades.

First of all, it was highlighted the effect of the increased mechanization and the concentration of ownership of the means of production both on the relations between workers and their organizations, and within the bourgeois class itself. Many trades disappear, the operations that workers have to perform are more and more simple, the worker is less and less differentiated and is increasingly treated as an amorphous material to be inserted in the production process until it becomes unusable; in this case it is thrown away as obsolete or unusable machinery. The mass worker is thus at the mercy of the master, who moves and uses it as he sees fit, without finding any resistance because workers’ organizations are unable to determine any. Where resistance manifests itself, the capitalists, increasingly united in employers’ organizations, with the complicity of collaborationist unions, use all the repressive equipment that the society they dominate can offer in a scientific way.

It is obvious that in this situation there is no prospect for the working class, if not of hopeless slavery. Craft unions are no longer suitable to defend working class conditions, on the contrary they have been used by the capitalists in their internal struggles and against the combative workers, to the point of making them organize the strikebreakers to break up the most determined struggles. «Universal economic evils affecting the working class can be eradicated only by a universal working class movement». on the basis of this statement it is necessary for the class to unite in a single industrial union that unites all sectors, based on the class struggle, without any affiliation to political parties, an organization that functions in a new and militant way.

The Manifesto concludes with the invitation, to those who recognize themselves in the principles we have briefly outlined, to participate in an assembly that would meet in Chicago on June 27, 1905, with the aim of founding the class economic organization capable of embodying the principles expressed in the Manifesto.

The document was printed to be disseminated among workers, and an addendum made further statements about the aims of the organization: to “combine the wage workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the working people of to‑day in their struggle” and to “offer a final solution of the labour problem – an emancipation from strikes, injunctions and bull‑pens” (bull‑pens were hovels in which workers on strike were locked up and kept in inhumane conditions, even though they hadn’t broken any laws).

The document continues: “…this organization will build within itself…a Workers’ Co‑Operative Republic – which must finally have to destroy the shell of the capitalist government, and be the agency by which the working people will manage the industries, and appropriate the products to themselves”.

A very combative document, which invited the class to find a guide that would defend their interests to the most extreme consequences, in the belief that the trade union struggle could not be considered a definitive solution to the social question. Similar statements can also be found in the statutes of the European trade union confederations of the time, and in fact the main members of the promoting committee acknowledged that they were inspired by the European example. But in Europe the big trade unions were closely connected to the socialist parties, and they proceeded in parallel on the trade union and political level, while within the working class the distinction between the political level and the labour claims level was very clear; the Manifesto instead excluded links with political parties, and also any involvement in the electoral struggle, which in Europe was considered central to political tactics. These points were clarified a few days later by Trautmann, one of the main promoters, who did not hesitate to define the desired organization as one of “revolutionary trade unionism”. We are not going to make here a critique of revolutionary syndicalism, which spread in Europe as a reaction to the grip that reformism was having on socialist parties, and was an ideology of direct anarchist derivation and which can also be labelled as anarcho-syndicalism; these are positions outside Marxism, even if they take their starting point from it and accept some postulates. We will go deeper into the political aspects of the American movement in the parallel party work dedicated to them. However, these were positions that had already seen the light of day in the country many years before, along with the defence of industrial unionism, as we have documented previously. What revisionism had been able to cause in Europe, to push proletarian strata towards anarchism, already beaten in theory and practice in previous years, was instead determined in the USA in the first instance by the brazenly collaborative politics of the AFL Faced with the extreme weakness of the workers’ parties, the mirage of a new socialist society, generated by one big shoulder of the class gathered in the “One Big Union”, did not take long to fascinate large layers of proletarians: a great general strike, and then a country governed by the organization of trade unions alone.

The Industrial Union Manifesto was widely disseminated in trade union circles in the United States, and also in Europe, to the great annoyance of Gompers, who never stopped attacking the promoters accusing them of only wanting to destroy the union. One of the signatories, Moyer, did not defend himself against the accusation, but stated that nothing could have damaged the union movement more than the AFL In fact, in the hope of many of the promoters was the possibility of a painless passage of sections and entire unions into the IWW Undoubtedly, the immense power of the Federation, through its press organs and its capacity for blackmail, certainly held back many trade unions from joining the IWW, even if it is not possible to estimate the number.

The Chicago Convention

On June 5, 1905 the Convention that Haywood will call the “First Continental Congress of World Workers” opened in Chicago. Haywood himself gives the inaugural speech:

“In calling this convention to order I do so with a sense of the responsibility that rests upon me and rests upon every delegate that is here assembled. This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism. There is no organization, or there seems to be no labour organization, that has for its purpose the same object as that for which you are called together to‑day. The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means for life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.

“The American Federation of Labour, which presumes to be the labour movement of this country, is not a working class movement. It does not represent the working class. There are organizations that are affiliated, but loosely affiliated with the A. F. of L., which in their constitution and by‑laws prohibit the initiation of or conferring the obligation on a coloured man; that prohibit the conferring of the obligation on foreigners. What we want to establish at this time is a labour organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by his brain or his muscle. There is a great work to be accomplished at this convention, and every one of you must recognize the responsibility that rests upon you…

“There is no man who has an ounce of honesty in his make‑up but recognizes the fact that there is a continuous struggle between the two classes, and this organization will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle (applause), having in view no compromise and no surrender, and but one object and one purpose and that is to bring the workers of this country into the possession of the full value of the product of their toil”.

Forty-three workers’ organizations participate in the Convention, but only half of them instructed their delegates to join without fail. The others wanted to know more, or are hesitating in the face of threats from the AFL, or had not yet decided internally. So a good number of participants voted only in their personal capacity. Total representation is around 50‑60,000 workers. The participants, while combative, represented a fairly diverse range of opinions and positions. There were the parliamentary socialists, especially those of the Socialist Labour Party, the organization headed by De Leon, who put the parliamentary political struggle first, and according to them the economic organizations must bow to it. There are the “labour” socialists of the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, who instead see the political struggle subordinate to the economic one, and therefore the party as a political representation of the unions. Finally, there are various shades of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, all fiercely opposed to any form of political organization, according to the best anarchist traditions. We will not elaborate on these aspects, which will be dealt with in the parallel party work.

Debs’ speech tries to define the new organism as something completely different from the AFL: «In taking a survey of the industrial field of to‑day, we are at once impressed with the total inadequacy of working class organization, with the lack of solidarity, with the widespread demoralization we see, and we are bound to conclude that the old form of pure and simple unionism has long since outgrown its usefulness; that it is now not only in the way of progress, but that it has become positively reactionary, a thing that is but an auxiliary of the capitalist class.

“They charge us with being assembled here for the purpose of disrupting the union movement. It is already disrupted…. The trades union movement is to‑day under the control of the capitalist class. It is preaching capitalist economics. It is serving capitalist purposes…. There is certainly something wrong with that form of unionism which has its chief support in the press that represents capitalism; something wrong in that form of unionism whose leaders are the lieutenants of capitalism; something wrong with that form of unionism that forms an alliance with such a capitalist combination as the Civic Federation, whose sole purpose it is to chloroform the working class while the capitalist class go through their pockets. There are those who believe that this form of unionism can be changed from within. They are very greatly mistaken…. I am satisfied that the great body of the working class in this country are prepared for just such an organization. I know, their leaders know, that if this convention is successful their doom is sealed…. [T]o accomplish its purpose this organization must not only be based upon the class struggle, but must express the economic condition of this time. We must have one organization that embraces the workers in every department of industrial activity. It must express the class struggle. It must recognize the class lines. It must of course be class-conscious. It must be totally uncompromising. It must be an organization of the rank and file. It must be so organized and so guided as to appeal to the intelligence of the workers of the country everywhere”.

On the sixth day of the Convention starts the discussion on the preamble, which is written by the secretary, rev Thomas Hagerty, who is credited to have said: “The vote is simply a concession of capitalists. Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box never did achieve emancipation for the working class, and in my opinion it never will”.

Thus begins the Preamble:

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

“Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labour through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.

“The second paragraph represents a compromise between different positions: that of syndicalists like Hagerty and Haywood, who saw the conquest of power as the work of economic organizations; that of the socialists of De Leon, who defended the dominant role of the party in the conquest of power; and that of the pure anarchists, so to speak.

“Joseph Gilbert asked to eliminate any reference to political action, in this supported by a large number of delegates, who saw the new organization as simply “an economic organization based on class conflict”. All “the electoral campaign like, confused language on political action”. had to be eliminated, and replaced by “a clear affirmation of the tasks of the working class in the economic field'”.

An attempt to affirm a traditional but independent political action, on the type of the British Labour Party, was rejected: according to the Constitution Committee, led by Hagerty, the members of the new organization could have political activity, but outside the political parties; in this they were supported by the anarchists.

It was De Leon, up to that moment a strong supporter of the pre‑eminent role of the party, to push through the compromise formula, which would condemn the IWW to an indefiniteness in theory and action that would undermine its whole existence. He argued, contrary to what was claimed until a short time before, that the process of taking possession of industry must be accomplished «through an economic organization of the working class… [because] it is out of the question to imagine that a political party can ‘take and hold”.

So the position, which was then a real radical change, almost a turnaround, of this socialist leader (who unfortunately showed wide gaps and misunderstandings of the Marxist doctrine, of which he claimed to be a defender) had the choice oriented in the sense set out in the preamble, which continues as follows:

“We find that the centring of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trades unions unable to cope with the ever‑growing power of the employing class. The trades unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trades unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

“These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

“Therefore we, the working class, join in the following constitution”.

The Constitution Committee proposed the name of Industrial Workers of the World, so that Canadians would not feel excluded. Thus, with the motto “an injury to one is an injury to all”, the new organization was born. Only wage workers were able participate, without any distinction of nationality, faith, colour, sex; the dues were kept low so as to not represent an impediment to participation.

The activities were divided into thirteen departments subdivisions (then reduced to six): mining, transportation, metal and machinery, glass and pottery, alcoholic beverages, farming, construction, textile, leather, wood working, public service, and miscellaneous. In these there were the local industrial unions; at the base there is the workshop or mine or factory, as the basic unit. All professions of the basic unit belong to the same union local. Of course, in many places where there were few members, the locals included all trades (mixed locals); moreover. in the West. many workers were migrants, and changed jobs several times a year (the famous “hobos”).

A missed opportunity

Thus began the adventure of an organization that would lead hard battles against the capital and its lackeys, the trade unionists of the AFL, even with all the limits that the Wobblies have carried with them since birth.

From the beginning, the problems were not lacking, starting from the leaders, who used the very few funds in an irresponsible way, and who were accused of wanting to oppose the revolutionary soul of the organization, to the extent of trying to make it a copy of the hated AFL. In 1906, Sherman was removed, although it had painful legal consequences. Unfortunately, the worst consequence was that of triggering a process that within a couple of years would also definitively cause the departure of the Western Federation of Miners, which was the strongest and most combative component of the organization.

The group that had expelled Sherman was not homogeneous, composed as it was by the faction that was headed by Trautmann and St. John, who aimed at the only union activity in view of the assault on power, and by that of De Leon, who instead did not want to give up the political option, in the sense of participation in elections. The organization avoided a further split, at least until 1908, at the price of compromises and endless discussions between socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, which had a negative effect on its operations.

In those years, however, the Wobblies had considerable success, both in the struggles that they directed, and in the membership of workers in the lower ranks, especially immigrants. In these activities the main opponent, alongside the organized forces of the bourgeoisie, was the American Federation of Labour, which saw in the IWW the main enemy. An opposition that manifested itself in propaganda and collaboration with the bosses to crush strikes by refusing to let their adherents strike and even providing the necessary strikebreaking support.

In the meantime, the crisis of 1907‑1908 hit the working class hard, and the IWW was nearly wiped out, due to their extreme organizational weakness, and the fact that their members were the hardest hit.

The exit of the WFM from the organization led to a trickle of abandonments by the socialists who were part of it, thus strengthening the anarchist component, in a vicious circle that soon led to the purge of De Leon himself. We cannot go into detail here, but the discussion developed both on the political and on the craft union levels, and both sides exposed in equal measure right and wrong concepts, each taking to the extreme limit the positions they defended. When in the end it came to the confrontation between proponents of direct action (anarcho-syndicalists) and proponents of political action (De Leon) the latter found themselves in the minority. The exit of the socialists further shifted the balance towards the anarchists, who obtained the inclusion in the Preamble of two additional paragraphs:

“Instead of the conservative motto “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system“.

“It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old».

Naturally, the AFL piecards rejoiced to see how these internal travails agitated the Wobblies, predicting their imminent demise. Instead, the next few years saw them very active in a large number of labour struggles, often involving both militant IWW and AFL members.

Who and what were the “wobblies”

After the fourth convention, that of 1908, which saw the exit of De Leon and his followers, it was possible to resume seriously the organizational work. But this does not mean that within the organization, although more homogeneous after the exit of the socialists, the theoretical debate was over; on the contrary, the debate continued about the role of the IWW: should it be an efficient union, which combines the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions with a program of revolutionary socialism, or a revolutionary structure focused exclusively on the task of leading the working class to seize power? The national leadership was for the former hypothesis, while many of the membership, anarchists, were for the latter, arguing that there was a contradiction between revolutionary aims and trade unionism, and that focusing on the latter would divert the workers from the ultimate goal. Therefore, according to them, any pretence of union activity should have been abandoned, and all forces should have been devoted to propaganda and agitation alone.

Despite this situation, in 1909 there was enough homogeneity to launch the activities of the organization, so much so that that year is considered the year of the real take‑off of the IWW

Being part of the organization was easy and cost little. All you had to do was agree to the bylaws, and pay a small amount, too small for many critics. The monthly fee was no more than 50 cents, and often much lower; although this was a problem, it served to organize those migrant workers from the West whose income was very uncertain, and always scarce. The epic of the hobos has been recounted by many writers, singers, poets, film directors, and spans America, especially the West, from the beginning of the century until after World War II, although it has never fully ended.

The only doctrinal rule of which acceptance by the membership was required was that all workers should be considered equal, and united in a common cause. To be accepted there was only one condition: «Are you a wage labourer., exploited by a capitalist master? In that case you are welcome, whatever your colour, creed, nationality, sex or political opinion». In contrast to almost all labour organizations up to that time, the IWW actively sought to organize Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans.

From a doctrinal point of view, the IWW accepted the Marxian critique of capitalist society, and the theoretical foundations of class struggle, while the “tactics and methods of struggle were generated from the everyday experiences of the exploits”. They were fiercely anti‑clerical and unpatriotic.

The primary method of struggle was for them “direct action”, even if the meaning of this expression was not the same for everyone. In the end, however, a definition was given in the press of the movement: “‘Direct action’ is any effort made directly for the purpose of getting more of the goods from the boss…. “Direct action” means dealing directly with the boss, through your labour union. The strike, in its various forms, is the best example of ‘direct action'”.

And indeed, the strike was always considered the best tool for the workers, although boycotts were also occasionally used. The tactics used for strikes by the IWW is difficult to describe because they had a talent for improvising new tactics in the course of strikes, a talent that made them famous. They did not like strikes to become “passive sieges”, in which workers stayed home or loitered on street corners until, after weeks or months, the strike was proclaimed won or lost. They then spread the habit of organizing mass picketing, marches or demonstrations. The idea was that, if the striker was not given something to do, he would be demoralized. Through collective activity, on the other hand, “strikers draw courage from one another, feel their common interest, and realize the necessity of solidarity… The Industrial Workers of the World always has one fundamental aim in view when going on strike. Other aims and purposes may be at times – in fact generally are – the most widely advertised and better known. Decent camp conditions, shorter work days, larger wages, the release of class‑war prisoners and other things may be put to the front as the main cause of the strike. But back of them all and vastly overshadowing them all in importance is the fundamental thing for which we strike: raising the standard of consciousness and aggressiveness of the working class”.

There was no truly losing strike. “Strike when you like and wherever you like!” was a central slogan of the IWW; but not for as long as you want. Even though the strike was considered the main tool, it was clear to all that the concentrated power in the hands of the capitalist class made strikes of long duration impractical. Little confidence was placed in the accumulated reserves, which they called “war chests”; in 1912 they wrote: «Being a fighting organization we place but little faith in well‑filled treasuries. They invariably lead the workers to rely upon the money rather than their own efforts, and demoralization results. The most conservative unions are always those with the largest treasuries». Thus, there was no custom of making contributions for strikes, unemployment, sickness or death, a practice called “coffin unions”. Only locally and temporarily were fundraisers organized for strikers. This was also why protracted struggles were discouraged: “We want no long, drawn‑out starvation strike…If we should fail to win our demands in a few days, let us go back to the job and get wages while we strike on the job”.

The “strike on the job” was nothing more than the work-to-rule, which of course often resulted in layoffs. In that case the wobbly would find a new job, and start over. Although it was considered a brilliant tactic, while on the one hand it was permitted by a situation of full employment, on the other hand it tended to become an individual attitude, with the opposite consequences to those that the IWWs were aiming for.

Once it was recognized that there was no commonality of interest between masters and workers, the IWW was for a continuous struggle against the former: «When you join the IWW, you are enlisting for a war. A bitter war». A war which for the IWW could result in neither victory nor defeat until the final victory of the workers had occurred; nor could there be any real agreement. If the demands of the struggling proletarians were accepted, work resumed, but this was neither a triumph nor a lasting agreement. It was merely the conclusion of another phase of the class struggle. The members of the IWW did not consider themselves committed to the agreement to which the master had adhered; new demands were usually prepared even before the end of the strike. At that time, one of the main objectives of the unions was recognition by the company, as it was believed that, without official recognition the workers would not be sufficiently protected, because the bosses would easily renege on any concession not backed by a written agreement. The IWW, on the other hand, rejected out-of-hand any concession to agreements between masters and workers. «No contracts, no agreements, no compacts», Haywood stated in 1910, «These are unholy alliances, and must be damned as treason». The position of St. John in 1912 was similar: «All peace so long as the wage system lasts is but an armed truce. At any favourable opportunity the struggle for more control of industry is renewed». Needless to say, equally inexorable was the condemnation of the proxy system.

“A labour organization, to correctly represent the workers – declared the IWW pamphlet One Big Union of All the Workers: the Greatest Thing on Earth – must have two things in view”. First, it must organize them «in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the workers of today in their struggle for fewer hours of toil, more wages and better condition». Secondarily, it must propose “a final solution of the labour problem – an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bullpens, and scabbing against one another”. Such an organization, it was clearly stated, was the IWW.

In refuting members of more anarchist tendencies, Karl Marx was quoted as saying that the struggle for immediate demands is a necessary step in the direction of the new society. Every strike for wages and hours trains the workers for the class struggle, and prepares them for the final abolition of the wage system. Those members who invoked arguments already beaten by history and theory were opposed to Marx’s pamphlet Value, Price and Profit. To those who complained of the futility of struggles for higher wages it was replied, “… if the wage increase is, as you say, irrelevant to the workers and the bosses, how is it that the bosses are so reluctant to grant it?”.

A balance sheet

The organization of the Industrial Workers of the World, although in principle structurally better suited to involve the workers and to lead their struggles, never managed to grow sufficiently to the point of gathering large masses of proletarians, as had been its vocation from the beginning. The causes of this failure are numerous, both related to the objective situation and, as we have seen, follow from defects visible from the beginning.

Objective difficulties lay in the characteristics of the proletarians to whom the Wobblies were directed: immigrants, unskilled, various minorities, who changed jobs and residences frequently, leading to an excessive fluidity of militancy. But other difficulties stemmed from serious errors of approach:

– propaganda often imbued with political messages that could exclude some of the potential adherents, such as rejection of patriotism, religion, etc.;

– too many enemies: the bosses and the State, which shifted on them the repression they often contained against the Trade Unions; the AFL, which rightly saw in the IWW a deadly enemy; from a certain moment on the socialists themselves, often considered as accomplices of the bosses;

– an organization that was not very solid and centralized, which raised little money and often allowed access to unreliable characters, thus making itself unreliable in the eyes of the proletariat;

– waiver of strike funds and for assistance to the unemployed, etc.

– giving up operating within the unions affiliated with the AFL, which although aristocratic were nevertheless penetrable, especially at certain times, both to help them be more combative and to empty them of members;

– even the renunciation of signing contracts, although appreciable in theory, was difficult to understand for the working masses, and deprived the grassroots unionists of an instrument of agitation against the employers; who found a way to use this attitude to their advantage.

But at the base of everything was a poorly defined fluctuation between the political vocation and the union: the rejection of the party form and of a State power after the conquest of power, worthy of the most classic, and by now dying in Europe, anarchist tradition, took away any revolutionary value from the otherwise determined formation born in opposition to collaborationist syndicalism; while the pollution with vague political perspectives of an organization that had to remain exclusively trade union to be able to extend to the majority of the class, severely reduced the potential for struggle and enfranchisement of the North American proletarian mass in the following decades, which will see the proletariat of the country under a tremendous attack of the bourgeoisie, an attack that will result in an overseas war and a very serious economic crisis.

The IWW represented a remarkable leap forward in theory and in combativeness for the North American proletariat, many of their insights surpassed the sleepy and little evolved socialists, not to mention the unions; but their theoretical flaws, due to an excessive detachment from the experiences of the European proletariat and which had immediate consequences on daily tactics, made them a blunt instrument, even if moved by the most sincere revolutionary passion. Even if the Wobblies continued to operate among the working class, paying high tributes of suffering and blood to their determined militancy, it was a lost opportunity, a high price paid to a tradition of virtual absence of the party, of collaborationist syndicalism, and other unfavourable characteristics innate to the American working-class movement, which have accompanied it throughout its course and history.

17 – The “Progressive Era”

At the beginning of the century, the US economy, now fully recovered from the “Great Depression” of the 1890s, was heading towards a long period of expansion destined to end with the boom of the years of the First World War. In the forty years after the Civil War, the country had transformed itself from a predominantly agricultural and largely unexplored nation into a major industrial power. The victory over Spain in 1898, in the war for dominion over Cuba, and the subsequent annexations of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, had shown the world that the young American imperialism should now be considered as one of the protagonists of the international scene. If the sanction of American political-military power would come only with the world conflict, the recognition of its economic strength was now a given.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, industrial production had reached very high levels. The United States had surpassed Great Britain in the production of steel and cast iron in 1890, and coal in 1895. At the beginning of the century, the United States accounted for 30.1% of the world production of manufactured goods, rising to 35.8% in 1913, far above the levels reached by the other great industrial powers, Great Britain and Germany. Also in 1913, the USA obtained the definitive statistical sanction of its economic supremacy: in that year, in fact, its gross national product per capita exceeded even that of Great Britain, until then the first among the industrialised nations. But, perhaps even more importantly, the United States excelled above all because of the rate of growth of its economy, consistently higher than that of the other industrial powers. In the period between 1870 and 1913, the annual growth rate of production per employee was 1.9%, compared to 1.6% in Germany, 1.4% in France, 1.0% in Great Britain and 0.8% in Italy. During the same period, the annual growth rate of the gross national product per capita was 2.2%, well above the 1.7% of Germany, l.4% of France, 1.2% of Great Britain and 0.7% of Italy.

The development of the US economy in the second half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a vigorous growth of presence on international markets, especially after the crisis of the 1890s. The value of exports increased fivefold in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910, from 400 to 1,919 million dollars: but in the following five years it grew by 50%, reaching 2,966 million dollars in 1915. Since the 1890s, in fact, there has been a sharp increase in the attention paid to foreign markets. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and political leaders saw in commercial expansion, in the conquest of new markets, the indispensable solution to the dilemmas posed by growth. The end of the process of internal colonisation, the so-called “closing of the frontier”, induced the ruling class to look abroad for new spaces for the placement of surplus goods and capital. On this basis, the young American imperialism took its first steps: first, by consolidating its economic and political dominance over the two Americas, and secondly by trying to extend its influence over the Pacific area and the Far East. The “open door doctrine”, enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 with regard to China, provided this expansionist drive with a “general strategy”, based on the pursuit of economic penetration in new markets rather than on the classic colonial practice of territorial conquest. At the beginning of the new century, therefore, the United States entered decisively into the international competition between the great powers. Twenty years later, at the end of the First World War, they were already in a position of clear predominance.

While big capital led this epochal advance, a newly formed working class was amassing in the cities, whose characteristics were continually modified, and even disrupted, by the continuous waves of migration from Europe. The differences produced by the different experiences at home intersected and overlapped with religious, cultural, and ethnic divisions. The latter became particularly relevant towards the end of the century and in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. The migratory flow reached the highest peaks, touching the average of almost one million arrivals per year, in the period between 1900 and 1914. Above all in this period, the influx of emigrants of Slavic or Latin origin from the Mediterranean or eastern areas of Europe became by far predominant, while in the 19th century the immigrants were mostly of Anglo-Saxon, German or Scandinavian origin. As land became more and more expensive, and the possibility of leaving Europe with even a small amount of capital became more and more rare, there were no other possibilities open to immigrants than life in a poor quarter of the city, working in a factory, or in a remote mining village. In the urban areas all the tensions deriving from the impact between an extremely composite and differentiated working class and an industry that was growing and changing its characteristics under the pressure of mechanisation and the search for maximum efficiency were concentrated.

In the course of what was called the “Progressive Era” all social components underwent a rapid evolution. The large corporation in a position of quasi-monopoly certainly represented the antithesis of the previous ideals of American democracy of a rural kind, whose central figures, the farmer and the small independent businessman, had given life to the culture, and the myths, of individualism. The organisation of the trusts constituted, on the economic level, a mortal threat to that culture, because their ability to control the market and prices eliminated every possibility, and even semblance, of free competition. In the political field, the concentration of wealth offered the possibility of corrupting and controlling public affairs on a scale hitherto unthinkable. For this reason, the fight against trusts had already constituted, in the last decades of the 19th century, one of the battle horses of rural populist agitation. Particularly rooted in the agrarian states of the Midwest, the populist movement had demanded, and in part obtained, around 1890, public control over railroad tariffs (Interstate Commerce Act) and measures to control respect for the rules of competition (Sherman Act). But the agitation against the trusts continued to remain, at least until the beginning of the World War, one of the central themes of the American political scene. The anti-monopoly controversy became, in fact, one of the battle horses of the “progressive” reform movements.

Exponents of the old ruling elites such as Theodore Roosevelt, intellectuals, professionals, merchants, generally the most open-minded members of the middle and upper classes, reacted openly in the face of the pressing radical change of status that threatened them. While on the one hand they saw the rise of the new, arrogant power of financiers and industrialists who, at the head of great economic empires, accumulated an enormous power of conditioning on the life of the country, on the other hand they felt the threat of a growing working class that tended to the organisation of strong unions and, at least potentially, to the construction of a socialist alternative.

Faced with the social upheaval resulting from the rapid growth of an industrial economy, the agitation of a “progressive” nature chose the dual path of denunciation in front of public opinion and the political battle at local and central level. In the early years of the century became famous journalists nicknamed muckrakers (shovelers of manure): they brought to light numerous scandals, abuses, episodes of corruption in the public life of the cities. It spread with them a publicity of denunciation first, and then analysis of the social plagues produced by the boom in industry and urbanism: dilapidated neighbourhoods, poverty, child labour and women in appalling conditions, accidents at work. But while attacking monopoly big business, they never lost sight of the danger posed by the working class, whose uncontrolled union organisation and growing presence of socialism and related ideologies were feared above all.

Big business had clear objectives: stability of the financial system, predictability of market trends, elimination of the harmful effects of competition, elimination or reduction of labour conflicts.

For this reason, the major reforms, especially at federal level, ended up being supported, and often designed and managed, by the most politically “enlightened” exponents of big financial and industrial capital. Thus, the reorganisation of the banking system, implemented in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act, was directly inspired by the bankers, who created a more elastic and efficient credit structure. Similarly, the regulation of competition in the railways, the new Clayton law on trusts, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (responsible for the supervision of any monopolistic activities), the modification of protective tariffs, were all reforms launched with the consent of large industrial capital. The men of the large corporations participated directly in the conception and planning of reforms that were presented as an attempt at public control over certain aspects of the economic structure. And they were the ones called upon to be part of the federal commissions charged with administering and applying the reform laws. In this way, the control of major economic interests over politics was realised, the use of political instruments to rationalise the economic system, defined as “political capitalism”. It was a question of institutionalising the guidance of politics operated by capital, which is inseparable from the capitalist system of production, but which the bourgeoisie always tries to hide, so as not to highlight the class character of the state; and which only appears in the light of day when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to the authoritarian solution.

The reforming thrust of big capital also had as its primary objective the pursuit of a “rational” and “efficient” harmony between classes, to prevent the emergence of an aggressive and organised working class, with all the dangers that this would entail.

Reformism, an antidote to the class struggle

It was the latter, a far from remote or fantastic possibility in the early years of the century. The years of economic expansion that followed the crisis of the ’90s had seen a dizzying multiplication of strikes and workers’ unrest. The number of officially registered strikes went from 1,098 in 1898 to 1,839 in 1900; it then rose to 3,240 in 1902 and arrived the following year at an “all-time high” of 3,648, which would only be surpassed in the years of World War I. Trade union members, which at the end of the 1890s did not exceed 500,000, reached one million in 1901 and exceeded two million in 1904. They were still low values, however, when viewed in relation to total industrial workers. In fact, the percentage of union members in the total labour force was 12.3% in 1904, the year with the most favourable ratio. In the following period it would fluctuate around 10-11%, only to rise again during the conflict. However, this was a considerable and very rapid progress compared to the percentages of the previous years: 3.5% in 1897, 4.4% in 1899, 7.4% in 1901, 11.3% in 1903. But three-fourths of the members belonged to the unions belonging to the AFL, that federation of which we have already spoken at length, and whose leaders were fundamentally convinced that the welfare of labour was inevitably connected with that of capital.

On the whole, the attitude of the entrepreneurs was divided along two distinctly different political lines. A large part of the companies gave life, starting in 1904, to a real campaign, coordinated nationally by the National Association of Manufacturers, to remove all union representation from the companies and hit the root of the strength of the unions. It was a real generalised offensive, which used all possible repressive instruments, both state and private, to re-establish the total control of the employers in the companies.

Other industrial sectors, however, tried to follow a different line. Some exponents of the major corporations, starting with those linked to the financial house Morgan, began to think that social stability, outside and inside the factory, could be more solidly guaranteed through the recognition of conservative unions as representatives of the workers, the establishment of a regular collective bargaining, the creation of bodies for mediation and arbitration of labour conflicts.

To this end, in 1900, the National Civic Federation (NCF) was born. We have spoken previously of the birth and activities of this structure that brought together exponents of various social components, with a clear anti-working-class purpose and class collaboration. It symbolised the reform movement’s aspiration to social harmony, and in particular that of the most conscious sectors of big capital; it pushed the AFL to embark decisively on the path of cooperation; it favoured the formation of political balances of reformist orientation on labour issues.

In 1912, the reformist orientations of a large part of the country also imposed themselves on the political level, with the victory in the presidential elections of Woodrow Wilson, on a program, called the “New Freedom”, with a clear progressive approach. The Socialist Party, which was born in 1901 from the convergence of the Social Democratic Party of America with elements of the Socialist Labor Party, obtained its best success, approaching one million votes. In the following two years, the structural reforms we mentioned above were enacted. But, above all, the affirmation of the Democrats and the establishment of the Wilson administration changed the state’s attitude towards the working class. Faced with growing conflict, the need to develop a comprehensive policy of social stabilisation led the government to adopt the line of cooperation between capital and workers’ organisations. At first in an uncertain and sporadic way, then gradually with greater organicity and determination, the co-responsibility of the AFL and of the conservative unions for the maintenance of social peace and the increase of productivity became an explicit political choice of the administration. The World War, with the multiplication of state control over the economic and social sphere of the country’s life, saw the full affirmation of this policy. The repression of conflict, and in particular of its most radical expressions, was accompanied by the spread of collective bargaining, the recognition of union standards both in the field of wages and regulations, and the integration of union leaders in the structures of conciliation of labour conflicts.

Labour legislation

These measures were more necessary than ever for the bourgeoisie, since the years 1912 and 1913 were the years in which the radical clash between the working class and the bosses emerged most explicitly in the most industrialised states of the East. These are the years in which the most de-qualified sectors of the working class, those of more recent immigration from Southeast Europe, express with greater force their claims and their insubordination to the high rates of exploitation that the rationalisation of production brings with it. To mention only the best known, in 1912 there was the textile strike in Lawrence, in 1913 those in the silk industry in Paterson, in the rubber industry in Akron and in the car industry at Studebaker in Detroit. This was the culmination of a whole cycle of determined struggles that worried the industrial bourgeoisie, which understood that it was necessary to take action, no longer relying solely on direct confrontation, now incapable on its own to keep in check the most desperate strata of the class, especially because on the horizon, from 1914, there was the involvement in the great war, and the movement for preventive rearmament, called “preparedness”.

The reformist response to the workers’ struggles, and more generally to social unrest, managed to take shape in various legislative measures in the course of these years thanks to a political situation now quite clearly oriented in a “progressive” sense. So much so that the Democratic Party in its pre-electoral convention not only warmly welcomed the delegation of the American Federation of Labor, but practically left to the latter the task of writing that part of its electoral platform concerning the world of labour. The situation immediately appeared extremely favourable to those sectors of big capital that constituted the direction and soul of the “progressive” movement, even if in a very discreet and sometimes hidden way. The NCF, in fact, often constituted a true centre of elaboration and conception of those reform projects that were most dear to the big corporations, and one of the most important instruments through which they intervened in the debate and in political action. Gompers himself wrote in his autobiography that in the session of Congress immediately following the elections, “the union proposals received unprecedented attention”.

To this picture must be added the remarkable success obtained by the Socialist Party, whose candidate for the presidency, Eugene Debs, obtained about 900,000 votes, just under 6%, the highest result in the history of the party. This affirmation obviously sounded threatening to big business and all other defenders of the economic and social system, and therefore helped to stimulate reformist tendencies and attempts at rationalisation.

It should not be thought, however, that there were no obstacles or difficulties in the face of the push for reform. The most important of these were the more openly reactionary and decidedly anti-union forces in the employers’ camp. They were organised in hundreds and hundreds of local associations, starting with the chambers of commerce, and in numerous trade organisations, but above all they had a strong national organisation, the National Association of Manufacturers which, originally created to give weight at state and government level to the employers’ need to expand foreign trade, then built its fortunes on a rigid and decisive anti-union position. The NAM was responsible for directing and organising the violent reaction of hundreds of entrepreneurs to the workers’ struggles and for creating national campaigns for the open-shop and against what they liked to call “immoral class legislation”. At the institutional level, the NAM used its power of pressure, which reached the most blatant corruption, at the local level, through powerful lobbies; the same happened at the federal level, with the creation of special organisations; a custom that the bourgeoisie has not abandoned, on the contrary, it has institutionalised it.

But it was the control of the courts that constituted the main institutional obstacle to the development of the reform initiative, and it was precisely their attitude towards social and industrial questions that aroused popular discontent. Because the law placed “private property rights above personal and social rights”, as Robert Hoxie, a well-known reformer of the time, complained, the courts very often struck down laws that postulated any workers’ rights and declared them unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, the very one passed at the end of the Civil War to guarantee the rights and freedom of blacks! It stated that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law”, and this formula was used by the courts to invalidate any law that placed any restrictions on the freedom of the entrepreneur.

In the spring of 1917, with the war just around the corner, and when both the main capitalist sectors and the administration had by then definitively opted for a policy of openness to the moderate components of the workers’ movement, the Supreme Court finally sanctioned this changed attitude of the judiciary. In a very short time it issued a series of rulings declaring constitutional some of the most important measures passed in the field of labour legislation both at state and federal level.

Legislation aimed at regulating child labour was also very extensive, given that in 1906 43 states had already passed measures on the subject. Many of these measures were, however, very limited, if not formal and ridiculous: in South Carolina, for example, an article had been voted in which, after having established a limit of twelve years for child labour, exceptions were allowed if this imposed sacrifices on families!

Only an apparent victory

The eight-hour claim was supported by vigorous union campaigns and was at the centre of attention. This was also because the processes of restructuring and rationalisation of production directly involved the question of working hours, contributing to the opening of a discussion even in employers’ circles. However, the discussion was not much more than that, because if the introduction of the eight-hour working day at Ford’s factory chain dates back to this period, to the first months of 1914, the vast majority of industries would continue, at least until the war, to maintain much longer working hours, ten and often, as in the steel industry, even twelve hours.

The question of working hours remained, therefore, in these years entrusted to the direct confrontation between the working class and the employers, and even the legislative measures which were voted, at the federal level, for some categories, had their origin, as we shall see, in the need for the government to intervene in order to settle some important open disputes.

This extensive development of labour legislation in the second decade of the century was due to complex and often diverse reasons, which reflected the different tendencies and movements that animated the country on the social level. However, we can try to identify the basic reasons that gave rise to this phenomenon.

The most important, and above all the most urgent, was the need to contain the impetuous development of social unrest and the workers’ struggle. More precisely, there was a need, on the part of the most conscious sectors of capital and the ruling class as a whole, to divert the development of social agitation from class and anti-capitalist tendencies, exemplified not only by the fighting behaviour of large sectors of the working class, but also by the growth of a revolutionary organisation such as the Industrial Workers the World and the fortunes of the socialist party.

On the other hand, many of these laws had a rather relative effectiveness, and their function often did not go beyond propaganda. The Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, for example, had no power whatsoever to force employers to apply the minimum wage it had established: it could only publish lists of renegade employers for public disapproval, but nothing more. In other situations, where the law was obligatory, its effectiveness was reduced to a minimum by the fact that the levels set were not linked to price changes, so that in times of rising costs of living, the quotas set soon became lower than the wages actually applied. To this must be added a final factor, that of the action that employers could exert in each state, either through pressure on legislative bodies, or through the presence of their representatives in the commissions charged with setting minimum wage levels, in order to impose minimum levels low enough not to substantially modify the situation. After that, it is clear that the entrepreneurs were able to exploit the political and propaganda aspects of the legislation in their favour without having to pay particularly high costs or be forced to introduce major changes in their companies.

In the field of labour and social legislation, the problem for capital was, therefore, to prevent radical solutions, without opposing the reform movement, but, on the contrary, being part of it and trying to influence it, to direct it towards solutions suited to their needs. The case of workman’s compensation (i.e., guarantees and indemnities in the case of accidents at work) is extremely indicative in this sense. Many large companies, even those that were fiercely anti-union, had already launched accident insurance programs, both because it was a measure that could no longer be avoided, on pain of giving a further reason for social unrest, and in order to increase the worker’s loyalty to the company. Legislation took note of this, extending it to all companies and, above all, relieving companies of the relative burdens.

A very meaningful parallel can be made between these interventions, even of a social nature, and the measures taken by European authoritarian regimes a few years later: an example is the claimed defence of the family, which had been seriously weakened as an agent of social reproduction in the 19th century; hence the attempt to regulate female and child labour, and the valorisation of domestic work and the role of the housewife.

On the whole, the various measures of social and labour legislation, while drawing their origin from the growth of workers’ struggles, from the threat that they constituted for the entire social order and from the pressure of a reformist character of large sectors of the middle class, ended up being realised, and determined in their content, precisely by the action of the most conscious sectors of big capital.

The attitude of the AFL towards labour legislation was always well-differentiated, depending on the interests of the union store. Its leaders in fact saw the reform action from above as an emptying of the role of the unions “good”, and therefore as their dis-empowerment. Thus, the AFL tended to remain entrenched in the ideology, and practice, of “pure and simple” unionism on which it had based its successes. This meant that the federation’s line on labour legislation was initially determined by a fairly simple mechanism: reject any measure that would intervene in problems or sectors of the working class where unions were present or expected to be able to organise workers. This meant rejecting almost all laws aimed at regulating in some way the working conditions of adult male workers, i.e., the sector on which the trade unions were based and to which they addressed themselves. For example, they were openly opposed to laws limiting working hours for men, because they wanted this issue to be resolved solely and exclusively by direct bargaining with employers, by the union struggle. On the contrary, they favoured, and often directly committed themselves to the promulgation of laws to regulate working conditions in those sectors where they could not reach with the organisation of the unions or where they believed they had to operate to limit the competition brought to the labour market by the workers they organised: thus the federation committed itself so that public employees, among whom the prohibition to strike made it impossible to have a strong union presence, obtained the eight-hour schedule, minimum wages and workman’s compensation through special laws of Congress. The battle for the regulation of child labour also saw the AFL fully engaged and active, since its spread was a very effective tool to keep wages low and exert more forcefully the blackmail of unemployment on adult workers. In the field of limiting working hours for women, the AFL was always in the forefront, and even came, as in California, to promote the bill itself. There were several reasons for this attitude. First, the unions did not organise, nor did they intend to organise, women, particularly the great mass of unskilled women workers at whom the legislation was primarily aimed. Moreover, on the part of the leaders of the unions and the federation, there was a certain ideological and political convergence with the capitalist projects of limiting women’s work and reconstructing and consolidating the family structure. A traditional opposition to the development of women’s work was rather rooted in the trade workers’ organisations, and there had been numerous battles against the hiring of women in the factories.

With regard to the establishment of minimum wages for women, however, the AFL was in opposition, or merely gave formal support to the movement: this was because they were convinced that minimum wage levels for women would call into question the union tables and weaken the unions, something that officials were not at all happy about because of the danger it could pose to their chairs.

In the years of Wilson’s first presidency, however, the attitude of the federation slowly began to change. It tended more and more to support all those laws that concerned sectors of workers where there had never been any practice of collective bargaining, where the unions had never been able, or had never wanted, to develop their own organisation. It is important to note that this logic was based on the fact that the unions based all their strength, and their very existence, on their ability to exercise almost monopolistic control (hence the tendency to establish the closed-shop) of the labour market job by job, thus leaving out the enormous mass of unskilled workers. It was precisely the development of struggles and worker organisation in the unskilled sectors, in open antagonism with the AFL and the trade unions, that played a decisive role in making the latter change their position and accept the reformist logic of capital, in the common interest of cutting the grass under the feet of these struggles.

On the whole, however, there remained a fairly firm position against any legislative regulation of the main aspects of working conditions, first and foremost of working hours and minimum wages, with regard to adult male workers, that is, where there were, or could be organised, unions of skilled workers. In this case, for the union leaders, the existence and functions of their organisation came into play and it is therefore obvious that they were particularly opposed to those programs that could allow the government to compete for the trust of their members. The growing harmony between the AFL and the government came to fruition in 1913 with the calling to head the newly established Department of Labor of William B. Wilson, a former executive of the miners’ union whom Gompers had proposed for the position.

At this point, therefore, at a time when the start of the campaign for preparedness and, above all, the beginning of a cycle of large-scale labour struggles changed the political and social framework, relations between the federation and the government had matured to such an extent that the traditional distrust of the AFL leadership in the intervention of the state in labour problems had almost disappeared. In 1916 the shift became obvious and explicit. While the campaign of economic and ideological mobilisation of the country in view of a possible entry into the war consolidates the cooperation between unions and government, the spread of a massive wave of strikes forces the administration to make clearer and more explicit choices in its labour policy.

The President intervenes

The outbreak of war in Europe had created enough demand in American industry to overcome the crisis of 1914 and, starting in the spring of 1915, to start a consistent economic recovery; at the same time, it had produced a vertiginous drop in immigration levels. The result of these two phenomena was a rapid disappearance of the traditional reserve of labour-power and a consequent strengthening of the bargaining power of the working class.

From 737 strikes in 1914, the number rose to 658 in the first half of 1915 and 675 in the second half. In 1916, the figures rose steadily: 111 strikes in January, 195 in February, 189 in March, 329 in April and 461 in May. It is a cycle of struggles that will last until the United States enters the war and, albeit under different conditions, even during the war itself, expressing a strength and often a unity between different categories of workers, between immigrants and non-immigrants, between skilled and unskilled workers, that tends to overcome old divisions.

In this climate, in the summer of 1916, the administration was faced with a dispute opened by the four Brotherhoods, which organised more than 350,000 railroad workers, with all the companies to obtain an eight-hour schedule, a maximum daily distance of 100 miles and the payment of overtime at 50% more than the normal hourly wage for all freight train personnel. Faced with the companies’ refusal and the union decision to call a strike that would paralyse the entire transportation network, Wilson personally intervened with his own mediation plan. But the companies refuse the plan and the Brotherhoods, as a result, start the organisational machine that must prepare for the strike, set for September 4. At this point the president, having no other means to prevent the paralysis of transportation that would result from the strike, goes directly to Congress, on August 29, asking the Congressmen to decide immediately to 1) restructure and enlarge the Interstate Commerce Commission, the administrative body that presided over the regulation of the railroad system, 2) establish an eight-hour basic schedule for all interstate railroad workers, 3) to establish a commission of inquiry into the results and costs of implementing the basic eight-hour schedule, 4) to give its consent to a reconsideration of railroad freight rates by the ICC after the introduction of the eight-hour schedule, 5) to amend existing laws so as to make inquiry into labour disputes on the railroads mandatory before strikes or lockouts could be legally declared, 6) to give the president the power to control the railroads and to organise the staff in case of military necessity. The president’s pronouncement in favour of the eight hours is clearly the most important aspect of the whole proposal, although it should be noted the search, explicit in point 5, for a model of labour relations extremely controlled from above. In the face of criticism from the more conservative circles, Wilson replied: “It seems to me, considering the subject of the dispute, that the whole spirit of the moment, and the evidence of recent economic experience, speak in favour of the eight-hour day”, where “spirit of the moment” probably means the strength of the movement of struggles underway in the country and “recent economic experience” means the experiences, now anything but negligible, of productive rationalisation that involve, at times, the reduction of working hours. In short, it is the first important anticipation of the labour policy that the administration will adopt during the war, based on the efficient restructuring and the full inclusion of the union in a mechanism of collective bargaining controlled from above. Haste forced Congress to deal only with the problem of working hours, and the president’s proposal was accepted, with the establishment of the basic eight-hour schedule. Thus the strike is averted and a period opens in which government and state intervention in labour matters will not only become constant and regular, but will be accepted if not demanded by the trade unions. The AFL, which at the beginning of the dispute announced its solidarity with the Brotherhoods by asserting that “the power” that would institute the eight hours on the railroads would be that of the “labour movement”, accepted the law without flinching, satisfied with the administration’s pro-union orientation.

The federation leadership, at this point, was ready to welcome, and to urge, the standardisation of working conditions and wages that the government would conduct, in the course of the war, with their active participation. Yet barely three years had passed since Gompers still peremptorily asserted, “I hope that the time will never come when it will be the authority and power of the government to fix the minimum wages, or the maximum hours, at least for male workers, on the face of the earth”. But Gompers had made so many such volte-faces that one was no longer surprised.

The change, as we can see, is quite radical and finds its reasons not only in the danger posed to the AFL by the development of workers’ struggles and class organisations that threatened its very existence, but also in the government’s changed attitude towards the unions and their demands. A policy that had now openly chosen the path for which for years the men of the NCF, union leaders and the most conscious exponents of big business, had been fighting. That is, the path of the division of the workers’ movement, of the recognition and integration of its moderate and conservative components, of the development of an orderly and “constructive” practice of collective bargaining, of the isolation and repression of anti-capitalist behaviour and organisations expressed by considerable sectors of the working class. In the years between Wilson’s rise to the presidency and his entry into the war, this line was progressively adopted by the administration and the other structures of the state, up to the Supreme Court, and inspired the basic features of labour legislation. The same opposition of employers to these choices, exemplified by the NAM and similar organisations, was modified, and formal acceptance of social legislation was affected, with the consequent exploitation of the propaganda advantages that this entailed, while boycotting its practical effects.

The new attitude of the most evolved part of the big bourgeoisie shines through in the speeches for the election of 1912, in which he exposes his program defined “New Freedom”. There Wilson appears as a champion of the defenceless worker against big business.

The attempt was to cope with the growth of workers’ struggles through the establishment of a system of cooperative relations between capital and the moderate sectors of workers’ organisations. That is, a system that would make possible orderly, predictable and controllable relations between workers and companies, based on collective bargaining constructively aimed at efficiency and increased production.

It was an opportunity for the AFL to see the reforms it had been presenting to Congress since 1906, the “Bill of Grievances”, come to fruition.

It included a call for comprehensive eight-hour legislation for all government employees, some measures to restrict immigration, a bill to protect workers from the competition of forced labour, and various measures to improve working conditions for seamen that would later be incorporated into the La Follette Seamen’s Act; but its main points concerned issues related to the right of workers to organise collectively and to take action to fight.

In fact, the first part of the Bill called for a law to prevent the use of injunctions by the courts against workers’ struggles or other union activities, and another part called for the tightening of the legislation on trusts while excluding its application to workers’ organisations. In the first case, it was a question of taking away from the courts the main instrument of repressive intervention against workers and their organisations; in the second case, it was a question of preventing the use against workers of a law created to punish every restriction and limitation of trade, and on the basis of which the major repressive operations against workers and against the unions themselves had been built. The injunctions were orders of a judge that imposed on those to whom they were addressed to refrain from some action when it could result in “irreparable damage” to property; failure to comply with this order led to charges of contempt of court and immediate imprisonment.

There were three types: the temporary restraining order which was issued by a judge, without any hearing or notice to the party in question, on the basis of a simple complaint; the temporary injunction which required prior notice and could also be preceded by a hearing; and finally there was the permanent injunction which was issued only on the basis of a hearing.

But it is clear that the most important, and most feared by the workers, was the first type of injunction: it was not only issued on the basis of the opinion of the entrepreneur and his version of the facts, but also had the advantage of a very rapid procedure, so as to be a formidable instrument of intervention against a strike or other action of struggle from its very beginning. In this way, an enormous amount of power was concentrated in the hands of judges whose conservative and pro-patron positions cannot be doubted: it is enough to think, for example, that in the federal courts alone, in the period between 1901 and 1921, the magistrates granted an injunction at the request of the entrepreneur 70 times and refused it only once! So what was supposed to be an “extraordinary remedy” under common law quickly became the “usual legal measure” in the attack on workers’ struggles and their organisations, and in fact it was used on the most diverse occasions.

The other measure requested of Congress, namely the exclusion of workers’ organisations from the repressive measures of the law against trusts, which tended to strike at any form of limitation or restriction of trade, was of equal and perhaps even greater importance and urgency: that law, in fact, the Sherman Act of 1890, had been used far more to strike at workers’ organisations than to prosecute and dissolve trusts. In the period between 1892 and 1896, for example, of the five cases brought by the government for violation of the Sherman Act against trusts, only one was won, while of the five brought against labour organisations, four were won and only one was lost. The mechanism was quite simple: the federal courts had in fact the power to prosecute the leaders of the workers’ organisations every time they saw in some action of struggle an undue limitation of trade and competition, and this obviously meant, thanks to the generality of the law, an immense power.

In the first months of 1914 the AFL launched a great propaganda and pressure campaign to put an end to the anti-union use of the Sherman law and to take away from the courts the weapon of the injunction with which unions are fought. In every issue of the “American Federationist” there are articles that, in addition to illustrating the countless abuses committed by the courts, try to convince moderate public opinion, and especially the political circles and the dominant forces in them, of the need for a more liberal legal discipline towards workers’ organisations. In fact, it is no coincidence that the most frequently used argument is the threat of a strong growth of radicalism and worker unrest if the unions continue to be weakened and persecuted. The AFL, stressing how the repression of “responsible” and “constructive” unions fuels workers’ distrust of the democratic system and cooperation for economic development, thus openly offers itself as the organisation that can guarantee social stability and develop mass consensus for the current economic organisation. Gompers, with impressive frankness, wrote: “if you do not grant the full right of association to the working masses of our country, you will have to deal with other elements that will not let you sleep so peacefully and with so few worries”.

Marching separately, striking together

As usual, the bourgeoisie was not united on the relationship to be held with the trade unions: we have seen that the small and medium entrepreneurs were headed by the NAM and the Anti-boycott Association. The latter, in addition to opposing the overall project favoured by the government and large corporations, did not intend to deprive themselves of any possible tool for the repression of unions. On the contrary, the attitude of the most acute among the leaders of the corporations was probably already inspired by the idea of granting the unions the legal rights they claimed, precisely in order to bring them more and more onto a collaborative ground and to stimulate them to an attitude of responsibility towards the social order. But above all to guarantee themselves against the development of radical and class organisations of the workers, for which a widespread and solid presence of trade unions constituted a no small obstacle. These different policies derived not only from the greater foresight of the leaders of the corporations, but also from the fact that they could afford such an attitude by virtue of their economic and political strength, which allowed them to successfully fight the unions within their factories, while the small entrepreneurs had a greater need for the repressive intervention of the state in order to win their anti-union battles.

A law was finally passed in October 1914 (the Clayton Act), legitimising the existence of unions: the American Federation of Labor rejoiced at what it considered to be the greatest achievement of its legislative activity, and Gompers would define the Clayton Act as the “Magna Carta” of workers.

In reality, this was little more than a formal success, since the very vague law, even if it meant an open attitude on the part of the state towards the workers’ organisations, would certainly not have led to a decrease in repression against the unions, or better, against the strikers, when the political moment required it. So much so that proceedings against unions for violation of the Trusts Act ended up being greater in number in the twenty-four years after the enactment of the Clayton Act than in the twenty-four years before, when only the Sherman Act was in force. In practice, it was only the existence of unions that was declared legal, while any of their activities, such as boycotts or the publication of lists of anti-union employers, could easily fall into that category of actions aimed at restricting trade that the antitrust legislation intended to punish. Hot air, in short, that the AFL took for granted, but in the end the only real result was exactly what those corrupt organisations wanted.

It is symptomatic, in this regard, how Wilson himself had intervened in the summer of 1914 in two rather serious and almost simultaneous labour conflicts, shortly after the passage of the Clayton Act. On the occasion of a dispute between the Brotherhoods of the railroads and the railroad companies over wages and working conditions on 98 lines in the West, Wilson did not hesitate to intervene with the railroad executives, urging them to accept a mediation plan; their intransigence in fact, after a mediation attempt had failed, might have led to a strike. On this occasion, for the first time, the president appealed for responsibility for the national emergency caused by the war, and his intervention was successful, inducing the railroad companies to accept an arbitration that, however, would later prove to be largely unfavourable to the Brotherhoods on almost all points of the dispute

But a few months later, in November of the same year, when a struggle of Arkansas miners led by the United Mine Workers found themselves facing a federal court injunction against picketing (and what’s more, one of the mine owners was appointed as administrator of the court’s orders), Wilson acted quite differently. He had no hesitation in complying with the federal court’s request by sending troops to ensure that his order would be obeyed. He thus endorsed not only the injunction and its use, but above all the extreme anti-union behaviour of the magistrates, and to prevent the miners’ struggle from defeating the injunction, he ordered the federal troops to disband without hesitation every “illegal meeting” in the territory of the district. In short, the substance of the repression of proletarian struggles did not change, it was only delegated to the central organs of the bourgeois state, and taken away from the arbitrariness of the small or medium capitalist, who with his greed and narrowness can unnecessarily endanger social peace.

Thus the whole complex of refined instruments of anti-union repression, beginning with the injunction, continued to remain more than legitimate and available, ready to be used again in a different situation, and above all functional to always remind the yellow unions that their present power depended on their behaviour, on their willingness to cooperate, on their active participation in the work of stabilising the economic and social order in which big capital and the state were engaging.

18 – War: for Capital, a Panacea for all Ills

Wilson changes his line of conduct

We saw how the first Wilson administration (1913-1916) showed much more attention to the labour movement than previous administrations had done. In addition to the aforementioned interventions, the most tangible sign of this was the creation of the Department of Labor, at the head of which (not surprisingly) was placed William B. Wilson – a former member of the miners’ union – beginning a tradition of direct corruption of trade union leaders by the State (in commendable anticipation of the same phenomenon in Europe). The task of this Department was to reduce conflicts to a minimum, which was not exactly easy because of strong resistance on both sides: the IWW among workers, and sectors of the employers who believed only in the repression and destruction of workers’ organisations.

Another significant initiative was the creation of the Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR), a consultative body aimed at investigating the causes of social unrest, something which came to play an important political role. In practice it was almost an official consecration of the NCF; joining it were both AFL trade unionists and “moderate” representatives of the bourgeoisie. In short: the state committed to take over the function of regulating social conflict and the task of stimulating cooperation between labour and capital which had, until then, been carried out “privately” by conservative unions and exponents of bourgeois interests.

The commitment of the federal administration to making the unions play a role in containing the most radical pressures from the proletariat, and in regulating spontaneous social conflict, became increasingly clear in 1913. Moreover, increasingly large sectors of the bourgeoisie shared this attitude as well.

A typical example is that of the IWW-led 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, where an ill-fated AFL-led scab recruitment campaign was openly encouraged by conservative newspapers to strengthen the AFL. Its motivation: to help it attain the influence necessary to mediate the conflict (something which could not be done insofar as the leadership remained in the hands of the Wobblies). The traditional trade union movement was no longer necessarily seen as an implacable enemy; in moderate and well-organised forms it could become the stable interlocutor of capital, able to speak for and thereby control the spontaneous and local forms of workers’ representation.

Alternatively, the employers also supported the company’s trade union. The most significant project in this realm was launched by Ford with the establishment of the eight-hour working-day and $5 daily pay for assembly line workers. To quote William Haywood, it was “an insurance against unrest” which not only aimed to prevent the collective organisation of workers in the factory, but – as part of a larger plan including a profit-sharing project and other welfare measures (insurance, credits, recreational associations, etc.) – tended to develop an ideology and a way of life based on the relationship between the individual worker and the company (as opposed to relationships between classes). These experiences were still very limited in terms of extension and incidence, limited to sections of the most advanced industrial sectors; nevertheless, they demonstrated the urgency to face the growth of worker’s struggles and general social instability with means that were no longer limited to direct repression (including repression of union organisation). With this purpose in mind, it pointed to a developing trend that would fully assert itself in the 1920s.

There was a passage – in some cases – from brutal and repressive methods to forms of corporate paternalism. One example of this is the Colorado Coalfield War, a long and very violent strike lasting from September 1913 to December 1914. After the usual actions by bosses and government, with gunfights, casualties, militia and (eventually) federal interventions, the solution, favourable above all to the mining companies, was mainly the effect of the government’s efforts to persuade the AFL-affiliated United Mine Workers union (UMW). The Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the most important of the companies involved, after having cleverly dragged the strike out to the point of exhaustion, was quick to understand that it could not continue with its old strategies. Once it had established order in the mines (which would continue to be guarded by the federal army until early 1915) and averted the danger of union resistance, its management quickly set up a workers’ representation project that became famous under the name of the Rockefeller Plan.

The project envisaged the election of workers’ representatives in each mine and in each district and entrusted them with the task of meeting periodically with the company’s various management bodies to resolve any disputes. Additionally, mixed committees of workers’ and company representatives were set up to study and solve problems related to safety, health, hygiene, housing, and “recreation and education” of employees. This was accompanied by the announcement of the establishment of the eight-hour working day and an unspecified company commitment to increase wages sometime in the future. In short, it was a real alternative to collective bargaining with regular workers’ organisations. Of course, the company still had total power to hire and fire at any time.

At the same time as the Rockefeller Plan was being implemented (accepted by the workers via vote in October 1915), important innovations in the administration of labour issues were being introduced at the state level; in particular, an Industrial Commission was established to deal with the enforcement of labour laws and conduct investigations of working conditions where a strike was threatened in order to prevent any interruption of production. Moreover, the Commission also constituted the arbitration authority to which companies and workers had to turn after failures to reach agreement during negotiations.

With such a mix of welfare measures and constant relations with the company management, and with the establishment of the Industrial (also called Walsh) Commission at the state level, the corporations established an organic structure for governing relations with the workers, which at the same time could keep the unions out of the mines and prevent new explosions of workers’ struggles. The Rockefeller Plan was thus one of the first examples of company unions: yellow unions that would become a central element of the post-war capitalist counteroffensive

The Colorado affair also brought to light some interesting elements with regard to the federal administration’s policy: it showed that if the government was in favour of collective bargaining, it did not necessarily have to implement it through unions.

The work of the Commission on Industrial Relations was concluded in 1915, with the presentation of a report signed by only 4 of its 9 members (the union representatives and the president), while the others presented two other reports. The main report provided for reasonable working conditions, in addition to more progressive taxation, control of monopolies, and union rights; the other two, although less concerned about the conditions of the working class, still made proposals aimed at avoiding conflicts.

The conclusion of the work of the Commission also touched on another fundamental point of the debate in those years: that of the labour market and of its control. All of the social and economic problems connected with the labour market policy pursued during the final decades of the 1800s were beginning to appear. Based on massive immigration of unskilled workers from Europe – in particular from the poorest rural areas of southern and eastern Europe – the policy aimed at providing industry with a steady reserve army of labour; expressly conceived for the purpose of strangling workers’ struggles, it was intended to allow for the rationalisation of work organisation and of its accentuated mechanisation via the use of large masses of unskilled workers in order to destroy the control that labour unions exercised over the production process. Much to the chagrin of capital, however, immigrant workers had become protagonists of the hardest and most important strikes of recent years and the social base of revolutionary organisations like the IWW; they had become the main factor of social instability inside and outside of the factory.

In fact, although unemployment caused a weakening of struggles and workers’ organisations, on the other hand it caused considerable agitation in the most affected sectors or in those in the most danger of being affected, so much so that it even led to organisation and struggle of the unemployed.

It was thus proposed that the government set up a special fund to be used for public works during times of crisis in order to absorb part of the unemployed to prevent the movement from spreading (it could not, of course, do away with unemployment entirely since it resulted from the need to maintain a reserve army of labour). Another proposed measure was “unemployment insurance”, an allowance for the unemployed to be paid by the employer. Despite support from many economists, this was strongly opposed by the unions. The AFL saw it (as for other social assistance measures) as an attempt to replace the function of trade unions with the direct initiative of employers and the state so as to weaken the relationship between the unions and the proletariat; since the unions were flabby in terms of struggles at this point, without their welfare function they would have lost any purpose to exist.

Despite the good intentions and reasonable proposals, there is no doubt that the most important results of the Commission’s work were political and propagandistic and that its main effect was to win the support of workers and radicals for the Wilson administration and for the idea that unions and radical intellectuals could have real power over social policy; this was of such enormous importance for the government and for American capital that, as we shall see, they will base their choices in the following years – in particular, concerning the preparedness and march towards their involvement in the First World War – precisely on this factor.

The government project on labour policy was accomplished in 1916, the last year of President Wilson’s first term.

1916: response to workers’ struggles and preparation for war

1916 was the year in which the operation initiated by the government and
big capital on labour politics was completed. Faced with the
intensification and spread of workers’ struggles, and with the prospect of
entry into the war, the need to isolate the socialist and radical forces
becomes a priority, with a view to stabilising the relationship with the
class on a “responsible” and “patriotic” level, thanks to the good offices
of the unions. From now on, the government will never lose sight of the
goal of dealing with the strike movement and preparing the country and
industry for war.

The cycle of workers’ struggles developed with the economic recovery caused by the European war — which not only stimulated production but also led to a labour market favourable to workers with the reduction of immigration and with the competition between companies for new employees — soon assumed impressive proportions: the number of strikes rapidly increased from 1,204 in 1914, to 1,593 in 1915, to 3,789 in 1916, and 4,450 in 1917.

The new wave of strikes soon appeared to the AFL as an opportunity to regain a prominent position within the working class because many of these strikes were born completely outside of the unions. According to official data, the percentage of all strikes called by the unions in particular – which until then had remained at an average of between 75% and 80% – suddenly dropped to 66.6% in 1916 and the trend continued in the following years (during the war) when the percentage reached its lowest values, with 53.3% in 1917 and 55.5% in 1918. For the unions and their federation this was clearly a rather worrying trend, which could only stimulate their commitment to expand their organised presence and influence among the struggling workers.

Strikes during this time achieved their goals quite frequently – especially regarding wage increases, which had relative value given the rising inflation. Moreover, very often it was the entrepreneurs themselves who granted them unilaterally in order to prevent conflicts; for example, U.S. Steel decided to increase wages by 10% in February and then for a second time in May 1916. Even the eight-hour workday was sometimes conquered, especially by sectors of the proletariat with a greater tradition of union organisation (such as anthracite miners and railway workers). Much more complex, however, was the problem of extending and establishing stable collective bargaining and recognition of the presence of unions. In general, where unions had already been recognised by the employers and there was a customary practice of union agreements, this strengthened and extended its scope of action both as a result of the basic push for greater power by workers and of the choice of some employers’ sectors to exceedingly cooperate with the unions in order to strengthen productive stability. Sometimes the pressure of the struggles or fear of them becoming more acute also led hitherto uncompromisingly anti-union entrepreneurs to change tactics and accept collective bargaining. On the whole, nevertheless, there was certainly no lack of resistance and even counter-offensives from all those who deliberately pursued destroying or at least weakening the unions and who saw the situation created by the war as a good opportunity to carry out their attack by exploiting the climate of emergency; they were now a minority among of the bosses, however — one which had not yet understood in what sense social relations were shifting but who nevertheless existed and continued with their methods, especially at the local level.

The federal administration was by now decidedly oriented to favour the recognition of conservative unions for their role in containing and channelling workers’ conflicts within collective bargaining schemes. As the prospect for entering the War approached, there was also the explicit recognition of the role that they could play in the development of production and in the construction of a national and patriotic identity to weaken the classist elements within the workers’ movement. At the same time, whenever they proved inefficient or insufficient, the government also tried and succeeded to replace unions during workers’ negotiations with the employers.

As a consequence, the percentage of conflicts ended with a conciliation jumped to 36.3% in 1916 after having fluctuated for years between 18% and 19% and having reached 20.9% only in 1915. If we consider that the absolute number of strikes had grown enormously and that above all the number of strikes not called by the unions had grown, it is clear that the government’s activity in mediating struggles, together with the efforts of the unions themselves, increased enormously during 1916.

The AFL drive belt of bourgeois governments

Beyond intervening in labour disputes, the government began to move towards the more ambitious goal of integrating the AFL – or at least its management structures – into its labour policy. That is, it was attempting to make it become an irreplaceable component of its apparatus of economic control which, during the war, would unfold in all its extension and articulation; but its foundations were laid in that very 1916, during preparedness. For the time being, it was a matter of persuading the Federation leaders to make a direct commitment towards patriotic ideological mobilisation, transferring also on the institutional and political level those relations of cooperation that were sought – and to a large extent already implemented – on the productive and trade union field. Since the beginning of the year, the AFL began to express itself and press directly in this direction, claiming the right of workers’ organisations to be represented “in all agencies that control and determine public policy or matters of general interest”, and guaranteeing the willingness of unions to do for the country, at all levels, what they were already doing in the factory: fighting for efficiency, production, and patriotic mobilisation. The general characteristics that the preparedness had to assume, therefore, for the leaders of the unions, were the maintenance and extension of the working conditions achieved with the most favourable labour agreements, a “democratic” management of the war effort (that is to say, including workers’ representatives in determining the main economic choices), and the development of patriotic unity among all social sectors.

The appointment of Gompers to the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, as representative of the trade unions and at the same time with the task of orienting the war policy in the field of labour, officially marked, in October 1916, the start of this policy by the Wilson administration and prepared its most accomplished implementation during the war.

The pressure of the working class, in the absence of the communist party, had as a consequence a strengthening of the unions and the AFL precisely because of the government’s decision to support and encourage the choices of those industrial sectors inclined to develop collective bargaining and its choice to recognise unions as tools to contain conflict and pursue productive normality. In fact, cooperation remained linked to the willingness of employers to maintain it, while all the legal instruments of anti-union discrimination – which often allowed to exclude or prevent unions from entering the factory – remained in force, confirmed by several court decisions.

For unions based on skilled workers, which therefore did not tend to organise the entire working class and were not based on the search for a general unity of the class, the material basis of strength was inevitably the ability to achieve and maintain sectoral control over the labour market, place by place and in each category of workers; this was even more exacerbated by the historical characteristics of American economic development, marked by a general overabundance of labour. For this reason, they had always aimed at the establishment of the closed shop in order to obtain full control of hiring and prevent employers from using the industrial reserve army to undermine union positions and expel unions from the factories.

Conversely, the various bosses’ offensives against workers’ organisation, intertwined with the destruction of their social base through the rationalisation of production – which made the figure of the highly skilled worker, with their considerable power over the production process, disappear – had focused on the implementation of the open shop, which implied the total power of the entrepreneur to hire and fire at their leisure. This obviously meant that any workers’ organisation could easily be expelled from a factory through accelerating the turnover of workers, allowing for complete control over them. The necessary complement to the open shop was the yellow dog contract: an individual contract in which the worker agreed not to join a union during their employment or not to engage in collective bargaining or striking; in this way the formal right to belong to a union was completely worthless. The annulment by the Supreme Court of rulings against “yellow dog” contracts because they would be contrary to the 14th Amendment (according to which no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) all but demonstrates that the bosses had not renounced their arms.

Thus, at a time when trade union rights were gaining significant political recognition and collective bargaining was increasingly asserting itself as the accepted policy of large sectors of the bourgeoisie and of the government itself, all the rights of employers to violent, anti-union conduct remained intact. The only important success that the AFL obtained in this period was the beginning of legislative work on immigration restriction, which, in the post-war period, would be completed with the virtual blockade of mass immigration of workers from Europe. On the other hand, the employers aimed to substitute for the labour surplus from immigrant labour with that of female labour, with the emigration from the countryside to the city and, above all, with the great migration of blacks from the south to the big industrial cities of the north. The latter was due to a series of factors that would deserve a separate discussion: first of all, meteorological events combined with insect infestations that had wiped out the cotton production of many small farmers, who had had to pay their debts with savings, mules, or even with their small property; then a policy of the various southern states strained in previous decades to exclude blacks from civil rights; finally, an endless series of discrimination, persecutions, lynchings to keep them subjugated to the whites, who had not accepted the theoretical equal rights. Official data say that in 1916 and 1917 alone, between 500,000 and 700,000 blacks arrived in the industrial concentrations of the North. Often, playing on racial divisions and prejudices, they were used as scabs against the struggles of white workers, as in previous years the bosses had tried to do with immigrants.

To repeat: the reason for this change of strategy was that recently immigrated workers, employed in large numbers in mass production, had become the main factor of social instability and had soon become the greatest danger for the economic and social system of corporations. Therefore, in the period of preparedness – when an offensive aimed at facing these threats was launched on a social level – there was also launched a political and repressive attack (which would grow until the Red Scare of the first post-war period) against the organisations in which the social danger of immigrants materialised: the radical and left-wing organisations, and in particular the IWW. The repressive wave against the socialists and the IWW and more generally against all opportunities for social and political struggle outside of class-collaborationist boundaries was the other side of the coin of the unions’ integration policy and the consolidation of the privileged relationship between the AFL, entrepreneurs, and the government.

While the episodes of violent intervention against the workers’ struggles multiplied – especially if they concerned the industries most involved in rearmament and war mobilisation programs – the repression began to assume the most typical features of a patriotic and nationalist crusade, focusing on the radicalism and foreign origin of many workers, to label as national traitors anyone striking outside the protection of conservative unions. The repression was facilitated and obtained most consensus where socialist and extreme left forces suffered the most social isolation or where these tendencies were experiencing a decreasing prominence. Albeit moderate, the reformist policy characterising the first Wilson administration and the ideological campaign conducted mainly by the NCF (aimed at emphasising the merits of this policy as an alternative to socialist programs) had weakened socialist influence in reformist circles and favoured the strategic alliance between Big Business and middle-class interests which historically characterised the “progressive” era. The 1916 elections testified to this retreat of the socialists, whose votes fell from 897,000 in 1912 to 590,000. Here, the socialists had mainly lost the support of progressive sectors, where the liberal image the administration had presented of itself had taken hold: an image skillfully built in the four years of government and in particular in the last months before the elections, which had included, among other things, support for anti-child labour laws, promotion of the eight-hour workday for railroad workers, and finally the promise to keep the United States out of the European conflict (a blatant lie).

The trade union movement actively participated in Wilson’s election campaign, and it was some of the unions most traditionally close to the Socialist Party – such as the Western Federation of Miners or the International Association of Machinists – that, through their move onto the plane of Democratic, electoral struggles, had most demonstrated the weakening influence of the Socialists. The relationship of trust built between the AFL and the Wilson administration allowed the reforms it produced – although they did not produce any substantial change in the lives of most workers – to appear as an alternative to the development of a classist and revolutionary political perspective, and their overall impact was sufficient enough to halt the previously steady growth that the Socialist Party had enjoyed over the previous four years.

Write “cooperation”, but read “collaboration”

The participation of the United States in the First World War – which established its emergence as the dominant capitalist nation – was, among other things, the result of its long process of expansion and penetration into the international market.

If the war sanctioned the definitive affirmation of the choices of large corporations in terms of international politics and the direction of economic development, on the other hand it also saw the completion of the political operation that had long been underway with regard to the workers’ movement on the part of their most discerning leaders. The traditional strategy of the kolkhoz – aimed at the division of the workers’ movement, the repression of its classist and revolutionary organisations, and recognition of and cooperation with the moderate, pro-capitalist and now “patriotic” ones on the other hand – became the official policy of the federal administration in the last months of preparedness, thus obtaining an organic and extensive application.

The leadership of the AFL obviously supported this evolution by all means, confirming without any shame its definitive and total subjugation to capital. “Our country”, said Gompers, “…has the opportunity to become the banker of the world…the great protagonist of world trade”. Therefore, preparedness saw the approach of conservative unions towards government policies which sought to seize the fruits of this “opportunity” with far more energy.

So obvious was the approval by the trade unions for the war that the conference produced a document that did not even mention the opportunity to enter it; the document instead promised maximum patriotic commitment and asked the government to recognize “the organized workers’ movement as the agency through which…to cooperate with wage earners” and consequently that its representatives were part of all “agencies for the determination and administration of national defense policy”. Secondly, it was required that these agencies adopt a policy in accordance with the needs of the workers, ensuring that “union standards” in terms of hours, wages and working conditions were respected everywhere; in return, it guaranteed maximum cooperation in the war effort.

Thus, at the official level, very few unions expressed even weak criticism of the March conference resolution (among them the Western Federation of Miners and the Typographical Union, which did not attend the meeting). Only a few independent unions, particularly in the clothing sector, sided with the anti-interventionist campaign of the Socialists, who saw their influence rapidly diminish within the trade unions despite their positions being met with growing consensus among workers (as demonstrated by some elections in the following months).

But the bosses had not given up their offensive; the entry into the war saw the concentration and intensification of attacks on various labor laws in the states on the basis that patriotism required the abolition of all restrictions on the full use of the country’s labor potential. In particular, attempts were being made to obtain the revocation or suspension of child labor laws, those for the limitation of women’s working hours, laws on the exclusion of immigration from the Far East and, in some states such as West Virginia, laws were also being proposed to prohibit strikes. Although some measures, in some states, were approved, in general the attitude of the federal state prevailed, aimed at uniformly defining working conditions, also in view of a partial planning of productive activity.

With regard to the objective of social peace, the rising tide of struggles for wage increases and the 8 hours could not be faced with simple repression, which would have risked triggering an explosion of class struggles and a radicalization of the proletariat. On the other hand, the boom produced by the orders of the government and the allies led to enormous profits for the corporations — above all for the biggest ones: US Steel, for example, went from an annual average of 76 million dollars in the three-year period 1912-1914 to 478 million dollars in 1917, while the aggregate figures of net earnings of the American industry rose from 4 billion dollars in 1913 (the best year so far) to 7 billion dollars in 1916 and even higher for 1917. This made possible a policy of wage increases — indulged by many corporations at the time — aimed at counteracting inflation or at least masking its effects on the purchasing power of the workers.

Thus, while the 8-hour limit was abolished in the sectors in which it was previously conquered, excess hours were paid 50% more. Everything now depended on governmental decisions and arbitration by specially created agencies, after the Council of National Defense. President Wilson himself took care to call on state governments not to take advantage of the situation to legislate against workers.

The repression of radicalism and of class organizations

All these measures had, however, a minimal influence on the overall economic and social situation. The situation was characterized by, on the one hand, the chaos and anarchy of a productive recovery that was as intense as it was unregulated and with very strong competition, and on the other hand by a further increase in workers’ demands and strikes to support them. Businesses contending for the workers and “labor stealing” among the entrepreneurs, became a source of strength for the proletariat: it was no longer they who competed for jobs and wages, but the entrepreneurs who competed for workers, resulting not only in a strong push for higher wages but also a growing mobility of workers, who went where new jobs were created and where there were the highest wages. There was a very rapid congestion in the industrial centers, where not enough measures were taken to accommodate the workers, an enormous increase in rents, and a sharpening of the wage differences between the various sectors and regions of differing importance to the war. All of this, and the very high inflation resulting from it, would further increase social unrest and the frequency of strikes.

The social situation therefore seemed to be pointing towards a progressive radicalization in which wildcat strikes could spread and the influence of leftist organizations could expand. In many areas, and particularly in the West where the presence of the AFL was much weaker, very hard clashes broke out between workers and employers.

Evolution towards the harshest social clash was on the agenda in all industrial sectors where a habit of union agreements had not existed; the AFL did not fail to emphasize this fact in order to accelerate the spread of collective bargaining and its recognition as a reliable intermediary between the needs of capital and the working class.

Faced with this situation, and in view of the war effort, the federal government moved more and more quickly and decisively in the direction of a far-reaching offensive against social unrest. It was based on a dual policy of concessions to pro-war organizations – such as the AFL – and the suppression of anti-war organizations and periodicals. Therefore, a rather widespread and capillary process of disintegration of organizations that could organize and consolidate a discontent or opposition to the war soon occurred. The first instrument of this campaign were the laws against trade unionism (criminal syndicalism) that several western states, starting from Idaho and Minnesota, voted in the spring of 1917 and in the following years. They established serious penalties (usually from 1 to 10 years, but sometimes the maximum could rise to 20 or even 25 years) for crimes typically of opinion such as propaganda and agitation. Under these laws, not only those who openly advocated doctrines of criminal acts for political, industrial, and social change (i.e., crime, sabotage, violence, and other unlawful methods of terrorism) could be found guilty, but also all those who justified it or belonged to organizations inspired by these doctrines and, finally, even those who had granted the premises for meetings of these organizations. Finally, it should be noted that these laws often contained clauses that removed them from the possibility of a repeal referendum!

To those on “criminal” trade unionism were soon added other laws that also tended to strike at any attitude contrary to the government and the established order, such as those on the flag, which established, for example, that “no red or black flag or banner, emblem or insignia could be carried in a demonstration that bears writings contrary to the established government, or that are sacrilegious, or that may be offensive to public morals”. In this way, the various powers of the state were entrusted with all sorts of instruments to strike at popular unrest and protest. In general, these laws were particularly aimed at repressing the IWW and its activities because, especially in Western states they were identified as the most dangerous organisers of workers’ discontent; nevertheless, often the real usefulness the law went much further. Several of their clauses were designed to hit, when deemed appropriate, also certain activities of conservative unions or elementary civil liberties of citizens who had very little to do with organised radicalism; in the phase in which they were issued, however, their objective was only revolutionary and anti-war organisations.

At any rate, the conservative unions were already so caught up in the vortex of “patriotic” mobilisation that the state federations of the AFL did not oppose the promulgation of the laws on “criminal” trade unionism, limiting themselves, however with little success, to press for clauses to prevent their use against their organisations: the principles of their stance were never openly contrary to repressive legislation and their practical action – with full participation in the “patriotic” and anti-radical campaign – certainly contributed to its spread. As good shopkeepers, they were happy to accept legislation that took out the competition for the control of the working class, even if it was legislation that in theory could also be used for purely anti-union goals.

Active supporters and promoters of these laws were instead the bosses, who aimed to take advantage of the climate created by the war to equip themselves with effective tools for the repression of workers’ struggles. The authorship of the bills was in fact almost always of some entrepreneurial group or association. Around these forces, of course, all the patriotic organisations had gathered (such as the American Legion), the most important of press organs, and the most influential political circles. In this way there spread, in the first months of the war, a frantic local mobilisation of the public apparatus, of the major political and economic interest groups, and of vigilante groups or volunteers who closed the locales of the Socialist Party and the IWW, chased away the militants, and destroyed their organisational networks, making increasing use of the aforementioned laws to facilitate their work.

In this framework, at the beginning of the summer of 1917, a national initiative of the federal government was also launched: on June 15th, the Congress voted the Espionage Act, a law directly requested by the president to provide the administration with broad powers of repression. Wilson had asked the congress to authorise direct censorship of the press by the White House, but this proposal had been rejected following lively protests from the press and because of the fear of entrusting such power to the executive. However, another article of the Espionage Act gave the administration what it had requested, entrusting the postmaster the authority to exclude from the shipments any material that would incite “betrayal, insurrection or resistance against any law of the United States”. In this way, almost all the major socialist newspapers were confiscated, depriving the party of its most important propaganda tools and, having deprived their main source of contact with the centre, wreaking havoc on its local organisations.

In addition, the government and the courts attacked the opponents with a long series of indictments that affected both the leaders and, often, the party rank and file. These initiatives, and the great propaganda campaign that accompanied them, naturally fuelled violence and paramilitary activity in all areas of the country so that public demonstrations were very difficult to carry out and the work of the militants had to become semi-clandestine. It is estimated that in the last year of the war there were about 1500 party headquarters destroyed out of a total of about 5000, and this, combined with the suppression of newspapers and the arrest of several activists, greatly weakened the socialist party, especially in the West and Midwest.

This furious repressive campaign was probably made all the more urgent by the considerable consensus that the Socialist Party was gaining among workers and farmers by virtue of its opposition to the war, reflected in some local elections. Despite the considerable difficulties of its campaign and the terrorist press campaign it was subjected to, the party had multiplied its votes in an impressive way: in the Dayton (Ohio) elections held on August 14th, the Socialists obtained 44% of the votes against 6.5% of the previous year; in Buffalo, the following month, they went from 13% to 32% of the votes, in Chicago they obtained 34%, in Cleveland 22.4% and in New York – in an election of considerable national importance – 21.7%. These successes came almost entirely from the small industrial centres or, in the case of large cities, from the workers’ districts, testifying to the class character of the opposition to the war.

The other main target of the repressive campaign were the IWW, attacked mainly in their national centre and in those situations of labour struggle in the West that represented their strongholds. From the bourgeoisie of the West there was a strong pressure to take exceptional measures against the presence and influence of wobblies among workers. After having obtained the passage of laws against “criminal” trade unionism, at least in some states, and having started a real lynching campaign against the IWW, the bosses and governors of several states began to turn to the federal government to dissolve the organisation. The administration at first responded negatively to these requests, but started an investigation into the character of the organisation directed by the Department of Justice. In the meantime, a wide variety of repression initiatives were taken by the states.

Finally, the federal government accepted the pressures from many States and, towards the end of the summer, took the initiative in its own hands: several jurists, following the investigation of the Justice Department, suggested to the federal government to arrest and indict the wobblies for conspiracy, in order to infringe the law on draft and the Espionage Act.. The government, starting with President Wilson, approved the project. On September 5th, federal agents, along with local sheriffs, raided all IWW offices throughout the country, starting with the National Directorate located in Chicago, and on September 28th, a federal court in Chicago indicted 166 IWW leaders, including all major national leaders, for conspiracy; thus began a series of trials against the organisation’s members, beheading the its executives and turning it from a combative industrial union into a legal defence committee.

War: For capital, a panacea for all ills

The union as an institution: cooperation to the bitter end

As the country had been at war for some months, the bourgeoisie could not admit voices of dissent because they were often accompanied by economic struggles (which never completely ceased during the war).

The repression of any class struggle worthy of the name and the “patriotic” and anti-worker mobilisation that accompanied it were soon flanked by another initiative aimed at countering the influence of anti-war propaganda within the workers’ movement.

The development of the US economy in the second half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a vigorous growth of presence on international markets, especially after the crisis of the 1890s. The value of exports increased fivefold in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910, from 400 to 1,919 million dollars: but in the following five years it grew by 50%, reaching 2,966 million dollars in 1915. Since the 1890s, in fact, there has been a sharp increase in the attention paid to foreign markets. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and political leaders saw in commercial expansion, in the conquest of new markets, the indispensable solution to the dilemmas posed by growth. The end of the process of internal colonisation, the so-called “closing of the frontier”, induced the ruling class to look abroad for new spaces for the placement of surplus goods and capital. On this basis, the young American imperialism took its first steps: first, by consolidating its economic and political dominance over the two Americas, and secondly by trying to extend its influence over the Pacific area and the Far East. The “open door doctrine”, enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 with regard to China, provided this expansionist drive with a “general strategy”, based on the pursuit of economic penetration in new markets rather than on the classic colonial practice of territorial conquest. At the beginning of the new century, therefore, the United States entered decisively into the international competition between the great powers. Twenty years later, at the end of the First World War, they were already in a position of clear predominance.

While big capital led this epochal advance, a newly formed working class was amassing in the cities, whose characteristics were continually modified, and even disrupted, by the continuous waves of migration from Europe. The differences produced by the different experiences at home intersected and overlapped with religious, cultural, and ethnic divisions. The latter became particularly relevant towards the end of the century and in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. The migratory flow reached the highest peaks, touching the average of almost one million arrivals per year, in the period between 1900 and 1914. Above all in this period, the influx of emigrants of Slavic or Latin origin from the Mediterranean or eastern areas of Europe became by far predominant, while in the 19th century the immigrants were mostly of Anglo-Saxon, German or Scandinavian origin. As land became more and more expensive, and the possibility of leaving Europe with even a small amount of capital became more and more rare, there were no other possibilities open to immigrants than life in a poor quarter of the city, working in a factory, or in a remote mining village. In the urban areas all the tensions deriving from the impact between an extremely composite and differentiated working class and an industry that was growing and changing its characteristics under the pressure of mechanisation and the search for maximum efficiency were concentrated.

In the course of what was called the “Progressive Era” all social components underwent a rapid evolution. The large corporation in a position of quasi-monopoly certainly represented the antithesis of the previous ideals of American democracy of a rural kind, whose central figures, the farmer and the small independent businessman, had given life to the culture, and the myths, of individualism. The organisation of the trusts constituted, on the economic level, a mortal threat to that culture, because their ability to control the market and prices eliminated every possibility, and even semblance, of free competition. In the political field, the concentration of wealth offered the possibility of corrupting and controlling public affairs on a scale hitherto unthinkable. For this reason, the fight against trusts had already constituted, in the last decades of the 19th century, one of the battle horses of rural populist agitation. Particularly rooted in the agrarian states of the Midwest, the populist movement had demanded, and in part obtained, around 1890, public control over railroad tariffs (Interstate Commerce Act) and measures to control respect for the rules of competition (Sherman Act). But the agitation against the trusts continued to remain, at least until the beginning of the World War, one of the central themes of the American political scene. The anti-monopoly controversy became, in fact, one of the battle horses of the “progressive” reform movements.

Exponents of the old ruling elites such as Theodore Roosevelt, intellectuals, professionals, merchants, generally the most open-minded members of the middle and upper classes, reacted openly in the face of the pressing radical change of status that threatened them. While on the one hand they saw the rise of the new, arrogant power of financiers and industrialists who, at the head of great economic empires, accumulated an enormous power of conditioning on the life of the country, on the other hand they felt the threat of a growing working class that tended to the organisation of strong unions and, at least potentially, to the construction of a socialist alternative.

Faced with the social upheaval resulting from the rapid growth of an industrial economy, the agitation of a “progressive” nature chose the dual path of denunciation in front of public opinion and the political battle at local and central level. In the early years of the century became famous journalists nicknamed muckrakers (shovelers of manure): they brought to light numerous scandals, abuses, episodes of corruption in the public life of the cities. It spread with them a publicity of denunciation first, and then analysis of the social plagues produced by the boom in industry and urbanism: dilapidated neighbourhoods, poverty, child labour and women in appalling conditions, accidents at work. But while attacking monopoly big business, they never lost sight of the danger posed by the working class, whose uncontrolled union organisation and growing presence of socialism and related ideologies were feared above all.

Big business had clear objectives: stability of the financial system, predictability of market trends, elimination of the harmful effects of competition, elimination or reduction of labour conflicts.

For this reason, the major reforms, especially at federal level, ended up being supported, and often designed and managed, by the most politically “enlightened” exponents of big financial and industrial capital. Thus, the reorganisation of the banking system, implemented in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act, was directly inspired by the bankers, who created a more elastic and efficient credit structure. Similarly, the regulation of competition in the railways, the new Clayton law on trusts, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (responsible for the supervision of any monopolistic activities), the modification of protective tariffs, were all reforms launched with the consent of large industrial capital. The men of the large corporations participated directly in the conception and planning of reforms that were presented as an attempt at public control over certain aspects of the economic structure. And they were the ones called upon to be part of the federal commissions charged with administering and applying the reform laws. In this way, the control of major economic interests over politics was realised, the use of political instruments to rationalise the economic system, defined as “political capitalism”. It was a question of institutionalising the guidance of politics operated by capital, which is inseparable from the capitalist system of production, but which the bourgeoisie always tries to hide, so as not to highlight the class character of the state; and which only appears in the light of day when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to the authoritarian solution.

The reforming thrust of big capital also had as its primary objective the pursuit of a “rational” and “efficient” harmony between classes, to prevent the emergence of an aggressive and organised working class, with all the dangers that this would entail.

The State sharpens its weapons of control

On the whole, in the first phase of the war, the administration’s labour policy was quite incisive and innovative even if its major results were limited to industrial sectors directly responsible for supplying the armed forces or building the structures and machinery necessary for their operation. In all sectors where the government intervened directly to regulate working conditions, wages rose (at least nominally) to levels required by the union pay scales, even where this had not been established since the first agreements, as in the case of shipyards. This was partially due to the pressure that the union leaders in the various agencies could exert, but the main reason was undoubtedly that the workers’ struggle would have exploded and extended much further without these measures, eliminating any possibility of guaranteeing social peace and making it impossible to use unions as instruments of conciliation and workers’ “empowerment”.

As far as working hours are concerned, the maximum limit of eight hours was established everywhere as the base time, while overtime hours – 50% or even 100% more than base pay – practically became the rule given the enormous demand for production. The government’s realisation of this long-held goal of the labour movement was necessary for the conciliation of labour and capital, and if it often was the tripartite agencies granting this measure to the workers without struggle, it is equally true that it was often forced from the employers without any government intervention. The bosses as a whole accepted this government policy and only in special and sporadic cases was any opposition exercised.

From the unions’ point of view, it allowed a considerable strengthening of their organisations firstly, within the workplace, because of the greater freedom they had towards the entrepreneurs, thanks to the governmental action against anti-union discrimination, and because of their growing rank and file; and secondly, more generally, because of the power they were gaining through the integration of production into the governmental apparatus.

The counterbalance to this process was the repression and destruction of the forces of the workers’ movement, which represented the only organised alternative to the conservative unions; this also constituted a valid deterrent for all those who could think of not respecting the peace agreement by the government and the leaders of the AFL

All these factors, on the other hand, while contributing to the strengthening of the unions, also shifted their main reason for strength from the ability to successfully face the employers to the permanence of cooperative relations with the government: that is, they made the unions less and less “self-sufficient”, as they liked to call themselves, and increasingly linked to political balance and to their orientation in a liberal sense. This produced some rather important changes within the AFL organisation itself, wherein all tendencies towards bureaucratisation and transfer of power to the top management of the unions were accentuated.

In January 1918, the United States Employment Service (USES) was born: a federal employment office, it was responsible for regulating the labour market. In general, its work was aimed at planning and organising a distribution of the workforce more in line with the needs of production sectors, thus remedying the chaos of the first year of war caused by the anarchic race of entrepreneurs to hire labour. Additionally, the USES supported and often directly organised new flows of labour, which should recreate a large reserve of labour for the bosses since the reserve once constituted by European immigrants – in addition to no longer being available during the War – was no more able to be used as a means of social stabilisation, because it had revealed itself to be the main subject of the proletarian struggle.

In March 1918, President Wilson decided to transform the War Industries Board (WIB) into an autonomous agency – answerable only to the President – whose director had the immense power to prioritise certain kinds of production and the distribution of supplies among the various sectors of the administration. Additionally, within the WIB there was also a Price Fixing Committee, which had to fix and control the prices of several industrial products. Ultimately, the war had the effect of creating ideal conditions for the self-regulation of industry, clearing any controversy about trusts and realising on a large scale the interactions between state and industry – a cooperation that the bourgeoisie is only able to temporarily achieve when the survival of its class is in peril. Stalinist statism was born in Washington.

The last among a series of agencies created by the administration, the National War Labor Board (NWLB) was born in April 1918 to perform a dual function: firstly, to be the central agency for mediation of labour conflicts, coordinating the work of all the other operating mediatory agencies, acting as the ultimate authority in this regard; secondly, to set up and select new conciliatory structures for productive sectors not already under con-trol. This was, in theory, solely with the war inter-est in mind, but in reality these powers extended much further and, in this way, the NWLB became a court of appeal for disputes not resolved locally.

The right of workers to organise themselves in trade unions and to deal collectively, through their representatives, with employers was formally recognised, and it was explicitly stated that employers could not fire workers because they belonged to a trade union or because they carried out legitimate trade union activities. The experiences of various agencies were thus recognised, and in particular of the President’s Mediation Commission, which entrusted a decisive role to collective bargaining for the containment of conflicts, and which at the same time, however, confined the possibilities of organisation and trade union activity of workers within the boundaries of the “patriotic” choice of cooperation for the elevation of war production. It is clear that the term “legitimate” did not apply to all activities considered de jure legal; it was also a political judgement: the door was left open to the repression of all workers who did not respect the agreements and the social truce decided by the unions. The right to collective organisation was, therefore, once again subordinated to the condition that it had aims and methods matching the official policy of the administration and its union allies.

Throughout the war period the claim on which the industrial proletariat fought periodically everywhere was the eight hours. It was the insistence of the workers for the eight hours, and their stubbornness to organise and fight for them, that made this measure so general and widespread during the war; the attitude of the NWLB and other agencies to adopt the reduction of hours was the result of such pressures. The action of the workers in particular was decisive in making even the most reluctant bosses accept the eight-hour and other measures proposed by the tripartite agencies.

Another focal point of the NWLB were the aforementioned shop committees, having an unprecedented spread and beginning to play an important role in obtaining the settlement of disputes directly in the workplace, on the largest possible scale, through conciliation and negotiation carried out personally by the workers and managements concerned. By the end of the war, the shop committees had lost all semblance of being instruments of workers’ struggle and organisation and became company unions – yellow unions – the nucleus of the reaction of capital within what was designated the American Plan; it was essentially the confirmation of the 1915 Rockefeller plan.

On the whole, the action of the tripartite agencies in the field of wages did not produce great changes; for the workers the improvements in living standards during the war were largely illusory. Although wages had increased in monetary terms (compared with 1914) by 11.6% in 1916, by 30% in 1917, and by 63% in 1918, this was hardly enough to keep up with the pace of inflation; in fact, in real terms, wages increased (compared to 1914) by 4% in 1916, by 1% in 1917, and by 4% in 1918. The regulation of working conditions by the government had not done anything other than prevent a net devaluation of wages with respect to the increase in the cost of living, and this result was also obtained above all through the constant pressure exerted by workers with strikes or with the simple threat of struggle.

The real and important changes taking place in the wage structure were the increase in the real wages of less skilled workers and the consequent decrease in the wage differences between the highest and lowest paid sections of the proletariat; these were due to the fact that unskilled workers – generally not organised in unions – had been able to take advantage of a shortage of the reserve workforce (thanks to the concomitance between a very high production demand, the employment of a certain part of the workforce in the armed forces, and the virtual disappearance of the high migratory flow) to impose their demands on both the bosses and the government.

The bourgeois solution: patriotism–democracy–corporatism

The key feature of the last year of the war was undoubtedly the decisive entry of the government into the field of relations between the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. The establishment of the National War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board represents the start of a labour policy aimed on the one hand at coordinating and centralising the government’s conciliatory activity and on the other hand at coordinating and – up to a certain point – planning production, mainly intervening on wage and working conditions: an intervention caused by the war contingency, first foreseen and then real, which, as indeed in other countries in similar situations, requires perfect co-ordination of resources to achieve the goal of victory. In these cases, the bourgeois state does not hesitate to strike even the capitalists who do not comply with its regulations, a characteristic that in peacetime is more typical of manifestly dictatorial regimes, but even in that case the measure is linked to some form of emergency because the bourgeoisie prefers total anarchy of production, which it calls – rather pompously and crassly – “freedom”.

It goes without saying, however, that it is the proletariat that bears the brunt of emergencies and is made to sacrifice the most, by fair means (patriotism, vague promises, propaganda) or by brutal ones (threats of enrolment, repression, anti-union laws).

Indeed, the constitutive document of the NWLB gave official character and maximum authority, to collective bargaining and its tools, strengthening the boundaries within which it could develop, and thus constituting a powerful deterrent against any temptation to break the balance that had come to exist between the bosses, government, and conservative unions.

The consolidation of cooperation between these groups, and its centralisation under the protection of the state and government, tended to rather quickly assume authoritarian and orderly connotations. The wage policy of government agencies, thus, while meeting some of the proletariat’s demands in order to eliminate the most important causes of class conflict – establishing minimum wages and tying numerical wages to the trend in the cost of living (i.e., compensating for inflation) – also traced precise boundaries beyond which workers’ demands could not go. Beyond these borders there was only head-on confrontation with the state apparatus and with the broad political and trade union alignment that supported its policy.

It is good to remember that the spread and consolidation of collective bargaining, however extensive, especially during the war, never undermined or weakened the legal systems hitherto used to fight the unions. The target of these means had simply been redirected away from unions and towards radical organisations; they were far from done away with. The use of injunctions and legislation against trusts for the persecution of workers’ organisations, including conservative unions, would quickly make a comeback in the post-war period. However, even if temporarily, a much more solid institutional framework was established in the face of workers’ struggles, capable of intervening harshly in those conflicts where some of the cardinal points of its activity were questioned; its greater compactness accelerated the integration of trade unions and, as we have seen, managed to overturn even the behaviours and choices most rooted in their tradition.

All these factors led to a decrease in strikes in 1918, although if compared to the pre-war years the figures still remained very high (in 1918 there were 3,353 strikes compared to 4,450 in 1917 and 1,593 in 1915), but above all they put the government in a position to put an end to any social unrest that contested the guidelines of its policy. The administration therefore decisively imposed itself both on those companies (a few) that rejected the decisions of the NWLB by not accepting any form of bargaining with their organised employees, and above all onto struggling workers that broke the trade union truce and made demands that the conciliation agencies refused to accept.

What actually took place with the war was the political and institutional response given to the labour movement by big business. The dual policy conceived by the NCF towards the organised labour movement, centred on integration and cooperation with conservative unions and on the simultaneous frontal battle against the anti-capitalist and radical forces, reached its maximum extension with the world conflict and its own temporary triumph. Around it a large unity of entrepreneurs and more generally of the ruling classes was formed, as well as a certain consensus of vast sectors of public opinion, favoured and nourished by the climate of emergency and national unity that the war had brought with it.

Even the consequences of the practice of trade union agreements were, or at least tended to be, of a dual nature: on the one hand, unions accentuated their bureaucratic character, escaping more and more from the control of their rank and file and thereby disposing of their character as organisations of struggle; on the other hand, radical organisations and spontaneous workers’ struggles outside “legal” bargaining were isolated, marginalised, and repressed. But above all, the AFL and the unions were seen as instruments for the maintenance of social peace in the factory and as guarantors of equilibrium and consensus on a social level. As Commons wrote: ‘American workers’ organisations, however aggressive they might have been, were found to be the first bulwark against the revolution and the strongest defenders of constitutional government.’

This betrayal did not earn the unions a safe place in the government structure, but only a temporary political position that the post-war period would cancel.

A synthesis, one hundred years later

Our Party’s research work on the American labour movement – ended so far by the entry of the United States into the First World War on 6th April, 1917 – started with the seventeenth century, when the lack of resources suited for robbing the continent forced England, a colonial power in the region, to focus on the exploitation of labour to fill the coffers of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats. This labour, necessarily, had to come from outside – from Europe and Africa – consumed and replaced by ever new waves of immigrants; this is one of the constants that characterises the development of capitalism across the Atlantic, and especially of its working class. Another constant of the class struggle in North America has been violence: the United States can boast the bloodiest history of the labour movement in the ranks of the industrialised nations.

After the war for independence from England had begun with a massacre of proletarians in Boston, it was the workers of the cities who fought and won the war while the bourgeoisie was divided into two camps, English and American; the proletarians did not obtain any advantage except the generalised economic development of the country, largely to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. This national development was mainly built off of the strong exploitation of the proletariat, including women and children, while trade union associations were struggling to take off; the political movement suffered the same fate, despite numerous attempts to create a workers’ party, a problem that continued to exist throughout the nineteenth century.

A peculiar aspect of the working class in North America was its constant renewal due to the continuous migratory flows, which brought in the country the English, Irish, Germans, in a first phase, and subsequently emigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This phenomenon – accompanied by the growing attraction exerted by the western territories, where it was easy to obtain land to cultivate – meant a continuous renewal and reshuffling of the composition of the working class, causing immense difficulty in developing class consciousness and in the formation of workers’ organisations, both economic and political. The trade unions, which existed in large numbers since before the civil war, suffered the repercussions of the frequent crises, being born and disappearing with extreme ease.

The Civil War in 1861–1865 represented a further setback for trade union formation, which was nevertheless followed by a period of considerable activism due to the influence of the militants of the First International, who imported the socialist doctrine from Europe.

In the years following the Civil War, in parallel with the tumultuous economic growth, the working class grew both in number and combativeness, and great national strikes took place. Towards the end of the 1970s, the Knights of Labor developed, which – unlike trade unions – organised all workers, including non-skilled workers, women, and children. Despite its numerous successes, however, the leadership of the Knights of Labor did not like the weapon of the strike, and this attitude in the long run led to real betrayals of the struggling workers, and therefore to the decline of the organisation in flavour of trade unions, now united in the American Federation of Labor; which, in spite of the fact that its member unions continued to keep unskilled workers away, began to rise rapidly in the late 1880s.

Unfortunately, the trade unions – narrow and often localistic, aiming for partial results for the working-class aristocracy – was not what was needed in a country where a ravenous bourgeoisie would not retreat before anything to impose its terms. Against the struggling workers, in addition to the vigilantes of the company or rented from the Pinkerton agency, the local militias were always present, while the judges, always ready to submit to the demands of the bosses, did not spare injunctions and sentenced the strikers to severe penalties, often involving imprisonment. Not infrequently, in the most important cases, when all these resources were not enough, federal troops intervened. In addition to this complex bourgeois apparatus, there were numerous cases in which the AFL unions themselves sided with the bosses, or even organised scabbing. Many struggles were characterised by armed clashes, wounding and killing many.

With the rise of the new millennium, the interest of the AFL to present itself as a bulwark for the survival of capitalist society is clear, just as the Industrial Workers of the World was born with opposing union and political aims. The latter represented an example of militancy and dedication to the cause of the working class, but it was always a minority movement due to its fusion of the party and the union form; nevertheless, this did not prevent it from conducting great and hard struggles, especially in the western side of the country.

The final part of the period treated in this work – ending with the entry of the US into the first world war in 1917 – saw a growing attention and presence of the federal state in trade union matters, with the intent to eliminate the pressures of the most extreme sectors of the bourgeoisie and to organise in a homogeneous way the conditions of exploitation of the working class, in order to minimise the conflict between capital and labour, with preparation for entry into war in mind. This was done by peaceable means if possible, by ruthless ones whenever necessary. These ruthless means were, among other things, a harsh persecution of all non-cooperative trade union agitators and the outlawing of the IWW, even with the enactment of special laws, such as the Espionage Act and the law against criminal syndicalism.

State intervention also included a strong involvement of the collaborationist trade unions – those of the AFL in particular – with regard both to social peace and to the war effort, an involvement that the trade union movement adhered to with enthusiasm, being almost integrated into the state; it was so for a time in fact, but never in a completely formal way. Nevertheless, in fact, the “responsible” trade union is accepted by the bourgeoisie in its structure of government, a historical event that will soon be imitated in all capitalist countries, either in a disguised manner (democratic regimes) or in a directly institutional manner (dictatorial regimes).

A peculiar characteristic of the class struggle in the USA, which differentiates it from that which took place in Europe in the same years, at least in the more industrialised countries, was the scarce penetration of the socialist party into the class due on the one hand to the theoretical and organisational weakness of the parties that succeeded each other and on the other hand to conditions outside the class, such as the great distances between industrial concentrations, the virulence of the reaction of the bourgeoisie, the fluidity of class composition – often multi-ethnic and multilingual, with successive migratory waves, each time of proletarians less evolved than those already present (except in the case of the migration of the Germans in the central period of the 19th century, generally socialist workers); in fact, after the civil war and especially between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was almost exclusively composed of former peasants, who required years of factory work to acquire class consciousness. This, combined with the prevailing individualist ideology – derived from a past of pioneers – conditioned the development of the proletariat in both a political and union sense.

But it is clear that the most important, and most feared by the workers, was the first type of injunction: it was not only issued on the basis of the opinion of the entrepreneur and his version of the facts, but also had the advantage of a very rapid procedure, so as to be a formidable instrument of intervention against a strike or other action of struggle from its very beginning. In this way, an enormous amount of power was concentrated in the hands of judges whose conservative and pro-patron positions cannot be doubted: it is enough to think, for example, that in the federal courts alone, in the period between 1901 and 1921, the magistrates granted an injunction at the request of the entrepreneur 70 times and refused it only once! So what was supposed to be an “extraordinary remedy” under common law quickly became the “usual legal measure” in the attack on workers’ struggles and their organisations, and in fact it was used on the most diverse occasions.