Communist Left 44-45

The fable they are spinning us almost everywhere is the same, taking advantage of the credulity and divisions within the ‘left’, and the inertia and apathy of ‘reasonable people’: a few unscrupulous demagogues, appealing to the deepest and worst instincts of the electorate and turning them into the so‑called ‘will of the people’ have managed, as is allowed by the rules of parliamentarism, to ascend to the heights of State power.

Once settled in their palaces in Washington, Rome, Westminster, Vienna, Budapest and elsewhere, with sleeves rolled up, these young men, arriving in power after all the swingeing cuts and fire sales of previous administrations, immediately set about changing things, by means of daily politically incorrect pronouncements that ignore economic reality and show complete disdain for ‘diplomatic niceties’ and feigned concern for the safety of the country’s finances, the savings of fellow citizens, and the sacrosanct and inviolable democratic rules they decide should continue to be observed (or ignored).

We need to unravel this horribly tangled muddle of ideas.

State power is essentially a material thing, about control of armaments and a disciplined hierarchy of armed men. This complex century’s old structure has at its apex a tier of top management, formed by the government. But this is organic in nature and it responds to the functions of the State: the defense of the interests of the social class from which it emanates. In modern times financial capital everywhere monopolizes the running of the State; it alone chooses government personnel, who govern, yes, but according to its directives.

That it is the electors who choose is just a cock-and-bull story: the whole of the mass media, which easily shapes so‑called ‘public opinion’, is owned and controlled by big capital, which uses it to spread their lies; and if they quarrel among themselves it is for show or due to internal conflicts within its colossal interest groups. Electoral campaigns now cost billions.

Those who really hold power – constituted by a system of consolidated personal relations with the leaders of those armed men, and certainly not by the will of the people, which like a weathercock can be, and is, turned this way and that. Grand coalitions, ‘supply and confidence agreements’, Trump’s hiring and firing, and even the bi‑cephalous vice-presidency bringing right and left together (an Italian masterpiece) entertain the revolting bourgeoisie and its media with their knockabout brawls, while the real business goes on as normal.

But behind every one of these spectacles – half comedy, half tragedy – there lurks a harsh reality: the material fact of the crisis, which is pushing the formerly consolidated domestic and international equilibriums to breaking point. Here the crisis is imminent, there less so, but it exists on a global scale. The schizophrenia and confusion just reflect the way things are. The time when it will be every-man-for-himself is fast approaching, and the floundering of those who are drowning never appears particularly rational, elegant or dignified.

It is also true that, if in the turnover of its personnel the ruling class is now putting forward individual nonentities, and not only in the parliamentary theatre but also among government representatives, it is because the war between its fractions is so bitter and irresolvable that it renders any stable solution or compromise impossible. The election of ‘populists’ such as Donald Trump is an indicator not of American capitalism’s strength and its will to be ‘great again’, but of the profundity of its crisis, and the ridiculous clowns doing their turns in the media circus are only there because the ruling class now finds it impossible to recruit anyone better. They are therefore a sign of the bourgeois class’s objective weakness, which the proletariat need neither complain about nor fear; indeed, it should celebrate and rejoice, not bothering too much about the eccentric threats and peculiar bragging from the ‘tough guy’.

To counter the bourgeois class, be they ‘tough guys’ or ‘pushovers’, the only way forward is through organization and proletarian class struggle.

In most countries, the bourgeoisie finds it useful to change its political mediators often. As far as inter-State relations goes, what better than to have a constant turnover of government personnel in order to maneuver around, try out new alliances, and, if necessary, return to the previous alliances on the following day. Or else it can speak in threatening tones to the European Union, like merchants do when haggling, to get a better compromise.

With actual war approaching, the commercial war continues apace; the shift in the respective sizes of the imperialist giants, with China tending to outstrip the others, is putting more and more strain on the old equilibriums. There are no more safe ports, and the storm may sever the moorings of the various national vessels, pushing them far and wide in search of a safe landing place. And the lousy national bourgeoisies of second-rate powers will certainly not hesitate to find a new boss; or if possible, more than one, while continuing to rant on about ‘sovereignty’. Witness, for example, the Brexiters’ groveling to Trump.

On the domestic level, on the other hand, what better than to create a huge uproar, to have a permanent revolving door of politicians to confuse and distract the working class, supposedly wanting to protect them from ‘immigrants’, from the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’, from ‘dishonest politicians’, ‘the Westminster bubble’ etc., etc. If there is any charity to be bestowed, they try to ensure that credit for it goes to the ‘right‑wing’ governments. If not, they rekindle antifascist frontism which, along with the mythical ‘specter of fascism’, diverts the working‑class struggle from its immediate and historic objectives to that of maintaining a characteristic fiction of bourgeois rule: democracy.

Because democracy is dead. So dead in fact that even professors in the bourgeois universities are sure of it; and when they are honest, they even rule out the possibility of reanimating it.

This is not actually very precise. If by democracy we mean power being shared between the ruling class and the ruled, such a democracy can never die because it never existed: even the most perfect democracy is a form designed to hide the fact that control is being exerted over the working class. If what they mean is, instead, a democracy of the bourgeoisie, the landowners, and the numerous petty‑bourgeois sub‑classes, we have to point out that the death certificate for this democracy was issued over a century ago, at the time when international imperialist and monopolist capitalism came of age.

Since then, although in different ways and at different times, the working classes, small tradesmen and farmers of city and countryside, merchants, intellectuals, professionals, etc., have been progressively excluded from any share in State power, and their political parties have either fallen apart or been transformed into agencies for social consensus that are dependent on the State and have their own paid staff.

The petty bourgeois strata, increasingly reduced from carrying out productive functions to simple micro‑rentiers, no longer have the energy to think or act, even to defend themselves. Incapable of equipping themselves with any corporative or political expression of their own and reduced to impotence and infamy, they implore the State to give them ‘more security’ against the ‘invasion’ of desperate proletarians from the south; penniless, but very much alive. In this vile and rancorous world, patriotism and nationalism are now used to negate, not affirm; to exclude, not to include. The first and fundamental ideal of the petty bourgeoisie has triumphed: individualism. And from on high, the loved (or reviled) Great Leader, craps on them with his endless tweets.

From time to time the petty bourgeoisie expresses its desperation by means of spontaneous and disorganized protests and rebellious actions, which, however, lack any kind of historical or immediate program (such as the gilets jaunes protests in France); it will always face the challenge of submitting to one of the only two solutions that history now has on offer: either the anti-proletarian dictatorship of big capital, and its parties, or the anti-capitalist dictatorship of the working class, and its party.

Thus, the democracy of the various petty-bourgeois sections ends up effectively voting against itself, committing suicide by willingly yielding to the Salvinis, Orbans, Bolsanaros, Trumps, Kaczynskis and the Putins… Who, on the other hand, are not wrong to declare themselves to be ‘super-democrats’, and that the ‘technocrats’ the ‘rich’ and the ‘global elite’ who criticize them, are ‘anti-democratic’ because nobody voted for them.

Nor can it be maintained, that the League (Italy) or the Brexit Party (Britain) or Fidesz (Hungary) are any ‘more fascist’ than the other parties, in the sense of being more anticommunist and anti-worker. Because fascism and democracy have merged the one into the other; they are just different forms, compatible with one another, of bourgeois State government.

So much is this so, that different forms of democracy alone conceal the uncontested dictatorship of capital over the whole of society. These, however, are now so threadbare that they no longer really work even as a cover. The recall to ancient unifying antifascist mythology, such as Italy and France’s ‘war‑time Resistance movement’, or Britain’s ‘Dunkirk spirit’ or for that matter Germany’s post‑war ‘reconstruction’ and ‘economic miracle’, has been giving Europe’s proletarians indigestion for more than 70 years; it has now gone stale and is increasingly seen as an insult to our intelligence, especially when faced with the chronic and extreme degeneracy of the phony parties, all the way from those formerly known to be Socialist, ‘Communist’ (i.e. Stalinist) or Labour, all of them identical in their inconsistency, to the ‘deplorable’ right wing parties.

We are paying today for the antifascist swindle. Due to the present weakness of our movement those with anti‑democratic sentiments within the proletariat are still being attracted not to communism, but to the ‘anti‑system’ parties, which are actually just as capitalist and just as aligned against the workers and communists as those of ‘the political establishment’.

A dictatorship, a one‑party regime, therefore, looms on the horizon. Do we dread it? No. Because this very regime, behind all the flapping around in the parliamentary henhouse, is already here! It is just that the big bourgeois class, just as it will sack a PR agency if it costs too much and produces too little, sometimes does likewise with the pseudo-parties gathered around it, consolidating its expenditure on just one. The ‘fascist peril’ does not therefore exist, because fascism is already rampant everywhere, thinly veiled by the ever more threadbare electoral rites.

With the alibi of the dictatorship of the majority behind it, capital, which always has the majority, can already get all of its abominations passed democratically, imposing on society its infamous superstitions and horrible vexations, which in themselves are often perfidiously oblique in their attack on the working class: the persecution of women, or religious, racial and national minorities etc. In an agonized paroxysm it has lost all material and ideal sense of direction: democracy/fascism, reality/spectacle, true/fake, man/woman, racism/globalization, nationalism/imperialism, agnosticism/piety… The one unifying point of reference remains the Gods of the Market and Profit. In its catastrophic collapse, capital’s lack of humanity is clearly visible in the obscene excesses of its high priests.

And is our liberating revolution, now that it has been condemned to minority status, therefore postponed indefinitely? The ABC of our historical materialism has taught us that there is a time for everything. The sharpening of the bourgeois global crisis at particular historical turning points obliges the proletariat to organize and rebel. But the vast bulk of proletarians will not know they are making a revolution, nor why they are doing it; no‑one will have voted for communism. Only a significant minority from within it will have gathered around the class party. The latter arrives from a distance, with its own doctrine, confirmed and refined by history and the only one truly free from all the errors, beliefs and prejudices imposed by class societies over thousands of years, the worst of these societies being the democratic one. This party alone can know, see, and predict for the class.

The ideological bankruptcy of the ex‑social democratic and pseudo-communist parties, their surrender to parties which are openly bourgeois, belligerent, chauvinist and racist, as well as being a kind of payback for all their old lies and hypocrisies, marks a step towards the global crisis of capital and therefore, through historical necessity, a step towards its forceful destruction by the communist revolution. It is bound to be an anti-democratic government that will try to bar the way to our revolution, after all democratic ones have failed to halt its advance. The ‘right‑wing’ face of Capital, the last class‑based society, is in fact its true face, and it is against it, and those who want to disguise and embellish it, that the working class will have to fight, and emerge victorious.

In our account of the critical events and proletarian movements in Germany from 1918 to 1923, our party highlights a series of theoretical and tactical errors that were made by the communist leadership in those momentous years. It must be stated in advance that this should not be interpreted as dishonoring the huge sacrifices made by the revolutionary proletariat; nor is it in any way a dismissal of the legacy of the German working class as a whole, or a matter of assigning “blame” to specific individuals who put themselves at the head of the political and trade union organs of the German proletariat.

Nor are we such poor materialists as to assert that, even if the communist movement in Germany had adopted the perfectly “correct” strategy and tactics, victory would have been assured. It was the objective situation, both in Germany and internationally, that made it at least challenging, and perhaps even impossible, to achieve victory and to produce a party with a firmly established doctrine and well connected to the working-class movement.

Nor should our critique be taken to mean that we reject all of the “positives” of the revolutionary movement in Germany.

However, in every single case, it is vitally important to understand that these positives contained their own contradictions, both in terms of principles and in practice – again, for material reasons that have been clearly identified in our texts.

The most onerous of these objective circumstances was the hold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) over the working class in general and, in particular, over its most advanced and militant representatives, including the leadership of the young Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

The weight of tradition weighed heavily on the working class, both in the leadership and at the base.

Hardly surprising: the SPD was the world’s largest political party. It had been the party of the German working class since 1875. It had survived Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws. It was the bedrock of the Second International. Yet by the outbreak of the First World War, it was a State within a State, inextricably bound to the destiny of German imperialism.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the degeneration of the SPD must inevitably lead to its abandonment of proletarian internationalism. But at the time, it came as a great shock. When Lenin saw a copy of Vorwärts, the SPD newspaper, which proclaimed the SPD’s active support for the war, he simply refused to believe it; he was convinced that it was a forgery by the German General Staff.

He was not the only one to be deceived. The glaring cognitive dissonance of the socialist left in August 1914 – not just in Germany, but internationally – was embodied in two of Luxemburg’s most significant utterances: “After August 4, 1914, social democracy is nothing but a nauseating corpse,” she correctly stated, and yet, “Better the worst working-class party than none at all”.

But the fact is, the SPD was no longer a party of the working class.

The unwillingness of the opposition faction led by Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, the International Socialists, later the Spartacists, to break with the SPD or the left-leaning independent social democratic party (USPD) because “that is where the masses were” was a grave mistake, leaving them badly prepared when the German proletariat finally “awoke from its stupor”, as Luxemburg herself foresaw in her “Junius” pamphlet.

The desire to “go to the masses” was a theoretical and tactical error that would dog the proletarian movement throughout the wartime and post‑war period.

From the first days of the insurrection of 1918‑19, when soldiers and sailors in particular responded to the calls of the Spartacists, when, in the streets of Berlin, it seemed that the fate of the German revolution must be decided, social democracy – whether majoritarian or independent – multiplied its presence to crush the impetus of the masses, putting itself completely at the service of the “Fatherland in danger” by raising fears of a French invasion, presenting the insurgents as “savages”, and mobilizing all forces first to prevent the extension of the movement and then moving on to the massacre of the young Communist Party.

The role of the SPD in this crushing of the revolutionary movement is well known. Less well known is the role of the independents, who always posed as the friend of the revolutionary proletariat, only to leave it in the lurch: “The Devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape” (Hamlet). At all of the decisive moments, the USPD provided the best weapons for the defense of the bourgeois regime, by disorienting the masses when all the conditions existed for the assault on power; the Scheidemanns and the Noskes were then called upon to complete this treacherous work as the executioner of the working class.

The savage decapitation of the communist movement that followed in the tragic days of mid‑January in Berlin marks an important stage in bringing the proletarian movement to a shuddering halt. But if these were the negative consequences of the defeat, this first baptism of fire of the young communist party in the armed struggle, and the exposure of social-democracy’s role as guard‑dog for the capitalist regime, were the elements that determined the orientation of great swathes of the working class towards communism, towards the Russian revolution. Millions of German proletarians were won over to revolutionary communism.

Nonetheless, as later events unfolded, every positive development was soon confronted with a countertendency. It was always one step forward, one step back:

– Workers councils were rapidly established and seized power in many German cities and regions; but they ceded power at a national level and lost any political content. For many on the Communist Left, the “workers’ council” became an organizational fetish, while the key questions of political power and arming the broader proletariat were neglected;

– The German Communist Party was (finally) established in January 1919, with a fundamentally clear program; but it was totally unprepared for the onslaught, to the extent that it was unable to protect its most experienced leaders, notably Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches, who were murdered soon afterwards;

– Millions of young workers, soldiers and sailors flocked to the new party; but frustrated by the hesitations and vacillations of right‑wing and centrist leaders such as Levi, the exclusion of the Communist Left at the rigged Heidelberg Congress of 1919, the merger with the left wing of the USPD, and the embrace of parliamentarism, most militants (especially in the north, including Berlin) left to join the Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD);

– The Kapp putsch of 1920 was brought to a halt by a general strike (perhaps the most effective general strike in history) and spontaneous armed struggle of the proletariat; but the KPD surrendered the initiative to reformists whose objectives were limited to “defense of the Republic”, an early manifestation of proto-antifascism;

– In the Ruhr and parts of Saxony, the working class armed itself and went onto the offensive in response to the Kapp putsch; but the KPD offered no decisive central leadership, and where in coalition (or “loyal opposition”) in regional “workers’ governments”, it actively prevented the workers from seizing more arms;

– There was a rapid growth of militant industrial unionism in the Unionen; but, under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism, these often (though not always) rejected the need for political action (which meant, for example, that the AAUD under Otto Rühle’s direction undermined the insurrection of March 1921);

– The VKPD, to the jubilation of the KAPD, sanctioned the immediate seizure of power in March 1921; but when the revolutionary Red Army acted on this, the leadership hung them out to dry and, after the inevitable defeat, thousands of Red Guardsmen were summarily executed or thrown in jail;

– The Red Armies themselves raised the hopes of the most militant workers; but failed to win the active support of the powerful industrial workers, who, crucially, remained inside the factories;

– The KAPD adopted some positions close to our own; but, lacking firm and experienced leadership, it soon broke into numerous factions embracing non‑Marxist positions (workerist anti-intellectualism, the councilist tendency, the terrorist tendency, national bolshevism…)

– The revolutionary working class made a heroic “last stand” in 1923, mainly in Hamburg; but “the party’s military preparation, began at feverish speed, was divorced from the party’s political activity, which was carried on at previous peacetime tempo. The masses did not understand the party and did not keep step with it” (Trotski). The new leadership hypocritically assigned the blame to Luxemburg’s legacy of “spontaneism”.

There were other factors at work.

History had not yet produced a truly global communist party with consistently solid and common Marxist foundations, well trained in facing the common political enemies in the streets and in the media, and fully rooted in workers’ organizations within which it was held in high esteem for the continuity and effectiveness of its directives.

The Third International, constrained by both the need to promote world revolution and the need to shore up the embryonic socialist State in Russia, inevitably sent mixed signals and contradictory advice, and could provide little assistance. Given the weakness of the German Communist Party, Lenin’s Left‑wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder just disoriented and demoralized German communists and caused further schisms. The defeat of the German proletariat was moreover reflected in the defeat of a series of revolutions started in various other countries.

Following the actions of 1920, 1921 and 1923, literally tens of thousands of the best revolutionary militants were sentenced to long prison sentences. Many of the KPD’s resources were focused on getting them amnestied. This in turn accelerated the process of the integration of the KPD within the framework of the bourgeois Weimar Republic, its courts and its various parliamentary committees, lobbies and pressure groups etc. By the time these militants were released (most of them in 1928) the KPD had been fully Stalinized.

The militants who returned to the KPD were given a choice: accept the new party discipline or take the consequences. Troublemakers such as Max Hölz, leader of the Central German insurrection, were shipped off to Moscow and executed by Stalin in his anti‑German purge of the early thirties.

The legacy

We refer to the events that took place in Germany from 1918 to 1923 as “The German Tragedy”. But this was a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, in which the leading protagonist, the German proletariat, waged a heroic and admirable struggle, but was brought down by a combination of its own flaws and forces beyond its control.

The physical and intellectual counter-revolution that followed was more intense and devastating in Germany than anywhere else. Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the KPD from 1925, soon perfected the Stalinist art of deploying pseudo-revolutionary language – wrongly characterized by trotskists as “ultra-leftism” – to denounce German communism’s greatest leaders.

Thälmann called for the “sharpest fight against the remnants of Luxemburgism” and described it as a “theoretical platform of counter-revolutionary directions”. In the divided Germany that followed 1945, Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy was further mutilated on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Walter Ulbricht, Chairman of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) called Luxemburgism a “mutation of social democracy”. Her Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, criticized by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? for what he regarded as its tactical errors, was taken out of the context of the struggle against revisionism and dismissed in a way Lenin never intended.

Luxemburg always believed in the need for a political party, and in 1918 she and Liebknecht established the first Communist Party outside Russia.

Later, as the DDR needed its own home-grown icons, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were idolized as martyrs, as they still are by the German Left Party (Die Linke), whose main political research organization, which pumps out wretched papers calling for a more caring, “green” capitalism, is named the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Even more nauseatingly, Luxemburg has been embraced by various liberals, “democratic socialists”, libertarians and new‑age thinkers. The bourgeoisie loves dead revolutionaries.

This latter trend was initiated by Paul Levi. Levi left the KPD after aligning with the Serrati faction at the Livorno Congress in 1921, joined the USPD, and then the SPD in 1922. In that year he planned to republish precisely those writings of Rosa Luxemburg where she had differed with Lenin. Lenin commented that Paul Levi’s intention was to get into the good graces of the bourgeoisie and his new (i.e., old!) party. Lenin famously wrote:

“We shall reply to this by quoting two lines from a Russian fable, ‘Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles’ […] But in spite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world” [our emphasis].

The other left current that might have emerged with some credit was within the KAPD. From the start, the Italian left criticized the KAPD’s “libertarian and syndicalist tendencies” (as discussed in the third section of this report) but the critique did not prevent Il Soviet from recognizing the combativity that the KAPD exhibited during the Kapp putsch and contrasted it with the passivity of the KPD:

“The new organization is to a large extent more combative and revolutionary and has developed a broader activity amongst the masses; its partisans are the workers who tolerate neither the lack of intransigence which the old party has sometimes shown, nor its conversion to parliamentarism, which took it close to the Independents, who are taking advantage of its tactics to gain credence in front of the proletariat and the International” (“The situation in Germany and the communist movement”, Il Soviet no. 18, 11 July 1920).

Our current initially hoped to see the KAPD reintegrated into the KPD and regarded the greater danger (as in Italy with Serrati) as coming from the opportunism of the left USPD. But in Germany as well as Italy (and elsewhere) the Communist International pushed for the integration of communists with left social democrats to create a mass party – in Germany, the United Communist Party (UKPD). This proved disastrous. Left Communists never judge the strength of a party by the number of membership cards it issues, but the instruction from the Comintern was to “go to where the masses are”.

The fundamental problem with the KAPD, however, and the cause of its disintegration into factionalism, lay precisely in its origins: it brought together various currents that were only united by their common disgust at the centrism and opportunism of the KPD. It attracted the best militants, but its programs were inevitably a mish‑mash and, once the revolutionary tide had turned, all of its “tendencies” ran aground, one by one. Once the KAPD cut its ties to the Third International, debate between the Italian Left and the Communist Left not only in Germany, but also in England, the Low Countries and Bulgaria, became impossible and they grew further and further apart.

“I was, I am, I will be”

Germany offers the one and only attempt so far at communist revolution by the proletariat of a modern country, that is to say, a country that was highly industrialized and had a constitutional-democratic political system.

Despite the many mistakes, the “German Tragedy” provides a powerful inspiration for the working-class militants of today and tomorrow. The German and international proletariat must rescue its history, and the experiences of the revolutionary workers who took part in its struggles, from the official commentariat and hagiographers of the bourgeoisie.

This will provide an essential weapon in the intellectual arsenal of the German working class when it once again rises from its slumber, as one day it must. The lessons drawn from the events in Germany from 1918 to 1923 have played no small part in the formulation of the program of the International Communist Party, echoing Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “I was, I am, I will be”.

Commentators from across the bourgeois political spectrum have done their best to suffocate this cry. We reclaim it. Only in this way should the German revolutionaries be remembered. Only in this way will the dead of yesterday rise again to inspire the revolutionaries of tomorrow.

“We may die, but our program will live!”.

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.