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The UK Bible Students Website History Corner |
Friedrich Engels On The Labour Movement In America (1885)
Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England (Oxford; Oxford University Press; 2009), pp. 303, 304.
ʻIn February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil.
And yet, at that moment, the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal-miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the preparations, all over the country, for the great Eight Hours movement which was to come off, and did come off, in the May following. . .
[N]o one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie-fire, would shake American society to its very foundations.
ʻThe fact is there, stubborn and indisputable. . . . But at that time the movement was only just on the start; there was but a series of confused and apparently disconnected upheavals of that class which, by the suppression of negro slavery and the rapid development of manufactures, had become the lowest stratum of American society.
Before the year closed, these bewildering social convulsions began to take a definite direction.
The spontaneous, instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with a miserable social condition, the same everywhere and due to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact, that they formed a new and distinct class of American society; a class of practically speaking more or less hereditary wage-workers, proletarians.
And with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political working men's party, with a platform of its own, and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal.
In May the struggle for the Eight Hoursʼ working day, the troubles in Chicago, Milwaukee, etc., the attempts of the ruling class to crush the nascent uprising of Labour by brute force and brutal class-justice; in November the new Labour party organized in all great centres, and the New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee elections.
May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of US bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working class presented their coupons for payment.ʼ
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