Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America by August H. Nimtz Jr

Author:August H. Nimtz Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739157541
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

Birth of a New Labor Movement

It was within this overall longue durée framework that Marx and Engels approached the newly revived labor movement in the United States and, less explicitly, the initial and hesitant steps toward an alliance of labor in both “white and black skin.” Once slavery had been confined to the dustbin of history, their theory had predicted the qualitative deepening of capitalist property relations and, hence, the emergence of working-class opposition and organization. Thus Marx was cheered by news that, within weeks of the victory over the slavocracy, American workers had launched a nationwide campaign to win the eight-hour workday. Weydemeyer, in August 1866, put the significance of the undertaking for the class struggle in the United States in historical context: “With the eight-hour movement . . . the labor question, i.e. the modern labor question—the question of hired labor, which is better known under the euphemistic name of ‘free labor’ —steps before the social forum, strips off the secondary character which heretofore adhered to it on this continent, raises itself to a social question.”26 The initiative had not just theoretical but also political import for the class struggle in Europe as well as the United States. In his “Instructions” to the first congress of the IWMA in 1866 in Geneva, Marx pointed to the vanguard actions of the workers as an example to be emulated. “We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day. This limitation being generally claimed by the workmen of the United States of America, the vote of the Congress will raise it to the common platform of the working classes all over the world.”27

Thus began the first international campaign to institute the eight-hour workday. In the preface to Capital Marx wrote: “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.” In addition to the stimulus that the war against slavery provided for independent, European, working-class political action in the form of the anti-interventionist movement—which in turn helped inspire the formation of the IWMA—Marx was also referring to the newly organized eight-hour campaign and its anticipated impact on the other side of the Atlantic, one which he was doing everything in his power to encourage.

The Geneva meeting coincided with the inaugural conference of the National Labor Union (NLU) in Baltimore. It adopted the eight-hour day as one of its main goals. The formation of the NLU, truly the first national labor organization in the United States, signaled for Marx and Engels the revival of the American labor movement on a new and more advanced basis. This development commanded their attention, for the first time, toward the question of union organizing in the United States. Marx remarked, “I was exceedingly pleased at the American workers’ congress which took place at the same time in Baltimore. The watchword there was organisation for the struggle

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