Marx and Engels on Revolution in America/Chapter 8

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Marx and Engels on Revolution in America
by Heinz Neumann

VIII. The International Role of the American Labor Movement

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4304487Marx and Engels on Revolution in America — VIII. The International Role of the American Labor MovementHeinz Neumann

VIII.

The International Role of the American Labor Movement.

IN his letter to Mrs. Wischnewetzky dated June 3, 1886, Engels writes:

"… one thing is certain: the American working class is moving, and no mistake. And after a few false starts, they will get into the right track soon enough. This appearance of the Americans upon the scene I consider ONE OF THE GREATEST EVENTS OF THE YEAR.

"What the breakdown of RUSSIAN CZARISM would be for the great military monarchs of Europe—THE SNAPPING OF THEIR MAINSTAY—that is for the bourgeoisie of the whole world THE BREAKING OUT OF CLASS WAR in America. For America after all was the ideal of all the bourgeoisie: a country rich, vast, expanding with purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants or monarchial traditions and without a permanent and hereditary proletariat. Here every one could become, if not a capitalist, at all events an independent man, producing or trading, with his own means, for his own account. And because there were not, as yet, classes with opposing interests, our—and your—bourgeois thought that America stood above class antagonisms and struggles. The delusion has now broken down, the last bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can only be prevented from becoming like Europe, an Inferno, by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly-fledged proletariat of America will take place."

This analysis of the international significance of the proletarian class struggle in America holds true even today, stronger and more vital than ever. There already exists in America a "standing hereditary proletariat." The illusion of the bourgeois paradise has already been dissipated. The outbreak of the class war in America, its leadership by a revolutionary mass party, at the head of which the American Communists will place themselves, and the inception of revolutionary mass struggles in America, would in reality signify the "snapping of the mainstay" of imperialism throughout the world.

THE END.