Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie 
only of the payment of coupons of U.S. bonds; henceforth May 
and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the 
American working class presented their coupons for payment.
In European countries, it took the working class years and years 
before they fully realized the fact that they formed a distinct and, 
under the existing social conditions, a permanent class of modern 
society, and it took years again until this class consciousness led 
them to form themselves into a distinct political party, independent 
of, and opposed to, all the old political parties formed by the various 
sections of the ruling classes. On the more favored soil of America, 
where no medieval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the 
elements of modern bourgeois society as evolved in the seventeenth 
century, the working class passed through these two stages of its 
development within ten months.
Still, all this is but a beginning. Th
  at the laboring masses should 
feel their community of grievances and of interests, their solidar-
ity as a class in opposition to all other classes; that in order to give 
expression and eff ect to this feeling, they should set in motion the 
political machinery provided for that purpose in every free coun-
try—that is the fi rst step only. Th
  e next step is to fi nd the common 
remedy for these common grievances, and to embody it in the plat-
form of the new Labor Party. And this—the most important and 
the most diffi
  cult step in the movement—has yet to be taken in 
America.
A new party must have a distinct positive platform, a platform 
which may vary in details as circumstances vary and as the party 
itself develops, but still one upon which the party, for the time 
being, is agreed. So long as such a platform has not been worked 
out, or exists but in a rudimentary form, so long the new party, too, 
will have but a rudimentary existence; it may exist locally but not 
yet nationally; it will be a party potentially but not actually.
Th
 at platform, whatever may be its fi rst initial shape, must 
develop in a direction which may be determined beforehand. Th
 e 
causes that brought into existence the abyss between the working 
class and the capitalist class are the same in America as in Europe; 
the means of fi lling up that abyss are equally the same everywhere. 
Consequently, the platform of the American proletariat will in 
242 frederick 
engels

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the long run coincide, as to the ultimate end to be attained, with 
the one which, after sixty years of dissensions and discussions, has 
become the adopted platform of the great mass of the European 
militant proletariat. It will proclaim, as the ultimate end, the con-
quest of political supremacy by the working class, in order to eff ect 
the direct appropriation of all means of production—land, rail-
ways, mines, machinery, etc.—by society at large, to be worked in 
common by all for the account and benefi t of all.
But if the new American party, like all political parties every-
where, by the very fact of its formation aspires to the conquest of 
political power, it is as yet far from agreed upon what to do with 
that power when once attained. In New York and the other great 
cities of the East, the organization of the working class has pro-
ceeded upon the lines of Trades’ Societies, forming in each city a 
powerful Central Labor Union. In New York the Central Labor 
Union, last November, chose for its standard-bearer Henry George, 
and consequently its temporary electoral platform has been largely 
imbued with his principles. In the great cities of the Northwest, the 
electoral battle was fought upon a rather indefi nite labor platform, 
and the infl uence of Henry George’s theories was scarcely, if at all, 
visible. And while in these great centers of population and of indus-
try the new class movement came to a political head, we fi nd all 
over the country two widespread labor organizations: the Knights 
of Labor
4
 and the Socialist Labor Party,
5
 of which only the latter 
4 Th
  e Noble Order of the Knights of Labor was a working-class organiza-
tion founded in Philadelphia in 1869. Existing illegally until 1878, it observed 
a semi-mysterial ritual. Th
  at year the organization emerged from the under-
ground, retaining some of its secret features. Th
  e Knights of Labor aimed to 
liberate workers by setting up cooperatives. Th
  ey took in all skilled and even 
unskilled trades, without discrimination on account of sex, race, nationality, or 
religion. Th
  e organization reached the highest point of its activity during the 
1880s, when, under pressure from the masses, the leaders of the order were 
compelled to consent to an extensive strike movement. Its membership at that 
time was over 700,000, including 60,000 Negroes. However, on account of the 
opportunistic tactics of the leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary class 
struggle, the order forfeited its prestige among the masses. Its activity came to 
an end in the next decade.
5  Th
  e Socialist Labor Party came into existence in 1876 as a result of the union 
of the American sections of the First International with other working-class 
the working class in england  243

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has a platform in harmony with the modern European standpoint 
as summarized above.
Of the three more or less defi nite forms under which the 
American labor movement thus presents itself, the fi rst, the Henry 
George movement in New York, is for the moment of a chiefl y 
local signifi cance. No doubt New York is by far the most impor-
tant city of the States, but New York is not Paris and the United 
States are not France. And it seems to me that the Henry George 
platform, in its present shape, is too narrow to form the basis for 
anything but a local movement, or at best for a short-lived phase 
of the general movement. To Henry George, the expropriation of 
the mass of the people from the land is the great and universal 
cause of the splitting up of the people into Rich and Poor. Now 
this is not quite correct historically. In Asiatic and classical antiq-
uity, the predominant form of class oppression was slavery; that 
is to say, not so much the expropriation of the masses from the 
land as the appropriation of their persons. When, in the decline of 
the Roman Republic, the free Italian peasants were expropriated 
from their farms, they formed a class of “poor whites” similar to 
that of the Southern Slave States before 1861, and between slaves 
and poor whites, two classes equally unfi t for self-emancipation, 
the old world went to pieces. In the Middle Ages, it was not the 
expropriation of the people from, but on the contrary their appro-
priation to the land which became the source of feudal oppression. 
Th
  e peasant retained his land, but was attached to it as a serf or 
villein, and made liable to tribute to the lord in labor and in pro-
duce. It was only at the dawn of modern times, towards the end of 
the fi fteenth century, that the expropriation of the peasantry on a 
large scale laid the foundation for the modern class of wagework-
ers who possess nothing but their labor power and can live only by 
the selling of that labor power to others. But if the expropriation 
from the land brought this class into existence, it was the develop-
ment of capitalist production, of modern industry and agriculture 
on a large scale, which perpetuated it, increased it, and shaped it 
socialist organizations in the United States. Th
 is party consisted mainly of 
immigrants, particularly Germans. Its activities were sectarian, and its leaders, 
because they refused to work in the trade unions, were incapable of heading the 
mass movement of the American workers. 
244 frederick 
engels

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