Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

noted above, by the progressive income tax.
139
 However, in the early 
1870s the income tax was dropped—and then declared unconsti-
tutional by the Supreme Court. Th
  e Fourteenth Amendment had 
promised “all persons” the equal protection of the laws. Th
 ough this 
proved a dead letter so far as the freedmen were concerned, the 
corporations—who enjoyed the legal status of persons—successfully 
invoked it against measures for corporate taxation and regulation.
Th
  ese and other reactionary developments might themselves have 
increased the willingness of the trade unions to back a labor party. 
Indeed, those trying to organize general or industrial unions aimed 
at the mass of workers realized that they needed the support of gov-
ernment. But Archer argues that many key craft leaders—especially 
Samuel Gompers—had greater industrial bargaining power and 
feared that their organizations might be put at risk if they teamed 
up with political adventurers. 
Several key trade unions had been inspired by the agitation 
surrounding the IWA and Marx’s writings on the importance of 
self-organization by the workers. Several US unions were to describe 
themselves as International organizations—the International 
Longshoremen or International Garment Workers Union and so 
forth—an echo of the IWA. Sometimes the “International” was 
justifi ed by its reference to organizing in Canada, but it had a reso-
nance beyond this. If Marx’s followers—many of them German 
Americans—can take a share of the credit for the impetus given to 
trade union organization, they must also accept some of the blame 
for the failure of the US workers’ movement to develop a labor 
party and for the related tardy development and weakness of the 
US welfare state. Indeed, some blame the infl uence of Karl Marx 
for these failures.
140
 
Yet Marx favored both trade unions and social democratic or 
socialist parties in the 1870s, as may readily be seen in the case 
of Germany. Th
 e German SPD was clearly linked to and sup-
portive of organized labor, but its Erfurt program committed it to 
139 W. 
Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America, Cambridge 1996, p. 26.
140 Messer-Kruse 
in 
Yankee International and Archer in Why Is Th
 ere No 
Labor Party in the United States? come close to this but ultimately concede that 
on such questions there was a large gap between Marx and those in the US who 
regarded themselves as his followers. (Th
  ese included Samuel Gompers.)
introduction  85

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revolutionary and democratic objectives and to immediate reforms. 
It campaigned for votes for women and the defense of the German 
forests. It supported rights for homosexuals and an end to Germany’s 
imperial exploits in Africa, and it debated the “agrarian question.”
141
 
Th
  e breadth of the SPD’s program did not, of course, wholly stem 
from Karl Marx but came also from several other currents, includ-
ing the Lassalleans. Th
  ough Marx had tenaciously fought against 
what he saw as Lassalle’s misguided belief in the progressive char-
acter of the German state, he nevertheless went out of his way to 
cultivate Lassalle’s acquaintance, gently to warn him of his mis-
takes, and above all to remain in touch with the tens of thousands 
of German socialists who were infl uenced by him. Marx stressed 
the great potential and attractive power of the working class, but in 
his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” he combated the idea that 
labor was the only source of value, insisting that land (by which he 
meant nature) was a vital source of use values.
142
 
Th
  e programmatic scope of the SPD is not the only evidence 
of the approach favored by Marx and Engels. Th
  e program of the 
French workers party was directly inspired by a conversation with 
Marx. Its very fi rst clause declared, “the emancipation of the class 
of producers involves all mankind, without distinction of sex or 
race.”
143
 Its immediate program committed it to universal suff rage 
and equal pay for equal work. No doubt that economism still lurks 
in it, but in 1879 a platform like this was not such a bad start-
ing point. Th
  e idea that trade unions and political organization are 
mutually exclusive put supposedly Marxian US Socialists and trade 
unionists at odds with their mentor.
Th
  e paternalist ethos of the early socialist movement rendered 
its commitment to equal rights for women ethereal and abstract. 
141  I have a very brief discussion of the programmatic ideas of the SPD in 
“Fin de Siècle: Socialism After the Crash,” New Left Review, 1:185, January/
February 1991. For the evolution of the party’s positions on sexuality in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth century, see David Fernbach, “Biology and Gay 
Identity,” New Left Review, 1:228, 1998.
142  Marx and Engels, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx, Th e 
First International and After, pp. 339–59.
143  “Introduction to the Program of the French Workers Party,” Th e First 
International and After, p. 376.
86  an unfinished revolution

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But as women were drawn into the labor movement in the 1880s, 
female activists challenged the idea that a woman’s place was in 
the home. While male labor organizers were prone to support the 
notion that the male worker should earn a “family wage,” the social-
ist organizations, especially those infl uenced by the German SPD, 
took a diff erent stance: they urged that women would not be truly 
emancipated until they entered the world of paid labor on equal 
terms with men. August Bebel, one of the historic leaders of the 
SPD, wrote a book on the topic, Woman Under Socialism (1879), 
which was widely read in both German and English. Bebel urged 
that domestic labor should be lightened, and women’s employment 
promoted, by the provision of free communal child-care facilities 
and restaurants. Th
  ough they did not anticipate twentieth-century 
feminism and often romanticized patriarchal features of the family, 
the socialists of this era did pay some attention to the issue of gender 
equality.
144
 Female members of the Socialist Labor Party were able 
to off er a feminist interpretation of Bebel’s ideas and to use them 
to argue for the importance of organizing women workers. Given 
the employment of large numbers of women in new branches of the 
economy, socialist women became a signifi cant force. 
In 1887 Engels paid tribute to the giant strides being made by the 
American workers movement, embracing momentous class battles 
in Illinois and Pennsylvania, the spread of the Eight Hour Leagues, 
the growth of the Knights of Labor, the sacrifi ces that had established 
May 1
 
as International Labor Day, and the electoral achievements 
of the fi rst state-level labor parties.
145
 But appreciative as he was, he 
insisted that the whole movement would lose its way unless it could 
develop a transformative program: “A new party must have a dis-
tinct platform,” one adapted to American conditions. Without this, 
any “new party would have but a rudimentary existence.” However, 
beyond saying that the kernel of this program would have to be 
public ownership of “land, railways, mines, machinery, etc.” he did 
not speculate as to what problems that program should address. 
Engels rebuked the doctrinaires of the heavily German American 
Socialist Labor Party for their hostility to unions and their failure 
144  Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, Urbana 1981, pp. 1–48.
145  See Frederick Engels, “Preface to the American Edition,” Th e Condition 
of the Working Class in England, New York 1887, reprinted in this volume.
introduction  87

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