We celebrate today the birth of the labor movement and the anniversary of the September 28 1864 founding of the First International. The principles of labor organization which it forged have become foundational for any revolutionary struggle; class solidarity and international unity of action foremost among them.
In this time of Fourth Reich Nazi revivalism and nationalist identity politics which has recaptured Hungary, Italy, and Austria, with significant threats to democracy in Germany, France, The Netherlands (not the one with Beetlejuice), Belgium, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Portugal and well as in America where democracy has fallen and been captured by Trump’s fascist kleptocracy of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, the idea of Internationalism and the solidarity of a United Humankind offers an alternative vision of humankind and civilization.
For those of us with a multigenerational heritage of labor unionism, this is a special day of family remembrance of the great sacrifices with which our more fair and equal partnerships in society were won, and of re-evaluations of what remains to be achieved and forging strategies and plans of action for the struggles ahead.
In this great project of the transformation of humankind and the systems and structures of our social, political, and economic relations, I invite you all to share; let us seize our power to shape ourselves and our own destiny from those who would enslave us.
Writing in Socialist Worker, Elizabeth Schulte describes the purpose and significance of the First International; “Karl Marx made sure there was no confusion on where he thought socialists should want their story to go. When he drafted the rules for the International Workingman’s Association in 1864, he started with the statement: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
No other class could do the work of liberating the working class, only the working class itself, Marx believed. This stood in sharp distinction to other ideas about achieving full human liberation and equality at the time.”
“By studying the historical development of capitalism and its inner workings, Marx identified the potential revolutionary role of the working class in winning a socialist society.
By the nature of workers’ role under capitalism — forced to sell their labor power in workplaces where they neither own nor control the means of production — workers came into conflict with the existing system and the bosses who own and control these workplaces.
The Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs explained this relationship in a 1905 speech, focusing in on a famous member of the ruling class, industrialist Andrew Carnegie; “The capitalists own the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not own. The capitalists, who own the tools that the working class use, appropriate to themselves what the working class produce, and this accounts for the fact that a few capitalists become fabulously rich while the toiling millions remain in poverty, ignorance and dependence…
Andrew Carnegie, who owns these tools, has absolutely nothing to do with the production of steel…His mills at Pittsburgh, Duquesne and Homestead, where these tools are located, are thronged with thousands of toolless wage workers, who work day and night, in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, who endure all the privations and make all the sacrifices of health and limb and life, producing thousands upon thousands of tons of steel, yet not having an interest, even the slightest, in the product.
Carnegie, who owns the tools, appropriates the product, and the workers, in exchange for their labor power, receive a wage that serves to keep them in producing order; and the more industrious they are, and the more they produce, the worse off they are; for when they have produced more than Carnegie can get rid of in the markets, the tool houses are shut down and the workers are locked out in the cold.
This is a beautiful arrangement for Mr. Carnegie; he does not want a change…and he is doing what he can to induce you to think that this ideal relation ought to be maintained forever.”
As Debs pointed out, this conflict between those who work and those who rule isn’t always obvious. In fact, capitalism does its best to obscure it. But nonetheless, these contradictions are ever present.”
“On any average day, workers feel powerless in their workplaces. It can seem like the last place where they could have their voices heard — and for good reason. In most workplaces, you check your opinions and your rights at the door in exchange for employment, and you are forced to bend to the rules laid out by your employer.
It hardly feels like a place, as Marx argued, where workers have the most power. This is why — though there has been an increase in strikes, including the explosive teachers’ strikes of last spring and this fall — the workplace is still not the epicenter of most working-class struggle today.
Plus, it’s important to point out that workers have been involved in struggles that aren’t at their workplaces — such as the Women’s Marches, the #MeToo movement, protests against the Trump administration’s family detention policies and more.
These are important points of struggle where class issues are fought out. But it’s the potential power that workers have at work which Marx believed made them the prime force for change.
In ways that are unlike any other group in society, workers are brought together by capitalism into a common situation and usually a common location — and by being subject to a common discipline, they have an interest in taking action collectively. This is why Marx said capitalism created its own “gravedigger.”
Of course, many factors keep the underlying contradictions from turning into outright revolt. They often are specifically designed to keep workers’ eyes trained on one another rather than the bosses — such as competition for jobs or sexism and racism.
But when workplace struggles do break out, not only are the contradictions laid bare, but so is workers’ potential power as workers. Strikes can play the role of demonstrating to workers their collective power to shut down a workplace, and even a city and more.
The more the struggle is able to challenge the status quo, the more questions come up about who should be making the decisions about our everyday lives — inside and outside the workplace.
During the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which was inspired by the Russian Revolution, workers demonstrated a high level of organization — both so they could have the strongest impact on the bosses and to make sure that their families received the food and milk they needed, and much more.
The General Strike Committee became the real government of the city, as First World War veterans replaced the police, and radical literature was passed from hand to hand to provide the news that the bosses’ newspapers refused to report.
In the process of this kind of struggle, one that grows beyond individual workplaces and begins to challenge the existing governments and social structures, history shows that workers see that they have to reorganize society if they are going to win against those who would like to keep the status quo.
Marx learned this through the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. He concluded that while many democratic changes could happen quite quickly, a complete transformation of society is necessary if workers’ power is going to prevail.”
As Marcello Musto writes in Jacobin; “After its first meeting, on September 28, 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association (better known as the “First International”) quickly aroused passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of women and men to struggle against exploitation. Thanks to its activity, workers were able to gain a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of their own strength, and to develop new, more advanced forms of struggle for their rights.
In the beginning, the International was an organization containing various political traditions, the majority of which were reformist rather than revolutionary. Originally, the central driving force was British trade unionism, the leaders of which were mainly interested in economic questions. They fought to improve the workers’ conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence, they conceived of the International primarily as an instrument to prevent the import of workers from abroad in the event of strikes.
The second most important group were the mutualists, long dominant in France. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they opposed any working-class involvement in politics and the strike as a weapon of struggle.
Then there were the Communists who opposed the very system of capitalist production and argued for the necessity of overthrowing it. At its founding, the ranks of the International also included a number of workers inspired by utopian theories and exiles having vaguely democratic ideas and cross-class conception who considered the International as an instrument for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.
It was Karl Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International and who achieved a non-exclusionary, yet firmly working-class-based political program that won it mass support. Rejecting sectarianism, he worked to bring the International’s various strands together. Marx was the political soul of its General Council (the body that worked out a unifying synthesis of the various tendencies and issued guidelines for the organization as a whole). He drafted all its main resolutions and prepared almost all its congress reports.
But the International was, of course, much more than Marx, brilliant a leader as he was. It was not, as has often been written, the “creation of Marx.” Rather it was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes. The International was made possible first of all by the labor movement’s struggles in the 1860s. One of its basic rules — and the fundamental distinction from previous labor organizations — was that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
“The late 1860s and early 1870s were a period rife with social conflicts in Europe. Many workers who took part in protest actions decided to make contact with the International, whose reputation quickly spread widely. From 1866 on, strikes intensified in many countries and formed the core of a new and important wave of mobilizations. The International was essential in struggles that were won by workers in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The scenario was the same in many of these conflicts: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries. As a result, the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers’ demands. These advances were supported by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathized with the ideas of the International or were veritable organs of the General Council. Both contributed to the development of class consciousness and to the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International.
Across Europe, the association developed an efficient organizational structure and increased the number of its members (150,000 at the peak moment). For all the difficulties bound up with a diversity of nationalities, languages, and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organizations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the crucial importance of class solidarity and international cooperation.
The International was the locus of some of the most famous debates of the labor movement, such as that between communism and anarchy. The congresses of the International were also where, for the first time, a major transnational organization came to decisions about crucial issues, which had been discussed before its foundation, that subsequently became strategic points in the political programs of socialist movements across the world. Among these were the indispensable function of trade unions, the socialization of land and means of production, the importance of participating in elections and doing this through independent parties of the working class, women’s emancipation, and the conception of war as an inevitable product of the capitalist system.”
“The 156th anniversary of the First International takes place in a very different context. An abyss separates the hopes of those times from the mistrust so characteristic of our own, the anti-systemic spirit and solidarity of the age of the International from the ideological subordination and individualism of a world reshaped by neoliberal competition and privatization.
The world of labor has suffered an epochal defeat, and the Left is still in the midst of deep crisis. After decades of neoliberal policies, we’ve returned to an exploitative system, similar to that of the nineteenth century. Labor market “reforms” — a term now shed of its original progressive meaning — have introduced more and more “flexibility” with each passing year, creating deeper inequalities. Other major political and economic shifts have succeeded one another, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Among them, there have been the social changes generated by globalization, the ecological disasters produced by the present mode of production, the growing gulf between the wealthy exploitative few and the huge impoverished majority, one of the biggest economic crises of capitalism (the one erupted in 2008) in history, the blustery winds of war, racism and chauvinism, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a context such as this, class solidarity is all the more indispensable. It was Marx himself who emphasized that the confrontation between workers — including between local and migrant workers (who are moreover discriminated) — is an essential element of the domination of the ruling classes. New ways of organizing social conflict, political parties, and trade unions must certainly be invented, as we cannot reproduce schemes used 150 years ago. But the old lesson of the International that workers are defeated if they do not organize a common front of the exploited is still valid. Without that, our only horizon is a war between the poor and unbridled competition between individuals.
The barbarism of today’s world order imposes upon the contemporary workers’ movement the urgent need to reorganize itself on the basis of two key characteristics of the International: the multiplicity of its structure and radicalism in objectives. The aims of the organization founded in London in 1864 are today more timely than ever. To rise to the challenges of the present, however, the new International cannot evade the twin requirements of pluralism and anticapitalism”.
What did Marx intend when he handed humankind the Promethean Fire of liberation and revolutionary struggle that was the International?
Here is my reply in a celebration of his birthday and of the Communist Manifesto in my post of May 5 2022, Let us Dream a New Post-Capitalist Society: Karl Marx, on his birthday; Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method via Hegel as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new psychology as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At fourteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, in Berkeley at People’s Park. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third part of a round of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man free of the profit motive would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me, a civilization shattered by Occupation and savage tyranny. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Kurt Godel, and with prefigural echoes of Kafka and Samuel Beckett, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe. This interpretation owes something to my changing understanding of the world; after Beirut all was illusion and the lies of those who would dehumanize and enslave us.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, and during a sabbatical from my Great Trek after the savage fight for survival in the Shan States versus the Burmese Army slavecatching raiders, then the revolution in Nepal, the resistance to the Indian conquest of Kashmir, and the Siege of Sarajevo, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients, violent teenage felons. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, tyranny, systems of oppression, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding of human being, meaning, and value has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Love is a madness, but like hope it is one which may grant us power, resilience, and the ability to adapt and survive. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender and race as well as class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty, the inviolable sovereignty of individuals, and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms glittering with gold buttons in which one may feel like a prince.
As described to me, I would lead a group of boys through the program from a three month boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses across the Navajo nation to Denver and then Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown, and no restraint; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of quasi-official military outfit; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the vast ghettos of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys our nation had thrown away.
This is what is wrong inherently with prisons as a cure for systemic inequalities; not only does prison cause more harm rather than heal it, and the enforcement of virtue impossible, we are throwing our children away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity reconstruction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because unlike people you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a seventeen year old former gang enforcer and cult extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist theocratic-fascist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with rival gangs and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a fifteen year old former Jamaican Posse drug lord from Philadelphia who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror, which included skinning alive people who owed him money and ordering his recruits to set a member of their families on fire as a loyalty test, ended in betrayal and arrest (thus illustrating the truism that in a world where leverage, meaning blackmail as knowing where the bodies are buried and who made them and knowing who and where their loved ones are, and often controlling the vices of others and their access to such, is survival, whomever possesses it both on his allies and his enemies and offers none of his own to anyone and who also controls the street enforcers wins) and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia in his May Day speech to the Black Panthers for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term The Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism; Malcolm X references Burroughs’ metaphor of capitalism as possession when he speaks of heroin addiction as a white man who must be exorcised and cast out of one’s body. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as both Existentialist philosophy and a Humanist psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, caste and class, theocracy and authorized national identities, and other divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and through abjection and despair by the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
Like Jacob wrestling the angel, our method in revolutionary struggle is to refuse to be defeated when engaged with vast and ancient forces which are more powerful than ourselves, as nearly everything in life is; this is our victory, to be Unconquered. Our goal, however, always remains seizure of power.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
The Emancipation of Labor: A History of the First International, Henryk Katz
Unions and How To Build Them, a reading list
Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, Kim Kelly
There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America,
Philip Dray
A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy,
Jane F. McAlevey
Secrets of a Successful Organizer, Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, Jane Slaughter
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29926394-secrets-of-a-successful-organizer
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102748.Rules_for_Radicals?ref=rae_3
Class Struggle Unionism, Joe Burns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60417739-class-struggle-unionism
Karl Marx, a reading list
The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel, by Martin Rowson (Adaptor), Karl Marx, Friedrich Engel
The Communist Manifesto: with an introduction by Yanis Varoufakis
by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, David Aaronovitch (Introduction)
The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, by Slavoj Žižek
Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen
A Companion To Marx’s Capital: The Complete Edition, by David Harvey
Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, by G.A. Cohen
Karl Marx and World Literature, by S.S. Prawer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9751747-karl-marx-and-world-literature
Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton
The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, by Bhaskar Sunkara
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18736925-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century
Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty
