5. Labor and Capital¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, the author traces the transformation of the American working class from a reservoir of revolutionary European energy into a force repeatedly crushed by the brutal machinery of industrial capital. The celebrated “pioneer spirit” was, in fact, the redirected revolutionary fervour of political refugees—Poles, Germans, Irish, Jews—who fled defeated Old World uprisings only to find class struggle absorbed into individual struggle against the wilderness. As Woodward observed, this “American Dream” of rugged individualism dissolved class consciousness and made permanent labour organisation nearly impossible.
De Tocqueville’s early American democracy, rooted in relative equality and a weak state, was obliterated after the 1870s. Railroad expansion from 30,000 to 260,000 miles was achieved through massive state subsidies and corruption, epitomised by the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Northern industrialists, protected by high tariffs, seized state power from Southern landowners after 1865. The Grant administration revealed bourgeois democracy’s true content: government wedded to big business, politicians lining their pockets, and a ruling class descended from speculators like Vanderbilt and Drew shrouding itself in a “rags to riches” myth. By 1904, monopolies controlled entire industries. Workers faced ten-to-twelve-hour days, wages twenty to forty percent below a decent minimum, and the highest job-related fatality rate in the industrialised world.
The chapter documents the violent response to these conditions. The Knights of Labor advanced a radical programme—eight-hour day, equal pay for women, abolition of convict and child labour, public ownership—but faced extreme repression. The Molly Maguires, a secret society of Irish coal miners, saw fourteen leaders imprisoned and ten hanged in 1876. The Great Rail Strike of 1877, triggered by a ten-percent pay cut, escalated into a full-scale uprising in Baltimore, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and San Francisco. Militia and regular troops killed unarmed workers, including women and children. In St. Louis, a general strike involved black workers and prominent female participation. Marx called it “the first uprising against the oligarchy of capital.”
The 1886 Chicago May Day demonstrations for the eight-hour day involved 80,000 marchers. A bomb at a subsequent protest killed one policeman; police fired, killing seven of their own and four others. Eight labour leaders were tried in a rigged proceeding; four were hanged on November 11, 1886. The Second International later declared May Day International Workers’ Day. Engels hailed the 1890 British demonstrations as the end of the working class’s “long winter sleep.”
Craft unionism under the AFL’s Samuel Gompers represented a step back—a “labour aristocracy” that Lenin argued was inherently bourgeois. The class-collaborationist leadership preached unity of interest between capital and labour, yet employers intensified anti-unionism from 1912, using scientific management, vigilante groups, and court decisions to smash unions. The Homestead strike of 1892 saw strikers fire on Pinkerton detectives, killing ten; unions were excluded from Carnegie’s plant until 1937. The Pullman strike of 1894, led by Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union, was crushed by federal injunctions and troops.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) emerged as the most radical union in US history. Founded in 1905 by Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and others, it rejected craft unionism and aimed to organise all workers into “One Big Union,” declaring that the working class and employing class have nothing in common. The IWW led militant strikes, including the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, but was virtually destroyed by a government crackdown in 1917, degenerating into a sect partly due to state repression and partly due to its sectarian attitude toward the AFL. Joe Hill, a Wobbly songwriter executed in Utah in 1915 on a murder charge widely seen as a frame-up, left the rallying cry: “Don’t mourn, organize!”
The chapter also notes a tradition of left-wing American writers. Jack London’s The Iron Heel predicted fascism; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed conditions in Chicago slaughterhouses—workers freezing to pillars, leaving skin on knife blades, wrapping feet in blood-soaked newspaper and sacks. The book became a bestseller within a