Engels - Articles from The Labour Standard

Articles from the Labour Standard

Frederick Engels

1. Content

1877

Mar:

1881

May 07:

May 21:

May 28:

Jun 18:

Jun 25:

Jul 02:

Jul 09:

Jul 23:

Jul 23:

Jul 30:

Aug 06:

Letters

Aug 11:

Aug 10:

Aug 15:

1882

Feb 10:

1. Introduction

As the 1870s drew to a close, the temporary peace between the English classes grew shakey. The Great Depression of the 1870s swept the western world and was, as always, particularly rough on the proletariat. The capitalist cycle down turn set in motion familiar attacks by the capitalist class against what reformist compromises within the capitalist system existed.

George Shipton, Secretary of the London Trades Council, also served as editor of The Labour Standard , the organof British trade unions. He asked Engels to contribute to a discussion of reformism and the labor movement itself.

Engels complied and, between May and August 1881, wrote 11 articles, all appearing as unsigned editorials. He used contemporary issues to elaborate basic economic principles of scientific socialism and the nature of capitalism itself. Engels stressed the inevitability of the conflict between the capitalists and the proletariatthat struggle isn't an aberration, it's a central feature of capitalism. Capitalists will forever be interested in lowering the wages and living conditions of the masses of property-less people because it's simply in their interest.

He held up trade unions asthe daily defenders of the working class in that struggle. In the first article, Engels said the labor movement should lose the meaningless slogan "A Fair Day's Wages for a Fair Day's Work" since capitalism's internal nature prevents capitalists from being "fair" to the workers whose wages they must continually seek to depress with the slogan: "Possesion of the means of work raw material, factories, machinery by the working people themselves!"

In the article "A Working Men's Party," Engels notes that unions alone cannot break people free from the endless cycle of capitalist wage-slavery. They must congregate in an independent political party. England's lack of such a party kept the working class tailing after the"Great Liberal Party." And that creates confusion and demoralization.

The MECW notes: "These articles by Engels exerted a definite influence on the young generation in the British socialist movement. James Macdonald, later to beone of the representatives of the Marxist wing of the British socialists, said what really attracted him to socialism were Engels' articles in The Labour Standard ( How I Became A Socialist , London, 1896, pp.61-62.)"

From different Engels letters (to Marx, August 11; to George Shipton, August 10 and August 15; to Johann Philipp Becker, February 101882) we learn he stopped writing for the paper because of the growth of "opportunist elements" in its editorial board.

1. To the Working Men of Europe in 1877

Source : in The Labor Standard , March 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31, 1878;
Transcribed : by Tony Brown.
HTML : https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1878/03/03.htm

1. I

The past year has been an eventful and a fruitful one for the Working Class of Europe. Great progress has been made in almost all countries with regard to the organization and extension of a Workingmens Party; unity, threatened at one time by a small but active sect, has been virtually restored; the working-class movement has forced itself more and more into the foreground of every-day politics, and, a sure sign of approaching triumph, political events, no matter what turn they took, always turned out, in some way or other, favorable to the progress of that movement.

At its very outset, the year 1877 was inaugurated by one of the greatest victories ever gained by workingmen. On the 10th of January, the triennial elections, by universal suffrage, for the German Parliament (Reichstag) took place; elections which, ever since 1867, have given the German Workingmens Party an opportunity of counting their strength and parading before the world their well organized and ever increasing battalions. In 1874, four hundred thousand votes fell to the candidates of labor; in 1877, more than six hundred thousand. Ten workingmen candidates were elected on the 10th, while twenty-four more had to be ballotted for in the supplementary elections which took place a fortnight after. Of these twenty-four, only a few were actually returned, all other parties uniting against them. But the important fact remained, that in all the large towns and industrial centres of the Empire the working-class movement had advanced with giant strides, and that all these electoral districts were certain to fall into their hands at the next ballotting in 1880. Berlin, Dresden, the whole of the Saxon manufacturing districts, and Solingen had been conquered; in Hamburg, Breslau, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Brunswick, in Schleswig-Holstein and the manufacturing districts of Westfalia and the Lower Rhine, a coalition of all the parties had scarcely sufficed to defeat the working-class candidates by bare majorities. German democratic socialism was a power, and a rapidly growing one, with which henceforth all other powers in the country, governing or otherwise, would have to reckon. The effect of these elections was enormous. The middle class were seized with a perfect panic, all the more so as their press had constantly represented social democracy as dwindling down into insignificance. The working class, elated at their own victory, continued the struggle with renewed vigor and upon every available battlefield; while the workingmen of other countries, as we shall see, not only celebrated the victory of the Germans as a triumph of their own, but were stimulated by it to fresh exertions in order not to be left behind in the race for the emancipation of labor.

The rapid progress of the Workingmens Party in Germany is not bought without considerable sacrifices on the part of those who take a more active part in it. Government prosecutions and sentences of fine, and oftener of imprisonment, hail down upon them, and they have long since had to make up their minds to passing the greater part of their lives in prison. Although most of these sentences are for short terms, a couple of weeks to three months, long terms are by no means of rare infliction. Thus, in order to protect the important mining and manufacturing district of Saarbrucken from the infection by social democratic poison, two agitators have recently been sentenced to two years and a half each, for having ventured upon this forbidden ground. The elastic laws of the Empire offer plenty of pretexts for such measures, and where they are not sufficient, the judges are mostly quite willing to stretch them to the point required for a conviction.

A great advantage to the German movement is that the Trades organization works hand in hand with the political organization. The immediate advantages offered by the Trades organization draw many an otherwise indifferent man into the political movement, while the community of political action holds together, and assures mutual support to, the otherwise isolated Trades Unions.

The success obtained in the elections to the German Parliament has encouraged our German friends to try their chance on other electoral fields. Thus, in two of the State Parliaments, in the smaller States of the Empire, they have succeeded in electing workingmen, and have also penetrated into a good many Town Councils; in the Saxon manufacturing districts, many a town is governed by a social democratic Council. The suffrage being restricted in these elections, no great result can be hoped for; still, every seat carried, helps to prove to the governments and the middle class that henceforth they will have to reckon with the workingmen.