Freedom and Labor in the Era of Imperialism

American Values and the Communist Movement

The American War for Independence was a war that shook the world to its very core. All over the world, from Haiti to France, oppressed peoples took up the banner of liberte, egalite, fraternite! They fought and died for this motto, and their blood stains the foundations of the very society we live in today. But, looking around, it becomes obvious that their cries for freedom and equality went unmet. Racial and gender based oppression run rampant. Alienation under capitalism has intensified. The promises of religion have revealed themselves to be fraudulent, and the American government has all but abandoned its people. Salvation is not to be found in floating abstractions such as liberte, egalite, fraternite, but rather, in the material, concrete struggle for existence. It is to be found in the labor movement. Solace must not be found in the hope that one day the world may be better. It must be found in the active struggle to transform it. In other words, it must be found in communism.

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” So wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the German Ideology. One thing must be made clear; communism is not an ideology; it is the negation of ideology. Communism is not the realization of bourgeois values, or “American Values”; it is the negation of said values. The working class has no country, and thus any talk of “American values” or “constitutional liberties” is nothing but liberal squabbling.

What purpose, then, do the ideals “liberte, egalite, fratinite” serve? They serve only to negate themselves. The people see that they are told that they have certain rights, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the right to equality before the law. They see that these rights are declared, but that they are not reinforced by action, for everywhere one looks these rights are violated. Once this has been realized, it is possible for the people to utilize these rights in the fight against capitalism and the state apparatus, negating it. This is the first stage of the negation of the negation. However, the dialectic is not yet complete, for the system has only been negated within its own ideological framework, but the ideological framework itself must also be negated. This is the task that the communist movement must carry out. This is the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of the revolution in which the bourgeoisie is crushed, class contradictions are eliminated, and the need for bourgeois rights is abolished.

Where the bourgeoisie has promised freedom, they have brought only slavery; where they have promised equality, they have brought the faux equality of law, an equality that floats in the heavens, while earthly man lives in squalor and despair. To discover the true values of America, one must not look to what the American bourgeoisie says; rather, one must look to what they do. What they do is exploit and enslave the working masses. If one wishes to truly find the values of equality and justice, one must look to the labor movement.

Unions and the Labor Movement

Today, unions are, at best, reformist, and at worst, counter-revolutionary. Throughout history (especially American history) they have been quite different. A union can be described as a group of workers that came together to fight the bourgeoisie in a time when “collisions between the individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.” They “club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts.”  (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 15).

So, at what point in history were unions revolutionary? Here, we can look to early Medieval Europe, where workers’ and peasants’ revolts were extremely common. The philosopher and hHistorian Silvia Federici says, in her book Caliban and the Witch, that “throughout the 14th century, particularly in the Flanders, cloth workers were engaged in constant rebellions against the bishop, the nobility and the merchants and even the major crafts. At Bruges, when the main crafts gained power in 1348, wool workers continued to rebel against them. At Ghent, in 1335, a revolt by the local bourgeoisie was overtaken by a rebellion of weavers, who tried to establish a “workers’ democracy” based on the suppression of all authorities, except those living by manual labor.”

Can we define these workers’ dictatorships as unions? I believe so, seeing that, unlike a proper dictatorship of the proletariat, they did not seek to abolish the present state of things, nor did they seek to end wage labor; they merely sought to impose the will of the workers on the bourgeoisie, but not abolish it entirely.

Here, however, we can also see the counter-revolutionary nature of unions once they become too ingrained in the system they are supposed to fight against. Federici mentions that often workers would rebel against the guilds, a type of proto-union that existed in the middle ages for the purpose of regulating trade and labor. 

However, we see the opposite in many other unions, including the IWW, which was founded in America in 1905, and was described by Bill Haywood, one of the founders, as a confederation of “the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.” 

Not only that, but traditional left-communist critiques of trade unions don’t apply to the IWW. Take Amadeo Bordiga, who wrote “The narrowness of the trade unionist perspective… resides in the fact that it is limited to a trade, rather than a class, context, and is affected by a rigid, medieval separation of crafts…” This simply does not apply to the IWW’s model of organization, which welcomed everyone “that earn[ed] his livelihood either by his brain or his muscle.” 

Through their broad based labor organizing, the IWW made many great achievements, from things like the eight hour work day to child labor laws. In 1917, “lumber workers won an 8 hour day in the forests of the northwest. They had a strong fighting union, the I.W.W., and made the bosses cut their hours from 9-10 to 8.”

Though the I.W.W. is a shadow of what it once was, organized labor hasn’t completely disappeared, and has begun to make a comeback within the United States. Jay Greene, an author for the Washington Post, writes that “union success in Alabama could fuel organizing drives in Washington state and beyond, triggering nascent collective worker movements Amazon has quelled in recent months at facilities in Minnesota and New York.” However, despite its comeback, organized labor has changed radically in order to survive under the imperialist era of late capitalism. Imperialism, as defined by Vladimir Lenin, is the era in which “competition becomes transformed into monopoly.” This results in “immense progress in the socialization of production.” Under imperialism, there is “no longer the old type of free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market.” (Lenin, 25).

This has impacted the labor movement in many ways, but, first and foremost, it has created a situation in which hundreds of different professions are brought under the banner of single corporations. In this way, it becomes easy for workers from various different backgrounds to easily unite into unions. 

However, this resurgence will not be taken kindly. The IWW, at the height of its influence, was brutally suppressed by the US government. Steven Parfitt with the University of Washington writes that “the War Department claimed that during hostilities its soldiers put down twenty-nine revolts, most of which actually referred to strikes called by the IWW. Lawmakers gave army units the power to use force in defence of anything that state governors declared a “public utility.” In practice this meant that, as Robert Goldstein writes, military personnel ‘began a massive program of strike-breaking, including raids on IWW headquarters, breaking up meetings, arresting and detaining hundreds of strikers under military authority without any declaration of war, and instituting a general reign of terror against the IWW.’”

Such brutal repression is likely to be seen again. “The state,” writes Louis Althusser in On The Reproduction of Capitalism, “is a repressive ‘machine’ that enables the dominant classes to ensure their domination over the working class in order to subject it to the process of extorting surplus value.” (70). Thus, it will do whatever is necessary to ensure that power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and that includes brutally repressing workers who attempt to organize.

No matter how difficult it is, it is a task that must be undertaken, for revolutionary ideas mean nothing if they are not brought to the people. Strong ties must be established between the communist party and the masses, and in order to do that, “we have to concern ourselves, down to the details, with concrete trade union demands and questions…” (132).

What Must Be Done

The US government has a long history of suppressing left wing movements and governments. From interventions in Vietnam and Korea to the CIA backed coup that recently overthrew the democratically elected government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, the US has been at the forefront of the reactionary onslaught against the Left. For this reason, for the revolution to succeed, it must first and foremost combat the running dogs of US imperialism thatwhich suppress movements for liberation all over the world. The revolution, contrary to the opinions of many, must be led by the proletariat of the most developed and powerful countries, beginning with America and its allies. If this is not done, any third world revolution will certainly be isolated and slowly crushed by America and its allies.

Engels, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, writes the following about Germany; “now that the Germans are throwing off their own yoke, their whole foreign policy must change too. Otherwise the fetters with which we have chained other nations will shackle our own new, barely prescient, freedom. Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free neighboring nations.” (61). The same can be said of America. If we do not actively work to dismantle our oppressive foreign policy, to destroy imperialism, we will never be free.

American politics is a politics of class collaboration. Revolutionary politics is a politics of class warfare. American politics is a politics of unity between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Revolutionary politics is one of unity among the proletariat and hostility against the bourgeoisie. Those who preach inter-class unity, peace, brotherhood, are liars. “Petty-bourgeois democrats,” Lenin writes, “are distinguished by an aversion to class struggle, by their dreams of avoiding it, by their efforts to smooth over, to reconcile, to remove sharp corners.” (Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat).

This bourgeois morality must be rejected. Unprincipled peace must be rejected. Class collaboration must be rejected. The proletarian class party must declare all out war on the bourgeoisie and its allies. “The oppressor must be harassed until his doom,” Huey Newton writes in To Die for the People. “He must have no peace by day or night.” (33). 

What, then, must be done? Engels, in Anti-Duhring, writes that “the proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property… socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible… in proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time lord over nature, his own master - free.” (338).

It is up to the people of the world to rise up and defeat imperialism and the American war machine. Working people of every nation must rise and seize power, lay waste to the machinery of the modern state and shatter the shackles of imperialism, racism, sexism and wage slavery. Bourgeois values such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, floating in the clouds, have only held us back. Their abstract form must be negated so that their material content can finally be realized. 

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Edited by Etienne Balibar and Jacques Bidet. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian, Verso, 2014. 

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring. Wellred Books, 2017. 

Lenin, Vladimir. “Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat.” Economics And Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 2002, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/oct/30.htm. 

Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: a Popular Outline. International Publishers, 2013. 

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. International Publishers, 2017. 

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Prometheus Books, 1998. 

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. PENGUIN BOOKS, 2021. 

The Proletarian's Pocketbook. Radical Reprints, 2021. 

“Cut Down The Hours Of Work!” Cut Down The Hours Of Work! | Industrial Workers of the World, archive.iww.org/history/library/iww/cutdownthehours/. 

“Minutes of the IWW's Founding Convention - Part 1.” Minutes of the IWW's Founding Convention - Part 1 | Industrial Workers of the World, archive.iww.org/about/founding/part1/. 

Parfitt, Steven. “The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920.” Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920, 2015, depts.washington.edu/iww/justice_dept.shtml#:~:text=The%20IWW%2C%20the%20most%20radical,marked%20out%20for%20repression%20instead.&text=That%20repression%20came%20from%20several%20quarters.&text=The%20Justice%20Department%20went%20farthest,their%20repression%20of%20the%20Wobblies.