We are publishing below the translation of an article from Accion Proletaria, the ICC's paper in Spain, which analyses the strike of rubbish collectors in Madrid of November 13 and which stresses an essential and vital factor for the class struggle: workers' solidarity.

November 17 last, general assemblies of the Highways Department of Madrid ended 13 days of strike by accepting an agreement which avoided job losses of close to 1200 workers as well as threats of wage cuts of up to 43%. Coming out of these assemblies the feeling among workers was one of relief, a feeling that they had gained something, at least temporarily, from the outcome of an interminable struggle against the incessant attacks from this system against our living conditions. That they had this feeling wasn't so much because of the tangible results of negotiations - because these workers had been forced to accept the freezing of wages up to 2017 as well as a temporary contract of work limited to 45 days a year up to this same date - as for the way that they had succeeded in resisting this latest blow: support from a rousing demonstration of workers' solidarity. A solidarity which was revealed to all the workers of the three sub-contracting firms responsible for the Madrid streets and which spread to the workers of the public firm TRAGSA, to the bars of the most populous districts of Madrid where "collection boxes of support" were placed as a spontaneous form of assistance in order to compensate from economic losses of the strikers or in the concentration of solidarity amongst them on the last night of the negotiations...

Solidarity builds the unity of the workers

The media and the TV channels particularly - themselves accustomed to "rubbish" programmes - focused attention on the sacks of garbage and on the protagonists who were shown as social rejects. Firstly, regarding the media, there wasn't a television programme that didn't take its cameras onto the streets in order to interrogate the population on "the inconvenience caused by the strike" (they didn't make the least enquiry about the inconvenience caused by the budget cuts of the highways services) or on their economic repercussions, except for business people, hotel owners, etc. It was really the launching of an ideological campaign being used to put the population up against the refuse workers. This kind of campaign has been used successfully on several occasions before, including with the complicity of the unions[1]. However this time, public opinion, above all in the workers' districts of Madrid, went to the side of the strikers. Thus for example in a "proclamation" of the Popular Assembly of Lavapies, one can read: "The men and women on unlimited strike is an example for us all. No sensible person can remain with folded arms looking at these events (...) What we are seeing today, is only a prefiguration of a Madrid filthy and left to rot which will hit our popular quarters; if the strike is defeated it will follow that there will be less workers and in worse conditions (...) If the workers who look after our streets and parks (and consequently, all of us) go on strike, we must support them to the end, we must be with them among the strike pickets and in demonstrations (...) If they imprison the strikers, we must be on the streets every day in greater numbers. The motives and the anger of strikers must not be reduced to silence by the police, judges, the bosses, the media and the union chiefs. If the strike ends it must be because we have won something and not because of agreements concluded on the backs of the men and women on strike..."[2].

When they tried to pass off the strikers as "blackmailers", the workers remembered that the origin of these job cuts was a cut in the budget of the highways municipality of Madrid and that the local firms - subsidiaries of the larger concerns - were being fattened up by building speculations and other gifts accorded by the administration while at the same time the latter was trying to lay the cost on the backs of the employees of these enterprises and the population of the workers' districts of Madrid.

It's true that the arrogant attitude of the mayor of Madrid, worthy spouse of the ex-President Aznar ("worthy" of him in any case...), served to heat up the atmosphere of support for the struggle somewhat. When she put forward an ultimatum calling for an agreement in the middle of the night of November 15, by threatening to call on the workers of the public concern TRAGSA to abort the strike, she met with a refusal of these same workers (who, in their turn, were threatened with job cuts) to play the role of scabs against their comrades. Trying to recruit 200 workers that she wanted immediately only appeared completely ridiculous. The same night, during which the mayor supervised the semblance of a minimum service dressed in a fur coat, the boss himself accepted replacing cuts in wages by a freeze up to 2017, and reported on the following night, going beyond the time of the ultimatum, the decision on job cuts. Among the workers a feeling spread that, this time, they had been able to put a brake on the attacks.

Why was this? Because our exploiters became more reasonable? Nothing could be further from the truth: a few days later the same protagonists - or almost - announced a very similar attack aimed this time against laundry workers of Madrid hospitals. And did the unions make a "volte-face" (as the PSOE repeated) in order to defend the workers? You can't say that when you can see that they signed agreements involving thousands of job cuts in the banks, at Panrico, RTVE and so on. During the night of Saturday November 16, when the unions of the highway workers of Madrid were ready to accept a deal on a reduced number of job cuts for hundreds of workers(in fact, the UGT stayed at the negotiating table and the Workers' Commissions quit, although they returned later). And this was not only in the highways sector but also others - who were meeting up around the building where these so-called negotiations were taking place and began to call for a demonstration on the following day. A few hours later, the companies withdrew the announced plan of job cuts, replacing them with technical measures of temporary unemployment.

The key factor in the course of this struggle - solidarity - has been the fruit of a change obscured by bourgeois propaganda which preferred to focus attention on the piles of rubbish bags, or on the declarations of the mayor who, recently, has reappeared among the media complaining of a permanent campaign aimed at her. For the exploited, on the contrary, the most important thing is the response given by an anonymous striker to a television reporter who asked him what was positive about the strike: "To discover that someone who works alongside me is a real comrade."

Class solidarity can't allow itself to be buried in a democratic or nationalist rubbish dump

The "basic" mechanism on which the capitalist system rests is one of relentless blackmail: the isolated worker can only obtain his or her means of existence if their labour power profits capital. The propaganda of our exploiters artfully insinuates that this is an "order" inherent to human nature, wanting to reduce our existence to that of a commodity, aiming by any means to let the "market value" of this commodity fall to the lowest possible price. But in reality the price of labour power is not determined on the blind laws of capitalist exchange (supply and demand, the law of profit and exchange value...) but also on moral parameters such as courage and anger faced with the inhumanity of the laws which regulate society, solidarity and the defence of the dignity of the workers. Here, two worlds oppose one another and are separated by an abyss: those of human need and those of the interests of capital.

All attempts to sacrifice the first to the second is presented as a defence of the "competitive edge" of the enterprise or to the profitability of the public service such as health or education. Whether the living conditions of the exploited are to be sacrificed to the demands of this or that firm, this or that local or regional industry, or even the interests of the nation, this very clearly implies the sabotage of the very principle of solidarity between the exploited in order to put in its place a fraudulent fraternity between exploiters and exploited. The most important contribution of the struggle of workers of the Madrid highways is not to have shown an infallible way of drawing concessions from the boss, but of having won a level of solidarity which serves to strengthen the unity of the class rather than further subjecting the workers to the logic of exploitation.

Again we're seeing today a deluge of thousands and thousands of redundancies and, among those workers that "keep" their jobs, brutal wage cuts. Everywhere the concern of workers is growing faced with the cynicism of the exploiters who are announcing the end of the crisis and a recovery for the Spanish economy while scapegoating those most hit by poverty becomes more commonplace and dramatic. This agitation has given rise to a number of protests and mobilisations. But we must be honest and not let ourselves be fooled. In the great majority of cases, this agitation among the ranks of the workers has been recuperated by the parties of the left of capital and the unions through a string of movements that have been dispersed and, above all, diverted onto a false version of solidarity, that of the defending democratic institutions.

We can use the example of Radio-Television Valenciana[3] where the anger faced with job cuts was channeled into the defending "television at the service of the public and the region". On this terrain, the unions had a free hand to justify the reduction of wages by proposing a so-called viability plan - all in the name, of course, of salvaging the "national heritage". On these grounds the workers of Canal 9 were forced to march alongside the deputies of the PSOE who, when they were in power, undertook the most massive plan of job cuts in Spanish radio and television!

On this rotten ground our exploiters present themselves to us as "allies" and workers of other firms, other sectors of production or other countries, are presented as competitors and enemies. It's what we've seen for example at Panrico or at FAGOR. In the first case, the workers at the firm of Santa Perpetua of Mogoda, who refused to accept redundancies and wage cuts, were exposed to a brutal offensive by the boss and the media, but also from the unions which told them that their intransigence and those of workers of other firms were putting the "future" in danger. Another case was the Mondragon Group, part of the FAGOR business and up to recently a model for the "rise of Basque industry" and the advantages of "cooperative systems". A "cooperative" which has now thrown onto the streets more than 5,000 workers who then found themselves caught up in an ideological battle about which units were the most "profitable" or whether they had the right to be relocated to other firms of the group...

Competition between workers[4] can deliver profits on capitalist investment but implies the ruin of the exploited. Class solidarity isn't sufficient to protect workers indefinitely from the attacks of capitalism in the period of decadence, but it does show the sense of a social alternative, another form of the understanding of relations between men that do not submit to the laws of the market. As the Communist Manifesto, written some 150 years ago, indicates: "Sometimes the workers triumph, but it is an ephemeral triumph. The real result of their struggles is less their immediate success than the growing union of all the workers".

Valerio (November 25, 2013)

“Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may.” 1

The unprecedented response of the US state to the April 2013 bombings in Boston and more recent revelations about NSA spying on the entire population have inevitably struck at illusions in American liberal democracy and civil liberties. We’ve written about what lies behind the US state’s increasingly repressive activities today,2 but these illusions run deep and it’s also important to look at their historical roots.

Our series on the early class struggle in America has reached the ‘American Revolution’ of 1765-1783, which of course has a cherished place in bourgeois mythology as a brave struggle against tyranny by patriots who founded “the world’s oldest democracy”. The working class did indeed gain real and lasting reforms from this struggle, which took place in the epoch of capitalism’s progressive expansion across the globe. But as this article shows, these gains were limited and even at the moment of its birth American democracy clearly revealed its class character, proving that, even in ascendant capitalism, the most democratic republic served as a mask for the dictatorship of capital.

Violent uprisings and insurrectional struggles

As we saw in the first article, faced with the threat of a unified struggle by black and white slaves and labourers, the bourgeoisie in North America successfully adopted a strategy to divide the proletariat along racial lines. Nevertheless the class struggle continued to be characterized by violent uprisings and insurrectional struggles that posed a growing threat to the capitalist class and finally precipitated a crisis for the existing system of political rule:

• There were organised and violent struggles by sailors and labourers against impressment into the British navy. In the most serious of these, in 1747 a crowd of over 1,000 led by ‘‘Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and other Persons of mean and vile Condition’’ held control of the town of Boston for three days, seized naval officers as hostages and threatened to hang the Governor. Confrontations with the press gangs flared again in the 1760s.3

• A renewed wave of African slave plots and revolts erupted in the Caribbean which spread to North America and intensified after 1765 as slaves seized opportunities created by the growing crisis of the ruling class. This reached a high point in the 1770s with uprisings in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Boston (in which Irish workers also participated), New Jersey, New York and Maryland.4

• There was also increasing unrest and resistance among indentured servants – i.e. time-limited slaves. In 1768, in “the most serious insurrection of white workers in the history of the British colonies on the North American mainland”,5 300 Italian and Greek workers in Florida rebelled, seized arms and ammunition, captured a ship and prepared to set sail for Cuba. Troops had to be despatched before the rebels surrendered.

• There were almost continual struggles by small farmers along the eastern seaboard. In 1766 violence in the Hudson Valley erupted in a massive uprising with pitched battles involving 1,000 white tenant farmers. In the most significant pre-revolutionary struggle, in North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 a movement of over 6,000 poor farmers and labourers (‘Regulators’) waged a prolonged campaign against the corrupt local capitalist regime until eventually defeated by a militia army and artillery fire.

• There were increasingly violent struggles and spontaneous protests by the impoverished proletariat in the rapidly growing cities, in the context of a deepening economic depression. In 1765 a crowd led by seamen and labourers attacked Fort George, seat of royal authority in New York, attempting to burn it to the ground in protest against new British taxes on the sale and use of commodities, while as part of the same protests a Boston crowd vented its pent up fury on the houses and property of wealthy merchants and prominent loyalist officials.

The ruling class saw in these last struggles, not a protest against new taxes but “a War of Plunder, of general levelling and taking away the Distinction between rich and poor”, and feared they would lead to “an insurrection of the poor against the rich”.6

The American bourgeoisie’s fear of insurrection

The American bourgeoisie seized on this growing crisis as an opportunity to advance its own political and economic interests, but from the beginning it faced a dilemma: despite being haunted by the fear of an ‘insurrection against the rich’, it had to make use of direct action and illegal methods in order to give its own struggle the necessary political firepower against the British state. It therefore had no option but to try to harness the struggles of the poor urban proletariat – commonly dismissed as the ‘mob’ – while at the same time preventing them from developing into a more dangerous class struggle against capitalist society.

Caught unprepared for the violence of the early protests, which quickly threatened to escape the control of the conservative merchants and planters who led the opposition to British rule, the American bourgeoisie was forced to depend on more radical leaders who were closer to the struggles of the proletariat and better able to mobilise popular support for anti-British objectives. Revolutionary leaders like Samuel Adams in Boston defended a more radical democratic vision of the revolution but shared a deep suspicion of ‘the mob’ and actively worked to prevent the class struggle from escaping the confines of the bourgeois independence movement.

With the backing of radicals like Adams, organisations such as the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence came into being as a response to the “threatened anarchy” of the early protests. Their rank and file tended to be white artisans and skilled workers (women, indentured servants and of course slaves and free blacks were all excluded), but the leadership was in the hands of smaller merchants, master craftsmen and professional men, who acted to ensure order.

The artisans and skilled workers exerted enormous pressure for more radical action not only against British authority but also the domination of the merchants, which the leadership was forced to go along with in order to prevent being swept aside. But the American bourgeoisie was ultimately successful in isolating the most militant elements of the poor urban proletariat and in mobilising artisans and skilled workers behind its programme of nationalist and protectionist demands, so that by the time of the famous 1773 ‘Tea Party’, for example, the crowd in Boston acted as a political agent of the radical bourgeoisie, its struggles confined to exclusively anti-British actions.

National war or class war?

The American bourgeoisie had no option but to mobilise artisans, workers and small farmers to fight its war against Britain. Impressment into the American navy was taking place by 1779 despite the earlier struggles against the tyranny of the British press gangs.

There was no strong support for independence among the population and little enthusiasm for the war, which caused runaway inflation and increased poverty. There was inevitably a stark contrast between the suffering and sacrifice of the proletariat and the profits and privileges of the bourgeoisie. There were at least fifteen major mutinies involving large numbers of soldiers in the American army. In 1781 for example, 300 New Jersey troops defied their officers and marched on the state capital where they were quickly surrounded and disarmed and two leaders shot as “an example” on George Washington’s orders.

Some of the poorer artisans and workers were radicalised by being mobilised into the militia which, like the New Model Army in the English revolution, became a centre of intense political debate. In Philadelphia the militias seized the early initiative in rejecting British rule, demanding the right to vote and to elect their own officers. Backed by the radical bourgeoisie and small farmers, they overthrew the colonial government and elected a convention that produced the most democratic constitution of the American Revolution. During the war the militia’s Committee of Privates also took the lead in pressuring the bourgeoisie on behalf of “the midling and poor” and threatened violent action against profiteers. In 1779 a group marched into the city and attacked the house of a wealthy lawyer and prominent conservative republican who opposed price controls and the new democratic constitution (the ‘Fort Wilson Riot’).

In the South, the first priority of the American bourgeoisie throughout the war was to prevent a generalised slave insurrection. Fear of arming slaves led to a ban on their recruitment (although both free and enslaved Africans fought in many of the battles of the Revolution, especially in the north). After a cynical offer to free slaves if they joined the British army, this ban had to be reversed, but the prevention of a slave insurrection continued to trump American military strategy and manpower needs. Tens of thousands of slaves deserted the plantations to either join the British or liberate themselves in what amounted to a mobile slave revolt of immense proportions; in South Carolina as many as 20,000 deserted or 25 per cent of the entire slave population, and even more in Georgia. As soon as the British finally surrendered at Yorktown, Washington posted guards on the beaches to stop slaves escaping aboard British ships.7

Nor was it only slaves who posed a threat. Rural areas remained largely in the grip of right-wing political elites who were often viewed as more oppressive than British tyranny. Attempts to mobilise the population, especially in areas with a recent history of class struggles, met with varying degrees of resistance, fuelling ruling class fears that the war would unleash a generalised insurrection of the poor. In Maryland the militia spearheaded a local struggle for democratic rights, demanding the vote or they would lay down their arms. There were also attacks on members of the ruling class suspected of hoarding commodities. In the Carolinas, scene of major pre-war rural rebellions, many small farmers and labourers viewed their rulers’ calls for liberty and natural rights as rank hypocrisy and resisted all attempts to mobilise them. There were several large uprisings and in some parts of the South bourgeois rule collapsed completely: “With the fall of Charleston in the spring of 1780, a total civil war engulfed the Lower South. From that time until the war’s end, the region experienced social anarchy.”8

The American bourgeoisie crushes resistance to capitalist rule

The state to emerge from the war was a weak, decentralised Confederation with no standing army to enforce its rule. The victorious American bourgeoisie soon faced concerted resistance to its attempts to impose its authority.

Around 70 per cent of the population in the ex-British colonies were small independent farmers. The colonial regime had always faced difficulties in exerting control over this group, which resisted attempts to enforce land ownership claims and demands for rent. During the war the American bourgeoisie was able to win support by confiscating the holdings of British landowners and turning them over to freeholders, who became mortgagees, paying back loans from banks instead of rent to landlords. But at the end of the war the priority of the new American state was to repay its enormous war debt and re-establish the terms of American credit in the world economy. It began to squeeze the small farmers, taking them to court, imprisoning them, confiscating their land and selling it below value.

In 1786 4,000 small farmers in Massachusetts fought back, in what became known as ‘Shays’ Rebellion’. This began as a peaceful movement for reform but the state just imposed stricter laws and increased repression through the courts, leading one local farmer to argue, “The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.”9 Army veterans organised a disciplined force and burned down the courthouses. The movement achieved a high level of organisation, forming committees which in effect became an alternative government. Local militias sided with the insurgents and the local bourgeoisie itself had to fund an armed expedition to crush the rebellion. After a failed march on Boston the rebel army was defeated and dispersed and several leaders were hanged. The former radical Samuel Adams accused “British emissaries” of stirring up the farmers and helped to draw up a Riot Act and a resolution suspending habeas corpus to crush the rising. Against pleas for clemency for the convicted rebels, he argued: “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”10

By forcing farmers into debt and then using the new federal state to crush resistance, the American bourgeoisie finally succeeded in imposing capitalist authority on these independent producers and brutally integrating them into commodity production, thus achieving its aim of creating a class of capitalist small farmers which would help provide a buffer against the struggles of the poor proletariat, slaves and frontier Indians.

Ultimately the struggle of the small farmers was to try to preserve their existence as independent producers and essentially looked backwards to a previous, idealised stage of capitalist development. In practice, due to the vast availability of land, many were able to temporarily escape their new status by re-locating to the frontier.

The counter-revolutionary aims of the US constitution

‘Shays’ Rebellion’ directly influenced the debate on a new US Constitution, finally convincing anti-federalist elements in the American bourgeoisie of the need for a strong central government fully equipped to suppress insurrections of the poor.

In the wake of the uprising the federalist wing of the bourgeoisie (Madison, Hamilton, Jay) argued for a strong republic as a “barrier against domestic faction and insurrection”, seeing clearly that given the inevitable division of society into “those who hold and those who are without property” the principal task of the state was to manage the resulting class conflicts. Far from being a weakness, as anti-federalists argued, the large size of the new republic would make it even more difficult for incipient rebellions to unify:

“The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. […] A rage for paper money, for the abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union…”11

The resulting Constitution was thus not only designed to protect the interests of the rich, but was part of a conscious strategy by the most far-sighted faction of the American bourgeoisie to prevent future internal threats to the rule of capital from “those without property”. (The railing of today’s ‘Tea Party’ movement against overweening federal government while demanding a return to ‘government as intended by the Founding Fathers’ shows just how far removed it is from the real history of American capitalism, let alone its real interests…).

When resistance from small farmers flared again in the so-called ‘whiskey rebellion’, a tax protest by farmers in Pennsylvania in 1794 that spread to Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, this time the federal government mobilised 10,000 militia under Washington to occupy the region and unleash a wave of repression.

The same Constitution protected the institution of slavery and the rights of slaveholders to pursue fugitive slaves. As the price of its support for the new state the southern slaveholding bourgeoisie was given a guarantee that the slave trade would continue for at least 20 more years, during which time slavery in the Lower South expanded massively: in 1800 there were many more enslaved Africans than there were in in 1776. Slavery in the northern states was progressively ended, but as late as 1810 almost a quarter of the black population of the North remained slaves.

The Revolution cemented the political rule of the slaveholding bourgeoisie, whose slave-based plantation economy was essential to the survival of the new republic. To justify why the ‘universal’ rights enshrined in the Constitution – supposedly the self-evident gift of God – could be denied to an entire section of the population, increasing use was made of racist, pseudo-scientific concepts of biological inferiority and white supremacy. The growth of such ideas, together with the sanctioning of slavery and constitutional guarantees to the slaveholders, further entrenched the deep racial divisions in the early American proletariat.

Conclusions

The American Revolution strengthened capitalist domination in North America and established a more effective state apparatus to enforce bourgeois rule.

The American bourgeoisie – one of the most intelligent fractions of the capitalist class in this epoch – was able to successfully harness the class struggles of artisans, labourers and small farmers to its own struggle for political power. In doing so it taught an invaluable lesson to the rest of its class in how to rule: the need for flexibility, compromise and above all for policies specifically designed to mobilise popular support and forge tactical alliances with sections of the working class. (The success of these policies at the time is shown, for example, in the enthusiastic demonstrations by white artisans and workers in New York City to celebrate the signing of the Constitution.) Having achieved its goal, the American bourgeoisie then abandoned all pretence of more radical social and economic change and ruthlessly asserted the need for capitalist order.

The American bourgeoisie fought its successful national liberation struggle in order to remove the obstacles placed in the way of its pursuit of profit by the mercantilist policies of the British capitalist state, which restricted the growth of American trade and industry in order to prevent a threat to domestic manufacture. The fact that this struggle led to the removal of this obstacle to the growth of capitalism – and hence to the growth of the proletariat, its ultimate gravedigger – is alone enough to give the American Revolution a progressive character from the perspective of the interests of the working class.

The American Revolution also triggered further bourgeois revolutions in Europe, especially the Great French Revolution of 1789, which weakened the grip of decayed feudal society and removed obstacles to the growth of the proletariat internationally, thus hastening the conditions for capitalism’s ultimate overthrow.

Before the war there was no industrial proletariat to speak of in North America. The needs of the war against Britain accelerated the process of industrialisation and by the mid-1790s we can see a growing polarisation of interests between capital and labour, with an increase in strikes followed by the formation of the first permanent trade unions, which heralded the emergence of the modern working class in American capitalist society.

Some sections of the American working class gained real and lasting reforms from the Revolution. Due to the pressure exerted particularly by the struggles of the artisans, skilled and unskilled workers, the right to vote was extended to most white male workers in many states (but by no means all and not without ruling class resistance). By 1832 property qualifications had been removed in all but four states. This meant that, unlike the British working class, for example, which was still fighting a protracted battle for basic democratic rights in the mid-19th century, in America many workers had the right to vote even before the emergence of the industrial proletariat and its own permanent organisations, trade unions and political parties. But these gains for parts of the proletariat need to be seen alongside the sanctioning of slavery and the deployment of racist ideologies which ensured that the American working class remained deeply divided.

Under the influence of the struggles of the American proletariat the radical political thinkers of the bourgeoisie (Paine, Jefferson, Samuel Adams) had developed revolutionary new ideas which justified violent resistance to colonial tyranny and oppression based on a recognition of “the natural rights of man”. These ideas represented a breakthrough in bourgeois political thought in this epoch. But once in power, America’s Founding Fathers ensured that their new state was equipped to prevent violent resistance to their own rule and they did not hesitate to use it to crush further struggles against home-grown tyranny and oppression.

Liberal democracy proved to be the perfect ideological cover for the American bourgeoisie’s struggle against the obstructions to its pursuit of profit while the Bill of Rights served not only to protect its class rule but also to prevent unjustified state interference in this pursuit. The noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence sanctified a state which from the moment of its birth defended the sordid interests of a system based on oppression and exploitation.

The story of the American Revolution from the point of view of the proletariat amply confirms Lenin’s conclusion in State and Revolution that “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this […], it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” This was the enemy that the American proletariat faced in the next phase of its historic struggle to emancipate itself from all forms of tyranny.

MH 27/01/2014