“Foreign Wage-Reducers and the Attitude of the International”, Die Neue Zeit, 25th year (1907).
“In inviting the trade unions of Great Britain and Ireland to take part in the Brussels Congress of 1868, the General Council declared:
“‘The fundamental principle of the Association is that the produce of labour ought to be the property of the producer; that the brotherhood of labour should be the basis of society; and that the working men of all countries should throw aside their petty jealousies and national antipathies, and make common cause with each other in their struggle with capital. Labour is of no country! Working men have the same evils to contend with everywhere. Capital is but accumulated labour. Why should the labourer be the slave to that which he has himself produced? Too long have the capitalists profited by the national isolation of the sons of toil. Foreign competition has always furnished a plea for the reduction of wages’” (pp. 511-12).
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“The ever- ready cry of the British capitalists that the longer working hours and lesser wages of the continental workers make a reduction of wages unavoidable can only be effectually met by the endeavour to approximate the hours of labour and the rate of wages throughout Europe.[1] This is one of the tasks of the International Working Men’s Association” (p. 512). |
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“That is in fact the only method of safe- guarding the gains of the more favour- ably placed sections of the international proletariat. These gains will always be in danger as long as they are the possession of only a minor- ity, and the danger will be all the greater, the lower the level of the main mass of the proletariat compared with this minority. That holds good for the masses within a single country as it does for those of the whole world market. An advanced proletariat can main- tain its position by solidarity with and support of those who have been left be- hind, but not by exclusiveness, by isolating itself from them and keeping them down. Where, under the influence of a short-sighted, craft attitude, it adopts the second method, the latter sooner or later suffers a fiasco and becomes one of the most pernicious means of crippling the proletarian struggle for emancipation” (p. 512). |
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[1] Die Neue Zeit’s italics.—Ed.
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