Theodore W. Allen1
...THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING THE INTEREST OF THE WORKING CLASS
21. By taking "the American working class" as their subject, labor historians necessarily presume that there is a distinct working class interest to be investigated. In the evolution of the tactics of working class movements and organizations, at any particular juncture debates and controversies must necessarily occur over what policy decisions best serve labor's interests. The best fundamental guide, in my opinion, is that set forth by Marx and Engels to the working class movements in Europe a century-and-half ago, and which, on the plane of American history, provides the ordinate and abscissa by which to locate the interests of the working class at any point in its history:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries,...point out and bring to the fore the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through,...always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.38
22. In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois, having studied and set right the record of Black Reconstruction in the South, with attention to the interests of "the laboring class, black and white, North and South,"39 drew the following somber conclusion:
The South, after the [Civil] war [said Du Bois], presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the [white] labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States.40
In my opinion, the insight thus expressed by Du Bois is indispensable for understanding and applying the general Marxist principles in assessing the interests of American labor and the state of American labor's consciousness of those interests....
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