Vol. 79/No. 8      March 9, 2015

BY PHILIP S. FONER  
The speed with which the Great Strike moved across the country was positively breathtaking. On July 18 the strike, which had begun in West Virginia, spread to Ohio; one day later, it reached Pennsylvania, and a day after that, New York. On Sunday and Monday, July 22 and 23, thousands of workers throughout the eastern and midwestern sections of the country went on strike. By noon on Tuesday, July 24, the Great Strike had ripped through West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and even Iowa. The New York World estimated that day that it involved more than eighty thousand railroad workers and over five hundred thousand workers in other occupations. Aside from the walkouts of workers in sympathy with the railroad men, thousands of businesses that were dependent upon the railroads for their supplies — factories, mills, coal mines, and oil refineries — were forced to shut down. …

And on July 27 — the very day that the railroad blockade was wholly or partially raised at several of the major transportation centers, and the day the crisis passed in Chicago and the general strike was broken in St. Louis — the Great Strike came to Galveston, Texas. The headline in the Galveston Daily News of July 28 read: “IT IS HERE!” Hundreds of Black (and a few Irish) laborers went on strike against a cut in their wages from $2.00 to $1.50 per day. For the next several days, the strikers paraded through the streets of the city, moving from job to job and asking all workers who made less than $2.00 a day to join them. At the Narrow Gauge Railroad, the strikers told the men engaged in laying the track that “they were not being justly compensated for their labor, and that no measure could repair the wrongs to which they were subjected except that to which the body before them had resorted. They urged them to lay down their tools and to ‘stand by their rights’ until the price of $2 per day was paid them.”

The reporter for the Galveston Daily News, who was following the strikers as they moved from place to place, described the response:

All the hands employed at this point immediately assented to the proposition and filled out the strength of the column that was leading the revolutionary movement against a low rate of wages.

After the strikers had succeeded in closing down the majority of Galveston’s business establishments, they marched to the courthouse and, “without a dissenting voice,” adopted a series of resolutions.

BY JACK BARNES 
In 1877 Marx had anticipated that the powerful nationwide strikes sparked by railroad workers in the United States that year, even if not successful, might produce new clarity among the exploited about the deadly consequences of being tied politically to the bosses and landlords. It could create conditions in which a vanguard of the U.S. working class could provide leadership to exploited farmers and to the freed slaves. “This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down,” Marx wrote to Engels, “but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labour party in the United States.”

Marx continued that the decision of newly elected Republican president Rutherford Hayes to withdraw Union troops defending Reconstruction governments in the South “will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favour of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the peasants of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers.”

But this was not to be. The economic and political reserves of the rising U.S. industrial bourgeoisie were far from exhausted, and thus the class-collaborationist illusions among working people still had deep taproots. The class-struggle leadership of the working class and its revolutionary core were still too small in numbers and inexperienced in class combat. Over the next half century the United States would become the world’s mightiest imperialist power, and the U.S. labor officialdom would become Uncle Sam’s handmaiden.

Moreover, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction dealt a devastating blow to Blacks and other U.S. working people. The U.S. working class became more deeply divided by the national oppression of Blacks that was institutionalized in the South on new foundations in the bloody aftermath of 1877. U.S. labor’s first giant step toward the formation of major industrial unions did not come for another six decades, and the formation of a labor party, anticipated by Marx 108 years ago, remains an unfulfilled task of our class to this day.

Nonetheless, Marx could not have been more correct about the alliance of social forces that would have to be at the center of a successful revolution in the United States — the working class, toilers who are Black, and exploited farmers.  
 
 
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