Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune 1853

Industrial Distress

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;
Written: by Marx;
First Published: in the New York Daily Tribune, December 2 1853;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

I have repeatedly stated that the turn-outs of the men, by beginning at too late an epoch, when the opportunities afforded by unprecedented prosperity were already vanishing away, could not prove successful in an economical point of view, or as far as their immediate end was concerned. But they have done their work. They have revolutionized the industrial proletariat, and, stirred up by dear food and cheap labor, the political consequences will show themselves in due time. Already the idea of a Parliament of Labor which, in fact, means nothing but a general reassembling of the workingmen under the banners of Chartism, evokes the fears of the middle-class press.