This is a travel topic concerned with the history of modern industrial labor as it emerged in the late 18th, early 19th century with the development of steam power and industrialization and the fight of laborers for the right to strike, the eight hour work day, political participation and numerous other advances. While the Soviet Union for seven decades claimed to be "the homeland of the world proletariat", the history of labor has often been ignored, forgotten or deliberately erased by the ruling classes. Who for example knows why May 1st is "Labor Day" in most of the world - but not in the one country where the event occurred which set that date, the U.S. Who knows that "redneck" now a slur for poor rural white Southerners originally referred to striking workers wearing red neckerchiefs and fighting against the hired goons of their bosses. That said, many sites of the history of Labor are preserved in some ways and can be visited.
Understand
In early Industrial Britain, industrial laborers had few if any rights. Small children were employed in factories and accidents which cost workers life and limb were daily occurrences. Virtually all advances in rights for laborers were hard fought for and won with the blood, sweat and tears of working men and women and sometimes children. During the early industrialization many people fled the rampant rural poverty (or as in England the "enclosure" phenomenon which removed the Commons from the access of normal people by putting it under private ownership) into the burgeoning urban centers for hope of a better life only to find starvation wages, unsanitary conditions in slums, excessive rents and disease, malnutrition and generally unacceptable conditions. It was these conditions, sometimes called "Manchester capitalism" that inspired the German factory owner's son Friedrich Engels to write "On the State of the Working Classes in England" an indictment of the horrific conditions under which laborers had to toil. His friend Karl Marx meanwhile began developing a system of critique of capitalism which he laid out in his magnum opus Kapital which Engels edited and published after the death of his friend. Inspired by Engels and Marx but also by their horrific conditions, millions of workers started joining Unions and Worker's Parties to advocate for better treatment, better wages and more political influence. The response of the powers that be mostly consisted of repression and many strikes were broken up by force - both of official police and "private security forces" hired by the bosses. However, some capitalists recognized that treating their workers slightly better would decrease the likelihood of strikes, rebellions and uprisings. In Germany the military-industrial company Krupp started building "ideal communities" to house its workers and pay above average salaries while at the same time ruthlessly cracking down on Unions, Social Democracy and any open discontent. Reactionary politicians like Bismarck employed "carrot and stick" policies like cracking down on Social Democracy (including "apolitical" worker's clubs whose official purpose was sports or singing but which were used for political agitation) while at the same time instituting the beginnings of the modern social safety net, namely old age pensions, health insurance and accident insurance for workers. In 1871 in the course of the disastrous war Napoleon III had started against a Prussian led alliance, the people of Paris rose up against the Bourgeois Republic and the remnants of the Empire alike, forming the "Paris Commune" which was crushed with the collaboration of Republican forces led by Adolphe Thiers and the tacit approval of the Prussians. This was the first attempt at a proletarian revolution and the only one during the lifetime of Marx and Engels. Marx subsequently wrote a book critiquing the Paris Commune and outlining what they could have done to avoid being crushed.
Marx's ideals would later come to be known as communism, which he envisioned as a classless society in which the workers owned the means of production, and where everybody worked for the good of the community as a whole and received equal pay. The Russian Revolution in 1917 would lead to the establishment of the Soviet Union as the world's first communist state, and this system of government was later exported to other countries such as those in eastern Europe, as well as some other countries like Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia and North Korea. However, neither the Soviet Union nor any of the other communist countries got anywhere close to achieving Marx's vision, and by the 1990s, communism was largely abandoned as a system of government, and even the few remaining nominally communist countries are mostly capitalist in practice.
Sites
- 1 Haymarket Martyrs' Monument. Dedicated to those sentenced to death and executed due to their alleged involvement in the "Haymarket Affair" which is officially commemorated as Labour Day on May 1st in many countries, but not in the United States.
- 2 Communards' Wall (Mur des Fédérés). The wall against which 174 fighters for the Paris Commune were lined up to be shot by the victorious forces of reaction that had crushed the Commune.
- 3 Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum, Dorchester Road, Tolpuddle, Dorset, DT2 7EH, ☏ 44 1305 848 237. April to October: Tues-Sun: 1100-1700; Closed Mondays. A museum charting the history of the Tolpuddle martyrs and their struggle for labour rights in the early Nineteenth Century
- 4 Former Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911, New York City's worst ever industrial disaster. The disaster led to a major overhaul of industrial fire safety regulations in the state. While the factory is no more, the building still stands and is today owned by New York University, thus making the interior inaccessible to the public. However, there is a plaque commemorating the fire on the building's exterior.
