JANUARY 1887
"Pages from an Editor’s Sketch Book," by August Spies [January 1887]
Chapter-length excerpt from the little known memoir of August Spies,
one of five revolutionary socialist leaders judicially murdered in the
aftermath of an 1886 bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The
German-born Spies (name pronounced "SPEES") was editor of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung,and
a member of the so-called "anarchist" left wing of the Socialist
Labor Party. The bulk of this document deals with Spies' visit to an
Ohio coal mining strike in 1884 and is an excellent primary source in
the social history of the 19th Century American labor movement. Spies
recounts his speech to striking miners and declares: "it was not
socialism that inflamed these men, for when I spoke of socialism to
them, they became quiet and calm and interested; it was the words of
the capitalist, their master -- it was the teaching of capitalism that
incited them almost to madness! Socialism has nothing in it that
incites to violence and bloodshed; these qualities are only peculiar to
the doctrines of capitalism, doctrines based upon and maintained by
force."
APRIL 1887
"Labor and Work," by Adolf Douai [April 23, 1887] A
rare English language article by Marxist pioneer Dr. Adolf Douai of
Texas, best remembered as the father of the kindergarten movement in
America. Douai attempts a distinction between "labor," a commodity
corresponding to the capitalist process, with "work," voluntary
activity for oneself and for the benefit of society. Every people
around the globe dislikes the former -- the performance of labor for
others -- but "likes" self-employment and "voluntary activity for
useful and necessary purposes," Douai asserts. So-called "wage labor"
is equally "against human nature" as was slave labor before it, the
change in form initiated merely to boost the productivity of labor for
the benefit of the ruling class, according to Douai. Douai hails the
day "in the near future" when wage labor will be abolished and human
beings will no longer be subjected to "labor of the most uniform,
mind-killing, disgusting, and brutalizing kind" as slaves to the
machine.
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