Interview with Karl Marx
RL And what is the nature of that aid?
Karl Marx: to give an example, one of the commonest forms of
the movement for emancipation is that of strikes. Formerly when a strike took
place in one country it was defeated by the importation of workmen from another.
The International has nearly stopped all that. It receieves information of the
intended strike, it spreads that information amongst its members, who at once
see that for them the seat of the struggle must be forbidden ground. The
masters are thus left alone to reckon with their men. In most cases the men
require no other aid than that. Their own subscriptions or those of the
societies to which they are more immediately affiliated supply them with funds,
but should the pressure upon them become too heavy and the strike be one of
which the association approves, their necessities are supplied out of the
common purse. By these means a strike of the cigar makers of Barcelon was
brought to a victorious issue the other day. It cannot possibly gain by them in
a pecuniary point of view, but it may easily lose. Let us some it all up in a
word. The working classes remain poor amid the increase of wealth, wretched amid
the increase of luxury. Their material privation dwarfs their moral as well as
their physical stature. They cannot rely on others for a remedy. It has become
then with them an imperative necessity to take their own case in mind. They
must revise the relations between themselves and the capitalists and landlords
and that means they must transform society. This is the general end of every
known workmens organisation – land and labour leagues, trade and friendly
societies, cooperative stores and cooperative production are but means toward
it. TO establish perfect solidarity between these organisations is the business
of the International Association. Its influence is beginning to be felt
everywhere. Two papers spread its views in Spain, three in Germany, the same
number in Austria and in Holland, six in Belgium and six in Switzerland. And
now that I have told you what the International is, you may perhaps be in a
position to form your own opinion as to its pretended plots.
August 12, 1871
