“The decision for 8-hour day was made by the National Labor Union in August, 1866. In September of the same year the Geneva Congress of the First International went on record for the same demand in the following words: “The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive… The Congress proposes 8 hours as the legal limit of the working day”. In the chapter on “The Working Day” in the first volume of ‘Capital’, published in 1867, Marx calls attention to the inauguration of the 8-hour movement by the National Labor Union. In the passage, famous especially because it contains Marx’s telling reference to the solidarity of class interests between the Negro and white workers, he wrote: “In the United States of America, any sort of independent labor movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new vigorous life sprang. The first fruit of the Civil War was an agitation for the 8-hour day – a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” Marx call attention to how almost simultaneously, in cat within two weeks of each other, a workers’ convention meeting in Baltimore voted for the 8-hour day, and an international congress meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, adopted a similar decision. “Thus on both sides of the Atlantic did the working class movement, spontaneous outgrowth of the conditions of production”, endorse the same movement of the limitation of hours of labor and concretize it in the demand for the 8-hour day. That the decision of the Geneva Congress was coordinated with the American decision can be seen from the following portion of the resolution: “As this limitation represents the general demand of the workers of the North-American United States, the Congress transforms this demand into the general platform of the workers of the whole world.” A similar influence of the American labor movement upon an international congress and in behalf of the same cause was exerted more profoundly 23 years later” [Alexander Trachtenberg, History of May Day, 1947]