L'attenzione di Engels per il movimento operaio e socialista americano

“The American labor movement, along with the German SPD (which continued to increase its share of the electorate in spite of the Anti Socialist Laws), was regarded by many as the most advanced in the world. The comments of the French newspaper ‘Le Socialiste’ in May of 1886 on the Haymarket bombing were typical: “The social revolution announces itself in the United States… and is the tocsin for the social revolution in England, France, Germany, in a word, in all the civilized world” (179). And Friedrich Engels, in his preface to the American edition (1887) of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, stated with great enthusiasm that “during these ten months, a revolution has been accomplished in American society such us, in any other country, would have taken at least ten years. In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America; that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists, such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American Republic; and that, therefore, socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil. And yet, at the moment, the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal miners, and of many other trades, and especially in the preparations, all over the country, for the great eight hours’ movement which was to come off and did come off in the May following. … No one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie fire, would shake American society to its very foundations. (…)” [Carol J. Poore, German-American Socialist Literature, 1865-1900, 1982] [(179) Quoted in R.L. Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land, 1970, p. 71]