Karl Radek Quotes
Without Socialism the working class is a heterogeneous mixture of different categories, some of which have independent, varying interests, sometimes opposed to each other.
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
Ironically, this view was also held by many of the capitalist “Captains of American Industry” who believed that all unions were revolutionist regardless of the views of the union’s membership or leadership. Even today, there are some who still equate trade unionism with communism and revolution. The majority of the unions and the left never believed that, but the extreme communists and extreme capitalists did than and some do today.
She was writing about the textile mills of Manchester, England in the Industrial Revolution. Workers’ wages were so low that many of them could not feed themselves and their family decently
Karl Berngardovich Radek was a Marxist active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and an international Communist leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.
