The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-10-08
Frame-ups in the American Class Struggle

q
frame-up and murder of two workngmen finds in
existence organization able to make their strug
gle, torture ard death integral part of the ma
tional and international class struggle.
The judicial murder of Saceo and Vanzetti will
be welded into the fighting tradition of the world
working class movement by the conference of the
International Labor Defense to be held in New York
City November IL, IL and 13-the fortieth anniver-
sary of the Haymarket martyrs.
The date of the conference has in itself great sig
nificance Due to the deliberate concealment of the
real meaning of the execution of the Haymarket
martyrs by labor officiadom anxious to avoid the
stigma of militant struggle in connection with its
corrupt craft union policy, comparatively few work
have been allowed to know that the murder of
the Haymarket martyrs conceded with the struggle
of the American workers for the eght-hour day and
part Of the price paid by the workers in the
course of that struggle.
But still more culpable has been the conspiracy
of silence the part of labor officiadom in CON
nection with the deep political significance of all
the classic frame-ups of American labor mitants
which have given the word 'frame-up" a special
connotation in international circles.
These frame-ups form chain whose every link
is duplicated by corresponding link in the chain
of American capitalist-imperialist development
Every time American capitalism has been prepar-
ing to take another step in its career of robbery
and oppression every time it has been preparing to
tighten its grip the natural resources and the
masses of this and other countries, there has APP
peared, as part of the class struggle, and
of the principal weapons of the ruling class,
attempt to murder by legal process leaders of the
labor movement and the working class.
To celebrate each period in its history Amer
lean capitalism has pucked human sacrifices from
the ranks of the workers The affairs of American
fol- TAIN new
the ritual chaned by the priests of capitalism may
have discarded the savage minor notes, the electric
chair may displace the knife of obsidan, but the
class character of the victims never changes-al-
ways they are workers
Each gigantic frame-up marks historical period
in the life of American capitalism
This is the MARKHAM explanation of this American
institution-far more typical of America than the
formal democracy which fools think it negates.
1ss7-the Haymarket martyrs swing from the
scaffolds.
In 1886 American capitalism was emerging from
the competitive period The of the huge
fortunes founded on Civil War graft and augmented
by the period of outright lootng of the natural re-
sources which followed it, were pooling their power
and laying the foundations for the of trustifi-
cation which approximately two decades saw COM
pleted.
New burdens were placed upon the working class
They could no longer combat with old methods the
rising might of the trusts. Hours could be short
ened only by united action scale far wider
than had ever been attempted before
Always the ruling class picks out for its victims
those individuals with a political doctrine which
tends to synthesze the struggles of the masses
They pick those of the working class who far
Their than the mass and who put forward chal-
To nitn1ic cYyCtn q0Ita
concerned with the faaces of revolutionary doc
trne--it is concerned only to whether the work
ers who voice them actually leading other work
ers to struggle in given conflict, broadening and
deepening it.
Thus it happens that anarchists, syndicalists, So
cialists and Communists have during various his
torical periods been singled out for persecution.
As American capitalism in 1886 struck at the
working class in order to make easier its drive
toward Capitalization, it fixed anarchists whom
it believed giving to the eight-hour movement
political character dangerous to captalisms fur