Published:
Proletary, No. 23, October 31 (18), 1905.
Published according to the text in Proletary.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1972,
Moscow,
Volume 9,
page 413.
Translated: The Late Abraham Fineberg and Julius Katzer
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2004).
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This is how the matter stood: the Taff Vale Railway sued the railway workers’ union for losses caused by the strike. Despite bitter resistance by the workers, the bourgeois judges awarded damages to the capitalists! Court injunctions instructing trade unions to compensate the capitalists for losses caused by a strike means in fact destroying the right to strike. Judges who play the lackey to the bourgeoisie know well how to nullify even constitutionally guaranteed liberties, when it comes to the struggle between labour and capital.
Unfortunately, the British working-class movement promises to serve for a long time to come as a sad example of how the labour movement’s divorcement from socialism leads of necessity to its becoming shallow and bourgeois in character.
[1] The article “The British Labour Movement and the Trade Union Congress” was published without the author’s signature in No. 23 of Proletary, October 31(18), 1905. The manuscript of the translation of this article was edited by Lenin, who attached two notes to it—one on the Taff Vale case, mentioned in the article, and the second on the concluding part of the article.
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