Representing Global Labor

Abstract

Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation. A better world’s in birth. No more tradition’s chains shall bind us. Arise you slaves, no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations. We have been naught, we shall be all. ’Tis the final conflict; Let each stand in his place The international working class Shall be the human race. — “The Internationale” These are the common U.S. lyrics to “The Internationale,” which was written in 1871 by the Communard poet Eugene Pottier after the fall of the Paris Commune. 1 Pottier, born in 1816, was one of the revolutionary Parisian artisans of 1848, an admirer of Proudhon, a friend of Courbet, a leader in the Paris Commune who subsequently went into exile in the United States. His poem was set to music in 1888 by a member of a Lille workers’ chorus, Pierre Degeyter. By 1910, it had been adopted as the anthem of the international workers’ movement. It later served as an anthem of the Soviet Union, but it has been translated into many languages and sung around the world. It was banned in many parts of the world in the early years of the century; it was sung by Wobblies in the Lawrence textile strike and by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; and it was the source of Frantz Fanon’s most famous title. I begin with “The Internationale” because it stands as one of the first great popular representations of global labor. 2 Somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century — one might mark it from the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848, written by Pottier’s German contemporaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with its final lines: “Proletarier aller Lander, vereinigt euch!” (“Proletarians of all countries, unite!”)