T...’s proposal to only admit workers to the International and the cooperatives is a reestablishing of the corporations of the ancient regime and compagnonnage.[1]
This constitutes the abdication of any political and civic idea, the relegating of workers to an entirely private, purely material existence. It’s their intellectual and moral degradation, the proclaiming of their inferiority as a caste. It’s a veritable abdication.
January 1868
[1] Societies of journeymen in craft trades, a movement of some strength in the mid-nineteenth century but which dated back to the eighteenth. (From: Marxists.org.)