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Marx & Engels
The role of the unions
How to combat the worldwide offensive of
capitalism against the rights and conditions of the working class? This
is a big issue facing the trade unions today. So also is the absence of
a distinct political voice for working-class people as former ‘workers’
parties have abandoned a working-class and socialist perspective, like
New Labour in Britain. PETER TAAFFE shows that in the writings of Marx
and Engels are to be found many answers to begin overcoming these
problems confronting trade unions today.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the Trade Unions
Edited by Kenneth Lapides
Published by International Publishers (New York), £6-95
THIS BOOK IS essential reading for all those who
wish to understand the role of the trade unions and the tasks of
socialists within them. Although first published in 1987, containing the
works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on this issue, it has great
contemporary relevance.
Written in the 19th century, inevitably parts of the
book are dated. However, in the main, the freshness with which Marx and
Engels approach the real movement of the working class is evident. What
has not dated is the method of analysis of these two great socialist
teachers, their almost unerring ability to put their finger on the pulse
of the working-class movement at each stage, not just in Britain but
internationally.
To read extracts from Engels’s classic, The
Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), is to marvel once more
at how the 24-year-old author illuminated so many aspects of the
conditions and the outlook of the working class then and later. Engels
knew his way around documents and libraries but this was not enough, as
he indicated in his introduction to this book. Addressing the British
workers, he writes: "I have not been satisfied with this [study of
documents], I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject,
I wanted to see you in your homes, to observe you in your everyday life,
to chat with you on conditions and grievances, to witness your struggles
against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done
so…"
In these few lines is how all socialists, but
particularly the new generation entering the struggle for the first
time, should proceed in analysing and helping to provide a lever for the
more developed sections of the working class in its struggle against
capitalism. Not for Marx and Engels the role of ‘teachers’ from on high.
For instance, Marx wrote: "… we do not confront the world in a
doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down
before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s
own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they
are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely
show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is
something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to".
(Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843)
It is this approach that runs like a red thread
through the analysis of Marx and Engels on the trade unions. In the
first section of the book, Trade Unions and Revolution (1844–1848), the
inhuman conditions confronting the industrial working class at the time
are described and condemned in powerfully written lines by Engels. We
learn about the Chartists, the great general strike of 1842, the resort
to lock-outs and the vital role and development of the trade unions in
confronting the capitalists. He denounces the "absolute power of the
lord of the factory in his little state". Things have changed little in
Britain, it seems, when the Gate Gourmet ‘lords’ can treat workers in
exactly the same way 160 years later.
In describing the role of the trade unions Engels
also touches on the character of the British working class, how it
differed at that time, for instance, from the German and American
workers. He deals with the general conditions of the working class and
how it arrived at a trade union and political consciousness. The
different routes and the manner in which it does this is partly
conditioned by national factors, differences in the economy, the
proportion of workers, etc. He comments: "The incredible frequency of
these strikes proves best of all to what extent the social war has
broken out over all England".
Striking lessons
ON STRIKES IN general and how they develop the
working class, he writes: "These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes
result in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but they
are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and
proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the
working-men in which they prepare for the great struggles which cannot
be avoided…" Engels was premature in expecting the ‘decisive battle’
between labour and capital, at that stage, as he later conceded. But his
and Marx’s analysis of how struggle fuses together the working class
retains all its force today.
In relation to the unions, he says they are "schools
of war", in which, "the unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the
peculiar courage of the English. It is said on the Continent that the
English, and especially the working-men, are cowardly, that they cannot
carry out a revolution because, unlike the French, they do not riot at
intervals, because they apparently accept the bourgeois regime so
quietly. This is a complete mistake. The English working-men are second
to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the French, but they
fight differently".
Engels also describes the cold cruelty of the
British ruling class in this ‘war’. It uses every device, including
eviction from company houses: "This measure was carried out with
revolting cruelty. The sick, the feeble, old men and little children,
even women in child-birth, were mercilessly turned from their beds and
cast into the roadside ditches. One agent dragged by the hair from her
bed, and into the street, a woman in the pangs of childbirth".
In the cauldron of the rise of industrial capitalism
in England, so too developed trade unions that were blooded in brutal
battles with capital. Given that a big layer of the new generation in
the workplace does not yet even understand the basic idea of trade
unionism, the very simple but profound description by Marx and Engels on
the role of the working class and of trade unions bears repetition
today. Engels writes: "Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a
crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their
interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they
have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance –
combination".
Of course, because of de-industrialisation, the same
conditions do not pertain to the working class en masse as perhaps in
the 19th century (although there is still a substantial industrial
working class in Britain). Nevertheless, neo-liberalism has ensured the
destruction of the conditions of previously ‘privileged’ layers who
perhaps did not even consider themselves part of the working class, such
as civil servants, teachers, etc. Marx and Engels also answer the 19th
century pro-capitalist arguments – which have been repeated recently,
for instance in the miners’ strikes of the 1980s – that workers cannot
‘afford’ to strike or finance trade unions: "… the workers are right to
laugh at the clever bourgeois schoolmasters who reckon up to them what
this civil war is costing them in fallen, injured, and financial
sacrifices. He who wants to beat his adversary will not discuss with him
the costs of the war".
On concessions dragged out of the capitalists Engels
writes: "… Messrs the bourgeois and their economists are so gracious as
to allow in the minimum wage, that is, in the minimum life… [but] it
must in contrast appear to them as shameful as incomprehensible that the
workers reckon in this minimum a little of the costs of war against the
bourgeoisie and that out of their revolutionary activity they even make
the maximum of their enjoyment of life". In the Communist Manifesto,
Marx and Engels wrote: "Now and then the workers are victorious, but
only for a time. The real fruits of their battles lie, not in their
immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers".
Political struggle
ARISING FROM THIS struggle inevitably is politics,
the generalised struggle of the working class as a whole: "… every class
struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years". With modern technology, mobile phones, the internet, etc, what
took years in the 19th century can be achieved in a much shorter period
today. However, as in the past, this requires leadership and
organisation which avoids the pitfalls of opportunism on the one side
and sectarianism, a doctrinaire approach, on the other.
The correct method of Marx and Engels is
particularly brought out in the sections, Trade Unions and the First
International (1859-1872), Socialist Sectarians (1868-1875), on the
problems of the US labour movement, as well as the analysis of Engels on
the London dock strike of 1888 and the problems of the labour movement
at the beginning of the last decade of the 19th century. Marx was the
greatest theoretician of the working class but his practical work in the
construction of the First International (The International Working Men’s
Association – IWMA) was vital in laying the basis for the rise of the
workers’ movement both then and after its demise. Engels described the
formation of the IWMA as Marx’s "crowning achievement". What is brought
out in the extracts from his and Engels’s writings is the necessity for
implacable firmness on principled, political and theoretical points
while showing the greatest flexibility on trying to facilitate real
steps forward both in the trade unions and also politically of the mass
of the working class.
There are some very important parallels with the
tasks confronting socialists and Marxists today in these pages. The
First International, through the work of Marx and Engels, brought
together English trade unionists, European socialists and even the
anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin. But Marx always tried to point the
trade unions towards a generalised struggle against capitalism while
supporting all their struggles on a day-to-day basis. For instance, in
his fourth annual report to the First International’s general council in
1868, he states that the IWMA, "… has not been hatched by a sect or a
theory. It is the spontaneous growth of the proletarian movement, which
itself is the offspring of the natural and irrepressible tendencies of
modern society". He also states: "If the trade unions are required for
the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more
important as organised agencies for superseding the very system of
wage labour and capital rule".
But, even while collaborating with the trade union
leaders at the time, he also points to their limitations as well as
those of the trade unions as a whole: "Too exclusively bent on the local
and immediate struggles with capital, the trade unions have not yet
fully understood their power of acting against the system of wage
slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social
and political movements". Is this not the characteristic of many of the
trade union leaders today? Their members increasingly disillusioned with
the Labour Party, they nevertheless refuse to draw the obvious
conclusion of seeking and constructing a political alternative. Some may
distance themselves from the Labour Party but still retreat into a
neutral, so-called ‘non-political’, stance which ultimately undermines
the trade unions and their members’ real interests.
International solidarity
IN THIS BOOK, Marx and Engels point to the rise of
an aristocracy of labour, particularly amongst skilled workers, whose
living standards rose during the economic upswing which followed the
collapse of Chartism in the 1840s. This term, ‘the aristocracy of
labour’, was usually associated with the exclusive character of the
trade unions – concentrating on the skilled trades to the exclusion of
the great mass of unskilled exploited workers – in the late 19th
century. But, as this book reveals, the term was in use even by early
socialist writers and was familiar to Marx and Engels as early as the
1840s.
Through the First International and subsequently,
Marx and Engels attempted to break this down, supporting all strikes,
acting as a co-ordinating centre, and trying to persuade the trade
unions to broaden their base. In one report to the general council of
the IWMA, Marx makes the point, "… it was not the International that
threw the workmen into strikes, but, on the contrary, it was the strikes
that threw the workmen into the International". Marx showed the vital
role played by the First International in solidarity action: "… one of
the commonest forms of the movement for emancipation is that of strikes.
Formerly, when a strike took place in one country it was defeated by the
importation of workmen from another. The International has nearly
stopped all that. It receives information of the intended strike, it
spreads that information among its members, who at once see that for
them the seat of the struggle must be forbidden ground".
How far the trade unions need to travel today to
reach the position of the IWMA more than 150 years ago! The Committee
for a Workers’ International (CWI) does more, it seems, than the
‘mighty’ trade union apparatus in publicising and eliciting solidarity
for strikes in a country, continent and worldwide. The privileged trade
union officialdom, in the main, is at home in committees, participating
in the drawing up of weighty reports, suggesting pious resolutions for
parliaments, but not through class action through picket lines,
sympathetic strikes, organising immigrant workers, etc. A typical case
was the recent dispute in Irish Ferries, in which East European
immigrant labour was used in an attempt to break union conditions and
even the unions themselves. The European maritime union leaders did
undertake solidarity action. This was not true of the trade union
leaders as a whole who, in the main, are dilatory in organising it.
Through solidarity action, especially the efforts of the Socialist Party
in Ireland and its MP, Joe Higgins, as well as solidarity action
supported by the Socialist Party in England and Wales, the employers did
not win a complete victory.
Half a million immigrant workers have entered
Britain, Sweden and Ireland in the last 18 months to two years, the
overwhelming majority without union organisation and prepared to work
for drastically reduced pay and conditions. It is vital that the trade
union movement acts like the First International by spreading
"information among its members, who at once see that for them the seat
of the struggle must be forbidden ground". Polish and other Eastern
European workers should be organised, both in their home countries and,
when they come to Britain and the rest of Europe, should be recruited
immediately into union organisation.
The extracts from Marx’s Capital and other works in
this book, particularly on the struggle over the working day, have a
very topical ring about them. In this era of neo-liberalism, how
strikingly contemporary is the following comment? "The general tendency
of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average
standard of wages… Trade unions work well as centres of resistance
against the encroachments of capital [unfortunately, not the case under
right-wing leaderships – PT]. They fail partially from an injudicious
use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a
guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of
simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised
forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class…"
Marx correctly described the struggle between labour
and capital over the working day as a "civil war" unfolding over 50
years. This resulted in legislation restricting the amount of time
workers were forced to spend in the workplace. Even that has been
undermined today as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair insist that the European
Working Time Directive, limiting the working week to 48 hours, is not
applied in Britain! Capitalism is described by Marx as the "vampire
[which] will not lose his hold on [the worker] ‘so long as there is a
muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited’."
Democratic organisation
THE CHAPTER ON Socialist Sectarians is remarkable
for bringing out not just the role of the working class but the
different tactics that must be employed in different stages of the
struggle if socialists and Marxists are to link up successfully with
mass movements of the working class. It must be remembered that when
Marx is dealing with ‘sects’ he is not primarily concerned with the size
of such organisations – although this was a factor – but in their
abstract, incorrect tactics, their generally denunciatory and lecturing
approach towards the working class. People like Ferdinand Lasalle in
Germany – who Marx praised for taking the working-class movement forward
– had substantial forces behind him but had a false approach to trade
unions. The same applied to Pierre Proudhon, the inspiration for
anarchism in France, as well as many others.
In relation to the German workers and trade unions,
Marx makes the pertinent comment in arguing against over-centralised
mass organisations: "… centralist organisation, although very
useful for secret societies and sectarian movements, goes against the
nature of trade unions. Even if it were possible – I state outright that
it is impossible – it would not be desirable, and least of all in
Germany. Here where the worker’s life is regulated from childhood on by
bureaucracy and he himself believes in the authorities, in the bodies
appointed over him, he must be taught before all else to walk by
himself". Stifling bureaucracy, which is still the hallmark of trade
unions in Britain and throughout the world today, is a barrier to the
working class learning to "walk by itself".
Organisation and leadership is vital, but not as a
substitute – as some small sectarian organisations in Britain
unfortunately believe – for initiative and spontaneity by workers in
struggle. The role of socialists and Marxists in the trade unions is to
encourage this tendency of workers to act by themselves while helping to
provide, where necessary, the ideological and material means for the
working class itself to organise and defeat the employers and their
system.
Throughout the later writings of Engels is the theme
of the opposition of Marx and himself to an ultimatist or one-sided
approach to the struggles of the working class. Also the need for
political action is a constant theme. Engels, after the death of Marx,
pointed towards steps to be taken that would move the mass of the
working class into action. He pointed out in 1883: "And – apart from the
unexpected – a really general workers’ movement will come into existence
here only when the workers feel that England’s world monopoly is
broken".
He denounced the trade union leaders for acting as
the tail of the "‘great Liberal Party’, the party led by the
manufacturers". Today, the "manufacturers" are not represented by the
Liberal Democrats at least directly, and in any case do not have the
clout of their counterparts in the 19th century. But the equivalent of
the "great Liberal Party" then is the three main capitalist parties in
Britain today, particularly New Labour. Engels constantly writes of the
need for the "formation of a workers’ party".
Steps forward
WHILE MARX AND Engels were meticulous on points of
theory – read Marx’s criticism of Lasalle for his false idea of an "iron
law of wages" – they nevertheless welcomed all genuine steps forward,
even of a layer of the working class. For instance, Engels welcomed the
formation of the Knights of Labor in the USA following the end of the
American civil war. This encompassed 100,000 workers at one stage and
Engels fervently hoped it would lead to the development of a US labour
party. This did not materialise because, amongst other factors, the
expansion of US capitalism towards the west, with land provided for the
most energetic, acted as a safety valve for American capitalism and
undermined the development of a nationwide labour movement. Only when
this came to an end at the end of the 19th century did the labour
movement begin to take on national proportions, particularly in the
first decade of the 20th century.
While Engels understood that the objective situation
was a barrier to the development, in Britain in particular, to a
broad-based mass political party of the working class, he never stopped
advocating this and supported all steps, limited though they were,
towards the achievement of this goal. In relation to the US, he
demonstrated the hostility of genuine Marxism to sectarianism of all
kinds: "It is far more important that the movement should spread,
proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the
whole American proletariat than that it should start and proceed, from
the beginning, on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no
better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than to learn by
one’s own mistakes". He further adds: "The great thing is to get the
working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will
soon find the right direction, and all who resist… will be left out in
the cold with small sects of their own".
In relation to England and Britain as a whole, he
states at the time of the upsurge of ‘New Unionism’ that: "A large
class, like a great nation, never learns better or quicker than by
undergoing the consequence of its own mistakes. And for all the fault
committed in past, present and future, the revival of the East End of
London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this… and
glad and proud I am to have lived to see it".
New workers’ party
ENGELS’S ANALYSIS OF this period is rich, detailed,
and very useful even today for those who wish to understand strategy and
tactics in relation to the working-class movement. It is particularly
important in England and Wales today in view of the discussion underway
on the need for a new mass workers’ party. Writing about the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), formally ‘Marxist’ but denounced by Marx
when he was alive, he writes: "The English Social-Democratic Federation
is, and acts, only like a small sect. It is an exclusive body. It has
not understood how to take the lead of the working-class movement
generally, and to direct it towards socialism. It has turned Marxism
into an orthodoxy. Thus it insisted upon John Burns unfurling the red
flag at the dock strike, where such an act would have ruined the whole
movement, and, instead of gaining over the dockers, would have driven
them back into the arms of the capitalists". Engels was fulminating here
against the SDF’s ultimatumism towards the movement at that stage. This
malady eventually led to its shipwreck and collapse.
At the same time, he did not hesitate to criticise
the opportunist trade union leaders of the time, denouncing for instance
the "bourgeois labour party", as he described the right-wing trade union
leaders at the time (how apt this is for those who are still propping up
New Labour today), to the exclusivity of the skilled trade unions, as
well as the naivety and mistaken tactics of the dockers and gas workers
at different stages of their strikes. He also unequivocally welcomed all
attempts by the working class, no matter how small, to act
independently. For instance, he writes: "The gas workers now have the
most powerful organisation in Ireland and will put up their own
candidates in the next election…" He would have been denounced by some
of our socialist sectarians today in, for instance, Respect and the
Socialist Workers’ Party, who insist on a very centralised organisation,
controlled by themselves of course, which would exclude trade unionists
who see the need, as an initial step, to stand independently against the
capitalist parties, particularly New Labour. There are comments like
this and many more which make this book invaluable.
Its real relevance, however, is that the conditions
observed by Engels which led to the development of the Labour Party in
the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries are now
maturing. New Labour is the equivalent of the Liberal Party then. New
Unionism, which paved the way for the formation of the Labour Party, was
created by the terrible poverty, the equivalent of neo-liberal
capitalism today. The same conditions will produce like results.
Those who may be a bit disconcerted today by the big
task of creating a new mass party in Britain only have to read Engels’s
comments: "One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with
their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially
bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their ‘practical’
narrow-mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has seriously
affected the leaders. But things are moving nonetheless. The only thing
is that the ‘practical’ English will be the last to arrive, but when
they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale".
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