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Unions, Strikes, and Class Consciousness Today
Sheila Cohen and Kim Moody
One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the “specter” of communism can no longer be said to be haunting Europe—whether in the form of mass parties devoted to revolution or the states that inaccurately claimed that title. But class struggle, the inextinguishable source of everything the authors of the Manifesto meant by communism, is, it seems, as irrepressible as ever. Despite ever-stronger siren calls by social-democratic and union leaderships for “partnership” and “cooperation” with capital, old-fashioned mass strikes have recently stalked not only Europe but almost every other continent.
By the mid-1990s, this could be seen in the dramatic confrontations between major labor federations and the neoliberal, populist, and even social-democratic governments of such seemingly dissimilar capitalisms as France, South Korea, South Africa, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Belgium, Italy, and a dozen others. Alongside, sometimes preceding, and often following these political outbursts was a return to militant confrontation with capitalist employers far larger and more powerful than any Marx and Engels could have envisioned in 1848. If no manifestos appeared, no barricades were thrown up, and the red banners typically bore the initials of a trade union federation rather than a revolutionary party, the dynamics dramatically evoked throughout the original Manifesto were nonetheless clearly at work and a renewed class consciousness was evident across much of the industrial and semi-industrial world.
Despite all the real and apparent differences between Europe 150 years ago and today’s capitalist world, two fundamental issues remain equally unresolved: the lack of fully fledged and widespread socialist consciousness and the absence of large-scale organization directed at fostering such consciousness. If Marx and Engels saw in the rise of class conflict the birth of such organization, the moves cited above toward some resurgence of class struggle may offer the opportunity for its rebirth—providing, of course, the socialist left can overcome its own isolation from the reality of this struggle. In many ways, we are faced with the same problems and limitations within the socialist movement itself as were the authors of the Manifesto.
Socialism and the Working Class
In 1848 as now, the socialist movement consisted of a variety of “socialisms” ranging from the idealist/populist/utopian to the avowedly revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary. The Manifesto’s survey of “Socialist, and Communist Literature” identified the three categories of Reactionary Socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, and Critical-Utopian Socialism or Communism, and the forceful rejection by Marx and Engels of all these forms of “socialism” had one common theme: their mistaken abnegation of class. “German or ‘True’ Socialism,” for example, prides itself in representing “not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”1 While more aware of “the working class, as being the most suffering class,” utopian socialists like Fourier and Owen are equally castigated for considering themselves “far superior to all class antagonisms. . . . Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class.”2 The sectarians of the era receive no gentler treatment: “They hold fast by the views of their masters [i.e., Fourier, Owen, et al.], in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat.”3
Even in the apparently revolutionary era when the Manifesto was written, the class-oriented politics of Marx and Engels placed them at a peculiar distance from many of the other socialists of their time. One of the most central features of this difference revolved around their consistent adherence to what they referred to as “the real working class movement”; this was shown most clearly in what was then an almost unique focus on, and endorsement of, trade union organization.
The general absence of this orientation within the intellectual and political milieu of Marx and Engels—mirrored in an equivalent distaste for “economistic” struggles in our own era—is recognized by Hal Draper: “Marx was the first leading figure in the history of socialism to adopt a position of support to trade unions and trade unionism, on principle.”4 Most other socialists, as Draper points out, were often not only indifferent but positively hostile to trade unionism; he shows this was even true of Owen as well as Proudhon, who “not only condemned trade unions and strikes on principle but vigorously approved gendarmes’ shooting down strikers as enemies of society, that is, enemies of small property.”5 Even the leading Chartist, Ernest Jones, rejected trade unionism as a “fallacy,” despite the fact that his views were published only a few years after the mass Chartist struggles, which centered at their height on a general strike and the attempt to found the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union.6 Marx and Engels were in effect unique, then, among their socialist contemporaries, in consistently following an orientation toward basic trade union organization and struggle as expressions of what they referred to as the “real class movement.”
But were they correct? Richard Hyman, in his 1971 pamphlet “Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism,” comments that despite their lifelong involvement with both theoretical and practical aspects of trade unionism, the attention of Marx and Engels to this question is “remarkably slight.” Although he acknowledges that they provided a sufficient base in their writings “to be considered as a coherent theory of trade unionism,” Hyman evidently regards this theory as essentially naive. “One need scarcely document the failure of subsequent experience to validate [the Communist Manifesto’s] optimistic prognosis; yet Marx and Engels never produced a comprehensive revision of their earlier analysis.”7 This view is echoed in John Kelly’s comment, in Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, that “despite their contact with, and interest in, trade unionism they left behind no systematic or coherent analysis of the limits and possibilities of trade union action.” The “array of seemingly contradictory insights and arguments” said to be presented by Marx and Engels on the question is contrasted critically to the sustained and internally consistent logic of Marx’s economic analysis and his “constant endeavour to penetrate between the ‘surface appearances’ of capitalism and its underlying essence.”8
There is, however, no unified “underlying essence” to the character of trade unionism; it is an essentially contradictory phenomenon, and this is what accounts for Marx’s and Engels’s apparently “contradictory” responses to the class struggle (or lack of it) taking place around them. The contradictory character of trade unionism, and the dialectical nature of the necessary political response, are not sufficiently or explicitly theorized in the writings of Marx and Engels on trade unionism. Yet the distinction between the consistently subversive potential of basic industrial organization, the grass roots of trade unionism, and “trade unions” as organizations and, incipiently, bureaucracies, was the underlying reason for their apparent vacillations between feverish excitement about union struggles during working-class upsurges and strong disapproval of the general orientation of the trade unions during periods of acquiescence.
This instinctive “nose” for the class struggle potential of grassroots trade unionism is evident in Engels’s delighted response to the eruption of basic class conflict into the New Unionism of the late 1880s, a development that, though sadly too late for Marx, Engels greeted like a drink of water in the desert of nineteenth-century craft trade unionism. As he wrote excitedly to Lafargue in 1889: “These new trades unions of unskilled men and women are totally different from the old organisations of the working class aristocracy and cannot fall into the same conservative ways. . . . In them I see the real beginning of the movement here.”9 His estimation that these new unions could not “fall into the same conservative ways” was before