Marxism and the Unions: The Young Marx and Engels, the Workers, and the Trade‑Union struggles

Introduction

The trade-unions of today, present a picture of a labyrinthine complexity of organisations which overlap, merge, and constantly change their names, with a corresponding array of officials and bureaucratic structures, from the factory up to the national and international level. Reflecting this fragmented situation, a cornucopia or rulebooks, and arcane customs add to the confusion.

Although many of these features of the trade unions arose in the course of the unions’ historical evolution out of local organisation, they also indicate the increasing ties of the trade-union leaders to the official State apparatus, to which they have become increasingly bound by the carrots of honours, financial reward and bourgeois respectability, and, the stick of legal restrictions on trade-union activity, including threats to confiscate union funds. Nowadays, on the increasingly rare occasions when a union does launch a strike, the confrontation tends to be more and more isolated within a particular sector, due as much to a narrowly corporativist attitude as to recent legislation against secondary actions.

The fact is that in the modern epoch, it is increasingly difficult for workers to wring even the smallest of concessions from capitalism without breaking the law. But instead of launching a vigorous campaign to defend the rights of union members, the trade-union leaders place all their trust in the vague promises of the bourgeois workers parties to change the law once they have got in power, something they invariably fail to do (in Britain, the Labour Party leader Tony Blair has said that he will only see to change some of the Tory’s anti-union legislation). Thus the cart of the proletariat is hitched up to a gang of political speculators, and the trade-union leaders return to their task of administrating what are increasingly nothing more than pension, insurance and even mortgage societies!

The fact is, the trade union leaders are unwilling to confront capitalism itself, and admit to workers the dreadful truth that aiming for a secure, well-paid existence within parameters acceptable to capitalism is to aim for a fools paradise; a fools paradise which the trade-union leaders are eager to defend since their livelihood depends on it, for at the end of the day, they are no different to the various priests and mystic conmen who, wafting of incense, flock around the disillusioned and sell them expensive utopias.

A resounding silence then has been the response of the official trade-union leaders to the increasing stranglehold of the bourgeoisie, and it is a stranglehold which has undoubtedly been strengthened by the increasing marginisation of communists within the unions, to the extent that they are either forbidden from assuming leading positions, or find themselves entirely straitjacketed by a union constitution which is dedicated to anything but class warfare.

In Italy, in response to the increasing availability of the union leaders o bourgeois directives, the trade-union movement has split. The workers, and therefore communists, are starting to desert the old trade-union organisations and join the base committees and other alternative workers’ economic organisations which have come about as a result of the old ‘syndicates’ being reduced to an empty shell. In these organisations it is possible again for communists to form fractions and make themselves heard.

In this climate of increasing illegality of all workers’ struggles, these new organisations in Italy are of compelling interest for workers still trapped within the old, sclerotic trade-union organisations elsewhere. Increasingly they are forced to enquire whether their own trade unions are not every bit as hidebound as the ones from which there has recently been such a mass desertion in Italy. And if so, wherefore now? To answer these questions effectively would mean making an actual comparison of the respective histories of the Italian and other trade-union movements (a work we also engaged in), but equally in this current situation, it is a good time to refresh our memories about the fundamentals of the ‘trade-union question’, and retrace our steps back and examine the theoretical bases of Marxist strategy and tactics in the unions.

1. The ‘Young Hegelian’ Marx

Marx first broached the problem of social conflict in general as a student at Berlin University. After matriculating in the Law department in October 1836, he would soon cast off his early romanticism and in an attempt to resolve a problem he had encountered in his Law studies, of the gap between ‘what is and what ought to be’, would make a conversion to Hegelianism as sudden as it is profound. It would not be long before Marx had entered into the thick of the controversies that raged between the ‘Old’ Hegelians, who remained loyal to the system and conservative ideals of the older Hegel, and the ‘Young’ Hegelians who would stress the revolutionary elements in the Hegelian method, whose significance lay in “that for the first time the totality of the natural, historical and spiritual aspects of the world were conceived and represented as a process of constant transformation and development and an effort was made to show the organic character of the process” (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).

Marx would soon be recognised as one of the main contributors to the ‘Doktorklub’, the main bastion of the ‘Young’ Hegelian movement, and would take up a position on its extreme left wing. Discussions would revolve to begin with around the question of religion, but soon, in an atmosphere where a rising bourgeoisie was starting to have occasional skirmishes with the Prussian absolutist State, the ‘Doktorklub’ would become increasingly involved in political matters and defending the supporters of constitutional monarchy. When Frederick Wilhelm IV ascended the throne in July 1840, they were keen to see whether the King would put into effect the many reforms he had proposed as Crown Prince, including freedom of speech. They were to be rudely awakened. On them would his first repressive falls, and there would be a concerted attempt to remove Hegelians from all Government and academic posts. By the winter of 1840-1 the club were calling themselves ‘friends of the people’ and their theoretical position was therefore at the extreme left wing of revolutionary republicanism.

The result of this for Marx personally was that he was forced to abandon his hopes of becoming a university lecturer. Instead he would turn to journalism.

2. Marx and the ‘Rheinische Zeitung’

In the course of 1841, a loosely knit group of industrialists (including Camphausen, the railway king and future prime-minister), merchants, writers and philosophers came together in Cologne: the epicentre of Prussia’s most industrialised region, the Rhineland. By the middle of the year, this group had conceived of the project of having a daily newspaper of their own, and this plan eventually came to be realised by taking over an already existing, but ailing, cologne newspaper, with money put up largely by Cologne industrialists. On January 1^st, 1842, the first number appeared.

Marx had been associated with this group from the start, and after the success of his first contribution, an article on freedom of the Press (his first published article) he was pressed to contribute as many articles as possible. In October 1842, Marx took over the editorship.

Commenting on this period, Marx would later write “In the year 1842-3, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests. The proceeding of the Rhineland Parliament on thefts of wood, and so on… provided the first occasion for occupying myself with the economic questions” (from ‘A Preface to a Critique of Political economy’). Engels would reiterate this and say in a letter to R. Fischer (MEW XXXIX 466) that he had “always heard from Marx, that it was precisely through concentrating on the law of thefts of wood and the situation of the Mosel wine-growers that he was led from pure politics to economic relationships and so to socialism”.

This increasing interest in socialism had also been nurtured by the communist movements in France and the Chartists in England, whose activities were regularly reported in the RZ and in the German press in general. Stoking these flames, there was Moses Hess, who in August 1842 had started a study-circle for the discussion of social problems which effectively became the editorial committee of the paper. Hess was the first of the Young Hegelian camp to turn his attention to communism and Engels reports he was the first three to come over to communism.

Ironically, considering his future course, Marx’s debut article as editor was a refutation of charges of communism made against the Rheinische Zeitung by another paper (“Communism and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung”), but the article consisted more in a criticism of the rival paper’s refusal to take communism seriously than an outright condemnation, and marx was careful to say that ’the Rheinische Zeitung doesn’t concede theoretical validity to communist ideas in their present form (our underlining).

During this period, however, Marx was still essentially at the extreme left wing of bourgeois democracy. But whilst still experimenting with the idea that it might be possible to convince the rulers of the need for change, he could nevertheless see that if divine inspiration from above failed, English history pointed to another possibility: Charles I mounted the scaffold because of divine inspiration from below”.

Marx’s increasing involvement with the real problems of the day, along with the continual harassment at the hands of the Prussian censors, was resulting in a growing conviction that simple ‘criticism’ of the status quo was not enough, and this would lead to a split in the Young Hegelian movement between the ‘critical critics’ headed by Bruno Bauer, and the more practical contingent around Marx. “The more deeply Marx plunged into reality, the more his Berlin friends lost themselves in abstraction. Their criticism became ever more ‘absolute’, and was destined to end up in empty negation. It became ‘nihilistic’.

“The word ‘nihilism’, which dates from those times, was coined for them. The Russian writer, Turgeniev, who is generally supposed to have invented it, learned it during this period in Berlin, when he met members of Bruno Bauer’s circle. He transferred it to the Russian revolutionaries twenty years later (…)”. Eventually they “spun a new theory out of their very impotence, made a fetish of individual consciousness, which they regarded as the only battlefield on which victories could be fought and won, and ended up in an individual anarchism which reached its zenith in Max Stirner’s ultra-radical and ultra-harmless Einzigen” (from Karl Marx, Man and Fighter, by Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen).

Marx’s increasing disillusionment with the Freien group, the remnant of the old ‘Doktorklub’, and their indulgence in empty philosophising reflected Marx’s own doubts that the rulers could be brought around to the need for change by philosophical means. In the end, the matter would be settled once and for all by the establishment’s very unphilosophical riposte to the criticisms levelled at them: they would close down the paper – along with the entire liberal press in Prussia. The last issue would go out on March 31, 1843 with the following poem as its epitaph “We boldly flew the flag of freedom, and every member of the crew did his duty. In spite of the watch having been kept in vain, the voyage was good and we did not regret it. Though the gods were angry, though our mast fell, we were not intimidated. Columbus himself was despised at first, but he looked upon the New World at last. Friends who applauded us, foes who fought us, we shall meet again on the new shore. If all collapses, courage remains unbroken”. The new shore would be Paris.

3. The Proletariat Identified as the Revolutionary Class

But before moving to Paris, there would be a brief interlude when Marx ‘withdrew from the public stage into the study to solve the doubts that assailed him’. In March 1843, he moved from his mother-in-law’s house in Kreuznach where he stayed for the following six months, marrying Jenny in June. It was during this stay that he decided to get to grips with Hegel’s political philosophy, a project he had had in mind for more than a year (…)

‘A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ was “written when Marx’s ideas were in a transient state: he adopted the fundamental humanism of Feuerbach and, with it, Feuerbach’s reversal of subject and predicate in the Hegelian dialectic. He considered it plain that the task ahead was the recovery by man of the social dimension of his nature that had been lost ever since the French revolution levelled all citizens in the political state and thus accentuated the individualism of bourgeois society. It was clear to Marx that private property must cease to be the basis of social organisation” (Karl Marx Selected Writings, D. McLellan, OUP). Marx also clearly identifies here the “class of immediate labour, of concrete labour” which didn’t so much “constitute a class of civil society as provide the ground on which the circles of civil society move and have their being”.

Marx would later say in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy that he was led, during these studies, to the conclusion “firstly that the legal relations as well as forms of state are to be understood neither in themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in material conditions of life (…) secondly that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy”.

In October 1843, Marx moved to Paris to take up co-editorship of a new paper the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbucher – The French-German Year-books – which aimed to bring into an ‘intellectual alliance’ the Germans, who were most advanced in theory, with the French, who were the most advanced in practice.

Here Marx would identify the role of the “class of immediate labour” as the one which would put into practice the revolution he had already accomplished in philosophy. In his Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction written in early 1844, Marx, in posing the question “so where is the real possibility of a German emancipation” would answer “in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class in civil society, of a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, of a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only to a human one. It is not in a one-sided opposition to the consequences of the German political regime, it is in total opposition to its presuppositions. It is finally, a sphere that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating these other spheres themselves. In a word, it is the complete loss of humanity and thus can only recover itself by a complete redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat”. Further on, Marx scotches all notions about the utopian nature of a propertyless communist society by pointing to the fact that it is already the case for the proletariat: “When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order, it merely declares the secret of its own existence, since it is in fact the dissolution of this order. When it demands the negation of private property it is only laying down as a principle for society what society had laid down as a principle for the proletariat, what has already been incorporated in itself without its consent as the negative result of society”. The dichotomy of German Philosophy and French socialism stood revealed as one between communist ideas and proletarian material: ‘As philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has struck into the virgin soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be completed.’

4. The Paris Manuscripts

In 1844, Marx was firmly ensconced in Paris, and was immediately impressed and stimulated by the numerous workers’ associations and attended as many of the meetings as possible: ‘at the communist workers’ meetings brotherhood is no phrase but a reality, and a true spirit of nobility is reflected in the faces of these men hardened by labour’.

Paris was also host to about 100,000 German immigrants, who tended to depress the wages of French artisans and there had been as a result several street battles between the two groups, and tension did not diminish until various revolutionary groups started working amongst the workers. Soon there was no French secret society without a German member and the Blanquist groups actually had special German sections. Contacts between Marx and the league of the Just – which aimed to set up a ‘social republic’ in Germany and was almost entirely composed of artisans – were to the extent that Karl and Jenny Marx even tried a short-lived attempt at living in a ‘philanstery’ which included Maurer, one of their leaders.

In this highly charged Parisian atmosphere, Marx would write his famous Paris Manuscripts. What is immediately apparent is that the language is simpler and clearer and less wrapped in the abstruseness of Hegelian terminology. Marx was now less concerned with philosophical contradictions than with the actual contradictions of contemporary society, and is obviously firmly under the sway of Feuerbach’s writings, which in the preface he refers to as the only ones “to contain a real theoretical revolution since Hegel”. But although Feuerbach’s radical brand of materialism had successively ‘inverted’ Hegel’s philosophy in seeing mind as derived from matter, rather than matter derived from Hegel’s ‘absolute idea’ Marx would nevertheless move beyond the abstractness of Feuerbach’s notions of ‘Nature’ and ‘species being’ to flesh out these concepts as ‘capitalist society’ and ‘social being’ respectively. And discovering the material contradictions in society meant a study of actual society rather than the reflection of these material contradictions in the minds of philosophers.

The Paris manuscripts have become the subject of much debate amongst Academia, since they think they have discovered a ‘humanist’ Marx which they can deploy against the revolutionary Marx. This has largely been achieved by ignoring the obvious fact that Marx was still in the process of clarifying his revolutionary position, which was then still under the influence of the declaredly Humanist Feuerbach, but also by ignoring the revolutionary implications of Marx’s first serious analysis of wages and the proletarian class.

Thus, in the very opening lines of the manuscripts, in the section entitles “wages of labour” we read the following: “Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker, victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker without the capitalist. Combination amongst the capitalists is customary and effective: workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them” for “the worker can supplement his income from industry with neither ground rent nor interest on capital. This is the reason for competition among the workers”. Thus we find Marx condemning from the very outset the possibility of a favourable outcome for immediate struggles and by implication, all reformist attempts to reform the wages system rather than overthrowing it. After more than 150 years, we can say that these words have been confirmed – despite combinations of workers now being legal, the capitalist can still hold out longer, and even if forced into arriving at some compromise with workers’ demands, the workers’ victories which accrue are inevitably of short duration.

But the wage is not just decided by competition. The worker enters the capitalist’s calculation just as another cost of production. And the lowest necessary cost of producing a worker is the level around which the level of wages gravitates: “For wages the lowest and only necessary rate is that required for the subsistence of the worker during work and enough extra to support a family and prevent the race of workers from dying out. According to Smith, the normal wage is the lowest which is compatible with common humanity, i.e. with bestial existence”.

“The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men as of every other commodity. If the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then one section of the workers sinks into beggary and starvation. The existence of the worker is therefore reduced to the same condition as the existence of every other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and he is lucky if he can find a buyer”. Thus when the worker enters the struggle for improved conditions, he immediately, even if not consciously realising it, is striking at the very heart of the capitalist system. But the reformist trade-union leaders make damn sure that this fact is concealed by constantly dangling the enticing prospect before the workers of an improvement of their lot under capitalism. As if in reply to these illusions Marx says “Let us take the three chief conditions in which society can find itself and consider the situation of the worker in them:

1. if the wealth of society is decreasing, the worker suffers most, for although the working class cannot gain as much as the property owners when society is prospering none suffers more cruelly from its decline than the working class.
2. Let us now consider a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition between the capitalists sets in – the demand for workers exceeds their supply. But:
3. In the first place, the rise of wages leads to overwork among the workers. The more they want to earn the more they must sacrifice their time and freedom and work like slaves in the service of avarice. In doing so they shorten their lives. But this is all to the good of the working class as a whole, since it creates a renewed demand. This class must always sacrifice a part of itself if it is to avoid total destruction”.

But even this more favourable condition for the worker involves its own negation. Marx points out that “as a result of the accumulation of a large quantity of labour, for capital is accumulated labour” more of the worker’s products are being taken away from them. This increasing accumulation of capital results in an increasing division of labour which produces a “very one-sided and machine-like type of labour”, and also makes him “more and more dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the investment of capital and in the whims of the wealthy”. An additional fact undermining the workers supposed advantage of a capitalist “boom” is that competition amongst the capitalists and there is an increasing concentration of capital which throws a host of small businessmen into the working classes which increases competition for jobs, once again causing a depression of wages. “Hence a section of the working class is reduced to beggary or starvation with the same necessity as a section of the middle capitalists ends up in the working class”.

The reformist trade-union leader, for whom notions of a ‘good’ capitalism are his veritable bread and butter, might be now forced to admit that not all workers will ‘make good’ under such conditions. He might regale us with moving tales of the vitues of ‘hard-work’ and Stakhnovite exertions, and be forced to admit that he is in fact a firm believer in the ‘right’ of the worker to improve himself (at other worker’ expense), to pull himself up by the bootstraps, and elbow his fellow workers aside in a bid to become a capitalist himself. After all, hasn’t he himself beaten a path through to the leafy glades of suburbia? For this too Marx has a reposte: “An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and body. An increase in wages presupposes, and brings about, the accumulation of capital, and thus opposes the product of labour to the worker as something increasingly alien to him. Similarly, the division of labour makes him more one-sided and dependent, introducing competition from machines as well as from men. Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor”. Thus the legendary hard-working John Henry, the epitomy of pride in muscular exertion, and immortalised in song, died in his attempts to prove his superiority over machinery. Finally, just as the accumulation of capital increases the quantity of industry and therefore the number of workers, so it enables the same quantity of industry to produce a greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of work or by reducing their wages to a pittance”.

The third condition which can occur in society is when this state of growth has reached a peak. In a nutshell: “The surplus population would have to die”.

To sum up: “In a declining state of society we have the increasing misery of the worker: in an advancing state, complicated misery of the worker; and in the terminal, static misery”.

If a humanist Marx exists in the Paris manuscripts, it is only insofar as he succeeds in voicing the dreams of the factory worker tied to an unsatisfying and repetitive job; dreams which arise as an initial escape, an initial overthrowing, in the mind, of capitalist society. Thus in the section on ‘estranged labour’ he points out that “an enforced rise in wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that such an anomalous situation could only be prolonged by force) would be nothing more than better pay for slaves and would not mean an increase in human significance or dignity for either the worker or labour”. [note: that despite Marx seeing a sustained rise in wages as anomalous, he still says that it can only be ‘prolonged by force’]. The dream is of real involvement and pleasure in human activity, but if Marx allowed himself to be inspired by it, he would nevertheless spend the rest of his life dedicated to proving that it was the actual conditions of life which prompted the dream, and that even dreams only arise when the material possibilities exist to realise them.

But “Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to work. Society would be conceived as an abstract capitalist”. Already in 1844, Marx had already foreseen what a serious obstacle to workers struggles the calls to defend nationalised industries and the future “planned economies” of the so-called “socialist” bloc would be; schemes which would retain all the instruments for perpetuating estranged labour – whilst passing them off as workers’ paradises. How often would workers fall into the clutches of pseudo workers’ parties vaunting nationalised industries as the panacea of all ills!

5. Labour in a Post-Capitalist Society

In Excerpts from James Mill’s ‘Elements of Political Economy’, written at the same time as the manuscripts, Marx provides us with one of his rare constructions of a future communist society, a ‘dream’ which he contrasts to the condition of alienated labour under capitalism:

“Let us suppose that we had produced as human beings. In that event each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and his neighbour in his production. (1) In my production I would have objectified the specific character of my individuality and for that reason I would both have enjoyed the expression of my own individual life during my activity and also, in contemplating the object, I would experience an individual pleasure, I would experience my personality as an objective sensuously perceptible power beyond all shadow of doubt. (2) In your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, i.e. that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being. (3) I would have acted for you as the mediator between you and the species, thus I would be acknowledged by you as the complement of your own being, as an essential part of yourself. I would thus know myself to be confirmed both in your thoughts and your love. (4) In the individual expression of my own life I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my authentic nature, my human, communal nature.

Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth.

This relation would be mutual: what applies to me would also apply to you:

My labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life. My labour is not life.

Moreover, in my labour the specific character of my individuality would be affirmed because it would be my individual life. Labour would be authentic, active, property. In the framework of private property my individuality has been alienated to the point where I loathe this activity, it is torture for me. It is in fact no more than the appearance of activity and for that reason it is only a forced labour imposed on me not through an inner necessity but through an external arbitrary need.

In the object I produce my labour can only become manifest as what it is. It cannot appear to be what it is not. It therefore becomes manifest only as the objective, sensuous, perceived, and hence quite indubitable expression of my self-loss and my impotence”.

Thus far, we have followed Marx as he analyses wage labour and shows its organic connection with capital. We have seen that Marx held out no prospect of any significant improvements for the wage labourer under capitalism, even during its peak periods, and points to a future society in which labour would be truly fulfilling and human, because man would be able to act as a communal, social being.

There is no doubt that Marx’s observations are as valid now as when written, on a global scale; for through the conditions of the proletariat have definitely improved in the capitalist metropolis (though relative to the increased needs that modern capitalism has suscitated the improvement is not significant) the condition of the proletariat in the rising capitalisms is as dire, if not worse, than those which predominate in 19^th Century Europe. Famines, executions of surplus children, and wars prey on the minds and bodies of this ex-colonial proletariat, and the breadcrumbs of social welfare, which still fall off the banqueting tables of the metropolitan capitalism, barely exist.

Nevertheless, we have hardly broached the trade-union question yet; we have equipped ourselves with facts to counter some of the illusions of the trade-union reformists, with agitation material to draw workers to communism, but we do not think the revolution will only transpire when a majority of workers are communist; precisely the bones of the trade-union question resides in how to set into action the masses of non-communist workers outside the party; those on workers’ economic organisations often dominated by reformists, but who nevertheless may be instinctively drawn to communism at crucial moments of intensified struggle.

But even to say that is to jump ahead of ourselves, to beg the question, for what is the relation between proletarian politics and the workers’ economic organisations? Could not the communist party operate without the unions, or vice-versa? This subject was first broached by Marx in an essay on the King of Prussia and social reform written in 1844, and it is there we will commence our enquiry in the next part.

In the first part of our investigation into the genesis of the Marxist approach to the trade unions, we undertook a brief survey of Marx’s early work from the time of his editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung up to his exile in Paris, and we commented, albeit very briefly, on his intellectual development as he made the transition from radical Hegelianism to communist materialism.

During this same period, Marx’s future lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was beating a parallel path through the maze of radical Hegelian ideas, and indeed the two men, even before they first met, were already exerting a reciprocal influence upon each other through their respective writings in the radical press. But before their historic collaboration formally commenced in August 1844, Engels, like Marx, would make a significant, and lasting, contribution to the development of the Communist programme.
 

6. THE ‘YOUNG HEGELIAN’ ENGELS

Engels came from a family of wealthy cotton manufacturers in Barmen, in the Rhineland, and was brought into the family firm at the age of 17, a year before he was due to take his school diploma. With a university education denied him, he would soon turn to journalism as an intellectual and creative outlet, and proceed to settle accounts with his religious upbringing. Even as early as 1839, at the very start of his commercial apprenticeship in Bremen, he was observing the appalling conditions of the German working classes and the ideological use of religion against them. With his Pietist father presumably squarely in his sights, he railed against the «pietists amongst the factory owners [who] treat their workers worst of all; [who] use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers (…) are always the first to bribe the people».

Engels was already commenting on the appalling conditions in the factories and the «work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen – and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six» (Letters from Wuppertal, March and April 1839).

Engel’s increasing involvement in social issues, combined with a keen interest in poetry and literature, would soon lead him to the writings of “Shelley, the genius, the prophet”. And Engels must surely have identified with this anarchist rebel who was expelled from Oxford university for sending atheistic pamphlets to bishops. As Engels translated Shelley’s Queen Mab, he would find himself moving beyond his earlier preoccupations with religion and seeking a political solution to the social ills that he had observed.

As Engel’s time at Bremen came to an end, and with a reputation as a political and religious heretic already established, a return to the parental home was something to be avoided. With his military service looming, and given an already deep-seated interest in military matters gleaned from his childhood years sat at the feet of Napoleonic war veterans, his problem was solved by volunteering for the Brigade of Artillery, and he took up his posting in Berlin in 1841.

Soon he linked up with the Freien group, ‘The Free’, who, faced with a tightening up of the censorship laws and the expulsion of many of their leading lights from their professorships in the German universities, were being forced to question their notion of a slow and peaceful permeation of revolutionary ideas. The time had come to protest, and protest they did, by means of colourful processions, student pranks and a type of militant individualism which irresistibly brings to mind today’s cringingly petty-bourgeois protests.

Indeed Marx himself had partaken in such activities as a student, and participated in “donkey parades” in Bonn with Bruno Bauer, but having seen their ineffectiveness first-hand, he felt no compunction about condemning such “guttersnipe antics”. No doubt Engels got swept along in this movement as well, but he would concentrate his protests on taking on the pillars of the academic establishment. But as yet, to Engels, Marx was still just a legendary figure of the anti-establishment, who in a poem of April, 1842, he would describe as:

«A swarthy chap of Trier, a marked monstrosity.
«He neither hops nor skips, but moves in leaps and bounds,
«Raving aloud. As if to seize and then pull down
«To Earth the spacious tent of Heaven up on high».
    (Christliches Heldengedicht).

At the end of his military service in Berlin in September 1842, Engels claimed to be an atheist in religion but in politics indeterminate. Soon that would change. On his way back to his family home in Barmen, he would stay in Cologne and meet Moses Hess, one of the first socialists (or communists) in Germany, and an initiator and contributor to the Rheinische Zeitung. According to Hess’s own account, Engel would make a lightning conversion to the tenets of ‘true socialism’, as expounded in his book, the European Triarchy, which held that revolution was imminent, and that it would be the role of England to synthesise, by a new kind of revolution, the German Reformation and the French Revolution. Fired with these ideas, His father’s proposal that he go to England to complete his apprenticeship in the family firm’s Manchester branch met with little protest as it meant that he had an opportunity to participate in the forthcoming revolution first-hand.

By this time, Engels was also a regular contributor to the Rheinische Zeitung, with seventeen articles and sketches to his name published between April and December, 1842, contributing considerably to the revolutionary-democratic tone which the paper would acquire under Marx’s editorship from the autumn of 1842. The two men would meet face to face for the first time in late October, 1842, when Engels visited the newspaper office on his way to take up his appointment in England, but the meeting was not a great success as Marx was still suspicious of someone who he saw tarred with the Freien brush. It was nevertheless agreed that Engels would contribute articles to the paper on English affairs.
 

7. ENGELS ARRIVES IN ENGLAND

In December, 1842, Engels arrived in Manchester after spending a brief period in London. In his first few weeks, he would almost certainly have worked at the mill in Weaste to learn the manufacturing side of the business. But soon he moved to the warehouse and office situated in Southgate, where his knowledge of languages and continental contacts found ready use.

From here, it was but ten minutes to the Owenite Hall of Science, where he would soon find himself actively participating in the debates and discussions. «At First – he said – one cannot get over one’s surprise at hearing in the Hall of Science the most ordinary workers speaking with a clear understanding on political, religious and social affairs… I saw the Communist Hall, which holds about 3,000 people, crowded every Sunday» (MECW,vol 3, p,387).

In late 1843, Engels would make his first contribution to the Owenite New Moral World, and one can follow Engels testing the notion of ‘building the new society within the old’ in a number of writings in which he undertook a thorough study of utopian communities old and new. He would also get to know the leaders of the Chartist movement and the League of the Just, but even as regards the latter organisation, in which the germs of the future Communist Party lay dormant, he would still not make a firm commitment ‘for I still owned, as against their narrow-minded egalitarian communism, a goodish dose of just as narrow-minded philosophical arrogance’.

Meanwhile he had been undertaking an intense study of English economy and conditions which would bear fruit in the article Outlines of a critique of Political Economy, published in 1844 in the Deutsche-Franzosiche Jahrbucher along with Marx’s articles on the Jewish Question and the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The Outlines was an article which made a deep impression on Marx prompting him as late as 1859 to describe it as “a brilliant outline of a critique of economic categories”. If many of Engel’s writings may be described as coolly analytical, in this article we see him sensing that he had found his life’s work; and a shower of question and exclamation marks, signalling a million questions to be answered and a million horrors to expose, mark his arrival at the threshold of a new social and economic theory. Perhaps, in this article’s power to concentrate Marx’s interest on the anatomy of capitalist economy, it is from here that we can really date Marx and Engel’s mental, if not actual, collaboration.
 

8. THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND

But Engel’s greatest priority during his first stay in England, and a task to which all his research of the period was ultimately subordinated, was his study of proletarian conditions which would bear magnificent fruit in his book The Condition of the Working-Class in England; a book which the founders of Marxism would consider as one of their few the pre-Communist manifesto works worthy of permanent preservation along with the Theses of Feuerbach and the Poverty of Philosophy.

In the preface to the first German Edition, Engels would explain that the book dealt with a subject which he originally intended to deal with in a single chapter of a more comprehensive work on the social history of England, but that the importance of the subject soon made it necessary to investigate it separately. In England proletarian conditions could be observed in their classical form, and «a knowledge of proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to provide solid ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgements on their right to exist, on the other». This was especially the case for “German theoreticians”, amongst which he included himself, who had arrived at Communism by the purely theoretical route “of the Feuerbachian dissolution of Hegelian speculation”.

In late 1845, he would write in an article on the 1842 turnout, that

«readers of my book will remember that I was chiefly concerned to describe the position of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in relation to each other and the necessity of struggle between these two classes; and I attached especial importance to proving how completely justified the proletariat was in waging this struggle, and to rebutting the English bourgeoisie’s fine phrases by means of their ugly deeds. From the first page to the last, I was writing a bill of indictment against the English bourgeoisie».

Thus, as distinct from the many partial studies that hitherto existed, Engels set out to provide a piece of writing which “takes up all the workers”, and in that very comprehensiveness, its examination of workers in their class context, would lie its revolutionary thrust.

The book is most famous for the numerous and detailed depictions of grinding poverty and starvation; of squalid, crowded, broken-down dwellings; of men, women and children chained to machines in noisy, dirty factories, or crowded into concentration-camp-like workhouses; of mind-numbingly boring work conducted in a dictatorial atmosphere of organised thievery. These depictions indeed have such force that they have even been incorporated as original source material into bourgeois economic history and sociology syllabuses. But here, needless to say, they are not used to condemn today’s capitalism, but are hideously distorted into an illustration of how far capitalism has progressed since those terrible early days. You workers! – they see to be saying – Look at your situation then, and look at it now! You workers and us capitalists, now we both have a decent living standard to defend against foreigners and the unemployed! Our reposte to this largely implied, rather than directly stated, insinuation we will deal with later on when we come to examine the Marxist theses on the creation of the labour aristocracy. But suffice to say that if workers’ conditions are looked at on a historical and global scale, especially in those countries where insurgent capitalisms are struggling to compete with the long established nations of the West; if we consider not just the “good” years but also the long years of crises and recession, the impact of Engels’ description of working class conditions still operate as a powerful call to revolution.
 

9. THE CREATION OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS

In Lenin’s words, Engels ‘was amongst the first to say that the proletariat is not only a class that suffers; that it is precisely its shameful economic situation which irresistibly drives it forward, and obliges it to struggle for its final emancipation’. It is that struggle that really interests us here.

Engels’ makes a very pithy, depiction of the genesis of this struggling class, from its origins in a largely rural economy to one based on large-scale machine production.

Before the industrial revolution there is mainly self-sufficient cottage industry: the weaver and his family spin and weave and farm their small-holding, and have abundant time to take part in healthy country pursuits. The invention of the spinning jenny, with its 16-18 spindles to the one of the spinning wheel, produces a shortage of weavers. To take advantage of this opportunity, a class of property-less full-time weavers arises which, without even the “pretended property of a holding”, become proletarianised. The spinning and weaving which had traditionally been carried on under the same roof thus became separated, and so «began that division of labour which has since been so infinitely perfected».

Single capitalists now found they could undercut the lone spinner by setting up Jennies in great buildings powered by water power, a process which was given further impulse by the development of Arkwright’s spinning throstle in 1767. This invention, which Engels considered, next to the steam-engine, the most important mechanical invention of the eighteenth century, would further extend the encroaching factory system since it was designed specifically to be powered by mechanical motive power. The steam-engine itself, invented in 1764 by James Watt, would in its turn revolutionise that motive power. In 1804, the recently invented Cartwright’s power loom, specially adapted to steam power, was successfully competing with the handloom weavers. The only way the latter could now compete with the machinery was by working themselves virtually to death, creating a situation in which these same weavers would figure in the annals of the English working class movement as one of its most embittered and militant sections.

But the dispossessed weavers were not the only element who would go on to make up the new rapidly expanding proletarian class. Engels also refers to elements from the peasantry, proletarianised due to competition from capitalist farmers, and to those who had previously been employed in the old handicrafts system, whose masters and apprentices would see come in their place great capitalists and working-men who had no prospect of rising above their class. They would see handwork increasingly carried on after the fashion of factory work, the division of labour would be strictly applied, and

     «small employers who could not compete with great establishments were forced down into the proletariat. At the same time the destruction of the former organisation of handwork, and the disappearance of the lower middle-class deprived the working-man of all possibility of rising into the middle-class himself. Hitherto he had always had the prospect of establishing himself somewhere as master artificer, perhaps employing journeymen and apprentices; but now, when master artificers were crowded out by manufacturers, when large capital had become necessary for carrying on work independently, the working-class became, for the first time, an integral permanent class of the population, whereas it had formerly often been merely a transition leading to the bourgeoisie. Now he who was born to toil had no other prospect than that of remaining a toiler all his life. Now, for the first time, therefore, the proletarian was in a position to undertake an independent movement».

The sheer concentration of proletarians in the industrial centres was enough to create a sense that though feeble as individuals, they formed a power united.

     «The great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers first begin to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the Trades Unions, Chartism and Socialism».

Meanwhile, the sheer scale of the new Manufactures in the great cities would destroy the last vestiges of patriarchal relations by making many employees dependent on a single employer. No longer could the bourgeois tyrannise over the working people,

     «plunder them to his heart’s content, and yet receive obedience, gratitude and assent from these stupid people by bestowing a trifle of patronising friendliness which cost him nothing (…) Only when estranged from his employer, when convinced that the bond between employer and employee is the bond of pecuniary profit, when the sentimental bond between them, which stood not the slightest test, had wholly fallen away, then only did the worker begin to recognise his own interests, and develop independently; then only did he cease to be the slave of the bourgeoisie in his thoughts, feelings, and the expression of his will».

This process of rising class consciousness was constantly fostered by the fact that what was of advantage to the bourgeoisie was, in so many cases, directly contrary to the interests of the working class. Most evidently in the very fact that the worker was condemned to work.

     «As voluntary, productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, as is compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night against ones will (…) once more the worker must choose, must either surrender himself to his fate, become a ‘good’ workman, heed ‘faithfully’ the interests of the bourgeoisie, in which case he must certainly become a brute, or else he must rebel, fight for his manhood to the last, and thus he can only do in the fight against the bourgeoisie».

And then there were those without any work at all. Engels saw that the capitalists needed

     «at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months. This reserve army is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or smaller proportion of its members».

And the resulting state of beggary and destitution Engels describes in all its stark detail.

This reserve army, also swelled by those replaced by machinery, and from the waves of settlers arriving from Ireland, would put the question of the competition of proletarians amongst themselves firmly on the agenda. This would result in both an enhanced class consciousness on the one hand, and a narrow trade corporatism on the other. But in the workers’ battle for better wages and better living standards, the sharpest weapon which the bourgeoisie could deploy against the workers was, nevertheless, their competition amongst themselves for jobs. «Hence the effort of the workers to nullify the competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them».
 

10. THE TRADE UNIONS

So finally, like the hero-narrator of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, who fails in the first two volumes to even get himself born, we finally arrive at our main topic: the trade unions.

The revolt of the workers began soon after the first industrial development, and has passed through several phases: «The earliest, crudest and least fruitful form of this rebellion was crime». It is resorted to largely by the unemployed workers amongst the ‘surplus’ population who have «courage and passion enough openly to resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to the disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him», but it is an individual rather than a class response. «As a class they first manifested opposition to the bourgeoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial period. The first inventors, Arkwright and others, were persecuted in this way and their machines destroyed». This Luddite form of opposition was directed however only against one feature of the new system, and «a new form of opposition had to be found».

     «At this point help came in the shape of a law enacted by the old, unreformed, oligarchic-Tory parliament, a law which could never have passed the House of Commons later, when the Reform Bill had legally sanctioned the distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and made the bourgeoisie the ruling class. This was enacted in 1824, and repealed all laws by which coalitions between working-men for labour purposes had hitherto been forbidden. The working-men obtained a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the right of free association».

Engels goes on to say that secret coalitions had existed earlier but «could never achieve great results. In fact it was the very fact of their secrecy which “crippled their growth”. After the 1824 law was passed, these combinations were very soon spread over all England and attained great power. In all branches of industry Trades Unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-man against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie».
Trade Union objectives are «to fix wages and to deal, en masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages according to the profit of the latter, to raise it when opportunity offered, and to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country. Hence they tried to settle with the capitalists a scale of wages to be universally adhered to, and ordered out on strike the employees of such individuals as refused to accept the scale». Other aims consisted of limiting the number of apprentices to keep up the demand for labour, and assisting the unemployed ‘society men’ financially when seeking work.

«To attain these ends, a President and a Secretary are engaged at a salary (since it is to be expected that no manufacturer will employ such persons), and a committee collects the weekly contributions and watches over their expenditure for the purposes of the association. When it proved possible and advantageous, the various trades of single districts united in a federation and held delegate conventions at set times. The attempt has been made in single cases to united the workers of one branch over all England in one great Union; and several times (in 1830 for the first time) to form one universal trades association for the whole United Kingdom, with a separate organisation for each trade. These associations, however, never held together long, and were seldom realized even for the moment, since an exceptionally universal excitement is necessary to make such a federation possible and effective».

The Trade Unions are heavily restricted by bourgeois legislation, and their lawful powers are very weak

«when there are workers outside the Union, or when members separate from it for the sake of the momentary advantage offered by the bourgeoisie. Especially in the case of partial strikes can the manufacturer readily secure recruits from these black sheep (who are known as knobsticks), and render fruitless the efforts of the united workers. Knobsticks are usually threatened, insulted, beaten, or otherwise maltreated by the members of the Union; intimidated, in short, in every way. Prosecution follows, and as the law-abiding bourgeoisie has the power in its own hands, the force of the Union is broke almost every time by the first unlawful act, the first judicial procedure against its members.
     «The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalist among themselves. But in dealing with minor, single influences they are powerful. If the employer had no concentrated, collective opposition to expect, he would in his own interest gradually reduce wages to a lower and lower point; indeed, the battle of competition which he has to wage against his fellow-manufacturers would force him to do so, and wages would soon reach the minimum. But this competition of the manufacturers among themselves is, under average conditions, somewhat restricted by the opposition of the working-men.
     «Every manufacturer knows that the consequence of a reduction not justified by conditions to which his competitors are also subjected would be a strike (…) Then, too, the Unions often bring about a more rapid increase of wages after a crisis than would otherwise follow. For the manufacturer’s interest is to delay raising wages until forced by competition, but now the working-men demand an increased wage as soon as the market improves, and they can carry that point, by reason of the smaller supply of workers at his command under such circumstances. But, for resistance to more considerable forces which influence the labour,market, the Unions are powerless. In such cases hunger gradually drives the strikers to resume work on any terms, and when once a few have begun, the force of the Union is broken, because these few knobsticks, with the reserve supply of goods in the market, enable the bourgeoisie to overcome the worst effects of the interruption of business. The funds of the Union are soon exhausted by the great numbers requiring relief, the credit which the shopkeepers give at high interests is withdrawn after a time, and want compels the working-man to place himself once more under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. But strikes end disastrously for the workers mostly, because the manufacturers, in their own interests (which has, be it said, become their interests only through the resistance of the workers), are obliged to avoid all useless reductions, while the workers feel in every reduction imposed by the state of trade a deterioration of their condition, against which they must defend themselves as far as in them lies.
     «It will be asked, ‘Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when the uselessness of such measures is so evident?’ Simply because they must protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity; because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a recognition of these conditions, an admission of the bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in bad ones».

Several important points are raised in this passage. To begin with, it is noted that the Unions are largely impotent operating within the restraints set by Capitalism’s laws of supply and demand of labour. This is why they are far more effective when they find themselves impelled to protest against reductions in standards of living even when labour is not in short supply; when the advantage is not with the capitalist, and they are thereby able to compete on equal terms under the terms of this same law. But when there is a surplus of labour, their protest thus comes up against the central rock of the mercantile system itself, and it is in such cases that Trade Unionism, per se, comes up against its limitations. «The active resistance of the English working-man has its effect in holding the money-greed of the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class».

11. THE TRADES UNIONS AND THE WORKING CLASS PARTY

It is insofar as the Unions contribute to this growing sense of class consciousness that Engels attributes importance to them. «They are the military schools of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement (…) And as schools of war the Unions are unexcelled».

But left to their own devices, union struggles tend to remain isolated, restricted within particular sectors. A giant step forward is taken, therefore, when different sections link up, but «if the fight became general, this was scarcely by the intention of the working-men; or when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole working-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks first of all, the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie surrounds itself».

The crucial point being made is that trade-unionism becomes more and more of a threat to the system itself the more it oversteps narrow, trade concerns, and links with other sections of the working class. And that for this wider perspective to impinge into the workers’ consciousness, a political leadership is required; a political leadership which Engels is already implying – and it is an observation usually associated with Lenin – as having to be imported into the trade-union movement from without. Only if the Trade-unions subordinate their partial struggles to a struggle against the capitalist social will they be able to achieve anything other than short-term, partial gains for their members.

The failure of the 1842 turnout was due to workers not having clear goals, to it not being an “intentional working-men’s insurrection”. Without this consciousness of their own goals, the strikers instead became deployed by the liberal bourgeoisie ‘to wave a stick at the Tories’, and assumed the role of troops quartered upon the enemy as part of the anti corn law agitation against the landed aristocracy.

The main lesson which was drawn out from the 1842 turnout was therefore one of class interests, since «The fruit of the uprising was the decisive separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie». At the Birmingham National Convention in 1843, the radical bourgeoisie would split off from the Chartist movement leaving the Chartist working-men to espouse «with redoubled zeal all the struggles of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie».

     «The ‘Six Points’ which for the radical bourgeois are the beginning and end of the matter, which are meant, at the utmost, to call forth certain further reforms of the Constitution, are for the proletarian a mere means to further ends” and «although their socialism is very little developed (…) yet the measures they propose «involve the alternative that they must either succumb to the power of competition once more and restore the old state of things, or they must entirely overcome competition and abolish it”. On the other hand the present indefinite state of Chartism, the separation from the purely political [‘political’ meant in a purely parliamentary sense] party, involves that precisely the characteristic feature, its social aspect, will have to be further developed».

Engels then proceeds to give a detailed criticism of Chartism and Socialism as they existed at the time, seeing that the ultimate question to resolve for all the various forces existing in the working class movement was an effective scientific explanation and description of working class problems and the organisational and theoretical means to resolve them.

12. CONCLUSION

There is much else in Engels book that we could have referred to; notably descriptions of the living conditions and organisations of the miners and the agricultural proletariat, but we have aimed to concentrate on those passages where Engels, as a pioneering social investigator, sets in place those keystones of a Marxist, Communist approach to the Unions which remain largely unchanged to this day, and which have contributed to a general, theoretical approach to the Unions.

Let us briefly resume the most important points raised:

Without the concentrated, collective influence of the Unions, individual capitalists would be forced to lower wages in order to compete with other capitalists.

The power of the unions is significant within particular sectors at particular times, and is enhanced when demand for labour is high.

The Unions are powerless against all great forces which affect the supply and demand in the labour market.

The Unions have a tendency to remain isolated within their individual sectors; they only tend to concentrate their forces in times of general agitation.

The Unions are the military schools in which the workers, although unaware of it, prepare themselves for the great struggle which lies ahead: a struggle in which they will negate their existence as a wage-earning class.

The Unions will be indispensable levers in the struggle of the working class as a whole to conquer its maximum political objectives, but this will entail an heightened political and class consciousness which will be brought into the Union movement, from outside, by the working class political party.

In the 1892 introduction to ‘The Conditions’, Engels would say. Modest as ever, that he considered the book not a mature Marxism, but rather ‘one of the phases of its embryonic development’, but he makes few amendments to his view of the unions; in fact the historical update of the Trade unions he provides merely bears out what he had written in 1844; that the trade-union struggle, isolated from the fight against capitalism is doomed to failure. This key point, rammed home so effectively in Engel’s book, serves to this day as a searing indictment of all later theories, which seek to sanctify the official seperation of the working-class, organised in the trades unions, from their class political party.