Marxism and the Unions (Pt. 2)

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.