Marxism and the Unions (Pt. 1)

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.