Recent “socialism vs capitalism” columns have discussed why we are concerned so specially for the emancipation of the working class, highlighting that about other groups; why we think the emancipation of the working class can be won by the working class itself, rather than some better-off group doing the task for the workers; and why we consider the labour movement as central, not just one of many “social movements” and maybe a dull one.
Another question is: all that about the working class may have been true, for example, in Marx’s time. But now the workers have smartphones, TVs, cars, annual holidays and such. Pacified by those consumer boons, they will make no revolution.
Of course, there are some better-off workers who are locked into promotion prospects, comfortable with looking out for themselves and not worrying about the rest. But there always have been, and they are still a minority.
Meanwhile, with the unions on the back foot, child poverty has grown since 2010, not dropped. More and more workers rely on food banks. Ill-health from poor (because the cheapest) diet is increasingly. Homelessness is increasing. The number of workers in damp, insecure, crowded housing is increasing. Even better-off workers, like for example the steel workers in Port Talbot and Llanwern, have insecure livelihoods.
Also, the big historic improvement in workers’ living standards — when, for example, we came to live in houses with running water, plumbing, sewage, electricity, electronic communications, items like fridges and washing machines, and access to public transport and bikes — came before World War Two in the USA, and by about the 1960s in Europe. Just before a great upsurge of workers’ action in 1968 and the early 1970s!
The working class in Britain is not revolutionary right now. But young radicals who lose patience with the working class because they find workers too stodgy will also find no other large section of society any more revolutionary. In practice, the impatient young radicals tend to up allying with quite well-off academics, NGO people, and such who claim to speak for the worst-off.
In 1889, when the New Unionism was already beginning, Frederick Engels wrote to a comrade: “The most repulsive thing here is the bourgeois ‘respectability’ which has grown deep into the bones of the workers. The division of society into a scale of innumerable degrees, each recognised without question, each with its own pride but also its native respect for its ‘betters’ and ‘superiors’, is so old and firmly established that the bourgeois still find it pretty easy to get their bait accepted... Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the finest of them, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor....”
Engels was confident that the movement would overcome those divisions. If they have recurred, which of course they do in times of working-class defeat, then the movement can overcome then again. And even now, with the movement in a relatively low period, “respect for its ‘betters’ and ‘superiors’” is surely weaker in the working class than it was in 1889.
In Marx’s early writings, the working class is sometimes depicted as revolutionary because it is sunk in pauperism. It “is the complete loss of humanity and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of humanity”. He soon moved on from such flourishes.
In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, though he still repeated the then-conventional view that wages would not rise above physical subsistence level, he rebuked earlier socialists because “only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them”. For Marx and his comrades, the working class was important because it is a creative and competent class.
Not paupers
In Russia in the run-up to the workers’ revolution of 1917, the working class was not the most suffering class at all. The city workers, especially the skilled workers in big factories who were the mainstays of the labour movement, were exploited but markedly better off than the peasants.
There were great mass strikes in Russia in 1905. Even right-wingers in the German socialist movement applauded them. But, they said, German workers should not take the mass strikes as a model. It was understandable that pauperised workers like in Russia should be so fiery. German workers were better-off, so would be more cautious.
Rosa Luxemburg replied: “The layer of the workers in large industries in the great towns... are, as regards the material conditions of life, on a scarcely lower plane than the corresponding layer of the German proletariat... here and there, [on] even higher wages... With paupers no revolution of this political maturity and cleverness of thought can be made, and the industrial workers of St Petersburg and Warsaw, Moscow and Odessa, who stand in the forefront of the struggle, are culturally and mentally much nearer to the west European type than is imagined...”
Marx later corrected his views in the Communist Manifesto on wages. InCapital he showed that more advanced capitalist countries (he then had Britain in mind) generally had higher wages than less-advanced (Germany, then), and simultaneously higher rates of exploitation. He showed that as industrial capitalism had advanced, workers had been able to shorten the working day, a more fundamental gain than most wage rises. In Wages, Price, and Profit, written about the same time, he denounced the so-called “iron law of wages” (which said that under capitalism wages could not rise above poverty level) and argued that the “laws” of wages were elastic and dependent on worker organisation and action. In Theories of Surplus Value (a draft for the fourth volume of Capital, written before volume one was published), Marx wrote: “the workers themselves, although they cannot prevent reductions in (real) wages, will not permit them to be reduced to the absolute minimum; on the contrary, they achieve a certain quantitative participation in the general growth of wealth”.
The draft was never finalised, so contains a puzzling apparent contradiction. The obvious explanation is that Marx meant “reduction in wages” in the sense he saw as fundamental, wages as measured by the number of hours of labour-time to produce the equivalent value-added.
Wages have declined as measured by hours, but increased as measured by goods and services, along with “the general growth of wealth”.
In 1881, Engels wrote: “The great merit of trade unions, in their struggle to keep up the rate of wages and to reduce working hours, is that they tend to keep up and to raise the standard of life...
“The law of wages... is not inexorable within certain limits. There is at every time (great depression excepted) for every trade a certain latitude within which the rate of wages may be modified by the results of the struggle between the two contending parties...
“If the isolated worker tries to drive his bargain with the capitalist they are easily beaten... but if a whole trade of workers form a powerful organisation... and thus become enabled to treat with these employers as a power, then, and only then, have they a chance...”
In 1891, presented with a draft German socialist programme which said: “The number and misery of the proletarians becomes ever larger”, Engels objected that there was no iron law of increasing working-class misery even under capitalism. “The organisation of the workers, their continually growing resistance possibly serves to set up a certain barrier against the growth of poverty”.
And that organisation and resistance does more. It generates solidarity and respect for the worst-off and specially oppressed sections of the working class, and self-esteem among them. It generates the human basis for making a new society.
Asking Chinese comrades for a translation of the back-page headline of our paper this week — “solidarity with Chinese workers” — we found that no exact equivalent of the word “solidarity” exists in Chinese.
The word and the concept do not fall from the sky. They come from capitalist society and the working-class and socialist resistance to it. Spun out of an old legal term signifying “in it together”, the French word solidarité first appeared in the dictionary of the Académie Française in 1798, after the great French revolution of 1789-94 and the sprouting of early socialistic movements within it. The word was translated into English as “solidarity” from about 1829, and joined wide usage from the mid and late 19th century as worker movements solidified.
It reached other languages — solidarietà, Solidarität, solidaridad, solidarność — too. In the USA, from 1909 to 1917, it was the name of the paper of the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary union organising workers from many migrant backgrounds.
China had a tremendous workers’ movement in the 1920s, but evidently suppression by the Guomindang and then by the Stalinists came too soon for the word to reach comparable currency there. It will in time.