The Militant - August 27, 2012 -- Marx: ‘Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future’

Vol. 76/No. 32 August 27, 2012

Marx: ‘Trade Unions:
Their Past, Present, and Future’
(Books of the Month column)

Printed below is “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future” by Karl Marx the prologue to Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay by Leon Trotsky, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for August.

Marx was the central leader of the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, from its founding in London in 1864. “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present, and Future” was drafted by Marx and adopted by the International’s 1866 congress in Geneva, Switzerland, to guide its trade union work. It was published in early 1867 in the association’s journal International Courier.

It has been invaluable for union fighters ever since and was used by V.I. Lenin in organizing the union work of the Bolshevik Party, which led the workers and peasants to power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917.

“The resolution,” Lenin wrote in 1899, “recognised that the trade unions were not only a natural, but also an essential phenomenon under capitalism and considered them an extremely important means for organising the working class in its daily struggle against capital and for the abolition of wage-labour.”

The resolution underlined that the unions “must not remain aloof from the general political and social movement of the working class,” Lenin said, but “must strive for the general emancipation of the millions of oppressed workers.”

The conviction central to the resolution “that the class struggle must necessarily combine the political and the economic struggle into one integral whole has entered into the flesh and blood” of the world revolutionary workers’ movement, Lenin concluded.

BY KARL MARX
(A) THEIR PAST
Capital is concentrated social force, while the workman has only to dispose of his working force [labor power]. The contract between capital and labor can therefore never be struck on equitable terms, equitable even in the sense of a society which places the ownership of the material means of life and labor on one side and the vital productive energies on the opposite side.

The only social power of the workmen is their number. The force of numbers, however, is broken by disunion. The disunion of the workmen is created and perpetuated by their unavoidable competition among themselves.

Trades’ unions originally sprang up from the spontaneous attempts of workmen at removing or at least checking that competition, in order to conquer such terms of contract as might raise them at least above the condition of mere slaves.

The immediate object of trades’ unions was therefore confined to everyday necessities, to expediences for the obstruction of the incessant encroachments of capital, in one word, to questions of wages and time of labor. This activity of the trades’ unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts. On the contrary, it must be generalized by the formation and the combination of trades’ unions throughout all countries.

On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the trades’ unions were forming centers of organization of the working class, as the medieval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the trades’ unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labor, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labor and capital rule.

(B) THEIR PRESENT

Too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital, the trades’ unions have not yet fully understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general social and political movements.

Of late, however, they seem to awaken to some sense of their great historical mission, as appears, for instance, from their participation, in England, in the recent political movement, from the enlarged views taken of their function in the United States, and from the following resolution passed at the recent great conference of trades’ delegates at Sheffield:*

“That this conference, fully appreciating the efforts made by the International [Working Men’s] Association to unite in one common bond of brotherhood the working men of all countries, most earnestly recommend to the various societies here represented, the advisability of becoming affiliated to that body, believing that it is essential to the progress and prosperity of the entire working community.”

(C) THEIR FUTURE

Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organizing centers of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the nonsociety [unorganized] men into their ranks.

They must look carefully after the interests of the worst-paid trades, such as the agricultural laborers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.

* The Sheffield conference, held July 17-21, 1866, brought together 138 delegates representing 200,000 organized workers in Britain. From 1865 to 1867, British unions helped lead a broad campaign for expanded voting rights.

In early 1861, following moves by the southern slave states to secede from the United States, unions in cities throughout the northern and border states held meetings and demonstrations supporting the federal government and urging its defense. During the 1861-65 Civil War, new unions were organized and union activity for the eight-hour day increased.