in more of the world’s rural population to the creation of surplus value and the conditions described above. What is more, this shift conforms to Marx’s argument in Capital that even as the mass of labor’s subsistence grows, “in relative terms, i.e., in comparison with surplus value, the value of labor-power would keep falling, and thus the abyss between the life situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.” 44 Thus the relative shift of value, and hence income and wealth, from the working class to capital prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008 is a reality. The ILO states:
We show that over the period 1995–2007 average wages lagged behind the growth in GDP per capita, which we interpret as an indication that increases in productivity have failed to translate fully into higher wages. We also show that the recent period, characterized by growing economic integration, has seen a decline in the share of GDP distributed to wages. 45
The rate of exploitation, therefore, has increased on a global scale.
This shift is apparent not only worldwide but also in the heartland of capitalism. In the seventeen leading countries of the OECD, capital’s share in GDP rose from 25 percent in 1975 to 33 percent in 2005.46 Looking somewhat more narrowly at the US corporate sector, capital’s share of US national income rose from 18.8 percent in 1979 to 26.2 percent in 2010.47 This has not been simply a matter of some economic trend, but the result of a class struggle in which capital has had the upper hand for some time—and all too often labor has fought with one hand tied behind its back. In the case of the United States, this is addressed in some detail in subsequent chapters in this collection. Here it is worth mentioning that this overall trend in capitalist development has produced increased worker resistance, perhaps most notably in China.48
It is always tempting at this point in such an essay to predict the next working-class upsurge. One thing Marxism is not so good at, however, is predicting the future. One reason is that socialist predictions are often in practice just economic predictions, and those not always on the mark—like the comrade who has predicted six of the last three recessions. Marxism, however, analyzes history as a process that is in large part guided by class conflict in its various forms; the outcome of such struggles is almost always indeterminate. We can, to a certain extent, analyze and predict trends to provide guidance for action, but outcomes are another matter. This is because class struggle itself depends in large part on the state of organization, consciousness, leadership, and analysis of the contending forces on the part of both sides. Marxism provides many tools to approach these problems, but all require organized human intervention. In the final analysis, therefore, the task is not to predict the future but to prepare for it.
2
Unions, Strikes, and Class Consciousness Today
Sheila Cohen and Kim Moody
One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the “specter” of communism can no longer be said to be haunting Europe—whether in the form of mass parties devoted to revolution or the states that inaccurately claimed that title. But class struggle, the inextinguishable source of everything the authors of the Manifesto meant by communism, is, it seems, as irrepressible as ever. Despite ever-stronger siren calls by social-democratic and union leaderships for “partnership” and “cooperation” with capital, old-fashioned mass strikes have recently stalked not only Europe but almost every other continent.
By the mid-1990s, this could be seen in the dramatic confrontations between major labor federations and the neoliberal, populist, and even social-democratic governments of such seemingly dissimilar capitalisms as France, South Korea, South Africa, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Belgium, Italy, and a dozen others. Alongside, sometimes preceding, and often following these political outbursts was a return to militant confrontation with capitalist employers far larger and more powerful than any Marx and Engels could have envisioned in 1848. If no manifestos appeared, no barricades were thrown up, and the red banners typically bore the initials of a trade union federation rather than a revolutionary party, the dynamics dramatically evoked throughout the original Manifesto were nonetheless clearly at work and a renewed class consciousness was evident across much of the industrial and semi-industrial world.
Despite all the real and apparent differences between Europe 150 years ago and today’s capitalist world, two fundamental issues remain equally unresolved: the lack of fully fledged and widespread socialist consciousness and the absence of large-scale organization directed at fostering such consciousness. If Marx and Engels saw in the rise of class conflict the birth of such organization, the moves cited above toward some resurgence of class struggle may offer the opportunity for its rebirth—providing, of course, the socialist left can overcome its own isolation from the reality of this struggle. In many ways, we are faced with the same problems and limitations within the socialist movement itself as were the authors of the Manifesto.
Socialism and the Working Class
In 1848 as now, the socialist movement consisted of a variety of “socialisms” ranging from the idealist/populist/utopian to the avowedly revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary. The Manifesto’s survey of “Socialist, and Communist Literature” identified the three categories of Reactionary Socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, and Critical-Utopian Socialism or Communism, and the forceful rejection by Marx and Engels of all these forms of “socialism” had one common theme: their mistaken abnegation of class. “German or ‘True’ Socialism,” for example, prides itself in representing “not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of human nature, of man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”1 While more aware of “the working class, as being the most suffering class,” utopian socialists like Fourier and Owen are equally castigated for considering themselves “far superior to all class antagonisms. . . . Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class.”2 The sectarians of the era receive no gentler treatment: “They hold fast by the views of their masters [i.e., Fourier, Owen, et al.], in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat.”3
Even in the apparently revolutionary era when the Manifesto was written, the class-oriented politics of Marx and Engels placed them at a peculiar distance from many of the other socialists of their time. One of the most central features of this difference revolved around their consistent adherence to what they referred to as “the real working class movement”; this was shown most clearly in what was then an almost unique focus on, and endorsement of, trade union organization.
The general absence of this orientation within the intellectual and political milieu of Marx and Engels—mirrored in an equivalent distaste for “economistic” struggles in our own era—is recognized by Hal Draper: “Marx was the first leading figure in the history of socialism to adopt a position of support to trade unions and trade unionism, on principle.”4 Most other socialists, as Draper points out, were often not only indifferent but positively hostile to trade unionism; he shows this was even true of Owen as well as Proudhon, who “not only condemned trade unions and strikes on principle but vigorously approved gendarmes’ shooting down strikers as enemies of society, that is, enemies of small property.”5 Even the leading Chartist, Ernest Jones, rejected trade unionism as a “fallacy,” despite the fact that his views were published only a few years after the mass Chartist struggles, which centered at their height on a general strike and the attempt to found the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union.6 Marx and Engels were in effect unique, then, among their socialist contemporaries, in consistently following an orientation toward basic trade union organization and struggle as expressions of what they referred to as the “real class movement.”
But were they correct? Richard Hyman, in his 1971 pamphlet “Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism,” comments that despite their lifelong involvement with both theoretical and practical aspects of trade unionism, the attention of Marx
