of trade unionism,” Hyman evidently regards this theory as essentially naive. “One need scarcely document the failure of subsequent experience to validate [the Communist Manifesto’s] optimistic prognosis; yet Marx and Engels never produced a comprehensive revision of their earlier analysis.”7 This view is echoed in John Kelly’s comment, in Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, that “despite their contact with, and interest in, trade unionism they left behind no systematic or coherent analysis of the limits and possibilities of trade union action.” The “array of seemingly contradictory insights and arguments” said to be presented by Marx and Engels on the question is contrasted critically to the sustained and internally consistent logic of Marx’s economic analysis and his “constant endeavour to penetrate between the ‘surface appearances’ of capitalism and its underlying essence.”8
There is, however, no unified “underlying essence” to the character of trade unionism; it is an essentially contradictory phenomenon, and this is what accounts for Marx’s and Engels’s apparently “contradictory” responses to the class struggle (or lack of it) taking place around them. The contradictory character of trade unionism, and the dialectical nature of the necessary political response, are not sufficiently or explicitly theorized in the writings of Marx and Engels on trade unionism. Yet the distinction between the consistently subversive potential of basic industrial organization, the grass roots of trade unionism, and “trade unions” as organizations and, incipiently, bureaucracies, was the underlying reason for their apparent vacillations between feverish excitement about union struggles during working-class upsurges and strong disapproval of the general orientation of the trade unions during periods of acquiescence.
This instinctive “nose” for the class struggle potential of grassroots trade unionism is evident in Engels’s delighted response to the eruption of basic class conflict into the New Unionism of the late 1880s, a development that, though sadly too late for Marx, Engels greeted like a drink of water in the desert of nineteenth-century craft trade unionism. As he wrote excitedly to Lafargue in 1889: “These new trades unions of unskilled men and women are totally different from the old organisations of the working class aristocracy and cannot fall into the same conservative ways. . . . In them I see the real beginning of the movement here.”9 His estimation that these new unions could not “fall into the same conservative ways” was before long revised by Engels himself, with a disillusioned reassessment of leaders like John Burns and Tom Mann as symbolizing “the bourgeois ‘respectability’ which has grown deep into the bones of the workers.”10 But his instinctual awareness of the always-subversive undercurrents of exploitation-based grassroots class conflict had ensured that the potential for undermining the labor “aristocracy” was, in Engels’s mind, always a possibility. This class-centered “optimism” is more than a simple naivety; it challenges the essentially static conception of class consciousness frequently embodied in assessments of “the unions” as implicitly monolithic organizations.
Twentieth-century analysis of trade unions is, of course, more sophisticated in its understanding of the internally stratified nature of unions as social phenomena. Yet, in most of the renditions of economists and sociologists, “modern” analysis is far more one-sided than Marx’s and Engels’s instinctive understanding. The internal dynamics and contradictions of trade union life have been buried in a series of static theories, from Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s glorification of union bureaucracy and Robert Michels’s declaration of its inevitability in his “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” through the “institutional” analyses of the American Wisconsin School and the 1950s “maturity” theorists. All shared a belief in the inevitability and desirability of bureaucracy and stable labor relations. All imagined the direction of development to be a one-way street toward order and the professionalization of labor relations.11 Marx and Engels, in contrast, saw something deeper beneath the organizational surface, in the living force of the workers themselves. The focus on the working class as the fundamental force in the struggle against capital; the recognition of the common interests of that class that lend it the potential, through struggle, to grow from “class in itself” to “class for itself”; the orientation, through this focus, toward the potential of basic trade union struggles as an aspect of class activity—all these aspects of Marx’s and Engels’s analysis both flowed from and led to their consistent awareness of where the class was rather than where they, and certainly their contemporary fellow socialists, might have liked it to be.
This crucial orientation toward existing class realities is expressed in the Manifesto in its presentation of the “theoretical conclusions of the Communists . . . [which] merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”12 As Engels wrote later, discussing the impact of the concept of historical materialism, “Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.”13
This orientation on the part of Marx and Engels toward the “actually existing” consciousness and organization of the working class, rather than toward some separate, idealist construction of socialism, has been widely dismissed as implying a simplistic conflation of class activity with revolutionary consciousness. Certainly, the blithely determinist logic of the Manifesto’s statement that “what the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the fall of the proletariat are equally inevitable” appears to sum up the crude historicism for which Marxism has been most frequently lampooned.14 But what intervenes between such “inevitability” and the reality of reformism is, of course, the issue of class consciousness, the subjective arena of which objective social and material realities can at best be regarded as an erratic and unpredictable undercurrent—a “determinant in the last instance.” The consistent orientation of Marx and Engels toward such objective material conditions as generators of working-class struggle and organization has been well noted; their awareness of the complex balance between such factors and the nature and progress of working-class consciousness and realpolitik has perhaps received less attention.
While, as we have pointed out, Marx and Engels failed to develop any explicit theory of the mutually influential relationships between concrete working-class conditions and class interests, activity, and consciousness, they were clearly aware of the importance of more than simply the “economic base” in conditioning such relationships. The essentially dialectical nature of the Marxist view of class consciousness, though never fully explicated, was rooted firmly in an awareness of the interrelation between material realities and the uneven, erratic, but always materially based development of such consciousness. In The Poverty of Philosophy, written a few years before the Manifesto, Marx developed the famous distinction between class “in itself” and “class for itself,” which bases the development of class consciousness not in theoretical abstractions but in the concrete requirements of capitalism and the organizational forms thus generated:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital had created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.15
The crucial reference here is to some earlier paragraphs in which Marx enunciates a description of the significance of working-class “combinations” very similar to that put forward in the Manifesto: “In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other objective than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trade unions, which serve as ramparts for the workers in their struggles with the employers.”16
The significance of this argument is that “economistic” struggles are not dismissed, as by so many socialists in Marx’s time and since, as removed from any connection with political consciousness and socialism; rather, they are identified as the central elements in the development of more explicit class consciousness and thus,
