Marx on unions & international solidarity

Excerpts from the new book “Low-Wage Capitalism” by Fred Goldstein.

In the crisis now unfolding, a revitalized workers’ movement, in order to be effective, will have to draw in all the sectors that have either been left out or marginalized. All workers’ movements and working-class communities must have a place in the struggle that takes into account their particular needs, without being subordinated or subjected to bureaucratic leadership. This includes the fight for jobs, for income, for the right to a home and food. Occupations, mass demonstrations, strikes, and every form of struggle will be required. This is the road to a renewed workers’ movement encompassing the unions and the far broader sections of the working class whose fighting spirit must be mobilized on the basis of addressing their needs.

Karl Marx delivered an address to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) in 1866. Included was a section on “The Future of the Unions.” This passage, along with many others, is as relevant today for the labor movement as it was back in 1866 when it was first delivered:

“Apart from their original purpose, they [the unions] 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 as acting as the champions of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the [unorganized] into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as 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.”

Marx directed this passage to the advanced workers of the time in Europe. He was attempting to intervene in the developing trade union movement, which was reviving and growing after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent suppression of the workers.

This was the early stage of the union movement and the dominant forces were primarily workers in the skilled trades. The earliest General Council of the First International was made up of tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, furniture makers, weavers, a mason, a watchmaker, a musical instrument maker, and a hairdresser. The powerful force behind the International was the London Trades Council, representing numerous organized trades in what was then the center of world capitalism and colonialism. It was not only the development of the unions and the class struggle that caused Marx to intervene, but also growing internationalism. It was the workers themselves who initiated the International. Marx became the heart and soul of it after the workers declared their intentions.

The genesis of the move toward international solidarity was the importation of strikebreakers from continental Europe by the English capitalists. The wages of craft workers were lower on the Continent. French workers had not yet gained the right to organize. In November 1863, the English workers drew up a letter to the French workers. This is an excerpt:

“A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labor, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labor, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, or Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages; and we are sorry to say, that this has been done, though not from any desire on the part of our continental brethren to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communications between the industrial classes of all countries. Our aim is to bring up the wages of the ill-paid to as near a level as possible with that of those who are better remunerated, and not to allow our employers to play us off one against the other, and so drag us down to the lowest possible condition, suitable to their avaricious bargaining.”

On September 28, 1864, workers from Paris brought the French reply to be presented to a packed St. Martin’s Hall in London. After the English letter was read, the French read their reply. Here is a short excerpt:

“Industrial progress, the division of labor, freedom of trade—these are three factors which should receive our attention today, for they promise to change the very substance of the economic life of society. Compelled by the force of circumstances and the demands of the time, capital is concentrating and organizing in mighty financial and industrial combinations. Should we not take some defensive measure, this force, if not counter-balanced in some way, will soon be a despotic power. We, the workers of the world, must unite and erect an insurmountable barrier to the baleful system which would divide humanity into two classes: a host of hungry and brutalized people on the one hand, and a clique of fat, overfed mandarins on the other. Let us seek our salvation through solidarity.”