Page 132 - DMGT516_LABOUR_LEGISLATIONS

Unit 6: Trade Union Act

Notes

Note Marx and Engels lived as revolutionary exiles in England during the period of
the rise of trade unionism. Even before they had arrived in England, they had recognized

the objective significance of trade unionism as the response of the working class to the ef-
forts of the employers to lower their wages. In opposition to the petty-bourgeois theoreti-
cian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who denied the utility of both trade unions and strikes on
the grounds that increases in wages achieved through their efforts led only to increases in
prices Marx insisted that both formed necessary components of the struggle of the working
class to defend its standard of living.
Marx was certainly correct in his criticism of the views of Proudhon, but it is necessary
to bear in mind that these early writings were produced at a time when the trade unions
themselves were still in their swaddling clothes. The experience of the working class
with this new organizational form was extremely limited. The possibility could not be
foreclosed, at that time that the trade unions could yet evolve into potent instruments of
revolutionary struggle, or at least as the direct forerunners of such instruments. This hope
was expressed in Marx’s observation in 1866 that as “centers of organization” the trade
unions were playing for the working class the same role “as the medieval municipalities
and communes did for the middle class.”
Even by then, however, Marx was concerned that “the Trades” Unions have not yet fully
understood their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself.” But it was in
this direction that they had to evolve:
“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 champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail
to enlist the non-society 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.”
Marx sought to impart to the trade unions a socialist orientation. He warned the workers

“not to exaggerate to themselves” the significance of the struggles engaged in by the trade
unions. At most, the unions were “fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those

effects; that they are retarding the downward movement; that they are applying palliatives,
not curing the malady.” It was necessary for the unions to undertake a struggle against the
system that was the cause of the workers’ miseries; and, therefore, Marx proposed to the
trade unions that they abandon their conservative slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s
work,” and replace it with the revolutionary demand, “Abolition of the wages system.”

But Marx’s advice made little impression, and by the late 1870s, the observations of Marx
and Engels on the subject of trade unionism had assumed a far more critical character. Now
that bourgeois economists were expressing greater sympathy toward the trade unions,
Marx and Engels took pains to qualify their earlier endorsement. They distinguished their
views from those of bourgeois thinkers like Lujo Brentano, whose enthusiasm for the trade
unions was dictated, according to Marx and Engels, by his desire “to make the wage-slaves
into contented wage-slaves.”

By 1879, it was possible to detect in Engels’ writings on the subject of trade unionism an
unmistakable tone of disgust. He noted that the trade unions had introduced organizational
statutes that prohibited political action, thus barring “any participation in any general

Contd...

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