Page 133 - DMGT516_LABOUR_LEGISLATIONS

Labour Legislations

Notes
activity on the part of the working class as a class.” In a letter to Bernstein, dated June 17,
1879, Engels complained that the trade unions had led the working class into a dead end.
“No attempt should be made to conceal the fact that at this moment a genuine workers’
movement in the continental sense is non-existent here, and hence I don’t believe you will
miss much if, for the time being, you don’t get any reports on the doings of the TRADE
UNIONS here.”
In an article written six years later, in which he contrasted the England of 1885 to that of
1845, Engels made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the conservative role played
by the trade unions. Forming an aristocracy within the working class, they cultivated the
friendliest relations with the employers, in order to secure for themselves a comfortable
position. The trade unionists, Engels wrote with scathing sarcasm, “are very nice people
indeed nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole
capitalist class in general.”
But the trade unions had all but ignored the great mass of the working class, for whom
“the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower.
The East-end of London is an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of
starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work.”
Engels’ hopes were aroused, toward the end of the 1880s, by the development of a new
and militant trade union movement among more exploited sections of the working class.
Socialists, including Eleanor Marx, were active in this new movement. Engels responded
to these developments with enthusiasm, and noted with great satisfaction that “These new
Trades Unions of unskilled men and women are totally different from the old organizations
of the working-class aristocracy and cannot fall into the same conservative ways ... And
they are organized under quite different circumstances all the leading men and women
are Socialists, and socialist agitators too. In them I see the real beginning of the movement
here.”

But Engels’ hopes were not fulfilled. It was not too long before these “new” unions began
to exhibit the same conservative tendencies as the old ones. This was an early verifi cation
of the theoretical conception we consider critical to the analysis of the trade unions i.e., that
the essential character of these organizations is not determined by the social position and
status of the particular sections of workers organized within them. These are factors, which,
at most, only influence certain secondary aspects of trade union policy perhaps making

some unions more or less militant than the average. Yet, in the final analysis, the trade

union form, whose structure is drawn from, and embedded in, the social and production
relations of capitalism, and, we must add, the nation-state framework, exercises the decisive

influence that determines the orientation of its “content” the working class membership.
The theory of modern Socialism is inseparable from the constructive thought of Karl Marx.
The theory of modern Socialism does not admit of arbitrarily constructed Utopian ideals.
The philosophical basis of Marxian Socialism is a synthesis of the theories of the economic
interpretation of history, of the class-struggle and of surplus value.

2. Webb’s Theory of Industrial Democracy: Webb’s book ‘Industrial democracy’ is the Bible
of trade unionism. According to Webb, trade unionism is an extension of democracy from
political sphere to industrial sphere. Webb agreed with Marx that trade unionism is a class
struggle and modern capitalist state is a transitional phase which will lead to democratic
socialism. He considered collective bargaining as the process which strengthens labour.
3. Cole’s Theory of Union Control of Industry: Cole’s views are given in his book “World
of Labour”, 1913. His views are somewhere in between Webb and Marx. He agrees that
unionism is class struggle and the ultimate is the control of industry by labour and not
revolution as predicted by Marx.

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