Alex Snowdon on why socialists must help re-build the trade unions as fighting organisations for the working class

Workers are exploited by the capitalist class. Capitalists seek to get maximum surplus value from workers: without their labour, the capitalist system would grind to a halt.

Capitalists are driven by competition to ratchet up exploitation. Productivity gains might be made through investing in technology, but they are also made by cutting pay and pensions, increasing working hours, and so on. This is why capitalism is often characterised as a race to the bottom.

This exploitation fuels grievances and therefore resistance. Class conflict is inevitable in such conditions. Capitalism engenders class struggle. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism creates – in the working class – its own gravedigger.

Marx grasped the importance of strikes – the most obvious expression of class struggle in capitalism – as early as the 1840s. He observed early examples of strikes in the era of industrial capitalism. The new industries of the nineteenth century were remorseless in exploiting not only natural resources, but those who worked on them.

Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels documented this exploitation – from child labour to long hours, from poverty pay to the slashing of safety standards – in his mid-1840s book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Marx and Engels fully supported strikes as a way to ameliorate the exploitation suffered by workers. They could protect against the worst excesses of capitalism and enable small gains or reforms within the system.

Marx also saw that strikes could embolden workers to organise collectively and struggle against the capitalist class. This might almost always be firmly within the constraints of capitalism – not an attempt to overthrow the system – but it was still significant. Any sort of collective workers’ action, even small or short-lived, encourages workers to see themselves as having agency.

Strikes could increase class consciousness, encouraging workers to perceive the world in terms of class division and struggle. This could help to overcome divisions within the working class such as race, nationality and sex. Strikes could feed workers’ confidence to raise demands, act collectively and challenge the capitalists. Victories are particularly inspiring.

Trade unions arose initially from early efforts by workers to organise collectively. Marx viewed them as essential defence organisations of workers under capitalism. They could become schools of strategy and tactics for working-class struggle.

Marx worked with trade-union leaders in the development of the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in London on 28 September 1864, which brought together a number of political currents oriented on the working class.

This period also saw some impressive examples of unions raising broader political issues – beyond the workplace – and promoting international solidarity. This could be seen, for example, in efforts to win larger numbers of workers the vote and in support for the fight to end slavery in the American Civil War.

However, trade unions could also prove to be frustratingly conservative for socialists. Most unions during Marx’s lifetime were organised on a sectional craft basis. This could reinforce divisions within the working class and sometimes involve workers protecting their own interests at the expense of other workers.

Their leaders, operating as full-time officials, tended towards a conservative outlook. Their role was to mediate between bosses and workers. Their relative privilege and distance from the day-to-day pressures of the workplace reinforced their conservatism.

Such conservatism found political expression in loyalty to the Liberal Party. After the break from the Liberals and the emergence of the Labour Party, many union leaders supported Labourism as a bulwark against more radical currents.

Since then, the history of trade unions has further illustrated these contradictions. In periods of explosive class struggle, strikes have mushroomed and unions have grown. Workers made serious material advances through their unions, in particular by striking and especially during times of general advance by the labour movement.

The New Unionism, appearing shortly after Marx’s death in 1883, was a strike wave of largely ‘unskilled’ workers accompanied by the rapid growth of new unions. It challenged the sectional divisions and conservatism of craft unionism.

The extraordinary period of strikes from around 1910 until the defeat of the 1926 General Strike transformed the British trade unions, with massive growth in membership.

There have also been many examples of unions seeking conciliation with capitalism rather than confrontation. This can be influenced by the conservative role of union leaders, contradictory ideas inside the working class and the erosion of confidence that often follows defeats.

In today’s world, it is vital that socialists help re-build trade unions as fighting organisations of the working class.