Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 130, April/May 1996
The 100th anniversary of the death of Engels was marked in most journals of the ‘left’ in Britain with articles looking at his life’s work and collaboration with Marx. However, none of them moved from the abstract celebration of his ideas to the concrete application of them by Engels in the last decade of his life. For the British ‘left’ to have done so would have meant confronting their own tired and discredited political practice.
The stirring of the great mass of workers existing in dire poverty in the slums of the East End of London gave new strength to Engels’ revolutionary optimism in this period. As he put it, contrasting the political awakening of the masses of the East End to the middle class chattering about socialism:
‘What I consider far more important … is the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the “New Unionism”, that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of “unskilled workers”.’
The New Unions, epitomised by the Gasworkers’ and General Labourers’ Union, were organisations of ‘unskilled’ workers, combining not to defend positions of privilege but to fight for the interests of the mass of workers. Engels described the difference between the old conservative craft unions and the New Unions as being between ‘exclusive health-insurance and death benefit funds and unions geared to organising and funding strikes’. Engels saw in the New Union movement the most important political development in England since the Chartists.
‘The woman became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production… the modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules.’
Engels, The origin of the family, private property and the state
‘The new unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken, their founders and promoters were socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited “respectable” bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated old unionists.’
In fighting to defend their own interests the New Unions came up against the interests of the labour aristocracy and their craft unions and middle class political allies. The political battles fought by the New Unions, particularly around the demand for the legal eight-hour day and the 1890 May Day demonstration, hold great lessons for the developing movement today.
Engels’ political influence on the movement during this period was through the work of Eleanor Marx and her partner Edward Aveling. They were both politically active in the East End of London amongst the poorest sections of the working class. Eleanor, through her work in support of the great Dock Strike of 1889, became a leading member of the newly formed Gasworkers’ and General Labourers’ Union: a union formed in 1889 with the single aim of lowering the working day from 12 to eight hours. Within 12 months it had over 70,000 members.
The first meeting of what became known as the Second International was held in Paris in July 1889. It issued a call for workers internationally to demonstrate on 1 May. 1 May was a Thursday in 1890; a further meeting of unions changed the date from 1 May to Sunday 4 May. This change of day was blamed by The People’s Press, the paper of the New Union movement, on ‘the apathy and abstention of the older and richer unions’. However, a- ‘Central Committee’, which included Edward Aveling and Will Thorne, the leader of the Gasworkers’ Union, was formed to organise the demonstration. The Central Committee approached the London Trades Council, which represented the old craft unions, to support the May Day demonstration. The Trades Council attempted to take over; it refused to meet with a delegation from the Central Committee, that included Eleanor Marx, on the grounds that she was not a manual worker. It attempted to bar the Central Committee’s demonstration from Hyde Park and did not support the demand for a legally enacted eight-hour day. The Trades Council informed the Central Committee that, ‘only trades unions, that is no socialist associations or political clubs, were to take part in the demonstration or carry banners’. The London Trades Council was supported in its reactionary line by the sectarian Social Democratic Federation, the largest group on the left in Britain at that time.
The Trades Council did not succeed in its attempt to take over and disrupt the demonstration organised by the Central Committee. It ended up holding its own separate march into Hyde Park. As Engels put it, ‘On the one side we find stagnation represented by trade unions that have not yet completely freed themselves from the craft spirit’, and by a narrow-minded sect (Social-Democratic Federation) backed by the most wretched of allies; on the other, the living free movement of the reawakening English proletariat’.
‘The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and … the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of each particular epoch.’
Engels, Socialism: Utopian, and Scientific
The demonstration was attended by between a quarter and half a million people, the majority marching with the New Unions and socialist clubs calling for a legal eight-hour day. Engels saw the success of the May Day demonstration against the attacks of the organisations of the labour aristocracy as a significant victory; he wrote, ‘This is our first great victory in London and proves that here too we have the masses behind us. The whole East End is with us. The masses here are not yet socialist, but on the way towards it.”
The fact that the mass of the working class was moving into independent political action meant that it was no longer election fodder for the Liberal Party. Engels encouraged the formation of an independent united workers’ party; as he put it: ‘The superstitious belief in the “great Liberal Party” which had kept a hold on the English workers for nearly 40 years has been destroyed. They have seen by striking examples that they, the workers, are the decisive force in England.’ Then, as now, middle class socialists attempted to stop workers organising independently and tried to tie them to the Liberal Party. Writing of the Fabian Society, which preached and practiced affiliation of the workers to the Liberals, he characterised them as ‘a clique of middle class “socialists” of diverse calibres, from careerists to sentimental socialists and philanthropists, united only by their fear of the threatening rule of the workers and doing all in their power to avert this danger by making their own leadership secure.’
‘Hegel was the first to state correctly the relationship between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the appreciation of necessity. “Necessity is blind only so far as it is not understood”. Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends … it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.’
Engels, Anti-Dühring
An independent working class party was and is crucial in the fight for socialism: ‘the proletariat cannot conquer political power, the only door to the new society, without violent revolution. For the proletariat to be strong enough to win on the decisive day it must — and Marx and I have advocated this ever since 1847 —form a separate party distinct from all others and opposed to them, a conscious class party.’
In the rise of the New Union movement, based on the poorest sections of the working class, the masses of the East End, Engels saw the seeds of a revolutionary movement in England. For the first time since the Chartist movement he had, as he put it, ‘heard again … the unmistakable voice of the English proletariat’. The revolutionary potential of this movement was because it was based on’ those sections of the working class that were not infected with ‘bourgeois respectability’ and were ‘virgin soil’ for socialists.
Today in Britain, as millions of people are forced to exist on benefits, and young people are flung on the scrap heap, these are the sections of the working class that communists have to relate to and attempt to represent. Those sections of the left who are moving away from Labour need to judge new, political formations by how they relate to the ‘great mass’ of the working class today: Not how many members of this or that union executive have joined them.
Bob Shepherd
‘let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory takes its revenge on us … at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature, but that at we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst and that all our mastery of it consists in that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.’
Engels, The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man
