For as long as there have been wage-earners – in other words, long before the formation of modern capitalism – there have been instances of class struggle between employers and workers. This is not the result of subversive activities on the part of individuals who ‘advocate class struggle’. On the contrary, the doctrine of class struggle is the product of the praxis of the class struggle which precedes it.

1 The elementary class struggle of the proletariat

The first stirrings of the class struggle of the wage-earners always centre on three demands:

(1) The raising of wages, an immediate means of redistributing the social product between employers and workers in favour of the wage-earners.

(2) The reduction of working hours without loss of pay, another direct means of altering the balance in favour of the workers.

(3) Freedom to organise. While the employer, owner of capital and the means of production, has all the economic power on his side, the workers are disarmed as long as they continue to compete amongst themselves to get jobs. In these conditions the ‘rules of the game’ work solely to the benefit of the capitalists, who can fix wages as low as they want while the workers are obliged to accept them for fear of losing their jobs and, therefore, their means of survival.

It is by putting an end to the competition which divides them and confronting the employers en bloc, by refusing to work in conditions they consider unacceptable, that the workers have the opportunity to win advantages in the struggle against the capitalists. Experience rapidly teaches them that if they have not got the freedom to organise they have no weapon with which to oppose capitalist pressure.

The elementary class struggle of the proletariat has traditionally taken the form of a collective refusal to work – that is, the strike. Chroniclers have provided accounts of strikes in ancient Egypt and China. We also have the account of strikes in Egypt under the Roman Empire, especially in the First Century A.D. 

2 The elementary class consciousness of the proletariat

The organisation of a strike always implies a certain elementary – degree of class organisation. In particular, it implies the idea that the well-being of each wage-earner depends on collective action; it opposes a solution of class solidarity to an individual solution (attempting to increase individual gain without regard for the income of other wage-earners).

This idea is the elementary form of proletarian class consciousness. In the same way, in organising a strike, the wage-earners learn instinctively that they must set up relief funds. These relief funds and self-help schemes also help to diminish the insecurity of working class existence a little, and allow the proletariat to defend itself during periods of unemployment, etc. These are the elementary forms of class organisation.

But these elementary forms of consciousness and workers organisation do not imply either a consciousness of the historic goals of the workers movement or an understanding of the need for the independent political action of the working class.

The first forms of working class political action emerged from the extreme left of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals sprang up at the extreme left of the Jacobins. This represented the first modern political movement which envisaged collective ownership of the means of production.

At the same time in England, workers set up the London Corresponding Society which tried to organise a movement of solidarity with the French Revolution. This organisation was crushed by police repression. But immediately after the end of the Napoleonic wars, a League for Universal Suffrage was created out of the extreme left of petty-bourgeois radicalism. This was essentially composed of workers from the industrial region of Manchester and Liverpool. The separation of an independent workers movement from the petty-bourgeois radical movement was accelerated after the bloody incidents of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, and this enabled the Chartist movement to be formed a little later, as the first essentially workers organisation to demand universal suffrage. 

3 Utopian socialism

All these elementary movements of the working class were largely led by the workers themselves; that is, by self- taught men who often formulated naive ideas on his- torical, economic and social subjects which cannot be properly explored without solid scientific studies. These movements therefore develop somewhat on the margins of the scientific progress of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

It is, on the contrary, within the framework of this scientific progress that the efforts of the first great utopian authors – Thomas More (Chancellor of England in the Sixteenth Century), Campanella (Seventeenth Century Italian author), Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century authors) – are to be found. These authors attempt to assemble all the scientific knowledge of their epoch to formula:

(a) a virulent critique of social inequality, especially that which characterises bourgeois society (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon);

(b) a plan for the organisation of an egalitarian society, based on collective ownership.

Through these two aspects of their work, the great utopian socialists are the true precursors of modern socialism. But the weakness of their system lies in the following:

(a) The society of which they dream is presented as an ideal to be constructed and achieved at one go through the understanding and the good will of men (from this comes the term – utopian socialism). It thus bears no relation to the historically determined evolution of capitalist society itself.
 (b) Their explanation of the conditions in which social inequality appeared, and in which it could disappear, are scientifically insufficient and based on secondary factors (violence, morality, money, psychology, ignorance, etc.) without starting from the problems of economic and social structure, of interactions between the relations of production and the level of development of the productive forces. 

4 The birth of Marxist theory – The Communis tManifesto 

It is precisely in these two areas that the formulation of Marxist theory by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in The German Ideology (1845) and especially in The Communist Manifesto (1847) constitutes a decisive step forward. With Marxist theory, working class consciousness is united with scientific theory at the highest level. Marx and Engels did not discover the ideas of social class and class struggle. These ideas were known to utopian socialists and bourgeois authors such as the French historians Thierry and Guizot. But they explained scientifically the origin of classes, the causes for the development of classes, the fact that the whole of human history can be explained by class struggle, and, above all, the material and intellectual conditions under which the division of society into classes can make way for a socialist, classless society.

They also explained how the development of capitalism prepares the coming of a socialist society, prepares the material and social forces which can assure the triumph of the new society. This no longer appears as a simple product of the dreams and desires of men, but as the logical product of the evolution of human history, an outcome of the actual ongoing class struggle.

The Communist Manifesto therefore represents a superior form of proletarian class consciousness. It teaches the working class that the socialist society will be the product of its class struggle against the bourgeoisie. It teaches it the necessity of struggling not simply for the raising of wages, but also for the abolition of the wages system itself. Above all, it teaches it the need to construct independent workers parties, and to consummate its action around economic demands through political action on a national and international scale.

The modern labour movement is therefore born of the fusion between the elementary class struggle of the working class and proletarian class consciousness brought to its highest form in Marxist theory. 

5 The First International

This fusion is the end product of the whole evolution of the international workers movement between the 1850s and 1880s.

Except in Germany (with the small Association of Communists led by Marx) the working class did not appear during the European revolutions of 1848 as a political party in the modern sense of the word. Everywhere it was dragged along in the wake of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In France, it separated itself from this during the bloody days of June 1848 without, however, being able to constitute an independent political party (the revolutionary groups constituted by Auguste Blanqui were in a way the nucleus of one). After the years of reaction which followed the defeat of the 1848 revolution, it was mainly trade union and mutual aid organisations of the working class which developed in most countries, with the exception of Germany, where the agitation for universal suffrage enabled Lassalle to constitute a workers political party: the General Association of German Workers.

It was through the founding of the First International in 1864 that Marx and his little group of followers really fused with the elementary workers movement of the epoch, and prepared the establishment of socialist parties in most European countries. However paradoxical it may seem, it was not national workers parties that assembled together to constitute the First International. It was the constitution of the First International that allowed the grouping on a national level of local and syndicalist groups adhering to the First International.

When the International broke up after the defeat of the Paris Commune, the vanguard workers remained conscious of the need for organisation on a national level. After a few early defeats, the socialist parties based on the elementary workers movement of the period were definitively constituted in the 1870s and ’80s. The only important exceptions were Great Britain and the USA, where the socialist parties at this time remained marginal to the already strong trade union movement. In Great Britain it was only in the Twentieth Century that the Labour Party, based on the trade unions, was created as a mass party. In the USA the creation of such a party is still today the burning task of the workers movement. 

6 The different forms of organisation of the labour movement

We can thus say more exactly that the unions, mutual aid societies and socialist parties appear to a certain extent as spontaneous and inevitable products of the class struggle within capitalist society, and that which form develops first depends on factors of tradition and national particularity.

The co-operatives, however, were not the spontaneous product of class struggle, but the product of the initiative taken by Robert Owen and his comrades when they founded the first co-operative in Rochdale, England, in 1844.

The importance of the co-operative movement was real, not simply because it could provide a school for the working class in the running of the economy, but also because it could prepare the solution of one of the most difficult problems of socialist society – that of distribution – from within capitalist society. But at the same time it contained the potential danger of deviation towards economic competition with capitalist firms within the capitalist system, competition which can only have disastrous results for the working class and above all sap the class consciousness of the proletariat.

7 The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune brought together all the tendencies present in the origins and initial growth of the modern labour movement. It was born out of spontaneous mass movements and not from a plan or programme elaborated in advance by a workers party. It showed the tendency of the working class to go beyond the purely economic stage of its struggle – the immediate origin of the Commune is eminently political: the Paris workers’ distrust of the bourgeoisie, who were accused of wanting to hand the city over to the Prussian armies which were besieging it – while constantly combining economic and political demands. For the first time the working class was drawn towards the conquest of political power, even at the level of just one city. The Paris Commune reflected the tendency of the working class to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, to substitute proletarian democracy for bourgeois democracy, as a higher form of democracy. It also showed that, without a conscious revolutionary leadership, the enormous heroism of which the proletariat is capable during a revolutionary struggle remains insufficient to assure it victory.