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      The “Real Class Organization”

      It was Engels who, in his 1844 Conditions of the Working-Class in England, first pointed to unions, or “combinations” as they were then called, as the major means of resisting the aggression of capital. Strikes were, he wrote, “the military school of the workingmen in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided,” adding that “as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled.”38 Later, in his 1875 critique of the Gotha program of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD by its German initials), Engels denounced the absence of trade unions in the program, calling them “the real class organization of the proletariat.”39 Similarly, in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote that it was through strikes and unions that “the proletarians effect their organization as a class.” Their battles he termed “a veritable civil war.”40 In fact, Marx and Engels were the first socialists to see unions as central to the class struggle and hence to the fight for socialism.

      As Draper pointed out, Marx and Engels would become critical of the conservatism of British trade unions. Nevertheless, unions remained central to their view of building class organization and consciousness. Unions were, of course, key to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association.41 It is not just that class conflict of this sort is an unexcelled school of war; unions are the basis for the political movement of the class. Writing to a friend in 1871, Marx said: “The political movement of the working class has as its ultimate object, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles.”42 This did not mean that every trade union struggle or every strike wave becomes political in the sense in which Marx uses the term here. But it does give a certain priority to economics—in the form of union organization—and to the possibility that economic struggle leads to political struggle—here he gives the example of the fight for an eight-hour working-day law.

      That this process is not inevitable has been all too well demonstrated by the history of the US labor movement. This is precisely why trade union work by socialists is so essential to drawing out the meaning of the daily conditions and conflict as well as that of the high points of struggle. Elsewhere in this collection, various essays address this topic from different angles, particularly “The Rank-and-File Strategy” and its “Update,” so I won’t attempt to develop this perspective here.

      Class and the World Today

      In its 2008/09 Global Wage Report, the International Labour Office (ILO) of the United Nations revealed that nearly half the world’s “employed” workforce worked for wages or salaries, rising from 43 percent in 1996 to 47 percent in 2006. This meant a shift of millions from either self-employment (peasants, independent artisans, peddlers, and others) or toward exclusion from the workforce. While not all waged workers are working class in the sense discussed above, most are. If we include dependents and the “reserve army” of labor (which would include many working as “self-employed”) this might well amount to a majority for the first time in history. This shift is uneven. As the ILO described it, “Paid employment appears to be growing everywhere (with the exception of Latin America) and has been expanding particularly rapidly in East Asia.”43

      Thus, capital’s drive to expand and take in more and more types of labor and commodities continues to draw in more of the world’s rural population to the creation of surplus value and the conditions described above. What is more, this shift conforms to Marx’s argument in Capital that even as the mass of labor’s subsistence grows, “in relative terms, i.e., in comparison with surplus value, the value of labor-power would keep falling, and thus the abyss between the life situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.” 44 Thus the relative shift of value, and hence income and wealth, from the working class to capital prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008 is a reality. The ILO states:

      We show that over the period 1995–2007 average wages lagged behind the growth in GDP per capita, which we interpret as an indication that increases in productivity have failed to translate fully into higher wages. We also show that the recent period, characterized by growing economic integration, has seen a decline in the share of GDP distributed to wages. 45

      The rate of exploitation, therefore, has increased on a global scale.

      This shift is apparent not only worldwide but also in the heartland of capitalism. In the seventeen leading countries of the OECD, capital’s share in GDP rose from 25 percent in 1975 to 33 percent in 2005.46 Looking somewhat more narrowly at the US corporate sector, capital’s share of US national income rose from 18.8 percent in 1979 to 26.2 percent in 2010.47 This has not been simply a matter of some economic trend, but the result of a class struggle in which capital has had the upper hand for some time—and all too often labor has fought with one hand tied behind its back. In the case of the United States, this is addressed in some detail in subsequent chapters in this collection. Here it is worth mentioning that this overall trend in capitalist development has produced increased worker resistance, perhaps most notably in China.48

      It is always tempting at this point in such an essay to predict the next working-class upsurge. One thing Marxism is not so good at, however, is predicting the future. One reason is that socialist predictions are often in practice just economic predictions, and those not always on the mark—like the comrade

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