The Influence of Philosophical Currents on Trade Unions
Milton Fisk, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University, USA
02/05/2005
1 Remarks on Philosophical Influences
Labor unions form and then change under a host of influences. Among those influences are various philosophical currents. This does not deny that we find the predominant influences on unions in the direct experiences wageworkers and their artisan predecessors have in confronting those who try to suppress them. After all, philosophical currents can have an impact only by being able to mix in with those experiences.
For example, the idea of liberty developed by French philosophers around the time of the French Revolution subsequently played a role in changing the nature of organizations workers relied on, not just in France but elsewhere as well. The traditional organization of workers by trade - the guilds - had made workers dependent on master workers within a kind of corporate structure that was itself subordinate to the state. As the modern economy began to develop, this form of worker organization went into decline. Merchant capitalists eroded the relation between master and journeyman by getting work done by independent artisans. Simultaneously, industrial capitalists were building a labor market that eroded the labor monopoly of those traditional worker organizations.
By the early 19th Century, a sweeping disorganization of labor had taken place. As a result, what workers earned was less; the communities in which they lived became more squalid; and constant abuses at work went without redress. This experience when mixed with the ideal of liberty was able to generate a wave of voluntary associations among workers.[1] They considered themselves at liberty to form associations that they could use to improve their circumstances. Still moved by the Jacobin spirit of the French Revolution - the ideal of individual liberty as opposed to privilege - they had no need to follow the tradition of submitting to a master artisan or of letting a guild’s monopoly of labor keep them from work. As individuals, workers considered themselves free to do what seemed best to escape the effects of disorganization. In the first third of the 19th Century, they chose to form voluntary associations some of which became forerunners of modern unions. Unlike their declining traditional organizations, these new associations could claim to be autonomous in respect to external bodies and internally democratic, features that were to become central to what workers would value in unions.[2]
The philosophical ideas that have an influence in the history of unionization are not ideas that just float into people’s minds. They have emerged, in their turn, out of social and economic changes. The French Revolution’s idea of liberty, for example, had roots in the expansion of commerce and the desire of those engaged in it to avoid traditional regulations. Philosophical ideas are, then, only one stage in a whole circuit of influences. They are not utterly original influences that have somehow escaped from the circuit of more mundane influences.
Moreover, philosophers need not make direct contact with the labor movement in order to transmit their ideas to it. Agencies of a variety of types carry the philosophical currents influencing unionism. Philosophers themselves often operate at a level of abstraction that fails to admit of immediate application to something as concrete as the labor movement. It is then necessary to have mediating agencies between philosophers and unions, as the following example illustrates.
One brand of unionism in the second part of the 19th century saw unions as key to transforming society from a collection of individuals pursuing their separate ends into a community. Pursuing community had become an important aim since many at that time thought that a true republic required the kind of solidarity characteristic of a community. In the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had put forward precisely such a strong ideal of a republican sort, in which an essential component was a community with its shared goals.[3]
In the United States, William Sylvis of the National Labor Union (1866 to 1872) and George McNeil of the Knights of Labor (1869 to 1902) championed the idea of making unions tools for community in order to realize a strong republican ideal.[4] Their unions took concrete steps toward an inclusive community by, among other things, organizing black workers and recognizing the right of women workers to organize. The dedication of these unions to a strong republican ideal came from this ideal’s seeping into and becoming a significant current in the political culture, rather than through direct contact with Rousseau’s work by labor leaders like Sylvis and McNeil.
2 Freedom to Associate and the Wage System
Talk of unions is not like talk of, say, governments or economic systems. Unions are new and the other systems are very old. Plato in the 4th Century BC wrote about philosopher kings and about an economy to back them up, without having dreamt of trade unions. It took the development of the modern wage system to make unions possible. In this system, workers are free to contract with whatever employer will have them. No guild restrictions or seigniorial rights over serfs limit their mobility, yet they are not self-employed in the way many artisans are. It is not surprising then that only modern ideas could influence workers in the modern wage system as they moved in the direction of unionism.
The influential 18th Century notion of liberty, which we discussed above, is general enough to apply equally to workers and to owners. It is the notion of liberty that appeared in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1789. This notion, like the others in the Declaration, was fashioned by the disciples of the French philosophes of the 18th century. These disciples were followers of people like Francois-Marie Voltaire and Denis Diderot, who wished to promote the new economy, which emphasized making profits from the use of private property by wage labor.
The Rights of Man and Voltaire
The Declaration of the Rights of Man claims that people are born free and equal, with any distinctions between them derived from their social usefulness rather than birth. It asserts that the basic rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. It defines political liberty as the power of doing whatever does not injure another. Voltaire (1694-1778), perhaps the most creative and versatile of the French philosophes, had formulated in his writings a number of the rights in the Declaration, some of which he had found in the work of the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704). Voltaire defended property and thought that the propertied middle class should rule. His defense of liberty included a defense of the liberty to grow rich, though he thought that without the dispossessed there would be nobody to do the work that keeps humanity from extinction. Voltaire also defended an unregulated form of capitalism. Those in the Constituent Assembly who voices counted in drafting the Declaration, were in basic agreement with these views of Voltaire.
This liberty or freedom, whether of property owners or workers, was about the will. Being free, one should be able to will to do things without interference. Of special importance as regards the relation between employers and employees was the will to enter a contract with others. This freedom was, though, not a freedom to live without want, to live with dignity, to live in solidarity with others, or to live with enough to take advantage of opportunities. It was, in short, a freedom designed to humble the manorial lords, who stood in the way of the new economy, without lifting the workers, who the owners in the new economy would want as cheap labor.
Even though this liberty was to apply to all, the Constitutent Assembly in 1791 passed the Le Chapelier law, which denied French workers the right to form associations and to strike. Only in 1864 did they win back the right to strike and in 1884 the right to collective bargaining. Even if one adds, as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen did, the restriction on freedom-as-will that what one wills should not harm others, this freedom would pose no obstacle to peaceful association and bargaining between groups. To make liberty consistent with the Le Chapelier law would require giving the notion of liberty a narrower application than the wording of the Declaration seems to imply. Instead of applying to both those with property and those without it, the notion of liberty would have to apply generally only to those with property.
The Declaration does not explicitly mention the right to association. Yet those, like Jean-Paul Marat, who during the French Revolution saw themselves as advocates for the populace, did not doubt that such a right existed. In criticizing the Le Chapelier law in his periodical, L’Ami du Peuple, Marat said, “They have taken away from the class of trades people and workers … the right of free assembly … .” Supporters of the law could reply that, even if the basic right to liberty implies the right to association, both rights, when exercised, are subject to the limit of not harming others. That limit, according to the Declaration, is “determinable only by the law,” and the Le Chapelier law was the relevant law for establishing a limit on the right to associate. Marat, of course, would have appealed beyond the law to the fact that an assembly led by men alarmed by the pace of popular gains and with an interest in establishing a free market in labor passed the law.
The language of liberty is, however, expansive; those it intends to curb learn how to use it for their aims. Those wanting to allow a significant role for workers, artisans, and small proprietors made their own appeals to freedom. Rousseau, and later on important actors in the French Revolution like Jacques-Rene Hebert and Jacques Roux, wanted a popular republic in which the special interests of those with sizeable property would not triumph over the general interests of the community.[5] One could not build a popular republic on economic self-interest without civic virtue - including respect for the laws, devotion to country, and dedication to the general interest. In such a republic, freedom would transcend mere free will by adding, among other things, the new dimension of ability to realize needs. Citizens would be free in this sense if they had food to nourish themselves, schools to learn in, jobs to earn a living, and a government to participate in as equals.
In the union movements of various countries in the 19th century, there was room for both of these ideas of freedom with roots in the French Revolution. We saw at the start how the idea of freedom of the will from interference featured in the transition from the older corporate to the new union model of worker organization. The voluntary association, of which the union is one kind, comes about and functions through the free acts of its members; whereas the feudal corporation subordinates its members to a master and ultimately to the state.
In contrast, some defended unions on grounds that they protected the quite different kind of freedom characteristic of a popular republic. A popular republic could not survive where commerce was unrestricted, for this would create inequality of such a degree that a freedom of this kind - the opportunities and resources to do the things a citizen of a popular republic needs to do - would be lost. Inequality of this degree would undermine the mutual trust and concern that is the basis for the civic virtues. Unions fit in here precisely because of their promise to prevent the high degree of inequality that would wreck the freedom and civic virtue of a popular republic.
As noted already, this argument revolves around the republican ideal that Rousseau, rather than 18th century philosophes of a more individualist bent, had advanced. A central tenet of Rousseau’s was that republican virtue called for a dedication to the general interest. This tenet shows up in the US in the vision Sylvis had for his National Labor Union and that of McNeil for his Knights of Labor, visions that projected cooperative communities, rather than simply decent wages, as the goal of working people.
Inseparable from the notion of a popular republic, which the French Revolution conceived in 1793 but never realized, was the notion of fraternity or solidarity. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen did not mention and was in fact distant from this notion. Forming a general interest and pursuing it are tasks that call for making the interests of others one’s own interests. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant had affirmed, already in 1785, the popular republican ideal when he said that we are not to treat others as mere means but at least some of their ends should be ones we pursue with them.[6] Following this prescription leads to solidarity in the pursuit of general interests.
Rousseau and Kant
The idea that the state exists for certain private interests was anathema to Rousseau (1712-1778). The state should pursue, instead, common interests, and the state does this through a common will, a will to pursue the interests common to all. For him, the political sovereignty of a united people cannot be divided, which it would be if, say, one class or faction were to rule. To assure that the state promotes common rather than private interests and that sovereignty is undivided, workers and tradespeople must play a role in shaping the common interest and in executing the common will. Kant (1724-1804) transformed Rousseau’s theme of a common will into the moral imperative, which he called categorical, that we act only on rules that we could will as universal laws. A reasonable interpretation of Kant’s view is that rules we cannot will to be universal fail to qualify as part of a version of Rousseau’s common will that is the common will of humanity and not just of a given state. It would follow from this that, since the common will acts for common interests, Kant’s moral imperative calls for acting in solidarity with others by pursuing at least those of their interests that are common.
3 Class Conflict and Socialism
We just saw that, though the notion of freedom as free will seemed to apply equally to everyone, in application it gives preference to those wills backed with more power. Those backed with less power were restricted in their ability to form associations and to withhold their labor. There is a parallel problem for the other notion of freedom, the republican one. Due to social divisions, not everyone in the republic enjoys this freedom. As a result, the republic falls short of being a community.
The all-inclusiveness of a republican regime implied that it could unify disparate groups, including employers and their employees. The solidarity that holds it together would have to leap over this class divide, as well as any other social divide. A traditional corporate craft also rested on an inclusive solidarity, uniting artisans and masters. Thus, masters would strike right alongside the artisans they controlled.[7] However, the transition from corporate crafts to unions broke with inclusiveness in the direction of class exclusion. The unions were class entities separating workers from employers. This created a problem for the popular republican ideal of a general interest and an inclusive solidarity.
This problem for the republican ideal became evident once class-consciousness displaced corporate craft consciousness. The enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century might worry about tumults of the undefined masses - the canaille. However, neither they nor those in the 19th Century who followed their ideas came to grips with the conflict between wageworkers and entrepreneurs in a manner that let them see it as a problem for the stability of the republican order. Nonetheless, the awareness within the working class of its interests and of their conflict with the interests of property owners soon became widespread in countries where capitalism had a foothold. Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) took note of this awareness and made the notion of class conflict central to their understanding of capitalism. In the mid-1840s, they interpreted the growing union movement as a product of this conflict.
This class consciousness not only differed from the corporate consciousness of the crafts but it also differed from the Jacobin radicalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and by later Jacobins such as the influential English publicist Thomas Paine (1737-1809).[8] Nonetheless, Paine’s work resonated with workers struggling for elementary political rights against regimes still defending hereditary rule. In England, Paine’s influence led several generations of workers in the early 19th century to make the aristocracy their main target, while the right of industrial capital to profit from labor went unchallenged by them.
Jacobinism and Marxism
In France, the Jacobin Club was influential in the Constituent Assembly of 1791 as a force for liberty and democracy and hence for ending the monarchy. Those in the Club were from the middle bourgeoisie, and they supported financial and propertied interests. Despite these origins, the Jacobin distaste for autocracy and aristocratic privilege and its support for rights inspired several generations of workers, including those in England. Marx, however, drew attention to the connection between the individualism of the market and the ‘Rights of Man’ in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. At the same time, he approved of the inclusion of the ‘Rights of the Citizen’ in the Declaration, since they reflected the way people are together in a society rather than their separation in a market. Nonetheless, from a Marxist perspective Jacobinism is lacking since for it oppression comes primarily only from autocratic government. The harm of inequality that comes from exploiting workers or from different forms of discrimination goes without notice by Jacobin radicals like Thomas Paine. For Marx, autocratic government is not the only source of oppression; the institutions of civil society can be oppressive as well.
The radical reformers in England in the first quarter of the 19th century argued for civil liberty, a free press, the right to vote, and an end to aristocratic privilege. Repression of the movement for reform was often brutal, reaching a climax in the 1819 massacre outside Manchester at St. Peter’s Fields. Regular cavalry together with a loyalist middle class rode through a peaceful crowd of some 60,000 riding down and sabering all they could. It was class war but over the privileges of the nobility and the monarchy.[9]
Unions had been illegal since 1799, under the Combination Acts, but the demands of those attacked in “Peterloo” - the name given the massacre with ironic reference to Waterloo four years earlier - did not include freedom for unions and strikes. Still, the disgust created in the lower classes by the massacre was enduring and played a role in the expansion of worker consciousness in the 1820s beyond Jacobinism. This expansion opened the way to the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. The radical reform movement then merged with the increasing prevalence of wage work to create the sort of class-consciousness motivating unions.
However, many of the socialists of the mid-19th century did not support unions. This was true for Robert Owen (1771-1858) of Scotland, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) of France, and Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) of Germany. Marx, then, became the first major figure to give a socialist rationale for unions. For him, socialism involved the self-emancipation of the working class through struggle with the owning class. This conception connected socialism directly with unionism, for unions were, in Marx’s view, organizations formed by and for wage workers - including not just the skilled workers of the crafts but also the growing numbers of unskilled workers - to fight against the encroachments of capital.[10] Unions were, then, the basic organizations of class struggle, a struggle that socialists would carry to its conclusion by overthrowing capitalism.
Establishing this affinity between unions and socialism was only part of Marx’s contribution. He still had to say what role socialists would play in relation to unions. He opposed giving control of unions over to a socialist political party, as both followers of Lassalle and Soviet Communists were to do. Since unions are the basic organizations of class struggle, a political party should not compromise their independence. Nor were unions to function apart from the influence of socialists who were members of a socialist party. That would lead to their being absorbed in day-to-day economic struggles and in the reformist politics associated with them. Instead, Marx walked a fine line between these views. In addition to participating in a socialist party, some socialists would form a loyal left wing within unions.[11] Without subverting the unions’ autonomy vis-à-vis socialist parties, these socialists would work within the union movement in its struggle with capital. In this way, there would be a symbiosis between parties and unions while maintaining union autonomy.
Lassalle and Marx
In the 1860s, Lassalleans and Marxists had, for a time, separate socialist parties in Germany. One of the main points of difference between the parties was over trade unions. Lassalle and Marx agreed that trade unions would not be able to raise workers on average beyond a living wage, but from this they drew different conclusions. Lassalle concluded that trade unions were useless; whereas Marx concluded that the experience trade unions give in the class struggle makes unions indispensable elements in the revolutionary struggle for socialism. Despite Lassalle’s views on unions, workers continued to join them in increasing numbers, and so, instead of ignoring unions, his followers - he had died prematurely in a duel - insisted that trade unions formally recognize party control over them. Another point of difference was over alliances. Whereas Marx viewed the emerging bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class that was ending feudalism and absolutism, Lassalle favored an alliance between workers and the old regime for eliminating the bourgeoisie. Marx opposed committing workers to such an alliance, arguing that
the defenders of feudalism would deny workers freedom of the press and universal suffrage and that only with the development of capitalism will workers become a powerful majority class.
——————————————————————————————————————————–
In contrast, Owen’s socialism tried to establish cooperative relations between owners and employees without addressing the issue of the existing imbalance of property, which was at the root of owners’ struggles against unions. Proudhon thought unions would endanger the small property owners around whom he built his socialism. Further, Lassalle’s hope to do away with the bourgeoisie by having workers ally with the Prussian feudal establishment was incompatible with support for unions, which unlike feudal guilds, were a product of the capitalist period.
Within the context of growing working class consciousness, Marx’s idea of unions pointed up the inadequacy of the previously mentioned popular republican idea of unions. Popular republicans, when they considered unions at all, thought of them as a source of adjustments needed to maintain republican unity and the civic virtue behind it. From Marx’s perspective, there were two things wrong here. First, given class divisions, republican unity was at best a distant ideal and not an existing unity in need of buffing up by reducing inequality through union struggles. Second, basing himself on classical economics, Marx did not think that unions would have a significant redistributive effect in favor of the working class. The competition between capitalists keeps labor, on average, at what the social circumstances determine as a living wage. With the popular republican idea of unions failing on both counts, it made sense to see unions as organizations for class war, which pursued to its end would eliminate the wage system. The Marxist idea of unions had an impact through the International Workingmen’s Association (1864-1872), which brought together trade union leaders and revolutionaries.[12] Within the International, Marx defended his view of unions as autonomous with respect to parties and the state but as a legitimate arena for activism by members of socialist parties. In it, he was able to influence British radical reformist unionists as well as French anarchists. Members of the International, whether they were individuals or organizations, could then promote, through their countries’ socialist parties or unions, a class-conscious unionism that had an agenda for social change.
The First International and Beyond
Unions in different countries, being organizations whose members are of the same class, have reason to support one another despite the pull of national identity. Internationalism shows up, then, as a trend in the trade union movement whatever the obstacles may be to its realization. Building on this trend, international socialist bodies attempted to incorporate unions, directly or through national parties, in order to coordinate working class economic and political struggles in different countries. In 1864, Marx gave the inaugural address to the International Working Men’s Association, a body that encompassed, in a delicate balance, socialist, anarchist, and union bodies from different countries. This was the so-called First International, which ended after the defeat of the Paris Commune. Following it was the Socialist International (1889-1915), which split over whether workers should fight for any of the warring ruling groups in World War I. Then came the Communist International (1919-1943), dominated by the Soviet Union and ended by Stalin in World War II. Working class internationalism lost supporters due to wars and the long split among nations into capitalist and Communist camps. To counter neoliberal globalism, a creation of capitalist internationalism, unions, left protest groups, and socialist formations began making efforts in the 1990s to establish solidarity across borders, but so far without a unifying structure.
In Germany, there were two major socialist parties active in the labor turbulence of the 1860s - one created by Lassalle and the other, which belonged to the International, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Unions there grew out of the previously existing mutual help societies and the strikes that occurred more frequently once they became legal during the 1860s. The unions actually came before, and hence were not creations of, those parties. By the late 1860s, the unionization movement had the support of both these parties, which then united in 1875 to form the party that was later renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).[13] The unions and the SPD enjoyed the kind of symbiotic relation for which Marx had worked. Party members in the unions could move their unions in the direction of social change, and in turn, the experience of the ranks in unions with a strong left wing would lead them into the party.
The Marxist notion of having a socialist party alongside but not controlling unions in which socialists would participate was influential beyond Germany. In Italy, the General Confederation of Labor (CGL) was founded in 1906 in reaction to revolutionary syndicalism, with its call for direct action and no politics. The CGL, instead, worked in conjunction with the Italian Socialist Party, whose roots went back to 1892. Founded in 1895, the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT) merged the legacy of Marx with that of anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and P.-J. Proudhon. Despite the CGT’s official stance of electoral abstention, workers within it tended to vote for the socialist candidates of the French Section of the International. In Britain, however, union organization proceeded until 1918 without a major socialist party and indeed without even a major independent worker’s party.[14]
4 The Contract and Unionism
It was proving difficult around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, in whatever capitalist country, for the working class to make progress with the class struggle model of unionism that Marxists had advocated. There was competition from liberal, Catholic, and anarchist unions, but the main problem lay elsewhere. Capital had become organized and able to use the state to repress militant unions.
In the US, Samuel Gompers, who had been president of the cigar makers union, founded in 1881what was soon to become the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He then began looking for a way for unions to make progress despite the strengthening opposition from capital. Employers had found they could rely on the state to issue anti-union injunctions to end strikes, stop boycotts, and prevent union organizing. Between 1898 and 1908, they asked for injunctions 66 times and judges granted them in 46 cases.
Gompers eventually developed a new unionism, which was neither that of popular republicanism aiming at social unity nor that of class struggle aiming at social transformation. The new unionism attempted to overcome the opposition of capital by bringing it into a contractual relation that would establish labor peace. His new brand of unionism was an application of a modern version of the enlightenment liberal philosophy of the social contract, specifically the liberal philosophy of John Locke.[15]
In the US, formal agreements between employers and unions had been rare prior to the last quarter of the 19th century. Once agreements became more common and became regional and even national in scope, union leaders recognized that through these agreements unions were establishing peace with employers. Agreements, while they lasted, reduced aggressive efforts by employers to destroy unions.
As Gompers put it in 1921, “Collective bargaining … establishes industrial peace which is essential for the orderly production and distribution of wealth.” [16] This does not deny the existence of conflict, but since peace is possible through agreements, conflict is not inevitable. There is no suggestion that community and a popular republic result from collective bargaining. It offers only a truce made because of the potential for conflict. Nor is the goal to realize the Marxist vision of a radical break with the existing economy. Gompers displaces this vision in order to pursue orderly production and distribution. The price of this peace with the owners of capitalist enterprise is, of course, a distribution of income and wealth compatible with capitalism.
John Locke and Union Contracts
In addition to making important contributions to understanding the nature of knowledge, Locke had a great influence on both theorists of the state and political leaders. For him, government arises not from the right of any particular group or individual to rule, but from the mutual consent of the people governed. The governed, then, contract among themselves to form a government that will provide security for them and will carry out the laws they decide on. The early 20th Century institutionalists extended Locke’s notion of contract to apply not just to individuals but also to collective entities. Instead of Locke’s individuals contracting with one another for their governance, the institutionalists’ workers, for example, would contract with their employers through representatives to make institutions for cooperation in their industry. For institutional economists, like John R. Commons and William M. Leiserson, agreements between labor and management were “nothing less than constitutions for the industries which they cover.” These constitutions set up organs of industrial governance in the way the Lockean agreements among individuals led to organs of state governance.
The core idea of this view of unions is that the contract creates a new entity; just as in Locke the contract on which individuals agree creates a political society for their peaceful living. For Gompers this entity was a voluntary institution created by an agreement between a labor union and an employer on a set of rules to govern their interaction. This set of rules was considered a constitution of an industrial unit, formed by labor and an employer. Since Gompers showed little interest in unionizing workers outside the crafts, the compact was, for him, between skilled labor and an employer. The task of the state in respect to labor-employer relations was not to regulate labor or capital, but to create an environment in which forming and maintaining these voluntary institutions involving both encountered no major obstacles.
It was necessary to decide who the contracting party was on the side of labor. In the original liberal version of contract theory, individuals agreed among themselves on certain principles, but Gompers was reluctant to view the union as an aggregate of individuals. Hence, the contract with an employer was not a contract into which individual employees entered. Instead, the union as a collectivity made the contract with the employer. Gompers wanted, then, to splice an earlier view of associations as more than their members onto the individualist Lockean view of contracts. This made it easy for employers to say that collective bargaining agreements with unions had no standing in the law of contracts, which based itself on that individualist view.[17]
Even before he decided to make industrial peace the overarching goal of unions and to make the collectively bargained contract their means to it, Gompers had insisted on keeping political parties and their ideologies at arms length from unions. In 1890, he clashed with Daniel DeLeon, a follower of Lassalle and leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), over the AFL’s refusal to charter DeLeon’s SLP as a member organization or even to charter the socialist union federation within which the SLP already had a charter. When DeLeon appealed for support to no less a figure than Engels, the reply was that Gompers had the right to make the AFL an exclusively union body. Gompers was equally concerned that Eugene Debs, who was active in recruiting workers to AFL unions, was, by the late 1890s, successfully recruiting trade unionists to socialism, distracting them from their day-to-day unions’ tasks. A majority of delegates at the 1894 convention of the AFL came to adopt the political program of the English Independent Labor Party. In it was a plank calling for the collective ownership of the means of production. Gompers managed to defeat its adoption by manipulating delegates whose unions sent them to the convention to vote for the program. His policy of strangling socialist politics wherever it arose in the AFL facilitated making agreements with employers in the interest of industrial peace.[18]
Gompers’ contract view of industrial units faced the same difficulty that Locke’s contract view of political societies did. The difficulty arises because social contracts, whether they create political societies or industrial units, succeed where they are least needed and fail where they are most needed. Why is this? There is an actual or feared social rupture where people resort to contracts. To have respite from the suffering of an actual rupture or from the anxiety of a feared one, people seek to get around an actual or feared rupture by an agreement. Had there been a common ground for real unity, there would have been neither an actual rupture nor a feared one, and hence neither the misery nor the anxiety. Without such a common ground, though, agreements to avoid misery and anxiety are fragile. Inequality is often the reason for the absence of a common ground that would be sufficient to avoid an actual or feared rupture. When the burdens of inequality become insupportable for those who have the least or the rewards of inequality become irresistible for those who have the most, the fragility of any contract is exposed. Either those with the least or those with the most will find a way to break the contract. Inequality, then, creates a need for a contract, while at the same time making any contract too fragile to create enduring peace.
Inequality is certainly characteristic of the labor-capital relation. With their command of political, economic, legal, and media resources, employers can both ensure that contracts do not harm them and execute those contracts in a way that favors them. As a result, contracts will be too weak an instrument to promote peace, but to make them stronger would call for employees to break with the effort to have industrial peace and to set out on a course of class struggle. Moreover, due to this inequality, which favors them, employers have proven their ability to avoid coming to an agreement with unions when it does not serve their interests. The condition for even having contracts becomes a willingness on the part of unions to engage in class struggle rather than a pursuit of industrial peace. It would seem, then, that Gompers’ contractual unionism was more suited to a classless society, where it is unneeded, than to a class society, where it fails.
5 Bureaucracy and Direct Action
A number of developments converged to make unions bureaucratic. Unions had become regional and national and needed central offices to run their affairs. Leaders, who mostly rose from the ranks, wished to protect their power from shifts in attitudes of the ranks. Contrary to what Gompers said, collective bargaining was not something the associated ranks engaged in directly as a collectivity. In reality, collective bargaining was the domain of union officials. Proposed contracts were worked out in detail before the ranks were summoned to give their approval. Thus, Gompers’ contractual unionism, which existed in a number of countries by the early 20th Century, was ripe for bureaucracy.
Complaints about bureaucracy became widespread in both Europe and the United States. In Germany, the representatives of the trade unions played an increasingly conservative role in the Social Democratic Party. In 1906 at the SPD congress, the Social Democratic unions, with their focus on economic issues and with control over them in the hands of officials, were successful in doing away with the party’s revolutionary perspective. This transpired over the opposition of SPD founders, Bebel and Leibknecht, as well as other Marxist oriented party leaders.
In Italy, a left-wing group in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), including, Antonio Gramsci among others, lamented the reformist and top-down character of the unions in the General Confederation of Labor (CGL), the federation allied with the PSI. Nonetheless, these leftists in the PSI saw the unions as necessary so long as the wage system existed. Unions must continue collectively bargaining contracts over wages, hours, and conditions of work, but the left did not expect the unions to unify workers for social transformation. They gave that task to another player, the workers’ councils, which arrived on the Italian scene in 1919-1920, a period of intense militancy in Italy’s major industrial center, Turin.
In various countries in the early 20th century, there were strong revolutionary syndicalist movements, which penetrated the socialist unions and formed unions for workers outside the established trades. Their members added weight to the reaction against the spread of union bureaucracy and contractual unionism. They had no use for pacts with capitalists or union hierarchies, and they advocated the general strike as the strategy for ending capitalism. The French social philosopher, Georges Sorel, influenced early 20th century syndicalism in numerous countries. He rejected the mediocrity of life in bourgeois democracy and advocated direct action in class struggle, rather than bargaining accords or passing laws.
In France, where this tradition was strong, a deep suspicion about delegating authority delayed the institutionalization of unions. Workers showed solidarity in action against employers but they did not see this as a choice to belong to an organization. Within the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), syndicalism remained a strong current even after the CGT associated with the French Section of the Workers’ International in the years before World War I. Within this syndicalist current, there was the view that arbitration, and any other practice that limited union autonomy, sapped the class struggle.[19]
In the US, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 by delegates from 43 different labor organizations, was opposed to arbitration, collective bargaining, and political affiliation or intervention. Its philosophy of direct action led to a number of historic strikes, including the Lawrence textile strike (1912), the Mesabi Range miners’ strike (1916), and the Seattle general strike (1919). While the AFL was organizing exclusively the trades, the IWW was organizing skilled and unskilled workers, whether they were migratory or in a settled location.[20]
Gramsci appeared to be staking out ground lying between bureaucratic, contractual unionism and revolutionary syndicalism. In 1919-1920, workers councils were forming in the factories of Turin and Gramsci saw his task in running the journal, L’Ordine Nuovo, as one of interpreting their relation to the unions of the CGL and to the socialist party, the PSI.[21] The councils came together in the factories for direct action in the interest of workers. Their goal was to challenge the power of the owners rather than making pacts with them.
Gramsci and Philosophy
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) criticized both the economic materialism defended by some Marxists and the idealist view of history upheld by Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Against the former, he held that popular beliefs are a material force in politics, while taking it as obvious that these beliefs could not gain currency except in certain kinds of economic contexts. Against the later, he held that to understand politics one had to recognize the existence of conflict among groups, whereas the idealist can only recognize the distinctness of ideas. Gramsci interpreted Croce’s vacillation over fascism and his withdrawal from public life in 1926 as an outgrowth of this idealism. Without denying that the economic context of politics was vital for understanding it, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony gave a key role to ideas. He wanted to understand how in a given society a class manages to become dominant economically, politically, and culturally. The first step is for such a class to recognize that it cannot achieve dominance by a program that aims simply at its own interests as a class. It must make a credible case that it stands for the general interests of the society. This requires, as a second step, creating ideas and practices that constitute a picture of what is good for the society within which this class nonetheless plays a dominant role. Then it can achieve hegemony in the society.
The unions, in his view, were still relevant so long as the wage system existed, making it necessary to bargain with employers over wages. In contrast, the councils pre-figured a socialist state after the fall of capitalism when the conflict over wages would be replaced by worker control of production. The factory councils were eventually to form, along with neighborhood and rural councils, a network making up the society as a whole. The different parts of the network would delegate representatives to a governing body. Prior to such a socialist outcome, the councils, according to Gramsci, had the task, not to replace, but to “remodel [the trade unions] fundamentally” and “to win the trade unions to the cause of communism.” Other socialist leftists, like Palmiro Togliatti, disagreed, arguing that it was futile to try to make the unions - as devices for bargaining with capitalists - democratic and to make them useful for transforming society. As to the party, Gramsci took the view that in forming a state, the party would have to relinquish power to the councils. For him this was, though, compatible with the view that, inside the councils, the socialist party would aspire to be a leading force and, since the councils would make up the society, it would act as a governing party.[22]
This view of the councils as remodeling the unions implied a subordinate role for the unions. They were not the autonomous bodies in earlier republican, Marxist, or contractual views of unions. However, this subordination of unions to the councils had to be understood in the context of special circumstances. Councils arise only when outrage and militancy are intense, as they were in Turin in 1919-1920 and had been in St. Petersburg in 1917. As he came to see when the council movement suffered its defeat in April 1920 the subordination of the unions to the councils was not their normal condition but only their condition in a situation bordering on revolution. The instructive thing about the view of this philosopher, journalist, and party activist is that it sees a limit on how far union autonomy can be useful to workers. In a revolutionary situation, Gramsci thought unions should cede their autonomy to the councils.
At the root of Gramsci’s views on the relation of unions, councils, and parties was the conviction that without a development of consciousness and culture there could be no successful social transformation. This development had to be an ethical-political one. The councils brought with them a new consciousness and culture, which was an outgrowth of the situation of Turin’s factory workers after World War I. The will of a socialist party could not impose factory councils on these workers. As mere act of will, a general strike or an action in the streets is futile since the consciousness and culture emerging out of existing conditions has not prepared for it. In this regard, Gramsci’s thought blended both materialism and idealism, showing the influence of both Marx’s historical materialism and the philosophy of spirit of Benedetto Croce, whose writings, by the time Gramsci was a university student, were having a profound impact on Italian society.
6 Unions Run for External Purposes
The idea that unions are autonomous working class organizations - having its origins in the idea of liberty coming from the philosophers of the French Revolution and in the idea of working class self-emancipation in the Marxist tradition - has been a difficult one to realize in practice. Non-working class organizations are tempted to use unions for their own goals, goals for which they give some broad philosophical backing. The result is a subordination of unions to states, political parties, nationalist movements, religious institutions, or even an organized section of another class. These external organizations succeed in splitting the union movement at times when workers most need strength through unity. In many cases, those subordinating unions have no sympathy at all for unionism. Finding that unionism cannot be avoided, they hope to limit what they see as its negative effects by diverting workers into subordinated unions.
In Italy, for example, there was a Catholic federation of labor, alongside the CGL and the syndicalist federation. After its founding in 1918, the Catholic federation, the CIL, grew to over a million members by 1920, the great majority of whom were rural. The CGL had reached nearly two million by that time. The CIL had ties to the Popular Party, the PPI, which was dedicated to Christian democracy as opposed to ending private property, the nominal goal of the Italian Socialist Party, the PSI. Because of its views on property and class, the PPI refused to work with the PSI. An important consequence of the CIL’s keeping labor within the bounds of Catholic social teaching was its refusal to analyze the situation of those it recruited in terms of class conflict. It admitted rural workers and landowners alike to its ranks, despite the problems this created for it. For example, in supporting land occupations by the former, the CIL was opposed from within and without by the later.
Catholic federations of labor in Italy and elsewhere reflect the social doctrines laid out in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical On the Condition of Labor, known as Rerum Novarum. While recognizing the right of workers to form unions to change the inhumane conditions that had become prevalent in workplaces, the encyclical also condemned socialist unionism as “contrary to the natural rights of mankind.” The appeal to natural rights - and specifically the natural right to private property - was a philosophical rather than a theological appeal and hence could appeal to believers and non-believers alike. Because of this encyclical, church officials urged Catholic workers not to harm capital by confiscating capitalist property, not to give the state as opposed to private entrepreneurs the power to run the economy, and not to agree to the doctrine of class conflict, with its implication that the capitalist is the natural adversary of the worker.[23]
|
Leo XIII and Unions The philosophical ideas affecting unionism were for the most part ideas that became current within the period in which wage labor and capital emerged and continued to exist. However, Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum harked back to a period prior to capitalism. This document gave approval to unions, but on the assumption that they were a mere variation on the guilds. It viewed them as possibly winning enough for workers inside the unjust system of laissez-faire to allow them to get outside it as small property owning peasants. Pope Leo thought of the 13th Century as a model to hold up in the face of the savagery of capitalist accumulation. In light of this, it is not surprising that he made Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) the church’s official philosopher. However, when bishops with flocks in large industrial cities interpreted the teaching of Rerum Novarum, they stripped it of its medieval trappings. Its message no longer harked back to a feudal past, but called for improving the conditions of workers without threatening capitalism. They saw the document simply as support for a kind of union that did not attack capitalist property or support socialist parties.
|
In the early 20th century in the US, the Catholic hierarchy made clear that it would have to base its acceptance of Gompers’ AFL on assurances that it would not violate the right of private property and would not attempt to form a leftist leaning labor party. Gompers was more than willing to give these assurances since an exodus of Catholics from the unions of the AFL would, at that time, have enabled socialists to control the AFL, ending Gompers leadership. The “pure and simple trade unionism” that Gompers advocated made it unnecessary for the Catholic hierarchy to create a Catholic union federation parallel with those in Europe.[24]
One can find many examples of unions whose autonomy has been corrupted through domination from the outside. There were unions dominated by the party-state in Communist countries. By the late-1920s in the Soviet Union, the trade unions were no longer organs representing the special interests of the working class, but had become organs within the machinery of the state for realizing the state’s goal of increasing productivity.[25] Moreover, in the non-Communist countries during the Cold War, there were unions dominated by the foreign policy interests of the US and its allies. The American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations through its overseas institutes, such as the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which was active in Latin America, promoted unions that would compete with leftist unions and that would use their strength to oppose leftist governments. By the end of the Cold War, the divisive activities of these US dominated unions had so weakened labor movements in their countries that they were less able to resist the austerity and privatization programs promoted by their neoliberal governments.
7 Further Investigation
The present account leaves untouched vast areas of union activity. Admittedly, it centers on Western Europe and North America, areas where the wage system first predominated. Further investigation is needed to trace the philosophical influences on the various stages of development of unionism in other areas of the world. Without studying how philosophical currents influence unionism in Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Algeria, India, or Indonesia, it would be foolhardy simply to project on unionism there the influences found in Western Europe and North America.
Notes
[1]For an account of how liberty and misery came together to form voluntary associations, see E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (New York:World Publishing Company, 1962), chapter 11.
[2] William H. Sewell, Jr., “Artisans, Factory Workers, and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1789-1848,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 59-63.
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1761), book 2.
[4] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy and its Discontents: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 185-189.
[5] Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1799, translated by A. Forrest and C. Jones (New York: Vintage, 1974), part 2, chapter 4.
[6] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), chapter 2. Kant’s notion of humans as ends was picked up by German philosophers of the Marburg school some of whom viewed Kant’s ethics as a basis for socialism. See, Harry Van Der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), chapter 6.
[7] The corporate craft concept was still alive as late the time of G.W.F. Hegel, who used it to develop his concept of a civil society. See his Philosophy of Right (1821), translated by T.M. Knox (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952), paragraphs 202-207.
[8] Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1790), part 1, “Observations on the Declaration of Rights.”
[9] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, Vintage, 1966), 669-700.
[10] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), chapter 2, section 5; also Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), “Labor Movements.”
[11] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), beginning of Section 2; and Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution,Volume 2:The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 115-125.
[12] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital:1848-1875 (New York: Mentor, 1979), 117-125.
[13] Jürgen Kocka, “”Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800-1875,” in Working-Class Formation, edited by I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 338-346.
[14] For a comparison of the union/party relation in different countries, see Aristide R. Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?” in Working-Class Formation edited by I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 408-430.
[15] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690), chapter 8.
[16] Quoted from unpublished speech, “Recognition of the Trade Union,” by Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relation, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 82.
[17] For the 1902 debate on the legal status of unions between Gompers and Louis Brandeis, then a Boston lawyer, see Tomlins, The State and the Unions, 83-91.
[18] Philip S Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 2, From the Founding of the A.F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1955), chapter 19.
[19] Michelle Perrot, “On the Formation of the French Working Class,” in Working-Class Formation, edited by I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg, 108-110.
[20] For a detailed account, see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 4, The Industrial Workers of the World: 1905-1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965).
[21] The relevant articles from L’Ordine Nuovo are gathered in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings: 1910-1920, selected and edited by Quintin Hoare and translated by John Matthews (New York: International Publishers, 1977).
[22] On interpreting these points, see Gwyn A. Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Communism in Italy: 1911-1921 (London: Pluto Press, 1975), chapters 5 and 6.
[23] Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria elaborated on these themes in his Socialism and Labor (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1902), which was published in the same year he played a role sympathetic to labor on an arbitration board set up by President Theodore Roosevelt to settle a major miners’ strike.
[24] Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 3, The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor, 1900-1909 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), chapter 5.
[25] In the Soviet Union, the effort by Mikhail Tomsky to maintain some autonomy for the unions in relation to the Communist Party and the state led to his having to resign from the presidency of the central council of trade unions at the end of 1928. Industrialization and planning would henceforth not face opposition from the trade union hierarchy. See E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies, A History of the Soviet Union: Foundations of a Planned Economy: 1926-1929 (London: Macmillan, 1969), volumn 1, part 1, section 20 (a), 580-599.
