For Marx the British working class was both a practical inspiration and a challenge. Britain's was the world's first majority proletariat and in the 1840s was also the first to create a mass working class party. Yet in the second half of the 19th century British trade unions changed direction, allied themselves with bourgeois political parties and worked within the assumptions of the existing system. Marx's explanation of this transformation is, the article argues, of continuing importance for our understanding of working class consciousness—with its key elements carried forward by both Luxemburg and Lenin in their critique of the revisionism of the Second International. The main intent of the article is to use more recent examples of working class mobilization in Britain to show the continuing relevance of this analysis. It focuses in particular on the issue of the relationship between the working class and a Marxist party. In doing so it draws on the Soviet school of Vygotsky and Leontiev to argue for a dialectical and materialist understanding of the development of working class consciousness in which the role of a Communist Party, in Marx's terms, remains critical.
Marx Memorial Library and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in November 2011.
Engels (1881) "A Working Man's Party," Collected Works (CW), Vol. 24, pp. 404-407.
Foster, "The Aristocracy of Labour and Working Class Consciousness Revisited," Labour History Review 75, 3 (December 2010).
Marx, "Capital," I, CW 37, p. 286.
Engels, "1845 and 1885," Commonweal, CW 26, p. 297.
Engels to Jung, May 10, 1871, CW 44, p. 147 Engels to Kautsky, September 12, 1882, CW 46, p. 322.
1892 Preface, CW 27, p. 269; Engels to Sorge, April 19, 1 890, CW 48, pp. 485-487.
Lenin, Preface to the Correspondence ot Marx and Engels with Sorge and others [1907J, CW 11.
Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (Pluto, 1999).
James Klugmann's History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formation and Early Years, 1919-1924 (Lawrence andWishart, 1968).
J. Skelly, The General Strike, 1926 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1976).
Foster, "What Kind of Crisis? What Kind of Ruling Class," in John Mcllroy et al. (eds.), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout (University of Cardiff Press, 2004).
Samuel Courtauld writing in The Economist, April 4, 1942, Angus Calder, The People's War (Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 294.
Noreen Branson, The Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1985).
Paul Addison, The Road to '45 (Pimlico, 1994), pp. 190ff,
National Archives RG 23/43 Survey of 5,639 readers in June-July 1943.
Peter Sloman, "Rethinking a Progressive Movement: The Liberal and Labour Parties in the 1945 General Election," Historical Research 94, 226 (November 2011)
Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley, Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson (Lawrence and Wishart, 2011)
John Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves (Routledge, 1998).
D. McAdam, C. Tilly, and S. Tarrow, The Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2000).
D. Howard (ed.), Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (New York, 1971), p. 231.
Ibid., pp. 262.
A. N. Leontiev, Activity, Consciousness and Personality (New Jersey, 1978), p. 94.
V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and Language (New York, 1973), p. 21.
Charles Collins, Language, Ideology and Social Consciousness: Developing a Socio-historical Approach (Ashgate, 1999); Charles Woolfson, "How Workers on the Clyde Gained the Capacity for Class Struggle: The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work in 1971-1972," in A. Campbell et al. (eds.), The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964-1979 (Ashgate, 1999).
Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered : What is to be Done? In Context (Leiden, 2006)
Rosa Luxemburg, "Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Neue Zeit, 1904.
Karl Kautsky, "Trade Unions and Socialism," International Socialist Review 1,10 (April 1901)
Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905) and Theses on the Fundamental Tasks of the Second Congress (1920).
Y. V. Andropov, The Teaching of Karl Marx and Some Questions of Building Socialism (Moscow: Novosti, 1983). Foster, "Trade Unions under Socialism: Perestroika Revisited," Communist Review (Winter 2007).
Blade Nzimande and Mpume Sikhosana, "Civil Society and Democracy," African Communist 128 (1992).
Marx and Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," CW 6, p. 518.