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Yet the history of the English labour movement before 1848 simply does not bear this out. It is a story of positivity, the survival and evolution of skill; of hillside mass meetings, study circles, cooperative stores. Above all, it produced a vibrant working-class culture – of song, poetry, folklore, newspapers and bookshops. In short, there was a ‘one’ where Marxist philosophy said there should be a ‘zero’.

What this means has to be confronted squarely by anyone who wants to defend materialist thinking about history: Marx was wrong about the working class. He was wrong to think automation would destroy skill; wrong to say the proletariat could not produce an enduring culture within capitalism. They had produced one in Lancashire before he had even graduated from university.

Marx, as a follower of Hegel, always insisted that the subject matter of social science should be ‘the whole thing’: the thing in a process of becoming and dying; the thing in its contradictions; the official thing but also the subtextual, hidden thing. He followed this method rigorously with regard to capitalism, but not when it came to analysing the working class.

Engels’ anthropology of the English working class in 1842 is detailed, complex and specific. The Marxist theory of the proletariat is not: it reduces an entire class to a philosophical category. And it was about to be totally disproved.

1848–98: MEN VERSUS MACHINES

By the end of the nineteenth century, trade unions had become woven into the industrial fabric. For the most part, they were led by skilled workers with a bias towards moderation but fiercely defensive of their autonomy in the workplace.

Engels’s book on the English working class was not published in Britain until 1892, by which time it was a museum piece. His preface to the first UK edition recognized this, and stands both as a brilliant insight into capitalism’s adaptive nature and as an act of self-delusion about the sources of moderation among workers.

In Britain, after radical republicanism had fizzled out in 1848, the stable form of working-class organization was trade unions organized by skilled workers. Wherever the factory system was rolled out – particularly in metalwork and engineering – the autonomous skilled worker became the norm. Radicalism and utopian socialism were sidelined.

Engels rationalized this first through economics. After 1848, with new markets, new technologies and an expanded money supply, Engels recognized the takeoff of ‘a new industrial era’ – what Kondratieff would dub the second long cycle – which would run until the 1890s. And he identified something crucial to its technological paradigm: cooperation between labour and capital.

The system was now so profitable that the British bosses no longer needed to use the methods of Oliver Twist. The workday was limited to ten hours, child labour was reduced, diseases of poverty were suppressed by urban planning. Now, wrote Engels, employers were apt ‘to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of trade unions’.¹³

The British workforce had expanded to include millions of unskilled, poor and precarious workers. But Engels recognized a ‘permanent improvement’ for two specific groups: the factory workers and those in ‘the great trade unions’ – by which he meant skilled jobs dominated by adult men.

Engels said workers had become moderate because they ‘shared in the benefits’ of Britain’s imperial power. Not just the skilled workers – whom he described as ‘an aristocracy of labour’ – but also the broad mass of people, who Engels believed also benefited from falling real prices as a result of Britain’s Empire. However, he thought Britain’s competitive advantage was temporary and that skilled privilege would also be temporary.

Meanwhile, among the workers in the rest of the developed world, he could see only pre-1848 levels of rebellion and alienation. So Engels, in the late 1880s, begins a second attempt to rationalize the non-emergence of working-class communism: Britain had bought off its workers by exploiting its imperial power, but when the rest of the world caught up with Britain, moderation would disappear.

It was a near-total misreading of the situation. Skill, passivity and political moderation were pervasive all across the workforce of the developed world during the second half of the nineteenth century. We could draw on any number of case studies; some of the most detailed were written in Canada.

Gregory Kealey’s account of Toronto’s barrel makers shows how, in each workshop, the union set the price of labour. There was no wage bargaining. Coopers would meet, present a price list, and the bosses had to either accept it or start a lockout. Like skilled workers everywhere, though the working week was six days, they regularly took a ‘Blue Monday’ – that is an unofficial day off after getting drunk on Sunday night.

They had total autonomy over their own work. They owned their own tools – indeed the term for a strike was ‘taking their tools out of the shop’. They controlled access to apprenticeships tightly. They would restrict output during downturns to keep wages up. They achieved all this through secret meetings, Masonic handshakes, oaths, rituals and total solidarity.

And the union was only the base-layer of a complex tapestry of institutions. ‘The culture of the nineteenth-century working man,’ writes Bryan Palmer in a study of workers in Hamilton, Ontario,

embraced a rich associational life, institutionalised in the friendly society, the mechanics institute, sporting fraternities, fire companies [i.e. volunteer fire brigades] and working men’s clubs. Complementing these formal relationships were less structured but equally tangible ties of neighbourhood, workplace, or kin, manifesting themselves in the intimacy of the shared pail of beer, or the belligerence of the charivari [Punch & Judy] party.¹⁴

In the workplace, informal control – not just over wages but over the work itself – extended into even the newest industries.¹⁵

These extraordinary levels of informal workers’ control were not residual, they were actually created by the new technological processes of the mid-century. The signature technologies of the second long wave – telegraphy, steam locomotives, printing, iron and heavy engineering – were heavily manual, which means that the strong hand and the experienced

brain were vital. ‘The manager’s brain is under the workman’s cap,’ was a working-class slogan that reflected reality. To prevent skill constantly outpacing automation, the bosses would need ‘a thinking machine’, warned the leader of the Toronto coopers’ union.¹⁶ But that would take another 100 years.

Even during the downswing of the second long cycle, after 1873, as managers tried to impose low-skilled work and automation, they largely failed. As Kealey concludes of the skilled Toronto workforce in the 1890s: ‘They had met the machine and triumphed.’¹⁷ By the 1890s, the existence of a skilled, privileged and organized layer of workers was a general feature of capitalism – not the result of one nation’s competitive advantage.

The combined impact of skilled autonomy, ‘the rich associational life’ and rising social-democratic parties would force capitalism into a new adaptation. Having ‘met the machine and won’, the organized worker would, in the first half of the twentieth century, meet the scientific manager, the bureaucrat and – eventually – the guard at the concentration camp.

1898–1948: PICK UP A PIG AND WALK

In 1898, in the freight yard of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, a manager called Frederick Winslow Taylor came up with a new solution to the century-old problem of skilled worker autonomy.

‘Pick up a pig and walk,’ Taylor told his labourers – a ‘pig’ being a lump of iron weighing 92lbs. By studying not just the time it took them to move the iron, but the detailed motion of their bodies, Taylor showed how industrial tasks could be made modular. Jobs could be broken down into learnable steps, and then allocated to workers less skilled than those currently doing them.

Taylor’s results were startling: productivity almost quadrupled. The incentive was a pay rise, from \$1.15 to \$1.85 a day.¹⁸ The ‘science’, from Taylor’s own scant description, seems to have involved putting a manager in strict control over the worker’s rest periods, and even over his speed of walking. Taylor wrote that the type of man suited to such work was ‘so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type’. On the basis of such insights, scientific management was born. Now Taylor applied his methods to other workplaces. At a ball-bearing factory, he introduced process changes that allowed the workforce to be cut from 120 to thirty-five, with the same output and increased quality. He observed: ‘This involved laying off many of the most intelligent, hardest working, and most trustworthy girls merely because they did not possess the quality of quick perception followed by quick action.’¹⁹

Outwardly, Taylorism was about time and motion. But its real purpose was the selection and stratification of the workforce, creating a layer of better-educated workers to check, organize and train the lower layers, and then imposing rigid management control. This, Taylor boasted, ‘rendered labor troubles of any kind or a strike impossible’.²⁰ The whole project was designed as an assault on skilled autonomy. The aim was to move the brain work as far away as possible from the manual work.

Though he had never heard of Taylor, in 1913 Henry Ford launched the second big innovation needed to enable semi-skilled work: the production line. At Ford, as at Bethlehem Steel, wages were hiked in return for absolute compliance. A ruthless anti-union hiring policy ensured management control. Three-quarters of Ford’s early workforce were firstgeneration immigrants, and overwhelmingly young.

Taylor, Ford and those who followed them effectively redesigned the working class. The skilled manual layer would survive – with machine-tool makers at its core. But there would now be a white-collar elite within the working class too. The white-collar workers owed their higher wages to the new system, where management were in control. Entering the white-collar layer could be done on merit, not just through family ties and seven-year apprenticeships, as had been the case with the engineers and the spinners – and in certain industries, white-collar work was more open to women.

Semi-skilled workers brought a critical difference to the innovation process: they would generally adapt their skills to new machines free of the restrictions imposed by craft unions. There would still be unskilled general labourers, but the centre of gravity of the working class had moved upwards, towards manual semi-skilled workers.

If all this was designed to induce passivity, it failed. What nobody foresaw was that this reshaped working class would become educated, radicalized and political. Taylor’s ‘dumb oxen’ would teach themselves to read – not just dime novels but philosophy. The white-collar secretaries and telephonists would become agitators and educators in mass socialist parties.

The raw facts of the labour upsurge of the 1900s are startling. An electoral breakthrough by the German SPD gave it 31 per cent of the vote in 1903. A clandestine labour movement in the tsarist empire formed itself into workers’ councils (soviets) and armed militias in 1905. French industry was paralysed by strikes in 1905–6, while union membership doubled in a decade. The USA saw the tripling of trade union density in ten years, even as the workforce itself grew by 50 per cent.²¹

Working-class towns became centres of a sophisticated culture – of clubs, libraries, choirs and nurseries, the separate working-class lifestyle and, above all, of resistance inside the factory.

From 1910 to 1913, unskilled workers staged a strike wave that rolled across the globe and became known as the Great Unrest. At the centre of it was the struggle for control. The Welsh miners’ union outlined a strategy that was being pursued everywhere: ‘Every industry thoroughly organized, in the first place, to fight, to gain control of, and then to administer, that industry … leaving to the men themselves to determine under what conditions and how, the work shall be done.’²²

It was as if, through their offensive against the old craft control of workplaces, Taylor and Ford had created a new and more sophisticated demand for democratic control among the workforce.

What halted the Great Unrest was a combination of economic downturn, beginning in 1913, and high levels of repression. When war broke out in August 1914, it seemed as if the whole thing had been a blip. Before we consider what happened next, we should ask how the Marxists of that era understood this new configuration of the working class. In summary, they did not.

In 1902, the exiled Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote a pamphlet that, although only mildly influential at the time, was to have huge significance for the far-left thinking of the twentieth century. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin stated baldly that workers were incapable of understanding the role allocated to them in the Marxist project. Socialist consciousness ‘would have to be brought to them from without’. ‘The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness,’ he wrote.²³ The labour movement, he said, would have to be ‘diverted’ from its spontaneous moderate pathways and towards the seizure of power. This stands in total contradiction to Marx’s understanding of the working class. For Marx, the working class was the self-contained agent of history; for Lenin it was more like a reagent – needing the catalyst of the intellectual-led vanguard party to set off the historical process.

But by 1914 Lenin had a new problem to address: why were the workers – so ferocious in their defence of wages and democracy during the Great Unrest – either enthused or paralysed by the patriotism that followed the outbreak of war?

To explain this, Lenin reached back to Engels’s ‘labour aristocracy’ theory, which he turned inside out. Instead of abolishing the skilled elite in Britain, said Lenin, the dash for colonies by all industrial countries had made the labour aristocracy the permanent feature of modern capitalism. They were the source of patriotism and moderation polluting the labour movement. Fortunately, a larger pool of unskilled workers still remained to provide the raw material for revolution. The political split between reform and revolution, Lenin claimed, was the material result of this stratification of the working class.

By now, Lenin was a long way from both Marx and Engels. For Marx, the working class is capable of becoming communist spontaneously; for Lenin it is not. For Marx, skill is destined to disappear through automation; for Lenin, skilled privilege at home is the permanent result of colonialism abroad.

LENIN AND THE ARISTOCRATS

In Lenin, there is no discussion of the economic or technical basis of the skilled layer’s privileges: it is as if they are simply awarded higher wages by the capitalists as a matter of policy. In fact, as we’ve seen, at this point the actual policy of the capitalists was focused on destroying skilled privilege and autonomy.

In 1920, Lenin restated the labour aristocracy theory, calling them ‘the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement … the real carriers of reformism and chauvinism’.²⁴ But this was an utterly bizarre thing to write in 1920. By then, the working class was four years into a wave of revolutionary struggles led by skilled workers. Between 1916 and 1921, the working class launched a frontal assault on management control. It would reach revolutionary proportions in Germany, Italy and Russia, and prerevolutionary levels in Britain, France and parts of the USA. In each case, the struggles were led by the so-called ‘labour aristocracy’.

I am loath to bolster the anti-Lenin industry. The man himself proved an adept revolutionary, ignoring in practice many of the strictures of his own theory. However, the labour aristocracy theory of reformism is rubbish. The source of patriotism is, unfortunately, patriotism, owing to the fact that just as classes are material, so are nations. In his prison notebooks, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci recognized that developed capitalist societies have layer upon layer of defence mechanisms. The state, he wrote, was ‘just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’. And one of the strongest emplacements is capitalism’s ability to grant reforms.²⁵

The 1902 theory, however, does contain a grain of truth, though not one palatable to most Marxists. To understand it, we must watch an unprecedented global drama unfold.

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: 1916–39

By 1916 the wheels had begun to come off the war machine. Dublin’s Easter Rising – led by an alliance of socialists and nationalists – failed completely. But it fired the starting pistol for five years of worldwide unrest. The poet Yeats sensed its global significance when he wrote of the ordinary men who’d led it: ‘All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.’²⁶

May Day 1916 saw Berlin’s factory workforce on strike against the war, battling the police and led by a new kind of union activist: the shop steward – elected by the rank and file, independent of the pro-war trade union leaders and usually a left-wing socialist. In Glasgow, another rank and file shop stewards’ group, the Clyde Workers Committee, were arrested en masse after leading strikes for workers’ control in the arms industry.²⁷

In February 1917 a strike wave in the arms factories of Petrograd, Russia, escalated to a nationwide revolution that forced the tsar to abdicate, bringing to power a provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists (Kondratieff was minister of agriculture). Russian workers created two new forms of organization: the factory committee and the soviet, the latter a geographically elected council of workers’ and soldiers’ delegates. And through the telegraph, the telephone and even military radio signals, the global unrest began to feed off itself. In May 1917 the French army mutinied. Of 113 divisions, forty-nine suffered disruption and nine were rendered incapable of fighting.

These events were shaped by a new sociology of the workplace and a new kind of war. From Seattle to Petrograd, as male workers joined the army, employers recruited women and unskilled teenagers into shipyards and engineering factories to work alongside the remaining skilled men whose jobs exempted them from military service.

With the unions supporting the war effort, and therefore opposed to strikes, shop stewards were a phenomenon that sprang up almost everywhere; they were drawn from the skilled layer but prepared to organize women and young men, across the old hierarchical boundaries, into ‘industrial unions’. When the revolutions broke out, the shop stewards formed the grassroots leadership.

Parallel to this, another radicalization was taking place in the trenches, led by young men who had learned the cruelty of industrial-scale warfare. They had seen notions of courage, nation and ‘manliness’ – notions absolutely central to the culture of work before 1914 – destroyed.

Now a widespread collapse of workplace order happened. By June 1917, Petrograd had 367 factory committees representing 340,000 workers. At the Brenner engineering factory, for example, the committee resolved: ‘In view of the management’s refusal to go on with production, the workers’ committee has decided, in general assembly, to fulfill the orders and to carry on working.’²⁸ No Bolshevik programme had ever called for workers’ control. Lenin was wary of it, initially trying to explain it as ‘a workers veto on management’ and later, as we will see, outlawing it.

The next great power to collapse was Germany; the German working class, having tried but failed to prevent the war starting, triggered its end. In November 1918, left-wing activists in the Imperial German Navy organized a mutiny which, within twenty-four hours, forced the ships back into port and sent thousands of rebel sailors speeding across Germany on armed trucks. Among their primary objectives was a radio tower in Berlin, from which they wanted to communicate with the revolutionary sailors of Kronstadt, Russia.

Across Germany, factory committees and soviet-style councils were formed. Within forty-eight hours of the mutiny, they had forced an armistice, the abdication of the Kaiser and the inauguration of a republic. Only by joining the revolution at the last moment did the moderate leaders of the mainstream socialist party head off a Russian-style revolution.

Then, in 1919, a mass strike in Italy led to a coordinated lockout of car workers in Turin, Milan and Bologna. They occupied the factories and – most significantly at Fiat in Turin – attempted to keep production going under their own control, with the help of allies among the technicians.

These events reveal a much more interesting sociology than the one Lenin imagined. In the first place, skilled workers were central. They fought for control in a new, explicit way. Workplace sociologist Carter Goodrich, observing the phenomenon in Britain, dubbed it ‘contagious control’:

The old, craft control almost necessarily implies small groups of skilled workers; the advocates of contagious control are for the most part either members of industrial unions