Chik Collins reviews Languages of Class Struggle: Communication and Mass Mobilisation in Britain and Ireland, 1842-1972 by John Foster (Praxis Press, 2024).
Serious historical studies of working class movements with a substantial focus on experience in Scotland will always be of deep interest to readers of Scottish Left Review. But John Foster’s Languages of Class Struggle will be of much heightened interest. Why so?
First, because of the book’s practical relevance for those who are committed in the present to the pursuit of radical social change. This commitment inevitably involves seeking to understand how working class movements have challenged the power of the capitalist state in the past, and how they can do so again.
Second, and connectedly, it is because the book presents a rich, historically grounded perspective on the kind of political practice that is able to prepare radicals in working class organisations, of both the workplace and the community, for the emergence of these moments of possibility, and to help them to exploit such moments when they do emerge.
In much of what has passed for ‘critical’ social science, the focus has not been on such moments of possibility for change. It has too often been on the apparently overwhelming forces of social reproduction which render anything beyond fairly marginal resistance unlikely if not all but impossible – and, by some accounts, even undesirable.
Foster, on the other hand, deploys a Marxist perspective that allows us, for sure, to understand the formidable barriers to the emergence of class conscious movements of working people. But that perspective allows us at the same time to grasp how the dynamic of capitalist development, and the struggles bound up with it, from time to time undermine those barriers, creating moments of practical possibility which can be harnessed.
Marx and Engels, in their political writings, were of course intensely interested in these moments. Indeed, as Foster demonstrates, Marx’s and Engels’ basic understanding of capitalism was profoundly shaped by the practical experience of those who participated in the 1842 General Strike.
However, Foster introduces a crucial extension to the Marxist theoretical perspective on how to understand these kinds of moments. This is the understanding of the role of language in social change developed in the early Soviet Union by the group around the psychologist L.S Vygotsky, including A.N. Leontiev, and by members of the ‘Bakhtin Circle’, most importantly V.N. Vološinov, whose Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) is still astonishingly fresh.
This perspective illuminates the profound significance of the clash of rhetoric in the ‘practical moments’ of class struggle. In these moments, possibilities for significant change crystallise, and are either amplified by class conscious leaders of working people’s movements, or muted by the agencies and instruments of the ruling class (including, too often, of course, the official labour movement itself).
As Vološinov puts it: “A word in the mouth of a particular individual person is a product of the living interaction of social forces” (p.41). However, in critical moments radical leaders are able to express this interaction in ways which both undermine the ruling powers and enlarge the scope for radical change. The language of the leaders of the UCS ‘work-in’ is a well-known case in point.
In such moments, the expressions of movement leaders can become both “objective facts” and “a tremendous social force” (35), shaping wider understandings and commitments. In such moments, movements can become, in Marxist terms, class conscious.
Such moments are relatively rare and generally, in the UK at least, they have not endured for that long. But despite the attempts by some historians to write them out of existence altogether, they are both clearly identifiable and of very real significance. They are significant because such practical moments have typically required important concessions and other highly consequential changes to secure the re-stabilisation of capitalist domination. Such moments are immeasurably more important for the learning of those pursuing radical social change than any number of studies of ‘domination as usual’.
Foster deploys the immense learning acquired over a lifetime of historical study to analyse five of these moments, including the 1842 General Strike. The ‘work in’ to defend shipbuilding on Clydeside in 1971-72 is compared with the 1919 mobilisation on Clydeside aimed at reducing the working week. Readers may be surprised to find that the later struggle is found to have been further reaching in the challenge it posed to the power of the capitalist state than the earlier struggle. In 1919, the concern of the majority of the workers was to defend the workshop control achieved over the war years, and the leaders sought to develop on this basis “an understanding of political economy that sought in the first instance to limit the capitalist market” (emphasis added). In 1971, however, leaders were able to attempt “a more profound reordering of meanings involving democracy, alienation and the role of the working class in carrying forward society’s productive potential” (64-65).
Foster’s analysis of the parallel 1919 strike in Belfast to reduce the working week reveals the “relatively fast development of class consciousness” within the city’s working class. This required skilled handling of the issue of sectarian divisions: “Repeatedly, and using very much the same rhetorical devices,” the strike’s leaders “would refer to sectarian conflict as a disabling division of the past, something blocking workers’ advance, and point to the real enemies in class terms and the need for a solidarity that encompassed all workers, both in the north and elsewhere”. The resulting movement, “for a period of up to two years was seen as a serious challenge by the region’s rulers” (91-92), and it was one which ultimately elicited a brutal response.
Events 18 months later at British level, in August 1920, saw the Trades Union Congress and the Councils of Action – established by the labour movement to forestall further war – threaten a general strike to halt British military intervention against Soviet Russia. Remarkably, “previously committed right wingers and friends of the government … actually supported the decision to proceed with preparations … to usurp the powers of constitutional government” (98). They did so to seek to re-establish their leadership credentials with a growing body of, especially younger, activists, who had been radicalised both by the experience of war and by the painstaking and patient work of socialist campaigners in their local communities and workplaces in the preceding years. This work enabled leaders such as Robert Williams of the transport federation unapologetically to declare to a joint Labour Party-TUC conference in August 1920 that “it was better to make peace unconstitutionally than to go to war and kill in the name of the British constitution”. The government of the day “speedily reversed course” in the face of a movement with a language increasingly posing some “fundamental issues of social system change” (12). The key priority of the capitalist state became, above all, to restore right wing leadership of the labour movement.
It is not possible here to do justice to these deeply researched historical studies. They draw on Foster’s many years of experience in presenting such historical studies to students – overwhelmingly working class – at Paisley Tech/University (now part of the University of the West of Scotland), and also to labour movement and community activists across the UK and internationally. Unlike so much contemporary ‘critical’ scholarship, the case studies – albeit detailed and at times challenging – are both intelligible and accessible.
In each case, the political economy underlying the struggle is masterfully laid bare, before the living dynamics of the day to day struggle are presented and analysed. And in each case we find deepening confirmation of an initial conclusion first reached by Foster fully fifty years ago. In his study of 19th Century England, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974), Foster pointed to the “perhaps surprising importance of language: of the forms in which the arguments were carried on” (124).
Why surprising? Perhaps because to many who have imbibed a caricature of Marxism-Leninism, language might seem all a bit too ephemeral – and philosophically ‘ideal’ – to be of such profound significance in shaping the actual ‘material’ development of society.
But Foster was onto the profound significance of language in processes of social change many years before other historians started to get excited about ‘the linguistic turn’. Unlike most of the latter, his turn to language, via the early Soviet theorists, has deepened our ability to identify and to understand those practical moments when working class movements have challenged the power of the capitalist state, and to orientate us towards how we prepare for and connect to such moments of possibility when they arise anew – as they almost certainly will.
Seen in this light, Languages of Class Struggle can be seen to present, perhaps above all, a powerful argument about the nature of political practice for those meaningfully – practically and intelligently – committed to challenging the power of capital. For Foster, it means sustained and patient work, in communities and workplaces, building networks, capacities and understandings. Conducted on the required scale, such work can create a movement. When moments of practical possibility arrive, such a movement, with agile leadership, prepared for the inevitable rhetorical battle, might, in Marx’s and Engels’ terms, prove “capable of ridding itself of the muck of ages” and “fitted to found society anew”.
The fact that this book is written by someone who has committed a near lifetime of activity (and almost 50 years as a community organiser living in Glasgow’s Govan) to implementing and developing such political practice adds a depth of experience and authenticity to this book (especially for readers of SLR) which very few – even of Foster’s diminishing generation – can match.
This is a book, then, which on many levels deserves to be discussed widely, and to be incorporated into educational courses at all levels and across varying contexts. Not everyone will agree with all of its arguments, of course. But those who are or can become motivated towards the pursuit of radical social change, and to challenging the power of the capitalist state in the process, will doubtless become better educated and prepared by engaging with its arguments in the constructive spirit which they merit.
Chik Collins was previously employed at the University of the West of Scotland and the University of the Faroe Islands, and is currently Director of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.