Programme

The Transformation of the Labour Movement after 1968

The text presented here is merely a brief introduction to a series of articles. It is therefore general in character, offering an overview and a theoretical perspective. In writing it, we did not seek to provide a detailed analysis of individual strikes, but rather to sketch out the political-economic map on the basis of which the world proletariat, wandering and making mistakes, has been moving for the past half-century.

Contents

The late 1960s marked the exhaustion of the potential of the cycle of capitalist accumulation that had begun following the destruction of capital during the Second World War. The events of 1968–1969 – above all, the French “May” and the Italian “Hot Autumn” – were not reducible to student riots or isolated political outbursts: they coincided with a broad workers’ movement and laid bare the accumulated contradictions of the post-war model of state-monopoly capitalism.

The system of mass assembly-line production (the so-called “Fordism”), which had ensured high rates of growth in the 1950s and 1960s, was showing signs of exhaustion by the end of the decade. Among the competing explanations of this crisis, a prominent place is occupied by the Marxist law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: according to it, the continuous increase in the mass of machinery per worker (the growth of the organic composition of capital) meant that the surplus value created by living labour could no longer sustain the previous rate of profit.

At the level of production, the crisis manifested itself directly in the factories. The intensification of labour reached its limits, and workers responded with an increase in mass absenteeism, labour turnover, deliberate damage to equipment (sabotage) and defective output – this was recorded in factories in the US, Italy and France and is well documented in the literature on labour history.

For the ruling class, this objective impasse at the level of production developed into a full-scale crisis. Its symptom was stagflation, which called into question the effectiveness of the Keynesian model of state regulation that had prevailed since the 1940s.

Keynesianism was followed by an ideological reorientation towards monetarism and neo-liberalism (the Chicago School of Economics, M. Friedman, F. von Hayek). These ideas, which had previously remained on the periphery of the post-war economic mainstream, gained widespread acceptance in the 1970s – partly because they offered a coherent alternative programme at a time when the previous model was faltering. Under the slogans of “fighting inflation”, “freeing markets” and “supply-side economics”, policies were pursued that included dismantling elements of the “welfare state”, restraining wages and deregulating the movement of capital. Critics of this course – both at the time and subsequently – regarded it as a way of shifting the costs of the structural crisis onto wage labourers.

Alongside the direct assault on wages, neo-liberalism set in motion a process of large-scale financialisation. Against the backdrop of stagnating real incomes for the working class in the old metropoles from the 1970s onwards, financial capital began artificially to sustain levels of mass consumption through aggressive lending. The proletariat found itself ensnared in mortgages, consumer loans and student debt. In Marxist terms, this amounts to the direct extraction of a portion of the necessary product (the value required to reproduce labour power) through the mechanisms of fictitious capital and interest, leading to an unprecedented system of economic coercion. Debt bondage became a powerful instrument of class domination and discipline: a proletarian’s ability to strike and risk losing their job falls sharply when they face the threat of immediate repossession of their home by the bank.

Faced with a falling rate of profit and the exhaustion of the post-war growth model, capital sought new ways of reducing costs. The response was global restructuring: the large-scale export of capital – an essential feature of imperialism – to countries with cheaper labour. This process was driven primarily by the logic of market competition; its political consequence – regardless of whether it was deliberately planned – was the weakening of the old industrial trade unions in the Western countries. The transfer of a significant portion of industrial production from the old Western imperialist metropolises to countries with a lower organic composition of capital altered the structure of employment and the social base of the labour movement. Thus, the objective impasse of the old industrial model, coinciding with the political course pursued by the ruling class, brought about a new geography of global capitalism.

The technological precondition for this global restructuring and the “flight” of capital was a revolution in the sphere of circulation – the mass adoption of containerisation in maritime transport in the 1960s and 1970s. The introduction of the standardised shipping container dramatically accelerated the turnover of capital and drastically reduced the costs of transporting goods, acting as a powerful counter-tendency to the falling rate of profit. However, the adoption of this innovation also addressed a crucial political task: it radically altered the technical composition of capital in logistics and thereby physically undermined the structural power of dockworkers – historically one of the most militant and cohesive sections of the proletariat, which, before the container era, could paralyse the “circulatory system” of world trade with a single strike.

The processes described clearly demonstrate how economic changes and political decisions condition one another – making any purely economic or purely political analysis of this period inherently incomplete.

Thus, the waves of strikes in the 1970s unfolded against a backdrop of tectonic shifts in the capitalist mode of production itself. The workers’ economic resistance was confronted not merely by the position of individual corporations, but by a large-scale attempt on the part of the capitalist system as a whole to shift the costs of the structural crisis onto wage labourers. In this sense, the strike struggles of that period went beyond the usual bargaining over working conditions and acquired a broader political dimension. The working class lost that battle.

The Crisis of Factory Despotism and the Limits of Spontaneous Struggle (the 1970s)

In the early 1970s, the factory system of labour organisation (Taylorism) reached the limits of its effectiveness. Workers’ resistance was directed both against the intensification of labour and against the official trade unions, which by that time had lost the trust of a significant proportion of the workforce, having ceased to be independent organisations representing class interests and having definitively transformed themselves into an apparatus of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

In large factories, workers turned to direct action – “wildcat” strikes. In 1972, a strike broke out at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, USA, in protest against the intensification of labour: the assembly line was running at a rate of around 100 cars per hour, leaving workers approximately 36 seconds for each operation. In 1973, workers at the French Lip factory in Besançon occupied the plant and organised independent production and sale of watches.

These events reveal an internal contradiction that can be described in dialectical terms. On the one hand, they demonstrated the workers’ genuine capacity for grassroots self-organisation – in defiance of both the official trade unions and the capitalists. On the other hand, the Lip experience itself illustrates the limits of this self-organisation in the absence of a broader political strategy. Having occupied the factory, the workers found that isolated workers’ self-management was forced to operate according to the very laws of the market against which it had rebelled: to compete, cut costs and seek buyers. The enterprise survived in various forms until 1981 and was repeatedly reorganised – which in itself testifies to the resilience of the experiment, but also to the constant pressure of the market and political environment, which the enterprise ultimately could not withstand.

Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology that «the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas»1. Left to the mercy of spontaneity and deprived of a revolutionary party, the working masses inevitably fall captive to bourgeois ideas – and the Lip workers were no exception: they naively believed that they could become a “just” collective capitalist in the ocean of market spontaneity. Lacking political leadership and the goal of smashing the state machine of capital, they remained defenceless against the logic of the world market, which ruthlessly forced them to exploit themselves, while the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie predictably isolated and stifled this and other spontaneous centres of trade-unionist struggle (limited to the confines of the capitalist system).

The Destruction of Fixed Capital: The British Miners’ Strike (1984–1985)

In its efforts to overcome the crisis of over-accumulation and restore the rate of profit, capital was faced with the need to radically reduce the cost of labour. The organised labour movement remained the main obstacle to this. However, it was not the official trade union structures that posed a threat to the system – their top bureaucracy had long since become intertwined with the state-monopoly apparatus, assuming the role of buffer and manager of the class compromise. The real danger lay in the grassroots militancy of the working masses, which was capable of paralysing the economy. Consequently, in the 1980s, the ruling class embarked on a targeted political and economic assault on the most organised sections of the labour movement. The British miners’ strike of 1984–1985 was a prime example of this.

The Thatcher government did not enter into confrontation with the miners unprepared. As early as 1977, an internal Tory Party document (the “Ridley Plan”) outlined a strategy for confronting the trade unions, including the stockpiling of coal. By 1984, stocks at power stations had been significantly increased, depriving the strike of an immediate economic lever of pressure. The extent to which these preparations were centrally planned remains a matter of historical debate; however, the very fact of the state’s structural readiness for a protracted confrontation is evident.

The British coal-mining industry had historically developed a high organic composition of capital, which exerted downward pressure on the rate of profit. The industry’s fatal crisis came when it became uncompetitive vis-à-vis producers using other energy sources (oil, gas and nuclear power) and cheap imported coal. The individual labour time required to produce a unit of energy from coal in deep British mines proved to be substantially greater than the new, globally established socially necessary labour time. In these circumstances, the decision to close the mines and carry out mass redundancies among miners – initially, the plan involved 20 mines and 20,000 jobs, although by the end of the decade the number of mines closed was considerably greater – was, from a political-economic perspective, an act of forcibly subjecting the industry to the dictatorship of the global law of value: the physical destruction of vast masses of “dead labour” (fixed capital) that had ceased to secure the required rate of profit and had therefore been devalued by the world market.

The state deployed its entire arsenal of repression: from the confiscation of trade union funds to large-scale police violence, one of the best-documented examples of which was the Battle of Orgreave. However, the defeat of the strike was determined not only by external pressure from the state. Here, it is necessary to take into account the internal contradictions of the labour movement itself. The strike began without a nationwide ballot of NUM2 members, which undermined its legitimacy from the outset in the eyes of some organised workers and provided its opponents with a formal argument. The split within the miners’ movement led to the formation of the strike-breaking UDM3, which drew its support primarily from the Nottinghamshire mines. The TUC4 and a number of industrial trade unions limited their support for the strikers: from a class perspective, this behaviour was a logical consequence of the institutional integration of the trade union bureaucracy with the state-monopoly apparatus. The bureaucracy of the official trade unions constitutes a classic labour aristocracy, bribed by the super-profits of imperialism. It objectively acted as the direct agency of the bourgeoisie within the labour movement, prioritising the preservation of its privileged position over class solidarity with the strikers.

The combination of these factors – state preparations, legal pressure, internal divisions and the refusal of the trade union apparatus to give full support to the striking workers – sealed the miners’ defeat. This crushing defeat paved the way for a large-scale offensive against the working conditions and social gains of the working class.

Class Struggle East of the Berlin Wall and the Price of Illusions

The “Solidarity” movement in Poland (1980–1981), having begun as a classic form of proletarian resistance to the reduction in the value of labour power, harboured an internal contradiction from the very outset. The Catholic Church and the liberal intelligentsia (above all, the circles around KOR5) became an organic part of the movement, partly because Catholic and nationalist identities were widespread among the workers themselves. This internal ideological mixture determined the heterogeneity of the movement: alongside demands concerning working conditions and the right to independent trade unions, national-Catholic and anti-communist motives were present from the outset, reflecting the genuine convictions of a significant proportion of the participants, rather than merely an agenda imposed from outside.

In the absence of an independent class programme and amid a deepening economic crisis, the movement was unable to maintain a proletarian class line. Subsequently, in 1989–1990, it was precisely the pro-Western and liberal factions that found themselves in the most advantageous position, enabling them to convert the movement’s accumulated political capital into positions within the new system. The energy of the working class, which lacked its own revolutionary vanguard, was once again used in the interests of one of the factions of capital.

The miners’ strikes in Kuzbass and Donbass in 1989 were a spontaneous working-class response to the deep structural crisis of the USSR’s economy – a crisis stemming from the exhaustion of the extensive model of accumulation and manifested in technological backwardness, chronic imbalances (primarily between Departments I and II) and an acute shortage of goods. It was here that the dominance of the ruling class’s ideas manifested itself with the greatest brutality and tragic clarity. Deprived of a communist programme, the workers mistakenly demanded “economic autonomy” for enterprises. This demand objectively turned the proletariat into a blind battering ram in the hands of that section of the nomenclature (the de facto bourgeoisie) which was preparing to dismantle the inefficient form of the economic system.

Faced with a falling rate of profit, the party and economic nomenclature, which already controlled the resources, used the workers’ protest to discard the thoroughly rotten fiction of “socialism”.

The class energy of the miners, channelled into the false trade-unionist path, ensured capital’s successful transition to privatisation. Yesterday’s secretaries of CPSU committees transformed themselves into “efficient owners” in the blink of an eye. For the proletariat, however, this resulted in the destruction of the productive forces and acts of desperate futility (for example, the “railway wars” of 1998).

The “New” Reserve Armies of Labour and “Old” Exploitation

Since the 1990s, the process of globalisation has entered a new phase: the intensification of capital exports and the relocation of production have coincided with internal processes of industrialisation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As a result of this interaction, one of the largest contingents of the global industrial proletariat in history in terms of absolute numbers has emerged – although the proportion of industrial workers in total employment has continued to decline in a number of countries. By concentrating millions of workers in the mega-factories of China and India, capital, in accordance with its own inexorable law, is creating its own gravediggers. Strikes here are fierce, directly affecting the global mass of surplus value.

In the old metropolises of imperialism, the bourgeois illusion of a “post-industrial society” masks the fact that the industrial and logistics working class has not disappeared. By offloading some “unprofitable” production to countries with a lower value of labour power, capital has offset the fall in the rate of profit within the old metropolises through the super-exploitation of cheap labour – drawing millions of migrants into construction, meat processing, heavy industry and logistics hubs. The import of relatively cheap labour has enabled the bourgeoisie to reduce the average cost of reproducing labour power and to divide the proletariat along national lines.

However, this renewed industrial working class continues to resist.

In Germany in 2020, appalling exploitation of Eastern European migrants came to light at the giant meat-processing plants of the monopolist Tönnies, where they had been hired through a system of subcontracting firms (the so-called “Werkverträge”). Because of their extreme vulnerability, the constant threat of deportation and the fact that their accommodation in overcrowded barracks was directly dependent on the owner of the enterprise, the workers were virtually unable to organise a full-scale strike. Their main forms of protest remained scattered complaints.

However, this super-exploitation suddenly became the subject of high-profile exposés by the liberal bourgeois media and human rights NGOs. This was not an act of abstract humanism. The plight of these disenfranchised workers was cynically used as a tool in the competitive struggle between different factions of capital.

In the US, the nationwide strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in autumn 2023 – a victory in terms of its immediate results, which affected the plants of the “Big Three” – secured a substantial increase in wages and improvements in working conditions. However, critics within the labour movement pointed out that questions concerning employment at electric-vehicle plants and the position of temporary contract workers remained unresolved. The 2022 victory of the Amazon warehouse workers’ collective at JFK8 on Staten Island, whose ranks were predominantly made up of Black and Latin American workers, demonstrated the real possibility of self-organisation in a sector previously considered impossible to organise – although subsequent difficulties in securing a first collective agreement and organisational problems within ALU6 laid bare the limits of a victory in trade union elections without a stable, autonomous class structure. Be that as it may, both cases shattered the myth that industrial class struggle had disappeared at the heart of imperialism.

A key feature of the transformation of capitalism after 1968 was colossal socio-demographic change – first and foremost, the mass feminisation of wage labour. Faced with falling profits, capital dismantled the Fordist “single-breadwinner” model (the male worker’s family wage). The entry of women into social production is the first condition of their emancipation; however, under capitalism, it has resulted in double oppression. The sharp reduction in the value of labour power has meant that, in order to secure a family’s basic subsistence, both men and women are now forced to sell their labour power. At the same time, the colossal burden of unpaid reproductive labour (raising children, caring for the sick and running the household) has not disappeared, falling primarily on women’s shoulders. Capitalism has continued to prey on this labour, effectively subsidising the costs of the social reproduction of a new generation of workers at women’s expense. This is precisely why feminist and women’s strikes (from Latin America to Europe) form part of class resistance as a whole. They have laid bare the fact that capitalist accumulation is based not only on direct surplus labour at the workbench, but also on the total appropriation of unpaid reproductive labour.

In inseparable connection with this process, there has been a large-scale proletarianisation of the service sector, healthcare and education. Whilst in the mid-20th century these spheres appeared to analysts to be far removed from classical production, today capital has brought about their real subordination, transforming social reproduction into a commodity. Teachers, nurses and social workers are subjected to the most brutal form of neo-Taylorism: strict time quotas per patient or pupil are imposed, algorithmic control is introduced, and every step is commercialised. Social benefits have been transformed into ordinary commodities. In response to this degradation of working conditions, the vanguard of the modern class struggle in the metropolises has shifted precisely into these sectors. The powerful nurses’ strikes in the UK and the unprecedented wave of “Red for Ed” teachers’ strikes in the US demonstrate that the proletariat of the social sector is today striking against the very logic of capitalism’s destruction of the conditions of human reproduction.

Alongside industrial exploitation, capital extracts surplus value from precarious sections of the workforce through the so-called “gig economy”. Platform workers – employed, albeit under conditions of extreme instability – do not correspond to the Marxist category of the reserve army of labour in the strict sense: the latter refers to the unemployed or partially employed, who exert downward pressure on wage levels. Nevertheless, platform employment is functionally akin to this category: it keeps workers in a state of constant competition with one another and hinders collective organisation. Platforms (Uber, Deliveroo, etc.) are not merely a technological innovation, but the latest digital form of the real subordination of labour. Here we are witnessing the revival, in a high-tech guise, of the classic piece-rate wage, which, as analysed in detail in Volume I of Capital, is the form most suited to the capitalist system of sweatshop production and the extension of the working day. Algorithmic control is heir to Taylorism’s objective – the maximum intensification of labour – but achieves it by different means: not through timekeeping and the standardisation of operations, but through the management of demand, ratings and dynamic pricing. Operational flexibility is retained, and it is precisely this that serves as ideological cover, allowing wage labour to be presented as a “partnership”. The derisory legal fiction of the “independent contractor” flatters the self-esteem of the atomised worker, but in reality merely masks the classic piece-rate form of remuneration, shifting the costs of reproducing labour power (vehicle depreciation, medical treatment) onto the proletarian themselves.

It is telling that early protests in the “gig economy” often took place not under slogans calling for the abolition of wage labour, but around demands for “fair competition” and “transparent rates” – that is, within the petty-bourgeois horizon of a “fair market”. This clearly demonstrates how the legal fiction of self-employment shapes workers’ real consciousness, reproducing the ruling ideas even under conditions of objective exploitation. However, the law of the concentration and socialisation of labour operates inexorably: international strikes by platform couriers and taxi drivers demonstrate that capital, even under conditions of extreme legal and spatial atomisation of workers, inevitably produces its own gravediggers and drives them towards unity.

Appendix

Statistical Illusion and Political-Economic Reality

Any quantitative study of the state of the global labour movement inevitably encounters distortions – whether deliberate or not – in official statistics. Bourgeois sociology obscures the scale of the class struggle. Statistics also frequently serve as an instrument of class domination – the art of lying through carefully calibrated figures. To see the true picture, it is necessary to systematically deconstruct the two main methodological tricks of bourgeois sociology.

The First Trick: The Illusion of Absolute Quantitative Indicators

The most primitive method is simply to count strikes as discrete events. Under this approach, a local strike by 50 bakers in Europe is equated with a strike by hundreds of thousands or millions of proletarians in India (both are recorded as “a single event”). Since thousands of local strikes took place in the advanced countries in the 1970s, whereas today the class struggle in Asia takes the form of massive nationwide actions, a graph based on this methodology would paint a false picture of the conflict subsiding. Moreover, capitalist states deliberately exclude “wildcat” strikes from their reports and classify mass workers’ actions as “disturbances of public order”.

The Second Trick: Ignoring the Size of the Proletariat

Another method of distortion is to calculate average figures across countries without taking into account the size of the working class. The materialist approach requires the class itself, in its total mass, to be the unit of measurement. Every striking worker must carry equal weight, regardless of the state within whose borders they are exploited.

Guided by this principle, let us turn to objective reality.

In the countries of “old imperialism”, the statistics do indeed show a decline. In the UK, 23.9 million working days were lost in 1972; by the 2010s, this figure had fallen to around 450,000 days a year – a decline of more than fiftyfold.

In Japan, the period of rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by intensified negotiations over wage increases against the backdrop of the customary annual “Spring Struggle”7: the number of strikes lasting at least half a day reached 2,256 in 1970, with 1,719,551 participants. The subsequent job cuts, prompted by internal economic instability amid the crisis, led to a rise in the number of strikes, which peaked in 1974 at 5,197 strikes involving 3,622,830 people. Thereafter, the number of strikes began to decline, falling particularly sharply from the second half of the 1980s – during the period of the expansion of the economic “bubble”. This trend continued even after the bubble burst in the second half of the 1990s, despite the fact that the average wage of workers in private companies continued to decline steadily during this period. During the crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, workers’ struggles continued to ebb: in 2010, there were only 38 strikes lasting half a day or more, involving 2,480 people.

Bourgeois sociology takes this fact – which reflects the weakening of the labour movement in particular countries – and presents it as the “world-historical decline” of the proletariat.

The picture changes radically when one looks at those regions to which industrial capital has been relocated. In China, where official statistics on labour disputes are not published by the state, independent sources record a sharp increase: the China Labour Bulletin “Strike Map” database has recorded more than 16,000 protests since 2011, of which 1,794 occurred in 2023 alone – more than twice as many as in 2022.

In India, the class struggle is reaching historic heights: while around 100 million proletarians took part in nationwide strikes between 2010 and 2012, the general strike in November 2020 drew 250 million participants, making it the largest in the history of capitalism.

The capitalist mode of production has neither resolved nor can it resolve class antagonisms. The export of capital has merely expanded the geographical scope of exploitation. What bourgeois statistics present as a historic defeat of the working class is, in reality, a massive expansion of the front of the class struggle.

Today, the world proletariat is technologically and politically fragmented, remaining largely in a state of a “class in itself”. This objective disunity means that even the most intense clusters of class anger are often confined within the framework of trade unionism – economic self-defence and bargaining over the terms of the sale of labour power.

Historical experience proves inexorably that neither spontaneous revolt nor the automatic action of economic crises is capable of destroying the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. By remaining confined to an exclusively economic struggle, the proletariat is condemned to wage an exhausting Sisyphean war against capital, with no prospect of eradicating exploitation itself. The principal historical task of the labour movement remains the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. The transition from fragmented defence to a political offensive requires the formation of a new type of Communist Party – a revolutionary vanguard, purged of opportunism, armed with advanced theory and capable of organising the proletariat into a “class for itself” with the aim of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

July 2026

Footnotes

  1. - K. Marx. The German Ideology // Marx Engels Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm ↩

  2. - NUM - National Union of Mineworkers ↩

  3. - UDM - Union of Democratic Mineworkers ↩

  4. - TUC - Trades Union Congress ↩

  5. - KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników – Workers’ Defence Committee) – a Polish opposition organisation founded in 1976 by a group of intellectuals: historians, lawyers and writers. It was established in response to the repression of workers following the strikes in Radom and Ursus in 1976. Members of KOR provided legal and material assistance to the affected workers and their families – hence the name. In 1977, the organisation broadened its remit and renamed itself KSS – KOR (Committee for Social Self-Defence – KOR), and in 1981 it dissolved itself following the legalisation of “Solidarity”. ↩

  6. - Amazon Labor Union – an independent trade union that emerged on 20 April 2021 from The Congress of Essential Workers, an organisation founded by Chris Smalls following his dismissal from JFK8 for organising a strike in protest against Amazon’s policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. On 1 April 2022, workers at JFK8 on Staten Island secured the first-ever recognition of a trade union at an Amazon facility in the US. ↩

  7. - Shunto (“spring struggle” / “spring offensive”) – a practice established in Japan in the mid-1950s involving annual, coordinated negotiations between trade unions and employers over wage increases and improved working conditions. Negotiations take place simultaneously across all sectors in spring (usually February–March), strengthening the trade unions’ bargaining position by synchronising demands across the economy as a whole. ↩

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