Workers’ Movement

A form of mass movement, refers to the social movement joined, driven and led by the working class in order to fight for its own political, economic and cultural interests. The main subject of the workers’ movement is the working class, which includes the working-class political parties, trade unions and other workers’ organizations. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote: The factory-hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the workers’ movement, and the others have joined this movement just in proportion as their handicraft has been invaded by the progress of machinery. After the Industrial Revolution in Europe during the mid-18th century, with the rapid development of capitalism, the ranks of industrial workers gradually formed, the cruel exploitation of workers by capitalists intensified the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. In the 1850s and 1860s, the industrial production of capitalist countries in Western Europe doubled and the industrial proletariat grew rapidly, while the fundamental contradictions and class contradictions of the capitalist society became increasingly intense, and the economic crises of capitalism arose, which were the socio-economic prerequisites and class basis for the formation and development of the workers’ movement.

The workers’ movement has gone through a tortuous process of development from spontaneity to consciousness. The early workers’ movement was characterized by spontaneity and scatteredness, and its theoretical expression was the utopian socialist current. The then workers’ movement was appropriate to the immature condition of capitalist production and the immature class condition. In its process of development, the workers’ movement constantly moved from the spontaneous struggle of individual workers to the stage of organized and conscious activity, that is, from smashing machines and destroying factories to fighting against their possessors. As stated in Capital, the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. In the 1830s and 1840s, three major workers’ uprisings broke out in Europe: the armed uprising of the Lyonnais weavers in France from 1831 to 1834; the Chartist movement in England, which began in 1836 and lasted 12 years; and the Silesian weavers’ uprising in Germany in 1844. The occurrence of these workers’ uprisings and riots was not accidental, they were the result of the cruel exploitation and oppression of workers after the bourgeoisie acquired political supremacy, and also a manifestation of the intensification of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist society. At the same time, it shows that the workers’ movement had entered the stage of self-conscious struggle and waged political struggle with the bourgeoisie for its own interests. The working class has entered the arena of world history with great strides as “soldiers of socialism”. Lenin called the Chartist movement in England as “the first broad, truly mass, and politically organized revolutionary movement”. The publication of The Communist Manifesto and the establishment of the Communist League, the first proletarian party, marked the combination of the workers’ movement and the scientific theory of communism, and that it was truly led by a proletarian party. A qualitative leap has taken place in the workers’ movement. After the failure of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, the workers’ movement temporarily entered a low ebb, and in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers’ movement in various countries rose up again, the workers’ revolutionary organizations arose accordingly, and in August 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association was founded. It is historically known as the “First International”. The First International has formulated the programme and the tactical principles of the struggle of the working class and its political parties, trained a number of excellent cadres of the workers’ movement, supported the workers’ movements in various countries, and united the workers’ movements scattered across the world. Thus, the workers’ movement entered the stage of international workers’ movement.

The history of the international workers’ movement is full of struggles against all kinds of opportunism, including opposition to Proudhon’s reformism, trade unionism, Bakunin’s anarchism, Lassalle’s opportunism, etc. The forms of these opportunist factions were different, but their essence was the same: they all advocated the retention of the fundamental system of capitalism and pursued some partial reforms of the old economic relations, which is a kind of economic reformism. Criticizing various erroneous currents, the First International furthered the combination of Marxism with the international workers’ movement.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the center of the international workers’ movement shifted to Russia, ushering in the new Leninist stage in the international workers’ movement. The victory of the October Socialist Revolution was a historic victory of the international workers’ movement in the world. The establishment of the Third International in March 1919 marked the beginning of a new period of development of the international communist movement. The historic victory of the international workers’ movement after the World War II was the establishment of people’s democracies in a series of European countries and the development of the workers’ movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The workers’ movement in China was led by the Communist Party of China from the very beginning, and after the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921, the Secretariat of the Chinese Labor Organization was established, as the organ leading the workers’ movement. In 1925, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions was established in Guangzhou. From 1927 to 1949, in the enemy-ruled areas, the Chinese workers’ movement mainly acted in concert with the armed struggle in the countryside; during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, it opposed the aggression of Japanese imperialism in various forms; during the period of New-Democratic Revolution (1946–49), it mainly and directly supported the Revolutionary War of Liberation. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the workers’ movement focused its efforts on the realization of the socialist revolution and socialist construction and reform led by the Communist Party of China, with the goal of pushing forward the smooth progress of the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the hard work of striving for the realization of communism.