John Kelly’s Trade Unions and Socialist Politics appeared in 1988, three years after the defeat of the British miners’ strike and amid the organised labour movement’s continuing retreat under the Thatcher government. It targeted a growing body of opinion among left academics, Communist Party intellectuals, and trade union officials who argued that changes in the working-class composition, declining trade union membership, and Thatcherism’s electoral victories had rendered the traditional politics of class struggle obsolete. Verso’s description confirms that Kelly explicitly challenged claims that unions were in chronic decline or had exhausted their progressive potential, calling such arguments based on “poor sociology and bad history”.
Kelly sets himself two fundamental questions. What kinds of trade union strategy are most likely to develop political class consciousness among workers? And what role could such strategies play in a transition to socialism? These are serious questions, and Kelly treats them with a seriousness absent from much of the literature generated by the demoralised British left of the late 1980s. The book is extensively researched and draws on historical material, strike statistics, surveys, and the writings of classical Marxists. Yet the volume’s fundamental weakness is that it keeps these questions within the political horizons of the existing trade union apparatus and the Labour Party. Nearly four decades later, the fate of these organisations provides an objective test of the perspective advanced in 1988. That test has not favoured Kelly’s conclusions.
Kelly’s argument
The book examines the classical Marxist literature on trade unionism before considering the political and strategic problems confronting British unions during the 1980s. Kelly begins with Marx and Engels, for whom unions were both an elementary organisational expression of workers’ resistance to capital and a potential means for broader class consciousness to emerge. He then considers Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902), with its argument concerning the limitations of spontaneous trade union consciousness, before turning to Antonio Gramsci and his discussion of trade unionism and the factory councils.
Kelly’s sympathies lean heavily toward Rosa Luxemburg. In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), Luxemburg examined how mass struggles affect the working class’s political consciousness and organisation. Kelly draws on historical evidence from strike movements to argue that participation in industrial struggle can transform workers’ consciousness. This argument is central to his response to those who, during the 1980s, increasingly depicted the working class as fragmented, politically quiescent, and incapable of collective action. Verso’s account of the book similarly stresses Kelly’s use of empirical evidence to support Luxemburg’s emphasis on the transformative consequences of participation in trade union struggles.
From this foundation, Kelly conducts a two-front polemic. Against the Eurocommunist and “new realist” currents associated with Marxism Today, which drew ever more pessimistic conclusions about the working class’s historical prospects, Kelly argues that the difficulties confronting trade unions in the 1980s were neither historically unprecedented nor evidence that collective working-class organisation had reached its end. His criticism of this standpoint remains one of the book’s strongest elements. The labour movement was experiencing a serious defeat. Still, defeat is not the same thing as the disappearance of the working class or the abolition of the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.
On the other flank, however, Kelly challenges conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy, particularly those associated with tendencies to his left. He opposes the claim that full-time trade union officials constitute a distinctive conservative bureaucracy that systematically seeks to contain the struggles of the workers they nominally represent. Drawing on empirical studies, Kelly argues that officials may, under certain circumstances, be as militant as, or even more militant than, sections of their membership. The weakness here lies less in his evidence than in the political conclusion he draws from it. Comparing degrees of individual militancy cannot settle the Marxist critique of trade union bureaucracy. It concerns the apparatus’s objective social position and political function within capitalist society.
Kelly’s strategic conclusions follow from this approach. He examines corporatist arrangements between governments, employers and union organisations and considers the possibilities for a more class-conscious trade union movement capable of placing political pressure upon the state. His ultimate perspective nevertheless remains centred upon militant trade unionism combined with a Labour Party committed to radical economic reform. The democratic road to socialism comes with qualifications, but it remains recognisably within the political traditions of the British Labour left.
The missing question: the unions’ programme
Kelly’s book is strongest when it challenges the new realists’ pessimism. Workers had not lost their capacity for collective struggle. The miners demonstrated this with extraordinary force in 1984-85, sustaining a year-long confrontation with a government that mobilised the capitalist state’s resources against them. The strike therefore never raised a deficiency of courage or militancy among miners. It was the political isolation of their struggle.
The miners’ defeat poses a problem that Kelly’s theoretical framework struggles to answer. A trade union bureaucracy cannot be adequately defined through the subjective qualities of individual officials. A bureaucrat can speak militantly, support particular strikes, and occasionally find himself pushed into conflict with employers, yet he remains fundamentally distinct from the membership in social and political terms. The decisive issue is how the trade union apparatus relates to capitalist property relations, the national state, and the political organisations that defend the existing social order.
Trotsky’s unfinished 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” matters precisely here. Trotsky sought to link the development of monopoly capitalism to the tendency toward closer integration of the trade union apparatus with the capitalist state. He did not conclude from the bureaucracy’s conservatism that revolutionaries should abandon workers organised in trade unions. Rather, he saw the revolutionary party’s political independence from the apparatus as essential precisely because large sections of the working class remained organised within the unions.
Kelly’s presentation of Lenin and Luxemburg tends to blur this issue by presenting their differences too strongly through the categories of pessimism and optimism towards spontaneous industrial struggle. Lenin argued that workers were not incapable of militant struggle, nor that economic struggles could never contribute to political radicalisation. The essential point was that spontaneous struggle alone does not resolve the problem of socialist political consciousness and revolutionary leadership. The working class encounters not merely the employers but an entire network of political institutions and ideological pressures through which bourgeois society reproduces itself.
This distinction becomes decisive when Kelly moves from empirical evidence to strategic conclusions. His alternative to the demoralisation of the new realists is ultimately not to build an independent revolutionary leadership but to make the established relationship between the unions and the Labour Party more militant. This is the central limitation of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Kelly correctly insists that the working class retains an enormous capacity for struggle. Still, he does not adequately confront the possibility that the existing organisations claiming to represent that class had themselves become increasingly important mechanisms for subordinating workers’ struggles to the requirements of British capitalism.
The verdict of history
In the decades after Kelly’s book was published, this question gained an importance that 1988 could only partly have anticipated. The globalisation of capitalist production placed immense pressure upon nationally based trade union programmes. Corporations increasingly organised production across borders, while unions remained institutionally and politically tied to the national state. The old reformist perspective, which held that union pressure on national employers and Labour governments could produce an indefinite succession of improvements, became increasingly untenable.
Kelly’s own later scholarship continued to engage extensively with these problems. Rethinking Industrial Relations developed a mobilisation approach to industrial relations and collective action, and Kelly later revisited that work in a 2018 article examining conceptual and empirical questions that had arisen since its publication. His later research also examined union revitalisation, organising strategies, social partnership, and strike activity. His academic profile identifies industrial conflict, trade unions, and union organising as subjects associated with this work.
This later development matters because mobilisation theory addresses a key problem: how grievances acquire a collective character and become organised action. Yet, from a Marxist standpoint, it does not, by itself, resolve the more fundamental political question posed by Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Explaining why workers mobilise is not the same as explaining the political role of the organisations through which they mobilise, nor does it determine which political programme their struggles should pursue.
The British strike wave of 2022-23 demonstrated the enduring relevance of this distinction. Rail workers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and other sections of the working class entered into major struggles over wages and conditions. The eruption of these conflicts vindicated a key aspect of Kelly’s polemic against those who had written off collective working-class struggle during the 1980s. But industrial militancy did not automatically resolve the question of political strategy and leadership. Lenin’s central problem, identified more than a century earlier, remained: what political perspective should guide the struggles generated by the objective antagonism between workers and capital?
Consequently, the historical fate of Kelly’s argument is ironic. Against the “new realists”, he was right to insist that the working class had not disappeared and that trade unions still had the capacity for collective action. But the labour movement’s subsequent history showed that these observations alone were insufficient. The more fundamental question was whether organisations rooted in national reformism could provide a progressive way forward under conditions of globally integrated capitalist production.
From Trade Unions and Socialist Politics to mobilisation theory
Kelly’s subsequent intellectual development makes Trade Unions and Socialist Politics particularly interesting in retrospect. His later Rethinking Industrial Relations shifted the analytical emphasis towards mobilisation, collectivism and the processes through which workers become involved in collective action. Kelly returned to that work in “Rethinking Industrial Relations revisited”, describing the later article as an examination of the origins and consequences of the earlier book and of conceptual and empirical questions raised subsequently.
His wider work on union revitalisation likewise examined the organisational possibilities confronting unions in a changing economic environment. Union Organisation and Activity, edited with Paul Willman, addressed union organising, statutory recognition, public-sector union strategies, partnership agreements, and the barriers existing union structures may pose to revitalisation. This provides an important bridge between the 1988 arguments and Kelly’s subsequent industrial-relations scholarship.
Yet continuity matters as much as development. Whether the analytical language is socialist politics, mobilisation, organising or revitalisation, the decisive unresolved issue concerns the political character of trade unionism itself. Unions cannot be understood solely as mechanisms through which grievances become collective action. Their leadership pursues definite programmes, operates within definite institutional relationships, and responds to pressures generated by its position between labour, employers, and the capitalist state.
This is ultimately why Kelly’s examination of the classical Marxist controversy cannot be resolved by industrial-relations sociology alone. The question is political. Under conditions of globally integrated production. At the same time, the trade unions remain nationally organised, can the existing apparatus become the vehicle for an international socialist struggle against capital, or does its programme bind workers ever more closely to national economic competitiveness and the capitalist state?
Conclusion
Trade Unions and Socialist Politics deserves to be read. Kelly’s critique of pessimistic currents that declared the working class historically exhausted contained an important element of truth, and his insistence on the transformative potential of collective struggle stood in sharp contrast to the increasingly fashionable abandonment of class politics during the 1980s. The empirical seriousness of his work distinguishes it from much of the superficial theorising produced during that period.
But the book’s greatest significance today lies in the contradiction at its centre. Kelly correctly defended the working class’s continued capacity for collective struggle but underestimated the political problem posed by the organisations that mediated those struggles. Workers’ defeats cannot be explained simply by insufficient mobilisation, unfavourable economic conditions, or variations in membership militancy. They raise questions of organisation, programme and political leadership.
Read nearly four decades after its publication, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics poses a problem more clearly than it solves. The issue is not whether the working class can fight. Repeated eruptions of class struggle have answered that question. The fundamental question is whether workers can advance through organisations whose political perspective remains subordinate to national reformism and the capitalist state.
The alternative is not political passivity or withdrawal from workers already organised within trade unions. It is the struggle for the working class’s political independence from the bureaucracy, combined with the development of democratic organisations through which workers can exercise direct control over their struggles and link them internationally. From this standpoint, rank-and-file committees are not simply a militant supplement to the existing apparatus but an organisational expression of a fundamentally different political orientation, based on the international unity and political independence of the working class.
That is the central question Trade Unions and Socialist Politics raised in 1988 but could not resolve. The intervening decades have made its resolution more urgent, not less.
Bibliography
Primary text
Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.
Classical Marxist sources
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920. Edited by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.
Lenin, V. I. What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902). In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). London: Bookmarks, 1986.
Marx, Karl. “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present and Future.” Resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, Geneva Congress, 1866.
Trotsky, Leon. “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940). In Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969.
Kelly’s later work on trade unions and industrial relations
Kelly, John. Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge, 1998. Kelly subsequently revisited the arguments of this book in 2018. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]
Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly. “Union Revitalisation Strategies in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 1 (2003): 7–24. [scholar.google.com]
Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly, eds. Varieties of Unionism: Strategies for Union Revitalisation in a Globalising Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [scholar.google.com]
Kelly, John, and Paul Willman, eds. Union Organisation and Activity. London: Routledge, 2004. The volume examines organising, recognition, partnership, public-sector unionism and union revitalisation. [routledge.com]
Kelly, John. Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform. London: Routledge, 2010. John Kelly’s ORCID record lists the work among his publications. [orcid.org]
Kelly, John. “Rethinking Industrial Relations Revisited.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 39, no. 4 (2018): 701–709. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]
Related works
Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.
Hyman, Richard. Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism. London: Pluto Press, 1971.
Kelly, John. Labour and the Unions. London: Verso, 1987.
North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.
Contemporary reviews
Grimshaw, Bruce J. Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. Hummer, no. 24.
Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December 1989).
