Languages of Class Struggle: Communication and Mass Mobilisation in Britain and Ireland 1842-1972
John Foster (Praxis Press, £25)

IN 1847, Karl Marx wrote that in the process of struggle the working class is transformed from being a class against capital into a class “for itself,” consciously struggling to change the social order. 

Throughout his career, from his ground-breaking book Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution onwards, John Foster’s work can be seen as a dialogue with this idea. 

What are the concrete conditions in which class consciousness can develop? Exactly how do classes mobilise and reach the point where they start to pose a challenge to state power? How does consciousness change in the process of struggle and what role do leaders play in this process? What is left over when mobilisations end? 

In Languages of Class Struggle, Foster examines these questions by analysing a series of key struggles in Britain’s labour history and drawing out the lessons through contrast and comparison. These are the general strike of 1842, the mobilisation on the Clyde in 1919, the almost simultaneous general strike in Belfast in 1919, the councils of action in 1920 and then, finally, the Upper Clyde work-in of 1971-2. All are mined for what they reveal about working people combining, fighting and in the process, transforming themselves and their historical conditions.

As the title indicates, Languages of Class Struggle pays special attention to the role of words and speech in the dynamics of struggle. Using the insights of Soviet linguists Alexei Leontiev and Valentin Voloshinov, Foster directs the reader to the way that language operates less as a system or structure of signs than as a social product, rooted in communities and reflecting all the tensions and conflicts that run through them. 

In times of relative calm, language reflects the dominance of the ruling class and its world-view. But as capitalism throws people into conflict, so the contexts in which people speak are changed and words can take on new meanings that can express and help enable social change. 

Seemingly moderate slogans, phrases and words like the “right to work” and “peace,” references to “labour” and “the workers,” carefully deployed in changing contexts by activists rooted in their communities, can all form part of an escalation in class consciousness. 

Foster’s case studies are firmly rooted in the particular context of their time and he combines this with detailed attention to the textual evidence of the shifting consciousness of working classes in struggle. 

One of the most striking points in the book is Foster’s insistence on the fleeting nature of these mobilisations. Often they are short, always the ruling class responds, and frequently through concessions aimed at defusing mobilisations and dividing workers while a later counter-attack is planned. 

Whether such mobilisations are revolutionary in their effects or not is determined by the concrete balance of forces. 

But for all that they are fleeting, even if they fail to unseat the ruling class, Foster shows that these struggles leave an enduring mark on history. The changes in “front and speech” forced on the ruling class transform the field of class struggle in ways that the ruling classes do not wholly control. For this reason future generations conduct the class struggle on a social, economic and ideological terrain actively created by their struggles of their forebears. 

One of the greatest merits of this book is to highlight the decisive role of the actions of “actual people” at every stage in the mobilisation process. From the activists who embed themselves in circles of contacts in the workplace, listening to the workers, making the decisive speeches that turn the meeting one way or another, to the union and party cadres, listening, interpreting, shaping the slogans, building the new organisations of the class and making the key strategic decisions and tactical movements. All are seen to be vital to the mobilisation of the class and the development of consciousness. We may not know their names but they made history. 

And these struggles are vital because it is the actual people of a class who have to undergo a transformation though this process. Only in these fleeting moments, through mobilisations built on years of patient work, is it possible to forge real unity and overcome the divisions and stratifications that cut through the class, making it capable of becoming the ruling class. 

Languages of Class Struggle is a wonderful, rich book that repays reading and rereading. It is a great work of labour movement history based on deep understandings of the best of Marxist theory and steeped in historical knowledge. And in spite of this, critically, the writing is crystal clear and accessible to the general reader. 

For these reasons it will be a key resource for the labour movement of today and tomorrow.