Marx And The Post Office

“Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”

Karl Marx – Value, Price and Profit

As a revolutionary Marx always placed himself of the side of workers in struggle. But, as the quote above demonstrates, Marx, did not in any way limit his support for workers in such struggles to a simple Economism, to simply tailing the workers, and acting as a cheer leader. The job of a Marxist is to look beyond the immediate battle, and to provide the working class with a line of march, to offer solutions which go beyond a simple defensive reflex to fire fight the immediate situation.

A similar situation was that in respect of the Lyndsey Oil workers. The task of a Marxist was to support the workers in their struggle even though initially the demands and slogans raised by the workers of “British Jobs For British Workers” was reactionary. The task of a Marxist is to recognise that the working class DOES NOT already share our level of class consciousness, and IS dominated by the ruling bourgeois ideas, including some of the most reactionary aspects of those ideas. If that were not the case our job would be done, if workers already shared the ideas of the Marxists, then the revolution would happen immediately! As Lenin put it in “Left-Wing Communism”,

“The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly "Left" slogans.”

(On Work In Reactionary Trade Unions)

“How can one say that "parliamentarianism is politically obsolete", when "millions" and "legions" of proletarians are not only still in favour of parliamentarianism in general, but are downright "counter-revolutionary"!? It is obvious that parliamentarianism in Germany is not yet politically obsolete. It is obvious that the "Lefts" in Germany have mistaken their desire, their politico-ideological attitude, for objective reality. That is a most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make.”

(On Working in Bourgeois Parliaments)

Lft-Wing Communism.

It would be useful for many on the left to read or re-read Lenin in relation to their attitude to the LP, too.

The Marxists approach has to be dictated by those facts. On the one hand the Marxist, recognising that the working class does not yet have a fully developed class consciousness, does not yet truly understand their position, and how to further their interests, has to support the workers in their immediate struggles, even though the workers for all those reasons will engage in them on an inadequate, even a reactionary basis. But, from that position of active support, the Marxist seeks to engage with the working class, to educate it, to show its true position, and to provide the solutions that enable the class not only to deal with immediate issues, but which offer the workers a means by which to deal with them in the future, that enable the workers to thereby strengthen their economic and social position vis a vis Capital.

As Marx says, in the quote above Trade Unions frequently fail from this perspective because of “an injudicious use of their power”. The strike as a weapon is a very blunt instrument. In some instances, for example, that of nurses, it is obvious that the immediate casualties of a strike are other workers. That is why the Labour Movement has always tried to provide other solutions to strikes by nurses and other health workers – for example, when the Miners have struck in support of them. Even here I can remember times in the past when ultra-lefts like the Sparts argued that if an ambulance crew during a health dispute came to an accident, it was the job of Marxists to organise a picket around the victim to prevent the “scabs”(!) getting to them!!!!!

In May 1968, when millions of French workers struck, and occupied the factories, they rapidly had to make decisions to engage in some production to ensure that power etc. was supplied to hospitals, and the vulnerable. The fact that workers have to resort to the strike is, in fact, an indication of the weakness of the working class, the fact that the only lever of power it really DOES have is the ability to withdraw its Labour Power. However, the actions of those French Workers who DID, having taken over the factories and workplaces, engage in production under their own control, shows precisely that workers DO NOT have to simply respond in a defensive manner, DO NOT, have to restrict the solutions they find to purely economistic ones. Political solutions are at hand for workers that not only deal with the immediate situation, but which can deal with it in ways that do not adversely affect other workers, and which, on the contrary enhance the economic and social power of the working class.

What we have in the Post Office dispute is a very similar situation to that which applies with the dispute at Vestas. In the case of Vestas the management sought to close the business in order to transfer it to the US where it believed it could make bigger profits. In the case of the Post Office, the reality is that Capital, through the agency of its State (and this is separate from the desires of the Government) seeks to transfer it into the private sector as it has already done with telecommunications. That desire arises due to the significant changes that technology have brought about.

In both cases, the workers and their Trade Unions argue that these businesses can be efficient and profitable. But, as I wrote in my blog For A Vestas co-op,

“But, if that is the case then why argue for Vestas to continue production? Surely, if the market for these wind turbines is as large and as profitable as Bob Crow suggests then the sensible thing would be for the RMT and other unions and sections of the Labour Movement, to move as quickly as possible from the current occupation of the factory to beginning that production under workers control! Surely, it would be sensible for the Trade Unions and the Labour and Co-operative Movement, to enable the Vestas workers to buy up the plant and run it as a Workers Co-operative, reaping these profits for themselves rather than handing them over to the Vestas capitalists!”

See Also:, The Left And Vestas

The same thing applies to the Post Office. We have now had repeated disputes between the UCW and the Post Office such that even the most doctrinaire statist must now realise that there is absolutely nothing socialist about State ownership. To simply keep asking the Post Office workers to engage in such actions against the Post Office, which are debilitating for those workers in both financial and physical terms, especially given the odds they face against a powerful Capitalist State, is reminiscent of the tactics of those First World War Generals who kept asking the soldiers to go over the top. It is once again a matter of “Lions Led By Donkeys”. And so long as Capitalist property remains – be it private or State Capitalist property – the workers always WILL be at a massive disadvantage, and any victories will be only temporary until such time as Capital regroups, and reverses them.

As Marx put it,

“Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.”

The job of a Marxist is to provide workers with a better alternative to these Economistic struggles that can ultimately only fail. Again as Marx put it,

“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"”

Ultimately, of course, the application of that means the complete overthrow of Capitalism. That is the maximialist view adopted by today’s “Leninists”, whose view is that nothing other than these continual skirmishes from which they hope to “build the party” is possible, and through which they hope to “expose” the existing Labour leaders, and the nature of the Capitalist State. But, that was not Marx and Engels view. Marx praised the actions of the Lancashire textile workers who took over their factories and set up Co-operatives. In his address to the First International Marx said,

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”

Meanwhile, Engels wrote,

“It seems that the most advanced workers in Germany are demanding the emancipation of the workers from the capitalists by the transfer of state capital to associations of workers, so that production can be organised, without capitalists, for general account;”

We should give every support to the Post Office workers in their current dispute, but it is our duty as Marxists to provide a political solution to their problems. If the Capitalist State cannot run the Post Office efficiently, if it looks to shedding its ownership of the Post Office, and if the Post Office workers, as they do, believe that the Post Office can be run effectively and profitably, then we should demand that it be handed over to the workers to run! As I have said in other posts, that would set up the possibility of Post Office Workers not only creating their own Post Office Bank, but connecting that to the Co-op Bank and Unity Trust. It would facilitate a similar link in each area with the many Credit Unions being established, providing workers with a range of financial institutions appropriate to their particular needs and situation, and would do so within the context of workers ownership and control. In doing so, it would remove the continual problems of industrial disputes with private and State capitalists, and would strengthen the economic and social position of workers both as producers and as consumers. The greater efficiency of a Workers Co-operative, backed by the entire Labour & Co-operative Movement, would free it to aggressively compete against the private Capitalist companies.

Moreover, as technology has developed, and the telecommunications monopoly has disappeared, such a Co-operative would have the potential to link up with and develop its own telecommunications arm, once again re-uniting electronic and physical communications networks, providing a greater degree of security in the longer term for workers within the Co-operative.

Only such a perspective can offer the prospect of a long term victory for Post Office workers.