Nick Clegg - "I Agree With Karl" - Part 3

Marx fills out the dialectical approach, described in Part 2, elsewhere in his approach to a number of questions. For example, in his debates with Weston, Marx makes clear that workers can never resolve their problems via wage struggles. At best Trades Unions can defend wages at the level of the value of labour-power. Wage struggles themselves only continue to keep workers trapped within the system that causes their problems, and makes those wage struggles necessary in the first place. For Marxists, our policy is not higher wages, but abolition of the system based on wages.

“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!"”

And yet, that does not mean that Marxists oppose wage struggles, because they cannot immediately meet workers needs because,

“By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.”

This is no different to the position Marx adopted in the Communist Manifesto to the Sismondists who could only see the negative aspects of Capitalism, and thereby sought to inhibit its development. Marxists are advocates of Socialism not Capitalism, but the road to Socialism necessarily runs through Capitalism, which creates the necessary material conditions, including the development of the working-class, without which Socialism is not possible. Marxists, therefore, advocate Socialism, but defend/support Capitalism as against previous social forms. We do not seek to inhibit Capitalist development, on the contrary we support its advancement. As Lenin put it in his “The Development Of Capitalism In Russia” arguing against the Sismondist approach of the Narodniks, in Russia they were not only suffering from Capitalism, but from not enough Capitalism!

The same approach was taken by Trotsky, in his “Action Programme For France” in opposition to the ultra left, Popular Front position of the Stalinists. In other words, we are not bourgeois democrats, we advocate workers democracy not bourgeois democracy, but we defend/support bourgeois democracy against any return to feudalism, or against attempts to remove bourgeois freedoms, for example, by fascists. We defend bourgeois democracy against such a reversion, however, by the means of workers democracy, by the establishment of workers committees in factories, by the establishment of peasant committees, by the creation of workers defence squads and militia, and so on.

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