Note that Lenin, throughout, here, talks about the role of the proletariat, and of the Marxists, in terms of the “political struggle”. This reflects another aspect of the struggle that both Marx and Lenin had to engage in, within the labour movement. It is a struggle against Economism. Marx describes it in “Value, Price and Profit”. The labour movement necessarily begins in the workplace, with the workers organising to defend their position. As Marx and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto, even this begins on a false basis, as the workers focus their attention on the machines they saw replacing them, rather than on the property relations that put those machines at the disposal of capital rather than labour.
“They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.”
(The Communist Manifesto)
Reactionary sections of the labour movement never get beyond this stage; it simply takes different form. The kinds of individual acts of terror, and destruction of property, that are typical of peasant protest can still be seen amongst petite-bourgeois strands, the most obvious instances being the actions of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Red Army Faction, Brigate Rosse, and so on, but it has also characterised the forms of protest of various strands of “anti-capitalists”. Similarly, reactionary economic nationalist elements within the labour movement can be seen not only “destroying imported wares”, but seeking modern equivalents of it, via calls for import controls, immigration controls and so on. The most obvious current example of this kind of reactionary sentiment is Brexit.
But, even where the workers move beyond that primitive condition, they defend their position by bargaining within the system. That is the whole point of trades unions. The unions job is not to transform society and property relations, but simply to get the best possible price for labour-power as a commodity, in the same way that businesses form cartels to try to get the best price for the commodities they sell. In other words, trades unions, despite being organisations comprised of workers, and whose sole function is to defend the interests of workers, are, by definition, and by their function and ideology, bourgeois! As Marx says, their function is merely to engage in a distributional struggle with other commodity owners, within the confines of capitalism. Their job is to try to win a higher price for labour-power, just as the money lenders seek to get a higher rate of interest, the landowners higher rents, and so on.
Moreover, as Marx and Engels describe, even this distributional struggle is in vain, other than within narrow constraints. Wages, profits, rents and interest are not arrived at subjectively, on the basis of such distributional struggle, or a contest of wills, between the owners of these different factors of production, but are the consequence of objective economic laws, as Marx demonstrates and sets out in Capital. These laws determine the operation of supply and demand, which also fixes the market price, including the market price of labour-power – wages.
Engels says,
“The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.”
And Marx follows up.
“I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. ... 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.”
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