5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers
Proudhon shared with the Utopians an hostility to trades unions and strikes for higher wages. For the Utopians, strikes distracted from their schemas to persuade the bourgeoisie of the logic of cooperative production. For Proudhon, of course, as the representative of the interests of the petty-bourgeois small producer, there was a very good reason to oppose unions, strikes and higher wages. The small producer is the least able to afford such higher wages, which eat into their profits. The same interests motivate the petty-bourgeoisie, today, and their ideologists, amongst the Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, which is why they support things like Brexit, as an attempt to escape the rules and regulations that establish minimum civilised standards.
As Marx and Engels pointed out, Robert Owen, coming later than Saint-Simon and Fourier, and seeing the development of a large working-class, in Britain, was distinguished from them, and also from his own followers. He did not rely on simply convincing other bourgeois of the rationality of the cooperative commonwealth. He actively supported the setting up of unions, and the idea of One Big Union, which he sought to establish with the GNCTU, as part of the process of social transformation. That was not true of many of his followers, who continued on the path of the earlier Utopians, and whose social-democratic ideas also flowed from an acceptance of Ricardian theory. The best known example of that is Marx's polemic against the Owenite, Weston, detailed in Value, Price and Profit.
The same ideas, presented by Weston, and repeated by Keynesians, today, were also put forward by Proudhon. At a time of high levels of inflation, and renewed discussion over its cause, its worthwhile citing Proudhon's comment, presented, here, by Marx.
“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every day by the mass of the workers. Now, to double wages ... is to attribute to each one of the producers a greater share than his product, which is contradictory, and if the rise extends only to a small number of industries, it brings a general disturbance in exchange; in a word, a dearth....
“It is impossible, I declare, for strikes followed by an increase in wages not to culminate in a general rise in prices: this is as certain as that two and two make four.” (p 153)
Contained, here, are all the same fallacies presented by Keynesians, today. Higher wages cause higher prices/inflation, and higher prices leads to a curtailment of demand/recession/stagflation, and so on. All of which is intended to show that workers should simply accept real wage cuts, or suffer worse consequences. A starting point of the fallacy, here, is that a rise in wages is the same as a rise in value, and consequently, prices. It assumes that the value of labour-power is the same as the value created by labour, i.e. it makes no distinction between the commodity labour-power, sold by the worker, in exchange for wages, and the activity of labour, which is the process by which value is created.
Yet, these must be two distinct things, because otherwise, there could be no surplus value, and so no profit. If wages equal the new value created by labour, there is nothing left over for profit, and capital would not employ labour in those conditions. The assumption of Proudhon, and those who make this argument, is based on Adam Smith's absurd dogma, and cost of production theory, that the value of commodities resolves entirely into revenues, and not on his labour theory of value, taken over by Ricardo and Marx.
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