The Ricardians, out of whom emerged the social-democrats, and the Utopian socialists, both opposed combinations of workers, but for different reasons.
“The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals.
The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.” (p 158)
Yet, the workers continued to form more and bigger unions, and the degree of that development was also an index of the degree of capital development in each country. It became so, because, for as long as workers had not yet developed to a stage of breaking with bourgeois ideology, of positing themselves as a class for themselves, in opposition to the bourgeoisie, they were doomed to continue to stay within the confines of bourgeois production and social relations, simply engaging in periodic distributional struggles over the price of their labour-power. That reality forced them to create such unions the better to engage in those negotiations. It was a dead-end, as Marx sets out in Value, Price and Profit.
“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla 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...
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.”
But, it was also an inevitable part of the process of the workers forming themselves as a class for themselves, so as not to engage in a purely economic, distributional struggle, but a political struggle, for the creation of a new type of society. As Lenin put it, strikes, other than a political General Strike, are not class struggles, but only sectional struggles, but they are also at the same time, a school for real class struggle.
“Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.
“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class.”
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