Marx, in Value, Price and Profit, and in Wage-Labour and Capital, and elsewhere, sets out that trades union/industrial struggle is not class struggle. Lenin makes the same point, in “On Strikes”. A strike, unless it is a political, General Strike, does not constitute class struggle. It is a purely distributional struggle, no different from industrial capitalists seeking a bigger share of profits, at the expense of landlords or money lenders. It remains entirely within bourgeois limits of bargaining inside the system, and is consequently a dead-end, which, ultimately, the workers will lose from. In fact, this bourgeois, trades unionist consciousness, is not just an illusion, but it strengthens that very bourgeois ideology, legitimising it, and making it seem part of some natural eternal law. As Marx sets out, it reinforces that bourgeois ideology that workers, capitalists, landlords, and money lenders are simply receiving their appropriate factor rewards for the contributions each make to the value of society's wealth.
It is an indication that, even the more advanced, engaged and militant workers have not escaped from the domination of bourgeois ideas. Yet, whilst Marx repeatedly points this out, and spells out the lesson that the workers had to create cooperatives, and demand their rightful control over the other forms of socialised capital, it did not lead him to call on workers to abandon their unions and such strikes. They too formed a basis for Marxists to intervene and better convey these lessons to those more advanced workers – again being an undisclosed, or informal United Front. As Lenin put it, strikes do not constitute class struggle, but they are schools for such 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.”
(Lenin – On strikes)
In conditions where workers engage in such struggle, it is ultra-left sectarian madness for socialists to refuse to engage with those workers, instead demanding “Socialism Now!” Similarly, Marx and Engels vehemently opposed welfarism and other forms of statism, as Marx describes in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, and Engels in his Critique of The Erfurt Programme. But, when the bourgeoisie, for its own ends, engages in such welfarism, and created “free” public education, socialised healthcare and so on, it would, again, be sectarian madness for socialists to demand that workers boycott this provision, instead demanding that only worker owned and controlled provision will suffice. (See: Political Indifferentism)
Of course, it does not mean we stop pointing out the bourgeois nature and purpose of such provision, and raising the need for our own provision, or even supporting demands that the state-capitalist provision be improved and democratised. We simply point out, during all such struggles, why that will never happen, because it is not in the interests of the ruling-class and its state to do so. As with money wages, the social wage (welfarism) is determined by the laws that Marx and Engels set out. Both may rise, under certain conditions, but only in so far as it is compatible with the needs of capital, and as soon as it is not, then those wages – money and social wages – will be reduced. As with bourgeois-democracy itself, there may also be times when a greater or lesser degree of apparent democracy might exist, for example, the creation of elected Health Boards, but that democracy will always be a sham, and will be curtailed, as soon as it threatens the interests of capital.
No comments:
Post a Comment