So, ultimately, Weston's conclusion that workers could not win, by simply trying to raise wages, and that they needed to transform society, was correct. But, that did not mean that they could settle, in the meantime, for that ultimatist solution, whose modern equivalent is the sterile demand, as the solution to everything, of “Socialism Now”.
“Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. 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. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.” (p 92)
Trades unions are workers organisations with a bourgeois ideology, the ideology of simply bargaining within the system for a better price for labour-power. The Labour Party, and other social-democratic, workers parties, are the political reflection of that idea. Marxists intervene in those unions, in the same way they intervene in other aspects of workers' lives and struggles, to point out the limited nature of those struggles, and why they are doomed. In doing so, we seek to give the workers a real basis of struggle, a class struggle, to posit in place of capitalist property the emerging collective property of the workers themselves.
The socialised capital of the cooperative is the most obvious example of the chrysalis form of that property. It is a transitional form, still capital, but, now, the capital of the workers. Moreover, the mammoth socialised capital, most obvious in the shape of the joint stock company, corporation and oligopolies, itself must borrow the methods of the encroaching, socialist society, as Marx and Engels set out, in Anti-Durhing. It requires planning and regulation to replace competition, both at the level of the company and the economy as a whole, an economy that itself must become an international, and multinational economy, demolishing the old nation states that act as a fetter on its further development. So, whilst they cannot abandon their struggles against falling wages, they cannot be distracted by those struggles either.
“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. 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!"” (p 93)
Marx concludes with a summary of his argument.
“Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.
Thirdly. 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.” (p 93-4)
Many of those that call themselves Marxists, today, have forgotten, if they ever understood, these basic principles. They are fully absorbed in those kinds of struggle that they wrongly describe as “class struggle.”
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