Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 26

Engels, a century before had pointed out.

“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.”

(Condition of The Working Class in England p 243)

Similarly, Marx had confirmed,

“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 guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.”

(Value, Price and Profit)

Trotsky had based himself on that same analysis.

“... a boom is a boom. It means a growing demand for goods, expanded production, shrinking unemployment, rising prices and the possibility of higher wages. And, in the given historical circumstances, the boom will not dampen but sharpen the revolutionary struggle of the working class. This flows from all of the foregoing. In all capitalist countries the working-class movement after the war reached its peak and then ended, as we have seen, in a more or less pronounced failure and retreat, and in disunity within the working class itself. With such political and psychological premises, a prolonged crisis, although it would doubtless act to heighten the embitterment of the working masses (especially the unemployed and semi-employed), would nevertheless simultaneously tend to weaken their activity because this activity is intimately bound up with the workers’ consciousness of their irreplaceable role in production.

Prolonged unemployment following an epoch of revolutionary political assaults and retreats does not at all work in favour of the Communist Party. On the contrary the longer the crisis lasts the more it threatens to nourish anarchist moods on one wing and reformist moods on the other. This fact found its expression in the split of the anarcho-syndicalist groupings from the Third International, in a certain consolidation of the Amsterdam International and the Two-and-a-Half International, in the temporary conglomeration of the Serrati-ites, the split of Levi’s group, and so on. In contrast, the industrial revival is bound, first of all, to raise the self-confidence of the working class, undermined by failures and by the disunity in its own ranks; it is bound to fuse the working class together in the factories and plants and heighten the desire for unanimity in militant actions.)

(Flood Tide)

This could equally have been written in relation to the 1980's, as the 1920's. I remember, in the early 1980's, speaking to a member of the SWP, who confidently predicted that the stagnation and rising unemployment being experienced would never lift. He clearly had not read Marx's analysis of capital, and his statement that “there are no permanent crises.” Moreover, as Marx, Engels and Trotsky set out above, the “economic crisis”, of the 1980's, in other words, the start of a period of slower growth/stagnation, and the related unemployment, did not represent a crisis for capital, but for labour! The period of crisis for capital arose in the 1970's, as it became overproduced relative to labour, resulting in relative wages rising, and relative profits falling. (Workers & The Profits Squeeze, as Glyn and Sutcliffe described it).

The continual catastrophist dream of a never ending, and deepening economic malaise, in which booms are responded to, not as Trotsky does above, but as being a temporary nuisance, as they look forward to “The Next Recession”, which they hope will be different from all the ones that went before, and somehow bring on the revolution, is a delusion, and simply reflects the impotence of those that cling to it, as an alternative to them actually formulating any adequate Marxist strategy of real class struggle, to take the movement forward.

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