The working class are as our Chartist forefathers were not afraid to call it, a class of wages slaves. Yet today we are less preoccupied with the abolition of the wages system than ever. Reformists attempt to mollify inhuman social relations whilst preserving them intact. The old cry for a fair day’s pay echoes repeatedly time and time again. The essence of working-class enslavement is not impoverishment. Whether a worker’s wages be high or low his existence is imposed. It is necessary to abolish the basic condition of modern exploitation, wage slavery.
The old conceptions in the labour movement have become faulty and inadequate and working class organisations offer indecision and confusion, and are reduced to impotence.
Karl Marx counseled the working class many years ago that “they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘abolition of the wages system.’ ”
When we fight for a demand like a wage increase, we are merely fighting against the effects of capitalism. Not merely that. We are demanding it from the capitalists. In other words, we envisage the continuation of the capitalist system. What trade union struggles really do is to fight to improve the conditions of the working class within the framework of the capitalist system. They do not challenge capitalism itself. That is why they degenerate to pure and simple reformism and, in the end, bolster up capitalism.
Every wage increase that is won by the workers is eventually offset by the employers by more intensive work. So, usually, the workers are back to from where they started.
What all workers should understand is that their misery is due to exploitation carried on by the capitalist class. Trade unionism merely restricts their struggle to attempts at lessening this exploitation. It does not fight to end exploitation i.e. to end the capitalist system and replace it by socialism. This is the limitation of trade union struggles. However, we should not oppose trade union struggles. It is essential to organise workers and help them to realise the value of their labour power in the fight for their day to day demands. And it is also in the course of these fights, that the workers can learn about the system of capitalist exploitation and the need to abolish it. They will not only discover how to fight for wage increases but also how to abolish the wage system itself.
The objective of the Socialist Party is nothing less than the socialist reconstruction of society, the abolition of the wages system. We press the workers to transform the economic struggle into a political struggle for the seizure of power by the working class. Otherwise we will sink into the morass of never-ending reformism.
The old conceptions in the labour movement have become faulty and inadequate and working class organisations offer indecision and confusion, and are reduced to impotence.
Karl Marx counseled the working class many years ago that “they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘abolition of the wages system.’ ”
When we fight for a demand like a wage increase, we are merely fighting against the effects of capitalism. Not merely that. We are demanding it from the capitalists. In other words, we envisage the continuation of the capitalist system. What trade union struggles really do is to fight to improve the conditions of the working class within the framework of the capitalist system. They do not challenge capitalism itself. That is why they degenerate to pure and simple reformism and, in the end, bolster up capitalism.
Every wage increase that is won by the workers is eventually offset by the employers by more intensive work. So, usually, the workers are back to from where they started.
What all workers should understand is that their misery is due to exploitation carried on by the capitalist class. Trade unionism merely restricts their struggle to attempts at lessening this exploitation. It does not fight to end exploitation i.e. to end the capitalist system and replace it by socialism. This is the limitation of trade union struggles. However, we should not oppose trade union struggles. It is essential to organise workers and help them to realise the value of their labour power in the fight for their day to day demands. And it is also in the course of these fights, that the workers can learn about the system of capitalist exploitation and the need to abolish it. They will not only discover how to fight for wage increases but also how to abolish the wage system itself.
The objective of the Socialist Party is nothing less than the socialist reconstruction of society, the abolition of the wages system. We press the workers to transform the economic struggle into a political struggle for the seizure of power by the working class. Otherwise we will sink into the morass of never-ending reformism.
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