The working class are learning. They are beginning to spell solidarity and to pronounce socialism. Our propaganda is one of education to teach workers to unite and vote together as a class in support of the Socialist Party, the party that represents them as a class. Organised labour does not lie down at the command of Prime Ministers or Presidents. No strike has even been lost, and there can be no defeat for the labour movement. No matter how disastrous the day of battle has been, it has been worth its price, and only the scars remain to bear testimony that the movement is invincible and that no mortal wound can be inflicted upon it. The union has from its inception taught, however imperfectly, the fundamental need of solidarity; it has inspired hope in the defeated and despairing worker. The union has fought the battles of the worker upon a thousand fields, and though defeated often, rallied again and again. The union was first to outline the lesson that the worker needs to learn, that only through the collective interest and welfare of his or her class and embracing our class as a whole is permanent change of conditions possible. Although only vaguely and imperfectly accomplished the union has promoted the class-conscious solidarity of the working-class.
Perhaps the trades-union movement has in some respects proved a disappointment, but it may not on this account be repudiated as a failure. The worst that be said of it is that it has not kept up with changing conditions and situations but there are reasons for this as most know. The trades-union movement of the present day has enemies bent upon destroying it or reducing it to impotency. Step by step the writ of legal injunction has invaded the domain of trades-unionism, limiting its influence, curtailing its powers, sapping its strength and undermining its foundations and this has been done by the courts in the name of justice but at the behest of the indusrrial oligarchs and financial plutocrats. Court orders have been issued restraining the trades-union members from striking, from boycotting, from voting funds to strikes, from walking on the public highway, from gathering together in public spaces, from asking others not to scab and from communicating with those who had taken or were about to take their jobs. In fact the law has been evoked hindering unions from doing anything and everything, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the employing class in their unalienable right to run things to suit themselves. The law have found in favour of the bosses, leaving the workers and their unions defenceless. The court system is under the control of employers, and so shamelessly perverted it reveals the class character of our capitalist government and leads to the inevitable conclusion that the labour question is also a political question and that the working class must organise their political power to put an end to class rule forever.
The members of a trade-union should learn the true importance and discover the labour movement means infinitely more than a paltry increase in wages and the strikes necessary to secure it; that while it engages to do all that possibly that can be done to better the working conditions of its members, its higher object must be to overthrow the capitalist system, abolish wage-slavery and achieve the freedom of the whole working class (and all mankind.)
The trade-unions, however, is not, and can not become, a political machine and nor can it be used for political purposes. The Socialist Party has no intention to convert the trades-union into a political party and would oppose any such attempt on the part of others. The important thing to impress upon the mind of trade unionists is to do their own thinking. Unions are an economic organisation with distinct economic functions and as such is a part, a necessary part, but a part only of the labour movement. It has its own sphere of activity, its own platform and is its own master within its economic limitations.
The socialist movement is its political side and the Socialist Party expresses the political power of the labour movement. The class conscious worker uses both economic and political power in the interest of his or her class. The struggle between labour and capital is a class struggle; that the working class are in a great majority, but divided, some in trades-unions and some out of them, some in one political party and some in another; that because they are divided they are helpless and must submit to being robbed of what their labour produces; that they must unite their class in the trades-union on the one hand and in a socialist party on the other hand; that industrially and politically they must act together as a class against the capitalist class and that this struggle is a class struggle, and that any worker who deserts the union in a strike and goes to the other side is a scab, and any worker who deserts the Socialist Party on election day and goes over to the enemy is a traitor to their class. Capitalism can only rule by corrupt means and its politics are essentially the reflection of its debasing economic character. He who controls my bread controls my head.
The capitalists are far more thoroughly organised than the workers. In the first place, capitalists are comparatively few in number, while the workers number millions. Next, the capitalists are men of financial means and resources, and can buy the best brains and ability the market affords. Then again, they own the factories, the communications, the transport and retail stores and all the jobs that are attached to them, and this not only gives them tremendous advantage in the struggle, but makes them for the time the absolute masters of the situation. The workers, on the other hand, are poor as a rule but they are in an overwhelming majority. In a word, they have the power, but are not conscious of it. This then is the task of activists and militants; to make them conscious of the power of their class, or class-conscious workers.
The working class alone does all the work, has created and produced the world’s wealth, constructed its roads, drives the trucks, laid its rails and operates its trains, spanned the rivers with bridges and tunnelled the mountains. The working class alone - and by the working class we mean all useful workers, all who by the labour of their hands or the effort of their brains increase knowledge and add to the intellectual wealth of society - the working class alone is essential to society and therefore the only class that can survive in the world-wide struggle for freedom.
The Socialist Party is to the workers politically what the trades-union is to them industrially; the former is the party of their class, while the latter is the union of their trade or profession. The difference between them is that while the trades-union is confined to occupation, the Socialist Party embraces the entire working class, and while the union is limited to bettering conditions under the wage system for its members. The Socialist Party is organised to conquer the political power, wipe out the wage system. Trades-union and the Socialist Party, the economic and political wings of the labour movement, should not only not be in conflict, but act together, in harmony, in every struggle, whether it be on the one field or the other, in the strike or at the ballot box. The main thing is that in every such struggle the workers shall be united and be no more guilty of scabbing on their party than on their union, by voting a pro- capitalist on election day and turning the working class over to capitalist misrule. Would a worker ever think of voting in the union to turn it over to his employers and have it run in the interest of management?
To do its part in the class struggle the trade union need no more go into politics than the Socialist Party enter into the trade unions. Each has its place and its functions. The union deals with work issues and the Party deals with politics. Trade unionism is by no means the solution of the workers’ problem, nor is it the goal of the labour struggle. It is merely a line of defence within the capitalist system. Its existence and its struggles are necessitated only by the existence and predatory nature of capitalism. Until the workers shall become a clearly defined socialist movement, standing for and moving toward the unqualified co-operative commonwealth they will only play into the hands of their exploiters. The socialist must point this out in the right way. He is not to do this by seeking to commit trade-union bodies to the principles of socialism. Resolutions or commitments of this sort accomplish little good. Nor should socialists be meddling with the details or the machinery of the trade-unions. Or trying to commit socialism to trade-unionism, and vice versa, trade unionism to socialism. It is better to have the trade-unions do their separate distinctive work, as the workers’ defence against the encroachments of capitalism and giving unqualified support and sympathy to the struggles of the organised workers to sustain them economically. But let the socialists also build up the character and strength of the socialist movement as a political force, that it shall command the respect and confidence of the worker, irrespective of union obligations.
It is imperative we keep in mind the difference between the two so that neither shall handicap the other. The socialist movement, as a political development of the workers for their economic emancipation, is one thing; the trade-union development, as an economic defense of the workers within the capitalist system, is another thing. Let us not interfere with the internal affairs of the trade unions, or seek to have them become distinctively political bodies in themselves. The unions can never become a political machine, but they must recognise the necessity for a united political party. Let socialists attend to the development of the socialist political movement as the channel and power by which labour is to come to its emancipation and its commonwealth. It is of vital importance to the trades-union that its members be class-conscious, that they understand the class struggle and their duty as union men on the political field, so that in every move that is made they will have the goal in view, and while taking advantage of every opportunity to secure concessions and enlarge their economic advantage, they will at the same time unite at the ballot box, not only to back up the economic struggle of the trades-union, but to finally wrest the government from capitalist control and establish socialism. Declaring opposition to the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, and urging upon the working class the necessity for working class political action is as far as the trade union organisations need to go. If you were to use your economic organisation for political purposes you would disrupt it, you would wreck it.
The mainstream parties have sounded a note of alarm at the so-called “apathy” of the voters, and there is reason for their fear. Unintelligible sound-bites from campaign spin-doctors will no longer answer the insistent questionings of a slowly awakening electorate. The workers are refusing to get enthusiastic over the many fake election issues, for all these dwarf into insignificance before the very practical question of “What are you going to do about the problem of the unemployed”? To which questions the Tories and Labour can answer only, “Who knows!” The Socialist Party is the only one that gives the worker a practical and logical answer to his elemental question.
If you have no right to work you have no right to life because you can only live by work. And if you live in a system that deprives you of the right to work, that system denies you the right to live. No work, no food and all this in the shadow of the abundance these very workers have created. In capitalism a worker can only work on condition that he or she finds somebody who will grant them permission to work but for just enough of what his or her labour produces to keep them in sufficient fit state and working order. Why should any worker need to beg for work? Why be forced to surrender to anybody any part of what his or her labour produces? No matter whether you have studied this economic question or not, you cannot have failed to observe that society has been sharply divided into classes into a capitalist class upon the one hand, into a working class upon the other hand. The capitalist has become a profit-taking parasite. The capitalists are absolutely unnecessary; they have no part in the process of production – not the slightest.
So long as the means of production are privately or state owned, so long as they are operated for the profit of the capitalist or a bureaucracy, the working class will be exploited, millions will be reduced to want, some of them driven to be vagabonds and criminals, and this condition will prevail in spite of anything that organised labour can do to the contrary.
What is it that keeps the working class in subjection? What is it that is responsible for their exploitation and for all of the ills they suffer? Just one thing, the working class have not yet learned how to unite and act together. The capitalists and their retinue have managed during all these years to keep the working class divided, and as long as the working class is divided it will be helpless. It is only when the working class learn (and they are learning ) and by very bitter experience to unite and to act together, especially on election day, that there is any hope for emancipation.
We have now no effective revolutionary organisation of the workers along the lines of this class struggle, and that is the demand of this time. The capitalists are combined against you. They are reducing wages. They have control of the courts. They are doing everything they can to destroy your power. You have got to follow their example. You have got to unify your forces. You have got to stand together shoulder to shoulder on the economic and political fields and then you will make substantial progress toward emancipation.
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