Our Class Against Our Enemy

The class struggle and class warfare continue under all circumstances in capitalist society. Workers’ efforts to organise unions in order to raise wages, shorten hours, and improve working conditions go back to the earliest days of capitalism. Throughout history, the bosses have always tried to keep workers divided, unorganised and weak, in order to intensify their exploitation and thereby grab bigger profits. The capitalist class has never stopped–and will never stop–its efforts to destroy and weaken the trade union movement. A powerful, militant trade union movement is a constant threat to profits. As long as the ownership of land and industry is under control of the capitalist class, the economy is run solely for the maximum profit interest of the bosses, and their state power is used to protect their capitalist system.

Workers must be guided by the slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all” and must advance solidarity in all battles against the capitalist enemy and combat all practices that cause disunity. and divide the workers, competing with each other for jobs, bidding against each other to give employers the cheapest deal, often scabbing on each other.

Workers must also build toward independent political action by the working class. For the most part, labour seeks political expression through the Labour Party and this reliance on a capitalist party is one reason for the workers’ political impotence. The government, regardless of which party is in temporary control, is actually the political general staff of the ruling class. Workers’ understanding must be developed so that they fight the bosses politically as well as economically.

 For as long as capitalism exists, there will be capitalist exploitation. That is the way capitalism operates, the only way it can operate. For the capitalists run things for their own profit. They don’t have to pay wages to machines, and the workers not replaced by machines have to produce more than ever. In those factories made obsolete by new machines, employers intensify speed-up in an effort to compete. If they can, they cut wages and lengthen hours. Eventually, such factories modernise or have to be closed down. Workers are removed farther and farther from the commodities they produce; they have less and less reason to take pride in their work. For the workers, new technology and automation mean insecurity, and often disaster. Traditional skilled and semi-skilled trades become useless in many cases. Labour-saving machines are not objectionable in themselves. What is objectionable is the way in which capitalism introduces new machines, their use to increase profits at the workers’ expense, to bring on unemployment and depression and hunger. The way to deal effectively with the problem is to fight to shorten working hours with no cut in daily or weekly pay. Workers has done it before, and must do it again. We have to fight back now against what the capitalists try to do to us. A working class and a people that does not fight for its material needs, and for its dignity, will never get to socialism, and is in danger of being reduced to slavery. We can’t make capitalism work like socialism, but we can limit some of the capitalist thievery. But our real task is to kick out the capitalists and establish socialism. But that doesn’t mean we can just sit around and wait for socialism.

 We are fighting the same enemy; we must work together; we must help each other. Workers become the grave diggers of capitalism. Capitalism forces the workers to connect theory with practice, to wander all over the world, to try their hand at all occupations, to find themselves reduced to a common level, to organize and discipline themselves as a class. All this makes them fit to build a new society. Capitalism hardens them, tests them, wipes out all their illusions, gives them arms, and compels them under penalty of extinction to go forward towards socialism. In the struggle of the workers against their enemy, whatever victories they win in the beginning are but temporary. The victory of the workers is the end not only of wage slavery but of all class rule forever. In socialism, there are no longer a market, commodities, values, prices, nor wages. Goods are no longer sold for a market, but are produced for use. There being no class struggles, there is now no need for a State. Even police disappear as the basis for crime is gone, since labour is so productive that all the wants of life easily can be obtained. Socialism lays the basis for a new type of life by the ending of the misery and despotism. The government over persons is transformed into the administration of things.

Workers unite! Fight for socialism! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain!