Trade unionism is the organised refusal of the workers to submit meekly to the laws of supply and demand. The trade unions, in Marx’s phrase, were centers of resistance to the encroachments of capital. Neither the value of the workers’ commodity labour power, nor his standard of living in general are fixed automatically but by way of the class struggle. The first attempts to combine in trade unions encounters the savage repression by the State. Trade unions were declared an unlawful society and to strike, a crime. The propertied class today are just as hostile to trade unionism as they were generations ago. The present day capitalist class is once again engaged in the restriction of trade union activities. Statutes forbid the sympathetic solidarity strikes and places limitations upon peaceful picketing. The right to strike, if at all effectual, must carry with it the corollary right to organize the unorganised and persuade them to join the strike. Only a strike growing out of a trade dispute within narrow limits are “legal”and hanging over every union is the threat of employers legal injunctions and criminal proceedings. Yet unions which abandon their militant functions for defensive or offensive purposes, invite legal and governmental strangulation at the hands of a capitalist class. Whatever concessions have been wrung from the capitalist class in the past have been along the way of mass struggle. The “democratic” state is the political representation of the interests of private property and not of the working class.
The bubble burst. The collapse of banks and the stock market, the deep decline in industry, and the creation of a huge army of the un- or underemployed are having the effect of wiping out illusion in the minds of broad sections of the working class. Capitalism is revealed in all its frailties of its anarchic production for profit. The attempts of capitalism to exit the crisis by a re-adjustment of its industry for more effective competition on the world market, attempts which spell rationalisation, wage-slashing, and a general offensive upon the workers’ standards of living, can only further the process of disillusionment. Under the pressure of these developments, workers are moving away from their former passivity and moving away from acquiescence. There is a growing mood for struggle and militancy.
Once again there exists alarm among the wealthy at the “spectre” of communism. Employers are fully aware that as a result of unemployment and the pay-cutting offensive, and ending of the welfare state workers hitherto faithful to the traditions of capitalist politics will be radicalised by their increasing experience of misery and mounting exposure to inequality. The pressure upon the workers has become unbearable. For sure, the capitalist class of this country has not yet lost its confidence and its power to rule. There is no immediate revolutionary struggles on the horizon. But the necessary defensive resistance of the workers can become the starting point for revolutionary struggles in the future. Once started in that direction, we in the Socialist Party are confident that the momentum of the class struggle will be like an avalanche (or perhaps like an ever-enlarging snowball). Nobody can foretell the exact speed of events, but nobody has the right, to count on an even and gradualist course of the class struggle. The workers must be clear that even were the exploiters willing to grant them without struggle no mere palliatives or reforms will suffice any longer. You cannot serve both the wealthy and the workers without committing treachery.
The power of the plutocracy is great. But there is a power greater than theirs and that is the power of numbers. Organise!
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