Digging the grave of wage slavery

We live in a world rife with misery and oppression in many various forms. Hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and political repression are still the lot of the majority of the people of the world. Ever since the earliest class-divided societies, the exploited have aspired to a better life. They have yearned for a society where all injustice would be banished forever. The dreams of the past have become real possibilities for a future. Socialist revolution is the only way that working people can ensure the abolition of all exploitation.

Socialism will mean the rule of the working class. It will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. It will bring freedom to all those oppressed by capital and open up a new period of history for people. The enormous waste of capitalism will end. Socialism is the future of humanity, a radically new society where classes and the state will have been completely eliminated.

In the end it is possible to do away with classes and the state since these only exist during a specific period of society’s development. Humanity has not always been divided into classes. In the primitive communal societies all the members cooperated together to assure their survival. But as mankind progressed, as the productive forces – the way in which man made his living – developed and it became possible to accumulate wealth, society was split into antagonistic classes. Since that time all of human history has been the history of class struggle; the struggle between slave and slave owner, between serf and feudal lord, between worker and capitalist. Each of these major periods in the development of society – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – corresponds to a particular level of development of the productive forces. Each of these societies is marked by a sharp division between the masses of toilers on the one hand, and a small handful of exploiters who live in luxury on the other.

Socialism means tremendous progress. In all the former societies, the state was an instrument for the domination of a minority of exploiters over the vast majority of working people. Under socialism, the state serves the vast majority allowing it to keep its hold over a minority of capitalists. In socialist society all social inequalities will have been banished; there will be no rich and no poor, and all members of society will contribute to the common good. With socialism, the immense advance of the productive forces and the tremendous abundance of social wealth will allow for the application of the principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Each person will contribute to society according to his or her ability, while society in turn provides for his or her needs. The differences between workers and farmers, town and country, and manual and intellectual work will have disappeared. In socialist society, each individual will develop to his full potential. Socialism is not an end to human development but just the beginning – the beginning of a further development of production, the people’s well-being and all facets of human society. But before we arrive at this goal we must take the first steps forward. We must take power from the ruling class. Reformism regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing more. Reformism advocates not class struggle, but class collaboration. We must draw a clear line of distinction between ourselves and the enemy, i.e. the bosses and their bureaucrats.

For Marx, the wage-system is not a feature of socialism but of quite a different system, capitalism. Marx spoke of the ‘free association of real producers’. It is through such a free association, when labour in all its aspects becomes controlled by the workers themselves that production will rest not upon decisions of the planners, but of the freely determined wishes of the producers themselves. Socialism will have no need of the irrational remnants of a past age, such as money and prices. The Marxists strive for the free association of completely free men, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In a socialist society, on the contrary, a man would be given ‘the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as he chose’ (The German Ideology).

Marx designated the working class the ’grave-diggers of capitalism’ – the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. The working class is not the gravedigger of capitalism by virtue of any intrinsic merit it possesses as a class qualifying it for that role, but because of the objective role it plays in the production process of capitalism. Thus it can be, and indeed has always been, that the very class which alone is capable of destroying capitalism and with it all class society, is itself deeply imbued with the ideology of the ruling class it is historically destined to overthrow. The contradiction between the objective role of the working class as an agent of social revolution, and its own lack of consciousness of that role, makes necessary a battlefield of ideas so that workers are conscious of their role as the agent of social revolution.  

According to socialist theory, the development of capitalism implies the polarisation of society into a small minority of capital owners and a large majority of wage-workers. This concentration of productive property and general wealth into always fewer hands appears as an incarnation of ‘feudalism’ in the garb of modern industrial society. Small ruling classes determine the life and death of all of society by owning and controlling the productive resources and therewith the governments. That their decisions are controlled, in turn, by impersonal market forces and the compulsive quest for capital does not alter the fact that these reactions to uncontrollable economic events are also their exclusive privilege. The producers have no direct control over production and the products it brings forth. At times, they may exert a kind of indirect control by way of wage struggles, which may alter the wage-profit ratio and therewith the course or tempo of the capital expansion process, but generally, it is the capitalist who determines the conditions of production. Unless the worker accepts the exploitative conditions of capitalist production, he is ‘free’ only in the sense that he is free to starve. This was recognised long before there was a socialist movement. As early as 1767, Simon Linguet declared that wage-labour is merely a form of slave labour:

“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? ... He is free, you say. Ah. That is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs him ... These men, it is said, have no master – they have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”

Almost three hundred years later, this is essentially still the same. Although it is no longer outright misery which forces the workers in the advanced capitalist nations to submit to the rule of capital and to the wiles of capitalists, their lack of control over the means of production, their position as wage-workers, still marks them as a ruled class unable to determine its own destiny.

The goal of socialists is the abolition of the wage system, which implies the end of capitalism. Social development will no longer be determined by the uncontrollable fetishistic expansion and contraction of capital but by the collective conscious decisions of the producers in a classless society.

The cooperative movement came into being as a medium of escape from wage-abour and as a futile opposition to the ruling principle of general competition.  Producers’ cooperatives were voluntary groupings for self-employment and self-government with respect to their own activities. Some of these cooperatives developed independently, others in conjunction with the working class movements. By pooling their resources, workers were able to establish their own workshops and produce without the intervention of capitalists. But their opportunities were from the very beginning circumscribed by the general conditions of capitalist society and its developmental tendencies, which granted them a mere marginal existence. Capitalist development implies the competitive concentration and centralisation of capital. The larger capital destroys the smaller. The cooperative workshops were restricted to special small-scale industries requiring little capital. If they became a threat, the better resourced capitalist companies drove them out of business.

Consumers’ cooperatives proved to be a little more successful and some of them absorbed producers’ cooperatives as sources of supply. But consumers’ cooperatives can hardly be considered as attempts at working class control, even where they were the creation of working class aspirations. At best, they may secure a measure of control in the disposal of wages, for labourers can be robbed twice – at the point of production and at the market place. The costs of commodity circulation are an unavoidable faux frais of capital production [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_frais_of_production], dividing the capitalists into merchants and entrepreneurs. Since each tries for the profit maximum in its own sphere of operation, their economic interests are not identical. Entrepreneurs thus have no reason to object to consumers’ cooperatives. Currently, they are themselves engaged in dissolving the division of productive and merchant capital by combining the functions of both in the single production and marketing corporation.

The cooperative movement was easily integrated into the capitalist system and, in fact, was to a large extent an element of capitalist development. Even in bourgeois economic theory it was considered an instrument of social conservatism by fostering the savings propensities of the lower layers of society, by increasing economic activities through credit unions, by improving agriculture through cooperative production and marketing organisations, and by shifting working class attention from the sphere of production to that of consumption. As a capitalistically-oriented institution the cooperative movement flourished, finally to become one form of capitalist enterprise among others, bent on the exploitation of the workers in its employ, and facing the latter as their opponents in strikes for higher wages and better working conditions. The general support of consumers’ cooperatives by the official labour movement – in sharp distinction to an earlier scepticism and even outright rejection – was merely an additional sign of the increasing ‘capitalisation’ of the reformist labour movement.  The division of ‘collectivism’ into producers’ and consumers cooperatives reflected, in a sense, the opposition of the syndicalist to the socialist movement. Consumers’ cooperatives incorporated members of all classes and were seeking access to all markets. They were not opposed to centralisation on a national and even international scale. The market of producers’ cooperatives, however, was as limited as their production and they could not combine into larger units without losing the self-control which was the rationale for their existence.

 It was the problem of workers’ control over their production and products which differentiated the syndicalists from the socialist movement. In so far as the problem still existed for the latter, it solved it for itself with the concept of nationalisation, which made the socialist state the guardian of society’s productive resources and the regulator of its economic life with respect to both production and distribution. Only at a later stage of development would this arrangement make room for a free association of socialised producers and the withering away of the state. The syndicalists feared, however, that the state with its centralised controls would merely perpetuate itself and prevent the working population’s self-determination. The syndicalists envisioned a society in which each industry is managed by its own workers. All the syndicates together would form national federations which would not have the characteristics of government but would merely serve statistical and administrative functions for the realisation of a truly collectivist production and distribution system. To speak of workers’ control within the framework of capitalist production can mean only control of their own organisations, for capitalism implies that the workers are deprived of all effective social control. But with the ‘capitalisation’ of their organisations, when they become the ‘property’ of a bureaucracy and the vehicle of its existence and reproduction, it follows that the only possible form of direct workers’ control vanishes. It is true that even then workers fight for higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions, but these struggles do not affect their lack of power within their own organisations. To call these activities a form of workers’ control is a misnomer in any case, for these struggles are not concerned with the self-determination of the working class but with the improvement of conditions within the confines of capitalism. This is, of course, possible so long as it is possible to increase the productivity of labour at a rate faster than that by which the workers’ living standards are raised.

The basic control over the conditions of work and the surplus-yields of production remain always in the hands of the capitalists. When workers succeed in reducing the hours of their working day, they will not succeed in cutting the quantity of surplus labour extracted by the capitalists. For there are two ways of extracting surplus-labour prolonging the working day and shortening the working time required to produce the wage-equivalent by way of technical and organisational innovations. Because capital must yield a definite rate of profit, capitalists will stop producing when this rate is threatened. The compulsion to accumulate capital controls the capitalist and forces him to control his workers to get that amount of surplus-labour necessary to consummate the accumulation process. He will try for the profit maximum and may only get the minimum for reasons beyond his control, one of which may be the resistance of the workers to the conditions of exploitation bound up with the profit maximum. But that is as far as working class exertions can reach within the capitalist system.

The workers’ loss of control over their own organisations was, of course, a consequence of their acquiescence in the capitalist system. Organised and unorganised workers alike accommodated themselves to the market economy because it was able to ameliorate their conditions and promised further improvements in the course of its own development. Types of organisations effective in such a non-revolutionary situation were precisely reformist socialist parties and centrally-controlled business unions. Capitalists no longer confronted the workers but their representatives, whose existence was based on the existence of the capital-labour market, that is, on the continued existence of capitalism. The workers’ satisfaction with their organisations reflected their own loss of interest in social change. While it may still be necessary to fight for immediate demands, such struggles no longer bring the entire order into radical question. In the fight for socialism more stress must be laid upon the qualitative rather than the quantitative needs of the workers. While there cannot be socialism without workers’ control, neither can there be real workers’ control without socialism. To assert that gradual increase of workers’ control in capitalism is an actual possibility merely plays into the hands of the widespread demagoguery of the ruling classes to hide their absolute class-rule by false social reforms dressed in terms such as co-management, participation or determination. Workers’ control excludes class-collaboration; it cannot partake in but instead abolishes the system of capital production. Neither socialism nor workers’ control has anywhere become a reality. State-capitalism and market-socialism, or the combination of both, still find the working class in the position of wage workers without effective control over their production and its distribution. Their social position does not differ from that of workers in the mixed or unmixed capitalist economy. Everywhere, the struggle for working class emancipation has still to begin and will not end short of the socialisation of production and the abolition of classes through the elimination of wage labour.

Reforms presuppose a reformable capitalism. Improved conditions have become the customary conditions, and continued acquiescence of the workers requires the maintenance of these conditions. Should they deteriorate, it will arouse working class opposition. Even though the ‘value’ of labour power must always be smaller than the ‘value’ of the products it creates, the ‘value’ of labour-power may imply different living conditions. It may be expressed in a eight-hour day, in good or in bad housing, in more or less consumer goods. At any particular time, however, the given wages and their buying power determine the conditions of the labouring population as well as their complaints and aspirations. When capitalism is forced by economic developments that brings the conditions which lead to the formation of class consciousness, it will also bring back the revolutionary demand for socialism.