Going Beyond The Unions

FOR A  NEW WORLD WITHOUT MONEY

The assumption, in our present system, is that workers may not be allowed to make fair wages, if it means employers are forced to take less profit for themselves.  It doesn’t matter that the corporate CEO makes millions, or that the shareholders make millions.  The system defends, at all costs, against a billionaire having to make do with one less jet or yacht. This is why the workers are screwed, big time and all the time.

Unions were the first means of defence developed by the working class in its struggle against capitalist exploitation. They were the result of concerted efforts by workers to organise and fight collectively for better working conditions, wage increases and a shorter working day. The establishment and organisation of unions is no gift from the capitalist class, but the result of the workers’ struggles against their exploiters. A glance at the miserable life imposed by capitalists on the unorganized workers in the early 1800s and the struggle to set up the first unions best illustrates this step forward. It also shows how the first unions developed in open conflict with capitalist legality. Working conditions were intolerable before unions were organised. The working day in factories had no limit other than the physical exhaustion of the worker. Workers needed union organizations to wage united struggles and develop labour solidarity so to present a common front against the employers and also the government. Revolutionary political education and socialist thought have been part and parcel of the union movement from the beginning.

What every worker must realise is that through trade union struggle we are not fighting the causes which is capitalism but only its symptoms. We are fighting against the effects of the system as Marx points out, and not against the system itself.

When we fight for a demand like a pay rise, 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. What all workers must 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 fatal limitation of trade union struggles.

Trade unions as we explained are not revolutionary organisations and fight only for limited demands within the system. Furthermore, once rank-and-file workers force the boss to recognise the union (and they must force it; bosses never volunteer to deal with a militant union), the next step for the bosses is to attempt to reverse that workers’ victory. The bosses attempt this because a strong, militant union will eat into their profits and because such a union will become a vehicle for still greater struggle by the workers. Out of this struggle longer-range, revolutionary ideas and goals may be learned. Within it are the seeds of understanding necessary to final overthrow of the system which can take root. What is wrong is to limit ourselves always to trade union struggles.

We do not, of course, therefore oppose trade union struggles or refuse to participate in them. Very often, it is only in the course of these fights, that the workers learn about the system of capitalist exploitation and the need to abolish it. Trade union struggles can educate the workers. What is wrong is to stop at that stage, limiting ourselves always to trade union struggles. Workers, at some stage, should transform the economic struggle into a political struggle for the capture of state power by the working class. If we do this we would be doing revolutionary work. Otherwise we will invariably sink into the morass of reformism. We should prepare for revolutionary action to overthrow the system of exploitation itself. We must not only fight for wage increases. We must go further and abolish the wage system itself.

The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation and it can only be realised by the workers themselves being master over production. The employing class have never concerned themselves with the positive aspect of socialism, which is the liberation of the working class from all forms of oppression and exploitation and the assurance of abundance and freedom for all. Their idea of what socialism is, is simple enough. It is the threat to the profits and privileges they derive from their ownership of the means of production and exchange which socialism would abolish. Socialism is uncompromisingly opposed to capitalism. But if socialists were merely an anti-capitalist movement and nothing else, it would be exceedingly primitive, simple-minded and even subject to all sorts of reactionary perversions. If it simply took the view that what is good for the capitalist class is bad for the working class, that what hurts the capitalist class automatically promotes the interest of the working class, or that the aim of the working-class movement is to take revenge against capitalists for their exploitation and oppression – it wouldn’t have the progressive character which gives it its fundamental power. Feudalism, for example, is opposed to capitalism and stands in the way of its development. But the feudal opposition to capitalism has never promoted the interests of the working class and it never merited the name or the support of socialism.

 

TOWARDS WORLD SOCIALISM

Workers, enraged by capitalist exploitation, at one time unleashed their fury against the modern machines which were the means of exploiting them. But the smashing of the machines which took the place of primitive handwork was, at bottom, futile and reactionary; and even if it was painful to the capitalist, it did not advance the interests of the working class.  Socialism opposes capitalism only from the standpoint of promoting the interests of the working class, only from the standpoint of speeding the working class to control of the economic and political power throughout the world, only from the standpoint that this control alone will enable society as a whole to dispense with all forms of class rule and therewith develop in full freedom from all social fetters. The more acute the problems of society become, the more urgently the working class is called upon to break all its ties with capitalism and to resolve these problems in a socialist democratic way. If the working class fails to destroy capitalism it will suffer the penalty of its own destruction.