Fight the Disease, Not the Symptoms

The Socialist Party would agree with the proposition that labour and management have nothing in common. Fundamentally, the interests of management must be to operate profitably. They are not in business for the benefit of the employees (albeit some employers may be benevolent because it means harmonious industrial relations and therefore good business-sense). Labour, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with wages, hours, and working conditions. Without their unions, labour would be in a sorry plight, for capital is in the stronger position, economically. Unions are the only weapons workers have. There exist ample experience and plenty of evidence to realise where labour would be if they had not resisted and fought.

It is mistaken to believe that anyone can serve both the bosses and the workers. There is a basic conflict of economic interests. Employers are concerned with lowering labour costs; employees are concerned with a living wage to support their families. Without resistance by workers in their unions, the tendency of capital is to reduce labour costs to the very bone in the interests of their profits. Invariably, capital will always cry “poverty,” despite what the real facts might be. There is a conflict of interests between capital and labour because, in the final analysis, a reduction in wages results in an increase in profits. Conversely, an increase in wages results in a decrease in profits. Inexorably, wages are determined by the cost of existence of the workers. It is the rise in living costs that compels the fight for higher wages. The superstition that a rise in wages causes a rise in prices is nothing but brainwashing propaganda on the part of capital. It is as simple as that.

This fact of life is what gave birth to trade unions in the first place. The labour movement was not created by philanthropists. It arose because of the solidarity of unionists in their common interests. This very solidarity gave rise to its democratic procedures. Within trade unionism, no action should be taken without the approval of the membership. The members must be watchdogs, constantly on the alert for abuses of sound unionism. The union is controlled by its members and not by any officialdom. The Socialist Party advocates trade unionism — the economic manifestation of the class struggle, but we certainly do not support all aspects of trade union activity such as its growing bureaucracy and endorsement of capitalist political parties. Workers are divorced from the means of production. Unions function to offer workers some protection within the limits of this estrangement. Therefore unions do not and cannot give workers an opportunity to have a real say in the vital processes of our society; unions, like the workers who compose them, are cut off from the roots of social processes.

 Nothing has taken place in recent developments that have even remotely repudiated the wage-labor and capital basis of present-day capitalism. This also applies to the following: the prime object of production is the production of commodities to be sold on the market with a view to profit; that the accumulation of capital is accompanied by and concomitant with the production of surplus values; that there does take place a class struggle both economically and politically; that the transformation of ownership from entrepreneurs to gigantic combines and state ownership still finds a class whose members are the “eaters of surplus value,” even though they may be government bond-holders, a state bureaucracy or the One-Party.  The general analyses of Marxian economics have not been found invalid despite the best efforts of capitalist academics who claim that we socialists " Were correct yesterday but wrong today." But capitalism remains capitalism.

It suffices to say that the workers do not have “economic power” as long as they are wage slaves. Economic power has no meaning when it is confined to just withholding your labour power from production, which still leaves economic power in the hands of the masters. Economic power flows from having political control of the state machinery. Remember: in spite of all their growing economic influence, prestige, and advantages, the rising bourgeoisie was choked by the control of the state by the feudal aristocracy. The success of the bourgeois revolution (capture of the state) transferred economic power into the hands of the new rising bourgeois class. The class struggle is one of scientific socialism’s three great contributions to knowledge. Unions deal with the economic phase of the class struggle, not its political phase. The realisation of the class struggle leads to the understanding that the politically awakened working class will vote for socialism.

There are those in other organisations who are very close to the views of the Socialist Party on most matters, except on the use of the ballot. These anti-parliamentarian views arose from the concepts of syndicalism, industrial unionism and workers councils. To them, the road to socialism was via the path of economic organisation of the workers. They stressed that the State was an organ of the ruling class and electoral activity was a deception, merely a democratic form and not democratic essence. However, it is not the economic phase that is the highest expression of the class struggle, but the political phase. In the factories, co-ops, unions, we are fragmented, sectionalised and tied to our interests, but on the political field, we can make our numbers tell in a way in which they cannot use the state to strangle. The economic phase by its very nature is limited to working within the framework of capitalism. It is the fact that State power is in the hands of the ruling class that stymies workers from revolutionary changes. Titles and deeds, the military forces, etc., are in the hands of the ruling class through its control of the State. The essence of Marx’s writing (from the Communist Manifesto on) was consistent in stressing the need for political action, and this view has stood the acid test of unfolding events. Because the state is the central organ of power, it requires the political action of a resolute, determined class-conscious majority to accomplish the transfer of the means of living from the hands of the parasites to the possession of society, as a whole. That is revolutionary socialist political action. 

The class struggle is one of socialism’s great contributions to knowledge. Unions deal with the economic phase of the class struggle, not its political phase.

A number of writers are fond of describing socialism as a society in which the worker gets the “full product of his or her toil.” This is a misleading concept. There is no class of workers in a socialist society. There are only citizens, members of society, who receive according to their need. If everyone got the full product what would be left for the common administration of the affairs of the whole community?