II.5. Strikes and the Combination of Workmen

“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than that of a rise in wheat, in wine, &c., that is to say, the effect produced by a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of wheat, &c., the integral price of everything. Let us go further still, wages are the proportion of the elements which compose wealth and which are consumed reproductively each day by the mass of the workers. But, to double wages... is to bestow upon each of the producers a part greater than his product, which is contradictory; and if the rise only affects a small number of industries, the result is to provoke a general perturbation in exchanges, in a word, a scarcity.... It is impossible, I insist, for the strikes which result in an increase in wages not to lead to a general dearness: that is as certain as that two and two make four.” (Proudhon, Vol. I., pp. 110 and 111.)

We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four.

In the first place there is no such thing as general dearness. If the price of everything is doubled at the same time as wages, there is no change in prices, there is only a change in terms.

Further, a general rise in wages can never produce a dearness, more or less general, of commodities. In effect, if all industries employed the same number of workmen in proportion to the fixed capital or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a general reduction of profits, and the current price of commodities would undergo no alteration.

But as the relation of manual labor to fixed capital is not the same in different industries, all the industries which employ relatively a greater mass of fixed capital and less workers will be forced sooner or later to reduce the prices of their commodities. In the contrary case, where the price of their commodities is not reduced, their profit will rise above the common rate of profit. The machines are not wage-workers. Therefore, the general rise in wages will affect those industries less which, compared with the others, employ more machines than workmen, But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, those which rise above the ordinary rate can only do so temporarily. Thus, apart from some oscillations, a general rise in wages, so far from resulting, as M. Proudhon contends, in a general rise in prices would result in a partial fall, that is to say, a fall in the current price of the commodities which are manufactured chiefly by machinery.

The rise and fall of profit or wages merely expresses the proportion in which the capitalists and the workmen participate in the product of a day of labor without, in most cases, influencing the price of the product. But that “the strikes which are followed by an increase in wages lead to a general rise in prices, to a scarcity even,” —these are ideas which could only be hatched in the brain of an unintelligible poet.

In England strikes have regularly given rise to invention and to the application of new machinery. Machines were, we might say, the arms which the capitalists used to defeat revolted labor. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention in modern industry, put the revolted hand-spinners out of action. Even when combination and strikes have no other effect than to arouse against them the efforts of mechanical genius, they always exercise an immense influence on the development of industry.

“I find,” continues M. Proudhon, “from an article published by M. Leon Faucher.... September, 1845, that for some time English workmen have ceased to form combinations, which is certainly a progress upon which they are to be congratulated. But this improvement in the morality of the workers arises above all from their economic knowledge. ‘It is not upon the manufacturers,’ cried a working spinner at a meeting at Bolton, ‘that wages depend. In periods of depression the masters are only, so to speak, the whips with which necessity is armed, and, whether they will or no, they must strike. The regulating principle is the relation between supply and demand; and the masters have not the power.” “Well and good,” cries M. Proudhon, “these are well developed model workmen, &c., &c. The poverty we have here does not exist in England; it cannot cross the Channel.” (Proudhon, Vol. I., pp. 261 and 262.)

Of all the towns in England, Bolton is one in which Radicalism is as fully developed as anywhere. Than the workers of Bolton there are none more revolutionary. During the great agitation in England for the abolition of the Corn Laws, the English manufacturers felt that they would be unable to make head against the land-owners except by putting the workers in the front of the fight. But, as the interests of the workers were not less opposed to those of the manufacturers than the interests of the manufacturers were opposed to those of the land-owners, it was natural to expect that the manufacturers would get the worst of it in the meetings of the workers. But what did the manufacturers do? In order to save appearances they organised meetings composed in great part of foremen and overseers, of the small number of workmen who were devoted to them, and some “friends of commerce,” properly so-called. When afterwards the real working people attempted, as at Bolton and Manchester, to take part in such meetings in order to protest against these factitious demonstrations, they were told they were “ticket meetings,” to which no one could be admitted without a ticket, and were refused admission. Nevertheless, the placards advertising the meetings had announced them as public demonstrations. Every time these meetings were held the capitalist journals gave glowing accounts, with full and detailed reports of the speeches. It goes without saying that these speeches were made by foremen and overseers. The London newspapers gave literal reproductions of these reports. M. Proudhon is so unfortunate as to take the foremen and overseers for ordinary workmen, and to urge upon them the advice not to cross the Channel.

If in 1844 and in 1845 strikes attracted less attention than formerly, it was because 1844 and 1845 were the two first years of prosperity which English industry had enjoyed since 1837. Nevertheless none of the trade unions were dissolved.

Let us now hear the foremen and overseers of Bolton. According to them the manufacturers are not the masters of wages because they are not masters of the price of the product, and they are not masters of the world market. By this argument they gave it to be understood that combinations were not necessary to drag from the masters an increase of wages. M. Proudhon, on the contrary, forbids them to combine for fear that combination may be followed by a rise in wages, which would bring in its train a general scarcity. It is not necessary for us to point out that on one point there is perfect agreement between the foremen and M. Proudhon, that is, that a rise in wages is the equivalent of a rise in the price of products.

But is the fear of a scarcity the true cause of M. Proudhon’s ill-will towards combination? No. He cordially agrees with the foremen of Bolton because they determine value by supply and demand, and because they scarcely think of “constituted value,” of value passed to the state of constitution, of the constitution of value, comprising the “permanent exchangeability,” and all the other “proportionalities of relations” and “relations of proportionalities,” flanked by Providence.

“For workers to strike is illegal, and it is not only the penal code which says so, it is the economic system, it is the necessity of the established order.... That each workman should have the free disposal of his hands and of his person, that can be tolerated, but that workmen should undertake by combination to do violence to monopoly, that is what society can never permit.” (Vol. I., pp. 235 and 237.)

M. Proudhon wishes to make an article of the penal code pass for a necessary and general result of bourgeois production.

In England trade combination is permitted by law, and it is the economic system which has forced Parliament to give this legal authorisation. In 1825 when, under the minister Huskisson, Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more into accord with a state of things resulting from free competition, it was necessary to abolish the laws which prohibited the combination of workmen. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements are there which provoke and support competition, and as soon as combinations have become an economic fact, acquiring greater consistency day by day, they will not be slow in becoming a legal fact.

Thus the article of the penal code only proves at most that modern industry and competition were not sufficiently developed, under the Constituent Assembly and under the Empire, for the legal recognition of combination.

The economists and the Socialists are agreed on one point. That is, in condemning combinations. Only they have different motives for their act of condemnation.

The economists say to the workers: Do not combine. By combining you hinder the steady progress of industry, you prevent the manufacturers from executing their orders, you disturb commerce and precipitate the introduction of machinery which, by rendering your labor in part useless, forces you to accept still lower wages. Otherwise you may do very well, your wages will be always determined by the relations between the demand for and the supply of hands, and it is an effort as ridiculous as dangerous to revolt against the eternal laws of political economy.

The Socialists say to the workers: Do not combine, because at the end of the account what will you have gained by it? An increase of wages? The economists prove to demonstration that the few pence which you temporarily gain if you succeed, will be followed by a lasting reduction. Clever statisticians prove to you that it will take you years to recover by the rise in wages the expenditure you have had to make in order to organise and maintain your combination. And we—we, as Socialists tell you, that apart from this question of money, you will be not less workmen, and the masters will be always the masters as before. Therefore, no combinations, no politics; for after all, to form combinations is that not having to do with politics?

The economists desire that the workers should remain in society as it is formed, and as they have recorded and ratified it in their manuals.

The Socialists desire the workers to leave the old society in order to be the better able to enter into the new society which they have prepared with so much foresight.

In spite of the one and the other, in spite of the manuals and the utopias, combinations have not ceased to progress and to grow with the development and growth of modern industry. It is at such a point now that the degree of development of combination in a country marks clearly the degree which that country occupies in the hierarchy of the world market. In England, where industry has attained the highest degree of development, the combinations are the largest and best organised.

In England these combinations are not confined to a partial organisation with no other object than a temporary strike, and which will disappear when that is over. Permanent combinations have been formed—trade unions—which serve as a rampart for the workers in their struggle with the capitalists. And at the present time all these local trade unions have a centre or union in the “National Association of United Trades,” the central committee of which is in London, and which already numbers 80,000 members.

The organisation of strikes, combinations, trade unions, marches simultaneously with the political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a great political party under the name of Chartists.

It is under the form of these combinations that the first attempts at association among themselves have always been made by the workers.

The great industry masses together in a single place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of their wages, this common interest which they have against their employer, unites them in the same idea of resistance—combination. Thus combination has always a double end, that of eliminating competition among themselves while enabling them to make a general competition against the capitalist. If the first object of resistance has been merely to maintain wages, in proportion as the capitalists in their turn have combined with the idea of repression, the combinations, at first isolated, have formed in groups, and, in face of constantly united capital, the maintenance of the association became more important and necessary for them than the maintenance of wages. This is so true that the English economists are all astonished at seeing the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages on behalf of the associations which, in the eyes of these economists, were only established in support of wages. In this struggle—a veritable civil war—are united and developed all the elements necessary for a future battle. Once arrived at that point, association takes a political character.

The economic conditions have in the first place transformed the mass of the people of a country into wage-workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass of people a common situation with common interests. Thus this mass is already a class, as opposed to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have only noted some phases, this mass unites, it is constituted as a class for itself. The interests which it defends are the interests of its class. But the struggle between class and class is a political struggle.

In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish, that during which it is constituted as a class under the régime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that wherein, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy in order to make of society a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longest and necessitated the greatest efforts. That also commenced with partial combinations against the feudal lords.

Many researches have been made to trace the different historical phases through which the bourgeoisie has passed from the early commune to its constitution as a class.

But when it becomes a question of rendering an account of the strikes, combinations, and other forms in which before our eyes the proletarians effect their organisation as a class, some are seized with fear while others express a transcendental disdain.

An oppressed class is the vital condition of every society based upon the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class therefore necessarily implies the creation of a new society. In order for the oppressed class to be emancipated it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be able to exist side by side. Of all the instruments of production the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of the revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which can be engendered in the bosom of the old society.

Is that to say that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination, comprised in a new political power? No.

The essential condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the condition of the emancipation of the third estate of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates, all orders.

The working class will substitute, in the course of its development, for the old order of civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be political power, properly speaking, since political power is simply the official form of the antagonism in civil society.

In the meantime, the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle between class and class, a struggle which, carried to its highest expression, is a complete revolution. Would it, moreover, be matter for astonishment if a society, based upon the antagonism of classes, should lead ultimately to a brutal conflict, to a hand-to-hand struggle as its final dénoument?

Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There has never been a political movement which was not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there will be no longer classes or class antagonism that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Until then, on the eve of each general reconstruction of society, the last word of social science will ever be:—