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>Also, if unions are not a direct, full frontal attack on capital and hierarchy, why are they facing constant attack from organs of ruling class consciousness, like, say, the WSJ, the Financial Times, or even other less explicit papers like the New York Times? The fact that the capitalist class doesn't appreciate tactics that complicate or reduce the effectiveness of their preferred business practices doesn't mean that those tactics represent an attack on capitalism itself. Corporations violently oppose taxes and regulations, too, but neither threatens capitalism or its fundamental class structure. >Unions started as an instrument of class struggle and remain precisely that, the fact that that is even slightly controversial is more representative of the ideological climate of today and specifically this website. It's hardly peculiar to the 'climate of today'. Karl Marx, 1865: At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!” And in regards to unions specifically: Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. |