Who the Hell is Karl Marx?: And what are his theories all about? (Who the Hell is...? Book 7) by Manus McGrogan

Author:Manus McGrogan [McGrogan, Manus]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Inequality and Strikes

The productive forces unleashed by capitalism have created, for the first time in human history, the potential for abundance. This would be the precondition for a socialist society to exist, a society in which everyone’s material needs can be met. The productive and technological advances under capitalism mean that, for instance, the working week can be reduced or the retirement age lowered. Paradoxically the opposite can, and does happen. The social relations – in other words private corporate ownership – of the means of production, prioritize increased production over reduction in labour time. Capitalism’s relentless search for increasing profit, its ‘need’ to drive up the exploitation of workers, works against the potential improvements in people’s lives. Indeed, capitalism has created a vast chasm of social inequality, standing in the way of the social transformation that Marx and Engels claimed was not only desirable, but necessary.

Although it is immensely productive, the capitalist system is inherently unstable and anarchic, creating periods of boom and slump, provoking crises of mass unemployment, poverty, famine and war around the globe. The system creates immense want and suffering alongside the potential for plenty and peace. These contradictions, stated Marx, generate resistance to the system, in the form of protest, revolt and, periodically, revolution.

According to Marx, only the working class can be the true agent of revolutionary social change, for several reasons. First, workers are forced to organize collectively. The very nature of the labour process means they must cooperate in order to produce goods and services. As a result they share a common interest in improving working conditions or obtaining higher wages. Workers join trade unions which seek to defend their interests, ultimately ‘stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist’ (Marx 1847). It is this collective organization that gives the working class power.

Workers are uniquely placed at the heart of the labour process to disrupt production and stem the flow of profits. When a strike brings production to a halt, the company’s leadership team is compelled to consider and sometimes concede to workers’ demands. Mass strikes link workers from different workplaces together, enabling them to assert their interests as a class and challenge the system as a whole. For example, in the French general strike of May and June 1968, workers occupied their factories to protest against poor conditions and low wages. For the best part of two months the country was paralyzed. The president, Charles de Gaulle, eventually managed to restore order, but the government was forced to make significant concessions to the workforce.

British coal miners went on strike for over a year during 1984–85 against pit closures planned by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. It was an epic strike which saw pit occupations, picket line clashes and the militancy of miners’ wives. But the miners were left to fight alone and the strike eventually collapsed. This was a defeat that had far-reaching consequences for the British working class.

In 2018, the USA experienced the largest number of work days lost through strikes and stoppages since the 1980s.

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