At any time in the history of capitalism there have been lots of people and organisations occupied in trying to solve wages problems: the difference between now and the past being that the problems multiply and become more complex, and the armies of “solvers” – politicians, business people, academics, trade union officials and so on – become larger and larger. There is not the slightest prospect that these people will solve the problems associated with what Marx called “the wages system”.
Over a century ago, Karl Marx urged the trade unions to give up struggling for “fair” wages and go for the abolition of the wages system, not, of course, as a tactic that could be operated in a capitalist social system but as an integral part of the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism.
Marx was being logical. Socialism, as he envisaged it, involved the “abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production” (Communist Manifesto). It would not be possible to abolish the system of buying and selling generally, and still retain it in the form of the employer buying the worker’s labour-power and paying him wages for it.
In the late nineteenth century, the idea of abolishing the wages system appeared to have become widely accepted in organisations making some claim to be socialist. In 1890, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society both signed The Manifesto of English Socialists which contained the pledge: “We look forward to an end forever to the wages system”.
Among the individuals who signed on behalf of their organisations were Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb but before long most of the signatories forgot all about it and were busy joining the anti-Socialist Labour Party which devoted itself to the attempt to solve social problems, including wages problems, within capitalism. That attempt has, of course, been fruitless. Marx foresaw that it would fail and explained why this was bound to happen. In one of his early writings he said:
What errors are committed by the advocates of piecemeal reform, who either want to raise wages and thereby improve the conditions of the working class, or (like Proudhon) regard equality of wages as the aim of social revolution.
Quoted in McLellan’s Marx before Marxism, Pelican, p 214
And he pinpointed the basic error of their approach to the problem in their belief that it is possible to retain the capitalist mode of production and superimpose on it a socialist principle of distribution. One place in which he explained this was in his notes on the 1875 constitution of the German Social Democratic Party, published as Critique of the Gotha Programme:
Vulgar socialism has accepted as gospel from the bourgeois economists (and a part even from the democracy have taken over the doctrine from the unreflecting socialists) that the problems of distribution can be considered and treated independently of the mode of production from which it is inferred that Socialism turns mainly upon the question of distribution.
The German Social Democratic Party, like all subsequent ‘vulgar’ socialist groups – social democratic and liberal political parties, trade unions and labour movements – right up to the present day, support the worldwide capitalist system believing, despite overwhelming contrary evidence from history, that capitalism can be reformed and work in the interests of all human beings. Such blind irrational faith an only be matched by the doctrines of the world’s religions.
