Re: Re: Re: social democracy

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ken Hanly wrote:
>
>
>     Politics beyond any type of reformism is necessary for the working class
> to bring about socialism. On the other hand surely it is necessary to fight
> back against attempts to savage social democratic reforms rather than do as
> social democratic parties in Germany and Britain are doing, namely serving
> as agents of capital in destroying the very reforms they had earlier
> championed.
>

****
 These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of
modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the
capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general
tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the
average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less
to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system,
is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance
against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at
making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary
improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of
broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their
struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the
whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising
wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and
that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is
inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities.
By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they
would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger
movement. K. Mark, Wages, Price & Profit, Chap. 14*****

It is worth noting that the man who insisted on this struggle for reform
was hardly a reformist. I will suggest, moreover, that most (perhaps
all) social-democratic struggles which led to positive gain had a very
extensive leavening of revolutionaries (and usually leninists) among
their cadre.

Anti-leninists make poor reformers.

Carrol