Workers can overcome bosses and bureaucrats

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The strategy of the current "leaders" of the unions—the labor bureaucracy-is based on systematic class collaboration. This is the scientific term for the view that a partnership exists between workers and employers.

The bureaucracy peddles this false notion to justify a policy of subordinating wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions to profitability.

Official AFL-CIO policy, firmly based on this concept of "partnership," has led working people into its current morass. Disarmed by this concept, labor is unable to effectively resist accelerating employer takebacks.

To the extent a partnership does exist, it is between the bosses and the bureaucrats and is necessarily directed against the class interests of working people. Collaboration between bosses and bureaucrats can only be established on the basis of joint efforts to guarantee the capitalist "right" to make a profit.

Such a "partnership," in principle, is similar to that between slaveowner and slave. The slave owner, like the capitalist, must have the "right" to expropriate the surplus produced by the slave-otherwise the slave system would die.

Class collaborators in the unions are under pressure, however, to show results to their membership. They worry that if they are not able to appear to make gains for the membership they can be ousted. Thus to get wage increases they tend to bargain away previously won gains or accede to conditions which are detrimental to the working class as a whole.

The "no-strike" clause in most union contracts is a particularly onerous result of this method of bargaining. It ties the workers' hands when the boss violates the contract and compels workers subject to this clause to cross the picket lines of other unions.

Before we can begin an effective defense of living standards we must refute this myth of class partnership.

Workers vs. capitalists

Ask workers which class they are members of and most will confidently answer, "middle class." In a sense, this is not wrong. They generally mean to say they are neither rich nor poor. But this sense of the term "class" is not adequate for perceiving and understanding the underlying material conditions dividing society into warring camps.

(Social) class refers to the basic division in society between those who own the factories, mines, systems of transportation, communication, etc., and those that do not own the basic means of production-only their capability to sell their labor power for wages.

The opposition between these two basic social classes over the division of the product of human labor is the source of perpetual economic, social, and political conflict in modern society. It is in the nature of the system. Profit rates can only be increased at the expense of working people, because profit-to get to the heart of the matter—is derived from unpaid labor.

How capitalism works

Workers in capitalist production sell their labor power for a given time for a price (wage). In one sense this is a "fair" exchange since the value of labor power, like all other commodities, is determined by the labor time necessary for its production (and in this case, its reproduction).

But labor power is different from any other commodity in that its value increases during its consumption. That is, the laborer normally produces new value for the capitalist in the course of a day's work that is greater than the wages paid that worker for that day.

Thus, an average worker may produce new value equal to his or her wages in the first four hours of a typical eight-hour day. But the work-day doesn't end at this point. The worker must continue to work "the full day." The value produced by this average worker in the second four hours is surplus value, i.e., unpaid labor—profit.

The capitalist persistently strives to expand surplus value in a variety of ways, including speedup, extending the work day, and reducing wages.

All who have nothing to sell except their labor power are objectively part of the working class, and all who live by exploiting workers are objectively part of the capitalist class. The interests of these two classes are diametrically opposed: Improvement in wages, hours, and working conditions tends to depress profits, and an opposite movement in wages, hours, and working conditions tends to raise profits.

Class struggle vs. class collaboration The dominant economic position of the capitalist class is rooted in the entire legal and political structure of the capitalist state. This dominance was reinforced in the course of hundreds of years of class struggle. The

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MISS-ELE WORKING MEN'S transition to socialism stands as an obstacle to harmonious development in that direction.

In the view of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin and Trotsky who came after them, the transition from capitalism to the classless society of socialism could only be carried out by an ever-expanding democracy, involving the masses of the workers more and more in all phases of social life, by direct participation and control.

And, in the course of further progressive development in all fields, as Lenin