On May 1, 2009, at 10:51 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Doug and Alan take issue with my lauding of Gompers.
>
> If his trade union demands are too downmarket and grasping, will the
> Irish Revolutionary James Connolly and original socialist feminist
> Sylvia Pankhurst's claims do instead?
>
> 'Our demands most moderate are,' sang James Connolly, 'we only want
> the earth'
>
> 'We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and
> self-denial', Sylvia Pankhurst wrote. 'We call for a great
> production that will supply all, and more than all the people can
> consume,'
I'm not a hair shirt guy, never have been. But Gompers' "more!" is empty of politics. Remember the quote from Marx I posted the other day? Gompers was on the wrong side of this.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm
>
"At the same time, and quite apart form 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!""