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Title: Resistance Societies Author: Errico Malatesta Date: May 1, 1897 Language: en Topics: unions, resistance, anarchist
The resistance society is the workers’ association for defending their
own interests against the contrary interests of the capitalists.
Workers in the same trade, or from various trades attached to the same
firm, band together and fight to improve their pay and other working
conditions, or in order to stop the master from making existing
conditions worse, as well as to protect any of them who may be
personally singled out for injustice and annoyance. And, in order to add
vim to their struggle and marshal the resources of all behind whatever
section of them may from time to time be involved, these various
groupings, conscious of the ever-growing solidarity of interests between
workers of every trade and every land, progressively band together into
local, national, and international federations for each trade, and into
general federations of workers from amalgamated trades.
The normal weapon available to the resistance societies—besides the
moral respect that is always obtained by men who have shown themselves
capable of understanding and defending their own rights—is the strike,
which is to say, the refusal to work.
The meaning and the economic and moral implications of strikes need
scrutiny if we are to avoid illusions—which are followed by inevitable
disappointments and bring loss of heart and indifference—and unjustified
scepticism, which leads to blithe acceptance of all bullying and reduces
the worker to the most humiliating dejection.
If the worker were an animal (as all too often he still is), short of
intelligence and bereft of willpower, and if there were no forces in
society beyond the economic one, the strike would serve no purpose.
Capitalists and the propertied have control over all means of
subsistence; they regulate production, they rule the market and set
prices. The workers, always threatened by hunger the moment they lack
work and always in danger of being replaced by other unemployed workers
and compeled by poverty to any act of vileness, must of necessity endure
the conditions it pleases the masters to impose.
If, by some extraordinary effort, helped by the competition of one
employer with another and profiting from exceptional circumstances, the
workers managed to obtain some improvement, it would only be temporary
and would soon turn into a vanished illusion.
If it is an increase in wages (besides the master’s being always able to
withdraw the increase as soon as the circumstances that helped the
strike have passed), it so happens that the price of consumer goods rise
in proportion and therefore the increase in wages would only be nominal
and nothing would have changed. If it is a reduction in work hours, the
master hits back by introducing new machines and making work more
intense and wearisome; moreover, after the introduction of the new
machines, he might still seize upon the first favorable circumstance to
reintroduce the old hours and fire part of his workforce, thereby making
any future resistance harder because of the swelling numbers of the
unemployed. In the case of a solidarity strike in defense of comrades
unjustly targeted, the master would not fail to seek opportunities for
revenge and would definitely find one, come the first depression in the
market.
In short, in a society where a few have it all and the rest have
nothing, those who have nothing are allowed to live only because it
suits the former, and in return for their labor, they receive the
minimum required to allow them to render the services demanded of them.
This tendency of wages to fall to the minimum necessary to survive and
reproduce has been described as the iron law of wages.
But none of this is wholly true unless, as we stated, the workers had no
consciousness, no will, and no capacity to resist—in which case even
striking would not be possible, and humanity would stay forever divided
into two unequal parts: a handful of ferocious, grasping oppressors and
a mass of abjectly servile slaves.
The mere fact that strikes happen shows that the workers have a certain
awareness of their rights and there is a level of suffering past which
they refuse to go. This is why the strike has become such an important
factor in the history of the emancipation of proletarians.
While it is true that the capitalists control all means of subsistence
and can call upon the entire machinery of the state to guarantee their
possession and unimpeded use of those means—without which the workers
can neither work nor survive—it is also true that the workers have
greater numbers and that they alone have the effective capacity to
produce. Ultimately, therefore, there is no doubt that, if the workers
wanted, they could demand the entire product of their labors and thus
radically transform the existing social order.
Meanwhile, the facts are these: the masters are out to exploit the
workers as much as possible, and the workers strive to secure as much as
they can of their products for their own consumption; the masters are
out to reduce the workers to slave status, and the workers to achieve
the dignity of free men. And at a given point the real life conditions
of the workers, all else being equal, hinges upon the degree of
resistance they are capable of putting up against the pretensions of the
masters.
These days such resistance mainly takes the form of the strike or the
threat of strike.
On examining the history and statistics of strikes we find that, on most
occasions, the workers have either been forced to settle for
negotiations or have been completely routed—and if one considers the
enormous expense incurred and huge suffering endured during the strike
and the wages lost, it could reasonably be argued that strikes are,
broadly speaking, damaging to workers.
But to get the proper measure of this issue, we need to bear in mind
what the workers’ conditions would be if strikes never took place, and
to observe the conditions in those countries where labor resistance is
unknown or still in its infancy, like Italy. In reality the strike is
forced on the worker, on pain of seeing his bread gradually whittled
away, until he lives as the Chinese and Blacks do. The fact that the
masters know that they cannot exploit the worker beyond a given limit
without triggering a backlash damaging to their own interests is what
sets a limit upon exploitation; and if, say, the Parisian worker is not
reduced to eating rotten polenta like the Lombard peasants, if he does
not live in the beastly conditions of the Apulian peasants, it is simply
because he would not accept such living conditions.
The same applies to strikes as to political upheavals and revolutions.
Those mounting them usually lose their freedom, or their lives, or at
least their tranquillity, but it is only because of these upheavals, or
the fear of them, that governments concede a little more freedom.
Without revolutions we would still be under the lash of the Inquisition;
and now, precisely because there has been no revolution for so long and
there is no visible disposition to make one, we are gradually reverting
to that condition.
So the strike is a good way for the worker to cling to a given measure
(however small) of well-being. It is, at any rate, an inevitable fact of
life for the proletarian, if he does not want to sink into an ever lower
and more beastly standard of living.
The strike and, even more, the strike’s preparations unite workers as
brothers, get them used to reflecting upon their conditions, open their
eyes to the causes of social wretchedness, and, while uniting them in
the pursuit of immediate gains, prepare them for the future
emancipation.
However, we should not believe that strikes suffice to solve the social
question, or even improve the conditions of all workers in a serious and
enduring way.
No matter how determined the workers might be to rebel against living
conditions that fall below a certain standard, with production organized
as it presently is, there are even stronger circumstances at work
crushing all possible resistance. The swelling numbers of the
unemployed, crises, and relocation of industries will persist as long as
private property and production for profit endure, and poverty will
merely swing between a highest and a lowest point without ever going
away, forcing workers to travel the same painful road over and over
again.
So, while they wage the daily struggle of labor resistance, the
resistance societies must also aim at a higher and more general target:
the transformation of the system of ownership and production. They must
prepare the workers for the great fight and equip them to someday
perform those functions in the life of society that are carried out
today, to the workers’ detriment, by capitalists and rulers.