Strikes and Seizing the Means of Production

The capitalist state — the police, military, courts, and associated legal scaffolding — allows individuals to privately own the resources that are used by society to produce its needs. Under capitalism, production is social but ownership is private. This ownership of the means of production is the source of capitalist power. The strike is the first weapon at the disposal of the working class to break that power.

What is Class Struggle?

There is a fundamental antagonism between workers and capitalists. When workers perform labor, they add value to whatever commodity they produce. A portion of this value is given back to the worker in the form of wages. Another portion is taken by the capitalist as ‘profit’. Both workers and capitalists seek to increase their share of this ‘surplus value’. This battle is the ‘class struggle’.

The fundamental contradiction between workers and capitalists cannot be resolved through compromise. The capitalist mode of production requires that capitalists continually turn a profit. The profits realized by capitalists must be invested into increasing production capacity. This increase in capacity pushes down relative production costs. Doing so enables them to eliminate their competition, buy their competitors’ production capacity, and further increase their rate of profit. If they fail to do this, they will be liquidated by their competitors.

Workers require a certain proportion of the value they produce in order to meet their social needs — food, shelter, childcare, transportation, etc. This is called the ‘cost of reproduction’ because it represents the cost required to reproduce workers as a class. Workers cannot allow wages to fall below this level.

This antagonism is made worse because increases in production lead to increases in social needs. For example, the cellular phone was a luxury item thirty years ago. Today, it is almost impossible to find or keep a job without having access to a cell phone. Once cell phones were produced in sufficient quantities, they became ubiquitous and key social functions became attached to their use.

Since wages tend to fall and the cost of reproduction tends to rise, workers are motivated to spontaneously combine their efforts in trade unions and resist exploitation. The capitalist mode of production itself provides leverage for the working class. Commodities cannot be produced without labor. Further, because profits are drawn from the surplus value produced by workers, labor is the fundamental source of profit. Therefore, unionized workers can go on strike — they can withhold their labor as a group — to halt capitalist production and the accumulation of profit.

Strikes and Class Consciousness

This fall in wages, real or relative, causes tension which is broken by the workers’ strike. Because the strike is a reaction to increasing exploitation — reduced wages, increased hours, decreased benefits — the demands of the workers are focused around decreasing economic exploitation. The strike is only concerned with the leading edge of exploitation, its economic component, rather than its less apparent causes.

It follows then that early in the class struggle, the workers’ strike is an economic strike. Workers unite only by industry. They do not see the contradiction which exists between the capitalist ruling class and all workers collectively.

Further, they do not see the political nature of the struggle. That is, they are not aware that the capitalists’ control over the means of production comes from the power of the state — the police and the military. However, the character of a strike changes with the changing character of class struggle.

Through continued struggle, deeper and deeper layers of the capitalist regime are revealed. Workers see that although they struggle on economic terms, the capitalist class is not so constrained. Capitalists, having control over all the levers of government, suppress the workers’ struggle by outlawing unions, collective action, and the right to assembly. They break picket lines with the police baton and choke the cries for economic justice in clouds of tear gas.

Understanding that the capitalist regime will use all means to wage class struggle, the workers in turn broaden the scope of their demands. They use their economic leverage to target capitalist political power.

Workers begin to go on strike to address political concerns. On the one hand, they oppose discrimination against minority groups (which threatens to divide the workers’ movement) and the manufacturing of arms (which increase the coercive power of the capitalist regime). On the other, they demand political control over local municipalities, attempting to break the hold of the capitalist electoral system (which can only ever serve capitalist ends).

The emergence of political strikes demonstrates the emergence of a new class consciousness. In identifying that the interests of the capitalist class are opposed to all workers, workers begin to see themselves as a class with their own political interests.

Seizing the Means of Production

The aforementioned actions can emerge spontaneously. But, without Marxist-Leninist political education, the capitalist regime will eventually take hold of the movement. If Marxist-Leninists allow a political vacuum to form, the capitalists will fill it with a liberal political vanguard which seeks reform and the ceasing of class hostilities. Concessions will be made on both sides, and the conflict will be tabled until, years or even a generation later, the exploitation once again reaches an intolerable point and the process resumes.

However, through Marxist-Leninist political education and the progression to political strikes, revolutionary class consciousness can be achieved. If the workers understand that the contradiction between workers and capital is irreconcilable, Marxist-Leninist political education can prepare workers for the next step, the only means of solving the contradiction; seizing the means of production.

If the collective working class has control over the means of production, exploitation can be rolled back and surplus value can be directed towards the interests of society as a whole. As Marx and Engels stated:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [capitalists], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat [workers] organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” - Manifesto of the Communist Party

Even prior to the establishment of political supremacy, the seizure of the means of production can commence ‘by degree’. This is because ownership itself is merely the collection of privileges that the owner is granted over the property by the state. Workers can wrest these privileges from the capitalists one by one.

One of the privileges of property ownership is the management of the workers who must use that property to produce commodities and earn a wage. Specifically; the ability to hire or fire workers, to discipline them, to determine their workload, and to set their objectives.

Even capitalist-friendly unions have seized some measure of control over these functions from capitalists. A strong union contract usually contains provisions mandating that a worker not be terminated without evidence of wrongdoing. The hours a worker is permitted to work are strictly constrained. Job duties are clearly defined and penalties can be imposed for violations.

If even capitalist unions can use the threat of a strike to secure such power, how much more could revolutionary workers’ organizations gain?

Another privilege of property ownership is physical possession; to enter or leave the premises at will, to sell it, build on it, etc.

This capitalist privilege has been ‘infringed’ upon by workers in the past via the sit-down strike. By occupying a factory, workers prevent the capitalist from being able to use it. Even scabs cannot enter to continue commodity production.

Revolutionary Workers’ Organizations

Class struggle is the struggle over surplus value, beginning with the economic strike. As the struggle becomes political and then revolutionary, the economic strike begins again, but now at a new and higher stage. The economic demand for a greater share of surplus value is no longer constrained to raising wages for the individual worker. Now, the workers strike to divert surplus value into the workers’ movement as a whole. The workers use their increasing share of surplus value to increase their capacity to organize and to strike. In doing so, the revolution begins to feed itself.

Herein lies the importance of workers’ organizations. Workers’ organizations must be the organs of working class power, the prototype of a workers’ state, and the first step in the development of dual power. The creation of a workers’ state — where the working class can collectively exercise democratic control over the means of production — is the only road to a socialist economy where labor power is used for the common good.

It is this transition, from the struggle for surplus value to the struggle for the establishment of revolutionary democratic control by the working class, which distinguishes an economist workers’ organization from a revolutionary workers’ organization. Revolutionary workers’ organizations democratically lead the class struggle. They determine when, where, and how long to strike. They establish the political line and they bind workers together.

Because these organizations are revolutionary, they are not constrained within a single industry, as unions are. They bridge all gaps, uniting workers in every industry. In seeking the end of capitalist exploitation, revolutionary workers’ organizations transcend the workplace by extending the organization into the surrounding community, incorporating the struggles of the community (housing, healthcare, education, etc.) into the broader workers’ struggle.

This extension is not only logical but necessary. Landlords are a part of the capitalist class and they also extract surplus value from the working class by extracting rent payments.

The path to the seizure of the means of production is paved by the workers’ strike. The revolutionary workers’ organization is the physical body which labors to construct this path. Collective workers’ organizations, with Marxist-Leninist political guidance, fuse the efforts and the interests of the working class and channel them towards revolutionary ends. If the workers can wrest surplus value from the capitalist class and use it to drive the organizational machine, then the revolutionary struggle will take on a character of rapid and explosive expansion — dooming capitalism to historical obsolescence.