Page:Resolutions of the Congress of Geneva, 1866, and the Congress of Brussels, 1868 - International Working Men's Association.djvu/13

 to share alike. As a mere temporary expedient, we are willing to allow shareholders a low rate of interest.

5.—Trades' Unions. Their past, present, and future.

(a) Their past.

Capital is concentrated social force, while the workman has only to dispose of his individual working force. The contract between capital and labour can therefore never be struck on equitable terms, equitable even in the sense of a society which places the ownership of the material means of life and labour on one side and the vital productive energies on the opposite side. The only social power of the workmen is their number. The force of numbers, however, is broken by disunion. The disunion of the workmen is created and perpetuated by their unavoidable competition amongst themselves. Trades' Unions originally sprung up from spontaneous attempts of workmen at removing or at least checking that competition in order to conquer such terms of contract as might raise them at least above the condition of mere slaves. The immediate object of Trades' Unions was therefore confined to everyday necessities, to expedients for the obstruction of the incessant encroachments of capital; in one word, to questions of wages and time of labour. This activity of the Trades' Unions is not only legitimate, it is necessary. It cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts. On the contrary, it must be generalised by the formation and combination of Trades' Unions throughout all countries. On the other hand, unconsciously to themselves, the Trades' Unions were forming centres of organization of the working class, as the mediæval municipalities and communes did for the middle class. If the Trades' Unions are required for the guerilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour.

(b) Their present.

Too exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital, the Trades' Unions have not yet fully understood their power of action against the system of wages slavery itself. They therefore kept too much aloof from general and political movements. Of late, however, they seem to awaken to some sense of their great historical mission, as appears, for instance, from their participation, in England, in the recent political movement;