Are you a supporter of the boycott as a means of fighting high prices? The first big meat boycott of 1973 certainly received a lot of attention by the mass media and produced certain results although it did not succeed in bringing prices down to any really noticeable extent. The red meat industry was certainly affected during the boycott week — all but paralyzed with approximately 75,000 butchers, across the country, being thrown out of work. Part of the losses to the retail owners must have been overcome, to be sure, by the mad rush before the boycott week by more affluent shoppers to cram their freezers. But the net results to the working class, generally, are negligible and until workers can force their employers to pay wage increases they must continue to suffer a cut in their real pay.
For let's face it. The wage and salaried workers are also selling a commodity, labor-power. And just as the farmers can and do argue that the costs of the grain, anchovy meal and soya beans they need to produce cattle and hogs have risen; so should the workers insist that the items they need to produce and reproduce their labor-power — the food, clothing, shelter, etc. — are more expensive. Just as the farmers and owners, generally, must include in their costs the expense of replacing plant, raw materials. etc., so must the workers provide for children who will ultimately replace them as producers and sellers of labor-power. And this is the most important commodity of all because without it nothing can be produced and the owning class would be helpless. So the response of workers to rising prices should be an immediate demand for higher wages rather than joining an organized movement to bring down prices.
In fact, the attempt to bring prices down can only be — in the long run — counter-productive to the interests of labor. Even though the struggle for higher wages does not generally result in the workers getting a larger share of the pie this is still the heart and core of the class struggle on the economic front. In the final analysis it is this struggle that makes workers class conscious and — we maintain —eventually aware of the need for the abolition of the wages system itself. The goal of consumer movements, on the other hand, is a coping with capitalism by fostering the illusion that present wages and salaries can be made adequate if costs of the commodities that are needed by workers can be lowered. Were it possible, in fact, to lower prices generally. the employers would be quick to respond by forcing lower, rather [than] agreeing to higher wages. And since governments of any type and labor union hierarchies, as well, are essentially tools of a continuing capitalism, working people could expect no help and little sympathy from either.
The immediate reaction, then, of workers to the skyrocketing prices should be a defiance (to the extent this is possible), of the Government’s restricted guidelines for wage increases and a demand for higher increases. There should also be a rejection of the George Meany-type ultimatums to Government of a roll-back of prices or a demand for more pay. Socialists say: let’s not worry about their commodities, let us take care of the price of our own.
But all of this sort of struggle, essential as it is, leads nowhere. Like a dog chasing its tail. Capitalist propaganda would have us believe that higher wages automatically brings still higher prices. If there was ever a time that this proposition was proved to be upside down it is now.
The factors that are bringing about fast-climbing prices have certainly nothing to do with wages, are — in fact — a world-wide phenomenon in countries of relative low wage levels as well as in America where high wages are supposed to be responsible for the loss of markets by U. S. capitalism. The only sensible answer remains. as Marx phrased it more than a century ago: Instead of the conservative motto, a fair day's work for a fair day’s pay, the labor unions should inscribe on their banners, Abolition of the Wages System.
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