◆1 The imperfect state of economic science has allowed a totally false idea to be formed as to the force which Trade Unionism represents.
◆2 The force which it represents is not Labour at all, but a power of combining in order to abstain from labour.
◆3 And even this power could never be universal, nor last long; and whilst it lasts it depends on Capital.
◆¹ These great developments of Trade Unionism which are commonly called Labour movements do not really, in any accurate sense, represent Labour at all. ◆² All that they represent in themselves is a power to abstain from labouring. In other words, the increased command of the labourers over the machinery of combination, and even their increased command of the tactics of industrial warfare, represents no increased command over the smallest of industrial processes, nor puts them in a better position, without the aid of Ability, to maintain—still less to increase by the smallest fraction—the production of that wealth in which they are anxious to share farther. A strike therefore, however great or however admirably organised, no more represents any part of the power of Labour than the mutiny organised amongst the crew of Columbus, with a view to making him give up his enterprise, represented the power which achieved the discovery of America. And this is not true of the average labourers only; it is yet more strikingly true of the superior men who lead them. From the ranks of the labourers, men are constantly rising whose abilities for organising resistance are remarkable, and indeed admirable; but it is probably not too much to say that no leader who has devoted himself to organising the labourers for resistance has ever been a man capable, to any appreciable degree, of giving them help by rendering their labour more productive. Those who have been most successful in urging their fellows to ask for more, have been quite incompetent to help them to make more. Thus these so-called Labour leaders, no matter how considerable may be many of their intellectual and moral qualities, are indeed leaders of labourers; but they are no more leaders of Labour than a sergeant who drilled a volunteer corps of art students could be called the leader of a rising school of painting; and a strike is no more the expression of the power of Labour than Byron’s swimming across the Hellespont was an expression of the power of poetry, or than Burns’s poetry was an expression of the power of ploughing. A strike is merely an expression of the fact that the labourers, for good or ill, can acquire, under certain circumstances, the power to cease from labouring, and can use this as a weapon not of production, but of warfare. ◆³ The utmost that the power embodied in Trade Unionism could accomplish would be to bring about a strike that was universal; and although no doubt it might do this theoretically, it could never do so much as this practically, for the simple reason that, as I have already pointed out, Labour could not be entirely suspended for even a single day. Further, the more general the suspension was, the shorter would be the time for which it could be maintained; and to mention yet another point to which I have referred already, it could be maintained only, for no matter how short a time, by the assistance of the very thing against which strikes are ostensibly directed, namely Capital; and not even Capital could make that time long. Nature, who is the arch-taskmaster, and who knows no mercy, would soon smash like matchwood a Trade Union of all the world, and force the labourers to go back to their work, even if no such body as an employing class existed.
All the ideas, then, derived from the recent developments of Trade Unionism, that Labour, through its means, will acquire any greatly increasing power of commanding an increasing share of the total income of the community, rests on a total misconception of the power that Trade Unionism represents, and a total failure to see the conditions and things that limit it. It is limited firstly by Nature, who makes a general strike impossible; secondly by Capital, without which any strike is impossible; and lastly by the fact that the labourers of the present day already draw part of their wages from the wealth produced by Ability; that any further increase they must draw from this source entirely; and that, being thus dependent on the assistance of Ability now, Trade Unionism, as we have seen, has not the slightest tendency to make them any the less dependent on it in the future.
When the reader takes into account all that has just been said, he will be hardly disposed to quarrel with the following conclusions of Professor Marshall, who derives them from history quite as much as from theory, and who expresses himself with regard to Trade Unions thus: “Their importance,” he says, “is certainly great, and grows rapidly; but it is apt to be exaggerated: for indeed many of them are little more than eddies such as have always fluttered over the surface of progress. And though they are now on a larger and more imposing scale in this age than before, yet much as ever the main body of the movement depends on the deep, silent, strong stream of the tendencies of Normal Distribution and Exchange.”
◆1 Trade Unionism, in raising wages, can do little more than accelerate or regulate a rise that would take place owing to other causes.
◆2 But none the less it may be of great benefit to the labourers, and remove many evils which a general rise in wages has not removed, and could not remove by itself.
◆¹ But in the case of Trade Unionism, just as in that of Socialism, because the extent is limited to which it can raise the labourers’ income, it does not follow that within these limits its action may not be of great and increasing benefit. ◆² Thus Mill, whose general view of the subject coincides broadly with that of Professor Marshall, points out that though a Union will never be able permanently to raise wages above the point to which in time they would rise naturally, nor permanently to keep them above a point to which they would naturally fall, it can hasten the rise, which might otherwise be long delayed, and retard the fall, which might otherwise be premature; and the gain to Labour may thus in the long run be enormous. Unions have done this for Labour in the past; and with improved and extended organisation, they may be able to do it yet more effectively in the future; and they have done, and may continue to do many other things besides—to do them, and to add to their number. It is beyond my purpose to speak of these things in detail. In the next chapter, I shall briefly indicate some of them; but the main points on which I am concerned to insist are simpler; and the next chapter—the last—will be devoted principally to these.