higher prices for it, will this attract other capitalists into the same field of production in the hope of securing bigger profits?
What happens when several big capitalists fight for a field of production where prices are high? Do prices fall?
Do these capitalists remain producing a commodity after its price falls so low that they cannot make the average rate of profit?
When they go into another sphere of production do pricer an this commodity fall to normal again?
Why cannot a capitalist raise prices at his own will? Suppose a wealthy ranch owner has a splendid stock of horses when the U. S. troops are sent down to the Mexican borderline. Horses are very scarce, since automobiles have won favor with the leisure class. He sells these horses at an enormous price. There is still talk of war. What does every other ranchman in the country plan to do when he hears of the profits of the lucky owner of the horses? Do they an go into the COAL BUSINESS?
EVEN if there is still war, or rumor of war, will the price on horses be as high in a few years as it is now? Why not?
In Lesson VII. we discussed a general increase in wages, and how and why they would benefit the working class. We discovered that a general increase in wages mould ultimately result in a fall in the average rate of profit, but would not affect prices in general.
But now that we have seen the desirability of higher wages, how may we secure them?
It is true that the working class, as a class, has never been sufficiently well organized to demand a universally higher price for its labor power–a larger portion of the value of its product from the capitalist class.
It is equally true that when they shall have become sufficiently organized and class conscious to do so, they will not stop with asking higher wages, but will abolish the whole wage system itself.
But Capital makes continual war upon the workers. It reduces wages to the bare cost of living and lowers the standard of living whenever and wherever possible. It prolongs the hours of labor as far as the physical endurance of the workers themselves will allow. And the workers find themselves forced constantly to fight in order to hold the little they already have. So that, on every side, we see little groups of workers in conflict with their employers, fighting to maintain working conditions, or to improve them where they become unendurable.
It is obvious, that men or women working from ten to sixteen hours daily will have little strength or leisure for study, or activity in revolutionary work. It is also patent that wages are bound to be higher where men toil eight hours a day than where they work sixteen hours. It requires two shifts of men, working eight hours daily, to run a machine that one man runs sixteen hours.
It is not only necessary, but it is a highly desirable matter, that we continue to resist and to advance and attack in our daily struggle with the capitalists; For it is through present defeats and victories that we learn our strength and our weaknesses. We learn to fight by fighting. New tactics are often evolved in struggles that seem to be total failures. And class solidarity becomes a living thing, a resistless weapon, when we are fighting and acting more or less as a class.
Even group struggles–the isolated wars waged by craft unions against their employers–hear fruitful lessons in class solidarity. For craft wars, are becoming more uniformly failures, and to show the vital need for a wider and even broader organization of the workers of the world.
But craft union struggles have not always failed in that which they set out to accomplish, although victories are becoming increasingly difficult and impossible with the advance of productive machinery that abolishes the need of skilled laborers. Skilled workers have often been able to form skilled labor monopolies, or unions, where their particular skill has been in demand, and have forced their employers to give them shorter hours, higher wages or better working conditions. But these victories have been due to a monopoly of a particular kind of ski