Living Wage

Tuesday September 11, 2012 15:47

by The Saint-Just Mob

this is a bristol indymedia story

This Billboard in Totterdown raises one of the most contentious issues for those who fight for a revolutionary change after more than thirty years of the largest transfer of wealth and wellbeing from the poor to the rich in the history of Capitalism.

Said issue is the concept of the living wage and the seeming contradiction that amongst those who have called for it have been Pontifs and US Presidents but also Anarcho- Syndicalists. So in 1931 we have Pope Pius X1 saying that " In the first place the worker must be paid a wage suficient to support him (sic) and his family." And then a few years later FDR said that " No business which depends for existence on paying less than a living wage to workers has any right to continue in this country."

OK these statement are from over seventy years ago but an echo of such sentiments can be heard today from Social Democrats like Ed Miliband. In respose to such Janus faced apologists for Capital the temptation is to say, like the Situationists said during the student/worker revolt of May 1968 in Paris " Be reasonable - Demand the Impossible." The impossible here being what would of course be unthinkable to Capitalists - that is their own demise!

Well - yes, say that by all means but at the same time remember William Blake saying " That without contraries is no progression" and that the various recent gains by the IWW Union in Living Wage campaigns among cleaners in London show that small victories build a sense of confidence in self activity and while both reforming the system of profit accumulation these gains also at the same time sow the seeds of it's eventual replacement by a World of the Possible.