THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 187
prove to demonstration that the few pence which you temporarily gain if you succeed, will be followed by a lasting reduction. Clever statisticians prove to you that it will take you years to recover by the rise in wages the expenditure you have had to make in order to organise and maintain. your combination. And we— we, as Socialists tell you, that apart from this question of money, you will be not less workmen, and the masters will be always the masters as before. Therefore, no combinations, no polities; for after all, to form com- binations is that not having to do with politics?
The economists desire that the workers should remain in society as it is formed, and as they have recorded and ratified it in their manuals.
The Socialists desire the workers to leave the old society in order to be the better able to enter into the new society which they have prepared with so much foresight.
In spite of the one and the other, in spite of the man- uals and the utopias, combinations have not ceased to progress and to grow with the development and growth of modern industry. It is at such a point now that the degree of development of combination in a country marks clearly the degree which that country occupies in the hierarchy of the world market. In England, where indus- try has attained the highest degree of development, the combinations are the largest and best organised.
In England these combinations are not confined to a partial organisation with no other object than a tem- porary strike, and which will disappear when that is over. Permanent combinations have been formed— trade unions—which serve as a rampart for the workers in their struggle with the capitalists. And at the pre- sent time all these local trade unions have a centre or
