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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 22. 1973

Wage Labour

Wage Labour

"The essential condition for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoise, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modem industry, therefore, cuts from under it's feet the very foundation on which the bourgoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoise therefore produces above all is its own grave diggers. Its fall, and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (Communist Manifesto)

Thus we may see that the vital question is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of ownership - as the monopolies expand so too the proletariat grows in strength, in organisation, and in knowledge of the relationship between itself and the class rule which holds it in wage slavery i.e. "A dictatorship of the bourgeoise masked by Parliamentary forms." (Lenin) Ultimately the only way this contradiction can be resolved is for the working class, under the leadership of a genuine workers' party to destroy the old bourgeois state structure in all its forms and to create a new state the dictatorship of the proletariat. "The Proletarian movement is the self conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." (communist Manifesto)