great numbers requiring relief, the credit which the
shopkeepers give at high interest is withdrawn after a time, and want
compels the working-man to place himself once more under the yoke of the
bourgeoisie. But strikes end disastrously for the workers mostly,
because the manufacturers, in their own interest (which has, be it said,
become their interest only through the resistance of the workers), are
obliged to avoid all useless reductions, while the workers feel in every
reduction imposed by the state of trade a deterioration of their
condition, against which they must defend themselves as far as in them
lies.

It will be asked, "Why, then, do the workers strike in such cases, when
the uselessness of such measures is so evident?" Simply because they
_must_ protest against every reduction, even if dictated by necessity;
because they feel bound to proclaim that they, as human beings, shall not
be made to bow to social circumstances, but social conditions ought to
yield to them as human beings; because silence on their part would be a
recognition of these social conditions, an admission of the right of the
bourgeoisie to exploit the workers in good times and let them starve in
bad ones. Against this the working-men must rebel so long as they have
not lost all human feeling, and that they protest in this way and no
other, comes of their being practical English people, who express
themselves in _action_, and do not, like German theorists, go to sleep as
soon as their protest is properly registered and placed _ad acta_, there
to sleep as quietly as the protesters themselves. The active resistance
of the English working-men has its effect in holding the money greed of
the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition
of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the
bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed
than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.
But what gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real
importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to
abolish competition. They imply the recognition of the fact that the
supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the
workers among themselves; _i.e_., upon their want of cohesion. And
precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of
the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however na