The central problem always facing Marxist revolutionaries is how the struggle of workers inside capitalism is related to the struggle against capitalism. For social democracy even in its heyday—the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the present— the problem was not even posed. In direct opposition to social democracy, V. L. Lenin repeated hundreds of times that reforms are the by-product of revolutionary struggle: ‘partial improvements can be merely a by-product of revolutionary class struggle’. With a replacement of piece-work by Measured Day Work, with the abolition of tens of hundreds of wage levels in a plant and their substitution by a few grades, with plant negotiation instead of piecemeal negotiations, the ground is being prepared for a wider unity of workers in struggle. The factor of comparability—and the struggle for parity—increases also as a result of mergers.