FORD MOTORS CHINA What can the militants in the factories achieve? The workers at Ford's gained a few more shillings a day, headed off a system of sanctions which management and government would like to impose, and reinstalled control from the floor where union officials had by-passed democratic demands.
But what else has been gained? The government's incomes policy has not been destroyed; In Place of Strife has not been withdrawn: and the handwringing, the noble appeals churned out by the press indicate that the anti-union lobby has life in it yet.
In a sense, the bourgeois pundits are right. Wage increases are regarded by the owners as an increase in costs, and are passed on as an increase in price. Which affects, as they put it, us all. Militancy in the factories, Mrs Castle suggests, achieves nothing at all - unless productivity increases in step.
To see the error in this, it is not necessary, like our kind-hearted Labour backbenchers, to come up with more facts, lament today's prices for groceries and rent. It is necessary to step outside the bourgeois system as such; to see in whose interests the present system persists.
The economy does not operate in the interests of those bereft of stock, shares, and income from rent. The concentration of wealth in Britain today is stupendous indeed; and matchs growing concentrations of power. 5 per cent of the adult population owns 75 per cent of the private capital wealth; twenty years ago, this top 5 per cent owned only 68per percent of such wealth. So twenty years of industrial strife, militants believing they were harming the bosses, have availed not at all, the Ford workers lose ground to those who own the company's shares.
At most, industrial militancy just permits wages to keep up with prices; in times of industrial peace, the working class (and part of the middle class) swiftly lose ground.
Six Labour governments have been voted into office in the past fifty years; and have never tackled this problem. When was thriving, could afford to ignore it, but, now that the system veers close to collapse, they have had to react. Mrs Castle, whose rhetoric may once have swayed Labour voters at Fords, is now their most vicious opponent - a fact which has only just begun to sink home.
Without a long period of industrial peace, the government has argued, there is no hope for Great Britain. neglect to inform us whose Britain it is — it belongs to the top 5 per cent - and they have never admitted that industrial peace is accompanied by a growing concentration of income and wealth.
The present number of Dwarf devotes a good deal of space to the issue of workers control. It does so, not in the belief that such control will emerge step by step in the night, that "participation will gradually supplant the owners themselves.
In the present situation, workers control is a utopian goal - but so is the notion that somehow the cake can be more fairly cut up, decent slices for all.
the of they They WORKERS CONTROL MARCUSE CHAINS FOR TOILETS NOT WORKERS POSTER CARRIED BY FORD STRIKERS, PRODUCED BY POSTER WORKSHOP
The Diack twart 28th March 1969 lage 2