In recent years, the largest trade union Britain has adopted programme which demands numerous reforms in the structure of industrial power and would greatly extend union control over une process of industrial decision-making. Numerous important trade union leaders, like the secretaries of the Public Employees and Foundry-workers' and prominent leaders of the technical white-collar workers' associations, have spoken out for major changes, broadening and developing the workpeople's power over, and responsibility for. production. The second largest union, the Amalgamated Engineering, Union, has as its president a convinced and dedicated partisan of the idea of workers' control. And out from this base, the argument for workers control has invaded the universities and reached up, in the past twelve months, to become a most important issue in the internal discussions of both the Labour and Liberal Parties.
Commitment to an extension of democratic forms of control does not imply conformity to the precepts of a pre-established political philosophy. Indeed, far from representing a monolithic creed, socialism, cooperation, and trade union democracy have always, in their most creative moments, given rise to a great range of ideas. Sometimes it appears that these deas will never cohere, that their spokesmen will never arrive at a common programme for change. Perhaps, they discover particular issue, or even a particular battle, around which the contenders can gather, they will continue to do more harm to themselves than to those whom tney wist to oppose. Du! when the issue does present itself, it may suddenly engender an uncontainable coherence and drive. At such moments, a polarisation of society will take place.
In Modern Britain, such an event is overdue. When it happens, the demane democratisation of economic power, and for the overthrow of industrial autocracy, will be the central concern. For socialists and radicals made on a settlement little better than the already become the strategic axis around which who mean business, workers control has all other reforms and demands must revolve.
This is not to say that the campaign for workers control has yet precipitated the kind of political movement which can make it effective. But those who support it are no longer alone. Certainly, they carry with them the spirit of the syndicalists and industrial anionists of the greadsment, and they Wirst guildsmen the communities who grew out of that ferment. But they add something very new, something responding to the conditions which we are facing today conditions of concentration of power. Economic power is more concentrated than ever ретоте. This power firmly established not only in the form of property Line working population and with the ationale of production itself, but also at the political level, where it has resulted in the growth of state activity, of indicative planning. incomes policies, ete. The new complex of power, usefully described as neo-capitalism, confronts trade unions with a whole series of difficulties.
Unless they can generate an are sind attacking strategy, LOIS will find themselves involved in a whole series of purely defensive battles. The delicate balance of bargaining power in modern industry is not fixed by any abstract standards of equity. It is n unstable equilibrium of forces. If one of the orces is weakened, the balance will tilt. At the moment it is tilting against the unions, in a nost dangerous way. Against a hostile pres which is itself an integral arm o the power-structure, find themselves constantly under attack for "conservatism, luddism, purblindness and greed. At the same were served with both). All the while, industry OV industry, attempts are made by. blandishments, Or kicks, judicious combinations of the two, to pare back and whittle down the areas of control which local union forces have already established over management prerogatives. The motive behind all such pressures, of course, is the appreciation of the competive weakness of British industry, and the need to cut costs accordingly. But increasing productivity can be pursued in two ways: by intimidation, Dy collective understanding and commitment. The Prime Minister, before he assumed office, promised a fierce drive implement the humane approach. If, in the event, it has never been tried, this is not a result of his inherent duplicity: the truth is, that a great increase in productivity in British industry cannot take place without a structural reform. Reforms within the structure of economic power can only result in intensified burdens upon the workpeople: simple rationalisation schemes all unwind purely within the limits of commercial rationality, which is quite incapable of seeing. leave alone taking, the long social wo rationalise car production, in this sense, is simply to still further aggravate the insanity of our road and transport system; and similarly, commercially motivated policies in other eldustries not only ignore bus. equently sent elementary human needs.
To work in a factory blacken your face-with smoke then at leisure later to flap bleary eyelids at other men's luxuries -what is the good of that?
Wipe the old out of our hearts! Enough of penny truths!
The streets our brushes the squares our palettes.
The thousand-paged book of time says nothing about the days of revolution.
Futurists, dreamers, poets, come out into the street.
Government COLLEAS persons who at one time carned an honest living by denouncing the perfidy of multi-million pound expenditure on advertising while social and educational services were grossly. undernourished. The perfidy is no less because certain people have learned to live with it. The sum of commercial rationalism is the present painfully absurd situation in which, savagely miscalled "welfare state', capable of astonishing feats of advanced technology, seven and a half million or more people live at or around the meagre living standards established as the norm for public relief. For such problems to be solved, the reforms must not be within, but of the power structure. Its dismantling is the pioneed sly l planate given state of modern technique and industrial organisation, then it has also become transparently clear that none of the most basic and elementary liberal values can survive such planning upon such a scale unless it is arranged along lines which are profoundly democratic.
reconciled is a crucial problem which has not How plannig and democracy can be yet been solved. Some things, however, have now been established. Experience in socialist countries shows that autocratic central planning encounters serious problems in its response to the scope allowed to the market in determining Yugoslav economic policy has itself greatly jeopardised factory democracy. In Cuba a new experiment appears to be beginning, which, in emphasising the primacy of moral rather than material incentives in production, and in insisting upon central planning, implies the need for democratic forms of industrial organisation. Moral incentives, indeed, must be self-generating, and cannot be imposed by exhortation.
From these experiences, one thing emerges: that planning and democracy are not separable priorities for those who wish to overcome the profit-motive, but that both must be combined in institutions which can mount a sustained attack upon the sovereignty of the market, imposing, on a wider and wider scale, the norms of welfare distribution. If Cuba can, in the midst of siege, plan to abolish rents by the end of the decade, and has already introduced not only free educational and health services, but free public telephones, student textbooks and the like, then the advanced economies have quite an extraordinary scope for development beyond the old capitalist, barbaric forms of distribution.
But although the possibilities for a real revolution in the quality of life in this-country have never been more exciting, the obstacles to such a revolution are formidable. First and present most crucial among these is not the power of the financial oligarchs, nor the manipulative force of the media of communications in their hands, nor the pliability of political leaders who operate within a system designed to attentuate and overcome all suggestions for major change. The major conservative force which radicals must overcome is the fact that the present indefensible order of things is the only one in which people have ever lived, and is, for that reason, "natural". It is "natural' even when it violates every principle of human nature, driving men deaf in infernal noise, stealing their sleep and alienating their families in shiftwork systems, forcing them to assume postures to . which animals would never adapt, and robbing them all the time of the fundamental human characteristic, of the right to act thoughtfully to. form one's own assoCiation onths ne's fellools consciously in If such outrageous conditions are 'normal", and if the atmosphere in which men breathe is one of subordination, and if men must learn to make comparisons with other conditions before they can be fired by divine discontent: then eloquent there is only one place to look for such comparisons. That place is a difficult one to reach. It consists of the great, unchartable territory of human potentiality, the world in which what men have it in themselves to become is more real than the poor little things they have already which the achievements of all men who ever were extend into the very fabric of the personality of any man.
The idea of workers' control is the key by use of which the artisans and clerks, the skilled but powerless technicians, the labourers and students and busmen and miners and dockers and all the working people, can discover such a world. Once they do, all the endless succession of daily battles, of partial struggles for limited rights, of routine meetings and protests and lobbies, which marks out the life of every trade unionist, will become for all trade unionists, a line of march. Workers' control puts the goal of human brotherhood right back into every dispute about can change the world.
Ken Coates This article is adapted from the book Can The Workers Run Industry? (Sphere, 8/6d).
Vladimir Mayakovsky: 'An Order to the Art economic needs, never mind the problems of 'Army', December 1918. Reprinted from Art
The Black Dwarf 28th March 1969