It is now clear that the Tories are planning a confrontation with the unions. It could be a long and if the miners' strike bites home-cold winter.
The strike figures rise, unemployment figures move up and, most worrying to the bourgeois economists, wage-inflation rushes forward with increasing momentum. Perhaps the most dangerous weapon in the Tories' arsenal is not a straight confrontation with the unions or even a resurrection of Barbara's Income Policy, but rather productivity bargaining and Measured Day Work.
PRODUCTIVITY BARGAINING Productivity bargaining-has already allowed the capitalists to win big victories.
The first and most famous was the Fawley Refinery agreement. The unions and stewards were persuaded to sell their rights for a flat increase in wages. The result was that Fawley, in a matter of years, fell from the top of the wages league in the Southampton district to nearly the bottom. What makes the strategy of Fawley and Devlin, etc. so deadly is that the response from the Labour movement has been so pathetic. Scanlon, Daly, Jones, etc. have been totally preoccupied with spelling out how the bosses will be responsible for the coming confrontation and mouthing phrases about "free collective bargaining." The former is a dubious defensive exercise (the employers are causing the nasty strikes), and the latter is a reactionary nostalgia for the wage-drift of the '50s. Even the Left, which at least recognises the dangers of productivity bargaining, has failed to produce an adequate response. Some have even argued that one must fight productivity packets but, even if it goes through, not to worry, since the lads will eventually see through the scheme and then fight back. Extrapolate this approach and you end up with the lunacy of "the worse the better", i.e.—if only the Tories would build concentration camps for trade unionists on Hampstead Heath then many more workers would see through liberal democracy than do at present. A defeat is a defeat. It is not the job of socialists to observe defeats but to attempt to organise victories.
NEEDED: AN AGGRESSIVE COUNTER STRATEGY The employers' onslaught has to be met not with defensive formulations but with an aggressive counter-strategy. A key component of such a strategy would be a series of workers' control demands:
demands which would fight to democratise the trade unions the only real response to the initiatives to integrate the unions into the state machine-and would strengthen the power of the workers on the shop-floor to encroach upon the "rights of management to manage". At this stage, the movement for workers' control, and the coming conference in Birmingham, assume prime importance.
THE CONFERENCES...
The Workers' Control Conferences have been with us since the early '60s. They were originally sponsored by the journals The Week and Voice of the Unions. Since 1968 the Institute for Workers' Control has taken over this function. The numbers attending these conferences have grown but the structure and effectiveness, unfortunately, have scarcely altered. In essence, they are a cross between classical propaganda exercises and revival meetings. Speeches, inspiring or otherwise, are addressed to the plenary sessions; smaller seminars are held, and then finally the assembled gathering is exhorted forward and onward and asked to come back next year. It could be said that the conferences owe more to Bullshitism than Bolshevism. Of course, the Conference does more than provide a weekend away from the family for trade union militants. Important reports and proposals have come forward dealing with the docks and steel, ete. But the Conference has never grown into a movement. It has never assumed an on-going character. It has never managed to translate its flowdiagrams and tabulated statistics into actual struggle. Even at the level of pure theory, it has never had sufficient structure to clarify political arguments. Proponents of workers' control and of workers' participation (even people like John Cousins whose horizon of socialist vision even fails to include participation demands) incongruously rub shoulders, apparently unaware of the vital differences involved. All this is not a plea for a new Red Christ to drive the revisionists from the Socialist Temple. The Conferences must be non-exclusive, but they must also be able to resolve the debates they engender. Workers' control struggles, within the context of a worked-out anticapitalist strategy, can be a powerful weapon for the Labour Movement. Participation demands can find their place in a pro-capitalist strategy to integrate the Labour Movement. It is not pedantry or an excess of nicety to determine if the dose is coming from a bottle labelled "Tonic" or one inscribed "Poison". It is precisely this avoiding of political confrontation that explains the gap in time between the last conference in Sheffield and the present one in Birmingham. It was decided that it would be impracticable to hold the Conference before the Election. The risk of a sharp debate between the Labourites and others was too great!
•. AND THE INSTITUTE If the Conferences do not add up to a workers' control movement, what about the Institute for Workers' Control? The IWC has an excessively high subscription fee and a correspondingly low membership. R. Davies, in his article in the September issue of International, notes that only 26 people attended the 1970 AGM of the IWC. At times the IWC resembles a radical Atheneum in which a select elite mutter about blackballing the revolutionary cads. It seems neither to have the will nor the ability to launch a mass workers' control movement. It rather sees itself as the trusted adviser and confidant of important people. The possibly subliminal effect of whispering in the ears of Jones and Seanlon will move them, like sleepwalkers with no control of their actions, decisively to th Left. There is another side to the IWC, and that is in the publication of a series of extremely important pamphlets. But even here, the same political incoherenc that afflicts the conferences is found The pamphlet Participation or Control by Coates and Topham still remains the most exact and rigorous dissection of th political traps that are being laid under the disguise of "workers' participation" And then they print a rare offering by Scanlon that muddies the waters and blu all the carefully-drawn distinctions. Suck a cavalier attitude to theory can only exist if theory is exactly and rigorously divided from practice.
PRAXIS One of the major tasks of the Birminghai Conference will be to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The stage has come when there has to be a transition from a talking-shop to a body which is action-oriented. There have to be precise political debates and prescription. The structural forms have to be assemble that will enable decisions taken to be translated into action. We still have the job of creating a Workers' Control Movement: it is now an urgent task. Julian Atkinson