1. THE RECENT GROWTH OF THE WORKERS' CONTROL MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN
There has been a recent growth, or rather regrowth, in the workers' control movement in Britain. This can be documented in several ways.
(a) The Trend of Strikes. There has been a long-term increase in the number of strikes, mining apart. The figures are reported in The Employers' Offensive (Cliff, 1970, p. 197). With only one year's deviation (1963), the figures show a steady growth from 1956 to 1965, and then, as incomes policy and its concomitant, productivity dealing, get under way, the rise is sharper in 1966. The upward trend continues. The relevance of strikes to workers' control is outlined below.
(b) The Workers' Control Conferences. First The Week and the Voice newspapers, then the Centre for Socialist Education, now the Institute for Workers' Control (to some extent different names covering the same people) have organised a series of workers' control conferences from 1964 to 1969. From about 100 at the first meeting in Nottingham, the figure grew to some 1,200 at the 1969 conference at Sheffield. The main significance of these conferences has been the large number of shop stewards and militant workers who have attended, and the integration of political and industrial, theoretical and practical conceptions of workers' control which they have afforded. It appears to be precisely the lack of ability to control this interaction in large conferences that has led some of the leaders of the Institute to reject the holding of a conference in 1970, and this represents a real set-back to the movement.
(c) The Trend of Resolutions. Resolutions on Industrial Democracy and Participation have been appearing regularly at Union Conferences, the TUC and Scottish TUC, and at Labour Party Conferences. Several of the milder ones have been passed (e.g. Jones and Seabrook, 1969). Not just the Labour Party, but all three political parties have issued statements accepting some degree of workers' participation in management. As will be indicated below in the discussion of workers' participation, these proposals are not of advantage to the movement, but that they have appeared is significant.
(d) Other Events. The main event which may be said to be an indicator of the growth of interest in workers' control is the response of sections of the English Electric workers in the Liverpool area to the takeover of the company by GEC (Institute, 1969). An attempt to take over production by the workers as a symbolic challenge to the likelihood of closures was defeated in each of the three factories concerned, but by a narrow majority in two of them. The incidents illustrate both the gap in consciousness between militants and other sections, and the trends of thought among more conscious workers. Recently a stoppage in the London Docks took place over, among other issues, the lack of implementation of the recommendations of the Labour Party Port Transport Study Group (Labour Party, 1966).
(e) The New Left. On the theoretical side, the emergence of a New Left movement in the post-1956 period, as a result of disaffection among Communist Party intellectuals over Hungary and the 20th Party Congress revelations by Krushchev, has provided a stimulus to the workers' control movement. Interest was shown in the Yugoslav experiments, and theoretical articles appeared (e.g. Harrison, 1957; Butt, 1961. Specific articles apart, the whole atmosphere of the New Reasoner and New Left Review was suffused with an orientation towards a Marxist conception of control.) As a political movement itself, the New Left had no chance of development. Its middle-class intellectuals, with years of misorientated political activity in the Communist Party behind them, were swept off their feet by the CND movement, and emerged as various brands of liberal-radicals. (This does not apply to the small group around the current New Left Review. This developed as a reaction to the former trend and took over the magazine at the beginning of 1962, since when it has become the most significant Marxist theoretical journal in Britain.) But the significance of these contributions to the development of a holistic concept of workers' control was great.
(f) The Trotskyist Groupings. The Trotskyist groupings derived from the pre-war Fourth International, which. like a very thin and sometimes frayed red thread having maintained a continuity with the Bolshevik past, also began to grow in the late '50s. They gave workers' control a prominent place in their political slogans. (This is less true of the SLL. Peter Fryer's Battle for Socialism (1959), for example, has hardly any discussion of the concept.) In some cases the place of workers' control has remained at the level of slogans (e.g. between 1960 and 1969 there has been only one theoretical discussion of the concept in International Socialism—Sedgewick, 1960). But the emergence of the Trotskyist groupings as the key growth points of the left in the later 1960s, and the quite widespread distribution of propaganda material, has meant that the concept has been linked to the revolutionary left. More importantly, the forerunner of the IMG, the group around The Week (1964—became International in 1968), did develop an orientation to workers' control as a political strategy for development, and it was from this that the workers' control conferences, referred to above, emerged. The modest success of this orientation led to political problems. On the one hand, an influx of workers attracted to the idea in industrial terms but without a generalised understanding of its revolutionary connotations, leads to pressure for the restriction of the concept rather narrowly to specific industrial forms. On the other, the growth of concern among the ruling class about the spread of control ideas is reflected in the spread of ideas about participation in management. The confusion engendered by this latter concept is reflected in the positions of left trade leaders, like Scanlon and Jones. Since the latter have great prestige, and have been prepared (especially Scanlon) to nod towards the workers' control movement, there is pressure to limit this movement to forms not unacceptable to the left trade union leadership. It is because of over-accommodation to this pressure that the Institute for Workers' Control (founded 1968) has been left with very valuable theoretical expertise, but no organisation—only 26 people attended the AGM in 1970, and affiliation and membership fees have been maintained at a very high level. One may surmise that the reason behind this is to discourage a "takeover" by the revolutionary left, but it has also meant that no local movement of any significance could develop. For all their faults, only the revolutionary left groupings can develop a politically meaningful workers' control movement.
(g) The Need for Integration. The first four indices above indicate growth in interest from among the working class; the last two the development of the concept from the political left. It is only by the integration of these two strands that the concept can become meaningful to either; for the working class has the potential power to implement ideas of workers' control, without which political conceptions remain abstract; while the content will be taken out of workers' demands as they are manipulated by bourgeois forces, if they are not related to a whole revolutionary programme. By examining the idea of workers' control in more detail, the necessity of this integration, and the nature of some of the initially attractive dead ends become apparent, But it is also instructive to examine the lessons of British labour history in this respect.
2. BRIEF NOTES ON THE LESSONS OF THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE IN BRITAIN
The development of a workers' control movement in Britain in the '60s had an important historical precedent in the first quarter of this century, especially in the period from about 1910 to the 1926 general strike, a great defeat for the working class which disintegrated a movement already on the decline. Material on the development of these events from a socialist viewpoint is available to the general reader (Pribicevic, 1959; Coates and Topham, 1968), but a real political analysis of the meaning of the events is not as far as I know available. There are, however, parallels which seem in a very general way to have relevance today.
(i) The very power of the movement derived from a partial fusion of industrial militancy and revolutionary political conceptions. By 1918 some forms of control demands had been forced upon the TUC and the Labour Party, and the Party constitution contained Clause 4, a result of the power of this movement. The three political currents of Industrial Unionism, Syndicalism and Guild Socialism interacted with workers' demands deriving from a relatively favourable bargaining situation for labour, and created a powerful, anti-Social Democratic, potentially revolutionary force.
(ii) The movement represented a serious threat to Social Democracy, even though the latter had not yet then had the opportunity to discredit itself as a means of social transformation in Britain. The reaction of the more progressive sections of the ruling class was the attempted emasculation of the movement by the acceptance of the notion of participation, embodied in the Whitley councils. The confusion thus created, related to the power positions of the various participants, is seen in the development of guild socialism, which came to admit of degrees of joint control, encroaching control, and thus to reproduce Social Democratic gradualism within the workers' control movement. Some of those in power espoused participation to deflect the movement. Leaders of the labour movement who feared a real confrontation since it might threaten their own sources of limited power as negotiators, wanted to modify the revolutionary content to a more acceptable radicalism. The hold of revolutionary conceptions was strongest among those without official positions.
(iii) Yet there was strong pressure from the industrial base to depoliticise the movement completely, for reasons outlined in the discussion on workers' control below. This pressure distorted the revolutionary content of the movement. Conceptions that political organisation was not needed, that transformation of society by industrial action and organisation alone was possible, became dominant. Until the lessons of the Bolshevik Party's success in the Soviet Union began to sink home, which was not until 1919, when economic conditions culminating in the 1921 slump forced the movement on the defensive, the main organisation for social transformation was considered to be the industrial union, not a party. This concept was dominant in all three political strands of the movement.
Parallel pressures and responses are in evidence today. There are tentative efforts towards a political-industrial synthesis. Already sufficient power has been generated to enable resolutions to be passed at the TUC and Labour Party Conferences, albeit innocuous ones. We see the ruling class once more concerned to substitute participation for control, and trade union leaders concerned to derevolutionise the content. While there is no following for industrial unionism, we still find strong pressure from the shop floor to "keep politics out" and sections of the left believing in the spontaneous politicisation of workers, But the potential is greater. Instead of a slump (25% of engineering workers were unemployed in 1921), we have chronic crisis following a period of working-class gains. The potential for sophistication of revolutionaries is much greater, for there is a great store of international experience, both positive and negative. Social Democracy has achieved precisely nothing in the intervening 50 years in terms of the transfer of wealth and power. Each term in office contributes to its discredit.
3. A CONCEPTUAL-THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TERMS INVOLVED
Many of the political distinctions which need to be brought out in underpinning a workers' control movement theoretically emerge through an examination of the concepts involved. Many writers (e.g. Blumberg, 1968) use the term "industrial democracy" as a general hold-all term, and 'workers' control' is often used in this sense too. Within this general usage there are three concepts which need separation: Workers' Control, Workers' Participation, and Workers' Self-Management. The following discussion owes much to the work of Ken Coates and Tony Topham (see especially Coates and Topham, 1967).
(a) Workers' Control.
In many discussions, the term "workers' control" is used to describe the struggle undertaken by workers in a capitalist, or bureaucratically managed industry, for a degree of control over aspects of their working lives. In Britain that struggle centres on the shop steward movement. There have been tendencies to separate out strikes about conditions from strikes about pay, or to imply that the latter are really about the former (e.g. Cliff & Barker, 1966). The discussion of workers' control should be more clearly focussed than this, since a blurring of the key relationship in industry leads towards the mistake that workers' control is really about humanising conditions in industry, or removing alienation in the workplace, in fact a subordinate meaning.
(i) The Basis of Dehumanisation. In a capitalist society the basis of the relationship between man and man is the purchase and sale of labour power. For the capitalist, labour power is a commodity, to be bought and sold like other commodities, but essential to the production of all of them. But labour power is not a tangible thing. It is not separable in any way from the person who sells it. The labour power seller therefore appears to the purchaser not as a human being, but as a commodity. As managements say, "Labour is a cost item", or "We have to get the best out of our workers". In the central relationship which they have to enter into in order to exist, which the capitalist and his state require them to enter into in order that the system which benefits them continues to exist, the vast majority of the population are dehumanised. In challenging the price their labour power receives, in other words in asserting control over the price of their labour power, workers are making an assertion of their humanness—no other commodity can challenge its price—and potentially challenging the system which dehumanises them. In striking, workers are asserting the right to control their own labour power, and thus potentially striking at the basis of the system. This is why trends in strikes are significant indicators of potential prospects for the challenging of the dehumanising system as a whole.
It does not mean, of course, that Marxists go round urging workers to strike on any occasion and any pretext; that is a figment of the bourgeois conception which, based on the dehumanisation of the workers, cannot credit them with any human powers of decision and independent action of their own, but demands that, as commodities, they are "used". (In post-capitalist societies of the Soviet type, the control of authority itself becomes more and more important, since resource allocation is not based on search for profit, but on control over decisions by a bureaucratic grouping.)
(ii) The Control of Conditions in the Plant. The purchase and sale of labour power takes place in specific sets of conditions in which the parties are related in complex ways. The relationship is never a simple economic one, although it may more or less approximate to it. For instance, the extent to which labour power is effectively utilised in production, which determines the real return for the price paid for it, is related to the actual mechanical efficiency of the actions performed by the worker; hence work study, by eliminating redundant action, can benefit the purchaser. Effective utilisation is also related to the physical condition of the worker's body or brain, where brains are needed. Hence the provision of optimum physical conditions, the maintenance of the worker-commodity in good health, can also benefit the purchaser. Effective utilisation is also related to the attitudes of the worker towards production. Hence human relations techniques, by manipulating the attitudes of the worker-commodity, can benefit the purchaser. (cf. Friedmann, 1955).
Workers strive to a greater or lesser degree to exert control over a range of things connected with the sale of their labour power. This struggle gives them a better return for its sale (for a given amount of production, a given price for labour power is a better bargain to the worker if he has safety devices, holidays, tea breaks, chances to smoke and talk etc., than if he has not). On the other hand, employers, those who are sophisticated, try by the introduction of cheap fringe benefits to get a disproportionate increase in production, and thus to reduce the real price of labour power.
One of the ways employers try to utilise labour power effectively is by supervision. In the authority system of the factory, workers' attempts to increase the price of their labour power by increasing fringe benefits come into conflict with management's attempts to cheapen it by the close control of behaviour. Sophisticated managements may try to lessen this problem by the integration of workers into the authority system. This is the meaning of workers' participation in management.
I have given very strong emphasis to the central relationship, the purchase and sale of labour power. This is not to say that all the variety of degrading and humiliating relationships that are found in our society between man and man (and man and woman) are directly and totally determined by this relationship, But because the capitalist system as a whole has historically developed around the purchase and sale of labour power, it has a central significance. In challenging that central relationship, the worker is potentially engaging in a revolutionary transformation of society.
(iii) The Present Situation. The relationship of the forces in this constant control struggle is obviously crucially affected by the forces outside the single factory context. A series of blows sent the British working class reeling the post World War I period—the 1921 slump; the defeat of the general strike; the prolonged 1929 slump. These blows weakened the capacity of workers for industrial-political action and must indirectly have helped to strengthen parliamentarist illusions. The advent of sustained periods of labour administration is gradually (very gradually) eroding these. The uneven prosperity of the '50s enabled the resurgence of a shop stewards' movement, at its strongest in prosperous areas, in modern developing industries. It is from the shop stewards' movement that more generalised control demands have come. In other relatively declining areas reactions have been much more defensive. Nevertheless, overall real living standards have risen considerably for a great majority. Only in the most recent period have they begun to be challenged, as increasing international pressure reveals the structural weaknesses of British capitalism. By the logic of the system, the workers are expected to provide the solution of the problems. They are attacked in two ways. Incomes Policy nationally coordinates attempts to keep the price of labour power down, and also, by legislation attempts to weaken the shop stewards' movement in favour of the more easily controllable trade union leadership. Productivity Bargaining attempts to weaken the shop stewards' movement by reducing the area they can control and increasing supervision (Cliff and Barker, 1966, and Cliff, 1970, are essential reading for documentation of all this.) [illegible] cover all aspects of industrial life, it becomes more easily possible to make clear the way all these aspects are linked to the central exploitative mechanism. Secondly, the company-wide scope of productivity deals, and the nation-wide scope of incomes policy and anti-working-class legislation, makes it easier to make links between the exploitative relationship as it appears to the worker in the plant, and the system as a whole.
(iv) Deviations towards Spontaneism. It has been a constantly recurring fallacy among revolutionary socialists to assume that the basic nature of the industrial situation, revolving around the struggle over the price of labour power, alone provides sufficient basis for the development of consciousness among the workers that the system itself is the cause of their [illegible]. Lenin spent much time attacking such views in What is to be Done (Lenin, 1902, 1967, Ch. 2, 3, 4). The early British workers' control movement was dominated by such views, and today they are represented in the semi-anarchist groupings around Solidarity, who conceive of a revolutionary's job as simply to assist workers in struggle in every way. This also applies to a considerable, though decreasing, extent in the industrial theory and practice of the International Socialists. In his introduction to the Cliff-Barker book, Reg Birch points out the fallacious assumption of the authors that the shop stewards movement will spontaneously develop under pressure of events into a national movement, at the same time taking on an increasingly political character. In The Employers' Offensive, Cliff has recognised the need for political organisation, but it remains separate from, and parallel to, the struggle in industry. Many comrades still seem to feel that the sale of revolutionary material outside factory gates will act as the catalyst for the spontaneous radicalisation of the workers.
This is a very important error, and one that must be combatted constantly. It reflects, among other things, reaction to pressures arising from workers themselves. An examination of features of the conditions under which workers work indicates powerful counter-pressures against spontaneous politicisation and generalisation.
The distorting effects deriving from capitalist relationships are not confined to the work place. The whole education and ideological system inhibits spontaneous generalisation by workers, tends to fragment, localise and compartmentalise their conception of the world. The actual work experience of the worker provides the point at which this ideological distortion is most susceptible to challenge, because in it is the experience that solidarity is the basis for any achievement, but even here, the actual experiences seem to relate to specific, particularised issues—a fight for higher wages, for better conditions, etc., and to specific particularised areas—a department, or a factory. The growth of the shop stewards' movement in the '50s both reflects and reinforces this. For many, national agreements have been irrelevant in terms of real wage levels over a long period. It has been possible to make real advances by militancy in one factory, easy to ignore the national, or local, situation, or even the situation in other factories of the same company. Owners make use of this fragmentation in productivity deals, by picking out the weakest sections first, in order to be able to increase pressure on the strongest. As mentioned above though, present conditions facilitate some generalisation, but the specificity of the actual work situation still counters it. When generalisation is made, both politically and geographically, this can take the form that industrial organisation alone can defeat the system, a distortion that can be encouraged by revolutionary socialists in their necessary discrediting of bourgeois forms of political action. Again, the lesson that the political structures of capitalist society are the organisations of its continuity and require direct attack does not arise spontaneously from the industrial experience, although at a very deep level a generalised feeling of malaise may exist—cf. the French events. Only a revolutionary political party, working within specific industries and transcending them, in which the generalising capacity of intellectuals is integrated with the practical experience of workers, can provide the basis for a workers' control movement which will be a real threat to the system. The present political groupings form the basis from which such a party might be created.
(b) Workers' Participation
In any situation where group X has one more representative than group Y, group X will be able to carry out any decision (if voting is the basis for decision taking) that it wishes. What is the point, then, of excluding group Y totally from the decision process, especially if, by participating, group Y may come to feel that it "belongs", and that its interests are not opposed to those of group X? Such is the basis of the reasoning behind schemes for workers' participation, which always emerge as a concomitant to movements for workers' control. By spreading psychological confusion in the area of authority relationships, participation may benefit the purchaser in the conflict over the price of labour power which is central to the capitalist system.
Subordinate to this general and quite crucial basis for workers' participation lie a number of other reasons which may encourage it.
(i) Specialists in human relations in industry have argued that features of many work situations are frustrating to workers, who therefore resist them.
The worker may be dissatisfied because on an assembly line he may only perform some tiny task, and not feel that he participates in the creation of a total object, considered to be very satisfying to a craftsman. If the work process were reorganised, the worker might feel he was participating in a common effort, and thus offer less resistance. In order to achieve this, for example, assembly lines might be laid out in circular form, so that every worker could see the whole product taking shape before his eyes. Or the worker may be taken on conducted tours of the plant (Walker, 1954).
Alternatively, his resistance may stem from his total lack of integration into the authority structure, in which case schemes of joint consultation, the placing of a worker or two on the Board, might reduce the resistance. It is when people feel they "belong" that they produce most abundantly. (cf. Mayo, 1957; Herzberg, 1959).
(ii) In various degrees some people have come to see that workers really do have expertise in regard to production, and that if this expertise could be tapped, the price of labour power could be cheapened. The authoritarian managerial relationship is wasteful (Coates, 1965, p. 299f.). Most workers in fact know this very well. As a railway inspector in Central Scotland said, "...The workers are looking on, watching the fumbling of management—this level, that level and the higher level." (Riddell & Hobbs, 1966, gives several examples from discussions with railway workers). The suggestion box is the most primitive means of trying to tap this expertise; after it comes prizes for innovation, etc.; another method is the use of joint consultative committees and participation proper. But workers are usually resistant to passing over to management this expertise, which provides them with a valuable reserve.
(iii) The fact that in a bourgeois democracy, with an ideology of freedom, the major institutions are totally autocratic gives qualms to some. Thus we have conscience-stricken liberals with schemes for "co-ownership". Like bourgeois democracy itself, but in a more blatant way, such schemes have the effect of mystifying the actual nature of the relationships that exist. In a similar category may be classed profit sharing and the distribution of a few shares to workers in a firm.
Manipulation for the benefit of the purchasers of labour power is the way workers' participation schemes may be summed up. This may apply in terms of the individual firm, or of the class state as a whole. The German Mitbestimmung scheme, by which a minority of workers' representatives sit on the boards of large companies, has had some effect in reducing trade union militancy (Strumthal, 1964), and the Tories have currently adopted a similar scheme as the carrot to the stick of their proposed penal legislation. The Labour leadership clearly has similar ideas about participation. Marsh, in discussing the nationalised steel industry in the House of Commons, put it very clearly.
"I do not believe we can carry out the major reforms necessary in this industry unless we can carry the men with us. We cannot carry them unless they are parties to some of the decisions and some of the unpopular decisions. They must place themselves in a position where there is no excuse for dodging the issue. For the long-term interests of their members they will have to carry the responsibility for some of the unpopular decisions." (Times, 25.1.67). In other words, the employers' state introduces a mechanism which will enable it to make the workers take the responsibility and bear the cost of the mess that the employers have made of the industry.
It would, of course, be a crude distortion to suggest that this idea of manipulation is the basis of the interest in workers' participation among numbers of left trade unionist leaders. They may hope that a gradual increase of participation may stimulate a gradual change of society towards socialism. Their positions subject them to constant cross-pressures from employers, government, and reactionary sections of their own movement, all of which makes it almost impossible for the holder of such a position to accept the revolutionary implications of a workers' control movement. An example may be given from the speeches given by Hugh Scanlon to the 1968 and 1969 Workers' Control Conferences. As Scanlon became more consolidated in office, so the 1969 speech weakens as compared to the 1968 one. (Scanlon, 1968, 1969). Such leaders as Scanlon and Jones have, however, genuinely instituted measures for the partial democratisation of their unions, and the possibility of communication with the large following that they have makes it very tempting to give a more sympathetic hearing to ideas of participation than would otherwise be the case. Such criticisms can be directed at the Institute for Workers' Control, although to use this to dismiss its work as valueless would be an even more serious error than to accept its policies uncritically. Trade union leaders may also feel, when they have been pressured into taking decisions contrary to the interests of their members, that association with a progressive organisation may help them to retain the support of their more progressive members.
In addition to this, there is the argument that, although workers' participation schemes are in themselves illusory, the experience of them may stimulate demands for more meaningful control. This clearly has more force, since it does not imply illusions about the potentialities of participation itself; but there are many problems involved. Whatever the intention of the participants, the effects may be to spread illusions about the unity of interests of purchaser and seller of labour power, unless participation is combined with a very high level of education about its real aims, which is not usually the case. On the other hand, more militant workers may be so disgusted with the results that their attitudes will revert back to the position that the management-labour struggle is inevitable, i.e. that the system is immutable, and that a purely defensive organisation is the only protection, attitudes that the work of industrial specialists such as Clegg are designed to encourage. (Clegg, 1960). This is not to suggest that such schemes should never, on any occasion, be used. But they should be approached with the greatest of caution. In the student movement, even radical students have accepted positions as representatives on committees under conditions which deny them the right to report back to the student body. It is a short psychological step till one comes to believe that it is in the best interests of all that discussions on "difficult" matters really needn't be reported back—and so on, The very fact of constant interaction in an atmosphere dominated by one group tends to lead to the adoption of the dominant group's attitudes by the minority. The awful experience of radical Labour M.P.s in our bourgeois parliament is good evidence of this. (Miliband, 1961).
(c) Workers' Self-Management
When a workers' control movement grows to such an extent that, in conjunction with external conditions, a real challenge can be made to capitalist authority in the factory, then a situation of dual power in the society occurs, and the basis of commodity production may be eroded. Thus, for a time in May 1968, workers in a factory in Brest threw out the management, ceased making radio equipment for the profit of the owners, and began to make walkie-talkie equipment for use of the militants in combat with the forces of repression. (Mandel, 1968). When all this is combined with a powerful revolutionary party integrating action and capable of challenging capitalist state power, a revolution can occur, which can lead to the institutionalisation of workers' management in the factory. Workers' management is not the necessary result of, but is dependent on, a transformation of social structure. The dual power situation emerges everywhere at times of great social upheaval (Paris commune, Soviets in Russia, Bela Kun Hungary, Czechoslovakia 1968, etc., etc.), but workers' self-management has been institutionalised only in Yugoslavia (and to the most limited degree, in Algeria).
One of the most frequent, and oldest, distortions that arises from the concept of workers' self-management, is the proposition that it is possible for a small group to "opt out" of the larger society, and create an island of socialism within it. Robert Owen was an exponent of this view, and Engels already refuted it in Socialism Utopian and Scientific (Engels, 1880, 1951). This is not to say that firms with some form of workers' self-management may not continue to exist for a period in a hostile society, but to point out that the whole ideology of the society is against them, and that economically they exist on sufferance, since they are small and under-capitalised in a world of industrial giants who, if they chose, could put them out of business by undercutting their prices, For instance, Scott Bader, a paternalistic enterprise with some strictly circumscribed elements of self-management, has to follow the chemical price ring of the big manufacturers, for if it were to step out of line it could stimulate a price war which would kill it.
These utopian deviations apart, the main arguments against workers' self-management from a bourgeois point of view are threefold. (To say that they are bourgeois denotes their origin. Naturally in a capitalist society, dominated by a legitimating ideology, many workers will be mystified and reproduce them.)
(i) Workers are not capable of managing factories. Such arguments represent another facet of the dehumanising central relationship in industry. It may be rephrased: commodities are not capable of managing factories. It is important to try to find out what are the specialised skills so difficult to acquire (techniques such as accountancy, etc. apart). The specialised skill of a manager has eluded everyone's definition; indeed, it appears to be instinctive, since by far the best way to become one is to be the son of one (cf. Nichols, 1969, ch. 18). We may say very simply, however, that since Yugoslav workers, who have a much lower educational and skill level than their British counterparts, have been running factories for 20 years, with quite considerable economic results, practice has disproved this argument. A variant of the argument is that workers are not interested in management. This is of course true at this given moment of time, and in these given conditions. But the creation of a society in which self-management is realisable implies the transformation of existing consciousness, which a workers' control movement helps to achieve in a very central way.
(ii) It is said that workers' management restricts managerial authority. This is quite true, and may seem unpleasant to a certain type of manager, a common type in the hierarchical system capitalism represents, but since, apart from specialised techniques, management appears to consist in the exercise of authority, the elimination of those who have no "skills" other than this, and their replacement by workers' councils will represent neither social nor economic loss.
(iii) The kinds of council and committee systems which are involved in a workers' management system can be criticised on the grounds that the decision-making process is slow and cumbersome. The image is invoked of the stereotype industrial tycoon, cleanly and decisively regulating the lives of thousands from his office (or more frequently from Biarritz). Such an argument is also the mainstay of those who advocate fascism as a social form. But quite apart from the fact that decision-taking at almost all levels of industry does not really have this individualistic character, the advantages to be gained from the transformation of the conflict over the sale of labour power, in terms of the removal on the restrictions on production deriving from it, and the release of the skill and expertise of the workers, far outweighs any slight slowing down of the decision-making process.
While the above arguments may be considered as rationalisations of the status quo, the practice of workers' self-management as institutionalised in Yugoslavia has given rise to a set of problems, of which three are noted here. The third indicates a fundamental distortion which is constantly reproduced in practice elsewhere, and which the next section will outline at a more theoretical level.
a. Managerial Superiority. Even in the Yugoslav situation, where the factory director is appointed by the workers, can be dismissed by them, and has to submit any proposals to the workers' council for approval, there is a tendency for workers to be "out-talked", and to come towards adopting the view of the situation held by the director, which may not always be in accord with those of the workers. Such a problem is in itself a technical one, and can be resolved on the basis of, in the long term, higher levels of appropriate education, and mitigated in the short term by clear and simple presentation of issues with the use of visual aids. But in conditions where there are heavy pressures on directors to adopt policies counter to workers' interests, as in the current Yugoslav situation, this kind of problem may be very serious.
b. There is a tendency for higher-skilled, more highly educated groups to dominate workers' self-management organs, related to the fact that they have more facility in expressing their views in a situation. Again, long-term appropriate education can solve this problem, but in the short term it is clearly necessary to have special legislation to ensure appropriate representation. (The operation of the workers' management system in Yugoslavia is discussed in detail in Riddell, 1968).
c. By far the most serious problem, and one which is centrally important in the theory of workers' control movements, as well as the practice of Yugoslavian self-management schemes, derives from the restriction of self-management to the enterprise level, and the attempt to decentralise a large amount of decision-taking to that level, as a substitute for democratising more centralised decision-taking. Workers' councils in Yugoslavia have begun to compete among themselves, sometimes in a very bitter form (in one case workers in a bus company slashed the tyres of the buses of a competitor). Workers in profitable sectors can receive good wages, conditions and training, while those who, through no fault of their own, work in less profitable sectors, are disadvantaged in these respects. The decentralisation of control of investment decision means that workers will be pressured to invest in schemes of short-term profitability, as opposed to a planned consideration of social needs, while as in a capitalist country, investment will be generated in, and flow naturally to, economically developed areas, so that the relative difference between developed and underdeveloped regions actually increases. In terms of social consciousness, the results following from this are very predictable. An increase in individualistic attitudes; determination to do one's best in the system, and damn the others; concern for one's own firm as opposed to others; cynicism as to the workers' self-management ideology; loss of collective policy and the emergence of private charity as a means of trying to cope with unemployment and poverty; the re-emergence of narrow nationalist ambitions; all these are the direct consequences of the way the Yugoslav self-management system has developed in the past decade. (For discussion of the specific reasons for this development, and the growing opposition to it among students especially, see International Socialist Review, 1967; World Outlook, 1968; Black Dwarf, 1968.) Basically, only two alternatives are presented in the ideology of the Yugoslav League of Communists; either the decentralised, market-based organisation, in which the enterprise is the apparent decision-taking centre, or the totally discredited bureaucratic planning system of the Soviet Union—which the Yugoslavs experienced between 1945 and 1950. But the proposition that if control is decentralised to firms and democratically controlled there, the development of the whole in a socialist direction is automatic, is a fundamental deviation from Marxism. The apparent amount of control that an individual has is meaningless unless it is analysed in relation to the system of which he forms a part as a whole. Analogously, under capitalism the worker is a free agent. He can choose not to work if he doesn't like it. (But what an illusory freedom!) In the same way, a system of workers' management which remains at the level of the firm is largely illusory, since:
i) most of the important decisions are really above the firm level;
ii) any individual decision at the firm level has implications for social development as a whole, and therefore should be integrated and controlled above the level of the firm;
iii) finally, decisions apparently unrelated to the firm, such as those about education, the social security system, etc., actually have crucial implications for it.
Both the equation, planning = bureaucracy, and its alternative, decentralisation = democracy, are fundamentally incorrect. A precondition of individual self-realisation is the creation of a total system in which the interests of groups and individuals are regulated in relation to each other by a democratic process. The substitution of decentralisation and the market in Yugoslavia represent an abdication of responsibility by the leadership of the League of Communists.
4. WORKERS' CONTROL IN INDUSTRY VS. WORKERS' CONTROL IN SOCIETY
The tendency towards the idea that the problem is solved by the creation of democracy at the base is a very natural one. People seem to be more easily able to operate in smaller face-to-face groups, a feeling made more plausible because the larger political system is manipulative in our societies, In another way, Marxism itself seems to support the confusion, One is tempted to limit one's attention to industry. It is within the specific industrial situation that the surplus value is extracted that provides the basis for the capitalist to continue to exist, Also, it is from the working class, formed by its experience of primary exploitation that the means of the replacement of capitalist society will come.
Nevertheless, Marxism is a holist critique of society. Its reference point is the organisation of society as a whole. Even Marx did not seem to be absolutely clear about this in the very early writings, for in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he closely juxtaposes two different conceptions of alienation, one deriving from factory organisation, the other from the organisation of the system as a whole. Compare:
"The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced, it is forced labour..." (Marx, 1844, 1959, p. 72)
and
"It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty, but for the worker, deformity... It produces intelligence, but for the worker idiocy, cretinism." (Marx, 1844, 1959, p. 71).
On the one hand the exploitation of labour within the factory produces certain attitudes in the worker towards work. On the other the consolidation of a generalised system of such exploitation produces a distortion of the whole of social reality in both material and ideational realms. The situation in the work place by which the worker is forced to sell his labour power alienates him; the generalisation of that situation into an on-going social system, which, for example, turns social resources from welfare into armaments and war, creates alienated men in a much wider sense. Marx's later works emphasise constantly the examination and logic of development of the system as a whole. To attempt to reduce social relationships back to the institution in which primary production takes place is a fundamental mistake.
Alienation must therefore be defined more broadly in Marxist terms as the process by which a system of productive relations produces pressures in its real operation, through time, towards the systematic social distortion of people. Two characteristic distortions, rather crucial in terms of the mobilisation of people for action, are the confusion of means and ends—so that, for instance, people do not see the possession of material objects as a means, but as an end in itself—amassing of property, advertising-induced accumulation of consumer goods; and the confusion of existence and essence—people come to see their present state as inevitable, and often to some degree just. The co-existence of palace and hovel, of wealth and privation, are not preserved by coercion alone.
A third distortion, characteristic of the capitalist system, deriving from the congruence of the capitalist firm, the capitalist education system and the capitalist family, and related to the others, is the reduction of generalisation among the exploited sections of the population. Thus, militant attitudes deriving from experience in an industrial situation tend to be restricted and diverted by lack of generalisation, both outside that situation (section 3 (a) (ii) above), and outside that idea (to take an example, how many workers are against bosses, want to see a new kind of society, but won't have anything to do with you if you call yourself a communist?) A very important instance of this fragmentation of consciousness is the division between political and industrial action, a separation never made by the ruling class. This helps a lot in maintaining the system. (Miliband, 1961).
The revolutionary's job in industry is not synonymous with helping the worker in struggle. Unless that help is given in such a way as to [illegible] in the task of building a totalising consciousness, to remove the distortions in its way, the position will constantly revert to the status quo ante. In other words, the unmasking of the system as a whole, and the elimination of the defences of the system within the mind of the worker himself, are faces of the same coin. The restriction of a workers' control movement to the sphere of factory relationships will make the defeat of the movement, or its diversion, more certain, and it is here that the mistakes of those who assume that the industrial situation produces revolutionaries spontaneously (anarchists and Solidarity); of those whose political programme stands parallel, but is not integrated with their industrial activity (I.S.); of those who believe that a socialist man can be created by involvement at firm level (Yugoslavia); share a common root.
Marxists have always tried to use the method of the transitional demand—a demand that is reasonable to the worker but which cannot be met within the framework of the system. Whether a demand is transitional or not does not demand on its own quality, but on the situation in which it is presented. In the vast majority of day-to-day situations in industry, it is not possible to develop meaningful transitional demands in this sense. But in a weaker sense, it is possible to develop demands which by assisting the development of a totalising consciousness, both erode the ideological defences of capitalism among workers themselves, and also lead them to consider as reasonable further demands which would otherwise have been rejected. Thus the way actual struggles are presented and interpreted is of great importance in building a workers' control movement. If they are presented in such a way as to encourage the building of links—socially in terms of the involvement of other groups of workers; geographically in terms of the linking up of different factory organisations in different regions; and ideologically in helping to expose the total distortion of society, they are also in an important sense transitional. The key to this is that many workers do feel that the struggle over labour power dehumanises them in relation to management, and control demands seem immediately reasonable to them.
5. RELATING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Without a theoretical orientation appropriate to the aim of revolutionary transformation of capitalism, the practice will tend to become distorted, and the system will still survive the challenge. But the problem of translating that aim into day-to-day practice is a tactical one of great complexity. The isolated Marxist, attempting to intervene using only his own capabilities; the isolated student socialist society, containing many disparate and confused streams of thought, and with no broader links—both work under a crippling disadvantage. The Marxist revolutionary grouping, linking social groupings, geographical regions, and providing a consistent national, and preferably internationally based critique of the system as a whole, corresponds organisationally, at however low a level, to the totalising consciousness necessary for a meaningful workers' control movement, providing a basis of support for the Marxist, without which he is likely to respond too readily to the pressures of the moment. In the same way, at a much higher level, as the conditions of revolutionary rupture in society appear, the revolutionary party is the essential instrument of social transformation.
But some basic, almost common-sense prescriptions can be suggested to the Marxist attempting to develop a workers' control movement in a local area. Every action involves a consideration of immediate and longer term consequences, an assessment, based on acts of judgement for which no set formula can be laid down. By acting according to a set of "Marxist principles" which have actually nothing to do with Marxism, one's effect may be precisely nil. Thus some Marxists loudly proclaim under all circumstances that they are "Communists" (even though they may not belong to the C.P.), as a matter of "principle" even in circumstances where the local population has been so conditioned by cold war propaganda or the Catholic church that they have a positive phobia about the word. But on the other hand, by working within the established machinery constantly, one may compromise oneself so totally that one actually holds back consciousness instead of developing it (a fate that has befallen many Communist Party trade union officials, and which relates to the total lack of an integrated industrial strategy in that Party), but it tempts all, at every level. What is at least required is a careful examination of the level of consciousness of the particular group to be related to, and the differentiation within the group. Secondly, it is necessary to make a relationship to the group in a tactical way, trying neither to stand on a pedestal of pseudo-principle, nor losing sight of one's aims. In making such a relationship, the Marxist must establish his seriousness, and that he has something to offer in relation to the immediate problems as defined by the work group. It has been known for students intervening in disputes to hand out leaflets in the name of non-existent "student-worker committees", without bothering to check the wording or the facts, and as such to enable the right wing to spread hostility towards "outside agitators"; or for students to march up to a picket line without so much as a by-your-leave, waving flags and banners and calling for "more militant action" to "stir it up".
A Marxist, on the other hand, recognising that workers do not strike irresponsibly, but because their real interests are involved, and that the decision to strike involves financial hardship and sacrifice in families, will approach such situations quite differently. He will be able to help meaningfully in the organisation of the strike as requested, after he makes good contact with strikers, Contact involves steady, disciplined picketing. He will work through the strike committee, and not outside it. He will be able to help in the production of leaflets to inform workers of the background of the dispute, and of developments, He will be able, by the use of such reference works as the Stock Exchange Year Book, Who Owns Whom, The Directory of Directors, to provide information about company profits, control, and links with other companies, and to interpret it, perhaps by working with shop stewards to prepare a pamphlet. In assisting in all these ways and others he is always trying to develop the generalising potentialities of the situation, but without going too far beyond the existing level of consciousness, so that the ideas become meaningless, or hostilities are aroused. He will not necessarily even support the most militant demands, but must make a decision based on his analysis of the dynamics of the situation. The purpose of Marxist work in industry is not as the capitalist world would have it, disruption, but the revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole. (Of course, he must always support workers in dispute with management, since this is not a question of the rightness or wrongness of a particular case, but of solidarity in class conflict.) He will, above all, try to develop the contacts he makes in a long-term way, preferably by some organisation of militants, so that the basis for development is laid, and so that the most politically conscious workers can become integrated into his Marxist revolutionary group. It is very important that material resulting from this long-term association is not pushed at workers from the outside, but is seen as their own—and really is their own. The establishment of a factory bulletin is worth 100 sellers of newspapers at the gates, and in many cases, the compromises involved in having that bulletin as an official branch bulletin may be worthwhile, as it is accepted by branch members. But that depends on the specific union, branch, and relations between branch and membership.
In working to a consciously thought-out, and discussed, programme like this, Marxists are not manipulating anyone, or disrupting anything. By relating Marxist theory, as Mandel (1970) characterises "the highest product of centuries of intellectual and scientific developments of mankind", to the actual life experience of workers, they are providing them with the means for both the understanding of and the eventual supersession of the system which oppresses them, and, by the political integration of this work with others doing the same thing within a disciplined but democratic revolutionary group, creating the conditions out of which the mass revolutionary party—essential for the overthrow [illegible] develop. Let us build a workers' control movement!
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