The Alternative Economic Strategy has dominated labour thinking in recent years. Alan Freeman examines the latest version in the Report published by the TUC-Labour Party Liaison Committee.
[illegible] by Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Terry Duffy and Clive Jenkins. [illegible] Democracy: the [illegible] Full Employment', it is cast as a report to the TUC [illegible] Party [illegible]. But its thinking [illegible] from the 1973 [illegible] Parliamentary Labour Party can rally our serried ranks. So it [illegible] attention. This article calls for a forthright rejection of the report. It [illegible] on Joint [illegible] by [illegible] Labour [illegible]ment policy or have wide acceptance in the Labour Party and TUC. It argues for a different method of struggle from the Liaison Committee, with the emphasis on industrial action and mass campaigning to defeat the Tories, to secure a Labour government and to defeat any extraparliamentary resistance to such a government from the banks, multinationals and civil service.
Socialists cannot simply reject this report lightmindedly. It is quite easy to criticise in a discussion article, but it is another thing entirely to win the argument in trade union and Labour Party branches against a report endorsed by figures from Terry Duffy to Joan Maynard. The immediate charge such a course will bring is that of 'breaking the unity of the movement'. Yet the movement has already achieved very broad unity around, for example, unilateral disarmament, support for the healthworkers, or withdrawal from the EEC. Will the report build on this unity or weaken it? This is one issue we want to discuss. These are very practical and immediate questions. In our view it isn't helpful to reject the report for the traditional, and often sectarian reasons given on the far left. These can be summed up in one charge: the report won't introduce socialism.
This accusation is of course true: put at its crudest, the document is a plan to save capitalism from Margaret Thatcher — a goal shared by many but pursued by few. The Liaison Committee would inject £9bn into the economy, concentrated in the nationalised industries and public services; use a slightly expanded public sector to spearhead economic revival and restore jobs and social welfare; back this up with a long term plan to be overseen by a new, centralised Department of Economic and Industrial Planning to channel investment into the home industries; discuss this plan with absolutely everyone; and introduce a National Economic Assessment to control prices and 'influence' incomes.
All good Keynesian stuff despite the Bennite colouring, and nothing at all to do with introducing socialism. Nothing could be further from Terry Duffy's mind. But this doesn't mean it should all be rejected. No socialist rejected the 1945 nationalisations although they were obviously intended to save capitalism from rapacious but bankrupt and incompetent rail and coal owners. Nor did anyone reject the health service, or universal education, and nor today would anyone except a few Spartans reject unilateral disarmament or withdrawal from the EEC, just because the aim is to save capitalism.
What does the report say?
We argue for these particular steps to be taken more thoroughly, under workers' control, without compensation, or by somebody else, or using different methods. Above all it has to be pointed out that they must be [illegible] with the capitalist class as a whole. But when it comes to the question 'to be or not to be?' there are only two socialist criteria. The first is: will it advance workers' interests if it is done? And the second is: can it be done? Is it in fact practical?
On this field the report contains many individual proposals which in another context could take workers forward. Some of them are practical. Particularly important are the Bennite proposals seeking to erode management decision-making prerogatives. The [illegible] promises measures like a statutory right to information about company investment plans; a statutory right to consultation and 60 days' notice of any changes involving redundancies, and the establishment of Joint Union Committees involving workers from several plants within a combine and from several unions, in order to make use of these rights. Provided information is available to the whole workforce, provided the new committees are accountable to the workforce, and provided there is no reciprocal obligation on [illegible] help workers to fight redundancies.
Moreover, the report proposes statutory obligations on employers to discriminate positively in favour of women and blacks, and to offer training for youth — all of which are progressive demands that have been raised within the labour movement.
Finally, it would of course be excellent if the government spent £9bn on public services. It is also a small mercy that the report [illegible] aims at full employment instead of figures such as 'no more than x million unemployed' which the leadership have been toying with. All these measures are reflections of demands for which rank and file workers have been fighting for years, often against the resistance of many people who have signed this report.
And perhaps it might seem churlish to reject a report that contains them, merely on the grounds that — for example — it hardly proposes any extension of public ownership, and makes no mention of bank nationalisation, or because it persists with the demand for import controls when the whole world is discussing the imminent prospect of a new trade war, or on the grounds that it is riddled with wonderful promises about Ministries to be created and Boards to be established, but says practically nothing about what we should do now about the four million unemployed,
The problem is this: most of the positive measures in the report are already labour movement policy on an individual basis, and those that are not could easily be made so. In this report, however, they appear as a package in a definite framework that tells us not only what the TUC wants, but how it proposes to get it.
This has important implications in the run-up to a General Election. No longer is there a vague 'Alternative Strategy' with as many different interpretations as authors. This is the alternative. This is the one the Labour Party leadership is going to campaign around, the one we will be asked to support. This is the end product, the result of all the debates and discussions of the last three years. To all the theorists of the AES — Geoff Hodgson, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, Stuart Holland, and Tony Benn — we have to say: 'No more general discussions about an ideal AES. Here is the policy. Let us decide — for it or against it?' And to the labour movement we have to say the same thing.
The Chilean example
But the report as a whole can't be assessed without asking 'what is the context in which it is put forward?' There is no such thing as an abstractly right or wrong policy. In 1970 President Allende of Chile launched an outwardly very similar policy in different circumstances. Chilean working people achieved two important things as a result which are often forgotten but should not be denied. First, they secured a temporary but genuine shift of income and wealth in favour of working people. They won jobs, houses, food: and this was reflected in a growth of Allende's popular support in his first two years of office.
Second, workers greatly advanced their own organisation. Beginning from factory and neighbourhood committees they created networks of struggle organisations which not only went beyond what Allende set out to do — imposing workers' control, organising land seizures, and so on — but created a vehicle which could have prevented the coup and taken over the economy, had the government trusted them to do so. Indeed, the Economy Minister, Pedro Vuscovic, was sacked in 1972 for proposing just this.
The critical weakness of the Chilean government was thus not its economic policy alone — although this of course expressed all its other weaknesses. The problem was the government's failure to deal with the unaccountable power of the army, civil service, multinationals and bankers, so that it could not defend the gains made against the state.
In short, the policy, despite its reformist nature, was a vital factor in radicalising working people and advancing their cause. Unlike Madam Allende, who confided in Tony Benn that there was no way the coup could have been prevented in Chile, we believe that it would have been possible even as late as July 1973 to consolidate everything that had been won and defend it against a coup, if a leadership had emerged which was willing to take the next logical step and make a revolution. Indeed the worst and most ironic aspect of Allende's failure is that his followers now conclude it was wrong even to attempt reform.
But the problem is — as Tony Benn has often told us — that Britain is not Chile. The context in which the TUC-Labour Party document is put forward is totally different. Yet a surprisingly wide spectrum of the Left approaches Britain as if it were Chile. The problems which everyone discusses surround the following question: what would happen if a left Labour government were elected and began to carry out its programme? Chris Mullin's recent book 'A Very British Coup' is an excellent example of this trend.
Such theorising ignores a fundamental difference between Britain and Chile, a direct consequence of the fact that Britain is an imperialist country, grown fat and lazy with the proceeds of foreign plunder, and that Chile is a dependent country. In Britain the ruling class is defended by an immensely stronger Labour bureaucracy, wedded to the defence of the capitalist order by its material interests and by its political dependence on imperialism. Against the widely held conventional wisdom in Britain, it cannot be stressed often enough that the one obstacle the British labour movement has never surmounted is not the Tories but its own leadership. There has never been even a left Labour government, let alone a left Labour government that carried out its programme.
Nor has anything changed to make this more likely today. The TUC is more treacherous than ever. Not only is the PLP majority right wing, but the 'soft centre' is also decamping to the right; the Shadow Cabinet, after a three years' democracy struggle, does not even include Tony Benn, unlike in 1973. And the most practical problem we face is that of securing a Labour government at all. Therefore, the report can only be judged practical from one standpoint: will it help us change this relation of forces? Will it even get a Labour government?
The problem of winning a Labour government
Tony Benn says it will. His keynote speech at the TUC congress stated quite plainly that Labour can win if it unites around the policies agreed between the leaderships of the unions and the party, provided only that there is no witch-hunt.
Is this a plausible suggestion? We don't think so. There is, it will be argued, a precedent. This is Labour's 1973 policy, which incorporated much of the left's Industrial Strategy, was generally considered quite radical, and was however very similar to the new report or indeed, to its right. Labour won the election of 1974. It could be argued that it can win again, in the same way, but with an improvement: the threat of replacement now hangs over MPs or leaders who fail to carry out the policy, and the left has conducted a long battle over the issue of accountability. This will act as a sufficient sanction to stop any betrayal.
Somehow this idea doesn't ring very true. The point is this: what actually determined the result of the February and October 1974 elections? In February, Wilson did not even win a parliamentary majority. But he took office on a radical programme and, it must be said, initially carried a lot of it out. Rents and prices were frozen, lots of money was pumped into the economy, houses were built, wage rises were granted, and so on.
But why? A proper account of this election is impossible unless we remember that it took place during an extraordinary event: a miners' strike which forced the Tory government to resign. This was the first time any such thing had ever happened in Britain. It is so important that of the entire debate between myself and Tony Benn at the ICA, the one point which the Times chose to report was the fact that Tony Benn argued against a strike to bring down the present government. The Times at least understood that one of the crucial determinants of election outcomes is the extraparliamentary action going on at the time.
This is so for two reasons. First, the vote itself doesn't settle who makes the government. Only if one party wins an overall majority is it 'automatically' entitled to form a government — and then, only if its MPs all stay loyal. If these conditions are not met, a coalition may well be the result. In 1974 Heath was unable to form a coalition because everyone understood that it would not have the compliance of the unions. It would be unable to govern.
But the action also affected the vote itself. The media fosters a persistent myth: that strikes lose elections for Labour. This is as stupid as the idea that runs on the pound lose elections for capital. The fact is that any class loses elections when it is disunited and without clear perspectives. The miners' action won the election because it united the labour movement and some of the middle classes around support for basic rights which the miners were championing, and because it discredited the Tories and divided the ruling class over how to respond. In exactly the same way, the healthworkers — or any other group of striking workers — can help win the election for Labour provided they receive mass support and provided they do not have a leadership which lines up against them. The most effective thing that the Labour Party and TUC can do to win the election is to throw their wholehearted support behind everyone and anyone who is fighting for their rights against the Tories.
Moreover this relates to what happens after the election. Wilson carried out Labour's promises in the first six months of office because the working class was mobilised and vigilant. If he had given in to pressure from the Treasury, the CBI or the IMF at that stage, the risk was that workers would have resorted to mass industrial action against cuts and wage restrictions and, moreover, would raise the demand for a Benn government, unleashing a full scale class confrontation. It was only when he had scored a political victory over Benn through the EEC referendum, and when he had disciplined the trade union leaders by threatening them with anarchy followed by a coup if they did not cool down their members, that the CBI and the Treasury were able to put the boot in.
The question then arises: why was Wilson nevertheless able to betray Labour's promises? Again, we want to differ from conventional Labour left wisdom. This holds that the Treasury, the IMF and Whitehall conspired to thwart Labour's programme and that the Cabinet bowed to their pressure because of some mysterious lack of willpower. This is to say the least a bit naive. All these pressures of course existed, and the Cabinet did become the prisoner of extraparliamentary forces. But it was not exactly an unwilling prisoner. Harold Wilson used to write to firms threatened with nationalisation advising them to write back demanding not to be nationalised, so that he could then write to them assuring them it wouldn't happen.
The CBI and Treasury did not conspire to unseat the Labour government but to subvert it by turning Labour's own leadership against its supporters. It could do this because Labour's leadership was perfectly willing to be turned. And when it had created the conditions to launch its betrayal, it did so in the name of the 1973 programme. The Industry Act was not scrapped: it was rewritten. The Social Contract was not abandoned: it became the main device for attacking the working class.
The Labour left are right to say that Wilson's version of the Industry Bill (which, incidentally, was drafted by Michael Foot) was not true to the original intentions of the act. But the question which has to be asked is this: how was such a diversion of Labour's purpose possible without becoming immediately plain to everyone?
Joint control or workers' control?
The point is that the 1973 policies contained the seeds of their own defeat. The plainest way to demonstrate this is to ask what happened to planning agreements. Only two were ever concluded: one was with the National Coal Board. As Adam Sharples has said, it would be a bit much if the government couldn't conclude an agreement with one of its own companies. The other agreement was with Chryslers, who took the money and ran. Labour has never answered the question which this experience poses: what do you do if management don't agree? What do you do when they say, 'our priorities are more important than your social need'? The new report proposes all manner of procedures which oblige firms to discuss, to take representations from unions, to listen nicely: but the only sanctions to be taken against firms which don't agree at the end of this process is to withdraw government co-operation. In short, the government will take the grandiose step of refusing to co-operate with a firm which is no longer co-operating in any case. Wonderful.
But the whole report reeks of this bankrupt approach. Every single measure it proposes, with the exception of the statutory duty to provide information, depends on the co-operation of business: depends on reaching agreement around questions which everyone knows will produce disagreement. Nor, in the case of information provision, is anything said about the measures to be taken against a firm which refuses to comply.
The most important concession of all, however, is the concept which runs throughout the report: the notion of joint control of industry. What does this mean? That the unions, management and government will together seek to 'reach agreement' on company priorities, with a view to ensuring that social needs are taken into account. The real bankruptcy of this approach is revealed in all its starkness by the following passage on workers' consultation rights:
'Decisions affecting the operation of the enterprise as a whole and of individual parts of it — eg closure, nationalisation, merger or new investment — must be communicated to the workforce within a minimum notice period of 90 days. This right to consultation will also apply when a company is involved in discussions with the government leading towards an agreed development plan or with other sources of finance.
'No such decisions should be implemented until the trade union representatives of the workers affected by them have had a chance to respond within a set period of 60 days.
'If the workers affected propose alternative strategies to [illegible] the circumstances underlying the [illegible] there [illegible] obligation on management to meet the workers and discuss these options within a set period, with a view to reaching agreement. As well as the general information rights set out above, more specific information relating directly to the areas of consultation must also be provided. Management will be under an obligation to state and explain their reasons for taking a particular approach; and workers must have the right of access to outside expert advice.'
Full stop.
Reading this, one is seized with the irrepressible feeling that a paragraph has dropped out. Surely, you think, the report must have something more to say. You draw up your alternative, you wait your sixty days, you discuss with management, and management say 'no'. What happens next?
In the real world, workers either give in or go on strike. The report has absolutely nothing to say about this. It doesn't say whose side the government will be on. The government will sit up there like Nero, fiddling away while the country falls apart beneath it. This is bizarre. In case the printers did actually lose a few words, can we supply our suggestion for the missing bit? It goes as follows:
'If failure to agree is registered, the workers will have a statutory right to take industrial action up to and including the occupation of the factory in defence of their right to work or, if they consider the objectives of Labour's programme as spelt out in its plan to be transgressed by the employer's proposals, in defence of the government's plans;
'The TUC, Labour Party and government will provide all necessary facilities to support such actions and, if the case put forward by the workers is found to be just and in the social interest, the government will nationalise the enterprise.'
The point is a very basic one. Who has the final say?
The importance of such a stance is that it is the only way to convince industry that Labour is serious about its proposal to plan the economy. Planning is impossible unless you have some means of ensuring co-operation with the plan. You can discuss and persuade all you like, but what must be settled is: who has the final say? And who will enforce the decisions of the plan against those who refuse to co-operate? Democracy is not just a question of discussing matters: it means majority rule, no more and no less.
The principle of joint control, and the necessity to reach agreement, hands the capitalists in advance the weapons with which to blackmail the Labour Party and unions. Every time industry or the banks wish to exert pressure on the government they will threaten a withdrawal of co-operation and a sudden 'loss of confidence'. The confidence loss will, of course, express itself in very visible ways: a run on the banks. In short, the report is an open invitation to extraparliamentary sabotage. It is a declaration in advance that the leadership of the movement will surrender [illegible] pressures.
In spite of all this, is there not a case to argue that the report will help workers to resist capital, because, at least, [illegible] rights they do not now have? At least, as will be argued, it offers workers the chance of a say in industry's plans, even if it doesn't offer them control over it.
When workers clash with employers, when social need clashes with profit, who takes the final decision? The fundamental principle for which the labour movement must fight is that the workers should have the final say and that the government will support them. In short, they should have veto powers and the right to take action to back up these powers. The same principle applies in relation to the 'right of representation' on boards of management. It is not democratic to propose, as the report does, a mere right to be represented by workers who constitute the overwhelming majority in a firm. Why not fight for workers to have the right, if they so choose, to a clear (two thirds) majority on boards of management and to be allowed to hire and fire managers?
In 1973 this sort of argument carried more weight. The trade unions were self-confident. Occupations were breaking out all over. Tory industrial legislation had foundered on the Pentonville Five strikes and the miners were making hay of its pay policy. For the first time in years the trade union movement was paying attention to political issues: as Benn said, Heath could at least be applauded for reawakening its class consciousness. The 1973 programme was an expression of this newfound confidence. It said yes, workers do have a right to a say in whether their factories are closed or not: yes, they do have a right to challenge the priorities of a blatant government of class privilege. The 1973 policies even awakened workers who had not thought of such issues, encouraging them to take action in defence of rights they had forgotten they possessed.
Learning the lessons of 1974
But things have moved on since 1973. The ruling class has reorganised itself around a daring assault on workers' rights by Thatcher. They are more desperate than before; more weak economically, more threatened by their rivals, more frightened than ever of reform. They have learned the lesson of 1974. They have taken steps, in the creation of the [illegible] and the changes in the election system which will be used, if necessary, to block off the possibility of a purely electoral Labour victory. The SDP gives them a much more flexible instrument for coalition manoeuvres. Most important of all, they have adopted a fundamentally different approach to the trade union leaderships, capitalising on their political weaknesses.
There are two diametrically opposite conclusions which one can draw from this. First, one may take the appearance for reality and believe that the Tories are immensely strong, cannot be defeated, and that we should therefore retreat to the demands of 1973, dig our heels in and rest on very defensive positions for a while. This is, despite the verbiage, the essential drift of the report. It makes no advances on 1973 and a number of retreats. Less nationalisation, in particular a refusal to grasp the nettle by calling for the nationalisation of the banks; a retreat on the 1973 conference demand for a majority of workers on management boards, back to the position imposed by the CBI offensive in 1976, of mere representation on management boards; no sanctions against firms that won't conform to the plan; incomes policy under another guise, and so on. All the rest is in reality window dressing for a retreat into a compromise which Terry Duffy is quite happy to sign, because he knows damn well where it is heading.
Indeed that incomes policy question continues to be central. It is not just that wage controls cut working class living standards. It is also that they are designed to break the struggle of the working class. That is why their rejection continues to be central to any working class policy. The proof of this is contained in the reaction of the more sensible right wing leaders to the TUC decision to reject incomes policy: they quietly declared that it was okay because the Liaison Committee report still allowed for an incomes policy 'in the future'.
There is a second possible interpretation of events to that of the report however: this is that the Tories are in a very weak underlying position and that their viciousness is a product of their weakness. Strong classes govern by consent, not repression. The problem we face is therefore our own weakness, the lack of preparedness of our own class, and above all the unbelievable cowardice and treachery of its leadership. Of course this cowardice capitalises on deepseated political weaknesses of the class as a whole: but the tremendous mobilisation in support of the healthworkers demonstrates that given the right political demands, our class is not defeated and does have the means to win.
In this situation it is criminal to take a political stance of the type in the report, to water down one's political demands. If the Tories are incapable of running the country, the one thing that will keep them in office is if the labour movement also demonstrates its incapacity to run the country. But it is absolutely clear one cannot run the country on any different basis without taking over the banks, without an armoury of sanctions against the extraparliamentary resistance of the capitalist class, without being prepared to take over factories that are closing through flight of capital and to run them under workers' control; in short, without mobilising the working class by preparing them to take over administration of both the economy and the state.
What's the alternative?
In our view, there is an alternative to hand, which the labour movement has already tried and proven: that of mass, extra-parliamentary campaigning and action combining the forces of the Labour Party and the trade unions. The most damning feature of the new Report is that after ten years of discussion and experience, during which the importance of extra-parliamentary action has been at the forefront of the Left's advance, it receives scarcely a mention from the Liaison Committee. Instead of spelling out how the new Joint Union Committees could co-ordinate industrial action to compel recalcitrant employers to divulge information and change their plans, the Report discusses nothing but the most improbable conditions under which they might ask the employers to do things they have no intention of doing if they can possibly avoid it.
Will extra-parliamentary action alone secure lasting change? No, of course it has to be combined with government action. The question is: which one first? The Liaison Committee says first wait for an election (which we may very well win); then hope the government will carry out our plan (which it probably won't); then wait for the employer's response so that we can invoke statutory rights (which the cabinet will probably not even grant.) The vain hope of the Left in the Liaison Committee is that when all these unlikely events have taken place, extra-parliamentary action is waiting in the background as a kind of reserve, last-ditch power.
Our approach is the direct opposite: extra-parliamentary action will defend our rights in the here and now, and create the best conditions for the election of a Labour government. If this succeeds, the extra-parliamentary action should continue, under a Labour government instead of being wound down, to defeat the extra-parliamentary resistance of Whitehall, the Treasury and the multinationals, and to force the cabinet to carry out the decisions of the labour movement. The Left in the Labour Party should be fighting for further policies whose goal is to neutralise and eventually destroy the resistance to change which is offered by these unaccountable institutions of capitalist rule, by preparing the working class to replace them with new and democratic institutions.
Let us take, as an illustration, just four of the most popular demands of the labour movement: unilateral disarmament, full employment, equal pay for women and a free and adequate health service. On every single one of these demands, there have been large extra-parliamentary actions. 250,000 took to the streets against Cruise missiles; hundreds of thousands took part in the People's March; equal pay struggles, often mingling with low pay struggles, are a constant fact of industrial life. Most important of all, the degree of unity and solidarity achieved around the healthworkers' dispute — as well as the degree of public support — shows that this kind of mass action can unite our movement better than 34-page manifestos.
If the Tory government is forced to concede to the healthworkers, the 'Iron Lady's' image will be somewhat dented to say the least. Tory unity will be the first casualty; the government's very existence would be threatened. This would only be the first breach in the wall: what will become of Tebbit's industrial legislation? Will the trade union left not take heart and try to repeat their success against privatisation? And why shouldn't industrial action be used to prevent Cruise missiles coming to our shores? The TUC could easily mobilise industrial support for equal pay if it chose to do so.
Suppose, then, that a Labour government came to office in the wake of this kind of movement. The first problem it could well confront is the attempted desertion of MPs to the SDP, or indeed the real possibility of arriving in parliament as the largest minority party. On what basis could it govern? On the basis, not simply of its parliamentary showing, but by claiming that it alone can retain the confidence of the women, healthworkers, anti-missile campaigners and unemployed workers who demand a future from it. It would therefore have to support and extend mass campaigning action in order to stay in office. If, as is most likely, the parliamentary leadership refuses to take this course, the left would have to do so, and force the right wing to implement Labour's promises under the threat that the country will become ungovernable if this is not done.
But the ruling class would not take such a situation lying down. The attempt to remove Cruise missiles would lead directly to an attempt by America to use international economic and diplomatic pressure to bring the government to heel, and Labour would rapidly be forced to decide whether to tolerate American bases and whether to remain a member of the Western Alliance and NATO. A break with NATO would be necessary to defend the decision to remove Cruise missiles; in the light of such a break Labour would have to review all defence commitments, and the best way to neutralise the military lobby would be a withdrawal from all overseas commitments, including Ireland.
On the economic front, Labour would clearly have to move rapidly to create new jobs by spending its promised £9bn and beginning to put its proposed plan into practice. It would have to legislate equal pay. But these two measures alone would make large holes in capitalist profitability. Labour would be threatened with a flight of capital, and the closure of factories — an open attempt at extra-parliamentary sabotage.
What should happen then? First, Labour has to command two vital instruments. It has to be able to nationalise firms which are not complying with social need; and it has to be able to mobilise workers in any firm threatened with closure to prevent that closure and, if necessary, take over the firm concerned. As a very minimum it would have to take over the banks and financial institutions.
How can Labour prepare the trade union movement for this kind of action? This is where the demand for workers' control becomes important. Capital's ultimate threat, which it uses most successfully to bring the union leaderships to heel, is what we might call the 'Samson threat'. It frightens the union leaders with the prospect that the whole economy will come down about its ears through loss of business confidence. How can we respond? Only if we are ultimately ready to take on the running of industry ourselves. However, we are not yet ready to do so. We do not have the expertise. We do not have the information. We do not have the cash.
A strategy for workers' control should aim to acquire these vital assets. First comes the demand for information. This is probably the single most important demand which emerges from the Liaison Committee Report. We do need to know about the various companies' investment options, trading partners, financial structure, and so on. But these secrets will not be yielded without struggle. Therefore, the Joint Union Committees proposed in the Report should by all means be created and fight, hand in hand with Labour legislators, for the right to information. But they must be prepared to struggle for it, by means of industrial action and by conducting their own research. There is scope here for widespread co-operation between Labour councils, Labour Parties, unions and even academics, in building up a real picture, at every level, of how British industry operates and how it could be made to serve social needs. A campaign to acquire this information, as a basis for real planning, could galvanise the labour movement.
However, having acquired this information, how can we begin to impose our own priorities? At this stage, while we are on the defensive, the most important realisable goal is that of a right of veto; the right to know what the employers plan to do and block it, if it is not in our interests. The development of alternatives flows naturally from this kind of action.
With Labour in office, a struggle for information and the right of veto could acquire a much more advanced dynamic: for Labour could not only legislate in favour of industrial action to secure these demands; it could go one stage farther. If the employers refuse to carry out a project proposed by the government and unions, if they refuse equal pay or refuse to provide jobs, the labour movement could then say: 'Right, you are not fit to run this industry in the interests of the public. We are going to put elected representatives of the workers in overall charge. We want the same rights the shareholders now have. We want a clear majority on the board of directors; we want the right to hire and fire managers; and we want to begin training up our own managers who will serve our interests.'
Needless to say, firms thus brought under workers' control could not function without financial resources and without insertion into a framework of national planning. The nationalisation of the banks, a basic national plan, and government commitment to nationalise firms thus brought under workers' control, are indispensible.