Workers’ power or jobs for the boys? (29 March 1969) (original) (raw)
Jim Higgins
(29 March 1969)
From Socialist Worker, No. 115, 29 March 1969, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Control or participation? As the Workers Control conference meets this weekend, JIM HIGGINS suggests there is some confusion on the Left
IN RECENT YEARS workers’ control has acquired a more general currency in trade union and political discussion than it has enjoyed since the period leading up to the First World War.
The notion of workers’ control that has been kept alive through the dead years in the small circles of the Left now emerges to be taken up and transformed to its opposite by every trade union and Labour opportunist with a sharp eye for the main chance.
‘Industrial democracy’ is the cry from Jack Jones of the TGWU. Participation is the cry of almost any vice-chancellor suffering the onslaught of the student militants.
The Liberals weigh carefully the relative merits of shareholders and workers and decide, with some justice, that the man who gives his labour to an industry should have more rights than the man who just gives his money.
In all of this there is something missing – real control. The elaborate blueprints for workers’ representatives on management boards, shares for the workers and variations on the theme of advisory councils all leave aside the question of power and who exercises power.
In all societies with any pretensions to development, power is not exercised by the man with the biggest muscles. (If that were the case, Mohammed Ali would be President of the USA – not a bad idea at that.)
Control
In the capitalist system power is exercised by the capitalists not because they are tougher a because they know more about the industries they own (frequently they know nothing) but because they control the state.
In Britain today the police, the judges and the army are there to ensure that the capitalist system remains. The comparative liberality of the state machine and its alleged neutrality will last as long, and not one minute longer, as the system is not seriously challenged.
From the Weimar Republic to Hitler Germany was but a short step. The police, the judiciary and the army were, with minor alterations, composed of the same people; the only difference was that, under the Nazis, they were operating a militant defence of German capitalism.
To imagine that it is possible to legislate changes in effective control is to cast doubts on one’s good sense and it is not the good sense of the supporters of participation that we need to doubt.
Their notion is to change nothing. Workers’ representatives on management boards may give the impression of control while effectively disarming or degutting the representative.
Operate
If the bosses have the majority their only need for us is to provide a smokescreen behind which they can operate. If the workers have a majority they do not need the bosses, but to hold their control of the enterprise they must control the state.
The role of the worker director, in the capitalist enterprise, is merely a reversal of the historical role of the harlot: responsibility without power.
A very real problem for trade unionists at any level of contact with management is to avoid accepting the bosses’ aims for those of the workers.
The pattern is set right at the top with trade union leaders taking their fat salaries for jobs on NEDDY, the IRC, the CIR and any other government sponsored body that can be utilised to bring the unions into closer contact with the government and its policies.
The fundamental policies of British capitalism are invariably taken with some tame trade unionist to second the decision.
Denies
The idea of a national interest that stands above class lies at the bottom of the philosophy of participation. The individual may achieve harmony and agreement with the bosses only to the extent that he denies the class interests of his fellow workers.
Capitalist interests are fundamentally different and opposed to working-class interests and the final resolution of those differences will not come in cosy chats in the board room but in the streets and on the factory floor.
Anyone who adopts a class position on workers’ control is eventually faced with the question of what to do about it now. It is clear that although militancy is rising in the face of capitalist rationalisation, most workers are not yet convinced of the need to struggle for state power.
But, between the existing situation and the fight for control of the state there are a number of useful and instructive struggles that can be fought against management prerogatives.
Control over hiring and firing, grading, overtime and speed-up are all matters that are most hard fought in any industry. The struggle to wrest control over these factors of the workers’ everyday life completely from the employer’s grasp, to remove, if only partially, the employer’s stranglehold on the workers’ life in the factory,is a policy that nearly all workers will recognise as worthwhile and worth fighting for.
And in the process they might well develop the muscles and the will to do away with the employers altogether.
Discipline
In many of the struggles, big and small, that take place today, control of the day to day life on the job is the major component of the strike. At Ford the battle was not so much about the size of the increase and the differential with the Midland car factories but about how far management would be allowed to go in disciplining the workforce.
Whatever the formal result of the official discussions (and there is room for criticism of Scanlon and Jones for their acceptance of back-door penal conditions) it is clear that from a situation where the workers were defending their position against a management attack they are now in a position to mount an offensive against Ford rationalisation and denial of shopfloor organisation.
The nonsense of the remote official machinery has been exposed and broken irreparably.
The struggle for real control is continuous and will continue while society is divided into classes.
The Labour and trade union fakers who see ‘participation’ as the soft option that will give content to their demagogy are either daft or deluded.
To elect a worker director is to change nothing and will give nobody any sense of participation. It will merely serve to emphasise the desperate stupidity of our captains of industry and their labour lieutenants.
Last updated on 26 October 2020