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WHAT NEXT?
The talks failed and the people who seemed most depressed and dispirited were the CBI. Unlike S.Brittan, they have looked at the long-term and are willing to incur the risks ... they have no choice. The talks failed not because any of the three participants were deceitful or dishonest; but because society itself - and that means the working class - was unwilling to embark on the necessary changes to implement such a policy i.e. giving up collective bargaining as it is done today and moving towards a more conscious division of the working class's product. The CBI could afford to be detached and unworried about gaining its members' adherence to any agreement because it knew full well that if the working class backed a voluntary agreement, its members would have to fall into line, they would have no other option open to them. Thus, it was the CBI and not the Government that has played the honest broker right from the talks very beginning back in January when the CBI invited the TUC to a discussion. Michael Clapham, CBI President, pointed out on 27 September that the Government's package deal "might" make CBI members think:
"that industry was being asked to make an 'undue sacrifice after holding down prices for the past 15 months ... they might doubt whether the whole package allowed for a growth of profits adequate to sustain the 5% growth in the economy on which the Government's proposals were predicated ... The proposals are a rational attempt to divide up between producer, consumer and employee the addition to national wealth that we can reasonably expect,' Mr Clapham said. 'The proposals call on all three parties to accept a new social contract in which the contribution of each is dependent on the contribution of the others (i.e. make conscious and thus capable of discussion and change the existing relations of production, NS).'" (FT, 28.9.2) Even though industry was making the greater sacrifice, it was worth it, 'we shall indeed have achieved something which for years has been as elusive as it has been desirable' (ibid).
The CBI recognised that the only way to deal with wage claims was to explain to the working class why the claims were unrealistic; it did not have the power to resist paying them. There is simply no other reason why the CBI should have initiated the talks. If it had had the power to maintain its profit rates without the talks, it would certainly have asserted it and done so.
What about the TUC? "It's (policing wage restraint) not what they (the TUC) are paid to do. They are elected to do the best they can for their members, and if they fail in that task they are liable to be replaced by other, more militant, men. (That certainly, was one of the results of the unions' willing co-operation with the last Labour Government during a period of acute economic crisis)." (Observer leader, 5.11.72) "... there is no doubt a still, small voice in Mr Feather's ear which is saying the same sort of thing as the militants are shouting outside - namely that the unions have no business to be conducting this kind of detailed negotiation. They are not equipped for it, they cannot deliver their side of the 'bargain' even if they wanted to, and they are running the risk of a humiliating debacle ." (D.Watt, FT, 10.11.72)
It is simply a truism to state that the trade union leaders could not police an incomes policy because that is not their job and they would be replaced by militants if they tried. This is only true if the leaders do not actively explain what an incomes policy can give and what it cannot and also what makes it necessary. If the working class sees that the militants are wrong, it will not support them; i.e. if it sees that it cannot consume all of its product and that bosses cannot be expected to produce wage rises at the expense of reproduction and accumulation. And that in return for conscious self-regulation of wages, the bosses and the state have conceded a direct voice in how surplus value is parcelled out.
The problem for the working class then becomes to see that
(l) its % consumption is maintained and its level of consumption increased as growth continues
(2) to work out its demands for how the surplus value should be parcelled out. The guarantees that the Government and employers will cough up follow very simply after this: if they don't there is organised opposition. And in Britain, organised opposition by the working class works: i.e. the Industrial Relations Act and the Miners' Strike. Far from the talks being a Tory ploy or charade, they become those things only because the working class does not actively participate and refuses to take what the ruling class are saying at its face value and test the veracity of the ruling class in practice. It of course follows that trade union leaders will be replaced by 'militants' if those leaders never fight the militants on the basis of whose view of reality is correct. The tripartite talks definitely implied a change in the role of trade unions because they implied a change in the action of the working class itself in the economic struggle. The trade union leaders would not have to worry about being replaced if the working class itself changed its views on the economic struggle. But the working class was never given a chance to do so despite all the efforts of the ruling class to use the tripartite talks to shake things up and publicly examine the facts. Not once during the five months of talks, did a trade union leader dare to address a working class meeting about the talks and what they meant for the working class. They dared not face up to their rank and file, and deal with the left's arguments. It is small wonder that the ruling class remained sceptical about the TUC's ability to deliver a voluntary agreement. They never really tried. IS and the CP had nothing to fear when they cried out against all the opinion polls in favour that a voluntary agreement "shall not pass".
The proof of the above is to be seen in World War II where the working class accepted a cessation of normal collective bargaining when they saw good reason for doing so: i.e. to win the war. The TUC negotiations at Downing Street were united (from right winger Sidney Green to lefties Scanlon/Jones) in finding the Government's package deal on 2nd November unacceptable. Why? They could never sell it to their members. So much yet again for the bureaucracy theory of history. £2.60 was an impossibly low figure (yet it was based on 5% growth rate which is higher than any time since the war, i.e. Britain has yet to manage it).
The Government asked the TUC to present it with alternative sets of statistics showing that a higher growth rate and therefore a bigger wage increase was possible. The TUC did not do so. The TUC stated the flat-rate increase was wrong as it ate into correct and just differentials based on skill etc. The Government asked how else the lower-paid were to be better paid. The TUC did not answer. Nor on those issues like the Rents Act, food prices, the IR Act, property, which were obviously negotiable and expected to be negotiated, did the TUC seek to play its hand: i.e. assert working class power. A demonstration organised by the TUC in favour of these things just prior to the November talks would have increased the pressure on the Government to deliver immeasurably. If the TUC did not wield its power in the negotiations, it must be that it did not really take them seriously. Instead Jones and Scanlon tried to imagine what it would be like being Mrs Smith confronted with your husband's wage freeze and a shop where prices have gone up.
A DIMINISHED ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT
What about the Government? The Heath Government had not faced what Sameul Brittan had: a voluntary agreement on the Heath lines would indeed lessen Parliament's power. Not because the agreement would have taken away any of Parliament's traditional business so much as that it would create a new centre for bargaining between the classes, a centre much closer to the actual production process and therefore much more responsive to their needs, demands etc and much more capable of regulating the classes within the market. Given such an alternative centre of power, decisions which Parliament at present takes would "naturally" move over to be taken by the new tripartite body since it would be in fact reflecting economic reality more accurately. This explains why on the last day of the talks Heath announced that certain topics were not negotiable because they were for Parliament only (e.g. the Rents Act). He had waited until the last moment to say this because it genuinely had not occurred to him before. As Rogaly pointed out, the Government was impelled by events. First, to make the offer of a new social contract. And then, when during the discussions the Government got some inkling of what the new social contract would mean to present, normal politics (i.e. as great a change as to normal collective bargaining) it too pulled back, like the TUC, from explaining the change to its constituents, the electorate and the Tory party.
One thing is clear. No Government can give rise to such a "new social contract" in Britain. Such a development requires the active and conscious consent of both classes. It requires the alteration of present collective bargaining and politics and a development of the working class's understanding of its own function and power within capitalism. This becomes obvious when we read first that "But the exercise (tripartite talks) had to be gone through in order to expose the issues to the, nation." (Sunday Times, Ronald Butt, 5.11.72) Even though "The main purpose of wage control should be to give a short sharp shock to inflationary expectations so that orthodox monetary and physical restraints can be used without putting unemployment above a million again ... they (the Heath proposals and tripartite talks, NS) have given away so much in an attempt to buy the support of the TUC and the media that what is left is neither short, sharp, nor much of a shock." (S.Brittan, FT, 1.11.72) Dirigisme and rule by bureaucratic fiat is simply impossible in Britain. Measures have to be explained and agreed voluntarily.
Though the talks broke down, the Government is enacting all the concessions that it promised the TUC in its package deal. A form of agreement was reached in fact, though neither the Government nor the TUC will put themselves in a strong enough position vis a vis the working class (i.e. to explain the underlying issues) to state that. It is hoped that the Freeze will not be challenged by the working class. But what happens next? "One's instinct is naturally to suppose that after the failure of one set of assumptions (voluntary agreement is desirable, NS), everyone concerned will now move to the opposite extreme - the Government towards statutory compulsion, the trade unions to disengagement and the Labour Party to a closer and closer harmony with the unions. But ... the situation is far more fluid than that. The parties concerned (and that includes the CBI) genuinely do not know what to do for the best. In a way this is a depressing prospect but in another it represents a real opportunity. Attitudes may harden very fast from now on but for a month or two the Government has the chance to follow up the initiative. The only proviso is that it should clear its collective mind - and fast." (DWatt, FT, 10.11.72)
Given the historical structure of British politics, it is impossible for the Tory Party to enact any measure of real reform unless there is working class pressure, hard pressure, from without for that reform. In the past that pressure has always been expressed through Parliament. Now that there are no more democratic measures that can be enacted to bring greater political democracy, the only reforms left are economic ones: a greater measure of conscious working class control over production and the distribution of its surplus value. The Labour Party will not push those reforms unless it is pushed by the trade unions or a well organised pressure group such as the Anti-Corn Law League was to the Liberals. The trade unions have no heart for completely altering their way of existence; for shaking up the processes of collective bargaining; the left are more concerned to preserve pure and unsullied by bourgeois molesters the sacred heart of the working class. The Conservative Government in this situation are powerless. The motive force for their measures as Rogaly accurately observes has always come from the pressure of events. Far from Britain lacking theorists of the right, her real lack is theorists of the left who are more interested in advancing towards socialism than in preserving the working class's tradition. This problem will be with Britain and indeed Europe for some time and so we will have occasion to re-examine it again when the pressure of economic reality throws it up.
Postscript: Brittan's lament on the corporate state ignoring and trampling the interests of the consumer is instructive: conscious control by the producers of commodities means that their use-values and not exchange-values can become of primary importance when (a) the level of consumption of the working class and (b) the reproduction and accumulation of a society are both guaranteed. The problem then becomes one of producing for use. Brittan has thus to become a market socialist and use market socialist arguments. Why? He is faced with a move towards socialism.