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BOURGEOIS RECOGNITION OF THE NEED FOR CHANGE
On Tuesday 22 May, Lord Watkinson wrote an article in the Financial Times entitled "Time is not on our side". Watkinson is Chairman of Cadbury-Schweppes and has been chairman of the CBI' s Company Affairs Committee. He said:
"This could be the year of fundamental change for British business. The factors forcing change are widespread and impressive; the dialogue between the Prime Minister, unions and the CBI on Phase III; the determination of the EEC Commission to make progress now Britain is a member; impending company legislation in Britain and in the EEC as a whole; an apparent move to the left by the British Labour Party in company affairs; growing pressures for change in almost every professional body concerned with business affairs. Beneath it all there is a general demand for a new approach pervading the industrial scene in Britain and throughout the Community ... As far as Britain is concerned, the TUC has changed its stance from refusal to participate in management, to qualified support for involvement in supervisory boards with worker directors. One thing is certain, the debate will continue and the present situation of British company boards in the area of industrial relationships and wider participation in decision-making will not be allowed to remain as it is - the pressures for change are too great. Proof of this lies in the work being done by the Institute of Directors, the British Institute of Management, the CBI, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Industrial Society and many others. All of them assume a demand for change that has to be met by the directors of British companies. The interest is an excellent thing but time is not on the side of British industry. As chairman of the Company Affairs Committee, I am disturbed at the current lack of agreement on a clearly defined common policy on company affairs that would provide a reasonable brief for a British Government writing a new Bill or conducting a difficult dialogue with the EEC....It would be easy to dismiss the urgency by saying that the Government's tripartite talks may fail and that the EEC has deliberated on company structure ever since its inception without making much progress. This would be dangerous complacency. As an old hand in the one-time Ministry of Labour, I detect a move to more progressive attitudes all round. It does not really matter who has converted whom, but it seems that this round of talks has a better chance of success than the last one, all the parties concerned having learnt something in the interval."
Watkinson is warning the less conscious sections of the bourgeoisie that a social change of significance for them is in the process of development, and that they will ignore its signs at their perils - they lose their "right" to be democratically consulted and to wield their class power by overlooking the arena for change that has sprung up. By acknowledging the existence of the will to change and identifying their essential interests in the present status quo and what parts of that status quo are inessential to them, the bourgeoisie can survive the change. Otherwise, they will defend all aspects of the status quo with an unreasoning obstinacy against a will to change that will become equally obstinate and the risk of social breakdown will be very real.
There is no doubt that even the "essential interests" of the bourgeoisie will be affected by change. In 1831 Peel spoke in the Reform Bill debate. He said that the Bill would mean the acquisition of sovereignty by the House of Commons though the Bill itself did nothing to curtail the powers of the Lords or the Throne. Nor after the Bill's passage was the power of the aristocracy in the Commons immediately lessened. Peel pointed to the underlying political logic and to the political forces set in motion by the Bill, and was correct in his analysis. The "essential interests" which Peel and the Tories enforced in the struggle over the Reform Bill were a gradual and fairly orderly extension of the franchise, taking place within a political ambience still largely determined by the British aristocracy and their consciousness. When the strident and militant consciousness of British non-conformism and liberalism emerged in the last half of the 19th century, it entered into a collision course with that of the "aristocracy". That the conflict would be won by the non-conformist liberals had been determined half a century previously by the passing of the Reform Bill.
Like Peel, Watkinson does not attempt to oppose the change; nor does he attempt to minimise its significance by suggesting, that the bourgeoisie can conserve something by looking to their essential interests. He argues rather that the bourgeoisie should identify the will and the direction of the change and then attempt to channel it into forms already established and understood by the bourgeoisie - forms which they know how to use. Thus he states; "There is nothing in British company law which makes a consultative board or a holding board illegal, nor is there any legal bar to appointing worker directors to a consultative or any other kind of board."
The change to which Watkinson refers is not a change in the essential aspects of capitalist production. It does not involve altering the forces which determine that production takes place for exchange, or that the motor force for production is the appropriation of surplus value. What the change does however involve is the social, political and legal forms within which that production takes place.
At present the managers of a joint stock company (the form of capitalist production which is overwhelmingly predominant in Britain) derive their power to execute and administrate production, marketing, capital accumulation, purchase of means of production from the people who own shares in that company. Shareholding carries with it the formal legal power over the actions and destiny and fortune of the firm; the managers are legally accountable to the shareholders and to no other group within the nation as long as they conduct the firm's business within the law. (Conducting business within the law in Britain involves great freedom. British company law is distinguished by its lack of prescription or regulation compared either with Europe or the US. The legal actions which have been the basis for Ralph Nader's campaigns in the US would be very difficult to sustain here.)
The significance of the change is that the managers of companies should be legally accountable not only to shareholders but also ( 1) to the workers of the particular firm for certain aspects of the firm's conduct and (2) to the "community” or "nation" for certain aspects. How the working class and the nation use this legal power over firms will depend on the will to change continuing and on how each class's consciousness of this legal power and its substance develops.