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WHAT WOULD WORKER PARTICIPATION MEAN?
The will to change to which Watkinson referred at present involves formal changes in the legal responsibility of management. It would make management legally responsible not only to shareholders (the owners of capital) but also to the workers in the firm and to the "community" or "nation" (i.e. the state of public opinion which is determined by the politics of the class struggle). This change in substance has already been occurring; it remains for it to be formally reflected and then for the further possibilities of the development of that change in substance to occur as a result of the change in form (like the development of the sovereignty of the Commons as a result of the Reform Bill).
It is a change of significance both for the working class and for the development of national politics. It is of significance for the working class because it will force the working class to confront the essential realities of capitalist production directly rather than through the legal and social form of private property. Rather than that form being seen by the working class as being the cause and the source of the features of capitalist production it will be an inescapable conclusion that that form is merely a result of the laws of capitalist production. The reason for redundancies will not be management's or the shareholder' s arbitrary prerogative or avarice but rather will be seen by the working class to arise from the laws of capitalist production itself. The working class will have to deal with the fact that it is not only the forms of capitalist production but the laws of that production which must be confronted if social needs are to be met directly and consciously (and at present the right to keep a particular job constitutes a social need for the working class). This fact will arise not from the propaganda of Communists but out of the "day-to-day mundane" occurrences of workers "participation" or "control". Communists will be able to analyse them, they will not have been the cause of these occurrences. The cause lies in the continuing political development of classes in Britain. That this fact will be faced by the working class politically becomes as inevitable as that the non-conformist liberals had to face the fact of their own political power in the 1880s.
The significance of the change for national politics is that it will present national politics with what Bagehot describes as "substantial business". Bagehot states:
"To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial business. If you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other about that nothing. Where great questions end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature. There is nothing for it to enact, nothing for it to settle." (The English Constitution, Fontana edition, p 244).
The factious behaviour of the Labour Party since at least 1951 and the fashionable commentators' disillusion with Parliament are explained by the lack of "substantial business" which either working class or bourgeoisie has presented for Parliament to have to deal with. Precisely because Parliament and the British state depend on the conscious political action and will of classes in order to be able to enact, has Parliament had very little to enact since that first Labour Government after World War II. The business of Parliament has been ground which has been already settled between the classes and which therefore has no place in Parliament or has been of a democratic nature and involved individual's views about social relations (e.g. the abolition of capital punishment, immigration). By putting large areas of reality into politics which have not been there before, have not been legitimate concerns for class politics, the change described above will give Parliament and national politics a great deal of "substantial business".
A NEW BOLDNESS IN THE LABOUR PARTY?
In concluding, signs can already be seen of how the most conscious section of the bourgeoisie are reacting to the will to change of both the working class and the nation. The Financial Times leader of 4th June commented on the Labour Party NEC decision to endorse the nationalisation of 25 major companies (itself a reflection of the will to change. The Labour Party has not made so bold a statement of intent for at least forty years. Its present eagerness is instructive because it is less the settling of old scores by the old left as an attempt to seize the political initiative by the most practiced opportunist elements in the Party.) The FT remarked on this reflection:
"In some respects it (the commitment to nationalise 25 leading companies) is a reflection of the growing unease over the role and conduct of businessmen and the relationship of business to the rest of society. Within industry itself, an awareness of these problems has recently led to experiments in new working relationships in an attempt to reduce the boredom, frustration and feeling of remoteness which is felt on the factory floor, in offering to provide skilled managers for short term secondment for various social or public projects and in the Watkinson committee's hesitant initial steps towards codifying the responsibilities of directors. Politicians would be better advised to approach these very real problems in a similar mood of pragmatism and experimentation rather than advocating sweeping nationalisation or promoting a dogmatic approach to worker participation."
Once again the main weapons of the bourgeoisie are practicality and stability/order. It must be expected that the bourgeoisie will continue to wield them and use their considerable powers of initiative to establish just such pragmatic and real experiments in workers control. Communists can refuse to perceive that these changes are going on; they can retire to the more certain world of essence and fundamental laws of capitalist production. Or Communists can insist on explaining to the working class just how these pragmatic "gradualist" steps affect the working class and the chances that they give to the working class for learning about fundamental laws of capitalist production and confronting them. If the working class forsakes the essence of Communism for the more tangible and immediate reality of the pragmatic bourgeoisie it will be because Communists have been unable to explain to the working class just how that essence is contained and determines the more tangible reality.