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RECOGNITION OF NECESSITY
Peregrine Worsthorne has made a better effort than most of his kind to imagine how the world appears to a worker. There are plenty of "sympathisers" but not many who are bugged by the need to understand. Worsthorne wants to understand the social era in which he lives, and therefore tries to imagine how the world presents itself to a prole. To judge from his Bullock article, his imagination has fallen very short of the mark.
He sees political democracy as only having been a means of engineering mass support for the growth of state power. In fact the growth of state power, and of a vast and impersonal state bureaucracy, has been a necessary condition for the development of the masses as individuals. It has curbed, or made frivolous, the individuality of other classes, but has made possible the individualisation of the working class.
Trade unions may no longer embody "high moral principles", but that is because they embody something more substantial and matter-of-fact. As they have become more widespread and more powerful the heroic aura has dissipated and the high moral principles have become less elevated by becoming more general and more functional. Their power is certainly not seen as being "shockingly illegitimate". Power is what they are about, and the more powerful they are the more "legitimate" they will be considered. Conflicts about the use of this power will not develop extensively and publicly until the bourgeoisie are no longer there to take advantage of them. The post-Heath Tory vision is a mere hallucination.
It is perfectly true that "the man on the shop floor" will not acquire industrial power through workers' control. But "the men on the shop floor" will. When management clearly ceases to represent an alien power, and is made ultimately responsible to and disposable by the shop, and when as a consequence the shop floor has grounds for thinking that matters are being arranged as far as possible in its interest, the shop floor will tend to behave responsibly.
It is likely that only a small percentage of workers will ever aspire to participate in the direction of management of industry. Nevertheless the man on the shop floor will benefit. He will presumably benefit from wage increases resulting from the greater productivity that would ensue when one no longer felt in honour bound to produce as little as possible. He will benefit no less from the elimination of the psychological irritations which are unavoidable in capitalist production relations or bureaucratically controlled state industries.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity, as Engels said. When somebody else is responsible for necessity one can never recognise it. This is only partly because one can never be sure that what he says is necessary is actually so.
It is sometimes the case at present that the capitalist does little more than mediate necessity. But the very fact that he is mediating it means that it cannot be recognised on the shop floor. The social development of the shop floor is aborted by the mere existence of the capitalist as the agent of economic necessity, in much the same way that the development of the individual conscience was aborted by the existence of priests as the agents of morality.
The priest, observing the behaviour of people under his influence, reasoned, by projecting that behaviour forward, that, if his restraining influence did not exist, rape, plunder and murder would become normal. The capitalists now reason in the same way about the behaviour of trade union representatives on boards. The truth is that working class irresponsibility is at present being caused by the fact that the capitalist continues to exist when he is ripe for being phased out. The working class is now perfectly capable of developing through the recognition of necessity once it comes into direct confrontation with it.