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SENTIMENTAL ANTI-CAPITALISM
THE BULLOCK REPORT is being opposed by a combination of left and right. Its opponents on the left are concerned that its implementation would operate to the disadvantage of real and actual immediate interests of workers by undermining trade union activity. Its opponents on the right are concerned that it would not do this, but would enhance trade union power and make it more disruptive of the production process than it already is.
(There is a second category of left wing opponent: the fantasiser of revolution. For him the matter is entirely ideological. He sees yet another miserable reform warding off catastrophe. The opposition of trotskyists is almost entirely of the second category, but in the Communist Party it overlaps and merges with opposition of the first kind.)
There is a real point at issue here. The trade union opposition to the Report is not essentially Utopian even though most of the "socialist" opposition is. "Industrial democracy" could conceivably result in trade unionism being undermined and the labour force being disorientated. In our opinion it is not likely to have such an effect in this instance. But a fear that it might do so is far from being irrational.
The labour movement in Britain undoubtedly has benefitted in the past from its notorious untheoretical character, but it is now suffering from it. It is unaccustomed to discuss reality, outside very restricted limits. And even within those limits, discussion has been carried on in a sort of traditional slang which is adequate to its limited purpose, but which is quite unsuitable to the discussion of wider interests.
Workers' control, however closely its establishment is tied to trade union machinery, is essentially different from wage bargaining. The ideology that has grown up around the activity of wage bargaining, (and which, however formally misleading it sometimes is, seldom actually misleads because the real situation in which trade unions operate is usually perceived independently of the ideological rhetoric which is the formal language of the movement), is unsuitable for speculating about workers' control. The ideology, which is adequate to the carrying on of a well-established trade union movement, does actually become misleading when it comes to reckoning the probable consequences of a new departure.
The trade union movement has a vague and sentimental anti-capitalist ideology or rhetoric. But capitalism is what it knows about. It knows how to operate within a clearly defined system of capitalism in which the management is the unambiguous agent of capital. When economic evolution blurs this definition, the trade union ideology is reluctant to take formal account of the fact even when trade union practice takes actual account of it.
In its evidence to the Bullock Commission, the EEPTU pleaded for the maintenance of a clearly defined system of management. It is the business of management to make the company viable, and it is the business of trade unions to screw the last possible penny out of the company in wages. It is necessary that trade unions should be able to complain about management, and indulge in a certain amount of rhetoric against it as the representative of an alien and antagonistic interest. It is necessary that the outward forms of capitalism should be kept in good working order even when the substance of things is quite different.
It is appropriate that this view of the matter should have been given its most coherent expression by Frank Chapple, who forced the issue of trade union democracy into the courts in his struggle against the Communist Party fifteen years ago. After that he could only survive as a trade unionist pure and simple. It is this that has enabled him to state the trade union case against workers' control so unideologically and realistically. But it is the very same case that the Communist Party of Great Britain and some Tribunites present within a Utopian wrapping: workers' control would confuse and sap the vitality of the trade union movement, which needs a management that is unambiguously representative of capital in order to function properly.
Trade unionism is now flourishing because capital is a declining force. Management, as the representative of degenerate capital, can offer no real resistance to trade union power in the major industries. The trade unions extract what is extractable for the wages fund. Of course the senior management and the major shareholders still live in comfort. If it is desirable from a trade union point of view that there should be a management representative of capital in industry, then allowance must be made for a body of ephemeral parasites in the society. The capitalist must be allowed to enable at least one generation of his offspring to be conspicuous consumers. And the increase in real wages that would now result from a general redistribution of income in excess of the maximum that can be earned in wages would be very modest indeed.
The process of expropriating the expropriators in Britain, which was begun in a modest way with Lloyd George's pre-1914 Budgets, is now so advanced that it cannot proceed much farther without obliterating the expropriators altogether. It would not be safe to do much more of it if the continuing existence of a weak capitalist class is considered to be desirable in the long run from a trade union viewpoint.