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DEFINING WORKERS CONTROL
1. Because workers' control was never considered in any detail by the members of the Second or Third Internationals and because the economic conditions in the Soviet Union did not allow workers' control to be put into practice, there is no generally accepted definition of workers' control in the Communist movement.
2. Probably the most fundamental definition - that is, that which sticks to essentials - would be: the sovereignty of the workers in a given factory or firm in the managing of that factory or firm. That is certainly the definition which Marx operates with when he deals in passing with workers' control in Volume III of Capital.
3. This definition places the argument about direct and representative democracy fairly and squarely where it belongs: in the realms of pure political thought. Those who would argue that if the workers delegate their sovereignty to a representative of their interests, they thereby lose control, are not arguing as communists, but Rousseauvians (Rousseau denied that democracy was possible on the basis of representative government). For the workers in a factory to keep direct control over management, they would have to be in virtually perpetual session as a general meeting, as problems in production occur virtually hourly. Under direct democracy actual production would decline steeply as more and more time was spent in general meetings, and such production as did occur would be erratic, because workers would be obliged to stop working whenever a problem of management cropped up. Direct democracy in practice must give way to some form of delegation or representation. Therefore when workers control is considered practically, it must be from the viewpoint of a representative system.
CAPITAL OPPOSED TO THE WORKFORCE AND CAPITAL SUBJECT TO THE WORKFORCE
Writing of the organising function of the capitalist, Marx says:
"Inasmuch as the capitalist's work does not originate in the purely capitalistic process of production, and hence does not cease on its own when capital ceases; inasmuch as it does not confine itself solely to the function of exploiting the labour of others; inasmuch as it therefore originates from the social form of the labour-process, from combination and co-operation of many in pursuit of a common result, it is just as Independent of capital as that form itself as soon as it has burst its capitalistic shell. To say that this labour is necessary as capitalistic labour, or as a function of the capitalist, only means that the vulgus (i.e. the mob) is unable to conceive the forms developed in the lap of the capitalist production, separate and free from their antithetical capitalist character... In a co-operative factory the antagonistic nature of the labour of supervision disappears, because the manager is paid by the labourers instead of representing capital counterposed to them." (Capital, Volume 3, pp. 379-80. All quotes are from the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1962 edition.)
4. The only time when representatives have no chance to become despots is when the people whom they represent have an interest in what their delegates are deciding and enough knowledge of the reasons why a decision is taken to be able to judge it correct or incorrect in the light of the reasons given for it. The right of recall is purely a formal device which has no practical application if constituents are neither interested or equipped by knowledge to judge. When these two conditions are present recall is unnecessary since any representative will find it impossible to continue when he has lost the confidence of his constituents; he must resign or risk the certainty of revolt and forcible removal.
5. Unless these two conditions of interest and knowledge are present, workers' control will have no practical meaning or effect if implemented in legal form. If they are absent, even though workers' representatives may be elected to manage, they will not manage for the workers, but rather as despots or if reasonable men as enlightened despots. This is the case in Yugoslavia where the working class for historical reasons have neither interest nor knowledge to make their elected managers their representatives.
6. By interest we mean involvement arising out of material necessity. We argue that workers should be sovereign in the management of their factory because it is necessary that they are so. The material need is for the working class to survive and develop. Therefore the class has an interest in whatever is necessary for it to survive and develop. From the beginning of the 19th century to 1847 in Britain, the main threat to the working class's survival came from the mill-owners' practice of continually extending the length of the working day until the working class was dying of exhaustion. At that time the working class interest was to restrict hours of work; they formed Short Time Associations and forced the passage of the 10 Hours Act in 1847 after about 20 years of agitation.
7. Since 1945 the two main things affecting the survival of the working class are:
i. the tendency for the level of investment to be too low to ensure sufficiently extended accumulation, thus threatening the continuing development of the productive forces (one of the consequences of this is that working class consumption cannot increase sufficiently, as there is nothing additional to consume).
ii. the inability of management to organise production on the shop floor efficiently so as to maximise productivity of labour and capital in the production process - with the result that both labour-power and capital are wasted and thus there has been comparatively less produced to be available for consumption and investment.
8. The first threat to working class interests is not directly affected by the transfer of sovereignty for management decisions from the shareholders (where it at present resides) to the workers. However, workers' control has proved historically necessary to deal with this threat, because without workers' control, the working class has refused to accept conscious regulation of wages, that is, incomes policy. Such a policy aims to ensure a high level of investment. The second threat can be met directly by workers' control for which the working class in Britain is sufficiently developed at present.
9. There are two conditions for knowledge:
i. the developed ability to reason
ii. experience of what has to be reasoned about.
Capitalism has produced a working class capable of reason by virtue of universal primary education and access to the results of scientific experiment and invention, political disputation and bourgeois culture. The working class has also inherited an industrial culture created by the experience of their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers. As the Communist Party of the Soviet Union found in the early 1920s, it is no good expecting peasants who have migrated to the towns to be capable of organising production in the factories. However, for the reason and experience of the class to be able to function, it is essential to have means of publicly debating the decisions taken by workers' representatives in managing, to ensure that those decisions are correct. Public debate means both regular assemblies of workers in order to question their representative and reach decisions, and the production of written discussion about what constitutes the correct decision, that is, some form of newspaper and publicity in each workplace.