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WORKERS' CONTROL AND THE FUTURE
39. Workers' control is obviously not just another management device for ensuring increasing productivity and ensuring production. It has only become a practical way to ensure these things because the working class are literate, accustomed to reasoning, accustomed to taking conscious action for definite aims, and socialised in an industrial culture where science and a material relation to the world are taken for granted. It would be foolish indeed to jeopardise production by vesting responsibility for it in less capable hands. For when the vesting has taken place, there will indeed be no recourse left for capitalists but reason. The use of force and the abuse of his place by a representative of the people against the people has been defined as tyranny by Europeans since they began to think about the Bible. A workers' management representative who becomes a tyrant is very likely to face the same fate that has always come to tyrants in Europe.
40. What then will remain for the working class to struggle against? Will there be any capitalists left? Capitalism is determined by the operation of the law of value within a market, which market provides for equalisation of rates of profit, wages, exploitation, interest amongst the workers and rentiers. Insofar as the owner of a firm from the late 18th-mid 19th century acted for his firm on the basis of the limits and options which the market and its workings determined for him, Marx calls him capital embodied, a capitalist.
"We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its growing concentration. Thus grows the power of capital, the alienation of the conditions of social production personified in the capitalist from the real producers. Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist's source of power." (Capital, volume 3, p. 259)
From the 1850s with joint stock companies and the creation of a labour market for managers from bankrupt entrepreneurs, managers came to be capital embodied, since it was they who employed the shareholder's capital - who evaluated the market and acted on their judgements The owner of the capital was no longer its real incarnation. Marx and Engels saw in the joint stock company the beginning of the end of capitalism precisely because it was the beginning of the divorce of ownership and control.
"The capitalist stock companies, as much as the cooperative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other," (Capital, volume 3, p. 431)
With workers' control, the shareholder will cease to have even vestigial rights of control. The workers will be capital embodied. The transition from capitalism to communism will come as Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin were always careful to state it would - when the working class is able to supersede the law of value and the function of the market by conscious social determination and able to implement that conscious social determination without hindrance from a state machine.
41. Will government continue to have a function under workers' control? Most emphatically, yes. It will be needed to use the coercion of society as a whole against sections of it who are attempting to act in their own narrow sectional interests (what Marx calls "the performance of common activities arising from the nature of all communities" - Capital, volume 3, p. 376), as well as to reflect and oversee great movements forward by the society or reflect a resistance to progress when the society is temporarily out of breath. The problem of sectionalism is a continuing one. Thus there is no reason why steel workers under workers' control should not resist the introduction of aluminium as a substitute for steel and present perfectly scientific arguments about the superiority of steel over aluminium. The two industries could struggle against each other and hold society to ransom by each going out on strike unless the other were stopped from producing. To enforce society's interests, a government is necessary. At present the government has the confidence of the working class as being the body which governs society. If that body still enjoys their confidence when workers' control has been achieved, then it will still govern.
42. It is obvious that the development of workers' control from the point where the workers' right to be consulted and to veto management decisions is merely acknowledged and the shareholders retain the semblance of greater sovereignty, to workers' control where the workers are the sole sovereigns will be uneven. In industries where labour is casual or not in the habit of exercising power in trade unions, it is likely to proceed slowly and also to encounter much opposition from employers. In industries where trade unions are strong and where management take a decision which the majority of workers consider tyrannous (e.g. Dennis Poore's decision to close the Triumph factory; UCS's decision to close etc.) workers are likely to take full sovereignty for themselves immediately such a decision is announced.