Back to Labour Values index
Back to Workers Control Index
Back to article index
Previous
WORKERS CONTROL AND THE LEFT (2)
The would-be revolutionary left
53. The Communist movement has never placed great significance on the benefits for the working class in measures for workers' control being taken by employers or the government. In fact, there has even been hostility to such measures because they have been seen by Communists as obscuring the class struggle, of being "the sugar coating on the bitter pill"; The assumption on which this hostility is based is that the taking of political power by the working class would only be possible if the capitalists behaved as badly and oppressively as possible. Once capitalists began behaving as intelligent capitalists, the game was up. Further there was an assumption that the only basis from which the working class were capable of asserting their class interests was out of oppression and hardship. If oppression and hardship kept diminishing as capitalism developed, this would render the working class impotent against the capitalists, who would then enslave the class with ideology and the good life instead of hardship, rendering communism a mere dream.
54. When the term 'workers' control' is used by Lefties their intention is to maximise the syndicalist aura of the term, taking care never to define what exactly they mean. These men require all the mystery of the syndicalist aura to excite the masses. It makes the Left think they are saying more than meets the ear; makes the requisite obeisance to hallowed proletarian tradition; while committing the speaker to no definite aim or course of action.
55. Workers' control when stripped of this syndicalist aura is subjected to criticism by the Left on the grounds
(a) that these measures are a matter of indifference for the working class because they do not bring the end of capitalism any nearer
or
(b) they are divisive for the working class because they will make it capitalist minded, that is, interested in the fortunes of their firm, when instead they should be longing for an end to capitalism in general.
Therefore they conclude the measures should be opposed.
56. It is hard these days to get a bald admission of opposition to workers' control as defined in the last paragraph from the Left. Opposition is expressed in the Left's insistence on seeing every political act of the bourgeoisie as an attempt to increase the level of oppression and hardship of the British working class. It follows that the working class cannot think about workers' control until it has fought against and defeated these attempts by the capitalists to impoverish the working class. For the working class to adopt such a course of action would make sense and be necessary if such attempts were being made and succeeding. But it is a fact that the working class' standard of living has been rising for 30 years. And it is also a fact that the threat to the working class is now coming from the firm's failure to invest and the manager's inability to organise production efficiently. The capitalists propose to meet these two threats (since they are equally threats to capitalism) by incomes policy and workers' control.
The Left's assumption of ever increasing impoverishment is held for reasons of faith which make its actual truth quite beside the point and a mere irrelevance. The reason for such an assumption is not that it reflects reality correctly, but rather that it is necessary to keep the revolutionary spirit alive, which the Left believe will be quenched if the working class were not being progressively impoverished. The Left has failed to convince the working class of this doctrine of greater and increasing oppression. The socialist groups in Britain before World War I had more members and made a greater impact on the working class than has the left since 1945.
57. The Left cannot cite where Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin ever state the view that capitalism would only be overthrown when the working class had reached a point of absolute impoverishment or misery. This is because none of them ever made such statements. These four were aware that increased impoverishment and oppression were necessary results of capitalist production with its tendency to extract absolute surplus value (by lengthening the working day, increasing the pace of work, lowering wage-rates by employing child-labour and women) and to emiseration by creating a pool of labour in excess of its requirements by which to keep wages as low as possible. They also know that such tendencies could be counter-acted by the conscious political action of the working class and by the development of capitalist production. Marx shows in Volume 1 of Capital how such tendencies carry with them the NECESSARY counter-acting tendencies to resistance in the working class'
"Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society ... The establishment of a normal working day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and labourer" (p. 270).
"However, the principle" (of the regulation of the working day within what Marx calls not only physical but moral bounds) "had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century , themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still 'free'." (pp. 295-6)
"...from the mere connection of the historic facts before us, it follows:
"FIRST. The passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless extension of the working-day is first gratified in the industries earliest revolutionised by water-power, steam and machinery ... The changes in the material mode of production and the corresponding changes in the social relations of the producers gave rise first to an extravagance beyond all bounds, and then in opposition to this called forth a control on the part of Society which legally limits, regulates, and makes uniform the working-day and its pauses...
"SECOND. The history of the regulation of the working day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer, the labourer as 'free' vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance. The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class ... The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally, as their theorists were the first to throw the gauntlet to the theory of capital." (Marx here refers to Robert Owen, as he tells us in a foot-note to this sentence.) (p. 298-9)
(The pool of surplus labour disappeared with the second world war and the use of Keynesian fiscal measures. Since then capitalism's demand for labour has outstripped the supply in Europe and the state in Britain has been unwilling to risk reaction from the working class by importing more than a limited amount of labour from elsewhere.)
In fact Marx is careful to explain that the predominant tendency as capitalist production advances is for the extraction of relative surplus value. The worker yields more surplus value not because he works harder or longer, but because he has more machinery to help him. Marx defined exploitation as the amount of surplus value produced in relation to the amount of wages. Thus for Marx an increase in exploitation does not necessarily imply an increase in suffering; on the contrary in advanced capitalism he was clear that it meant simply that each worker had greater amounts of more efficient machinery with which to produce. The advent of socialism will in fact only heighten the need for greater productivity in the working class. Because this greater productivity will be necessary for socialism to develop into communism and it involves increasing amounts of machinery and more advanced techniques being adopted - both things which are identified with exploitation under capitalism. With socialism the working class will voluntarily introduce both things itself in order to continue developing the productive forces towards communism. Marx and Engels' interests in workers' co-operative factories and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's and Lenin's and Stalin's statements about the benefits of workers' control for the working class show that they were not indifferent or hostile to workers' control.
58. The ambiguity of the left's views on workers' control is that, on the one hand, it cannot oppose workers' control with any reasons or evidence. On the other hand, it feels that workers' control would unnecessarily prolong capitalism (perhaps forever) by being the sugar coating. This ambiguity began actively to hinder the working class' interest during World War II and has continued to do so since then. Prior to that time, the question of workers' control was of no pressing urgency for the working class. Rather it had first to organise itself as a class capable of acting in factory conditions. It then had to secure its place in the fluctuations of the production cycle - that is, act to try to prevent wage cuts and maintain employment (in fact this problem intensified so that it came to eclipse all others for the working class in the 20 inter-war years). The working class had not shown a deep or abiding interest in workers' control up to World War II because it had other more important things to think and act about.
59. The Left's ambiguity has been a positive hindrance to the working class because at any point from World War II to 1972 (beginning of the Tripartite Talks) the working class could have demanded workers' control as the only basis for the Incomes Policy being tried by each successive government. By taking the initiative the working class would have been in a position to quicken the pace of implementation of workers' control (by making it easier for the conservative sections of capitalists to be whipped into line by the progressive ones). Such tangible signs of working class power usually have greater effect than when that power is presented as a logical result which is hypothetically inevitable by the capitalist politicians.
60. Instead the working class's erstwhile Left mentors have spent all their energy in arguing the opposite, that threats to the right to work, and wage reductions are still the main danger to the working class. A slight variant of this is the argument increasingly used: that the working class has an abstract right to ever higher wages. This implies that there is no threat to working class survival today. That survival will somehow take care of itself. There is only abstract right to assert. The world has unaccountably become Utopian and all things are always for the best. We assume that the Left uses this argument increasingly because the ridiculousness of maintaining that there is increasing impoverishment is becoming increasingly obvious. Believing that above all a collision course with the capitalists must be steered, the Left can only envision this collision coming out of abstract right, not material necessity. On the contrary, there will be no collision in Britain about abstract right to ever higher wages. The capitalists in Britain feel too certain of the essential materialism and will to survive of the working class to accept a collision with the working class about abstract right to ever higher wages. The capitalists are therefore proceeding to put the working class's materialism to the test by instituting workers' control. Workers' control will mean that every worker will be able to see for himself if the money is there for a wage increase. It will mean that changes in the production process will be argued to the workers on the basis of whether efficiency is increased by them. Workers will have to weigh up the advantages from greater output (more wages) against any disadvantages (more complex technique requiring greater concentration and skill).
61. By its ambiguity, the Left has hindered the working class's interests, since workers' control has been necessary for working class survival and development since 1945.