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DEFINING SOVEREIGNTY
10. Before proceeding it is perhaps necessary (because so often ignored in these days of left infantilism) to define sovereignty. Sovereignty means the ability of men to consciously direct their activities towards a given necessity arising out of a given physical or historical law. Thus, sovereignty has never implied absolute power, only power over the activities of the group of men who live within the circumference of that sovereignty. It does not imply the ability of workers to go against the laws of capitalist production today any more than it ever implied a sovereign king's ability to walk on water or prevent his country being flooded.
If workers are sovereign at their place of work, they will only be able to exercise that sovereignty if they recognise the physical and historical laws determining their conditions, and decide their actions with those in mind. These laws are not absolute limits, because as they are understood, so they can be superseded. Once it is understood that flooding can be prevented by a reservoir and a dam, the physical law which determined that spring rains would bring floods can be superseded.
So with historical laws like those of capitalist production. That law of capitalist production which determines the tendency of all labour power to be exploited without stint - that is, with no account taken of the workers' physical and social needs - was experienced by the working class and understood by it. Therefore the working class formed trade unions and acted in them to supersede that law, to positively prevent it from operating by withdrawing their labour whenever a capitalist acted under the determination of this law. After approximately 150 years of the working class in trade unions in Britain preventing capitalists from so acting, the intelligent capitalists have learned from experience not to try and operate according to this law; while the capitalists' own culture has taken account of this experience and now helps the dimmer ones learn what they failed to see.
11. There has been a minority of capitalists (Robert Owen was probably not the first [1]) who found that their firms were not less profitable and in most cases more profitable when operated on the basis of giving the workers a share of the sovereignty in management. In the 19th century these employers were often Quakers like Cadburys who found the waste of human reason and experience in their workers morally unacceptable. The consequence was in Cadbury's from the 1890s, the responsibility for making all rules for workers and the disciplining for infringements of rules was gradually handed over to workers. Safety was dealt with in a similar way, whilst workers' representatives were given confidential information about the performance of the firm. (The first conciliation agreements between employers and trade unions had been pioneered on the employers' side by Quakers like the ironmaster David Dale. [2] They started from the premise that industrial disputes were susceptible to reason, that employers and workers had a common interest in keeping production going and that it was possible in a dispute that the employers had acted mistakenly in not granting a demand, just as it was possible that the workers had been mistaken in making it.)
[1] I'm not sure that Robert Owen did this at all, except in his later unsuccessful experiment in New Harmony - PB
[2] Sir David Dale (1829-1906) not David Dale (1739-1806), Robert Owen's predecessor in the textile mill in New Lanark - PB