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WORKERS CONTROL AND STATE POWER
27. Workers' control will aid the development of politics. An increasing amount of capital accumulation is being undertaken by the state; and in addition taxation and public credit are being used to induce private capitalists to make new investments, continue production, or seek new markets. In Britain, state accumulation and concessions to private industry must seek and obtain parliamentary assent. At present such assent is not effective control by Parliament. The absence of effective parliamentary control has alarmed a section of the British ruling class whose habits and reflexes make them chary of decisions taken in the name of Parliament which are not publicly debated and fought out between the parties, in the press, by both classes. The former de facto head of the civil service, Sir William Armstrong, appeared on television in the summer of 1973 to speak of his concern for a return to the floor of the House of decisions about "public money".
28. The difficulty of implementing such a change is that any mere change of parliamentary procedure or form would alter nothing. All the talk about curing the present decline of Parliament and recouping its loss of power by reform is beside the point. Parliament will be unable to exert effective control over "public money" until the public has a reason for controlling it, an aim to be achieved in taking action. At present public money is doled out by Parliament and the Government as and when the vicissitudes of the market induce either capitalists or workers to demand it as their right and for the good of the economy. The aim achieved in granting the money is primarily one of stability - ensuring that things are able to go on as before with making the few necessary changes as painless as possible.
Thus was each docker who made himself voluntarily redundant given £4,000 in summer 1972; or each employer in Lancashire who was paid for voluntarily scrapping 150 year old spindles and looms in 1959. When the people who elect MPs have only these limited political aims - job security, continuing production the same as always or being helped to do so if short of profits - then it is not surprising that Parliament lacks power to do anything more than sanction such piecemeal demands for money as and when they occur from those sections of the working class or capitalists who are best placed to exert political pressure. Nor is it surprising that a section of the capitalists, civil service and party (Conservative and Labour) leadership should defend the encroachment of the civil service on such decisions on the grounds that someone must judge these demands for public money on a criterion apart from political pressure, because the needs of an advanced capitalist economy must be met, and these needs may not necessarily coincide with what sections of either class want.
29. It should be said that the Labour Party leaders have always been in favour of civil service control of public money on principle; the others are purely pragmatic in their conclusion, seeing no other source for such judgements being made. The Labour Party leaders have this principle from the old habit of the socialist movement which saw decisions about the economy (in effect socialist planning and administration of a wholly "collectivised" economy) being taken by a bureaucracy of socialist experts. Such a vision was arrived at because no socialist believed that the knowledge or understanding necessary to take such decisions might be available to the working class.
Thus the function of the working class in bringing socialism seemed to the Independent Labour Party leaders and Fabians to be to vote Labour so that socialist laws could be enacted and a socialist civil service could be established and put to work. It must be recognised that because the working class in the inter-war years did not possess the interest or the ability to either plan or administer production itself, this view was realistic in seeing legislation and administration coming not from the class itself but from its leaders as being necessary for socialism. The Communist Party of Great Britain drastically underestimated the need for such provisions, adopting the attitude that such things were bound to fall into place after the Revolution had occurred, so that there was no need to think about them. What the ILP leaders and the Fabians ignored was the fact that the capitalists would struggle against socialist enactment and socialist bureaucracy. The working class would be forced to do more than vote if such advances were to survive capitalist pressure. The working class would have to apply stronger pressure and would be certainly unable to do so if its leaders were not prepared for such action.
30. However, the present inevitability of some form of workers' control, whether the "Left" wish it or not, will radically alter the situation from one where the working class know very little about the laws of capitalist production into one where the working class will be able to know what actions need to be taken to regulate market forces by the conscious working of the law of value. Just as under workers' control it will be normal for the working class to decide that a new technique is operable and worth investing in within one factory or firm, so it would be extraordinary if the experience of taking such decisions did not affect the working class's political demands of Parliament. The residual powers which Parliament now possesses but wholly delegates to the Cabinet and civil service will be retrieved because Parliament will be capable of exercising them - the public will demand the opportunity to debate and form an opinion on them. For the first time economics will become part of democratic politics because the working class will all be economists in their working lives - responsible for the economic decisions of their factory and firm. (This is obviously equally true for an Incomes Policy. Decisions about what should be produced, capital or consumption goods, and how much a section of workers should be paid will already be being taken at the factory or firm level by the workers themselves and will be reflected in the negotiating of an Incomes Policy by the whole working class.)
For the working class, deciding how public money should be spent is now a matter of which section of workers can exert most political and economic pressure on the class as a whole, for instance, the UCS [Upper Clyde Shipbuilders] workers were better at exerting political pressure on the working class than the Triumph workers have been. With the experience of workers' control, the working class will be able to take such decisions on the basis of the practicality of each rival request for money, the long term interests of the working class, and whether each request helps to meet the necessary requirements for the economy's continued growth. Working class representatives in Parliament will have to reflect that decision or lose the class's confidence.
31. This change in the ability of the working class to organise and administer the economy through being able to effectively exert control over its representatives means that economic issues become political issues in the strict sense of political, that is, an aim capable of being effected by political action. The question of a transition from capitalism to communism becomes one which the working class will find from its own experience that it is able to undertake.
No longer will socialist parties view themselves as holding ideas in trust for a working class incapable of grasping them; these same socialist parties will now be forced to argue for and justify this same sacred trust on their party programme's economic merits. And indeed in consequence these ideas will be forced to become less abstract and theoretical and rhetorical and more practical. Their function will cease to be hortatory - to inspire awe and moral fervour - and will become more mundane, that is, capable of being achieved.
The B&ICO for one will welcome this enforced change because we are thoroughly fed up with the socialist heroics that never deigns to explain what relevance it has to the workaday world, and the pristine chasteness of the intellectual Left's scholasticism which passes for theory. The bourgeoisie's first attempts to take control of the productive forces and direct them gave rise to a veritable torrent of political economic thought (Petty, Smith, Ricardo etc.) which could break new theoretical ground because there were new practical developments. Workers' control will give rise to much reflection within the working class. Until the changes of workers' control with the new ability to control the productive forces lead to a desire on the part of the working class to achieve new aims, any theorising about the shape of communism must necessarily be abstract and limited in its effect. As for theories of capitalism, the bourgeoisie have clearly outdistanced Marxists in their ability to use Marx's political economy. The greatly increased ability to measure the market forces and act on the basis of measurements in choosing how much to produce and what to charge without waiting for these to express themselves wastefully and inefficiently in real competition have made the possibilities open to workers' control much greater.