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WORKERS' CONTROL AND THE LEFT (1)
The Syndicalist tradition
43. To our knowledge, no working class organisation has ever opposed workers' control. However, there has been a history of protracted controversies amongst working class organisation about workers' control. The legacy of these controversies for the present generation of workers and communists has been an ambiguity about workers' control.
44. Syndicalism became known as a political tendency with a name when the French took it up in the 1890s. Prior to that time, English workers had attempted to practice it without giving it a name. (William Lovett became the storekeeper of the first London Cooperative Trading Association which had been established in 1828. Lovett estimates that between 4-500 similar associations were established in Britain at this time (see "The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, p. 33). French syndicalism (which influenced the rest of Europe) held that control over the production process by the workers would mean the end of capitalism. The one and only condition for communism was workers' control.
45. The main opposition to the syndicalists then was that they ignored the existence of a state which was controlled by the capitalists and which would never allow such an event to occur. The state must be smashed and a workers' state constructed before workers' control would be realistic. In this, critics in Europe were certainly correct. It took the upheaval of World War I to convince even a section of the capitalists that workers' control was necessary.
46. However, in making the criterion for rejection of workers' control the impossibility of its implementation, the critics of syndicalism neglected to deal with the assumption that workers' control over the production process was sufficient of itself to lead to communism. This omission is important because the logic of syndicalism is that it is the fact that capitalists organise production which makes it capitalist. This implies that capitalists when organising production do so not because impelled by the laws of capitalist production, but out of preference or choice.
Yet in practice, it was just these laws which caused the failure of the English experiments. By abolishing money, and exchanging their products via the issuing of certificates for the labour time spent in producing each article, the workers in London, Birmingham and Manchester hoped to be able to earn a living wage. After all if one worker could work for 8 hours and exchange his products for those of 8 hours of other people's labour, no one should gain more than he earned through labour and all live in harmony with each other.
"I was sanguine that those associations formed the first step towards the social independence of the labouring classes... I was induced to believe that the gradual accumulation of capital by these means would enable the working classes to form themselves into joint stock associations of labour, by which (with industry, skill, and knowledge) they might ultimately have the trade, manufactures, and commerce of the country in their own hands." (Lovett, p33-4)
In each place this system soon broke down and money re-established itself. What caused its breakdown was that each individual worker's labour time in producing an article for exchange cannot remain inviolate and absolute (this is equally true of an individual factory). Competition determines how much labour is socially necessary to produce an article and it is only through competition that the law of value can operate and continue to give rise to technical innovation, increased productivity and capital accumulation. The "direct exchange" of labour time leads to competition, the operation of the law of value and the consequent development of the productive forces, unless obstructed by guild organisation. The English workers believed that it could lead to a cooperative commonwealth if given its head. When it did not, they returned to attempts to restrict competition and control the labour market in trade unions.
47. "Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale." (Capital, volume 3, p. 431)
The credit system makes the total capital of a society available to producers. One factory is not limited to its own profits for investment, it can draw on the wealth accumulated by the rest of society. This is the direct opposite of the direct exchange of labour time. Instead of exchange on the basis of equal labour time, it is exchange on the basis of the most profitable labour saving: only that is sold and produced which is the most efficient user of capital and labour. Marx clearly assumed that workers' control would be practised on the basis of recognising the laws of capitalist production.
48. S. and B. Webb were the only ones to attack syndicalism on the basis that it ignored or was unaware of the existence of the law of value. They pointed out that if the miners were allowed to organise their production according to their democratically arrived at wishes, and town gas workers practised the same "democratic right", society might be faced with too much coal and town gas and not enough cotton and machine tools. S. and B. Webb were not in favour of the market and competition deciding these questions. They wanted society to consciously operate the law of value through a new parliament where workers would be represented not according to occupation, since what you worked at had nothing to do with what things you wanted to consume.
49. Because no one on the Left has taken up S. and B. Webb's attack, syndicalism remains at the level of denying the laws of capitalist production. Syndicalism will continue to be a "natural" reaction of a working class which is newly proletarianised - fresh from the farm or ex-artisan. Because all his life the new proletarian has been able to produce enough to feed and clothe himself and his family, he cannot believe that 10 hours of his labour should not bring him the means to subsist. Further, he has always worked when and how he thought best; the necessity for working to suit the maximum use of machinery is to him incomprehensible.
50. However, once a working class has been proletarianised for some generations, they learn by experience to accept the laws of capitalist production as given and do not waste their energy in attempting to act as if these laws were not there. Moreover, they find that within those laws it is possible to act and achieve the aim of a living wage. It is no accident that syndicalism has had most influence in each nation of Europe at the period when its peasants and artisans were becoming proletarianised. There is a direct connection. Moreover, as each new wave of migration proceeds, syndicalism must be tried and rejected by experience. Thus England has had no proper syndicalists amongst its working class since the 1830s, (the Webbs characterised the British "syndicalists" of the 1890s-1910s as getting support from an increasingly educated and politically interested working class who would not be treated as if they had no reason and would no longer accept mere orders), while May '68 in France and Italy's Hot Autumn of 1969 were direct evidence that these nations had indeed seen a population shift from farm to factory since the mid-50s unequalled in magnitude in their respective histories. Just as certainly were the general strikes in which Rosa Luxemburg saw so much [potential? - PB] in Germany and Austria in the 1890s evidence of the same thing.
51. When the Left talk of workers' control, they are trying to reawaken the primeval syndicalist responses in a much too old and realistic working class. It must be said that no advocates of workers' control on the left today have faced up to the necessity of recognising the laws of capitalist production as incapable of being changed by democratic will alone. They thus logically fall victim to the errors of syndicalism in believing democracy at work will abolish capitalism.
52. It is hardly surprising therefore that these advocates of workers' control have had no effect on the working class whatsoever. In fact, workers' control first appeared as practical to this generation of workers in spring 1971 when militant shop stewards organised a work-in which had the aim of securing government aid to prevent the shipyards closing. The workers at UCS showed that they believed themselves to be sovereign by demanding that the resources of the nation (that is, the capital of all society) be made available to continue what they considered to be a potentially profitable undertaking, though the management did not. The UCS shop stewards acted on the basis of reality:
(1) accepting that production must be profitable;
(2) accepting that it was impossible to go it alone, outside the already existing exchange and credit relations and indeed recognising there was no sense in even trying to do so.
It was not syndicalism but sheer pragmatism which determined the actions at UCS.