Recently in an atmosphere of increasing milltancy, the issue of workers contro/ has been raised again by the Labour movement. The attendances at the Workers Control Institute Conferences shows that shop-stewards and militant workers are more interested in the issue than at any time since the 19201. The object of this article is to examine, in the light of the massive Tory attacks being mounted on the working class, the years of highest militancy in order to draw out the most important aspects of the experiences for our use today.
Webb, one of the first reformist socialists to discuss the subject, divided "workers" control" into three parts, firstly control over decisions about what, when and where to produce: secondly control over decisions about what methods to use and how to produce, and thirdly control over decisions about under what conditions to produce. These three divisions are usefuf because by showing which division a particular organisation or group is interested in, we can more easily explain its relation to other groups and to revolutionary politics in peneral. The trade union movement has traditionally been interested in gaining some control over decisions about wages, working conditions and working hours. By demanding increases in wages, etc., trade unions are demanding a right to decide what a worker should be pard-which erodes the power of the bosses or owner within the factory. The trade unions achieve this smail area of control only through struggle, and these actions relate to the third division of Webb's scheme. The first area of contro/ outlined by Webb would obviously have to include the national economy in its scope. To ensure this sort of control seizure and main tenance of class power must be achieved-such a political abject would be the aim of a revolutionary party. in the garly part of the period 1914-23, however, the most common type of "control"" desired by the various workers movernents was of the second sort, control over production levels, etc. Often this control was seen within a framework of capitalism (as for example the miners" plans for joint control of their industry submitted to the Sankey Commission on the mines in the early "20s). But a theme of the period is the growth of the idea, and working-class organisations, that saw the second and' third types of control as ultimately impossible to deal with, without first taking the question of the overall political power of the state.
After 1900 a decline in real wages set in. The official figures show that retail prices had risen by 16.5% from 1900-13, while wage rates had only increased by 6.5%. The decline in real wages was only slightly offset by marginally greater job-security than in the 1890s. So there was a real feeling of a drop in living standards, particularly disturbing because it occurred in a period of good trade, and when unions were rapidly increasing their memberships and improving their organisations. The period of World War I saw an increase demand for armaments and made state intervention a feature of British capitalism. This went hand in hand with attempts to "dilute" the skilled industries with cheaper, less skilled labour, The "dilution" issue was particularly important in the engineering industry, which was the stronghold of the shop stewards movement during and after the war. This better form of local organisation was a response to the threat of the new unorganised semi-skilled influx of workers, After the war, a short boom providing full employment meant that 1918-21 were peak years of working-class militancy-however with the slump in 1921. defending workers Jobs and conditions became issues and workers' control was dropped from the position it had held as prime concem of the The "new unionism" movement of the 1880s and "90s reflected the increasing tendency for "crafts" to give way more and more to mass production techniques. The pressure created by the New Unions was initially for political representation for the working class in Parliament. It was to that end that the Labour Party was formed. The failure of the Labour Party to do anything but tailend the Liberals, up to 1913, directed attention away from "the political" to "the industrial'" as the apparent place to make gains for the working class, The grip of syndicalism was very strong, and militants were faced with the need to create a new leadership giving expression to their militancy within the factories and trade unions. The rank-and-file committees and shop-stewards' movement arising between 1914 and 1921, especially in engineering (the craft under most pressure from dilution) became the backbone of the movement for workers" control-as it assumed more and more importance in the factory relations with the employer.
POLITICAL THEORIES & WORKERS' Guild socialism was centred around the National Guilds League whose influence reached a peak between the years 1914-19-and was the most important and widely held theory of workers control, It had members in the mining, railway and engineering unions, as wall as in the buliding and Post Office unions, Their impact can be seen in the detailed plans both mining and railway unions drew up for committees of "joint control" in their industries. But the Guild socialists were strongestin the growing shop stewards' movement in the engineering industry: first in the "Amalgamation Committees" and then in the shop stewards and Workers ComGuild socialists were as critical of the leadership of the unions as their brothers, particularly in the ASE, Their ideas were to transform British society peacefully, by creating national Guilds or Industrial Unions (including white-collar workers and the unemployed). Industrial self-government would then be achieved if a policy of "encroaching control" were followed and only when "the community" had control over the means of production. "The Community" would then hand over industrial affairs to the Guilds which would pay a rent for them!
Encroaching control was the gradual transformation of trade unions into industrial unions, which would press for greater and greater shares of decision-making in industry. These Ideas deal in a completely unsatisfactory way with the problem of national control and local control.
This can be seen in practice in two ways, firstly Guild socialists participated in the Government's "joint control" experiments, in the Whitley Councils, in the Councils to spread dilution, and in the case of the miners nationally, completely excluding the local pit-committees except in name. Secondly. when the shop stewards in engineering began to move away from Guild socialism under the influence of the Russian Revolution", the failure of the miners" proposals in the Sankey Commission, and the strengthening of the employers by the creation of railway cartels, left only the building and Post Office workers' unions as strong bases of Guild socialism. Hobson's Guild experiment in the building industry la cooperative based in Birmingham) completely collapsed in 1923.
One qualification is needed, however, Despite Guild socialism's reformism and Utopianism, it could with certain uses and in certain situations assume almost revolutionary implications-as indicated by the Clyde Workers Committee in 1916. Eventually, the government had to deport leading militants from the Committee to prevent "Industrial unionism" and its ideas about workers control, represent a British version of the theories developed by thinkers like De Leon in the United States. The international Workers of the World had its much smaller British counterpart in the Socialist Labour Party la split from Hyndman's SDF in 1903), and its industrial wing in the Industrial Workers of Great Britain-intended as a recruiting union. On the decisive day, workers would vote political power to the SLP and would, in their industrial unions, lock out the employers and take over all industries. The Socialist Parliamentary majority would then adjour itself, and control would pass to the unions. They viewed other unions as a bulwark of the capitalist class. Workers' control was a slogan that they used, but which remained undiscussed in their propaganda, Their contribution to the workers" control movement in general was most obvious in their support for the SS and WCM-greatest on the Clyde and in other Scottish areas particularly between the years 1915-17. The immediate fallure of Industrial unionism to build a base in Britain, especially in the workers' control movement, was because they did not appreciate that for British trade unionists the question of control, because of the government's wartime measures, was an immediate one. The precise reason why the complicated plans of the Guild socialists met with immediate success was because advanced workers wanted control immediately, and therefore saw the need for operational plans. Again Industrial unionists did not deal with the question of overall political power, which reduced their influence when the stewards' committee realised the importance of the state, and the model of the Soviet Revolution. in Russia became available to them.
Syndicalism by 1914 had "shot its bolt", although Tom Mann became president of the ASE as late as 1920. It too regarded political action as a waste of time. Its enormous successes of the pre-war period were not repeated in the new wave of militancy during and after the war. We can say, however, that its success was due to the immense practicality with which it approaches political struggle. It had fallen under the industrial politics. In this it was distinguished from the small and sectarian Marxist parties and from the SLP. The syndicalists' policy for control, based on national industrial unions and the Trades Councils of different districts, was however not so useful in a situation in which increasing militancy had mobilised the state in attacks on the working class-although some syndicalist base was maintained in the Amalgamation Committees in the engineering unions What were the problems of these competing theories of workers' control in practice? The political failure of the Labour Party for the working class (it only passed Clause 4 in 1918) together with the attacks made upon the working class by the government (in dilution, the Munitions Acts, deportation, etc.J were underlined by the economic stresses of the imperialist war. In a sense these pressures especially the lever used by the government that strikes harmed the war effort") held back the outburst of militancy until 1918. When it did occur in full flood in the years 1918-23, the number of stoppages jumped from 730 in 1918 to 1,165 in 1919; 1,352 in 1920 and 1,607 in 1921-surpassing the record 1913 total of 1,459. The number of working days lost in strikes reflect the increasing fight back of the capitalist class after the enormous 1922 total of early 86,000,000. This peak is not only the most working days lost before 1926, but was also the watershed of the labour movement's offensive struggle. From 1922 onward (despite the Minority Movement) the demand for workers' control was dropped in favour of a underlined by unemployment, wage reductions and cutbacks on the dole. The essential failure of the movement for workers' control up to 1922 was that it had not yet fully developed into a form which could challenge state power, at least potentially. An impasse had been reached in 1921 in which only a consolidation or obstruction of capitalism could occur. More of the organisations assoclated with the three strands of theory discussed could make the leap to the essential workers' control, the political seizure of the state. Only by the 1920s did the shop stewards and workers' committee movement even grope towards a national committeeeven then it had little power.
The final stage in the workers' control movemen of this period was the gradual realisation by vanguard workers' groups, in the light of the Bolshevik revolution, of the need for a revolutionary party. The effects of the rethink that the SS and WCM undertook in 1919 occurring even two years previously are impossible to calculate. Even so the schemes advanced by The Worker, a Glasgow paper of the movement, centred around the nation of workers control through district based workers" social committees. Although Gallacher (President of the Clyde Workers Committee) and Campbell finally rejected gradualism and reformism in the name of their movement, they still made no mention (as yeti of any agency of national control. Power would flow to the working class "because of their power of numbers in industry". The social committees dic at least recognise a nonindustrial dimension of workers" struggle, despite the fact that their construction was a failure, The class relationship of forces not fitted to a dual-power situation, the soviet flavour of these committees was then a empty one By the 1920 conference "joint-control" schemes were called class collaboration. In 1921 the conference called for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the industrial movement was only part of, and should serve the wider influence of the Communist Party formed in 1920. It was Lenin who finally convinced the British shop stewards movement, at the Comintern, to form a British C.P. Unfortunately the establishment of a fully revolutionary move ment was started in increasingly hostile condiIn sum, it was the practicality of workers' participation and later control as a next step which attracted militant workers. But a purely workers' movement could not generate the fully fledged theory of Leninism, it could not even make the essential link-up of the political nature of industrial struggles and work from that. The result was ultimately that "workers' control" submerged until these important political questions had been faced and met. "Workers' control" is again being raised by the militants. In some way the revolutionary ten dencies must converge with this vanguard if "Workers' control'* is ever to become anything MOVEMENT FOR THE DEFENCE OF QUEBEC POLITICAL PRISONERS Help defend the Quebec citizens recently arrested under the War Measures Act solely for their political views. 43 of those arrested lust October still await trial, The MDOPP is the major fund in English Canada and Quebec formed to pay the legal expenses of these political prisoners Send money order or cheque to MDOPP.
4984 Dis Anolo Ce Hahort Anshe
Some weeks ago the Workers Press in its now iniruitable fashion published a corefully chosen