What is the political go' of the workers control movement in general and what, in particular, is the potential significance of the Institute for Workers' Control Conference to be neld in Sheffield on 19/20 July?
First, a word or two about what workers' control is and is not. It is commonly interpreted in a somewhat bookish way as a more democratic organisation of factory production in which the workers have a greater say in management or themselves provide the management. The argument then proceeds to discuss whether real workers' control' is possible within capitalism' or only 'after we have socialThose who criticise the campaign for workers' control within capitalism' argue that it ends up only in snares and delusions, participation with capitalists, helping them to run capitalism'. This, the argument continues, hinders the struggle of workers against capitalism and generates confusion and delusion within the working class consciousness.
STARTING POINT
What is wrong, in my view, with these argusents is the starting point. Workers' control is not a 'known quantity', is not a well-defined form of socio-economic organisation. It is in fact no more than the simple meaning of the words, viz. the exercise of some degree of ocial, political and economic control by workThe movement for workers' control is conscious attempt to help, organisationally ad by exchange of ideas and experience, the activity of workers asserting - in whatever form form and to whatever extent - control over the conditions of their lives at work' and 'in Sort this movement is to believe in desirability and feasibility of democracy in its literal Greek sense - people-power (demosHow this power, this control is to be ercised has still to be discovered out of strugexperience and thought. What ends this power is to serve, what refashioning of conditions of life in production, in consumption, in community activity is to be brought about, working people will themselves determine as and when they develop their power to change things. Workers' control is a direction of march; in my view, the only possible direction of march out of the present socio-economic crisis towards socialism.
To speak then of workers' control when we have socialism' seems to me to say nothing. Socialism itself is the outcome of the struggle tor workers control. The economics of socialism revolve around the task of changing relations between people in production and distribution so as to make feasible in a practical sense the ideal of a classless society; a society, that is, in which the apparatus of production and distribution is not controlled by a minority as a means of exploiting dominating materially and ideologically the majority.
POLITICAL POWER Clearly political power in the hands of and thought by workers themselves. new' will come out of the struggle against the old; and this struggle must begin within the old'. From the standpoint of Marxist theory this simple fact provides the foundation on which the workers' control movement rests Of course, in practical experiences and in the development of socialist theory there will be many differences. But must there be as many 'movements" as there are "differences"? In fact this tends to happen, thereby weakening the common cause of the potentially wide movement of genuine fighters for a classless peoplepower society. At the Sheffield Conference it is to be hoped that a wide range of different political experiences and different political positions will be represented, but it is hardly to be hoped that it will go more than a fractional part of the way towards the 'unity of differences' that, in my view, the working class movement needs to discover and make actual which, in some measure, to control the mounting crisis which blazons out the social and political bankruptcy of capitalist society.
The shop stewards from the factories and protagonists of the labour moment in the -communities will be looking for ideas and understanding of how to act and organise against the institutional power and the economic philosophies of capitalism which at present predominate. There will be seminars discussing all the main sectors of industry, there will be first-hand news from the newly formed productive co-operatives; there will be debate about national economic policies - in particular how to use the NEB and Planning Agreeideas and experiences, but united by a common desire for a classless society.
Practical steps need to be taken to strengthen the social forces at the base, to encourage their initiatives, to distribute the kind of literature that they need and to do all these things on a continuing basis. At the same time their struggles can only develop within a frame work of national policies. In my view there are three main objectives against which interacting grass-roots and national onslaughts need to be concentrated:
Unemployment - by means of social programmes to use idle labour and capacity (such 'socialisation of markets' can be underpinned by Government guarantees and purchases.)
Cuts in finance for social and industrial investment and the 15% interest rate (to be countered by social control over banking, finance, foreign exchange, import controls priority.)
The bureaucratic crisis (over-centralisation is the practical fruit of reactionary social philosophies and money-based criteria of effefficiency against which some effective struggles are needed and are beginning at grass roots level in the nationalised industries, social services, health, education, housing and local as well as national administration)
POSTSCRIPT Healey's announcement in the House of Commons transforms the tempo and highlights the urgency for action. It announces the Cabinet's utter enslavement to the money/power of international capitalism. It demonstrates also that workers must necessarily hammer out for them selves their alternative for using resources to supply their social priorities. They themselves too must campaign and win public support for the alternative.
But the essential basis for a new direction of economic policy is social control of the financial system (bank policies and interest rates, exchange and import controls). This alone would make possible social control over resources of labour and means of production and insulate such control from the inflationary crisis into which monetary trends and power relations in international capitalism are driv ing our economy.
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etc. with workers' and peoples' control to check that social needs in fact are given