The campaign of sectarian violence nothing?
After two days of uproar in the House of Commons, Tony Benn's Industry Bill, which sets up tke National Enterprise Board and establishes the principle of planning agreements between capitalist firms and the Government, finally made it through its Second Reading It has heen bemoaned by the Confederation of British Industry as the death knell of private enterprise: as sheer irresponsibility by the chairman of Unilever Limited: and as the beginning of Marxian * socialism in Britain by some Tory MPs.
But the basic thinking behind the creation of the National Enter * prise Board is the same that has governed the actions of succesaive Governments, both Labour and Tory, since the end of the Second World War, British industry is massively under-invested and poody * equipped, relying on ever more archaic machinery and processes while * having to face up to the intense pressures of international capitalist * competition. The only source for the massive amounts of money * needed for the "regeneration of British industry", to use Benn's phrase One of the main functions of the new Bill will be to promote rearganisation in industry. The last Labour Government's experiments with reorganisation led tu a wave of redundancies. 10,000 jobs were lost in * the IRC-promoted merger of the Generul Electric Company and Eng* lish Electric alone.
Wilson and Edmund Dell, the Paymaster General, have gone out of their way to re-asure big business that wholesale nationalisation is not * the aim of the National Enterprise Board. Indeed, the Likely appointment of the hard-nosed capitalist Don Ryder as the head of the NEB should have scotched any fears on this point. As it is the NEB will be * limited in most cases to possessing 30 per cent or £10 million of the * share value of any one company.
The main fear of capitalist spokesmen is that information which * they may be forced to reveal ho the Government and trade unions * could be used by workers to disrupt plans for future redundancy * and closures, But the Bill is hedged round with restrictions which allows * the Government to stop information going to the trade unions if this * is against the so-called "national interest'. Furthermore, if a trade unio * nist did reveal 'restricted information, under Clause 26 of the Bill he couid face two vears imprisonment.
So why all the fuss? When Benn introduced the Bill in Parliament he was at pains to explain it was not a "Trotskyist nightmare'. By which no doubt he meant that the Bill would go no further than mutual exchange of information between industry and the Government, and would not lead to widespread calls for opening the books * and workers' control in industry. No doubt what the capitalist class fears is that in a period of cconomic trisis, when wholesale chopping of the workforce will be needed in order to 'rationalise industry and survive, such a dynamic could develop However capitalist industry needs massive injections of state capital This is why the mote far-sighted sections of big business, such as The Economit, believe that more stringent safeguards of business secrecy. * and not outright opposition to the Bill, is more sensible For the workers movement the lessons of the Industry Bill are the * same. The capitalist state only intervenes in industry to defend the overall interests of the ruling class. Even if profitable firms were * nationalised this would only benefit the working class if the nationalisa tion plans were monitored at every stage by trade union representa fives to ensure this was not done at the expense of the workers and was * not sabotaged by capitalist management.
A fully-ledged system of workers' control would be necessary. The * co-urdination of this system of workers" control berween industries * would involve not planning agreements" between capitalist firms and * the Government, but the workers organisations drawing up a workers' dan for the whole economy and putting an end to capitalist anarchy.