The enigma of workers' control

Recent years have seen a revival of interest on the European left in the subject of workers' control of production. For decades socialism has suffered grievously from its identification with Stalinism, and the re-discovery of slogans which, in one way or another, embody the theme of worker's democracy, has served to re-assert the connection between socialism and the liberation of the working class. The Stalinist model of state power is surely one of the greatest impediments to the advance of socialism in the West and it is vitally important that socialists be able to demonstrate that proletarian power can and does require that the institutions of a workers' state, both political and industrial, be run by the workers themselves. The current international discussion of one such slogan, workers' control of production, is therefore to be welcomed.

In Britain this revival has been animated to a large extent by the Institute for Workers Control (IWC), which has done some valuable work in the labour movement, promoting demands for the abolition of commercial secrecy ('open the books') and for some form of control by the workers over managerial decisions. These two themes have now become an established part of socialist thinking in Britain and a significant component of trade-union demands. Politically, the IWC has encouraged the development of a new left-wing in the Labour Party that links the time-honoured theme of nationalization and a planned economy to workers' democracy in industry. (In the popular mind, of course, this new Labour left is associated principally with the figure of Tony Benn.) In this and other ways, the IWC has made a modest contribution to overcoming the idea, unfortunately prevalent among most workers today, that socialism automatically implies bureaucracy.

On the other hand, there are serious political weaknesses in the work of the IWC. We shall discuss these later on. Let us simply note that nowhere in the entire literary output of the IWC is there any examination of the chief historical experiences of workers' control of industry. The literature is not only doggedly Anglocentric — and workers' control of production, properly speaking, has hardly ever been established in Britain — but also resolutely avoids discussing the great revolutionary upheavals of the past, in which abundant examples of workers' control can be found. The IWC has conducted no analysis, for example, of the Russian, German, and Spanish revolutions, the Liberation of 1944-45, or the Paris Commune of 1871, and has written little on the more recent experiences in Chile and Portugal. The various schemes for workers' control in British industry drawn up by IWC supporter-groups and the proposals of individual contributors have remained divorced from any comprehensive debate over the sort of conditions that might be required to put them into practice. Despite the revival of interest in the subject, workers' control remains an enigma to the British left. A study of the significance of workers' control in several strategic struggles of the European working class may help to dispel some of the mists of confusion that surround the issue. Its importance and application in Britain can then also be clarified.

I

In the early days of the Communist International, workers' control was not used as a synonym for workers' self-management of industry in a socialist society, as is often done today. On the contrary, a sharp distinction was drawn between workers' management and workers' control, the latter term being reserved for a particular phase of transition from capitalism to a planned economy. During this transitional phase, the proletariat, rather than move directly to the management of production, might simply exercise control over the capitalists. This presupposes the continued existence of the capitalists and their administrators for a temporary period.

Some of the confusion which surrounds the subject of workers' control is terminological in origin, for in the Communist tradition, the term workers' management is used to refer to the administration of things (after the bourgeoisie has been removed), while control is used to refer to the administration of persons (the bourgeoisie). Confusion is compounded in the English-speaking world by the fact that the words 'control' and 'management' are frequently interchangeable in common English usage. Other languages draw a finer distinction between the two ideas: contrôle and gestion in French, control and gerencia in Spanish, kontrolia and upravleniye in Russian. In English, many people innocently use the term 'control' to refer indifferently to all forms of workers' sovereignty in industry, thus obscuring the distinctions made in the Communist tradition. Nevertheless, in all countries, the slogan of 'workers' control' has been an object of political contention. The reason is that to many people, the idea that [illegible]. (In what follows we shall be using the term workers' control in the narrow, Communist sense.)

Many may therefore be surprised to learn that by workers' control the Bolsheviks meant something less than the complete socialization of industry. But Lenin, who wrote and spoke a great deal on the subject during the Russian revolution, [illegible] stated: 'It is not our immediate task to "introduce" socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviet of Workers Deputies.' In his pamphlet, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, written on the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin stated: 'The important thing will not be even the confiscation of the capitalists' property, but country-wide, all-embracing workers' control over the capitalists and their possible supporters.' Another important pamphlet, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, a comprehensive statement of Bolshevik economic policy published in October 1917, speaks repeatedly of 'control over' and 'supervision of' the capitalists and not their immediate elimination. On coming to power, the Bolsheviks pursued no other policy. Before the [illegible] of the Civil War in May 1918, nationalization [illegible] the banks and the sugar syndicate, and although local soviets often confiscated factories on their own initiative, a large part of industry remained in private hands.

Why did the Bolsheviks adopt such policies? Trotsky's explanation ran as follows: 'The very idea of this slogan [workers' control] was the outgrowth of the transitional regime in industry when the capitalist and his administrators could no longer take a step without the consent of the workers; but on the other hand, when the workers had not as yet provided the political prerequisites for nationalization, nor yet seized the technical management, nor yet created the organs essential for this.' Furthermore: 'The proletariat...is interested in seeing to it that the transition from the private capitalist to the state capitalist and then to the socialist method of production be accomplished with the least economic convulsions and the least drain upon the national wealth. That is why, while nearing power and even after seizing power by way of the boldest and most decisive struggle, the proletariat will demonstrate complete readiness to establish a transitional regime in the factories, plants, and banks.' The foundations of this [illegible].

The employers in Russia sabotaged production extensively during the months prior to the revolution and for some time afterward, hoarding goods, fostering monstrous inflation, and so on. Indeed, the bourgeoisie invariably embarks on economic sabotage during periods of revolutionary upheaval, partly out of fear for the future of private property, partly in a spirit of mischievous obstruction. The means of production, material distribution, and exchange are turned into political weapons. The Russian proletariat therefore had to take far-reaching measures to avert complete economic and political catastrophe.

'Political prerequisites' and 'organs of technical management' needed to run industry. The bourgeoisie, like any other ruling class in history, is not a mere excrescence on society, but performs a specific role in the social division of labour, in this case organizing and administering production. The [illegible] the skills and institutions needed to assume that role immediately.

The Bolsheviks had considerable difficulty in organizing a nation-wide apparatus for running industry. In December 1917, for example, the group around Bukharin and Radek, which disagreed with Lenin's policy and favoured immediate nationalization of all major industry, secured the creation of Vesenkha, the Supreme Council of the National Economy. But even they did not find it practical to proceed immediately to sweeping nationalization. In practice, Vesenkha's authority [illegible] production and no network of trained personnel — communist administrators, statisticians, or even clerks — able to coordinate and manage production throughout Russia. The civil service boycotted the Bolshevik government. These problems were exacerbated by the material state of the country at the time. Communications between Petrograd and the provinces were in disarray, the railways in chaos, the transportation system as a whole in ruins after three years of [illegible]. Vesenkha found it difficult to requisition a few sticks of [illegible] economic activities of 150 million people. In The Bolshevik Revolution, E.H. Carr reports that in some towns workers who had driven employers away were forced to seek their return. He cites the case of one factory that had to close because the workers' committees proved unable to run it. Speaking of the capitalists and their administrators, Lenin said bluntly: 'We must learn from them, and there is something to learn, for the Party of the proletariat and its vanguard have no experience of independent work in organizing giant enterprises which serve the needs of scores of millions of people.'

The policy of workers' control was designed to respond to bourgeois economic sabotage while taking due account of the difficulties of the proletariat in managing the entire economy directly without relying on the expertise of the capitalists and their agents. The aim was to expose the activities of [those] sabotaging production, and to persuade them, by force where necessary, to remain at their posts. If some could be compelled to continue productive activities, subject to strict accounting and invigilation by the workers, that would be all to the good. At the same time, the new regime would gain a breathing space during which to form new institutions, train a cadre of Communist administrators, and repair the infrastructure so as to draw the workers into the management of industry at all levels of the state. Workers' control, therefore, an interim policy designed to see the revolution through its most arduous period, would serve a twofold purpose: to restrict and gradually suppress the social power of the bourgeoisie while simultaneously enabling the proletariat to train itself to manage industry. It would express a dialectical process of suppression and apprenticeship. Even during War Communism, when the exigencies of the Civil War obliged the Bolsheviks to nationalize the bulk of the industrial economy, which was 'transferred to the management of the republic', as the official formula put it, the Bolsheviks still sought technical assistance from [illegible] offering them posts in industry as ordinary state employees.

In terms of its economic objectives, the policy of workers' control was not a great success. A large number of employers either fled their enterprises or were driven off by local soviets after being convicted of sabotage. Under War Communism, bourgeois experts boycotted the regime wholesale, joining the Whites wherever they could despite the Bolsheviks' offer of special remuneration and other privileges. This was a serious blow to the workers' state.

The political aims of the workers' control policy were explained by Trotsky this way: 'By its readiness to establish transitional forms of workers' control, the proletarian [illegible] the proletariat, and neutralizes certain groups of the petty bourgeoisie, especially the technical, administrative, and banking staffs. Should the capitalists and the entire upper layer of the administration demonstrate an utter irreconcilability by resorting to methods of economic sabotage, the responsibility for the severe measures that follow therefrom will fall, in the eyes of the nation, not upon the workers but upon the hostile classes.' Such, he added, is the 'political import' of the slogan of workers' control. This was of particular importance in Russia, where the petty bourgeoisie (in this case the peasantry) constituted an outright majority of the population. Most of the nationalizations carried out after October, whether locally or nationally, were described as 'punitive' — retribution for sabotage or non-cooperation by the owners. To the peasants, attached as they were to the idol of private property, socialism appeared as just punishment of the bourgeoisie for ruining the people. Although workers' control in Russia was cut short, it seems reasonable to conclude that the political import of the policy played its part in the Bolshevik success. As Trotsky wrote, the slogan of workers' control 'retains an enormous [political] significance independently of the degree to which it will be realized in reality, if realized at all'.

The controls exercised by various proletarian institutions during the revolution were quite comprehensive. No doubt many readers familiar only with present-day discussions in Britain about workers' control will be surprised to hear just what the measures taken entailed. One of the earliest decrees, issued in April 1917 by the 'exploratory conference of factory committees of the Petrograd War Industries', stated: 'From the Factory Committee should emanate all instructions concerning internal factory organization (i.e. instructions concerning such matters as hours of work, wages, hiring and firing, holidays, etc.). The factory manager to be kept notified.' At the First Full Congress of Petrograd Factory Committees, which met in May 1917, Lenin's resolution, which passed overwhelmingly, stated that to establish control 'it is necessary, first, to make certain that in all the basic institutions there is a majority of workers, not less than three-fourths of all the votes, and that all owners who have not deserted their business, as well as the scientifically and technically trained personnel, are compelled to participate'. Furthermore, all commercial and bank accounts were ordered open to inspection by any shop or factory committee, central or local soviet, or trade union, with management 'compelled to supply them with all the data'. The Second Conference of Factory Committees declared that the committees had 'the right to dismiss all those who could not guarantee normal relations with the workers' and that 'administrative factory personnel can only enter into service with the consent of the Factory Committee'. All these powers were codified at the First All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees, which met on the eve of October. This conference accorded the factory committees the power to 'exclude from participation in the discussion any member of the factory management' and to confiscate the enterprise in the event of [illegible].

In other words, workers' control meant that the workers would have veto power over the decisions of the employers and administrators. It was 'passive' and 'observational' only in the sense that its aim was to ensure continuation of existing patterns of output and supply, but the methods used to achieve this were, as Trotsky put it, 'all-embracing'. Have no fear, said Lenin, the workers 'would institute such supervision that every Tit Titych will be surrounded as the French were at Sedan'. The workers would be sovereign. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky tells us that during the summer of 1917, when workers' control was first put into effect, the workers in various parts of the country were subjecting individual employers 'now to enforced appearance before the soviet, now to house arrest...no wonder that the workers' [illegible] hatred to the possessing [classes]'. In other words, as conceived by the Bolsheviks workers' control implied that the working class would hold effective state power. The February insurrection, after which the soviets formed, had delivered nearly all real power to the armed proletariat and soldiers (with the exception of the governmental apex); in this sense, Trotsky was able to say that 'the dictatorship of the workers and soldiers had already been a fact ever since 27 February', and Lenin frequently spoke of the possibility of the 'peaceful development' of the revolution. Naturally, this state of affairs — proletarian power — did not altogether exclude agreements with the industrialists. Nevertheless, such 'agreement' occurred under the massive weight of organized proletarian domination. This reflected an alignment of forces opposite to that of trade unionism, where workers are permitted to bargain and come to agreements, but only under the organized weight of bourgeois domination. With the proletariat holding state power, workers' control, which leaves the capitalists and their administrators nominally in possession of the enterprise, is not necessarily a compromise with capital. On the contrary, it can lay the basis for its effective suppression.

II

In the Communist tradition then, workers' control belongs to the period of the revolutionary overturn. It can be 'imposed' on the bourgeoisie, Trotsky wrote, 'only by force' and 'can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word'. Experiences of workers' control, and indeed of workers' management, are to be found during all the great proletarian revolutions of twentieth century Europe, whether victorious or not. Despite the currently fashionable allegations of Eurocommunists, the main features of the Russian revolution were by no means unique or peculiar to Russia. The revolutionary experiences of the Western proletariat have been as rich as those of the Russian, though ultimately less successful. The paths taken by the revolution in the industrial field, however, vary considerably. A brief look at two other proletarian revolutions, in which different industrial policies were pursued, will clarify further the real meaning of workers' control.

The German revolution was even more powerful, comprehensive, and politically advanced than the February revolution in Russia. The armed insurrection of 4-9 November, which overthrew the Kaiser's government and all the political institutions of the Kaiserreich throughout Germany, resulted in the formation of a coalition government of the two Socialist parties, the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany). This government was formally independent of the bourgeoisie and responsible to the workers' and soldiers' councils that had seized power during the victorious uprising. At the time, November 1918 was widely taken to be the German version of the Russian October. As one historian put it, all the social classes in Germany 'knew, or thought they knew, that they could not resist the councils. They resigned themselves to, or welcomed, the fact that Germany was to be socialist'. The day after the uprising in Berlin, some 2,000 delegates elected from the factories and barracks of the [illegible] workers' and soldiers' [councils convened as the] supreme organ of power in the Reich, proclaimed Germany a socialist republic, and resolved to oversee the actions of the new government, which was instructed to socialize German industry, draft a constitution based on the principles of [illegible] 'with the Entente' [illegible] Russia. As one [illegible] conference established the [illegible] German revolution, like the Russian, had its origin in [in]tense class hatred generated by the horror and privations of the First World War. But the Russian workers were swamped in the petty-bourgeois milieu of the peasants and peasant-soldiers, while the German proletariat was numerically and socially powerful. While there were serious shortages of food and other essentials in Germany at the time of the revolution, mainly because of the blockade imposed by US imperialism in 1917, industry in Germany had suffered far less dislocation than in Russia. Germany was a modern industrial country, with a powerful, well-organized, and culturally advanced proletariat. All the economic and social conditions existed for the rapid socialization of industry. As Lenin was fond of saying, Russia possessed the 'political half' of socialism, Germany the economic. Many of the November insurgents were convinced that the new government of the 'People's Commissars' in Berlin had no reason to hesitate before nationalizing industry and reorganizing it under a socialist plan. The bourgeoisie, overwhelmed by the November events, seemed at first resigned to its fate, having little choice but to obey the instructions issued by the workers' and soldiers' councils meeting beneath the red flag in city halls throughout Germany. Workers' control, it was widely assumed, had no special political or economic function, and would be but a way station in the itinerary of the revolution.

But the measures the workers anticipated from the 'socialist' government were not forthcoming. The revolution had been organized by the cadres of the USPD, a party that led the industrial workers and whose rank and file, together with a significant part of its leadership, admired the Bolsheviks. But by joining a coalition on equal terms with the SPD, the USPD made a serious error. Lending its own prestige to Ebert and Scheidemann, the USPD allowed the SPD leaders to present themselves as revolutionaries while curbing the revolution. The Circus Busch resolutions were never translated into government decrees. This was not for want of an apparatus, economic plan, or material possibilities, but for want of political will. Ebert, who was engaged in a plot with the High Command of the military, devoted most of his energies to securing general elections to a Constituent Assembly, which occurred in January 1919. By this device, Ebert sabotaged the revolution, for the two socialist parties, having taken no decisive measures in the interim, failed to gain a majority at the polls. Then, in February 1919, Ebert gratefully formed a coalition government with the two major bourgeois parties and repudiated the workers' and soldiers' councils. Between January and June 1919, the workers fought for the sovereignty of their councils, but their struggle was drowned in blood by Noske's Freikorps soldiers during the ferocious civil war that raged in all the industrial districts of the country during those months. Throughout this period, Ebert continued to promise that 'socialization is on the way'. But socialization never came. In reality, then, Ebert's policy of halting the revolution at control was a case of prevarication designed to buy time to prepare the counter-revolution against the working class.

Socialization was buried by the defeat of the workers in the civil war. It is instructive, however, to examine the measures of workers' control taken by the councils during the weeks and [months of] anticipation of rapid social transformation. Remarkable descriptions of this work have survived in the [memoirs] of two leading participants in the revolution. Albert Grzesinski was a top-ranking member of the SPD. In his book, Inside Germany, he describes how the workers' and soldiers' councils ran the city of Kassel. Such bodies, Grzesinski writes, 'were in full power throughout Germany'. The Council of Kassel, which had 600 representatives, about half of them soldiers, took a variety of economic and commercial decisions. It imposed the eight-hour day, confiscated all local food supplies, and arranged a system of rationing. It also attempted to secure employment for returning soldiers. In a remarkable passage which concludes on an amusing note, Grzesinski tells us: 'One of the first acts of my administration was the immediate shutdown of the great munitions factory established in Kassel during the war and employing approximately twelve thousand men and women. The workers were discharged with two weeks notice and sent back to their home towns. Those who were residents of Kassel were re-employed for the purpose of conducting the necessary inventory. Immense quantities of food were stored in the factory warehouse — among them a large number of cattle requisitioned by the management for its own use, which had caused considerable ill-feeling — were turned over to the local relief organizations. The factory was used as a storage place for military equipment. An order forbidding all work in the barber shops of Kassel on Sundays was also issued by me. This measure was later generally adopted throughout Prussia.' This touch of civic pride suggests that Grzesinski was a church-going socialist. He became chief of police of Berlin in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, Toni Sender, the young USPD member who led the workers' and soldiers' administration in Frankfurt, relates in her autobiography that the employers wanted to continue munitions production. (We know from Hindenburg that the High Command viewed the armistice as a breathing space that would permit Germany to resume the war later.) 'We opposed this idea', writes Sender. All war production was stopped. Moreover, she adds, 'we would collaborate in the shift to peace production, but would permit no discharge of workers. The working day was to be not longer than eight hours, and we reduced it to four when necessary to make place for the homecoming soldiers'. Several million German soldiers were demobilized and seeking jobs in late 1918. The imposition of a sliding scale of hours as decreed by the workers' and soldiers' councils made it possible to re-employ them. A joke doing the round of salon society in Berlin at the time had it that German labour had discovered a new slogan to replace the time-honoured demand for the eight-hour day; the 'no hour day'. Neither Toni Sender nor Albert Grzesinski describes any cases of confiscation and socialization during their period of office. Nevertheless, the workers were clearly growing impatient with the government. A number of Berlin enterprises were confiscated by the workers, and the councils in Saxony and in the Ruhr attempted to take over administration of the mines in February 1919. The government, however, refused to recognize them, and the general strikes that broke out to defend these and other proletarian actions formed part of the civil war that consumed so many lives.

A rather different pattern emerged in the Spanish revolution of 1936-1937. The pronunciamiento of 17 July 1936, when Franco rallied his generals for the overthrow of the Republican authorities, was answered by a fierce revolutionary uprising of the proletariat throughout Spain. The workers' insurrection of 18-21 July not only defeated Franco, leaving his military forces divided and without air or naval support, but also inaugurated one of the most profound social upheavals in European history. The beginning was exceptionally bitter. Towns captured by Franco in the early days of the rising were subjected to the most ghastly massacres, while in other cities the counter-insurrection of the workers took a heavy toll, particularly where the rising found the workers unarmed at the critical moment. This bitter beginning, during which thousands died, followed immediately by a full-scale civil war, dictated proletarian policy in industry. The Workers' Committees, [which sprang up in most] places in the Republic (only in Aragon did they formally remove the republican civilian authorities), rounded up and imprisoned a large number of bourgeois who were not quick enough to make their escape. July and August 1936 were the months of 'red terror'. Each party and union in nearly every town and city had its own tribunal, prison, and place of execution. Many tens of thousands were executed as fascists during the first months of the war, among them many clergymen. It has even been said that in parts of Spain an upper-class manner of speech alone was sufficient to condemn a person to death.

Generally, the outrage and fury of the masses left little room for workers' control. Even those workers who were not anarcho-syndicalists, to whom full workers' management of each and every enterprise was a matter of high principle, wanted to remove the bourgeoisie promptly. The picture that emerged in the first weeks of the revolution in republican Spain was, of course, uneven, but there was a notable trend towards confiscation and workers' management of factories. In some areas, Asturias and Aragon for example, collectivization was nearly complete, the factories being run by the CNT or UGT, the two Spanish trade unions. In Catalonia, industrial heartland of republican Spain, some 70 per cent of industry was collectivized, and the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias worked miracles in building chemical and metal industries from scratch. The Mediterranean ports were managed by the unions. Elsewhere, a lower proportion of industry was confiscated. In Valencia, it was about 50 per cent, in Madrid as low as 30 per cent. Franz Borkenau has reported that the UGT in Madrid even concluded profit-sharing agreements with employers in place of expropriation, which seems an unnecessary compromise.

In areas in which confiscation was widespread, it was not at all confined to large enterprises. In some cases, the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises were simply controlled by the local committees and urged to convert to war production whenever possible. In other cases — especially in Catalonia, though the practice was not unknown in Madrid — thousands of these small businesses were expropriated, something that infuriated the Stalinists, who, historians agree, formed the far right wing of Spanish labour. Erstwhile owners found themselves working alongside their former employees for the same wages. Small businesses considered backward, uneconomic, unhygienic, or inefficient were candidates for such treatment, which often included entire trades, such as dressmaking, tailoring, cabinet making, metal and leather goods, restaurants, and so on. The enterprises seized in this manner were declared the property of the CNT or UGT. In some cases the machinery was collected and put into a single building. Many buildings which fell vacant during the revolution or the 'terror', particularly churches and convents, were turned into warehouses, stores, markets, public kitchens, and barns. In the countryside, the CNT, and later the UGT, took over and ran the large estates as collectives. Many peasants, however, elected to go no further than the formation of cooperatives, though the hiring of agricultural labour was abolished.

From the outset, the workers faced the need for centralized management of industry, especially because of the pressing demands of the civil war. The workers' parties, however, failed to remove the republican government in July, despite its conciliatory attitude toward Franco. By September, the major workers' parties could afford no further dallying, but instead of seizing power, they joined the Republicans in a coalition under Largo Caballero. The bourgeois republic and its institutions were preserved. The Workers' Committees were curbed, and the old republican administrations were deemed the only legitimate public authorities. The traditional leaders of the proletariat assured their followers that the revolution was only being placed in cold storage until after victory over Franco, arguing principally that Britain, France, and even the Soviet Union would not supply arms to a 'red republic'. The Spanish revolution therefore had to be 'camouflaged'. In practice, the unions and workers' parties held real power in industry, for the government could not conduct the war without the aid and active involvement of millions of workers. But the failure to create a workers' and peasants' government had serious consequences, both immediately and in the long term, not least in the factories and on the land. Caballero's defence of republican legality (on which basis the police and courts were restored, and the armed forces regularized under bourgeois officers) entailed refusal to legalize the confiscation of factories. Only the confiscation of land was ratified, and then only if the land were seized from 'known fascists'. As a result, bourgeois owners eventually returned and began reclaiming their property under government protection. The banks were never nationalized, nor was a monopoly of foreign trade ever enacted. The banks were subjected only to a mild form of workers' control that prevented disbursement of funds to fascists, but they remained free to deny credit to collectivized firms.

The pressure of credit deprivation helped to dissuade workers from extending confiscations. Later, the Stalinists, together with Negrin, demanded the surrender of many existing collectives to insistent owners. Without title to the factories and land, the workers were at the mercy of this constant erosion of their gains. Under the Negrin government (Caballero fell after the armed assault on Catalonia by the Stalinists in May 1937) force was openly applied. In 1936, the government of autonomous Catalonia (the Generalitat) had legalized the collectivization of enterprises with more than 200 employees, though it had permitted compensation to shareholders, which meant that former owners in exile continued to draw revenue and thereby kept one foot in the door. But the Negrin government revoked even this decree. In Aragon and parts of rural Catalonia, some of the former caciques (bosses) were reinstated when collective farms were forcibly broken up in the summer and autumn of 1937. Other openly destructive measures included the de-collectivization of trade in Catalonia, which led to notorious speculation and inflation by private middlemen during the winter of 1936.

The war against Franco was lost not in industry, but on the political and military fronts. The first republican government, the Giral ministry, proved unable or unwilling to defeat Franco in the first critical weeks because it was a government of the bourgeoisie. The republican navy, for example, was withdrawn from the straits of Gibraltar for fear of offending Britain and France, thus permitting Franco to land troops from Morocco. Instead of launching an offensive against Franco's initially weak forces, the government drew in troops for the 'defence of Madrid' — whether from Franco or the social revolution was not entirely clear. Antipathy to the revolution dictated the militarily suicidal policy of depriving revolutionary Aragon of arms, and prevented encouragement of a workers' uprising in the key industrial areas of the Basque country. Bourgeois interests and Anglo-French alliances prevented the [republic] from declaring independence for Morocco, Franco's home base. In addition, the capitulation of the workers' leaders to the bourgeoisie inevitably unleashed counter-revolutionary developments behind the lines — the suppression of the Barcelona commune, the persecution of the POUM, censorship, the humiliation of Caballero by the Stalinists. All these actions spread doubt, suspicion, and pessimism, all of which inevitably helped to undermine the war effort, which depended on popular revolutionary enthusiasm. Although the erosion of the economic and industrial gains made by the workers within the Republic contributed to the defeat of the workers, the political and military factors were ultimately decisive. One of the lessons of the Spanish events is that in the face of political treachery, even the radical solution to the industrial question adopted by the Spanish workers — a direct move to management without passing through a phase of control — gives no automatic guarantee of victory.

To summarize, then. When workers today express an ambition to 'control' or 'run' industry, they mean that they want to be 'in charge' of production. They want to be sovereign. For the Communist movement, the working class could acquire real power in industry only under revolutionary conditions, which meant when workers were actually bidding for state power. Yet, once the workers take hold of state power, their sovereignty in industry may take various forms, depending on the circumstances. On some occasions, workers' power may be expressed in industry in the form of a transitional regime of control over the bourgeois administration; on others, by means of outright workers' management. Workers' control, then, has been an optional phase historically. In some cases, it may represent a step forward, in others a step back; even where the more 'radical' solution — workers' management — is adopted in preference to control, the revolution is by no means sure of success, for whatever form of sovereignty in industry circumstances may dictate, the working class must lay its hands on state power — and this it must do uncompromisingly — in order to establish it.

III

Britain today, of course, is a long way from experiencing anything resembling the events in Russia, Germany, or Spain. There is no indication that we are living on the verge of a revolution. Nevertheless, the relatively placid traditions of English politics, at least since the nineteenth century, should not be taken to imply that such experiences will prove irrelevant to the future transition to socialism in Britain. The three countries considered above, after all, had very different political traditions and forms of regime before the outbreak of the revolution. Today, however, the left faces tasks of a different order: fighting to win the workers to socialism. The vocabulary of workers' control can prove extremely valuable for this purpose. We agree with Ken Coates and Tony Topham when they say, in The New Unionism, that in raising the question of control we should not begin with the abstract or the remote. On the other hand, without studying the great revolutions of the past, the workers' control ideas available to socialists will inevitably be meagre, and the use of such themes by socialists in the present struggle to raise the class consciousness of the workers will be far less effective than it could otherwise be. This is precisely the difficulty with the IWC and the work of Coates and Topham, whose ideas we shall now [examine].

Coates and Topham are well aware of the classical distinction between management and control. They reserve the term self-management for the socialized industry of the future. Workers' control, on the other hand, presupposes the existence of the property-owning class. As they put it: 'until the question of ownership is solved — that is, so long as employer authority is still a separate thing based on property rights — workers' control will continue to be asserted as a countervailing element in a dual power, existing alongside and contesting the established power of capital and its agents.' We shall examine the particular question of dual power later, a topic over which Coates and Topham fall into considerable confusion. For the moment, let us simply note that workers' control assumes the existence of the capitalist administration. Consequently, argue Coates and Topham, the powers the workers require in order to control the capitalist, avoiding the pitfalls of consultation and participation, 'may be summed up in four words: power to obtain information, to establish supervision over management activity, to impose a veto on arbitrary decisions, and to obtain representation for workers to carry out these functions. The areas of decision-making to which these powers should apply include literally the whole field of industrial activity'.

Because of their failure to study the full history of their subject, however, Coates and Topham too often depict workers' control as an instance of militant trade-unionism that, on closer examination, fails to measure up to the promise of their own delineation of control. Militant trade-unionism undoubtedly can help to draw the workers' attention to socialism, and so can the demand for workers' control. But if workers' control is reduced to a synonym for militant trade-unionism, then we deprive ourselves of a valuable weapon. Worse still, the horizons of the labour movement could even be lowered rather than raised. Let us look at some examples.

In recent years, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers has been fighting for what it calls 'status quo' agreements. These stipulate that management shall not make changes in working conditions and arrangements until both sides have discussed them in the negotiating procedure. Coates and Topham comment that this 'implies that the workers would have the right to veto the unilateral and arbitrary decisions of management over a wide range of issues — dismissals, redundancies, discipline, alterations in speed and content of work, manning arrangements, etc.' This, however, is an exaggeration. Granted, management decisions are no longer 'unilateral and arbitrary' in that status-quo agreements compel negotiations. If 'unilateral and arbitrary' decisions are defined as those implemented without negotiation or consultation, then status-quo agreements do indeed give the workers veto power over such decisions. In no way, however, are the workers given the right to veto any decisions of management in the meaningful sense of actually ordering management to suspend objectionable decisions. On the contrary, at the end of the negotiating process, management can order implementation of its decisions, and the workers then face the choice of accepting the decisions or combating them through industrial action. This, however, is merely trade unionism, be it of a militant variety. Thus, by a terminological device — insertion of the expression 'unilateral and arbitrary' — Coates and Topham have blurred the distinction between trade unionism and workers' control.

Another example: many unions, faced with job evaluation, have demanded 'mutuality'. Coates and Topham also include this under the rubric of 'workers' control'. Mutuality is the right to contest work evaluations made by the scientific 'experts' appointed by management. Here again, however, the unions are demanding nothing more than the right to negotiate, not the right to veto. To extend the compass of collective bargaining is quite important, of course. But the distinction between collective bargaining and the right to veto is none the less real. It is clearly evident in the contrast between these trade-union practices and the various powers claimed, for example, by the Russian factory committees. By blurring the distinction, Coates and Topham fail to raise ambition and risk promoting contentment with the very situation they are striving to overcome.

[Skilled workers] have imposed a degree of de facto independence of management prerogatives. In cases in which shop stewards operate their own overtime roster, informally regulate the speed of work, determine their own tea-break, and so on, The New Unionism informs us that 'workers control is being exercised'. Coates and Topham, however, fail to examine critically the ways in which these 'controls' have been achieved. Some good examples, often quoted by Coates and Topham, are to be found in Huw Beynon's book, Working For Ford. One steward explained to Beynon: 'I'd set him up [the supervisor] for cases, and destroy him in the office. Every time I was in the office I'd say something about him. That's what we had to do. We had to do it. We had to destroy the foremen. We've got it pretty easy now. The blokes are told what has to be done at the beginning of the shift and they work out the speeds, and the times when they're going to take their breaks for tea and cards.' In other words, by discrediting the lower supervisors of management, the workers were able to keep management ignorant of the real situation on the shop floor. Nevertheless, declines in output were eventually spotted by higher management, even when supervisors had lost confidence in themselves. The same steward admitted: 'We're going to have to give way on manning on this section soon. We've just been fortunate with the change in the fascia panels.' Another, discussing the illicit practice of paying each worker to take one Friday night off in every eight, explained that it 'became too regular, too open and was noticed by management...so management intervened with threats and the pool was abandoned'.

In other words, the workers had no actual right to veto. On [the contrary they] operated [a covert] sovereignty [that depended on secrecy] rather than confrontation. It seems to be the case that workers, especially skilled workers, are often able to conceal some of their activities from management because of their familiarity with the job. It is, of course, important to defend these limited areas of freedom. In some cases, especially where management may not discover what is happening for a period of years, workers may come to regard what they got by stealth as theirs by right. Dockers, for example, used to operate the 'welt' — working half-an-hour-on and half-an-hour-off — and even achieved a kind of retroactive recognition of this right when they 'sold' it back to the management. In general, however, workers in such situations are unlikely to conclude that they are 'in control' in any meaningful sense of the term.

By contrast, when workers veto management arrangements openly, the conditions are usually exceptional and ephemeral. For example, when the 5,000 workers at the Pirelli tyre factory at Turin established new speeds without any 'help' from technicians and ran the plant at various speeds, they did so as a demonstration, the aim being to show that piece rates were nonsense. When public transport workers in France and Japan stopped collecting fares, it was an ingenious form of strike (a 'reverse strike') to win public support while simultaneously hitting the employer and not hurting the workers financially. To establish this kind of open control permanently or semi-permanently, to be able to feel the right to do it at will, would be tantamount to conquering power from management. Since this is unattainable in 'normal' times, the strategy of negotiation combined with evasion is more attractive and common. The right to veto is a very advanced demand, and few workers have adopted it in recent years.

When we leave the shop floor and turn to broader questions of enterprise management, we find that the ambiguities in Coates and Topham's work become more dangerous. It is extremely important that British trade unions have turned their attention in recent years to the boardrooms. The most interesting response to this by the bourgeoisie has been the Bullock Report. Under Bullock's recommendations, the law would provide for managerial boards of companies to be composed of representatives, half of whom would be appointed by unions, half by employers. To avoid deadlock, Bullock recommended a[n arrangement] according to which a third group of 'independents', always consisting of an uneven number, could be called in by appeal to an Industrial Democracy Commission. As Coates and Topham point out in their Guide to the Bullock Report, the 'y' component would inevitably be composed of people hostile to the workers. The aim of the Bullock Report, like the co-determination schemes in Germany on which it is based, is to accord the unions 'responsibility without power' and thereby implicate them in capitalist decisions, particularly the more unpopular ones.

These and many other criticisms of Bullock are made effectively by Coates and Topham, and show why socialists should give no support to Bullock. What is missing from their presentation, however, is any effective means of exposing the aims and deficiencies of Bullock in such a way as to point the workers towards struggles for real powers.

Coates and Topham advise workers to counter the '2x+y' formula by insisting on the original TUC suggestion of equal employer-worker representation, which would naturally produce deadlock, as Coates and Topham admit. Indeed, it turns out that this is precisely what they have in mind. The board would be unable to take any disputed decisions at all. 'Votes' would normally be either 100% or 50-50. What, then, is the purpose of such a 'managerial' board? Ultimately, it is nothing but a new forum for collective bargaining. 'Collective bargaining can enter the boardroom', they tell us. The trade-union side would remain 'purely oppositional'. For Coates and Topham, the 50-50 proposal would impose 'prior consultation' at boardroom level, or, in other words, 'extend the principle [of status quo]'. As in the case of status quo on the shop [floor], the final say — in other words, [operated] sovereignty — would inevitably rest with [management]. Despite this evident fact, Coates and Topham declare that parity would [constitute] 'workers' control'.

It may be wondered why Coates and Topham never demand that the workers be given an outright majority on the board, which would amount to genuine veto power. As they explain elsewhere, the workers want to 'participate' in the affairs of the company; life continuously drives them to seek access to the inner sanctum of management, but they do not want to 'participate' in the sense of accepting 'responsibility without power'. In that case, we ask, why not give them power? And power would require a working majority at the very least. In none of their work, however, do Coates and Topham discuss this idea. In The New Unionism they dismiss the subject as unimportant. They call for workers' majorities only in the public sector, where, they argue, workers should insist on self-management, which involves 'at a minimum, the direct election of at least half the members of all governing boards, and the right of veto over all appointments, including that of the Chairman'. In the private sector, on the other hand, the workers should [demand only partial control].

We agree wholeheartedly that workers should have majorities in public industry. The workers' control movement in the mines and railways at the time of the First World War demanded this. More recently, the IWC group in steel drew up a similar plan, which was adopted as policy by the craftsmen's co-ordinating committee in the industry. Such a state of affairs would no doubt transform the policies of the nationalized industries, and certainly enhance the popularity of nationalization among those still working in private industry. But what are the objections to extending it to private industry? It was the extension of workers' majorities to private industry that constituted workers' control in other times and places. As we have seen, it was among the measures Lenin demanded in private enterprise in Russia. Circumstances may well arise in future that compel the workers to place themselves in charge of the private sector before they command the legal and technical prerequisites for socialization. Indeed, in so doing they may hasten the transfer of ownership. The Coates-Topham approach excludes this possibility.

Thus we find that Coates and Topham have a strong tendency to assimilate workers' control to militant trade-unionism. One writer for the IWC, Ernie Roberts, has written a book that explicitly identifies any form of working-class struggle as workers' control. In the vision of Coates and Topham, the proletariat may inhabit one of two worlds: that of the present, where workers fight capital in private industry through the most advanced forms of trade unionism, and that of the future, where industry is socialized and the workers exercise self-management. There is no concept of transition, conditions under which the workers exercise less than self-management, but go well beyond the mere expression of opposition.

[Their] indifference to the problem of transition is expressed in their confusion about the question of 'dual power'. According to the revolutionary view, dual power is not a situation in which there is merely opposition, conflict, and struggle. It is a very special situation in which state power is no longer monopolized by a single social class, in which the institutions of the state apparatus of the ruling class are challenged by new institutions expressing the power of the exploited classes. It can arise only as the result of a revolutionary upheaval. If we are to believe that dual power exists wherever there is class struggle, then dual power is as old and continuous as the existence of classes. The need for a special concept of dual power — and with it, workers' control — then disappears altogether. Coates and Topham, however, are silent on the question of revolution. This is the origin of their difficulties over workers' control.

IV

[Some writers argue that the] demands raised by workers, such as workers' control and so on, are generally unattainable, whereas the extension of collective bargaining is. If that is true, however, then the distinction between the two should be preserved. Workers' control can generally be realized only by the revolution. But the revolution has to be prepared. Insofar as workers' control has a role to play in this preparation, two things are vital: first, a sustained effort of agitation and propaganda around demands for workers' control; second, the experience of episodes of workers' control, or even self-management in individual enterprises, no matter how fleeting or episodic they may be. Let us consider these first.

The past decade has seen a number of important incidents of workers' control and even self-management in a number of individual enterprises, particularly in the fight against redundancy. All such incidents, even the most wide-ranging, illustrate the limitations bourgeois society places on the freedom of the workers. Indeed, they bring the shape of bourgeois power into sharp relief, and for that very reason enable many workers to draw revolutionary conclusions from them. Although they fall short of the revolution, these struggles have served to unmask bourgeois claims that the capitalists are able to run production competently and in the interests of all. By their example, they point to a new social order. It has been said that the right to sack is among the most sacred rights of the employing class, the very basis of labour discipline. But even before the revolution removes this right and abolishes the private property on which it is based, the employers and their governments [can] be made to pay, by means of these partial struggles, an enormous political price for whatever economies they seek to make by sacking workers. This may deter them from declaring further redundancies; it will certainly hasten on the revolution.

One of the most popular tactics in the fight against redundancy in recent years has been the factory occupation. There are many practical advantages to occupying a factory, even in disputes over issues other than redundancy. Occupation prevents the movement of supplies and [machinery, and keeps] the work force together. But it has seldom proved possible for the workers to re-start production in a single occupied factory, whether under workers' control or management. For this raises questions of credit, markets, and coercion, which the workers are rarely in a position to solve. Usually, the workers tend to sit tight in the factory. We shall call this 'simple occupation'. The workers are not able simply to negate the right of the employer to sack them, but simple occupation radically alters the relationship of forces during the bargaining process, because the workers then bargain with the employers' own possessions. In effect the workers trade capitalist assets for jobs. This process can be extremely costly for the employer in economic terms, but is also a political blow at the ruling class, since the workers are acting in complete defiance of the property rights that society normally takes for granted.

A good example of a successful simple occupation occurred in Scotland in 1971, when Plessey attempted to sack the 700 workers at its factory in Alexandria. Plessey had bought the factory from the Royal Navy in order to sell some of its valuable torpedo-making machinery, transferring the remainder of the factory to southern England, South Africa, and Portugal. The workers occupied and barricaded the plant. Several thousand workers were alerted at local labour exchanges in case of attack by the police. It took five months to defeat Plessey, but the workers retained their jobs. Other such occupations have met with varying degrees of success. Some have been defeated.

If occupation of a factory attracts extensive mass support it can easily become part of a broader movement which may begin to raise the question of political power. The best two recent examples are the struggles that took place at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971 and the Lip watch-making factory in France in 1973. In both cases, the workers went beyond simple occupation and restarted production, in one case under workers' control, in the other workers' management. This was not the only, or even major, reason why these struggles became major foci for the workers' movement. UCS was at the heart of [illegible] the [illegible] self-management adopted was more critical in attracting support [in the case of Lip]. The most important point, however, is that both these [struggles put] political power on the agenda.

UCS was a consortium of five shipyards on the Clyde which the Heath Government tried to break up, closing down two of the yards and hiving off the others to private enterprise. The workers responded by taking over the yards and staging what they called a 'work-in'. The political situation was favourable to the UCS workers, and they took full advantage of it. The Tory government was pushing through the Industrial Relations Act, allowing loss-making firms like UCS ('lame ducks') to go to the wall and pursuing a tough incomes policy that had already crushed the postal workers strike in 1971. The action of the UCS workers suddenly placed them at the head of a national movement against the Tory government and its policies. UCS discredited the Tories politically and aroused the whole working class against them. Jimmy Reid, one of the UCS leaders, put it this way: 'Let it be known by Mr Heath that if he doesn't satisfy our demands, this explosion will submerge his government and sweep him out of power.' Here was the core of the workers' strategy.

In the event, Heath did fall in 1974 following his defeat by a movement stimulated in part by the courage of the UCS workers. But Heath could have been brought down much earlier if the TUC had seized on his political predicament to launch a determined, across-the-board attack at the time of the work-in. Had the Labour Party and TUC simultaneously drawn up an economic plan for resolving unemployment (then becoming a major problem), to be implemented by an incoming Labour government under workers' supervision, they could have won the support of a majority of the people for a struggle to bring down Heath and replace him with a workers['] [govern]ment. But the TUC refused to launch any struggle at all at the time of UCS and even came to Heath's rescue after his [defeat]. The TUC was thus able to prevent [the UCS work]ers from winning their demands, though they ultimately proved unable to block the overthrow of Heath in 1974.

The work-in itself involved a series of measures taken by the workers in the yards. The discharged workers turned up for work and were paid out of a fighting fund; the stewards controlled the gates to prevent the movement of machinery; the liquidator was barred from the yards; ships under construction were completed under the overall supervision of the shop stewards. These were modest moves, but in a very real sense they represent an example of workers' control. The lower managerial staff effectively functioned under the vigilant eye of the workers. Indeed, some of the lower managers [were] sympathetic to the workers' cause, for their own jobs were also in jeopardy.

[The work-in was capable of] lasting as long as the existing contracts (though there were threats to hold completed ships hostage in the yards). Nevertheless, before the problem of new orders had to be faced the UCS struggle had caught the popular imagination. The work-in tactic certainly played a role in this. It was not simply a demonstration of the workers' determination to retain their jobs, or an affirmation of their belief in the social value of their [work]. [For the] first time in [many years the work-in took on a] deeply symbolic significance, and tens of thousands showed it by gathering at the gates of UCS in solidarity.

The other great struggle of the period, in some ways even more daring than UCS, was at Lip, a Swiss-owned watch factory at Besançon in France. In 1973, the owners resolved to dismantle the plant, sack the workers, and cart the equipment off to Switzerland. At first the workers not only seized the factory but 'sequestered' the employer himself. After the riot-police had freed him, the workers appropriated a consignment of watches and stores as a guarantee against payment of wages. Later, they set the factory in motion, producing watches under their own self-management and selling them [throughout] France with the aid of [the trade-union movement].

The Lip workers ran the factory for several months entirely under their own management committees, which were democratically elected. The workers themselves were reluctant to call their action 'self-management', because they were anxious not to give the impression that Lip could be permanently administered in the interests of the workers under capitalism. Nevertheless, they did give workers everywhere a practical demonstration that workers are able to run production collectively. It was a precious experience, but doomed to be no more than temporary, for the action was [illegible] amounting to con[fiscation] through consumption [illegible] of his assets and stock. It was sustained only because of the massive solidarity of the French working class. The Paris Chamber of Commerce summed up its concern this way: 'Lip is the most serious of social conflicts... because starting the factory after what is essentially robbery of the shareholders challenges the principles of authority, responsibility, and respect for commercial agreements, which constitute the very basis of our economic system and our commercial right.' No Marxist could have put it better.

The Lip workers had the advantage that their action raised the spectre of another May '68. Had other workers occupied their factories in solidarity with Lip, putting forward their own demands, the bourgeois government might have been faced once again with the prospect of overthrow. But the leaders of the national union federations and the traditional workers' parties were not anxious to find themselves in a new revolutionary crisis. They did less than they could have done to help the Lip workers, and certainly failed to take their struggle [as] a component of a general challenge to the government. Even so, the Lip workers were still able to save a number of their jobs under the settlement eventually arrived at.

After the UCS struggle, several groups of workers in Britain faced with redundancy believed they should aim to create cooperatives. It is not difficult to understand the attraction of this idea. Workers occupying a factory taste a new freedom and feel a collective power, and it seems a great pity to relinquish these with the return of the employer. In addition, workers do not always believe that the market is incapable of supporting the product they produce. The employer might be closing his factory for reasons unconnected with the market for the product. There may, for example, be an element of land speculation involved. The prospect of a favourable government might lead workers to believe that credit will be available on the basis of political and social criteria, even though an enterprise might be running at a loss in strictly economic terms. The political situation can always change, not least as a consequence of one's own actions. All these considerations can lead workers to fight for a cooperative. But this means buying up the company from the employer and setting it in motion as private property within [capitalism, and here lies] the decisive disadvantage of [the co-operative solution].

In September 1973, the Meriden works of Norton-Villiers Triumph was faced with closure. The company intended to close the Meriden site in Coventry, sell the land, and shift production to the former BSA factory at Small Heath, Birmingham, and the Norton works in Wolverhampton. All 1,750 workers would be sacked and the factory site sold for £18 million. The workers, sure that the famous motorcycle had a future on the US market, discussed the idea of a cooperative. The impact of the market need not automatically reproduce all the effects of the capitalist system within a self-managed plant, but to run Meriden so as to supply a legitimate market raised immediately the problem of ownership. After all, the average retailer will not buy 'stolen' motorcycles; no bank will supply credit to a company operating with confiscated assets. This led the workers to propose purchase, a decision that not only forced them to draw on their life-savings, but also made them dangerously dependent on the Tory government, the only other available source of money. The Meriden workers scraped together some of the necessary cash, but the Tories spun out the negotiations in the hope that the workers would tire and relinquish their physical hold on the company's property. In February 1974, however, the incoming Labour administration decided, after some persuasion, to grant loans to various cooperative schemes that had sprung up. In the spring of 1974 Fisher-Bendix workers on Merseyside and Beaverbrook workers in Glasgow were granted financial aid for co-ops together with Meriden.

Most of these co-ops proved ill-fated, though Meriden is still operating. A co-op can be a challenge to capitalist ideas in spite of its commercial respectability, for it still shows convincingly that the workers are capable of running a factory, that they are able to acquire the necessary skills, given the time and opportunity to do so. Wholly new forms of collective organization of labour can be introduced and publicly displayed, becoming a pole of attraction for workers as [others still toiling] under the autarchy of private enterprise. Perhaps it was for this very reason that the Labour government strove to discourage factory seizures or co-ops by a policy of financial stringency. While doling out millions of pounds to private enterprise, sometimes with no controls of any kind, Labour made loans to the co-ops, thereby saddling them with debts and leaving them to the mercies of the Exchequer and future governments. Nor did Labour consider expropriating the owners of Meriden outright, despite the history of financial speculation. Labour remained the dutiful servant of the banks and the state machine, doing all it could to avoid encouraging other workers to follow the Meriden example. Dealing with redundancy and unemployment was less important than the rights of capital and private property.

The co-ops did not become the focus of a broad mass movement. Perhaps the rest of the working-class movement did not regard purchasing their factories as a useful tactic for fighting the bourgeoisie. To some extent, the Meriden workers (though not those at Fisher-Bendix or the Scottish Daily News) were marked by a sectoral spirit. (With characteristic craftsmen's pride, they demanded separation from the conglomerate, angering the less skilled workers at Small Heath, whose future was not especially secure). Nevertheless, these cooperatives, like the more spectacular and insolent struggles at Lip and UCS, contain some of the seeds of the new social order. An effective socialist government in 1974 would have undertaken a large-scale programme of public works, nationalization, and planning, within which co-ops might well have played a limited role, probably losing their private character. But Labour did none of that, for revolution is not in its programme.

Redundancy struggles are not the only circumstances under which workers' control or management might appear in a single enterprise, industry, or firm, though naturally only temporarily and under conditions of extreme class tension. Nationalization of individual firms and industries holds an honoured place in the lexicon of the British left. In its Fabian way, the Labour left likes to depict a handful of nationalizations as a stepping stone to a more distant general offensive, considering this half-way house approach a wise strategy. We are not implying that it is unimportant for such nationalizations to take place. It is important, and socialists should demand that the workers run the nationalized industries. However, occasions arise in which the bourgeoisie seeks to sabotage even the mere driblet of nationalization adopted by Labour governments. A case in point is the nationalization of steel under Atlee's Labour [government]. In 1950, over employer objections, parliament set up the Iron and Steel Board (ISB) to run the industry. But although it was perfectly able to acquire the shares of the industry and assume formal proprietorship, the ISB was prevented from running it by a well-orchestrated campaign of sabotage. The employers unofficially barred all technical and managerial personnel from collaborating with the ISB, which remained impotent. This campaign, encouraged by Churchill and the Tory Party (even though it was in flagrant violation of the constitution), finally was one factor in bringing down the [Labour] government itself. The Tories denationalized steel in 1951.

A fight for workers' control might have been effective here. The steel unions should have occupied the mills and locked out all managerial personnel, letting them return to work only if they agreed to hand over all necessary data to workers' committees and the ISB. This would have not merely broken the sabotage, but also put the workers in a stronger position to fight for a decisive say in the running of the industry. It would have inflicted a major political defeat on the bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, this example is speculative. Neither Labour nor the unions had the will for such a fight. But the lesson for the future is evident.

So far we have examined factory occupations, together with workers' control and workers' management of production, in single enterprises. If the working class were to seize all the enterprises at once, then the question of power would be posed point blank; even more so if they aspired to re-initiate production. As Gramsci once explained, it is impossible for the workers to retain the factories for long unless the workers' parties seize power and form a revolutionary government. Writing during the great Italian factory occupations of September 1920, he said: 'The pure and simple occupation of the factories by the working class, though it indicates the extent of the proletariat's power, does not in and of itself produce any new, definitive position. Power remains in the hands of capital; armed force remains the property of the bourgeois state, public administration, the distribution of the basic necessities, the agencies disposing of credit, the still intact commercial apparatus, all remain under the control of the bourgeois class. The proletariat has no coercive means to break the sabotage of the technicians and white-collar workers, it cannot secure its own supplies of raw materials. It cannot sell the objects it produces.' Lenin sent a telegram to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) demanding a 'national action', a diplomatic euphemism for armed overthrow of the government and seizure of power. A PSI congress narrowly voted down this idea, shirking its [duty] and dooming the Italian workers to defeat.

It is perhaps because of the internal logic of general strikes and factory seizures on a national scale, that they rarely occur except on the eve of revolution, after much political preparation of the workers' movement. The Italian proletariat, for example, had already passed through eight years of revolutionary struggle against the wars being waged by the Italian bourgeoisie, first in Libya, then in Europe. There had already been two armed uprisings, one in Ancona in 1914, one in Turin in 1917. The Italian workers viewed the occupations of 1920 as the springboard towards the final struggle for power. In France, where the workers took possession of many factories during the strikes of June 1936, their action occurred after two years of battle with the military forces of the fascists, following the attempted fascist coup d'état of February 1934. The struggle against fascism in France coincided with armed uprising and civil war in several neighbouring countries: Portugal (1933-34), Austria (February 1934), and Spain (October 1934). By contrast, the general strike of May 1968, in which many factories were temporarily seized, was preceded by no visible revolutionary radicalization of the working class. The workers discovered the connection between the strike and the question of power only after joining the strike, when de Gaulle threatened civil war. Upon this discovery and finding no lead from the chiefs of the mass reformist organizations, who preferred to opt for de Gaulle's promise of future elections, the workers' movement retreated. In general, history appears to demonstrate that seizure of the productive apparatus on a mass scale usually occurs at the peak of the class war, on the eve or the morrow of the revolution, which is usually preceded by several months, sometimes several years, of political and psychological preparation for the struggle for power. The seizure of industry is a symptom of the rise of revolution, which generally has its roots and origins elsewhere.

Writers on workers' control sometimes imply that control is an intermediate state of affairs prior to the outbreak of the revolution. Ernest Mandel's re-christening of transitional demands as 'anti-capitalist structural reforms' can easily give rise to this misleading impression. We must rather anticipate that transitional demands such as workers' control will not be actually implemented until the revolution begins, even in many cases until after the definite seizure of power by the working class. But the value of such demands does not depend on their realization before the revolution. Confusion on this [point is ap]parent in the works of Coates and [Topham, who sugge]st that workers' control either already [exists or ca]n be achieved in the future with no revolutionary upsurge. The purpose of raising the demand for control today, like the objective function of factory occupations and other such episodic struggles, is primarily to expose the bourgeoisie and to prepare the workers for a struggle to overthrow it. To this end, every opportunity must be used to promote the idea that the labour movement can and should take the place of the employing class at the head of society.

This means that socialists must constantly question the existing order. Why shouldn't the labour movement have unconditional access to all company information? A community, for example, has an absolute right to know if a company is planning to close a plant upon which many thousands depend for their livelihood. Again, it is unnecessary to know a company's financial condition before formulating a wage claim, but the demand that the books be opened will often silence a recalcitrant employer who rejects a claim. Furthermore, workers should get into the habit of demanding the right to invigilate company finances. Is it not a well-known fact, for example, that the decline in profits is stimulating a rise in embezzlement, financial double-dealing in boardrooms, and fraud upon the public authorities? The unions should be the first to 'offer their services' to investigate this corruption, especially at a time when the workers are being told to tighten their belts.

And why shouldn't the labour movement have the right to veto managerial decisions? The Bullock Commission formally endorsed the idea of 'industrial democracy'. Perhaps some employers, aware of their mounting unpopularity, are keen to appear as 'industrial democrats'. But what is democracy if not the rule of the majority? Since the workers are indisputably the majority in industry, they should have nothing less than a majority on every management board in industry, and certainly on every commission ostensibly set up to 'control' private entrepreneurs. If the employers will not grant the workers 'industrial suffrage' they had better stop chattering about industrial democracy and confess that 'democracy' does not extend beyond the bounds of Westminster.

[The demand for information and veto power is the beginning of a demand] — that is to say, workers' control. To demand workers' control is to maintain that society should entrust the stewardship of industry to the organized labour movement and not to the employing class. This argument is relatively distinct from that which contests ownership itself. Many people may come to question ownership through understanding the reasons behind resistance to control. The demand for control is an explosive one regardless of the extent to which a phase of workers' control may actually materialize during the transition to socialism.

Workers' plans for industry are a good example of proposals for working-class stewardship of production. In war-time conditions, even capitalist governments place production under some kind of 'control' within the framework of a rudimentary plan. Is not the decay of areas like Liverpool and the northeast today a 'national emergency'? The labour movement should draw up a plan for the reconversion of industry in these and other areas, and announce its willingness to supervise its implementation. The basic principle is illustrated by the example of the Lucas Aerospace Plan. By drawing up a plan for alternative products and the expansion of existing ones on the criterion of social need (the best known item of which was kidney machines), the Lucas Combine Committee stiffened the resistance of the workers to redundancies. While perfectly rational from the capitalist point of view, redundancies at Lucas thus appeared totally irrational and outrageous from a social standpoint, and the company suffered considerable political embarrassment over its refusal even to consider the workers' proposals and was forced to hold back on the redundancies. What is needed today is a similar plan on a national scale.

The elements of such a plan already exist: the Lucas plan, the Vickers plan, the demands of the building unions for an expansion of public sector programmes to absorb men off the dole, and so on. All these proposals should be drawn together into a single workers' plan for the economy as soon as possible. If the labour movement campaigned around such a plan it would not only acquire a political advantage in all its dealings with capital, but would also arouse the deepest layers of the oppressed. It would alleviate the demoralization and feeling of inevitability among the victims of mass unemployment, expose the mystifications through which the perpetrators of this social crime seek to justify themselves, and place responsibility for the situation where it really belongs. It would help the people to see why the capitalists deserve to be expropriated, and it would prepare the struggle to remove the present Tory government and replace it with a socialist one. If the leaders of the labour [movement] were to display such impudence, if they were able to [free themselves from] their desire to be practical and from their [own timidity, the workers would become] convinced that it is necessary, possible, and just to deprive the employing class of its command over [production] and set about replacing them.

1. It is significant, for example, that the large collection of source materials on workers' control assembled by Ken Coates and Tony Topham are exclusively British [illegible]. The associated Spokesman imprint has published material on [illegible] Andrée Hoyles [illegible], and on Portugal: Audrey Wise, Eyewitness in Revolutionary Portugal, Nottingham, 1975.

2. Theses, 'The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution', in Selected Works, Moscow, 1970, Volume 2, p.45.

3. Selected Works, Volume 2, p. 410.

4. E.H. [Carr], The Bolshevik Revolution, Harmondsworth, [illegible] pp. 87- [illegible]. In the early [illegible] Trotsky reproached a group of German communists for using the slogan of 'the management of the industries by the workers'. 'Why', he protests, 'designate management as control?' In the language [illegible] the checking of one institution over the work of another. Control may be active, dominant, and all-embracing. But it remains control.' Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York, 1971, p. 243. Trotsky not only supported Lenin's industrial policy in 1917, despite their previous differences over the tasks facing the revolution in Russia, but continued Lenin's usage of 'workers' control' long after the [illegible].

5. [illegible]

6. [illegible]

7. Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, p. 76.

8. '"Left Wing" Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality', Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 703.

9. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 245.

10. The Bolshevik Revolution, Volume 2, p. 87.

11. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany [illegible].

12. [illegible] The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917-1921, London, 1970, p. 2.

13. The Bolshevik Revolution, Volume 2, p. 67.

14. The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917-1921, p. 9.

15. [John Reed] Ten Days That Shook the World, Harmondsworth, [illegible].

16. The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917-1921, p. 20.

17. [Selected] Works [illegible] p. 10.

18. History of the Russian Revolution, Sphere edition in three volumes, 1967, Volume 1, p. 393.

19. Ibid., Volume 3, p. 300.

20. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 78.

21. Rudolf Coper, Failure of a Revolution, Cambridge, 1955, p. 99.

22. Ralph H. Lutz, The German Revolution: 1918-1919, Stanford, California, 1922, p. 80.

23. Albert Grzesinski, Inside Germany, London, 1939, p. 50.

25. Toni Sender, Autobiography of a Rebel, New York, 1939, p. [illegible].

26. For a description of the uprising, see A.H. Landis, Spain: The Unfinished Revolution, New York, 1975.

27. For an account of the 'red terror' see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 268-281.

28. Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit, Michigan, 1963, p. 140.

29. For a detailed account, see Burnett Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage: the Communist [Conspiracy] in the Spanish Civil War, London, 1961, pp. 48-52. See also Pierre Broué and Emile Temime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, 1972, chapter 6.

30. Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, New York, 1974, pp. 181-3, 198-208.

31. Ibid., p. 209-225.

32. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, The New Unionism, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 62.

33. Ibid., p. 51-60.

34. [illegible]

35. [illegible]

36. Ibid., p. 85.

37. Ibid., p. 60.

38. Huw Beynon, Working For Ford, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 132.

39. Ibid., p. 132.

40. Ibid., p. 148.

41. It is significant that, faced with productivity deals in the period since the late 1960s, workers have elected to follow the example of the dockers rather than demand the right to veto. Workers at Fiat demanded the right to veto in 1969. See The Red Mole, 13 March 1972.

42. [Ken Coates] and [Tony] Topham, Guide to the Bullock Report [illegible].

43. Ibid., pp. 77-78.

44. Ibid., p. 79.

45. Ibid., p. 78.

46. Ibid., p. 78.

47. Ibid., p. 58.

48. Ibid., p. 78.

49. Ibid., p. 97.

50. The New Unionism, p. 56.

51. Ibid., p. 256.

52. Ibid., p. 258.

53. Can the Workers Run Industry? Ed., Ken Coates and Tony [Topham], London, 1968, p. 154.

54. The position of Coates and Topham is similar to that of the Communist Party, except that the CP, which favours majorities in the public sector and collective bargaining in the private, repudiates the [illegible].

55. [illegible] rhetoric of workers' control, demanding only a mandatory provision of [information illegible]. Coates and Topham say: 'Workers' [control illegible] and collective power constrain employers' (Can the Workers Run Industry?, p. 235). In a later book, they are more cautious: '...the germs of workers' control exist, in greater or lesser degree, wherever [illegible] shop floor powers hedge the [employers' prerogatives]'.

56. [illegible reference to Ernest Mandel and the] confusions of Coates and Topham. Mandel believes that dual power — or at least lengthy periods of it — precedes a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary uprising, whereas, in point of historical fact, it more commonly follows them. The classical periods of dual power signified [illegible] reformist and centrist [illegible]. Ernest Mandel, [illegible] Revolutionary Marxist [Party] Today, London, 1979. We shall argue this view and deal with its [illegible].

57. [illegible] the following action [illegible], mostly over redundancy. For workers' control in relation to the media, see my article in Media, Politics and Culture, Ed., Carl Gardner, Macmillan, 1979.

58. Red Mole, 20 October 1971.

59. The most concise account of the UCS struggle is to be found in Hart, Finlay, and Thompson, The UCS Work-in, London, 1972.

60. The information on which this account is based is from articles that appeared in Red Weekly at the time, mostly by Martin Meteyard.

61. At the time of writing, the Tory government is refusing to waive interest payments on this loan, thus threatening the future of the co-operative.

62. A good account of the Meriden struggle has been written by Ken Fleet, in The New Workers Co-operatives, ed., Ken Coates, [Nottingham], p. 96.

63. [illegible] p. 327.

64. The story is told in Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920, London, 1975.

65. A Socialist Strategy for Western Europe, IWC pamphlet No. 10, Nottingham.

66. The Right to Useful Work, ed., Ken Coates, Nottingham, 1978, chapters 8 and 9.