As The Week went to press last week, George Brown was preening himself over Lis breakfast, which was obligingly televised in order that the greatness of the day should seep home to all. Mr.Callaghan took a return flight from Paris, and arrived for the event, breathless, as we were running off our last. pages. The collating and stapling was under way when, at Lancaster House, the mighty assembled to affix their names to the "Joint Statement of Intent", which marks out leg number one of the Incomes Policy race. The last copies were in: the post when we turned on our tellies, to see that genial, chirpy face, grinning all over, announcing in a voice like thick Christmas cake that the class war had now, with the sizning of this document, come to an end,
Even the sight of Fr. Maurice Laing and Loré Collison displaying their new truce on either smiling flank. of Mr.Brown did not, we must admit, suffice to convince us, Unhappily, we have witnessed a succession of similar announcements in the recent past. Mr.Macmillan made an identical discovery a few months before he fell a prey to the internecine, intra-class battles which subsequently rent the Tory party into wrangling factions. Apart from the fact that this particular treaty has been concluded between a Labour Lord and a Mister from the employers, we do not realiy think that much has changed since then, except that the crisis of British capital has worsened, and the thorough-going ineptitude of British capitalists to meet it has not relaxed,
Socialists cannot and will not deny that the human problems of our world require vastly augmented productivity for their solution, Cur problem is that we also recognize that this productivity is restrained and set back precisely by the confining interests of capital itself. No amount of declarations of intent will alter this. Only deep-goins structural reforms, aimed at carvings hefty inroads into capitalist power, can lift us out of the vicious stov-go-stop cycle which has now caught even a Labour Government in its srasp. In this connection, Michael Foot's recent analysis in Tribune is entirely accurate: unfortunately, he draws the conclusion that since there exists "no mandate" for such etructural reforms, they cannot yet be offered. This won't do at all, There is a mandate for thorough-going improvements in all the social and welfare services. If the bankers clobber these improvements, without any mandate to do so, then we have a mandate to clobber the bankers. And we needn't stop with them,
Meantime, active trade unionists will interpretthe new declaration's exhortation "to encourage and lead a sustained attack on the obstacles to efficiency" as a charter to encroach still further and deeper on the so-called 'preogatives of management', The inefficiencies of capitalist production cannot possibly be overcome until the workers themselves can bring the full power of their brains, as well as their muscles, to bear on production, This is certainly not going to happen until the incubus of private property is thrown off their backs, Property can't think or work: it Can only be used. George Brown really understands this, or otherwise he would exhort the machines and leave the workers alone. But what he doesn't seem to understand is how necessary the workers' inhibitions about productivity are, until the anomaly of the private ownership of social resources is overcorie,.
If any bridge is needed to erable people to understand this riddle, it can only be the bridge of workers' control, which will allow all the workpeople to face the problems of transition to socialism head-on. The Labour movement needs to urge this demand, strongly, before the powersthat-be get down to phase two of their plans,
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