["Open the Books!" is a slogan much used…]

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"Open the Books!" is a slogan much used and much abused in the growing crisis of British capitalism. From the lips of the reformist trade union and Labour leaders it is a plea to the employers to deliver a watertight alibi for their own refusal to defend jobs and wages.

But from the growing numbers of workers involved in struggle to defend their right to work, and against the employers' offensive on speed-up and on wages, it is a demand with a revolutionary content. It threatens to set loose the treasured and sacred "business secrets" of the capitalist class, and is intimately bound up with the threat to end private ownership itself.

The Investigator's Handbook, a guide to hundreds of sources of publicly available, but often little known information on companies, organisations and individuals provides a key to background material which can, if correctly used, greatly strengthen campaigns by wrokers for company books to be opened to trade union committees.

The Handbook is mainly directed towards assisting the 'libertarian' and anarchist currents which surround 'community newspapers' and of course for this reason misses out the significance of the fight to force companies to reveal business secrets. That is not the authors' intention. They seek to provide access to information for exposees rather than to direct towards the class questions involved in access to the account ledgers.

SECRETS

Indeed merely to dig around in the sources discussed in the Handbook will not in itself open the books of industry. But by revealing previously unknown information on the company in question, by revealing little known connections, and some of the complexity and concealment involved, such material can show powerfully the necessity of trade union struggle to demand the full picture, the unpublished material, the 'secrets' themselves.

Why open up the secrets of capitalism? Because only when the broadest possible layer of workers understands the necessity to end the system can the necessary determination arise to carry through the overthrow of capitalist private property.

The exposure of the concealed workings of the system begins to prepare for this, because it shows not only the corruption, the profiteering, the manipulation and the gross exploitation which are inherent in capitalism,' but also its increasing bankruptcy, its squandered resources, and the block it puts on scientific and technological improvements.

For Marxists the opening of the accounts of industry has always been a means to mobilise the masses. This is why as Trotsky wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution: "At the June [1917] Congress of Soviets, Lenin demanded serious measures of struggle against lockouts, plunderings and organised disruption of economic life on the part of the industrialists and bankers. 'Publish the profits of the capitalist gentlemen, arrest fifty or a hundred of the biggest millionaires. It will be enough to hold them for a few weeks, even on such privileged terms as Nicholas Romanov is held, with the simple aim of compelling them to reveal the threads, the tricky manipulations, the filth, the selfishness, which even today under the new | reformist coalition i government are costing our country millions' " [History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 1 p392] This method itself flowed from the lessons and movements of that revolutionary period. Workers had begun in any case to challenge both the employer's right to shut down factories, and the figures on which he based his case: "The manufacturers would refer to an absence of fuel, raw materials accessories, credits. The factory committees would interfere in the matter and in many cases indubitaby establish the fact of a malicious dislocation of industry with the goal of bringing pressure on the workers, or holding up the government for subsidies ... In several cases the sabotage was so obvious that as a result of the exposures of the shop committees the industrialists. found themselves compelled to re-open the factories, thus laying bare one contradiction after another." (History of the Russian Vol. 1, p. 385] The struggle itself then could have the most dramatic effects. Of course Trotsky is here describing a revolutionary period, but wher we turn to the programme for agitation in the present epoch -"a pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organisation" , as Trotsky's Transitional Programme describes it - then such demands play a role in mobilising the working class and in the training and development of revolutionary leadership. "Open the Books" as a transitional demand in this way starts from the daily struggles and problems of workers, and clashing at each point with the requirements of capitalism and the limitations of reformism and Stalinism, directs workers towards the basic questions of power. Trotsky shows this clearly in the Programme:

«Workers no less than capitalists have the right to know the 'secrets' of the factory, of the trust, of the whole branch of industry, of the national economy as a whole. The immediate tasks of workers' control should be to explain the debits and credits of society, beginning with individual business undertakings; to determine the actual share of the national income appropriated by individual capitalists and by the exploiters as a whole; to expose the behind-the-scenes deals and swindles of banks and trusts; finally, to reveal to all members of society that uncons. cionable squandering of human labour which is the result of capitalist anarchy and the naked pursuit of profits." (p. 22)

Here Trotsky talks of opening the books in the context of workers' control, meaning control by factory committees over the management, which creates a "dual power" within the factory at the point of production. The employer still owns the plant, and still receives the profits. But on questions relating to the production process workers organisations begin to deprive him of the control of that plant, de manding final say on manning, on track speed, on pay. As Irotsky states this situation cannot long continue because "by its very essence it represents the transitional state, because it includes in itself two irreconcileable regimes; the capitalist and the proletarian."

Completely different from current phoney concepts of 'participation', ' the factory committee retains full independence as a trade union committee. To strengthen its position in the plant it must work-for the widest support, and and, in this, publicising information on the company concerned, its links, its profits, its swindling and deceit of the workers can play a key role.

CHALLENGE

At the same time we must be clear that to carry through the fight for such tactory committees raises the question of what kind of leadership is prepared in this way to challenge, root and branch, the mos entrenched capitalist property relations. Only the most resolute and politically conscious layers will carry through such a fight, and this demands the building of a Trotskyist revolutionary leadership.

While mobilising broader layers of workers, the struggle to open the books trains groups of workers and the left alements in the C.D.

At the moment the various to understand the workings of their industry, and opens up the possibility, after nationalisation, of that industry coming under workers' management, run by elected trade union committees, and dispensing with the old managers installed by the employers. Trotsky shows how factory committees must come together on regional and national levels:

"Thus workers' control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality stikes." (Transitional Programme p. 23)

The Investigators Handbook is thus an assistance only tor the very first leg of this central struggle in the workers movement. Its political limitations are clear and to a certain extent self-confessed, though the authors correctly stress that: "Information should be used politically. This pamphlet has not been prepared to encourage attacks on others for the hell of it. The information must be put to political ise as part of a campaign." (p.5) They go on to say that: "Reports and pamphlets are not the end of a campaign: they are part of it ... Generally the publicity they attract is short-lived, so that you should continue to lobby to follow up your report."

The use of the word "lobby" indicates the protest politics of the Community Action Group. Nevertheless the Handbook explains some basic techniques of research, some necessary terminology, and directs towards sources of information which should be known to workers.

It can therefore be recommended to trade unionists to be used in the fight in every plant for trade union committees to confront the employers and demand the disclosure of business secrets. Despite its flimsy cover, the 30p price should ensure a wide sale in the workers movement.