[The refusal of the leaders of the Transport…]
Socialist Press1975 1975-08-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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The refusal of the leaders of the Transport & General Worker Union to use the industrial strength of the union as a whole to force the Labour Government to nationalise NVT threatens the jobs of the labour force in each of the factories.
Because of the lack of a programme on which to fight, NVT workers in the Wolverhamp ton and Small Heath factories may be forced into hopeless workers' co-operative projects supported by the trade union leaders as "safe" utopian actions with all the politics left out.
NVT workers should reject this trap, which would lead them ¡to speed-up via the 'viability' greement and eventual defeat.
MANAGEMENT
The real nature of co-operative is shown by the attitude of the NVT management, who have said that they support the idea, and by some of the NVT suppliers - who have already offered credit to a future cooperative.
It is through the suppliers and the distribution that a workers' co-operative remains within the orbit of capitalism and workers become super exploited, throu massive speed-up, as an article entitled The Myth of Cooperatives said in February this year: "The capitalist, as Marx pointed out, is only the carrier and the personifier of the capitalist relations of production. The physical absence of the capitalist in a particular case does nothing to annul those relations."
The only course of action for NVT workers is an occupation to force the nationalisation of NVT under workers' management and with state contracts to keep the factories open.