Workers" Contro N the Fight to Force

Scan page 4

One of the most abused and misapplied slogans current in the workers movement today is the call for "workers control". It is used to mean all things to all tendencies.

The Workers Socialist League was founded on the basis of a deep going struggle to return to the method and principles of Trotsky's Transitional Programme, and central to that programme is the fight at every level for forms of workers control. For this reason we have the task of restoring the revolutionary content of this slogan and exposing the perversions of it by other groups which today drag the demand in the mud.

The Transitional Programme is a guide to action, a Marxist programme to develop and strengthen politically the working class in the process of its daily struggles, through the intervention and building of the revolutionary party. Its goal isito prepare the working class politically and organisationally for the struggle for state power.

Trade union officials and businessmen, Council on Productivity, in the post IS This, like today's Chequers plan, was ch Unlike the programme of social democracy, which completely separates talk of "socialism" (as a prospect for the indefinite future) from its actual programme of minimal reforms, the Transitional Programme grasps the necessity to:

•..help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist prog ramme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the prolétariat" (pp 1415)

In other words, under conditions where capitalism in crisis can no longer improve or even maintain workers living standards and the existing productive forces, the transitional demands begin with the cosential contradiction between the potential strength in struggle of the working dass, and its politica!

paters a reflected in tibe opp ai date of prairana shit ers to break from their present reformist and Stalinist leaders, and sees the need for these struggles to begin from the daily class battles fought by workers - over jobs, wages, conditions, the independence of the unions, the nationalisation of bankrupt firms - in order to advance their political understanding.

TODAY'S STRUGGLES Transitional demands are therefore demands - such as the sliding scale of wages, work sharing on full pay, or the opening of the employers' books - which begin in material struggles faced today and which can be seen as necessary demands to solve problems confronted by workers, but which cannot be fully conceded within the framework of capitalism. Trotsky makes this clear in a discussion on the Programme with the American SWP in March 1938:

"Naturally we must make our first step in such a way as to accumulate experience for pracmember sof the Anglo-American 145 reformist drive for productivity collaboration not workers control tical work, not to engage in abstract formulas, but to develop a concrete programme of action and demands in the sense that this transitional programme issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism. It is not the reformist minimum programme, Lie reforms within capitalism, JL which never included workers' militia, workers' control of production. These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian revolution, a consequence insofar as they become the demands of the masses as the proletarian government. We can't stop only with the day-to-day demands of the proletariat. We must give to the most backward workers some concrete stogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to the conquest of porper." (Discussions on the Transitiones Progremme, 1938!

Ise demands of the Iransition to be popularised, to enable,them to become a material factor in developing the political awareness of workers. The objective in fighting for transitional demands is to reach the point where for large forces within the organised labour movement:

"The old 'minimal programme' is superseded by the transitional programme, the task of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution" • (TP p 16)

But of course demands do not on their own produce changes in workers' political thinking. It is not sufficient merely to print transitional demands in papers and leaflets, hoping some day workers will spontaneously take up the fight for them.

The struggle to win support for the demands must begin with the revolutionary leadership and their fight in the mass movement The lessons from this fight continuously enrich our understanding of the role and impact of transitional demands and strengthen the work that follows.

Thus only experience of the struggle in the workers movement taught WSL comrades that the demand in the Transitional Programme for the "sliding scale of hours" can best be grasped by workers if expressed in the popular form of "work sharing on full pay" . The content of the slogan is the same, but the impact much greater on the workers movement.

In a similar way the call for the "abolition of business secrets" in the Transitional Programme has won a mass response in the British Leyland Cowley factories-in the form of the demand to "open the Books - to elected trade union committees"

Here a basic slogan from the Trotskyist programme has been both popularised and brought right to the centre of workers daily struggles against speed up and redundancy. It has been overwhelmingly adopted both by the shop stewards committee and by a mass meeting at the Assembly Plant, and played a key role in challenging the extreme right wing leadership in the plant.

All this would of course have been lost if the WL had regarded the transitional demands as ab stractions, propaganda statements Thrown dowato the working class ESSENCE In their essence, the transitiona demands embody the fight for workers control. The initial demand struggle for the sliding scale of wages to be on figures assessed by trade union committees: for the books to be opened to elected trade union representatites ers sympatheric experis chosen bi them; for work sharing on full pay to be administered by made union committees on marnizat each step poses setting up the independent bodies of the morting class in counter position to employers and the state itschf Each of these demands s tberefore completely in opposition to any joint involverseat of trade unionists with management on committees, which is used by reformists and Stalinists to mas querade as "workers' control"

manio of this John Lister oration within British Leyland, where at each level within the combine there will be "participation" committees, the sole terms of reference of which is to "improve efficiency", and acceptance that "executive responsibility rests with management" . The committees are a complete fraud, with the straight forward job of imposing speed up with the stolen authority of the trade union movement.

To see the complete contrast between "participation" and genuine workers' control it is only necessary to contrast the latest Common Market plan to legislate widescale 'participation' and the right wing enthusiasm for Ryder with the storm of Tory press hostility to the workers councils and factory committees in Portugal, which really are coercing the employers and controlling their action: within the factories.

Yet it is not just the Communist Party and the right wing who are involved up to their necks in the Ryder plan - leading members of the International Socialists, the Militant group, and the Workers Revolutionary Party have been involved in the collaboration leading up to the formation of the "joint" committees, or subsequently stood for election to them.

WRONG SLOGAN

It is no accident that these three groups also share a com pletely wrong slogan on nationalisation which again diverts away from the fight for workers' control. Each of them (with only minor variations) carries the demand for 'Nationalisation of major industry without compensation under workers' control"

What they leave completely in the air is any struggle to bring about such nationalisation. Indeed the demand for workers' control, tacked on the end of the slogan, suggest that it is only to be fought for after nationalisation - which presumably must be legislated through parliament while workers look on passively from the sidelines.

SUPERVISION

Lenin and Trotsky never used the demand for nationalisation or for workers control in this way. For them the fight for workers control was the fight for the control or supervision of an elected committee of workers over the decisions of an employer, who still owned the factory.

Workers control of production is a transitional demand which leads workers from their present trade union, reformist, level of consciousness, to the point where they compel nationalisations and will struggle for state power. Trotsky summed this up: writing:

"Contra: lies in the hands of tie Fortes This means : an IF 270 thre spiraliner.

DEAL POWER

situation si dari posser a factory hevel There ae too opposed authorities on the plant - the bourgeois management on the one hand and the factory committee on the othes.

It can lead either to the ro power of the employer, or to the revolutionary expropriation of the employers as a class.

To achieve this expropriation the assertion of workers' control must take on a national rather than a local character - and lead on to the consolidation. and broadening of factory committees into soviets - challenging the power of the capitalist state. Trotsky again makes this clear.

"Workers' control is thus not a prolonged 'normal' condition, like wage-scale agreements or social insurance. Control is a transitional measure under conditions of the highest tension of the class war, and conceivable only as a bridge to the revolutionary nationalisation of industry."

So what does it mean to call, as do the revisionists, for "nationalisation ….. under workers' control"? Only that this bridge is to be left out, that the struggle to force nationalisation is set aside, while the abstract slogan of 'socialism' (the expropriation of basic industry, or '250 monopolies' in the case of the Militant phrasemongers) is wheeled in to fill its place.

At the same time we find these revisionists have no conception of the fight to open the books of the employers. The International Socialists oppose the demand wherever it is raised; Militant as usual vary their verbal position from place to place, but carry out no fight; while the WRP, in words committed to fight for the demand, has done nothing to carry it forward in the unions, and least of all in Cowley where despite their position, the first 'Open the Books' Committee is actually functioning.

LINKED

Yet for Trotsky the two demands are completely linked -indeed a whole section of the Transitional Programme is entitled " 'Business Secrets' and Workers' Control of Industry" , where he writes:

"...The abolition of 'business secrets' is the first step toward actual control of industry.

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 first and foremost, banks, heavy industry and centralised transport should be placed under an observation glass." (Emphas:

is added)

The whole section (which precedes any call for nationalisa: tion in the Transitional Programme) ends by stressing:

"The task is one of re organising the whole system of production and distribution on a ware digaified and workable basiz I dee rioticion of business secrets =: condition to morkanoral then control is the a pay the road to the = is demand the taking of state power. Dr provide a road of appacanti atio wins support and understanding of the masses for revolution.

Trotsky says in discussion on th 'open the books demand:

"This transitional dessed i

Scan page 5

SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesda :mber 26rh 19: control of production as the preparatory plan for the crucial step as well turning the whole demand into abstraction. force nationalisation.

At the same time it challenges

----- pull-quotes -----

il Programme are not ideal or utopian demands for the indefinite futare therefore. bur to be made