Fight for Workers' Control

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ORGANISER How to fight the Tories There Where Te westand agt Labour Socialist The 10 m Porty ORGANISER for Fight socialist poix ruling class was getting rattled about the coal strike when their press launched an attack - mouths foaming, throats raving, teeth gnashing - on NUM researcher Peggy Kahn.

Kahn is the joint author with Arthur Scargill, of a pamphlet called "The Myth of "Workers' Control'. trial democracy' or 'participation' they rightly criticise 'induspolicies under the last Labour government which were, in their words: "diverting the efforts of the labour movement from effective forms of industrial conflict and political struggle ...

They also criticise organisations like the Institute for Workers Control (IWC) which supported the cause of workers' control 'achieved through a process within capitalism' Scargill's experience of absentee committees at pit level, which included NUM representatives disciplining their own members, highlights the dangers of such forms of participation.

Both authors also point out that the nationalised industries "were the anvil on which incomes policies were hammered out, and workers' control contained no remedy for imposed pay restraint."

They counterpose free collective bargaining and political activity by trade unions to the various forms of workers' participation (or in the language of SocialistOrganiser, class- collaboration) dreamed up by the Fabians or IWC.

The revolutionary implications of the demand for workers' control, linked to actual class struggle - for example during the current action - are nowhere considered in the pamphlet. In fact demands for the opening of the books, linked to such actions as occupations are mentioned but without comment.

- Scargill and Khan write about the 1979 Plan for Coal and the tripartite body set up to implement it as an ares ixhara them union 'could exercise its influ- HO arca wiltit lne ence through the process of collective bargaining'.

Surely tripartite bodies are just as damnable as the consultative committees, working Arthur. Scarsill. against the membersip? In fact, even more so, as rank and file struggles over wages and pit closures were sold out by Joe Gormley on the pretext of preserving the Plan for Coal.

Now even this has been torn up by the Tories and Tebbit has again been hinting at the denationalisation of the coal industry.

Arthur Scargill and Peggy Khan are right to pillory industrial democracy when it is an attempt to evade (as they emphasise), the "conflict in the relationship between labour and capital"

They are also right to call for the building of a left wing political movement to resist attarke an the unions, and for those unions to construct a left-wing Labour Party "which is accountable to its members ...

The pamphlet's main weakness is that it does not spell out policies around which such a movement should be built.

Socialist Organiser does support workers' control - but in the context of it being a demand in the class struggle to be organised around and fought for, for example in the current fight against pit closures.

Whatever the outcome of the strike, government appointees will still be in charge of the National Coal Board, with the right to close pits. Remember even Joe Gormley was offered that job by Tony Benn!

The following words were written by W.F. Hay of the South Wales Socialist Society in 1919. control with the state offers an alluring prospect to leaders'. the working miner it is simply a change of masters.

Socialists like Hay were feeling their way away from syndicalism towards a revolutionary policy for the members of the miners unions, where the State owned the mines, and the miners controlled them.

Nationalisation is under attack and we mobilise to defend it. But if the current fight, by its own logic, does develop towards a general strike, then the demand for workers' control must be central if such a momentous struggle is not just to result in a cobbled u tripartite committee decidin which pit to close, or the partic pation schemes of the Alternativ Economic Strategy which reir force class collaboration.

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