Revolutionary Strategy ? ?

The New Unionism: The Case for Workers' Control.

By Ken Coates and Tony Topham. Published by Penguin Books Harmondsworth, Middlesex. Retail price $2.10, 280 pages.

Reviewed by Nicholas Griffin.

This important book made its first appearance in 1972 as a hardback. Its reappearance with an updating postscript, in a cheaper edition, is very welcome. Its authors are both members of the Institute for Workers' Control in England. As a result much of their most detailed commentary concerns the British industrial situation, although there is a useful account of workers' control in Yugoslavia and the distinctly less attractive German co-determination scheme often confused with workers' control. Nonetheless, the central theses of the book are generalisable to all western industrialised nations. It contains important lessons to be learnt by NZ unionists.

Coates and Topham argue the case for workers establishing complete control over their industry as part of a democratic transformation of society, thereby gaining autonomy in those wide areas presently under the authoritarian rule of management. They see this as a stage on the road to full industrial democracy in a socialised society where co-operative production is for social needs rather than for profit. This they term 'self management'. It seems to me that they are correct in treating self-management as the ultimate aim, for workers' control which falls short of self-management is inherently unstable. This seems to be one of the main lessons of the Yugoslav experience where workers' control was set (with good reason at the time) within a market economy. The resultant pressures, aided by western penetration of the Yugoslav economy, have resulted in a tendency to revert to the capitalist mode of production. There is no way to avoid a market economy, short of autocratic state planning or some combination of the two, without a complete socialist transformation of society. Either alternative undermines genuine workers' control. Thus once workers' control is established, pressure for self-management must be maintained or else the ground gained will be lost. It seems to me that this coclusion is implicit in the authors' argument but is not sufficiently emphasised.

The authors are rightly sceptical or management proposals for workers' participation and urge caution on unions prepared to bargain on these proposals. The flexible policy they advocate is surely correct here: participation, after all, may help workers to develop the skills they will need if workers' control is to work later; it may also develop the appetite for control. On the other hand, it may be used to buy off more important workers' demands by giving them minority representation on committees whose powers are illusory (a familiar outcome of student-power campaigns) and thus result in reducing worker autonomy. Similarly isolated examples of co-operative production, whilst useful as 'laboratories' in which much can be learnt about the democratic reorganisation of industry, offer no real hope for the general reform of industry since they are incapable of effecting reforms outside their factory gates and are prevented from serious expansion by their capitalist competitors.

Woodrow Wyatt, in a review (notable mainly for its flippant complacency) of the first edition, attacked the book as 'Utopian'. In fact one of the best things about the book is that it includes a detailed account of practical and immediate steps unions can take towards workers' control without losing sight of the overall objective - to produce a free society of autonomous men and women. If it is Utopian to be less cynical about people than Woodrow Wyatt is then Coates and Topham are Utopian - but then Utopianism is not incompatible with realism.

The book seems to me to be one of the most important statements of the practice and theory of socialism that has appeared recently. Its practical lessons should be learnt by all trade unionists.