Workers’ control¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the impending collapse of wartime capitalist “planning”—made possible only by the unlimited war market—will expose the underlying anarchy of the capitalist system, forcing the working class to confront the need for a genuine plan of production. The core narrative thrust is that the demand for workers’ control of industry is the only effective answer to the chaos of demobilisation and the transition from war to peace production, and that this demand simultaneously serves to separate revolutionary Marxists from the reformist trade union leaders and labour movement renegades who “stop short in pious trepidation before the thresholds of the trusts and their business secrets,” as the Transitional Programme puts it.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, workers’ control is not socialism, but a necessary transitional step toward it: the capitalists still own and manage industry, but their operations are placed under the open observation of factory and trade union organisations. Workers must gain access to the “secrets” of banks, heavy industries, and transport systems to effectively counter the plans of the government and the trusts. Second, once workers grasp and implement workers’ control, the next stage—explaining the credits and debits of capitalist society, the share of national income squandered by the capitalist class, tax avoidance swindles, and the waste of labour resources—becomes straightforward. A concrete picture of capitalist anarchy can be drawn, and the system swept away.
The chapter draws on the theoretical framework of the Transitional Programme, applying it to the concrete conditions of the immediate post-war period. It uses the example of the Belgian Miners’ Union, which adopted a resolution demanding the opening of closed mines previously operated by collaborationists and their operation under trade union and factory committee control. The author notes that such demands arise from pressure of the masses, not from the leaders’ revolutionary initiative, unless those leaders are under the influence of the Fourth International. The threat of mine and tinplate plant closures in South Wales is cited as a case where the transitional programme—including expropriation or nationalisation without compensation—would find an immediate response among workers.
The chapter contains notable polemics against sectarian tendencies within the revolutionary movement. It warns against turning one’s back on partial struggles and daily problems, dismissing such an approach as replacing Marxian tactics with “sectarian phrases.” It insists that it is impossible to write a blueprint of tactics from which party cadres must not deviate, and that concrete answers will arise from the struggle itself. A constant tactical consideration, however, is the defence and extension of mass trade union organisations, at least until they are replaced by more revolutionary forms—a point particularly relevant to Britain, where the unions organise 40 percent or more of the industrial proletariat.