If there’s anything that sends supporters of revolutionary spontaneity of all types and origins over the moon it is the myth of “workers’ control”.
It is obvious that, staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and faced with the threat of closures and lay-offs, the instinctive reaction of proletarians is to try the path of occupation and worker-management. There are many examples: to mention only the most recent, the Brazilian packaging factory Flaskô, in September 2012 (subtitle of a long article in the Italian daily Il Manifesto of 13/9: “Visit to a company which, faced with relocation, has chased out the ‘boss’ and continued production”); and quite recently in mid-February 2013, the Greek pottery factory Vio.Me.(owned by Philkeram-Johnson, the leader in this sector), occupied by the workers who organized themselves as a cooperative and began worker-management. But don’t let us forget what happened during the economic crisis in Argentina, at the beginning of 2000: dozens of factories, mostly small or medium-sized, occupied with worker-managements in the form of cooperatives or jointly managed with the former owners or the State. Or the famous cases of the Innse machine works in Milan in 2009, or Jabil (ex-Nokia), again in Milan, in 2012. No doubt other episodes will follow, more or less spontaneously and more or less piloted or controlled by the official unions.
What is our position as communists, to this sort of action? Do we support it? Can we limit ourselves to commenting that, as this is the will of the workers, it therefore constitutes a positive expression of the workers’ fighting spirit? Obviously not.
Occupying a factory, self-management of it, “getting the machinery going again”, “keeping the production line in order”, “deciding how, what, why and for whom to produce and cooperate” means remaining inside the circle of the damned of capitalist economy: the economy of business companies, of islands of production, still dominated by market laws. “Worker” management, rather than management by “the boss” or “the State” (municipalized, nationalized) does nothing to change its inevitably capitalist nature: there is the obligation to enter the market, to buy and sell, to compete with other companies, to draw up the balance sheet for the year… becoming “little bosses”, “self-entrepreneurs”. This is the prospect that supporters of revolutionary spontaneity of all types and origins encourage amongst proletarians beaten down by the crisis. A rehash of nineteenth-century anarchy based on “free communes” which barter the products of illusory “associated work” amongst themselves. A sort of “grassroots socialism” that sprouts up in the flower gardens bombarded by capitalist economy.
Not only is the issue of power not considered in the least (lord forbid!): it is even impossible to comprehend that socialist economy shall not be a photocopy of bourgeois economy, under a different name. To an economy based on business companies typical of capitalism, Socialism will oppose an economy based on a centralized economic and political plan. Only by means of a centralized economic plan and the centralized and unified management of the whole economic apparatus, will it be possible to allow individual production units to escape the need to valorize and independently accumulate the plusvalue produced by the workers, the need for capitalist entrepreneurial accumulation: briefly, to get out of the capitalist system itself and start socialization of the whole economy, which will no longer be founded on any form of private appropriation. It is not a question of changing the business management of the capitalist process by entrusting it to the workers rather than to other figures but of managing the whole product issuing from the general production process according to a social and no longer entrepreneurial mode: only on this condition can the production process itself rid itself of its capitalist nature, which constantly aims at entrepreneurial accumulation, and will assume a socialist nature for the satisfaction of human social needs. This possibility has now been made feasible more or less everywhere and above all where capitalism is most fully developed and generalized, both in industry and in the service sector and agricultural production. No further developments in capitalism or different forms of management within business enterprises are necessary, but simply and exclusively all the production must be managed socially as a unit, according to a general plan that finally and exclusively takes into account general social needs.
And here, once again, the issue of power arises. Lenin wrote in April 1917: “Control without power is an empty phrase.” Only by keeping a firm hold on the levers of power, won by the revolution guided by the communist party, is it possible to progress to real socialist re-organization, thus not based on business companies, of the whole production apparatus and, more generally, of the whole of society in all its aspects. For supporters of spontaneism, instead, it is possible to manage a single factory independently and then spread this worker management gradually to other factories, so as to obtain … what? But of course! “Workers’ control”! And, invariably, they refer to the experience of “factory occupation” in the so-called “biennio rosso” – the “red two years” from 1919-1920 in Italy.
In fact, it is this very experience that shows how, if the issue of power is neglected, every struggle, however generous, carried out inside the enclosure of the business company, even perhaps excluding the bosses and with occupation and management by the workers, solves nothing – bourgeois power waited patiently (but with its assault troops ready at hand) and, lacking a revolutionary guide, the struggle inside the factories died out. Our comrades, who were at that time leading a harsh struggle against the opportunist direction of the PSI (Italian socialist party) in favour of the constitution of the Communist Party, summed up the terms of the issue very clearly in an article that appeared in their newspaper Il Soviet of 22/2/1920, entitled “Seize the factory or seize the power?”: “it has been said that where factory councils exist, they have operated by taking over the direction of the mills and continuing work. We would not like the working class masses to get the idea that by developing the institution of factory councils, it is automatically possible to take over the factories and eliminate capitalists. This would be the most harmful of illusions. The factory will only be won by the working class – and not only this or that specific categoriy of workers, which would be too slight an achievement and surely not a communist one – when the whole of the working class has gained control of political power. Without the latter, any illusions will promptly be dispelled by the royal guards, the carabinieri, etc. themselves, i.e. the mechanism of oppression and power at the service of the bourgeoisie, its political power apparatus. These vain and continual outbreaks by the working class masses, which day by day wear themselves out in small efforts, must be channelled, united, organized into a single, great, overall effort aiming directly to strike at the heart of the bourgeois enemy. This function can and must be performed exclusively by a communist party, which does not, and must not have any task at this point, other than that of directing all its efforts towards making the working-class masses aware of the need for this vast political action, which is the only major route by which they will far more directly gain possession of the factory that they are attempting in vain to win by other means.” (1)
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Now some will say: “What do you mean, power! What do you mean, socialism! Here proletarians face the problem of survival, of feeding themselves!” True, and in fact we are not focusing on those workers who, abandoned to their own devices or as the victims of bad advice from the “faithful servants of capitalism” (see: unions and opportunist and reformist political groups), are under the illusion that they are dealing in this way, by means of “workers’ control and workers’ management”, with the attacks levelled at them by the bosses, by capital and by the State. We are aiming at all those who, in the past and in the present and certainly in the future, deviate the energy of the proletariat, trapping it in blind allies and in a perspective doomed to failure, preventing it from expressing itself in real class antagonism. Even when starting out from one isolated workplace or the other, any movement of militant opposition and solidarity must break out of it, setting itself the objective not of creating illusory “islands of alternative production” or “counter-power” (!!!) – which, however, exclude whole, huge sectors of the proletariat, such as the unemployed or precarious workers, who have no workplace to occupy and manage! – but to constitute territorial organisms of defence and proletarian struggle. The latter must be capable of sustaining over a period of time and extending to increasingly broad sectors the battles that the economic crisis will inevitably spark off, whatever their form and with all their objectives: wages, hours, pace of work, safety in the workplace, but also pensions, the cost of living, housing, daily survival, defence from the legal or illegal squadrons of bourgeois power and so on.
Not inside the factories (where, even in the most democratic of régimes, the gates bear the notorious sign Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work Liberates!”) but outside on the streets and in the squares: it is here that the destiny of “workers’ control” is decided! And it is decided according to the sole perspective that the bloody attacks of the capitalist crisis will make increasingly evident and necessary, that of preparation for revolution and the seizing of power. Otherwise the “fine dreams” of those, of whatever colour or origin, who support spontaneism will turn into the worst of nightmares: and, of course, not for them, but for the proletariat!
Notes:
(1) Quoted in our Storia della Sinistra comunista. 1919-1920 [History of the Communist Left. 1919-1920], Edizioni Il programma comunista, Milano 1972, p.177.
International Communist Party