(A)musings About Marx and the British Left
Is socialism still credible as the alternative to capitalism? If so, what kind of socialism are we talking about? How do we unite today’s Left around that model of socialism? It will take many different posts to even begin to answer those questions. In the meantime, there are several ideas contained in Gavin Kitching’s Rethinking Socialism: A Theory for a Better Practice (Methuen University Paperbacks, 1983) that can help in that endeavour. Here is a list of points made by Kitching that I will return to in future posts, followed by brief comments.
Is Socialism Still Credible as an Alternative to Capitalism?
(1) Definition of socialism: “Socialism is the greatest possible degree of conscious human control over the personal, social and natural environment exercized democratically” (p30).
(2) Preconditions for Socialism: Kitching believes that socialism is only possible once two major preconditions have been realized, world-level prosperity and an active citizenry. “My central thesis is that the construction of socialist societies and a socialist world will take a very long time (probably centuries) and that an essential prerequisite of such a world coming into being is a high degree of material prosperity and a citizenry of considerable skill, knowledge and intellectual sophistication” (p1).
Why world-level prosperity? Because the experience of attempts to create socialist societies in poor countries, whether as the result of Marxist revolutions or in Third World states with (elected) ‘socialist’ governments, has shown that the mass of people necessarily look after themselves and their families at the expense of others. There is not enough produced for everyone to share a high or even basic standard of living. Those who are altruistic in forgoing the opportunity to divert money and resources from their government job will simply be losers facing absolute poverty, while selfish and corrupt opportunists will be at least partial winners. Regimes are rational in not having genuine democracy because no rational worker or peasant would vote to put themselves through the level of exploitation and deferment of gratification required to achieve accelerated industrialization and modernization (p3, pp49-55). And, although Kitching does not explicitly argue the point, as long as there are poor countries in the capitalist world system to extract superprofits from, workers in rich countries will continue to be rendered conservative by the superconsumerism that this makes possible.
Why an active citizenry? Socialism will not be achieved for generations, perhaps not for hundreds of years. One reason is the time needed to achieve world-wide prosperity. But even if this were achieved tomorrow, genuine socialism would not be possible for a second, entirely separate reason: the mass of working people are not yet capable of actually ruling from below, i.e. ruling while they are still in the subordinate social position of being workers or peasants or whatever. Confusingly, Kitching’s formal definition of socialism is “human control… exercized democratically”. A reader might infer then that he thinks that the fight to gradually increase the amount of democratic control won by subordinate classes and groups is a process of gradually evolving into socialism.
Capitalism Will Never Evolve into Socialism — What Can Evolve is Prosperity and Regular People Learning to Rule
But Kitching is very clear that this is not what he believes. Rather he believes that the Left should encourage any and all democracy from below struggles, including ones that are led by non-socialists. Those struggles can realistically only be waged on the basis of a concept of shared citizenship (if only because differentiation within the working class makes a common social and political class consciousness unachievable). The cultivation of a sense of being a citizen with a duty to actively serve is something that will need to be realized before a serious process of winning and then building socialism can begin. Those struggles for active citizenship will be key in schooling the mass of people in the knowledge-skills and research-planning-management experience and self-confidence to actually rule.
Claims-making struggles by interest groups that are simply learning to be militant in demanding more for their self-defined group will not provide this schooling. Popular struggles will only prepare the ground for socialism to the extent that they engender what Kitching refers to as the classic republican virtues of active service in the performance of civic duties in order to serve the general interest . Kitching also notes that Marx’s conception of a socialist/communist society is one in which self-discipline (and the foregoing of narrow self-interest in order to achieve the general interest) must exist in order to replace a system in which top-down discipline (and service to the ‘general interest’ as defined by the profit-making needs of private capitalists) is imposed by bosses and their enforcement apparatuses (pp13-17, pp30-33, pp44-45).
(3) Replacing capitalism on two levels: Socialism will require changing capitalism to be more equitable and democratic and free for workers in different ways on the (micro) level of the local workplace and on the (macro) level of the whole economy.
Capitalism Increases Rational Control of Work — But Markets are Irrational and Produce Neverending Crises
On the micro level, capitalists use ever-increasing monitoring and time-motion Taylorist controlling of employees on top of the intimidation of insecure non-union jobs to squeeze out more profit. Hence socialism will want to reduce centralized monitoring and controlling and ensure that all jobs are secure and union. On the micro level, the watchwords for socialism will be decentralization, autonomy, accountability of the company and local management to employees as well as other stakeholders through mainly participatory democratic processes complemented with some delegation of decisions (but with maximum transparency).
In contrast, on the macro level the problem with capitalism is not too much rational controlling by a united class of capitalists. There is not any centralized set of capitalists who define a set of needs to be met in the overall society and then figure out how to meet them. Decisions on the macro level are made by a decentralized network of capitalists and buyers and sellers seeking to maximize their individual profit in gambling casinos called markets (stock, capital, currency, production etc). Hence socialism will need to correct this irrational boom and bust cycle, and especially the failure of capitalists to produce to meet the needs of all people equitably, with some type of rational central planning (pp31-32). This will likely need to be supplemented by some market mechanisms (see below).
(4) Democracy will be complex and always changing in socialist societies: Socialist democracy cannot just be complete autonomy for all enterprises and organizations plus participatory democracy by workers deciding everything at the workplace level (workers control). As experimentation in Yugoslavia and other Marxist states have shown, workers in fully autonomous enterprises will tend to think only of what is best for their enterprise. Thus enterprise level democracy will have to be some variation on the theme of tripartism where decision-making authority is shared in varying proportions (not always just one-third each) by three parties – employees, consumers of the product and the community (p132).
Local Control by Workers in Each Workplace Will Result in Decisions Serving Narrow Self-Interest — Multiple Stakeholders at Multiple Levels Must Be Involved
And, although some activists who love endless Occupy Wall Street type public assemblies may not believe it, most people (including them) get tired of those meetings pretty quickly. When people aspire to a more democratic society they do not mean the opportunity to be obliged to spend hours of their time, day in and out, in such neighbourhood and workplace and other organization assemblies. So there will be a need for some representative democracy, albeit more like a delegate democracy where the representatives make their decisions transparently and are ultimately accountable to assemblies than a democracy of representatives elected to some long-term committee or council. But, even then, there will be plenty of the latter type of representative democracy too.
A socialist economy needs to be better in all ways than a capitalist one. That means that it cannot just be more democratic, it must also be more efficient and effective in producing and distributing the highest quality of goods and services (p76). And that means decisions will require the input of specialists and experts in multiple ways. First, even participatory decision-making by ordinary non-expert citizens/employees needs to draw on the most advanced knowledges produced by people with specialized education. Second, sometimes the decisions to be made will require specialized expert knowledge by the actual decision-makers (e.g. decisions on medical surgery or the operation of turbines in a nuclear plant). Third, lots of reviewable but still final decisions will need to be made on the spot and minute to minute by individuals and small groups who develop specialized knowledge and relevant experience over time. In other words, a socialist economy will need lots and lots of specialized occupations and bureaucracies (p41).
Many Varieties of Public Ownership Will Predominate — But There Will Also Be Some Market Mechanisms
In addition, there will be a need for an even more elaborate set of democratic processes to achieve an ongoing day to day as well as longer term reconciliation between the interests of all the different enterprises at the overall economy level. A single central planning authority cannot possibly do this alone, even with ever improving access to big data by ever more powerful computers. A socialist economy will be overwhelmingly based on various forms of public ownership. But even these public enterprises will need to supplement democratic processes of debate, negotiation and compromise with market mechanisms (at the very least, this will be necessary to incorporate effective demand and supply information into pricing costs and benefits accurately). The experience of Marxist states shows that a market mechanism is “the only effective way to match the use of resources to their relative scarcity, to guarantee a real degree of consumer choice and power and to provide for real [decentralized, face to face level] worker and community controls over enterprises” (p42). To repeat, these market mechanisms are not in and of themselves capitalist markets (which would be markets serving private capital accumulation), although they could be the seeds of them.
Furthermore, the “constitutional ‘checks and balances’ [in capitalist democracies]… are no mere ‘ideological mystifications’ to be swept aside” (p41). Socialism is not a libertarian absence of norms and laws. It is social science 101 that shared norms, including codified and explicitly enforceable ones called laws, are indispensable building blocks in any society. Equally basic is the need to avoid concentrations of power, and this includes concentrations where the power is exercized in the purest form of participatory democracy imaginable.
Socialism is Based on Constitutional Rights and Democratically Decided Laws — Many Political Parties Can Compete If They Accept the Parameters of a Progressive Post-Capitalism
Kitching also declares that a socialist society would need institutionalized competition between different policy programmes and individuals to fill decision-making posts, especially given the threat of power concentrating at the top in central planning bodies in a mostly public ownership society, but also at every other level. Such competition must be “regularized in competing political parties with competing socialist programmes” (p43). Competing socialist programmes. This issue could be the subject for lots of political science analysis and debate. Capitalist democracies effectively ban parties that aim to eliminate capitalism or to go backwards in time to feudal or other anti-Enlightenment, anti French and American and British revolution principles. Kitching is saying that socialist societies should do the same. Presumably he would favour tolerating anti-socialist parties as long as they are marginal. It is a realistic but obviously controversial suggestion.
(5) Market socialism: Extensive use of market mechanisms to complement processes of democratic planning does not require private ownership (which would result in private capital accumulation). “For an argument in favour of market socialism, but with a strong directing state, which seems, at least in its essentials, to be unanswerable, see Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, London, Allen & Unwin, 1983”. Kitching adds that he “see[s] no objection to the maintenance of private ownership of very small production and service enterprises”, which would of course include what we call start-ups (p42). Startups, but no unicorns.
Kitching devotes two chapters to making an apt critique of the three main parts of the British Left and their thinking about how to develop and maintain a socialist economy (pp64-77 and pp141-178). He argues that the classic Fabians, the Tony Benn led 1970s Bennite Left and the E.P. Thompson New Left all end up being ‘romantic anti-capitalists’ with no elaborated analysis or specific proposals for a full-scale socialist economy. (There are obvious exceptions, including journals like the New Left Review and Capital and Class but they are essentially academic, and marginal to actual Left political activism.)
The 1970s British Left Made a Virtue of Its Ignorance of Both Mainstream and Socialist Economics
This is because all three parts of the British Left did (and still do) two things in varying combinations. First, they all treat their total ignorance of modern economics as a badge of pride. They end up being uncritical supporters of some variant of Keynesian economics. Even if your goal is to save capitalism and make it a bit more humane (these were Keynes’s explicit goals), Keynesianism is quite clearly no longer able to provide any answers for today’s economies where tradeoffs between inflation and full employment or savings and investment are no longer workable, the way they were in Les Trentes Glorieuses from 1945 to 1973. Yes academic economics operates off many assumptions that result in a circular logic justifying capitalism as the only possible economy. It is still science and its insights and techniques are invaluable. The same could of course be said for all the other social sciences. Second, they are equally ignorant of Marx’s economic writings and fail to study all the Marxist and socialist economists who have done important work building on the crucial insights of Capital since. Hence today’s left (because this has not changed much, if at all, since 1983) is unable to develop a new up to date socialist economics that can incorporate mainstream economics.
(6) Universal Basic Services (UBS): In a socialist economy, some production and distribution would be in the public sector and some in the private sector. Kitching proposes that democratic processes should “identify a ‘bundle’ of goods and services to which access should be on the basis of need, not discretionary want” that would be produced by the public sector and available at no or minimum and affordable cost. “Obvious candidates for inclusion would be health and education services, housing, domestic heat and light, transport, and at least ‘basic’ food and clothing” (p43). This proposal anticipates the idea of guaranteeing a ‘floor’ basic standard of living for everyone, that is currently becoming popular in the form of proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Except it is fundamentally different, because it is socialist provision not capitalist provision. It is a variant of the left answer to UBI, which some call Universal Basic Services (UBS).
Guaranteeing Everyone a Minimum Standard of Living (Goods and Services) Is a Good Idea — a Universal Basic Income (UBI) plan Is Not
Perhaps some version of UBI could be a supplement to UBS but there is a reason why Milton Friedman and other disciples of Friedrich Hayek and the neoliberal market fundamentalists have proposed a UBI. For them, standalone UBI could and should replace the welfare state and public provision. All services would have to be bought from profit maximizing private companies. UBI would also subsidize capitalists by enabling them to pay lower wages and provide fewer, or even no, benefits. UBS is based on a different logic and would have very different consequences.
(7) Marx’s Capital tells us very little about socialism or how to get there: Kitching argues that Marxists should recognize that Marx’s economic analyses in Capital and other works were not meant to be more than what they actually are: a critique of the classic pro-capitalism economists and of the mystifications used by capitalists to hide the way the economic system really worked. Although he sometimes indulged himself in making hopeful predictions about how workers would one day wake up enough and unite enough to end that system socially and politically, Marx quite consciously narrowed the variables in his analyses to economic ones. He wanted to show the inherent logic of the system in its purely economic aspects.
This did not mean that Marx was an economic determinist or reductionist. Marx’s non-economic writings and his political activity show that he understood very well the central importance of sociological (social structure and culture) and political variables to progressive social change and the prevention of progressive social change. For example, it has frequently been remarked that, in his non-economic writing (e.g The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, writings on Ireland, India, China and the American civil war), Marx used a multiplicity of classes and subclasses that were specific to a time and place and were shaped by historically specific and changeable cultural and non-economic social (e.g. caste, ethnicity, race, religion) and political (e.g. Asiatic mode of production) factors. This is very different from how he employs class in Capital, where he intentionally works ultimately with two ‘classes’ -- wage labour and capital -- that are entirely abstracted from all their historically, socially and politically concrete particular characteristics.
In Capital Marx Intentionally Abstracts to Look at Purely Economic Variables — But His Other Writings Are Very Different
Kitching argues that Marx mostly showed how capitalism would result in economic events that were neverending and not resolvable within the logic of maximizing profit in competitive markets (individual companies must continue to maintain or increase profit, or die). But note that recurrent contradictions and persistent undesirable outcomes like poverty and unemployment do not result in any particular social or political change (as opposed to purely economic) struggle, even when conditions get considerably worse. Economic events do not automatically make people more left versus right. They only change some of the visible facts context within which actors decide what is wrong, who is to blame and what if anything they want to do about it.
(8) Five things that happen over and over in a capitalist economy:
Here is a partial list of some of the economic events that are neverending in capitalist economies:
1. Extraction of surplus value from unpaid labour: Taking non-labour costs, ie. land, raw materials and technology, as fixed, the capitalist owner of a business operation (means of production) makes a profit when the new value created by the labour of the workers is realized (when the good or service is sold to a paying customer) and that monetized value is greater than the wages paid to produce that new value. All the costs other than the labour in that production process are the result of the labour expended in earlier production processes (past living labour has produced “dead labour”). The capitalist has the right to 100% of the monetized value created because of laws saying that the owner of the business (means of production) owns all of what is produced. The owner always pays the worker less than that amount in order to make a profit. Hence workers create surplus value (total potential profit) for the owner. Net Realized Profit equals Money Received by the Business Owner(s) for the Product Minus the Wage Costs and the Non-Wage Costs.
Private Property Laws Make It Legal for Capitalists to Pay Workers Less than the Value of the Goods and Services that They Produce
For each production process, the capitalist gets richer and (after paying him or herself and senior managers and professionals income out of profits) reinvests the net profit in other businesses or in the same business, in order to keep making more profits. Capital (money invested in profit-making production) increases (accumulates). Meanwhile, the workers do not make any profit, are not paid according to the productivity of their labour and/or the amount of new value and profit they create. Hence capital (wealth, as opposed to income, due to ownership of profit-making property that at a later time point will be invested) gets bigger and bigger while the workers have to consume most or all of their wages. Because they do not own a business (are propertyless), workers remain in a position where they have to go to work again for a boss to get wages just to live. Capital increases geometrically. Labour is on a treadmill.
2. Recurrent economic crises: There is anarchy in the timing, level and placement of investment at the macro level, and a disconnect between decisions at that level and ones about wages and prices at the micro level, and this results in endless boom and bust cycles and recurrent crises of overproduction;
3. Free market competition concentrates capital in fewer and fewer bigger and bigger businesses: Every free market competition between individual company producers creates winners and losers, where the winners maximize sales by producing at the lowest cost and/or selling at the lowest price, and this continues over time for every new production run no matter how many previous competitions a company has won. Over time, markets tend towards monopoly as capital is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the winners;
Free Enterprise Competition Between Companies Results in Winners and Losers — Eventually There Are Just a Few Big Winners
4. To win in competitive markets, employers must compete on price, and reduce labour costs; and that means incessant conflict between employers and workers: To avoid a decline in the rate of profit, the winners must endlessly reduce the proportion of their costs due to wage labour and wages relative to monetizable profit. And this means that there is a constant purely economic class struggle between wage labour and capitalist owners over the division of surplus value between wages and profit;
5. Reducing the level of wages that workers need to be made to survive can be achieved if the cost of goods and services workers must pay is reduced, but there is no market mechanism to engender this automatically: The surviving companies from previous competitions cannot reduce wage costs by simply lowering money wages unless the cost of living for the workers ( i.e. the prices the workers pay to reproduce the labour power of themselves and their families) is reduced by an equivalent amount. But this way out is limited, since reducing consumer prices in these other industries might squeeze profits in those industries, i.e. in consumer essential goods industries like housing and food and clothing and house furniture and appliances but also in other less obvious ones like health and education and insurance. And there is no Invisible Hand mechanism to make the cost of living less, and no motive either to adjust the entire national (let alone international) economy to accommodate a few specific companies that go the wage cutting route.
(9) Other ways that capitalists try to get wage labour costs down by getting labour productivity up: One way to increase profits without any change in wages paid or labour productivity is to reduce non-wage costs e.g. get roughly the same quality of land, raw materials and technology (fixed capital) for a lower price.
One solution to getting wage costs down is to extract more absolute surplus value by increasing the hours worked by workers without increasing wages. Increasing labour time comes up against physiological limits. Nevertheless, imposing very long working hours is possible in poor countries or regions with no unions or enforced labour law protections. This is especially possible when there is what Marx calls a large and expanding reserve army of labour, i.e. high unemployment and/or a steady supply of unemployed people moving from rural areas or elsewhere to seek urban jobs.
Absent those conditions, the better choice for capitalists is to change what Marx calls relative surplus value. This means every other option other than increasing hours worked for the same wage. It means increasing labour productivity, i.e. increasing the amount of profit produced per worker per hour.
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Labour — Capitalists Make Fewer Workers Do More Work for Less Wages in Nice Ways and in Not So Nice Ways
There are essentially two ways to increase labour productivity (profit produced per hour worked), ways that make things mostly worse for workers and ways that make things at least partly better. The mostly worse ways are to (1) cut wages; (2) increase the speed and intensity of work required -- often by introducing new technology and new work processes, but also just by monitoring the work more closely, setting more specific and/or higher production targets to be met, and /or by reorganizing what is to be done in what sequence and in what increasingly specified way more “efficiently”; (3) lay off workers and make the remaining staff pick up the slack, so that the same total work is done by fewer workers. Usually there is a combination of all three applied differentially to different sets of workers at the company, so that each work reorganization typically makes things better on balance for some, while being worse on balance for others.
If the workers are in a weak position, the easiest way to increase labour productivity is to simply cut wages. There are all sorts of ways that companies can cut wages for an increasing number of their employees. They can manipulate job classifications and hire women or youth or racial minorities into those new job classifications to do essentially the same work for less pay. They can introduce the kind of technology that permits deskilling of the work so that it is easier to make those workers accept lower pay increases for fear of being replaced more easily than if they were still skilled. But there are physiological limits to how much wages can be cut without reducing the productivity of the worker (e.g. because they have to take a second job, because a lower living standard hurts their health) even if their work effort remains the same. And reducing the cost of living for the worker runs up against the limits noted in point (5) above. So wage cutting is rarely enough to keep increasing labour productivity. There also needs to be some increasing the speed and intensity of the work, and layoffs without reduction in total work to be done.
What is the way to increase labour productivity that makes things mostly better for workers and not just for the capitalist? By bringing in new technology that does not require such an increase in speed and intensity of work as to make the work less tolerable (as new technology combined with increased monitoring often does, especially for all but the most highly skilled workers). And by upskilling (more of the) workers in such a way that the upskilled workers have more interesting jobs with more autonomy and prestige and sense of being recognized for the value they create for the company.
Marx Never Got Around to Giving His Views on What Institutions and Policies Would Make Local Workers Control Viable
(10) Militant economic struggles are endemic to capitalism: Struggles between capitalists and workers over the consequences of all these economic events may be militant. They are likely to increase what Lenin called “trade union consciousness”, i.e. workers recognizing the absolute need to maintain a united front vis a vis the employers, and the state, and private agencies that support the employers against them in their economic struggles. However, Kitching argues that history has shown conclusively that economic consciousness does not lead to left-wing social and political consciousness, not even to support for left-wing reforms within capitalism, let alone to understanding the systematic and neverending nature of their exploitation, and the necessity of overthrowing that system for a new one.
Kitching is adamant that nothing in Marx’s works justifies any logical inference (by him or anyone else) that militancy in economic struggles will translate into a recognition that capitalism needs to be replaced by socialism. Yes, Marx often expressed the view that workers would develop a common class consciousness through repeated class struggles, and that over time this would lead more and workers to come to the conclusion that they should replace capitalism with socialism. But Kitching argues that this was “wishful thinking” (p155) by Marx and does not square with his general view that history was open-ended and depended on humans making choices in more or less favourable contexts. Marx was not a determinist or economic reductionist.
Kitching goes further and cites Leszek Kolakowski Main Currents of Marxism, volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 1978) to the effect that Marx never got around to doing theoretical and empirical scholarship about non-economic processes and institutions comparable to his work on purely economic processes. Kitching is concerned about the absence of work on (liberal) democracy. But the same point could be extended to the lack of study of all other ‘superstructure’ institutions, namely the state and all other aspects of social structure and culture and issues related to the individual beyond just those driven by economic factors.
Here is his paraphrase of Kolakowski: “Marx fudged some absolutely crucial issues about the construction of socialism and communism because of his essentially philosophical understanding of them as the transcendence or annulment of human alienation under capitalism. Thus, for Marx, the essence of the revolution against capitalism was the reappropriation of human products (‘commodities’) from their alienated state as commodities to the directly controlled and comprehended product of human beings (albeit now specified in class terms – ‘the proletariat’). As a result, Marx never confronted the problem of creating actual institutions in real societies by which such a total ‘unalienated’ control of the environment could be, at the same time, meaningfully democratic” (p169).
Efforts by Marxist States to Short-Circuit the Steps to Public Ownership Plus Workers Control Produced Major Disasters
(11) Political revolutions gave revolutionaries state power — Marx saw them as a relatively short-lived means to the end of local workers control: Marxist Lefts have led revolutions, where the goal was to take control of the capitalist state (about which they had little theoretical or empirical knowledge), and then use it to achieve a stripped down and simplistic goal -- to give the working class, and its vanguard, ownership and control of the means of production. State power was just a means to the end of socialism, and Marx was quoted as believing that the essence of socialism was reducible to worker control at the point of production, to a purely economic and local change. There was recognition of issues like the need for both coercive state power, and the substitution of the workers’ vanguard party for the workers direct democratic power, to gradually ‘fade away’, but no idea how to achieve either. So one Marxist regime after another has tried to fast forward the simple goal -- worker control of publicly owned means of production (most disastrously through collectivization of agriculture). They have done that without having theoretically and empirically analyzed, and then practically applied and tested, all the other alternative institutions that are necessary to ensure that socialism both works economically and is superior to capitalism in liberty, equality and democracy.
(12) Workers should propose ways to raise labour productivity as fast as possible: Kitching believes that it may take centuries to replace capitalism with socialism. For him, this means that two goals should trump all others in a Left strategy to get us to that point – achieving world-level prosperity and a republican virtue, active citizenry consciousness. The fastest way to reach prosperity, in both poor countries and rich countries, is to raise labour productivity. Capitalists will always want this because it means maximizing profit for them. In poor countries, democratic socialism is impossible, so regimes will in practice be either socialist or capitalist dictatorships (with or without elections). Working people should of course fight for the best working and living conditions possible, but above all they should support whatever regime raises labour productivity the most and the fastest (p55). Workers in rich countries are better placed to get something in exchange.
The Lucas Aerospace Workers Did Research in order to Propose a Complete Change in What Was Produced and How — Their Example Is Still Worth Following
As noted above, when capitalists reorganize production to achieve higher labour productivity without a strong pushback from workers, the result is usually on balance worse for the majority of workers. This is true even though the pie that could be divided up between wages and profit has been made bigger, and even though new technology can often be introduced in ways that makes at least some workers’ jobs better in various ways. Nevertheless, Kitching argues that the threats to capitalist profit in 1983 Britain, due to international competition and stagflation, are real. Resisting all proposals for work reorganization and new technology in hopes of saving a few jobs is misguided. He proposes that British workers follow the example of Lucas Aerospace workers who waged a campaign throughout the 1970s to get their company, that mostly made products for the defence industry, to adopt an ‘alternate plan for alternate products’. The Lucas workers, mostly the highly skilled engineers, with the support of the shop stewards and inputs of information and practical suggestions from production workers, did research into new products that were more ‘socially useful’ and which would achieve higher labour productivity (pp111-131)
Kitching proposes that British workers make a Faustian bargain They should consciously engage in “pre-emptive unionism”, whereby they develop an advanced capacity for research leading to very detailed plans for producing alternate products, or the same products, that increase the profitability of the company, the whole industry and the whole national economy. In exchange, they would demand that workers be conceded some of the rights and responsibilities of the management. Not only would management have to accept some of the proposals coming from the union research and planning bodies necessarily staffed in large part by highly educated experts, they would also have to afford ordinary workers responsibilities that would provide them a schooling in how to manage. “[O]ne envisages members being involved in administering retraining schemes, manning consultancy organizations, advising on the use of redundancy payments, supervising rehousing schemes, acting as directorial delegates, staffing worker committees concerned with new investments from plant level to sector level, administering profit-sharing schemes. One would also envisage regular ‘turnover’ of workers in all these positions to spread the knowledge and experience of decision-making and research as widely as possible” (p130). Granted all the risks, pre-emptive unionism would contribute to achieving both world-wide prosperity and working classes schooled in how to actively manage a socialist society ‘from below’.
CRITICAL COMMENTS ON KITCHING
This has been a very long post, so my comments will be brief. Kitching managed to pack a lot of ideas into a very short and accessibly-written book. His main thesis is parsimonious and his arguments are forthright. Of course, the book was written more than 35 years ago, and it speaks specifically to the Left in Britain at that time, but his thesis and arguments remain relevant.
Here are two comments on Kitching:
(1) The Left needs to take some democratic power now: Kitching is likely correct that it will take many generations before a full-scale democratic socialist society will be achieved. But can we wait that long before the Left and popular movements take control over governments, and perhaps also exercize at least some degree of democratic power in other institutions as well, in order to prevent and roll back the worst results of living under capitalism? Climate change is the most obvious, but there are many others. For example, the rapid increase in Big Brother surveillance and micro-managing control of individuals made possible by information technology already being pioneered in China and elsewhere. And an imperialistic world system that uses war as well as economic and political domination to make rich countries richer and keep poor countries at least relatively poor.
Reversing these and countless other disaster outcomes will take more than just electing a social democratic party to government. The longer capitalism continues, the wealthier and more powerful capitalists and their governments become militarily, economically, ideologically and politically. So what is the strategy for winning real left power in the here and now to at least roll back the constant strengthening of capitalists while we prepare the preconditions for democratic socialism, for an alternative post-capitalist society?
(2) Kitching’s biggest point — We need to think out and try out detailed ideas of what socialism is and how it can be made to work: Perhaps the best thing about Kitching’s book is the way he squarely lays out the central task for the Left. Yes, he focusses on the need to realize two preconditions bit by bit over a long time period. But underlying that idea is a more fundamental point. We on the socialist Left do not actually have much of an idea what a socialist society would look like. Even Marx did not manage to go much beyond local worker control of publicly owned means of production – and the experience of both Marxist states and social democratic nationalized industry shows that this is very far from an adequate idea. There is a need for an entire system of democratic processes involving multiple ‘stakeholders’, and both central planning and market mechanisms, and a lot more. All of this remains to be imagined in theorizing by Left scholars and developed more inductively by popular initiatives in and outside of workplaces for ‘research, planning and management by citizens’ in the spirit of the Lucas Aerospace workers.