A Long Struggle for Democracy May Have to Precede Socialism
Gavin Kitching’s Rethinking Socialism: A Theory for a Better Practice (University Paperbacks – Methuen, London 1983) aims to tell uncomfortable truths about Marx, Left activist intellectuals, the working class and socialism in order to advance some bold proposals for rethinking and redirecting the socialist Left in his native Britain. His second sentence states: “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). Further, while the “continuous social conflict” that will be necessary to build both support for socialism and the institutions of socialism “may at times be violent, especially when crucial issues of power are being decided… I reject a cataclysmic, ‘barricades’ conception of socialist revolution” in favour of “a gradualist and evolutionary (but not reformist) concept of socialist construction” (p2). In sum, socialism can only be achieved through a very long period of “construction”, and this is in part because two key preconditions have to be struggled for and won first – prosperity and an active citizenry.
Socialism is Conscious Human Control over Self, Society and Nature
Kitching defines socialism as “the greatest possible degree of conscious human control over the personal, social and natural environment exercized democratically”. Consequently any social struggle that increases human control over self, society or nature moves us closer to socialism; and anything that “impedes advance towards such control” is “a retrogression from socialism” (p30). Two major consequences flow from this definition, one about the prosperity precondition and one about the active citizenry precondition.
PROSPERITY AND BOOM AS PRECONDITIONS
Regarding prosperity, Kitching says that workers in the workplace should aim to collaborate with their employers and managers to continuously raise the level of labour productivity. This will counter the trend to declining profits that has resulted from increased international competition (p107). It will enable the capitalist economy generally to increase the pace and level of production of new wealth. It will mean longer boom periods in the short run, and greater prosperity achieved more quickly in the long run. In exchange, workers should demand a share in both the rights and the responsibilities of management.
As a bonus, contrary to what most parts of the Left assume, “advances toward socialism are much more likely to occur in capitalist booms” (p12). When economic t useful’, and proposed that they be produced instead, or at least in addirimes are tough, or when the business that a set of workers are working for is doing poorly, workers are necessarily more preoccupied with survival. This may sometimes result in militant economic struggles, but these are necessarily defensive battles raising what are survival oriented defensive demands, to hold onto to as much of what they have got as possible (p26).
In the 1970s in Britain, Lucas Aerospace workers demonstrated an alternative way to wage economic workplace struggles, where workers pro-actively fought to wrest management rights power and authority from company management, and to do so in a way that trained workers to become managers of their own work in a socialist society. Lucas workers researched new products that were ‘socially useful’ and proposed that these products be produced instead of, or at least in addition to, the mostly defence industry products they were already making. This would involve new technology and work reorganization, normally things that unions and workers resist (and often with good reason).
Kitching argues that when workers help sustain capitalist booms by welcoming new technology and work reorganization and upgrading of worker knowledge and skills (ideally by emulating the Lucas workers by having well researched proposals for this themselves), they are increasing human control over Self, Society and Nature (p31). Of course, this increased human control is not increased democratic control, it is increased control by employers and management. Recognition of this fact, Kitching hopes, will make workers more open to the Lucas Aerospace strategy of “pre-emptive unionism” where workers concede the reorganization (and perhaps defer some wage and benefits increases until the company is better placed to meet those demands) in exchange for being granted a real, if minor, role in planning and managing the business.
When workers win and exercize research, planning and management powers they will not only have to start thinking proactively about how to change the company going forward, they will have to start thinking about the “general interest” of both the company and all people in society. There will be clashing views about what future changes are best and about what constitutes the general interest, but the neverending struggle to articulate the different views, the worker counterplan to the employer plan, will develop the active citizenry consciousness of the workers.
Without the Skills to Be Management, Workers have Always had Others Substitute for Them
Kitching insists that he is not advocating a worker control strategy of a gradual transformation of capitalist-controlled companies to worker-controlled ones, hence a gradual evolution of capitalist economy into socialist economy. Capital will never concede real control. There is always the danger of being co-opted into to serving only capitalist interests (and those of a small group of bought off workers and leaders). And to state a more brutal truth, as the efforts to create socialist economies and governments through Marxist revolution have shown repeatedly, workers simply do not have the knowledge and skills, or the self-confidence born of experience in taking on management responsibilities in and out of the workplace, to actually be a ruling class.
Like it or not, a pro-worker vanguard party has always necessarily substituted its rule for that of the workers in Marxist revolution created states (pp48-63). Something similar has occurred with socialist parties and their working class supporters in relatively prosperous states like Britain. The bottom line is that the main purpose of waging Lucas Aerospace worker type struggles for an active role in management is to provide a kind of schooling for at least some workers in how to rule, and to make a wider set of workers think more in terms of how to change both their company and the overall economy so that it serves a “general interest”. It is one way to develop the second precondition to socialism, an active citizenry.
REPUBLICAN VIRTUE OF ACTIVE CITIZENRY AS A PRECONDITION
Kitching says that he defines the boundaries of the working class in the same broad way as Karl Marx, as including “all those people who live by selling their labour power and who have no other means of survival since they do not own or control ‘means of production’ (land, buildings, machinery, stocks and shares)”. This is sharply different from the very narrow definition of the working class that has been established as the popular common sense, namely “skilled and unskilled manual workers” (p8).
Local Workers Control of the Means of Production Will Not Result in a Democratic Economy Responsive to Everyone’s Needs and Wants
As noted above, Kitching does not define socialism in the same way as has prevailed in both the reformist and revolutionary wings of the socialist left, as rule of, by and for the working class instead of rule of, by and for the capitalist class and its agents and allies. He defines socialism as human control over self, society and nature exercized democratically, hence by all people in society equally regardless of class. Hence he implies that the Left should abandon “the classical concept of the working class as the [only] constituency for socialism” and try to mobilize all people regardless of class. Nevertheless, as a Marxist, he believes that workers are materially exploited and dictated to by capitalists in and outside the workplace and need to be mobilized to recognize their class interest in fighting for socialism, alongside everyone else who can be persuaded on other grounds to fight for the same goal.
The problem faced by the Left in mobilizing workers is that “in contemporary Britain no such sense of common class identity or interest exists among the working class” (p13). “Many working class people think of themselves as ‘middle class’ for a variety of reasons, ranging from the non-manual nature of their work to the places and types of houses in which they live and the way they speak. They certainly feel no sense of common identity with the manual ‘working class’” (pp13-14). The Labour Party cannot count on workers to vote for them and trade union leaders cannot count on workers to support their economic demands or strike actions based on simple appeals to a supposed common class interest of all workers. The internal differentiation of the broad working class into a multitude of different occupations with very different occupational interests and opportunities for upward mobility is too great (p104). And giving up on the workers who see themselves as different from manual workers and thereby as middle class, and falling back into seeking to mobilize only the manual workers, is no solution. The manual working class is a shrinking minority of the working class, is “in decline economically” and this has led them to be “politically regressive” (p19).
Workers Do Not Share a Class Identity — We Must Appeal to All People Based on the Common Identity of Citizen
The solution is “to use the one common identity which all these people [in the broad working class] do share – their identity as citizens of a parliamentary democracy”. The Left should aim “to encourage any and all activities which involve turning a passive citizenry into an active one… not because the creation of such a citizenry will itself construct socialism, but because without it the construction of democratic socialism [i.e. socialism where the workers, and not a party or others substituting for them, actually rules or co-rules while still being workers and therefore ‘below’ managers and other elites] is impossible” (p14). Involvement in democratic groups of virtually any kind inside or outside the workplace, including groups that are completely unrelated to politics or progressive social change, even ones led by non-socialists or anti-socialists (presumably non-reactionary ones), is good to the extent that it increases active citizenry as a knowledge, skill and habit (p16, p18).
Having said that, Kitching then gets to a crucial point that underlies his entire analysis. The cultivation of an active citizenry consciousness is about educating oneself to play an active role in democracy, in democratic control of institutions in the economy, society and state -- but it is not just about learning to insist upon rights and freedoms. It is also about learning to take responsibility, and to be ready to defer gratification and even the exercize of one’s rights or enjoyment of available benefits to sacrifice for the general good. Movements that develop this mentality “represent the reassertion of old ‘republican’ virtues, of the concept of a truly human life as a public as well as private life in which a citizen has duties as well as rights, and in which the performance of civic duties is the primary safeguard of liberty” (p33).
Democracy Requires the Cultivation of Republican Virtues — Responsibility Paired with Rights, Sacrificing Sometimes to Serve the Common Good
Republican virtue and a lifestyle of democratic volunteering and activism are important preconditions to socialism. They will also be central once socialism arrives, because socialist institutions will need to be not just more democratic, but also more efficient, than the capitalist ones they replace. They will require “efficiency and social discipline… because Marx’s conception of socialism and communism involves nothing less than the substitution of coercive discipline… by a voluntary accepted mass self-discipline… [and] self-restraint in the general interest” (23, 44). None of this is easy or ‘natural’ but will need to be built up over time, perhaps centuries.
CRITIQUE AND CONCLUSIONS
Let me make three brief critical points about Kitching’s argument. First, his definition of socialism is democratic control and nothing more. This is parsimonious. It could be defended as making clear his view that a society cannot be socialist unless it is democratic first, unless masses of people have cultivated active citizenry as a habit first. But it tells us nothing about what would be involved here and now, under capitalism, in building a socialist movement promoting socialist policies that are about more than just democracy.
Second, as he admits, while the Lucas Aerospace campaign developed the knowledge level and self-confidence of many of the workers active in it, and also gained significant support from workers and citizens outside Lucas, the Lucas bosses categorically rejected any ceding of research, planning and management rights. The Lucas workers themselves gave up by 1980. To my knowledge, this model has not been taken up by other groups of workers elsewhere since. Building knowledge, skills, self-confidence and a habit of active citizenry through Lucas style campaigns are victories in themselves, but if you are leading workers into certain defeat, it will not be sustainable. There is more work to be done to recalibrate the Lucas approach to make it workable.
Kitching is Right that Defensive Struggles Do Not Automatically Generate the Consciousness Needed to Change Society …
Third, Kitching goes too far in his pessimism about the capacity of working people in conditions of non-prosperity to develop a class consciousness, democratic activism and socialist consciousness. He is right to make the point that when workers fight militantly against employers to defend and/or improve their wages, benefits, conditions and rights, it does not require any conscious awareness of how capitalism works as an overall system. Hence, the Left will never succeed in building a socialist movement of workers by simply supporting workers when they wage militant economic struggles.
But waging defensive class struggles, like waging defensive feminist or anti-racist or anti-war or anti-global warming or anti-fascist or any other kind of defensive struggles, is not something one can opt out of in order to concentrate exclusively on well-researched and pro-actively planned ’offensives’ to increase democratic control and prosperity, and thereby move us closer to socialism. Like it or not, the rulers of capitalist societies are always on offence and most of the time we leftists will be involved in mass struggles to counter those offensives. Kitching is right that developing a social and political consciousness and a habit of active citizenry are separate tasks from fighting back. But there is more to work out about how to do both of these things in relation to one another.
Kitching’s book was published in Britain in 1983 but it speaks to issues still facing the left everywhere today. His crucial contribution is his assertion that getting to a socialist system requires a very long period of construction of a culture of active citizenry with republican virtues and a long experience of working to democratize social institutions. My main caveat is that he goes too far in his ‘first prosperity and democracy then socialism’ sequencing. The active citizenry we in the left need to be promoting all the time needs to be one that is socialist (and feminist and anti-imperialist and anti-racist etc) too.
… But the Many Consciousnesses that We Do Develop Can Be the Foundation for a Citizen Movement that Goes Far Beyond Democracy
Kitching makes a brief reference in an appendix (p169) to a critique of Marx made by Leszek Kolakowski in volume one of Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford University Press 1978). The gist of it is that Marx failed to see the need to figure out how to build the institutions that would be necessary in a future socialist society beyond simply having the working class re-appropriate their alienated labour and its products at the factory level, to take back control over the means of production. Figuring this out now is not utopian socialism but the opposite – getting specific about what alternative institutions and policies will be like in a socialist, feminist etc society. Kitching is right that building an active citizenry is key but it needs to be around values, beliefs and norms that are about more than just democracy.