considerations on self-management – by henri simon

We are pleased to publish this letter we received from Henri Simon, a French activist who has been involved in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, Informations et liaisons ouvrières/Informations et correspondances ouvrières and Échanges et mouvement. A long-time council communist favouring a self-managed society based on workers’ councils, Henri has written about the impossibility of maintaining self-managed units as islands of communism within capitalist society:

What follows is only a schematic look at my views on self management and not at all a complete and well documented article on the subject of self management. I was for a long time, and still now am interested by all kinds of experiments which could be connected to this idea of self management from the Israeli kibbutz up to the past and recent experience of cooperatives or communes, and have got some material about all that.

tom d’s report of workers’ control meeting

Tom D has written this report of our ‘uncaptive minds‘ forum on ‘the debates on workers’ control’ held on Monday 29th September.

What does it mean for workers to control the institutions that determine the content of their lives? What does it mean for us to control organisations of struggle, factories, workplaces, production, consumption – and, ultimately, all society? This question matters, because it is posed ever more intensely, the higher the pitch of the class struggle, until it becomes the final question of politics. The answer is the difference between victory and defeat, communism and bureaucracy.

press conference with behrooz karimizadeh and kaveh abbasian

On Monday 29th September there was a press conference at the University of London Union with Iranian activists Behrooz Karimizadeh and Kaveh Abbasian. The pair were among the founding members of Freedom and Equality Seeking Students, an organisation which is opposed to war and sanctions as well as the Islamist régime and which last autumn played a central role in student protests against President Ahmedinejad. Following these demonstrations the régime cracked down on the student movement, arresting dozens of activists – Behrooz Karimizadeh was subjected to torture. Ted Crawford has kindly given us permission to reproduce his report on Monday’s press conference:

manifesto of the workers’ group of the russian communist party

We publish below extracts from the Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).  This current of opposition in the RKP (b) was led by Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov, a Russian metalworker from the Urals, who was a veteran Bolshevik activist who participated in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. Myasnikov was a Left Communist in 1918, opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was dissatisfied with elements of Russian ommunist Party policy and increasing bureaucratisation but had disagreed with the Workers Opposition in 1920-21 in their call for unions to manage the economy.  Instead, in a 1921 manifesto, Myasnikov called for “producers’ soviets” to administer industry and for freedom of the press for all workers.  Leaders of the Workers’ Opposition Alexander Shlyapnikov and Sergei Medvedev feared that Myasnikov’s proposals would give too much power to peasants. Despite their disagreements, however, they supported Myasnikov’s right to voice criticisms of Party policy. Along with former members of the Workers’ Opposition, Myasnikov signed the “Letter of the Twenty-Two” to the Comintern in 1922, protesting the Russian Communist Party leaders’ suppression of dissent.

new pamphlet: ‘nationalisation or workers’ management?’

We have produced a pamphlet on the subject of workers’ control and management, counterposing working-class power exercised from below to nationalisations by the bourgeois state.

The pamphlet, costing £1, includes the following articles:

Review of the LEAP pamphlet on social ownership for the 21st century

The struggle for self-management (by Solidarity)

An exchange between Solidarity and the Institute for Workers’ Control

The ambiguities of workers’ control (by Solidarity)

The Harrogate debates: the 1977 debate between the then secretary of state for energy Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield from the NUM on workers’ control. Includes summaries of contributions from the floor.

As indicated above, we have posted some of the contents on this website already, but we have not yet uploaded the Harrogate debates piece, which represents about half the pamphlet’s length.

If you would like a copy of the 26 page pamphlet, email uncaptiveminds@googlemail.com or write to us at The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London EC1V 4PY.

reading material for 29th september (updated)

Comrades may be interested in a look at some of the following articles, which relate to the subject of our 29th September ‘uncaptive minds’ forum on ‘the debates over workers’ control’ in the 1970s workers’ movement.

Self-management in the struggle for socialism (by Raptis, aka Pablo)

The ambiguities of “workers’ control” (Solidarity)

The struggle for self-management: an open letter to IS comrades (Solidarity)

What is Workers’ Control? (Solidarity exchange with Institute for Workers’ Control)

Workers’ Control and Revolutionary Theory: an appraisal of the publications of the Institute for Workers’ Control (Richard Hyman)

This piece is from a slightly earlier period but is still of interest:

Nationalisation: a socialist analysis (ILP)

socialismo o barbarie: 21st september ’08

Readers of the commune keen to learn more about the class struggle in Latin America (and who can understand Spanish) may well be interested in the website of Socialismo o Barbarie. This group have activists and publish papers in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica and Paraguay, and they tell us that they are soon to establish a section in Honduras.

The group publishes a weekly newsletter each Sunday, and the 21st September issue includes this lucid piece by José Luís Rojo and Martín Camacho in La Paz on the current situation in Bolivia. Due to the length of the article we are yet to translate it into English, but will do so shortly.

We can also advertise the latest issue of their Bolivian newspaper Socialismo o Barbarie, which carries the front page headline “Don’t negotiate with the fascists: crush them”.  Click here for the pdf (Spanish language).

socialist democracy and cuba after castro

“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back in again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.” Eugene Victor Debs, 1905.

“A socialism without democracy and civil liberties, where equality is limited to sharing poverty, is little different from a beehive with a Queen Bee in command. In such a society individualism would surely be eliminated, except for the Queen Bee’s, but so would political pluralism and individuality, which is not the same thing as individualism.” Samuel Farber

We would like to draw our readers’ attention to this interesting exchange between Samuel Farber and Saul Landau over the situation in Cuba and the transformations it is set to experience.

Life after Fidel – by Samuel Farber

Landau’s reply and a further response by Farber

‘uncaptive minds’ forum on workers’ control, 29th september

Our series of ‘uncaptive minds’ forums on class struggle in the 1970s continues with a meeting at 6:30pm on Monday 29th September.

The subject of the meeting will be the debates on workers’ control. Guest speaker Ian MacDonald and David Broder from the commune will be leading off a discussion on the idea of “workers’ control” of privately-owned and nationalised workplaces raised in the workers’ movement internationally in the 1970s. The issue of workers’ control and how to implement it was widely debated among trade unionists at the time, not least by partisans of workers’ self-management, a project which found particular resonance in Portugal during that country’s revolution.

The venue is in central London – contact uncaptiveminds@googlemail.com or 07595 245494 for details.

For Chris Ford’s report on the last meeting on the 1970 Leeds clothing workers’ strike click here, or here for a report on the first meeting, which was on the subject of the 1968-74 upsurge in class struggle.

the cost of living: it’s time to act

a leaflet by the commune

A mere 22% of a typical household’s monthly income is left after tax and essential bills, down from 28% since 2003. The situation is getting worse.  Costs have gone up across the board:
 
Increase of    10%      for Electricity
Increase of    15%      for Gas  
Increase of    6.6%     for Food                
Increase of    20.2%   for Petrol  
Increase of    6.5%     for Water             
 
The government says wages must be kept down to stop inflation – but it’s not wages that are to blame.  In May, over 90% of workers got wage rises beneath inflation.  In fact the share of the overall economy going to wages has gone down this year, as it has every year since 1995.  Wages are nowhere near enough to meet the rising costs.  To make it worse, unemployment, which has never gone away, is rising fast.

the ambiguities of “workers’ control”

The Commune has opened a discussion on the meaning of workers’ self-management and workers’ control, two concepts which are often confused with each other and given a wide range of meanings, from trade union participation on management boards to collective ownership and management of a workplace by its workers themselves. We will be having a forum on the question on 29th September, but are also looking to stimulate a broader debate in the movement. 

We will soon be publishing a review of the new Left Economics Advisory Panel pamphlet on “social ownership for the 21st century”, and have also put online two pieces from previous debates on the meaning of “workers’ control”: an exchange between the libertarian socialist ‘Solidarity’ group and the Institute for Workers’ Control as well as the piece below, also from ‘Solidarity’.

lukacs on terror

We present here to readers of The Commune a little-known article by the leading Marxist philosopher George Lukacs.  Well known for his History and Class Consciousness, it is sometimes forgotten that Lukacs was an active Hungarian communist during the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.  Lukacs fought in the ranks of Hungarian Red Army, but the republic of which he was a leading member was suppressed by foreign intervention. The following article challenges the hypocrisy of Social-Democracy on the question of violence – the term terror having a different meaning from its current use. This first appeared in the Workers’ Dreadnought, a communist paper published by Sylvia Pankhurst, on August 21, 1920.  Chris Ford

lenin the god and lenin the revolutionary

by Sylvia Pankhurst: introduction by Chris Ford

The following article originally appeared in the Workers’ Dreadnought entitled ‘Lenin’, written by pioneer communist Sylvia Pankhurst after Lenin’s death.  Pankhurst was a sympathiser of those opposing the retreat of the Communist International from an organiser of world revolution into defender of Soviet Russia at the hands of growing bureaucracy.  She sought to create in England a Communist Workers’ Party aligned to the short-lived Fourth International founded by the KAPD and others.

kapd documents in ‘ideas’

Introduction by Chris Ford

The following two texts are from the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD).  The KAPD is mostly known through the critique written by Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism – An Infantile Disorder, aimed at the KAPD amongst others.   As result the KAPD are often simply dismissed amongst the traditional left as “anarchists” and “ultra-left”.  In fact the KAPD were none of these things:  they were a mass communist party and played a key role in the German Revolution.