IN THE LAST ISSUE of War Commentary, we said of stay-in strike: „It is not the Syndicalist aim to return tot he employer class the means of production and distribution, but to retain them in the hands oft he workers operating them by the principle of workers‘ control of industry“.

This issue of Workers’ Control causes dismay to many, if not all Socialists and Communists. “How can the workers run industry?” they ask.

If the workers cannot run industry, we must examine the claims of the others, the capitalists and politicians. Let us take the capitalists first.

The capitalist is the owner, the shareholder, or at the least, the big shareholder. We shall see how necessary he is to industry. Most workers do not even know their employer, who he is, or where he is. Even when a man’s name appears over a factory gate or on a commodity, the identity of the boss is still hidden, for usually the person who gave his name to the concern has long since been swamped by financial capital. The Angus Watson Packing Company, of “Skippers” and “Sailor Salmon” fame was once personally directed by Mr. Angus Watson himself. About twenty years ago new capital, mostly American, entered the firm and Angus Watson was given a nominal managerial job. After being treated like an office-boy, Watson retired protesting, but his name still appears on the products of “Angus Watson & Co., Ltd.” So we might go on from one company to another; the real boss is unknown to the worker.

A couple of years ago, America gave us an amusing example of the absentee capitalist. A rich woman, who was very fond of her Pekinese dog, was afraid lest she die before the little pet. In order to provide its living in the case of her demise, she consulted her lawyer and stock-broker. The result was the transfer to the Pekinese of a big block of industrial shares! So, the Peke became a capitalist. A few years ago, the same thing occurred to a chimpanzee, and for all that it matters, all shareholders might be Pekinese and chimpanzees.

Once, discussing Workers’ Control with a Communist metal machinist, I put the problem in this manner: let us suppose that your employers, the shareholders of the company, are holding their annual meeting in a big hotel. The Luftwaffe appears in the sky overhead, the hotel is bombed and the shareholders are blown to smithereens. Next morning, before going to work, the machinist reads the sad news. Would he, left with no employer to control the industry, forget his art of machinery or his knowledge of metallurgy? Would he be unable to read a micrometer or a blue-print? The machinist gave his answer in indignant tones.

But while most Socialists will agree with out statement about the capitalist, they will yet not trust the industry to the workers. To them it is the politicians who must control industry. Let us see how the politician is indispensable to the production and distribution of wealth.

All industry requires specialisation, the division of labour. So modern industry develops technical problems, all of which no man may know. The problem of engineering may not be understood by the seaman, or the problem of the chemist may be unknown to the miner. But the politician claims to know everything!

The prospective Member of Parliament will go to a constituency of 100,000 or more inhabitants an present himself to busmen, railmen, weavers, cooks, teachers and a thousand other crafts, or occupations and claim to represent them all. If he is returned to Parliament he will vote on the working of the mines without having been down one, he may speak on shipping laws without having been to sea, he will speak and vote (and compel others to act on his opinion) on building, agriculture, woodworking, road making, medicinal practise, entertainment, education and a hundred other services, each one of which requires a lifetime of study and practice.

Not content with solving and problems of technique in his spare time at the House, he will interfere in everything else from birth control to telling us how to spend our Sunday evenings. On one odd afternoon each year, he will spend a few hours settling the affairs of India, a sub-continent inhabited by a mere 400 millions.

If one considers the composition of any House of Commons, it appears to be sheer impudence for them to interfere in technics, particularly the whole sphere of technics. The dominant social groups in any Parliament are lawyers, retired military and naval officers and directors of finance companies. Owing to the M.P.’s being drawn from mixed constituencies, without any regard to vocation, it is possible for a parliament to be composed of 615 ex-army officers or 615 lawyers.

If we consider the Cabinet, the picture is no less comical. A man is appointed as Minister of Agriculture, not because of any knowledge of farming, but because of political or business pull. At one time the conservative government appointed a Minister of Mines whose only qualification seemed to be that he was a fox-hunting squire. When he answered questions in the House, Labour Members responded by crying “Yoicks!” “tally-ho!” and other cries of the hunting field. When a Labour government was formed, however, an ex-tailor’s cutter was appointed to the same ministry.

Instead of the political or geographical method of organisation, the Syndicalist build on an industrial basis. Such a basis is now the foundation of the future society and the embryo of Workers’ Control.

Under Workers’ Control the mines would be run by minders and not by lawyer-politicians. The engineers would regulate the factories, the textile workers the mills, the railmen the railways and so on, throughout each industry and service.

Each industry would regulate its own affairs, each factory or mill its affairs. This is quite unlike the political organisation which claims the right to govern everything. Further, the political method is chiefly concerned with governing men, the industrial syndicate is for the administration of things.

Political parties can never lea us to Workers’ Control, for by building parties we are erecting barriers in the way to that end; we are building something which we must later destroy. On the other hand by organising industrially now we are creating an organisation which can take over control of industry and which is not to be later destroyed, but developed.

At present the Syndicalist workers organise themselves at the point of production, seeking the unity of all workers in the factory or other undertaking, breaking down all craft union barriers, of age, sex, degree of skill, craft, black-coat, or black hands. United, the workers in each metal factory become federated to the district federation of engineers, while each district federation sends its delegation to the National Federation of Metalworkers. This method is carried on throughout each industry and service; textiles, transport, power, farming, distribution, sanitation, etc. Then, all national industrial federations are linked together in the National Federation of Labour.

Here we have an organisation able to swing its forces to any part of the whole of industry, so that any section of workers on strike can receive the full support (industrial solidarity rather than just collections) of the rest of their fellow workers. How unlike trade unions, which have no real connection with one another, and collect tanners for strikers while they quite constitutionally black-leg on each other; railmen against busmen, engineers against boiler-makers, porters against loco-men.

With the triumph of the stay-in strike such organisations take over the control of industry. The factory branch manages the factory, while the district affairs of the industry are regulated by the district federation, the common problems of the industry by the national industrial federation, and the whole of the economy of the country is co-ordinated by the National Federation of Labour.

The greatest weakness of the trade union is its lack of an ultimate aim, a supreme reason for existence. At its best it struggles for a higher wage or a shorter working day. (At its present worst it gives up the struggle). But a struggling man usually has some aim. He intends to end the struggle victoriously by finally overcoming his enemy, not to keep the action going for ever and ever.

So, the ultimate aim of Syndicalism is not a wage increase, but Workers’ Control of industry. Every action by the Syndicalist workers is a means to that end. Every strike is a training period, a skirmish before the Social General Strike.