Lubricated with morning coffee, sprinkled with afternoon teas, and fortified with 7/6d lunches. the London & Home Counties Workers Control Conference slid smoothly into gear at Chelsea College of Science and Technology on January 11th.
At first glance it seemed that the national one at Sheffield last spring had merely divided amoeba-like into a smaller regional version. The same faces could be seen, the same Union offi. cials, shop stewards and rank-and-file workers rubbing shoulders with the same intellectuals, liberals and Liberals, Maoists and Fabians, the same Socialist Charter badges, the same "Tribune" banner, and the same unsold back numbers of Voice of the Unions distributed on the chairs.
There were differences, of course; Ken Coates and Bill Jones were not with us, and But the important differences were outside the hall; at Sheffield last year we were heading for a showdown with Wilson and Castle over In Place of Strife, the conference was useful in ensuring the success of the May Ist strike. Since then we have had the compromise between the TUC and the Government, made possible by Scanlon and Jones, the failure of the Merseyside GEC-AEI occupation, the collapse of the January Ist Inner London Transport strike, but also a tremendous new wave of militancy, the dustmen, the teachers, the tube Guards, the great avalanche of wage demands, including the seamen's 50% claim.
However, Chelsea College was well insulated, the noise of battle did not penetrate its walls. The conference did spend a short time putting the GEC experience under the microscope, but the report from Ted Mooney was brief, rather negative, and there was no time given to discuss it; apart from this, the concrete problems facing militants in the factories were never tackled.
THE SEMINARS The seminars were as arid. I attended the one on "Trade Union Democracy", taken (with professional paternalism) by Walter Kendall. The discussion was loose and inconclusive: it swung between academic attempts to calibrate amounts of democracy within given unions, to trade unions was a good thing, and b) that we ought to have another discussion. Attempts to steer the discussion onto the problem of fighting bureaucracy within the unions and the strategy needed to make them effective instruments to combat the Government and employers, above all the political nature of this task, were drowned in a welter of unconnected contributions. The reports from the seminars would not even have been taken, if there had not been a demand from the floor. All the reports seemed as inconclusive; for example, the Transport seminar had apparently not examined in detail the experience of the L.T. Guards dispute, and the January 1st strike.
For some reason, time had been given on the agenda for John (son of big Frank) Cousins to speak on "Workers Control and Productivity Bargaining in the Seventies". During the morning session the Chairman announced that this should read "Collective Bargaining", but when Cousins got up to speak, he confirmed that it was indeed "Productivity" and not "Collecbargains out of hand. For Cousins there were two dominant factors: first, that although not himself a gradualist, he recognised that there was not going to be a revolution in the foreseeable future, secondly, although he himself regretted it, all that most workers were interested Pat Braine of the POEU earned tumultuous applause with his blistering attack. The heart of the conference was sound; the enemy had infil trated, but had exposed himself; they recognised him, and the sound of battle broke through for a few minutes. It was soon damped down, and the dreary cycle started again. AN IDEA Workers control is a great idea; these conferences have played a useful role in propagating it. But such conferences can only take it so fai as an abstract concept before they become self defeating. They have become more and more riddled with reformists and careerists (there were constant coy references to elections in the TUs and Labour Party). The academic dis cussions and the knowledge that nothing prac tical will come of them provides the perfect conditions for left-reformist mystification.
Factory occupations, sit-ins, new and imagi native forms of struggle are on the agenda for British industry; the workers control movement could play a vital role in propagating, explain ing, helping. To do this, it needs to turn to. wards the struggles which are taking place, examine them, help to clarify the issues, de velop a strategy, nationally and internationally If in doing this it alienates a few "left" union leaders, too bad. Workers control will be won on the factory floor, not in the lecture hall. Bob Purdie
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tive". We were then regaled with a speech about the importance of not rejecting productivity