as DAVE WIMHURST reports. One of the main planks of the new Soares Government is its declared intention to restore authority in the factories'. And it must be said that time is on its side.
The longer workers control is not consolidated but remains uncentralised and therefore open to attack, both directly by the state and indirectly by the laws of the international capitalist market, the greater will be the workers" demoralisation from this experience; the greater their lack of confidence their ability to increasingly dominate and control the of production themselves.
The best way to understand this is to look at a couple of different experiences of workers control, both in the North of the country, but in different industries, each with specific problems but also with a very different kind of leadership.
The first is a textile factory in Oporto called Jacinto, producing cloth which is sold to other factories to be made into clothes. The factory was taken over in May 1975 to prevent its closure, and a workers commission was elected, made up of members of the Socialist Party, Communist Party, and PPD (Popular Democrats - *liberal' bourgeois party).
At a press conference I attended earlier this year, it was announced that the factory owed 4,000 contos (about crucial one for the textile workers, and they took an initiative to propose means by which such investment could be tought for not simply by the textile workers, but also by the bank workers.
But this idea, far-reaching in its implications, was lost because the leadership of the textile workers, reformists for the most part, refused to generalise the idea, and because the simple mechanisms of workers democracy (mass meetings, etc.) did not exist so that the workers themselves could decide.
Instead, the workers commissions looked no further than their own individual factories. At Jacinto they succeeded in getting a certain amount of financial aid from the Ministry. Excellent, in spite of the previous lost op portunity. But of course, the Ministry is nobody's fool.
Along with the money (which was promised for a long time before it came, in order to prevent the workers from stepping up their struggle) the Ministry sent two of its members to act as directors, to oversee the use of the capital and to 'help' the workers in the factory. Thus the situation at Jacinto is no longer one of extending the gains made so far, but has become a fight to end of the strike, which was won, the workers informed the boss that he had two weeks to decide whether or not he would agree to workers control. He SOARES - His gove said yes, he would agree, and showed his willingness fleeing country with two other directors for Brazil, taking 14 million escudos (E250,000) with him.
otage.
The first measure taken by elected workers commission was to raise all the wages of the workers. In ent will try to smash the emerging workers democracy and control addition, a subsidised canteen Wy d established, insurance against any accident was introduced, and ever worker now has the right to change his or her job within the factory, thereby gaining new skills.
The means of organisation were kept as simple as possible, witn al decisions taken by the workers commission subject to ratification (or otherwise) by the mass meeting. factory newspaper was also set up, open to all the workers, and along with this classes were arranged to teach those workers who could not read or write to do so.
Production itself had previously been completely disorganised, with 1½ million escudos (£27,000) going into the boss's pocket every month. So this too was reorganised in a collectively agreed plan, with the effect that it is now higher than previously.
Having seen that production could be increased, that wages could be increased, without any increase in labour time, the workers were eager to raise their standard of living even further by producing more. The leadership of the factory, on the other hand, proposed that instead of production being increased by the workers working more, the labour force should be expanded to provide jobs for the unemployed. Thirty new workers have now been taken on.
Another problem was the cutting off of raw materials by the suppliers. To overcome this problem, links were built with another factory which supplied the wood, and the workers here forced the boss to resume supplies. In addition to these measures, the workers commission also proposed that it should join the local organisation set up by some 80 factories under workers control in the Oporto area.
In other words, whenever practical problems have arisen, political solutions have been proposed that both strengthen the position of the workers and educate them in the need to look for solutions outside of the walls of their own factory, and in the interests of the working class as a whole.
Of course all this does not mean that success is guaranteed for the workers at Cincomo. Indeed, the former boss has decided to come back from Brazil and has launched legal proceedings against the workers, accusing them of having stolen his factory!
But whatever the final outcome, it is clear that only the application of workers control throughout the industry, with a workers plan for the whole of the industry, can provide a permanent solution to the problem. Of course for such a situation to be reached a socialist revolution is necessary; it is only within a planned economy as a whole, within a workers state, that the capitalist relations of production wil be destroyed. But the importance of the present experiences of workers control is that they are a vital step or the road to this goal - if they are understood as such by the workers in struggle.
This is the problem at Jacinto. If the workers there are finally defeated, their response will be one of deep demoralisation - a demoralisation prepared long before the actual defeat by the inability of the reformists to provide a leadership capable of edu cating the workers through their own experience in a positive sense.
At Cincomo, on the other hand, the workers have begun to understand that a defeat - if it comes — will not be the result of their own stupidity or inability to fight for the correct strategy, but a result of the overall balance of forces. For it is the practical exper iences that result from such con frontations between the workers and the ruling class that either educate or miseducate the workers as a whole, that either give them hope for the future or undermine their confidence in their own ability to struggle. NEXT WEEK: How US steelworkers are fighting for union democracy
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problems of work and production - the problems of the capitalist relations
Workers democracy and workers control cannot stand still. If they do not reach out into new areas of society they will be forced into retreat. Nowhere has this been shown more clearly than in Portugal,