self employed society
to the ridiculous ness of thinking we have found and/or are trying something new..
this is ch 11 of colin ward‘s anarchy in action
notes/quotes:
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Chapter XI. A Self-Employed Society
The split between life and work is probably the greatest contemporary social problem. *You cannot expect men to take a responsible attitude and to display initiative in daily life when their whole working experience deprives them of the chance of initiative and responsibility..t The personality cannot be successfully divided into watertight compartments, and even the attempt to do so is dangerous: if a man is taught to rely upon a paternalistic authority within the factory, he will be ready to rely upon one outside. If he is rendered irresponsible at work by lack of opportunity for responsibility, he will be irresponsible when away from work too. The contemporary social trend towards a centralised, paternalistic, authoritarian society only reflects conditions which already exist within the factory.
*oi.. responsibility ness .. displaying initiative ness.. as cancerous distraction.. we need to let go.. and let people be
Gordon Rattray Taylor, Are Workers Human?
The novelist Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on “incentives” in industry. He remarked that “Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.”
graeber min\max law et al
But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging in his garden because there he is free from foremen, managers and bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the same thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to himself and not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and not because he has to. He is doing his own thing. He is his own man.
The desire to “be your own boss” is very common indeed. Think of all the people whose secret dream or cherished ambition is to run a small-holding or a little shop or to set up in trade on their own account, even though it may mean working night and day with little prospect of solvency. Few of them are such optimists as to think they will make a fortune that way. What they want above all is the sense of independence and of controlling their own destinies.
kilpi work law et al
The fact that in the twentieth century the production and distribution of goods and services is far too complicated to be run by millions of one-man businesses doesn’t lessen this urge for self-determination, and the politicians, managers and giant international corporations know it. This is why they present every kind of scheme for “workers’ participation”, “joint management”, “profit sharing”, “industrial co-partnership”, everything in fact from suggestion boxes to works councils, to give the worker the feeling that he is more than a cog in the industrial machine while making sure that effective control of industry is kept out of the hands of the man on the factory floor. They are in fact like the rich man in Tolstoy’s fable — they will do anything for the worker except get off his back.
In every industrial country, and probably in every agricultural country, the idea of workers’ control has manifested itself at one time or another — as a demand, an aspiration, a programme or a dream. To confine ourselves to one century and one country, it was the basis of two parallel movements in Britain around the First World War, Syndicalism and Guild Socialism. These two movements dwindled away in the early 1920s, but ever since then there have been sporadic and periodic attempts to re-create a movement for workers’ control of industry. From some points of view the advocates of workers’ control had much more reason for optimism in 1920 than today. In that year the Sankey Report (a majority report of a Royal Commission) advocating “joint control” and public ownership of the mining industry in Britain, was turned down by the government for being too radical, and by the shop stewards for not being radical enough. When the mines were actually nationalised after almost thirty years, nothing even as mild as joint control was either proposed or demanded. In 1920, too, the Building Guilds began their brief but successful existence. In our own day it is inconceivable that large local authorities would let big building contracts to guilds of workers, or that the co-operative movement would finance them. *The idea that workers should have some say in the running of their industries was accepted then in a way that it has never been since.
*makes no diff.. because still cancerous distraction
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And yet the trade union movement today is immeasurably stronger than it was in the days when workers’ control was a widespread demand.
It was unfortunate that the idea of workers’ control was almost completely identified with the concept of union control … It was obvious throughout that the unions would oppose any doctrine aiming at creating a representative structure in industry parallel with their own.
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In fact, in the only instances we know of in Britain, of either complete or partial workers’ control, the trade union structure is entirely separate from the administration, and there has never been any suggestion that it should be otherwise. What are these examples? Well, there are the cooperative co-partnerships which make, for instance, some of the footware sold in retail co-operative societies. These are, so far as they go, genuine examples of workers’ control (needless to say I am not speaking of the factories run by the Cooperative Wholesale Society on orthodox capitalist lines), but they do not seem to have any capacity for expansion, or to exercise any influence on industry in general. There are the fishermen of Brixham in Devon, and the miners of Brora on the coast of Sutherland in Scotland
oi.. cooperatives ness
I *mention these examples, not because they have any economic significance, but because the general view is that control of industry by workers is a beautiful idea which is utterly impracticable because of some unspecified deficiency, not in the idea, but in those people labelled as “workers”. The Labour Correspondent of The Times remarked of ventures of this kind that, while they provide “a means of harmonious self-government in a small concern”, there is no evidence that they provide “any solution to the problem of establishing democracy in large-scale industry”. **And even more widespread than the opinion that workers have a built-in capacity for managing themselves, is the regretful conclusion that workers’ control is a nice idea, but one which is totally incapable of realisation because of the scale and complexity of modern industry. Daniel Guerin recommends an interpretation of anarchism which “rests upon large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques, the modern proletariat, and internationalism on a world scale”. But he does not tell us how. On the face of it, we could counter the argument about scope and scale by pointing out how changes in sources of motive power make the geographical concentration of industry obsolete, and how changing methods of production (automation for example) make the concentration of vast numbers of people obsolete too. Decentralisation is perfectly feasible, and probably economically advantageous within the structure of industry as it is today. But the arguments based on the complexity of modern industry actually mean something quite different.
* and ** .. makes no diff.. still cancerous distraction
What the sceptics really mean is that while they can imagine the isolated case of a small enterprise in which the shares are held by the employees, but which is run on ordinary business lines — like Scott Bader Ltd. — or while they can accept the odd example of a firm in which a management committee is elected by the workers — like the co-operative co-partnerships — they cannot imagine those who manipulate the commanding heights of the economy being either disturbed by or, least of all, influenced by, these admirable small-scale precedents. And they are right, of course: the minority aspiration for workers’ control which never completely dies, has at the same time never been widespread enough to challenge the controllers of industry, in spite of the ideological implications of the “work-in”.
makes no diff.. still cancerous distraction
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The tiny minority who would like to see revolutionary changes need not cherish any illusions about this. Neither in the political parties of the Left nor in the trade union movement will they find more than a similar minority in agreement. Nor does the history of syndicalist movements in any country, even Spain, give them any cause for optimism. Geoffrey Ostergaard puts their dilemma in these terms: “To be effective as defensive organisations, the unions needed to embrace as many workers as possible and this inevitably led to a dilution of their revolutionary objectives. In practice, the syndicalists were faced with the choice of unions which were either reformist and purely defensive or revolutionary and largely ineffective.”
perhaps.. until today.. today have means for a legit global detox leap
*Is there a way out of this dilemma? An approach which combines the ordinary day-to-day struggle of workers in industry over wages and conditions with a more radical attempt to shift the balance of power in the factory? I believe that there is, in what the syndicalists and guild socialists used to describe as “encroaching control” by means of the “collective contract”. The syndicalists saw this as “a system by which the workers within a factory or shop would undertake a specific amount of work in return for a lump sum to be allocated by the work-group as it saw fit, on condition that the employers abdicated their control of the productive process itself”. The late G. D. H. Cole, who returned to the advocacy of the collective contract system towards the end of his life, claimed that “the effect would be to link the members of the working group together in a common enterprise under their joint auspices and control, and to emancipate them from an externally imposed discipline in respect of their method of getting the work done”. I believe that it has, and my evidence for this belief comes from the example of the gang system worked in some Coventry factories which has some aspects in common with the collective contract idea, and the “Composite work” system worked in some Durham coal mines, which has everything in common with it.
*oi.. that’s not a way out.. not a way to legit freedom anyway.. oi..
**makes no diff if emancipate in part\ial ness.. ie: if still thinking there is a ‘work’ to be done.. not free..
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The composite work organisation may be described as one in which the group takes over complete responsibility for the total cycle of operations involved in mining the coal face. No member of the group has a fixed work-role. Instead, the men deploy themselves, depending on the requirements of the ongoing group task. *Within the limits of technological and safety requirements they are free to evolve their own way of organising and carrying out their task. **They are not subject to any external authority in this respect, nor is there within the group itself any member who takes over a formal directive leadership function.
if *this.. not *this.. loi
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These examples of on-the-job workers’ control are important in evolving an anarchist approach to industrial organisation. *They do not entail submission to paternalistic management techniques — in fact they demolish the myths of managerial expertise and indispensability. They are a force for solidarity rather than divisiveness between workers on the basis of pay and status. They illustrate that it is possible to bring decision-making back to the factory floor and the face-to-face group. They even satisfy — though this is not my criterion for recommending them — the capitalist test of productivity. They, like the growing concept of workers’ rights of possession in the job tacitly recognised in redundancy payment legislation, actively demonstrated by workers taking over physical possession of the workplace as in the “work-in” at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders — have the great tactical merit of combining short-term aims with long-term aspirations.
*whalespeak.. oi
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Can we imagine that in a situation where the control of an industry, a factory, any kind of workplace, was in the hands of the people who work there, they would just carry on production, distribution and bottle-washing in the ways we are familiar with today? Even within capitalist society (though not within the “public sector” which belongs to “the people”) some employers find that what they call job enlargement or job enrichment, the replacement of conveyor belt tasks by complete assembly jobs, or deliberate rotation from job to job in the production process can increase production simply by reducing boredom. When everyone in an industry has a voice in it, would they stop at this point?
*perhaps not.. but would still be same song.. ie: people telling other people what to do
So instead of restarting the assembly track (if the young workers haven’t already smashed it) they spend *two months discussing the point of their work, and how to rearrange it. Private cars? **Why do people always want to go somewhere else? Is it because where they are is so intolerable? And what part did the automobile play in making the need to escape?
*oi.. cancerous distraction
**because we keep not getting out of sea world.. we keep perpetuating the death of us via same song
He envisages another month of discussion and research in complexly cross-cutting groups, until the workers reach a consensus for eventual self-redeployment for making products which the workers consider to be socially useful. These include car refurbishing (to increase the use-value of models already on the road), buses, overhead monorail cars, electric cars and scooters, white bicycles for communal use (as devised by the Amsterdam provos) , housing units, minimal work for drop-outs, and for kids and old people who like to make themselves usefuL But he sees other aspects of the workers’ take-over, voluntary extra work for example: “As work becomes more and more pleasurable, as technology and society develop to allow more and more craft aspects to return at high technological level, the idea of voluntary extra over the (reduced) fixed working week becomes feasible. Even the fixing of the working week becomes superseded.” The purpose of this voluntary extra? “New Delhi needs buses, provide them by voluntary work.”
oi.. voluntary compliance as same song.. need global detox leap so we can org around legit needs
84
The *factory itself is open to the community, including children; “thus every factory worker is a **potential ‘environmental studies’ instructor, if a child comes up and asks him how something works.” The factory in fact becomes a university, an institute of learning rather than of enforced stupidity, “using men to a millionth of their capacities” as Norbert Weiner put it.
*in the city.. as the day ness.. but not if **still holding onto this mentality..
The evolution and transformation of the factory envisaged by Keith Paton leads us back to the idea of the Community Workshop envisaged in the previous chapter.
Groups of community workshops could combine for bulk ordering of components, or for sharing according to their capacity the production of components for mutual exchange and for local assembly.
As we are frequently reminded by our own experience as consumers, industrial products in our society are built for a limited life as well as for an early obsolescence. *The products which are available for purchase are not the products which we would prefer to have. In a worker-controlled society it would not be worth the workers’ while to produce articles with a deliberately limited life, nor to make things which were unrepairable.
*deeper problem.. we have no idea what we want.. until we org around legit needs as detox.. still working for things we don’t want/need
85
In his book The Worker in an Affluent Society, Ferdynand Zweig makes the entertaining observation that “quite often the worker comes to work on Monday worn out from his weekend activities, especially from ‘Do-it-yourself’. Quite a number said that the weekend is the most trying and exacting period of the whole week, and Monday morning in the factory, in comparison, is relaxing.” This leads us to ask — not in the future, but in our present society — *what is work and what is leisure if we work harder in our leisure than at our work? The fact that one of these jobs is paid and the other is not seems almost fortuitous. And this in turn leads us to a further question. The paradoxes of contemporary capitalism mean that there are **vast numbers of what one American economist calls no-people: the army of the unemployed who are either unwanted by, or who consciously reject, the meaningless mechanised slavery of contemporary industrial production. Could they make a livelihood for themselves today in the community workshop? If the workshop is conceived merely as a social service for “creative leisure” the answer is that it would probably be against the rules. Members might complain that so-and-so was abusing the facilities provided by using them “commercially”. But if the workshop were conceived on more imaginative lines than any existing venture of this kind, ***its potentialities could become a source of livelihood in the truest sense. In several of the New Towns in Britain, for example, it has been found necessary and desirable to build groups of small workshops for individuals and small businesses engaged in such work as repairing electrical equipment or car bodies, woodworking and the manufacture of small components. The Community Workshop would be enhanced by its cluster of separate workplaces for “gainful” work. ****Couldn’t the workshop become the community factory, providing work or a place for work for anyone in the locality who wanted to work that way, not as an optional extra to the economy of the affluent society which rejects an increasing proportion of its members, but as one of the prerequisites of the worker-controlled economy of the future?
*so.. just paid vs unpaid work
**caring labor.. nika & silvia on divorce.. et al
***not if still any form of m\a\p
****what we need is ie: city sketchup ness.. sans any form of earn a living ness.. need to try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
Keith Paton again, in a far-sighted pamphlet addressed to members of the Claimants’ Union, urged them not to compete for meaningless jobs in the economy which has thrown them out as redundant, but to use their skills to serve their own community. (One of the characteristics of the affluent world is that it denies its poor the opportunity to feed, clothe, or house themselves, or to meet their own and their families’ needs, except from grudgingly doled-out welfare payments). He explains that:
bs jobs from birth et al
.. Garages can be converted into little workshops, home-brew kits are popular, parts and machinery can be taken from old cars and other gadgets. If they saw their opportunity, trained metallurgists and mechanics could get into advanced scrap technology, recycling the metal wastes of the consumer society for things which could be used again regardless of whether they would fetch anything in a shop. Many hobby enthusiasts could begin to see their interests in a new light.
again.. graeber min\max law et al..
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*“We do”, he affirms, “need each other and the enormous pool of energy and morale that lies untapped in every ghetto, city district and estate.” The funny thing is that when we discuss the question of work from an anarchist point of view, the first question people ask is: **What would you do about the lazy man, the man who will not work? The only possible answer is that we have all been supporting him for centuries. The problem that faces every individual and every society is quite different, it is how to provide people with the opportunity they yearn for: the chance to be useful.
*what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people
**oh man.. only possible answer?.. oi.. rather.. that we have not yet let go enough to see the dance.. so we perpetuate myth of tragedy and lord ness
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be you. 