Plans, however imposing, for reorganising our economic life remain on paper until it is to the interest of some powerful social group to force them through. It must be a continual puzzle to those who see society in terms of individuals, not classes, why schemes, in themselves admirable, are not adopted. Douglas Credit enthusiasts may prove that their proposals are economically flawless, but in fact they can get no wide social basis for them. Unless or until it becomes to the interest of some sufficiently powerful class to force through a plan, no amount of propaganda, no names on note-paper, however imposing, no number of individual converts, can overcome the inertia in society which prefers things to remain as they are. In Britain tariffs, a form of planning, whose propaganda was backed by immense funds and great influence, remained a subject for lectures until it suddenly became to the interest of the industrialists to have general tariffs. At that moment free-trade opposition faded into two wisps of parliamentary parties, themselves not very sure about their opposition.
The planned organisation and coordination of all those who cooperate in a factory belongs to the very essence of capitalism. This has been developing through three centuries, and has reached a high pitch of perfection at the moment. Worked out on a profit-making basis, it created the contradictions of capitalism. Since about 1880 the scale of planning has been gradually extended to whole branches of industry by the forming of monopoly trusts. The process has gone a long way in Germany, USA and Japan. Britain has tended to lag behind, and now in the slump, caused to a certain extent by these monopolies, is reaping a certain advantage from that tardiness.
Since the dawn of this century economic theoreticians in the intervals between crises have explained that monopolies tend to abolish crises. In fact, monopolies intensify the crises because they sharpen the contradictions of capitalism. The monopoly trusts raise prices, or prevent competition forcing them lower. This gives the trust extra profit, at the same time leading to the further shrinking of purchasing power, and so the fatal gulf between producing and consuming power widens to a crisis.
The immediate task before capitalism is to weave the monopolies into a national trust – meaning by that that the whole national industry becomes a monopoly for finance capital – hence the emergence of autarchy as a new and more virulent form of nationalism. But this planning must necessarily extend the boundaries of the nations because none of them is economically independent. It must be accompanied by a widening of the spheres of influence, by a new type of imperialism. Nations who have lost their basis for this, like Germany, or who never had a satisfactory one, like Japan, are forced to an aggressive imperialism. Britain, which has such a basis, is forced on to the defensive to maintain its position.
From this to World Planning – the domination of the globe by a single financial group – is in the phase of fantasy at the moment, but it is the logical way out from the devastation likely to be caused by autarchy. Michael Arlen’s novel, Man’s Mortality, and Robert Nichols’ Fantastica are intelligent prophecies of quite possible developments.
The kind of planning that will come out of the present capitalist chaos depends, as we have said, on which particular social group is behind the planning, and in whose interest the planning process is carried through. It is necessary, therefore, to look more closely at the attitude of the different sections of the population to the problem of planning.
The Capitalists and Planning: To take first the capitalists, who are the present owners of the means of production. There are two ways of owning a business. One is to derive an income from it. In this sense all shareholders own an undertaking. If this were the only form of ownership there would be truth in the contention so frequently made, that the system of small shares has broken the individual ownership of the means of production. That we are all Socialists nowadays because the small man can become a capitalist.
But to own a thing also means to be able to use and control it. A capitalist is a person who can control the means of production by having a title to the property of a certain part of them. Forty per cent of the shares in an undertaking in one hand, and directed by one will, are in practice stronger than the remaining 60 per cent if these are split up among thousands of ignorant and uninterested men, or directed by divergent wills. The share system, far from being ‘Socialist’, has enabled the capitalists to control an enterprise with a part only of the capital, the rest being in the hands of people who buy income with their shares, but derive no influence from them.
One section of capitalists are a driving force in planning so long as it takes the form of centralisation of capital, of subsidies, of state help in foreign trade, that ‘freedom from state interference built up on state assistance’, which Edgar Mowrer describes as the aim of postwar German capitalism. In individualistic England the increasing difficulties of world trade and foreign competition has given an impetus to the integration of industry in return for national assistance, as for example, the quota schemes in the mining industry, and the schemes for reorganisation in the iron and steel trades which were to be the price of the tariff concessions.
This process is rather expensive. The British public has grown somewhat restive at the costs already incurred for the agricultural marketing and milk-planning schemes. The subsidies granted for sugar beet have reached the absurdity of being higher in value than the entire crop. A National Sugar Marketing Board, which is, in fact, a capitalist price-raising monopoly, and has been denounced by the Cooperative movement as such, is now to take control. But obviously the public cannot be expected to pay indefinitely for the concentration of monopoly capitalism – as long, that is, as it is allowed any knowledge of, or say in, the matter. ‘National planning’ sounds much better, and secures the interest and assistance of people who consider that their main interest in life is to fight ‘capitalism’. National Planning is the Innocents’ Club, thoughtfully provided by capitalists for unwary Socialists.
On the other hand certain capitalist elements are a definite obstacle to planning. These are the owners of plants which centralisation and rationalisation would put out of business. These smaller owners would also lose that personal independence in their industry which they value highly. If events take their normal course, they can be crushed out either by bankruptcy or forced sale. If planning is undertaken as an urgent task, they must be brought in by the joint action of the ‘progressive’ capitalists and their government. The electricity grid is a classic example of the ruthlessness of a capitalist state against small capitalists’ interests when this is desired by the bigger men. Where the Italian Fascist state has done any planning it has had to break this resistance partly by administrative measures, but mostly by giving further advantages in the form of taxation relief or subsidies. A strong national state is thus necessary for the movement towards capitalist concentration, to make trade agreements abroad, to enforce them at home, and to crush certain capitalistic as well as the workers’ resistance. The Labour governments are anxious to carry on the good work. The agricultural marketing schemes were proposed and the Bill passed by a Labour government. The Coal Quota schemes and London Passenger Transport were the work of the same agency.
The planning of production can be, and has been up to now, carried through by the capitalists. The problem of our time is the planning of production and consumption in relation to each other. This can be done, either by extending the purchasing power, or by restricting production. Restriction is the capitalist way. Almost every day since 1929, the newspapers have given particulars of the cruder type of restriction, the burning of harvests, the ploughing in of growing crops, the restriction of acreage to be sown. The Roosevelt Plan has subsidised such destruction. Carried through more discreetly are the innumerable schemes for the restriction of factory production, the agreed quotas, the levies on tonnage produced over a certain limit. National Shipbuilding Securities Ltd has not extended the market for ships, but has concentrated on eliminating the British shipyards made redundant by the restriction of trade all round. Between 1930 and 1933 it bought and dismantled 20 shipyards, with an annual capacity of 704,000 tons, and sterilised them against future use for shipbuilding. Mr TD Barrow of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, advocating a scheme for the reorganisation of the Lancashire cotton industry, wants ‘plans designed to bring about a controlled and orderly contraction in the productive capacity of the cotton industry’. The agreement drawn up by the West Yorkshire Federation of Mineowners provides for the closing of redundant mines, and the regulation of prices. The Woolcombers’ Mutual Association has made a somewhat similar scheme for the elimination of redundant plant.
The other way out of the crisis, the increase of purchasing power, is so against the capitalist grain that in most countries it has hardly even been discussed. America in the ‘prosperity years’, previous to 1929, boasted of their high-wage policy which, it was claimed, had ironed out the cyclical crises of capitalism. But even to this, as President Roosevelt has since explained, there were too many exceptions. And if there were not, the increase of purchasing power, and consequent increased turnover, leads inevitably, if the profit system is kept, to further extensions of production which expands more quickly than purchasing power, and the old problem is there again. Henry Ford has been proclaimed the High Priest of the High-Wage Policy, but it is an illusion that he in reality pays higher wages. His method simply presses more productive capacity into the eight-hour working day. He pays more for those eight hours than his competitors, but he buys the leisure time of the worker as well, by exhausting the energy which enables the worker to use his leisure time for his own purposes. By this means Ford presses also more of the workers’ lifetime into the eight-hour day. In later years he can only sell his labour at a very low price, or not at all, owing to the high degree of exploitation in his youth. According to Pound, in the car industry of Detroit, piece-work wages have their maximum at 25 years and drop very rapidly after the thirty-fifth year. In pre-Ford days, the wages rose gradually to the thirty-fifth year, and remained fairly stable until 60. The cost of the reproduction of the power to work must now be gained in fewer years. If all capitalist enterprise was run on the Ford system, the purchasing power of the working class as a whole would not rise. What they gained at 25 would be lost by the men at 40.
The Workers and Planning: The part that can be played by the workers in planning is the crucial question now. The capitalist and Fascist forms of planning are deliberately designed to exclude the worker from any say in the matter. In Italy they are excluded from any direct influence. Their representatives, who are taken, not from their own ranks, but from the middle classes, have a certain direct influence on the conditions of work, but the attempt of these avocati to get some influence on production itself, through the Corporation idea, has been quite ineffective so far. The only influence that the workers have in Italy is based on the fear of revolution, on the memories of the workers’ attack in 1918-20. But this means only that the degree of exploitation is limited to the degree in which it remains just tolerable.
In Germany, the Workers’ Front, with its 23 million members, has been deliberately excluded from having any influence whatever on questions of production. The Economic Council consists only of capitalists – and the egregious Dr Ley. As in Italy, the only limit set is the menace of revolution, for the ordinary checks and balances of independent trade-union organisation do not work. Hitler, less well seated in the saddle than Mussolini, and conscious of the coming war, has to keep his workers in as contented a state of mind as possible, but the whole ‘leader principle’ on which his policy is based excludes the workers from anything other than the maintenance of such tolerable fodder basis as can be provided by an economic system run and planned entirely by the employers.
In England, particularly since the war, there have been discussions of various forms of ‘Workers’ Control’ in capitalist industry. The Joint Industrial Councils formed under the Whitley schemes were supposed to develop towards some kind of consultation, at least. They have not gone beyond the negotiation of wages and working conditions. The Labour government’s Mines Quota scheme made no provision for the workers taking any share in planning. Mr Macmillan, in his ‘Plea for a National Policy of Reconstruction’, states emphatically: ‘Interference in the daily management of industry must clearly be rejected. Those entrusted with that highly technical task must be chosen for their ability.’ In this assumption that the workers have no ability for ‘that highly technical task’, Mr Macmillan adopts Hitler’s view that the capitalists have shown by their success that they are the true leaders of industry, and therefore the workers, by the fact that they are not employers, have shown that they are not fitted to be. In assuming that the workers are not competent for the task, great care is taken to ensure that they do not have the chance to become interested in it. Here lies the essential difference between Fascist and Socialist planning.
The workers have, as their main and immediate interest, the raising of wages. But to do this effectively and permanently they must go on to solve the main contradiction of capitalism, the maladjustment of consuming to purchasing power. Thus, even unconsciously, they become the main driving force behind Socialism. Everything which is done in society by groups is done on the basis of class-interest. Therefore the contradictions of capitalism can only be solved by the class which is materially interested in solving them.
The question then arises why they haven’t done this before now. But great changes like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or from capitalism to Socialism, though the actual change may come swiftly as in Russia, take long years, sometimes centuries, before the necessary explosive force accumulates. Capitalist control of industry has been regarded as a matter of course. Its efficiency during the great years of expansion from the 1840s till the first World War seemed to be proved. But that confidence, shaken by the war, has not been restored in the period of deepening crises and permanent unemployment that has followed the war.
In the country where the explosion came early, and the workers (under a leadership that had been carefully trained for years beforehand) took control and started to plan industry, they have had to concentrate on this function of adjusting consuming to producing power. Indeed, the phenomenon was witnessed by the capitalist world of a country where consuming power actually outran productive capacity, even when that productive capacity was raised to above prewar level. This is as much the inevitable result of the early days of workers’ control of planning, as the opposite, the excess of producing over consuming power, is the necessary result of capitalism.
If the workers in other countries remain indifferent and apathetic to the problem of taking over the planning themselves, while demanding a better standard of living, then the capitalist attempt to meet the problems caused thereby will lead through Fascism to a second World War. That, as far as can be judged at present, seems inevitably the path that will be taken.
After the second World War, Europe outside Russia, possibly also America, will exhibit the same conditions of utter breakdown that forced the workers to take over the planning of economic life in Russia. If the workers’ movement can, in that situation, become the representative of the interest of society against a parasitic and dangerous class, the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie were able to become the leaders of the rest of the classes in society against feudalism in decay, then a Socialist Europe will be the next stage of human development. If, that is, the second World War leaves any Europeans to develop.
The Technicians and Planning: The technicians have an interest of their own for planning, and they are indispensable for the planning of modern industry.
Their drive towards planning comes because they are trained to regard waste and inefficiency as serious faults, and all their professional efforts aim at eliminating them. When, under the pressure exerted by big convulsions of the economic system on their own economic status, they begin to look at the capitalist system as a whole, they are shocked by the discovery that though their individual machine or factory may have reached the summit of organised efficiency, the sum total of machines and factories is in a state of anarchy and chaos. The machines which they build are not allowed to work because the social machine is out of order. Planning becomes for them a demand of reason. To them it seems that only stupid inertia and lack of reason prevents an intelligent planning of society. Only a few see the group interest that is served by the waste and inefficiency that shocks them. To the technician the reconstruction of society appears as a problem of science, of mechanics. Put some new parts into the machine to replace some parts that have worn out and the social machine will run perfectly. This is why proposals of currency reform receive so much support from eminent technicians. They think that if new paper is printed something will have happened to make the machine work. They have blind spots [1] in their scientific vision to the social issues, and the conflict of group interests involved in planning. The social division of society is to remain the same. Only the apparatus employed by society needs mending.
This attitude leads some of them even to conceive of a society ruled by technicians. This was the basis of ‘technocracy’, which had such a vogue in the America of 1931-32. No one could answer the smashing condemnation of modern capitalism which inevitably followed the technocratic analysis, except by proof that the leader of the movement could not get on happily with his wife, which convinced America that his ideas were unworthy of notice. Actually the movement could produce no results, could strike no roots, not because of the personal idiosyncrasies of Mr Scott, but because in attacking the powerful capitalist group interests they were not concerned to get the backing of the class whose interest lay in a planned economy.
Being a class which comes in between the workers and the capitalists, and which could combine with either, the technicians like to imagine themselves as impartial judges, disinterested arbiters of the social questions. They think that the claims of the capitalists and of the workers are partly right and partly wrong. They regard themselves as the scientific element standing for the interests of efficient production, whereas capitalists and workers are greedily interested only in their share of the fruit of production, in higher wages or in higher profits.
That the technicians are indispensable to the planning of industry as a whole, as well as of the individual plant, cannot seriously be doubted. But whereas some of the technical men desire their own hegemony as the ‘true experts’, the more class-conscious workers tend to regard them as possibly dangerous enemies, only fit to be used by a triumphant proletariat. Because of their theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Russians have had endless difficulties with their technical staffs which still handicap their socialist reconstruction.
The attitude of superiority to the workers, the weight of the tradition of inferiority of the manual to the technical staff in a factory, accounts partly for this attitude on both sides. Different standards of living prevent the workers and technicians meeting socially, getting to understand each other’s problems and point of view. For the future success of a planned state contact between workers and technicians in the factory and not merely their representatives in the conference room is important. If they have never seen each other under capitalism except at a distance, how can they at once work together as equals under socialism after the control of the capitalist who coordinates their efforts now has been abolished?
1. See Eberhard Conze, ‘Theorie der Blindheit’, in Der Satz vom Widerspruch (Hamburg, 1932).