The Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, August 11, 1948 HOLDING-DOWN PROCESS

Grey River Argus, 11 August 1948, Page 4

The Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, August 11, 1948 HOLDING-DOWN PROCESS

tirade against the very notion of any democratising of industry such as locally is to be occasionally read, must prompt any wageearner to compare his lot to-day with that of workers in the past. | Individualism, in a sense that whoever gets to the top ought to have the "right of hiring apd firing, dictating pay and conditions, and excluding the rank and file from any real say iii control, is the arugment candidly advanced. As remarked the other day, the capitalists are themselves realising that they must humanise industry if they expect the degree of co-operation which spells maximum production. We are told, on the one hand that to the .extent workers are accorded a voice in industrial control, the result will tend to resemble an impersonal system such as that in Russia, but, on the other hand, arc assured that the Soviet has discarded “worker control.” Whatever be the degree of impersonal control developed under the Soviet, one thing is pretty evident in every country where industrial capitalism has for many generations had the fullest scope to reach its logical conclusion. It is that the workers, in various ways, are seeking steadily to a greater degree of control in industry. It has been more the result of regimentation by capitalism, —the enslavement of the working class under burdens of poverty —than anything else that the world-wide movement for public ownership of certain fundamental industries has come to take such general effect. It is suggested wage and salary earners ought to shy at the very idea of looking upon the State as an employer. But in actual fact the working class is not persuaded by actual experience that the private capitalists are in general preferable as employers to the State. On the contrary, a very great proportion of workers in important industries have consistently advocated nationalisation in their own ease. The State is declared to possess such power that its employees must always find themselves engaged in an unequal struggle. That contention is unproven, but time and again has history proven that when the workers have been opposed by organised plutocracy they have been engaged in a very unequal struggle. It might be possible to lend feasibility to the argument that co-operation in industry and even private ownership would offer a better environment for wage-earners. Prerequisites for such a claim, however, would be, first, such a modification of private monopoly and such a redistribution of the ownership of in-1 dustry as would open up for the workers a prospect of some greater security than is offered by the liability to the sack, and by the reckoning of remuneration as nearly as possible on the mere subsistence level. So much is indeed essential if the protelariat is to be kept in being and to reproduce itself. Secondly, the power of money in the sphere of monopoly would require to be modified by a State administration. Yet on the part of the money power itself there is scant disposition to depart from the traditional dictatorial ways of plutocracy. It may be said that to urge the redistribution of productive property is now to pull (against the tide. Capitalists oppose it with the plea that the joint stock company allows wage earners to own shares, even if it denies them as far as possible any measure of industrial control. Workers likewise are prone to ignore the idea from a conviction that the wages system is one which has become unalterable. The alternative presented is that through public ownership all at least will be sharers in ownership, and as the great majority, are wage or salary earners, the weight of numbers has its inevitable effect.

The very claim that a voice in industrial policy must be mainly limited to the few individuals picked out to rule their fellows by capitalists surely denotes that the latter have no more intention either of modifying' monopoly or redistributing productive property than of modifying even their predatory competition against one another, or else forming monopolies which hold the whole community to ransom. The average wage earner is apt to con-

clude that where any industry becomes largely one of monopoly, justice at least, if not the volume of output, would better be served by making everybody a participant in such monopoly. Finally, industry is often called a partnership between capital' and labour, and it is time the expression were given a real meaning, and the proceeds divided more evenly, instead of a strict limit on one side and the sky the limit on the other side.