The AWL and Workers Control

Sean Matgamna has posted this short piece by TRotsky on the qustion of Workers Control, which is worth reading

TRotsky on Workers Control .

In particular, the following is worth reading.

"Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the failing back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word."

Now, if I am not mistaken this state of society does not correspond to the current state of society and the class struggle in Britain today. Which means that when the AWL put forward the slogan of "Nationalisation under Workers Control" of the Banks at the moment we can see how far both from reality and from TRotsky they now are.

What would the demand for Workers Control amount to according to TRotsky in condiiotns like those which apply today?

"If the participation of the workers in the management of production is to be lasting, stable, “normal,” it must rest upon class collaboration, and not upon class struggle. Such a class collaboration can be realized only through the upper strata of the trade unions and the capitalist associations. There have been not a few such experiments: in Germany (“economic democracy”), in Britain (“Mondism”), etc. Yet, in all these instances, it was not a case of workers’ control over capital, but of the subserviency of the labor bureaucracy to capital. Such subserviency, as experience shows, can last for a long time: depending on the patience of the proletariat."

In other words it is a demand for class collaboration at best. The reality is that it is a totally meaningless demand, because not only is there no militant class conscious working class at the moment capable of implementing such a demand or forcing it upon the Government, but not even those TRade Union leaders referred to by TRotsky have any intention of fulfilling that role of permanent class collaborators sitting on the Boards of the Banks.