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TANU branches is very important in estimating the path which
the councils will take.

Eventually, therefore, the title of the discussion has had to be
changed to what it is.

I try to go into a kind of mini-case-study of the council at
Ubongo Farm Implements Factory, which was the first to be for-
med and hence has the longest history of about a year.

Dr. M. A. Bienefeld and Mr. J. S. Saul read and commented on
an earlier draft. The fact that I have been a little adamant to take
their advices does not in the least reduce my indebtedness to them.

B: Workers’ Participation Under Capitalism

In the West, the idea of workers’ control in the management of
enterprises can be traced back to the industrial revolution. Ad-
vocated principally by the autopian socialists of the time, this
notion of active worker involvement in the decision making
processes of enterprises sought to regulate the property rights of
the capitalist order to minimise the social disorder and economic
exploitation that are inherent under capitalism.

As with most of the ideas propounded by the utopian socialists,
this notion was conceived in perverted and often contradictory
terms. This was necessarily so because the whole question was
analysed in isolation. While they believed that the control of social
affairs should ideally be exercised by the producers in society, they
included in the term ‘producers’ not only the workers but also the
capitalist employers. In other words, they were seeking palliatives
for a disease that they were not really prepared to cure — they
presupposed the capitalist system and sought to merely reduce
some of its more glaring vagaries. In the words of one their
leading numbers, Robert Owen, they were seeking to ‘humanise
capitalist enterprise’ and not to destroy it.'

The syndicalists, on the other hand, visualised a society in
which each industry would be managed by its own workers, both
manual and mental. In a conglomeration of such units, they
thought society would function best both for the individual mem-
ber as well as for society as a whole. Following syndicalism, guild
socialism was centred on the idea that the ‘guilds’ — consisting of
all the workers — would ultimately control industry but with ‘due’
regard for the interests of ‘other sections’ of the community.?

It was not until the end of the First World War, however, that

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