TR

 

  

management the balance sheet, the profit and loss account, and
the administration and auditor's reports, but only where
publication of these is required by law; and, moreover, the em-
ployer need not reveal information which could ‘damage’ his
business. In France, similarly, the law authorises the committees
to make suggestions as to how profits should be used. But ‘no case
has come to the author’s attention where such suggestions have
been followed by the employer, and very few suggestions of this
kind have been made in recent years'.!2

In sum, then, the West has evolved systems which by various
degrees permit the ‘participation’ of the workers in industrial
management but which cannot be said to have succeeded even by
their own bourgeois standards. These systems, as I have tried to
illustrate, are a function of firstly the pressing need of capital to
maximise efficiency and hence profits in the new monopoly stage
reached by the production forces;'? and secondly the reformist
character of working class movements in the West. In other
words, capital has long reached the level whereby individual
management is outdated and incompatible with growth; trade
unionism also has long ceased to be a revolutionary force and has
become a tool of capital. Hence the ‘marriage of convenience’ and
the formation of ‘workers’ councils’. By and large, it is those coun-
cils that have not set themselves to consider the question of the
distribution of the product that have managed to maintain some
degree of stability. To quote Sturmthal again, ‘as a general rule. . .
. . it may be said that those committees that have been most suc-
cessful which seemed most remote an attempt to change the social
system’.'* Those which have done so have, in almost all cases.
met premature death. The sole purpose of these councils in the
West, in the final analysis, is to maximise profits and not to serve
any humanitarian let alone socialist goal.

In discussions of this theme (industrial democracy) in Sweden, there
has never been any great pre-occupation with fundamental philosophical
or moral concepts based on the dignity of MAN. The primary emphasis
has been on practical matters, on increasing production, and on the con-
tribution which the workers’ influence on the running of a firm could
make to increased efficiency. Swedish industrial democracy has a strong
economic basis: soap-and-towel democracy is not dismissed out of
hand, but is regarded as a means to increased production and thereby
higher real incomes (real ‘profits’) rather than as an end in itself.'s

190