a phenomenon by its own standards; one must search for the ob-
jective conditions and, more important, for the historical con-
sequences of such practice.

This notion of workers’ participation within the capitalist
system is now very popular in nearly all Western countries. It is
based, fundamentally, on the myth of ‘class cooperation’ and
mutual development’. | have already referred to the Whitley Com-
mittee which was charged with making recommendations to the
British government on improving industrial relations. While both
government and labour movements were discussing the Com-
mittee’s report, the Sheffield Workers’ Committee, for one,
published a pamphlet which exhaustively criticised this idea of
‘Class cooperation’ on which the recommended Joint Councils
were to be based.'?

The pamphlet put forward three main arguments against these
councils:

(a) they could function only when both sides were equal in
strength, otherwise they would just strengthen the em-
ployers’ hold on the workers;

(b) they would soften the attitude of the trade unions to the em-
ployers since they would teach them to look at things from
‘both sides’; and

(c) the workers would be undertaking some responsibility for
the development of property which they did not own and
they would thus become a part of an organisation which is
pledged to prevent them from ever owning such property.

Thus the pamphlet argued that ‘so long as labour remains a com-
modity and the employing class purchasers of that commodity, the
relationship remains the same, wage-slave to profiteer, workmen to em-
ployer, power to power . . . an addition of power to one side meaning a
loss to the other’.?°

There is hardly a word one could add to this argument — par-
ticularly when one looks at the stark realities of the present day.
The Workers’ Committee could not have been more accurate in its
prophecy of the consequences of workers' participation’ in the
management of capitalist property. The trade unions in the West,
as a result, have learned to look at things ‘from both sides’, the
working class has been ‘bourgeoisified’ in its outlook, and by elec-
ting its best members onto the employers’ boards they have

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