Incomes Policy II. A Strategy For The Unions

Abstract

Many pressures have brought British capitalists, hobbling and apprehensive, to feed at the trough of indicative planning, and to take a new look at the state, which becomes for them today a corporate strategist as well as a protector: these very pressures have found their echo in the Labour movement in the debate on Incomes Policy. This produces a neatly satisfying situation for the men of power. By forcing Labour to respond on the issue of whether or not there should be an incomes policy, they have succeeded in presenting it with the interesting dilemma: say "yes" and you endorse the goals of neo-capitalism, and agree to the steady absorption of the unions into disciplinary state organs; say "no," and you opt simply for old-style capitalism, the sanctity of collective bargaining, and the uncomfortable company of Mr. Enoch Powell. Naturally socialists cannot intelligently choose either course. Their task is to find an aggressive reply, one which forces the employers on to the defensive, and opens up the prospect of a considerable development of socialist understanding, self-confidence and optimism among the working population. At the moment, since Mr. Brown has secured the adoption of his "Declaration of Intent," solemnly approved by a Labour Lord from the T.U.C. and a simple neo-capitalist mister, and presented to the world as a treaty to end the class-war, things do not appear to augur well for the chances of an alternative, offensive strategy for the unions. Such appearances are likely to prove misleading. In reality, Mr. Brown skates upon ice of little more than molecular thickness, while the currents beneath that ice are moody, truculent, and liable to erupt at any time. The truth is that Mr. Brown's broad line of march is based upon a naive and platitudinous assumption, that Britain's economic difficulties are simply the result of "mistakes" by former governments, rather than symptoms of a deep and painful crisis of structure. Nowhere is this more plain than in the debate which has been raging around the question of incomes policy itself.