Communism Will Liberate Workers’ Knowledge to Meet the Masses’ Needs here ♦ Nothing Moves Without the Working Class here ♦
Communism Will Liberate Workers’ Knowledge to Meet the Masses’ Needs
I work in a small factory where we manufacture medicines and pharmaceutical products. The management, preparing for a government inspection, are paying huge amounts of money to consultants to re-assess the quality systems and equipment we have used for years. Production has stopped until the consultation is complete. Who don’t they consult the workers on the shop floor?
A whole industry is devoted to publishing books on quality issues. A workmate said, “Instead of wasting money on consultants they could have got us all to read the books on this subject.” Years ago, a few of us pointed out improvements which could be made, and we were ignored. Now they listen to highly paid ‘experts.’
On a previous job, I worked in a large pharmaceutical corporation on a mass production line. I operated a computerised bottle-filling machine from the USA. I got to intimately learn the machine’s quirks and the ways it worked.
Then, once, the machine broke down. The company brought over engineers and electricians from the US to find out what was wrong. But these ‘experts’ had great trouble with the general running of the machine. They had to ask me to stay behind and do overtime to show them all its quirks! Having a certificate saying you are an ‘expert’ does not mean you know everything or that your labour has more value than a so-called ‘un-skilled’ worker.
Labour creates all value. And often the lowest-paid work is the most essential—think farmers, cooks, and custodians—while those at the top of the salary scale do nothing useful at all.
Why do the capitalists need ‘experts’ and why are they paid so much more than workers?
First, ‘experts’ are necessary to promote the ideology of the capitalist ruling class and to reproduce the division of labour under capitalist production. Capitalists divide work into small parts so that workers learn as little as possible about the productive process. They need to devalue the experience and knowledge that workers have. Workers who understand that we can organize productive work collectively, with mutual respect, can also see the potential of organizing the whole society that way.
Many ‘expert’ consultants specialize in organising ways to increase the exploitation of the working class. They make work processes more ‘efficient’—that is, to speed us up! Communism will use our collective knowledge to organise work safely and cooperatively.
Thirdly, some ‘experts’ possess special knowledge of management secrets. They think and act in ways which suggests the bosses can trust them to run their enterprises. They are crucial to the bosses’ competition, which capitalism requires, but which communism will eliminate.
This question of ‘experts’ has been a point of struggle within the communist movement for a century.
In the Soviet Union, Lenin and the Bolsheviks introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, during the famine and crisis following the Civil War. It made significant concessions in power and pay to technicians and managers. Lenin himself soon noted that “communists are not directing anything, they are being directed,” referring to the power of the economic and technical ‘experts.’
During the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, a key struggle was whether you needed to be ‘Red’ or ‘expert’. Should class struggle and politics be at the forefront of work and life, or should work and cultural matters be organised by ‘experts’?
Under the domination of experts, communist politics was left out. Work became focused on economic efficiency, meaning production for profit and increased exploitation of workers. The ‘experts’ received more pay, perks and privileges than the workers.
The left struggled against this division of labour in the factories. They fought to merge manual and administrative and decision-making tasks. They encouraged cooperation between manual and technical workers in arriving at decisions. The work-place became a place for political study and cultural activities. Charles Bettelheim wrote about these struggles in Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China.
However, many did not see at the time that the existence of wages encourages the perpetuation of managerial ‘experts’ and indeed the division of labour which sustains it. Workers will end up competing if it means more wages to survive on or getting an easier, better-paid desk job.
The left lost this struggle and China is now a capitalist power. The revolutions in the 20th century led by the Communist Parties were eventually defeated from within by the elevation to power of these very ‘experts’.
We fight for a communist world without ‘experts’ and the division between “mental” and “manual” labour. We will create cooperative working conditions without wages and money. We will produce for human needs and not for ‘efficiency’ or profits.
Nothing Moves Without the Working Class
UNITED KINGDOM, October 4—The results of low pay and lack of respect for industrial workers are becoming clearer during the current fuel shortage.
For decades, Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) drivers have been paid badly to work in a very stressful job with long hours and time away from home. Haulage firms, in recent years, also relied on temporary staff, often migrants. Now a combination of Brexit, poor conditions and low wages has led to a lack of HGV drivers.
This has meant petrol (gasoline) sitting in tanks in port. Delivery to petrol stations has been slow. This has led to panic buying at the petrol pumps, and stations have run dry. Many working-class people now cannot get to work in areas poorly serviced by public transport, and there are shortages of certain goods and services.
Today the government has deployed 200 military tanker personnel, including 100 drivers, to deliver gasoline to service stations. These workers in uniform are British capitalists’ back-up to guarantee capitalism’s functioning and profitability.
Industrial workers and soldiers are key to overthrowing this capitalist system and to building a communist world. We are reaching out to workers, including truck drivers and military personnel, around the world.
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