Tony Topham

Workers’ Control Conference

From International Socialism (1st series), No.40,October/November 1969, pp.40-41.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

I have just read the proof of Ken Coates’ reply to Ray Challinor’s IS article, in endorsing what the former has said, I should like to add a supplementary note, to draw attention to one or two specific examples of Challinor’s level of argument.

1. Challinor writes: ‘... if Hugh Scanlon believes in workers’ control, then let him argue openly and publicly for it’. Challinor knows full well that Hugh Scanlon has spoken on several occasions at Workers’ Control conferences – indeed Challinor enters a complaint about the IWC allowing platform time to Scanlon to present his open and public arguments. How self-contradictory can one get? Challinor knows that IWC published Scanlon’s 1968 speech as its first pamphlet; does Challinor deny that that speech contains a deep appreciation of the direction in which socialist struggle for workers’ control should go? Challinor continues by arguing that on the question of ‘workers’ democracy within the unions, Hugh Scanlon has remained strangely silent’. A questioner at the 1968 Conference asked Scanlon why it was ‘that a vast union like the AEU can be right-wing at one given period and then with the election of one or two officials becomes extreme left?’ Scanlon replied:

‘I just wonder whether you want me to be honest or moral. One of the greatest fallacies that will exist if we perpetuate it, is the idea that the election of any one man will change any form of society. We have a great deal to do and a long way to travel before we can come to the final conclusion that the questioner came to ... I would say to any friends of the AEU or any members of the AEF that they have a job of work to do second to none, perhaps even more important now, what would be absolutely fatal would be if people found themselves prisoners to a policy to which they themselves do not subscribe.’ [l]

2. Challinor ascribes the responsibility for the 1964 Nottingham workers’ control conference to the IWC. He also says that Coates and Topham had ‘the Institute for Workers’ Control behind them’ in the debates on incomes policy in 1964-65. The IWC was not founded until 1968!

3. Challinor says that I described a certain position on incomes policy as the ‘Cousins thesis’, in an article I published in 1964. This term was in fact coined by Antonio Lettieri in an article in International Socialist Journal, vol.1, which I quoted in my article. Challinor then goes on to ascribe to me a lengthy quotation which, as is perfectly clear in my article, is itself a quotation from Lettieri. [2] By this gross piece of misrepresentation, Challinor manages to avoid any representation of what I said about the ‘Cousins thesis’, which, I wrote, was ‘developed and expanded’ at Nottingham,

‘to embrace the demand for control, under the slogan: “NO INCOMES POLICY WITHOUT WORKERS’ CONTROL” or alternatively, “NO INCOMES POLICY WITHOUT A WORKERS’ VETO”.’ (Capital letters in original)

Why did Challinor see fit to ignore the central weight of my argument, which was deliberately emphasised in capital letters, and instead to put another writer’s words into my mouth? Is it because it would be stretching credulity beyond its limits to classify the workers’ control discussion on incomes policy as ‘reactionary’? (Challinor claims, in a statement which even he will find hard to surpass in sheer, blind, sectarian stupidity, that ‘the whole history of the Workers’ Control movement shows’ that ‘its content is reactionary’. Like the programmes of the dockers, the miners, the aircraft workers, the car workers, the engineers, the teachers, the busmen, the agricultural workers, the workers in mass media, the workers in public services, chemicals, post office, steel, etc., etc., which have emerged from the rank and file participants in the seminars and conferences of the movement?) Quite frankly, Challinor’s piece is not worthy of the standards of socialist journalism and polemic which a publication like International Socialism normally observes.

Notes

1. How and Why Industry must be Democratised, IWC 1969, pp.170-171.

2. See New Left Review, No.25, May-June 1964, pp.15-16.

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