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Ken Coates

Socialism and the division of labour

Some notes on the views of Paul Cardan

(Summer 1961)

From International Socialism (1st series), No. 5, Summer 1961, pp. 18–23.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

Paul Cardan, in his article Socialists and Capitalism [1] has lamented the lack of discussion among socialists about socialism. He has grounds for this lamentation, and I would like to take issue with him for the dual purpose of undermining both his lamentation and some of his arguments. This is a difficult task, because there are many things in his article with which one is glad to agree, a few which cause the hairs on one’s neck to bristle, and far more that seem to lurk like hostile icebergs, with clean pure lines above the water, visible, and god-knows-what beneath, obscured, but menacing. It is always possible to misunderstand someone, and in parts I may have misunderstood Cardan, so I would like to begin in a rather simple way by sketching out what seems to me to be the basis of the argument. Cardan talks about ‘traditional marxism’ in his article, and represents it rather differently than I would, so I think it appropriate to say what I think traditional marxism is about. Rightly, Cardan is concerned with the disruptive and destructive effect of the division of labour in modern factories; So too was Marx. But what he had to say about the matter is perhaps most simply grasped by looking at what he appropriated from others who faced this problem before him and alongside him.

Classical political economy begins with a treatise on the effects of the division of labour on productivity. The very first pages of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations consider how

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is anywhere directed or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. [2]

Adam Smith pointed to three basic ways in which the division of labour tended to increase productivity: it increased individual dexterity, cut out wasted time in transferring from one operation to the next, and opened up the road by which mechanization entered working life; to ‘abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many’. He also pointed out the limitations which beset the application of the division: in particular, he noted that the size of the market set the bounds to, and the pace of specialization; in that the smaller the market, the less incentive, indeed the less opportunity, to separate out tasks in the general production. With all their refinements, later economists had little to add to this basic insight on this matter.

For the moralists, however, it was quite another story. Adam Smith had begun his exposition with his famous parable of the pin-makers.

A workman ... could scarce make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which the business is now carried on ... one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is another business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper ... [3]

... and so on. But the same story was seen very differently when refracted through the prisms of a de Tocqueville, a Melville, or a Ruskin:

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men – divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished – sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is – we should think there might be some loss in it also.

And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this – that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. [4]

A more general version of this complaint was given by Emerson: ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride Mankind’. In our own century, it has been taken up again and again, as witnessed in this heartcry of Norbert Weiner:

it is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar, and use him as a source of power, but it is an almost equal degradation to assign him to a purely repetitive job in a factory, which demands less than a millionth of his brain capacity. [5]

Whom then do we choose: the moralists, or the economists? Marx’s own answer, and surely it is the right one; was, Neither: and both. [6] The division of labour is the key to progress, yet it is the source of all that is retrogressive in human society at the same time. Classes themselves are merely a hardened case of the division; the great division between mental and manual labour. The dilemma is plain; to choose Adam Smith without Ruskin’s insight would be brutish, inhuman; yet to reject him for Ruskin would be to reject the possibility of producing a Ruskin who could see what was wrong. Even so, the fact that low impotent moans come from the moralists is itself a great thing, for ‘mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve,’

For Marx the problem was, then, to overcome the division of labour, on the basis of expanding needs, that is to say, without retreating into monastic self-denial and puritan self-stultification. It was not, as Cardan suggests it was, to ‘use the productive apparatus of capitalism’ towards the end of ‘satisfying the needs of the masses’, unless one puts a much wider interpretation on these words than he seems to, and excludes the implied meaning, which seems to be simply an equation of needs with material goods. Further, once one understands needs in this broader sense, one would have to see the ‘use’ of capitalism’s productive apparatus as involving the transcending of that apparatus, which is precisely the creation of the very division of labour which is to be overcome. Cardan takes issue with Marx quite explicitly on this matter, condemning the notion that ‘the realm of freedom’ will be established through ‘reduction in the working day’. This seems to me to be a matter of cardinal importance, and one which needs to be thoroughly discussed yet again, if people like Cardan find themselves in doubt about the matter.

Clearly, the business of transcending the division of labour is not a matter of issuing decrees to the effect that people must ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and become critical critics in the evening.’ Such decrees are quite worthless in all conditions in which the general productivity, is not ripe to uphold them, and unnecessary in any condition in which it is. When men find it convenient at the moment to be either hunter or fisherman or critic, it is because the state of the market, of the economic organization of society, decrees it to be so. These agencies are somewhat more powerful than any group of legislators: indeed, ‘laws’ on this matter would not merely be worthless, but probably destructive into the bargain. Even assuming the quixotic attempt to legislate, a race of universal men into being, and the requisite policemen to uphold the law, the only conceivable result would be a race of universal morons. The only way men can become free is by freeing themselves: and this they can only do in obedience to an accurate understanding of the sources of their unfreedom. Accordingly, Marx did rightly look to the area of leisure in a society in transition to socialism as the growing point of freedom. Cardan finds this distasteful. So it may be, but that cannot help us if it is true.

If we leap ahead for a moment, and take a look at one of the factories in which Cardan will have us celebrate our socialist freedom, what shall we find? There will be a division of labour, or there could be no factory. It will be ameliorated. People will choose collectively what jobs to do: that is to say, as individuals they will contribute to collective decisions on this matter. Similarly, they will have a say on such questions as what and how much shall be produced, and when. For their say to be effective it will be necessary for them to have a say also in the factories of other groups of workers: and this will involve them in surrendering this right to those other groups, in their own factory. Up comes the whole apparatus of planning: and set around as it must be with democratic safeguards, still power will rest in the hands of real men, not fictions. ‘Autonomy’ is invoked by Cardan as such a safeguard. Either it will be a placebo, conveniently protecting the minutiae of factory customs, or it will wreck the whole elaborate set-up, if those against whom it is exercised are foolish enough to let it. People in this factory will doubtless make away with many, if not most of the institutions of supervision which irk present-day factory workers. But will they be free? Well, they will be freer than they are today. But a collective decision, even at factory level, and still more at plan-level, is not necessarily my decision. True, my desires and needs are socially-formed, but they may and will diverge at many points from those of my socially formed neighbours. Freedom, as Lenin said, echoing Hegel, equals subjectivity. The division of labour, however, is solidly objective, standing firmly in the ‘realm of necessity’. We can only expand our free personality to the extent that we gain the technical ability to subdue Nature more and more effortlessly.

‘Work’, Cardan tells us, ‘is agony because the worker is subordinated to an alien and hostile power.’ Good. ‘This power has two faces: that of the machine and that of the management’. Again, just so. But which face is which? Eliminate the manager’s face, and the machine’s is still there. Control it democratically, and other men will still from time to time vote you down. This is a mighty advance on being ruled without a vote, but ruled you still are. Democracy, in this case as in all others, is not freedom, but the road to it. This is a painful road to travel, but it is not made any more delectable by the sight of great pools of Cardan’s thought in full flood across it, and of the snouts of herrings, red as revolution and large and ravenous as sharks, muzzling through the surface with ominous ill-intent.

‘No British capitalist’, we are told, ‘could ever introduce into his plant a machine which would increase the freedom of a particular worker or of a group of workers to run the job themselves, even if such a machine would increase production.’ But this just isn’t true. Countless examples are available to the contrary: examples of technological improvements accidentally giving rise to greater control of the workers over their jobs, and even examples of managements consciously going out of their way to help just this to happen. [7] Collective contracts exist fairly widely spread over British industry; and have recently been given quite a fillip in the mining industry by the introduction of such machines as trepanners. The teams on some trepanner faces dispose of the necessary jobs between themselves, and elect their own chargehands who are subject to ‘instant recall’ if the team so desires. All this is very nice, but what sort of freedom is it? It seems quite like the freedom of a laboratory mouse to choose which treadmill to run and when to run it, which cheese to bite and when to bite it, on the sole unstated condition that it forgets the vast universe of choices that might exist outside its cage. Given enough treadmills, enough cheese, and room in the cage, a quite bright mouse might never form an inkling of the disconcerting world of potentiality outside.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. The power to regulate and dispose of one’s labour through a collective decision is a valuable one: but it is for a socialist merely a necessary part of the trek to socialism, which is the abolition of labour. Anything which can be done to humanize the conditions in which labour is performed will be welcomed by any socialist: but the whole case for the democratic control of these conditions of labour rests on a more fundamental one, of which the assumption is that true humanity lies on the far side of the division of labour. Forget this, and you forget what you wish people to be conscious for, the reason why the irresponsibility, anarchy, and pointlessness of working life seem to us to be such a cruel denial of what is potential in men. Once the goal is forgotten, whether you are a revolutionist or not, the effect is the same; you are compelled to see through blinkered eyes in treacherous twilight. Adjustments in the conditions in which the division of labour operates become not only the transitional but the ultimate demand. The end of this road is either conformity, or a dedication to the impossible, attempting to legislate community in conditions which forbid it. Socialism is about the creation of a race of individuals who can find fulfilment only in embracing and comprehending their whole society, breathing and enriching its whole culture. Titans like Beethoven and Marx must be commoners in a socialist society; and certainly men who cannot reach up to these peaks in human culture are not capable of striding into human society, where the State has joined the Bronze Axe in the Museum.

This means that at all times the relations between workers on the shop-floor must be judged in relation to the creative culture of the whole world. The distance between the one and the other is at least as far as the distance between here and socialism.

Cardan seems to think that the regulation of their working conditions alone will liberate the workers. Of course, it is the indispensible first step. But that is all. If men are engaged in making colanders all day, even if they have complete control over the operation, we shall still be forced to measure them as men in terms of their activity outside colander making. Indeed, this is the way that they will measure themselves. If colander-making absorbs over-much of a man’s lifetime, he will, as Ruskin saw, be good for little else. In a world where there is music, where there are books, where other men are probing the universe, to encourage a man to be mainly an expert colander-maker is to encourage him to geld himself. But, Cardan tells us, ‘Leisure as such is empty’. An American worker, he thinks, would agree with a French one that working class Sundays reflect all the misery of the working week. This is to be doubted. If workers really thought like this about their leisure then they would be far more ready to listen to socialists than they are. In fact they find their weekends so free that when Monday morning comes, they say ‘roll on Friday night’. [8] But their freedom is a pale, limp little thing on Sundays? Maybe. If so, it is because the division of labour has produced special men, weak and warped: and you won’t wake them up to splendid socialist Sundays, let alone work-weeks, within its frame work - in fact, you will be far more likely to invigorate life in the workshop with men awakened in leisure, in free activity, than you will to inspirit Sunday solely from the experience of the shop-floor, colander bases, department B. Of course, the truth is that one activity will feed the others, and that men’s lives will grow in richness to the extent that they collectively push back the demands of the division of labour, multiplying their area of free-time and free-activity.

We have at this point begun to step outside the crude antithesis between leisure and work within which so much of Cardan’s thought seems to run, in spite of his protestations to the contrary. Cardan finds Marx guilty of equating freedom with leisure, which Cardan in turn seems to equate with slothfulness. A few words from Marx himself are appropriate on this point:

The true economy, saving, consists in the saving of labour time ... but this saving is identical with productivity. Therefore, not renunciation of enjoyment but development of power, of the faculties of production and thus of the faculties as well as the means of enjoyment. The faculty of enjoyment is the condition for enjoyment; consequently the primary means for enjoyment. And this faculty is the development of individual ability, productivity. Saving of labour time is increase of free time, that is, time for the full development of the individual. This is the greatest productive force, which in turn reacts on the productivity of labour... free time – which is leisure time as well as time for higher activity – transforms its possessor into a different subject. [9]

But there are other matters of which Marx was considerably aware which seem to have escaped Cardan. Not only does he not appreciate that Marx speaks of dead labour and living labour in order the better to prepare for the abolition of both of them, that free time is ‘the greatest productive force’, and that both these suppositions are a far greater menace to the ‘factory as it now stands’ than even Cardan’s most radical proposals: but he does not seem to have met any of Marx’s reasoning about the shape of ‘necessity’ in the force of the market. ‘Workers’ management’ he tells us, ‘will mark the end of labour’s domination over man’. What on earth does this mean? Will it mark the end of wage-labour? Certainly not, for Cardan himself tells us that he wants ‘equal pay for all who work’ which he sees as one of the first rules a socialist society will have to apply. But the traditional view of a socialist society has always been of one in which pay just doesn’t happen, one which Marx saw as emblazoning on its banners the slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ This slogan is more subtle than it looks. Both ‘need’ and ‘ability’ in this context are not things that are determined ‘objectively’. They are determined by the socially-engendered individual himself, not by the state, nor even by the workers’ council. Freedom equals subjectivity, again. On the other hand, equal wages, like any others, are very objectively determined. They are determined by the backwardness of social production.

But let us grant that Cardan is seeing equality of wages as a transitional stage along the way to socialism. Even if we remained within the context of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’, outside whose bounds Cardan never seems to tread, a very high degree of compulsion would be required to enforce the most rudimentary compliance with such a measure. Imagine the situation which would exist when one of Cardan’s factory communities needed, say, a patternmaker it hadn’t got. Where to find him? Train him? Yes, but what of the meantime. Direct him from another factory? But perhaps he doesn’t want to come, or they can’t spare him. Share him. He may have his own ideas about that. In fact there are two ways of directing scarce labour, and they are called policemen and grease-in-the-palm. I see no great moral superiority in policemen. Step for a moment outside England or France, and think of world socialism, which is the only socialism there is, and the difficulties become immensely more obvious. Equal wages for the Birmingham tool-maker and the Egyptian farmer? At the Birmingham level, universal joy and the prospect of the supersession of the whole wage-system tomorrow. At the Egyptian level, insurrection in Birmingham, or supernaturally heavy forces of (Egyptian) socialist policemen in very heavy tanks. We must strive for equality, not by Cardan’s Procrustean method of stretching and lopping the workers to fit the bed of the economy, but by changing the bed, by abolishing the market, step by step, not with laws but with abundance. A regime transitional to socialism will progressively whittle away the power of money, by abolishing its use wherever possible; from the establishment of public Water Boards to the steady abolition in turn of electricity bills, rents, fares, payments for food, and so on.

Cardan’s attitude to consumption is of a piece with his approach to equality. Shades of Erich Fromm flit across the page as we read that there is a ‘serfdom of man – in consumption itself’. Men are apparently alienated by motorcars, refrigerators, television sets. Well, I’m not. Nor, I think are many other people who haven’t got them. Motor cars always have a strange way of alienating people. They always alienate the men who’ve got them, not because they’ve got them, but because ‘everybody else’ has. For sure, we could manage with less cars than we have now if we weren’t governed by our present norms of property owning: one might well serve a whole group of people. But to rail against the effeteness of man the consumer in this way is to move a long way along the road to setting up a model man who serves as the yardstick of a normative humanism, the humanism of lopping and stretching, whose patron saint is once again Procrustes. This humanism means very well, but insists on stripping its subjects of all sorts of manifestly human, but ‘bad’ characteristics. Fromm is a clever chap at it, but I don’t think he succeeds in integrating it into the mainstream of the socialist tradition. [10] The question which Cardan must answer is, ‘who is to say whether our wants are “less and less real ones”?’ Truly, a new culture can be expected to produce new needs, and in the process old ones can be expected to wither away. To stand in judgement on the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the desire to have a car is to place oneself temporarily outside the growing aspirations and changing moralities of the very men whose consciousness of wider potentialities you are trying to awaken. [11] If people feel they need this or that article of consumption, this is simply one of the facts about society which has to be met, good, bad or indifferent though it may seem to people who don’t feel the same needs. Socialism is about opening up roads to satisfaction of needs such as these, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ though they seem to some socialists. It is also about opening up other roads, which at the moment interest the merest minorities of the population. But it won’t prosper the spiritual development and awakening of people one iota to don hair shirts and walk when we can fly in nylon.

Finally, Cardan has some interesting things to say about the road from here to there – about the nature of a workers’ party and its relation to the working class. These are somewhat difficult to discuss, because there are mixed together in his argument all kinds of sensible notions and questionable nostrums. For instance, he is very cross with the Trotskyists for some reason. I don’t doubt that they have annoyed him from time to time, but it seems to me churlish not to appreciate that Trotsky himself made most of Cardan’s useful distinctions between workers’ management and control, and met most of his arguments in favour of Cardanarchy, in his section on workers’ control in What Next? [12]

Although he doesn’t clearly appreciate the real sources, as opposed to the effects of the division of labour in the life of society, Cardan does seem clearly enough to be very concerned about the division of labour in the socialist movement. But again he fails to appreciate its sources. If there were no leaders in the working class movement, this would either signify that it was inert, dead, or that the working class was already conscious of itself as a class to a degree unprecedented and inconceivable. Cardan accepts this to the point of conceding the need for a party. However, once that step has been taken, more must follow. The party leads the class. Somebody leads the party. The price of efficiency is specialization with all its attendant evils, and the price of inefficiency is uselessness. Indeed, the contrast here is not sharp enough, for however slackly organized and decentralized a party may be, it remains in existence to the extent that it pays the toll of division of function, specialization.

The question then is not how to draft rules which overcome the division of labour by denouncing it, which must invariably mean seeing the mote in another’s eye whilst staggering under the perplexing weight of an unseen beam in one’s own; but – ‘how do we face this fact?’ One can only face it and remain a socialist by waging a relentless war on it: by striving all the time to make leadership redundant in the same way that a teacher and his pupils try to make themselves redundant to each other. Alas. This is a war that can never be won. But if it is not constantly waged, it will most certainly be lost, and with it any prospect of living a useful life.

Cardan seeks a black-and-white solution to this multicoloured problem, and he has written one. But to my poor eyes it seems to be black-and-white. We are told that local organs must have the greatest degree of autonomy compatible with the unity of the organization. But that is just how much autonomy they will have anyway, and it may not be a lot. Similarly with Cardan’s other points: they are either so general as to be meaningless, or they are retrogressive. At bottom his assumption that the party should reflect the new society is an impossible one, because it has to organize in this one. The new society exists only in what is potential, in the minds of men, and that is the only place it can be reflected. Alongside this Utopian demand, though, goes a firm misapprehension about the nature of this society. The division of labour in society has produced classes, and with them ideas. But the ideas in worker’s heads are not normally socialist ones: how could they be? To be class-conscious in the full sense, to have socialist consciousness, is only possible when one has a glimpse of the whole of society, of the ruling-class as well as the workers, and of their ideas as they mesh through the lives of rulers and workers alike. The fish is only caught because it cannot see what lurks at the other end of the line. When on the hook it resents it, and will surely try to get free. The workers try to get free, too, but unlike the fish they won’t in any circumstances be able to do so until they see beyond the hook that chafes them to the sources of their discomfort, which are laced through their own ideas again and again. These mind-forged manacles are infinitely tougher than those from the smithy, and have the advantage of being welded on by the wearer himself.

Really the concession Cardan gives us, that he needs a party to propagate his socialism, establishes this fact. If socialist consciousness welled up spontaneously among the workers, they would never need a party. There’s no point in forming a party if it isn’t out to change people’s ideas: and if it is, then it must prepare for the task, and dispose of its forces rationally so as to economize their efforts. In this connection some sort of ‘vanguard’ notion seems inescapable. The shape of a vanguard will depend on its approach. Cardan is right to deprecate efforts to manipulate workers into positions which are supposed to entail socialism. Clearly the demands of a party must be calculated to arouse deeper understanding in the workers, to awaken socialist consciousness within them. But Cardan’s proposals as to how this can be done are scarcely helpful. He is anxious to support rank-and-file movements, and while nobody is going to oppose them (in the columns of IS), it is fairly obvious that in the rich history of these movements in Britain, there are no examples of any of them autonomously developing socialist ideas. Invariably they have been geared to the fulfilment of trade union functions. The busmen of the early thirties, like the dockers after the war, organized around the central slogan of a National Agreement [13]: a demand which if successful surely would far more seriously undermine ‘local autonomy’ than could any grasping clique of socialists. Some rank-and-file movements, like those of the Harworth miners, and sit-down strikers in Wales, have been gestures of support for sober trade unions like the NUM (MFGB) against company unions. Others, like the movement of dockers into NASD in the mid-fifties and the Garment Workers’ movement of the early thirties were movements out of the frying pan of one scarcely efficient Union into the fire of another still less useful breakaway. [14] It is all very complex, and socialists must try to follow the complexities and assist the workers who are involved in such movements: but none of it takes anyone nearer to socialism, by itself. What does one do when faced with such a movement? Attempt to carry politics into it? But how? The same workers who rebel today against bureaucratized trade unions find their political expression in the right-wing of the labour party: and that is as far as politics tied to the workbench will get them. All eyes are focused on the hooks, while the anglers play out the lines.

This does not mean that Cardan is wrong to stress that socialists must campaign on all questions concerning the conditions of work. It does mean that if they do only this they will make few socialists. The worker sees and resents the foreman, and can draw lessons from attempts to curtail his powers. But he does not see, or resent a fraction as much, the take-over-bidders, the merchant bankers, the war cabinet, the mainsprings of all the fear and misery of welfare capitalism. Until he sees society as the whole it is, he will not see it as the whole it must be. That is why Kautsky and Lenin were right when they spoke of bringing socialist consciousness to the working-class from outside. It is difficult to shape a party which can attempt to do this without being overcome by the insidious growth within itself of all the tendencies Michels has noted. [15] The one severe and implacable enemy of the tendency to manipulation, paternalism, oligarchy and betrayal is an appreciation of what socialism is for and about, wedded to a remorseless honesty about the world as it is and ourselves as we are. Only as this deepens and flourishes can the task seem possible, albeit with difficulty. But it will never be performed by wishing the difficulties away, for they are the way over which we must travel.

Notes

1. Socialism and Capitalism, International Socialism 4, Spring 1961.

2. The Wealth of Nations, Chapter I, Everyman ed., p. 4.

3. Ibid., p. 5.

4. John Ruskin, from The Stones of Venice, Volume 2, The Nature of the Gothic.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Oxford World Classics ed., pp. 427–428.
Herman Melville: The Tartarus of Maids, Billy Budd and other Stories, Chiltern Library, pp. 113–125.

5. Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings, Boston 1950, p. 16.

6. That this was Marx’s answer can be confirmed by reading the first section of the German Ideology, called Feuerbach, the opposition of the materialistic and idealistic outlook. (1938, L&W, pp. 3–78) and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts – On the meaning of human requirements where there is private property and under socialism. (1959, L&W, pp.115-135)

7. See the forthcoming Work Organisation at the Coalface by E.L. Trist and H. Murray.
Also Anarchy – A journal of anarchist ideas, No. 2, 96, a special issue of workers’ control.
And H.A. Clegg, A new Approach to Industrial Democracy, Blackwell, 1960, Ch. XVI.

8. Anyone who doubts this and doesn’t want to get his hands dirty verifying it in the obvious way, should read Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

9. Marx, Grundrisse des Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, Berlin 1953, p.599. quoted and trans. Marcuse, introduction to Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, New York 1958, p. 10.

10. Cf. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, Routledge, 1956.

11. It is also to import into your theory external standards which are not accounted for in its basic conceptual framework. This seems unlikely to worry Cardan any more than it does Fromm, however. Fromm, too, talks of ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, as being ‘good’ and ‘bad, without showing in any way how he derives these judgements from his theoretical principles. In fact he just smuggles them into his books from the general atmosphere of prevailing prejudice, and leaves his theory to burp around them as best it can.

12. Trotsky, What Next?, Pioneer Publishers, 1932, ch. 14.

13. Cf. H.A. Clegg, Labour Relations in London Transport, Blackwell 1950, Ch. IV.
Busmen versus the Combines, 1936, Section V, pp. 15–16.
The Dock Worker, Liverpool 1956, Appendix I.
V.L. Allen, Trade Union Leadership, Longmans, 1957, Chapters 11, 12.

14. Cf. Bob Pennington, Docks: Breakaway and Unofficial Movements, IS 2, Autumn 1960.
Shirley Lerner, Breakaway Trade Unions and the Small Trade Union, Allen and Unwin 1961, Ch. III.

15. In Political Parties, Dover Books, 1959. Few Marxists have bothered to meet Michels’ important arguments. Bukharin denounced them as anti-socialist at one stage, and commended them as accurate understanding of insidious social-democracy at another. Perhaps the most promising treatment of them is to be found in the notes and hints of Gramsci, From the Modern Prince, Lawrence and Wishart, 1957.

 
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