CELEBRATING THE LUCAS PLAN
SOCIALLY USEFUL PRODUCTION
The Lucas Plan offers people ideas and direction with respect to the future of work and production and can serve as an example and inspiration to those seeking to transform the organisation and running of the economy – addressing questions of what we produce, how and to what end. The ideas are many, including Just Transition to a zero carbon economy, defence diversification converting military capacity to civilian, automation and local communal and participatory planning.
It is time, four decades on, to revalue the wealth of knowledge, experience and practical wisdom that exists in the work place, and that human beings, as citizen-producers, are capable of deciding together the products and services we need for the common good – producing goods that are truly good and services that truly serve ends that are worthy of being served.
The most socially useful product the Lucas planners left to us was the idea and the example, to be taken on and developed further by us as creative agents co-determining the future.
'The Lucas Plan was a pioneering effort by workers at the arms company Lucas Aerospace to retain jobs by proposing alternative, socially-useful applications of the company’s technology and their own skills. It remains one of the most radical and forward thinking attempts ever made by workers to take the steering wheel and directly drive the direction of change.'
1/ The Lucas Plan and socially useful production.
2/ Arms conversion and peace.
3/ Climate change and a socially just transition to sustainability.
4/ The threat to skills and livelihoods from automation.
5/ Local/community economic and industrial planning.
'Consisting of an unusual and uneasy combination of grassroots trades union organisation and new social movement activism, the movement generated alternative corporate plans, arguments for alternative innovation institutions, socially useful prototypes and product banks, co-operative enterprises, and networks of community-based workshops. Activity was informed by a range of movement ideas: peaceful, environmentally and community-friendly alternative technologies; skill-enhancing, human-centred machines and worker control in the labour process; participatory design and industrial democracy; productive, practical activity for building socialised markets and economies; and a faith in the grassroots ingenuity and skill of people liberated through creative opportunities to engage in technology design and development.'
'The Lucas Plan was a pioneering effort by workers at Lucas Aerospace to propose alternative, socially useful applications of the company’s technology and workers’ skills. The idea was to meet genuine social needs whilst retaining jobs.
We hope these celebrations will help to reopen debate about industrial conversion and democratic control of technology, in relation to current issues.'
Thirty-eight years ago, a movement for ‘socially useful production’ pioneered practical approaches for more democratic technology development.
'shop stewards embarked upon a broader political campaign for the right of all people to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, one of the leaders, said they wanted to, ‘inflame the imaginations of others’ and ‘demonstrate in a very practical and direct way the creative power of “ordinary people”’.
'The movement that emerged challenged establishment claims that technology progressed autonomously of society, and that people inevitably had to adapt to the tools offered up by science. Activists argued knowledge and technology was shaped by social choices over its development, and those choices needed to become more democratic. Activism cultivated spaces for participatory design; promoted human-centred technology; argued for arms conversion to environmental and social technologies; and sought more control for workers, communities and users in production processes.'
There is a simple truth at the heart of the Lucas example: 'Wherever and whenever people are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop their ideas into material activity, then creativity can and does flourish.'
A New Lucas Plan For The Future.
The Lucas Aerospace workers’ idea of socially useful production suggests a way forward from the economic, ecological and social contradictions of the capital economy.
Even in the early phase of the environmental movement, before many understood the significance of these issues, the Lucas Plan acknowledged that protecting the environment is part of the concept of socially useful production.
One of the great strengths of the Lucas Plan was that it came from the bottom up, from workers, not managers. It valued the knowledge, skill, and expertise of those who do the job, and mobilized the workers.
These traditions of bottom-up local planning have been continued by various citizens’ local planning initiatives, such as Just Space in London, and form a vital element in any democratic solution to the crises.
A preview of Steve Sprung's film The Plan, socially useful products - what could you do with the skills, expertise and technology you've got? what could you make? A plan that's even more pertinent today.
This film, "The Story of the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Alternative Corporate Plan" was made in 1978 for the Open University. It documents an unusual episode in British corporate history. Shop stewards from Lucas Aerospace, facing massive redundancies, developed their own plan to safeguard their jobs by moving the business into alternative technologies that would meet social needs, as well as new methods of production.
Architect or Bee? A discussion about the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Plan
In drawing up their Plan, shop stewards at Lucas turned initially to researchers at institutes throughout the UK. They received three replies. Undeterred, they consulted their own members. Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.
An evening of discussion about Lucas Aerospace workers’ plan in the 1970s where they combined to diversify manufacture and enhance working lives. Questions around workers' control. Looking back as looking into what is happening now and looking forward, in relation to this incredible story of workers who, in the face of factory closure, looking to take control not only of the means of production but also of the products - production for social use.
This event is organised with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation was launched in 1963 to carry forward Russell's work for peace, human rights and social justice. Preoccupied with the danger of nuclear war, Russell had always been deeply concerned with the defence of civil rights, and the institutionalisation of his work made it possible to create a number of desks which could specialise on different areas or particular problems.
Just to add a few critical comments … such initiatives need to be set within a critique of the political economy of the capital system, thus ensuring that the transition to associative production/self-management is set within a structural transformation so as to release economic activity from systemic accumulative imperatives and dynamics. Socially useful production implies a break with the commodity value form based on the distinction between use value (realm of true wealth, labour and nature) and exchange value.
I’ll put it this way (excuse the jargon, if I could put it any other way, I would - we need to keep going from the abstract to the concrete and back again, such is life subject to the abstract tyranny and force the capital rule):
The contradiction between wealth and commodity value places a distorted accountancy at the heart of the capital system, one that sees only exchange value, to the neglect of use value. In consequence, a universal value-equation dominates, obliterating substantive incommensurability everywhere. The money form, with money as the universal medium of exchange, generalizes the fetishism of commodities and extinguishes social and natural processes (the time it takes for the reproduction of labour or for the recovery of natural resources after their exploitation). Public wealth, defined as the sum of use values, (including natural wealth, neglected in the focus on exchange value), comes to be systematically diminished as it is exploited in an accumulative process concerned solely with the expansion of private wealth. Predicated upon an endless growth through the pursuit of exchange value, the capital system can recognize no limits upon the accumulation process. Capital must necessarily, therefore, transgress any and every limit it is confronted by, whether social or natural, regardless of the destructive consequences that may follow.
As Istvan Meszaros states the point: ‘In this way a specific mode of social metabolic control emerges out of such fundamentally unrestrainable and fetishism-producing constituents. One which cannot possibly recognize boundaries (not even its own insurmountable structural limits), no matter how devastating the consequences when the outer limits of the system's productive potentialities are reached. For — in the sharpest possible contrast to earlier forms of highly self-sufficient socioeconomic reproductive 'microcosms' — the economic units of the capital system are neither in need of, nor capable of, self-sufficiency. This is why in the shape of capital for the first time ever in history human beings have to confront a mode of social metabolic control which can and must constitute itself — in order to reach its fully developed form —as a global system, demolishing all obstacles that stand in the way.’ (Meszaros, Beyond Capital 1995: 45-46).
But is it socialism? Critics read demands for socialism as against capitalism and point to the socially and ecologically destructive (and politically repressive) example of the Soviet Union. Here, the distinction between "capitalism" - focused on the institutional forms of the capital economy - and "the capital system" - the capital relation, the logic and the accumulative dynamic of capital - is all-important. Movements for social and political change focused upon the former to the neglect of the latter are many. They may well call themselves socialist, and people supporting them may well identify themselves as socialist. But the truth is that all they are likely to achieve is a generalization of the capital form over the whole of society under the auspices of the state. Hence Weber warned that socialism would issue in the "housing of a new serfdom," Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat taking form as the "dictatorship of the officials." Economics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the gap left by the missing self-mediation of the associated producers will be filled by bureaucratic planning agencies.
'If workers aren’t in control it’s not socialism. It might be better than we’ve got, and therefore desirable in the way that reforms are, but it’s not socialism.' (John Rees). And it might not be better, either, and therefore undesirable. Overcoming the power of capital is a difficult enough task, and many may be disinclined to take their leave of the devil they know, even as it takes them to Hades. I'm concerned that, now that socialism is back, free from its old Communist political and intellectual prisons, that we understand it right and do it right. Standing on the brink of climate catastrophe, any more decades long detours and deviations will prove fatal to civilization.
'However, it seems to me it will take much more than the co-operative model to really wrest control away from big capital and genuinely allow for democratic control. The problem with co-operatives is that they exist within the larger capitalist system and therefore are forced to compete within them. They are also subject to the vagaries of economic crisis, interest rate levels and the whim of financial capital in particular. Unless, as Michael Roberts has argued, Labour also demands nationalisation of the banks and financial services, then it is hard to see how any of this would be brought under control, and how a democratically elected government would be able to stop capital from sabotaging its plans.'
The question is about more than the institutions of capitalism, it is about uprooting "the capital system," the very logic of capital and the capital relation at the heart of it all. Changing the title deeds on property is easily enough achieved, but real social transformation goes to the heart of production relations. Some forms of ownership may be better than others, but it matters a great deal who we cooperate with and to what ends - and who or what set those ends. Some forms of capitalist ownership may be better than others, but there is no form of ownership that counts as socialist under the capital system. State ownership or nationalization is not a genuine socialisation but remains subject to the accumulative imperatives of capital; it is a political appropriation/extraction of surplus value within the value form (within, that is, the indirect supply of social labour through the value form). Robust markets within effective public regulation and a strong social welfare support ... (the old 'mixed economy') is indeed better than neoliberalism and 'small government,' but begs the question of where the neoliberal counter-revolution came from and why it was needed and why it was so successful. That's a pertinent question for all those currently arguing that neoliberalism is the source of all our problems. Putting the point that way is evasive, blaming a particular form of capitalist economics and calling for a new theory, rather than identifying the capital system as such as the problem.
Co-operative production still subject to corporate competition and the 'laws of the market' do not constitute social production under the control of the 'freely associated producers.' As for the state regulated market and 'market socialism' or the German 'socially responsible market,' they may all be better than what we have, and therefore worthy of support, as all such reforms are. But when they become the end in themselves they become a different end indeed to socialism. Ultimately, the capital system is an 'anarchy' of production, a subjectless system of external control, intrinsically irresponsible. Meszaros thus writes of its 'uncontrollability.' Emphasizing the ‘ultimate destructiveness of uncontrollable capital-accumulation and the subjection of human need to the imperatives of ever-expanding exchange value,’ Meszaros states that the positive side of the socialist project can only be articulated by confronting the problems of primary social metabolic mediation.’ (1995: 138). By this, he means that the positive dimension of the socialist alternative metabolic order can only be turned into reality as a result of ‘finding a rationally controllable and humanly rewarding equivalent to all those vital functions of individual and social reproduction which must be fulfilled — in one form or another — by all conceivable systems of productive mediatory interchange.’
There can be no democratic social control under the capital system. Engels saw from the start the dangers of identifying socialism with nationalization, and sought to nip it in the bud:
‘But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.’
We've had long enough to have learned those lessons on social control, workers' control, socialisation, socialism.
Too radical? Look at the scale of the problems we face on economic instability, political corruption, inequality and environmental degradation, and then look at the timidity of the solutions, the apologetic tone, the political evasiveness when it comes to key questions of power, authority, production and resources. You think 1% owning more wealth than 50% of the world's population is accidental? You think a few reforms, tax and redistribution can uproot such inequality? The system is antagonistically structured - other results require a radical restructuring. Or are we just going to stick with what we have, since a rising a tide lifts all boats, small as well as great ..
My favourite film director is Werner Herzog. I don't particularly share his worldview, but he is pertinent and challenging. In Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Klaus Kinski plays a rebel conquistador lusting for gold, power and empire. He takes everyone on his raft on a mad quest down the Amazon. Some are consumed by the mad lust themselves, others learn to silence and suppress their doubts in face of the brute facts of power and control. It soon becomes evident that they are drifting to their doom, as one by one they die. Those who rebel are killed, and the rest keep on the raft under the control of their mad leader. Because the raft is familiar, it is the normality that they know and are now fitted to. Even though they know their certain fate, they stay on board. They are more afraid of the consequences of challenging political power than they are of the consequences of challenging nature. The irresistible force of politics trumps the irresistible force of nature - so they proceed to their doom in full knowledge and resignation. How more mad can it get? In the end, there is only Aguirre/Kinski left, who delivers the greatest speech ever given to a cast of monkey extras on how, together, they are going to conquer the world and found a new dynasty. Unlike the humans, the monkeys don't believe him and take to the water to swim away. Not sure these monkeys are known for swimming, but facing a future with a power-mad leader in charge and heading for certain death, they jump in the water and find abilities they never thought they had. They swim as though their lives depend on it.
His boat sinking, his remaining men dying of fever or slain by natives, his only child felled by an arrow, Aguirre the blasphemer, the betrayer, the "Wrath of God", is consumed by his dream of a conquest as limitless as heaven.
I may only have a Learners' Swimming Certificate from 1975, but I'm with the monkeys on this. But ... as social beings, locked into socially structured patterns of behaviour, enclosed by institutional and systemic force that bestrides the entire planet, we don't actually have any safe ground to make for. Those building local communities of resilience, or those taking the Benedict Option and building their local communities of virtue will not escape the central corrupting force that pervades the entire social and ecological fabric. So let's get practical and take institution-building seriously. And engage citizens as co-constructors of the new world.
Herzog dedicated the film to the flute player: “We create art not because we want to, but because we hold fast to the delusion that we need to, that against all odds we must pursue and persevere to forge our dreams, because without us the members of our small village would surely die.”