The Economic and Social Consequences of Automation, by F. Pollock

[p033] The Economic and Social Consequences of Automation, by F. Pollock. (Basil Blackwell, 25s.) A. STORY, surely apocryphal, relates how Walter Reuther, the American motor-car workers’ union chief, was being con- ducted around an automatic section of Fords when the factory. manager wickedly remarked: ‘I'd like to see you collect union dues from those “fellows’.’ To which Reuther replied: ‘And I’d like to see you selling them motor-cars.’ This story illustrates the kernel of the social problems presented by automation. Automation under capitalism heightens every social contradiction and demonstrates, more effectively than any long-winded deductive proof, that capital- ism is ripe for revolution; that only socialized industry, pro- ducing for use instead of profit, can realize to the full the enormous potentialities of modern electronic methods of con- trol of industrial production. In this book, Pollock quotes a passage from the journal Looking Ahead: ‘In the present early application of automation to fac- tories, manpower is substantially reduced—not completely eliminated. Currently it is too costly for most factories to go to the limit. The necessary instruments and mechanisms could be made, but at a cost so great it is not profitable to deplace all production workers right away.’ Vv Looking Ahead is saying here that capitalist industry wili continue to use human labour only so long as it is profitable. Automation presents mankind with the opportunity to release all from irksome toil; the capitalist profit motive retains cheap manual ‘slave’ labour, tamely serving the machines, but is prepared to throw live labour on the scrap-heap as soon as electronic mechanisms become cheaper. In a number of brilliant descriptive chapters Pollock des- cribes the scope of the new techniques of automation (‘a new industrial revolution . . . whose essence is the invention of machines which can control machines’). Anyone who today denies that all mankind today could be rich, prosperous and leisured, should be made to read these descriptive chapters. 189 Curiously, Pollock’s Introduction apologizes for including these very chapters. The book, he explains, is really ‘one of a series of inquiries into the structure of society which are being undertaken by the Institut fiir Sozialforschung at the University of Frankfurt’ and is ‘concerned mainly with the economic and social consequences of the advent of automa- tion’. It is this explanation of the purpose of the book which prevents our being too surprised when we come to a series of chapters which amount only to a ponderous reiteration of the oldest-fashioned Fabian platitudes about ‘our complicated society’. True to form, Pollock is Left-wing enough to expose the inadequacies of refurbished ‘laissez-faire’ slogans which the Establishment’s tame economists hand out, but Right-wing enough to be dead centre on the Cold War ‘Western civiliza- tion in danger’ line. : Vv Some writers regard the social consequences of automation as only short-term disturbances of the ‘normal equilibrium’. They believe that automation will have long-term effects exactly like all previous industrial innovations, 1.e., ‘the men who lose their jobs because of technical changes will quickly find employment elsewhere because the reduction in produc- tion costs . . . soon stimulates an increased demand which leads to an expansion of output’. Pollock is devastating in destroying this myth. Yet he never comes within a hundred miles of developing a satisfactory alternative forecast. In fact Pollock can only dig up and slightly adapt the old Burnham rubbish about a managerial revolution. As modern society advances towards completely automatic industrial production, Labour, he says, is being split into two groups: the ‘minority’, the qualified technicians and adminis- trators, and the ‘majority’, those who ‘have only an element- ary education and have not got the brains or the training to understand the workings of either a modern economy or a modern society’ and whose labour is ‘unproductive in the economists’ sense’. The ‘majority’ will then have to buy, from the ‘minority’, with their labour, the products of automatic industry. But walt! _ ‘Such a class structure would be a very insecure founda- tion for a free society. The great power of the minority coupled with the ignorance and weakness of the majority might well lead to the establishment of an authoritarian in place of a democratic form of government.’ The ‘liberal’ Pollock, as ever, is petrified by the prospects of revolution (‘insecure foundation’), contemptuous of the intelligence and organizational ability of the working class (‘ignorance and weakness’) and resentful of absolute domina- tion by big-business moguls (‘great power of minority’, ‘authoritarian’). Oh dear, whatever shall we do? A good book of questions, but a pretty poor set of answers. DAVID DEAN Trotsky’s Classic The Revolution Betrayed, by Leon Trotsky (New Park, 10s. 6d.) MANY readers of Labour Review have no doubt recently emerged, as I have, from many years in the Communist Party. Probably a good proportion of future readers will be dissident members and ex-members of that party. Judging from my own experience, the reprinting of Trotsky’s classic will help them very much. The members of the recent opposition in the Communist Party, in rejecting the Stalinist policy of the Soviet leaders, felt there had been a degeneration in the Soviet Union since the 1917 Revolution. In their struggle inside the British Com- munist Party they came to the conclusion that this party reflected that degeneration; but the nature of the distortions could not be understood by most of them. The Reasoner, unfortunately, had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to organize a discussion on this problem. This is the reason, I think, why the opposition did not become a definite trend

[p034] and was only able to form such a loose structure as the Socialist Forums. While still passing through a period of ferment, the national Forum meeting at Wortley Hall showed that the discussion was dominated by ‘Trotsky’ and ‘the value of Marxism’, and that many Forum members were beginning to tackle the funda- mental questions, those on the front cover of ‘The Revolution Betrayed’: ‘What is the Soviet Union’ and ‘Where is it going?’ The communists who have joined the Marxist opposition to Stalinism must be impressed by this book, which was written in 1936, for their recent experiences must provide considerable evidence that Trotsky wrote a basic Marxist critique. Those who could not be quite convinced that the ‘cult of personality’ was responsible for the ‘errors’ and changes of line, will wish to examine the manner in which Trotsky analyses social relations in Russia, industry, agricul- ture, the strength of the classes and the zigzags of the bureau- cratic leadership. If this book had been new, rather than a reissue, one would have assumed that the chapter on ‘Socialism and the State’ had been written to satisfy popular demand stimulated by the Khrushchev speech and Hungary. The problem that is most unpopular with Communist Party tutors, “Why has the Soviet State not withered away?’ is examined in great detail. Other questions examined include, ‘Has every cook learned to govern?’ and ‘Is the Red Army equivalent to an armed people?’. We have learned recently about the Soviet command- ing officer who issues orders to inferior ranks over a loud- speaker; Trotsky writes in 1936: ‘The army is only a copy of the social relations’. How often in the Communist Party do the functionaries, boast about the ‘liberation of women in the USSR’, describing how the Soviet women work in the factories, feeding their children during breaks and enjoying equal rights in all spheres? However, Trotsky’s. scrutiny shows how they really suffer almost similar deprivation of rights as do the working-class women in capitalist society, while the Soviet laws concerning the family are as ‘conservative’ as any bourgeois moralist would wish. On the question of the nature of the Soviet régime, Trotsky’s conclusion that it is ‘a contradictory society, half-way between capitalism and socialism’ seems to me to be logical, non- dogmatic and still valid. Probably there will be discussion on whether the advances made by Soviet economy in the pas: twenty years have altered the possibility of a backslide to capitalism, which Trotsky considered ‘wholly possible’. Present developments can only support Trotsky’s charge that the Soviet ‘Bonapartist? régime is ‘a régime of crisis’, for Khrushchev’s speech to the [wentieth Congress could be des- cribed as a detailed confession from the accused. How io remove the cancer from what is still basically a workers’ State is the problem. Trotsky refutes the accusation of the self-styled ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’ that socialist criticisms of Russia injure socialist construction, showing that this view suggests thai the capitalist powers would wish to avenge any deviation frem revolutionary principles. The programme of the Fourth International, outlined by Trotsky in the concluding chapters, forecasting a political re- volution in the Soviet Union, which can be helped by victories of the working class in the advanced countries of the West, 1s a programme I can support as a Marxist and anti-capitalist ene. This programme leads towards the triumph of world socialism. JIM JOHNSON