Democratic Workplaces as a Centrepiece for Wider Democracy

One of the tragedies of industrial society is that so many people dislike, if not outright hate, their jobs. They often feel that work has come to dominate their lives rather than enriching it and that the purposes of the work are not truly one’s own. Is this a necessary state of affairs? Given the complexity of industry and the many different tasks that must be carried out within it, isn’t a more or less strict division of labour necessary for the smooth functioning of the economic machine with its myriad inter meshing components? I would argue that it isn’t, and there is much else to be said about the biases we harbour towards work. I believe that, to achieve a viable social order, we need to address, at a fundamental level, these biases, and to see whether they might be in error.

Work has become largely divorced of any human significance for the worker. He feels separated from the value of his work; he rarely sees the whole process in which he plays a part, and he is often driven towards higher and higher rates of production for the sake of “efficiency”.Modern society is deeply deformed in relation to the human aspirations of its people. The social aspect of work and the way its social utility is conceptualised by the worker has been utterly distorted, such that work cannot effectively express the worker’s inner powers of creativity. Naturally, then, any solution to this situation must have as its basis the harmonising of work with the human aspirations of the worker, with his social responsibilities, and with his empowerment as an individual.

In my view, the following must all become features of any future industrial society if we are to turn it to truly human ends rather than continuing on the current path of subordinating it to the requirements of capital:

* industry must be set up to serve the needs and aspirations of communities of people. Production must therefore be a means to an end, not an end in itself. A people may have political freedom, but if it allows its priorities and goals to be a reflection of production, it has succumbed to tyranny;

* work must be meaningful for the individual worker. That is, he must understand not only the technical aspects of the work for which he is suited, but also the social aspects of the work. While the former may be rather “unpleasant” and dull (though this is largely a matter of taste, and in any case unpleasant tasks can be shared by mutual consensus), the latter may be exceedingly important and can thus give the worker a sense of importance and responsibility that the technical aspect by itself may not imbue. Taken as a whole, the work situation becomes one of seeing the totality of the product, in both its technical and social aspects;