“We got to do something now, the company are not going to do anything and we got to protect ourselves”, proclaimed a shop steward at Lucas Aerospace when filmed by a 1978 documentary by the Open University.

He was explaining the rationale behind the so-called Alternative Corporate Plan, better known as the Lucas Plan. It was proposed by shop stewards in seventies England at the factories of Lucas Aerospace. To stave off pending layoffs, a shop steward committee established a plan that outlined a range of new, socially useful technologies for Lucas to build. With it, they fundamentally challenged the capitalist conception of technology design.

Essentially, they proposed that workers establish control over the design of technology. This bottom-up attempt at design, where not management and capitalists but workers themselves decided what to build, eventually failed. It was stopped by management, sidelined by struggling trade unions and the Labour Party, and eventually washed over by neoliberalism.

The seventies were a heady time, the preceding social-democratic, fordist consensus ran into its own contradictions and died in the face of a triumphant neoliberalism. With it, experiments such as the Lucas Plan died as well. Today, however, neoliberalism is in crisis and to bury it we should look back to precisely those experiments that failed decades ago.

Technology’s neoliberal crisis

One part of the crisis of neoliberalism is the crisis of its technology. The software and information technology sector, often denoted as “tech”, is facing widespread criticism and attacks, with demands for reform stretching wide across society.

Even an establishment publication such as The New York Times now publishes a huge feature headlining: The Case Against Google, about Google’s use of their near monopoly on search to bury competitors’ sites.

Other controversies revolve around companies such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter making use of insights into human psychology to make people interact with their products more often and more intensely. This involves everything from gamifying social interaction through likes and making the notification button on Facebook red, to the ubiquity of unlimited vertical scrolling in mobile phone apps.

This has a number of consequences. Studies show that the presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity, that Facebook use is negatively associated with well-being and that preteens with no access to screens for some time show better social skills than those with screen time.

In public discourse, this combines with fears that social media might harmfully impact political processes (basically Russia buying Facebook ads).

Or, as ex-Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya stated:

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works, hearts, likes, thumbs-up. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.

Early employees and execs at Facebook and Google even created the Center for Humane Tech that will propose more humanised tech design choices. Their website states:

Our world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs intimately understands the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds.

Part of this are the usual worries about intergenerational change, technology and centrism starting to fall apart, but there is a core truth in the worries about social media: design of technology is political.

Technologies are designed by capitalist firms, and they do it for capitalist purposes, not for maximising human well-being. In the case of social media, it is designed to pull as much attention as possible into the platform and the ads shown on it.

As Chris Marcellino, a former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone, has said:

It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product, it’s capitalism.

The Lucas Plan

This brings us back to the Lucas Plan. At a time where the design of technology is under unprecedented scrutiny, a plan that pushes for workers’ control over it might be an answer.

The Plan was a truly remarkable experiment at the time. The University of Sussex’s Adrian Smith explains:

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.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, “one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company” (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’.

The Lucas Plan eventually failed because of opposition from management, the trade union hierarchy and the government. Lucas Aerospace subsequently had to restructure and shed much of its workforce. Nevertheless, the plan provides great lessons for our current predicament.

Technology is political, yet its design is ultimately in the hands of capitalist firms. The Lucas Plan shows that workers, particularly in the more technically-oriented layers, have the skills and resources to design alternative technologies to those proposed by shareholders and management.

Workers’ control over the design of technology is thus a way to make it more ethical. Many of the problems we encounter with modern-day information technology are caused by unrestricted capitalist control over it, and workers’ control can be a necessary counterweight to push through human-centered design choices.

Composition

So how to build a modern-day Lucas Plan? Developing a plan reminiscent of the Lucas Plan for modern times needs, first and foremost, to be based on the present-day class composition of the workers in tech.

Tech, and more precisely sectors focused on information technology and software, have a notoriously dual composition. On the one hand there are the (generally) highly paid top-end workers, mostly composed of programmers and people employed in fields such as marketing and management. On the other hand there are large armies of underpaid workers employed in functions such as moderation, electronics assembly, warehouse logistics or catering.

The first group has very peculiar characteristics. They are often taken in by the classic Silicon Valley ideology consisting of “lean startup” thinking, social liberalism, and the idea that they are improving the world. Materially, they are also different from large sections of the working class. They earn extremely high wages, are often highly educated, possess specific technical skills, are given significant stock options in their employers’ companies and are highly mobile, notorious for changing jobs very easily.

Besides that, many also have an aspiration to start their own startup one day, in line with Silicon Valley ideology. This adds a certain petty-bourgeois flavour to their composition.

Yet these workers also have their grievances. They are often employed in soul-crushing jobs at large multinationals, some of which (for example Amazon or Tesla) have the reputation of making them work as much as they can and then spitting them out, often in a state of burn-out.

On the other hand, there are subaltern sections of tech workers. These people moderate offensive content on Facebook, stack Amazon boxes in their “fulfillment centres”, drive people around on Uber and Lyft, assemble electronics such as iPhones or serve lunches at Silicon Valley corporate “campuses.”

These workers are generally underpaid, but conduct the drudging work that makes tech multinationals run. Without Facebook moderators watching horrible content all day, the platform would be flooded by it (and Facebook would have no one to train their AI on); without the fleet of elderly workers manning Amazon warehouses, packages would not get delivered; without the staff on Google and Facebook campuses, they would look a lot less utopian.

This section of workers can also be highly mobile in regards to jobs, but less from possibility and more from precarity. They also have fewer ties to the tech sector specifically— whether they work at the warehouses of a self-styled tech company like Blue Apron or the warehouses of any other company matters less for them than it does for programmers.

This bifurcation holds real problems for a modern-day Lucas Plan. If we simply move the control over the design of technology from management and shareholders to a tech worker aristocracy, it might not solve so much.

Yet there are some hopeful tendencies we can build on. Tech workers in Silicon Valley have started to bridge the divide that separates them, with organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition starting to help cafeteria workers organise.

A Guardian piece on their organising even observes some budding solidarity between these two groups arising:

Khaleed is proud of the work he does, and deeply grateful for the union. At first, he found it difficult to talk about his anxieties with coworkers at the roundtable. But he came to find it comforting: “We have solidarity, now.” A cost-of-living raise would mean more security, and a better chance of staying in the apartment where he lives. Khaleed deeply wants to be able to live near his son, and for his son to continue going to the good public school he now attends.

When I asked Khaleed how he felt about the two TWC Facebook employees he had met with, his voice faltered. “I just hope that someday I can help them like they helped me.” When I told one of the engineers, he smiled, and quoted the IWW slogan. “That’s the goal, right – one big union?”

This is precisely the basis on which a modern-day Lucas Plan should be based: solidarity between both groups of tech workers and inclusion of both. The Lucas Plan of the 1970s understood this. The main authors of the Plan were predominantly to be highly-educated engineers, but the people making the products were not. Hence they tried to bridge this gap with proposals that would humanise working conditions as well as technology, and by including common workers.

A shop steward, an engineer, would declare during a public meeting after showing how company plans decided how long bathroom breaks could be:

We say that that form of technology is unacceptable, and if that is the only way to make that technology we should be questioning whether we want to make those kinds of products in that way at all.

Furthermore, the humanisation of work inside tech companies, and not just the end product of it, would also positively impact the work of the core tech workers. In essence, it would serve as the glue to connect both groups.

A Lucas Plan today would thus analyse the composition of tech workers at both sides of the divide, include both of them and mobilise them behind a program of humanisation of labour for themselves and humanised technology for the rest of society.

How to do it?

The practical implementation of workers’ control over design decisions can base itself on already existing policies and experiences, mainly reformist co-determination schemes (where trade-union officials are given seats on corporate boards) or direct-action oriented tactics (where management power is challenged through workplace protest and where workers establish a degree of workplace autonomy).

The choice of these tactics would need to be based on local working class experiences. In some contexts co-determination would make more sense; in some cases direct action would take precedence. In most cases a combination of both will most likely be required.

The first option is a moderate one. Workers’ representation on the boards of companies has been common in industrialised economies, and particularly continental Europe. Even Conservative PM Theresa May proposed implementing it in 2017, before making a U-turn after business lobbying.

As TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has stated:

Workers on company boards is hardly a radical idea. They’re the norm across most of Europe – including countries with similar single-tier board structures to the UK, such as Sweden. European countries with better worker participation tend to have higher investment in research and development, higher employment rates and lower levels of inequality and poverty.

Expanding the control of these boards to also deciding what products to produce and how to design them in technologically-oriented companies—both software and more traditional industrial companies—would radicalise the non-radical idea of workers representation on company boards.

A second, more radical option, is the establishment of workplace control through organising. A good example of this are the US longshoremen who at certain times of their existence controlled their own work.

As Peter Cole writes in Jacobin:

West Coast longshoremen were “lords” because they earned high wages by blue-collar standards, were paid overtime starting with the seventh hour of a shift, and had protections against laboring under dangerous conditions. They even had the right to stop working at any time if “health and safety” were imperiled. Essentially, to the great consternation of employers, the union controlled much of the workplace.

The hiring hall was the day-to-day locus of union power. Controlled by each local’s elected leadership, the hall decided who would and wouldn’t work. Crucially, under the radically egalitarian policy of “low man out,” the first workers to be dispatched were those who had worked the least in that quarter of the year.

Imagine a programmer at Facebook refusing to make a button red because research shows it would not increase the well-being of users, and being backed up in this decision by a system of workplace solidarity that stretches throughout the company.

From bees to architects

Mike Cooley, one of the key authors behind the Lucas Plan, was fired from his job in 1981 as retaliation for union organising. Afterwards, he became a key author on humanising technology. He also worked with the Greater London Council when—during the height of Thatcherism—it was controlled by the Labour left, and where current Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell earned his spurs.

Just as McDonnell bridges the earlier, failed, resistance to neoliberalism, with our current attempts to replace it, Cooley forms an inspiration for post-neoliberal technology. In an 1980 article he concluded:

The alternatives are stark. Either we will have a future in which human beings are reduced to a sort of bee-like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them; or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills and abilities in both a political and a technical sense, decide that they are going to be the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of choice and expression rather than less. The truth is, we shall have to make the profound decision as to whether we intend to act as architects or behave like bees.

These words ring true today more than ever.

About the author: Felix Holtwell In real life, Felix is a tech journalist. After dark, however, he edits the Fully Automated Luxury Communism newsletter, a newsletter about the interactions between technology and the left. You can follow him on Twitter at @AutomatedFully.

Photo by OuiShare

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It was in January 1976 that workers at Lucas Aerospace published an Alternative Plan for the future of their corporation. It was a novel response to management announcements that thousands of manufacturing jobs were to be cut in the face of industrial restructuring, international competition, and technological change. Instead of redundancy, workers argued their right to socially useful production.

Around half of Lucas’ output supplied military contracts. Since this depended upon public funds, as did many of the firm’s civilian products, workers argued state support be better put to developing more socially useful products.

Rejected by management and government, the Plan nevertheless catalysed ideas for the democratisation of technological development in society. In promoting their arguments, shop stewards at Lucas attracted workers from other sectors, community activists, radical scientists, environmentalists, and the Left. The Plan became symbolic for a movement of activists committed to innovation for purposes of social use over private profit.

Of course, the world is different now. The spaces and opportunities for democratising technology have altered, and so too have the forms it might take. Nevertheless, remembering older initiatives casts enduring issues about the direction of technological development in society in a different and informative light: an issue relevant today in debates as varied as industrial policy, green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-production, and grassroots fabrication in Hackerspaces and FabLabs. The movement for socially useful production prompts questions about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development.

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.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, ‘one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company’ (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’. Despite this attention, shop stewards suspected (correctly) that the Plan in isolation would convince neither management nor government. Even leaders in the trade union establishment were reluctant to back this grassroots initiative; wary its precedent would challenge privileged demarcations and hierarchies.

In the meantime, and as a lever to exert pressure, 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”’. Lucas workers organised road-shows, teach-ins, and created a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) at North-East London Polytechnic. Design prototypes were displayed at public events around the country. TV programmes were made. CAITS helped workers in other sectors develop their own Plans. Activists connected with sympathetic movements in Scandinavia and Germany.

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.

Material possibilities were helped when Londoners voted the Left into power at the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981. They introduced an Industrial Strategy committed to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, sacked from Lucas for his activism, was appointed Technology Director of the GLC’s new Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). A series of Technology Networks were created. Anticipating FabLabs today, these community-based workshops shared machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services, and were open for anyone to develop socially useful prototypes. Other Left councils opened similar spaces in the UK.

Technology Networks aimed to combine the ‘untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm’ in local communities with the ‘reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge’ in London’s polytechnics. Hundreds of designs and prototypes were developed, including electric bicycles, small-scale wind turbines, energy conservation services, disability devices, re-manufactured products, children’s play equipment, community computer networks, and a women’s IT co-operative. Designs were registered in an open access product bank. GLEB helped co-operatives and social enterprises develop these prototypes into businesses.

Recalling the movement now, what is striking is the importance activists attached to practical engagements in technology development as part of their politics. The movement emphasised tacit knowledge, craft skill, and learning by doing through face-to-face collaboration in material projects. Practical activity was cast as ‘technological agit prop’ for mobilising alliances and debate. Some participants found such politicisation unwelcome. But in opening prototyping in this way, activists tried to bring more varied participation into debates, and enable wider, more practical forms of expression meaningful to different audiences, compared to speeches and texts evoking, say, a revolutionary agent, socially entrepreneurial state, or deliberative governance framework.

Similarly today, Hackerspaces and FabLabs, involve people working materially on shared technology projects. Social media opens these engagements in distributed and interconnected forms. Web platforms and versatile digital fabrication technologies allow people to share open-hardware designs and contribute to an emerging knowledge commons. The sheer fun participants find in making things is imbued by others with excited claims for the democratisation of manufacturingand commons-based peer production. Grassroots digital fabrication (pdf) rekindles ideas about direct participation in technology development and use.

Wherever and whenever people are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop their ideas into material activity, then creativity can and does flourish. However, remembering the Lucas Plan should make us pause and consider two issues. First, the importance placed on tacit knowledge and skills. Skilful design in social media can assist but not completely substitute face-to-face, hand-by-hand activity. Second, for the earlier generation of activists, collaborative workshops and projects were also about crafting solidarities. Project-centred discussion and activity was linked to debate and mobilisation around wider issues.

Workers at Lucas Industries, Shaftmoor Lane branch, Birmingham, 1970. Photograph: /Lucas Memories website, lucasmemories.co.uk.

With hindsight, the movement was swimming against the political and economic tide, but at the time things looked less clear-cut. The Thatcher government eventually abolished the GLC in 1986. Unionised industries declined, and union power was curtailed through legislation. In overseeing this, Thatcherism knowingly cut material and political resources for alternatives. In doing so, the diversity so important to innovation diminished. The alliances struck, the spaces created and the initiatives generated were swept aside as concern for social purpose became overwhelmed by neoliberal ideology. The social shaping of technology was left to market decision.

However, even though activism dissipated, its ideas did not disappear. Some practices had wider influence, such as in participatory design, albeit it in forms appropriated to the needs of capital rather than the intended interests of labour. Historical reflection thus prompts a third issue, which is how power relations matter and need to be addressed in democratic technology development. When making prototypes becomes accessible and fun then people can exercise a power to do innovation. But this can still struggle to exercise power over the agendas of elite technology institutions, such as which innovations attract investment for production and marketing, and under what social criteria. Alternative, more democratic spaces nevertheless for technology development and debate.

Like others before and since, the Lucas workers insisted upon a democratic development of technology. Their practical, material initiatives momentarily widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist. Perhaps their argument was the most socially useful product left to us?

Adrian Smith researches the politics of technology, society and sustainability at SPRU and the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. He is on Twitter @smithadrianpaul. A longer paper on the Lucas Plan is available at the STEPS site.

Originally published in The Guardian.

Photo by Daniel Kulinski

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Forty years later, we are facing a convergence of crises: militarism andnuclear weapons, climate chaos and the destruction of jobs by new technologies and automation. These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, as the Lucas Aerospace workers did, and reopen the debate about industrial conversion and economic democracy.

Democratic egalitarianism

What so inspires me about the Lucas Plan is the democratic egalitarianism which runs through its every part – the work processes, the products and even the very technology they propose.

This egalitarian ethic inspired Laurence Hall to make ‘The Lucas Plan’ the focus of a regular gathering of Young Quakers in Lancaster, up the line from the Trident nuclear submarine yards in Barrow.

Eurig Scandrett from the Scottish Green Party made it the theme for Green Party trade unionists because ‘it is the most inspiring example of workers on the shop floor who get self-organised and demand to make what humanity needs.’

The fact that the plan was defeated has not diluted its capacity to inspire. For Scandrett, its defeat demonstrated that ‘it is the vested interests of the military-industrial machine which is the problem, and that workers liberating their collective brain is where the solution lies.’

The broad outline of the Lucas Aerospace workers’ story was familiar enough in the mid-1970s. Workers faced redundancies, got organised, resisted and insisted that their skills and machinery were not redundant. But here they went further. They drew together alternative ideas with those of supportive academics and, with the encouragement of Tony Benn (then industry secretary in the Labour government), produced their ‘Alternative Corporate Plan for Socially Useful Production’, illustrated with prototypes. Management refused to negotiate. The government, under pressure from the CBI and the City, made gestures of a willingness to talk, but would not move against management. The plan was never implemented, or even seriously considered, although commercial companies elsewhere picked up some of the ideas.

So what are the lessons we can draw from this past experience of ‘ordinary’ people organising and sharing their practical knowledge and skills to illustrate in the present the changes of which we dream? Some of the main ones are discussed below.

Lesson 1: Find common ground

A first condition for this group of fairly conventional, mainly middle-aged, male trade unionists to create what became a beacon of an alternative economics was building the organisation that eventually provided the means by which many individual intelligences became what Eurig Scandrett refers to as ‘collective’. Corporate ‘rationalisation’ meant groups of workers were being bought, discarded and the best sold on or used till they fell apart, like sacks of old clothes.

The shop stewards at the different Lucas Aerospace sites forged collective strength by taking action over basic common issues such as wages and conditions. This served to unite groups of workers with very different traditions and interests.

Lesson 2: Build democracy

Immense care and collective self-reflectiveness was needed to bring such diverse groups into a more or less united organisation.

All 35 (or so) delegates had the right to speak at meetings of the multi-union Combine shop stewards committee but decisions on recommendations to be taken back to the workforce were on the basis of ‘one site, one vote’. The decisions were binding on the delegates, who were expected to campaign for them at their local sites, although the sites were free to accept or reject them as they saw fit. This sensitive and consciously protected relationship between the Combine and the sites made it feel as though the members and local shop steward on the office and factory floor were ‘absent friends’, whose presence was palpable.

Lesson 3: Build alliances and look ahead

Although the Combine won victories, they felt as though they were engaged in a labour of Sisyphus – getting national agreement to halt job losses, only to find jobs were being slashed in different places and not because of decisions of local management.

The problem was Lucas’s restructuring towards longer production runs and more computer-controlled machinery, and its shifting investment into other European countries and the United States. The traditional approach of the trade union movement proved inadequate; instead the Combine produced its own experts and made use of outside help to educate and prepare itself.

Lesson 4: Building collective strategic intelligence.

‘We’re in a situation where politics is unavoidable,’ the Combine executive argued, in Combine News, in response to rumours of nationalisation of part of the aerospace industry. ‘Though there have been problems with nationalisation, we could, with the full involvement of all our members, insist on adequate safeguards against many of these. The advantages would be considerable, we would finally be working for our ultimate employers.’

They went on to sow the seeds of the alternative plan: ‘We could insist that the skill and talents of our members could be used to the full to engage in socially useful products like monorails and hovercraft, and that these skills are used in a much truer sense in the interests of the nation as a whole.’

This led to the presentation of the case for the nationalisation of Lucas Aerospace to Tony Benn, then secretary of state for industry. He was impressed: ‘Here was a group who had done the work to anticipate the problem. Others had come to me at the last minute saying their firm had gone bust and what could I do.’

For all his enthusiasm, he did not have the power to agree to nationalisation, but he suggested that the Combine should draw up an alternative corporate strategy for the company.

At first there was some scepticism. But the necessity of finding a new solution drove them on, and beyond management’s framework.

‘The only way that we could be involved in a corporate plan would be if we drew it up in a way which challenged the profit motive of the company and talked in terms of social profit,’ argued Combine delegate Mike Cooley, a designer who chaired the local branch of the technical trade union TASS.

The plan for socially useful production was a carefully phased process. Another Combine delegate, Mick Cooney, a fitter from Burnley, described the challenge: ‘The Combine wanted to know what machine tools we had. To do the Corporate Plan we were having to think as if we were planning. It really made the shop stewards sit up.’ The Combine asked site committees questions aimed to stimulate workers’ imagination: ‘How could the plant be run by the workforce? Are there any socially useful products which your plant could design and manufacture?’

Experiences of all kinds and knowledge of the company’s capacities led to 150 product ideas in six categories: medical equipment, transport vehicles, improved braking systems, energy conservation, oceanics, and telechiric machines.

Lesson 5: Know the limits

The idea inspired workers throughout the defence-related engineering industry, including the vast yards building nuclear submarines in Barrow, where designers worked with Mary Kaldor to submit alternatives to the Labour party defence policy committee. In the 1970’s the yards were owned by Vickers which also made tanks at the Elswick works on the Tyne in Newcastle. In Vickers a strong Combine Committee had been built in response to very similar pressures of rationalisation, acquisitions and closures that had stimulated the growth of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Commitee. Both Combine Committees had links with the Institute for Workers Control (IWC) and through the conferences and political connections organised by the IWC they found common cause in the idea of alternative plans for socially useful production. The shop stewards in the Elswick and Scotwood works responded to threats of reduncancies by drawing up such plans and gaining the support of Tony Benn and his close ally Stuart Holland. They made contact with shop stewards at Barrow, especially in the design office who were already doing their own work on alternatives. There had, in Barrow, been an earlier initiative towards diversification coming from Vickers management, led by an innovative engineer, George Henson, whose Quaker principles led him to refuse to work on the TSR2 at Vickers Weybridge plant and led to his move to Barrow where management wanted to diversify away from total dependence on government defence contracts.

However, Vickers responded to subsequent government nationalisation plans by keeping the profitable diversified section, making submersibles for deep sea oil exploration and handing over the yards to the government. The separation was a major blow to any longer-term diversification programme, but it’s success was a powerful memory for the designers who were still working on nuclear submarines and they were responsive to the contacts from across the country in Newcastle to collaborate on alternative plans to submit to the Labour party’s diversification committee. Labour’s defeat in 1979 closed down these possibilities. Later however, in the 1980s, some of those designers helped to create the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee (BAEC) to produce proposals for alternatives to Trident. By this time the Barrow yards were owned by British Aerospace, which rejected the strategy of civil diversification to keep skilled teams together. BAe concentrated entirely on its ‘core business’ whatever the cost in terms of loss of jobs.The only exception was war ships, the manufacture of which dominated the yards until the recent renewal of Trident.

Terry McSorley, a member of the now defunct BAEC, says: ‘The lesson I learnt is that site-based diversification won’t work’. Instead he now argues for an approach that integrates defence conversion with industrial strategy.

Steve Schofield, who was a researcher for the BAEC, draws a similar conclusion: ‘The Labour movement needs a much more ambitious arms conversion programme to challenge the embedded power of the military-industrial-complex.’ He argues for a change in security policy towards UN peacekeeping and peace building and suggests a combination of publicly-funded, national and regional investment banks for industries such as offshore wind and wave power to ensure an equitable distribution that benefits the small group of arms-dependent communities, including Barrow-in-Furness, Glasgow, Preston, Aldermaston and Plymouth.

Drawing on Lucas and his own more problematic experience in Barrow, he is certain that trade union and community participation is essential to guaranteeing that the skills of working people are maintained and enhanced.

We are in new times for trade union organisation but interest in democratic economics is increasing with the spread of green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-to-peer production, and grassroots fabrication in ‘hackerspaces’ and ‘fab labs’. All of which has deepened ideas about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development, as was the case with Lucas.

The lessons from the Lucas plan provide Labour’s proposed arms conversion agency with elements of a methodology for a network of organisations with an understanding of technological development not as a value-neutral process, autonomous from society, but shaped by social choices over its development – choices that the Lucas stewards showed need to become democratic.

This ‘ordinary’ group of workers demonstrated how it was possible to create a democratic economy. It is they, after all, who have the practical know how on which that technological development depends.

Originally published in Open Democracy

Photo by TheLeadSA

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Degrowth in Movements: Strengthening Alternatives and Overcoming Growth, Competition and Profit

About the authors and their positions

We write this text as editors and coordinators of the project Degrowth in Movement(s) with Dennis Eversberg. We see ourselves as part of the degrowth movement in Germany and Europe.

Corinna Burkhart first discovered degrowth during her studies through an internship at Research & Degrowth and has been working for Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie¹ since 2014. Dennis Eversberg is a sociologist and scientific collaborator at the DFG-funded Research Group on Post-Growth Societies at the University of Jena, where he studies the social composition, motivations and practices within the degrowth movement. Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian and activist who works as a scientific collaborator at the University of Zürich and as a freelance collaborator at Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie. Nina Treu cofounded Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie in 2011 in Leipzig and has been carrying out work related to degrowth since 2014.

This text only answers questions 1 and 2 of the project. Questions 3, 4 and 5 are planned to be answered in autumn 2016 after a collective evaluation process with the authors in order to complete the general goal of the project.
———————-

1. What is the key idea of Degrowth?

Overcoming growth, competition and profit – for a social-ecological and globally fair economy and way of life

The guiding economic and social principle of ‘higher, further, faster’ forces us into a social order of permanent competition in all areas of life. On the one hand, this leads to imperatives of social acceleration that overwhelm and exclude a great many people. On the other hand, this obsession with economic maximization is destroying the natural basis of human life and the ecosystems of plants and animals.

Degrowth represents a transformative path towards forms of economic activity and social (self-)organization centred on the welfare of all human beings and the preservation of the ecological basis of life. This requires both a fundamentally different way of interacting with each other on a daily basis as well as a profound cultural transformation, and the overcoming of capitalist ways of production with their imperatives of competition, growth and profit. Degrowth is not a finished model or plan that can be designed and then implemented —it is far more about re-politicizing the main aspects of our lives and economies in order to jointly conceive, test and fight for alternatives. The common values of this transformation are awareness, solidarity and cooperation. The goal: a life of dignity and self-determination for all human beings. And to make this possible, it is necessary to develop social practices and concepts in which humans see themselves as part of the planetary ecosystem and live accordingly.

A poster which is part of the game and education method “Game of good life”. (Image: Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie)

Degrowth is a movement explicitly focused on the highly industrialised countries of the Global North, even though social movements from the Global South are important allies and partners —for example, those discussions shaped by indigenous traditions such as buen vivir, post-extractivism and the grassroots ecological movements of the poor. Rich countries must reduce their consumption of raw materials, resources and land, as well as their emissions and waste production, to a level that is sustainable in the long run and that allows the countries in the South to have equal access to development opportunities.

Alternatives envisioned by the degrowth movement

The following concepts for an alternative society are central to the degrowth movement:

• A focus on a good life for all and therefore on the satisfaction of concrete human needs. This includes concepts such as slowness, ‘time prosperity’² and conviviality, in other words, quality in human relationships and the greatest possible freedom from all forms of domination.
• An emphasis on the changeability of social orders and an orientation towards sufficiency — instead of a fixation on technological novelties and increased efficiency— as strategies for solving ecological problems. From the point of view of degrowth, the idea that it is possible to completely decouple economic growth from the use of resources has been refuted by history and is technologically and politically unrealistic. This makes it necessary to search for alternatives beyond the concepts of ecological modernization and green growth.
• A truly collective political process to decide what products and services there should be more of and —especially— what there should be less of in the future. From the degrowth perspective, areas which could be dismantled are e.g. the fossil-fuel and industrial sectors, the military, the arms industry and the advertising sector, and individual and air transport. Areas that could be expanded, on the other hand are e.g. social and collective infrastructures, an ecological circular economy, decentralised and renewable energy sources existing as commons, care work, education and a solidarity economy.
• A redistribution of income and wealth on a national and global level, and a transformation of social security systems. In addition to an unconditional basic income —not only as money, but also in the form of social infrastructure— many are demanding a maximum wage.
• A focus on the reproduction of life, where the production and processing of goods is subordinate to human welfare, instead of the other way around. A potential first step in this sense would be a radical reduction in wage labour for all.
• Freedom from the one-sided Western development paradigm, in order to enable a self-determined shaping of society and a good life in the Global South.
• An expansion of democratic forms of decision-making in all areas, including the economy, in order to enable true political participation. Testing and practising of grassroots and consensus-oriented processes are fundamental to the movement.
• Regionally-based, but also open and interconnected economic circles. Because international trade deepens social divisions and prevents ecological sustainability, it is necessary to move towards a deglobalization of economic relations. However, degrowth does not stand for cultural isolation, homogenous ‘bioregions’, or economic protectionism for the sake of competitiveness, but for open forms of democratic relocalisation.

All these elements share the central idea that changes towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable society and economy at a global level are only possible through a combination of different strategies: In this sense, science and research are just as important as activism and practical projects that seek to provide alternatives in the here and now.

Degrowth is also far more than just a criticism of economic growth —it is about creating the conditions for a good life for everybody. Thus, conservative, racist-nationalist and sexist currents of thought that also criticise growth go against the essence of degrowth and its fundamental orientation towards a good life and equal rights and freedoms for all human beings worldwide; there is no place for them in degrowth.

The full courtyard of the University of Leipzig during the Degrowth Conference 2014. (Image: CC-BY-SA, Eva Mahnke)

A brief history of the degrowth movement

Now an international movement, the beginnings of degrowth can be found in France in the early 2000s. However, the concept of economic growth has been the subject of criticism for almost as long as it has existed. Since the 1970s, both the widely-read study, The Limits of Growth (1972), and the work of a wide range of intellectuals and economists such as André Gorz, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen or Claudia von Werlhof have contributed significantly to the development of this current of thought.

In 2002, the publication in France of a special edition of the magazine Silence on the subject of décroissance (French for ‘degrowth’) sparked a new wave of debate surrounding the criticism of growth; and the first International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity took place in Paris in 2008. During the conference the English word ‘degrowth’ was used, leading to its subsequent adoption in the international scientific debate. After this, international conferences on degrowth took place in Barcelona in 2010, in Venice in 2012 and in Leipzig in 2014. Since the first conference in 2008, the number of attendees has risen continuously and has included scientists from a wide range of areas as well as activists and practitioners. The conferences are a meeting point and a place of debate, learning and networking for the degrowth movement; and at the same time, they provide it with greater public attention. So far, the most important events for the degrowth movement in the German-speaking countries have been the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 with more than 3000 participants, the Beyond Growth?! congress in Berlin in 2011 organised by Attac, and the recently created Degrowth Summer School, which took place for the second time in 2016 at the Climate Camp in the German Rhineland.³
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Critical self-reflection as a path to anti-capitalism: socially homogenous, but diverse in its contents – and critical of capitalism

The degrowth movement in Germany is highly decentralised, and has neither a formal network nor an organizing centre. Rather it is composed of a great diversity of individual and collective actors.

There are, firstly, certain organizations that work directly in the context of the degrowth movement, for example the Netzwerk Wachstumswende together with the Förderverein Wachstumswende⁴ , or the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, which maintains the German degrowth web portal and initiates and supports projects listed there. Since the Beyond Growth?! congress in Berlin in 2011, there has also been an Attac working group with the same name that is active throughout Germany —and some local Attac groups work on the subject as well. In addition to these relatively large or well-known groups and institutions, there are also many smaller, generally local, actors working in the area of growth criticism and alternatives to growth. This has become especially apparent thanks to the positive response to the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 and the wide range of events it hosted. Furthermore, a variety of individuals or departments in other large organizations not solely focused on degrowth, such as political foundations and environmental organizations, also contribute actively to the degrowth debate through events, participation in discussions, or publications. Finally, many ecologically-oriented economists also study the subject of degrowth, particularly in the context of the Vereinigung für ökologische Ökonomie (VÖÖ) (German Society for Ecological Economics) and the Vereinigung für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (VÖW) (German Association for Ecological Economic Research). Last but not least, the Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (IÖW) (Institute for Ecological Economy Research) maintains the blog www.postwachstum.de, and since 2008 the University of Oldenburg has regularly hosted lecture series on the post-growth economy.

On the whole, the greatest amount of progress in the degrowth movement has been achieved thanks to the large, grassroots organizational teams involved in the international degrowth conference 2014 in Leipzig and the Degrowth Summer Schools in 2015 and 2016 in the lignite-mining region of the German Rhineland.

Degrowth in Europe

In addition to the above actors in the German degrowth movement, there has also been a growing degrowth movement in other regions, especially Southern Europe. For example, the international conferences started in Paris in 2008 were then continued by the group Research & Degrowth (R&D), which is active in Spain and France. R&D works mainly in the area of science, is especially active in Barcelona and surroundings, and seeks to promote the dissemination of degrowth ideas in the academic world. In France, the movement mainly revolves around the periodicals Silence and La Décroissance; as well as the Parti pour la Décroissance (‘Party for Degrowth’), which in addition to its political activities is also active in the dissemination of information. In Italy, the group Rete per la decrescita (‘Network for Degrowth’) conducts scientific research, whereas the Movimento per la Decrescita Felice (‘Movement for Happy Degrowth’), strongly rooted in local groups, promotes the idea of voluntary simplicity and seeks to provide an example of an alternative, ‘good practice’. Eastern European groups working for degrowth have received increased attention and acquired momentum thanks to the degrowth conference in autumn 2016 in Budapest. Furthermore, there is an ever-increasing range of research in addition to small-scale practical projects in various European countries (e.g. Can Decreix⁵ in France) related to a greater or lesser degree to degrowth.

Alliances and cooperation

In addition to the groups directly carrying out growth-critical work, there are, both in Germany and in other regions of the global north, close ties with and within the alternative economies scene: commons, solidarity economies, transition towns, common good economies, sharing economies, plural economies, common gardens, free and swap shops, etc. — and often the borders between these movements and degrowth are not necessarily clear-cut. There are also noteworthy instances of cooperation with scientific institutes, development aid organizations and political foundations, and individual representatives of political parties.

Publishing and practicing

Degrowth is, on the one hand, a proposal for profound societal transformation; and in this sense, much of the work focuses on firing up social and academic debate through publications⁶ , websites, events and conferences. On the other hand, degrowth is also the common element of a great many hands-on projects, where it manifests itself through concrete political and everyday practices. Thus, the large degrowth events are organised by grassroots organizational teams —the food is regional, organic and vegan and is prepared collectively, and financing comes exclusively from politically compatible organizations. Typical practices in degrowth circles are, for example: mobility that is as ecological as possible, cooperation with vegetable co-ops, living in common housing spaces or other alternative forms of living, and participation in direct actions.

 

The general consensus in the German degrowth movement

A survey carried out with participants at the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 provides information on the ideas and ideals of those individuals that are practically active within the degrowth spectrum.⁷ The study shows that the people active in the degrowth scene are mainly from student, academic and urban middle-class circles; the majority are between 20 and 35 years old; most are white; and many of the younger individuals become politicised through degrowth. Irrespective of any other possible differences between them, the people that see themselves as part of the degrowth movement share a common, growth-critical vision. This vision can be summarised in general terms as follows:

Growth without environmental destruction is an illusion. Therefore, economic shrinkage in the industrialized countries will be inevitable. This includes that we will have to abstain from certain amenities we have grown used to. The transformation towards a post-growth society needs to be peaceful and emerge from below; it amounts to overcoming capitalism, and female emancipation must be a central issue in the process

(see Eversberg/Schmelzer 2015).⁸

Currents in the post-growth discourse

At the same time, the growth-critical discourse is characterised by the heterogeneity of its contents. Still attempts to categorise the diverse actors critical of growth are made. In the German post-growth debate, it is possible to distinguish through the texts of certain key figures the conservative current, represented prominently by Meinhard Miegel, the social-reformist current, represented by Angelika Zahrnt, and the sufficiency-oriented current, personified mainly by Niko Paech. In addition, there are also feminist and anti-capitalist currents —although these, unlike the previous cases, revolve less around specific individuals. The differences mainly reflect typical positions found within the post-growth spectrum that can be read about in many books and articles. It is important to note, however, that the post-growth debate cannot be unequivocally equated with degrowth as a discourse and movement. For example, discussions and events in recent years have shown that in particular the conservative current of criticism à la Miegel is not reflected in the younger and more international degrowth scene.

Political and content-related currents in the degrowth movement

Another way of describing the range of contents and internal tensions within the degrowth movement is provided by the aforementioned survey, which reveals five main currents: Sufficiency-oriented Critics of Civilization, the moderate Immanent Reformers, a transitory group of Voluntarist-Pacifist Idealists, the Modernist Rationalist Left and the Alternative Practical Left (for a detailed overview see Eversberg/Schmelzer 2016). This shows the diversity within the degrowth movement with regard to, among other things:

• content and perspective (from a closeness to nature, to techno-optimism, to radical anti-capitalism);
• forms of organization (from large organizations, to alternative projects, to associations of activists);
• political practices (from petitions, to direct action, or even to dropping out of society altogether)
• political backgrounds (from a low level of politicization, to alternative circles, to the classic left-wing).

Demonstration “enough is enough for all” at the end of the Degrowth Conference 2014 in Leipzig. (Image: Klimagerechtigkeit Leipzig)

This breadth of interest provides the degrowth movement with a wide range of potential alliances and many degrowth activists also see themselves as a part of other movements and currents of thought —among others, those represented in the project Degrowth in Movement(s). Degrowth is thus often seen as a common ground or platform; a collective space for both action and debate.
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Literature and links

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned scepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

The post Degrowth in Movements: Strengthening Alternatives and Overcoming Growth, Competition and Profit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As the environmentalist Paul Hawken has pointed out,

‘We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP’

What the industrial system does is to convert our natural commons into private financial gain and leaves states and communities to pick up the pieces. If we do not find some way of shedding light on the myth of ‘the wealth creators’ and the insufficiency of GDP as any sort of measure of true wealth, we are never going to see the problem for what it really is.

This article by David Roberts of Grist.org highlights exactly how much damage is done to the global commons, especially by fossil fuel extraction:

Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero.

Read more here.

Photography by Louis Vest on flickr (CC Licence).

The post None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use appeared first on P2P Foundation.