John HollowayThe Red Rose of Nissan• THE NEW Nissan factory in Sunder-land was opened on 11 September 1986with a great fanfare of publicity : tele-vision advertisements, documentaries,newspaper supplements, news cover-age of the formal opening by the primeminister .

The theme of all this publicity wasthat the Nissan plant opened a newage. Here is a factory where managersand workers alike wear white coats andshare the same canteen, where manag-ers and workers alike are young(average age in the late twenties), acompany where there have never beenstrikes, where trade unions are not

142 forbidden but are redundant becauseworkers enjoy good conditions andidentify with the aims of the company .The factory of the new age, of the newtechnology, of the new consensus .Light years away from the militancy ofthe car workers in the seventies . Lightyears away too from the macho man-

COMMENTARY

agement of Edwardes, MacGregor orMurdoch .

Some weeks later, another eventwas surrounded by just as much glossypublicity, just as much sophisticatedmarketing : the launching of the new-look Labour Party at the annual Con-ference, the party of the new MoralMajority, the party of the new con-sensus. Here too is a new age, a breakwith the past. The lid is closed on thedustbin of history with its evil-smellingpolitics of conflict and trade unionmilitancy. These evil odours are dis-pelled by the sweet smell of the redrose, the macho militants are replacedby the gentle man with the flower .

The dawn of a new harmony in in-dustry, the heralding of a new politicsof consensus. Is this just coincidence,or does it tell us something about thedirection being taken by capitalism inBritain?

THE CONTRAST suggested by the Nissanpublicity is a contrast with the Britishcar industry of the 1970s, and particu-larly with British Leyland . If BritishLeyland can be seen as a symbol ofcrisis, then Nissan symbolises its suc-cessful resolution. British Leylandsymbolises not just the crisis of the carindustry, not just the crisis of Britishcapitalism, but the crisis of a particularpattern of production often referred toas Fordism. In contrast, Nissan repre-sents not just the success of Japanesecapital, but a new model of productionrelations, a current trend often referredto as neo-Fordism or post-Fordism .

The crisis at British Leyland in themid-1970s is significant, not only be-cause it was a very large company andthe last bastion of the British car in-dustry, but because it stands as a stereo-type of the industry associated with thelong post-war boom . Production tookplace in large factories organisedaround the assembly line, very muchin accordance with the principlesadopted by Ford in the production ofthe Model T. The vast majority of thework was repetitive and required littleskill . All the workers were organised intrade unions and throughout the longperiod of boom when any car producedcould immediately be sold, they man-aged to achieve relatively high andconstantly rising real wages .

Dull, repetitive, unskilled work inthe factory, compensated for by rela-tively high wages : the typical Fordistpeace bargain was maintained . Ford'sproduction of the Model T was trend-setting not only because of his use ofthe assembly line for the production ofcars, but also because of the way inwhich consumption was promoted asboth reward for and stimulus to pro-duction. Ford paid his workers the

The red rose of Nissan

high wages of five dollars a day inreturn for the intensive, monotonouswork on the assembly line . With thiswage they could become rich enoughto buy a cheap car, thus stimulatingdemand for more Model Ts, moremonotonous work, and so on .

At British Leyland the figures weredifferent, but the essence was the same,the core principle of post-war capitalistdomination : accept the deadly, dead-ening alienation of boring work inreturn for high wages which will allowyou to live the life of mass consump-tion, which will in turn generatedemand for the products of ever morealienating boring work .

Since, generally, it was men in thiscase who did the work in the factorywhile women were seen as being moreclosely associated with consumption,this pattern of relations at work impliedthe development of a certain pattern ofgender relations and a certain type ofsexuality. The pattern of dominationin the factory was complemented by apattern of domination in the home andit was on the basis of these relationsthat cars were produced : alienation inthe factory produces alienation in thehome, which in turn provides a stimu-lus to go out to alienated work .

The keystone holding this structuretogether was the trade unions and thepractice of collective bargaining .Through the annual rounds of collec-tive bargaining the trade-off betweenthe death of alienated labour and the`life' of consumption was regularlynegotiated and renegotiated .

Within this equilibrium there were,of course, conflicts and shifts in power .The long period of relative prosperityallowed the workers to build up a con-siderable position of strength . InBritish Leyland the bargaining strength

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144 of the workers (and the consequentlimitations on management) were ex-pressed most clearly in the system ofmutuality . Under the mutualitysystem, management accepted that nonew technology or reorganisation ofworking practices could be introducedwithout the prior agreement of the shopstewards. Mutuality was a strikingembodiment of the strength of theworkers within the Fordist equili-brium: the mutuality principle did notassert a revolutionary claim by theworkers to control production, butmerely made clear that management'srights were limited and that any inten-sification of labour must be paid for .`Payment for change' was the key prin-ciple of the mutuality system .

Of course this was never the wholestory . The Fordist wage contract in thefactory could no more run smoothlythan the marriage contract in the home .The trade-off between boredom at workand `life' outside could never be entirelysuccessful . Inevitably, there werestruggles in the factory which did notfall neatly into the Fordist pattern :struggles not just for higher wages, norindeed for the control of production,but revolts against work as such : sabo-tage, absenteeism, wildcat strikes etc .Revolts against work in the only formin which it existed: as death, as thenegation of life and creativity .

For a long time, however, theseexpressions of frustration posed littlethreat to the structure as a whole. TheFordist peace deal was never the wholepicture, but it was sufficiently real toprovide a framework for the rapid andsustained growth of the British carindustry (and other car industries)throughout the 1950s and much of the1960s. However, it rested on a veryfragile basis (like all social harmony in

a class society) : on the one hand, thebalance between frustration and con-sumption was always a delicate (andpotentially explosive) one, and on theother hand, the whole system pre-supposed the expansion of the market,the relatively easy sale of the carsproduced .

In the late 1960s and early 1970s thewhole pattern of domination-and-production began to crack. Accumu-lated boredom combined with theconfidence born of a long period ofunemployment to make it more andmore difficult to contain frustrationswithin the factory . The bursting frus-tration found expression in high labourturnover, increasing absenteeism andsabotage, and the frequent outbreak ofstrikes . In the British car industry as awhole, the level of strike activity rosemarkedly after 1963 and then verydramatically indeed in the late 1960sand early 1970s : from 1969 to 1978 anannual average of more than 1,800,000days were lost through strikes in thecar industry, as compared with anaverage of 377,600 working days lostpear year in 1950-63 (Marsden et al,1985 : 121) .

Significantly, the majority of thesestrikes were not for higher wages, butarose out of disputes concerning condi-tions at work . In his Annual Report for1976, the chairman of BL recognisd this :

`In BL, though relatively fewindustrial disputes have beendirectly concerned with pay, somany strikes have occurred with nobenefit either to the company or tothe employees that one is forced tothe conclusion that the underlyingreason is the desire to make aprotest.' (quoted in TelevisionHistory Workshop 1985 : 81)

The rising militancy of the late 1960sdid not just aim at the renegotiation ofthe Fordist deal - more wages for nastywork. It struck at the core of Fordismitself: high wages were no longer suffi-cient to contain the accumulatedfrustration . As one BL managercommented :

`This protest was, in my view, aprotest against the capitalism andthe democracy of this country .'(Television History Workshop,1985 : 81)

This was not a revolutionary situ-ation . There was no question, at BritishLeyland or elsewhere in Britain, of arevolutionary assault on capital . But itwould be totally wrong to concludefrom that that capital was not threat-ened. The structure of control whichwas the basis of capitalist developmentin the post-war period was being under-mined. The capitalist class was not inimminent danger of being toppled, butcertainly no British Leyland managercould speak with the confidence of thecenturion in the gospels : `I say untoone, Go, and he goeth; and to another,Come, and he cometh ; and to my ser-vant, Do this, and he doeth it' (Luke 7 :vii) . The authority upon which thewhole capitalist system of productionis premised was no longer functioning.

The loss of authority within the fac-tories blended with the collapse of theother fragile pillar of Fordism . Diffi-culties in production everywhere (dueto a combination of rising militancyand the fact that investments in newmachinery were no longer leading tosignificant increases in productivity)hit profits and brought to an end theconstant expansion of the capitalistmarket on which the smooth function-ing of the Fordist system had been

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premised . It was no longer true by thelate 1960s that any car produced couldbe sold without difficulty and by 1974,when world crisis was manifest and therise in oil prices took its effect onmotorists, car companies had to com-pete intensely to sell their products .The car companies were forced tochange their production methods inorder to compete . Management toowas forced to attack the establishedpatterns of relations at work . Fromboth sides of the capital-labour rela-tion, the relative stability of Fordismwas under assault . The period of com-promise in which the trade unions hadheld the two sides together in apparentharmony gave way to a period of openconflict, open struggle for power . Asthe BL manager already quoted put it :

`The only thing that really standsout is the fact that bothmanagement and the shop stewardsappreciated the situation - theyboth knew what their objectiveswere, and they both admitted toeach other what they were doing .There was no question of it being abattle that was raging with peoplewho were denying it - both sidesopenly admitted this was a struggle .Management were saying "We aregoing to win". Shop stewards said"We are going to win" .' (TelevisionHistory Workshop, 1985 : 81)

The crisis at British Leyland wasthe breaking out of open battle . TheFordist equilibrium, which had suc-ceeded in containing frustrations andmaintaining an adequate structure ofcontrol for so long that it had shaped awhole generation's image of capitalism,was broken .

Capitalist crisis is never anythingother than that : the breakdown of a

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relatively stable pattern of class dom-ination. It appears as an economiccrisis, expressed in a fall in the rate ofprofit, but its core is the failure of anestablished pattern of domination .From the point of view of capital, thecrisis can be resolved only through theestablishment of new patterns of dom-ination. This does not mean that capitalhas new patterns ready-made to imposeon the working class. For capital, thecrisis can be resolved only throughstruggle, through the restoration ofauthority and through a far-from-smooth search for new patterns ofdomination .

In the case of British Leyland, there-establishment of control becameidentified with the question of raisingproductivity . Raising productivity wasseen as the key to the survival of thecompany in the face of internationalcompetition .

Raising productivity was not just aquestion of introducing new machin-ery, but of getting workers to workharder. As a Central Policy ReviewStaff report of 1975 said :

`With the same power at his elbowand doing the same job as hiscontinental counterparts, a Britishcar assembly worker produces onlyhalf as much output per shift .'(CPRS, 1975)

In these circumstances, there waslittle point in introducing new tech-nology until new attitudes and a newdiscipline had been established. Newtechnology would require a new typeof control over the workforce, but atthe same time it could also contributeto the creation of that control . As onemanager in Ford put it when talking ofthe installation of 39 new industrialrobots :

`We haven't got control of thelabour force . We can't force eachman to put each weld in the rightplace. So we've tried to build inquality through the machines .'(Scarborough, 1986 : 99)

In British Leyland, the re-establish-ment of managerial control and theintroduction of new technology werevery tightly intertwined in the planningof a new car model, the Metro, to beproduced at the end of the 1970s . Thedecision to use the most advancedtechnology (automated multiweldersand robots) in the production of theMetro was taken in the mid-1970s,partly out of a concern for quality(machines being considered more reli-able than workers) and partly because`there were felt to be unquantifiableadvantages in using a technology whichresulted in management having to dealwith far fewer direct operatives'(Willman & Winch, 1985 : 50) . Oncethe decision was taken to invest in hightechnology and to construct a new plant(the New West works at Longbridge),it became more urgent than ever toestablish managerial control before thenew plant was opened .

The attempt by management toestablish control can be seen in twophases. The first phase, running fromthe financial collapse of the companyand the consequent takeover by theLabour government in 1974 to theappointment of Michael Edwardes aschief executive in October 1977, aimedat the incorporation of the shopstewards. When the finances of thecompany collapsed in December 1974,the government commissioned a reportby Sir Don Ryder, chairman of theNational Enterprise Board . The RyderPlan, published in April 1975, under-

lined the urgency of change at BritishLeyland, but, recognising the strengthof the shop stewards within the com-pany, it sought to achieve changethrough winning their cooperation . Inparticular, the Plan accepted the con-tinuing existence of the mutualitysystem and established a structure ofjoint management-shop steward com-mittees to discuss a wide range ofissues relating to company perform-ance. After heated discussion, the shopstewards agreed to cooperate in theparticipation scheme, some evenenthusiastically . As Derek Robinson,the convenor of the shop stewards atLongbridge, put it :

`If we make Leyland successful, itwill be a political victory . It willprove that ordinary working peoplehave got the intelligence anddetermination to run industry .'(Guardian, 9 .4 .1979, quoted inScarborough, 1986: 102)

Robinson's enthusiasm was notborne out by the experience . Discus-sions in the joint committees took placewithin a framework already tightly de-fined by managerial decisions (on theMetro, for example), and they wereseparated from the structure of collec-tive bargaining in which the actualdecisions on working practices weretaken . Consequently, the shop stewardsfound, on the one hand, that they hadexercised little influence and, on theother, that they were often com-promised in the eyes of the workersthey represented by their participationin managerial decisions (Willman &Winch, 1985 ; Scarborough, 1986) .

From the management point ofview, the participation exercise wasboth a success and a failure . On the onehand, it did promote some degree of

The red rose of Nissan

acceptance of the need for change ; as 147one manager put it, `participation wasa success and helped us in selling thechanges we wanted' (Scarborough,1986 : 103) . On the other hand, it was aslow and cumbersome way of bringingabout change and it did not establishthe clear authority that managementrequired : the power of the shop stew-ards was recognised and yet strikeactivity continued at a high level . Inthe view of Michael Edwardes :

`The three-tier employeeparticipation structure - acornerstone of the Ryder remedy tosolve the entrenched industrialrelations problems- only produceda bureaucratic paperchasedissipating management resourceand effort . Some managementdecisions were delayed by monthswhile the joint consultativemachinery tried unsuccessfully togrind out a consensus . Procedureand consultation to avert industrialrelations problems appeared tooverwhelm decision-making andaction-taking, yet during this timethe number of disputes rosesharply.' (Edwardes, 1984 : 39)

By 1977, it was clear that the Ryderstrategy could not bring about the re-covery of the company : productivitycontinued to fall and with it BritishLeyland's share of the market . Sinceeffective managerial control could notbe achieved through the incorporationof the shop stewards, it was necessaryfor management to become more open-ly aggressive . In October 1977, MichaelEdwardes was appointed by theNational Enterprise Board (with theapproval of the Labour government) asChairman and Chief Executive ofBritish Leyland .

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148 For Edwardes, the key to successwas the reassertion of capital's controlover labour : the `sine qua non of survivalwas to establish the right to manage'(Edwardes, 1984: 54), and this wouldinvolve `counteracting shop stewardpower' (Edwardes, 1984 : 79) .

Crucially, establishing the right tomanage meant breaking the mutualitysystem and asserting management'sright to introduce new working prac-tices without the prior agreement ofthe shop stewards. Although Edwardes'managerial style was abrasive from thebeginning, he first attacked the estab-lished pattern of management by takingon not the shop stewards but the man-agers themselves, getting rid of manyand moving others to new positions . Itwas two years before he engaged theshop stewards in direct confrontationover the issue of mutuality . Duringthose two years the position of thestewards had been considerably weak-ened by a number of plant closures, bythe inflexibility of management in wagenegotiations and by the sharp rise inunemployment at a national level . Itwas also weakened by management'snew populist strategy, designed tomobilise the workers against the shopstewards . Claiming that the shop stew-ards did not represent the wishes oftheir members, management developeda policy (after February 1979) of goingover the heads of the shop stewardsand appealing directly to the workersthemselves .

`This often meant sending letters toemployees' homes (where theycould calmly and deliberatelyconsider the situation with theirfamilies), the issuing of factorybriefing sheets, and posters . Whenwe felt a particular issue had wider

significance we used newspaperadvertisements and they seemed tobe effective, for the militantsinvariably called "foul" .'(Edwardes, 1984: 93)

In this way, `democracy' became amanagerial strategy : direct ballots ofthe membership were used to counterthe established patterns of trade unionrepresentation .

The confrontation over mutualityand managerial control came at the endof 1979. It began when, in response tocontinuing economic difficulties,Edwardes unveiled a Recovery Plan,which provided for the loss of 25,000jobs and the closure or severe cut-backof thirteen factories . The plan was ini-tially opposed by the trade unions, but,in the face of management's assertionthat the only alternative was closure ofthe company, the engineering unionsdecided to recommend acceptance in aballot of the company's employees, andthe ballot produced a large majority infavour. When a number of shop stew-ards then published a pamphlet criti-cising the plan (in November 1979),management responded by sackingDerek Robinson, one of the signatoriesof the pamphlet and chairman of theshop stewards' combine .

A strike in support of Robinson sooncollapsed, although the shop stewardscontinued to support Robinson andeven re-elected him convenor of theLongbridge stewards in January 1980 .The stewards no longer wielded thesame power as before . On the onehand, the national unions (particularlythe engineers' union, the AUEW, ofwhich Robinson was a member) failedto give him support : Robinson, andthe shop steward power which he rep-resented had long been a thorn in the

flesh of the responsible national officialsof the AUEW (Edwardes, 1984: 117-133). On the other hand it became clearthat the shop stewards could no longercount on the active support of the unionmembers: an important element wasundoubtedly the acceptance of theRyder strategy of involving shop stew-ards in a participation scheme whichdid not have widespread supportamong the workers (Willman & Winch,1985 : 83 ; Scarborough, 1986) . Al-though Edwardes' aggressive strategyappears to be the very opposite of theRyder approach, it actually built uponit in important respects .

Once the Recovery Plan wasaccepted, management spelt out someof the implications of the Plan in a92-page document on changes in work-ing practices . In Edwardes' own words :`At the heart of the 92-page documentoutlining the changes we needed wasthe challenge to "mutuality" .'(Edwardes, 1984 : 133) A documentcirculated at the time to managementthroughout the company emphasised :

`1 . It is managers who have theresponsibility for managing,leading and motivating employeesand for communicating oncompany matters . . . shopstewards have the right to representand to communicate trade unioninformation to their members at theworkplace but only within the rulesand procedures jointlyestablished . . .3 . Every manager must play hispart in defeating the small minoritywho would like to see BL fail . . .'(quoted in Willman & Winch,1985 : 130)

At issue was the extent of managerialcontrol within the factory. Manage-

The red rose of Nissan

ment was aiming `to change the habits 149of two business lifetimes' (Edwardes,1984: 133), to recover for capital theauthority of the proud centurion : I sayunto one, Go, and he goeth .

Negotiations over the 92-pagedocument broke down : the stewardscould not agree to the abandonment ofmutuality. Management responded bycirculating the document as the `BlueNewspaper' to all employees and gavenotice that it would be implemented on8 and 9 April 1980 : any worker arrivingfor work on that day would be deemedto have accepted the new workingpractices. The union response was un-coordinated and resistance quicklycollapsed. Management had been suc-cessful : capital had asserted its right torule :

`On those two days, Tuesday 8thApril and Wednesday 9th April1980, thirty years of managementconcessions (which had made itimpossible to manufacture carscompetitively) were thrown out ofthe window, and our car factoriesfound themselves with a fightingchance of becoming competitive .'(Edwardes, 1984: 135)

The power of the shop stewards hadbeen effectively broken : managementhad won .

The way was then clear for thelaunching of the Metro in October1980 . Workers were carefully selectedfor the new plant to make sure thatthey had the right attitude and thatanyone with a record of militancy wasexcluded . The success of the Metrodepended on a blend of new tech-nology and new workers : multiweldersand robots were of no use unless theworkers had the right attitudes to gowith them .

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The key word in the reform ofworking practices is `flexibility' . Flexi-bility means essentially the removal ofbarriers to management's right to tellthe workers what to do, where to do itand at what speed. The workers shouldno longer insist on job demarcations :they must be `flexible' enough to movefrom one job to another. As one workerfrom the Cowley plant commented :

`There's now a constant attack, andall the protective agreements thatwere established in the sixties arenow all gone. Workers are herdedaround now like cattle in thoseplants. The protective agreements,the seniority agreements, whichwere the most important protectiveagreements, are now completelygone. We're seeing conditionswhere workers that have worked inoff-track jobs for thirty or fortyyears are given five minutes' noticeto get onto a track . Often withmedical conditions. Often workingin a pit, with overhead conditionsthat make it absolutely impossiblefor them to do the job . And they'rejust directed totally ruthlessly afterforty years of working with thecompany . "Get in that pit and dothat job or find yourself another joboutside." And I'm not exaggeratingat all - that is what is happeningevery day. Every day in thoseplants. And the difference betweenthat and what existed when thetrade unions had power a few yearsago is absolute difference if chalk tocheese.' (Television HistoryWorkshop, 1985: 108)

Shop stewards are no longer able toexert control over the speed of work orthe mobility of the workers in the sameway as before . The shop stewards'

organisation still exists, but stewardshave far fewer facilities and a greatlyreduced role : they no longer have anypart in negotiating wages, bonuses oreffort levels, being reduced mainly tothe representation of workers in griev-ance procedures . The aim of manage-ment was never to destroy trade union-ism within the company, merely to limitits scope so that it assisted rather thanchallenged managerial authority .

Productivity on the Metro line sur-passed even management expectations .Productivity rose sharply in otherplants as well, suggesting that the risewas due at least as much to the newpattern of industrial relations as to thenew technology. The level of strikeactivity also fell . The change in theposition was so dramatic that by early1984 Longbridge was reported to havethe highest productivity of any carplant in Europe (Willman & Winch,1985 : 155) .

Raising productivity to Europeanlevels, however, is no longer sufficientto withstand international competition .BL (now the Rover Group) continues toface acute difficulties . The currentchallenge is to raise productivity andquality to Japanese standards .

Raising quality and productivity toJapanese standards, however, requiresfurther changes, not so much in tech-nology as in workers' attitudes . WhatEdwardes (whose term of office endedin 1982) achieved was the destructionof the power of the shop stewards, thedestruction of barriers to managerialcontrol. This sort of aggressive mana-gerial approach could (and did) forcethe workers to obey the commands ofmanagement, but it could hardly beexpected to produce a devoted andenthusiastic workforce . It is, however,just this sort of devotion and enthusi-

asm that is now considered necessaryto ensure the quality of the products .

The Edwardes `macho manage-ment' can now be seen as a transitionalphase, necessary to destroy the ob-stacles to managerial control, but un-able to establish the basis for a newstable pattern of industrial relations .What was achieved was the destructionof the old pattern of relations and aresounding defeat for labour . Whatmanagement need to do now is buildon this defeat and mould the submissiveworker into an enthusiastic worker,proud of his company .

Changes in this direction are alreadytaking place at the Rover Group . Whenthe appointment of the new chairmanand chief executive, Graham Day, wasannounced early in 1986, it was ques-tioned whether one of Edwardes' lead-ing collaborators, Harold Musgrove,could stay on as chairman of AustinRover, one reason being that it wasdoubtful `whether Mr Musgrove'sapproach - "whipping people's back-sides to get the cars out of the plant" asone put it - is the right one today'(Financial Times, 22 March 1986) . Andindeed, Mr Musgrove's resignation wasone of the first consequences of Day'sappointment .

A more positive indication of thesame trend can be seen in AustinRover's current `working with pride'initiative . As Andy Barr, the managingdirector in charge of this initiative, putit :

`We need to change attitudes andnot just behaviour patterns . Weneed total involvement to ensurethat quality and reliability of ourproducts .' (Financial Times, 18September 1986)

Applicants for a job on the Rover

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assembly line at Cowley now undergo a 151two-day assessment to discuss the aimsand objectives of the company . Evenparents or wives and children are en-couraged to take part, 'to come alongand judge whether Austin Rover is thecompany for their family' (FinancialTimes, 18 September 1986) . As Barrput it :

`We are not looking just for manualskills and dexterity . We want toknow whether their aspirations arethe same as the company's . It is atwo-way process . What is good forpeople is good for the company .'(Financial Times, 20 June 1986)

The `macho management' styletypified by Edwardes is being replacedby a new image : an image of a caringmanagement supported by a proudand dedicated workforce .

The image to which the Rovermanagement aspire is already beingpresented by the new Nissan factoryopened on 11 September in Sunder-land . The company's television adver-tisements project a picture of a newharmony, far removed from the strikeand acrimony of traditional British carmanufacturing :

`Imagine a car factory where no onegoes on strike, and where no one ismade redundant either . Imagine ifthe managing director dressed justthe same as the men on the line .Imagine if the management and theworkers got together every day tosee how they could make thingsbetter. Imagine if work wasn't justabout getting a better pay packet,but about working together tomake something you could beproud of. Maybe then it would bepossible to make a car so good,

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they'd have a 100,000-mile orthree-year warranty . Or is this justa day-dream?' (Quoted in Bassett,1986: 148)

All the advertisements have the sametheme: with Nissan, motor manufac-turing enters a new world . The rela-tionship between management andlabour is transformed. The Nissanworker is a new worker, so new that heis no longer a worker . He is a staffer :,they don't have "workers" at Sunder-land' (Nissan advertisement feature,Observer, 14 September 1986) .

The 'staffers' were carefully chosento make sure that they were really newmen, that they bore no taint of the oldtrade union militancy . First the site forthe factory was selected - `one of themost exhaustive location searches incommercial history, looking at morethan fifty sites in all, with local authori-ties vigorously bidding against eachother for the development' (Bassett,1986 : 149) . Once the site was chosen (aformer airport near Sunderland), thecompany set about choosing the`staffers' . Management had plenty ofscope for rejecting anyone with un-constructive attitudes :

`More than 11,000 applicationswere received for the first 247 postsat the new plant and everyone wasput through one of the most intenseand vigorous selection coursesimaginable . The vacancies for 22supervisors, a kind of hybridforeman, attracted 3,000applications .' (Advertisementfeature, Observer, 14 September1986)

The option of creating a non-unionplant was considered but rejected bythe company because it was felt that

such a decision could be a constantsource of friction . Instead, they decidedthat they would recognise only a singleunion and interviewed the various pos-sible unions (T&GWU, AUEW, GMBATU)before making a choice : `We wereforced to parade before prospectiveemployers like beauty queens', as oneof the regional secretaries put it(Bassett, 1986 : 149). The companychose the engineering union, the AUEW,and concluded an agreement with itwhich virtually eliminates the possibil-ity of a strike : all disputes are to besettled by negotiation, conciliation orarbitration .

The question of union organisationis, in any case, peripheral if one followsthe image projected by the company .Antagonism between management andlabour is a thing of the past . Manage-ment and production workers wear thesame clothes and eat in the samecanteen ; workers are not required toclock on in the mornings ; wage packetsare replaced by salaries paid directlyinto the employee's bank . All are partof a team, aiming to produce cars ofhigh quality. Job demarcation has noplace here, of course : the emphasis ison flexibility of crafts, skills and jobs .

`The concept has been to create ateam or small group of workers(sorry, "production staffers") usingand swapping different skills .'(Advertisement feature, Observer,14 September 1986)

The whole world of motor manu-facturing is transformed . Class strugglehas no place here : there is apparentlyno antagonism . Struggle as such has noplace here : the New Man does not fight .This new harmonious world has beenachieved not by struggle, but by therejection of struggle . Indeed, the new

world represents liberation fromstruggle, from the old world of strife .Here at Nissan, managers and workersalike are able to do what they alwayswanted to do: to make products of highquality, unhindered by union interfer-ence. In this view, the militancy of theseventies defeated itself: it was bothirrational and sterile . The New Man isnot militant, he knows that all problemscan be solved by communication :

`He who communicates is verymuch king,' advocates Wickens(personnel director) . If the teamleader is not happy he can chat tothe supervisor and they all sit downand try to iron things out .'(Advertisement feature, Observer,14 September 1986)

The New Man is still a man, ofcourse. The importance of ensuringreliability and keeping absenteeism toan absolute minimum `leads to verycareful screening of recruits in order toensure that they will have minimumdistractions from the domestic sphere,which, in a patriarchal context means astronger preference for male workers'(Sayer, 1986 : 67) . The New Man is stilla man, but not an aggressive, unreli-able man : he is a responsible, caring,family man with a good, stable, homeenvironment .

The world of Nissan is the world ofnew harmony, the new consensus .Militancy has been thrown into thedustbin of history, as has machomanagement : the names of Robinson,Scargill, but also Edwardes andMacGregor, are best forgotten as aber-rations in the forward march of rationalcommon sense .

FROM THE crisis at British Leyland andthe establishment of Nissan, it is pos-

The red rose of Nissan

sible to draw some conclusions aboutcapitalist development in Britain overthe last fifteen years or so .

The most obvious point is that thechanges that have taken place cannotbe understood without a concept ofcrisis . The crisis at British Leyland wasa crisis in the established methods ofproducing cars . It was not just that theestablished technology was outdated,but that the patterns of relationsbetween labour and management asso-ciated with semi-automatic assembly-line production were no longer viable .The crisis was above all a crisis in therelation of domination : the establishedpatterns of control over labour hadbroken down . As such, it was necessar-ily also a crisis of management . Newways of managing labour had to befound (and in the process many of theold managers had to be sacked) . And itwas also a crisis of the trade unions,because the established trade unionstructure was based upon the mainten-ance of a certain type of equilibriumbetween capital and labour .

The crisis was an outbreak of openstruggle between capital and labour .The established pattern of dominationhad broken down : this was not a revo-lutionary situation, but a situation inwhich everything seemed possible .Capital could not allow that to con-tinue: it needed to reassert its right torule, its arrogantly proclaimed `right tomanage', its right to determine what ispossible and what is not possible .

There is no doubt that in thisstruggle capital was victorious andlabour was defeated . In the case ofBritish Leyland, managerial strategywent through various phases, the mosteffective of which was undoubtedly theaggresive `macho' management ofEdwardes, but each apparent reversal

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154 of managerial strategy built upon theachievements of the previous phase .Edwardes was able to build upon theisolation of the shop stewards whichresulted from : Ryder's corporatistapproach, just as the present `workingwith pride' approach builds upon thecrushing of the workers underEdwardes .

Over the period as a whole, relationsof production have changed in a waythat would have been inconceivable inthe mid-seventies . The reassertion ofmanagerial authority has gone hand inhand with the exclusion of vast num-bers of workers . The number of manualworkers employed by BL fell from120,000 to 26,000 in a space of eightyears, a fall of almost 100,000, ascompared with the 400-odd employedby Nissan . The restructuring of thelabour process and of relations betweenmanagement and labour is simul-taneously the creation of large-scaleunemployment. The two cannot beseparated .

Why was labour defeated? Onefactor was certainly the insecurity ofexistence on which capitalism is based :if you do not own property, you have tosell your labour power in order to sur-vive at an acceptable standard . Duringthe period of conflict at BritishLeyland, unemployment rose sharplyand the threat of being made redundantwas acute . In those circumstances itwas easy for management to use thethreat of closure to impose its will .

A second factor was the way inwhich the shop stewards (and thenational trade unions) were internallyweakened just at the moment whentheir power appeared greatest. Theinvolvement of shop stewards andofficials in the participation schemeunder the Ryder Plan (and, nationally

in the whole corporatist structure ofthe Social Contract) led to an alienationof the workers from their 'representa-tives' . Edwardes' strategy of directcommunication with the workers wasable to build very successfully uponthis alienation .

Participation had this effect be-cause, inevitably perhaps, it meantparticipation in restoring the companyto competitivity . The stewards acceptedthis goal, just as they did not questionthe need to introduce new technologyin order to achieve it : there was noobvious alternative . In the absence ofan alternative, the logic of capitalistdevelopment imposed itself: cars mustbe made as efficiently as possible, andmanagement must manage. The law ofvalue asserts itself as necessity in acapitalist society .

It would be wrong to think that thecrisis is over . The Rover Group (as it isnow called) is still in grave difficultyand there are obviously problems inimplementing the new methods thathave become fashionable among man-agers . The legacy of Edwardes is notthe best basis for building up a senseof dedication and pride among theworkers .

Nissan is instructive because it isable to start afresh, taking for grantedthe destruction of the old traditions . InNissan it is possible to see, not yet anew established pattern of relationsbetween management and labour, buttrends that indicate the shape of a newemergent pattern . The extensive use ofnew technology means that many ofthe problems of control (such as controlof the quality of welding of painting,for example) are transferred from directsupervision of the production workersto the design and especially the pro-gramming of the multiwelder or robot .

Control of the workforce does not inany case present the same problems asbefore: establishing a new factory in agreenfield site in an area of high un-employment means that many of theproblems of managerial control-can betransferred to the point of selection . Byensuring thad only workers with theright attitude are employed, manage-ment is able to resolve to a large extentnot only the problem of militancy, butalso the questions of quality, flexibilityand discipline . It now becomes possibleto expect the workers to identify withthe company to the extent of beingconcerned about the quality of theproduct, to demand flexibility in theperformance of jobs and to assume thesort of discipline that makes just-in-time production (with its minimalstocking of components) possible .

In this context, trade unionismcomes to have a new meaning . Thenew factory does not exclude tradeunions, but the unions, like theworkers, undergo a process of selec-tion and have to satisfy the companythat they have the right attitude . Thenew trade union is cooperative andidentifies with the interests of thecompany. For the leaders of the elec-tricians' union, the EEPTU, and theengineers' union, the AUEW, the twounions most strongly identified withthis trend, militancy is irrational andoutdated : it has no place in this newworld . The miners' strike, the printers'struggle at Wapping are untimely relicsof a buried past. The new trade union,like the new workers, is liberated fromthe past, free to enjoy, on the graves ofthe defeated and to the exclusion ofmillions, the new harmony of suffocat-ing conformism .

Of course that is not the whole story .It cannot be .

The red rose of Nissan

THERE ARE striking parallels between 155the phases of managerial strategy in thecar industry and the development ofthe British state .

In the state too there is a certainequilibrium which holds until the mid-1970s. As in British Leyland, thatequilibrium is based on a recognitionof the strength of the trade unions andtherefore of their importance for thewhole structure of government. InBritish Leyland this is known asmutuality, in the state it is calledKeynesianism .

Often the term 'Keynesianism' isused to refer to a set of economic poli-cies designed to ensure full employ-ment and the even development of theeconomy through demand manage-ment, or to the economic theory whichsupports those policies . The adoptionof those policies and the developmentof that theory, however, were not justhistorical chance: policies and theoryalike grew out of a recognition of thegrowing power (and therefore threat)of the working class, and of the need todevelop a new form of controlling andharnessing that power. In Britain itwas the outbreak of the Second WorldWar which made this need particularlyurgent and led to the coopting of tradeunion leaders into the government andthe commitment by the state to main-tain full employment and to implementwelfare state policies after the war . Inthe post-war period, in which the ex-pansion of mass production and thetight labour market consolidated thepower of labour, Keynesianism becamethe established pattern of domination .

Essentially mutuality and Keynes-ianism are the same thing . In both casesthere is a recognition of the strength ofthe working class, and a recognitionthat that strength imposes limits on the

Capital & Class

156 power of the state (or management) todo as it wishes . At the level of thefactory, it is recognised that manage-ment cannot introduce changes intechnology or working practices with-out the prior agreement of the shopstewards . At the national level, it isaccepted that the control of wages orother aspects of industrial relationscannot be imposed against the wishesof the trade unions, that this is an areain which the law should not intervene .

In both cases too, there is an attemptto build the power of the unions intothe structure of control and to use it tocapital's advantage . The key principleis the conversion of the frustrations ofthe workers into monetary demandsand the harnessing of those demands insuch a way that they become a positiveforce for capital accumulation . InBritish Leyland and other companies,this is achieved through collectivebargaining and the convention of pay-ment for change . At the level of thestate, the attempt to regulate demandin the interests of capital accumulationhas the same end . Demand is the frus-tration of the working class convertedinto money . Demand management isprecisely what it says it is : managementof the monetised frustrations of theworking class in such a way as to con-vert them into a stimulus for capitalaccumulation .

In both cases it was clear by the late1960s that the established structure ofdomination-and-compromise was ob-structing the development of capitalismin Britain . However, it was still a verylong way from the recognition that itwas essential to break the establishedbalance to actually being able to do it .In Britain Leyland, it was recognisedin the late 1960s that there was serious`overmanning', but the chief executive

at the time, Stokes, held back fromsacking 30,000 workers for fear of theconsequences (Turner, 1973), and itwas not until nearly ten years later thatEdwardes was able to make a seriousassault on the problem . At the level ofthe state, the attempts of both theWilson governent (the `In Place ofStrife' White Paper of 1969) and of theHeath government (the IndustrialRelations Act of 1971) to radicallyrestrict the power of the unions failedwhen confronted with the reality ofthat power . Agin, it was to take tenyears or more to break the pattern .

In both cases the crisis of controlreached its peak in 1974-75. At thelevel of the state, as in British Leyland,there was no question of a revolutionarysituation ; but there was a serious crisisof authority and control . Events suchas the failure of Heath's IndustrialRelations Act after the freeing of thePentonville Five in 1971 and theminers' strikes of 1972 and 1974 madevery explicit the limits of the authorityof the state . Rising inflation, soaringpublic expenditure, falling profits,high levels of strike activity : all madeclear that the post-war equilibrium wasbreaking down .

The Labour government's responseto this dilemma was essentially to adoptthe Ryder strategy: to get the tradeunions to participate openly and expli-citly in the management of the country,through the Social Contract. The ex-perience of the Social Contract wasremarkably like the experience of par-ticipation at British Leyland. Discus-sion took place within the frameworkof pre-defined objectives : restorationof competitivity and technologicalrenewal at British Leyland ; restorationof competitivity and technologicalrenewal in Britain as a whole . Since

these objectives clearly involved re-ducing the power of the trade unions,participation by the unions could onlymean participation in their owndestruction .

And so it happened . As the crisisdeepened, and especially after 1975-76,it became clearer and clearer that theSocial Contract meant nothing otherthan the participation of the tradeunions in a policy which cut working-class living standards and, by allowingunemployment to rise, eroded the basisof the unions' own power .

The Social Contract, from capital'spoint of view, was both a success and afailure, in exactly the same manner asthe Ryder strategy at British Leyland .It was a very striking success in that,by apparently giving the unions power,it effectively destroyed them. Whenthey were directly attacked in the early1980s, it became clear that the powerof the unions was hollow : like the shopstewards at British Leyland, they hadbeen discredited by their participationin management . The Social Contractboth hollowed out trade union powerand puffed the unions up so that theybecame an easy object for attack .

The Social Contract was also afailure in exactly the same sense as theRyder strategy at Leyland . It wasexpensive (because concessions had tobe given to buy the unions' acquies-cence) and cumbersome, and above allit could not achieve the clear reassertionof authority which was necessary if anew basis for capital accumulation wasto be established .

Edwardes finds a clear counterpartin Thatcher at the national level . Shecame to office over a year afterEdwardes was appointed chief execu-tive at British Leyland, with verymuch the same image and the same

The red rose of Nissan

message. The government would be 157firm, there would be no compromise ;it was the government's task to govern,just as it was management's task tomanage. Keynesianism and the cor-poratism of the Social Contract wererejected .

Thatcher, like Edwardes, was notsimply attacking the trade unions. LikeEdwardes, she was attacking a style ofgovernment (or management) whichwas based on a recognition of the powerof the trade unions . Just as Edwardeshad first attacked management and gotrid of managers too committed toestablished practices, one of Thatcher'sfirst objects of attack was the civil ser-vice and the established network ofrelations between civil servants, tradeunionists and employers . Capitalistcrisis involves not just an intensifiedattack on the working class, but thedestruction of a whole structure ofdomination . That destruction isachieved largely through the operationof money, but an important role is alsoplayed by people who come from out-side the established structures ofpower. That explains the particularprominence in recent years of managersbrought in from outside a particularindustry (like Edwardes or Mac-Gregor), or of someone like Thatcherwho came from outside the Conserva-tive establishment . It explains also whypeople like Edwardes or Thatcher,although acting in the interests ofcapital, may be very unpopular withmany individual groups of capitalists .Finally, it explains the particularimportance of money under theThatcher government: this is notbecause the government has beenunduly influenced by finance capitalrather than industrial capital, as issometimes argued, but because money

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plays a central role in a period of crisisin the breaking and restructuring ofpatterns of domination .

The post-war equilibrium lay inruins, at least in rhetoric . In 1979,however, it was not entirely clear thatthe Keynesian-corporatist welfare statewas as dead as Thatcher proclaimed itto be. There were still those whoclaimed that the social democratisationof the British state could not be reversedand who predicted that Thatcher wouldhave to go through the same sort ofU-turn as the Heath government tenyears earlier . That view was over-optimistic : the Keynesian-corporatiststate rested on a recognition of thepower of the trade unions, and by theend of the 1970s that power had beensubstantially weakened . However, justas Edwardes had held back for twoyears before putting his rhetoric to thetest in a direct confrontation with shopsteward power, so the Thatcher gov-ernment postponed its legal restrictionof trade union power, prefering tointroduce it little by little in the yearsafter 1981 . It postponed too, quitedeliberately, its major confrontationwith the miners, until 1984 .

In retrospect, it seems that MrsThatcher, far from being an `iron lady',was in fact very cautious in her ap-proach to the trade unions . She waitedto make sure that the enemy was reallyvanquished before cutting off its head .It was after the defeat of the unionsthat the harsh anti-union legislationbecame possible . It was not primarilythe Thatcher government that broughtthe Keynesian era to an end ; nor was itthe previous Labour government :Callaghan's famous speech at the 1977Labour Party Conference recognised(or heralded) the death of Keynesian-ism, but did not bring it about . The

Keynesian system of government restedon a recognition of the power of theunions, but it was not the state that waschiefly responsible for breaking thatpower. The power of the unions wasdestroyed first and foremost in theindustrial conflicts of the late 1970sand early 1980s, and the role of thestate in these was important butsecondary . If one had to put a date onthe final death of Keynesianism, thenit would not be Callaghan's speech, norThatcher's electoral victory, but 8 April1980, the day on which mutuality endedat BL . It was that (together with a hostof similar developments throughoutindustry) which eliminated the possi-bility of a U-turn, of a return to thepatterns of post-war social democracy .

To say that there can be no return tothe old patterns of social democracydoes not, however, mean that That-cherism will necessarily provide a long-term model for government in Britain .On the contrary, the analogy withEdwardes at British Leyland wouldsuggest that it is better to seeThatcherism as a transitional type ofgovernment, well suited to destroyingthe vestiges of Fordism/Keynesianism,but not suitable for establishing thepolitical patterns of the brave new worldtypified by Nissan . It is premature tosee in Thatcherism a model of the'post-Fordist state' .

THE PARALLELS between changes in themanagerial strategy and changes in statepolicy are striking . Striking too is thefact that the currents of influence donot run in the direction that the dom-inant state-centred view of societymight lead one to expect . Naturallythere is constant interaction, but onthe whole it is changes in managerial

strategy that point the way for changesin state policy . Rather than seeingEdwardes as the John the Baptist ofThatcherism, it is probably more ac-curate to see Thatcher as the St Paul ofEdwardesism . Management leads, thestate follows .

'Edwardesism' here stands for awhole sea-change in managerialstrategy . The changes at BritishLeyland are particularly clear andwell-documented, but they are notuntypical. Edwardes himself was veryinfluential in setting a managerial stylethroughout industry : but even wheremanagement did not become so overtlyaggressive, management-labour rela-tions almost everywhere were charac-terised by a sharp shift in the balancetowards management, a weakening ofthe power of shop stewards and a tight-ening of managerial authority . Every-where, the changes have been helpedby an environment of high unemploy-ment and by the introduction of newtechnology, which both facilitates andrequires changes in working practicesand the undermining of the power rela-tions associated with the old patternsof work . The changes have not all beenas sharp as at British Leyland, or asconflictual: often they have beenachieved without battle waged. Norhave they all been simultaneous: somegroups of workers (the miners and theprinters in particular) have managed tohold on to their old patterns of work,Keynesian rocks withstanding the in-coming tide of change. For that theprice was isolation : when battle came,the old world was no longer there togive them full support .

The new patterns being built on theruins of the old do not all correspond toa strict model either ; yet Nissan canfairly be seen as representative of an

The red rose of Nissan

important trend . It represents not justthe expansion of Japanese capital but,much more important, a significanttrend in the structure of capitalistdomination over work . The emphasison quality, and therefore insistence onthe workers' pride in `their' products ;the widespread subcontracting of com-ponent supplies to small and thereforedependent firms ; the reduction ofstocking so that components arrive justin time for assembly ; the establishmentof a factory in a greenfield site with anenvironment of high unemploymentand no tradition of trade union milit-ancy ; the stress on careful selection of aloyal workforce and exclusion of thedisloyal and unreliable ; the conclusionof a strike-free deal with a cooperativetrade union ; the international controlof geographically separated groups ofworkers ; all of these are importanttrends in the current development ofcapitalism (see Sayer, 1986) .

These trends are often referred to asthe 'Japanisation' of production, but itis misleading to place too muchemphasis on the place of origin of themanagerial strategies: Nissan's man-agement techniques in Sunderlandmay be of Japanese inspiration, buttheir real basis is the defeats of theworkers at Cowley, Longbridge andelsewhere. It is these defeats that allowmanagement to talk of introducingJapanese management techniques, ofmoving from just-in-case to just-in-time production . Just-in-time produc-tion (which gets its name from the factthat components are delivered just intime for incorporation into the finishedproduct rather than being stocked inlarge quantities to allow for possibledisruptions) presupposes a certain,predictable environment (Graham,1986), both in the factory itself and in

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160 the factory's suppliers . It is a style ofmanagement built on the assumptionthat workers are disciplined and loyal,that there will be no unexpectedstoppages and that the quality of theproducts at every stage of the produc-tion process will be reliable . It assumestherefore that when the manager saysGo, the worker goeth .

The patterns exemplified by Nissanare trends, not universal reality . Thesetrends are experiments in a new formof domination ; whether they willharden into a clear long-term pattern,it is still too early to say . Many firmshave experienced difficulties in intro-ducing quality control circles and just-in-time production. Not every firm hashad the advantages of Nissan, yeteverywhere there are movements inthe same direction .

If changes in the car industry arerepresentative of changes in the pat-tern of management-labour relationsmore generally, then it is not surprisingthat there are parallels between changesin managerial style and changes in thesate. The parallel development ofmanagement and the state has beenpresented here in the form of ananalogy, but the similarities are not amatter of chance . Management andthe state are two aspects of the samething, they are two forms of the capitalrelation, the relation of dominationbetween capital and labour . Both workin distinct but inter-related ways toensure the profitable accumulation ofcapital, the continued exploitation oflabour. It cannot be otherwise . Just asmanagement depends on the state toprovide (through the maintenance ofpublic order) a disciplined environ-ment for the exploitation of the work-force and the accumulation of capital,the state depends equally on the success

of capitalist exploitation for its owncontinued existence ; capital accumula-tion is both the source of the state'sincome (through taxation) and the basisfor the maintenance of public order.Both management and the state dependon the successful exploitation of labour :the actions of both are ultimatelydirected to the same end ; both areshaped by the same constant strugglefor capitalist authority . It is thereforethe conditions of that exploitation, thestruggles around the process of work,that are the key to understanding notonly changes in management, but alsothe development of the state . More-over, since management is closer andmore responsive to the labour process,it is not surprising that trends in politi-cal development should be fore-shadowed by trends in management .

At the level of management, thetide has moved on from the macho man-agement of Edwardes and MacGregor .Aggression was effective in breakingthe power of the old worker and inhacking a new sharper division betweenthe core, employed workers and themarginalised, peripheral workers . Thestate, under Labour and Tory govern-ments, gave support to this approachin the late 1970s and early 1980s :through the appointement and supportof people like Edwardes and Mac-Gregor, through the acceptance andpromotion of high unemployment,through public expenditure cuts,through legislation to curb strikes,through the mobilisation of the police,etc .

If people like Edwardes andMacGregor hacked their way throughthe workforce and excluded millionsfrom work, then Nissan suggests thatthe emphasis is now on integratingthose that remain . While excluding the

irresponsible masses, the focus hasshifted to integrating the responsibleworker, to holding him up as a modelof virtue . Now that the bouncers havethrown out the unruly guests, they canretreat to their normal position at thedoor and the party-giver can concen-trate on entertaining the well-behavedguests who remain. The roughing-upof those excluded continues : the police,the Manpower Services Commissionand the Department of Health andSocial Security see to that ; but that is inthe background, behind the scenes,excluded from the press and frompolitical debate. Attention is nowfocused on the `moral majority' -whether they are actually a majoritydoes not matter, since they are the onlypeople who count . Like a mafioso in agangster film, the party-giver's facechanges suddenly. The thug turnsaround and smiles with charm at theremaining guests : the iron lady turnsinto . . . a fresh-faced boyo .

Or does she? It does not reallymatter. It does not matter what herface, or sex, or name is . The point isthat at the political level too the tide ischanging . Whether Mrs Thatcher goeson or not, the aggressive stance associ-ated with Thatcherism is giving wayincreasingly to a more humn face . Theemphasis is moving towards the con-struction of a new consensus, not aconsensus that will cover everybody,but a consensus among the responsiblemoral majority. Political competitionis increasingly focused on the claim tospeak for that majority . Who wins thatcompetition - whether it is Thatcherwith a revamped face, or a new, moremoderate leader of the ConservativeParty, or Owen, or Kinnock - mattersa great deal to the participants in thecompetition, but it will probably not

C & C 32-K

The red rose of Nissan

make very much difference to anybodyelse . Democratic elections are not verymuch more relevant to the running ofthe country than they are to the man-agement of a car company .

And so: the Red Rose of Nissan .The caring, conformist worker ofNissan who firmly rejects all trace ofmilitancy finds his counterpart in thecaring, conformist Man with the RedRose, who firmly rejects any irrespon-sible behaviour, any mindless militan-cy, the man who speaks for the MoralMajority, the New Man .

THE NEW MAN has strange acolytes . Notonly the established bureaucrats of thelabour movement, but many on theintellectual `Left' clamour to partici-pate in the construction of the newpattern of domination. To justify theirposition they claim to have a basis inMarxism, a new Marxism of course, aMarxism of Today .

To read these analyses of thechanges in capitalism, of the `new real-ity' (e .g. Carter, 1986), one wouldsuppose that no struggles had takenplace over the last ten years . The newreality has not been created throughstruggle; it has just `emerged' . Thestruggles that have taken place - theminers' strike, for example - are seenas struggles against reality . Heroic butanachronistic, they are out of tune withthe new reality, `with the inescapablelines of tendency and direction, estab-lished by the real world' (Hall, 1985 :15) . The miners, like the rest of us, arenot the creators but the victims of thenew reality .

The new reality, apparently, is notconstituted by the permanent conflictbetween capital and labour . It is a real-ity which emerges and confronts not

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162 classes but `people' . Class has no placein this world : change takes place notthrough incessant class struggles butthrough democracy and winning thesupport of public opinion . In this newreality, we are all staffers .

The people of this new reality are allreasonable, gentle people . In a remark-able somersault from the feminist radi-calism of the early 1970s, feminism isnow used to justify passivity, and mili-tancy is identified with machismo(Campbell, 1985 ; Hall, 1985 ; Carter,1986) . The analysis which sees womenas the victims of male violence - a strongcurrent within the feminist movement- easily turns into the condemnation ofall violence as an expression of maledomination . The violence of theminers, for example, is seen, not asarising from righteous anger but as anexpression of a macho culture, whichwe can (and must) condemn with agood conscience. And so the `Left'orchestrate Marxism and feminism in aremarkable concert of support for thenew reality, new morality, new sexual-ity : a world of suffocating oppression .

Against such views, it is importantto emphasise some of the conclusionsthat stand out from the story of BritishLeyland and Nissan . Capitalism hasindeed changed: capitalist society todayis very different from the capitalistsociety of ten years ago . But many ofthe discussions of the `new reality',whether in Marxism Today or in themuch richer debates on the neo-Fordiststate (for an account see Bonefeld,1987), overlook the most importantfeatures that are so striking if onefocuses on the story of British Leylandand Nissan .

The first point to emphasise is thatneither the car workers, nor the miners,nor the women, are the victims of an

emergent new reality . Whether we likeit or not, reality is constituted bystruggle and we are part of that struggle .The `new reality' of the car industrywas not something which simplyemerged to confront the car workers asvictims : the new `reality' was consti-tuted through struggle, through thestruggle of capital against labour and oflabour against capital . All workers inthe industry were part of that struggle,whether they wanted it or not . In thatstruggle, the odds were stacked againstlabour because we live in a societydominated by capital . Struggle in acapitalist society is not an equalstruggle, but it is always both inevit-able and unpredictable . The carworkers, like the miners, were un-doubtedly defeated in that struggle,but there is a world of differencebetween being temporarily defeated ina continuing struggle and being thevictims of `the inescapable lines oftendency and direction established bythe real world' .

Struggle implies unpredictability,instability . Patterns of domination areinherently unstable in capitalism .Periodically, it becomes clear that theestablished pattern of domination is nolonger functioning and there is an out-break of more intense and open struggleto restructure or to break those relationsof domination. During such periods,capitalist authority is particularlyfragile . That is why the concept of crisisis central to Marxist analysis : in crisisthe inherent instability of capitalism,the unreality of `reality' becomes clear .It is not possible, for example, tounderstand the changes in the car in-dustry since the mid-1970s without aconcept of crisis . yet the proponents ofthe `new reality' rarely mention crisis,for they have forgotten how fragile that

reality is .Recovery from crisis means for

capital above all the reassertion of itsauthority, its right to manage and torule. It is in this context - in the contextof crisis and not because of elections orsome autonomous battle of ideas- thatthere is a turn in capitalist strategiestowards more authoritarian ideas, moreauthoritarian management and a moreauthoritarian state. The increasedauthoritarianism does not result fromthe success of the New Right : on thecontrary, the success of the New Rightis the result of pressures for moreauthoritarianism . For capital, the re-assertion of its authority is the pre-condition for everything else .

The mere reassertion of authoritydoes not yet constitute a new stablepattern of domination, however. Cer-tainly, there are clear trends whichindicate what a possible long-termpattern of domination may look like :that is the significance of Nissan andthe Red Rose . But it would be wrong tosee Nissanism as already establishedreality . For the moment it is merelyan (increasingly influential) strategyfor establishing a new pattern ofdomination .

The Nissan strategy is proving veryeffective, but there are still majorobstacles to its success . It is hard toimagine that the happy party guestswill go on smiling for ever, when theparty is based on their exploitation .And it is not at all clear that thebouncers on the door will be able tosuppress indefinitely the frustrationsof those who have been thrown out ofthe party and are constantly being toldhow nice it is inside .

The Nissan strategy, and the just-in-time approach with which it is asso-ciated, aims at the management of an

The red rose of Nissan

environment which is certain: it aims 163at replacing management against un-certainty with the management ofcertainty (Graham, 1986) . But the onlything that is certain in this world isdeath. The only `inescapable lines oftendency and direction' are the linesthat lead to the grave . As long as thereis life, it will be impossible to achieveanything other than managementagainst uncertainty . That is why just-in-time is proving so hard to implementon a wide scale . That is also why thereis a contradiction at the very heart ofautomation, of the attempt to subjectmore and more processes within societyto mathematical control - a contradic-tion expressed in the problems of soft-ware production (Pelaez, 1987) . Andthat is why the gleam of Nissan hasalready been tarnished by widespreadreports of discontent among bothmanagers and workers .

To talk of `new reality' is to talk ofcertainty, of death . To talk of struggleis to talk of life and of the openness ofthe future . The working class has cer-tainly been defeated, and the conform-ist world of Nissan daily declares,through the mouths of Kinnock andco., that more and more types ofopposition are illegitimate, irrespon-sible, immoral . But for capital, thestruggle to subjugate and exploit labouris endless . And oppression by capitaldaily meets resistance from labour. Theworld of Nissan is suffocating, butoccasionally a scream of protest breaksthe silence . The miners' scream waslong and loud and heartening : it wassilenced, but it echoes still - as do theriots, as does Wapping, as do a thous-and other daily screams that fill the airwith echoes of hope .

The cracks that appeared in capital-ist domination in the late 1960s and

Capital & Class

164 early 1970s have been plastered overand it is not yet clear how they willreappear: in the inevitable reistance ofthe Nissan worker, pushed too far, orin the unpredictable explosions of those,00who have been excluded from theparty. One thing is clear: struggle isinseparable from domination . At thecentre of capitalist society is a silent butexplosive scream:

`Inside our ears are the many wailingcries of misery,

Inside our bodies, the internalbleeding of stifled volcanoes .

Inside our heads, the eruptingthoughts of rebellion .

How can there be calm when thestorm is yet to come?'

(Linton Kewsi Johnson, Two Kindsof Silence)

References

Bassett, P . (1986) Strike Free: New Indus-trial Relations in Britain . Macmillan,London .

Bonefeld, W . (1987) 'Fordism and theReformulation of State Theory' .Unpublished paper, University ofEdinburgh .

Campbell, B . (1985) `Politics Old andNew', New Statesman, 8 March,pp. 22-25 .

Carter, P . (1986) Trade Unions - The NewReality. Communist Party Publications,London .

Central Policy Review Staff (1975) TheFuture of the British Car Industry . HMSO,London .

Edwardes, M . (1984) Back from the Brink .Pan Books, London .

Graham, I. (1986) 'JIT with UncertainDemand'. Unpublished paper, HeriotWatt University, Edinburgh .

Hall, S . (1985) `Realignment for What?',Marxism Today, December, pp . 12-17 .

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* The poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson isan extract from `Two Sides of Silence',from Dread Beat & Blood, BogleL'Ouverture Publications, London,1975 .

** The paper is the product of many dis-cussions in Edinburgh - thanks to allwho took part .

*** The paper was written before the June1987 election . The Red Rose has nowbeen set to music, appropriately .