The views expressed in this article are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Lucas Plan working group.
Following on from the highly successful conference on the 40th anniversary of the Lucas Plan, a network of trade unionists and ecosocialists are working together to develop a new Lucas Plan for the 21st century. We have created working groups on the four themes of the conference: conversion of arms industries to socially useful production, Just Transition/climate jobs, automation/robotics and bottom-up economic planning. But what have the ideas of workers in the 1970s got to do with our current situation?
Socially useful production
The Lucas Aerospace Alternative Corporate Plan, devised by workers at the company, was launched in 1976 and became famous worldwide, sparking an international movement for socially useful production. Facing the threat of unemployment caused by new technology and recession, the workers collected 150 ideas from the shop floor for alternative products that could be produced by the company, instead of relying on military work. As a fundamental exercise in workers’ control, it was resisted by Lucas management, but has left a rich legacy of ideas that are highly relevant today.
40 years on, neoliberalism has deepened the structural problems of industrial capitalism, leading to environmental crises, resource wars, the displacement of millions of people, economic crises, including the threat of massive job losses due to automation, and now the resulting right wing populism. The world clearly needs something better, an ecosocialist transition to sustainability based on social justice that provides people with decent livelihoods.
Such a transition requires nothing less than a new system of production and consumption, because it is the production of goods and services that is at the interface between people and nature. The power of industrial capitalism is that it is a techno-social regime, in which the design of technology is directed by and reinforces the values and interests of the owners of capital. An ecosocialist future must also redesign technology as well as society.
This is where the Lucas Aerospace workers’ idea of socially useful production is critical, and can serve as a corrective to both neoliberal and orthodox socialist industrial high technology visions of the future. The idea of socially useful production is obviously at work in the demands for arms conversion and Just Transition/climate jobs. But the Lucas workers went further than the traditional socialist idea of production for human need rather than profit: their notion of socially useful production was also based upon a fundamental critique of industrial technological methods of production.
In order to understand this, it is necessary to delve below the surface of conventional accounts of the Lucas Plan. Like many other workers in the 1970s the workers at Lucas Aerospace were facing a wave of introduction of new computer driven machinery, which threatened to deskill their work and so reduce their bargaining power, and in some cases to eliminate their jobs. This process of capital-intensification of production is a structural dynamic of industrial capitalism, which is continuing in the current ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. Since the early 1900s, it has gone by the name of Taylorism after Frederick Taylor, whose system of ‘Scientific Management’ was described by management guru Peter Drucker as ‘the greatest contribution of America to the world’. Taylor summed up his system in the phrase “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first”.-
In contrast to some present day authors, who seem to believe the industrial capitalist mythology that automation will lead to a leisure utopia, the Lucas Aerospace workers remained grounded in the traditional analyses of radical workers – that automation is the workers’ enemy. As highly skilled workers, they knew that the underlying dynamic of industrialism is the extraction of workers’ knowledge and know-how and its embodiment of in machines, as a means of increasing production efficiency and reducing dependency upon labour. It is this process, together with the application of scientific knowledge to enable the harnessing of natural energy sources, that has produced capitalism as we know it.
The Lucas workers’ response was fundamental. They insisted that socially useful production must be based upon what they called ‘human-centred technology’ that placed the utilisation and preservation of human skills at the centre of production. Of their 3 key criteria for socially useful production, one was that it must be based upon labour-intensive methods.
An ecosocialist future
Thus, the great value of the Lucas Plan is that it is a holistic techno-social programme, in which socialist values shape both technology and the society we want. It showed what working class people could do and represented technology design by working class people for the common good. In place of the Taylorist/industrial capitalist enshrining of system efficiency as the highest value in technology design, it put human needs and human values first. In this, it is far better than either current orthodox socialist visions of automated post-work utopias, or the mainstream environmentalist focus on technological efficiency for waste and resource use reduction and as the key means of environmental protection. Both of these approaches lack the understanding of technology design as inherently political and perpetuate the industrial capitalist fetish of system efficiency as the driver of ‘progress’.
Together with its methodology of bottom-up economic planning, the Lucas Plan’s bottom-up technology design thus represents an integrated socialist approach to economic democracy, and a paradigm for an ecosocialist transition. The Lucas Aerospace workers were not merely inventing new technology; they were inventing a new production system and so a new world. In short, their approach tells us that the main technology that the world needs now is people and their skills. A society based on human skills, community solidarity and production for genuine social need is far more resilient and sustainable than one based on fragile industrial megasystems (including information technologies), which demand ever more energy and resources.
The New Lucas Plan working group is developing these ideas and aims to develop local, regional and national policies (e.g. industrial strategy) through bottom-up democratic processes. You are invited to join us in this work.
Contact info@breakingtheframe.org.uk for more information, or visit watermelon edit2 (mb
iecosoc.net 
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