[The following article appeared in the February 16 issue of La Gauche, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs (Revolutionary Workers League), Belgian section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The incomes policy has come on the scene. It ran like a thread through the governmental declaration of the Leburton cabinet: "The measures taken by the government must be upheld and completed by a policy of concert between the social partners aimed at bringing wage increases in line with productivity increases, and more generally, at seeking coherence and equilibrium in the relations between prices and costs."
The latest National Bank report also called for an incomes policy, in a muted form, but it also recognized that "adoption of a formal incomes policy would be met with hostility by the unions, which are already, disturbed by their partial application."
It was also openly called for by Mr. Evalenko, former friend of the FGTB [Fédération Générale des Travailleurs Belgique-General Federation of Belgian Workers] and now director of the National Bank. This illustrious citizen delivered a speech before the Belgian Royal Society of Political Economy last January 31. It was warmly greeted by the whole capitalist and conservative press in Belgium, from L'Echo de la Bourse to Libre Belgique.
Citizen Evalenko's Incomplete Statistics
All the while denying that he wanted to hold "excessive" wage rises responsible for the inflation now racking Belgium and all the other capitalist countries, all the while denying that he wanted to eliminate the linking of wages to the retail-price index
Evalenko nevertheless put forward statistics and solutions that would have just that effect; that would make people believe that wage increases are the basic cause of inflation; and that would make wages bear the costs of the "financial reorganization" considered indispensable.
Of course his statistics are incomplete and therefore distorted. They present a false picture of the real development of the economy.
As for his solutions, they would not lead to halting inflation. They would simply produce a redistribution of the national income to the advantage of the bourgeoisie and to the detriment of the workers.
Citizen Evalenko compares the rise of the workers' pure and simple monetary wages to the rise in the cost of living. He then concludes that the workers' real wages have also increased since the end of the second world war. No sane person would disagree.
But the national income, both in monetary and real terms, has itself increased considerably. The productivity of labor has vastly increased. The intensity of labor has grown. The effort demanded of the worker, by hour or by workday, has risen uninterruptedly.
According to citizen Evalenko's statistics, the base daily earnings of industrial workers supposedly rose, in real terms, at a yearly average of 4% during the 1958-63 period, at 4.7% from 1963-68, and at 6.7% from 1968-71. Mr. Evalenko claims this is accelerating, and he's increase worried about it.
Now, what has happened to the growth of the physical productivity (that is, abstracted from price fluctuations) of the industrial worker? Even taking into account the total number of industrial employees (and everyone knows that in fact the number of whitecollar employees has risen while the number of blue-collar workers has slightly, but continuously, diminished), we arrive at the following figures:
From 1963 to 1968: The increase in industrial production was 19%; employment dropped 3%; productivity rose 22% that is, at 7% a year.
From 1968 to 1971: The increase in industrial production was 20.8%; employment was up 0.8%; productivity increased 20%, or 6.66% a year.
Considered over a longer period, the facts are still more compelling. Industrial employment remained the same from 1957 to 1971. But during that same period, industrial production rose 81%, according to the AGEFI index, and 78% according to the index of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Besides that, over the fourteen-year period, the mean annual increase in industrial physical production was on the order of 5.5% or more.
If these percentages are compared with the annual growth rates of real wages for the same period (provided by Mr. Evalenko) it becomes apparent that the workers were only barely able to maintain their share of the product they create. Their wages generally lagged behind productivity increases during the 1958-68 period; they made up the lag somewhat during the 1968- 71 period.
Under Capitalism Incomes Policies Always Mean Policing Wages
Citizen Evalenko's idea of limiting nominal wage increases to 10-12% during the 1973-75 period in reality implies, if it were literally carried out, the severing of wages from the retail: price index. This would happen if prices rose by more than 4% a year, which will very probably be the case.
And even if he meant - and Evalenko did not say this - that the increases would be over and above adjustments in the cost of living, that is, if they were increases in real wages, the workers would still get cheated.
Because a real-wage increase on the order of 3-4% a year while industrial productivity is rising at 6-7% a year means that labor's share of the real (physical product that it creates is being eaten away year by year.
But this is not at all the only reason why trade unionists and all workers must firmly reject any incomes policy. Two fundamental factors argue strongly against any such policy.
In the first place, under the capitalist system, any incomes policy claiming to regulate the incomes of all social classes is always a trap. In practice, governments can closely control only wages and salaries. Other forms of income are impossible to seriously control under a system of private property. No bourgeois government- not even the Nazi regime, with its most tyrannical powers - has ever succeeded in blocking or closely controlling prices, from which the income of the various sectors of the bourgeoisie derive.
The result is that in practice every incomes policy reduces itself to policing wages, as the successive commissions set up on this matter in France at least had the honesty to acknowledge. And in a period of rising prices, policing wages obviously means boosting profits.
In recent history, every period in which an incomes policy has been applied has seen a spectacular rise in capitalist profits. After Nixon imposed wage controls in August 1971, capitalist profits rose by about 20%. After the German trade unions accepted Konzertierte Aktion [a method of government intervention in collective bargaining], capitalist profits in West Germany visibly rose during 1972. And in Great Britain, we have seen an analogous development since the Conservative cabinet established wage controls.
In nonhypocritical terms, the incomes policy is a means by which the bourgeoisie reduces the wage component of the national income and raises the profits component. That's what all the literature of the "experts" finally amounts to, no matter how "subtly" it may be put.
A Threat to the Workers' Freedoms
But the incomes policy threatens not only the workers' material interests. It also threatens their political interests, their democratic rights.
In fact, the incomes policy, like "social programming," implies that the workers should voluntarily refrain from exploiting favorable conditions in the capitalist "labor market" to raise their wages. In the long run, such a voluntary pledge is unrealizable so long as freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom to demonstrate, and above all the free exercise of the right to strike are maintained. The bourgeoisie understands that it itself would be playing the fool if it convinced the union leadership on a national scale to accept limits on wage increases, only to see these limits constantly overturned by the militancy of regional, local, or factory units of the trade unions.
An effective incomes policy, that is, real policing of wages, therefore requires serious restrictions on the democratic freedoms of the workers' movement. The right to strike must be reg-
"wildcat"
ulated. Picket lines and strikes must be forbidden. Strike calls through leaflets or newspapers must be restricted or banned altogether. Democratic assemblies of workers and of strikers must be suppressed.
The trade unions cannot simultaneously be controlled by the membership and also subject to the requirements of an incomes policy. So, heavy blows must be dealt to tradeunion democracy, and the union apparatus must be transformed into an appendage of the state apparatus. The end result of such a development, which the workers would not accept without tenacious resistance, would be the strong state, accompanied by vio lent repression and state "trade-unionism" of the Spanish type.
This is why any concession to the notion of an incomes policy must be firmly rejected by all workers. The struggle for workers' control must be counterposed to any call for "policing wages." The key demands are:
Open the employers' books; end secret banking.
Examination of cost-prices and profit margins by delegates elected in the factories by all the workers.
Control over price changes by union organizations and consumer committees.
When the real records of economic life - and not the fraudulent records cooked up by advocates of incomes policies — are thus revealed, it will very soon become clear who is really responsible for inflation and rising prices. A working-class mobilization against what is really responsibleinternational and national the capitalist system — would then be possible.
But it is exactly this working-class intervention into the "mysteries of economic life" that the class collaborationists, good "democrats" that they are, are bent on preventing by any means necessary. Surely it takes a subversive professional agitator to suggest that the workers should be involved in something that's none of their business: how to manage and distribute the wealth that they themselves create.