There is an alternative to the arms trade – The Lucas Plan nearly 50 years on…..
JVL Introduction
Protesting arms manufacture is not an attack on the workers in the factories and officers of those businesses but it is important to acknowledge the workers’ need for jobs and for those involved in pickets and direct actions not to blame let alone attack the workers. As the words of a song by Sue Gilmurray (The War Machine Goes Round) say: “We’ve an industry that lives and thrives
Making tools to shatter human lives, And our honest workers ply their skill, Helping distant tyrants maim and kill As the war machine goes round/It is time my friends for us to say, We will not sell death to earn our pay, It is time for arms exports to cease, For the world can never live in peace, While the war machine rolls round.” This week Greek, dockworkers block ammunition cargo bound for Israel.
As this article makes clear, 48 years on from the Shop Stewards Committee developing the Lucas Aerospace Plan, there are many differences, not least the weaker Trade Union Movement, but there is still much to learn from the Plan not only to stop arms trading with Israel but to prioritise production to meet people’s needs rather than for surveillance or death.
This article was originally published by Counterfire on Fri 18 Oct 2024. Read the original here.
The Lucas Plan: When workers showed what could be done with technology
Capitalism prioritises profit at the expense of social benefit, but workers in the arms industry in the 1970s showed there is an alternative.
Loading article text…
MIKE SAID {and I was there when he said it “we must think of ourselves in the dual role, both as producers and consumers”
Because I was still brooding
about being beaten up outside the Brunswick
I missed the death of Mike Cooley from Galway,
the trade unionist, who worked as a design engineer
at Lucas Aerospace until he was sacked for militancy,
and believed it was possible to develop a radically
different approach to the relationship between skills
and technology, harnessing both to meet social needs,
and linking production to democracy and community.
For example, he came up with the idea of workers
making a portable dialysis machine for failed kidneys
instead of weapons for sale to foreign dictators. I saw
him speak in the 70s, outlining the concept of living
labour, workers who were practically and politically
engaged in production, reaching forward to a future
where labour had a purpose beyond mere payment.
There is no equivalent to Mike from Hyde.
I wish there was (but)
I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. Moody as fuck.
Measured. Marked. Cut
High military spending stimulates the economy but does not produce anything that benefits ordinary people. There is thus no re-distribution of wealth. That helps explain its attraction to reactionary politicians like Starmer.
This was noted by trade magazines back when President Truman launched his war scare in order to provide cover for rescuing the aircraft industry which had considerable over-capacity after World War2.