Looking forwards to the Lucas Plan

An idea from fifty years ago offers solutions to today's economic, technological and environmental crises, writes Adrian Smith The post Looking forwards to the Lucas Plan appeared first on Red Pepper

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An idea from fifty years ago offers solutions to today’s economic, technological and environmental crises, writes Adrian Smith

This year marks fifty years since the Lucas Plan, described by the organisers of a forthcoming anniversary event as ‘an idea whose time must come’. Calling the Lucas Plan an idea is appropriate, because superficially, the story of the Plan itself is one of failure: it failed to meet the immediate aims of the workers who wrote it. And yet the idea – or ideas – that carried their wider purpose continue to inspire and guide progressive social movements and are especially resonant today.

The Lucas Plan was developed in 1976 by workers at Lucas Aerospace who wished to convert their firm away from manufacturing a range of products dominated by components for military contracts, towards democratically organised and ‘socially useful’ production. The Plan was an alternative to state-backed plans by owners to ‘rationalise’ Lucas Aerospace by closing down sites, consolidating facilities and laying off many of its 17,000 workers.

Through their trade union branches, workers proposed instead that their skills, technologies and knowledge be redirected into alternative products. Informed by issues affecting their communities, combined with a commitment to international solidarity, dozens of prototypes and designs were gathered into the Plan – ranging from wind turbines, heat pumps, and road-rail transport, to medical equipment and the human-centred, skill-enhancing automation of machine tools. Workers advocated the development of greener technologies that it has taken governments and business, under continued social pressure, many years to invest in.

The struggle over the future of manufacturing was economy-wide in the 1970s, in a context of poor management, dysfunctional industrial relations, rising international competition, new technologies and the restructuring and redirection of capital into other sources of profit. Inspired by Lucas, workers were developing Plans at other firms too, such as Vickers, British Aircraft Corporation, Dunlop, Parsons, and Chrysler. There was solidarity with similar initiatives in Germany and Scandinavia.

These proposals were playing into a fractured political landscape grappling with deep economic challenges. The ostensible post-war Keynesian consensus was fragmenting between a rising new right and a disoriented left. The Lucas Plan was a bold and practical set of proposals for a future economy that also addressed nascent ecological and energy crises.

But it was looking in a different direction to the ideas then contesting for power. The Labour government failed to engage with the Lucas Plan and the Conservative government rejected it outright. The latter’s laissez-faire ideas effectively closed down industrial policy: management should be liberated to make profitable choices and ‘lame duck’ firms should be allowed to fail; unburdened enterprise, especially in services, would generate new jobs.

The Lucas Plan may have failed on one level – but to stop there is short-sighted. Workers knew neither managers nor governments would acquiesce without concerted pressure, and as such saw their engaged struggle within a wider context of social movements.

What was remarkable about the Lucas Plan were the ideas its authors drew upon and the way that workers sought support and alliances around those ideas. Arms conversion and production for social use opened connections with the peace movement and activists on the left; attention to renewable energy, energy conservation, repair and public transport built unusual bridges with the nascent environmental movement; and the idea of opening design and production to popular planning attracted activists in community development.

The Plan stirred up a ferment of practical possibilities for democratisation, bringing together an unusual red-green alliance in a class-based society

Supported by a handful of left-wing local authorities, notably at the Greater London Council but also in the West Midlands and Sheffield, the varied groups interested in socially useful production linked into the development of alternative local economic strategies.

Community workshops and research centres were created with the aim of facilitating popular prototyping and the incubation of technology-based cooperatives. Techniques for participatory design were pioneered. Initiatives for community energy and refurbishing housing were established. New economic approaches were developed for valuing social use, allocating investment and organising the distribution of returns through local ownership. Industry projects responded to the challenges of automation technologies by co-developing designs and controls that placed new technology firmly in the hands of workers – enhancing skills and the quality of labour rather than replacing it.

In this broader, catalytic sense, the ideas behind the Lucas Plan can be seen in a more significant and successful light. The Plan can be celebrated for helping to stir up a ferment of practical possibilities for democratisation – of the workplace, the economy, technology, society and our relations with our environment. It brought together an unusual red-green alliance in a class-based society.

At the time, the future looked less clear-cut, but with hindsight it is evident that the movement was swimming against the political and economic tide. Any future for these possibilities was increasingly eclipsed by moves towards what we now call neoliberal ideology. Many of the institutions, centres and spaces working on socially useful production either closed down or became reshaped by this transforming world. Emblematic was the Conservative government’s closure of the GLC in 1986, their attack on the trade union movement, and the distorted caricature of and hostility to the ideas they had vanquished. The future was left to the market.

We live in the future the right created, but never entirely. There are always cracks where alternatives endure and survive, and which help the marginalised do the same. Now, the future is in deep trouble. Governments are looking for new ideas. Industrial policy is back. As always, the fundamental question is power.

Amongst the ideas informing democratic responses to the politics of division, scapegoating and power concentrated around authoritative leaders and their unaccountable technology overlords, are those that shaped the Lucas Plan. In some cases these are direct updates, such as ‘A Lucas Plan for the Twenty First Century’ advocated by CommonWealth in their report on military conversion into green industrial clusters. Mobilisations around a Green New Deal and for Just Transitions, such as Unite’s coordination of a future for steel at Port Talbot, occupy similar terrain in calling for worker-led transformation. Faced with savage cuts and hundreds of redundancies, colleagues at the University of Sussex, where I work, have developed a Community Plan alternative.

The legacy of the Lucas Plan can also be seen in community energy initiatives and local strategies for whole street refurbishment; in the use of open technologies in citizen science projects (with antecedents in union work on workplace hazards); or in using participatory design practices in ecological citizenship projects. These undercurrents run deep and wide. The Lucas Plan drew many into these activities and affected their subsequent work in the world.

Our current conjuncture is markedly different to fifty years ago. But the ways in which these ideas materialise in diverse activities, mobilise people and organise change is at heart a story of the perpetual struggle for democratic futures that work for all.

Adrian Smith is Professor of Technology & Society in the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex

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