Industrial policy and socialist strategy: Restructuring and the unity of the working class

Abstract

Jamie Gough continues the reassessment of industrial intervention from the left, starting with Goodwin and Duncan's critical look at Sheffield's experience in Capital & Class 27 and Cochrane's review of the London Industrial Strategy in Capital & Class 28, but shifts the analysis from their emphasis on the local versus national problematic to the more general implications of the underlying models of intervention. He argues that recent left-wing restructuring policies seek to sidestep the powers of capital and end up by exacerbating divisions between groups of workers, and suggests that we have to return to intervention which takes as its main aim the combatting of these divisions and strengthening of workers' collective organisation.