Victory Production, 1942. by J.T Murphy
“A personal account of seventeen months spent as a worker in an engineering and an aircraft factory; with a criticism of our present methods of production and a plan for its reorganisation…”
posted by Benjamin Nakizo at 6:21 PM
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p10: “We are trying to conduct a war belonging to a new a new epoch with the weapons and institutions of an epoch that is now dead”
p11: “There are only two ways to secure decisive leadership and purpose – the fascist way and the socialists way”
p17: “I had the impression that the war was generally regarded by management and men alike as a regrettable encroachment on the placid flow of their normal programme, which somehow of other had to be borne with resignation”.
P19/20: “Had there been real co-operation between management and men on the general question of production there would have been no muddle and the job would have been done in half the time. But such an idea was foreign to the accepted relations between management and men”.
P22: “Trade Unions are means through which workers hope to modify the degree of exploitation”
P22: “I could hardly regard it as a matter of surprise, therefore, when I returned to the workshop and took my place at the lathe, that I should find myself there not as a citizen called upon to participate with my fellow citizens in a great programme of production designed with the single aim of smashing the enemy, but just as an employee, engaged to work 47 hours a week as a turner, to do whatever odd jobs turned up, and to draw my wages at the end of the week”.
Political discussions flowed in the air raid shelters where the men found themselves for hours at a time, with little to do but talk.
P27: “The government was inhabited against solving the shelter problem by that same comfortable complacency by that same comfortable complacency of mind which has now left its deadly trail of disaster in so many phases of the war”
P34: He mentions the existence amongst the men for a desire to learn, and he ran classes on civilisation during the dinner hours which were well attended. A favourite theme for socialists. That so called working class men were eager and willing to self-improve.
P36: The factory workers formed a collective and mutual fund to assist those made homeless by bombing. Another socialist favourite.
P38: The lacklustre approach to warfare production, the machines sitting idle and weekends off continually frustrated Murphy.
P39: The Communist Party drew up the ‘People’s Convention’ looking to unite all the workers and unions under one umbrella. It sought to create a peoples government which would propose a ‘peoples peace’. Such a move would bring the war to an immediate end as the German people realised the ‘logic’ of it and stopped supporting Hitler.
P34: Murphy is far from a fan of the Communist Party (having before the war being kicked out of it) and he smugly notes the British parties turnaround when the USSR was attacked by the Nazis. “The Communists and the conventionalists must therefore carry not a little of the responsibility for the long in war production from September 1939 to June 1941 … Their language was the language of the class war romantics. Their deeds retarded production and prolonged the life of Hitlerism”
On women:
P43: “They were loyal patriots, but their patriotism was of the instinctive variety – they had never though about political and social questions sufficiently for it to be anything else”
The conflict between skilled and unskilled workers was institutionalised in their respective unions.
P47: “The entry of the women was just one more ‘regrettable necessity’, cursed by most men, deplored by the management, and labelled in the minds of all as temporary work”.
P58 – he is not a fan of the system of sub contracting. Rather he preferred that large scale and modern factories be developed to maximise efficiency. “It means that we are trying to run a twentieth century war with the industrial mechanism of the middle of the nineteenth century”
P64: “Once again I had entered a factory in which the clash of petty interests and the outmoded habits of former years were in full play.”
Planned Production:
P147: He wants a minister of production to pool together all the means of production and to co-ordinate the war effort.
P148: Such a ministry should also hold a untied database of information.
P149: Such a ministry would issue directives through local ‘regional executives’.
P151: “Bring military discipline into industry and democracy into its administration”.
P156: “We are now a nation at war. We are all soldiers, good, bad or indifferent as the case may be, and must be regimented willingly or perish” … “They would unite freely in the common purpose of securing the maximum production for victory, because there would be no further incentive to strive subversively or openly against one another to satisfy private interests that would have been removed”
P163: He wants the population to be armed and recognises the class implications of such a policy.
In summary:
Murphy was an industrial worker and writer. During the First World War and the inter war period he was active in the Communist Party of Great Britain but was expelled in the run up to the war, which helps explain some of his views in this book. He believed strongly that Nazism was an evil that had to be fought and defeated and he believed this best done by restructuring British society along socialist lines. However his criticism of the British system is not strictly directed towards the ruling classes but rather he criticises the working class as well for being so passive during war production and seems rather frustrated that people do not grasp the magnitude of the situation.
He was an active union member at both factories he worked at. His memoirs turn more into a manifesto as the book continues and he is especially scathing in his criticism of the passive position of the Communist Party and notes smugly how quickly they switched sides after the onset of Barbarosa.
He discusses among other things:
1. the communist parties position
2. the role and implications of females in the industrial labour force
3. the lack of urgency and co-ordination throughout the war industries
4. the arming and regimentation of the workforce
5. Uniform pay for all workers in all industries
6. The threat of unskilled workers to the existing unions
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