Capitalism prioritises profit at the expense of social benefit, but workers in the arms industry in the 1970s showed there is an alternative, explains Kevin Crane

The global trade in weapons is always controversial, but its problematic nature has taken on a massive new relevance as our governments arm the state of Israel to the hilt, while it conducts the most terrible genocide of a generation in plain sight. The British Labour Party has cravenly refused to cease supplying weapons to Israel, applying only a token suspension of less than a third of normal supply, to pretend not to be complicit in the worst crimes imaginable.

A wing of the protest movement in support of the Palestinians protests against arms manufacturers, sometimes even in preference to protesting against the government. In Britain, this has often focused on the Israel-based company Elbit Systems, as well as some businesses associated with it. Protests of this type mostly aim to draw attention to the arms companies’ activities from people and institutions in wider society. And that isn’t a bad goal in itself, as a lot of people genuinely have no idea that weapons being used to kill oppressed people are being supplied by facilities down the road from themselves.

It does have a real political drawback, however, in that it can be characterised as an attack on working-class people who are employed in or around those companies. An alliance of weapons-trade capitalists, pro-war politicians and the right wing of the trade union movement routinely uses this framing to bind working-class people to the arms trade and isolate the left.

In Britain, that alliance has served to weaken the movement for Palestinian rights, as union leaders like Unite’s Sharon Graham and GMB’s Gary Smith have explicitly argued that to be pro-Palestinian is to be anti-worker. So, many decades of hard work within the trade union movement to argue for solidarity with Palestinians has been critically undermined when that solidarity is needed most. It has been one of the biggest problems faced by our side in these past twelve months.

Solid left critiques of pro-arms trade arguments have long existed. The veteran anti-apartheid activist (and recent Keir Starmer election challenger), Andrew Feinstein, has written extensively about deep flaws in the argument that the working class benefits from the trade. Armaments, he demonstrates, is an industry that is very inefficient at producing jobs: so even though weapons are a £8.2 billion sector in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it only provides around 55,000 jobs in manufacturing1. In contrast, the rail sector has £20 billion in annual income but creates a whopping 250,000 jobs in its supply chain. The two have roughly the same public-sector workforce sizes, so you can very much see which one is the bigger provider of decent jobs beyond those directly working for the government. This is before we get into the various other concerns with the arms trade, such as its inherent corruption and the moral and legal peril of where the produce ends up going.

The problem is that while those tens of thousands of workers are getting their livelihoods from arms companies, just saying ‘it’s bad’ can simply be dismissed as hot air or worse. Those people still need jobs, and if their union leaders are telling them that the anti-war movement wants them to lose their jobs, it will be a barrier to appealing to those workers. Ultimately, what the left needs to do is to present a positive alternative, and a very relevant one does exist in recent British history.

A crisis of half a century ago

In the 1970s, Lucas Industries was the type of manufacturing company Britain no longer had a sprawling network of large, diversified sites, all of which employed large numbers of workers who were directly engaged in the production of physical goods. There was a time, many decades prior when those goods would have been civilian products, but the experience of two total wars across the twentieth century had seen Lucas become heavily integrated into Britain’s weapons and armaments infrastructure. Lucas Aerospace was the consolidation of facilities that had been built up in World War II to manufacture for the military air sector, and it continued to expand after the war, to the point where it was the largest manufacturer of plane engines and control systems in Europe. Its workforce was 18,000 people in 1970, which, as mentioned above, would account for over a third of today’s arms-industry workers.

Trade union membership was much higher in those times than it is today, and there was widespread union membership at Lucas and a history of worker militancy. In one notable incident in the 1930s, a strike of women working at Lucas had been a breakthrough in drawing more women into the unions across the country. Unlike today, however, workers were not normally in big, generalised unions: they often had relatively small, specific organisations which were based on particular grades or professions, and inter-union politics in big workplaces was sometimes complicated.

The strong union movement that existed was part of a wider economic picture: in the 1970s a far higher share of overall wealth in society was paid to workers as wages, and capitalists were getting increasingly bitter about what they perceived as insufficient profits. This fuelled a drive to change the structure of the economy substantially, as the ruling class looked to new technology, increased international trade, anti-union politics and – very significantly – job losses to increase their wealth at the expense of workers.

Lucas was just one of many such companies in which top management spent the decade beginning a process of intentional contraction and decline. Citing shifts in technology in the industry and competition from manufacturers in other countries (this should be very familiar if you’ve been following the Newport steel closures happening in our time) they began to argue for mass redundancies and the closure of sites. Union activists in the company had to lead a fightback of the members, but they knew it was going to be hard. Other companies had been allowed effectively to collapse due to unprofitability – notably Rolls Royce – while others like GEC enforced job losses in a very systematic way. A sense of dread was in the air as the Lucas management began an ominous restructuring. However, the union reps didn’t panic, they had seen what was happening and got organised.

A plan comes together

In Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliot’s comprehensive history, simply called The Lucas Plan, they cite strong initiative by workplace activists as one of the first things that marked this dispute out as not being another Rolls Royce-like instant disaster:

‘The shop stewards in Lucas Aerospace started to form their combine committee nearly two years before management had managed to unify the organization of the different companies into a single Lucas Aerospace structure. Even after this integration, in 1971, there was continued in-fighting between the management … In many respects the Lucas Aerospace management were in as much disarray as, if not more than, the shop stewards. This gave the Committee a rare advantage.’²

That advantage would prove to be hugely consequential. The Combine, as it simply became known, meant that the various sub-groups and departments of the Lucas workforce were substantially more likely to work together than against each other, making it much harder for the employer to buy off or delay one faction to leave another isolated for attack. It also meant that the reps were getting good, up-to-date information from the maximum spread of the workforce and sharing it constructively. 

The Combine was central for half a decade to a remarkably effective defensive strategy. Some major strikes ended in solid victories, including gaining some of the first trade union wins over the issue of company pensions in British history. However, as Wainwright and Elliot record, by 1974:

‘The most difficult problem was that of job loss. Although militant defensive campaigns had short-run successes, the number of workers still fell. Defensive strength was not enough.’³

The 1970s had already seen workers try to take proactive stances towards fighting job losses. In 1971, laid-off shipyard workers in Upper-Clyde Shipbuilders in Govan, Scotland, won a daring industrial victory by doing a ‘work-in’ in which they completed company orders for new vehicles rather than accepting unemployment. The Lucas Combine attempted something even more creative: they engaged their own members, working at every level of business operations, and came up with ideas for new products they could produce. The result of this is what simply became called ‘The Plan’ and opened up a new world of possibilities in what could be imagined both economically and technologically. It also asked a question that, up to that point, barely anyone had ever dared to ask: could we use the creative abilities represented by these factories to make something fundamentally better than weapons?

The really big idea: socially useful production

It was in January of 1976 that the first formal version of the Plan was released by the Lucas workers. It was to be the jumping-off point for a long project. A very large range of design concepts were completed by the workers of the Combine – involving highly detailed designs and thorough use cases. A private for-profit research facility would have been more than proud of the quantity of the work, even though they would reject the intent of it.

The volume of output was not the most striking thing, though. What really captured the imagination of people observing Lucas from outside was the creative energy. The Combine didn’t ask its members simply to come up with newer, better ways to make combat aircraft, instead, they promoted ‘socially useful production’ as a way to build alliances for wider society and demonstrate the true value of their own jobs. As Rep. Brian Salisbury put it in his own history of the plan:

‘150 product ideas were put forward by the workforce. From them, products were selected to fall into six categories: medical equipment, transport vehicles, improved braking systems, energy conservation, oceanics, and telechiric [robotic arms] machines. Specific proposals included, in the medical sector, an expansion of 40% in the production of kidney dialysis machines, which at that time were being manufactured on one of the [Lucas] sites. The Combine “regarded it was scandalous that people could be dying for the want of a kidney machine when those who could be producing them are facing the prospect of redundancy”. In the energy sector, proposals included the development of heat pumps, solar cell technology, wind turbines and fuel cell technology. In transport, a new hybrid power pack for motor vehicles and road-rail vehicles. Later, the Combine produced a road-rail bus, which toured the country.’⁴

It was as if the creative power of these workers had, out of a simple need to defend themselves, been unlocked. The ideas that came out of the Plan weren’t just preferable to building new bombs and the means to launch them, they were also ideas a generation ahead of their time. 

Renewable energy and energy conservation were scarcely thought of as serious fields of study in the 1970s. Although some forward-thinking scientists had suspected climate change might be a future threat in that time, it was before studies of the planet Venus had confirmed the ‘greenhouse effect’. There was really no environmentalism in the sense we know it at that time. It is slightly dizzying in 2024, as we face yet another winter of energy uncertainty in the grip of ecological turmoil caused by carbon emissions, to think that a group of workers half a century earlier could have pre-solved these problems for us!

Like the Upper-Clyde ship workers, the Lucas manufacturers attracted widespread support from the wider labour movement and political left. In addition to the usual business of worker solidarity, marches and rallies, an attempt was made by staff and students at North East London Polytechnic (the present-day University of East London) to establish an entire department based on the Plan’s themes: the Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems. They even, fleetingly, had support from official politics, as Tony Benn – the Labour minister for technology at the time, and beginning his personal shift leftwards – investigated the situation and realised that the Combine’s ideas had serious potential.

Imposed limits and the need to break through

Goodwill unfortunately does not resolve class struggle by itself. Never at any point was Lucas’s management willing to discuss the Plan seriously. Their idea of a plan was one to restore profitability, and if the simplest way to accomplish that was to do away with most of the company, then that is what they intended to do. Appeals to social usefulness do not impact this motivation. Brian Salisbury’s point about it being unjust that someone might have to go without a dialysis machine means, ultimately, nothing to someone who regards the kidney patient’s health as a secondary concern to ensuring that there’s healthy margin on the machine. We do not get to be surprised that men who market weapons to brutal dictators think in this way.

The capitalist class cannot, fundamentally, agree to relinquish control over production, because that control is what makes capital accumulation happen. They have a self-imposed limit on what the acceptable use of technology will be, and they proceed to impose it on the rest of humanity. The state that serves their interest serves them in this also and will use both overt and covert means for the purpose. Tony Benn very much encountered this with the civil service, which never enabled him to use his ministerial position to shift the situation at Lucas. In any case, the Tories were in government by 1979 and waged a brutal series of struggles against the entire trade union movement. Gradually, the process of attrition broke up the workplaces and workforce of Lucas.

The end of the Combine is often held to be when senior steward Mike Cooley was constructively dismissed from the business in 1981. Widely held to be one of the Combine’s absolute cleverest thinkers, Cooley played a key role in both preserving and developing the ideas of the Plan. Around the time he was pushed out of the company, he authored a superb book (which was recently reprinted for the forty-year anniversary of the Plan) called Architect or Bee? which admittedly is a title that sounds bizarre. There is an explanation of that title, but more than that, there is an almost uniquely excellent synthesis of technical and philosophical thinking to produce a socialist theory of engineering. To quote Cooley’s own summary:

‘The choices are essentially political and ideological rather than technological. As we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships, and as we question those social relationships and attempt to design systems differently, we are then beginning to challenge, in a fundamental way, power structures in society.’⁵

This really encapsulates why we need a politics that is opposed to the use of technology by capitalists and that poses an alternative. Ultimately, we do want Elbit Systems, and all the arms companies, to be gone for good, but we will not achieve this without posing an alternative to the economic, political and social structures that make them seem to be indispensable. 

It is capitalist priorities that create the illusion that precious resources should be spent destroying life, rather than saving it. Ultimately, the left must appeal to working people themselves, so they can realise that they don’t just have to not make things worse, but that they can and should create the solutions to problems. A future workers’ movement should aspire, like the Combine, to be an effective defence that progresses to a proactive project to create a better world.

¹ _{These figures are taken from Campaign Against the Arms Trade, who explain that the government puts out highly inflated figures: CAAT – What is the UK arms trade worth?.}

² _{Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan and Socially Useful Production, (Nottingham: Spokesman Books 2018), p.34.}

³ _{ibid. p.34.}

⁴ _{Brian Salisbury, ‘Story of the Lucas Plan’.}

⁵ _{Mike Cooley, Architect of Bee? The Human Price of Technology, introduction by Frances O’Grady (Spokesman Press 2015), p.180.}