Dry talk and slippery docks

'The Dialogue Society' was the Nationalist Party's winning battle-cry in the 1980s, and your name remained generally associated with it. Is it not disappointing that Gonzipn began its new term of office with unilaterally taken decisions, such as rejoining Partnership for Peace and privatising the shipyards?

My heart sinks much more heavily because of the vapid response of both sides of Malta's classical Left to shipyard privatisation. Neither the General Workers' Union nor, more surprisingly, the new Labour leader has given any hint of the quasi-standard response that New Left leaders give to privatisation proposals nowadays.

On one hand, they concede that state-run enterprises have everywhere turned out to be generally inefficient.

On the other, they insist that intrinsically profitable enterprises of key social/cultural importance to the nation should preferably be sold by the State to non-government but not-for-profit enterprises (the so-called 'third sector' that now constitutes such a large part of major economies such as the US and Italy) or to co-operative type enterprises (of which the owners are not 'capitalists' but involved, small investors).

Joseph Muscat does not seem to have had this kind of solution at all in mind when he said the privatisation of the shipyards should not be like that of Mid-Med Bank and Sea Malta. The context shows that his only concern was that he should always be talked with, even when he had nothing significant to say.

On the substance of the shipyard issue, interviewers only managed to eke out from him with great effort the suggestion that maybe partial privatisation should be considered, a suggestion that the Prime Minister had already said could be under consideration in a second phase.

The GWU produced a so-called plan mostly discussing 10-year-old proposals. This document is clear proof that the union had not been seriously thinking of an alternative model along New Left lines to that applied both by the MLP and the PN when the inevitable critical moment of privatisation came.

Surely it should have been doing that at least since Alfred Sant's 1997 deathblow to the seriously misfiring self-managed system, followed by the coup-de-grace of 1999. But clearly the Left has since then not bothered about the radical re-thinking of worker participation systems required in the second millennium. For instance, it has made no noises, at least not within my earshot, about Malta's total failure so far to implement the European Union's so-called SE directive on employee involvement in management (adopted in 2004).

Thus, the first of only two plausible justifications in a New Left perspective for nationalisation of an economic entity has flown away, once it is no longer perceived as a necessary stepping stone to worker ownership, control and profit sharing.

The second justification is the sort of security or supreme national interest consideration that neutrality was claimed to be in Cold War days. That earned the Drydocks an explicit mention in the Constitution. That provision in term served as tragi-comic camouflage in such hare-brained episodes as the 1987 blockage of HMS Ark Royal for their true motivation - which was plainly more in line with a such glorious exploits of the 'aristocracy of the workers' as the ransacking of the Curia within view of the Police HQ.

At this juncture, with the Prime Minister doubly delighting in the mixed metaphor of a 'buoyant' market, to call for a task force can only smack, in any reasonable perspective, of futile delaying tactics.

Apart from GWU - MLP failures, do you deny that Malta has experienced a breakdown of the Dialogue Society model which you, among others, celebrated the advent of in 1987?

The 'Dialogue Society' was projected in the 1980s as an update of the 'Self-Managing Society' that the Young Christian Workers movement (of which I was national chaplain) had campaigned for in the 1960s. Self-management had been the central idea of Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra.

Soon after, signs began to appear of the change from the first industrial, machine-based society to the new electronically-based means of production. With them came the realisation that governance of the means of communication was as important for a free but egalitarian society as governance of the means of industrial production.

Most unfortunately, the way in which the self-management model was applied at the Drydocks in the Mintoff years was appalling. The reasons appear clearly enough in the studies published for instance by Gerard Kester. The profits made in the mid-70s were followed by dismal losses in the 80s. It all served to discredit both the self-management and the wider dialogue-society theories.

To understand how the rapid debasement of excellent concepts can occur in political practice, consider what happens to the beauty of smiling when either Lawrence Gonzi grins at a discomfited opponent or Muscat at being faced by the shipyard's privatisation - and that facial expression turns out to be his only significant reaction to the decision.

How do you think he could do better?

It may well be too late now, and the task may well be beyond his abilities, but there can hardly be any doubt that an authentically creative Leftist reaction would have been more or less that which I outlined above: organise, as probably only the 'Left' could do successfully in Malta, a local 'third-sector' company.

A body autonomous of both GWU and MLP and with a non-capitalist shareholding structure, especially if it found suitable international partners, could be the best response to the government's (manifestly now unpostponable) privatisation call.

Does not undertaking such a challenging initiative sound more pertinent to Labour ears than the supermarket idea thrown away by the new Labour deputy leader Toni Abela (whose imaginative gifts incidentally I have long known to be admirable)?

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.