Statism is not socialism.

COMMON OWNERSHIP
 NOT STATE OWNERSHIP

Central to capitalism is accumulation and is accumulated through the exploitation of workers. Workers sell their labour power in exchange for a wage and the difference between what they actually produce and what their wage is worth is ‘surplus value’ – the source of profits for capitalists. In assessing labour costs, just like machinery costs, the capitalist is only interested in replacement – so that there will be enough workers of sufficient ‘quality’ to continue production tomorrow. The wage paid to a worker has to be enough to keep him working ‘efficiently’ and to ensure that when he is worn out a replacement is ready. His wage has to cover his own needs, those of his children and those of the wife whose job it is to service and maintain this generation of workers and the next. The employed worker works directly for capital, whether he or she is productive like a car worker, or unproductive like a policeman. His working life is controlled by the employer – what he does while at work and whether or not he has a job. Wages are not payment for work performed. It is not. It is a payment to cover subsistence, a necessary cost of production for capitalists, the cost of reproducing the labour force.

The struggle against our oppression is a class struggle, our enemies are the capitalist ruling class. Many so called socialists deny the old Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were a form of state-capitalism. This denial is based on their belief that the concept of capitalism necessitates formal private ownership of the means of production and the free sale of wage labour on an open market. A ruling-class and oppression still occurred, but somehow the state was neither bourgeois nor proletarian.

If formal ownership of the means of production is so crucial to the definition of capitalism, then every bankrupt enterprise that is nationalised automatically falls into the category of socialism. Likewise, anytime a government institutes wage/price controls, and thus sets the price of  labour power also automatically becomes socialist.

What is actually occurring is the further integration of capital and the state power. Capitalism does not cease to be capitalism on that account, but simply sheds those formal aspects peculiar to laissez-faire and adopts new ones more at tuned to monopoly. Under monopoly conditions, it makes little difference whether a particular employer holds a title deed of ownership over the means of production. What is essential is that the factories run, the workers work, surplus product be produced and appropriated, and that this entire process be directed by  and for a ruling class. State-capitalism facilitates this process by rationalizing the essential
features of capitalist production, by combining economic and political power into a direct, unified authority, and by thus giving the bosses even greater dominion over the working class. One should not confuse this change in form with a change in fundamental economic relations. Unlike traditional capitalist society, protesting workers do not confront a single company or industry,but the entire state apparatus. The working class, which constantly threatens the whole edifice of class privileges is to be mollified by a steady diet of ‘self-management’ and paternalism. The form of ownership was changed but not its control.

Nationalisation brought considerable benefits to the capitalist class as a whole. Statism is not socialism.