Since the beginning of the 20th century the state
has had to intervene in British industry, either to provide large amounts of
capital which could not be raised privately or because there was a strategic
advantage in the state controlling a particular industry. Now a policy has
arisen in which the state does NOT bailout an industry by nationalization but
merely provides the funds for continued investment. It is a programme to rescue
capitalism from crisis. The reformists, Old Labour and Trotskyists are unclear
and muddled about the nature of socialism, of capitalism, the nature of the
state and the class character of political parties. Thus the equation of
nationalisation with socialism, the description of the Labour Party as a
working class party and the demands for nationalisation as a means of making
inroads into the capitalist state.
The vast majority of British industry is corporately owned;
by banks, by finance companies, or by the
STATE. These are all forms of capitalism in which capitalist property
relationships remain intact. Surplus-value is still appropriated and production
is governed through the market by the operation of the law of value and
commodity exchange. These laws operate whether private companies or the state
control production. The essence of capitalism is property relationships;
ownership is merely a formal question, which can take MANY forms. To portray
nationalisation as a means of making inroads into the capitalist system is to
ignore the central role of the capitalist state. Hence nationalisation can
never be a means of making ’inroads’ into capitalism. To argue so is to deny
the fundamental teachings of Marxism. For all these reasons there is no
advantage, either strategic or tactical, in calling for the nationalisation of
private industry. It is irrelevant to the real interests of the working people
whether profits are in private or state hands.
A major battle for the Socialist Party has always been to
combat the fight for reformism and gradualism which diverts the fight for
socialism. Throughout our history we have opposed all the various ‘hangers-on’ to
the labour movement who have sought state-ownership. An important part of the Socialist
Party’s work has been exposing the socialist pretensions of the Labour Party,
the ‘Communist Party’ and in opposing the false strategies of their Trotskyist
offspring who demand that they nationalise industries. The Labour ‘left-wing’
and the Left demand nationalisation as a means of making inroads into the capitalist
system – as a form of creeping socialism. SWP and SPEW say that they are making
‘transitional’ demands but in essence their strategy is reformist. They claim
that slogans for nationalisation under workers control raise the question of
state power and heighten the consciousness of the workers. Tagging on the
phrase ‘workers’ control’ is merely
lipstick on Frankenstein’s monster. Objectively all these organisations are
serving the capitalists in that they are attempting to mobilise the working class
in order to bring about the expansion of state-monopoly capitalism to rescue
bankrupt private industries and enterprises. Nationalisation is always
conditional on improving ‘efficiency’ and ‘rationalisation’. Nationalisation
cannot stem the tide of redundancies and indeed may accelerate it. The call for
nationalisation as a means of saving jobs is an aspect of the general reformist
outlook of the Left. Nationalisation not had a demonstrable record of
consistently improving wages, jobs, rights and safety. Instead of begging the ruling
class to save their jobs the working class urgently needs to develop a
consciousness of its latent strength. The strength of the working class lies in
their labour and their relationship to the means of production – let us help
them to learn to use it! We must always always remember that that the state
intervenes in the economy only for the benefit of the capitalist class as a
whole and not for the benefit of the workers. The entire class character of
nationalisation means that they exploit the labour of the worker. Socialism is
not nationalization. State-owned companies have played a central role in exploiting the working class
in every single country, regardless of their rhetoric about socialism, workers’
power etc
Privatisation – the transfer of functions and industry to
the private sector – is widely and correctly rejected on the Left and in the
working class. Privatisation leads only to higher prices, less and worse jobs,
and worse services. Privatisation and nationalisation have failed the working
class. Nationalisation and privatisation are just two different ways that the
ruling class runs society; they are not means through which the working class
can run society. Both are undemocratic, run top-down by and for the rich and
powerful. The government bureaucracy and ministerial managers are part of the
ruling class, along with the private capitalists. As we have already stated, the
working class is exploited in the so-called public sector, just as in private,
through wage labour, and lacks any real control over these means of production.
The work process is authoritarian, run top-down by officialdom, and, just as in
the private sector, unpaid surplus value is accumulated and reinvested. A
“mixed economy” is merely a mixture of top-down state and top-down private
ownership: the main form being the Keynesian Welfare State
Faced with the evils of capitalism, radicals are looking for
alternatives which do not require the state ownership and bureaucratic planning
of the failed “communist” (state capitalist) economies. Now another idea with
its roots in the 19th century has become prominent once again as a
supposed remedy – Co-operatives (or as some of their modern proponents prefer
to call them, Worker Self-Directed Enterprises or a Pluralist Commonwealth. It
might be called decentralized ‘market socialism’. Worker-managed enterprises,
consumer coops, very small businesses and shops, family farms, etc., would
compete in the marketplace. Disappointingly they too fail to fulfil the
promise.
Enterprises such as workers cooperatives are unable to mount
a strong enough challenge to the capitalists.
As Rosa Luxemburg stated, workers forming a cooperative are under
pressure from competition in the market and must rule over “themselves with the
utmost absolutism” forcing them to either “become pure capitalist enterprises,”
or dissolve if they hold on to their principles.
The Mondragon cooperative federation in Spain is
exemplary. Because of its success, in
the mid-1990s Mondragon began to come into competition with multinational
corporations. In order to survive the
competition the cooperative federation began to change its policies. It started opening factories in low wage
countries like Poland, Egypt, Morocco and Mexico. None of the employees in these factories are
cooperative members and have little say in the operation of their
workplaces. Furthermore, cooperatives
could now apply to hire up to 40% non-member employees in order to remain
competitive. At the time these changes
led one cooperative member to lament that Mondragon could not “flourish as a
cooperative island in a capitalist world.”
Many say that factories and the means of production in
general should be controlled by independent groups of workers. But it has been pointed
out if production is controlled at the factory level, you can't have
society-wide socialist planning—and in fact you have individual factories
interacting with each other through the market, reproducing capitalism. If you
have worker co-ops or autonomous factories, you begin to have something that
resembles separate commodity-producing units. You won't have society-wide
mechanisms to foster cooperation between enterprises. If you fall back on
market principles, you begin to have competing interests over resources and
sales. You begin to have a situation in which stronger enterprises pull ahead
of weaker enterprises. It is impossible for society to pull in a unified
direction—towards meeting larger social goals and with the needs of world
humanity in mind. The workers of any one enterprise could choose how to respond
to the climate of economic conditions and how to weather it but could not
control the movements of the economy itself. There would be business cycles,
including periodic recessions. Some self-managed businesses would do better
than others; some regions would do better than others; there would be
inequalities within enterprises as well as between them; there would be
overproduction, unemployment, areas of relative poverty, and various amounts of
resentment.
Complete local self-reliance is neither possible nor
desirable, but there could be an emphasis on as much local autonomy as possible
– for municipalities, communes, cities and regions. The more localized the
community, the easier it will be for people to democratically plan its overall
economy. Like small shop-keepers and artisans of the medieval guilds, the
workers would be capitalists to themselves, “exploiting” themselves for the
sake of the enterprise. So long as self-directed enterprises still exist in a
mainly capitalist economy, then they have to compete on the market, like it or
not.
This is not “socialism” as meant by the historical
mainstream of the socialist movement. Historically, most socialists did not
include the market (with money, commodity exchange, and the law of value) as
part of their goal. At most that was seen as a remnant of capitalism in a
post-revolutionary society. As scarcity was overcome, the market (commodity
exchange) would die out and be replaced by conscious planning. Thinkers such as
Wolff and Alperovitz make the strategic claim that cooperative worker-run
businesses could be so successful that they can spread until they dominate the
economy and wipe out capitalism. A popular idea among many ‘anti-capitalists’ among
others. It is a delusion. It ignores the reality that the capitalist class
controls the marketplace as well as the government at all levels. The ruling
class will let people form a relatively small number of cooperatives, mostly at
the margins of the economy. They will not let cooperatives “supplant” the
corporate steel industry, auto industry, oil industry, and the giant banks. In
the unlikely event that the co-ops could accumulate enough capital to threaten
to “supplant” these semi-monopolies, the capitalists would cancel bank and
government credit, forbid the use of transportation and communication by the
co-ops, and pass laws against the cooperators. The courts and police would
enforce these laws. Those who advocate cooperatives are sincere in wanting a
wholly new society but they wish to get there by step-by-step, gradual, mostly
peaceful and legal methods, without ever expecting a direct conflict with the
capitalists and their state. Which is what defines these strategies as
reformist – and as unrealistic. Some advocates are like millennialists awaiting
the second-coming, hoping that a severe economic crisis perhaps sparked by
environmental disasters will offer an opportunity to institute the changes out
of necessity. If such a policy is adopted it condemns the socialist movement to
one of passivity and not a political movement which will consciously
expropriate the capitalist class. Working people will decide to cease to labour
for masters.
The Socialist Party view is that we have to keep raising the
issue of a genuine alternative society (without wages, money, finance, value,
etc) to capitalism as the way-out for the working class and not get bogged down
in defensive struggles to survive under capitalism or imagine that these by
themselves will lead to an understanding of the need for an alternative
society.
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