Many workers now understand that the capitalist system fails to provide for the needs of the vast majority of the human race and that it must be overthrown before the people can have freedom. But there is considerable difference of opinions as to the means by which this can be accomplished. Some advocate the ballot, or parliamentary action; some armed insurrection and some industrial action.
The advocates of armed insurrection’s reasoning is superficial. They deal with effects, not causes. The big capitalists who control industry are the real government, and the state is only a committee to represent their interests. Capitalism means a state of society in which production is carried on for profit. This necessitates control of industry by capitalists. The state is only an effect of capitalism. Overthrowing of the state would only mean a political revolution which could be of no lasting benefit to the workers. Overthrowing of capitalism would mean a social revolution, a complete change in the methods by which production and distribution are carried on. It would mean production for use instead of for profit. This can only be accomplished by the workers taking control of industry out of the hands of capitalists and running it for themselves.
Common Ownership Not Public Ownership
Common ownership not public ownership is the aim of the Socialist Party. Public ownership has a nice sound to it but it is simply another expression for nationalisation (or municipalisation) – state ownership. The goal is to bring about collective ownership of the means of production on behalf of the capitalist class instead of direct ownership by individual groups within that class as to-day. That is, organising the whole of production on a similar system to that of the Post Office once was and similar state-owned concerns. Even though nationalisation is sometimes called “public ownership”, it is not really ownership by “the public”, i.e. the community, i.e. all of us, but only ownership by the state, i.e. by the minority whose interests it serves. Nationalisation, as the experience of the nationalised industries since 1945 shows, is really state capitalism with the employees still needing trade unions to try to get better pay and working conditions from their employer.
There can be quite easily a gradual change from private to state property but there cannot be a gradual change from private to common ownership. The latter change is a fundamental change, in which one form excludes the other. In a modern state private and common ownership cannot exist side by side as the Bolsheviks found to their cost. It can only be all or nothing. Nevertheless, many on the left are apostles of public ownership (although these days they are always careful to add the caveat under workers control). Nor is it unknown for the Tories to take businesses under the government’s wing for the work of repairing capitalism for the capitalists. Sections of the capitalist class teetering on the edge of bankruptcy are only too happy when government pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them. The post-war Labour government did nationalise coal, the railways, gas, water and electricity but mainly in order to ensure that the rest of private industry got these provided in a more efficient and subsidised way.
No stone is left unturned to make efficient a lame duck and then return it good as new back to the private sector. People who are prepared to tolerate and support capitalist ownership (whether private or “public”) are full of plans. They have to be. The problems created by capitalism are so numerous that those engaged in its administration spend their time necessarily in endeavouring to solve them and in finding ways and means of reconciling the antagonistic interests involved. Socialists, on the other hand, recognise that the most fundamental antagonism of all, that between the workers and the capitalists as classes, can find no solution in any form of capitalist ownership. What can it matter to the workers whether they are exploited by a joint-stock company, a public utility corporation set up by a Labour government, or by a government department with the minister in charge? People also often overlook that the Miners’ Strike was a strike against an industry “owned” by the nation.
Businessmen at present prefer, or pretend, to believe along with members of the Labour Party, that socialism means the same thing as nationalisation. But nationalisation is a purely capitalist reform. Its chief object is to equalise the conditions of exploitation for capitalist competitors. The workers gain little by nationalisation. Their status is unchanged. The more capitalism is changed in detail the more it remains basically the same—a system resting on the exploitation of the working class. The capitalists still control the means of wealth production and guarantee the profits to themselves. They still compel the workers to sell their energy for wages that barely cover the cost of living. The Left should remind themselves of the thousands of workers in the past, in the nationalised coal, steel and railway industries who had to go on strike in an attempt to protect their living standards, and indeed of the thousands of these workers who were eventually sacked, just as would have happened under private ownership. That is the way capitalism works, whether it is run privately or by the state.
Only common ownership of the means of living can abolish this conflict of interests and it is our undertaking to make this plain to fellow-workers. The reason for government nationalisation of certain industries in countries like Britain where capitalism is operated under what is referred to as a mixed economy, is not for the purpose of providing a better social service, as such, but to ensure that the surplus-value-producing machinery of the whole national capitalist class continues to exploit the working class with the maximum possible efficiency. Common ownership is unthinkable to the capitalist class, something utterly impracticable and unjustifiable. To a class that has been in possession for generations, the idea of common ownership is abhorrent. To-day they will not even admit the possibility of it. When they are forced to recognise it as an alternative to their own system, they will use all the forces at their disposal to thwart its advance.
The employers are full of promises of better things for those whom they exploit. They will, as Tolstoy said, do everything for the workers except get off their backs. The workers, therefore, must cast off the parasite-class for themselves. Nationalisation was a technocratic act, placing industries under the control of managers thought better capable of running them than their predecessors, though they were often the same persons.
Karl Marx used the word “association” to indicate the society he envisaged as replacing capitalism. And this term is useful in terms of emphasising how the members of that society will freely enter into production relations with each other to produce social wealth.
The greatest strength of the Socialist Party is our ideas and our thinking. The aim of the Socialist Party is to convince our fellow workers that the overall and permanent solutions to all the economic problems we endure require a revolution to overthrow capitalism. We treat the Labour Party with the disdain it deserves. Do not waste efforts over it, and, certainly, do not attempt to resurrect it as a “true” labour party. Do we really want to re-run the setback and disillusionment and betrayal of the last 100 years? Let it wither on the vine. Let its decline be terminal.
We have a future to gain. Workers must do for themselves: we are many, they are few. There are but two classes and class is everything. Without clarity about it, we do not know who we are or what we are doing. We are at war against the capitalist enemy. The ruling class only has apparent strength due largely to our apathy and passivity; our ignorance and lack of activity. The Socialist Party stands firmly on the bed-rock of the class struggle, and; declares, that so long as the means of production are in the hands of a numerically small class, the workers will be forced to sell their labour-power to them for a bare subsistence wage. In recognising that there never can be anything in common between the employing class and the working class, the Socialist Party strives to instil into the workers’ minds class solidarity on the economic and political fields. It is also the duty of socialists to teach the solidarity of the interests of the working class, regardless of the race that some section of the class happens to belong to. Let’s build a great socialist movement.
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