Distributionism, Reformism and Economic Nationalism
The weakness of Paul's distributionist approach is again manifest when he says,
“Now reimagine the coffee shop as a co-op, paying its workers well, ploughing profits back into activities that promote social cohesion, or literacy, or post-prison rehabilitation, or better public health. The important thing is to indicate – as clearly as the 'organic' label on the coffee does – what social good is being produced and who will benefit from it.” (p 270)
Personally, I avoid organic produce, because after years of needing to watch the pennies, I have always preferred searching out value over virtue signalling. Many of Microsoft's highly paid workers have become millionaires. Its on the basis of paying their workers well, as they share in the company's performance, however, that they justify dismissing the lowest performing 5% of workers, each year, so as to keep up the company's level of performance. Moreover, if a deciding feature is to be wider social benefits, it's going to be difficult for any social enterprise to compete with the billions of dollars that the Gates Foundation provides for healthcare, and so on, in developing countries. When I was a councillor, one of the first places to call upon for money and support for various local projects was TESCO, which had a programme of providing money to support various schemes and projects in the town and around the store.
In order to pay high wages, provide good conditions, and so on, its first necessary to be able to operate on a significant scale, so as to obtain all of the advantages of the economies of scale. That requires adequate production, and accumulation of surplus value. It remains the case, therefore, that the locus of strategy must remain primarily within the realm of production and not distribution.
And the reformist/distributionist approach appears again when Paul says,
“There's one change which anybody in charge of a state could implement immediately, and for free: switch off the Neoliberal privatization machine.” (p 273)
First of all this skips over a whole period of time and development, in relation to the nature of the state itself, what it is, and what its for, and who controls it, let alone how that control was achieved. But, secondly, if this, as is implied, is still some kind of capitalist state, why worry about privatisation? The NCB was statised, so was BL and BSC, British Shipbuilders and so on. Did those workers, in the 1980's, for example, during the 1984-5 Miners' Strike notice any benefit? On the contrary, as Kautsky points out, the difference with these industries, run by the capitalist state, is that because they have the full power of that state behind them, they are more effective in exploiting and oppressing their workers than any privately owned company.
Nor indeed is the crucial question, in relation to healthcare, whether it is provided by state, private or cooperative employees, but is whether the healthcare is free at the point of need. If that is the real question, then whatever method of delivery achieves that, at the lowest cost for the required level of quality, is the one socialists should support. And, in terms of the capital involved in that delivery, the question for socialists is not whether it is state capital, the capital of a joint stock company, or a cooperative, but who exercises control over it. It is highly unlikely, for the reasons Kautsky describes, that workers can exercise control over state capital, so long as the capitalist state exists; to gain control over the socialised capital of joint stock companies, or to remove the control that shareholders currently exercise, will require a political struggle that essentially amounts to a political revolution, so the only practical, immediate form of workers control must take the form of the further development of worker owned cooperatives. However, in some spheres, e.g. local authority services, healthcare, social care, education, etc., that would actually require removing those spheres from the state, i.e. privatisation, or establishing worker owned cooperatives in competition with them. Engels makes clear that is what we would do.
“It seems that the most advanced workers in Germany are demanding the emancipation of the workers from the capitalists by the transfer of state capital to associations of workers, so that production can be organised, without capitalists, for general account; and as a means to the achievement of this end: the conquest of political power by universal direct suffrage.”
(The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers' Party)
The distributionist approach again comes forward when Paul says,
“The next action the state could undertake is to reshape markets to favour sustainable, collaborative and socially just outcomes.” (p 273)
It's not that this is impossible, to a degree, but that it puts the cart before the horse. The ability to achieve all of these desirable outcomes is a function of production. First, it requires production to rise to a level whereby abundance is possible; secondly, it requires the property question to be addressed, i.e. who owns and controls the means of production, so that this abundance does not simply result in the creation of a huge surplus social product in the hands of capitalists, landlords, rentiers or the capitalist state. As Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
The two things may need to go hand in hand, but it is always production that must lead the way. That is particularly true as, in order to deal with the issue of global development, the advanced economies will need to massively increase their output, so as to provide developing economies with the capital and technology they require.
Another example of this is illustrated in Paul's comment,
“If you set the feed-in tariff on solar panels high, people will install them on their roofs. But if you don't specify they have to come from a factory with high social standards, the panels will get made in China, generating fewer wider social benefits beyond the energy switch.” (p 273-4)
That sounds rather like the 1970's/80's AES type economic nationalism built around import controls, but without the actual demand for such controls. If China can provide these panels more cheaply, why would a socialist discriminate against the Chinese workers who produce them? The wider social benefits for the Chinese working-class are obvious where they are able to expand on the back of such production. The key to higher social standards in China flows through such an improvement in the position of Chinese workers, as the demand for their labour-power rises, and they are thereby enabled to organise so as to demand higher wages, better conditions etc. Indeed, for all such developing economies, the ability to benefit from the expansion of their production is significant for the growth and development of their working-class, as I set out several years ago in relation to Wal-Mart and India.
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