So, those “Marxists”, today, who argue for reforms of the type that the social-democrats previously called for, demonstrates how far they have moved from Marxism. They have both swallowed the liberal/social-democratic nonsense about the class neutrality of the state, and abandoned the Marxist understanding about the nature of the need for the working-class to liberate itself, by its own increasing self-activity and self-government, in militant opposition to the bourgeoisie and its state. They have swallowed the Lassallean/Fabian/Narodnik nonsense that this class neutral state can be made to act in workers interests rather than that of capital, simply by the installation of a progressive government, or, worse, simply on the basis of political pressure from “public opinion”! They believe it can be called upon to nationalise this or that failing business or industry, or even “the commanding heights of the economy”, in workers' interests, but as Kautsky wrote,
“If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, ii can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.
The state has never carried on the nationalising of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded, nor will it ever go further than that. So long as the property-holding classes are the ruling ones, the nationalisation of industries and capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat.”
The "Marxists" who make these empty pleas to the capitalist state are simply moral socialists, and their demands nothing but pious wishes, based upon schemas of how they would like the world to be rather than how it actually is. So, they tag on to their ridiculous appeals to the capitalist state the demand that it also grant "Workers Control" or "Public Control", as though that state would have any reason whatsoever for doing so! As Marx put it, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
"From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people"...
But what does "control by the rule of the people of the toiling people" mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!"
As Pannakoek put it,
“Public ownership is the ownership, i.e. the right of disposal, by a public body representing society, by government, state power or some other political body. The persons forming this body, the politicians, officials, leaders, secretaries, managers, are the direct masters of the production apparatus; they direct and regulate the process of production; they command the workers. Common ownership is the right of disposal by the workers themselves; the working class itself — taken in the widest sense of all that partake in really productive work, including employees, farmers, scientists — is direct master of the production apparatus, managing, directing, and regulating the process of production which is, indeed, their common work…
“As a correction to State-managed production, sometimes workers’ control is demanded. Now, to ask control, supervision, from a superior indicates the submissive mood of helpless objects of exploitation. And then you can control another man’s business; what is your own business you do not want controlled, you do it. Productive work, social production, is the genuine business of the working class. It is the content of their life, their own activity. They themselves can take care if there is no police or State power to keep them off. They have the tools, the machines in their hands, they use and manage them. They do not need masters to command them, nor finances to control the masters.
Public ownership is the program of “friends” of the workers who for the hard exploitation of private capitalism wish to substitute a milder modernized exploitation. Common ownership is the program of the working class itself, fighting for self liberation….”
Or, as Trotsky put it, the demand for workers control is either a social-democratic fraud meaning really control by capital, with the participation of the trades union bureaucrats, the better to exploit and control labour, for example, as with Mondism, or else it is simply revolutionary phrasemongering outside a condition of actual dual power in society.
"a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. Workers’ control consequently, can be carried out only under the condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavourable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.”
In reality, workers control is only a class wide demand that can be raised in the context of a political revolution, of demanding that the current control over socialised capital exercised by shareholders, and their executives be ended, as part of changing the laws on corporate governance, so as to ensure that control rests with the "associated producers", as collective owners of that socialised capital. It requires that the level of class consciousness of the working-class be at a very high level, and that it is prepared to mobilise its forces in a class wide battle that amounts to such a political revolution to bring into alignment the political superstructure with the reality of the underlying material conditions created by the development of this dominance of socialised capital.
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