Lenin set out why, despite the “socialist” form of such projects, they are in fact, bourgeois.
“The bourgeois character of the utopia is beyond doubt: firstly, according to Mr. Yuzhakov’s “plan,” the secondary school remains a class school. And this after all the pompous phrases poured out by Mr. Yuzhakov “against” the class school in his first article!! One school for the rich, another for the poor; if you have money, pay for tuition—if you have not, work!” (p 480)
And, the same applies with the mercantilist projects of the type of the Moseley Memorandum, or AES. The enterprises continue to be capitalist enterprises, and continue to employ wage-labour. The AES included proposals for Planning Agreements, in which large corporations were encouraged to adopt a corporatist strategy of involving the trades unions (read trade union bureaucrats) but there was no requirement for them, only various bribes to corporations that did. As Trotsky wrote about this kind of corporatism disguised as workers control,
“If the participation of the workers in the management of production is to be lasting, stable, “normal,” it must rest upon class collaboration, and not upon class struggle. Such a class collaboration can be realized only through the upper strata of the trade unions and the capitalist associations. There have been not a few such experiments: in Germany (“economic democracy”), in Britain (“Mondism”), etc. Yet, in all these instances, it was not a case of workers’ control over capital, but of the subserviency of the labour bureaucracy to capital. Such subserviency, as experience shows, can last for a long time: depending on the patience of the proletariat.”
The proposals of The Moseley Memorandum, were described by Dick Crossman in 1961, as follows, "this brilliant memorandum was a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking." The contents of Mosely's book, The Greater Britain, could read as a manual for today's fascists and Labourite nationalists alike. In it he writes of the dangers of free trade in mercantilist terms that today's “anti-capitalists” and anti-globalisation proponents have more or less copied and pasted. The Memorandum, as with the AES, have nothing in common with Socialism, which seeks not to hold back such developments but seeks to encourage them, alongside the development of the greatest unity of workers themselves across borders.
The mercantilist proposals of the economic nationalists, as with the opposition to the EEC and in favour of Brexit, amount to nothing more than bourgeois economic nationalism that divides workers in one country from workers in other countries, and instead unites them with their own bourgeoisie. In fact, in a globalised economy, such proposals do not even unite the workers, in one country, with their own bourgeoisie, because that bourgeoisie has already become a global class, and its interests lie in the development of global capitalism – imperialism. In practice, what the proposals amount to is a reactionary demand that workers in each country unite with the petty bourgeoisie of their own country, on the basis of holding back the rational development of capital. It unites the workers in each country with that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie against both the bourgeoisie and against the workers of other countries.
As Lenin describes, this means that the petty-bourgeois socialists that propose such a course of action make themselves more reactionary than the bourgeoisie itself!
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