Indeed, as Kautsky points out, such nationalisation puts the workers in a worse position, as British Miners, and US Air Traffic controllers found, in 1984, when they were involved in industrial action against such a state, acting as their employer.
“The modern state assumes these functions often simply because otherwise the interests of the ruling class would be endangered with those of society as a whole, but under no circumstances has it assumed, or could it ever assume, these functions in such a manner as to endanger the overlordship of the capitalist class.
If the modern state nationalizes 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, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.
The state has never carried on the nationalizing 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 nationalization 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 process involves also increasingly giving way to planning and regulation, both because monopolies/oligopolies plan their production, but also because, without such regulation, the huge levels of investment would be too risky. The planning occurs both at the enterprise level, and the state level. It requires the size of the state itself to become ever larger, and for existing nation states to be dissolved and to give way to multinational states, illustrating the utopian/reactionary nature of liberal demands for the creation of new nation states, and continuation of existing ones under cover of “self-determination”. The rational development is for planning and regulation at a global level, as indicated by the creation of global para state bodies like the IMF, WTO, World Bank etc., but the same contradictions that hindered a smooth transition to the nation state, and from it to the multinational states, stands in the way of such rational development, which only the global working-class, under Socialism, will bring about.
But, already, the degree of planning and regulation is extensive, and sufficient for a transition to Socialism. In his Critique of the Erfurt Programme, Engels wrote,
“I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”
Since then, that has increased enormously, as Simon Clarke described even 30 years ago.
“Indeed it would be fair to say that the sphere of planning in capitalism is much more extensive than it is in the command economies of the soviet bloc. The scope and scale of planning in giant corporations like Ford, Toyota, GEC or ICI dwarfs that of most, if not all, of the Soviet Ministries. The extent of co-ordination through cartels, trade associations, national governments and international organisations makes Gosplan look like an amateur in the planning game. The scale of the information flows which underpin the stock control and ordering of a single Western retail chain are probably greater than those which support the entire Soviet planning system.”
(Capital and Class, Winter 1990)
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