In the cooperatives the nature of socialised capital, as collective property of the producers is obvious, but, in the joint stock company, it is not. It is shrouded in the mystery and outward forms of shareholders, who, in reality, are nothing more than creditors of the company, as with a bank, bondholder, supplier of materials or a landlord. The material reality of this relation is out of alignment with its superficial appearance, and legal forms. The shareholders are given control over the capital of the firm, even though they do not own it, and, thereby, the actual owners of that capital, the associated producers within the company, are denied control over their collective property.
Even the ideologists of the bourgeoisie recognise the reality of that relation, as set out 30 years ago by Kay and Silberston.
“But none of this means that the owners of BT shares own BT – after all, investors own BT bonds, landlords own BT premises, and lessors own BT equipment, but no-one would suggest that BT itself is owned by these investors, landlords or lessors. The claim that BT is owned by its shareholders implies that there is something special about their contract with the company which means that they are owners, not just of that contract, but of the company itself.”
Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, say that the property question is central to the class struggle, and the program that communists must advance, and that property question, today, is why do the non-owners (shareholders) of capitals have control over them, whereas the collective owners of that capital, i.e. the associated producers in each company, are deprived of it?
Yet, both reformists/syndicalists and revolutionaries fail to raise this property question that even the bourgeois ideologists themselves have recognised. Indeed, reformists, syndicalists and revolutionaries alike, seem to accept the illusion that the capitals are owned by shareholders, rather than them being merely creditors of the company. The reformists, if they want to challenge ownership, think they must nationalise what are already socialised capitals, and compensate shareholders, whereas revolutionaries think that it is still necessary to seize these companies from the shareholders, in some spectacular revolutionary act, failing to see that the act of expropriating the expropriators actually happened more than a century ago! Its not ownership that is required, but legal control of what is already collectively owned.
The reformists/syndicalists, bogged down in a bourgeois economic struggle over distribution can only think in terms of trying to improve workers' immediate wages and conditions, which means, necessarily, subordinating workers' interests to the ebbs and flows of the market, and its consequences for the needs of capital. At best, the Left reformists see their role as promoting one form of socialised capital (statised capitalist property) over another (joint stock companies).
Even then, they see that in terms of the capitalist state buying from shareholders property that is already the collective property of the workers not shareholders. What they buy is not the socialised capital, but the shares. For the workers themselves, this is no step forward, because it does not give them control over their collective property. On the contrary, it now appears even more not to be their property, but the property of the capitalists state, even though, in reality, the state itself is now merely the creditor of the company rather than the former shareholders. And, now, the state is itself indebted to that same class of money-lending capitalists, who make up the bulk of share and bondholders. They now lend to the state by buying its bonds, simply in order for the state to lend to the company.
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