As Marx sets out in Capital III, the socialised capital is the collective property of the associated producers (i.e. the workers in each enterprise), and so consequently, the ruling class owners of interest bearing capital stand in an antagonistic relation to them, not as, in the past, capital – labour, but as owners of interest bearing capital to collective owners of industrial capital, of interest to profit of enterprise.
The interests of workers, as collective owners of that socialised capital, is to minimise the amount going to interest/dividends, but in the joint stock companies, they do not exercise control over that capital. It has been legally vested in its non-owners, i.e. the shareholders, and they have used that control, as yields on their assets fell, to compensate by devoting an increasing portion of profits to dividends, as described by Haldane, from 10% in the 1970's to around 70% today. A truly progressive social-democratic policy, therefore, would seek to change that.
The obvious means of doing so is that the unjustified position of shareholders exercising control over property they do not own should be ended. But, to demand that shareholders lose their control over companies, and that, instead, companies should be democratically controlled by their collective owners, the workers and managers in the company, is tantamount to demanding the socialist revolution, because the ruling class would not simply give up such control voluntarily.
That does not mean Marxists should not advocate it, as part of our programme, of socialist revolution, just as we do not have to immediately raise the demand for soviets, whilst noting their necessity for the success of the revolution. In the meantime, as I have suggested, elsewhere, in place of the petty-bourgeois attack on large-scale capital, represented by demands for increased taxes on corporate profits, Marxists should advocate lower, or no Corporation Tax, but much higher taxes on dividends, so that encouragement is given for companies to retain profits/maximise profit of enterprise, for capital accumulation, rather than paying them out to cover the revenues of shareholders.
It is not only as collective owners of socialised capital, however, that workers have an interest in maximising the profit of enterprise at the expense of interest/dividends. As Marx describes in Wage-Labour and Capital, under capitalism, the best conditions for workers exist, where the economy is growing and capital is accumulating more rapidly. Its in those conditions that more labour is employed, where greater stability for workers is created, and where this increased demand for labour makes possible higher wages. But, so long as capitalism, and commodity production and exchange persists, the underlying contradiction between capital and labour also persists, as Marx sets out, whether that capital is owned by a private capitalist, or collectively by the workers themselves.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
The workers, must still maximise the production of surplus value/profit, so as to maximise their own ability to accumulate additional capital, and thereby, to gain market share, and retain efficiency.
The ruling class also has an enemy in the petty-bourgeoisie, because the petty-bourgeoisie represents the remnants of the old petty commodity producers, and private capital. It clings to all of the outmoded facets of that past society that large-scale socialised capital has grown out of, such as the attachment to the nation state, as witnessed in the petty-bourgeois campaign for Brexit. So, although the working-class, as the collective owners of socialised capital, stands in opposition to the ruling-class, as owners of interest-bearing capital (fictitious-capital), whilst the petty-bourgeoisie also stands in opposition to that ruling class, there is no basis for the working-class, in any way, seeing the petty-bourgeoisie as its friend or ally against the ruling class.
The working-class stands in opposition to the ruling class because the latter has become conservative, and a fetter on further rational development of capital. It wants to move beyond the constraints that the ruling class place on that development. The petty-bourgeoisie, on the other hand, stands in opposition to the ruling class, from the opposite perspective. It sees the development of that large-scale capital, upon which the ruling class and its state ultimately depends, as already having gone too far. It wants to turn history back to a more primitive condition, of private capital, and the independent nation state, a condition which is a reactionary delusion, and impossible to achieve, which is why Brexit, in whatever format it is presented, is reactionary and doomed to fail.
All of Starmer's and Blue Labour's perspective, which is based upon that petty-bourgeois perspective, and attempts, purely for opportunistic and electoral considerations, to appease and appeal to those reactionary petty-bourgeois sentiments, is equally doomed to fail.
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