Marx and Engels, and even Lenin and Trotsky could never have visualised the situation that exists, today. Indeed, in Anti-Duhring, Marx and Engels, noting this huge expansion of socialised capital, its requirement for state planning and regulation, and so on, at the same time that the capitalist class was reduced to a class of money-lenders, with no social function, naturally assumed that the working-class, leading the rest of society, would simply sweep them away, much as the bourgeoisie had swept away the landed aristocracy as its social function disappeared.
“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.
But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.”
(Anti-Duhring, p 358)
Unfortunately, every nation has put up with such barefaced exploitation, and worse. On the one hand, conservative social-democracy has rationalised such barefaced exploitation, by presenting the whole of society as, also, taking part in it. Even though the vast majority of fictitious-capital is owned by a tiny minority, and control of all of it, by that minority, is exercised via the banks and finance houses, it is presented as though we are all equally owners of it, via pension funds, mutual funds and so on. But, the state most certainly would not even countenance workers exercising control over the funds in their pension funds, for example, let alone, changing the law to prevent shareholders exercising control over capital they do not own, and vesting that democratic control with the associated producers that collectively do own that capital. Yet, in terms of consistent industrial democracy, this need for control by workers over their collective property is as glaring and necessary as was the demand for political democracy advanced by the Chartists, in the 19th century, or in the Revolutions of 1848.
If conservative social-democrats, as with Attlee, Wilson, and Heath in Britain, or their equivalents in Europe and North America, nationalise capital, they do so not for the benefit of workers, or to enable those workers to exercise their rightful control over their collective property, but purely for the benefit of capital as a whole. The nationalisation of Rolls Royce by Heath, and of the banks, in 2008, is an example. Yet, this state-capitalism, undertaken by even conservative social-democracy (as now, with Starmer's commitment to rail renationalisation) is pretty much the zenith of the aspirations of the progressive social-democrats, but also of most of the so called Left, which masquerades in the clothing of Marxism. The Militant Tendency, for example, was well known, and ridiculed, for its “socialist” agenda, of calling for the nationalisation of the 200 top monopolies, but all of these Left sects, call, at one time or another, for the capitalist state to nationalise this or that industry or enterprise, as though the capitalist state would ever do that in workers' interests, rather than the interests of capital.
But, worse than that. Rather than seeing this large-scale socialised capital as progressive, in the way that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky did, not only the progressive social democrats, but nearly all of the so called Left see it as the main object of their ire, as they have collapsed into the same kind of economic romanticism, and petty-bourgeois socialism of the kind of Sismondi, criticised by Marx and his followers. It is the basis of their “anti-capitalism”, expressed in calls for it to be hit by higher taxes than small business, and so on. Yet, if workers did have control of that capital, or, as with say a very large workers' cooperative, why on Earth would socialists want that to be more heavily taxed by the capitalist state, syphoning resources from it???
Rather than a struggle for consistent democracy, which, today, involves a demand for industrial democracy alongside a defence of political democracy, the Left, instead, looks to the capitalist state to fight its battles, to nationalise these companies, in the hope, or rather sowing the delusion, that, in doing so, “social control” over that capital is, then, somehow facilitated. Yet, everything we know, shows that no such social control is established, far less workers' control, and that, absent any such control, these state-capitalist enterprises become bureaucratic monstrosities, inefficient and run for the benefit of their higher echelons, and leached off by other, large companies. As with the various British nationalised industries, their inefficiency, poor quality of service, hierarchical and oppressive structure and inevitable failure (as was also the history of Stalinism), simply undermine the idea of socialism, and create the conditions for their future privatisation, and strengthening of the ideas of the superiority of the market.
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