Of course, as I have set out previously, the idea of increasing taxes on large-scale capital is not only utopian, but itself reactionary, a reflection of a petty-bourgeois mindset. The progressive social-democratic approach would, instead, be to remove the right of shareholders to control capital they do not own, and to give that right to the collective owners of that capital, the workers in the respective corporations. Those workers would have no reason to export that capital. It would also make possible the taxation, not of the profits, but of any unearned income by share and bond holders.
However, again, to do so would mean to declare open class war on the ruling class. The idea that any national government, be it in Britain, France or anywhere else could do that without the global ruling class responding in kind is utopian. That global ruling class would throw all it had into removing such a government, and would inevitably succeed unless workers in other countries came to its rescue, and pursued the same course. Again, for Britain that is inseparable from re-joining the EU, and a struggle with other EU workers for a Workers' Europe. Commencing that struggle only after the ruling class has mobilised its forces is to invite disaster, as most recently, also, Greece discovered.
As I wrote at the time of the EU Referendum, the Marxist argument for voting Remain could not be that presented by Cameron, the Liberals or Blair, which was a bourgeois, social-democratic argument, based on national self-interest, i.e. the interest of British capital, and therefore, free free trade and the rule of market forces. The Marxist argument, rather, was, and is, that to defend workers' interests, be they British, French, German etc. workers, requires those workers to unite across the EU, as a European working-class to confront European capital. Removing outdated national borders is as important for that, in the age of imperialism, as was the removal of the old provincial barriers in the 19th century, so as to create the nation states.
As Lenin and Trotsky described, where Marxists joined with workers and peasants in those national revolutions, in the 19th century, and early 20th century, it was not because they supported, or had any illusions in that bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, but that they recognised that a large proportion of the masses did, and that the way too divest the masses of those illusions was to go through that struggle with them, to show that the only means of achieving even the limited aims of those bourgeois revolutions was by the masses creating their own independent organisations – parties, trades unions, factory committees and workers' councils/soviets.
Where we get our own representatives elected to parliaments, we use that tribune again to expose the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy, and of the bourgeois workers parties. We refuse to engage in all of the parliamentary routinism and chicanery, and, instead, at every opportunity, use those positions to support workers engaged in struggle. Even when we have large numbers of such representatives, we refuse to join the government, or form a government, or government coalitions, instead adopting the position of extreme opposition. That is true even when we call on the reformist and centrist workers' parties, the Stalinists and Anarchists, to form a Workers' Government, and demand that it break with the bourgeoisie, and represent workers' interests, as the Bolsheviks did in 1917, when they demand of Kerensky's government “Down With The Capitalist Ministers”.
In relation to the EU, we also know that a majority of workers do not, yet, understand the sham nature of bourgeois-democracy. Indeed, it is that fact that enabled the Brexiters to seize upon the democratic deficiencies of the EU, and, opportunistically, sell the lie that British bourgeois-democracy was an alternative to it. Some backward workers, and more or less the whole petty-bourgeoisie bought that lie, even though many of them quickly learned that they had been lied to, by Fartage and Johnson, as Brexit not only failed to deliver what had been promised, but led to one ill-effect after another on their lives. But, even for the majority of workers who were not taken in by that lie, and who voted Remain, they did so on the basis of another lie, the lie sold by Cameron, Clegg and Blair that the EU, as it stood, as a bourgeois-democratic, capitalist Europe, was itself the answer to their problems.
It clearly wasn't, but what the EU, even in its capitalist form, does is to clear away a lot of the barriers that stand in the way of workers creating the solution to their problems. As Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky described, even the creation of freer, more rational conditions for the development of capital is, itself, progressive, and facilitates the transition to Socialism. We are not petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, or “anti-capitalists”, seeking to hold back or reverse capitalist development. We do not see less mature forms of capital as preferable to its mature forms in the shape of monopolies and multinational corporations. Quite the contrary. These mature forms, as socialised capital, Marx explains, in Capital III, Chapter 27, are the collective property of the workers in those companies. They are the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. But, also, because of their size, and need to plan and regulate their production, they must also draw on all of those aspects of the encroaching socialist future that requires a close relation to the state, which must also incorporate this contradiction within itself.
The fact that these mammoth capitals must, themselves, burst out of the reactionary constraints of the nation state, becoming multinational and transnational companies, itself acts to unite the workers of these corporations across national borders. But, this same requirement drives the requirement to establish ever larger single markets, such as the EU, within the framework of a multinational state, which becomes the minimum adequate political form in the era of imperialism, just as the nation state was in the era of privately owned, competitive, free market capitalism. All of these features of imperialism, and of the multinational state are, also, features required by socialism.
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