Of course, dealing with that problem, of lack of workers' control, is not resolved by simply handing over that control from one group of shareholders to another, and, that includes the capitalist state as shareholder, which is what happens with nationalisation. The simple proof of that is to look at what happened with other nationalisations. When the capitalist state nationalised coal, steel, transport, and other industries after WWII, it did not give any additional control over that capital to workers. Rather the opposite, as the workers soon found, as the state closed down hundreds of coal mines, throwing the miners on the dole, a process that continued for decades after, until they were all gone. As Karl Kautsky noted,
“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, ii 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.”
There is, as Kautsky, and before him Marx and Engels, set out, nothing socialist about nationalisation, per se, and certainly not when it is done by the capitalist state, as I set out some time ago, That is why Marxists do not propose such nationalisation by the capitalist state. But, as I also set out, the fact that we do not propose such nationalisation by the capitalist state, and explain why there is nothing remotely socialist about it, that does not mean that we oppose such nationalisation, when it occurs, as the ultra-Lefts, and sterile sectarians would have us do. Marx dealt with such sterile nonsense, in his article, “Political Indifferentism”, in which he notes that, as Marxists, we are not in favour of such state ownership, and interference, by the capitalist state, we are in favour of collective workers ownership and control, via cooperatives, and ultimately, as part of a cooperative commonwealth, but does that mean that if the capitalist state intervenes and provides “free” state education, or healthcare and so on, that we would tell workers not to use it, and to oppose it? Of course not. We would, however, continue to set out the limitations, and real nature of such nationalistic and statist solutions, and, although we might argue and support demands and struggles for the “democratic control” of such state enterprises, we would also point out why the capitalist state will never agree to any such control, short of it being forced on them by a proletariat in the throws of seizing state power, arms in hand.
We also, tell workers that going on strike will never, ultimately, resolve their problems, because those problems reside in the lack of their control over the means of production, i.e. the property question. But, we certainly do not tell them, therefore, not to go on strike, in the meantime, to defend their wages – as, for example, the likes of Proudhon did – because, as Marx sets out in Value, Price and Profit, if workers cannot even do that, they have little chance of developing the class consciousness, and organisation required to assert their right to become the ruling-class. And, as Lenin, wrote later, for example, in On Strikes, whilst strikes over wages and conditions are not acts of class struggle, but only distributional struggle, the fact of the workers' organisation within the trades union, and the lessons learned during such strikes, combined with the intervention of Marxists within them, provide the basis for real class struggle, for the workers, as a class, to address the property question.
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