Starmer and Blue Labour look set to nationalise the “British” Steel plant in Scunthorpe. As with many other things, recently, the issue has been hastened by the actions of Trump's regime in the US, and, in particular, his decision to slap 25% tariffs on UK exports of steel, aluminium, and cars to the US, despite all of the claims that Starmer's Brexit Britain had some mythical advantage of nimbleness to suck up to him, or as Trump put it, “kiss his ass”. In fact, the US tariffs are not the reason that “British” Steel is not globally competitive, and Scunthorpe is closing. The real reason is that it simply cannot mobilise the huge amounts of real capital required to produce on an efficient scale in the era of imperialism, and it can't do that, because, in turn, it does not have a large enough domestic market to sell into that China, or the EU, does. Again, the proximate reason for the failure of “British” Steel, like the “British” fishing industry, is that Brexit caused Britain to deliberately cut itself out of that large domestic, single market of the EU.
The example of “British” Steel at Scunthorpe illustrates a lot of important issues. One of them, obviously, is that alluded to above, which is that, in the era of imperialism/large-scale, socialised industrial capital, the scale of production, required for efficiency, becomes so large that it bursts the fetters of the old nation state, and requires equally large single markets to sell into. As Lenin described it, following Marx and Engels' analysis in Capital III/Anti-Duhring/Socialism Utopian and Scientific, this socialised capital takes the form of state monopoly capitalism. Those single markets must, then, be multinational just as the national markets replaced the old regional/provincial markets of the pre-capitalist era. The rationale of that is to have a single, multinational state that creates the required set of rules, laws, regulations and so on, for capital to operate on a level playing field within, but which also acts to protect the capital operating within it, against capital operating within other states. It was on that basis that the EU was established, and one of its forerunners was the European Coal and Steel Community.
The other aspect of this large-scale, industrial capital, analysed by Marx and Engels, is that it could no longer be privately owned capital. Even the largest, wealthiest, private capitalists could no longer provide the required money-capital to operate on such a scale, as became obvious, for example, in the case of the railways, in Britain, even in the early part of the 19th century. To operate on an efficient scale, the capital itself had to become socialised, in the form of joint stock companies (corporations) or cooperatives, in which the company itself, as a legal entity, owns the capital, and simply borrows the money-capital it requires, via one means or another (bank loans, the issue of shares, bonds and so on). This socialised capital is, then, not the property of any individual, or of the people who lend money, equipment or land and property to it, but is the collective property of the associated producers within it, at any given time, much as an orchestra or a company of actors is constituted of the musicians and actors within it.
Formerly, the owners of real, industrial capital, obtained their revenue in the form of profits, but the collective owners of socialised capital, the associated producers, i.e. workers, including those professional, white collar workers who constitute the “functioning capitalists”, who manage and administer it on a daily basis, are, like all workers paid wages. The profit, now becomes, simply the means by which this socialised capital is able to accumulate additional capital, but a large part of it, is now drained from it, as interest, by the private capitalists/ruling class that have now become a parasitic class of money-lenders, and coupon clippers.
Objectively, those that are simply shareholders in a company, do not “own” the company, they only own share certificates/debt instruments, they are only its creditors, just as with the bondholders, a bank that lends it money, or an equipment leasing company that lends it machines and so on. That fact has been established in legal cases on several occasions, and is, also, evidenced by the fact that these creditors, including shareholders, have no liability for any losses that the company itself might suffer from its operations, unlike the case with privately owned capital. And yet, as ruling class, the capitalists who, as a class, removed themselves from the private ownership of real capital, and any social function in production, and became a class of money-lenders, coupon-clippers and speculators, owners not of real capital, but fictitious-capital, in the 19th century, ensured themselves, by company law, the right to still exercise control over this capital they did not own.
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