The failure to address that property question, indeed even to understand it, has left the working-class effectively leaderless. On the one hand, social-democracy and social-democratic parties, in the 20th century, emphasised the common interest of labour and capital. Indeed, as Marx sets out in Wage-Labour and Capital, so long as you assume the continued existence of capital, that is true. The workers interest is that of capital too, for a continued accumulation of capital, so that more labour is employed, which creates the best conditions for their wages to rise, not only from the fact of being fully employed, but also because of rising social productivity and an expansion of the range of goods and services they can consume, as Marx describes in The Civilising Mission of Capital. It also means that, as their employment expands towards full employment, their bargaining position is strengthened, so that not only do nominal and real wages rise, but also relative wages.
However, as Marx describes, in Wage-Labour and Capital, and in Capital III, Chapter 15, it is, then, precisely this rise in relative wages, whose concomitant is a fall in relative profits, i.e. a profits squeeze, as seen in the 1960's/70's, which creates a crisis of overproduction of capital. The first consequence is that the smaller, least efficient capitals, the plethora of petty bourgeois producers – whose profit margins were already below the average – go bust. To the extent they employ workers, they are laid off. The consequence is, the, also, an overproduction of commodities, even where none existed previously, because the firms that have gone bust no longer buy from their suppliers (as Marx puts it, capital itself is physically composed of commodities), and their workers no longer have wages to finance their own consumption.
So, the affluence of the workers, in these best of all conditions, turns, for many of them, into the cause of their own misery. Moreover, the underlying cause of the crisis of overproduction of capital was the shortage of labour, causing relative wages to rise, and so relative profits to fall. To respond to it, capital is led to engage in a technological revolution, to raise productivity, and to replace labour with machines. Again, that was seen in the 1970's, with the microchip revolution. Consequently, as long as capitalism continues, and so long as the working-class does not have control over its own collective property – the large-scale socialised capital – it is doomed to repeat the cycle of prosperity, full employment/boom, crisis, and unemployment.
Social-democracy, and reformist socialism/Menshevism, cannot offer any solution, therefore, but, at the other pole there are the “revolutionary” sects, who can only offer the illusion of some repeat of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or worse a version of the Peasant Wars, such as that in China in 1949, of Vietnam, Cuba, and so on. All of which are based on the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and not the industrial proletariat. But, that petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry can never form the ruling-class, because of its atomised and heterogeneous nature. It always results in chaos, crisis and Bonapartism. It can be see as a result of Brexit and Trump, today. But, the victory of Trump, Brexit and other petty-bourgeois nationalist movements is, itself, a consequence of the failure of Marxists to offer a real analysis and solution to the property question, turning themselves, simply, into more militant wings of social-democracy, and proponents of bourgeois, trades union consciousness.
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