At a time when the scale of production had burst through the fetters of the nation state, and required the creation of ever larger multinational states, this petty-bourgeois reaction demanded Brexit border controls, and when that inevitably, also, failed that reactionary dynamic meant an even greater historical reversion, leading to demands to break up even existing nation states.
The chickens of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist and Sismondist ideology of “the Left” came home to roost with a vengeance, but it has remained unable to free itself from that ideology. Engels, also, notes that there was nothing inherently socialist about the demand for nationalisation by the capitalist state. It was simply that at a certain point in the scale and development of socialised capital, it becomes inevitable, and only on that basis progressive.
“I say is constrained to. For it is only when the means of production or communication have actually outgrown direction by joint-stock companies, and, therefore, their nationalization has become economically inevitable — it is only then that this nationalization, even when carried out by the state of today — represents an economic advance, the attainment of another preliminary step towards the seizure of all the productive forces by society itself. But, since Bismarck became keen on nationalizing, a certain spurious socialism has recently made its appearance – here and there even degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism - that without more ado declares all nationalization, even the Bismarckian kind, to be socialistic. To be sure, if the nationalization of the tobacco trade were socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, constructed its own main railway lines, if Bismarck, without any economic compulsion, nationalized the main Prussian railway lines simply in order to be the better able to organize and use them in face of war, in order to train the railway officials as the government's voting cattle, and especially in order to secure a new source of revenue independent of parliamentary votes, such actions were in no sense socialistic measures, whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal Porcelain Manufacture, and even the regimental tailors of the army would also be socialistic institutions [or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in the thirties during the reign of Frederick William III, the nationalization of the brothels].” (Note *, p 359)
In the 1980's, for all those that had forgotten this ABC of Marxism, they were given a sharp reminder. As capital was overproduced, relative to labour supply, relative wages rose, relative profits fell. Rather than being the vehicle by which this crisis led to a rational solution, based on a transition to Socialism, the capitalist state, and the nationalised industries it controlled, became the main weapon in attacking the working-class. The bosses of those nationalised industries, appointed by the capitalist state, as their sole shareholders, were, of course, the same bosses who the day before, and the day after, were the bosses of the large corporations. In Britain, Michael Edwards at British Leyland, Iain McGregor at the National Coal Board, and so on, used the full force of the capitalist state, both its financial might, and its armed might, to defeat the strikes of the workers whose collective property they insisted be controlled by the state.
“If the crises revealed the bourgeoisie's incapacity to continue to administer the modern productive forces, the conversion of the large production and communication establishments into joint-stock companies [trusts] and state property shows that the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with for this purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now conducted by salaried employees. The capitalist no longer has any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clipping of coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so, now it is displacing the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, although not immediately to the industrial reserve army.” (p 359-60)
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