Labour and Nationalization

[p007] Labour and Nationalization WO QUESTIONS of major importance are to be debated at the annual conference of the Labour Party this year. Both questions concern the two great evils of capitalism, war and poverty. They are to be discussed under the headings of disarmament and nationalization. Disarmament and its related problems are touched on elsewhere in this issue. However the problem of peace is not so far removed from the prob- lem of nationalization as would at first appear, for both hinge on the question of who owns the means of pro- duction. Nationalization is not an abstract question, a mat- ter of dogma. The Tory Press today is doing its best to foster this idea, helped from time to time by such people . 132 as Winston Churchill and Sir Hartley Shawcross and Ted Leather. The capitalists no doubt have the view that it is their right to exploit labour, to accumulate vast wealth and power. These ‘rights’ they hold by vir- tue of some 160 years’ ownership and control of the total productive apparatus of the nation, so why should they bother with a theory? Moreover it would obviously be to the capitalists’ advantage if the ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange could be dismissed as a matter of no practical interest to the working class and unrelated to their daily struggles. The capitalists are assisted in their anti-social- ist propaganda by the ideas expressed in the official Labour Party document Industry and Society, around

[p008] which the struggle in the movement is likely to take place. This pamphlet is an outline of Labour’s policy for the movement in preparation for the next election. The Labour leadership have fired a cannon and shot out a pea. They begin with the quotation from the Labour Party constitution that the purpose of the party is to establish common ownership of the means of produc- tion, distribution and exchange under popular adminis- tration and control of each industry. They end by ad- vocating that a Labour government should become a purchaser of equity shares on the stock market. The argument differs from Sir Winston Churchill’s and Mr. Leather’s and the conclusions are of a kind which no true Tory would recognize. But the premise is the same. It is that nationalization is not necessary in the solution of the workers’ immediate problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. We agree one hundred per cent with the quotation from the Labour Party constitution. However it should be the axis of Labour’s policy now and not something which is put in the shop window to attract customers. Some forty-five sections of the Labour movement havz taken the trouble to draft and submit to this year’s -Labour Party conference resolutions on nationalization all of which agree with the attitude to nationalization summed up in the constitution. Moreover at nearly every trade union conference this year, including some which for long have been the main support of conser- vatism in the Labour Party, delegates and leaders too have strongly advocated nationalization. Obviously it is no abstract question. When the Labour Government nationalized steel and when it proposed to take over sugar, cement and water supplies in its new term of office every legal device (and some not so legal) was used in an attempt to frus- trate the purpose of the Labour movement. One recalls the unlimited supplies of cash which were poured out in the campaign around ‘Mr. Cube’, the advertisements of the road hauliers and the building rings, the refusal of the steel kings to serve on the board of the nationalized industry and the baying of the Tory pack in Parliament against nationalization measures. The attack was too much for the Labour leaders. They wilted and resigned, allowing the Tories to return to office to strip the British Transport Commission of road transport and to dis- mantle the public ownership of steel. The attempts of sections of the workers to fight against denationaliza- tion measures were frustrated by the leaders, who preached sermons on containing the struggle within ‘constitutional’ bounds. Today the Right-wing leaders, on a new tack, foster: the view that nationalization is not necessary, that such large combines as Imperial Chemical Industries and Unilever manage their affairs in a rational, efficient manner, ploughing back the greater part of the profit, re-equipping the industries, encouraging research. This argument parallels the attempts of Fabian theorists to prove that capitalism does not now necessarily lead to slump, that the workers are not ‘increasingly impover- ished’ and that Labour has plenty of time in which to achieve an amicable compromise in the best British traditions. The workers, however, are not visibly im- pressed. The crisis in the car industry in 1956 destroyed much of the complacency they may have had about the possibility of unemployment. No Fabian theorist has yet 133 applied his theory to this event. The strikes in engineer- ing and transport which followed were fought as though capital and Labour fully realized their antagonism. The fact that the Transport Commission owned some 60 per cent of the assets of provincial bus companies had not prevented the wages of busmen from being depressed. The engineers are now asking whether 10 per cent hold- ings in the British Motor Corporation would have ade- quately safeguarded the 6,000 workers who were fired. last year. Or in Standard Motors? Certainly 10 per cent government shareholdings would inflate the value of industrial shares and some City gentlemen would make a fortune. But the workers cannot be expected to wax enthusiastic at the news that among those benefiting from the exploitation of his labour the State is included to the extent of 10 per cent, or that when he is sacked he is thanked for his services by a government department. The National Executive’s shareholding proposals. are built on false foundations. In the document, of course, they refer to monopolies and to the domination of industry by the finance companies. These ideas were expressed far more clearly by Lenin in Imperialism forty years ago. However, whereas Lenin drew from his analysis the conclusion that the working class must struggle for political power and for ownership of the means of production, the NEC, like true liberals, con- clude that what is necessary is not more class struggle but more class collaboration. . The NEC argue that capitalism has largely solved the question of slump, at least within the internal mar- ket. This leads to the assumption that the last seventeen or eighteen years of capital expansion are typical of modern capitalism and that therefore the rate of capital accumulation will continue to rise. There is also an oblinue reference to a new form of society. But the NEC’s great new discovery is that the board rooms are no longer dominated by the profit motive. It declares that ‘the influence of private ownership in the large firms, as far as management, production and growth are concerned, is small’. The managers’ concern ‘is with production as much as with profits and with expansion far more than with dividends’. ‘Large firms as a whole are serving the nation well,’ declares the NEC, and it repeats the tribute twice in the pamphlet. It is determined that benighted class-ridden rank and filers will be purged of all ideas that monopoly capital- ism is an exploiting society. But let the workers place the claims to ownership in the board room and the directors will man the barricades. Never in the history of capitalism has any capitalist handed over ownership of a factory or mine or railway to the workers. On the contrary they have always fought bitterly against the idea of public ownership, seeing in it the gap through which can flow the revolutionary will of the working- class. Industry and Society states: “Roughly three per cent of the population enjoy at least 50 per cent of the capi-. tal gains.’ This three per cent constitute the hard core of the capitalist class. Their control of the industrial wealth operates in the main through the banks and fin- ance houses and in this way they direct policy. Not only does this sector determine the policy of the big com- bines; it also constitutes the real power behind the Tory government. Such people cannot be tricked out of their wealth by fancy formulas or by juggling around with stocks and shares. If the Labour Party constitution’s aim

[p009] of social ownership is to be realized then the capitalist class must be fought. ‘ _ The problems of the working class cannot be re- solved by a simple stroke of the pen. The real struggle on the factory floor stubbornly refuses to be ‘resolved’ by comfortable Fabian formulas. Is not the fight for more nationalization part of the class struggle, an ex- tension, in fact, of the fight which goes on in the factory? Contrary to the declarations of the Right wing, the capitalist is not inattentive to his ownership and control on the factory floor. Every militant shop steward knows that no matter how well organized the workers in the factory may be, there is a point beyond which militant industrial action is not enough. This is also understood by the capitalist class, which may give this or that con- cession, but will fight bitterly to maintain its ownership and control. For the working class, therefore, nationali- zation presents itself as a political act, the aim of which is to strengthen its own position in the industrial struggle. By this means the British workers seek to carry through the struggle against the evils of the system of exploitation and its attendant market chaos. In the trade union movement, nationalization pre- sents itself as a question of control—not abstractly, in the form of who owns most shares, but concretely, from the point of view of the class struggle. The workers argue that with the extension of nationalization to the rest of industry the trade union movement could demand a real plan of production and through this an end to threats of unemployment and, perhaps, a shorter working day. The trade union movement has noted the successes of even the limited planning achieved in those industries already _ lenge to capitalism. nationalized. It has however also noted the failure of the miners and the railwaymen to achieve any real con- trol over their own production. The NEC brushes aside this question as syndicalist nonsense and substitutes in place of workers’ control the hoary formula consulta- tions—a word detested in every nationalized industry. Consultation places the worker in exactly the same re- lation to the boss as he was before, a mere adjunct to the machine, whereas the worker is aiming for control of the factory, control of the productive process and liberation from the bonds of wage labour. To this end nationalization is the political form through which the workers now seek to press the attack against capitalism. There are of course doctrinaires who argue that nationalization is not socialism, that it is simply State capitalism, exploitation in another form. Strictly speak- ing they are right. The National Coal Board and British Railways are not yet socialism. Few in the Labour move- ment as yet are quite clear about what is meant by socialism. But what is of far greater importance than the sermonizing of the sectarians is that the Labour movement now pours into the demand for nationaliza- tion a class content which is clashing with the reformist policies of the Labour leaders. By this means, the workers are moving forward towards a decisive chal- The tasks of Marxists today are,-first, to strip the liberal mask from the programme of Fabianism and to expose it as one more form of class collaboration. Secondly, they must arm the movement with the pro- gramme of class struggle for the nationalization of all the major industries without compensation and with workers’ control.