State Ownership Vs. Workers’ Ownership: A Marxist Viewpoint

[dcsmart]

for those of you who read my posts--thank you to all, i hope they are informative--probably realize from the source sites, which are usually socialist, that whenever possible i have to bring Marx into the picture. i think this article is great because it addresses the idea of nationalization and what it would mean to workers and why Marxism begins and ends with the struggle of workers for control over the means of production since they are the ones that ultimately produce the wealth.

So, where workers are struggling for nationalization or some other form of State control, for example Municipalisation, Marxists support such struggles to their best ability, but they do not raise the demand for nationalization or Municipalisation themselves. Rather they engage in such struggles, to “stick with the workers”,
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4.) The position of Marxists is the same as that they take to workers engaged in, say, a wage struggle. If workers are fighting for higher pay, Marxists make themselves the best supporters of such a struggle, but in so doing they take the opportunity to explain to workers that they will repeatedly have to engage in such struggles for higher pay, so long as the Capitalists own the means of production. Moreover, any victory will be short lived. The capitalists at the earliest opportunity will take back what they have been forced to concede. Workers living standards can only rise in line with what is compatible with Capitalist development. Only by owning the means of production themselves can they avoid such repeated struggles, and inevitable defeats, along with the loss of production and wealth that go with them, the damage done to other workers who are affected by the loss of production caused by the strike etc.
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The demand for Workers’ Ownership, and for Workers’ Self-Management based on that ownership is then fundamental to revolutionary strategy for a number of reasons.

1.) Workers need ownership of the means of production in order to build their own economic and social power within society on a more stable basis than could ever be achieved simply by wage struggles.

2.) Workers’ ownership provides the fundamental requirement for developing Workers Control of production.

3.) Workers’ Ownership demonstrates to workers that production can be successfully undertaken without the organizing and directing force of either individual capitalists or their State.

4.) On the basis of Workers’ Ownership real solutions can be offered to the real problems of workers here and now rather than offering workers solutions based upon action by the Capitalist State, or solutions which basically tell workers that nothing can be done until the Revolution.

5.) On the basis of Workers’ Ownership, workers in Co-operative enterprises are not only led to the requirement to actively participate in the management of their enterprise, but as shareholders in that business they have a direct pecuniary interest in doing so.

6.) Out of Co-operative enterprise, and the Workers’ Control that flows from it, workers not only learn that they do not need bosses, but learn that they can run society more effectively than can the capitalists. They learn that the profit motive is not the only basis on which enterprises can act, and from the lessons learned in acting co-operatively within a single enterprise, follows logically the lesson that even greater benefits flow from a range of enterprises, communities and other organizations working co-operatively rather than competing against each other.

7.) On the basis of the fundamental changes in the relations of production that such co-operative enterprise brings about flows necessarily a different set of ideas, ideas based on co-operation not competition. On this basis is laid the foundations of challenging bourgeois ideas, and by winning the battle of democracy within the working class, as Marx put it, the starting point of positing socialist ideas as the ideas of the new ruling class, of placing the working class in its vast majority as the conscious force which not only recognizes the need to demolish the old, but the need for it to construct the new. A construction based on its own tried and tested Co-operative forms created not from on high by some State, but as Marx suggested by its own hand.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://theactivist.org/blog/state-ownership-vs-workers-ownership-a-marxist-viewpoint

[B Whale]

1. Over here in the UK we have a longstanding

and proud co-operative movement (as you probably know)

Since the financial crisis more people have been looking towards them for their banking needs as a trusted institution. they always used to be the heart of working clas communities when i was growing up. Everyone had their divvy (dividend) card that increased their share of the business the more they used it.

It is untainted by tthe recent crisis as it is non-profit and is grwoing in popularity and confidence (it has even been running a national advert on telly for the past few weeks with 'blowin in the wind' as a soundtrack, its brilliant).

Our government in their wisdom are seeking currently to part privatise the royal mail to the fury of the public, but an encouraging sign is this from the Unions as an answer, a peoples bank run from the post office at the heart of communities, and it looks like it might be on the cards. http://www.cwu.org/42032/people-s-bank.html

[amyrose2712]

2. Thanks for posting here...

I too, am happy to see more activity here.