By Joe Higgins: from The Socialist, October 2008
In a matter of weeks, governments in the United States, Britain and Belgium have nationalised major banks and financial institutions to save them from collapsing and with them the world’s capitalist financial system. This represents a stunning reversal of the policies advocated and implemented by the capitalist class and its political representatives, in particular over the last thirty years.
To appreciate the ideological defeat this represents –and the breathtaking hypocrisy as well – you need to think back to the philosophy espoused in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US. To a cacophony of cheers from world business leaders and media, this duo reviled the idea that government had a social responsibility to build a society that was fair and equal. The subsidisation of public enterprises and services was also reviled. Instead, deregulation and privatisation were to become the order of the day. The forces of the ‘free market’ would be the regulator.
These trends were intensified in the 1990s after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. Not at all socialist, but based on public ownership of their economies, their demise was supposedly the end of the very idea of a socialist alternative. There was now no alternative to free market capitalism and furthermore there would be no more crises such as the Great Depression.
This was the background to the presidency of George W. Bush and the cabal of neo conservatives who accompanied him to Washington in 2001. They epitomised the hostility to subsidisation of public programmes and eulogised a market, red in tooth and claw. Until the last few weeks that is, when the market began to disintegrate.
Suddenly billionaire shareholders were transformed into latter day Olivers, with gigantic begging bowls outstretched for the very public subsidisation which they had so denigrated. And Bush and other right wing leaders saved their bacon by bringing them into public ownership. So, in a few weeks, under the impact of events, thirty years of ideological propaganda was stood on its head. After decades of advocating privatisation the biggest nationalisations in their histories were being implemented by the great privatisers.
Of course these nationalisations are being implemented in order to save the capitalist system, not destroy it. They will subsidise these institutions and, if they can, sometime in the future quietly return them to the shareholders whose greed caused the crisis in the first place.
Socialists have always argued that major banks and financial institutions should be taken into public ownership and run under democratic control and management. Institutions which have such a massive role in the economy and society should not be the creatures of private interests driven by the accumulation of private profit. Rather they should be run in the interests of the common good of society. Furthermore the huge profits they generate, based on the funds of millions of ordinary people, should be devoted to investment in society and for social ends.
We also call for the nationalisation of major industry and natural resources under workers control and management. This makes possible the planning of production to meet the needs of society. There are sufficient resources on this planet to feed, clothe and shelter every human being and to lay the basis for a decent and dignified life for all. It is control of these resources by powerful transnational corporations seeking private profit which prevents this happening today.
The current crisis in the financial system and the forced response of the business and political establishment massively weakens their authority in society and undermines the neo liberal ideology and policies which they have pushed relentlessly. This should be a signal for workers and the organised labour movement to go on the offensive.
Up to 70,000 workers have lost their jobs this year, many of them in companies which either closed down or moved to cheaper labour economies in order to increase profits. Any future threat of large scale redundancies should be met with demands for taking the relevant enterprises into public ownership and running them under workers control. If it’s the correct solution for millionaire bankers whose system is causing the convulsions in the world economy, then workers deserve no less. And the trade union movement should be prepared to launch serious campaigns to protect jobs in this way while also linking this with the need for the socialist transformation of society.
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