Chapter IX. Karl Marx and Nationalisation

It is only necessary to examine these proposals put forward in 1848 to see that in purpose and in method they have no resemblance, beyond an accidental resemblance of phrases, to the nationalisation proposals put forward to-day by those who accept the continuance of State Capitalism, with its property incomes, wages system, buying and selling, and so on. Marx and Engels, since they proposed these measures as methods of encroaching on the capitalist class in the period immediately after the workers had gained political supremacy of course did not contemplate any form of “compensation”.

They envisaged the advent of Socialism and were therefore not considering (as advocates of nationalisation do to-day) the continuance of class divisions in society and of the existing State power by which the propertied class protects its privilege and property. The 10 proposals by Marx and Engels were immediately followed by a paragraph in which they outlined the socialist view of the abolition of classes :–

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class ; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

Above all it cannot be emphasized too much that Marx and Engels in 1848, and throughout their lives, perceived that Socialism necessarily involves the abolition of the system of wage-labour : the modern advocates of nationalisation rarely, if ever, even recognise that that step is practicable, let alone a necessity. This applies among others to the defenders of the system of State Capitalism that is being developed in Russia, with its permanent features of investment by individual investors in State bonds, its right of inheritance, and its great and growing inequality of income received by the various grades and social strata in the Russian system.