Lastly, in order to complete the picture, there are the State-operated concerns such as the Post Office in this country and railways and other undertakings in some other countries, and the numerous water, gas, electricity, tram and bus undertakings operated by Town and County Councils.

 These State and Municipal undertakings are financed by loans bearing various fixed rates of interest and the investors, while sure of their income, do not have the right of exercising control over the way the undertaking is run such as is possessed by shareholders in a private company.

The advocates of these State or Municipal undertakings argue that they are free from the “profit motive” and that they are run solely to serve the public by competent and disinterested officials and staffs who can have no other motive than that of public service.

It is not intended here to go into the details of the various forms of organisation. What concerns us at present is to point out that however much they may differ from each other in respect of the way in which they are controlled, they all serve the same purpose of providing the capitalists with opportunities of investing their capital in order to receive an annual return on it. They are all of them forms of capitalism and capitalist property. The form of control differs from one to the other, but to the capitalist they all provide means of investing capital in order to receive from it a property income.

It will now be clear what is meant by our earlier statement that while non-socialists in the various other parties are divided among themselves about forms of control, the socialist and only the socialist recognises that the question of paramount importance to the working-class is to end all forms of capitalist ownership no matter what may be the form of control under which it operates. The community as a whole can never obtain real control until it obtains ownership.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is not in favour of private competitive capitalism, or capitalist monopolies, or Public Utility Boards, or State and Municipal undertakings. Why the Socialist Party is opposed to them all will be better understood when we have examined in more detail what is the source from which all forms of property income are derived by the different groups of capitalist investors. Here it will suffice to point to the contrast between the Labour Party’s demand for “the progressive elimination from the control of industry of the private capitalist ( Labour and the New Social Order, 1918, p.12. Our italics) with the S.P.G.B.’s demand for the elimination of the propertied class from ownership of the means of production and distribution.

While the Labour Party is content to leave the capitalists as an owning class provided their undertakings are to some extent controlled or regulated by the Government, the S.P.G.B. aims at a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution.

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