Chapter X. What is to be done?

Throughout this pamphlet the point has been repeatedly stressed that the problem facing the capitalist class is that of the form under which their industry shall be controlled ; while for the working class the vital problem is that of ownership. Capitalism has evolved from small scale private, competitive, industry under the personal control of the proprietor, through the form of joint stock companies, to the present stage in which great combines, cartels and so on, with the elimination of competition within the group, more and more dominate the scene ; though rivalry between the combines and internationally between the different capitalist powers and groups of powers is as fierce as ever.

What is to be the next step? For the capitalists it is a problem of finding a method, either by nationalisation or more probably by public utility corporations or State regulated private-monopolies, by which capitalism itself shall be able to control those monstrous growths of its own creation – always of course with the idea of preserving capitalism and their own property and privileged position as an exploiting class.

This evolution of capitalism has revealed for all to see the fundamental error of the reformist parties which turned aside from the working class problem of ownership to busy themselves with the problem of control, only to find that capitalism had moved on and made their schemes obsolete. In earlier days the reformist parties thought that there was in progress a natural evolution towards the capitalist State completely taking over and operating one industry after another until it covered the whole field. The late J. Keir Hardie had this belief in an inevitable evolution to Socialism.

In his >From Serfdom to Socialism (1907) he argued on these lines : -

“If the State can build battleships and make swords, why not also trading ships and ploughshares? Since the State conveys letters and parcels and telegrams, why not also coal and wool and grain? And if the State insists upon owning telegraph lines, why not also railway lines? And if the railways, why not the coal mines from whence the power is drawn which sets the engines in motion? . . When the State enters upon business in any department there is no logical halting place short of complete State Socialism, and the further extension of its trading activities is purely a question of utility” (p. 89).

Keir Hardie was wrong in using the term “State Socialism” and in believing that there was an inevitability about this progress towards complete State industry, yet at least he did recognise that even if it happened it was not an end in itself, but could only be useful because it would, he thought, “prepare the way for free Communism in which the rule, not merely the law of the State, but the rule of life will be : From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

When, later on, it was discovered that capitalism was not following the lines Keir Hardie and his fellow members of the Labour Party anticipated, and they realised that State industries like the Post Office were not even particularly acceptable to working class voters who were influenced by capitalist propaganda against alleged red tape, bureaucracy, and inefficiency, the Labour Party quietly dropped its old propaganda for outright State acquisition of industry. In its place that Party began to advocate public utility corporations, and, as has been mentioned before, Mr. Herbert Morrison, who in 1923 denounced that form of organisation (as exemplified in the Port of London Authority) as a “capitalistic soviet” was himself responsible for initiating the London Passenger Transport Board when he was Minister of Transport in the Labour Government, 1929-1931 ; and Labour Party spokesmen began to put forward the idea that these public utility corporations were the “latest development in Socialist theory” (Mr. Lees Smith, Spectator, 26 December, 1931), and some of them were even prepared with Mr. Lees Smith to contemplate denationalising the telephones and telegraphs to the extent of handing them over to a public utility corporation.

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