The Labour Party’s announcement that they will provide free fibre broadband to every home in the country by 2030 has hit the headlines today.
It is an eye-catching claim. And Boris Johnson has boosted its socialist credentials by describing it as a ‘communist’ policy. Yet other capitalist commentators are not so sure. Is nationalisation a socialist step?
Trains, water, electricity and the post are all services which Labour has already announced its intention to nationalise, or ‘bring back into public ownership’. Adding broadband provision to this list would increase the extent of state control of the British economy. But in the words of Ben Chu, economics correspondent at the BBC, ‘There is nothing inherently economically backward looking about putting certain industries in state hands, especially so-called natural monopoly utilities’.
Ben Chu lists other European countries who have nationally owned and run utilities, such as the Norwegian postal service, the Swiss and Italian railways, the French electricity system and german savings banks. Many of these industries are highly successful, and they contradict the British caricature of nationalised industries as dour, inefficient and wasteful. Quite the opposite in many cases.
From the point of view of bourgeois economists, the issue is less about who owns such assets. The main issue is whether they would be more efficiently run in private or public hands. Infrastructure services are needed by industry, and if they are run efficiently and more cheaply, that assists the private sector industries that rely on them.
The issue for socialists is who controls the economy. Nationalising service industries does not transfer control to the working class. Manufacturing, banking, retailing, insurance and other sectors remain in private hands and remain subject to the laws of motion of capital.
It is those laws of motion that threaten to interrupt Labour’s tinkering with the economy. In the background to this election there are the gathering clouds of the coming financial and economic crisis. This is building up because the ruling class have failed to deal with the underlying contradictions which led to the 2008 crisis. Years of trying to push back the living standards and working conditions of the working class were initiated. The purpose was primarily to increase the profitability of capitalist enterprises. In order to service the huge debt burden capitalism has created for itself it needs to become more profitable. And the most immediate way to increase profitability is to reduce the cost of labour power.
The push back by the ruling class since 2008 has been considerable. But it has only been marginally effective. And before the ruling class can achieve their objective, the working class reached breaking point. They will take so much, and no more. One way that resistance was expressed in the UK was by rejecting the neo-liberal consensus when asked to vote on continued membership of the EU.
As the economic situation deteriorates, the Labour Party hopes to come to the rescue of capitalism. Their programme of limited intervention to modernise the capitalist infrastructure is intended to save capitalism, not to replace it.
The whole thing will blow up in their faces. And that economic explosion may be quite soon. They will be seen as unprepared for the worst, unprepared to take the drastic steps needed to replace a failing capitalist system with a planned economy.
What we need to get us through the coming eruptions is a Workers’ Party, committed 100 per cent to defending the interests of the working class, no matter what economic chaos erupts. It is not the role of the working class to keep capitalism going. It is its historic role to act as the midwife of a new form of economic organisation based on common ownership and democratic control of the productive system. That is what communism really means, not this half-hearted attempt by social democracy to rescue a decaying system.