Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour could restore its historic commitment to public ownership of industry – known as Clause IV – if he
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Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour could restore its historic commitment to public ownership of industry – known as Clause IV – if he were party leader.
Ah, Clause Four ! It's not what it seems and never was. Here's what it was when it was abolished twenty years ago now:
Quote:To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.And here's what we thought of it:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1994/no-1083-november-1994/rise-and-fall-clause-four
Quote:To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.In other words, insofar as it committed (on paper) the Labour Party to anything it was a nationalized economy, or state capitalisam, not socialism.
Went to wiki to read what it had to sayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clause_IVQuite illuminating. I had no idea about the 1976 Industrial Common Ownership Acthttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/78/contentsAnd it led me to read http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/14/contents
I was pleased to see the comparison drawn between Labour's Clause IV with the object of the SPGB
Quote:To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.Quote:The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.It was not blair who abolished clause IV, it was the labour party.
This, Corbyn denies he would bring back clause IV .
Yes, I noticed he was backpeddling a bit but also that he favours enterprises being run by cooperatives rather than nationalised, state industries. An admission, I suppose, that nationalisation was a failure (from a working class point of view) and isn't popular but, as we know, workers coops would be even more at the mercy of market forces.
Well Corbyn isn’t going to abolish Public Schools, that other perennial Labour ‘promise’, at least!
Just to say, I got some good responses on fb, where I post the party’s website.
He does not advocate a return to the old form of nationalisation but to a new form where the railworkers run the railways themselves for people instead of profit. Is this new for Labour?
"Is this new for Labour?"A new version of old Guild Socialism, perhaps?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_socialism
A trifle unfair to attribute that to Corbyn. Unless he has advocated it elswhere?
It wouldn't work but it might be a way to stop rail strikes, with workers having to be their own bosses and discipline themselves to keep costs down.Tony Benn, when Harold Wilson's Minister of Industry in the 1970s, tried this, only to fail:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244680/Tony-Benns-failed-experiment-with-worker-co-operatives.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_Engineering#The_Meriden_Motorcycle_Co-operativeThe Torygraph article, besides mentioning Scargill's view, refers to the Tories trying to steal the idea:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244376/Tories-plan-workers-co-operatives-for-public-sector.htmlI don't think it came to anything, did it?
Ineresting, the IWC material appears to be available (badly scanned) here:http://www.socialistrenewal.net/node/121
Trying to track down exactly what was Scargill's argument against cooperatives I've discovered that the remarks attributed to him were not about workers cooperatives but about "workers control". Further confirmation, I suppose, that you should never trust a Daily Torygraph journalist. He actually co-authored a pamphlet called The Myth of Workers Control which seems to have been an attack on the idea of having elected workers representatives on the board of companies. A flavour of his criticism can be found on page 6 of this document (an interview with "Marxism Today" in 1981):
Quote:I reject the argument that you can have some kind of workers' control within capitalism. What you can have is class collaboration within capitalism. Those who follow this argument in essence seek to perpetuate the existing system. It is only by politicising our membership that we will ever bring about the irreversible shift towards a socialist system in society. Therefore I don't agree that we ought to be talking about workers on the boards, irrespective of whether it is in private or nationalised industry. Once we've put workers on the boards they become bureaucrats for a start. Secondly, there is a conflict of interests. Thirdly, workers themselves distrust those people sitting on the boards. And fourthly, those who actually sit on the boards of directors, or boards of management, begin to think with a completely different outlook from when they were workers' representatives.There must, in my view, be a quite clear distinct difference between those who own and control and those who represent workers. There is a class conflict, we do live in a class society. There are two classes in our society — those who own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange and those who work by hand and by brain. There is no middle class as is suggested by those academics and intellectuals who would like to stratify society. There are only two classes in the strict political sense.This is a part of his argument that we can agree with, but it's not an argument against workers coops.
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