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The pay of FTSE100 Chief Executive's has risen by 343% in the last decade. it is revealed today. This shocking statistic is sign that despite the poor and the working class being hit with harsher and harsher cuts to their standards of living with the rich capitalists trying to regain the money they used to bail out their banks which failed they are increasing their wealth even still.
It is a disgrace that pay to the rich goes up while pay to the working class is being cut. Where is the fairness in that ?
It isnt that's why. It is capitalism which enables this to happen. The system that is designed so the wealth of a few is concentrated at the top while the workers suffer through exploitation and austerity measures.
Well enough is enough really under a socialist society the top 150 top monopolies many are in the FTSE 100 will be brought under nationalised democratic workers control to be used for the benifit of society not the few rich fat cats at the very top.
This would include the banks where this is rife and allow the workers to control the finances of the country for the betterment of the mass's. Funding schooling, health care, transport and decent affordable housing for all. There is clearly more than enough money going around in this country for us all to live a decent standard of life. We are not asking for the earth as socialists but a fair life for fair pay and a end to discrimination and exploitation.
Mark, we do not have any possibility of a Government that would do this. If we did, it would not be a solution? If companies were nationalised from above then their workers would carry on as normal. A few might take the trouble to go to meetings to exercise the democratic control , but on the experience of how many turn up to their union meetings, I doubt it. If the State owned the firm, they would not feel it belonged to them, any more than if a Capitalist owned it.
ReplyDeleteThe reason the Bolsheviks had to bring back the Capitalist owners and managers, and State Officials under Lenin, was because the ordinary workers had not been trained to exercise such ownership and control, and because the vast majority showed no real interest in exercising such control. Their lives were hard enough already without adding to their burdens . As Marx said, such exercise of ownership and control can only come from the workers themselves taking over the factories and being prepared to exercise such control.
Without that, all you get is what happened in Russia. The majority leave it to a small group of activists, and bureaucrats, who form themselves into a privileged elite. When the workers do decide to get involved, it is when they feel some degree of frustration, or discontent. Then when they come along and express it, that elite already believes it knows best. It describes the workers as "backward elements", reactionary, having "false consciousness", and so on, thus begins the process of limiting their involvement, of closing down the democratic forums of the workers and so on.
That is precisely the way in which revolutions and reform from above , degenerate.
“It would of course be a disastrous error, an outright deception, to assert that the road to socialism passes, not through the proletarian revolution, but through nationalization by the bourgeois state of various branches of industry and their transfer into the hands of the workers’ organizations.”
Trotsky - Nationalised Industry & Workers Management, or as Marx put it, in criticising the idea of the State bringing Socialism to the workers from above,
“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labour" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people".”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Trotsky also set out why Workers Control outside a Workers State and workers ownership of the means of production, could only lead to class collaboration, as Trades Union leaders were drawn into sitting alongside the bosses to discuss how the workers could be more efficiently exploited.
The revolutionary transformation of the means of production has to come up from the workers themselves, and over a period the workers through their ownership and control have to train themselves, and in Marx's words make themselves fit to become the new ruling class. Here and now that means workers occupying factories, public services etc. threatened with closure, and like the workers at UCS did organising production of those goods and services themselves. Unlike UCS, who handed the shipyard back to the capitalist State, the workers should follow the example of the Argentinian workers at Zanon, who having established their own Co-op having taken over the factory, demanded the State legally transfer its ownership to them. They should then link up all of these worker owned factories and services.