The miners' strike brings into sharpest focus the whole question of nationalisation and with it the question of the nature of the state.
Twenty three years ago the miners welcomed the nationalisation of the mines as a victory. Now virtually every miner in the land-and hundreds of thousands of other public sector workers as well-must wonder what is so different about working for the state instead of for a private employer. What is so special about nationalisation? What has it got to do with socialism? If we look at the prices of coal, gas train fares, postage, etc., we notice something which is the key to the whole question of nationalisation. Prices are much lower for industrial concerns than for private individuals. Nationalisation does not mean running an industry for the 'public" (we will come onto the question of running it by the workers later). It means on the contrary making the "public' to subsidize the main users-private industry. What all the nationalised industries have in common is a) they are essential to the running of any economy; b) they are very unattractive for capital investment. Huge sums were needed to modernise them and the return on that capital is a long time in coming and anyway much smaller than can be obtained by investment elsewhere; c) at the time of nationalisation plant had been completely run down.
Nationalisation has resulted in the following: 1) instead of expropriating the capitalists who had let the various industries run to seed, the state paid and is still paying them millions of pounds for negligible assets-broken down pitwinding gear, old fashioned steel plants, etc. This money was then invested either abroad or in those areas of industry which were expanding and highly profitable; 2) through direct taxation, mainly on the working class itself, or through bank loans at huge interest rates, the bourgeois state has the ability to channel millions of pounds into the state owned industries in an effort to provide a modern infrastructure which would enable British capitalists to compete on favourable terms with their international competitors; 3) any idea that the workers themselves would control these industries were quickly laid to rest. On the contrary, the rule is and always has been that the larger the capitalist is against whom the workers have to fight the harder it is to win. Private capitalists are hit by strikes where it hurts most for them-the profit sheet. The state need not be so worried by such considerations. It can hold out much longer than any private capitalist-compare the strikes in the Post Office and at Fords last year. Besides if the worst comes to the worst the state owned industry can always raise prices-and incidentally use this threat to try to isolate the striking workers from the public. So workers in the public sector have often found that they bear the brunt of any Incomes Policy'; the state clobbers them first, as over the last year and a half and during this strike. Yet their unions are least capable of defending them; 4) in Britain the Trade Union structure is such that each nationalised industry has a separate union for the workers in it (NUM,UPW, ETU, NUR, etc.) From the start every government's policy has been to try to pull the leaderships of these unions into the decision making process (only now are they giving them no room for manoeuvre by refusing them even that). The most notorius of these leaders, Les Cannon of the ETU, became completely at one with the management chiefs. The Union instead of being the fighting arm of the workers turned into its opposite, an instrument for policing the Not just conciliation but downright collaboration was the oder of the day.
It is clear that such participation by the Unions in the running of the nationalised industries has not helped the workers at all. But that does not mean that all attempts to wrest sectors of control from the management are useless. Very clearly what it does mean though is that any participation by union leaders in the affairs of an industry will only be useful if the workers themselves control these leaders and control their unions. In the Steel Industry the union, BISAKTA, works hand in glove with the management but it does not relay any information back to the rank and file, it does not prepare them to fight redundancies but actively assists in muzzling its membership and demoralising them. For too long this has also been the case in the NUM (pit closures) and the UPW too ('rationalisation').
To fight against the Union Chiefs becom ing agents of management there is clearly no other course but the formation within the trade unions of a revolutionary• Workers must organise and fight on a tendency capable, while maintaining the unity of the trade union movement, of struggling for a class policy in all dealings with the managment.
The second thing which cannot be repeated too often, is that workers' control, even in a state owned industry is not at all the same as workers' power. It is possible to imagine a situation where workers in a factory, even a state owned one, have a great deal of control over work practice, speed, etc. But so long as they produce for the market for exchange, they will be forced to obey the laws of the market. Moreover, as we have tried to show, nationalization has been carried out in the interest of the capitalists' class who control the state. State owned industries produce for that class, serve that class. Anyone who says that nationalisation is a measure, in the interest of the working class is either consciously fooling the working class, or has not seriously thought about the role of the state which controls the industries plays. To achieve workers' power we have to overthrow that state and replace it with a state directly accountable to the working class, only then can there be real workers' control of the nationalised industries.
It is clear by now that united class action in solidarity with the miners can achieve victory. This in spite of the betrayals of the TUC (see miners' special No.1) the rightward shift of most union leaders into verbal pledges and stony inactivity, and the pathetic comings and goings between Gormley, Feather, and Carr.
But such struggle must include more than wage claims alone.
whole series of issues which limit the power of management and change the relationship of forces in these institutions