Labour’s programme of nationalisation – is not socialism¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter excoriates the Labour Party’s 1945 General Election programme as a fraud upon the working class, arguing that its limited nationalisation proposals are not a step towards socialism but a manoeuvre to salvage capitalism. The core argument is that the leadership, having steamrollered a conference resolution for the comprehensive nationalisation of all big industry, land, and banks, produced a watered-down programme covering only iron and steel, coal and fuel, the Bank of England, and inland transport—and even then, with compensation for the expropriated capitalists. This, the chapter insists, is not socialism, and not even Herbert Morrison claimed it was.
The text systematically dismantles each pledge. Nationalising the Bank of England alone is shown to be hollow: the Swedish example is cited, where a nationalised central bank coexisted with four private banks controlling 79 per cent of all joint-stock companies. Without a state monopoly of foreign trade, the private banks that control foreign exchange can still determine what is produced, imported, and exported, and can engineer a capital flight as they did in 1931. The nationalisation of coal, steel, and transport is presented as a gift to the capitalist class, not a blow against it. Many capitalists themselves demand cheap coal and steel to prop up Britain’s export industries; compensation allows them to withdraw capital from declining sectors and reinvest in more profitable ones, offloading the chaos of coal and steel onto the workers. The retention of ‘controls’ over unnationalised industries is exposed as a sham: the steel industry is controlled by the Iron and Steel Federation, chemicals by Imperial Chemical Industries, and food by Unilever. These are not socialist controls but capitalist cartels.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at the Labour leadership, particularly Morrison, who is quoted contradicting himself—admitting that only a policy “which went to the roots of economic and industrial affairs” could secure food, houses, and full employment, yet offering only half-measures. The text contrasts this timidity with the measures taken by Lenin and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution of 1917: nationalisation without compensation of all big industry, land, mines, banks, and monopolies, operated under workers’ control, with production planned by committees of workers and technicians to meet human need. The chapter’s closing line—“You cannot get a quart of socialist prosperity out of a miserable pint capitalist pot”—encapsulates its insistence that partial reform within capitalism is not a transition to socialism but a recipe for greater chaos.