Democratic public ownership is only way to achieve genuine democracy

It’s at the heart of saving jobs, improving working conditions, guaranteeing decent incomes, providing public services fit for the 21st century – and tackling the climate catastrophe.

Democratic public ownership – with workers’ control and management – is the core alternative to the uncertainty, inequality, and planet-trashing pollution that inevitably accompanies production for profit in the system known as capitalism.

Public ownership is indispensable if we are to pursue the interests of people rather than profit – the billions, not the billionaires; the health and wealth of the many, not the grotesque opulence of the few.

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It is no accident that only the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) consistently argues for this alternative, as it challenges the very essence of capitalist profiteering, which all other political parties grovel at the feet of, or actively uphold, despite mounting evidence that capitalism can never provide for the vast majority of the population, and furthermore leads to climate catastrophe and wars without end.

“Betrayed” is a word increasingly being used by workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery, furious not only at its capitalist Petroineos owners for planning to toss 2822 workers on the scrapheap, but also the Labour and SNP governments’ miserable failure to step in to save these vital jobs, while at the same time urgently investing in a genuinely just transition to green production, to protect workers’ skills and the air we breathe.

Grangemouth is a glaring example of the dictatorship of capital over working-class people’s lives.

It screams out for democratic public ownership, to harness the combined skills of the workforce; to devise and urgently implement an alternative plan of green production, as part of a publicly owned People’s Energy Service, which research proves could create 70,000 new green jobs in Scotland; and to provide clean, green, affordable energy to households, eliminating the rampant fuel poverty in a country blessed with 25% of Europe’s renewable energy potential.

The collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic was a harsh lesson in the utter failure of the profit-driven capitalist system to protect lives, let alone livelihoods.

Governments’ refusal to properly fund our NHS, combined with the theft of resources through PFI privatisation repayments, left hospitals in danger of being overrun by the outbreak.

In a desperate attempt to free up bed spaces, elderly patients were dumped into care homes – mostly privately owned, run for profit (including by companies registered in the Cayman Islands to dodge tax), and wholly unfit for purpose, both in terms of residents’ health and safety or workers’ conditions.

This added to the cruel cull of thousands of older people. The case for massive investment in and democratic control of a publicly owned National Care Service, alongside an NHS cleansed of all privatisation, is written in the blood of thousands who suffered lonely and avoidable deaths during the pandemic.

The case for public ownership in any way diminished since the pandemic. On the contrary, the grotesque explosion of profiteering across multiple sectors of the economy during and since reinforces the case for collective ownership of society’s key wealth production and services – for socialisation of the profits made by workers’ efforts in the first place.

Capitalist profiteering is a global phenomenon. Studies of 1350 companies across the UK, US, Germany, Brazil and South Africa prove profits in 2022 rocketed by 30% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. Those figures begin to explain why it costs a fortune to heat our homes or feed our families.

The UK is no different. Companies as varied as banks, shipping firms, energy giants and veterinary practises all wielded their economic power to boost their profits by an average 30% compared to 2019. They jacked up prices a profit-driven binge of inflation. Meantime, workers’ real wages are £10,700 less than before the parasitic finance capitalists caused the banking crash of 2008.

Every aspect of our daily lives is stunted and damaged by the ruthless pursuit of profit that is written into the very DNA of capitalism.

And in every case public ownership would vastly improve the lives of millions.

UK energy companies grabbed profits of £45 billion in 2022. Treasury figures predict £170bn in “excess profits” over 2022 and 2023. At least BP’s chief executive officer was brazenly honest when he blurted out that “BP is a cash machine”.

(Image: PA)

And contrary to their greenwashing propaganda, the fossil capitalists are certainly not pouring their glut of profits into green investments.

Public ownership of energy could have made the people £45 billion better off in 2022 – that’s £1800 per household – by eliminating profit.

The same principles apply to childcare, dominated by privatised provision for profit, making the UK’s system the third-most expensive in the world; food inflation feeding the profits of supermarket giants; the UK’s railways, the most expensive and least reliable in Europe; and even the care of your pets, where six chains control half the market and turbocharged their profits to 237% of pre-pandemic levels in 2021.

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Historically, capitalists justified their existence by investment of some of the unpaid labour of the working class back into the means of production.

Nowadays they can’t even use that excuse! The 350 biggest UK companies have increasingly switched to handing out dividends to shareholders instead of re-investment to improve productivity.

In the 1970s, they gave shareholders 20p in dividend payments for every £1 of capital investments.

By the 2010s, had risen to 95p for every £1 reinvested. In the last five years that has rocketed to £1.03. This is the parasitic nature of capitalism summed up. The working class make the wealth, the parasitic rich take the wealth.

Society is crying out for planned, sustainable production for human need. But you can’t plan what you don’t control and you can’t control what you don’t own.

Democratic public ownership of all forms of energy, public transport, the big supermarkets, construction, banking, NHS, childcare, a National Care Service – even veterinary services! – would allow democratic plans of production and service provision, with the elimination of privatised profit vastly boosting the wealth in the hands of the people.

Instead of annual handouts to big shareholders and short-term profiteering rather than long-term planning, public ownership and control would allow investment in wages, job expansion, improved health and safety, a shorter working week without loss of earnings, and free provision of universal public services such as health, education and transport.

For the Scottish Socialist Party, public ownership must be accompanied by working-class control and management, with democratically elected boards of management living on a skilled worker’s wage, as opposed to the obscenity of the average FTSE 100 chief executive now earning £5m a year.

Workers’ control of everyday issues such as workplace health and safety, accompanied by worker-led plans of green production, could provide for a genuine transition away from fossil capitalism that is both just, rapid, and a vast boost to jobs.

As I wrote in my book Break the Chains (2015): “Scotland’s economy is dominated by a tiny handful of giant companies, owned by a small elite of giant shareholders, run by faceless chief executives and directors on salaries that defeat the human imagination.

“If anyone thinks the phrase I’ve often used – ‘the dictatorship of capital’ – is too harsh, try to recall the events at Grangemouth refinery in 2013 ... capitalism can dictate many of the actions of political parties such as Labour and the SNP – precisely because neither of them are founded on the principles that reject capitalism.”

Democratic public ownership is the only way to achieve genuine democracy, ending the dictatorship of the rich over the rest of us.