Defending Zarah Sultana against establishment goons and demoralised ‘leftists’
Zarah Sultana has made headlines recently with her bold call to “nationalise the economy”. Despite the entirely predictable opposition from the capitalist press, her call has opened up a crucial debate about what a socialist economy could look like.
Privatisation: A Disaster for the Working Class
Over the past 50 years, neoliberal governments have enacted mass privatisations of formerly publicly-owned industries. A look at these sectors today shows the disastrous effect of the ‘free market’ on our services. Britain’s rail fares are some of the most expensive in Europe, while delays and cancellations continue to rise. The same goes for utilities, with electricity prices 50-100% higher than most of continental Europe. Meanwhile water companies are announcing new price hikes. And it is not just public services that have suffered. In private hands, British Steel has all but vanished, at the cost of thousands of jobs.
Even Labour’s thoroughly pro-capitalist government has been forced to renationalise the railways, as well as floating the possibility of taking Thames Water back into public hands. This is not out of any commitment to socialism. Rather, profiteering has run our services so far into the ground that the capitalist state needs to intervene to prop up the economy. Unsurprisingly, polls show wide support for renationalising rail, mail and utilities. This is not a particularly revolutionary idea – it is clear for millions of ordinary people that you can’t control what you don’t own.
For several years, the Green Party have also called for limited nationalisations, although they too avoid directly confronting the interests of the bosses. Essentially, they suggest buying companies from their current private owners. Even their limited proposal to nationalise the top five energy firms would cost £2.85 billion of public money, going straight into the pockets of the bosses.
We say: no compensation for the super rich. That £2.85 billion would be better spent on a major programme of public investment to overhaul our energy infrastructure, reducing energy bills and boosting the transition away from fossil fuels.
This would be sure to provoke the fury and resistance of the whole ruling class. After all, if energy could be taken out of the hands of the profiteers, why not Royal Mail, or buses. Why not the rest of the economy?
Planning the Economy
Modern capitalist production runs on vast supply chains, huge coordination and co-operation between thousands of people, products, and places. In other words, production is highly social – but the running of production, and the profit from it, is all privately controlled. While the products we rely on every day are produced socially, they are not produced for us and our needs. Instead they are produced for exchange on the market, for private profit.
It is for this reason that steelworks are closed, destroying whole towns. It is why our supermarkets are full of ultra-processed foods that make us unhealthy. It is why the most advanced developments in computer technology are used to churn out AI slop and fake news rather than to make our lives easier.
While we can win important concessions under this system, like taxing the rich or a pay rise, we need to address these problems at their root. That is why socialists stand for an economy based on public ownership and democratic planning – so the technology we have can be used for the benefit of people and the planet rather than for profit.
Nationalising the banks and big corporations, and running them democratically, would allow us to control the enormous wealth in society, and make it possible to invest into the things we need, rather than what makes a profit for the bosses.
Factories producing machinery for fighter jets could transition to wind turbines, while defending jobs and creating new ones. We could eliminate the enormous wastage of advertising and similar industries, and put the workforce to use in really useful areas. This would allow for a transition to a four-day week for most workers, with no loss of pay. These are only a few of the examples of what would be possible.
“Nationalise the Whole Economy?”
But many will be asking what it would mean to “nationalise the whole economy” in practice. The ‘sensible’ liberal commentators of the mainstream press are up in arms about Zarah Sultana’s suggestion of a nationalised economy. Even self-described ‘left’ commentators like Owen Jones and Tariq Ali have balked at the idea.
Fundamentally, this is because they cannot see an alternative to capitalist private ownership. They stand, with varying shades of nuance, for maintaining the capitalist system. Meanwhile, public services exist in a state of endless austerity, the cost of living crisis has become the new normal, and governments stand by as we hurtle toward a climate disaster and the threat of new imperialist wars.
Zarah Sultana is right to point in the direction of fundamental change rather than ‘tweaks to a broken system’. In her recent interview with Laura Kuenssberg she called for the nationalisation of the “commanding heights” of the economy. In response, Kuenssberg shifted the conversation towards corner shops and other small businesses – a classic move by the capitalist media, always keen to let the billionaires off the hook.
Not Every Fish and Chip Shop
The main concern for revolutionary socialists is precisely the commanding heights of the economy – the handful of gigantic corporations and banks that dominate capitalist society. Just 100 corporations globally produce over 71% of total CO2 emissions. Gigantic companies like Nestle rely on slavery and child labour, debt traps and destructive farming practices to create mega-profits for shareholders. And it’s the giant arms manufacturers like BAE Systems which continue to directly enable genocide in Gaza. These are some of the greatest threats to humanity that exist today.
But it is not just the working class that suffers from this system. Many small businesses, including sole traders, tradespeople, independent cafes and so on face ruin. Not from a socialist government, but from the big corporations. This diverse middle-class layer of society, sitting between workers and the big capitalists, is what Marx called the petit bourgeoisie. While many small businesses represent basically a miniature version of the same exploitative practices of big business, many also experience conditions not that far removed from the working class.
They are squeezed by expensive rents from private landlords, rising running costs due to inflation, and private debt as they rely on loans to operate. Meanwhile small independent businesses are out-competed on the market by big chains and online giants. This is why thousands of pubs have closed in the last 20 years, and high streets have lost 37 shops per day in 2024.
A workers’ government would be far more favourable to the interests of these sections of society than the current system. On the basis of a nationalised banking system run for public need rather than private profit, cheap credit could be made available instead of crushing private debt. It would also be possible to implement rent controls to put an end to extortionate private rents.
A socialist government based on the public democratic ownership of the commanding heights of the economy would allow these sections of society to see the benefits of a planned economy in practice, and can provide the basis to persuade them to voluntarily incorporate their businesses into it. This was the policy of the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution, when the working class came to power for the first time in history. It has nothing in common with the monstrous policies of Stalin, whose methods of forced collectivisation were part of a desperate attempt to shore up his own power.
This programme has a long history in the British socialist movement too. Militant, the Marxist current in the Labour Party (and a predecessor of Socialist Alternative) raised the demand for the nationalisation of the top 200 corporations and banks. Taken together, this would have represented around 80% of the British economy, and laid the basis for an economy where decisive control lay in the hands of the working class. As they explained in their newspaper in February 1972: “We do not want to take over every barbers’ or fish and chip shop, but the giant monopolies that dominate the economy”.
Today, the economy is even more concentrated. The UK’s 50 richest families control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the whole country. Never before has there been so much wealth and economic power in the hands of so few. Our starting point today, in Socialist Alternative, is the demand to nationalise the top 100 corporations and banks under democratic workers’ control, to lay the basis for an economy planned for working-class people and the planet.
Democratic Workers’ Control
Would a nationalised economy mean a repeat of the monstrous dictatorships of Russia and Eastern Europe? We can say emphatically: no!
As Zarah Sultana has correctly explained, socialism would mean a massive extension of democracy. The capitalist state uses all sorts of undemocratic means to maintain its rule. The media companies were used to great effect to crush Corbynism in the Labour Party and prevent it from winning power.
The ruling class also has all sorts of undemocratic institutions such as the House of Lords and monarchy, which they can use to block any government that fundamentally threatens their interests. Indeed, the institutions of the British monarchy were used to overthrow Australia’s democratically-elected left wing Labour government in 1972, and recent reports have shown regular interference by the monarchy in dozens of parliamentary laws.
Even parliament itself, while giving a veneer of democracy to the current system, is connected by a thousand threads to big business. There is a revolving door between parliament and the upper echelons of the corporate elite. The post-parliamentary careers of figures such as David Cameron and Tony Blair demonstrate this.
We fully support Zarah Sultana’s call to abolish the House of Lords and the monarchy. The repressive institutions of the capitalist state should be replaced with genuinely democratic bodies at every level of society, with elected and recallable institutions, with all representatives on a workers’ wage. That way we could introduce genuine democracy into both the political sphere and the economic sphere.
This was the model of the Russian Revolution, which transformed Russia from a backward, semi-feudal society into a world superpower in only a few decades. Unfortunately in the years after Lenin’s death, a bureaucratic regime was able to consolidate power, with Stalin at its head.
This was not because ‘socialism always leads to dictatorship’, despite what pro-capitalist propagandists like to claim. The rise of Stalinism was in fact only possible because the country had been completely destroyed by years of civil war, and by an invasion of 21 imperialist armies determined to crush the revolution. It was also enabled by the isolation of the revolution to Russia, a semi-feudal backwater, after revolutions elsewhere in Europe failed to overthrow capitalism.
Stalin’s regime, which rose on the back of this deep crisis in society, reversed all the gains of the revolution, maintaining only the nationalised economy. Unfortunately even this historic gain was eventually strangled by bureaucratic mismanagement, paving the way for capitalism to restore its rule, with disastrous effects for ordinary people.
The working class in Britain, and in most of the world today, is relatively much more organised. More than 6 million workers are members of trades unions. There exist strong, long-running democratic traditions, won through historic struggles such as those of the Chartists and suffragettes. A dictatorship in the vein of Stalinism would have very little space to emerge in Britain.
However, a socialist government in Britain would immediately come under assault from the ruling classes internationally. It would require the intervention of working people around the world to defend these policies – including by fighting for socialist change in their own countries. The struggle for socialism is international – which is why we are part of International Socialist Alternative, which organises across borders to fight for a socialist world.
When liberal-left commentators from the mainstream press jeer at the idea of nationalising the economy, they do so to defend the status quo, rather than to sketch out the clearest way to break from it. But a socialist future is not just possible – it is essential for the future of humanity. That is the future Socialist Alternative – revolutionary socialists organised in Your Party – are fighting for. Why not help us fight for it?
