Tackling the City
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-09-22Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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COULD a Labour government control the City if it really wanted to?
Some comrades in the 'Alternative Economic Strategy' workshop thought it could - and moreover that exchange controls must be a priority measure for any radical Labour government.
Most speakers disagreed. So long as the basic framework of capitalism remains intact, they pointed out, the multinationals have dozens of channels to evade exchange controls. And so long as a Labour government restricted the mobilisation of the working class to merely 'controlling' the institutions of capitalist power - rather than overthrowing them - the entrenched power of the bosses and bankers would surely win out in the end.
Besides, what is the rationale of exchange controls in isolation from comprehensive socialist measures? Many on the Left say that the billions invested abroad by British capital are a 'waste' - but by what nationalist quirk is investment by British capital in Britain progressive, and investment by British capital elsewhere wasteful? The argument must be put on a class, not a nationalist, basis.
Tony Dale from Manchester argued that the central problem of the AES is not so much nationalism as the fact that it is a strategy 'from above' '. Martin Thomas, who had introduced the vorkshop, argued in reply that his is only half true All versions of the AES confine themselves to influencing the capitalist nation-state rather than overthrowing it. Most versions of the AES stress pressure on the state 'from above' through Parliament. But there are also versions stressing pressure 'from below' , through trade union and community organisations.
For example, Mike Cooley and Mike George (both closely associated with the Lucas Aerospace Workers' Plan) argue for: economic and industrial planning firmly based on activism at the grassroots", but in the framework of "an economics for social needs (much as in the Second World War, and in Dalton's immediate post-war budgets)"
One aspect which we failed to discuss, but which looms increasingly large in the labour movement, is the other sort of ' AES from below' - the 'local government AES', as practised by the Greater London Council and other left. Labour local , authorities.