Possession, today, is no longer a physical relationship. It Is a legal one. The shareholders of a joint stock company which owns a mine, a group of mills, or a railway system, may live at the ends of the earth, may never see their property, may know next to nothing about it, and yet go on receiving dividends upon which they can exist in comfort and luxury without labour. Superficial “revolutionaries”, who advocate that the workers should “occupy” the factories, forget that the workers are continually doing this—they have to—and that the last thing in the world that the capitalists want to do is to occupy the factories themselves. Physical contact with the means of production is a pleasure which they are quite prepared to surrender entirely to the workers—on terms. They merely insist upon controlling, through salaried agents, the ownership and disposal of the products. When and where such sale ceases to be sufficiently profitable, they use their legal powers to lock the workers out; and, in either case, their ownership and control, whether exercised negatively or positively, depends upon the state.
It is the state, with its machinery of coercion. including the armed forces, which holds the conditions condemning the workers to sell themselves piecemeal into lifelong slavery. It is the state that repels every attack upon the property rights of the master class by starving strikers or unemployed, and which, by doing so. makes the workers’ struggle a political one.
[From the June 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard.]
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