Nationalise the steel industry as a first step on the road to socialism

NOVANEWS

Nationalise the steel industry as a first step on the road to socialism

Thousands of steel workers’ jobs are being axed across the country. First,

the liquidation of Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) UK led to the closure of

the company’s site in Redcar, Teeside, with the devastating loss of 2,200

jobs. The Redcar plant had been operating for 98 years. Soon after, Caparo

went into administration, announcing over 300 job losses in the West

Midlands in addition to more cuts in Hartlepool and at its Welsh sites.

Then Tata Steel announced 1,200 job cuts in Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire,

followed by another 750 Tata jobs at Port Talbot. With a further 100 jobs

now on the line at Sheffield Forgemasters, more than a sixth of Britain’s

remaining steel industry workers have lost their jobs in recent months,

with no sign of any slowing in the decay of the industry. Indeed, it shows

every sign of being in terminal decline. The current prospect of the

complete demise of steel production in Britain threatens the livelihood of

some 30,000 families, most of whom live in areas of already high

unemployment.

Yet the products of that industry have never been more necessary to the

development of the modern world, whose infrastructure, transport and

machine tool requirements are urgent. The mainspring of capitalist

production is not the needs of society, however, but the needs of the

capitalist to make the maximum profit. Since the late 1970s, when the re-

emergence of a crisis of overproduction began to choke the market for

many commodities, including steel, sharpening competition between rival

producers has resulted in the widespread plant closures and lay offs we

now see unfolding.

The Labour party and the trade-union misleaders, along with the

imperialist mass media, are seeking to pin the blame for this on China,

citing the low cost of Chinese steel exports. A Daily Mirror petition, which

Unite is urging its members to sign, demands that the government should

“buy British” and “block China from dumping cheap steel on the UK

market”. Advising workers to cheer on British imperialism in its global

trade-war battle for markets will do nothing to “save our steel”, and

everything to mislead workers into lining up behind the union jack just as

crisis-ridden imperialism slips deeper into slump and war. Let it not be

forgotten how social democracy led the working classes of Europe into the

charnel houses of the trenches under the deceptive slogan of “defence of
the fatherland”.

Labour’s misleadership

The real cause of the collapse of Britain’s steel industry, along with mining

and other former economic mainstays, lies in the policies pursued by

successive British governments, both Conservative and Labour, over

decades, policies dictated by the long-ripening crisis of overproduction. In

1965, the number of workers in the plants of the then British Steel

Corporation (BSC) stood at 817,000. In January 1980, steelworkers began

a bitter 13-week strike as the privatisation and wage-cutting agenda of the

Thatcher government, elected the previous year, started to kick in. This

strike was betrayed by the Labour and trade-union leaderships. Mass steel

production in Scotland effectively ended with the closure of the

Ravenscraig plant in 1992, despite a protracted struggle by the workers

and their local communities. So vital had the plant been to local life that

the town of Motherwell had been popularly nicknamed Steelopolis.

This wilful destruction of a once-thriving steel industry by a parasitic

imperialist ruling class occurred long before China, or any other

developing country, was a significant steel exporter. When the likes of

Jeremy Corbyn attempt to outflank the Tories from the right, demanding

that the government “stand up to China” on the steel issue, they not only

fuel reactionary and social-chauvinist attacks on a developing socialist

country that was once the plaything of British imperialism; they also

prevent the class struggle of the British working class from even getting

off the ground by presenting friends (the socialist countries and workers in

other countries generally) as enemies and enemies (the British ruling class,

the EU and imperialism generally) as friends.

Workers are told by Unite that “together we can save our steel”. But what

does this mean? If it means that by putting pressure on our capitalist

government we can reverse the half century of decline, then it is just

whistling in the dark. Worse, it is encouraging workers to identify their

class interests with those of the capitalist at the very moment when the

state is making its preparations to crush working class resistance to

deepening austerity.

In hard reality there is only one way to save the steel industry in Britain,

and that is to fight class against class with the strategic objective of
establishing the rule of working people. Only then can we create a planned

socialist economy geared to serving the interests of all workers – not only

in this country, but throughout the world.

By all means let us demand the nationalisation of what remains of the steel

industry, and let us demand for those laid off full compensation and

retraining. But let us be sure that we demand these things, not as “left”

camouflage for the pernicious slogan of “British jobs for British workers”,

but as a first step in the direction of ending capitalist class rule for good