The Labour Party Shares Con

The Labour Party have re-discovered a proposal first put forward in the 19th century by a Liberal economist, John Stuart Mill—co-partnership or profit sharing. John McDonnell proposes that 10 per cent of equity in the UK’s large companies would be gradually handed over to workers. But profits arise as the result of working-class exploitation by the property-owning capitalists. McDonnell thus wants to spread the notion that the workers have an interest in their own exploitation.

 Apart from this such schemes are essentially reactionary and dangerous to working-class interests because such ‘‘profits,” being merely an extension of a form of wages, nevertheless foster the illusion that the workers have a stake in that shadowy and illusory conception called the prosperity of the firm.


Moreover, in a highly competitive capitalist world, where the cutting of costs, including wages, is of prime importance, such schemes are not suitable for the capitalists as a whole as a means of achieving this as efficiently as the rapid alternation of market conditions require.

Finally, while capitalism remains, the capitalist class will never yield their economic privilege of appropriating the unpaid labour of the workers either through profit-sharing or any other schemes.