On the first point he finds that, when compensation is paid to prior owners of nationalized industries, the redistributive effect is much diluted and that other methods are available which have a very considerable equalizing effect. On the second point, if full-employment policies are capable of successful application to a capitalist economy, the advantage of public ownership on this point disappears. He withholds judgment as to the probable degree of such success. On the third point, he finds that the earlier irresponsible power of capitalist enterprise has been much limited by trade-union and state action. While, as experience shows, nationalization in some degrees breaks up or diffuses power, it creates a new problem. As he says, "I doubt if there is any escape from the dilemma that the more independent the boards [of nationalized industries] are allowed to be, the more they will exercise power without responsibility, and the less independent they become, the greater the risk of over-centralisation and lack of enterprise" (p. 14). On the fourth point, the ethics of competition, he is noncommittal. Across the board, the general impression created is that Gaitskill regards the whole question of industrial organization to be open to reexamination, free of older socialist dogma.
Upon reviewing experience with the nationalized industries, he finds real accomplishments and is not "disillusioned." At the same time, serious problems have shown up. These very largely stem from large-scale management. The deadening effect of monopolistic centralism imposed upon these industries may yield to administrative improvement. But Gaitskill clearly has no conviction that the structure should be imposed upon others. A case-by-case, one-at-a-time approach is suggested without prior assumption that the circumstances will be found favorable to nationalization. He ends by drawing a distinction between nationalization and public ownership. He inclines to the idea that the state should gradually acquire equity shares in privately owned enterprises. "The state may become the owner of industrial, commercial or agricultural property without necessarily exercising detailed control even over an individual firm—much less a whole industry" (p. 35). Such assets—acquired from death duties, budget surpluses, and conceivably a capital levy—could be held by public investment trusts. To the extent of such investments, what is now private property income would become public income, and capital gains would accrue to the public, serving the objective of greater equality. "How far they [ the investment trusts] would exercise control over the companies in which they held shares is not a matter on which it would be wise to be dogmatic now" (p. 35). Other possible forms of mixed ownership and
control are envisaged as possibilities, especially where risks are too great for private enterprise alone or it is laggard in undertaking essential lines of production. The whole approach represents a thoroughly "statist" or interventionist viewpoint. But it parts company with traditional stereotypes of what a socialist economy would be like.
We now come to Mr. Grossman journalist, member of Parliament, and long an influential force in party councils, especially on international political affairs. His pamphlet, Socialism and the New Despotism, is more narrowly focused than any of the writings referred to above. He is concerned specifically with the concentration of economic power. What he has to say illustrates the truly difficult situation of those ageing socialist politicians who try at once to be faithful to their socialist principles and to engage in program-making for the Labour Party.
Grossman has adopted as applicable to Great Britain J. K. Galbraith's stereotype for American industry under the name of "oligopoly"—a convenient and rather more realistic successor to "monopoly capitalism." He rejects Galbraith's favorable judgment of performance under American conditions—finding private power too concentrated, distributive injustice too pronounced and competitive safeguards too weak. Therefore the industrial oligopolies must be socialized. The case having been made, Grossman then goes programmatic—with astonishing results. He places three fields on the action agenda: municipal housing and nationalized transport and insurance—in other words, fields to which the discussion of industrial oligopoly is totally irrelevant. His excuse for this delimitation is that "Neither the workers in industry nor the voters are well acquainted with the serious Socialist case for public ownership." It is "prudent, therefore, to select industries where even the non-Socialist can be convinced that it is desirable" (p. 13).
Nationalization alone still would not quiet Crossman's anxieties about power. He distrusts concentrated economic power wherever found—on the boards of nationalized industries, in the state bureaucracy, in the trade unions. The Coal Board, for example, has powers greater than those of private industrial groups, and they are little linked to the broad objectives of a socialist program, while "the state bureaucracy itself is one of those concentrations of power which threaten our freedom" (p. 12). To Grossman, "the defence of personal freedom and personal responsibility in a managerial society" are equally important with economic aims.