Alex has been releasing short-form video content exploring the idea of nationalising different well-known brands, including Uber, Nvidia and Nestlé. He will continue this series over the next few months to cover Nike, INEOS, VW and Dyson.
See these examples of Uber, Nvidia and Nestlé.
The thought experiment goes like this:
Take a well-known, commercially successful company and consider what we, as a population, could do with it if we socialised it.
By socialising, we are not asking what would happen if the ghouls currently in our government nationalised that company as it exists today. We are asking what we–the people–could do with its infrastructure, resources, finance and industrial capacity.
This assumes full and total democratic control over that company’s means of production.
It has been interesting to see responses across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as people struggle to sit with the abstraction, instead defaulting to asking how this could be financed given the size of these companies, pushing back on whether we should be seizing things from capitalists who put all their hard work into building them, or–most commonly–arguing that the government could just do this itself, or that you could do it yourself.
This highlights the liberal capitalist framing through which most people see the world around them. It also reveals how little democracy and collective organising most people have in their day-to-day lives.
The boundaries of what most people understand as democracy are incredibly narrow.
It seems that the collective belief in what is possible stems only from two places: state representatives do it for us, or we do it ourselves.
This isn’t about apportioning blame, this is liberal capitalism doing its quietest work.
Socialising the means of production is perhaps one of the ideas Karl Marx is best known for. However, in a modern society where the means of production don’t look like one building full of assembly lines–raw materials in, finished commodity out–the idea becomes diffuse in the face of modern globalised digital production and incredibly hard to piece together. Combine this with the liberal democratic model of democracy equalling voting every now and then, and this abstraction becomes unreachable.
Karl Marx and Socialising the Means of Production
The resistance to these thought experiments is not the result of ignorance. The societies that most of us find ourselves living in are very effective at limiting our ability to think beyond the existing social architecture. This is not an accident; it is constant and deliberate, working at such a level that makes it difficult to notice.
We think the power of these thought experiments is that they present a challenge of perception: pushing us to examine our perception of the world, our role in it, and our ability to effect change. This is not to suggest that the problems we face can be remedied by a change in perspective alone. This is just the starting point.
The initial resistance, we think, comes from our perception of the legitimacy of private property claims. We look at Nestlé and rationalise their behaviour from a position that accepts a basic premise without challenge: Nestlé owns the land, buildings, equipment, and knowledge base used to produce the commodities they sell. They take the risk and owe it to their shareholders to generate a profit. By leaving this ‘common sense’ premise unchallenged, we have unknowingly accepted a structural illusion that minimises our potential agency. To uncover the actual character of production, we need to examine how this ‘common sense’ is produced in the first place–and Marx can help us do this.
When Marx examines production, he doesn’t start with who owns what. He starts with something more fundamental: what production actually is. At its most basic, the labour process is the universal relationship between human beings and the natural world: we take what exists in nature and, through conscious, purposeful effort, transform it into something that meets our needs. This is not a capitalist invention. It is, as Marx puts it, “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence.”1 This condition is common to every form of society that human beings have ever organised. Capitalism captured production, even though it needs us to believe it created it.
Marx refers to this as the means of production: the raw materials, instruments, machinery, land, and infrastructure through which human labour transforms nature into useful things.2 And here is where our ‘common sense’ starts to crack. The machines in a Nestlé factory did not appear from nowhere. The agricultural knowledge embedded in their supply chains was not conjured by a boardroom. The logistics networks, the processing techniques, the understanding of soil and crops and climate are all the accumulated product of human labour stretching back not years but generations. As Marx observes, the instruments of labour “show traces of the labour of past ages, even to the most superficial observer.”3 Every piece of infrastructure Nestlé relies on is already the product of collective social effort–built by workers, scientists, engineers, farmers, and communities whose names appear on no shareholder register. Nestlé did not build this. We did. What Nestlé did was acquire legal title to it.
This distinction between the social process that produces the means of production and the legal relation that owns them is what Marx calls the relations of production.4 These are social relationships: who controls the means of production, who directs the labour process, and who takes the surplus it generates. Under capitalism, those are class relations. On one side, those who own the means of production. On the other, those who must sell their labour to access them. It is living labour that animates the means of production, that gives them their value and their purpose. Yet under capitalist relations, the worker enters the factory and from that moment, as Marx puts it, everything that happens there “belongs to the capitalist.”5
So how does this arrangement come to feel natural? This is where Marx introduces commodity fetishism.6 When goods are produced for exchange rather than direct use, the social relationships between the people who produced them disappear. The KitKat on the shelf has a price. It does not announce that the Ghanaian cocoa farmer was paid a fraction of a living wage, that water was extracted from communities who needed it, or that decades of lobbying shaped the regulatory environment in which it was produced. The social relations are invisible. We only see a product and a price.
This price that we see has been placed at the forefront of economics by neoliberal thinkers. In 1980, one of the fathers of neoliberal economics, Milton Friedman, gave a now-famous talk about a pencil and the social relations that preceded its creation: we recommend you watch it here.7 Friedman demonstrates Adam Smith’s invisible hand, as well as Hayek’s emphasis on the power of decentralised information. It is the price system that sends the signal driving each social relation in the production chain to come together and collaborate on the creation of a pencil now available to you for a small fee. This is the neoliberal ‘common sense’, and Friedman paints quite a utopian picture, free of exploitation, ecological destruction and coercion. He even points out that the British government imported rubber trees to Malaya from South America; glossing over the fact that this was only made possible by imperial and colonial institutions, and ignoring the ecological damage caused by monocrop cultivation.
This is a structural effect of the commodity form itself. We relate to each other as if we were things. We relate to things as if they had social power. The fetish is built into the architecture of how capitalist production works, which is why the ‘common sense’ that protects Nestlé’s property claims does not feel like ideology. It feels like reality: it is produced constantly, in every transaction, in every price, every time we interact with the products of collective social labour as if they were the natural achievement of a private company.
Democratising Nestlé
Nestlé controls huge amounts of the water supply, creating scarcity to charge you for water as a resource. They lobbied against its recognition as a human right.
They aggressively market infant formula in the Global South and lobby for restrictions on women’s autonomy in the U.S. government.
They hold the bargaining power over farmers and producers, making sure farmers and producers are paid a pittance while Nestlé accumulates enormous profits. While food prices rise, they pay their shareholders billions in dividends and make no effort to ease the situation–all in the pursuit of capital accumulation.
They operate in the Global South, often peddling UPFs to rural communities and effectively getting people hooked on products manufactured thousands of miles away, disrupting local food systems and worsening health outcomes.
Nestlé are, by all accounts, terrible.
Their control over the means of production damages mental and physical health, weakens democracy, disrupts family life, and deepens inequality.
And this is all terrible. The concerning part, though, is that it doesn’t particularly matter who runs Nestlé for this to be true.
Replace every executive on their board tomorrow with the most well-meaning people you can find, and the structural pressures that produce Nestlé’s behaviour would grind those people into the same shape. Nestlé behave the way they do because that is what the capitalist form of production compels.
The Compulsion to Accumulate
Capital is not a thing. It is a process. It is the endless movement of money into commodities and back into more money. And it has no natural stopping point. A firm that fails to grow, cut costs, and extract more value from its inputs will be undercut or destroyed by one that does. Marx calls this the coercive laws of competition: “the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”8
The system imposes this logic on the individual capitalist. This is why Nestlé privatises water in drought-affected communities. Water as a scarce, privately controlled resource is more profitable than water as a commons. Any competitor willing to do the same would do so if Nestlé didn’t.
The race to the bottom is structural.
Surplus Value and the Squeeze on Producers
Profit has to come from somewhere. For Marx, it comes from the gap between what workers and producers are paid and the value they actually create. The worker is paid the value of their labour-power: what it costs to sustain their capacity to work. But they produce more value during the working day than they are paid for. That unpaid portion is surplus value–the source of profit.9
The Ghanaian cocoa farmer is paid a price structurally less than the value they produce. Despite Friedman’s pencil, the cocoa farmer doesn’t do this for ‘efficiency’, or to ‘foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world’–they do it because they are coerced. The KitKat on the shelf represents far more value than flows back down the supply chain. Nestlé’s market power over suppliers and its ability to dictate terms to farmers with no alternative buyers both widen the gap. This is not aberrant corporate behaviour. It is capitalism working exactly as designed.
The Metabolic Rift
Marx identified that capitalism doesn’t just exploit labour; capitalism also exploits nature on the same logic. He described the metabolic relationship between human beings and the natural world as the ongoing exchange through which labour transforms nature and nature regenerates what labour uses. Capitalism, he argued, systematically ruptures this relationship: nutrients, water, and soil are extracted and not returned; natural cycles that sustain life are plundered for inputs and left to degrade.
John Bellamy Foster calls this the metabolic rift.10 Nestlé extracting groundwater from communities in Pakistan and Mexico and selling it back to them in plastic bottles is a precise expression of this rift. Like the British Empire’s transplanting of rubber trees halfway around the world, Nestlé displaces local food systems across the Global South with ultra-processed products engineered in laboratories. The disruption is the operation.
The State and the Lobby
Nestlé’s lobbying against the recognition of water as a human right is usually framed as corporate influence corrupting a neutral state. Marx’s analysis is more precise. The state is not a neutral arbiter–even Friedman’s pencil story lets slip that the British state moved rubber trees halfway around the world to serve imperial industrial production. It is the instrument through which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced and defended. As Marx and Engels put it, the executive of the modern state is essentially a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.11
We’d have the Power to Change all That
So the thought experiment is this: if we, the people, socialised and democratised the means of production of Nestlé, what could we do with it?
How could we take its for-profit structure and turn it towards human good, exactly as it exists today? Here are just a few examples:
If we controlled Nestlé, we could radically reshape the company into a force for global public good rather than purely for profit.
We could create a global infant feeding programme that prioritises public health over sales, ensuring that all infants have access to safe, nutritionally complete feeding options and that formula marketing is fully transparent and evidence-based.
We could lobby governments for more protective parental laws, including extended paid parental leave, workplace support for breastfeeding, and social policies that reduce child malnutrition.
We could ensure contracts favour farmers and sustainable producers, guaranteeing fair prices, ethical working conditions, and support for regenerative agricultural practices that improve soil health and biodiversity.
We could reinvest profits to stabilise food prices rather than distribute them as dividends, cushioning communities against food inflation and price shocks while funding nutrition education programmes.
We could work with local producers and communities in the Global South to help transform their local food systems. Using Nestlé’s vast supplier and logistics network, we could ensure communities have access to a balanced diet, sufficient calories, and locally appropriate foods, while respecting cultural food practices, local biodiversity, and local economies.
We could make water freely available in areas where it is scarce, and advocate for its recognition as a fundamental human right, supporting clean water infrastructure projects.
We could invest in research and development for sustainable, nutritious foods, including plant-based and fortified products, reducing reliance on resource-intensive animal agriculture and supporting global climate goals.
We could revamp Nestlé’s marketing and branding to prioritise public health over consumer manipulation, transparency over obfuscation, and education over aggressive branding.
We could harness Nestlé’s global reach to tackle diet-related health issues, including obesity, diabetes, and micronutrient deficiencies, by reformulating products, reducing sugar, salt, and harmful fats, and making healthy options more accessible and affordable.
We could use our ownership of major brands across beverages, confectionery, dairy, and nutrition, such as Nescafé, KitKat, Gerber, and Maggi, to embed these principles throughout the global food system, setting new standards for what production in the public interest actually looks like.
We could partner with NGOs, governments, and research institutions to measure impact, drive transparency, and create accountability frameworks so that our actions demonstrably improve health, equity, and environmental outcomes worldwide.
We could align every part of the business–from sourcing to marketing to R&D–with a vision of global public good, turning a multinational corporation into a tool for systemic change.
Finally, we could reduce output to match consumption, reducing emissions and waste, and ensuring only the products that people want and need make their way into their homes.
All this is possible, not in some utopian sci-fi future, but in this present reality, exactly as it is right now. The world doesn’t need to change. The only thing that needs to change is who commands our production.
The Social Character of Labour
Once you start reading Marx, it is hard not to notice how intuitive his arguments actually are. Understanding the social character of labour simply requires you to see something you already know.
Pick up your phone. That object contains the labour of miners in the DRC, engineers in Taiwan, assembly workers in Shenzhen, shipping crews crossing the Pacific, and decades of accumulated human knowledge that no single person or company produced. It contains the energy and time of thousands of people you will never meet. And yet it sits in your hand as if Apple made it. Apple is just the most visible tip of an enormous social production network, built across continents and generations.
This is what Marx means by commodity fetishism. The social relations disappear, and what you see is a product and a price. As Marx puts it, “the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him.”12 The collective knowledge that once belonged to workers gets absorbed into the machinery and technical know-how and comes back to confront them as someone else’s property. “Science, generally speaking,” Marx notes, “costs the capitalist nothing–a fact that by no means prevents him from exploiting it.”13
There is a related concept Marx develops called the General Intellect: the accumulated knowledge of humanity, including the science, the language, the technical skill, the cultural production built up across generations of collective effort.14 The language you think in was not invented by you. The mathematics behind your phone was developed over centuries. The internet was built on publicly funded research. GPS was a state project. Capital didn’t create any of this–it enclosed it.
This is a pattern. The social intellect is produced collectively and seized privately. The risk is carried by everyone. The profit flows to a few. As Marx writes in the 1844 Manuscripts: “My own existence is social activity. That which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.”15 The self-made person is not just a myth. It is an ideological necessity–the story capital tells to justify the enclosure of what belongs to all of us.
Once you start seeing this, it doesn’t stop. The road you drive to work on. The school that taught you to read. The medical research behind every drug you’ve ever taken. All of it, under capitalism, passed down collectively by countless people who came before you, but now owned by someone else and returned to you at a price.
This has real political implications. If production is already collective, then the liberal myth of the self-sufficient individual collapses. Nobody builds anything from nothing. There can be no ‘self-made man.’ Everything sits on top of an enormous foundation of collective social labour. The ‘rags’ in ‘rags to riches’ were provided for you by someone else. The question was never whether production is social. The question is who controls it and who takes the surplus.
The reason this is hard to see is not because it is complicated. It is because capitalism works hard to make the present feel permanent, and above all, universal. We are trained to believe that private property has always existed, that competition is human nature, that there is no alternative. Marx called this thinking ahistorical: stripping the historical character from a category until it appears as a timeless, natural fact rather than a temporary arrangement we made and could unmake. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama demonstrated Marx’s point perfectly by proclaiming the ‘end of history.’ Once you lose this historical sense, the future stops feeling like an open horizon. It starts to feel like a threat. You stop asking what could be and start defending what is.
Mourning the Possibilities
When you sit with that, it is huge. It leaves us feeling a few things:
We mourn what could be. It’s possible, but the people holding the steering wheel are driving us in the wrong direction while we’re in a straitjacket in the boot.
It makes us angry that all that capacity isn’t just being wasted: it’s actively being used to cause irreversible harm to people and the planet.
But it makes us hopeful. According to Hickel and Sullivan, providing decent living standards for every person on the planet–including nutritious food, housing, healthcare, education, electricity, sanitation, computers, phones, internet, and transport–would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use.16 This isn’t a statistic we should ignore. That means 70% of our global resource and energy use is at best being wasted on shareholder value and at worst is actively exacerbating inequality, destroying ecosystems, and coercing people into low standards of living in order to exploit them.
The means of production are there. The world can sustain us as a species in a life of healthy leisure and give us access to all the basic goods and services we need, while respecting the social metabolism between humankind and nature. There is no need to keep degrading our planet in the name of profit.
When you start seeing the world as a web of social relations rather than a collection of things, the naturalness of capitalism begins to dissolve. The high rent is not a fact of life. It is the result of a specific set of relations between people. The low wages are not a necessary function of Friedman’s price mechanism. They are the outcome of a class struggle, one side of which has been winning for a very long time.
We are the species that produces beyond immediate need, that builds on what came before, that transforms the natural world through conscious, cooperative effort. That is not incidental to human nature. It is human nature. Capital didn’t create that.
It was always ours. It is time to reclaim it.
Notes:
1.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990, p.290.
Ibid., p.284.
Ibid., p.288.
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Preface. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1859.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1, p.292.
Ibid., p.163.
Friedman, Milton. Free to Choose. PBS Television Series, 1980. Episode 1: “The Power of the Market.” Available on YouTube.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1, p.381.
Ibid., pp.324-325.
Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. New Delhi: Fingerprint Classics, Prakash Books, 2025.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1, p.482.
Ibid., p.508.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics, 1993, pp.704-706.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Third Manuscript: Private Property and Communism.
Hickel, Jason and Sullivan, Dylan. “How Much Growth is Required to Achieve Good Lives for All? Insights from Needs-Based Analysis.” World Development Perspectives, Volume 35, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612.