Outdoor speakers of the Socialist Party are frequently requested to name capitalists and are deemed to have failed to prove their case on declining to do so. The validity of our case does not depend on the ability to compile a directory of the parasites of this society however. Capitalists are the products of social conditions where the means of living are privately owned and production is for profit; they are not the makers of these conditions. So it is essential to understand how capitalism works. Socialists only quote names to illustrate this.
A good example is provided for us by the item in the Daily Telegraph of 5 June titled “Tory MP leaves £2.8m fortune”. The point of interest for us, was not in the fact that a Tory MP died rich, there is nothing unusual about that. It was in the first paragraph which stated “Reinvestment of Government compensation from his substantial interest in coal mines in Nottinghamshire, as a result of nationalisation in 1947, has helped to provide the largest probate value so far this year — £3,145,452 gross, £2,807,920 net — for the estate of Col. Claude Lancaster, a Conservative MP for more than 30 years”. To put it crudely, the Colonel, a former mine owner, was the victim of Labour’s nationalisation policies and came out of the ordeal with his wealth intact.
The mining industry between the wars faced shrinking markets. The measures to combat this included wage cuts, deterioration in working conditions, and pit closures and the resulting resistance of the miners to these cuts put the industry at the centre of political controversy in those days. The Labour Party, with the support of the miners, claimed the fault lay with private ownership of the mines and the owners’ greed for profit. Nationalisation was to be the remedy by eliminating the owners. It was understood that the chaos of competition would be replaced by a sane and humane planning of production. The Socialist Party at the time argued that nationalisation was not the answer, as the result would be state capitalism with no important changes in the lot of the workers.
The nationalisation that the Labour Party and many mine workers wanted so badly has been implemented for over thirty years now. Mining has changed much over that period of time, yet the essentials remain the same. The profit motive determines the decisions of executives of the National Coal Board every bit as much as it did that of the managers of the old companies. Closures have continued and the industry has shrunk much since 1947. Mechanisation, which could have been a boon in lightening the toil of the miners, when allied to the profit motive brought stress and danger instead. Nationalisation did for a time bring a change that Colonel Lancaster and the former owners would have appreciated, the miners believed in nationalisation and went along with the streamlining of the industry they had resisted before.
Thirty years after the event that was claimed to be such a momentous change, workers still produce wealth for the benefit of the owning minority and the announcement of Colonel Lancaster’s will is a timely reminder of this.
Joe Carter
No comments:
Post a Comment