Should Capitalism Have a Future?: Debate Report

A debate last night between a defender
of capitalism and the Party was one of

our most successful meetings for years.
Nearly all the seats set out in the Small
Hall at Conway Hall were taken.



Capitalism was represented by John
Meadowcroft, Lecturer in Public Policy at
Kings College, London, who gave a lecture
on the merits of capitalism as he saw it.


His basic argument was that capitalism,
like Churchill said of political democracy,
was the least worst way of organising economic
activity; it had its faults but all the alternative
ways that had been tried had failed.


He said that since it came into being around 1800
the market economy had lifted millions out of
poverty and provided a large proportion of the
world's population with the highest standard of
living ever experienced in human history.



The capitalism he defended was one where prices
were set by the free play of market forces and
where the government's role was restricted to
guaranteeing property rights and issuing the
currency; any attempt to set prices by government
intervention would only lead, and had led, to
the bureaucratisation of society with government
officials deciding what consumers needed rather
than the consumers themselves.


Richard Headicar, for the Party, stuck closely
to the debate topic of
"Should Capitalism Have a Future?"
and refuted the idyllic and almost ethical
way in which he said John Meadowcroft had
described the way the market worked.


The market did not encourage ethical behaviour
but allowed,in fact encouraged, all sorts of
underhand and destructive ways of making money.


His opponent,he said, had spoken of capitalism
as a system of meeting consumer demand, but had
not mentioned profit whereas making more money
for those who already had it was the primarily
objective of capitalism.


It was a system that was based on an inequality
of wealth ownership and income and this resulted
in the wants and whims of the rich, however they
had acquired their wealth, being met while the
needs of the rest of us were not properly catered
forand in the case of the millions in the world
who died from staravation and preventable
disease were not met at all.



It was an unethical system that was a disgrace
to humanityand should be done away with and
replaced by a world societyof common ownership,
democratic control, production for use
and free access for all according to need.



In the discussion from the floor, socialists
pointed out that we did not deny that capitalism
had played a necessary historic role but that this
was now long over; capitalism was now a hindrance
to the continued social progress of humanity which
led to wars and the destruction of the environment.


The supporters of capitalism did not deny that
the market system responded only to paying demand,
but argued that thesolution to poverty was for the
government(!) to guaranteeeveryone a minimum income
so that they could participatein the market.
Someone mentioned that socialism
would be against human nature.


In winding up, Richard Headicar explained that
human behaviour had changed and could change
again; in fact,succesfully convincing people
that it couldn't change wasin the end the
main thing that kept capitalism in being.


Capitalism should not have a future.


In his final speech, John Meadowcroft said
that inequality was necessary as a spur to
progress and that democratic discussion of
what to produce was a boring waste of time.


Capitalism was the only practicable future.


For the record, a precise count showed that
53 persons were present, of only 19
were Party members.