Wednesday, March 27, 2013

High Spirits

1945 was a time of hope, after 6 years of War and the depression of the 1930s, in the late 1940s the SPGB had a surge in membership probably its peak so far, in 1951 we bought Head Office on Clapham High Street.


'Public ownership' of industries aka nationalisation is the wages system under new management, it is state capitalism, the working class continued to have its surplus value robbed, Loach does show that previous mine managers were basically transferred over to the NCB

The 1945 settlement shows the failure of political reforms to capitalism, reforms are at the whim of the capitalist class, and can be rolled back as is the case since 1979 and Thatcher but also bear in mind that within the early years of the NHS the capitalist state was reintroducing charges for some things

The welfare state is a' redistribution of poverty among the working class' from those without to those with dependants, the NHS created to to maintain a healthy and efficient workforce so they can sell their labour power to the capitalist class and their surplus value robbed. Keynsian economic intervention is a failed experiment in reformist capitalism leading to unemployment, inflation, even stagflation

The Labour Party was the creation of the trade union movement and Fabian middle class intellectuals who basically via clause 4 advocated state capitalism, from being a reformist party it is now after Blair and New Labour indistinguishable from the Tories, both do the bidding of capitalism and support laissez faire policies and not any form of state capitalism, the Labour Party is the enemy of the working class - it is one of three things that have been disastrous for the working class - the other two being the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution.

One positive from the film is that reformists like Benn and Loach have now reached the conclusion that nationalisation was a failure - it being to down centralisation and there being no workers control. There was no mention of Marx in the film, even John Rees (ex-SWP) mentions the Peasants Revolt, John Ball, the Diggers and Robert Owen in a lineage of Labour Party but no Marx which probably is correct, we are talking about a Fabian trade union party

The 87 year old working class Liverpudlian put it all in a nutshell at end of film; "the profit system is rotten and corrupt, and the quicker it goes the better".

Socialism, the abolition of the wages system as advocated by the World Socialist Movement of which the SPGB is part is the only way forward.

Steve Clayton







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