On Behalf of Capitalist Industry

Reform & Reconstruction: Britain after the War, 1945-51 by Stephen Brooke
 (Manchester University Press. 
£12.99.)

Last month, being the 50th anniversary of the election of the post-war Labour government, was bound to see a spate of articles, books, and TV programmes on this. This book is one of them. Aimed primarily at history students, it is a collection of contemporary documents with an accompanying commentary.

At that time the Labour Party still used to proclaim that its ultimate aim was Socialism. Its manifesto for the 1945 election Let Us Face the Future declared: “the Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain”.

Of course this “socialism” was in reality a species of state capitalism under which, unlike in Russia, democratic political forms were to be retained. Nevertheless, Labour politicians, intellectuals and activists did see the nationalisation and welfare measures of the new government as “building up the Socialist economic system” (G.D.H. Cole) and “progress towards the Socialist Commonwealth” (Michael Young).

A more realistic interpretation of what was going on was that certain basic industries, essential to the economic property of capitalist industry as a whole, were taken over and run by the state on behalf of the rest of capitalist industry. Naturally these state industries were run on purely capitalist lines, as was soon recognised by the workers in them. According to one study that appeared in 1948:

“when the hoardings were put up in the colliery yards, declaring, ‘This colliery belongs to the National Coal Board and is managed on behalf of the People’, the men responded fiercely, but only for a fortnight. The miners worked harder, were more co-operative and the attendance was better, but this only lasted a fortnight, and this spirit never came back”.

As to the welfare measures, these too made sense in purely capitalist terms. There was an acute labour shortage after the war, so some concessions had to be made to the working class but these could be expected to pay for themselves in that a more healthy workforce that didn’t have to worry so much as to what would happen to them if they fell ill or were injured or became unemployed or old would be a more productive, and so a more profitable, workforce.

In short, far from representing progress towards some socialist goal, the measures passed by the post-war Labour government were measures that stabilised and consolidated capitalism. In any even, they only proved to be temporary in historical terms and have now been almost completely undone in the different capitalist economic conditions of the 80s and 90s.

ALB