Reason In Revolt
Its true, as Paul says, that states adopted full employment policies, but that was easy, in the conditions of long-wave boom that led to labour shortages, rather than surpluses! Capital always wants full employment of labour, in so far as as the more labour it employs the more surplus value it produces. It only fears full employment of labour, at the point that it leads to rising wages, and a consequent reduction in the rate of surplus value, and squeeze on profits. Indeed, as recent events have reminded us, its 70 years since 1948, when the Empire Windrush brought thousands of Caribbeans to Britain, answering the call to come and fill some of the many vacant jobs, that capital needed filling. And, herein also lies the reason for rising wages at that time. Not an attempt to buy off revolt, but competition between capitals for scarce labour-power. As described previously, and elsewhere, in the 1950's, this could be addressed by encouraging married women into the workforce, a large rise in the overtime worked – my father during this period (though he generally argued against overtime as a poor alternative to higher basic pay) often worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., plus half a day on Saturday's – as well as immigration. By the early 60's, some of the baby boomers also increased the labour supply, thereby increasing the total social working day, and total absolute surplus value, but, by this time, the potential to raise the total social working day, and mass of absolute surplus value begins to reach its limit, so that wage share rises, and the 1960's/70's profits squeeze sets in. As wages rose in the 1960's, those like my father, who only worked overtime to get the wages they needed, were able to refuse it.
“Workers abandoned the ideologies of resistance that had sustained them in the third long wave. Communism, social-democracy and trade unionism became – whatever the rhetoric said – ideologies of coexistence with capitalism. In many industries trade union leaders effectively became an arm of management.” (p 198)
But, that was not at all a post-war development. Trades unions had always been organisations whose basis was coexistence with capital. The trades union leaders always played a mediating role, and that became more the case as they formed into a bureaucratic stratum towards the end of the 19th century. They increasingly sought respectability. Its depicted well by James Bolam, playing the role of Jack Ford, in the 1970's serial “When The Boat Comes In”. And, those ideas were also always at the heart of social-democracy. The theory of Socialism In One Country, developed by Stalin, in the 1920's, also had at its heart coexistence with capital, manifest in the sabotage of revolutions elsewhere, and also in the Popular Front.
I'm surprised that Paul repeats the arguments of the so called “embourgeoisement theorists”, because those ideas were fairly thoroughly refuted by Goldthorpe et al, in their “affluent worker” studies. It was never the most immiserated workers that stood in the forefront of the labour battalions, but those like the car workers studied by Goldthorpe, and, as their studies showed, simply being able to buy a car, a washing machine, or take a foreign holiday was not enough to detach those workers from their support for Labour at the polls. It was not prosperity that weakened that link, but the failure of social-democracy to live up to its side of the bargain, in the 1970's and 80's.
“The automation levels of the time were crude, but advanced enough to illustrate what the future of work would be like. Though the actuality of a factory run by computer was decades away, and robotisation even further, workers understood that these things were no longer science fiction but distinct possibilities, There could come a time when manual work was no longer necessary.” (p 200)
Actually, I don't think anyone in the 1960's saw that as a remote possibility. When I was still at school, in the 1960's, computers were still big mainframe contraptions only used by governments, or very big corporations. For a time, my father worked at English Electric, in Kidsgrove, as an engineer, producing the casings and so on, but, beyond that, most people had no real conception of what they were, other than boxes with spinning tapes, and flashing lights, as they appeared on The Man From UNCLE. In fact, as the prospect of having to leave school began to enter my head, as I passed 14, it filled me with some dread, thinking whatever I might do, given that I had never shown the slightest ability when it came to woodwork, or anything that required any degree of manual skill. Most of my friends left school at 15, to become engineers, joiners, plumbers or electricians. My brain saved me, but, as a further indication, when I started work, as a cost clerk, the most advanced calculating device at my disposal was a slide rule. It was some years later, before electronic calculators became available, the first one of which cost me more than a day's wages.
Its an indication of just how rapidly technological change occurred, in the late 1970's, and more specifically in the 1980's, that what is actually more specific to the ideas developed in this later period, are transposed back, by Paul, to the earlier times, when they had not actually entered people's minds. The difference of this 20 years is significant. I am more of Paul's generation, hence our shared experience of Northern Soul, though I am a bit older, and yet, despite us both coming from working-class families, in working-class communities, I can relate more, in many ways, to the conditions he describes in relation to his father.
Paul's grandmother was born in 1899, my mother and father, both in 1919, though my mother was the oldest of her family, whilst my father was the youngest of his, and both came from the same kind of typically large families of the time. Even until I was about 12-13, I had my weekly bath in front of the fire, in the kind of zinc bath tub, Paul describes in the old photographs he showed to his grandmother. At the end of the street, where my mother lived with her family, in a rented miners house, were what we used used to call, when I was a kid, as had my parents before, the Starvation Banks. They are at the top of Kidsgrove Bank, on the A50, and, for the last 50 odd years, have been forested. When I was growing up, they were just a slag heap, of spoil from Birchenwood Colliery, where my grandad worked, and got their name from the fact that, in the 1920's, miner's families, who were being starved out, during the General Strike, eked out what they could, picking bits of coal from the slag. That was in the living memory of my mother, and I remember her telling me about coming home from school, one day, to find they were eating her pet rabbit for dinner.
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