The real problem, after WWII, in Britain, was not any lack of demand for the coal etc., but that the industries had suffered a severe lack of capital investment to modernise them, and raise productivity, again for similar reasons to those set out above. They were, largely, family owned, private capitals, whose history was shaped by the fact that they were established by, and on the land of, the old landed aristocracy, such as the Duke of Bridgewater.
The capitalist state, therefore, did what no individual private capitalist, or even non-state, large-scale socialised capital, could do, which was to mobilise the required money-capital for such modernisation, and to be able to do so on the basis of a long investment horizon, for the return on that investment. It didn't do so out of any socialist conviction, any more than when banks were nationalised after 2008, as seen from the fact that one of the first actions following nationalisation, was to close hundreds of mines, and sack tens of thousands of miners, as well as to take over all of those mines that were operated by miners themselves as cooperatives.
But, to return to the point, and example, above, we have an output value of £1.2 billion, of which £100 million is surplus value. Let us assume that this state owned coal industry sells the output sans the surplus value, i.e. sells it without realising the £100 million of profit. Has the produced surplus value simply disappeared into thin air? No, of course not. It is simply that, the other capitals that buy coal as an input, now obtain it at a price lower than its value/price of production, and so, themselves, each, appropriate a part of that produced surplus value.
Similarly, households that buy coal for their personal consumption, to heat their homes, obtain it, at this reduced price, which means that it reduces the value of their labour-power, and, consequently, raises the amount of surplus value made by their employers. In fact, a look at the operation of nationalised industries in energy production, steel production and so on, which produced material inputs for other capitals, shows that this was, in fact, normally the case.
The same is true, in relation to the provision of labour-services such as health and social care, and education. Though, there is another difference, here. Marx and Engels were opposed, to the creation of welfare states, and the national insurance schemes, used to fund them. They were highly critical of the involvement of the capitalist state, particularly in education. They set that out in the Programme of The First International, for example.
In a speech to the IWA, Marx made the following points,
“The question treated at the congresses was whether education was to be national or private. National education had been looked upon as governmental, but that was not necessarily the case.”
There was general agreement that the Church and government had to be kept out of education.
“Education might be national without being governmental. Government might appoint inspectors whose duty it was to see that the laws were obeyed, just as the factory inspectors looked after the observance of the factory acts, without any power of interfering with the course of education itself.”
In response to a proposal by Citizen Milner that children be educated in bourgeois political economy Marx said it,
“was not suitable to be introduced in connection with the schools; it was a kind of education that the young must get from the adults in the everyday struggle of life.”
In fact,
“Nothing could be introduced either in primary, or higher schools that admitted of party and class interpretation. Only, subjects such as the physical sciences, grammar, etc., were fit matter for schools. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker. Subjects that admitted of different conclusions must be excluded...”
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