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THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS AND 'FULL EMPLOYMENT'
From the interwar period, the working class have used their political power to demand the maintenance of full employment, the "right to work". Once it had been discovered by the state that Keynes' use of the credit system to maintain consumption was indeed possible, this demand has been met.
However, this demand has taken the form of the maintenance of the working class in the jobs in which they are working: that the prevailing conditions of production should continue even after the workings of the market have shown that production to be unprofitable. The working class has refused to accept profitability as a criterion for deciding what to produce. Instead the criterion of what to produce has in practice become what the working class were producing before threatened with redundancy. Because of the political power of the working class in Britain, when the class uses its political power, the state cannot ignore it. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders has been supported with "public money", as has Rolls Royce and BSA. Because the working class have also preferred to remain where they are living when they have accepted redundancy, the state has provided incentives for firms to invest in "the Regions", even though in terms of transport, proximity to markets, raw materials etc it would be more profitable to invest elsewhere. "Public money'' has provided the difference.
The demands by the working class that "public money" be used to support industry which is no longer profitable shows that the working class has understood in practice the importance of Keynes' rational solution: i.e. that it is possible to use the credit system to finance production when, under the rules of the game of capitalism, that production should cease. The working class did not make these demands of the state in the inter-war years because the class did not believe then that it was possible to achieve them. The demand in the interwar period for full employment was in terms of maintenance by the state of the unemployed at a living wage.
Profitability under capitalism is a criterion for what is socially necessary: the law of value exists in order to determine what is socially necessary labour time and what is socially necessary capital. Exchange is the means by which the law of value operates and it is the exchange process which proves that the labour embodied in a commodity is socially necessary. The supply of "public money" to unprofitable industry has meant that the law of value has been superseded by the conscious political decision of the society that commodities should be produced and exchanged because the society has desired that they should be produced, not because the market has called that production into existence by the movement of capital. The basis on which the working class has taken the decision of what should be produced and supported by "public money" has been whether that section of the working class threatened with redundancy has been well enough organised and capable of calling forth enough active support from the rest of the working class to enforce its unprofitable production i.e. it has been taken on the basis of the vicissitudes of the class struggle and the historically determined strength of the threatened sector of the working class
The use of "public money" in this way in Britain dates from the postwar years. The consciousness which reflects this new development has not been particularly well developed in either the working class or the bourgeoisie. Future articles can examine this in more detail The above has shown that the working class has acted to support a particular unprofitable industry because it has been well organised there for historical reasons and also viewing as a 'right' staying in one particular job: change ought not to be necessary.
The most conscious members of the bourgeoisie have been attempting to give Britain more conscious social control over the use of "public money". They have done this by demanding that Parliament should have more say in this kind of decision re public money. Edward du Cann, chairman of the Tory back-bench 1922 committee, wrote in the News of the World on 4.3.73:
"The Budget Debate will be the fifth economic debate this year. It is no longer the most important debate in the Parliamentary economic calendar. Nor should it be. There are better opportunities for discussion. In each of the last four years Government has produced a completely new Parliamentary document ... Its aim is to forecast two things: the growth of the total of our national resources over the next five years, and the amount of Government expenditure during that time with the detail of every activity: so much on health, so much on education, and so on ... This is where the real debate should be. And in the years to come that's where a whole series of debates will come. Judge the matter for yourself. Government expenditure increases continually. It now represents a total of about half our whole national annual production of wealth ... Suppose we all agree on the amount of money we should raise in taxes. On what should it be spent? What should the priorities be? Do you think we should spend more money on roads - or on railways? On preventive medicine - or on hospitals? How much State help should we give to private industry? Speaking as a businessman, I don't believe that we are all that effective in Parliament in controlling or supervising Government expenditure. Lately we've made better progress. We need to make much more ... The Budget becomes less important with every year. It's the long haul which counts, not the one day's wonder."'