Marx Wasn't Wrong, You Know...

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I read with amusement - schadenfreude, even - a piece in this weekend's FT by Chris Giles on '...relearn[ing] the painful inflation lessons of the 1970s...'. His view is that the decade was a financial disaster, which, I would hazard, depends on your perspective. As someone who was actually a young, working-class adult in Birmingham at the time, I fared pretty damned well, within the obvious constraints of my class and background, not even noticing particularly the effects of the oil crisis and the three-day week: we were already used to power cuts and scrimping through the immediate aftermath of WWII after all.

My recollection of the Seventies is of practically full employment, a National Health Service that worked exactly as it was originally designed, and pretty much free tertiary education to those that merited it, regardless of family circumstances. That decade kick-started many a working-class kid's life and prospects in a way unimaginable in recent decades. We bought our first house when interest rates were stupidly high in the very early eighties - during Thatcher's ridiculous reign of neoliberalism - but still managed to rise above it all, with no thanks to the Tories or their bullshit platitudes about 'enabling' or, as it is now, 'levelling up'. Our generation benefited from a Socialist ethos of education, unionization and social support that has since been as badly-eroded as the White Cliffs of Dover themselves.

The telling part of Giles' piece is that while energy markets were being screwed - sorry, skewed - by the politics of the Middle East (entirely of the UK's creation, mind you), one of the fundamental problems was - excuse me? - practically full employment: '...allowing employees to bid up wages to an annual increase of 5.6%...' Heaven forfend that the working man has any control over his own financial destiny: never minding the simple and irrefutable fact that the wealth of those that employ him/her/etc. is there as a direct result of their labours.

If I sound a tad Marxist, then so be it: after all, he was a pretty good economic philosopher and historian (not a demagogue, or even a politician: if you would just care to read anything other than the Daily Bloody Mail). I just call these establishment buggers out for what they are, as exploiters and charlatans, as I see them. If they were the worst hit in the Seventies, then more fool them for backing the wrong horse(s); but they've no justification whatsoever in blaming the very source of their wealth - my class: the working class - for their own fucking problems...

 


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