Freeze-up: Waste, Inefficiency and Chaos

Everyone knows about the world-wide waste of armaments and the destructiveness of war, but quite a lot of people have a feeling that capitalism is really rather marvellous in the way it gets things done; quickly, cheaply, efficiently and all tailor-made to the requirements of “the customer who is always right.”

You only have to spell it out like this to see what a laugh it is.

And whether it is fact or only a misleading impression, there seems to have been more and more criticism in recent years of what is done and the way it is done. Readers of Which, the Shoppers Guide and the Daily Press and any who spend a few hours browsing in the Molony Report on “Consumer Protection” will have had confirmed in general what they already know from particular experience, that capitalist production’s smiling image isn’t a bit like the reality. (And when we read about Kruschev telling the Russians to improve their efficiency by copying the western capitalist countries it gives a grim impression about Russian standards.)

But in January and February of 1963 the shivering inhabitants of Britain had an unprecedented opportunity (worst for a century) of watching and suffering from capitalism’s deficiencies—the blocked roads and railways, the frozen pipes, the failures of gas and electricity supply and inability to get coal because the millions of unsaleable tons were stored in places made inaccessible by snow and frost.

The Molony Committee said in their Report (Para. 12) that apart from solid fuel, they had not thought fit to consider whether “the consumer” needed protection against the nationalised power industries (gas and electricity) because “their functions, duties and monopolistic relationship to the public have been determined as a matter of governmental policy and there is no room to apply the ordinary consumer/retailer/producer principles.” Its meaning is rather hard to define, but in January and February quite a lot of would-be but frustrated consumers could have told the Molony Committee a thing or two.

The supply difficulties in cold weather led to demands that the gas and electricity authorities should have surplus capacity in hand to meet emergencies and that they and other suppliers of services should be organised to deal with cold spells.

The howls of complaint were very loud because this time it wasn’t just the poor who were going without but often the rich as well: no such volume of criticisms are heard in other winters when supplies are sufficient and only those who can’t afford to pay suffer.

The Gas and Electricity Boards defended themselves with the plea that it isn’t necessary to have a lot of capacity lying idle for ten months a year just for use in the cold spells. The Guardian backed them up, declaring that to have enough surplus capacity would cost something over £100 million. “This would not be good sense but extravagance.”

Here speaks the true voice of capitalism. Thousands of millions of pounds on armaments, yes, but not a tenth of that amount on providing something useful which might not pay! To the capitalist, capital, whether privately invested or in the nationalised industries must earn its proper return. Idle capital like workers idling on the employers time makes them shudder.

H.