Keir Starmer on energy prices, reform and revolution
It being the start of a new financial year, today is also the time when the price cap on energy is raised and many will see prices for electricity and gas rocket. Of course profits for the companies that provide energy are doing the same, which poses the question of what is to be done.
Labour leader Keir Starmer meeting pensioners in Stevenage has concluded that they do not want revolution but they do want to know how they will be able to pay food and energy bills (on a largely fixed income).
Starmer is clearly right but then a former Director of Public Prosecutions would hardly be the person to ask about revolutionary strategy. The fact the he mentioned it all, reflects an interesting point, about people that used to have very left wing views but no longer do. They often mention them when no one much else was actually on that page. Starmer was a member of an organisation in the mid-1980s, Socialist Alternative, which was at least notionally on the far left, and clearly it still lurks somewhere in his memory.
The reality is that in a market economy energy prices can be properly regulated as can profits if the political will is there to do it. Starmer need only have pointed to the current example of France.
Of course Johnson, Sunak and co have no intention of doing any such thing. Social change and how it is achieved is a matter of experience and process not some fixed thing (see the postscript E P Thompson wrote to the 1968 edition of the Making of the English Working Class where he argues that class is ‘the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise’).
If Labour and the unions can build a protest that forces the Government to intervene properly on energy prices, the pensioners of Stevenage certainly wont be thinking about revolution. If they can’t, or won’t, then they might think again.
Some reading this may think that revolution as much as reform stands the best chance of challenging capital. That is a conversation,a process that starts with organisation and protest. Getting that on energy prices is key,
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