The energy ‘price cap’ & the moral economy. Time to return to the practice of a ‘Fair Price’
The Regulator OfGem announced details of the October price cap on energy prices today. Of course it is not meant to cap or control exorbitant costs for electric and gas. Its essentially an indication to the market of what an unfettered price is.
The Government have shown no intention of doing anything so far. Political pressure and anger will mean that cannot last but their thought will be to use public money to subsidise energy prices. Certainly a freeze is essential as Labour has underlined. Talk by warmongering idiots like Johnson and Zahawi that prices are high because there is a war have a point. Britain is not at war with anyone but the Tories are engaged in a class war to give a free pass to profiteering energy companies.
EP Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class that before the ideas and practice of the market economy became dominant in the first decades of the nineteenth century there were other views. The leading thinker was the socialist Robert Owen but his ideas reflected wider customs and practices.
Before the ideas of Adam Smith took hold many workers had the perspective of a fair price and a just wage. Thompson notes that for Robert Owen the ‘profit-motive was wrong and unnecessary’. This idea was also held by Cobbett, Carlile and others. The capitalist was seen as ‘parasitic’ and labour as the source of all wealth. Such ideas led eventually the birth of the Co-Operative Movement co-existing with capitalism but operating on a collective rather than an individual basis.
As the energy crisis underlines that a market economy doesn’t work for many its time to revisit these ideas and strategies
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