[BL workers marching against the Edwardes plan Those…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-11-21Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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BL workers marching against the Edwardes plan Those that were caught —would have something to say annarally, mont to iail about it all. SIEWARDS generally went to jail.
Nor were the unfortunate buyers in any position to enjoy the fruits of ownership-since the old owners were not convinced of their "title deeds"
Yet buyers will doubtless line up to buy the bankrupt BL plants from the Spartacists (''One conveyor line, old and worn out-going cheap. Also 300 half built Marinas. Quick sale needed").
Overcapacity
Quite what this imaginary new buyer would do: with his bargain-priced BL factories in a period of overcapacity throughout the car industry has not yet been worked out by the IST.
Indeed the policy is carefully stated to avoid embarassing parallels with the moves by the Stalinist leaders of the UCS work-in and reformist leaders in endless plant closures ever since to find a "new buyer" for their doomed plant.
Of course one problem would be that capitalism as a whole would remain intact. Anyone bold enough to buy a "seized" factory secondhand from the IST would need permanent and massive workers' defence guard to protect it from the shareholders and the state (possibly providing jobs for the old workforce?)
And the workforce, dividing up the spoils of this con-trick of all time might find the forces of the state-the police fraud squad But these are details-no doubt to be sorted out in the next issue of Spartacist Britain.
Hot dog stand
What matter whether the question of property relations has been settled? Take the money and run!
• Armed with this new wealth BL workers can take their places at the back of the dole queueor use their assets to open a little shop or a hot-dog stand somewhere.
Indeed IST policy-concocted by petty bourgeois for petty bourgeois has all the ingredients to turn Britain into a nation of shopkeepers!
In essence the whole flight of fancy is no more than a leftish and laughable form of BL's own voluntary redundancy scheme. ( Beneath the "revolutionary" phraseology is a deeply reactionary, anti-working i class content that offers Leyland workers only total confusion, demoralisation and defeat.
But it gives the Sparts the position they have aiways sought-uniquely rotten; and uniquely wrong!
FOR