Capitalism and Socialism: not such strange bedfellows

Atop the parapets of the Great Western Bridge in Glasgow are lanterns supported by cast iron figures of heroic workers, representing the women and men who made the wealth which made the city. Well-deserved, you may think, but what patronising cheek the architect of the Great Western Bridge had for the reality was and is again that those who toil are neglected, underpaid and ignored.

Surely nowhere in the world is there a finer monument to Victorian enterprise than Glasgow. Even today, when Thatcherism and new technologies have swept away the workplaces of thousands and the maritime heritage has been airbrushed from the sight of the visitor, throughout the city there remain monuments to the civic and business leaders of the Industrial revolution, in the form of fine streets, public buildings and even tombs. Indeed the latter, gathered into the huge Necropolis beside the lovely cathedral, perhaps sum up capitalism to perfection: ostentatious self-esteem in competition.

However, so effective has been the cleansing of the city of the real story of its wealth that one could stop and just admire it as the perfect product of capital. But who really made the ships, the steam engines, the buildings? It was not those buried in the Necropolis, surely, but those anonymously dumped in paupers' graves. The former certainly ordained that these things should be created but they surely did not wield the tools nor break sweat to implement them. No, this was the role of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children [yes, children] underpaid, living in overcrowded squalor in rotting tenements. The evidence for this description is maintained in records and displays at the Peoples Palace and elsewhere, though not so much is extant, for most has been removed. Is it any wonder that, living cheek-by-jowl with their employers' excesses, the workers should have been driven to a different political allegiance - to solidarity, mass action, to objection to the vast inequality of the great city, to socialism? Yet, then, as now, power lay not with the majority but with the wealth. Today, we once again have a growing economy in which inequality is demanded by a few at the expense of the rest. Glasgow of 150 years ago is with us once more and it is again socialism's time, driven by capitalism's divisive greed.