Union leaders Smillie, Hodges, and Straker (the secretary of the Northumberland Miners), as well as Cole, who was asked to give a deposition, argued for a binding relation between workers' control and nationalization (in the form of abolition of royalties and state ownership of coal seams): “Just as national ownership is inadequate without workers' control, so workers' control is inadequate without national ownership” (Cole, in Arnot 1919, 33). Indeed, nationalization in itself did not secure the abolition of the wage system, under which “the worker sells his labour to an employer in return for a wage, and by this sale is supposed to forgo all right over the manner in which his labour is used” (ibid.). Th e bold demand was for economic democracy: joint control, shared between miners and the state.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 402