05.02.2015
In mortal danger
At the end of the miners strike in 1984-85 the question became whether it was possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Clear-headed partisans of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 knew by late 1984 that the strike was in mortal danger. While this Jack Conrad piece from The Leninist of February 1985 still talks with optimism and militant determination about the prospects for victory, it is balanced with sober realism. The strike was in a precarious state. More generally, the bleak prospects for the workers’ movement, if the miners were driven to their knees, is flagged up. What would ensue would be a general assault on “our pay, conditions, rights and organisations”. With the miners broken, “who could resist?”
In other words, a strategic defeat for our class and a defining victory for the class-war general, Margaret Thatcher, her baying Tory ranks and the class they represented.
Mark Fischer
mark.fischer@weeklyworker.co.uk
No surrender
In the class struggle there is no room for wishful thinking. The miners’ strike is not just in its “final negotiating stage”, but on the verge of collapse. Talk from the likes of Tony Benn that the “miners have won” now stands exposed, as do claims that there have already been power cuts because of this strike.
The truth must be faced, no matter how painful: the National Union of Mineworkers national executive committee is on its knees pleading for ‘honourable surrender terms’, as opposed to the humiliation Thatcher is demanding. The Tories and the National Coal Board know that they have the NEC by the throat and they are determined to smash the NUM as an effective union, destroy the political credibility of Arthur Scargill and decimate the NUM membership through a massive programme of pit closures. The more loudly the NUM NEC, Kinnock and the Morning Star scream for a negotiated settlement, the more Thatcher will press her advantage, in the belief that the drift back to work by miners will sooner or later reach the point where the strike collapses.
The blame for this tragic state of affairs must be placed firmly at the feet of the leadership of our movement - and not just the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party tops, but all those who have contented themselves with acting as cheerleaders for the NUM NEC. For the blunt truth is that the NUM NEC, including Scargill himself, had no clear strategy for victory beyond miners gritting their teeth and waiting for power cuts.
But all is not lost. While there are well over 100,000 miners still on strike, victory can still be snatched from the jaws of defeat. A clue to how this can be done was given by the Tories’ friends at stockbrokers Phillips and Drew.1 In one of their respected forecasts they maintained that there would be no power cuts, no miners’ victory, even if they stayed out until 1986 - but they also stated that this would change if the miners received “additional significant support”.2
The working class movement has a choice. It can, even at this 11th hour, throw its strength into the fray, or it can let the miners go down to terrible defeat.
If we let this happen it will encourage the Tories to unleash a major, sustained offensive against the entire working class: on our pay, conditions, rights and organisations. With the miners down, the Tories reason, who could resist?
Because of this we have from the very start of the strike called for the mobilisation of the working class as a class against the Tories, the capitalist state and those whom they represent. In other words, a strike wave of general strike proportions.
An assorted mish-mash of opportunists, including the leadership of the Communist Party, the Morning Star,the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Socialist Action, Tribune,the Socialist Workers Party, the New Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Group, argue in essence that a general strike ‘is a good idea, but is just not possible’. These philistines are trapped in the art of ‘what is possible’ and are incapable of confronting the Marxist science of ‘what must be’. By blinkering themselves, confining themselves to the situation as it is, the opponents of a general strike casually throw away the key to a victory for the miners. Because of this they slide into self-imposed, pessimistic defeatism, sectarian disdain or light-headed official optimism.
For Leninists, as the general strike is an objective requirement of the situation, we commit our energies, our resources to winning the ideological and political battle for what is needed, so as to make it possible. So, far from Leninists ‘waiting for the TUC’, as the lying bamboozlers of the Spartacist League claim, we not only place the demand for a general strike on the official leadership, but proclaim the slogan: ‘With or without the TUC - general strike’.
The central question is, of course: if the TUC won’t call a general strike, who can? What body has the authority and above all the courage to grasp this dangerous question by its class-war horns?
Certainly, the leadership of the NUM is ideally placed to initiate some sort of an alternative centre to the TUC general council. A call to establish such a body from the NUM would certainly be greeted with an immediate, enthusiastic response from militants the length and breadth of the country.
Will the NUM leadership make such a call? It seems unlikely. The NUM leadership is now increasingly characterised by the division between those who want an ‘honourable settlement’ (that is, in truth ‘honourable’ surrender), along with those who are inching towards this position, and those who insist on remaining intransigent when it comes to their members’ jobs and the necessity of winning the strike. Although the intransigents command a clear majority amongst the rank-and-file militants - something reflected at delegate conferences - they are now, it appears, in a minority on the executive.
At the January executive meeting not only did the compromisers have a majority, but, more importantly, they had the initiative. Because of this the executive accepted the vague suggestion emanating from Welsh churches that the strike could be settled through the establishment of some grand commission of enquiry, consisting of the NUM, the government, the NCB and ‘representatives of the community’ - hardly a demand which will rally “additional significant support”from the working class. Indeed, the fact that the executive decided that the whole of its membership should participate in negotiations with the NCB shows which way the wind is blowing and that the majority on the executive of the NUM have no thought, no intention of challenging the TUC traitors.
The other important executive decision - the one to expel the Notts area from the NUM - while it will no doubt be well received by the heroic Notts strikers, is as clear a sign as is wanted that the strike is on the retreat. The emergence of a neo-Spencer Solidarność-type3 union amongst the NUM’s second largest concentration of membership, and the danger that this could be repeated in Leicestershire and other backward areas, should send alarm bells ringing throughout the workers’ movement. The NUM is in desperate trouble, its integrity as a national union is at risk, it is in urgent need of help to turn the tide in the coalfields in order to bring out on strike those now at work, and indeed in order to win.
We all know that this help is not going to come from Judas Willis or Ramsay MacKinnock. Even union leaders like Jimmy Knapp of the National Union of Railwaymen and Ray Buckton of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (Aslef), who have compared so well with the open traitors, the ‘big bang’ talking windbags, the spineless Labourite tub-thumpers, have not been prepared to take on the Tories in open battle alongside the miners. Instead they have opted for the safety of tokenism. The leaders of the main rail unions have not even given those of their members who have stood by the miners, like the famous lads at Coalville, more than token support when they have been threatened with disciplinary measures, including the sack.4 What is needed from the NUR and Aslef, in truth from all unions, is not one-day protests, but joint strike action with the miners - strike action in support of their own members’ sectional demands, and strike action against the anti-union laws.
So, while we fight for workers to support the Yorkshire and Humberside action, we will, we must, go on arguing for a general strike. This is something we will fight to get the Mineworkers Defence Committee national conference in Sheffield on February 9 to back. We will also argue that the miners have no need for another talking shop like its first conference in December 19845 or the January 12 Liaison Committee conference. The situation demands that a National Miners Support Movement be established, using the existing miners support committees as its foundation stones and building it with elected, recallable delegates from all working class organisations committed to “total physical support”for the miners.
Such a body must quickly seek to transform itself into something like the National Minority Movement of the 1920s. It must fully debate the crucial questions confronting our class and fight to organise under its banner the best rank-and-file militants, especially those from the NUM, who have for so long acted as loyal but unconsulted troops. The militants organised into a well coordinated national body could both circumvent the TUC, the do-nothing fat-cat trade union leaders, and galvanise those intransigent NUM leaders whose only perspective is to call upon the miners to grit their teeth and see the strike on throughout 1985 and towards those elusive power cuts.
It has fallen onto the shoulders of the rank-and-file militants - those in the car plants, in local government, in communications, the docks, the power stations, the hospitals, the steel mills, the railways and, above all, in the mining communities - to turn the tide of the strike and the broad class struggle itself.
They must organise themselves to stop the movement of coal, reverse the drift back to work and provide the “additional significant support”in the form of a general strike that the Tories and Phillips and Drew dread. With this, potential rout can be turned into a magnificent victory for the entire working class.
Notes
1. Phillips and Drew was a large City of London stockbroking partnership. It was acquired by the Union Bank of Switzerland in 1986.
2. Financial Times January 9 1985.
3. George Alfred Spencer (1872-1957) was the miners’ union leader and an MP for Broxtowe (1918-29). In the General Strike of 1926 he negotiated a deal with the local mine owners, went on to lead a breakaway from the Miners Federation of Great Britain and set up the scab Nottinghamshire and District Miners’ Industrial Union (NMIU). This lasted 11 years until 1937, when it merged with the national union. Solidarność was an anti-socialist trade union/movement in Poland that struggled against the Stalinist regime. Its leader, Lech Wałęsa, interviewed in the Sunday Mirror of July 29 1984, had nothing but praise for the government’s handling of the miners’ strike: “With such a wise and brave woman [ie, Thatcher], Britain will find a solution to the strike,” he said.
4. While the official leaderships of rail and transport unions made noises about boycotting coal, rank-and-file railworkers in Coalville, Leicestershire, simply imposed the boycott throughout the strike - despite being surrounded by a sea of scabs.