12.02.2015

Still not too late

It was necessary to confront the defeatism of the left head on at the end of the miners' strike, says Mark Fischer

It is hard to believe now, but during the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 the bulk of the left in this country at best “toyed” with the idea of a general strike, as this Alec Long article from The Leninist of February 1984 puts it. That, or groups actively campaigned against the demand.

Possibly the most craven of these was the Socialist Workers Party, a self-regarding sect whose leaders viewed the strike with the interests of the SWP and the defence of its narrow perspectives foremost in their minds. This epic battle was thus characterised as an “extreme example of … the ‘downturn’ in the movement”.¹ Consequently, the SWP constituted itself as one of the most conservative, bureaucratically sluggish organisations in the solidarity movement.²

Perhaps the most explicit - and ghastly - expression of this came from the pen of leading SWPer Chris Harman, who, in the midst of the strike, wrote: “This isn’t 1925 or 1926. This is more like 1927” (that is, the miners’ were already defeated - the situation during the miners’ strike was akin to that after the strategic defeat suffered by the British working class with the failure of the 1926 General Strike).

In vivid contrast, The Leninist - forerunner of the Weekly Worker - even at this very late stage in the strike fought to harness the latent energy and élan of the miners and the networks of solidarity around them to launch an all-out, class-against-class struggle for victory.

Mark Fischer

mark.fischer@weeklyworker.co.uk

With or without the TUC: general strike!

“But if you do so [call a general strike],” went on Mr Lloyd George, “have you weighed the conse­quences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state itself, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state.”

“Gentlemen,” asked the prime minister quietly, “have you considered, and, if you have, are you ready?”

“From that moment on,” said [TUC negotiator] Robert Smillie,³ “we were beaten and we knew we were.”⁴

During the course of the miners’ strike a number of different political groups and individuals have toyed with the general strike idea, most without any real notion of what such a call entails. We, however, have been unique in the Communist Party in advancing this slogan. The Morning Star,true to form, has been so far behind the struggle that it has not even informed its readers as to why it would oppose the demand for a strike wave of general strike proportions. In this article we shall explain why we have called for this action and why we believe it to be both necessary and realisable.

For us, the general strike is an objective requirement of the strike in two ways. First, in the ‘narrower’ sense it is a need in order to win this ‘sectional’ dispute. The 70s are dead and gone forever: the crisis of British imperialism has upped the stakes and has led the bourgeoisie to sharpen its claws and stiffen its backbone. Increasingly therefore it will become necessary to mobilise the power of the labour movement as a whole in order to win sectional battles.

This is especially so with the miners, as their fight is in that sense a test case. The outcome of this dispute will set the tone for and the character of the class struggles to come. A defeat for the miners would mean a massive wave of demoralisation among the best elements of our class and consequently a stepped-up onslaught from the buoyed-up Tories on the living standards of all workers; a victory, on the other hand, could see our class imbued with a confidence and militancy unparalleled possibly since before 1926.

This perspective has been fully recognised by the ruling class. The Financial Times of April 6 1984 reported the highly significant fact that the Confederation of British Industry is “telling its member-companies to aim for zero increases in unit labour costs during the next 10 years and where possible to seek actual reductions of about three percent.”

Central to this struggle to drive down the living standards of all workers is the battle against the traditionally most powerful union, the National Union of Mineworkers, and this explains why the full forces of the bourgeois state have been ranged against the striking miners.

Militant⁵ of December 14 1984 cretinously claims that: “To some extent it [the miners’ strike] has already taken on features of a general strike situation.”What Militant is attempting to describe in its typically ham-fisted way is the feature of the strike we have pointed to above: the mobilisation and the placing on a ‘war footing’ of the full might of the state. So the miners have now been on strike for 11 months in defence of their jobs and communities, but this battle is only part of an overall offensive first to remove the ‘bottleneck’ of the miners and then against the living standards of the working class as a whole. Therefore to pit the undoubted strength, guts and sheer will to win of 140,000 miners against the fully activated power of the bourgeois state is heroic, but inadequate.

In the wider sense also, the general strike is an objective requirement of this struggle. The miners’ livelihoods and right to work is being destroyed by a moribund, irrational system, which has moved into inevitable crisis. The phenomenon of the general strike is the highest expression of class cohesiveness and combativeness short of revolution itself. As Lloyd George knew (see the opening quote), such a mass action can paralyse not only the economy, but also the normal administrative functions of the state. Workers are then posed with the practical difficulties of running a society day to day. In his book, The post-war history of the British working class,Alan Hutt gives some idea not only of the confusion that can sometimes result, but also of the immense possibilities:

When the government rejected the general council’s offer to run food trains, this question resolved itself into the issue of permits for the road transport of food. Headquarters tried to systematise the business by instructing the localities that the only authority to issue permits was the Joint Transport Committee, to consist of delegates from the transport and railway unions. In very many cases, however, this authority was assumed by the local trades council or council of action ... (p142).

The councils of action, which were themselves embryonic soviet-type organisations, in some areas assumed responsibility for the administration of large areas of civil life, a prelude to and an augury of the way the working class will one day take control of the running of society as a whole.

Some in the workers’ movement have timidly backed away from the perspective of a general strike for fear that it might prove impossible to win workers to back one. This, of course, is the totally wrong way to pose the question; we ought to think in these terms - we need a general strike, now how do we go about getting one? Concretely, we have argued that the ideal vehicle for winning this action is a National Minority Movement-type organisa­tion, springing from a transformed miners’ support movement.

The National Minority Movement (NMM) sought to bring together all the workers in rank-and-file organisations around a national structure and unitary demands for an unremitting fight for what the working class needs, not for what capitalism can afford. On its foundation in August 1924 it not only represented 200,000 workers, but, as can be seen from its programme, it was under no illusions about the reformability of British capitalism. The NMM committed itself “to organise the working masses of Great Britain for the overthrow of capitalism ... to carry on a wide agitation and propaganda ... against the present tendency towards social peace and class-collaboration and the delusion of the peaceful transition of capitalism to socialism ...”

The raw material for such a movement exists not only in the miners support committees, but especially in the 25% of workers that The Sunday Times revealed last year would be prepared to take industrial solidarity actions with the miners. This 25% are the pacemakers, the opinion formers - a militant minority who, if nationally organised and given a cutting political edge, can sway the mood of the majority.

The TUC are not going to organise a general strike. What we need therefore is an alternative organisational centre that can establish sufficient authority with the class to win one. That is the key task and one that is intimately linked to the fight to reforge the Communist Party, the organisation that set up the original National Minority Movement.

It would be wrong to close this article without commenting on the idea floated most notably by Militant,but also by others in the labour movement: that of a 24-hour general strike. In our view this would be, in the words of the great Polish revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, to turn the “thunder of a general strike into a damp squib”. Writing on the abortive 1902 general strike in Belgium, Luxemburg effectively demolished those like Militant and Socialist Organiser who would seek to straightjacket such a mass upheaval even before it begins:

A general strike forged in advance within the fetters of legality is like a war demonstra­tion with cannons whose charge has been dumped into a river within the very sight of the enemy.

Militant’stimidity is an inevitable product of its congenital Labourism. For this group, despite all its ‘revolutionary’ pretensions, the activity of the working class and its striving towards revolution must be subordinated to the election of the ‘next’ Labour government “com­mitted to socialist policies” (withlots of Militant backbenchers, hopefully). This Labour government, like tomorrow, never comes, of course. However, in the meantime, Militant insists that the working class confront the capitalists with fists firmly thrust in pockets: it sets workers up for a real pasting.

Others on the left are actually actively hostile to the call for a general strike. Yet the mere fact that groups as disparate as the staggeringly irrelevant Revolutionary Communist Party, through to the economistic Socialist Workers Party, have combated the idea illustrates that the call is far more than a throw-away one-liner from the likes of Tony Benn. It is being debated, both pro and anti, because the struggle itself is throwing up the question as an objective need; we do not have to invent it. The lame-brains of the British left thus choose to ignore reality and vilify the call for a general strike as ultra-leftist. Instead, apparently: “It is more important to talk first of all about what the miners themselves can do to bring about victory.”

As if the miners alone have not done enough already! We have called for a general strike in this dispute not to sound impressive or to warm ourselves with our rhetoric. We have called for it simply because it is needed. The miners’ fight is a fight for all workers. Let all workers join the struggle alongside the miners. They have suffered alone for all our sakes too long and too much.

•  Don’t let the miners stand alone!
•  For a general strike against pit closures and the Tory anti-trade union laws!
•  For a militant, organised fighting minority movement.

Alec Long

Notes

1. T Cliff Socialist Review April 1984.

2. See, for example, the report in The Leninist of the 1984 Mineworkers Defence Committee conference, reprinted in the Weekly Worker (January 8 2015).

3. Robert Smillie (1857-1940) was a miners’ leader who played an important role in breaking the union from the Liberal Party to Labour.

4. Quotation taken from Aneurin Bevan’s book, In place of fear (London 2010).

5. Forerunner of today’s paper, The Socialist, journal of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, of course.