Letters

Fighting miners

I await with great anticipation the rest of Jack Conrad’s series of articles on the 1926 general strike and, inter alia, miners’ strikes since. I hope the Weekly Worker will at least be better informed than most, given my own contributions to these debates in the paper over the last 40 years.

The Follonsby Wardley Miners’ Lodge will be hosting its centenary symposium on Sunday May 3 at 12 noon, at Wardley Club, Palmers, Bank Wardley, Gateshead upon Tyne. This will review the political influence of syndicalism, George Harvey and other regional and national leaders, such as AJ Cook. There is a contemporary film and a presentation with slides of the derailing of the blackleg Flying Scotsman, and much else.

One of my earliest memories, as a 14-year-old communist at the Durham Miners Gala, was watching a born-again member of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League telling a group of old miners, ‘Now this is why you lost the 1926 strike’. Folk have been purporting to explain our history to us ever since, but hopefully Jack will be more sympathetic to the actual conditions and limitations at each decisive phase.

I must take issue with the inference in Jack’s first article that Ron Todd was some sort of sell-out (‘Approaches to the general strike’ January 22), when he stuck with us to the limits of the National Union of Mineworkers membership’s combativeness - and more. If the 1984-85 action was defeated anywhere, it was on the docks at Immingham, where local union dockers decided to break our strike - and their own solidarity blockade - amid mass violent scenes. Standing alongside the leader of Aslef, Ron pleaded with them to defend the union, the dockers and the miners. He was pelted with iron bolts - at least one of which struck him in the head. With blood streaming down his face, he continued to demand they stay firm. That’s what I call solidarity in action!

As our last stand loomed in 1992, we faced an uphill fight we hadn’t done seven years earlier. We had major defeats in the numbers and morale of our forces, widespread victimisations, redundancy bribes offering small fortunes not to fight, and loss of bottle on our leadership. Our chance of a sustained fightback had come in 1987 - just two years after the defeat. Anger, loss of self-respect and jackboot management had so enraged the remaining miners that a 79% ‘yes’ vote had been the response to a national ballot for industrial action. The National Coal Board and our national executive committee crapped themselves, but the NCB withdrew its new disciplinary codes and increased the bribes.

By 1992 we were holding the line, but just days of action and joint national strikes with the RMT, Aslef and anyone we could sign up was as much as we could produce. It was really self-serving and delusional for the wild-eyed SLL paper sellers to urge us to all-out strikes - or, worse, suggest the NUM itself was holding back the tidal waves of rank-and-file resistance. If only! By the time they privatised (but still were unable to deunionise the industry), the back of national strike action and leadership by the miners - for half a century the vanguard of the class - was broken.

The irony is that, were the strike to take place now, all of these left groups would be against us, in support of anti-industry ‘net zero’.

I will read the rest of Jack’s series with interest.

David John Douglass
NUM

Depoliticisation

It was with interest that I read Eddie Ford’s article, ‘March to the right’, which gives a useful synopsis of current developments on the British political scene (January 22).

In it he mentions the new Socialist Workers Party-sponsored ‘front’ group, the Together alliance, which has called a major anti-fascist demonstration in London on March 28. Together bills itself as a broad front against the rise of the far right. Celebrities are much to the forefront in this group, but it also includes the TUC, various individual unions, Friends of the Earth, Zack Polanski of the Green Party and a host of others. ‘So far, so good,’ you may well be thinking, but, at a time when sharp politics are needed, this new alliance is devoid of actual politics. Its propaganda seems to consist of platitudinous slogans like ‘Love is stronger than hate’, ‘Choose love’ and ‘Love, hope, unity’. In terms of vapidity, they could give Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign a run for its money!

But should we really be surprised? The SWP has created a whole host of anti-fascist front groups (that it calls ‘united fronts’) since the 1970s, with one essentially replacing the other. The first, and most successful, was the famous Anti-Nazi League mark one, which existed from 1977 to 1982. Its story is well known, and the present-day SWP still ‘dines out’ on its impact almost half a century later. Now the defeat of the Nazi National Front was caused by a host of factors, but the ANL was clearly important in beating it back.

However, the seeds of the present-day depoliticisation was even apparent back then, with anti-fascist working class militants in the ANL arguing against the more liberal ‘vicars and celebrities’ faction, which prioritised events like carnivals and musical concerts. In one notorious incident in September 1978 a carnival in south London was prioritised by the SWP over confronting a large fascist demonstration in east London on the same day. Clearly the SWP’s line of march had been indicated. The ANL was wound up in 1982 on the unilateral decision of SWP leader Tony Cliff (he made all the important decisions in the SWP, while occasionally consulting Duncan Hallas).

Things lay dormant in terms of the party’s anti fascism for a decade until the SWP revived the Anti-Nazi League in 1991. This was outwardly prompted by the growth of the British National Party, although there was also the traction that rival anti-fascist campaigns were enjoying at the time - namely Militant’s Youth Against Racism in Europe, Red Action’s Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and the black nationalist Anti-Racist Alliance.

This new ANL broadly followed the modus operandi of a decade before, but adopted the annoying habit of claiming other left group’s victories for themselves - most notoriously AFA’s victory against Nazi skinheads at Waterloo station in 1992. This ANL mark two was in turn replaced by the SWP’s Unite Against Fascism and then Stand Up to Racism in subsequent decades. These twists and turns were usually prompted by whatever section of the Labour/trade union left and Muslim groups the SWP wanted its new campaign to appeal to at the time. The usual pattern was for the SWP to create the new organisation, state that its previous front group was sponsoring it, then allow the old group to essentially wither on the vine.

One key feature was that the politics in these groups became more watered down with each subsequent iteration, which brings us today to the Together alliance. It clearly is not what Leon Trotsky would recognise as a united front in any meaningful sense - it isn’t even a popular front! While we may disagree with the politics of a popular front, at least it had politics! Together seems to be a more diluted version of the Live Aid 1985 campaign - heavy on bourgeois moralism and wholly establishment-focused.

Together seems to be the sort of set-up even Liberal Democrats and One Nation Conservatives would feel comfortable in - and thus a fitting testament to decades of the SWP’s depoliticisation of its anti-fascist fronts.

Paul O’Keeffe
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Michael Parenti

The death of US ‘political scientist’ Michael Parenti invites both appreciation and sober assessment. Parenti was never a Marxist of great theoretical originality, nor did he pretend to be. His importance lay elsewhere - in insisting, with uncommon clarity, that capitalism, imperialism and class power remain the central explanatory categories of modern politics at a time when much of the left was busy forgetting them.

At his best, Parenti stripped bourgeois ideology down to its operative assumptions, exposing the class interests concealed beneath liberal moralism. For many, particularly outside the academy, his work functioned as a first encounter with Marxism unembarrassed by cold war pieties (that pedagogical role should not be dismissed lightly).

Yet his limitations were real. Parenti’s tendency towards a flattening anti-imperialism often slid into political campism, substituting structural critique with an overly indulgent attitude towards existing state power, so long as it opposed Washington. In this sense, his work sometimes mirrored the very instrumentalism he sought to criticise, offering moral inversions rather than dialectical analysis.

Parenti’s death therefore marks the passing of a particular moment on the Marxist left: one shaped by cold war ideological combat, defensive anti-imperialism and the need to speak plainly against overwhelming hegemonic pressure. If his work now feels insufficient, that is less a personal failing than a sign that Marxism must renew its critical ambitions rather than inherit ready-made positions.

Remembering Parenti properly means neither canonising nor dismissing him, but recognising his work as a provocation to think more rigorously about power, class and emancipation today.

Ewan Tilley
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Coming collapse

Readers may be interested to know that I’ve updated my essay on the ‘AI bubble’ and the deteriorating condition of the US economy, which was published in the Weekly Worker (‘Capitalism’s structural rot’, November 20 2025).

Since then things look to have entered an economic contraction that may well outdo the great recession of 2008-09. Silver has since raced up to $100 an ounce and gold to $5,000. A currency collapse and extreme inflation lie ahead.

The updated essay is comprehensively illustrated with charts and graphs that we can't fit into a newspaper. It makes for grim reading, but comrades may find it useful as an educational and agitational tool. You can read it at grossmanite.medium.com.

Ted Reese
DSYP

False claim?

According to the report in the Weekly Worker, at the CPGB’s January 18 aggregate, comrade Carla Roberts made the remarkable assertion that “The Marxist Unity Caucus in RS21 seems in danger of imploding” (‘At home and abroad’ January 22). I am most curious to know what evidence there is for this claim, for it seems to me to be grounded upon absolutely nothing.

Talal Hangari
London