31.03.2004

Students debate strike

A good number of people, mainly students, came to the March 26 Sheffield Communist Forum to hear ex-miner Dave Douglass talk on the lessons of the miners' Great Strike. Ben Lewis was there

Dave’s speech was both thought-provoking and highly critical, focusing on the mistakes of the left, but also on the myths behind the strike of both left and right origin.

The talk was educative for an audience that were mostly still in nappies during the strike, but after a while the debate picked up, covering a variety of subjects and themes - not surprising perhaps, considering the presence of both Conservative and Socialist Workers Party members. Dave highlighted the strikers as a group of class-conscious people, but saw no need for a Communist Party in the struggle for self-liberation.

This was the main focus of the debate, with CPGB comrades highlighting the necessity for a workers’ party to overcome the problems of the strike such as the spreading of class-consciousness to other sections of the working class. Dave portrayed the left groups as completely out of touch with the masses, using the strike to pursue their own agendas. Lee Rock of the CPGB agreed that the left, as presently constituted, is sectarian and disunited, often with support mainly amongst students, as opposed to the workers. This did not, however, refute the objective need for a united revolutionary party to coordinate, generalise and politicise actions such as the miners’ strike. But 20 years after one of the biggest class struggles of the last century the left, and consequently the working class, is weaker and less organised.

More general debate from the floor came regarding the violence and its role in public support, with Sheffield student David Sabbagh of the opinion that a key factor in determining whether the strike would succeed was public support. Although taking his point, comrade Rock remarked that everybody supports the nurses, but this, by itself, gets them hardly anywhere. Comrade Douglass correctly distinguished between the violence of the oppressor and the oppressed, and also the hypocrisy of the media in portraying the miners as fascistic thugs, highlighting The Sun’s attempt to dub Arthur Scargill a latter-day Hitler.

The presence of Conservative Future’s local branch secretary, Luke Graham, also fuelled a lot of discussion. His argument was that there was nothing that could be done about the decline in the British coal industry, but that other “opportunities” and jobs for the miners should have been created. In reply Dave claimed that the British coal industry was then and would be now economically viable - the Tories’ closure programme was determined first and foremost by the need to inflict a strategic defeat on the working class.

These systematic attacks on our class can only be resisted if we are armed with the main weapon that the miners were lacking in 1984-85 - a Communist Party. Let us just hope the left learns the lessons for the next big class confrontation.