Letters

Confidence in workers

In response to Dave Douglass (Weekly Worker 77), the workers’ buy-out at Tower was not intended to restore our dented armour nor to give us back our glory days.

If anyone’s armour is dented it is Tower’s. We probably fought our corner harder than anyone over the past 20 years, but we were not content to sit back and say, ‘Well, the pits are privatised: that’s the end of it’. We all said if there is no help out there to stop privatisation, we’ll buy our own pit and give ourselves fair pay and conditions and mine and sell our own coal. If we can’t beat British Coal at selling coal I would give up (British Coal could not sell water in a desert).

As to his comment, “We must continue to fight the capitalist state”, there is no rule that says you must be unemployed to fight. And “coal will come back to the valleys”; coal today is an internationally traded product. We are looking to our coal going overseas, not only to Welsh or British valleys.

Too many people today and many in our own industry believe the Tory and Coal Board lies that coal has no future. Coal has a future and it is up to us to go out and prove it. For Dave to even suggest that the workers at Tower will work longer hours for less pay and cheaper production methods only reinforces in my mind that some workers would not know what to do with control if we ever got it.

Nationalisation was never the answer for coal. We worked as slaves most of our lives with others benefiting off our backs. We provided cheap energy after the war and made millionaires out of many owners of companies feeding into us: Dosco, Baldwin and Francis, Meco, Dewty, Wecol - the list is endless.

Tower is 100% worker-owned, each with equal shares. We have a safety manager and large team, with safety and good conditions No 1 on our agenda. We have thrown the bonus scheme out and given a substantial increase on basic wages, full holidays and rest days.

This has never happened before. It is different to the pit in Scotland. We are the only pit in Europe to be owned 100% by the workers. There is not enough confidence in workers; we can take our principles into the working world, into the competitive world of the capitalist. But we go in on our terms, not theirs.

Dave goes on about changing the system. Well, we are trying to change it, not sitting back and moaning about it. If workers are going to control their own destiny, then we are going to do it at Tower. I hope Towerism will be more famous than Thatcherism.

Tyrone O’Sullivan
Personnel Director, Tower Colliery, South Wales

Marriage vows

In response to the ever increasing fractures in the United Kingdom the Tories have promised to play the British nationalist card at the next general election. The Labour Party’s devolutionary proposals aim to save the Union. As Enoch Powell noted, “Power devolved is power retained”. The constitutional nationalist parties will similarly pose no threat to British imperialism. Against these factions of the ruling and middle classes the Communist manifesto for the council elections does indeed provide a very different message. Nevertheless it fails to break new ground in terms of a communist platform on the national question in the UK.

The old CPGB never developed beyond traditional politics. In Scotland it started with a knee jerk denunciation of “Claymore communists”. Then, when tamed by Labourism, it joined the church in support of Home Rule. The attitude of communists to the national question was retarded by the decay of the ‘official communist’ movement.

For years official history was distorted and incorporated schools which were the antitheses of revolutionary progress. In the CPSU Great Russian centralisation was portrayed as the centre of historical development. Similarly the CPGB took on board a view no different from establishment unionism, placing the development of the United Kingdom of Great Britain at the centre of progressive thinking. Historians like John Foster in The Scottish Marxist created a history where “there was never any room for petty bourgeois separatism”, imagining the “equal development of Scottish and Welsh peoples” compatible with the “elimination of the regional (sic) problem”.

The current manifesto falls back on this framework, noting: “The people of Britain have come together over the centuries to form one nation”. I thought the class struggle was the motor force of history? In fact each Act of Union was the culmination of counterrevolution against radical alternatives posed by the lower orders. The ‘British nation’ was created for the ruling class cemented with the highpoints of the Empire. Then mostly reactionary, British ‘nation’ theorists abounded in the halls of learning. British national consciousness was able to sink deeper roots with the aid of Empire super profits, granting privileges to the vast middle class and integrating the labour aristocracy.

It is worth noting that today the only place that has seen a growth in British national consciousness is among protestant workers in ‘Northern Ireland’. The manifesto moans that after centuries “narrow nationalism still exists as a divisive force”. Once again by identifying the unity of the working class with that of the state, you end up hinting that the British ruling class has failed in its historical mission to merge national remnants. It was never in the marriage vows: the UK state unites the ruling class, but divides the people; it recognises nations, but denies self-determination.

In fact none of the traditional programmes in the elections can realise self-determination. This would require a programme far more revolutionary-democratic, that challenges the British state. The old British road to socialism set its aim at merely the refinement of the British state. If however our own communists cannot draw on their vernacular traditions then they could at least consider Lenin’s advice. He saw the revolutionary potentialities in the national question and advocated communists take a lead against other class parties. In State and Revolution with regard to Britain he saw that “the establishment of a federal republic would be a step forward”. Yet over 75 years later no Communist Party has stood on Lenin’s programme. It would be an indispensable start to a reforged Communist Party in the face of resurgent British nationalists.

Chris Ford
London

Crude distortions

I want to take up a point which was raised by Danny Hammill in the Weekly Worker (February 9). Comrade Bill of the Communist Action Group does not know what he is talking about when he speaks of the Revolutionary Communist Group’s views of the white working class. We are entitled to see the hard evidence, in words and deeds, for this outrageous distortion of the RCG’s politics.

That British imperialism has given rise to a labour aristocracy which has varied in its form and composition within a working class which has itself changed greatly is surely the basis for politics in this country. Yet it is very difficult to get the political consequences of this situation - that is, the fundamentally opportunist role of the Labour Party and trade union movement - discussed, accepted and acted upon seriously.

We in the RCG are used to the crude distortions of the SWP in their attempts to deny the existence of a privileged layer of the working class, yet a casual wander round any housing estate reveals this clearly. You will find - next to families struggling on Income Support - bought council houses, with drives stuffed full of motors. Come on! Who is more likely to want change and fight for it?

As Lenin pointed out, it is impossible to nail with certainty who is following the opportunists. “This will be revealed by struggle. It will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the opportunists represent only a minority.”

Today they still represent a minority but politically dominate what exists as the working class movement. The central task is to challenge and defeat this domination while organising the new forces willing to challenge the whole rotten system.

A Michael
Dundee