The miners’ strike
Twenty years ago this month began one of the most disastrous strikes in
the history of the working class in Britain. Not only were the aims of
the strike not achieved but the strikers’ union was split and reduced
to an ineffective rump. It wasn’t even a case of living to fight
another day.
It used to be said that workers can learn as much from an unsuccessful
strike as from a successful one. So what, then, were the main lessons
of the 1984/5 miners’ strike?
That in the end the logic of capitalism will always win out. The
declared aim of the strike was to keep open pits which by capitalism’s
standards were “uneconomic”, i.e. were not making the going rate of
profit (some were not actually unprofitable in the sense of not making
a profit, but the profit wasn’t big enough compared with what could
have been obtained if the capital had been invested elsewhere). A
government can keep an “uneconomic” activity going for strategic
reasons that benefit the capitalist class as a whole, such as security
of supply, and the coal industry had in fact been maintained at
previous levels for this reason while coal was a strategic
home energy source for electricity stations to power industry. But, by
the 1980s, North Sea oil and gas was being developed as an alternative
and cheaper home source of energy and the government had decided that
the time had come to stop subsidising the coal industry. In the absence
of strategic security-of-supply considerations, no government can
afford to tax the capitalist class to pay keep unprofitable production
units open, but will be obliged by international competitive pressures
to apply the capitalist rule of “no profit, no production” and close
them down.
That no strike can stop a government determined to have its way. Both
sides the government and the NUM leadership were
aware that the issue of keeping the pits open was going to be a trial
of strength. We now know that the government had planned for the
show-down well before it occurred, so that it took place on their terms
and at a time convenient to them. It was no co-incidence that the
government, via the notorious hatchet-man MacGregor they had appointed
to run the NCB, provoked the strike at the end of winter when
stockpiles had been built up and when the demand for coal would be less.
The NUM leadership openly declared that the aim of the strike was to
try to force the government to change its policy (to in effect continue
subsidising the coal industry). The NUM President, Arthur Scargill,
even unwisely suggested that the aim was to bring about a change of
government (as if a Labour government would have behaved any
differently, in fact had behaved any differently in the mid-60s when
they closed more pits than Thatcher and MacGregor were planning). This
provided the government with a weapon to use in the propaganda war to
win popular support.
But the government had other weapons in its arsenal, particularly its
control of the police force, which was used to contain and ultimately
break the strike. Once they had realised that the government was not
going to change its mind, the best thing for the NUM to have done would
have been to taken the government’s superior strength into account and
settle on the best terms possible in the circumstances , such as
big redundancy payments and perhaps keeping open some of the pits that
were making some profit even if less than the going rate.
This would not have been cowardice or betrayal, but a recognition of
the harsh fact that under capitalism the workers are a subordinate
class with only limited powers to affect the course of events,
certainly far less than those of governments, an unequal distribution
of power that is at the very basis of capitalism. Trade union activity,
including strikes, is necessary as long as capitalism lasts but it
can’t work wonders. Strikes are essentially a trial of strength,
testing the situation; once it has become clear what the
respective strengths of the two sides are as can happen fairly
rapidly, though not always then both sides know where they
stand and a settlement can be negated on that basis. Once it had become
clear in the miners’ strike that the government was not going to
concede and was in fact in the far stronger position, there was no
point in going on with the strike.
Don’t follow leaders.
The leadership of the NUM, and in particular
Scargill (a former member of the Communist Party who had only left it
because they backed someone else rather than him in an election for a
union post) and the Vice-President, Mick McGahey (a member of the
Communist Party), held the view that union activity consisted in an
active minority “giving a lead” to the normally passive majority in the
expectation that they would follow.
In other words, they didn’t trust the membership. This led to another
grave mistake in the NUM’s strategy: the refusal to hold a ballot
before launching the strike. This was doubly stupid. First, because it
provided the government with another propaganda weapon. Second, because
a ballot would probably have given a majority for a strike anyway. But
consulting the membership and allowing them to have the final say as to
whether or not to launch it was not part of the mindset of Scargill and
the others: they were leaders and they were going to lead. Ultimately,
they led the miners to unnecessary hardship and disaster in a strike
that went on for much longer than it need have done.
Calling a national strike without a national strike ballot was contrary
to the NUM’s rules. It was therefore at least understandable that some
miners and union officials should not feel bound by an unconstitutional
decision. Thus in Nottingham the majority of miners continued working.
The Scargill leadership’s response was to sent in pickets to, if it
came to it, try to coerce the Nottingham miners into striking. Of
course to have any chance of being effective a strike has to be a solid
as possible, but coercing workers who could argue a democratic case for
not striking at that moment was bound to be counter-productive. Maybe
the leaders of the Nottingham miners weren’t being sincere and were
just using the lack of a ballot as a pretext (most Nottingham pits were
profitable), but Scargill’s tactics here ultimately led to the break-up
of the NUM.
Socialists, as class-conscious workers ourselves, are on the side of
our fellow workers involved in industrial disputes with employers, but
this does not mean that this is unconditional. Strikes should not be
aimed at other groups of workers and should always be run
democratically with control remaining in the hands of those making the
sacrifice of going on strike; paid union officials should be their
servants not their masters or leaders. This doesn’t necessarily mean
that all decisions have to be taken by secret ballot; decisions could
also be taken by democratically-mandated delegates. But whatever the
decision-making procedure adopted it should be democratic.
Were these lessons learned? Not by Scargill for one, who went on to set
up his own party the SLP with the same
leadership-based policies and tactics as the former Communist Party.
Many miners, and others too, did, however, learn the
hard way that the government is a class government, or, as Marx and
Engels put it, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee
for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”, and that the
function of the police is not to give traffic directions or help old
ladies across the road but to enforce the will of the government.
But few drew the conclusion that, if the exploitation and oppression of
the working class is to be ended, we need to win control of the
machinery of government so as to at least ensure that it is not used
against us. In other words, the way forward lies in political action.
Industrial action, though necessary from time to time, is essentially
only defensive and has severe limitations due to the subordinate
position of workers under capitalism. What is needed is political
action to usher in a classless society of common ownership and
democratic control where production will be for use and not for profit.
ADAM BUICK
The Socialist Party’s analysis of the miners’ strike The Strike Weapon:
Lessons of the Miners’ Strike, published in 1985 can be downloaded here from
the internet .
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