DIGGING DEEPER, published by Verso, is the first comprehensive study of the miners' strike. JOHN ROSS assesses its weaknesses.
VERSO are to be congratulated for getting out so rapidly such a comprehensive collection of material on the miners' It is a book which every socialist should buy and read.
Some of the individual chapters are truly excellent: David 'Where's Ramsay. MacKinnock?, absorbing study of the similarities between Neil Kinnock's role in the 1984 strıke and Kamsav Maconald's mn 1926; John Mcliroy's Pickets', the best summary a vailable on police attacks.
Huw Beynon's 'Decisive Power: The New Tory State against the Miners' traces how the Conservative Party prepared its controntation with the NUM A Labour Party TV broadcast based on that chapter would be a fitting reply to Kinnock's condemnations violence' and the supposed separation between industrial disputes and politics.
But, despite the mass of excellent material there's a slight feeling of 'might Have pece aDoul uRe ooOk. material is so good, it's a pity that the strike's real significance, as a turning point in British politics, is not brought out more clearly. All the elements are there for a real advance in political understanding. Untortunatelv not all the 'i's are dotted or the 't's crossed.
One of the questions the book ought to have confronted is posed accurately at the beginning of the chapter 'Beyond the Coalfields', by Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright.
Expressing the view of much of the left, they write that: "The miners' strike seems to epitomise those aspects of the labour movement and class politics that certain interpreters have found "old fashioned", , sectional and, by implicanon, banktupl.
'Male manual workers, the working class with a vengeance, fighting jobs what described as a declining industry, state-owned and located in isolated delining strengths and Other Howell's movement of an women's liberation movement.' 'Police alliances that surusdie. blacks, republicans, of miners since World War II.' But more than just J0 lca Doln some he basic movement. This conterence.
to support black sections.
June on NUM championed the paign for Gay Rights.
including unlawful mandatory reselection of MPs.
every struggle at the conference. extraordinary old officially regions. And yet around this struggle a massive support movement has grown almost unreported with as £10,000 broad a social and geographical base as any post-war political movement.' colliDulors pul forward what they think to bethe same paradox. For example, in 'We'll be here right to the end..and after' Loretta Loach puts Beatrix forward the extraordinary idea that: 'It image would be quite wrong to say that the movement of women in the miners' strike was a feminist one', and that: "The Women Against Pit Closures did not owe its existence to the Yet, as everyone knows, one of the most stunning effects of the miners' strıke was the enormous range ol social were created around the women, Irish solidarity most organisations, as well as trade unionists INUIV, and the entire left wing of the Labour Party, participated in the struggle.
In the words of the Financial Times, it was: 'the greatest civilian mobilisation La solidarity movement was involved. It has trans miners, position of the NUM within the labour was seen dramatically at the 1984 Labour Party The NUM was the only major union Ăn NUM delegate was the only man to speak in the Committee resolutions, in favour. The Labour CamIt supported the fight of the cities, acuol. It Con- wulicll. demned the use of plastic bullets in wilnll Northern Ireland, and strip searches in the women's jail in Armagh. It led the fight against Neil Kinnock, in defence of Chinese In short it played a leading role in for the Statesman-Marxism oday view of the Liberal world! After all, don't we know the real situation? That male manual workers such as the miners are supposed to be the most 'backward', racist, sexist, and correctly anti-gay Tories.
No one earning a salary of less than La year can possibly defend women's causes. Only those who don't get their hands dirty - and who read the New Statesman, Marxism Today and City Limits could possibly support the demands of the oppressed. That is Campbell's weekly-presented of the Today's monthly-presented one.
As it turned out though, it wasn't the fashionable white collar unions ASTMSs, the CPSAs, the NUTs which supported black sections in the Labour Party. Nor could they, in fact. Many of them don't even fulfill the minimum conditión of being affiliated lu c pally At least the manual unions davancea enougn lo allinlale. And lne "proletarian' of them all, the took the most progressive positions.
To anyone with a sense of history none of this should come as a surprise. Historically it has always been the core sections of the working class, and their closest allies, who have been the most consistent fighters for the demands of the oppressed. The 'intermediate strata' have ususally backed off from the fight It was the Bolshevik Party in 1917, based on the industrial sections of the 'Russian' working class, that enacted the most advanced social legislation in the world - the most advanced on the question of women, on anti-racism, on national self-determination. The Mensheviks, based tar more on privilegec and white collar workers, refused to distribute land to the peasnats, refused the programmes for the liberation of refused the right of nations the empire determination.
In China a working class party, the Communist partv. based or peasants' struggles, carried through the measures for breaking the slavery of one eighth of the world's population: the capitalism achieved nothing in that domain.
TaT national liberation
concerned Sandino, in Nicaragua, put it when he said: 'Only workers and way' What we saw in the miners' strike was not an exception or a paradox' — it was a phase of the normal process of social development. It will be the core sections of the working class - those in industry, in the mines, in transpor!, in communications. in the biggest concenMarxism trations of numbers — who will Be the best allies of the oppressed in their fight for liberation. • the It will be the intermediate layers of the working privileged, those in petty production, those white collar workers most closely tied to management - who will back off in the struggle for the demands of the oppressed.
Every oppressed section of society rallied to the miners in 1984, and the NUM began to precisely because the oppressed understood that here was a force ability to rock society and which was an ally of theirs.
What began to emerge in the miners' strike was a section of'the labour movement tunctioning as a true labour': that is, as a force which took up the demands of all those having nothing to sell but their labour power.
For the working class is not, by any socialist definition, those 'who get their hands dirty'. It is those who are forced to work for others, for capitalists - or in tour million cases. those who would like to work for someone else but are unable to get a job. In Britain today, it is around 20 million people.
That is a working class which is no longer even remotely 'white male' in its composition. In the first place well over 40 per cent is female; a large part is self- black; 10 per cent is gay.
That working class has major social allies. wno work in tae nome, wno by every other virtual To them, add China. unemployed on official figures (before precisely Norman Tebbit doctored them!), and more in reality; several million people in an education system which long ago ceased to be a vehicle for prothe ducing privileged lackeys of capitalism; peasants will go all the DIGGING-