This page contains various bits of information which have been circulated around the Socialist Historians group - mostly related to the meetings.  It`s all shovelled in & a bit chaotic at the moment but I hope to knock it into shape in due course. 

 

2014 marked the 30th anniversary of the year-long Miners`Strike. This has already been a major focus of attention, and will continue to be so into 2015 and indeed beyond.

For the 10th anniversary in 1994, Richard Clarkson (late lamented member of this club) put together an exhibition of photographs, which led to publication of a book "Striking Memories".  We hope sometime to get this into a digital format which can be published online.
 

Miners` Strike - the prelude

How did the strike come about in the first place ?

First of all, it should be emphasised that Thatcher and her philosophy didn't "spring on to the world new-minted" in the 70s. As a strand of conservative thinking it can be traced back at least until 1957 when Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft, vexed about public expenditure, quit MacMillan's government along with two others. Even then there was talk of the need to control the money supply and leave things to the market. And even then there was impatience on the Tory right with MacMillan's patrician ways - and in particular with his apparent appeasement of the unions (Beckett 1997).

Roll on to the Thatcher years though. 1979 was clearly a watershed. Thatcher wanted to do away with Attlee's post war settlement. She wanted to privatise and to de-regulate.

Yet in her early days in Downing Street Thatcher had been cautious. The "Wets" still predominated in the Cabinet and one early attempt to confront the miners had backfired. Energy Minister David Howell had tried to force the hand of the relatively moderate NCB Chief Derek Ezra. The cash limits within which the NCB had to operate were cut so that even Ezra had to propose closures. It led to mass walkouts in February 1981. The Government, knowing coal stocks were low, backed down. Closure plans were withdrawn with the Government assuring the NUM that it would stick to the normal colliery review procedure.

But the Government was merely biding its time. Thatcher regrouped. She set up a secret Cabinet committee "MISC7" to prepare for any future confrontation. More money was allocated for the stockpiling of coal. There was an expansion of dual oil and coal fired power stations. Anti-strike laws were strengthened and the Scotland Yard National Reporting Centre (NRC) - which would deal with flying pickets - was also revived.

Thatcher's final ploy was to appoint Ian Macgregor, who'd butchered British Steel, as head of the NCB. The stage was set for confrontation.

On 1 March 1984 George Hayes - then South Yorkshire Coal Director - told local NUM leaders that Cortonwood would close in five weeks time on 6 April 1984. It was a bolt out of the blue for the 839 miners, 80 of whom had been transferred from Elsecar on the proviso that the pit had a rosy future. The miners were shocked and felt betrayed. Soon they were picketing the NUM offices in Barnsley where the Yorkshire Area Council was about to meet. And then on 6 March Macgregor told the NUM nationally of plans to cut 4 million tonnes of capacity and make 20,000 miners redundant. The 1984-85 Miners' Strike was about to begin.

THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGES
(a view from the Republican Socialist Alliance Google group)
 
I remember reading about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 when many people were killed and injured by a cavalry charge, soldiers wielding swords that could cut a person in half.  I put it down to the primitive early nineteenth-century thinking where the forces of law thought they had the right to put down any rebellion or opposition by force.  It was therefore a shock to see that in 1984, a modern age that was proud of having greater maturity, an age that had seen the consequences of war on a world scale, and an age that knew there was a better way based of love and peace, a cavalry charge was launched against working people because they had chosen to go on strike. 

EU economic policy emphasises austerity and incentivises governments to provide cheap labour over high-quality jobs; landmark cases such as those of Viking and Laval have found in favour of corporations’ right to search the globe for cheap labour over the right of workers to fair pay and conditions; and now TTIP threatens to give corporations enormous power over national policymaking.   Indeed, leading EU expert Michael Bowsher QC  warned that the trade deal poses a “real and serious risk” to the government’s ability to freely make decisions regarding the NHS.

The CHARTISTS

The "working class" emerged during the 1830s as the industrial revolution progressed.  Chartism emerged from this.  It was established in Leeds in 1837.  originally it was not one organisation but different strands of a social movement.  The various local organisations gradually came together as the first NATIONAL reform movement.

The chartists fought for representation.  There were six main points in the charter:

• All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
• Voting should be by secret ballot
• Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
• Constituencies should be of equal size
• Members of Parliament should be paid
• The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished

These were mostly achieved - by later generations.    Discussion about the longer-term benefits - after the achievement of parliamentary democracy was subverted by capitalism.  Now a new form of democracy is needed - and a new constitution.

TOLPUDDLE and the GNCTU

Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian political activist who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1926 and died while still a captive 10 years later from a combination of illnesses.  He was an undoubtedly courageous figure who fought difficult family circumstances when young to educate himself and became a prolific writer and editor for the emerging left-wing press in Italy in the second and third decade of the 20th century.  He wrote intensively of the need for both workers’ rights and workers’ revolution and actively involved himself in the political action he advocated.  He was a leading member of the foremost left-wing movement, the Italian Socialist Party, until, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, his disenchantment with what he saw as their over-timid approach led him to become, in 1921, one of the co-founders of the Italian Communist Party, which pledged allegiance to Lenin and the Bolshevik regime.  Then, in 1922-23, he spent a significant period in Russia as delegate to the Communist International (Comintern) and, on his return to Italy, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and served until his arrest and imprisonment.  Sentenced to 20 years for subversion, he was however able to continue writing in prison, where access to books and the extensive knowledge of history and politics he had accumulated during his years of political activity led him to produce a mass of notes, observations and essays on an astonishingly broad spread of topics, later ordered into what were called the Prison Notebooks. It is largely on these and on the collection of letters he wrote from prison – mainly to family members – that his reputation as a social and political theorist lies.

Gramsci is said, in the Prison Notebooks, to have developed a new and original kind of Marxist sociology, which, over the last half century or so, has engendered a vast range of debate, interpretation and controversy by academics and others - the so-called ‘Gramsci industry’.  One of the key matters debated has been his concept of ‘hegemony’ (‘egemonia’).  This was the term Gramsci used to describe what he saw as the prerequisite for a successful revolution: the building of an ideological consensus throughout all the institutions of society spread by intellectuals who saw the need for revolution and used their ability to persuade and proselytise workers to carry through that revolution.  Only when that process was sufficiently widespread, would successful revolutionary action be possible.  So hegemony was what might be called the social penetration of revolutionary ideas.

This outlook is very different from the fervour with which in earlier years Gramsci had greeted the Russian revolution and advocated similar uprisings in other countries.  By the second half of the 1920s, with Italy ruled by a Fascist dictatorship and opposition leaders exiled or imprisoned, Gramsci came to see revolution as a longer-term prospect which would depend on the conditions existing in individual countries.

And it is this ‘long-term’ idea of revolutionary change that has been interpreted in very many different ways according to the standpoint or political position of the individual commentator.  One way it could be read would seem to tie in closely with the Socialist Party’s view that only through widespread political consciousness on the part of workers and majority consent for social revolution can a society based on the satisfaction of human needs rather than on the profit imperative be established.  In this light Gramsci’s hegemony could be seen to have the profoundly democratic implications of insisting on a widespread and well informed desire among the majority of workers for socialist revolution before such a revolution can come about.  Indeed it is clear that Gramsci was not unaware of Marx’s ‘majoritarian’ view of socialism (or communism – they were interchangeable for Marx) as a stateless, leaderless world where the wages system is abolished and a system of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ operates.  In an article written in 1920, for example, Gramsci refers to ‘communist society’ as ‘the International of nations without states’, and later from prison he writes about ‘the disappearance of the state, the absorption of political society into civil society’.  However, though he referred to himself as using ‘the Marxist method’, such reflections on the nature of the society he wished to see established are few and far between and cannot reasonably be said to characterise the mainstream of his thought.

When looked at closely in fact, Gramsci’s thought is overwhelmingly marked by what may be called the coercive element of his Leninist political background.  So, while undoubtedly in his later writings he came to see the Soviet model as inapplicable to other Western societies, he nevertheless continued to conceive of revolution as the taking of power via the leadership of a minority group, even if in different circumstances from those experienced by Lenin in Russia.  The most important pointer to this lies in Gramsci’s view of the state.  Hardly ever does he view socialism other than as a form of state.  The overwhelming thrust of his analysis and his recommendations for political action point not to doing away with states and the class divisions that go with them but to establishing new kinds of states.  In 1919, enthused by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Gramsci wrote: ‘Society cannot live without a state: the state is the concrete act of will which guards against the will of the individual, faction, disorder and individual indiscipline ....communism is not against the state, in fact it is implacably opposed to the enemies of the state.’  Later too, in his prison writings, arguing now for a ‘long-term strategy’, he continued to declare the need for states and state organisation, for leaders and led, for governors and governed in the conduct of human affairs – underlined by his frequent use of three terms in particular: ‘direzione’ (leadership), ‘disciplina’ (discipline) and ‘coercizione’ (coercion).

So, despite what Gramsci himself recognised as changed times and circumstances compared with Russia in 1917, he continued to be profoundly influenced by Lenin’s view that ‘if socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least 500 years’ – in other words that genuine majority social consciousness was unachieavable.  And in line with this, when looked at closely his ‘hegemony’, far from eschewing the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, sees an intellectual leadership taking the masses with them.  In other words the ‘consent’ that his hegemony, his long-term penetration of ideas, proposes is not the informed consent of a convinced socialist majority but an awakening of what, at one point he refers to as ‘popular passions’, a spontaneous spilling over of revolutionary enthusiasm which enables the leadership to take the masses with them and then govern in the way they think best.

Underpinning this lack of confidence by Gramsci in the ability of a majority to self-organise is a factor little commented on but particularly significant – and that is his view of what may be called ‘human nature’.  In writing explicitly about human nature, which Gramsci does on a number of occasions, he expresses agreement with Marx’s view that human nature is not something innate, fixed and unchanging, not something homogeneous for all people in all times but something that changes historically and is inseparable from ideas in society at a given time.  This view of humanity is in fact described by Gramsci as ‘the great innovation of Marxism’ and he contrasts it favourably with other widely held early 20th century views such as the Catholic dogma of original sin and the ‘idealist’ position that human nature was identical at all times and undeveloping.  But despite Gramsci’s stated ‘theoretical’ view on this topic, scrutiny of his writings in places where ‘human nature’ is not raised explicitly but is rather present in an implicit way points his thought in a different more pessimistic direction.  When he writes about education, for example, his pronouncements about the need for ‘coercion’ indicate little confidence in the ability of human beings to behave fundamentally differently or adaptably change their ‘nature’ in a different social environment.  In corresponding with his wife about the education of their children, in response to her view that, if children are left to interact with the environment and the environment is non-oppressive, they will develop co-operative forms of behaviour, he states ‘I think that man is a historical formation but one obtained through coercion’ and implies that without coercion undesirable behaviour will result.  Then, in the Prison Notebooks, on a similar topic he writes: ‘Education is a struggle against the instincts which are tied to our elementary biological functions, it is a struggle against nature itself.’  What surfaces here as in other places, even if not stated explicitly, is a view of human nature not as the exclusive product of history but as characterised by some kind of inherent propensity towards anti-social forms of behaviour which needs to be coerced, to be tamed.

Viewed in this light, Gramsci’s vision of post-revolutionary society as a place where human beings will continue to need leadership and coercion should not be seen either as being in contradiction with his theory of ideological penetration (‘hegemony’) or as inconsistent with the views that emerge about human nature when his writings do not explicitly focus on that subject.  So we should not be surprised that Gramsci’s vision for the future is not a society of free access and democratic control where people organise themselves freely and collectively as a majority but rather a change from one form of minority authority to another – a change from a system of the few manifestly governing in their own interests to the few claiming to govern in the interests of the majority.

The evidence of Gramsci’s writings therefore suggests that the revolution he envisages is not one in which democracy in the sense of each participating with equal understanding and equal authority prevails.  Crucially, the leadership function is not abolished.  The hegemonisers will essentially be in charge, since they will be the ones with the necessary understanding to run the society they have conceived.  What this society might be like he does not go on to say in any detail.  But it would clearly not be a socialist world of free access and democratic control that rejects authority from above together with its political expression, the state.  For Gramsci any such considerations were at best peripheral to the thrust of his thought and his social vision.  And though he did have a revolutionary project, it is not a socialist one in the terms that socialism is correctly understood.

Howard Moss

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This page last updated : 4^th April 2021

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