In the cutting of coal there is noise and dust and unwanted stone. Similarly, in the coal strike, there are central issues of great importance to the society, but around them, and often obscuring them, the noise and dust and stone of confused, short-term or malignant argument. A large majority of miners have done their duty to their union in a collective endurance of extraordinary human quality. It is now the duty of socialists, not only to continue to support them, in all circumstances, but to clarify and campaign on the central issues on which, over the coming decades, the future of this society will be decided. These issues can be defined in four keywords of the strike: management; economic; community; and law-and-order. I will discuss each in turn as a way in to the general issues.
The strike began in response to a unilateral decision by ‘the management’ to close certain pits. Here, beyond the more immediate arguments about previous agreements and procedures, and also beyond important matters of political context and style, there is an issue which should be at the centre of the whole socialist project. This is the claim of workers to control not only the wages and conditions, but also the very nature of their work. The human substance of this claim is absolute. To deny it, or even to qualify it, is to subordinate a whole class of men and women to the will of others. It is to be expected that capitalists will deny it. Their world is built on the power of capital to subordinate actual majorities of workers to conditions of managed employment. They meet every challenge to this power with anger and contempt. Socialists, on the other hand, have attempted, over several generations and under immense practical difficulties, to move towards a society in which the human substance of the claim could begin to be recognized or could finally be realized. In the mainstream of our own labour movement, a particular path was chosen. The major industries and services would be nationalized, so that instead of embodying a capitalist interest, in private profit, they would embody a national or a public interest. It seemed a reasonable path to follow, as an alternative to the old irresponsible capitalism.
But this coal strike, more clearly than any other single event, has shown us where this path can lead, and how far this can be from the original human claim. The key to understanding this is in that slippery word management. For it is a fact about the development of all modern industry that there has been serious and at times deliberate confusion between this term ‘management’ and the older terms ‘master’ and ‘employer’.
Along the path of nationalization, a board representing the public interest and a technical management supervising production and distribution were the ideal elements of the new structure. The claim of workers to control their own production was set aside, under the presumed priorities of a wider national interest and the most efficient possible production. These presumed priorities remain important, but it is essential to see what has happened as they deny or qualify the wider human claim. First, the Coal Board, instead of representing the most general public interest, has become, in practice, a corporate employer, with political and financial relations only to the state. Second, the distinction between a public board and a technical management has been blurred to the point where ‘management’ – that supposedly professional operation – has become a simple cover word for the will and calculation of a de facto employer.
The confusion is especially serious because there is of course, virtually everywhere, a need for genuine management. Research, organization and planning are crucial in any complex operation. What is false in the currently imposed meanings of management is the reduction of these necessary processes to elements of the corporate plan of an employer looking only, on his own terms, to his version of profitable operation. What ‘management’ says is offered as a set of unchallengeable technical decisions, when the actual management – now very clearly the old master or employer – again and again arrives at these within a determining context of short-term political and commercial calculations.
Thus when the miners challenged that unilateral ‘right to manage’, and large bodies of opinion were mobilized to defeat their presumption, a key issue in the whole modern organization of work became clear. In the immediate decisions they had not been offered even consultation, but if they had been, it would have been short of what is necessary. The claim for which they have fought is the claim of any worker to be involved, from the beginning, in the long-term direction of the industry to which a whole lifetime is being given. Genuine management is a continuous and complex process of information and negotiation which goes on until some general and always renegotiable agreement is reached.
The supposed ‘right of management’ to ignore, abort or override this difficult process is false to the core. It is in fact doubletalk for the categorical and arbitrary right of an employer. In challenging that arrogance and confusion, in an especially crude phase of its assertion, the miners have been fighting for a principle which is of profound importance to every employed worker, over a range from hospitals and universities to offices and factories. For this now is the general interest: that people working hard at their jobs should not be exposed to these arbitrary operations of capital and the state, disguised as ‘the right to manage’. In a period of very powerful multinational capital, moving its millions under various flags of convenience, and in a period also of rapid and often arbitrary takeover and merger by financial groups of all kinds, virtually everyone is exposed or will be exposed to what the miners have suffered.
Our protection, hitherto, has been in our unions and in the idea of a public sector. Each kind of protection has been attacked, in the conditions of this strike, at a key point. It will be unforgiveable, whatever the fate of the immediate action, if we fail to build and extend a consciousness and a movement to defend and advance this central condition of democracy: that our labour remains ours, and that it is not at the arbitrary disposal of others.
But face the facts, says another kind of qualifying voice. If your labour is not economic, have you any right to live by it? It is, of course, a real question. But not in the terms in which it has been put against this strike: terms which are true noise and dust. Thus it is clear, at a first level, that economic, like management, is by no means necessarily an informed, professional, neutral judgement. Work on the direct trading accounts of actual pits has produced quite different and even alternative definitions of which are ‘economic’. Work on the general accounting procedures of the Coal Board has cast serious professional doubt on their clarity and relevance. Any of this work can be challenged, in the same way as the ruling official calculations, which cannot be intellectually protected by some general ‘right to manage’.
Yet, however that argument may go – and it is precisely this which should be the substance of genuine management and negotiation – there is another level at which economic, as a keyword, must be examined. It is characteristic of all capitalist economics, and even of some socialist economists who have been drawn into local arguments on those terms, that particular commercial operations are isolated from the economy as a whole. As a technical move this is understandable. Particular operations and investments require specific examination. But any and all of these results have then to be returned to the whole economy of which they are part, and beyond that to the society which it is the purpose of the economy to support.
Coal is in this respect both a very strong and a very special case. It is a deep economic resource of this island, and any reasonable economic calculation of its mining has to include not only current trading calculations, but long-term and interrelating calculations of general energy policy. Thus the concentration of production into the most currently profitable pits, and the closing of all those which on one kind of calculation are not now profitable, is even as an isolated economic process questionable while it fails to include economic calculations about the effects on long-term reserves.
But the full case is very much wider than that. What has actually happened is that isolated accounting has usurped the functions of any general economics. It is not only, as the miners’ union has argued, that the costs of defeating the strike and of financing redundancy are greater than the costs of sustaining the existing industry. It is also, and more generally, that there is a vast amount of social capital and continuing social investment in the old coalfields which, under the ‘right to manage’, it is proposed to make obsolete. Houses, schools, hospitals, and roads in these areas compose a huge economic investment which dwarfs the trading calculations of any particular industry. It is here, at the most fundamental level, that the miners have begun to define the real issues and problems of a socialist economy, and to expose the long-term destructive character of a capitalist economy. It is on this, in much wider areas, that the policies of a reviving labour movement must build.
The miners’ strike is being represented as the last kick of an old order. Properly understood, it is one of the first steps towards a new order. This is especially the case in the emphasis they have put on protecting their communities. Here is another keyword, which needs to be understood.
What the miners, like most of us, mean by their communities is the places where they have lived and want to go on living, where generations not only of economic but of social effort and human care have been invested, and which new generations will inherit. Without that kind of strong whole attachment, there can be no meaningful community.
However, there is another use of community, to mean not these actual places and people but an abstract aggregate with an arbitrary general interest. Any wider community – a people or a nation – has to include, if it is to be real, all its actual and diverse communities. To destroy actual communities in the name of ‘community’ or ‘the public’ is then evil as well as false.
Yet this is the implacable logic of the social order which is now so strongly coming through: the logic of a new nomad capitalism, which exploits actual places and people and then (as it suits it) moves on. Indeed, the spokesmen of this new nomad capitalism have come less and less to resemble actual human beings, and more and more to look and talk like plastic nomads: offering their titles to cash at a great distance from any settled working and productive activity, and expecting to be told, wherever they go, under whatever flag of convenience, that they will do nicely. Back in the shadow of their operations, from the inner cities to the abandoned mining villages, real men and women know that they are facing an alien order of paper and money, which seems all-powerful. It is to the lasting honour of the miners, and the women, and the old people, and all the others in the defiant communities, that they have stood up against it, and challenged its power.
Yet any challenge that can really defeat it has to be much wider. Coal was a good first case, because of its general and lasting importance. But the broader campaign will have to enter more difficult areas. The basic question of the relations between an economy and a society will have to be thoroughly reworked. For what lies ahead of us, within that alien order, is a long series of decisions in which one industry after another will declare more and more people redundant. The private talk of these alien forces – some of it submissively copied into the media – is a prolonged statistical crowing about increases in productivity and profit through getting rid of more workers. At the end of their road, it will be not only particular communities but whole societies – and what was Britain, but what they now call the Yookay, is an early candidate – that will be declared uneconomic and redundant.
We need not worry about the plastic nomads who hold our own nominal nationality. They will move on, or draw their heavily protected profits from elsewhere. The rest of us, here and needing to stay here, will have to find an alternative economic order if we are to continue to have any real society; and without that real society there can never in any case be any kind of socialism.
Some nominal adherence to socialism will not meet this challenge. The practicalities are immensely difficult, which is why we should be starting serious work on them. Socialists have always recognized the inherent inequalities of a class society. But we have often overlooked the similarly inherent inequalities of the earth itself, and of our own pieces of land. The strike has taught us again to think of coal as a native resource, and it is that kind of thinking – a practical and specific audit of the means of our livelihood, in resources and in skills – which will enable us to challenge the current ruling definitions of wealth and profit.
For, in fact, beyond all the alien categories, there is wealth only in people and in their lands and seas. Uses of this wealth which discard and abandon people are so profoundly contradictory that they become a social disaster, on a par with the physical disasters which follow from reckless exploitation of the lands and the seas. An economic policy which would begin from real people in real places, and which would be designed to sustain their continuing life, requires a big shift in our thinking, but a shift which in their arguments about pits and communities – their refusal to separate economics from a people and a society – the miners have begun to indicate.
It is in this context that we should examine the final keyword: law-and-order. I take this as a single word, as it is currently used, for example in opposition to picketing. For it is the arbitrary combination of what should be two quite different words and concepts that is the key to its contemporary ideological effects. All societies need laws, and all complex societies both make and remake them. The real problem is order. Listening to some ministers, it is easy to pick up their real sense of order, which is command: obedience to lawful authority; indeed, when combined with the ‘right to manage’, obedience to all authority. It is clear, in context, that this is the miners’ most substantial offence. Yet the idea of order is much more important than this. Laws are necessarily the instruments of a particular social order. None can survive without them. But then what is at issue, in any conflict about particular law, is the underlying definition of the desired social order. Thus there are now laws specifically designed to limit the powers of trade unions, or of assemblies of workers, to intervene in what is otherwise a free market in labour, necessarily dominated by capital. To challenge that order is to challenge those laws.
It is, therefore, of vital importance to socialists, who are regularly attacked for supporting disorder, to reply in something better than a negative way. For what is at issue, in the struggles about the rights of management, about alternative economic policies, and about the conditions of communities, is in a profound way a matter of order: not of command or authority but of a way of life chosen by a substantial majority of its citizens. Instead of being defensive about disorder, socialists should take every opportunity to show what is now really happening: the dislocation of our habitual social order and the destruction of specific communities, in a combined political and economic offensive.
For the miners and their families in the most threatened coalfields this is already quite clear. What they are directly defending is indeed a way of life, part of a particular social order which from developments elsewhere is now being cruelly overborne. Yet there are then extending lessons for socialists. It is already apparent, from divisions and differences between various coalfields and indeed from the way the strike then happened, by area decisions rather than national ballot, that the material inequalities which are literally inscribed in the earth have profound effects on the possibility of any wide and agreed social order.
The most profitable coalfields, and the pits with the easiest seams, can see quite different futures for their own immediate communities. The theoretical ability of a national union, or a national movement or party, to compose these differences into a single policy, a single alternative order, is sharply limited by these very practical differences of circumstances. This is why, from the beginning, a socialist policy has to rest on quite different bases from capitalist policy and any of its minor modifications.
Capitalist policy, which is still one of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, has in recent decades been profoundly subversive of what is still the most freely chosen social order of our people: that is, existence as an independent and self-sustaining nation. The continued legitimacy of appeals to either law or order rests primarily in this identity. Thus when supposedly public corporations, in steel or electricity or now coal, openly subordinate the interests of this true national to their own immediate market calculations – hauling coal, for example, across the seven seas to undercut, reduce or close down any supposedly national industry – a profound social crisis has begun.
At its centre is that version of economic or uneconomic which in practice, whenever convenient, overrides all other social considerations. But if it goes on doing this, what is left for any appeal to our supposed social order and its laws? Indeed what is left as economic? The few remaining industries and services, capable of withstanding any international competition in production under any conditions of labour? But there is no way in which, on those international capitalist criteria, a viable social order, without enforced redundancy, could in the long term be maintained.
The present government’s policy – if it deserves so serious a name – is to let this rundown happen, indeed to hurry it along, in the belief that all the redundant people and discarded communities can continue to be politically marginalized or, if they act on their own behalf to be controlled by centralized communications (the political argument, as in this strike, taking place not in Parliament but on radio and television) and by new forms of policing.
In two major respects, then, the miners have taken us to a point of decision. By any criterion of future policy for this island, their coal and their skills are a central resource. They are not some arguable market sector but a key to our sustainable economic life. But it is in the second respect, in pushing the argument through to the question of the survival of all our communities, that they have gone beyond their convincing general economic position to the social issue on which the future of this society, and with it of its labour movement and of any project for socialism, will be decided. The point of growth for a reviving socialism is now in all these crisis-ridden communities: not as special cases but as a general case. It is here, in diversity and in respect for diversity, that new popular forces are forming and looking for some effective political articulation. It will be long and difficult in detail, but in challenging the destructive catchwords of management, economic and law-and-order, which now cover the real operations of a new and reckless stage of capitalism, the miners have, in seeking to protect their own interests, outlined a new form of the general interest.
As the strike ends, there will be many other things to discuss and argue about: tactics, timing and doubtless personalities. But it is of greatest possible importance to move very quickly and sharply beyond these, to the decisive general issues which have now been so clearly disclosed.