acutely aware of the danger of a second front and intervened to broker a compromise in the rail industry that was grabbed by the leadership of the NUR. Some union leaders even argued that it would be a bad tactic to go on strike at the same time as the miners.
Later two national dock strikes erupted over the movement of coal through unregistered ports - offering the chance to break the isolation of the miners through the opening of a second front. The dockers were fighting for their jobs and their industry and Tory ministers were making it clear that they intended to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme.
It was clearty in the interests of both groups of workers to fight alongside each other and conversely very difficult for either group to win on its own. Nonetheless the dock strike was called off with no settlement just as the government was beginning to panic. In fact the dockers were defeated soon after the miners.
Arthur Scargill was the inspiration of A the stie. He foughe rest the brant
Lend, and his defense of the militant members of his union against media vilification was exemplary. When faced by reporters complaining about the battles on the picket line he would say: "I will never condemn brave young miners whose only crime is to defend their jobs. " His weakness, however, was his dealings with the TUC and the other trade union leaders who held the key to the success of the strike. He never fought for their support. In fact, at times he seemed to want to keep them out of it.
The funds and assets of the South Wales area of the NUM were sequestrated under the anti-unions laws five months into the strike and just before the 1985 TUC Congress, at a time when demands for solidarity with the NUM were at their strongest. It was the moment both to oppose the anti-union laws and support the miners.
The NUM had put a resolution on the agenda of the Congress calling for strike action in support of the miners. However the night before, Arthur Scargill agreed to withdraw it in favour of a policy of boycotting scab coal going into the power stations - a very difficult policy
to implement even given the will to do so. He The defeat provided the political basis for the rise of New Labour in the 1990s and for the policy of 'social partnership' in the ... would no doubt argue that he did not trust the union leaders to carry out a strike decision, but the withdrawal of the resolution cut the miners off from the support of the movement.
The effect of the miners' defeat on the British trade union movement was massive and determined the political and industrial situation for the next two decades. What crushed the strike was the rise of new realism in the unions backed by the Neil Kinnock leadership of the Labour Party who attacked the strike, particularly over the issue of the lack of a ballot.
The Tories recognised that the defeat of the miners would open the door to wave after wave of anti-union laws, and these were duly introduced without the TUC lifting a finger. The laws were by far the most draconian in Western Europe, becoming a model for other
EU member states to follow.
An NUM victory, of course, would have
meant a rise in the left in the unions and would have consolidated the left movement led by Scargill and Tony Benn inside the Labour Party.
As it was, the defeat provided the political
basis for the rise of New Labour in the mid
1990s and for the policy of 'social partnership'
in the unions.
The left and militant trade unionism have
had to battle to regain lost ground. It is a fight
that has begun but still has some way to go. With the prospect of the American Presidential Elections being dominated once again by the Republicans and Democrats, DAVID FINKEL suggests some historical reasons for the absence of a class political party in the US
t can't really be because the uppity
colonials took the "u" out of Labour,"
but almost every other explanation has been offered for the vexing dilemma of US working class politics: Why has no Labor Party developed in the United States?
The most recent brave attempt to break through came in the late 1990s, a heroic effort led by the late union organizer Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers. After years of groundwork, a founding Labor Party convention actually took place in November 1998 in Pittsburgh, with over 1400 delegates from six national unions, over two hundred local unions and thirty-nine chapters of the party.
Alas, almost six years and two electoral cycles later, the Labor Party barely exists; most workers have never heard of it; the party's efforts to build itself though campaigns for national health care and a living wage Constitutional Amendment never caught fire; and the largest sponsoring union, Mazzocchi's OCAW, has disappeared in a merger with a much more conservative paper workers' union. More than ever, mainstream organized labor in the US remains firmly chained to the rightwardmoving corporate capitalist Democratic Party.
Turning to the broader historical perspective, a once-popular theory called the "frontier thesis" held that class politics failed to crystallize in the United States because westward expansion afforded opportunities for upward mobility as against the rigid class boundaries of "Old World" nations.
This superficial overlooked everything that mattered: the fact that class struggle in this country has been historically extensive and quite brutal; that it was as violent in the West as in other regions, if not more so, and that labor class politics were if anything more advanced there; and anyway, that westward expansion, (notably the annexation of northern Mexico) and the attendant exterminations of Native Americans, was completed a century ago.
Nor can we really blame the rise of US imperialism; since Britain (for example developed its Labor (sorry, Labour) Party at the height of empire.
More serious explanations, rooted in the structure of the US working class and economy, have more traction and can only be mentioned briefly below as factors in a highly complex equation.
First, profound divisions and identity conflicts split the American working class throughout its history: free vs.slave and then white vs. Black; Protestant (German or Anglo) vs. Catholic (Italian, Irish, Polish, Mexican); native vs. immigrant; more recently, "American Labor" against "foreigners," and more.
Further, the craft union ideology, championed by Sam Gompers, explicity privileged the highest-paid workers against the interests of the rest, seeing the latter as "unorganizable" let alone a potential political force.
The Left made some grave mistakes in the periods of labor turmoil and industrial union organizing in the 1920s and '30s when a mass labor party might have been on the agenda. Most notable was the sectarian error of the Communist Party in 1924, when on Moscow's orders the CP made a deplorable "left turn" against those who should have been its allies; and the much worse Stalinist course of the 1930s when the Popular Front helped block an incipient labor break from the Democrats
There was the post-World War Il incorporation of the labor movement into the celebration of prosperity — who needed a labor party when so many (white) workers were becoming homeowners and suburbanites? — and into the imperial ideology of the Cold War.
Finally, the reversal of working class eco nomic fortunes in the last quarter century has left the trade union movement, espe cially in the private sector, struggling for its very survival. Far from a political offensive the labor leadership has adopted the strate gy of concessionary retreats.
Summing up all this, in the 1990s the labor movement threw its political energies into electing and reelecting the most conservative Democratic administration in modern times. Under Bill Clinton the Democrats with labor in tow turned their attention above all to winning the votes of white suburban voters, "fiscally conservative and socially moderate."
The needs of working people for socia services, stable employment, decent wages union rights and the social "safety net" of welfare entitlements were ruthlessly sacrificed in order to promote budget surpluses corporate globalization and "free trade," and a union-free environment for the hightech boom.
So brilliantly did the Clinton strategy suc ceed that it became the template for Tony Blair's New Labour. So I conclude with a brand new question: Why is there now no labo (u)r party in Britain?
• David Finkel is an editor of AGAINST THE CURRENT www.solidarity-us.org
page 22 of the scan
22 soci The Battle of Venezuela, by Michael America Bureau 2004 stance April 2004
may not be easily available and this book is a decent substitute. You'll also get some real insights. For example, there's the vicious racism of the Venezuelan elite and much of its middle-class how easy it is for government supporters to argue, and believe, that the current petition for a referendum on Chavez' rule is also based on fraud. There are sensitive portraits here too - of