The combination of these efforts has meant the virtual isolation of the miners as far as industrial action has been conganisation from top to bottom inside the labour movement around a class strug gle programme. This could be one positive outcome of the miners' strike. The miners may not at this stage be able to achieve the total victory they have must live up to the example they have set and continue the fight. Nationally and internationally, the labour movement must continue to fight to defend the NUM in its battle for jobs and for trade union freedoms. • cerned.
Few miners would blame Scargill for the sorry state that the strike finds itself
Fourth International discusses
From the beginning he has in today.
warned his rank and file against any rethe miners' strike liance on the TUC to win victory, counterposing the necessity for the miners to rely only on their own struggle.
type of class-struggle strategy represents
At its recent congress the Fourth International held a special meeting on a complete break with the class collaborthe British miners' strike to discuss the current stage of the strike and ation practised by British trade union leaders for the last 60 years.
Supporters from all over Europe gathered to hear a report on the present stage of the strike and an assessment of the solidarity campaign.
The NUM leadership did not give priority
Below we reprint the text of that report and following that some extracts to building the cross-sectoral organisation from the discussion which followed outlining the impact of the strike in of the left before and during the strike different countries and the work that has been done.
which could have brought concerted prestake action in the strike.
union left conference has been organised by the Broad Left Organising Committee, but it will take place in March, too late to save the strike.
Similarly absent has been any serious challenge to the Labour leaders who both locally and nationally have so shamefully
This aspect will bebetrayed the strike.
come more important in the period ahead.
Whatever the result of the strike, strug
Starting in March, gles still lie ahead.
local authorities controlled by the Labour
Party and municipal workers will enter into struggle against the government's attacks on local autonomy and finances.
will erupt as the
Still other battles
Thatcher government tries to apply its draconian new trade union laws.
Inevitably, many workers' eyes will turn to the general elections due in 1988 as the only way to remove Thatcher. The question of elections has also been raised
Thatcher's disastrous in relation to handling of the economy. This has now led to a dramatic rise in interest rates in an attempt to keep sterling stable in the face of falling North Sea oil revenues.
This rise in interest rates threatens to throttle the pitifully weak degree of economic recovery of the British economy.
the new
Under these circumstances left wing in the British labour movement, called into being by the miners" strike, can respond by presenting an alternative to the class collaboration of the present leadership of the Labour Party. Such an alternative would support all the present and future struggles against the Thatcher government, reject any alliances with other bourgeois forces and present anticapitalist policies such as those fought for by the miners in the course of their dispute. One result of such a campaign would be the entry of a whole number of new deputies into Parliament including those from the far left of the Party.
The essential condition for any politthe international solidarity campaign.
I will start out by reminding people of some of the facts of the dispute. Approx-
147,000 miners have been involved in this strike in a union comprising 180,000 members. During the period of the strike there have been in the region of 20,000 arrests and 9,000 of those have already been found guilty. As a result, 600 people have been sacked because of
Ten thousand remain to have their cases heard, including, unfortunately, three young miners on a murder
In the course of the strike six
Just these statistics reveal how important this strike has been within the class struggle. From the point of view of the British class struggle this strike is the most important since the 1926 general strike, though this was under different
The most important feature of the strike has been the role of the Scargill leadership of the NUM because unlike in every strike of major national significance in recent years, this is a leadership of a national union that genuinely wants to win the strike and pursues every possible means to that end.
Although there have been some debates about the precise tactics in the strike, the one accusation that no one can make against Scargill is that he has tried to sell out the strike. Whatever the outcome, whether there is a defeat or a victory, it will not be because Scargill betrayed the strike. This is very important for us. It means there is a section of the leadership of the labour movement which plays a class struggle role. Our perspectives, therefore, are very straight forward: we want to generalise the kind of leadership that exists within the NUM to the whole of the labour movement and to every issue that confronts the working class in its immediate struggle. The existence of such a class struggle leadership on this issue inside the British labour movement means that an important element in building a class struggle left wing is clearly in place. Our orientation to the leadership that has led this strike is one of complete non-sectarianism, one of complete solidarity and support and is one of linking ourselves and our political current to the struggle that they have waged and to the alternative they have put forward. We seek with them to generalise that to the whole of the labour movement.
This will continue to have an enormous impact on the labour movement after the strike because all those who are supporting the strike will draw a very simple lesson out of the strike. The issue that is posed in the British labour movement is do you want a leadership of the likes of Kinnock [the Labour Party leader] and Willis [the present leader of the Trades Union Congress] or do you want to fight for a leadership like that of Arthur Scargill? The choice that divides the labour movement
That is the choice that divides and will continue to divide the entire British labour movement and the Labour Party itself. Because when a balance sheet is drawn of the strike, it will ask was Scargill correct in his answer to Thatcher and to the austerity drive of the ruling class? Was he correct to answer that we have to wage the most ferocious class struggle and the most ferocious industrial struggle to turn this round? Was he correct and was the strike leadership correct? Or, were Willis and Kinnock correct when they said we should negotiate, we should talk to the Tories, we should avoid class struggle; it is doomed to failure?
The next most important aspect of the strike, in my view, is the role of women in relation to the strike. The fact that when this strike began nobody
International Viewpoint 25 February 1985
cuses in the Labour Party. The NUM of the Fourth International, the GIM, would have believed the mobilisation of the women that occurred in support of the strike. In fact one of the things which the government quite clearly gambled on and has traditionally gambled on is the fact that they thought the wives of those on strike would act as a pressure and could be mobilised in a way that we have seen in the past in the British labour movement, to pressurise their husbands to go back to work.
On the contrary, within the first few weeks of the strike the miners' wives organised themselves as miners' wives and as women's groups of the NUM even though they were not members of the NUM themselves.
Not only have the women been mobilised around the strike in their traditional role (though organising meals and food parcels has involved tremendous sacrifices) but also they have played the role of speaking meetings, mobilising and organising their own demonstration and
This activity has had a tremendous impact on women in general and one finds in many areas a miners' solidarity committee and, as a sub-committee or a parallel to it, a women's solidarity committee which mobilises all the women's organisations in a particular area in support of the strike. It also has had a tremendous impact on the labor movement in general and on the NUM itself. There is no doubt that the general sexist attitude which existed among miners and which exists amongst most working class men, was prevalent, with sexist slogans being used on demonstrations, etc. the first few months of the strike this was ruled out.
In fact this strike has had an impact on all social layers. We have seen the mobilisation of black people, the setting up of black groups in solidarity with the strike, different sections of the unions supporting the strike and also the mobilisation of gay people in support of the
The social layers mobilised behind the strike on the explicit understanding that the victory of the strike would take their own struggles forward. That understanding has begun to bring together chief elements of a class struggle wing in the labour movement of which one began to see the first elements at the Labour Party conference last OcBlack people campaign for separate caucuses
The NUM waged a successful struggle to get the Labour Party to support the NUM. What was important was that it was women, gays and blacks who mobilised around that idea and the NUM responded by, throughout the conference, sometimes being the only union to support the demands of those oppressed groups. On the question of women, it supported entirely their demands. Black people in the conference had been arguing the right for separate black cauInternational Viewpoint 25 February 1985 supported that demand and, I think I am right in saying, it was the only union
The NUM also sent messages of support to the gays organising in the
In the context of the strike the question of solidarity is vital. As supporters of the Fourth International in Britain, we have played a leading role in the solidarity movement. We have waged the fight for that solidarity to be implemented at a national level and generalised. In this context the role the European sections, in particular, have played in building international
The strike today is at a very difficult stage. The situation is on a knife's edge. There is no doubt that without action from major sections of the labour movement this strike cannot continue for much longer. In that context, we fight for action from the rest of the labour movement but we also have to have a
• SNOWDOWN
WOMENS SUPPORT
GROUP
The discussion which followed this inrank and file support from workers across Europe with the struggle which the British miners are waging. ers, especially in countries like West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands with right-wing governments, understand the need to fight Thatcher's government and have expressed the desire that their own trade-union leaders should fight back in the way that the Scargill leadership has done. In Sweden more and more workers are afraid that the right-wing policies of the Social Democratic government will pave the way for a Thatchertype government.
This rank and file support has consisted of thousands of pounds being collected for the miners — in West Germany the DGB (the general trade-union conand IG Metall (engineering union) launched a campaign hour's wage £300,000 has been raised - and of solidarity committees being set up in all the major towns across Europe. been matched by the extreme reluctance of the trade-union bureaucracy to take
In the discussion it was suggested that perhaps they too have noticed the example of Scargill and are afraid that workers will want them to do
The speaker from the German section realistic grasp of the situation. While we have been at this congress, in Britain the bourgeois press have been saying that the discussion on the NUM executive whether to return without a settlement because they think it is impossible for them to make any settlements accepting
This indicates that the situation of the strike is very serious indeed.
The point I want to stress is that after being on strike for 11 months, even when they go back, the hardship in the communities will be intense. You cannot recover from a year with no income in a matter of weeks. Therefore, where there are possibilities for continuing the solidarity work internationally, it should be continued whatever happens. Whatever can be done by the international workers movement in the next months will be vital in the task of confronting the problems after the strike, and the task of rebuilding the NUM in Britain. Dutch women's band plays for Kent miners (DR confirmed that this was the case in West
Here the right-wing mineunion stated that they disagreed with the aims of the strike and explained that when their industry had been ailing, they had been prepared to make sacrifices (that is, sacrifice people's jobs). They felt that Scargill, too, should help Arthur Scargill not welcomed by trade-union bureaucracy
Other union leaderships in West Germany had also been reluctant to give support but had had to accept that rank and file solidarity committees have been established. In fact, at a local level such committees have received official backing and IG Metall in particular have been forced to allow factory tours by British
Such a welcome was not accorded to Arthur Scargill, however, when the NUM representative in West Germany tried to organise a national meeting with him as
The meeting had to be called because German labour leaders threatened a boycott.
Another place where Scargill was unwelcome was in Sweden where again rank and file trade unionists at the Volvo car plant invited him over to speak and
5
YUGOSLAVIA-
the meeting was sabotaged by trade• union leaders in collusion with management.
The perspective of the GIM in West Germany throughout has been to try to the campaign at a national centralise level, something which has involved con-