Arthur Scargill hero or villian or something inbetween? views on the NUM?

First thing to remember was that Scargill was gerry-mandered into the presidency of the NUM because the then miners leader , Joe Gormley , managed to change the constitution that disallowed the Communist Party polit-bureau member Mick McGahey from standing for the position on account of his age . Although loyal to Scargill during the miners strike it makes interesting idle speculation to ponder how it would have all panned out if the more politically astute Mick had been in charge .

Scargill's dictatorial control of the SLP is detailed extensively by the Weekly Worker at http://www.cpgb.org.uk/simonharvey/index.html

Many have views on the miners strike , the rights and wrongs of not holding the ballot and picketing tactics , but basically my question is at what time during the strike did Scargill realise that the strike had been broken and would be defeated and why he did not bring to an earlier end the suffering of the miners , rather than drag it on for even longer .

Eeh I read with mounting frustration the comments on Arthur Scargill. Whatever one thinks
of him as a union leader, a Communist, a bloke, is irrelivant to certain facts. None of the
contributions Ive read this far have the slightest relation to the facts and are all more or
less based upon the medias counter strike propaganda. Interesting that the anarchists
have just absorbed the lies and misinformation and now make their assessments based
upon that rather than the reality of the events.

Can I suggest you all start by reading Strike-Not The End Of The Story -pub The National Coal Mining Musuem For England, you can get it from their shop...yes I wrote it, but its their book. This will explain some basic facts like;
a) Arthur Scargill DID NOT decide NOT to have a ballot
b)Did NOT call the strike
c)Niether decided to go back nor stop out. All of these things were decided by the rank and file in mass votes in the communities and at the pit heads.

The question on Mick is interesting but Mick had been in earlier national elections and lost
in individual ballot votes. The fact is the CPGB decided to run Arthur Scargill as their own
candidate rather than a member of their own team, it was not a completely popular
decision among the CP, and became less so as the CPGB turned against the strike
and tried to find ways out. Arthur would hear of no such thing and either would we.
Let me say one thing finally, if Arthur Scargill hadnt been born this strike would still have
happened, it might have been a good bit more fractured and bloody, but it would have
happened, we might also have won , thats not to say he caused us to loose, only that the
dice would have been jumbled up a bit more and may have come down with more sixes for
us.
Dave Douglass -NUM activist

I don;t think anyone on here thinks scargill was a hero or villain, the guy was a union leader he did what union leaders do: tried to rein in wildcat action and flying pickets and keep things under the unions control while trying to still steer the union to victory or an acceptable compromise.
Maybe as dave argues had scargill not been leader the strike would have done a little better, and then again maybe not, but at the end of the day the end result wasn't really down to scargill or which ever union leader took his place, it depended on the militancy of the rank and file and their ability to spread the strike. Focusing on how right or wrong union leaders are is a dead end. Its like worrying about whether the tories or labour are in power, it may have small effects on the order of events, but it shouldn't change the way you view struggles. .

The idea that blocking coal imports was somehow just ''nationalism'' is ridiculous.

Misinformation, stereotypical evaluations, gossip . This is what passes for
analysis of something as important as the 1984/5 miners strike and Arthur
Scargill’s role? No actually, Arthur Scargill is NOT just like other Trade Union
leaders, he did not betray the members of the union he represented. He has earned the undying hatred of the establishment for that reason. He is seen in middle class circles as a working class oink, a man above his station, actually a man who threatened the
middle class living room every night for a year. The sons and daughters of the middle class subliminally picked up on this hatred of Scargill and today they fit it into their own ‘radical’ reasons to hate and malign him. Scargill made mistakes, too right, I totally disagreed with his strategy on a number of central issues, but if we listen to some of the advice on this link, the miners wouldn’t have fought at all. Not only not fought but workers wouldn’t have unions. Without unions, what exactly should we do, just lie down and die? Don’t tell me ‘something’ more revolutionary or radical, we know that, but it has to be built on real struggles and within real situations not dreamed up in someone’s back yard or the realms of their imagination.
What can we make of the idea that this was a just a fight for British jobs for British workers ? I take it that no one here on this island is allowed to fight his or her jobs/living/community/union, because somehow that’s racialist.
Because this work could be done by workers in the third world, and we should just
politely say thanks, we’ll just sit on the scrap heap then should we? Don’t you realise the coal produced in Britian was produced in well paid, union controlled environments with high levels of workers control and blocks on alienation and management autocracy? That this was coal produced in the safest mines in the world.
That the strength of the miners union here and the position of coal in the energy market meant workers could challenge the government and the system as a whole?
That’s why they came in to close them, that’s why we fought. We lost, and now that coal is produced in pits where the miners are slaughtered wholesale, where they live on starvation wages, where unions are banned. Do you think this is internationalism?
The defeat of the British miners was a defeat for the mining communities across the world because it winds the terms, conditions, and social control of the miners and their families DOWN it weakened us worldwide. Whereas the victory of the miners and our political and social strength previously inspired workers world wide, our defeat was taken as a global defeat and grossly demoralising on a world scale. Why do you think we got support and aid from workers in the four corners of the planet?

Finally it’s a good job the strategists of Revolution were not guiding us eh? The NCB and the CEGB and the government had stock piled the best part of 50 million tonnes of coal at power stations to last out any strike. Our overtime ban was launched in preparation for all out strike action. It didn’t ‘lock us in’ for five months the fools, it was meant to last twelve months. It was rapidly thinning out the carefully stored stocks,
They couldn’t replace the coal at the rate they were burning it as a result of the overtime ban. We were weakening them, and still earning a living wage. Government commentators told Thatcher if the overtime ban stayed on until Aug, and a strike started in the following month, the coal stocks would last SIX WEEKS. Six weeks then the lights and power would go off , we’d have them. The overtime ban was a central and successful strategy. That is why they had to provoke a premature all out strike too early. That is why they came for Cortonwood and the other pits in Scotland and Durham and Wales. They knew the overtime was working. HOWEVER, revolution says it was a mistake. So then to combat the stocking of coal we cut coal seven days per week instead of four , we cut coal 24 hours per day instead of 18 ? Thus producing MORE coal than we would ordinarily, and allow them to save the surplus so they could wait out a strike for any length of time knowing they had enough stocks to last us out. Moreover, we are supposed to consider this wise advice.
I despair of some of the comments on here, I really do. Someone said at the recent Anarchist conference that if the miners strike was happening now, half the anarchists would support the miners and the others half would be against them. Too right, we can see from the logic of the comments on this link how that would shape up.
If I don’t respond to any further comments, its not cause you’ve said something profound although I wait with baited breath its just cause its too time consuming when trying to fight in the real world, as well as hair rippingly frustrating and I don’t have that much left.

Dave Douglass -NUM activist

For me the one sign that Scargill wasn't like other union leaders was how he did everything in his power to frustrate the states attempts to appropriate union funds - opening up bank accounts in Ireland etc to hide the miners cash funds etc. This later lead to false claims of misappropriation of funds but it was a brave attempt to keep the union running and fight off attacks on its very existence.

While we don't agree with his politics it is important to defend him against attacks from the right for the stand that he and the miners took.

I'd like to thank Dave Douglas for rightly pointing out that everyone who disagrees with his argument is 'middle class', an absolutely stunning political argument.
Devrim

I disagree with Dave on some things, his posts here seem fair enough however

It's interesting to read the quote someone else posted about the national ballot. It's correct to say that it is not fair to attack Scargill or the miners about the lack of a ballot - National ballots are anti-working class, as breaking workers up and having them vote on things secretly at home helps us be isolated, atomised and demobilised.

But that comment seems to be saying that it would have been worth holding a national ballot - I thought that the problem was to hold a legal national ballot the miners would have had to return to work in order to hold the ballot, which would have taken the wind out of the strike.

Libcom's coverage of the strike here: http://libcom.org/tags/miners-strike

I think it's a bit rich for a pseudo-academic with a PhD to be calling anyone "middle class".

And "gangster" as you should be aware you have been banned from libcom about 15 times. Dave Douglass has not been banned, so he is free to post here. You are not. Dave can register his own account, or keep using this one, if you stop using it.

I'm confused. Are you Dave Douglass or not? Not that it makes any actual difference to your argument, it's just kind of weird if you refer to yourself in the third person.

for background, the multiply banned poster 'gangster' was once banned for impersonating Dave Douglass in an attempt not to get rebanned...

Let's get back to the comments by Dave Douglass (DD), which deserve some considered response.

First of all, it's a pity that it's the ICC here who are criticising Scargill's nationalist rhetoric during the strike, because there were several other groups and individuals who also attacked Scargill's nationalist arguments (e.g.Worker's Playtime, A Communist Effort, BMCombustion, Wildcat, Sheffield Anarchist, to name just some of those who wrote something during the strike - there were hundreds of others who verbalised similar criticisms). The ideologues of the ICC, who were considered laughable by almost all the anti-Statist, anti-union radicals during the '84 - '85 strike not merely because of their habitual stodgy suffocating dogmatism, but, more precisely, because they condemned the attacks on scabs for being "within the ideological traditions of trade unionism" - by which abstract criteria, one could condemn all strikes! (Sadly, there are still too many at libcom who feel it's ok to have a polite dialogue with these sub-Leninist pseuds).

Obviously everyone with a bit of sense saw the miners strike, as DD says, as an international struggle, which is why it's such a spurious argument he's putting forward - defending Scargill's nationalist crap when he himself puts forward a lucid internationalist argument. Scargill - inevitably for a man in his unnecessarily compromised position - was putting forward his reasoning for keeping the pits open within bourgeois economic terms, - i.e. not putting forward an internationalist class struggle perspective. And it was a self-defeating argument: keeping the pits open would not have been good for their economy, and no-one could see the sense of the Scargill's self-contradictory position of trying to persuade TV viewers that it was good for the economy; people supported the miners precisely because they were attacking the economy and trying to argue "reasonably" (in bourgeois terms) was far from convincing. But no-one (apart from, and this several years later, the ludicrously academic Radical Chains) used Scargill's nationalism as an excuse to oppose the strike. It's typical of DD to falsify any criticism -

- when no-one who considered themselves radical ('anarchist' or whatever) was against the strike. No-one. But DD seems to think he can silence criticism by parodying it.

DD defends everything about the NUM in this strike because of his own position as an NUM leader. In 1972 he said, "[A miner] prefers the open direct representation of ‘we are all leaders’. Even in the case of a working miner who is a branch official, yes - they can see he is a worker, but that would be no call to get excited...the branch officer can be regarded as distant, even after a year in office... the worker can trust the man who works next to him, even if he is wary of giving him too much power”. (“Pit life in Co’ Durham: Rank and File Movements and Workers Control.”) But 12 years later he'd retreated from this position. Now, I'm obviously not against temporary 'leaders' - i.e. people who intitiate some attack on this society - but in the end, everyone has to take intitiatives -"we are our own leaders", as the Port Talbot steelwork strikers said in 1969. The class struggle has to give up the need for leadership outside of this self-leadership. Now, there's no doubt that DD initiated some activities during the strike - hit squads, etc; (more than Scargill did - he initiated nothing useful) but then so did loads of others, less famous - they never became well-known because they never had anything to do with the media.

Miners felt they had to present an image of unity behind the leader to the media - "Arthur Scargill, Arthur Scargill - we'll support you evermore" and all that - the usual "the enemy's enemy is my friend". But despite that, there were some who were not so taken in by his image of credibility: "Scargill goes down to Orgreave in his chauffeur-driven car, gets himself arrested, and has his chauffeur pick him up at the police station" , as one Yorkshire miner and his wife told me at the time (hardly middle class people subliminally picking up on the middle class hatred of their parents, as DD says - quite the contrary). In fact, the need for the media - which is where the focus on the individual personality of the leader is most concentrated - is there in DD as well (he's often been on the telly both during and since the strike), whereas any lucid disgust with this society has to treat the media as the enemy (which many miners did in fact - attacking journalists and TV vans because of their constant lies and manipulations). As a miner said to me during the strike, "Scargill's a peacock - never goes anywhere where there are no cameras". As cantdocartwheels said,

Which meant, in part, subverting the union - though DD is so entrenched in his 'NUM activist' role he's unable to see that.

The tendency to rely on leaders (and their use of the media) to do things was particularly devastating during Orgreave, when even independently-minded miners thought it was enough for Scargill to go on the telly and call for solidarity action; in 1972, the miners, in part due to Scargill's initiative when he had a pretty low-level position in the hierarchy, went round Birmingham near Saltley Coke depot and got up to 12,000 workers (mainly from engineering factories and car factories) to come out on strike and march down to Saltley. With decisive results for the miners strike at that time - they won. But in '84 - with the left of the NUM in control, no-one went round Sheffield, or spoke to the railway workers next to Tinsley Park steelworks or the local sewage workers, electricity sub-station staff, or the workers at Woodhouse Mill/Waring Gillow Carpets - all these could have struck and come down to Orgreave to see what was going on and participate. The fantasy that the media can be a form of communication useful for the class struggle is illustrated by the contrast between these 2 situations - Saltley and Orgreave.

And what about the contempt for Scargill that the miners at Fitzwilliam had because of his nepotistic manipulations, getting jobs for his boys, when a local pit closed a few years before the Great Strike; or their anger at the NUM hierarchy towards the end of the strike when they took away their mini-bus, preventing them from picketting; or the miner at Edlington threatened with eviction by the NUM, whose tenant he was, just a month into the strike with no pay; or the miner with Polish connections who complained about Scargill not criticising Jaruzelski ( the military leader who crushed the worker's movement of '81, including killing 6 miners) and who was met with "Why don't you criticise what they're doing in El Salvador?"- all these are hardly the 'middle class' he demagogically caricatures all critics of Scargill and the NUM as. But for him, the NUM is synonomous with the miners because of his own position, despite all the contradictions (admittedly it was more connected with the base than any other union because it was virtually the only working class community left where people lived and worked in the same villages, and where the union rep would sometimes work beside you - though some were full-timers - and would permanently socialise with the miners of his area). But that doesn't mean to say that a hierarchy didn't exist, and that the miners all too rarely challenged that hierarchy. But for him, so utterly immersed in his leftist role, this is as difficult to understand as a fish trying to understand water.

A lot more could be said, but it's all a bit academic now - the only real use of understanding these points is in their application to current struggles, obviously.

For a more detailed history of the British miners and particularly of the Great Strike see: http://libcom.org/library/so-near-so-far-selective-history-british-miners , which I put together about 4 years ago.

I think it's more than just a pity that Devrim can lie so blatantly: very few people on libcom posts don't have an internationalist "position" and yet here he is pretending only the ICC has. Pathetic. And a way of ignoring the main point -

.

.

I don't think that there is any lie here at all. It is quite obviously refering to the positions on trade unionism, not internationalism, and on that point I don't think that everybody does agree with us.

On the question of scabs in the miners' strike; I wasn't a member of the ICC at the time and I don't know exactly what they wrote. It seems that you aren't so keen to tell us either as even though you do directly quote., you don't do on the bit where we 'condemn' strikers.

I think that it is quite obvious though that beating up scabs wasn't a tactic that could lead to winning the strike. That isn't a condemnation.

Devrim