The threat that Stolypin’s reforms might attract liberal and peasant support and defuse the possibility of revolution symbolised the RSDLP’s greatest dilemma in the pre-war years. The defeat of the 1905 Revolution raised painful questions. Would the Russian Revolution really be a classic Bourgeois Revolution? Would the relatively tiny Russian proletariat have to assume the leading role and begin a socialist revolution which would then spread to heavily industrialised Europe? Lenin felt this was the obvious conclusion. But although he was an intelligent man who lived for many years in London, Paris and Geneva he remained in many ways a provincial Russian intellectual. When living in European capitals he seldom engaged with their cultural life or made any attempt to play a role in their trade union or socialist movements. As such he had little to no feel for Western Europe’s social and political reality in the decades before the First World War.
That reality was complex. It was not that there were no battles left to fight. The European ruling class–aristocratic, landowning, industrial, mercantile or a mixture of all these–did not concede political or economic power without a struggle. The 1893 Belgian General Strike, in which soldiers shot dead twelve strikers, had demonstrated that. Other battles such as the Italian General Strikes of 1904 and 1906 and the brutal Dublin lock-out of 1913 would demonstrate it again. France gained a Sunday rest law and the beginnings of old-age pensions in 1900 only over the bitter resistance of French employers, and from 1906 Clemenceau’s radical government dispatched troops to break strikes with as much alacrity as its conservative predecessor. This was pure class warfare and it could not be fought without the brave and selfless work of dedicated activists within the socialist and labour movement.
Yet there was a profound contradiction at the heart of this movement. In theory, European socialist parties believed in the desirability and inevitability of social revolution, as explained by Marx and Engels and elaborated by the great Marxist theorists of the Second International Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Rudolf Hilferding and George Plekhanov. But in practice the labour movement could not and did not confine itself to preparation for revolution, for “as a movement on behalf of the working class it needed working class support, which could only be obtained by showing practical results”.24 Hence the chosen compromise of most European socialist parties, including the German SPD, which paved the way for all the rest–a Maximum Programme of revolutionary demands which functioned as an ideal, and a Minimum Programme of social and economic reforms to be wrested from the state by mass agitation and political campaigning. Despite the revolutionary rhetoric of its leaders and official journals of Marxist theory devoted to fine points of philosophy, it was the Minimum Programme into which the socialists put most of their effort and that motivated the majority of working-class supporters.
The socialist and trade union movements had their revolutionaries, but were not themselves revolutionary. It was so in 1880 and it is so now. Though socialists may wish it otherwise, the vast majority of union members do not see trade unions as vehicles for political action. Union leaders know this and often use the lack of revolutionary sentiment amongst members to defuse any radical trade unionism or any effective fight to protect rights, terms and conditions. They cite the failure of those rare attempts to use industrial action politically, i.e. not just to resist attacks on working conditions but to alter the wider political landscape–most especially the British Miners’ Strike of 1984-85–as a reason to take no stand against oppressive, anti-labour governments at all.
To this day, British socialists and trade unionists find it hard to acknowledge that the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike was badly led and an almost inevitable disaster for the NUM and the wider union movement. Many feel that even to suggest this shifts the blame for the destruction of the NUM and of mining communities from where it belongs–Margaret Thatcher’s government–and disrespects the sacrifices of the miners and their families during the strike. But the blame is and always will be on Thatcher. The miners fought like heroes in what Paul Foot called “the greatest act of sustained defiance in the history of British labour”.25 The government’s case that it needed to shut uneconomic pits was revealed as utter hypocrisy when, after the strike, it proceeded to close fully economic pits as well. Its strategy was to engineer a strike and then use new anti-union laws to crush the miners and their union. Having provoked a strike when coal stocks were high, it then denied striking miners’ families benefits in an attempt to starve them back to work. It used the police as a para-military attack force, sealing off pit villages and assaulting miners and their supporters with impunity. At Orgreave the police launched a mass attack on pickets, the footage of which a compliant bbc reedited to infer that the miners had attacked first.
It should not have been a surprise to a Marxist trade union leader like Arthur Scargill that the British ruling class and its political front, the Tory Party, were cruel and ruthless, or that they had a deliberate strategy to defeat the NUM and reduce the mining industry. This strategy, carried out in its entirety in 1984-85, had been laid out in the “Ridley Plan” of 1977 and leaked to the press. Given the clear forewarning an intelligent and responsible trade union leadership should have prepared accordingly, i.e. not take the bait when Cortonwood colliery was threatened with closure in March 1984, not rush to a strike when coal stocks were so high, not alienate public opinion by refusing to hold a national ballot which, with time and organisation, it could have won. Instead it simply launched a mass strike as if it was the “glorious summer” of 1972, not 1984 with a different kind of government and a culturally and politically fragmented working class far less likely to demonstrate industrial solidarity.
Although the NUM Executive endorsed his strategy, the ultimate responsibility for the misjudgments rested with Scargill. Even in the 1980s he was an unrepentant Stalinist (in 1981 he defended the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland and its crushing of the independent trade union Solidarity) with almost no conception of modern Britain and its workforce beyond the mining industry. His dogmatic politics and parochial thinking were instrumental in the defeat of the strike–as more intelligent officials such as the Scottish communist Mick McGahey knew, although he kept to trade union discipline and voiced his criticisms in private. The refusal to hold a national ballot, instead substituting a series of Area ballots, was not just a PR disaster but wrong in principle for what was an obvious national action. If a trade union thinks it cannot win a national ballot of its members it should either work to convince a majority to vote for one, or not launch national action.
In the social and political atmosphere of 1984-85 there was very little chance that a miners’ strike like those of the early 1970s would succeed, or that an appeal to collective working-class solidarity–such as had been successful at Saltley Gates in 1972–would produce the same result. The subsequent discrediting of Scargillism in the wider labour movement gave perfect cover to those amongst the trade union bureaucracy who shy away from any fight–principled, smart, innovative or otherwise–with the Tories or with powerful employers. The most shameful example of this kind of defeatism came in November 2011 when major public-sector trade unions the GMB, Unison, PCS and the NUT took one-day national strike action to defend public-sector pensions and a decent retirement age. The strike was a mini-General Strike with nearly two million workers out. It could have heralded a mass anti-austerity movement to defend the welfare state and basic employment rights, of the kind that French trade unions had successfully carried out in opposition to the French government’s plan to the raise the retirement age to 62.