Scargill’s philosophy of betrayal

A long interview last June between Arthur Scargill, the militant Yorkshire miners’ leader and the periodical New Left Review has recently been serialised in the Observer. This is no doubt to show the middle class readership of that newspaper what dangerous “extremists” exist in the ranks of the Trade Union movement.

Scargill begins by recounting his early history as a young militant in the NUM fighting for the right even to attend branch meetings against the entrenched power of the right wing leadership.

He then talks at length about his role in the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 which brought down the Tory government. He gives a vivid picture of the battle of Saltley coke depot in Birmingham where a mass picket of miners finally closed the depot after battle with the police and how the working class movement of the entire midlands rallied to the support of the miners. Speaking of the development of the ‘flying picket’ tactic, in which he played a leading role himself, Scargill says:

“The picketting had been launched in all the areas but mobile pickets directed on targets outside the pits had been sent mainly from Yorkshire. You see we took the view we were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green like they did in 1926. We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies because we were fighting a government. Anyone who thinks otherwise was living in cloud cuckoo land. We had to declare war on them and the only way was to attack the vulnerable points. They were the points of energy, the power stations, the coke depots, the points of supply.”

Scargill was quite aware moreover that the miners strike, having brought down the Tory government had to be continued under Labour until the claim was met, and that the working class must come into conflict with the Labour government.

“Yes, what we should really do is go harder into the attack because a Labour government should never ever find itself in a position of conflict with the trade unions in this way. And if it does then it has nothing in common with socialism and it has nothing in common with working class principles . . . They (the Labour leaders) are now deliberately operating measures that are deliberately designed to solve the capitalist crisis at the expense of the working class . . The ruling class have created these problems . . . and if they’re not prepared to pay then we take over as we should do anyway all the means of production, distribution and exchange.”

Fighting talk! How then from such a ‘clear perspective’ does Scargill get to the position he adopted for example at the last Miners Conference of effectively capitulating on the question of the defence of miners living standards by his retreat on the £100 claim? To understand this is to understand the forces that drive towards betrayal in all the ‘left talkers’ in the unions and the Labour Party, however militant they are, and the vital need for the construction of an alternative leadership.

MAXIMUM

Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938:

“Classical Social Democracy . . . divided its programme into two parts independent of each other: the minimum programme which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society and the maximum programme which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum programme no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge since the word ‘socialism’ is used only for holiday speechifying.”

And this is exactly what ‘ultimately unites Scargill and the ‘lefts’ with the right wing. On the one hand Scargill speaks of the necessity to take over “all the means of production, distribution and exchange” and on the other hand the need to “go harder into the attack” on the struggle over wages. How are the two questions to be linked?

For Scargill the answer to this question is absurdly simple:

“But struggles convince the workers of the need for real control over society. Saltley and the miners struggles of ’72 and ’74 did more to convince the miners in the coalfields of the need to take into social control all the means of producing wealth and not just nationalisation than anything else I know.”

Struggle alone without clear political leadership convinces no-one of anything. Was it the struggle at Saltley that convinced Scargill of the “necessity” to capitulate to the £6 wage limit by abandoning the £100 a week demand?

The subsequent campaign in Yorkshire and other areas against the £6 wage limit were crippled before they began by Scargill’s retreat.

Scargill capitulated of course not because he is a cynic or any such personal motives but because he could see no political alternative. Such claims as the one before the last NUM conference are in themselves inadequate to defend the living conditions of miners. As Scargill admits: “Even if you get a wage increase the problem will be there tomorrow.”

ALTERNATIVE

Unable to see any concrete alternative to wage militancy and faced with a rate of inflation of 25% a year while the entire right wing in the unions and the Labour Party together with the capitalists campaign at high pitch for the view that ‘one man’s wage increase is another man’s job’ then of course Scargill out of ‘tactical considerations’ backs down on the claim itself.

His capitulation is aided by his attitude to the Labour party. Though starting from a position that workers should go “harder into the attack” on a Labour government, Scargill ends up in effect supporting the government. Scargill fails to understand that a Labour government is not just another government like the Tories. Whereas the Tory Party is a capitalist party, the Labour Party, like the unions was created to defend the working class.

When its leadership turns now to implement capitalist policies and viciously attack working class people this raises the most fundamental political questions in the working class movement. Namely the necessity for the construction of an alternative political leadership in the working class based on the defence of the independent class interests of the proletariat, and capable of leading a struggle for a socialist planned economy which is the only solution to the present crisis.

Scargill agrees that Wilson has to go but when asked what is his alternative he replies:

“I would like to see a broad alliance of the whole Left inside the party. I want to see the bans and prescriptions lifted so that the whole of the Left could participate. But having said that I’m a realist. You’re not going to get that overnight. So in the meantime we have to see how we can get the best for workers out of the situation as it is.”

This is the essence of the reformist separation of the maximum programme of socialism – always put off till tomorrow because no-one can see what on earth can be done about it today – from the minimum programme of reforms which we try to get ‘out of the situation as it is’. Workers’ practical struggles are limited in this way within the confines of reformism and trade union consciousness.

But when reforms are no longer possible, and nothing can be got from the ‘situation as it is’, Scargill cannot see how a political alternative can be fought for in the working class movement. For this enable workers to see beyond both Wilson and Benn and the ‘lefts’ and drive these people out. Therefore despite all the rhetoric about democratising the Labour Party Scargill ends up making the best of a bad job.

“It may be with all his weaknesses the Left has got to consider whether or not Benn has got to be supported. Nobody’s got more criticisms of Benn than I have . . . But at least he would be an improvement on the present leadership.”

That the position of the ‘Lefts’ brings them in practice into unity with the right wing is shown graphically by the speech at the Labour Party Conference by ex-left Michael Foot who denounced any attempt to criticise the £6 wage freeze as “a recipe for its [the Labour government’s] destruction. On this basis the left was completely immobilised. At the same time Benn calls for support of the Labour government as ‘the only alternative’, and votes for Wilson’s policies one day, only to mouth abstractly about ‘socialism’ the next.

‘LEFT’

Scargill ultimately can see, like all the other ‘lefts’, no alternative to supporting this Labour government which is determined to maintain capitalism, and therefore must intensify its attacks on the working class.

There is an alternative. It lies in the struggle for a programme which can defend workers against wage cuts and unemployment. It rests on a resolute defence of the political independence of the working class, and a fight for principle.

Such a programme - a sliding scale of wages organised by the unions, work sharing on full pay to defend jobs and nationalisation under workers management of all bankrupt sectors of the economy, together with a programme of public works to create new employment - because it clashes irreversibly with the measures that the employers have to take in defence of profits, poses the necessity of workers control.

That is of workers committees taking control of the factories and supervising the management to prevent capitalist policies being implemented. This stage itself would lay the basis for the working class moving ahead to abolish capitalist property relations altogether.

But Scargill resolutely refuses to give leadership by means of such a strategy and covers his tracks with a morass of confusion on the question of ‘workers control’:

“Now I’m a strange trade union leader . . . in that I’m totally opposed to workers control . . . I believe once you start talking about workers control under capitalism what you are saying is that we establish a system where we open the books and we take charge of 51% of the Board and all this sort of thing. That’s not workers power. Workers power is to take into the hands of the working people all the means of producing wealth, distribution, and exchange.”

CONFUSION

Here is a total confusion between collaboration with management for speed up, and workers seizing control of the plant to prevent the implementation of such policies. The struggle to open the books to elected trade union committees is designed precisely to prove the necessity for nationalisation of the industry under workers management, and to mobilise the forces necessary to compel such nationalisation.

When reminded by the interviewers that “this slogan of workers control has had a very different meaning to the one put forward by those who have been advocating participation schemes . . . When the Bolsheviks called for workers control they meant that the workers should anticipate nationalisation by taking control of their factories and using the resources . . . to strengthen the workers struggle” Scargill refuses to be drawn, and again totally fudges the issue:

“Yes well I was talking about the situation today. In Russia during the time of the first world war you had a totally different ball game. . . . We could take over all the means of production and distribution and exchange more or less immediately. I believe we can do it”.

Go on then Scargill – give the order! Of course there’s little chance of that happening. By refusing to acknowledge the differences between a fully fledged socialist economy and the concrete struggle for workers control now (which is both the only solution to the problems facing the working class and the concrete way of posing the necessity of a socialist planned economy) Scargill can maintain the purity of his socialist rhetoric. But despite the words, he is doing nothing to carry forward the struggle to defend jobs, wages, and the democratic rights of the trade union movement which now necessitates the ending of the capitalist property relations once and for all.