[WEEK 'hames TV Jan 'No class of men…]

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WEEK 'hames TV Jan 'No class of men have contributed more to the wealth and comfort of society and have partaken less of their own creation'. . This thought expressed in Chartist and Miners union papers lay at the centre of the great struggles of 1844 in the coal mines of North-East England, According to the mine owners, the men, particularly in the North-East, were the best-paid labourers in the land - indeed their average wage was nearly the same as that of workers in the factories!

But the men rarely received the full wage; failure to send up pure coal from the pits (despite the darkness making it difficult to tell coal from black slate) resulted in crippling fines. Opening the books would 'in itself have revealed this, since the bosses divided their spoils with Icrooked coal-inspectors. In this way, swindling the men out of 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work' was rendered invisible.

The 'Bond', a contract signed by all mine workers, tied the labourer to one employer exclusively. Because ¡the miners lived in company cottages with their families, it became possible to maintain a reserve army of workers. Any man redundant could not seek other employment for fear of having his family turfed out onto the streets.

Injury money and widow's benefits were minimal 'so as to create an incentive in the men towards care and responsibility' ' It was under these conditions that wages had been driven down by 30% in the years 1840-44.

A recession gripped the capitalist system. During the boom which followed on the introduction of steam power in the factories and "GOLD"

The contradictions of capital ism are all present in the Soutr African gold-mines in their most concrete form. 40,000 white and 400,000 black migrant workers labour up to 2 miles underground to produce millions of ounces of gold each year.

To open a mine costs tens of millions, and each ton of ore produces only a few pennyweights of gold. The black migrant workers live in mine compounds tor tne period of their contracts - the mines feed and clothe them, and teach them its own working language. The gold mines are a complete world, with its own laws - all ultimately determined by the unfailing need of capitalism for a standard of value.

Marx shows how men's material conditions determine their ideas and the way they live. The strang;

world of the mines moulds people just as strange - people whose hopes, desires and possibilities are - IT LAY-OFFS?

Vatican finances of 'severe deficit' An announcement in January from Cardinal Villot, the Pope's Secretary of State, revealed that the Church's cash position is even more serious than it was following Leo XIII's jubilee celebrations in 1900.

The council of cardinals has rejected the 1975 draft budget, and set up a special commission to look for savings.

Work study, and possible redundancies, are in the air, but we understand there is also concern transport, which had particularly affected the coal industry, immense quantities of capital had been accumulated. As demand fell rapidly, to maintain the rate of profit on this immense capital meant speed-ur mass redundancy, and the lowering of wáges.

But this could not be done without major confrontation. The workers had struggled successfully and often illegally against the Combination Act, (repealed 1826) and Trades Working conditions in the pits in the 1840s Unionism was developing rapidly.

The capitalist crisis itself in the 1830's had created the conditions for the Chartist movement to win first the sympathy of, and then the leadership of the working class.

Workers were on the move forwards in a much more organised way thai capital had ever had to cope with in the past. Capitalism had to play on such weaknesses that it could find in the working class, inflict demoralising defeats, and in that way prepare the defeat of Chartism. The defeat of the 1844 miners strike was a major milestone of this countershaped by the relentless drive of capitalism to accumulate surplus value. A film about such people could be dramatic indeed - violent contradictions, violent repressions, the struggles and isolation of the black workers separated from their families ..... but 'Gold' is a pathetic failure.

Pretty scenery, "manly" Roger Moore, Susanna York confused by her part, a nebulous international conspiracy complete with Sheikh, are combined with a rough-diamond style mining overlord (whose attempts at decisiveness are so feeble that the ruthless, flamboyant pirates who actually built the mining houses wouldn't have employed him as a clerk).

In the film Rod Slater (Roger Moore) protects black workers fron a brutal white colleague: later one of them dies for him. Both things might happen in reality, but what kind of personality would such a man as Slater have to have?

His actions would be in defience of the racist bonds forged between at the large episcopal travelling expenses involved in recent negotiations over Christian unity, and at the considerable sums lost by officials in 'unsuccessful speculation' on the Church's behalf.

Simultaneously with this crisis of confidence came news that Cardinal Marty, Archbishop of Paris, has set up another special 'ecclesiastical commission'. . Its task? To investigate the circumstances under which Monsignor Tc Bishop of Montauban, was found dead on the doorstep of a 'house of ill-fame' in one of Paris' red light districts on January 17th. His decease follows hard on the heels (if that is the word) of the revolutionary oftensive of capital, and at the same time a crucial factor in the breaking away of a section of the Chartist movement from a reliance on petitions and Parliamentary bills, and towards revolutionary methods based on an independent policy for the working class.

The main weakness of the Thames TV documentary on the strike, shown late on the night of January 21st, was the complete absence of any consideration of the strike as a political event.

Though it was able to show the solidarity of the capitalist class -the mine owners, the special constabulary, the army, bourgeois soc iologists and the medical professio (which at one point asserted that coal dust was good for the lungs because it was a natural product!)

the most vivid scenes of workers were of defeat and degradation.

The expressions on the faces of pickets who had failed to prevent scab labour from lower-paid sections of the industry from cross ing the lines seemed those of men white mineworkers since the early twenties, when they revolted against the attempts to replace them with cheap, black labour. They had fought the Army - as a badly armed militia confronting tanks, artillery and aricraft - until 250 of them were dead.

When the new National Party offered these men protection from redundancy and wage-cuts against the mineowners, they took it:

the price was Apartheid.

For a mineowner to be tolerant is one thing - it means he can cut his wage-bill by bringing in cheap labour. For a white worker it means being prepared to lose one's job, go against the racist union and his friends, and to cease fighting to better himself - a fanatic upholding of liberal principles.

Rod Slater is not portrayed as suct a fanatic. The only alternative could be that he has understood that the interests of white workers lie not in the protection of the National Party, which cannot be long maintained given the contradictions within South Africa today and that white workers must join TEET French prelate, Cardinal Danielou.

He passed away in the private apartment of a Paris striptease dancer. There were conflicting press reports as to whether either dignitary was wearing his mitre at the time.

BALLS TO YOU

International capitalist aggression is penetrating even the cricket field's peaceful green, England's defeat in the recent Test series in Australia has provoked a bitter controversy on 'body-line' bowling (i.e. aiming the ball at the batsman inwho have lost taith in workers as a class, not of the real men who went forward with their families through victimisation, eviction and near starvation in defence of their Union!

There were strong scenes showing the way the miners attempted to adapt the Christian religion to its requirements in the struggle. Similarly it showed how some leaders of the Chartist movement could not see beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, and refused to defend militants against eviction "because it would be impossible to do so in a court of law!' Well-staged scenes of meetings, eviction struggles and so on, and believably scripted interviews with the major Iorces in the struggle. could not in the end make up for the lack of an overall political and historical perspective.

Though showing the limitations imposed by religion, and by the legal methods of the mainstream of Chartism, and of an embryonic union organisation which was, as yet, not industry-wide, it could not go beyond these to grasp the truth of the struggle as a political conflict as full of meaning now as in 1844.

The miners' demands - à guaranteer minimum wage of 15/- a week, security of tenure of their homes, widows' and accident benefits, union recognition and so on - were the forms of a broader struggle whose content was the political birth of the British working class as an independent force. Economic demands reflect this political essence in every period of capitalist crisis.

To understand this is to begin to learn the lessons of that strike. Not to do so is to portray a defeat with a full stop at the end of it, as if it were a thing-in-itself.

Meanwhile, as any miner can tell you, the struggle over conditions and wages continues.

VIGO with black behind a revolutionary leadership and the destruction of apartheid. Roger Moore as Slater gives, not surprisingly, no evidence at all of knowing this.

Equally, why should King, the black worker, die for Slater? In 1969, including all benefits, he would be earning less in real terms than he would have in 1911 in the same job. Today, his minimum £l a shift, plus enough food to work and a bunk. Perhaps, being so far from home and family, he would be so grateful for Slater's friendship as to do what he does.

But if he felt the isolation and injustice of his position that strongly, he would be facing the police with stones in his hand, as at Carletonville - a much more likely place and reason for him tr die. The revolutionary movements n developing throughout Southern Africa therefore come in harsh contradiction to the liberal fantasies portrayed in "Gold" , and show the real way forward for African miners.

stead of the wicket; since fast bow lers can deliver at up to 100 mph this is no laughing matter.)

Progressive cricketting chaps are seriously worried for the sport's reputation for fair play. A recent letter-writer to The Times argues that peaceful co-existence can no longer be guaranteed by the umpires discretion. 'What is needed i a drastic law which forbids body.

line altogether.' We share his dismay over cricketting hooliganism. But whether the British Commonwealth can 'set an example on the right side in this struggle' we have our doubts. Perhaps a Common Market arbitrator at silly mid-off is the answer?

DIARY BANKRUPT?

The Royal Economic Society, collective association of economists faces 'serious financial difficulties' and 'major cash-flow problems So grave is the situation that a special committee has been set up -including Sir Donald MacDougall, formerly chief economic adviser to the Treasury - to look for possible remedies. One major burden, we understand, is the Society's large scale production of the complete works of John Maynard Keynes, author of the theory that intelligent economic management can save capitalism irom crisis. To the soaring cost of paper and ink have been added worries about future sales.

Reassurance was forthcoming, 'though from Professor Champer‚nowne of Cambridge University, who reported that 'money problems had not, as yet, had any real consequences for the society's intellectual life'. We are relieved to hear it. Concern among the rank and file has been roused, nonetheless, by the warning (from a representative lof the London Graduate School of Business Studies) that learned societies must be run on the same principles as small businesses. Are we to expect a fight against speedup and redundancies? Or perhaps the solution could lie in a system ¡ of payment by results?

'OPERATING PROFIT' A letter to theGuardian on January 15th reflects one way in which the crisis is now hitting sections of the middle class. The premiums on their private insurance schemes, which once eased them to the top of the waiting lists for medical treatment.

are now getting outside thet reache The Guardian reader complais:

'BUPA costs have risen so much that I cannot afford any longer to belong to their scheme?

BUPA is the largest of the private health insurance schemes. The Guardian 'Family Finance' page replies:

'Insurance Companies will not.......

take you on for the first time beyond Ia certain age, and are likely, sooner or later, not to offer renewal even to their existing clients. They don't want to lose money.........

Private health insurance, in other words, will only insure you if you ate unlikely ever to be ill! The answe even for those determined individual ists who tell workers they must pay their own way' and 'stand on their own feet, is, according to the Guardian: 'We shall just have to hope the National Health Service survives. '!

BUPA, then like all capitalist enter prise only operates if it makes a prof Work-to-contract consultants would do well to take note!

CASH AND CARRY HARRY Harry Lander IP, pillai of the Jewish establishment in London, was the boss of the Israel British Bank o London, which declared itself bank• rupt on September 23rd.

It appears that overdralt facilities are unlimited it you're the boss because Harry Lander 'borrowed' €1,120,000.

However poor Harry received no #salary in 1973-4 - he jusi drew a nominal £147,559 which appeared under the heading of 'other' on the balance sheet.

Need there be a stronger argument for 'open the books' and expose the wheelings and dealings of capitalist enterprise?

MINORITY OF ONE

Spotted recently by our roving! correspondent on a tombstone in Maine, New England, USA - the following epitaph: 'I told you I was sick?