[page 29]
year caused some left NUM leaders to lack confidence in organising strike action. The South Wales NUM leadership was traditionally one of the most militant. But Ian Isaac remembers that at the start of the strike he attended a meeting of the South Wales Area Executive where he and another left-winger argued, in the light of all pits and surface lodges now respecting picket lines after a shaky start, that "we should hold further mass meetings to vote on supporting those on strike and consolidate the mandate expressed by miners not crossing picket lines.
"This was argued against by a number of executive members including the president, Emlyn Williams, general secretary George Rees and vice-president Terry Thomas. They argued that it was too risky and what would happen if they voted against again? This was the expression of the kind of confidence that some leaders had in their members and this type of thinking would surface again over the arguments about a national ballot"
Notwithstanding the courage and determination that was shown by the NUM national leaders Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield, the beginning of the strike saw them caught off guard. Peter Heathfield had said only a few months before that he didn't think young miners would strike over pit closures. Many NUM leaders had the perspective of the overtime ban continuing until the winter of 1984 and then taking strike action.
Although both ballots for industrial action against pit closures had been defeated, there had been an increasing vote for action in all areas on the second ballot. Taking all these factors into consideration the Tories, through their henchman MacGregor, probably thought that the time was right for a pre-emptive strike in March 1984.
There is some dispute among right-wing commentators about whether the Tories wanted the strike or not. Former chancellor Lawson has said that the cabinet didn't think that the miners would strike then given that it was approaching the end of winter and all the contingency plans the Tories had made. However, whether or not the Tories thought the miners would strike in response to their provocative list of pit closures, they obviously felt they were ready to face them down. Thatcher, unlike some of her ministers, had a clear political perspective about the strike and its implications for the ruling class. For her this was an industrial version of the Falklands War which had to be pursued to the bitter end - no matter what the cost.
HATCHER MADE A political calculation that if the
miners could be beaten it would clear the way for fur-
ther attacks on the working class. This proved to be
generally correct although the long-term legacy of the strike, the increasing social division and bitterness against the Tories which saw a massive shift to the left on many social issues - even if this wasn't immediately reflected in industrial or political struggles - was something Thatcher and the Tories did not anticipate.
Since the strike every industrial struggle, from Wapping to Timex, and every political struggle like the anti-poll tax movement and the anti-CJA campaign, have been increasingly bitter; and seen an increasing police brutality and legal repression which has undermined public support for the institutions of the state. Also, the economic arguments surrounding the campaign against pit closures have been
8 Miners
historically justified. This was shown the millions of people (including large dle class) who supported the miners' sures.
People's long-term view of the miners' strike has been a big factor in increasing distrust and hatred of the Tories. The overwhelmingly held view now is that Scargill and the miners were right. But it is not now just a case of agreeing that the miners' arguments were right; more and more are concluding that the miners were right to struggle in the way they did.
Given what was thrown at them, could the miners have won? Right-wing critics, and some on the left, argue that the NUM's key mistake was not calling a ballot, which allowed the majority of miners in Nottingham and Leicester to continue working. The NUM had a long tradition of democracy and balloting but it wasn't always the case that ballots were held for industrial action. Particularly on the issue of pit closures, with some areas more affected than others, there was a genuine feeling among many miners that 'secure' areas like Nottingham shouldn't be allowed to vote down strike action in other areas like Wales, Scotland and Yorkshire.
A mistake was made by the
leadership in 1984 in not calling for a
one-day general strike when the funds
of the South Wales NUM, and later the
national NUM, were sequestrated by
the courts. This mistake was
unfortunately repeated in 1992 when
the call for a 24-hour general strike to
support the miners was left too late.
Militant maintained a united front with the miners during this period, since the lack of a ballot was being used by the right-wing to undermine the strike. But after the strike we pointed out that, because of the way the issue was used in the movement to cut across the miners' struggle, a ballot should have been called, especially after the rule change which allowed a 50% majority for strike action (instead of the previous 55%). A ballot then, six weeks into the strike, would have seen a clear national mandate for strike action.
This would have cut across all the arguments of the right wing and Kinnock. It could have cut off the Tory lifeline of coal supplies from the Midlands which was to prove crucial at a later stage of the strike. Despite this, the lack of a ballot did not defeat the miners. The main reason they lost was the role of the Labour and trade union leaders in not organising effective solidarity action - where the lack of a ballot was used as a 'get-out' clause.
A mistake was made by the NUM leadership in 1984 in not calling for a one-day general strike when the funds of the South Wales NUM, and later the national NUM, were sequestrated by the courts. This mistake was unfortunately repeated in 1992 when the call for a 24-hour general strike to support the miners was left too late.
in October 1992 by sections of the midfight against pit clo-
NUM
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idarity action being organised groups of workers.
through the use of the police. This great majority of chief officers would have been shocked points out that the police National Reporting Centre, senior officers' request as was claimed at the time. union leaders showed the need to build genuine Broad Lefts capable of transforming the unions. Even in the NUM, many of the left leaders, with a few exceptions, were found wanting. Had there been an open rank-and-file based Broad Left in the NUM before the strike started, especially involving people in Nottingham, then many aspects of the strike would have been markedly different and in the miners' favour.
workers, would have made solidarity action from below bypassing the obstruction of the national union leaders much easier to build. This would have had a crucial effect, as was shown in the few cases where it was achieved, in cutting off coal supplies to power stations and steelworks. sure plan would have been dropped and, under pressure from a confident working class, even a Kinnock Labour government would have had to carry through some measures in favour of the working class, perhaps being compelled to abolish the Tory anti-union laws. One of the principal reasons for Kinnock's attacks on the miners was his fear of a rising tide of militancy in the event of a miners' victory - he didn't want to see militancy pay. should be drawn from the events of the strike. The miners' defeat was undoubtedly a setback for the whole labour movement but the fact that they fought so valiantly and the subsequent historical vindication of their stand shows they were right to struggle in the way they did. The miners' strike politicised a generation of young socialists and produced a massive shift to the left on many issues in society. Had the miners not struggled as they did As the strike progressed other issues were raised about the effectiveness of mass picketing and the question of solfrom below with other The miners' strike in 1972 saw the first use of flying pickets and mass pickets. The mass picket at Saltley Gate coke depot in Birmingham, led by Arthur Scargill, was decisive in winning the strike. At that time the British ruling class was unprepared for such tactics. But by the 1984-85 strike the bourgeoisie had prepared thoroughly on how to render the mass picketing tactics of the 1970s ineffective was always a risky strategy. The Guardian in January 1995 reported that police officers felt "betrayed by the Thatcher government and badly led by some senior officers during the 1984-85 miners' strike, according to an official history of the Police Federation". The report goes on to say that "the Federation leaders and probably the had they discovered that there had been secret political collusion between MacGregor, Thatcher and others". It which co-ordinated police action during the strike, was set up on the instructions of central government and not at On organising solidarity action, the incapacity of the Building Broad Lefts in the unions, especially the power AD THE MINERS won then the whole course of history would have changed. Thatcher and her government would have resigned and most likely a Labour government would have come to power. The pit-clo- That is not to say, however, that pessimistic conclusions earlier than they were.
change society.
Chronology November 1983 NCB confirm 49 pits will close due to 'exhausted reserves'. March 1984 5 - Yorkshire miners stop work at proposed accelerated closure of Cortonwood and Bulcliffe Wood. Yorkshire NUM calls total stoppage from 12 March. • 6 - Scottish Area NUM calls 8 - NUM national executive declares strikes in Yorkshire and Scotland official and any other area "which takes similar action"
April 1984 19 - NUM special delegate conference supports action in all British coalfields.
Resolutions for a ballot overwhelmingly rejected May 1984 29 - 5,000 pickets at Orgreave, Riot police deployed for first time June 1984 4 - Scargill arrested at 6 - 10,000 pickets at Orgreave, 93 arrests, 73 police and hundreds of pickets injured South Wales NUM, fined £50,000 for contempt of court, refuse to pay.
August 1 - Mass demonstration outside South Wales NUM in Pontypridd against threat of sequestrators 16. £707,000 seized by sequestrators direct from South Wales NUM accounts.
October 1-5 - Labour Party conference under Arthur Scargill then the Tory pit-closure programme would have proceeded much more speedily and many other anti-working class measures would have been introduced But most importantly the miners' strike brought out the willingness of working-class people to struggle to change society. That willingness has intensified in the struggles since. New generations will return to the lessons of the strike to ensure they are better equipped to win their own industrial battles and succeed in the socialist struggle to backs the miners.
4 - NUM fined 200,000 for contempt.
25 - Proposed NACODS strike over colliery closure review procedure called off 25 - Sequestrators appointed to seize NUM funds.
November 13 - TUC secretary Norman Willis confronted by hangman's noose at miners'
rally in South Wales.
December 14 - Energy minister Peter Walker rejects further talks February 20 - NUM accepts review procedure as agreed by NACODS and asks for talks with no preconditions.
March 3 - NUM special delegate conference votes by 98-91 to return to work without an agreement or amnesty 5 - Miners return behind brass bands with their supporters, 700 sacked miners not reinstated into former jobs Miners 29
[page 31]
Wagnermania controversial 19th century figure. I munity (the Aryan Race) in decay due Wagner: "A great mind imprisoned by reaction". 30 • Review Following Channel Four's series on the composer Richard Wagner, John Bulaitis looks at the life and art of this HE CENTERPIECE OF Channel an interesting documentary entitled Wagner us Wagner featuring composer's great-grandson, the Gottfried Wagner. The documentary was an important statement dealing with the relationship between Wagner's work and Nazism.
Wagner's biographers - and his other descendants - have nearly to play down his always attempted But here was his reactionary ideas.
great-grandson making an unanswerable case, exposing the racism in his works and, moreover, describing and attacking the links between his own family and Adolf Hitler.
Against images of Nazi stormtroopers marching to Wagner's themes, Gottfried described how his grandmother Winifred Wagner, had joined the Nazis in 1923 - ten years before they came to power - and how she had played a major role in opening up links between Hitler and big business. Under her directorship, the yearly music festival at Bayreuth - a theatre built by the composer - became a Nazi gala.
Of course, there are countless examples where an artist's work has been utilised by others in a way that they themselves would not have endorsed; the British composer, Edward Elgar, wrote the Pomp and marches but always Circumstances detested the jingoistic ditty, Land of Hope and Glory, attached to one of them.
But, while one cannot say that Wagner would definitely have approved of Nazism, it cannot be denied that he ended his days a virulent nationalist and racist and that these ideas are clearly expressed in his later works.
It does not take much stretch of the imagination to interpret his last opera, Parsifal, as the story of a com-
[page 32]
to interbreeding with racial inferiors
(the Jews) and redeemed by adopting
a new racial religion and the principle
of racial exclusivity. Hitler once
described Parsifal as the "ultimate
experience... the only thing that antic-
ipates what I have to do"
The case is further strengthened by
the fact that Wagner not only wrote
operas, but churned out a series of
tedious essays and 'philosophical'
writings. The crudest of these were
written between 1878 and his death in
1883 and include the notorious Know
Thyself, which talks about the "great and noble character" of "pure-bred races" like the Germans and looks forward to a time when there will be an "absence of Jews" • All this has sometimes led to calls for his music to be banned - and indeed it is still forbidden to perform Wagner in Israel.
But the Channel Four season left a big question unanswered: how was it that Richard Wagner, who ended his days as one of the biggest reactionary egotists of all time (1), was in 1848 a revolutionary democrat, fighting on the Dresden barricades, helping to manufacture hand-grenades in his back garden and - after the revolution's defeat - only escaping arrest, imprisonment and a possible death sentence by the skin of his teeth? After that he was exiled from Germany for eleven years and invariably trailed by the secret police.
In fact it is only by exploring this contradiction that we can gain a real understanding of the development of Wagner's ideas, and their connection with, and influence on, the development of his art.
N TERMS OF the Western tradi-
tion of classical music, Wagner was
a true revolutionary - the most
influential figure in the second half of the 19th century. As well as redefining the relationship between music and drama, he stretched what musicians call tonal harmony to its limits. Without getting too technical, this device can create for the listener a feeling of unresolved tension in music and so act as an emotional trigger.
Even on a superficial level Wagner has had a lasting effect: it is hard to get by a day without one of his themes popping up in a TV advert, documentary, film, brass band concert or wed-
ding.
Trotsky argued that a work of art s should, 'in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art"
And there can be no doubt that from the point of view of his art, Wagner was a giant. But the argument of some that, as he wrote great music, that's all that matters and his political views are irrelevant, is wrong.
Art is not produced in a vacuum but is connected to the development of society and influenced by the struggles between the different social forces in society, reflecting the ideas that arise on the basis of those struggles.
And Wagner certainly dealt with, what we may call, the big themes in human society - life, death, love, fate, power and conflict. It is this, as well as his musical genius, that helps to explain the lasting impact, and power of his music. Even Trotsky describes
While one cannot say
that Wagner would
definitely have approved
of Nazism, it cannot be denied that he ended his
days a virulent
nationalist and racist.
Inspired by Wagner?
in his Diary in Exile how he stayed up
to midnight to listen to a performance
of Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) on the
radio.
The decisive influence on Richard
Wagner was revolution - and counter-
revolution. Beethoven, the colossus
who revolutionised Western music in
the first half of the 19th century, was
inspired by the spirit of a revolution-
ary age generated by the Great
French revolution of 1789. His music
is imbued with optimism and revolu-
tionary fervour.
In Beethoven's day the bourgeoisie
was generally still playing a progres-
sive role, although many artists very
quickly began to rebel against its
destructive impact on communities
and human relationships.
The young Richard Wagner mixed in
the same radical milieu as the young
Marx and Engels (2). For a time he
even followed a vaguely parallel politi-
cal evolution as the founders of scien-
tific socialism - influenced first by the
philosophical ideas of the young
Hegelians and latter by those of
Ludwig Feuerbach.
He was politically influenced by the ideas of anarchism. He worked closely with Bakunin (3) in the Dresden upris-
ing and was a personal friend of
Georg Herwegh (4) who in 1844 was on the editorial board of the radical
paper Vorwarts together with Marx and Bakunin.
About 1848 Wagner wrote: "I (revolution) will destroy every wrong which has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over the other... I will shatter the power of the mighty, of the law of property. Let there be an end to the wrong that gives one man power over millions"
Around the same time, he penned ideas about art in total contradiction to his later chauvinism: "Art of the future world would embrace the spirit of newly-liberated humanity. Nationality would be no more than an ornament - art would be taken out of the world of profit-making and capitalist speculation"
But the 1848 revolutions were betrayed by the bourgeoisie. It had ceased to be a revolutionary class terrified that a revolution would not stop at the demolition of feudal rule but spill over into a workers' revolution. In particular the German capitalist class - because, historically, it had
Doviour d
[page 33]
1171
in titt at '...tonal harmony to its limits".
developed weak and fragmented - had from the outset been thoroughly reactionary. Marx and Engels, by now, were basing their work completely on the understanding that the revolution could only be carried out, not by the bourgeoisie, but against it. 1848 confirmed that the task now fell on the shoulders of the German working class.
But middle-class intellectuals, including writers, poets and musicians - and including Richard Wagner while being repelled by the social conditions created by capitalism, and the system's rotten values, were unable to see in the small, relatively young German working class the decisive force for political change.
N COMMON WITH most intellec-
tuals, Wagner - despite his courage
and self-sacrifice displayed in
Dresden - had a haughty contempt for the working class.
Even after the brutal crushing of the Dresden insurrection by Prussian troops, he remained optimistic about the revolution's victory for a further three years. But - and this is the decisive point - without the perspective of a workers' revolution, it was inevitable that he would increasingly draw pessimistic and reactionary conclusions from the revolution's defeat.
Wagner's evolution was part of a tendency in German art: writers, poets and philosophers reflected a contradiction between, on one hand, a
• Review
hatred of capitalism and its values and, on the other - because of their lack of confidence in the working class struggling for a socialist future a looking back to a mystical feudal past or to mythology in a hunt for the values destroyed by capitalism.
Part of this trend was an appeal to the Volk (people) with its denial of class division. This Volkisch ideology, which originally developed with the rise of German national consciousness in the 18th century, contained the roots of the anti-semitism that was to become an integral part of capitalist reaction in Germany; the Jew was contrasted, as an outsider tied to commerce, to the mythology of pure German-blooded peasants living in a true community.
So although the bulk of German intellectuals - in contrast to the German bourgeoisie - had welcomed and were inspired by the great French revolution - the collapse of 'bourgeois liberalism' in 1848 and their failure to base themselves on the struggle of the working class meant that an entire generation took the road to extreme reaction. Wagner's journey from revolution to reaction can be traced in his epic work, The Ring cycle. He conceived the idea in the revolutionary days of 1848 and began work shortly after. The story, although based in myth, is a depiction of class conflict: an old world corrupted by power, tyranny and greed for control over a gold ring whose possession gives man economic control and power to exploit his fellow man. This old order is contrasted to a struggle for a new order based on freedom and love.
The young Richard
was politically
by the ideas of
anarchism.
Wagner influenced
The idea is a Feuerbachian rather than a Marxist one but there is undoubtedly also a socialist element in The Ring. One writer has described the hammering music in Das Rheingeld as "the most vivid evocation of the dark, harsh world of early industrial capitalism in nineteenth century music" (5).
The work's socialist element was illustrated magnificently in the acclaimed 'Marxist' interpretation of
the cycle by French director Patrice Chereau - complete with pit-wheels and hydro-electric dam and an optimistic conclusion that the masses, not individual 'heroes', would build a new society.
But The Ring was not completed until 1874 and in its later parts the analogies with class disappear and, of course, the whole thing ends with the doom, pessimism and destruction of Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods).
Between its start and completion Wagner had ditched Feuerbach and embraced the idealist philosophy of Schopenhauer; the reactionary 'philosopher of pessimism', who provided the philosophical cover for the German bourgeoisie's support for the Bismark Junker dictatorship. Wagner was to become a representative of German bourgeois reaction at a particular stage in that country's capitalist development.
Nazism and fascism - "the distilled essence of imperialism" as Trotsky described it - represented a different later stage of the same capitalist reaction. As always, reaction ransacks the past and Hitler stirred into his reactionary pot, amongst other trends, Volkism, Schopenhauer and... Richard Wagner. In the words of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs, Wagner's was truly a "a great mind trapped by reaction"
Notes 1. Engels wrote that many people thought themselves "the only true philosopher of today and the foreseeable future" but Wagner was "probably the first who has calmly blurted it out". (Anti- Duhring, p35).
2. In a remarkable coincidence the 20 year. old Frederick Engels wrote in 1840-41 a libretto for an opera called Cola di Rienzi a story of a fourteenth century Roman politician and general who led a popular revolt only to end up a tyrant himself. In 1842 Wagner's own version of Rienzi was premiered in Dresden.
3. George Bernard Shaw argued that Bakunin was the model for the Siegfried character in the The Ring.
4. In 1848 Herwegh attempted to invade Germany with a guerrilla band to spur , the revolution; an adventure that finishe in a bloody shambles.
5. Anthony Arblaster, Politics in Opera.
[page 34]
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