In 1984 I was lending a hand to some miners who were picketing a power station when a police officer kicked me rather viciously in the leg. I suppose he was only doing his job. A few days later I was due to talk about socialism to the sixth form at Eton, being a firm believer in preaching to the non-converted, and entered the room limping. I told the boys what had happened and they smiled politely at what they took to be my little joke, believing neither that a policeman would kick someone nor that an Oxford don would join a picket line. The next day I noticed three or four police cars parked outside a pub where some of the miners had adjourned for a pint or two. The police were waiting to breathalyse them when they emerged at closing time, hoping that by arresting a few of them they could thin out the picket line.
Among the many myths woven around the minersā strike is the claim that it represented the end of industrial working-class militancy ā indeed, of the industrial working class as such. From then on, so the story goes, coal mines gave way to call centres and manufacture to finance and the service sector. Greasy overalls were replaced by the dressed-down mateyness of the modern office. The class which Karl Marx had dreamt might take over material production was depleted and scattered to the winds.
This isnāt quite what happened, not least if one takes a rather more global view of the matter. For one thing, work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. It includes not only Harley Street receptionists and celebrity chefs but refuse, postal, hospital, cleaning and catering workers. For another thing, while todayās chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over a billion people on the planet go hungry every day. Slum dwellers, the fastest growing social group on earth, represent one third of the worldās city dwellers, while the urban poor more generally constitute at least half of the worldās population. Most of the mega-cities of the Global South are rife with poverty, disease and overcrowding. Capital is concentrated in fewer hands than ever, while the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour. The transition from industrial to post-industrial capitalism has expanded and consolidated the system, not modified it.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading " author="Suzanne Moore "]https://staging.unherd.com/2024/01/britain-is-still-scarred-by-the-miners-defeat/[/su_unherd_related]
Like Mark Twainās death notice, the obituaries issued for the working class have been much exaggerated. If you take the category to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers, it constitutes a massive proportion of the worldās population, perhaps around two to three billion. If you add to that the vast army of unskilled casual labour, along with the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, the number soars even higher. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce. There has also been an increasing proletarianisation of the professionals (teachers, social workers, technicians, journalists, middling clerical and administrative workers) as the modern middle classes are hit by the kind of economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th-century working class. Labels like āserviceā and āwhite collarā obscure the immense differences between airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids. Itās true that there has been a huge expansion in technical, administrative and managerial jobs, yet this increase was also taking place in Marxās day, who noted what he called the āconstantly growing number of the middle classesā and rebuked orthodox political economists for overlooking it.
If by āthe working classā you mean blue-collar factory workers, then this group has indeed diminished sharply in advanced capitalist nations ā though this is partly because a large slice of it has been exported to poorer regions of the planet. It is true, even so, that industrial employment on a global scale has declined. Yet the working class is by no means confined to factory workers. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. Marx is generally considered to be a champion of blue-collar industrial workers, yet he was well aware that they didnāt form the majority of working people of his own time. For that, one must look to the vast army of Victorian domestic servants, most of whom were women. In fact, the original proletariat wasnāt the male working class but lower-class women in ancient society. The word āproletariatā comes from the Latin word for āoffspringā, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies, producing labour-power in the form of children. And the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. Today, in the farms and sweatshops of the Global South, the typical proletarian is still a woman.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="Terry Eagleton "]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/06/despotism-is-a-beast-of-capitalism/[/su_unherd_related]
Marx didnāt champion the proletariat because he thought there was some resplendent virtue in labour. On the contrary, he wanted to abolish it as far as possible. In any case, some stockbrokers no doubt work as hard as some garbage collectors. Marx didnāt even consider the proletariat to be necessarily the most downtrodden of social groups. There are many more likely candidates for this role: vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the chronically unemployed and so on. What interested him was its place in the system of production. These men and women were familiar with its workings, organised by it into a collective force, indispensable to its successful running, yet with the capacity to take it over. It was in this sense that industrial capitalism created its own gravedigger. It couldnāt achieve its ends without massing people together, and by massing them together it created the conditions in which they could seize the means of production and run them for their own benefit rather than for the profit of their masters.
Itās in this sense that for Marx history moves under the sign of irony. Marxās championing of the proletariat, in other words, is inseparable from his belief in democracy. People needed to throw off their chains by their own collective efforts on the spot where they found themselves, not handed their emancipation from elsewhere. Whatās changed since the minersā strike, then, isnāt that the working class has vanished, but that its material conditions have changed. A more flexible, smaller-scale form of capitalist manufacture, with its average unit employingĀ only a few hundred people, means that the workplace is no longer the main or sole focus of political militancy, as pits and power stations were for the miners. In our own time, the theatre of political conflict is increasingly the street. The mass protests which matter, from Americans marching for George Floyd to Israelis against Netanyahu, take place in public squares rather than factory yards, and the participants are a far more socially mixed bunch than a phalanx of Yorkshire coal miners.
[su_pullquote]āFor Marx history moves under the sign of ironyā[/su_pullquote]
A coal minersā strike isnāt like a strike by, say, firefighters. There are no communities which consist almost entirely of firefighters and their families, but there used to be towns and villages which drew almost the whole of their identity from the local pit. It is this intimate interweaving of life and labour which Margaret Thatcher and her gang failed to grasp. For them, you would drive to the office and then return to your suburban home, with little connection between the two. In a mining town, the domestic and public realms are closely related, and one of the vital links between them is women. One function of the domestic arena is to breed a new generation of colliers, as well as to care for the current one. The solidarity among miners underground that may be essential for their survival can be translated into collective action in the political sphere.
Not much of this was understood by those bureaucrats and politicians for whom a mining community is just a convenient means of grabbing energy out of the ground, and can be allowed to collapse when the last chunk of the stuff has been excavated. What matters for them are the two grand abstractions of state and economy. The state was unleashed against the miners with such alarming force that any fiction of its impartiality was discredited. For their part, the police seemed to disown any semblance of disinterestedness and treated the strikers as deadly antagonists. My injured leg healed pretty quickly, but there are a number of wounds and traumas from that time which continue to fester.
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SubscribeWhen is a state ever impartial ? That implies the possibility of a state without any tension between competing vested interests and governed by infallible human beings, surely a fanciful notion. And when are police ever disinterested in those designated “antagonists” by the state ?
“Marx’s championing of the proletariat… is inseparable from his belief in democracy.” Oh, I see. The dictatorship of the proletariat was willing to be voted out of office in a free and fair election. Wow. How on earth did Lenin miss that?
How could the state be impartial in the 1984 miners strike when it was the miners employer and it was taxpayers money, managed by the state, which the miners were demanding in the form of subsidies and wage increases?
The last two paragraphs. Substitute farmers for miners and then look around at where we are. Professor Eagleton is clearly trying to show the essence of the problem is an overbearing state. I’m sure he must be out on the streets shouting “Viva la libertad carajo”.
Terry Eagleton is a unreconstructed Marxist by his own account. It’s almost embarrassing to hear this failed theory, which has been proved to be a disaster every time people have attempted to apply it, being championed as the source of human liberation again and again.
The comparison between the miners’ strike – where he makes some very good points about miners’ communities based on some kind of objective collective reality – with the insane quasi-religious Black Lives Matter riots is absurd. The latter should be better described as one particular man’s life matters – while the thousands of black people dying in street crime didn’t apparently matter at all.
I’m reading about Machiavelli – a much more realistic political theorist than Marx. There will always be conflict in society. People delude themselves about their own motivations in society, which includes of course most marxists. A measure of freedom and democracy might come about – this is not guaranteed – not ultimately through purposeful Utopian design or by the insistence that we should all believe the same thing, but out of the contention of social forces.
Eagleton also has a typically caricature view of his political enemies. I’m sure politicians were very well aware of the strength and coherence of miners’ communities, not least because their had been previous large scale industrial battles. But there remained the the fact that it has become much cheaper to import coal from elsewhere and to transfer to different forms of energy. This money could then be used for such social “goods” such as the NHS!
There wasn’t a communist government in Eastern Europe by the way which didn’t have exactly the same kind of economic decisions to make, often at the expense of the very workers in whose name the state had been set up
Yes coal from say Columbia, with its child labour.
So itās easier to organise workers in concentrated workspaces, like large scale industrial concerns or mines, than in more diffuse entities ā¦ but theyāre still workers. I think that was the main thrust of this word salad. Wow, incisive!
Of course, as an old soldier of the left, some mention must be made of a war wound sustained in that most existential of struggles, The Miners Strike. An industrial dispute elevated to an elemental clash between good and evil in the minds of bearded old lefties everywhere.
Still, presumably Terry is now happy that the current impartial forces of the state permit anti semitism to be beamed onto parliament, statues to be defaced and teachers sent into hiding.
Actually, it was such a clash, I raised a little money for the Point Of Ayr kids, at the Xmas party, they were so hungry, oh and I mentioned this in the Guardian comments, and a poster wrote “I was one of them, thank you” make of that what you will. Watch the recent doc on BBC1, where a former miner told how he was refused a death grant for his dead baby.
“Marxās championing of the proletariat, in other words, is inseparable from his belief in democracy.”
Seriously !?
So, the police tried to kick some sense into Prof. Eagleton 40 years ago. They failed.
“The state” acted in the interests of the British people as a whole in 1984 and did a job that desperately needed to be done – and indeed should have been done earlier.
The strapline at the end of his articles needs to change: “Terry Eagleton writes fiction”.
Strikes are simply a form of sectional blackmail whereby a section of workers, whether train drivers, junior doctors, nurses etc seek by disrupting normal life by withdrawing their labour in a coordinated fashion to improve their financial circumstances compared to other workers. Where they are employed by the state it is ultimately taxpayers, including, of course, to some extent themselves, who are expected to pay. It is not some noble struggle between the possessors of capital and the downtrodden labourers toiling for 11 hours a day for a hand to mouth existence.
In 1905 a law was introduced which stopped people suing unions for loss of money due to strikes which in effect gave them immunity from the Law of Tort . Imagine if say teachers union had to pay a parent if they lost money because of a strike, either reduction in salary or cost of additiona lchild care.
Interesting. A law that needs attention I’d say
Comrade Terry says “there used to be towns and villages which drew almost the whole of their identity from the local pit”. For today’s equivalent in the UK, substitute “ghetto” for “towns and villages” and substitute “mosque” for “pit”. The big change is the police force, which is now institutionally woke: it does nothing to contain the new form of militancy.
Is that any wonder when currently the Chief Constable of Northamptonshire has been suspended on full pay and is facing a charge of gross misconduct* that is to be held in private!
(*The wearing of two military medals to which he is NOT entitled. How low can one get?).
Who wants coal today? The painful death of the dirty, dangerous, polluting and tax payer funded mining industry was an inevitability.
Globally we consume much more coal worldwide than 50 years ago. Its just much easier to scrape it off the surface of open-cast mines in China, Australia etc than it is to dig it out of deep underground shafts in Yorkshire and South Wales.
Often using coercive labour or child labour from Columbia as they used post 84 Strike in UK.
Who wants coal today? Try asking an Australian that question! Last year, Queensland alone exported 200 million tons of coal, an increase of 5% over 2022. This year, they are expecting to increase exports by more than 5%. So demand is not just increasing, it is accelerating.
Production of coal has increased year on year. Clearly someone wants it.
Top 10 producers:
China, Indonesia, India, USA, Australia, Germany, Poland, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Colombia.
Top 10 consumers:
China, India, USA, Germany, Russia, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Poland, Australia.
China is also the world’s biggest exporter of wind turbines and their components.
So what are the pollutants that are not being captured?
Germans for starters… here in SA we’re exporting our best stuff to them as we struggle to keep the lights on.
The huge change in the UK since the 1980’s has been that our dysfunctional welfare system brought about a transformation of the lumpenproletariat. The Communist Party USA describe them as “Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. … May include … mentally unstable people.” It is not just the size of the lumpenproletariat that has changed: today, they have a sense of victimhood and entitlement that they never had back in the day.
Nearly all Marxists/Trots do, or what is left of them: I set up campaigns against Blairs brutal welfare ‘reforms’ none of the left were interested, esp SWP, etc, result now turbo charged by Coalation/Tories,. many hundreds of vulnerable people have taken their own lives as a direct consequence of sanctions(which NEW NEW Labour intend to keep)
But like your jaundiced view, they are only lumpen, God really is Misanthrope’s Are Us btl
BTw, The 60’s /80’s Lefti s only interested in Palestine, refugees; etc, and that a fact not opinion, the youth IdPol.
Eagleton doesnāt really get statistics. Although Iām not a fan of globalisation it has in fact made much of the world much much richer than 1984, albeit at a cost to the west. Even if 1 billion people were hungry (but hardly starving) thatās about the same as 1984 and a much smaller fraction of the world population.
And he doesnāt get Marxist economic relationships either – what he calls proletarianism is what Marx would call lumpen-proletarianism.
For instance
ā If you take the category to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workersā
Marx defines the proletariat to be anybody working for capitalists from whom the capitalists extract a profit. So mid to high level white collar workers are proletarian just as long as they are working for capitalists. This even includes football players. Football players are the workers who create the product football – meanwhile the owners are capitalists who extract wealth from that product.
Meanwhile most of these arenāt proletariatian ;
ā ā¦ the vast army of unskilled casual labour, along with the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, the number soars even higher. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce.ā
with perhaps the exception of some casual workers who are employees thatās just the poor. The proletariat is a relatively small part of the population in poorer nations.
Funny enough being employed by the state isnāt a definition of proletarian – thereās no capitalist class exploiting anybody. This means the miners were working class but not proletarian. The one isnāt synonymous with the other.
Iām not a Marxist myself but at least you would think the property relationships are useful to know if you were one.
“Although Iām not a fan of globalisation it has in fact made much of the world much much richer than 1984.”
And not only have many millions of poorer people been lifted out of poverty worldwide since 1984. As a bona-fide member of the northern, working class, inner city proletariat who grew up in the inner city wastelands of Thatcher’s 1980s, I can assure the professor that his pity is uncalled for. The quality of life and breadth of opportunities for the working classes in the North is immeasurably better now than it was 40 years ago.
Watcch Newsnight On the Rd,in the the new Doncaster East, there was real fear, anger about the state of the economy, public services, inequality, etc, nothing about boats though.
Eagleton was my tutor at Oxford, looking down his nose at the working class girl who had the audacity to disagree with him.
Oh, please write an article about your experience for UnHerd to publish! Iād read that with relish!
Terry Eagleton, born 1943 to Catholic Irish working class parents then living in Manchester.
His motherās antecedents had ā strong Republican sympathies ā*.
Why on earth do we give succour to such people? It must be patently obvious that creatures such as Eagleton have an absolute visceral hatred of us and all that we stand for and have ever stood for.
This current piece of bile belongs in the āSocialist Workerā and NOT in UH.
(*According to the Wikibeast.)
Ive no idea what this article is about. Marx unleashed a mind virus that unleashed a particularly glum materialistic philosophy that destroyed societies and spiritual traditions by taking an extremely crude take on humanity, progress and spirituality. He lived during the industrial revolution so I suppose he has some excuse. Terry has none as I assume he is familiar with USSr, Cambodia, China etc. Jesus, how does one man learn so little
I rarely read his
drivarticles. I just come for the BTL comments which are so much more erudite. Thank you all.The 1984 strike was a blatant attempt to bring down the government rather than a straight forward industrial dispute. That was why my colleagues and I spent so much time and effort raising large amounts of money to try and keep the miners and their families going. We also engaged in some (how shall I put it) questionable behaviour. The police did too, but there was a war on. Poor old Terry got a sore leg… some scab miners got rocks dropped on their heads… why are Marxist class warriors such whimps? They excoriate the capitalist class as ruthless killers, take them on by trying to shut down the country, and bleat about a bit of pushing and shoving on a picket line… just what do they expect? Applause?
I was at Genoa, at the G8 Protests(now described as the ‘Weekend War’), there were diffferent blocs: the Black Bloc went crazy, very violent, the Pink Bloc danced around the Carabineri, the SWP/Globalise Resistance( a front) part of the Red Bloc, ran away!
Eagleton says: “I told the boys what had happened and they smiled politely at what they took to be my little joke, believing neither that a policeman would kick someone nor that an Oxford don would join a picket line.” It sounds to me as if the intelligent boys were smiling not politely but ironically, at the fact that OF COURSE a policeman would kick an Oxford don for being so tiresomely virtue-signaling.
I think the new unherd layout is pretty, but I really miss the byline/biography of authors. It’s important to see what perspective an article comes from.
A number of comments here take issue with TE’s Marxism, though for me the only serious matter is the broader cultural Marxism that has eroded our civilisation, something the Russians and Chinese do not suffer. Tony makes an interesting point about corporate serfs, and the community of miners versus the dissipated suburbanite professionals, which I think most people have missed.
As for the folly of the grand abstractions of economy and state, yes. But the role of miners’ womenfolk was to ‘breed a new generation of colliers’ and care for this one? You mean, like farm animals? Lizzie J’s comment in this blog snaps into place. Though that may well be unfair to TE.
If the police weren’t there, what would Terry and his new pals have done to any worker who tried to cross the picket line?
Miners dropped a piece of concrete on a taxis driver and killed him.
Killing of David Wilkie – Wikipedia
And āgot offā with a miserable 4 years each.
Had it been 1964 they would correctly have been hanged.
Why is TE allowed to write for Unherd? does he pay to publish. He’s 80 now and hasn’t had an idea for 30 years.
Come on, no ageism here! And let’s support neurodiversity and let’s support leftwing romanticism and rose-tinted nostalgia for militant unionism which we can get any day in the Guardian and BBC or pretty much any media, but hey …
Unherd allows this posh, Marxist fool to publish article after article of absolute bollocks, this is a particularly hairy example of his “thinking”.
At least it gives me a regular reminder of this noxious ideology and the foolishness of its adherents/cultists.
I will never ever forgive the Tories, and seeing the residents of Goldthorpe many vote Tory, when years earlier they burned an effigy of the Witch on her death was shocking and bewildering. Of course many pits were uneconomic, and Labour shut many down, but the NUM had negoiated with Govts: moving to super pits, etc, but the speed of the closures and the abandonment of communities whose whole existence was focused around the pit and environs was disgusting and a social crime.
Mining engineers were leaving the coal industry in the mid 1960s and moving overseas becaus there was no future. Above 400 m open cast is cheaper than deep mined. Many faces were kms away from shafts. The faulting made mining expensive. 75% of mines were uneconomic and British coal was Ā£42/T when World price was Ā£32/T.
The issue with Britain since the1870s was that too few un skilled and semi-skilled were unwilling to obtain the education and training to move into skilled better paid jobs.
The NCB could have become an international mining company but this would have needed a vast increase in skills,foreign languages being one of them.
A weak contribution … repeating the same old mantra not very convincingly.
The (very bitter) irony of the Miners’ Strike which Prof. Eagleton (like most of the modern Left) ignores is that it was the failure of Scargill and his supporters (and I was one of them) to respect democracy that really lost the Strike.
A national ballot would probably have been won and the result would have been respected by the working miners who were simply decent working class men who held a different and legitimate opinion.
If a ballot had been lost, the NUM would have lived to fight another day.
It was the Left’s intransigence that determined the outcome rather than the actions of the Police or Thatcher’s resolve.
Service sector work is not as dirty as industrial labour was.
The Labour Party is a redundant entity, whose MP’s do not know what work is.
Well Well then what the hell do you expect after Thatcher gave her sermon upon the mound in the confines of Church of Scotland assembly rooms
‘ There is no such thing as Society ”
‘Result neo Liberal capitalism let off the leash but Hegomonic America quickly picked up the Leash to create a New World Order that has in turn spawned Iraq , Afghanistan ‘ Syria,Genocide in Gaza and the list goes on and on
But climaxes in the ever consequential amplifying cause and effect of Climate change / Environmental/ Eco System destruction
All we get from the Captain’s of the fossil fuel industries and the Stupid little political leaders is Blah Blah bloody Blah
as human civilisation confronts it’s impending extinction along with most forms of higher life upon the only home
That sustaines all ‘ Planet Earth ‘
History clearly demonstrates that despite Homo Sapiens being a tribal species
That when we work in unison with a common purpose then within a generation the green shoots of vibrant sustainable improvement for all springs forth
Whilst Hegomonic tribalism propels us backwards invariably culminating in disaster
Their right in front of our eyes and noses
Centuries and thousands of years of Wisdom pointing to the path of a Environmental and Eco friendly Civil SOCIETY Thatcher and your disciples spin in your graves and if not already there then Fret not because a place in Hell awaits your spinning arrival
Go study the Philosophy of Zen Buddhism and Confucius
President Xi of China has and follows fastidiously it’s teachings and wisdom
In all matters of Policy
Believe not one word that spews forth from The Neo Liberal Capitalist Leaders
And their cohorts in all the Media who are the Devils little workers
And to finish I qoute once more from
Thatcher
TINA there is no alternative
Just like her No Society dictum
Certainly not BLAH BLAH bloody BLAH
Her comments amount to none other as
Complete and utter Coital Bovine Scatology and now we find ourselves up to our noses in its cesspit unless a drastic immediate U turn is made but not as one of urgency but one of complete necessity
So all you so called Neo Liberal and Chattering classes Keep going Blah Blah bloody Blah
Your future Inc your children and grandchildren awaits your awful ending
And simply to deny of refute all I speak off I compelled to return to Maggie
TINA
Bye Bye enjoy the views as you go into
Freefall tis the sudden bump that awaits as civilisation thumps into the ground
Wtf?
God, I love Marxist so much.
His likening of modern postal work to that of underground mining of the 70’s, or of students as the downtrodden proletariat of today illustrates precisely the ivory tower from which he leers, despite his proudly kicked leg. A C- from me.
Marx was a big dope. Any article that quotes him ain’t worth the reading of, in my book.
Absurd stuff that. An inveterate Marxist, desperately trying to keep Marx relevant.
Marx was a hypocrite, a scoundrel, wrong about everything and completely ungrateful to the country who took him in.
And still, the young parrot his rubbish.
Not even worthy of attacking.
Among the many myths woven around the minersā strike largely created by Eagleton