The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.

Ed Miliband, class traitor

Ed Miliband also likes cuts, and won't promise them reversed. He uses the exact same rhetorical strategy of divide-and-rule as his toady Balls (and if you're a toady to Ed Miliband, I feel sorry for you) by presenting it as a choice between 'protecting jobs or... pay rises'.

Wherefore see my earlier post on Balls, substituting Miliband's name where appropriate.

Ed Balls, class traitor

Ed Balls is a class traitor. He's accepting that 'we are going to have keep all these cuts'. He's using the government's language of 'pay restraint' when discussing the effective public sector pay cuts in addition to job losses that the Tories are imposing. He's attempting to play workers against each other by creating a false dichotomy between 'higher pay and bringing unemployment down'. In the conflict between the government and the working class, he's positioned the Labour Party firmly in the enemy camp.

Some people don't get upset with Labour anymore because they've come to expect this. I think the reason this sort of betrayal still angers me - the reason it still feels like betrayal at all - is that the Labour Party was founded to be the political arm of the working class, to fight capital and get a fair deal for the great majority, whereas both the Liberals and the Tories have always been bourgeois parties. In capturing Labour, the odious neoliberal flunkeys of the Balls-Miliband variety have turned a weapon of the working class against it.

There are many among the Labour rank and file who are actively fighting cuts and working within the movement against austerity. Balls is betraying them, too. The old Blairite instincts of the party oligarchy are alive and well. We can't count on the Labour Party leadership - and if not now, will they ever be on the right side? There is no parliamentary opposition, and that means there isn't actually any politics left within parliament. But there have been, and will be, marches, strikes and occupations. We will fight, and we will win.

As for Balls, don't say that he's hypocritical - say rather that he's apolitical.

#Nov30 in Nottingham

Today was an important day for the fightback against 'austerity', with two million public sector workers out on strike all over the country. It was a lovely late autumn day, cold but clear and sunny. We got up at an ungodly hour, by student standards, to support our lecturers on the picket lines around University Park Campus.

We put up posters, held placards and posted pickets on all nearby paths. Picketing an open campus is a little tricky: many of the cars going past you will be private sector contractors, who are not on strike, and students may be going in for more than one reason. Still, we encouraged all who came to turn back, go to the pub etc.: some did and were cheered for it. We got quite a lot of declarations of solidarity from passers-by, but really the old principle that you never cross a picket line needs to be reinstated. (I hope this will happen as the struggle against the government broadens and continues.)

There were tight-lipped managers in Jaguars, too, and scabs who would try to avoid looking you in the eye as they drove past. (We generally didn't denounce them as vigorously as I've seen happen at the 2009 Royal Mail strikes, for example.) Shortly after 10am, we packed up and walked to Forest Recreation Ground, where the trade union march was gathering.

It was a terrific march, certainly the largest I've been on in Nottingham. There were people from more unions I've ever seen outside the TUC March for the Alternative, including unions not commonly associated with protest and industrial action, like the Royal College of Nursing. The local Labour Party branches were there, too, reminding us that Labour is not just the spinelessness of an Ed Miliband. As in March, there were people from all sections of society, including many with children. We marched down Mansfield Road, through the city centre and Market Square (past the occupiers, with whom there was much fraternising) before gathering in Wellington Circus.

The atmosphere was amazing. No march I've been on has ever experienced quite so much support from the general public, I think: drivers honked and raised their fists, people young and old clapped and shouted. I don't want to exaggerate this, but polling data suggests the government has pretty much lost the argument on job losses and cuts to services. The Tories and their LibDem running dogs mishandled the conflict from the start, managing to create a broad front between smaller, more militant and larger, more conciliatory unions. The challenge to the anti-cuts movement is to maintain and expand the front that's been created, and keep pressing the most reactionary government since Caligula until victory.

Ed Miliband: cowardly man trapped between two different forms of cowardice

Ed Miliband spoke at TUC Congress today. While much of his speech was crowd-pleasing, Miliband refused to budge on a central point. 'While negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen [he said in reference to the 30 June walkouts]. I continue to believe that. But what we need now is meaningful negotiation to prevent further confrontation over the autumn.'

Well, that sounds familiar, since it's the only statement available to Miliband in recent months. Apparently he's still not impressed by the argument, eloquently made by Mark Serwotka back in June, that the 'negotiations' are a sham. Mary Bousted reiterated the basic point: 'Just for information, the government are not prepared to negotiate. All they are prepared to do is negotiate how to implement the changes they have decided. There are no real negotiations going on. We can give you chapter and verse about that.' This sort of fake 'consultation' favoured by managerial types is well known to anyone who's ever been involved in conflict with our rulers.

The real kick, however, came during questions, when Miliband outlined his idea of what trade unions should be. Highlighting the need to increase unionisation in the private sector, he said:

Unions can offer businesses the prospect of better management, better relationships, as you did during the recession. Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure on all sides. Failure we cannot afford as a nation. Instead, your real role is as partners in the new economy.

This phony 'vision' for trade unions is quite familiar to me. I've been involved in negotiations with employers, and that's what they want unions to be: 'partners' helping them realise their aims. Channels of communication. Enablers. Miliband is parroting the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but in nicer-sounding New Labour packaging. Unions aren't useless relics, they can help the capitalists realise their profits! Let's all pull together! Unions should reject Miliband's patronising notion that they can be 'partners in the new economy'. To reiterate a basic point New Labour has always pretended not to grasp, workers and employers are locked in an antagonistic relationship, and a refusal to recognise that means surrender to the business owners.

Miliband topped it off with the beautiful reassurance that trade unions were a 'huge asset' to the Labour movement, adding that '[t]hey should never ever feel like passive or unwanted members of our movement. I want them to feel part of it.' Well, that's nice of you, Ed, if a little patronising. But the Labour party was founded to be the political arm of the working class - nothing more, nothing less. Unions are not an 'asset' to Labour: they are what Labour is about, or else the party is nothing. Despite his assurances to the contrary, it hardly seems that Miliband has any plans to reverse New Labour's efforts to subjugate the unions.

You might say that Miliband is caught between a rock and a hard place. He must at least pay lip service to trade union struggles; at the same time he's afraid of what the gutter press will do to him if he appears to openly challenge the neoliberal settlement. (And maybe there are actual political convictions in there somewhere: he never appears to believe what he says, but who really knows?) But this is not the time to be concerned with popularity. Miliband's fear reveals that he is not interested in the wellbeing of the working class, but in his political fortunes and, more broadly, those of his party: and that points to a politician who has seriously lost his way.

Impressions from London: which side are you on?

I’ve just got back from the great anti-cuts march in London. Estimates of numbers are still confused – the number most often cited is 250,000, although the Guardian claims half a million. One of the most paradoxical aspects of attending a demonstration of this size is that while you’re there, you have no idea what’s happening on a larger scale; it takes leaving and reading the news to gain an impression of the whole. But I thought I should record a few impressions.

 

We got off the Unison coach at Euston and proceeded to ULU where we joined a students’ feeder march. Upon reaching Embankment, where we joined the main march and the trade unionists, the previously tense atmosphere, changed markedly. The mood was one of cheerful defiance as we moved on to Parliament Square and from there to Trafalgar Square. (Being the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended, it was also the slowest.) The news reports will tell you about ‘protesters’, as if these were isolated people; but the overwhelming impression on the ground was that we were with the working class, union banner by union banner. And what banners! We were near the CWU and (massive) RMT contingents most of the time, and they were not alone in having the most fantastic and individual banners for local sections, clearly painstakingly sewn and painted; many were decades old but clearly beloved. I – and as a child of the bourgeoisie I felt like an imposter – was quite overwhelmed by the pride these workers had in their self-organisation, their struggles and their past: many banners referenced the labour tradition. There was great solidarity between the unions as well, a shared sense of having come here to defend working people. When I say ‘working people’, I include teachers and others in accordance with the Marxian tradition – a sense that will hopefully be revived as all who need to work for their living come together to resist the class warfare of this government.

What I mean to say is that there was love: a recognition that public services are an expression of love for one another, and a willingness to smile and talk to total strangers recognised as comrades. Sure, the usual suspects were around: in Hyde Park the CPGB-ML, the CPB, the SWP and the SP had their stalls quite close together. There were plenty of hooded activists, but the day was not about destruction of property (which I do not oppose), unlike the student demonstrations. Instead, it was dominated by this peaceful celebration of the working class. I hope that the march will have helped create a working-class sense of solidarity that goes far beyond any individual cut but recognises the government as attacking working people as a whole. The fight-back must begin in practical terms very soon. There need to be occupations of government buildings and of public spaces, actual disruption of the smooth running of the machinery of power. Defeating the cuts practically is the only way to honour this country’s great tradition of working-class struggles.