Miners' retreat: not a simple sell-out

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CONCERNING the front page article on the miners' ballot, the 'no' vote cannot just be explained by the 'sell out' analysis. There is an unresolved crisis among the leadership of our class. They have failed to present any form of socialist analysis of the present economic crisis, even less to challenge the ideology of the Tories, bosses and the media amongst workers or even in Parliament.

This has left our class worried, alienated, and vulnerable. Where workers have felt the confidence to strike, they have been cynically betrayed by the bureaucrats. The result of this has been general demoralisation from which miners are not immune.

The decision to call a national ballot was neither a tactical error nor an objective left retreat. A strike can only ben won by a confident, conscious membership.

A strike without a ballot would have meant the concentration of media, Tory and government pressure on a non-militant yet productive coal area such as the Midlands. This could have resulted in a return-to-work ballot called by the right-wing Area Executive.

Frirthermore, a national ballot was desired by many members, and the NEC was correct to grant this democratic demand although they were under no rule book obligation to do so.

The defeats at Kinneil and Snowdown were not so much due to the 'October blunder': 69% of Scottish miners voted to strike against closures, but the McGahey-led sell-out prevented action to save Kinneil and disillusioned workers.

Kent NUM also voted against closures but the disheartening news of the Scottish sell-out and the promise of 'generous' I WOULD criticise the front page articie of SO 123 in the opposite sense from Alan Thornett (letters, SO 124).

I don't know what happened at the NUM executive. But neither does Alan Thornett.

It may be that Arthur Scargill folded at the first word from the right wing. redundancy payments broke Snowdown's will to fight.

The decision to include South Wales miners in the national ballot was correct. This area was certain to cast a 'yes' vote, thus increasing the likelihood of an overall majority in favour of a strike.

With regard to 'reports' about Scargill's attempted But it is equally possible that the right wing had a majority for a ballot, or that a solid right wing minority had threatened to openly campaign against a strike called without a ballot.

Could Arthur Scargill have called the right wing's bluff? Arguably. But Alan Thorett does not argue it. He assumes that compromise with the NCB: Scargill is reactionary on the issues of women's emancipation and the struggle ot our comrades ır Solidarnosc, but he is a miltant union leader who wants to prevent closures. The revolutionary left will only alienate militànt workers if 'reports" of attempted sell-outs are not backed up with tirm it was within Scargill power to generate national strike movement.

Conditions

Given the conditions -the recent defeats, the slump, the high level of coal stocks - I'm not sure that is right. I am sure that to interpret the Trotskyist idea of the crisis of leadertively deal with, overthrow, Tsarism.

This did not mean that the coming revolution was simply "socialist'; on the contrary, that the coming revolution was a bourgeois revolution that the bourgeoisie was not capable of carrying out, and that once in power, the working class would have to 'uninterruptedly' go further than the 'bourgeois stage' • it also did not unear that the peasantry was irrelevant - Trotsky and Lenin entirely agreed. on the necessity of an alliance of proletariat and peasantry' , the difference was that tor Trotsky the working class would be dominant in the alliance and 'appear before the peasantry as its liberators'.

The dynamics of rural revolt were central Trotsky's perspective.

In Ireland, on the other hand, there . is no land question - the crisis of agriculture is a crisis of capitalist agriculture. The same combination of sucial contradictions simply do not exist. We invite readers to send us their letters, up to a usual niaximum length of 400 words.

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