> My last. Read the Weekly Worker? Full of material on the
> wreck of Scargill's SSP and his membership in the Stalin
> Society.
Scargill is not a member of the Scottish Socialist Party (which has several seats in the Scottish parliament) but of the Socialist Labour Party, to my mind an ill-advised split from Labour in the wake of the Blair "New Labour" takeover that has subsequently evolved into a sect. But the fact that Scargill's judgment as the leader of an electoral political party is not very good -- and the fact that the elemental class-against-class atmosphere of the struggle in the coalfields did not translate well into the idiom of British politics writ large -- says nothing about his principled leadership of an embattled trade union.
Still less does all that Stalin bullshit matter -- though it's also true that when the Soviet miners took up contributions to go to the British strikers, it was the "hard-liners" who were for it and the Gorby types who opposed it in the interests of making nice with Maggie Thatcher. So someone was putting food on the table for thousands of strikers who were battling the state on the picketlines, and it wasn't the soft socialists and wishy-washy "democrats" who were there when it really mattered. Given that, it's hard to begrudge Scargill a little nostalgia for the days of Uncle Joe -- though in real life Scargill was just as contemptuous of hypocritical "hard-liners." The Polish government -- then under martial law, having temporarily suppressed Solidarnosc -- delivered coal to Britain in the midst of the strike; a Polish official sheepishly told Scargill that they had a contract with Britain, and Scargill responded that "you have a much more important contract with the international working class."
Notice, though, that all of this has to do with the real life-and-death issues of running a strike, and none of it has anything to do with Stalin. So why bring it up, Michael? How can we explain this behavior of yours without first consulting a textbook on obsessive-compulsive disorder?
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories