"To delightful measures changed..." - Reflections on the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent
An analysis of a major 1970s highpoint of class struggle in the UK; its character, implications and consequences.
Preamble and Introduction:
History & Class Consciousness in the UK: Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent
History & Class Consciousness in the UK: Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent
1: Preparing the fire: The period up to the Winter of Discontent
2: The spark that lit the prairie fire: The Ford Strike (Autumn 1978)
3: The Fire Spreads: The Lorry Drivers Strike (Dec.'78 – Feb.'79)
4: Creeping flames: The strikes of the low-paid (Winter, Spring and Summer 1979)
5: Trying to extinguish the flames: the response of the Government, press and others and the contradictions of workers’ organisational forms
6: Class struggle across the pond: The Winter of Discontent in Ireland
7: Changing the fire brigade: The economic outcome of The Winter of Discontent and the Labour Government’s experiment with monetarism
8: Damage Assessment: The Labour/Capital Relationship of Force at the end of the 70s
2: The spark that lit the prairie fire: The Ford Strike (Autumn 1978)
3: The Fire Spreads: The Lorry Drivers Strike (Dec.'78 – Feb.'79)
4: Creeping flames: The strikes of the low-paid (Winter, Spring and Summer 1979)
5: Trying to extinguish the flames: the response of the Government, press and others and the contradictions of workers’ organisational forms
6: Class struggle across the pond: The Winter of Discontent in Ireland
7: Changing the fire brigade: The economic outcome of The Winter of Discontent and the Labour Government’s experiment with monetarism
8: Damage Assessment: The Labour/Capital Relationship of Force at the end of the 70s
* * *
HISTORY & CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE U.K.
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT
We have published this text because we feel it important to understand that the generally low level of struggle since the 1980s and today's vicious management policies weren't always the norm, but are a result of the ruling class's repression of a once very high level of class struggle in the UK. The bosses' savage manipulative practices of today would have been unthinkable in the 1970s - when the culture of working class struggle was preventing the ruling class even attempting such things.
"Social amnesia - memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society... The intensification of the drive for surplus value and profit accelerates the rate at which past goods are liquidated to make way for new goods; planned obsolescence is everywhere, from consumer goods to thinking to sexuality. Built-in obsolescence exempts neither thought nor humans. What is heralded as young or new in things, thoughts or people masks the constant: this society...Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged...Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance - society’s own past." (Russell Jacoby — Social Amnesia).
The Winter of Discontent, forgotten and repressed as it may be(1), nevertheless still haunts the memory of this society. The only time the politicians and media can bring themselves to mention it is as their ultimate horror scenario that must never be allowed to happen again. The occasions it is mentioned it’s usually accompanied by images of mile-high piles of rubbish in Leicester Square, crawling with rats(2). In this way, it serves as a warning of the destructive consequences and futility of any threatened strikes, blockades etc. After all, the ruling class won – not in the Winter of Discontent itself, which was partly a defeat for them, but in the few years after when it ultimately turned around this proletarian offensive and defeated it. But they defeated the offensive and that’s all they want us to remember.
We have concentrated especially on ‘The Winter of Discontent’ for four interconnecting reasons:
1. Most people know very little about it and yet it was the last great mass success of the class struggle for the employed section of the working class in this country (although it has to be said, that many of those who struck in ’79 won very little, particularly the lowest paid).
2. It was the most decisive defeat for a Labour Government at the hands of the class struggle ever, and it marked the beginning of the new epoch - the Thatcherite counter-revolution, a decisive change of strategy for British capital.
3. It shows many of the historical reasons why trade unionism is so embedded in what remains of the rebellious sector of the British working class. In fact the very success of the strike wave, a success which never broke with Trade Unionist ideology (even though it very often subverted the capitalist function of trade unions as a tool for integrating workers into the structures of exploitation) and the whole decade of discontent before it, is in a way one of the most important reasons for the subsequent failure of the struggles of the employed working class in the Thatcher era. What, at that time, was a sufficient – if limited – framework for workers to express themselves autonomously rapidly became an obstacle to autonomy.
4. It shows how "New Labour" is not at all a ‘new’ aberration. In fact the Labour Callaghan government that Thatcher replaced (and Wilson's earlier, to some degree) were considering some of the same significant policies that Thatcher later established; such as sales of council houses and curbs on strikes and picketting. But these policies and other structural adjustments were more easily achieved at the time for British capital by a Tory government than a Labour one. The traditional core Labour vote and the Party's closer personal, ideological and financial relationships with the unions would always be greater obstacles to reform. Since these reforms were achieved it's perhaps unsurprising that the differences between Labour and Tory policies have narrowed further to a general broad consensus of how to manage capital and the working class.
1. Most people know very little about it and yet it was the last great mass success of the class struggle for the employed section of the working class in this country (although it has to be said, that many of those who struck in ’79 won very little, particularly the lowest paid).
2. It was the most decisive defeat for a Labour Government at the hands of the class struggle ever, and it marked the beginning of the new epoch - the Thatcherite counter-revolution, a decisive change of strategy for British capital.
3. It shows many of the historical reasons why trade unionism is so embedded in what remains of the rebellious sector of the British working class. In fact the very success of the strike wave, a success which never broke with Trade Unionist ideology (even though it very often subverted the capitalist function of trade unions as a tool for integrating workers into the structures of exploitation) and the whole decade of discontent before it, is in a way one of the most important reasons for the subsequent failure of the struggles of the employed working class in the Thatcher era. What, at that time, was a sufficient – if limited – framework for workers to express themselves autonomously rapidly became an obstacle to autonomy.
4. It shows how "New Labour" is not at all a ‘new’ aberration. In fact the Labour Callaghan government that Thatcher replaced (and Wilson's earlier, to some degree) were considering some of the same significant policies that Thatcher later established; such as sales of council houses and curbs on strikes and picketting. But these policies and other structural adjustments were more easily achieved at the time for British capital by a Tory government than a Labour one. The traditional core Labour vote and the Party's closer personal, ideological and financial relationships with the unions would always be greater obstacles to reform. Since these reforms were achieved it's perhaps unsurprising that the differences between Labour and Tory policies have narrowed further to a general broad consensus of how to manage capital and the working class.
