The miners of Asturias

As you may already know, the coal miners of Asturias are at large. You might have seen them firing their home-made rocket launchers behind their vast barricades and you might have figured out they are very angry...

Why are they so angry? According to the media the strife is going on about some kind of industrial subsidies and other shit. Business as usual, you might say. But before dismissing them as such, let's take a look at history...

The place is the scenic hilly landscape of northern England,
The time is somewhere between 1984 and 1985... 

About a quarter century ago in Great Britain, the miners were also at large. Actually, much larger than their Spanish colleagues today. They didn't fire home-made RPG's, but nevertheless they were so much more powerful that they might just as well have been the demise of prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her grandiose project of austerity and reform. For many in the Iron Lady's party and her opposition alike, her task of defeating organized labour seemed all but insurmountable. The (in)famous Mr Anthony Burgess, author of the bestselling book Clockwork Orange, has actually written another dystopian novel - not so famous but much more relevant for the newborn pensée unique - in which he imagines labour unions to be the ultimate power brokers controlling every aspect of society and crippling it with general strikes for no apparent reason. In a masterful twist of George Orwell's thought, the book was named 1985. He even dared to praise the great masterpiece named after the previous year and its brilliant author in the foreword. As a devout communist until his death, Mr Orwell might have had a few words against it...

1985 was written seven years before 1985, but it was exactly this year when the book's political message turned out to be a false alarm. The defeat of the British miners was the first major victory of neoliberalism. It proved for the world that confronting organized labour is far from being impossible after the solidarity of the working class is broken. And 1985 was indeed the year when it became profoundly broken. In fact it became so broken that it didn't recover the tiniest bit ever since. England is now by far the most unfair society of western Europe only because the rest of the continent is not fast and brutal enough to follow suit. And the solidarity of the working class? Well, I might say it is all but extinct.

 
Today, after 25 years of relentless destruction which culminated in a structural crisis of capitalism never seen before, the question is whether this solidarity can be reborn. If the miners of Asturias will be defeated, it will not be the same defeat. It will be just one among the countless other defeats without any significance.

On the other hand, if the miners will not be defeated... Then what? Well, I might be wrong and it might be just one among the sporadic victories of labour organizing at the right place at the right time, but it might also become something completely different. It might actually become the first major victory of the anti-thesis of neoliberalism. It might be seen as a very visible break of the trend, signifying for the whole world that the tides are indeed turning.

So this story is not about industrial subsidies at all. The miners of Asturias have a little bit larger task at hand...

Here's a letter from one of them.