Question about Thatcher

[Haller]

The unions in the 1970s were seen as holding the country to ransom, three day weeks, candles, a winter of discontent, the country had had enough of their bullying.

Ignoring the argument about whether the unions were as all-powerful as they were depicted (they weren't), the public perception was quite clear: an opinion poll in 1979 showed 44 per cent of the public prepared to say that the very existence of unions was a bad thing.

Thatcher's legislation to restrict the unions was amongst her most popular policies.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

Ignoring the argument about whether the unions were as all-powerful as they were depicted (they weren't), the public perception was quite clear: an opinion poll in 1979 showed 44 per cent of the public prepared to say that the very existence of unions was a bad thing.

Thatcher's legislation to restrict the unions was amongst her most popular policies.

I hope that the remaining 56% were all union members. They and their perceptions were also 'the public'.

 

[Haller]

I hope that the remaining 56% were all union members. They and their perceptions were also 'the public'.

I can't remember the figures but most of the remaining 56% were in favour of curbs on union activity. The option of disapproving of unions even existing was simply the most extreme position and it still attracted a massive section of the people.

In the 1983 election 39% of union members who voted supported the Labour Party; 32% supported the Tories.

Just to be clear: I'm merely trying to answer the question of why Thatcher could assault the unions with such ease, in terms of the legislation introduced by her government and her conduct of the miners' strike. She did have a majority of the public on her side.

 

[isitme]

My dad worked as a lift engineer for a bit in the 70s and he reckons that the union bosses were right cunts a lot of the time. like you'd get union people turning up saying that you couldn't do something like change a drill bit or do something dead simple cos of union regulations, so you'd have to wait around all day for someone who was qualified to turn up

the impression that I get is that the unions were pretty pissy and dodgy in a lot of cases, but noone quite knew what they were getting into voting for thatcher against that

 

[oake]

'personalities' have feck all to do with it I am afraid. Both parties you mention were - fundamentally - defending a system of profit and the changing balance of the forces behind them were the deciding factor in how thier 'personalities came across/were presented. Both puppets of the rich and powerful. Both did a good job of it (from their point of view). Both should be hung from lamp posts.

Agree with your final point, and I probably could have found a better word than "personalities".

I was trying to answer the original question, which I took to be "why did so much change under Margaret Thatcher (not a baroness at the time), and so little under Tony Blair"?

Margaret Thatcher had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve, and she ruthlessly set about achieving it.
Tony Blair had no vision beyond his personal ambition for power - he carefully avoided doing anything that might make him unpopular (until he was seduced by the neocons with the prospect of immortality, as the great statesman who finally sorted out the Middle East).

 

[ViolentPanda]

Something i never do

 

[ViolentPanda]

They made Dennis a Baron in order that Mark would inherite a title

A baronet, actually. A hereditary peerage specifically invented for handing out to timeservers and former political muckety-mucks.

 

[dennisr]

Margaret Thatcher had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve, and she ruthlessly set about achieving it.
Tony Blair had no vision beyond his personal ambition for power - he carefully avoided doing anything that might make him unpopular (until he was seduced by the neocons with the prospect of immortality, as the great statesman who finally sorted out the Middle East).

Probably sounded like I was having a rant - it's the effect of the very mention of 'that' name

I can see your point but I'm not convinced Blair had no clear ideology (at least, was working one out in his head). His role in transforming the Labour Party (and the knock-on effect across old social democratic parties across the then 'west') was a leading one. He ideologically fought and bureaucratically manuovered to transform what was then, for all its limitations, a partial voice for working people in the UK. That was before his election. He has got away with far more than Thatcher would have been able to (with the help of a lame trade union leadership acting as dampeners of opposition under the spell of 'being Labour') in PFI in the NHS, partial privatisation of the education and many other formally public services, abolition of even limited accountability of the banking system, belief even that boom and slump capitalism had been forever banished, role in the Iraq War, centralisation of state and state controls, etc etc etc. He was an ideological neo-liberal leader rather than a catch-up - taking up the reins from Thatcher imo. The presentation of his individual personality in the papers and on the TV is a false one.

At least I have found someone to dislike as much, if not more, than I do Thatch

 

[isitme]

Probably sounded like I was having a rant - it's the effect of the very mention of 'that' name

I can see your point but I'm not convinced Blair had no clear ideology (at least, was working one out in his head). His role in transforming the Labour Party (and the knock-on effect across old social democratic parties across the then 'west') was a leading one. He ideologically fought and bureaucratically manuovered to transform what was then, for all its limitations, a partial voice for working people in the UK. That was before his election. He has got away with far more than Thatcher would have been able to (with the help of a lame trade union leadership acting as dampeners of opposition under the spell of 'being Labour') in PFI in the NHS, partial privatisation of the education and many other formally public services, abolision of even limited accountability of the banking system, belief even that boom and slump capitalism had been forever banished, etc etc etc. He was an ideological neo-liberal leader rather than a catch-up - taking up the reins from Thatcher imo. The individualisation of his presentation in the papers and on the TV is a false one.

At least I have found someone to dislike as much, if not more, than I do Thatch

personally i think blair was a different kettle of fish altoghether to thatcher. i think he is a lot closer to fascism in his way. he just seems committed to power at all costs. i think he would have literally said and done anything to get power

i do agree that thatcher had a set of goals and stuck to them (although when you look back now it's amazing that once the boom she had promised materialised she seemed to be more and more drunk everytime she appeared on TV

 

[dennisr]

personally i think blair was a different kettle of fish altoghether to thatcher. i think he is a lot closer to fascism in his way. he just seems committed to power at all costs. i think he would have literally said and done anything to get power

I'm wary of trying to extract ideologies from individual personalities. They were both of their time, only able to 'achieve' what they did by both strongly backing the powerful economic and social forces that were backing and building them. Rather than their personalities 'creating' a situation.

Blair represented the break with the old reformist workers 'leaders' view of the world in the wake of the collapse of stalinism (and along with that the perceived defeat of the very idea of 'socialism' - something Thatch and her controllers crowed about, even if it wasn't). He was a leading neo-liberal.

Both of them - authoritarian followers with a hatred of the masses that they were - could well have been ideological fascists in another time and another place but they were not in terms of what they actually did. They have both made the 'option' of a police state more realistic in a sense though. Both were very much hanging off the coat tails of the then powerful americans.

We have to remember - we don't really know them - either of them - as people. Although I have to admit if there is any two people I could say I hated...

 

[audiotech]

My dad worked as a lift engineer for a bit in the 70s and he reckons that the union bosses were right cunts a lot of the time. like you'd get union people turning up saying that you couldn't do something like change a drill bit or do something dead simple cos of union regulations, so you'd have to wait around all day for someone who was qualified to turn up

the impression that I get is that the unions were pretty pissy and dodgy in a lot of cases, but noone quite knew what they were getting into voting for thatcher against that

The lift engineer story seems to be an exaggeration from your dad, does he vote tory by any chance?

Being employed in the 70's saw pay freezes galore, with low paid public service workers bearing the brunt of the then crisis.

 

[isitme]

The lift engineer story seems to be an exaggeration from your dad, does he vote tory by any chance?

Being employed in the 70's saw pay freezes galore, with low paid public service workers bearing the brunt of the then crisis.

no, my dad fucking hates politicians, he votes liberal cos my mam does lol

but he would never vote tory ever, as political as he gets is saying that politicians are a bunch of slimey cunts and tony blair is nothing new, just another slimey cunt like all of them

i mean, it is a reminiced story from the 70s, so it's not that trustworthy. but he doesn't use it to make any argument, he just told me his experience of doing manual labour in the 70s. and that was basically his theory on why it all went wrong

like, most people don't care about politics they just want to be able to have a job that they can turn up to and lets them pay their own way and maybe have kids and pay their way as well till they grow

that isn't a political thing. neocons can't provide that, communism can't provide that. i dunno. it's kind of the crux of the thing really isn't it? everyone has massive ideas about the progress of the working class through history and blah blah blah but noone has ever managed to come up with a way to provide a normal guy with a job that isn't at the mercy of nutcases

 

[audiotech]

In the whole of the 70's I was employed in manual labour of some sort and I take a polar opposite stand to your old man and blame the bosses not the unions. Although I do have a similar views on union leaders as your da, particularly in relation to Tom Jackson of the then UPW.

 

[isitme]

In the whole of the 70's I was employed in manual labour of some sort and I take a polar opposite stand to your old man and blame the bosses not the unions. Although I do have a similar views on union leaders as your da, particularly in relation to Tom Jackson of the then UPW.

wel like i said, my dad isn't into politics at all. he just told me he had a job and union people came and fucked with it and it annoyed him

he always says that it shouldn't go too far one way or the other, i think that's how most people feel tbh. like theories are all well and good, but none of them work. like the unions got too powerful and they ended up as politicians

just let people work

 

[audiotech]

wel like i said, my dad isn't into politics at all. he just told me he had a job and union people came and fucked with it and it annoyed him

he always says that it shouldn't go too far one way or the other, i think that's how most people feel tbh. like theories are all well and good, but none of them work. like the unions got too powerful and they ended up as politicians

just let people work

Liberation from work is a theory I follow when I get the chance.

 

[isitme]

Liberation from work is a theory I follow when I get the chance.

you'd kill to work in a kitchen after 6 months lol

 

[audiotech]

you'd kill to work in a kitchen after 6 months lol

I would kill if I had to work in a kitchen.

 

[isitme]

I would kill if I had to work in a kitchen.

free food, cash in hand. free booze once a week best job if you are unemployed ever

 

[danny la rouge]

like the unions got too powerful and they ended up as politicians

We need to make a distinction between organised labour (which can never be 'too powerful'), and union bureaucratic hierarchy (in which people do build empires). Ossification of power structures can happen in the labour movement, as anywhere.

 

[TremulousTetra]

This has been a very good thread, with a lot of important points being made, but I,, think a very important point, and a fundamental point, has been missed.

Firstly, people have talked about the way the working class, and organised labour was divided, but what socialist worker made clear to me about Thatcher's role in the history, was the division of the ruling class.

People have spoke about Butskillism, the consensus amongst a ruling class about the economic model upon which capitalism should be based, keynesianism. Though they may argue about details, about their deepest and economic and philosophical fundamentals they were united. This consensus was not just in the UK, it was a global consensus. Russia and Germany had led the way with a massive increase in state direction of capital, but from the Second World War, to varying degrees, the whole world followed.

Not only were the ruling class united. Much of the working class was ideologically wedded to reforming capitalism, not overthrowing it. Where there were revolutions, the dominance of Stalinism ensured the state capitalist model was followed, rather than any social revolution which ensured a truly classless society would come into being.

Now, there is quite wide agreement that the Bretton woods agreement in 1971 marked the watershed of the end of the postwar boom, but even in the late sixty's one could see moves to renegotiate the balance of class forces, with such as that labour governments "In Place Of Strife" proposal (this was an attempt to undermine the strength of the unions, proposed by a labour government on behalf of the bourgeoisie, who, wanted to make UK labour more competitive. In other words, cheaper.) And this change in the economic conditions meant things could not carry on in the way they had done. The ruling class were divided about how to achieve these ends, somewhere reticent to give up the parternalistic model of government. Edward Heath took over where Labour left off, and we saw an obvious increase in the that level of open class WAR, but it wasn't enough. What Thatcherism and Reaganomics provided for the bourgeoisie was a change in tactics, a game plan which the ruling class could rally around, and attempt all out class was to make the working class pay for the cost of the crisis of profit. So just at the point the working class became the most divided, the ruling class became the most united. But why were the working class so divided, globally?


The two universally accepted alternatives to capitalism, state capitalism and reformism, had been demonstrated by history to be completely and utterly bankrupt. That's why Blair wasn't an alternative to Thatcherism. The only alternative social revolution, was not a game plan the working class could rally behind either in the UK, or internationally. For the past 30 years the working class has had no alternative objective to what we have now which to unite around, and so for the past 30 years the bourgeoisie has had little opposition to making the working class pay for by crisis of profit. It seems now it may possibly be the case that the limits of even that tactic has been reached, and a crisis of capitalism may be approaching, where the only choice will be, "social revolution or ruin of the contending classes".


And that is the fundamental point. That you cannot be really understand Thatcherism, unless you understand it as just one episode, in a class war. Class war is not an emotional term, it is a scientific fact. It is as fundamental to truth, as evolution. Evolution takes place whether the players are aware of it or not, and so will the class war in human society.

 

[audiotech]

Evolution takes place whether the players are aware of it or not, and so will the class war in human society.

Indeed.

I've worked all my life, I've never broke the law, never walked out on strike. Instead I've went to work and done my job, I've a mortgage to pay, I've children to put through school, and now I'm being told I have to take cutback, after cutback, after cutback.

100,000 march in Dublin.

 

[danny la rouge]

Class war is not an emotional term, it is a scientific fact.

And has been relentlessly waged upon the working class by the businesses classes since the inception of industrial capitalism.

 

[kyser_soze]

Class war is not an emotional term, it is a scientific fact.

It might be a truth, but it's not a 'scientific fact'...

And has been relentlessly waged upon the working class by the businesses classes since the inception of industrial capitalism.

Come on dl, hasn't the whole of human history since we stopped being hunter-gatherers been the history of class wars?

RMP3 - top post, but again, you're missing the main trick. The economies of the post-war consensus in the West were completely reliant on one thing - cheap oil. As soon as OPEC was formed, the post-war 'imperialist unreality' (as in the belief was that Euro/US could happily sit back and rule the planet as they had done pre-WW3) that Europe and the US, particularly, lived under fell apart, and this exacerbated both the splits coming in r/c ideology and later the cost basis of the primary industries the w/c were then mainly employed in.

 

[danny la rouge]

Come on dl, hasn't the whole of human history since we stopped being hunter-gatherers been the history of class wars?

Since the scope of the thread was really about the class consciousness of the capitalist classes, I was limiting the context to industrial capitalism.

Next week we move on to other epochs.

 

[dennisr]

The lift engineer story seems to be an exaggeration from your dad, does he vote tory by any chance?

its now become an official 'urban' myth as well as an actual one

 

[TremulousTetra]

It might be a truth, but it's not a 'scientific fact'...

you can measure the temperature of water, and predict that at 100 degrees Fahrenheit the water will boil, so that is a scientific fact. Class war is equally measurable, and can be used two make predictions, so how is it not a scientific fact?

More importantly, the Point I was trying to make, this is not emotional statements or even rhetoric, it is a cold logical and scientific analysis of human society. Marxist analysis does not necessarily have to be about what is right and wrong, it is more about what is logically true. The fact that Marxism coincides with what is right and wrong and is morally superior to any other analysis, is a product of it being the truth, rather than vice versa.

Come on dl, hasn't the whole of human history since we stopped being hunter-gatherers been the history of class wars?

I agree with you.

RMP3 - top post, but again, you're missing the main trick. The economies of the post-war consensus in the West were completely reliant on one thing - cheap oil. As soon as OPEC was formed, the post-war 'imperialist unreality' (as in the belief was that Euro/US could happily sit back and rule the planet as they had done pre-WW3) that Europe and the US, particularly, lived under fell apart, and this exacerbated both the splits coming in r/c ideology and later the cost basis of the primary industries the w/c were then mainly employed in

with respect, you're making the same mistakes the average bourgeois economist makes, confusing the details for the fundamentals. Your analysis is probably far more widely accepted than mine, but it is not a Marxist analysis.

I'm not saying the details should be ignored, but Marx was originally a philosopher. Philosophers look up for the ETERNAL truths.

The repetitive cycle of boom and economic crises of capitalism are blamed on are many things by bourgeois economists, the collapse of the gold standard and the oil crisis etc. ad nauseum, and so they should. Because if you are a bourgeois economist you want to believe the crises are an aberration, an accident that could be avoided, but this ain't true. History shows the crises are as inherent to capitalism as breathing, and marx located the fundamental cause of these in "The Tendency For The Rate Of Profit To Fall". In a Marxist opinion, the oil crisis was a symptom of the fundamental cause, rather than vice versa.

In fact just to meander on from that topic, it is the post-war boom that is an aberration. Never in the history of capitalism has there been such a boom. The chances of another 30 year boom, are not completely impossible, but very very very unlikely according to historical precedent.

(I do have a brief [about 15 hundred words] introduction to what or post-war boom was, and why it collapsed, which is very accessible I could post up if you want, but if you really want to understand it I would recommend Chris Harman's Explaining The Crisis.)

 

[kyser_soze]

with respect, you're making the same mistakes the average bourgeois economist makes, confusing the details for the fundamentals. Your analysis is probably far more widely accepted than mine, but it is not a Marxist analysis.

I'm not saying the details should be ignored, but Marx was originally a philosopher. Philosophers look up for the ETERNAL truths.

The repetitive cycle of boom and economic crises of capitalism are blamed on are many things by bourgeois economists, the collapse of the gold standard and the oil crisis etc. ad nauseum, and so they should. Because if you are a bourgeois economist you want to believe the crises are an aberration, an accident that could be avoided, but this ain't true. History shows the crises are as inherent to capitalism as breathing, and marx located the fundamental cause of these in "The Tendency For The Rate Of Profit To Fall". In a Marxist opinion, the oil crisis was a symptom of the fundamental cause, rather than vice versa.

In fact just to meander on from that topic, it is the post-war boom that is an aberration. Never in the history of capitalism has there been such a boom. The chances of another 30 year boom, are not completely impossible, but very very very unlikely according to historical precedent.

(I do have a brief [about 15 hundred words] introduction to what or post-war boom was, and why it collapsed, which is very accessible I could post up if you want, but if you really want to understand it I would recommend Chris Harman's Explaining The Crisis.)

I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not denying for one second that the crash in the 1970s was inevitable - I'm as aware of both the bourgeoise and Marxist accounts for why this happens in Capitalism; I was merely pointing out the specifics of the 70s crash, which was precipitated by the oil crises - had the US and Europe been able to maintain their quasi-Imperial hegemony over the oil states in the ME, it would have been later over something else. And since this is the crash we're talking about, it made sense to talk specfically about the changing global situation in the 1970s rather than more generically about the cyclical nature of capitalist markets.

The post-war boom was precisely made possible because of the post-Empire period, where the US felt it could achieve the degree of power and control over the world that the European powers had, but without resorting to mass force and occupation; relying on coercion and subversion instead. However, the post-war period was also the time when the Roman model for empires was crumbling around the world, and the 'virtual empire' the US tried (and has repeatedly tried) to achieve was exactly that - virtual. Much as the power of the European states was built on their Empires (and indeed the financial cushion they provided enabled the basis of the welfare states to happen at all), the post-war boom was built on cheap oil, and once that went, the boom went as well.

Besides, oil is fundamental. It's the most fundamental economic commodity in our society.

 

[ViolentPanda]

you can measure the temperature of water, and predict that at 100 degrees Fahrenheit the water will boil, so that is a scientific fact.

Only at sea level, though.

 

[kyser_soze]

and predict that at 100 degrees Fahrenheit the water will boil

Fahrenheit? Eh? Wassat then?

I think you mean centigrade...

I won't get into a tedious and hoary debate about the nature of 'science' WRT Marxism...

 

[Dissident Junk]

Your question is very interesting: i would suggest that "she got away with it" because she was only carrying forward what the preceding Labour governments had tried to do, but failed.

People forget that the main ideas of what became the "Thatcher Revolution" can be argued to have originated in the Labour governments of the early 60s and mid 70s. These periods saw a wholsesale rethinking and restructuring of British economic policy.

There's a very interesting paper about this here: Uk Economic Policy in the 60s and 70s