A long text, completed in 2005, 20 years after the end of the miners strike. It certainly has no pretensions to being complete. It covers mainly the period from '26 to '85, sometimes sketchily, sometimes in great detail, sometimes subjective, sometimes just facts. Though chronological, it jumps around in style, with texts written by different people: mainly by endangered phoenix, but also by John Dennis, Dave Douglass, the Webbs, Joe Jacobs, Solidarity, Neil Fernandez, the Spanish dockers' Co-Ordinadora, UK Wildcat and Counter-Information.
SO NEAR - SO FAR...
aspects of a history of the British miners
aspects of a history of the British miners
A Selective History of Miners' (and a few other) UK Struggles Up To And Including The 1984-5 Strike
Preamble
The whole of this text was completed in 2005, shortly after the 20th anniversary of the strike and is now being put in the library on the 25th anniversary of the strike. We have included "Miner Conflicts - Major Contradictions" (Chapter 13) here, which appeared during the Miner' Strike, at the beginning of July 1984. Unlike the "Miner Conflicts..." text, this text takes place in a vacuum: it cannot influence any specific movement, and has no intention of doing so. But unlike most of the reflections on the strike 20 or 25 years after, and on the history of miners struggles in general, its aim is to contribute to developing an analysis of the strike and the present day situation in Britain in order to extract a few pointers to a possible future practical use, just as analyses of, for example, the Spanish Revolution (1936-37), contributed to a supercession of anarchist ideology and an attack on Stalinism. In the present desert of practical opposition to this increasingly suicidal world, this may seem over-ambitious. But if you don't aim high you always end up low.
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Comments
To try and make this article more manageable, I have added chapter 20 as a child page of the main article.
It would be good to do this with all the chapters, and the footnotes.
To do this, just edit the main article to cut out the texts for chapters and if you can see the link at the bottom of the main article "add child page" click that and pasted in their. If not just submit a new library article, paste it in there and in the section "book outline" choose the main article as the "parent book".
Don't add any tags or anything to it though, also it would be best to call the chapters "chapter 01, 02, etc" just because they will automatically be sorted in alphabetical order.
The footnotes can just be an extra chapter at the end - or alternatively they can be coded into the text automatically with the following code:
. (Removing the spaces)
thats wat im talking about...tbh though i have no IT skills.
Steven; have added child pages up to chap. 6 - will do rest soon.
Nice one Ret, is it okay to now delete all of the text out of this main article? Apart from the preface of course
Hi Steven; all is done now - child pages & deletion of text from parent page.
Is this available in hard copy? If not, is there anything worth getting that I can read in my hands?
Not as yet available in hard copy, though a (not too distant) future possibility. It's amazing how there is so little written on the Miners Strike since it ended 25 yrs ago - and certainly nothing from a radical perspective as substantial as this text.
Thanks a lot Steven and Ret for re-organising it - it's far more user-friendly and clearer. Would have done it like that myself, more or less, but don't know how to put in internal library links.