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For A Working-Class Television: The Miners' Campaign Tape Project

by David E. James


................In one of the first working-class novels in English, Robert Tressell described a proto-cinematic event that heralded a genuinely proletarian cinema as vividly as the fandango dancer in L'Éve Future portended the commodity industry that in the event triumphed over it. The Christmas party in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists included "Bert White's World-famed Pandorama," a candle-lit miniature cardboard stage with rollers that showed "pictures cut out of illustrated weekly papers and pasted together, end-to-end, so as to form a long strip." Bert, an apprentice house-painter, used the toy theatre to take his audience on a tour of European cities: to one where "mounted police with drawn swords were dispersing a crowd: several men had been ridden down and were being trampled under the hoofs of horses"; to another, where they arrive "just in time to see a procession of unemployed workmen being charged by the military police"; and, back in "Merry Hingland," to scenes of domestic starvation, homelessness, and a procession of "2,000 able-bodied men who are not allowed to work" (324-27). Though the workers' cinema that Bert's Pandornama anticipated never came into being in England, something like it did in the age of television. A century later working-class people were using a similarly rudimentary apparatus and a similarly amateur mode of production to show virtually the same images of popular mobilisation against unemployment, impoverishment, and police rioting. But this time the medium was video: the Miners' Campaign Tapes, their own newsreels about their own strike.1

................The Miners' Strike of 1984-85 -- the "longest epic of collective resistance in the annals of British labour" (Anderson 1992, 179) -- caused violent divisions within the working-class and in British society generally.2 But it also occasioned a remarkable mobilisation of popular support for labour that, cutting across the lines of class and those of the identities that have displaced class in recent political discourse, was experienced and expressed specifically in class terms. The Campaign Tape Project was only one of the many cultural initiatives that helped to sustain the strike; working class people made films, videotapes, still photographs, plays, and songs, presenting them at formal and informal meetings at union branches, trades councils, and community groups, and especially at fund raisers organised by the hundreds of miners' support groups that sprang up all over the country.3 But the complicated class structure of contemporary Britain and the shifting and porous boundaries between the propaganda resources of the state and the miners' own media preempt any simple understanding or celebration of the Miners' Campaign Tapes themselves as the spontaneous self-expression of an autonomous working-class culture. Rather, in the specific conjuncture in which they were produced, the binary social divisions of early capitalism had become extensively diffused by the class-fractions and cross-class alliances present in both post-war Labourism and post modern Thatcherism, as well as by similarly complex developments in British culture and the communication industries.4 Heir as they were to the early Soviet agit prop cinemas and the Film and Photo Leagues of the 1930s, the Miners' Campaign Tapes were produced and shaped by quite different political circumstances.

................A hermeneutics adequate to these circumstances must have a historical and a theoretical component. The first entails the reconstruction in class terms of both the social developments that erupted as the strike and the developments in British moving-image culture of the same period-- the events which intersected to produce the Tapes. The second requires an understanding of culture as itself the praxis of social life, not merely its representation or reflection. Culture collaborates not only with contemplation, but also with human sensuous activity, and interpretation of works of art must move beyond the aesthetic object or product. Description of a text's formal properties or transcodings from its surface to some deeper meanings must be informed by and take place within a materialist analysis of the function of the cultural activity in the other forms of social and political practice by which it comes into being and with which it is inevitably integrated.

................In the case of the miners' tapes, the essential terms of both the historical and the theoretical projects may be illustrated by Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the rhizome (1987), which they use to distinguish between the centralised, hierarchical qualities of arborescent or treelike structures and the characteristics of the laterally growing root: connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity and asignifying rupture. These qualities of the rhizome, proposed here as defining what is culturally radical, inform: 1. the politics of the strike itself, 2. the moving image culture it generated, and 3. the nature of the relationship between these:

................1. The strike was a populist, syndicalist response to a deliberate and premeditated attack on the working class, its institutions, and the role it had secured in state power. Determined to roll back welfare-state, consensus socialism, the Thatcher government manipulated the state's combined repressive and ideological apparatuses so as to make it impossible for the miners not to strike, and then misrepresented the strike as an authoritarian act by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), hierarchically, centrally, and dictatorially structured, against the interests of its own members and of the country as a whole-- propaganda that, in fact, characterised not the strike but the Thatcherite state itself.

................2. In the previous a decade and a half, avant-garde and leftist film and video workers in Britain had created a network of democratic, decentralised, cooperatively-organised film and video Workshops, which had varying degrees of support from a number of public bodies but which were nevertheless committed to and at least partially integrated in working-class communities. When the strike came, these were immediately mobilised on the miners' behalf.

................3. The relationship of the Miners' Campaign Tapes to the strike was not simply to contest government propaganda by providing a "truthful," nonideological representation of it, as if from an ontologically separate level. Rather, they were an active intervention in the world, designed to participate in and promote the strike, to be its cultural praxis -- in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, an "aparrellel evolution" of it (11). Consequently their formal properties must be approached via functionalist rather than formal or mimetic principles. As campaign tapes, that is, as an instance of a specific genre of trade-union agitational activity (Spence 1988, 2), their work is not reducible to the concept of representation, the foundational heuristic of bourgeois media theory.


I: The Miners' Strike

................In the British post-war compromise among state, capital and labour, coal was nationalised along with other major industries, and the National Coal Board (NCB) was formed on 1 January 1947. Rather than working for structural social reorganisation or the redistribution of wealth, Labourism generally accepted this settlement; but, with the end of the postwar boom, industrial action increasingly challenged it. Harold Wilson's attacks on union power contributed to the Conservative electoral victory in 1970, but then strikes by the miners in 1972 and 1974 for higher wages-- the latter in response to attempts to impose a statutory pay norm-- brought down the Heath administration with what Perry Anderson has called "the most spectacular single victory of labour over capital since the beginnings of working-class organisation in Britain. . . . the only time in modern European history that an economic strike has precipitated the political collapse of a government" (1992, 176).

................The new Labour administration headed by James Callaghan attempted to renew the social contract, but its "Plan For Coal," proposing new investment and increased production, was forestalled by the series of strikes in winter 1978 that followed the rejection of pay norms by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Thus, the third government in a row fell to the unions, and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Blaming the consensus and particularly the unions for the decline of Britain, Thatcher committed her administration to a market economy, to dismantling the public sector and privatizing the industrial base rather than investing in it, and to the financial deregulation that allowed the City to grow into an international centre for finance capital, dealing especially in the offshore Eurodollar market. For coal, Thatcherism meant the industry's reconstitution in terms of the profitability of each pit rather than in terms of the role of the industry in British society as a whole, increased reliance on oil and nuclear power, and the eventual privatisation of energy. Huge cutbacks had already transformed the coal industry since nationalisation: the 980 pits employing 700,000 miners in 1947 had by 1970 been reduced to 292 pits employing 297,000 miners (Adeny and Lloyd 1986, 14). But the miners, who formed the strongest and most militant of the unions, still posed an inevitable problem, particularly given the election of Arthur Scargill to the NUM presidency in 1982. A member of the Young Communist League when an active miner, Scargill had since then consistently understood politics as class conflict and looked to class struggle as the road to a fully socialist society with a state controlled economy; in the opinion of a July 1975 New Left Review editorial, he showed "an intransigent pursuit of proletarian class interests that has not been seen for many decades" (Scargill 1975, 11).

................The Conservative Party's plans for restructuring Britain's energy policy, and specifically for dealing with the energy unions, had been leaked in 1978 in the Ridley Report, an internal party report prepared earlier in the decade. Since the "most likely battleground" was expected to be the coal industry, coal stocks were to be built up, especially in the power stations; contingency plans for the import of coal were made; the recruitment of nonunion lorry drivers by haulage companies was encouraged; and power stations were to be converted to oil. Opposition from miners was still strong enough in 1981 to cause the NCB to retreat on a pit closure plan, but in 1984 Mrs. Thatcher appointed as chairman of the NCB Ian McGregor, a known union-buster who as Chairman of British Steel had halved the number of jobs in that industry after the steelworkers' strike in 1979. In March 1984 the board announced a production cut of four million tonnes, the loss of twenty thousand jobs, and the closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire. Breaking industry protocol and commitments to a further five years of life at Cortonwood (on the strength of which men from other pits had recently been transferred there and over £1 million invested), this was a deliberate provocation and, as in Paris in 1848, the proletariat was forced into insurrection. On 3 March, the Yorkshire area council voted to strike and three days later, even though all the advantages were held by the government, the National Executive Committee of the NUM approved.

................Having been reorganised as the instrument of free market capitalism under the direct control of the government, the NCB was now to be used as the agent of the government's offensive in what was clearly a deliberate attempt to destroy the NUM and the union movement generally. It found itself confronted by a militant populism, informed by a vision of coal and its mining as a national resource, and determined to defend that resource and the social life it sustained. In previous strikes the miners had been fighting for higher wages; this time they were fighting to safeguard their jobs, the pits themselves, and the village communities that depended entirely on them. Against the miners, all prepared in advance, were the entire resources of the state: the judiciary, which was used to sequester NUM funds and withhold almost all social security payments to the families of striking miners, to harass striking miners with restrictive bail conditions that jailed them for persistent picketing, and to restrain secondary action by other unions; the police -- a massive, nationally centralised paramilitary police force, costing half a million pounds per day, routinely mobilising eight thousand men at any time, with riot gear, horses, dogs, and roadblocks -- which was used to prevent the free movement of pickets, and to intimidate the strikers and their families; and the press, which was used to demonize Scargill as the sole cause of the strike, to misrepresent its progress and especially the police violence in order to sway public opinion against the miners, and to demoralise the miners themselves with false accounts of returns-to-work.5 Against all of these, including the media offensive, the miners had resources of their own.


II: Alternative Cinema in Britain and the Workshop Movement

................Recent scholarship has discovered a substantial history of alternative cinemas in Britain, many of which were explicitly as well as implicitly political.6 Their post-war renewal, however, followed the US independent cinemas of the 1960s, and specifically the New York Film Makers' Cooperative, with the major difference being that the London Film Co-op (1967) was organised as an egalitarian, work-sharing collective, designed for production as well as distribution. As in the next decade the "structural materialism" of the inaugural moment gave way before feminist, gay, and eventually black initiatives, so a new regionalism challenged the metropolitanized institutions of British culture. Amber Films, to take a primary example of the new co-ops that were founded, was begun by a group of film and photography students in London in 1968, who moved a year later to Tyneside in anticipation that their desire to work collectively on films about the lives of working-class people would be facilitated by the area's strong industrial base and history of community organisation. Aided by grants from the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Regional Arts Associations (RAAs), similar groups developed in Cardiff, Sheffield, Edinburgh and other cities across the country, groups that were thoroughly versed in the post-1968 debates about the politics of representation and the social organisation of filmmaking units. Consequently they were typically committed to an integrated practice of production, exhibition, and distribution, to a collective or co-operative internal organisation, and to developing a working base outside the commercial industry.

................Though organised into the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) in 1974, these groups and the dissemination of their politics in film culture were still debilitatingly marginal. Actual alignment with the working-class demanded that these artists enter into both its alienation and the institutions that counter it; they had to become unionised workers in the film industry. But since filmmakers in the independent sector were not waged, they were not eligible to join the filmmakers' union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT). The logical impulse towards unionisation was further spurred by several historical factors, including the fall of the Labour government in 1979, which ended hopes for a state-funded network of wage-paying regional workshops; the deepening recession which, while it did not affect the film industry directly (in fact the industry was one of the few in Britain that expanded throughout the 1970s and into the first half of the 1980s), nevertheless eroded the outside employment opportunities which had previously sustained independent filmmakers; and Amber Films' precedent-setting success in joining ACTT as a self-contained "shop."

................After several years of discussions among BFI, IFA, and ACTT, several people active in ACTT convinced the union to establish a special category that would facilitate independent small-scale production and at the same time bring into the union people who were working independently outside it. The catalyst that allowed the unionisation of the independents was another state initiative, Channel Four, the new television channel mandated "to encourage innovation and experimentation" (cit. Petley 1989, 8) and to buy its programming from outside.7 After negotiations with ACTT, the RAAs, the BFI, and the IFA, Channel Four agreed to fund selected workshops as franchises in an ongoing way rather than simply to commission specific programs.

................In the Workshop Declaration of 1982, ACTT agreed to approve properly funded and staffed non commercial and grant aided film and tape work if made by a "workshop," that is, a non profit organisation, of at least four members with equal participation in control of the undertakings and receiving an equal and fixed remuneration. As well as producing programs of a predominantly "cultural" character, workshops were expected to be involved with archiving, education, distribution, and generally furthering film culture in their regions. In cooperation with other funding agencies such as the BFI and the RAAs, Channel Four was to contribute to the support of the workshops by paying fixed revenues, totalling 1 per cent of its annual budget. At the height of the movement in 1988, there were twenty-five fully franchised Workshops in the UK, of which sixteen were receiving varying levels of funding from Channel Four.

................Of ACTT's 27,000 members, only 400 to 500 were from franchised workshops and other grant-aided units, but their aggressive, articulate politics brought new class tensions into the union. The older, highly-skilled and well-paid technical and trades membership (including the ITV crews that would cover the strike) were by and large of working-class origin, but had a narrowly defined sense of trade unionism and little wider political awareness. On the other hand, the general secretary and leading officials overwhelmingly supported the miners, as did the highly educated, articulate and politically sophisticated workshop members, themselves mostly of middle-class origin. During the strike, these differences in class origin and sympathy caused arguments at General Council meetings: on the one hand, complaints about the way the strike was being represented in the mass media or, in the case of mass media crew-members, about having themselves been verbally and physically attacked by miners; and on the other, proposals for formal and informal methods of supporting the strike, that eventually included large and regular donations of money to the strike fund.

................These differences were compounded by regional issues. The London Film Division of ACTT (which comprised workers in the old feature film industry and freelancers) was subdivided into departments according to trade specialisation (camera people, producer/directors, editors, etc.), but created a special "Grant-Aid Department," lumping all the workshop people together. Concurrently, the growth of regional freelance production lead in 1984 to the creation of a Regional Division in ACTT, which, however was subdivided only regionally (East Midland shop, North-East shop, and so on), with no distinction made between film and television, between trades, or between commercial and grant-aided production, so that in the regions workshops were fully integrated into the industry.

................By the time the strike began, then, a nationwide network of young film and video workers committed to working-class and feminist politics was in place. These workers had strong regional identification and established local constituencies and were experienced in working for and with working-class people. They were organised into democratic, participatory collectives, virtually autonomous but nevertheless funded by state and local institutions, backed by another network of co-ops already engaged in community outreach and with equipment available for individuals and groups in one-off projects. Having their own distribution apparatus and access to national television, they possessed a guerrilla mobility through all points in a media-system that, while ultimately dominated by state and corporate broadcasting, was nevertheless multiple, diffuse, and capable of many different organisational forms. The working-class' self-mobilisation allowed these powers to be fully realised.


III: Voice and Space in The Miners' Campaign Tape Project

................At the beginning of the strike, two members of a London workshop (Platform Films), Chris Reeves and Lin Solomon organised a meeting in London of ACTT members, including Stuart McKinnon from a Gateshead workshop (Trade Films) and representatives from several other workshops across the country, to discuss ways in which as film and video workers they could help the miners.8 They agreed to a project of two parts. First, they would produce ten single issue, five to six minute tapes on topics that included redundancy; pit closures; solidarity with other unions; the police; the contributions of miners' wives and other women; and media coverage of the strike. Second, they planned to make a longer 30 to 40 minute agitational tape, provisionally entitled, The Miners of '84--Together We Can Win, which would supplement the shorter tapes, arguing the miners' case with a voice-over review of the general national and political background. Project members in the various regional workshops were to tape events in their own areas and send the material for editing to Platform, with distribution by Platform and Trade. All involved contributed their labour free-of-charge, and a fund raising appeal for editing-expenses netted contributions from individuals and £1000 from ACTT and £500 from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). In both organisation and function, the Miners' Campaign Tape Project, recalls Dziga Vertov's "network of cameramen in the provinces" sending material to the "experimental film station" where the Kinopravda, "a periodical of events summarised into an agitational unit" was edited (Vertov 1984, 22).

................In the event, only tapes in the shorter format were actually made, and they were assembled in pairs:

 Tape A:  1. Not Just Tea and Sandwiches (Miners' Wives Speak Out)
   2. The Coal Board's Butchery (No Pit is Safe)
 Tape B:  3. Solidarity (Trade Unions Support the Miners)
   4. Straight Speaking (The Strike and the Industry)
 Tape C:  5. The Lie Machine (Media Coverage of the Strike)
   6. Only Doing Their Job (The Police, the Law and the Miners)

................Endorsed by the NUM, between four and five thousand copies of these were distributed in Britain, with others, often appropriately dubbed, sent to sympathetic groups throughout Europe and in Japan, the US, and Australia. The tapes were free to the miners and the miners' wives support groups, and otherwise were rented or sold for modest fees on a sliding scale, with profits returned for further production or donated to the miners' Hardship Fund.

................The tapes are of two kinds. Straight Speaking and The Lie Machine are replies to the misrepresentation of the strike by the NCB and the mass media. The other four are essentially collages, similarly structured and organised around specific themes, in which miners and women from the mining communities speak, with cutaways illustrating some of their points. Not Just Tea and Sandwiches is concerned with the role of women in the strike, The Coal Board's Butchery with the long-term destruction of the industry; Solidarity with other unions' support for the strike; and Only Doing Their Job with the police offensive. Not Just Tea and Sandwiches, for example, begins with a woman describing the origin of her support group and the work it has done; it moves to women in a different region,

who describe the extreme poverty in their communities and point out that the "miners are being starved back to work via their children"; another group of women describe the communal meals they are making for their village; the tape returns to the second group who condemn scab miners; a new group of women talk about media manipulation of images of women to undercut previous strikes and affirm their absolute commitment to this one; another new group of women describe joining the men on the picket-lines; in a conference speech, Scargill pays tribute to the women's role in the strike; the women in the first group continue the issue of picketing and bring up police violence; another group of women talk about police harassment; and finally, over footage of massed police, simple graphics encourage further support groups.9

................Though the tapes are framed by short pieces of popular music and rudimentary graphics and some include historical footage of previous strikes, they appear to be essentially a means of enabling the miners to speak for themselves spontaneously and informally. This more or less complete preoccupation with speech is their most salient, and also their most problematical feature. On the one hand, it invests the tapes with the traditional orality of popular culture and the vivacity of miners' language in particular (speech being the chief art available to the working class in the form of practice), and it supplies the dominant imagery and compositional unit-- the brief head-shot of working-class people talking. On the other, it opens them to charges of naive and artless realism. Their lack of formal or technical complexity encourages their denigration as "a 'degree zero' documentary form,"10 while their dependence on talking heads, their implication of unmediated presence, and their similarity to the format of TV news all seem to disregard the problematization of representation that had occurred in their immediately-prior historical context, the documentary legacy of Straub-Huillet, structural materialism's critique of filmic illusionism, and the "Brechtian" mode of working-class documentaries like The Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975). Both objections-- that of formal primitiveness and that of uncritical realism and logocentricism-- reflect bourgeois political and aesthetic priorities. Ignoring the exigencies of a political crisis in a way that a pragmatic understanding of popular culture cannot afford, they ignore historical determination generally, and in their idealism are blind to the proletarian politics of the strike and of contemporary British moving-image culture. The particular combination of these sketched above, which made the Miners' Campaign Tapes project possible, also determined its general shape and structured the fabrication of the works themselves, as well as their textual and social activity. The effect-- and the effectiveness-- of the interdependent political and rhetorical agendas in the tape's responsiveness to their historical moment may be approached via the general principles at stake in what may be summarised as the tapes' use of video to spatialize and spatially redeploy the temporality of the miners' voices.

................A major issue in postmodernism generally, definition of and control over space are also key in postmodern forms of class struggle. In his elaboration of Henri Lefebvre's observation that "today, more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space. . . . Only the class struggle has the capacity to differentiate, to generate differences which are not intrinsic to economic growth," David Harvey has noted how "working-class movements are . . . generally better at organising in and dominating place than they are at commanding space" (1990, 236-37). With control of the British state, corporate, police, and media apparatuses all more or less centralised in the metropolis, the only incompletely-controlled zones were those of the working class, especially those in the far north and west-- precisely the location of the threatened coalfields. In the sociospatial dialectic of Thatcher's attack on the miners, a regional offensive against peripheral industries was intrinsic to a general invasion of autonomous, working-class places and their reterritorialization as centralised, core-controlled, free-market space; the abolition of the Greater London Council and other forms of local government exemplify the same offensive.11 These spatial issues were primary in the government's instigation and prosecution of the strike, and in the miners' and the tapes' response.

................First, the closure of the provincial pits threatened not only the miners' income, but the very existence of entire working class communities the single industry pit villages. It left the miners to choose between defending their own places or becoming deskilled peripatetic workers in the homogeneous space of a post-Fordist economy. Second, through the police and judiciary, the state invaded and occupied all relevant public space; the police refused to allow pickets to connect the dispersed elements of the strike by free movement through the road system or to place themselves close enough to scab workers to be able to speak to them, and once a miner had been arrested, restrictive bail conditions prevented him from picketing on the penalty of jail, that is, total spatial sequestration. These struggles over space-- the spatio-territorial form of the class struggle-- determined both the mass media misrepresentation of the strike and the Miners' Campaign Tapes' own participation in it.

................The mass media repressed coverage of the long-term historical developments that caused the strike, and sensationalised the miners' reaction to the police violence. Straight Speaking and The Lie Machine respond; based on fragments of mass media propaganda which are incorporated into their own audio-visual mode-- rephotography of tabloid articles for example, or quotations from Thatcher and other members of the government, which are then answered in the speaking voice of strike supporters-- they reterritorialize the state's discourse in their own terms. The other four tapes, conversely, manifest the offensive as distinct from the defensive mode of the same imperative. Beginning from where the miners stood and spoke, they attempt to forge the separate voices and places of resistance into a polynucleated working-class space, a proletarian public sphere. Given this objective, their formal properties and the specifics of their production and consumption, which all appear as deficiencies in aesthetic systems that fetishize immanent textual properties, are revealed as necessary to their practical function and intrinsic to their class position. In doing so, they demonstrate one form of proletarian aesthetics. Their properties may now be listed:

................– In the Tapes, the miners' voices are reproduced electronically and visually; their otherwise ephemeral and private discourse is objectified, made permanent and public. Turned into electronic information, it became a raw material to which the ACTT technicians--unionised, working-class artists-- could add their labour in editing and in the distribution of the finished artifacts. For the NUJ and ACTT members who worked for or financed the project, it was a way of partially redressing their own unions' complicity in the use of state and corporate media to attack the working class.

................– Although the miners and their supporters appear to be speaking spontaneously, they are in fact replying to questions asked by the video makers (from a list prepared at the initial conference). In editing, the questions were cut and the responses broken into pieces and interwoven with each other according to topic, so that in the completed tapes the working class appears to express itself in a unified, focussed, cogent, and absolutely committed voice. This, apparently the unanimous voice of the whole community, does contain individual specificity, but unites the separate accounts in the collective social story of the strike. And though the miners speak in a variety of strongly-accented local dialects--each the marker of a different place--their unity in the strike cancels the regional differences that the government had exploited to divide them. Again as in the Vertovian model, from fragments of many people, the perfect, exemplary working-class subject is created.

................– Whereas broadcast television pretends to objectivity and balance, the Tapes are overtly and totally partisan in their endorsement of the strike, never questioning or criticising it in any way. In this respect the Miners' Campaign Tapes Project's failure to produce The Miners of '84 (the longer tape with the supplementary review of general national background and the voice-over commentary mentioned in the initial prospectus), was entirely appropriate. The tapes' standard is not that of information, but of participation; they are not about the strike, but part of it.

................– The Tapes do not hierarchically rank the discourses they re-present: everyone is equal, no voice is framed by another. Broadcast television news, in contrast, asserts the voice of the news reader as a centre of objectivity that, Chinese-box fashion, contains within itself the partial truths of all other speakers. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, it is arborescent; the voice of the studio branches into-- and so administers-- the voices of the field correspondents, the sundry experts, and the "people" they interview, subdividing the program into successively more remote and dependent regions that are always controlled from the centre. Even on the rare occasion when a working-class person's voice does appear, it is multiply framed, the lowest level in the hierarchy, the least authoritative because it divides into no others. But the working-class voices in the Tapes link with each other as equals. Each its own authority; they appear to speak speak for themselves, not as illustrations of an argument proposed from above. As a result, the text is without internal definition, without climax. It is always complete, yet it may be entered anywhere and taken anywhere. Both textually and socially a rhizome, it can grow in any direction. But only and always on a grassroots level.

................– The Tapes were made on low-band U-matic video, transferred to VHS: a very cheap means of production, readily accessible and widely familiar in a variety of amateur capacities, and playable on domestic television sets. The achievement of such a collective, disseminated enunciation fulfilled the dream that has haunted the left in modern times, that of a motion picture medium, available to the working class as producers and whose distribution they could themselves control.

................– Though regional newscasts include varying amounts of locally produced programming, the dominant, national television news networks are directed from and produced in London. But the Tapes were only assembled there, as a synthesis of the social and cultural activity whose origin was dispersed throughout the coal fields and in the nationwide regional workshops.

................– The Tapes are of below-broadcast quality: while this deprived them of the audiences reached, for example, by the workshop tapes commissioned by Channel Four shot on high-band (such as those mentioned by Alan Fountain in the quotation in note 4), it also prevented their assimilation as one of the plurality of positions in the pseudo-democratic balance of liberal journalism. Reflecting the conditions of their production, the Tapes' technical limitations allowed them to be entirely functional in their own spaces and to be assimilable to the discursive arenas of working-class politics, but kept them invisible and silent in those of the ruling classes. Unlike the cultural products of all other postmodern identity politics, they could not be recruited to sustain and renew industrial culture or ratify its corporate agendas.

................– Once assembled, the Tapes were reproduced from multiple, proliferating, and self-appointing points of reproduction. Anyone with access to two VCRs could join the strike by making new copies and instigating new daisy chains of copies.

................– Whereas broadcast news is received at a specific time, organising information access as it organises the rhythm of the working day, the Tapes could be played and replayed, freely engaged in the liberated time of the non-working day.

................– The Tapes create an egalitarian, participatory mode of consumption. Broadcast television news asserts its own authority, a class difference between itself and its audience; its discourse implies and indeed occupies the parameters of what is allowed to be relevant, and it expects the audience to subordinate their discourse to its own. While scholarship (e.g. Morely 1980) has shown that it is never totally successful in this, nevertheless the program sets the agenda, even if people of different classes receive it different ways, and differently incorporate its discourse into their own. The Tapes do not resist this process of participatory consumption, but rather encourage talking back. Allowing the dispersed working-class voices to speak amongst themselves, they reject, not just the authority of the panoptical mass media, but also the discursive privilege of all industrial media, including themselves. Being very short, they do not preoccupy their own consumption; their turn to speak is soon over, and then they may be spoken to and about, augmented, verified, interrupted, and rephrased. Like Third Cinema films, they are only a "pretext for dialogue, for the seeking and finding of wills" (Solanas and Gettino 1976, 62), a conversation-piece to spur more talk by more miners and their supporters.

................– Broadcast television, which is financed by the working class, either forcibly in license fees or indirectly through advertising, is a mechanism for silently transferring wealth from the working class to the state or corporate shareholders. The Tapes, which were financed voluntarily by the unions and the general public and used to raise funds for the miners and their families, were a means by which people voluntarily and self-consciously decided to contribute to sustaining the strike. Raising "hundreds of thousands of pounds" (Petley 1989, 9) the tapes became a way for non-miners to act in class-solidarity, and so to participate in the strike.


Conclusion

................The defeat of the strike was a catastrophe for the miners, for the trade union movement, and for working people worldwide. The miners' predictions that the industry would be destroyed have proven true; since 1985, 140,000 coal jobs have been lost and as I write, today's paper announces the closure of the last working pit in Lancashire, ending a 400-year mining tradition, even as the government is considering the piecemeal privatisation of the remaining profitable pits and the licensing of private sector operation of discarded pits (Beavis and Brown 1993, 12). Subsequent defeats for the left, and especially the ascendancy of end-of-class and indeed anti-working class ideologies, appear to justify the miners' other prediction, that the strike was the last-ditch stand for the working-class. In fact the full implications of its defeat in this instance will not be clear until the long-term effects of the present phase of the international restructuring of capital and the effectivity of the new forms of resistance this will create are known.

................Until such resistance emerges, The Miners' Campaign Tapes and the other miners' videos will speak to us from a moment whose possibilities seem ever more remote. In Britain, for the remainder of the Thatcher years and then under Major, the working-class has bounced from defeat to defeat, as it has in the United States under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. The particular conditions in British moving-image culture that made the Tapes possible have likewise deteriorated; in 1989, giving notice that it had ceased to fund any more workshops in the manner agreed in the Workshop Declaration, Channel Four began a three-year phase out of existing funding, followed by the BFI in 1991. While the production of women's, gay, and ethnically identified film and video continues to expand, in both industrial media and outside it, the working class as the working class has virtually neither voice nor space of its own.

................Yet the example remains. The Miners' Campaign Tapes reproduced in their own moment the conditions of the other post war alternative cinemas in the West: like, for example, Underground Film in the 1960s, their production as texts was crucially determined by the construction of alternative apparatuses of production and distribution; the prise de la parole by a subaltern group was made in the face of misrepresentation by hegemonic media; their textual properties were determined by practical, participatory functions in real life beyond those of representation; they negotiated between articulating the miners' own political identity and responding to the apparatus and texts of the industrial media; and despite the overall oppositional project, the alternative practice did not exist as a one pole of a simple binary, but as a moment-- albeit a crucial and exemplary one-- in a total field containing multiple positions. In this summariness and in their unique ability to inspire and assemble the political and cultural support of other identities (however temporary this might have been), they were the apotheosis of the populist avant-garde. If it seems that, like Minerva herself, they appeared in the gathering of its evening, we must remember that the night will not last forever.12

 


WORKS CITED

Adeney, Martin and John Lloyd. 1986. The Miners' Strike, 1984-5: Loss Without Limit. London: Routledge.

Anderson, Perry. 1992. English Questions. London: Verso.

Beavis, Simon and Paul Brown. 1993. "Hanson Seeks to Buy Best Pits." The Guardian (London), 1 June, 12.

Benyon, Huw, ed., 1985. Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners' Strike. London: Verso.

A Catalogue of Films and Videotapes Produced During the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. n.d. Newcastle: Northern Film and Television Archive.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Dennis, Norman, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter. 1956. Coal Is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community. London: Tavistock Publications.

Fine, Bob and Robert Millar, eds. 1985. Policing the Miners Strike. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Fountain, Alan. 1985. "The Miners and Television." IN Benyon, 1985.

Fuller, Graham. 1993. "True Brit." The Village Voice, 9 February, 56 and 58.

Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Harvey, Sylvia. 1984. "`Those Other Voices': An Interview with Platform Films." Screen, 25, 6, 31-47.

Hogenkamp, Bert. 1986. Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929-39. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Lovell, Alan. 1990. "That Was the Workshop That Was." Screen, 31, 1, 102-8.

MacPherson, Don. 1980. Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties. London: British Film Institute.

Morely, David. 1980. The "Nationwide" Audience. London: British Film Institute.

Negrine, Ralph. 1989. Politics and Mass Media in Britain. London: Routledge.

Petley, Julian. 1989. "Background and Development of Film and Video Workshops." Landmarks. London: The British Council, 6-10.

Scargill, Arthur. 1975. "The New Unionism." New Left Review, 92, 1-33.

Schwartz Bill. 1985. "Redefining the National Interest." in Benyon, ed., Digging Deeper, 123-29.

Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Gettino. 1976. "Towards a Third Cinema." In Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press

Spence, Martin. 1988. Preaching to the Converted. London: Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians and the North East Media Development Council.

Stead, Jean. 1987. Never the Same Again: Women and the Miners' Strike. London: Women's Press.

Tressell, Robert. [1914] 1955. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. New York: Monthly Review Press

Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley. University of California Press.

Walsh, Michael. 1993. "Allegories of Thatcherism: The Films of Peter Greenaway." In Lester Friedman, ed., Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 


NOTES

<1. The Tapes may be obtained from the Northern Film and Television Archive, 36 Bottle Bank, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, NE8 2AR, U K, and the Video Data Bank, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60603, USA.

<2. As much as it was a crisis for the working-class, the strike was also a crisis within the working-class and its institutions. Divisions among the miners themselves, which had long been exacerbated by the federated (rather than centrally controlled) structure of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and by the government's differential pay-scales for more or less profitable pits, were reflected in a series of other divisions: within the miners nationally (miners in the North Midlands were reluctant to go out for the jobs of miners in Yorkshire or Wales); within the union movement generally (at the 1984 TUC conference, electricians and power station engineers opposed the strike, the Labour Party leadership supported it but also criticised the miners, and the steelworkers, themselves recently radically depleted by state offensives, did not support it); and even internationally (Belgian and Australian miners and dockers supported the NUM, but deliveries of coal from Poland, West Germany and USA escalated) See Benyon 1985, 19.

<3. A Catalogue of Films and Videotapes Produced During the 1984/85 Miners' Strike describes some forty works produced by individuals or small organisations, independently or with various kinds of sponsorship, but almost all made in collaboration with the striking miners and their support groups Much more material, including many hours of the miners' own amateur video recording, remains uncollected. Some sixty works have been collected at the Northern Film and Television Archive in Gateshead, England.

<4. Negrine (1989, 76-77 and 153-54) surveys the research on press and tv bias; of this, see especially Cumberbatch et als. 1986. For specific examples of newspaper misrepresentation of the miners, see also Schwarz (1985, 124-25). Here I emphasise the Tapes' alterity to the hegemonic media, but the latter was not itself internally undifferentiated or without contradiction. Overall, the miners' accusation of bias and indeed active hostility in the print and television coverage was justified. 75 per cent of national dailies and 84 per cent of Sunday newspapers were controlled by a conservative pro-Thatcher oligarchy of three press barons, and the government had close personal relations with many Fleet Street editors (Adeny and Lloyd 1986, 240-45). On television, sporadic attempts at "balance" could not compensate for the ongoing news program identification of picketing miners with violence, the use of selectively loaded language, and the inadequate contextualization provided for reported events (Fountain 1985, 131), let alone for the internalised prejudices of the higher-echelon career administrators in the state-controlled media institutions. But, as an analysis of tv news during the strike concluded, "while the public may have all watched the same news they didn't all see it in the same way" (cit. Negrine 1989, 17), and that part of public opinion opposed to the miners cannot simply be attributed to press distortion. Nor was national television immune to cooptation by the miners. NUM president, Arthur Scargill took advantage of the charismatic authority that made him a magnet for journalists to broadcast the strikers' arguments and to call for pickets and support from other unions. Until the bitterness of the last wintery months of the strike, the miners themselves recognised differences between BBC news, the most egregious offender, and Channel Four news. On all four channels, the news was supplemented by other kinds of programming. Alan Fountain, Commissioning Editor for Independent Film at Channel Four (who commissioned several pro-miners programs) listed the "loose categories" of these: "a range of current affairs programmes"; "a broad band of apparently 'lighter' coverage"; "regional coverage by ITV companies supplementing the national network"; "various one-off documentaries made from a clearly supportive class perspective, such as Chris Curling's The Last Pit in the Rhondda and Ken Loach's Which Side Are You On?" [which in fact was never broadcast]; and "programmes which, to some extent, have been made with the collaboration of their participants, Taking Liberties, Coal Not Dole, Notts Women Strike Back, and Get It Shown" (1985, 130-31).

<5. In 1984, almost nine thousand miners were arrested, and two miners killed on picket lines (Benyon 1985, 4). See Fine and Millar, eds., (1985) and especially Green (1990) for detailed investigation of the different forms of state offensive against the miners and the erosion of the independence of the judiciary, of democratic accountability, and civil liberties generally.

<6. An introduction to this may be found in Macpherson 1980. Hogenkamp 1986 surveys independent left filmmaking in the 1930s, the Workers' Film and Photo League and other workers' film groups.

<7. Created in the 1981 Broadcasting Act, Channel Four is a non-profit company, owned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, a government-appointed body. It is financed by subscriptions from the fifteen regional ITV companies that receive its programs and which sell advertising time between them. Unlike other television stations in Britain, it commissions programs rather than producing them itself. Since the 1992 Broadcasting Act, Channel Four has itself sold advertising time, in direct competition with other ITV companies.

<8. Eventually the group also included Nottingham Video Project, Community Video Workshop (Cardiff), Amber Films, Films At Work (London), Birmingham Film & Video Workshop, Active Image (Sheffield), and Open Eye Film and Video Workshop (Liverpool). See Harvey, S. 1984 for an interview with members of Platform Films that took place just before the Campaign Tape project began.

<9. As well as being important in so many other ways, the role of women in the strike was crucial in terms of media contestation, because in the previous strikes the BBC had made shameless propaganda use of images of women opposed to the strike; thus, Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures and many similar organisations were formed because of anger at the way in which the media portrayed "women and miners' wives in particular, as the victims of the irresponsible action taken by the NUM" (Stead 1987, 127).

<10. The putative "simple form of realism" of this mode was summarised by Alan Lovell as "the subject--oppression of one kind or another; the structure--talking heads interspersed with vaguely illustrative material; presentation--low key and undramatic" (1990, 104).

<11. The classic sociological account of miners' communities, Coal Is Our Life (Dennis et al. 1956) emphasises the local nature of mining knowledge and experience, with skills often not transferable from pit to pit, let alone village to village, and also the way the shared misfortunes of mining disasters binds miners to their home towns and home collieries.

<12. Not to be excepted here is the commercial British cinema of the 1980s which failed to address class issues. Ken Loach has recognised its failure to "put on the screen the appalling cost in human misery that Thatcherite policies had wrought on everybody" (cit. Fuller 1993, 59). This new cinema was criticised avant la lettre by Alan Fountain as the creation "of a cinema in Britain of a Fassbinder, Bertolucci or Truffaut. We have never had such a cinema in Britain, and we don't want such a cinema; we don't want this tacky glamour of the metropolitan EEC bourgeoisie" (cit. Petley 1989, 7). For a critique of this cinema as a symptom, rather than an analysis of Thatcherism, see Walsh 1993. A notable exception is the somewhat later, Cwm Hyfryd (Paul Turner, 1992), a feature-film investigation of the social costs of the pit closures and Thatcherism generally.

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