Who controls the past controls the future: the foreword to Inside Cowley
Reviews of his booksScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
LAST MONTH we carried a review of Alan Thornett's forthcoming book Inside Cowley, which will be published on January 8. In this issue we reprint the foreword that Ken Loach has written to the book.
We do so not only because we want to persuade our readers to buy the book, but because Loach's words deserve reprinting in their own right.
In the last weeks the Foreign Office has withdrawn its offer to print a biography of Loach in his own words as a representative of the British film industry. This is perhaps no surprise when these words pointed out Loach's twin struggle against the evils of stalinism and social democracy!
What the Foreign Office discards we are happy to publish. "WHO CONTROLS the past controls the Ere The controls the present FARTE NE SCA crests, that bose wbo an find work stocid identify with their employer, thai all political parties, especially "New Labour", support Business.
The market is omnipotent and it will work, or can be made to work, for the benefit of all. Those who control the present, the large industrial companies and their political hacks, tell us so.
History is written to prove this. Revolutions lead to tyranny. Strikes are provoked by militants and end in violence. Wars of liberation are fought by terrorists. Until their leaders do as they are told, when they are released from prison and become statesnow men.
As I write, it is the anniversary of Russia's October Revolution. The sound-bite histories on the news programmes reduce that huge event to a mere blip in the progress of "freedom".
French lorry drivers are on strike. We are told nothing of its cause, nor is there any suggestion that drivers across Europe may face similar problems and might show solidarity with the strike. The only issue is that "our" lorries might be stranded.
So, on a grander scale, the Spanish Civil War was seen by Labour politicians as making difficulties for British shipping.
It was in this tradition that Alan Thornett was described as a "mole" by the Daily Mail for his efforts as a union activist. An unrepresentative group of strike-breakers were congratulated by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Fortunately, there are those who will swim against the tide. The workers' struggle has always produced those who will lead it, and those who will record it. Alan Thornett has done both.
I first met Alan in the late 1960s, at meetings of the Socialist Labou League (SLL). After a long period of Conservative government, it had become apparent that Wilson's Labour Party would make no significant Shanges Maur people were looking for a party that Ford itse the sontemporary situation in Je gi: a a tistorial process and provide a icaderstip for starent struggles. The SLL mas good on the former but moefully inade. quare on the latter.
Nevertheless, for a few rears there was a strong sense of what was possible There was an education in political history that marked all those who took part.
Clarity
Amongst the groups who were most active were car workers from British Leyland, in particular from Cowley in Oxford. Alan was prominent in this company. A darkhaired, compact figure, he spoke to the point with clarity and precision. the speaker intends. bour. will last.
It should be in the library and on the reading He had, and has, that ability often denied the top. to academics and intellectuals, of an eloquence that comes from clear thinking and simple language. An argument is built up from a concrete situation that is immediately recognisable, and the audience is taken, step by irrefutable step, to the conclusion In his book, Alan has captured the details of the industrial struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. It shows how we came to exchange the possibility of secure jobs for casual laThat in itself is shown to illustrate the fundamental flaw that runs through society like a geological fault line: the essential, undying and inevitable conflict between employers and those who sell their labour.
It is a conflict fought out in thousands of workplaces day after day, on building sites, in dockyards, mines and on the factory floor, at airports, on railways, even in broadcasting studios and on newspapers.
Wherever a product is made or transported, or a service provided, someone is thinking about cutting labour costs and someone else is wondering how long this job The detail of that struggle, the day-to-day step forward or back, the changing balance of forces, the tactical ingenuity, the weaknesses and strengths of comrades and adversaries, all this can rarely have been captured with such precision as in this story. Socialist Dulloo "That's why I'm a socialist. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have struggled all my life for socialism.
"How do we get it? Now the point is, it's connected with the other question: How does the working class develop its consciousness? When it is in struggle trying to defend its conditions, improve its conditions and therefore pit itself against the employers and the government.
"How do you achieve socialism? It seems to me that if you don't have a policy in which you can confront the evils of capitalism, which is mass unemployment, falling standards of living, wars and so on ... if you haven't got policies that can confront capitalism and you don't follow those policies and fight every day to defend the working class, then there's no way that you're going to achieve socialism, because it's in the course of that fight that you're going to create from the working class the people that can achieve socialism.
"And if they are continually sold out and continually dispersed and they're never allowed to unite, never allowed to get at the main enemy, never allowed to get at the government, never allowed to seriously get at the employers, then you can't create the conditions in which you can end capitalism and establish socialism."
However the economies of the world evolve, and the fashionable jargon of politics changes, this underlying truth remains.
INSIDE COWLEY