The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

4 Comments

  1. Lucy McGough
    April 28, 2012 @ 9:02 am

    I like your posts because they make me think about things in a different way. (When I do read a newspaper it's normally the Daily Telegraph.)

    Reply

  2. Nick
    April 28, 2012 @ 9:23 am

    This is well written.

    Coming from South Wales, I've always had an awareness of the miner's strike though it happened a few years before I was born.

    Much of the writing I've found on the strike focuses understandably on the social damage wrought. I'd like to know what you wish the government had done?

    Do you think they have kept every working mine open? Alternatively, should they have gradually scaled down mining operations, keeping profitable ones open while spending generously on retraining for workers and regeneration for the mining areas?

    I've been looking at articles on the mining industry in other European countries. I know that the Dutch closed their mines in the 1960s, and that the French closed theirs in 2004. (Apparently, the miners made redundant keep receiving 85% of their salary until they're 45 and then 80% until retirement age). In Germany they're being forced by the European Commission to end public subsidy to the industry and Angela Merkel has negotiated a deadline of 2018.

    Given this, is it the 'inevitability' of mine closure that you disagree with, or just the manner in which the mines were shut down so quickly and callously?

    Reply

  3. Roobin
    May 2, 2012 @ 8:21 am

    Thatcher didn't shut the mines because they were unprofitable, large-scale mining has been subsidised for almost a century. There is several hundred years worth of coal left under the UK, should anyone want to mine it. She closed the mines as a culmination of a plan to destroy trade union organisation and influence – it was not a neutral economic calculation but an act of class war.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Plan

    Reply

  4. Jack Graham
    May 2, 2012 @ 10:56 am

    That's just what I was going to get around to saying. More or less. 🙂

    Reply

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