Nature's Evil

The strike of 1842 in Great Britain was one of the first such occurrences in history – and one of the largest. The action started among the miners and spread to the textile workers. Half a million workers joined in the action – one in every two workers. The strike was broken by force: the authorities used arms against the strikers, and 1,500 of them were arrested. In 1844, 40,000 coal miners again went on strike, leaving Newcastle without coal. These strikes played a pivotal role in the development of the Chartist movement – the organised struggle by miners and industrial workers for democratic rights. In 1908, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain won the right to an eight-hour working day for all underground workers. 7

As mines went deeper, they became more dangerous. In 1896 the roof of the Twin Shaft Colliery in Pittston, Pennsylvania, caved in, with the loss of fifty-eight workers, most of them recent immigrants. The following year the colliers at the Pennsylvania mine of Lattimer, also migrants from Eastern Europe, went on strike. The local sheriff gave the order to open fire and nineteen miners were killed. These events strengthened the United Mine Workers, the most important organisation of its kind in America. In 1902, American miners went on strike for six months. In 1905, miners’ strikes stopped production in the Ruhr Basin in the German Empire and the Donetsk Basin in the Russian Empire. In 1906, there was a disaster in the Courrières coal mine in France, when more than a thousand miners died in an explosion; a general strike followed in Paris. The greatest disaster of all happened in 1942 in the Benxihu mine in China, which killed 1,500 people.

The Mitchell thesis

The political scientist Timothy Mitchell sees the industrial reliance on coal as the key to understanding the social-democratic movement which defined the politics of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. There were four factors involved in the miners’ active role in the class struggle, and these arose from the natural characteristics of coal. 8 Seams of coal are found near the surface only in a small number of coalfields. The labour-intensive task of extraction concentrates the workers round the mine. The difficulty of transporting coal brings ancillary trades close to the mines, thus increasing the concentration of the proletariat. The nature of the work in the mines fosters a sense of solidarity and autonomy among the workers. In his remarkable book Carbon Democracy , Mitchell asserts that the different forms of fossil fuel have different political characteristics. The energy switch from coal to oil determined the political switch from social democracy to neoliberalism. Mitchell’s empirical examples are limited to Great Britain and the Middle East; his conclusions need to be tested in Eastern Europe, Russia and China and on a broader range of different kinds of carbon fuel – coal, oil, gas and shale.

Miners were the first to call national strikes, but revolutions happened far away from them, in the capital cities. Still, the miners’ power to block coal supplies brought to a halt railways, power stations and arms factories. In 1926, the British Trades Union Congress called a general strike in which 1 million miners stopped work. Nevertheless, coal prices were falling, leading to redundancies and unemployment. The Second World War increased the demand for all kinds of raw material; then there was a new slump. One of the reasons for both world wars was the conflict over the Ruhr Basin – a gigantic cluster of coal mines and industrial towns in the border region between France and Germany. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the Ruhr was put under international control, but in 1923 it was again occupied by French troops. Without raw materials German industry ground to a halt; the country was afflicted with hyperinflation. In 1936, Nazi troops occupied part of the Ruhr: thus the new war began. At the end of the war France nationalised its coal industry, including the occupied Ruhr. In 1951, thanks to an initiative by Jean Monnet, the éminence grise of European integration, the French government proposed to create a European Coal and Steel Community. In order to make war ‘not merely unthinkable but materially impossible’, the new body took direct control over the Ruhr. Realising Keynes’s old ideas in the long-suffering centre of European industry, this transnational organisation took responsibility for raw materials, leaving ready-made goods to private or national players. The Coal and Steel Community originally had six member countries; then it turned into the Common Market and then into the European Union. The Ruhr Basin was the cradle of new post-war Europe, and joint control over raw materials became the primary purpose and justification of the Union. 9 The age of oil has changed this perspective.