[Above: The Daily Scum, front page, 1986.]
Charlie Bond
Social and Cultural Analysis PhD Program
Concordia University
[Above: Neil https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/2Rc7PLK2JWGSndP5qdk8sXh/andrew-neil]
“Before Wapping”, I explained recently to a group of young journalists, “if any of you had done this” – I pressed a letter at random on the computer keyboard – “the print workers would have walked off the job and the paper wouldn’t come out.” They looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and incredulity, not sure if I was making it up or taking them for a ride. The proposition was so ludicrous that there are times I wonder myself if it was true. But it was.
– Andrew Neil, former editor of The Sunday Times (quoted in The Guardian, 15 January 2006).
To be fair to our young journalists, who hasn’t looked at Andrew Neil with a “mixture of incomprehension and incredulity”? “Is He Making It Up” and “Is He Taking Us For A Ride” name two very important sites of the British brain, for which Neil’s face triggers a dramatic increase of activity.
What Neil finds “ludicrous” is what we might call the ‘haptics’ of class struggle, that is, how labour and capital discipline one another through touch. This discipline regulates whose fingers may handle what and at what speeds, as well as the precise manners in which raw material, instruments of labour, products of labour, and other bodies may or may not be touched. Insofar as capital must organise a production process and its labour force – Marx’s term is “real subsumption” – for its own ends, every production process involves some such discipline. And, insofar as both labour and capital may appeal to law as a means with which to discipline the reach of the other – one thinks of Marx’s famous chapter ‘The Working Day’ in Capital Volume I – a haptics of class struggle is always contoured by the state and its apparatus of repression.
In what follows, I trace a haptics of class struggle during the so-called “Wapping Dispute” 1986, in which almost six thousand striking printers were dismissed by Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Times, Sunday Times, News of the World, and Sun newspapers. These haptics became massively pressurised following two Acts of Parliament, the 1982 Employment Act and the 1984 Trade Union Act. Under this legal pressure, striking printers went without jobs and pay for thirteen months, while their unions faced bankruptcy and court action. Having begun in January 1986, the strike collapsed in February the following year. The defeat of the heavily unionised printers signalled capital’s definitive circumvention of a printer’s ‘touch’ and its mobilisation as a force for resistance.
*
“There was the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, Reuters, the Sun, the Mail, […] all had beautiful offices and had a facade, real places to be proud of. But behind that, they were just factories” (Kyriacou and Rosenberg, 2014: 00:29).
From the early 20th century to the 1980s, the vast majority of British newspapers were produced by ‘hot-metal printing’, a highly skilled and physically demanding trade. The process would begin at a linotype machine – imagine a massive typewriter but, instead of letters stamped with ink, its keyboard releases brass matrices. The surface of each matrice is engraved with the negative of a letter, and each letter corresponds to one of the linotype machine’s keys. As a printer types up a line of a journalist’s copy, the matrices assemble into a line. When several lines have been typed, they fall into a column. The printer then slides the column into the linotype’s casting machine. Here, molten hot hardens and cools around the matrices, forming a metal cast of, quite literally, a ‘line o’ type’.1 The lines are then released from the casting machine, proofread, and assembled into blocks of text within a page-shaped, metal frame called a ‘chase’. The printer responsible for assembling the lines in a chase is known as a ‘compositor’.
Above: Printers typing on linotype machines [still from Loeb Weiss, 1980: 05-26]
Below: Brass matrices, stamped with the (random) letters, ‘aaonshrrdlm’. [still, Loeb Weiss, 05:36]
Above: A compositor assembles lines within a chase [still, Loeb Weiss, 09:05]
A compositor worked in what was known as the ‘composing room’. This was one of the few spaces in which editorial and printing staff met face-to-face. Here, editors worked with compositors to fit stories and headlines into the chase. Once the page’s composition was agreed, a mould would be made through pressing a thick sheet of card (known as a ‘flong’) down upon the lines within the chase. The flong, in turn, would then function as a mould to produce a lead ‘stereotype’. The stereotype is then fit to an enormous rolling machine and inked. Thousands of sheets of paper are fed into a roller opposite the stereotype and, as they spin, the inked stereotype impresses its text onto the paper. This process is repeated until thousands of newspapers have been printed.
Above: A printer removes a ‘flong’. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_(printing)]
Above: A flong emerges as a lead stereotype. [https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/gallery/2016/nov/18/making-headlines-printing-the-guardian-newspaper-1921-1987-in-picures]
Below: Printers fit stereotypes to the rollers, with the still unprinted paper just opposite. [https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/gallery/2016/nov/18/making-headlines-printing-the-guardian-newspaper-1921-1987-in-picures]
Above: A compositor (left) and editors (right) at the composing stone. [https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/gallery/2016/nov/18/making-headlines-printing-the-guardian-newspaper-1921-1987-in-picures]
Look closely at this photo above. We have a compositor and three editors. As Andrew Neil recalls in the excerpt with which we opened, editors were absolutely not allowed to touch the keys of a linotype machine, and neither were they allowed to touch the lines assembled within a chase on a special table, known as ‘a stone’. For what reasons, though, was touch so carefully regulated? Consider, on this note, journalist Elizabeth Grice’s description of the composing room at the Sunday Times in the 1970s:
Standing on the top of the steps leading down to the composing room floor of The Sunday Times, you got an idea of its primitive complexity. Banks of linos yattered away in the distance. Aproned compositors, working at lines of “stone” (actually metal) tables, tweezered slugs of type in and out of the formes. Shirt-sleeved stone subs darted about with galley proofs and page plans. Pages were locked up and rolled away on heavy trolleys. And that was just one room in the prodigious endeavour that was a newspaper office (Grice 2015: 62).
A prodigious endeavour. As we have now sketched, hot metal printing was an exceptionally technical operation, one that demanded an accordingly skilled labour force. Recall how much labour is expended, and indeed how much skill is involved, for the production of printing a single page – now scale that up to literally millions of pages. (At peak circulation, printers at The Sun produced over three million copies of the paper every day (Kyriacou and Rosenberg, 2014: 27:42-28:07). Furthermore, it took six years for printers to complete their training and receive their ‘journeyman’s papers’ that certified their skill in the trade as, for example, a ‘machine minder’, a ‘finisher’, a ‘compositor’, or a ‘reader’. As this list of different positions among a printing floor implies, printers were required to work within the highly complex, ‘just-in-time’ division of labour that Grice recalls above.
Consider now Marx’s description of one such division, “In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages” (Marx 1976: 548). This “incorporation”, however, must be forced. The following excerpt of Marx’s is worth quoting at length:
[…] it is the task of the capitalist to see to it when purchasing means of production that their use-values have no more than the average quality needed to manufacture the product. This applies both to raw materials and to machinery, etc. They must all function with average quality and not present labour, the living factor, with any abnormal obstacles.[…] The capitalist must attend to all these things. Even beyond that, however, if the value of constant capital is not to be eroded, it must as far as possible be consumed productively and not squandered […] In part this depends on the workers themselves, and it is here that the supervisory responsibility of the capitalist enters […] He must also see to it that the work is performed in an orderly and methodical fashion and that the use-value he has in mind actually emerges successfully at the end of the process. At this point too the capitalist’s ability to supervise and enforce discipline is vital. Lastly, he must make sure that the process of production is not interrupted or disturbed and that it really does proceed to the creation of the product within the time allowed for by the particular labour process and its objective requirements. (Ibid. 985-986)
In this light, the division of labour to which a worker is riveted harbours a contradiction. On the one hand, the deepening complexity of the labour process transforms the worker into its “appendage”, but on the other, capital must “really subsume” this process, it must ceaselessly monitor and supervise it insofar as any waste, squandering, stoppage, or disturbance may induce its breakdown. As such, the factory multiples the sites of labour only to the extent that each site now harbours the possibility of slowdown and resistance. Capital’s disciplining of labour thereby becomes the primary means with which to pre-empt the latter’s foot-dragging or, in Marx’s words, “pilfering of minutes” (Ibid. 352). It is the means, in short, with which to ensure labour’s absolutely “lifeless incorporation” with the production process.
It is in this sense that touch operates as a site of class struggle. Take, for example, the length of a printer’s working day. “We were supposed to get off at half past seven,” recalls Sun compositor, Terry Smith, “for the fifteen years I was there, I think we only did it once” (Kyriacou and Rosenberg, 2014: 04:59). His colleague shares the following:
I would make up the story and I would say to him [the sub-editor] I need six lines cut. He would look at the galley proof and he would say “lose that last paragraph” or he might say “take this word off here” and “do this” – that was that and the story would fit. The page would then be tightened into a spring loaded chase, wheeled on a trolley to a man who would proof it on a press, and it would then go to the reader, they would check that. And according to how late the page was, the head printer would be hovering in the background and, sometimes, it was a bit late, he would just send the page through anyway before last minute corrections had been done. There was always friction between the head-sub editor and the head printer over this. In other words, sometimes the story would just trail off half way and you were left wondering who won the football match or whatever. There was always a bit of friction during the days of hot metal (Ibid. 24:04).
The “friction” here is located between the demands of the editors and the demands of the printers, or between capital and labour respectively. The former, to return to Marx, has a “use-value in mind” that must “actually emerge at the end of the process” which, in this case, is an impeccably composed newspaper that it can sell for a profit. The latter, meanwhile, demands to leave the printing floor at the agreed upon hour. If that involves the sacrifice of certain pieces of copy, or the integrity of the newspaper’s use-value, so be it. What we have, then, is an instance in which the editors demand the printers’ ‘finishing touch’ well past closing time, at the very same moment that, owing to the lateness of the hour, printers feel editors may no longer command the right to discipline and supervise the printing process. The length of the working day subsequently materialises at the level of touch, wherein capital demands printers’ continued contact with the page, while the printers’ demand to leave at the agreed hour. Marx supplies a brilliant ventriloquism of labour’s complaint to capital:
‘You are constantly preaching to me the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence”. Very well! Like a sensible, thrifty owner of property I will husband my sole wealth, my labour-power, and abstain from wasting it foolishly. Every day I will spend, set in motion, transfer into labour only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour, I lose in the substance of labour. Using my labour and despoiling it are quite different things […] You pay me for one day’s labour-power, while you use three days of it. That is against our contract and the law of commodity exchange. I therefore demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A., and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast. What seems to throb there is my own heartbeat. I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity’ (Marx, 1976: 342).
The dialogue is not a story of personal complaint – ‘you want me to stay and work, but I want to leave’. Rather, it is an objective antagonism into which labour is sewn, an antagonism supplied not by the personalities of a ‘greedy’ capitalist or ‘lazy’ worker, but by the capital’s necessary subsumption of the labour process. Marx again: “The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist” (Ibid. 343). The point serves as a lesson regarding capitalist labour processes more generally:
The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and, where possible, to make two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class (Ibid. 344, my emphasis).
We may now return to the composing room, in which the friction between capital and labour, or more specifically, editors and printers, is once more present in the form of touch. As Ian Blunt, former sub-editor at the Sun explains,
Quite a lot of my job with printers was known as ‘stone subbing’. The stone was a curious sort of table where, once the words had been turned into metal and were being put into the page, the printer was on one side and there would be a sub editor on the other side. The sub editor isn’t allowed to touch any of the metal (Ibid. 24:21).
An editor’s touching of the type may be read to represent a replacement of the printers’ labour. Indeed, type would pass through every hand on the printing room floor – from the linotype operators to the compositors, then from the readers to the finishers. It was always on the move, always being formed and reformed; now borne in one impression, now borne in another; here cast by this hand, there cast by that. An editor’s touching of the type, however, represented capital’s dispensing of those whose hands it employed. Where an editor physically meddles with the type, it capital implies that it may do labour’s job all by itself, and that it may dispense, in other words, with the particular skill required for the task of composition. This, in turn, implies the regard with which capital holds labour – it is potentially superfluous. For this reason, the fact that printers maintained a hard boundary between their own touch and that of an editor’s is neither curious nor arbitrary. It is not, as Neil implies, simply an arcane or backwards tradition. Rather, by insisting that touch was the exclusive jurisdiction of labour, printers were able to assert the necessity of their skill against any attempt of capital’s to render them a superfluous and “lifeless mechanism”. Let us now turn to the way in which printers’ asserted this resistance.
[https://flashbak.com/the-sun-at-40-when-arthur-scargill-was-mein-fuhrer-16468/]
The image on the left is a copy of the Sun’s front page on the 15th May, 1984 (by which time the newspaper was one of the most popular in Britain, selling over three million copies a day). Two months prior marked the beginning of the miner’s strike, one of the most violent and drawn out repressions of labour in modern UK history. The strike had been led by the National Union of Mineworkers, of which Arthur Scargill was president. In solidarity with the miners, printers at the Sun, who were also very tightly unionised, refused to ‘handle’ the image and headline submitted by the paper’s editors. In the words of one printer who was working at the Sun on May 15th:
The picture came through John Brown of the National Geographic Association and he refused to touch it […] Arthur [Scargill] was waving to someone – there was no salute. A huge shock wave went through the offices when we stopped the page. We just would not set that headline […] It made us all feel incredibly powerful. I felt great. I went into the NGA art department and mocked up what front page the editor wanted, just to see what it would have looked like (Ollie Duke, quoted in Flashbak 2012).
That mock-up is what you see on the right.
Prior to successive pieces of legislation introduced by the Thatcher government – of which we will speak more later – trade unions possessed comparatively extensive rights, enshrined in law. The “Trade Union and Labour Relations Act” of 1974 and the “Employment Protection Act” of 1975 guaranteed, for example, the right to legal immunity for unions during industrial disputes, to primary strike action, and to secondary strike action. At this point in time, furthermore, closed shop unions (where employers may only hire union members) were perfectly legal. All three principal print unions; the National Graphical Association (NGA), the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW), ran closed shops. In addition, much of the mining industry, albeit unofficially, was also effectively a closed shop, such that the employment of non-unionised labour would have led to a mass walkout of mineworkers (Adeney and Lloyd, 1988:267).
The effect of closed shop policy and the legislation of 1974 and 1975 meant that unionised printers had considerable legal protection when it came to withdrawing their labour. When, therefore, printers at the Sun “refused to handle” the picture and headline of Scargill, they enacted the legal rights of labour at the level of touch. This is to offer a kind of countervailing force against what we saw Marx describe as the “disciplinary” function of capital. In mobilising this force, the printers engaged in a ‘haptics of struggle’, one in which capital’s demand for an uninterrupted work process is met with labour’s deliberate stoppage.
I want now to examine how the printers’ struggle against capital’s disciplinary function lost its legal backing across the 1980s. Indeed, just a handful of months after the publication of the Sun’s front page, a high court judge ruled that the miners’ strike was illegal. Crucially, it had been declared illegal in virtue of the Thatcher government’s legislation, “The Trade Union Act”, which became enshrined as law in July 1984. Notably, the Act required that all trade unions hold a secret ballot before calling a strike. In the case of the miner’s strike, however, no such ballot had occurred. With the strike subsequently declared illegal, striking miners and their dependents were left unable to claim state benefits, as well as the right to unfair dismissal.
In addition, a prior piece of legislation, namely the Employment Act of 1982, had already placed a number of severe restrictions on the rights of trade unions. It required, for example, that a “closed shop” agreement must be approved by 80% of union membership, as well as considerably enlarging the amount of money that may be awarded in compensation to those who are unlawfully fired for not belonging to a trade union in a closed shop. As a result, union finances were significantly weakened. The Act also restricted lawful picketing to an employee’s place of work, which essentially forbade solidarity action, even by workers of the same company at different workplaces (News International Dispute, 2011). Finally, the Act removed unions’ immunity from tort cases. This means that, if a tort were brought against a trade union, and if, moreover, the union lost, it is compelled to pay (often very significant) damages.
It is within this legal milieu that the Wapping Dispute unfolded. The Dispute began after then-and-now Sun owner, Rupert Murdoch, planned to introduce automated technology into the production process. Note, Murdoch acquired the Sun and News of the World in 1969, before acquiring the Times and Sunday Times in 1981. By the time of Dispute in 1986, therefore, Murdoch owned half of all major national newspapers in the UK).2 Note too that when Murdoch originally purchased the Sun, he promised printers’ unions that there would be fewer redundancies than any other buyer’s takeover. He also promised to continue to support the Labour Party. As a consequence, the unions supported Murdoch’s offer in the 1960s and he successfully acquired the paper (Stokes, 2013).
By the 1980s however, Murdoch’s papers were time and time again championing Thatcher’s conservative government and its union-breaking politics. (See above: Sun front page, June 9th, 1983, election day).
Murdoch was particularly interested in digitising the printing process, having estimated that, by switching from hot metal, he could save an estimated £84 million a year (Kelly, 2001). Crucially, digitisation meant a system of “direct input”, that is, one in which journalists directly type their copy on screen. Also known as “single stroke”, this system dispenses with the ‘double input’ of hot metal – in which a journalist first writes copy, then for a printer type it out at a linotype machine. As such, Murdoch’s intention to digitise the production of his newspapers functioned to circumvent the printers’ touch and, with it, the friction that printers were able to exert against capital. Digitisation, in this light, was not about technology – whatever that shibboleth means – but rather cheapening labour costs.
Negotiations between management and the printers’ unions began in 1981, the former needing members of the latter to work among a new printing site, a few kilometres east of Fleet Street. After negotiations broke down in 1984, Murdoch announced plans for a new afternoon newspaper, the so-called London Post, early the following year. The Post, claimed Murdoch, was going to be printed at a purpose built site in Wapping, east London, at the cost of $140 million. (Thomas, 1986) Precisely what was being installed, however, was not clear – inside visits were refused, and the construction site was protected by barbed wire fence. Hence the moniker, ‘Fortress Wapping’.
In October 1985, Murdoch’s management team agreed to resume negotiations, only to present a list of demands which included; a drastic cutting of wages, no union recognition, no “closed shop”, complete flexibility of working, and the company’s right to manage the production process without consultation of its workers (Workers’ Liberty, 2011). The demands were, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly rejected by union membership. As per the legal advice that Murdoch received,
If a moment came when it was necessary to dispense with the present workforce at [Times Newspapers Ltd] and [News Group Newspapers], the cheapest way of doing so would be to dismiss employees while participating in a strike or other industrial action […] The idea is to employees in the net as possible, and it seems likely that will be done best if the dismissals take place at the weekend […] (Farrer & Co, quoted in Ewing and Napier, 1986: 301-304).
Which was, in short, exactly what Murdoch did. The printers announced a strike in January 1986 but, owing to the 1982 Employment Act, the strike gave Murdoch the legal grounds with which to dismiss the 5500 striking printers at little expense. In what was the largest mass sacking by any UK employer at the time, printers were immediately given their six months’ notice of dismissal (Cusick, 1993).
Under the 1982 Act, striking printers lost both their entitlements to claim unfair dismissal and to receive redundancy compensation (Ewing and Napier, 291). Note too that there was, in fact, no plan to ever produce the purportedly new, afternoon paper, The London Post. Rather, Murdoch invented the title as a ploy with which to convince the printers’ unions that titles including the News of the Word, the Sun, the Times, and Sunday Times, would remain based in Fleet Street, and produced using the hot metal process. As Brenda Dean, then president of the SOGAT union described just days before the strike, “I rather got the feeling the company did not want a settlement” (Brenda Dean, quoted in Liz Ross, 2006).
Shortly after declaring the strike, the printers’ unions organised a form of secondary solidarity action known as ‘blacking’, which essentially functions as a kind of boycott. As Ewing explains,
[…] the unions issued “blacking” instructions to members not to handle News International titles. SOGAT, for example, which recruits at newspaper wholesalers, issued an instruction on 25 January to its members at wholesale depots not to handle the newspapers in question (Ewing and Napier, 292).
Observe once more the highly charged nature of touch here. The unions requested that members – who worked at the depots out of which newspapers were distributed – refuse to “handle” News International titles, such as the News of the World and the Sun. In this instance, where the printers’ own touch had been effectively circumvented by Murdoch, they now displaced it, gave its power over to a different pair of hands, with their resistance now operating in and through the touch of others.
Under the Acts of 1982 and 1984 though, for secondary action like “blacking” to be legal, all persons involved must first be balloted. The fact that a ballot has been held in respect of the 5500 strikers did not authorise this secondary action: those called upon to take such action had also to be balloted (Ibid. 293). As a result, News International obtained an injunction against the printers’ unions just a few weeks after the strike had been called, one in which union members at wholesale depots, for example, were legally required to handle copies of News of the World and the Sun. In addition, after SOGAT failed to comply with the injunction and withdraw its blacking instructions, the union was found in contempt of court, fined £250,000, and had its assets seized (Ibid. 295).
News International obtained a further injunction against the printers’ unions, one that demanded them to lift their instruction to members not to cross the picket lines at Wapping. This was particularly significant with regards to unionised delivery drivers. When, for example, members at British Rail expressed sympathy with the striking printers and considered blacking Murdoch’s papers – essentially dis-enabling their distribution up and down the country – Murdoch hired delivery drivers from the private company, TNT. Where these drivers belonged to The Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), they were nonetheless legally obliged to cross the printers’ picket line and load newspapers into their vehicles. Once again, the drivers were involved in secondary action but had not been balloted, leaving them with no legal grounds to “black” Murdoch’s titles. In the face of an enormous court fine, the TGWU subsequently instructed its drivers to cross the printers’ picket (Workers Liberty, 2011). What we have here, then, is a response to the printers’ attempt to displace the power of their own touch and, in solidarity, request that other unions refuse to handle News International titles in their name. The drivers’ handling of the papers, in this sense, was forced by law.
Finally, the Employment Act and the Trade Unions Act served to remove the legal immunity from printers that picketed outside of Wapping. Indeed, workers and trade unions only had legal immunity for picketing outside their own place of work or the place at which they were employed before being dismissed. For the printers in the Wapping dispute this meant the Fleet Street locations exclusively, given that they were never employed at Wapping (Ewing and Napier, 294). In this light, the question of where printers were able to politicise touch is crucial. Though they had legal grounds to organise a picket on Fleet Street, they were neither legally entitled to erect a picket nor request others to refuse to handle News International titles at Wapping.
With unions and their members financially devastated after thirteen months of striking, the printers’ agreed to call off the strike. We should, by way of conclusion, observe here the extraordinarily violent ‘touch’ of the police present at Wapping.
There was a virtual police state around Wapping. Surrounding streets were often locked down, closed except to the scab trucks. And the police were routinely violent against the demonstrators and picketers. More than 1,000 were arrested, and hundreds were injured. Such violence is seared in the memory of Barry Fitzpatrick, a SOGAT official. “The police would wait until the early hours of the morning, when most people had gone … With no regard to safety, officers on horseback would charge people.” Then, as the police finished their shifts, “they would jubilantly wave their overtime pay packets at us, along with their copies of the Sun” (Liz Ross, 2006).
Another printer involved in the strike recalls the following,
As soon as the pickets became serious, the police tactics became clear – to ensure that the papers were distributed at any cost. But the violence of the police was something I had never experienced. The mounted police rode at a group of marchers which included children. Away from the main roads and cameras, attacks against individuals were as vicious as anything I had ever seen (Peter Taaffe, 2016).
The brutality with which the police “handled” the striking printers was very much supported by the Thatcher government. When a question regarding the police brutality Wapping was put to her in the House of Commons, Thatcher replied, “Fleet Street employers are fully entitled to use all legal remedies” (Quoted in Khabaz, 2000: 173). As the The Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers reported in September 1987, apropos of these ‘remedies’:
When one matches the methods used at Wapping with Orgreave [a brutal police repression of miners operation] in 1984, and recalls Mrs Thatcher’s call to defeat ‘the enemy within’, the aim of the authorities seems to be clear: to defeat industrial protest at all costs, and thereby to give employers the licence to act as they please (Emmerson and Shamash, 1987).
The implication is clear: refuse to handle the commodities that capital needs in order to accumulate, then prepare for the police to handle you in whatever way they please.
Within but a few years following the Wapping Dispute, nearly all the national British newspapers had abandoned Fleet Street to relocate in east London, where they similarly re-organised from “double stroke” hot metal to “direct input”, digital practices (Laver, 1986). There was, therefore, no rival papers at which the now jobless printers could find work, and many were forced to leave the industry for good. As one documentary, surveying the end of hot metal at the New York Times, concludes,
Now back to the computer. When needed, a touch of a key returns it to the editor, it is then changed to the desired column width, style, size of type and hyphenation, followed by further keyboarding of headlines and bylines. Inside, a web of components and wiring does the work of 140 linotypes […] this productivity leap from fourteen to a thousand lines a minute is made possible several flaws above by a battery of computers […] there are switches and buttons, their touch bring us into an ever advancing world of automation, computerisation, and programmed electron flow (Loeb Weiss, 1980: 23:19).
Their touch. The switch from hot metal printing was not, in this light, simply the evolution of one kind of technology into another. Rather, it was a deliberate and violent circumvention of a highly skilled and politicised form of touch. As the above excerpt suggests, it now appears that touch no longer belongs to those operating the technology. Rather, touch seems to belong to electronic buttons and switches themselves – as though capital had finally completed labour’s incorporation with the “lifeless mechanism” of the production process, as though it had finally replaced labour’s touch with its own. This is the “negative side” of machinery deployed within a capitalist form. And the positive? That lies in flipping machinery’s social form on its head. Let us end, on this point, with a quotation from Marx’s chapter in Capital Volume I, ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’:
We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of modern industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous, we have seen, too, how this antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, modern industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers (Marx, 1976: 617-618, my emphasis).
Charlie is enrolled in the social and cultural analysis PhD programme at Concordia. His research interests include Marxian value form theory, queer theory, and political economy.
Addendum:
Readers are invited to peruse a copy of the striking printers’ own picket line paper, The Daily Scum, complete with several pages of a Tintin cartoon strip critical of Murdoch, the Labour Party, the police, and the more emollient union voices within the Dispute. The Scum is available to read online here: https://files.libcom.org/files/scum-wapping.pdf
Below: The Daily Scum, front page, 1986.
Notes:
[1] Prior to the introduction of the linotype machine in the late 19th century, printers would have to assemble an individual line by hand, letter by letter. They would reach into drawers full of ‘backwards reading’ letters and physically compose a metal negative of a journalist’s article.
[2] Thatcher famously refused to recommend Murdoch’s takeover to the monopoly’s regulator.
References:
Cusick, J., “The Jobless Crisis: Sacked staff in protest at Timex plant”, 19th February 1993 [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/the-jobless-crisis-sacked-staff-in-protest-at-timex-plant-1473826.html]
Emmerson, B., and Shamash, A., “A case to answer? A report on the policing of the News International demonstration at Wapping on January 24th 1987”, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, 1987[transcript available at https://www.oatridge.co.uk/wapping_files/HaldaneNI.htm#_ToC_16]
Ewing K., D., and Napier, B., W., “The Wapping Dispute and Labour Law”, The Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 1986, pp. 285–304
Grice, E., “Gone like the steam engine”, in British Journalism Review, 2015, 26(2):61-66
Flashbak, “The Sun at 40: When Arthur Scargill was Mein Fuhrer”, February 21st, 2012 [https://flashbak.com/the-sun-at-40-when-arthur-scargill-was-mein-fuhrer-16468/]
The Guardian, “Wapping: Legacy of Rupert’s Revolution”, 15th January, 2006
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jan/15/rupertmurdoch.pressandpublishing]
Khabaz, David V., Manufactured Schema: Thatcher, the Miners and the Culture Industry, (Leicester: Matador, 2006)
Kelly, J., “Revolution on Fleet Street”, Time Magazine, June 24th, 2001 [http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,143237,00.html]
Kyriacou, Sav, and Rosenberg, Matthew, Banging Out: Fleet Street Remembered, documentary, 2014, [available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wYqaQNmZhE&ab_channel=digitalworks51]
Laver, R., “A Dramatic Fleet Street Revolution”, Maclean’s Magazine, February 10th, 1986 [https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1986/2/10/a-dramatic-fleet-street-revolution]
Loeb Weiss, David, Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu, documentary, 1980 [available at https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/09/a-fascinating-film-about-the-last-day-of-hot-metal-typesetting-at-the-new-york-times/]
Marx, K., Capital Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin 1976)
Marx Memorial Library,“The News International Dispute Exhibition”, 2011.[https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/project/wapping-dispute/news-international-dispute-exhibition]
Ross, L., “Wapping – the bitterest of disputes”, Red Flag, 13th November, 2006 [https://redflag.org.au/node/5587]
Taaffe, Peter, “1986 Wapping strike – Defeat of the print unions”, Socialist Party, 20th January, 2016 [https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/22075/20-01-2016/1986-wapping-strike-defeat-of-the-print-unions/]
Stokes, C., “From the archive, 27 August 1969: Rupert Murdoch aims for The Sun”, The Guardian, 27th August 2013 [https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/aug/27/rupert-murdoch-the-sun]
Thomas, J., “In Battle with London Printers, Murdoch says News is Good”, New York Times, February 4th, 1986 [https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/04/world/in-battle-with-london-printers-murdoch-says-news-is-good.html]
Workers Liberty, “When Murdoch Smashed Unions, Workers Liberty, 20th July 2011 [https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/07/20/when-murdoch-smashed-unions]
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