Mike Richardson, Tremors of Discontent: My Life in Print 1970-1988 (Bristol: Bristol Radical History Group, 2021)

It is a surprise, in a way, that the succession of “angry young men” British novels, some with notable film adaptations, did not open the way for a richer, sustained literature of personal recollection. Or perhaps it is simply the case that writing from the working class itself remains rare, or when written, turns out to be about despair and personal collapse, with socialist ideals (if any) invisible.

At any rate, Tremors of Discontent is a tremendous book. Mike Richardson has a fabulous memory of his personal life and a lot to say about the class struggle. None of it is preachy or away from his own experience, and what he learns in the media of the time. Born in 1947, he can relay most of 40 years with precision and in fine, straightforward prose. No grandiosity.

It is useful, for me and perhaps other readers, to take a small byroad here and reflect on another new book, Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World, by Noel Ignatiev. This author is a hard-bitten faction fighter in the US left, and the book is closer to other accounts in past decades of someone who has for political reasons chosen to “go down” to the proletariat. It is a very well-written, realistic account of his experiences in the Gary, Indiana, setting – an increasingly black city with huge mills on their way to shutdown. He writes as much about friendships as about the struggles at the point of production. But the reader, like the writer, knows where this is going to end: at Harvard.

Mike Richardson, by contrast to Ignatiev, did not have Communist intellectuals for parents and did not grow up surrounded by classic literature. After being effectively thrown out of the industry at the end of the book, he gains a doctorate, becomes a lecturer and researcher, and launches books and pamphlets from Bristol, near his old neighborhoods. In his own way, he has never quite left home.

Not that “home” was ever an uncomplicated place. His parents managed to get the family into a remarkable estate, one of those planned to become “garden cities” for the British working class, this one on the fringes of Bristol. There, unbeknownst to his parents, a renter abused him sexually, which surely helps explain a few of his early brushes with the police. He gets his first job at a department store, and here, I think, the remarkable writing sets in. The intensity of memory carries over, with other life events (education, marriage, children), into the Robinson Wax Paper Company in 1970. He offers photos of the shop inside and out, as he describes in detail how he first got involved with unionism, as he learns the complicated procedures of printing and waxing.

By the middle of the 1970s, he is reading the publications of the Workers Revolutionary Party (wrp), best known in Trotskyist jargon as the followers of Gerry Healey. Mike is just as influenced by Days of Hope, Ken Loach’s documentary of the industrial struggle, 1916–26, broadcast by the bbc and scripted in part by another Trotskyist veteran, Jim Allen. In an early moment of doubt, Richardson found himself “bemused” by a Trotsky-quoting lecturer in Bristol, hanging in as he met people expelled from the wrp in factional maneuvers that made little sense. He appreciated a journalistically close account of striking firefighters in the party daily but instinctively understood that claims of advancing socialist consciousness did not describe the urgent struggle for wage parity with industrial workers. His doubts grew as he was warned against the “subjective” thinking of doubting party dogma.

In the real world, repeated crises in Callaghan’s Lab-Lib coalition government led to a national election and a very unreal effort to contest offices on behalf of the wrp, which was actually an attempt at mass recruitment of new members. The smashing Tory victory might have ended illusions but succeeded in pushing Richardson further into class struggle, unionism, and chess, where he competed in tournaments, true to his autodidact character. Only in the UK, perhaps, would a worker join a famous actress (Vanessa Redgrave) in a wrp turnabout, sensibly calling for reforms, in this case, the creation of community councils in every city, rather than for revolution. Only in the UK would he need to oppose his wife’s dream of buying their council house, an option thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s predatory initiative, and give in to practicality.

Readers, including this reader, will find the details of his union struggles both fascinating and impossible to explain in a review. In the occasional photo from the time, he is the curly and long-haired chap with the big smile: a charming socialist. By 1983, one senses that he had already begun to find part of himself elsewhere. He is taking courses at the Open University, even as he dreams (with so many others) that the miners’ strike could become a general strike.

The solidarity efforts become steadily more intense, but the Irish Republican Army (ira) plants a bomb at the Brighton Hotel where Margret Thatcher is staying, and the Iron Lady manages to turn public opinion against the so-called revolutionary danger. Meanwhile, the Labour Party and union officials ruled out any wider industrial action. Soon, the great coal miners’ struggle ends in bitter defeat, among the worst in British working-class history.

Richardson throws himself into the desperate backstairs defence of miners jailed for solidarity actions. Meanwhile, a scandal around Gerry Healey’s assault upon women in the party brings an end to Healey’s prestige and, in the not-very-long run, to the wrp generally. Meanwhile, he is on the way to getting sacked for shop steward activity, with precious little support from the leadership of the union he had spent years building.

In 1988, he stopped fighting for his job. Going to college, he worked at Bristol United Press in a “causal,” hard, and dirty printing job. It was his last outside of the classroom.

He could see closely, like few others, what Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman and Marxist historian David Montgomery, among others, had written about the theory and practice of labour’s degradation within the production process itself. One chief purpose of this book is to explain how much has been lost in job dignity and labour solidarity and to educate readers for future struggles. “The past can jolt a new awareness” (178), he says: the very point of a noble effort.

Paul Buhle

Brown University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v89.0036.