Deserto Rosso: Ravenscraig /
Ravenscraig, a Worker’s Poem
“I would wish to emphasize that too often our “Normal”, “Adjusted state is the abdication of ecstacy (R. D. Laing) “Alienation’ exists when a worker’s own products become an alien force standing over him and to which he is subject” (Karl Marx)
1] BY RAVENSCRAIG (originally for C. M. Grieve on the occasion of his eightieth birthday) Slouching from work, tired and disturbed, I’m stopping. Red sparks shoot from the furnace, fall like leaves. I’m watching. Over and it overruns “I can’t get through to them The problems clear….so few resist …it can’t get through to them… Rents rise and rise, the small men crumble, even profits drop. Their cardhouse tumbles and the tiger tries its jaws on Ireland We’re next. Yet here, today, we read, and said “Those thugs and gunmen” These, my friends, they didn’t see We’re next” I kicked stones hard against some crumbling walling Bouncing, breaking, falling. Comrade, you’ve written now for fifty years Explained things, thought life through, But we weak vassals could not hold our shield ring, Dreamt of Shielings or Wembley, losing our industry, losing our men, Long lost self-honesty and laughed at you. Your bitterness, it still comes through: The ones who can purpose the pattern deceived and self-deceived. Banal, but people loath freedom more than death it seems. And did you stand it? Elitist arrogance, real humour, masks? But oh, the pain – First their urinal, now their clown And doubtless soon the pedestal of past, irrelevant revolt. Untamed? But steered by a smarming Magnus all the same.
Your vastness failed. Some came to Scots, but Scots is not with the people Some socialists learnt, but few I think will enter by your route. You failed, and if YOU failed….?
Against the night sky the fiery sparks still keep on falling And in the furnace there a fire continues burning.
2] GETTING A START I couldn’t get the jobs at Rolls-Royce or Singer. I waited six weeks, nothing came. Two months teaching, Nine weeks on the dole, nothing came. At xmas Colvilles advertised for trainee programmers. In January 1980 I started in their stripmill, Motherwell. That year their letterheading changed to British Steel, A state owned corporation, not that we noticed much diff’rence Painted a square mile blue and kept Colville’s bosses! First thing I see A vast immensity. Those huge grey watertowers They dwarf me. Strange walls rise To tall sharp cylinders. High shacks, the great sheds, form the bulk of it. Roads miles long, trudging their ash in my shoes, But I’m wildly elated In a leap at the hugeness, In the smell,
In the noise in the steelplace that we have created. And as I looked, a Raven flew by high above me Evading the blue-grey smoke it passed above furnaces Missing the flame by inches. I swear it true. This is a vast and magic place, my Ravenscraig.
3] NECTAMEN CONSUMEBATUR Firing the blast furnace, bursting the sky, Flame in a pillar of smoke shoots up. And like the magic fires of Autumn, as witched-leaves dancing, The fire plumes play within a wraith of smoke. Bright red dust sparks, light-stars glinting, Midges rising on the shooting air, Stars themselves exploding in their dizzy motion, Light’s last nebulae to red death sinking, Smould’ring softly as their sisters dance. Flecked, flicked, flocked, the fickle points picked out, The patterned flames plotted by light-shafts bouncing, A silent cataract of light sparks dancing Like summer’s riverwave impressions (but no mere secondary creation) Lit by their own death candles, falling from burning brothers They spark off other clustered creations Men in Ravenscraig Moving quickfooted, afraid of the burning steel, Of the pinprick sparks that burn pinholes, Millions of holes, in clothes, in hair, in faces Till all things pass And the boiler suit (or the man) is scrap But he – unlike the steel he made – will never relive.
An Inspector’s eyes are his very living But the long neon lights of nightshift burn down his sight Till his mole-eyes unfit him, then the Green Book has it he must go (Rule 2: Each Man report for Medical Examination on Request) There’s no exemption. But he can’t say what’s safe That’s a management decision, so he signed In his contract. The Union agrees – I ask you then – What would you do in here But amble along, timeserving Laughing at worker directors And pissing on walls? A doctor to service the parts or to scrap them A “safety” rule that in fact enforces danger These will stay Till the whole world changes its mad direction. Peripheral “morality” hamstrings our energy Helps in the general consequence of Capital The total destruction of the worth of man’s creation The Alienation of work in which makers can take no satisfaction.
Our backs are broken and bent with our burdens – Our bended spirits will not break but spring! And climb like lotus, soaring from decay! Toil daily wears down hearts, it clamps down souls and brings By this class feelings and a hate that wages just defray For they – the bankrupt culture – live on our credulity Their lies of freedom keeping us unfree. It cannot last – they teach us more each day –
Their monstrous maggot – capital – it smells in sweet decay. For only this – the growth in capital Vast, vicious, vulture beaked decrepit Capital Creates the death that’s born in declining Capital The total destruction of Capital’s short reign of exploitation The confirmation of Human, the Makkar, the Maister. I don’t deny David Colville had his function But he got full measure for it in the products of thousands (And the guns that built Colvilles killed Krupps workers) (And the guns that built Krupps killed Colvilles workers) So the structure of his iron plant bears the seeds of its own extinction Or of the world’s destruction But, either way, the re-creation must be ours. I ask you then Just what “incentive-schemes” mean here Where each man is a jot on a slabs production Doing for reasons not given, and the lot Rely on one fool who’s constantly tanked up? The weak link breaks the chain. To speak of “enterprise”, Public or Private, Here it was always archaic. Dalyell had two hundred men from the start: Where are their names engraved but on the graves Of Majuba, Flanders, Dunkirk, Aden, Ireland? Some on the brass plaque up front that states they died “Not in vain, for our memories shall not perish” But perish they did, after blasting their rusty ploughshares into guns. It’s not that the Maisters were bad, not all of them, But the world had no need of Maisters by 1880. Still less today.
Each year there’s less men in control. Each year there’s more go bankrupt. Each year monopolies expand. Long since the small men vanished So that with History’s usual paradox They left the 1st and 3rd class in their trains But lost the 2nd. Then rail renamed the 3rd as the 2nd (‘twas confusing us in our stations). So now we’re all to be middle class Signifying – nothing. Class? I want to cure that. But denying disease exists Never destroyed it.
Let us see this, at least, That steel-making, car-making, food-making Have nothing to do with one man’s enterprise All these are social products, made for social needs And must be socially controlled by all, for all, Or nothing will be made at all. Give no examples to me, there’s been none. No democracy existed ever But for the top men of a slave state. Never have we decided anything Except by doing what we all thought best And balls to the rest. You glimpse, perhaps, some desperation Engendered by some previous inaction? And that I feel not even my child might glimpse With her two eyes what few minds have ever seen?
And yet I’m still sure of this That, when needed in struggle, her generation As did my father’s, as did mine, will regenerate in action The tools they need And in this necessary cycle of science expanding the conflict of class Will break itself, resolved. For our deep loathing Loathing of Masters Slavemasters, Serfmasters, Steelmasters, Masters of women and Masters of capital Masters of Nature, Masters of us But never without us masters of anything Our deep loathing, buried by debris of past eruptions Must needs erupt again And scorch out with its lava the black path to freedom Until we all are maisters No more, no less, important than our fellow creatures That is the summit, as always, manhood and womanhood Denied us since we relinquished gens, splitting classwards This cannot be denied Folk slave, folk slave and rot But capital will not stop until it rot. So in this pinnacle of fire in smoke Burning as always, glowing in the night And lighting up this little bit of Ravenscraig I see the servant sparks flame They burn out Burn out Out But their dance is not extinguished.