Region, Class, and the Politics of Steel Closures in the European Community

Abstract

One expression of the changing international division of labour and the generalized crisis of capitalist production during the 1970s was that the steel industry in the European Community slid into a deep and seemingly intractable crisis with rapidly falling profits or escalating losses. In an attempt to restore profitability, private capital, national states, and the supranational EEC (European Economic Community) initiated a series of severe capacity and employment cuts, which were unevenly distributed within the EEC, concentrated both at national and at regional scales. This distribution was intimately related to the strategies of those directly employed in the steel industry and those indirectly dependent upon steel employment in contesting proposed closure plans. This paper examines in detail anticlosure campaigns in the Northeast of England and in the Nord and Lorraine in France, interpreting them in terms of territory and class as bases for social organization, and attempts to draw some more general theoretical and political implications from these specific cases.