The 1984-85 miners’ strike’s defeat was only registered and secured a decade later

Evidence

The fiercely partisan novel ends with the incantation: “the Year is Zero”. But 1985, when both the strike and the book end, was very far from being a year of beginning or of possibilities for the novel’s “us”. (In fact, the very existence of that “us”, the collective proletarian subject, is itself in question by then. At the same time, however, this is the first of Peace’s novels in which the possibility of any sort of group-subject is raised. More typically, his characters are solipsistically alone, connected only by violence, their only shared project dissimulation.) On the contrary, it was a year of catastrophic defeat, the scale of which would not become apparent for a decade or more. (Perhaps it was only in the election of New Labour twelve years later that the defeat was both registered and finally secured.) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 212

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capitalist realism became entrenched through the 1984 miners’ strike defeat — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1362