ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the historical incorporation of working-class political and industrial movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within existing structures. The structural difficulties in the case of the union can be seen in the wider social and political life of the mining communities. The chapter describes how the commodity situation of the Northumberland miner, with all its contradictions, resulted in social and organizational contradictions in the critical early years of permanent unionization. A study of the Northumberland miners' union then does not obviously confirm the simplistic versions of the incorporation thesis; nor the simplistic, but nonetheless contradictory notions of economism, culture, and subordination upon which the thesis relies. The structual subordination of workers to the commodity-system is a necessary, inherent, and well understood feature of advanced capitalist market societies. In its utter and immediate dependence on extra-regional and international trade the Northumberland coal-field of the 1870s was in this sense a 'modern' context for working-class action.
