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Letter: Inequality is about more than invisible rivalry

Published 30 July 2025

From Alasdair Smith, London, UK

Your headline “The enemy within” echoes the phrase that UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to demonise striking miners in 1984/85. The ruling class planned to crush the National Union of Mineworkers to pave the way for deregulation and privatisation. There was no “invisible rivalry”, just open and often brutal class war. Cooperation and solidarity kept mining communities going for over a year. But the ruling class, using the instruments of state and media, crushed the resistance(12 July, p 38).

The pattern of class struggles is a better basis for understanding gross inequality than the theories of invisible rivalry in your piece.

Issue no. 3554 published 2 August 2025

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