THIS year there is great interest in the 80th anniversary of the general strike of 1926.
It is not hard to work out why. In 1926 British imperial power was weakening. The capitalists were desperate to reorganise their industries at home starting with the mining industry. Their attacks on the miners touched off a general strike where all the military power of the state had to be mobilised to prevent the working class taking power. Capital was rescued by the treachery of the General Council of the TUC. It called off the strike after nine days, leaving the miners out on their own for nine months.
Today British imperialism is on its knees. Its task is to strip the entire working class of all of its gains and destroy the Welfare State. The powder charge today is hundreds of times greater than in 1926, as will be the explosion when the charge is detonated. In fact the rumblings of the approaching earthquake are already being heard.
The Labour Party and trade union leaders were taken by surprise by the general strike.
When one year before, in 1925, Leon Trotsky in his book, Where is Britain Going, predicted ‘Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals,’ the Labour and trade union leaders sought to laugh him out of court.
However, the ruling class took the issue extremely seriously and planned the battle that lay directly ahead. In July 1925 the mine owners sought to cut the miners’ wages and lengthen their hours, culminating with their retreat on July 31 1925, called ‘Red Friday’ by the workers.
The Prime Minister, Baldwin agreed to the miners’ full wages being paid for nine months until May 1 1926. He explained to his party: ‘We are not ready’. He immediately established the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to organise the police, the military and middle class scabs to fight the forthcoming general strike.
On may 1 1926 the miners wages were cut, the TUC declared the general strike which began on May 4th. Section after section of the workers came out, and workers councils of action sprung up in all of the workers areas, where the trade unions took control and decided who would and would not enter. A regime of dual power developed rapidly.
From afar Leon Trotsky issued a warning. He wrote after the strike had begun: ‘The general strike is one of the most acute forms of the class struggle. It is only one step from the General Strike to armed insurrection. This is why the General Strike, more than any other form of class war, demands a clear, resolute, firm (ie a revolutionary) leadership.
He added: ‘The strike has made the substitution of a proletarian state for the bourgeois one a question of the day. . .’ However there was no party that was able to provide the working class with that necessary revolutionary leadership.
By 1926 Trotsky was under heavy attack by the growing Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, which in 1924 had ditched world revolution for socialism in a single country. Their recipe for Britain was that the party was too small and the job would have to be done through the trade unions.
They therefore formed an Anglo-Soviet trade union committee with the British TUC, which was used to turn the CP into the political servants of the TUC ‘lefts’. Thus at the most decisive moment of the struggle the CP in Britain was calling for ‘All power to the TUC’, the very force that dreaded power and sold out the struggle.
The defeat in 1926 led directly to the hungry 30s and to the Second World War.
Today, we can see that bankrupt British capitalism is well on the way to massive revolutionary convulsions. That the ruling class is preparing the state to deal with these convulsions is absolutely certain.
That the TUC and the trade union bureaucracy will seek to betray the workers’ movement is certain.
The major issue therefore is building up the conscious leadership of the WRP, in order to mobilise the working class to go forward from mass strike action, workers’ councils of action and dual power, to the taking of power by the working class, the abolition of capitalism and the victory of socialism.
This is what is on the agenda. In that sense 1926 was a dress rehearsal for what is to come, whose lessons will be ignored at our peril.
