Following the victory of Red Friday, all sides took stock. The miners met in August 1925 but the mood, although confident, was not triumphalist. Herbert Smith said the miners and the working class “had achieved one of the finest things ever done by an organisation”. However, he added: “We have no need to glorify about a victory. It is only an armistice.”1 Delegates insisted on drawing up a balance sheet of what had actually been gained. They asked what the practical outcome of the struggle had been. Had A.J. Cook, for instance, asked for an increase in wages to meet the increased cost of living, to which Cook replied that he did. Yet the struggle had been mainly about preventing big reductions in what was for the miners “not a living wage”. One delegate then stated plainly: “You did ask for the cost of living; then for God’s sake give over talking about a glorious victory.” One historian of the strike remarks in relation to this incident: “So differently can things look to those with opposed interests that these men were actually dissatisfied with the agreement, so fiercely fought for and with such difficulty obtained, by which the wages remained for nine months untouched”!2 The truth is even a standstill in wages for the miners at this stage, although a defensive battle, was a kind of ‘victory’ or an achievement. The essence of the whole situation in Britain was that even the semi-starvation wages and bestial conditions of the working class were under attack from the pressure of the diseased capitalist system.
Many years after the General Strike, Baldwin was asked by his biographer why he gave the subsidy which led to ‘Red Friday’. His simple reply was, “We were not ready.”3 They were surprised and taken aback at the unity and determination of the working class to resist the demands of the employers and the government. This made them even more determined to be prepared for the conflict when, nine months later, the subsidy was due to run out. In 1925, there were no serious preparations by the government on the use of state measures against strikers, the organisation of a blackleg army to counter the effects of a strike. What counter-measures would be necessary if a coal strike should take place, if for instance an embargo on the movement of coal was implemented by the working class as a whole in support of the miners? While in the 1926 General Strike the government did not appear to be as abrasive on the military front in confronting the strike, in the nine months’ grace that was given it did use the opportunity to set in place military measures to be used, if necessary, and, as an auxiliary, a paramilitary force to confront the miners and the working class.
Repressive apparatus
An emergency supply and transport committee was already in existence when Baldwin first came to power in 1923. This had been originally set up by Lloyd George during the ‘dangerous months’ of 1919 and had been ready to go into action on the eve of Black Friday in 1921. In the event, it was not needed but rather than being completely disbanded it was put into cold storage. This was despite the fact that, officially, the government had not sanctioned this, but a state official, John Davidson, maintained the plans for an organisation and a skeleton machinery, and these were dusted down to be used by the Baldwin government in preparation for the strike. Davidson was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and assumed the newly created title and functions of Chief Civil Commissioner. His salary was paid not from the state but direct from Tory party funds! Ten Regional Commissioners were appointed in England and Wales and arrangements were made to take over the British Broadcasting Company, with the possibility of producing a government news sheet if the newspapers ceased publication. Thus, even in a period of alleged ‘social peace’ the ruling class in Britain were preparing for ‘extra-parliamentary’ measures, in other words the methods of civil war, in order to defeat the working class.
Their plans, however, were slightly disrupted earlier by the election of the MacDonald government of 1924. Would these ‘contingency plans’ be maintained or disbanded? Their fears were soon assuaged when a Labour minister, Josiah Wedgwood, turned a blind eye to this secret strike-breaking organisation. Even when the public formation of the Organisation of Maintenance and Supply (OMS) was announced in September 1925, the right-wing trade union leaders were dismissive and attacked those on the Left, such as A.J. Cook, who called for counter-measures from the side of labour such as a workers’ defence force. Cramp, Industrial Secretary of the NUR, dismissed the OMS: “Personally, I have not the slightest fear of these jokers. They are people who have never worked in their lives. If they started to do it in a strike they would make a very poor job of it.”4 In a sense, this is what happened, as we will see, in the first stages of the General Strike. But if the strike had gone on for any length of time, the OMS could have become a serious strike-breaking force alongside the official forces of the state. Its official aims were not to oppose “legitimate trade unionism” but specifically measures such as the looming General Strike! The British Fascists, who were not then a political party but a quasi-military group headed by a retired Brigadier-General and a Rear Admiral, went over en masse to the OMS. This ‘volunteer’ army was, in effect blessed by the government. Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary, publicly ratified its formation in replying to an anonymous and mysterious ‘correspondent’ in The Times of 1 October 1925: “There is no reason why you should object to the OMS… [or] any other citizen who would desire the maintenance of peace, order and good government…”5
The country was divided and controlled by government-appointed commissioners with the aim of controlling “road transport, food and fuel supplies”. Each commissioner was deputed to maintain law and order in his own area and to recruit “able-bodied citizens of good character to serve as special constables”. One of the commissioners, Lord Winterton, stated, “We were given further instructions in the event of a complete breakdown, to take drastic action of a comprehensive character.”6 What constituted a “complete breakdown” and the resulting “drastic action” remained unspecified but it does not take a leap of the imagination to believe that this was code for military or quasi-military measures to be used in the event of a general strike appearing to be successful and challenging capitalism.
All of this indicates that behind the professions of “peace” by Baldwin and his like, the British ruling class were preparing the most ruthless means to suppress the working class if necessary. In 1919 they relied on an open display of military force with troops at the pitheads. In the run-up to the 1926 General Strike, they were more cautious, hoping that they could rely on the right-wing trade union leaders to draw back, but at the same time making serious preparations to use whatever means ‘necessary’ in order to realise their goals. Capitalist historians may picture the formation of the OMS as a kind of ‘Dad’s Army’ or as harmless ‘gilded youth’7 of the time or the organisation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois youth eager for a spot of ‘mild hooliganism’. This, however, involved attacking workers and trying to break a strike. It was not pranksters who were involved in the kidnapping of Harry Pollitt, or the hijack and crashing of a Daily Herald delivery van.8 Imagine the headline about ‘left-wing terrorism’ in the rabid capitalist press if such measures had been taken by the Left.
But this was all part of the preparations of the ruling class for a serious confrontation. They were acting according to their class interests. As Marx pointed out, the government in any capitalist state is the executive committee of the ruling class. When their interests are threatened, or are perceived to be, they can consider using the most draconian measures to protect them.
Only now, in 2006, has it been confirmed that Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was threatened by a military coup in the 1970s. The plot had been hatched by the secret service, MI5, who intended to replace Wilson with a member of the Royal Family, Lord Mountbatten. To this end, military manoeuvres, with the deployment of tanks, had taken place at Heathrow Airport. Yet this was in a situation less polarised from a class point of view than in 1926 itself.
The British capitalist class, one of the most “treacherous in the world” in their dealings with the working class, concentrated in their leading figures and politicians the whole experience of their class. Baldwin was to put this to good use with his combination of subtlety, cultivation of right-wing trade union leaders but at the same time the most ruthless preparations in defence of his class. The same could not be said of the leaders of the other side. One historian described the approach of the TUC General Council as “studied unpreparedness”. This was, if anything, an understatement.
But it was not just the Right but also the Left, including the official Left leaders and, unfortunately, the Communist Party, who were unprepared for this struggle. Those like A.J. Cook and the leadership and militants of the young Communist Party sincerely wanted the victory of the General Strike. Even the ‘pragmatic’ wing of the TUC like Ernest Bevin believed in the possibility of victory for the miners and the working class. As in 1925, Bevin thought he and the other trade union leaders could either bluff Baldwin to retreat by threatening a strike or, failing this, a general strike would achieve the same objective.
Theory and history of the general strike
In order to understand how things could have turned out differently in 1926, it is necessary to explore briefly the idea of a general strike, the different perceptions and misconceptions of what is involved in the use of this weapon as well as a consistent Marxist approach towards this. The idea of a general strike has a long pedigree going back even before the first independent movements of the working class, both in Britain and the world, the Chartists. It became a practical issue during the Chartist period after William Benbow in 1831 put this forward and it was accepted by the Chartist Convention. In his scheme for a “grand holiday and congress of the productive classes”, he argued that if all workers simply stayed at home or took a “grand national holiday”, the government and the ruling classes would be forced to submit to their demands. The Chartists attempted this in the historic failed General Strike of 1842.
In the 160 years since, there are numerous examples of different kinds of general strike. Even the bourgeois leant on the weapon of the general strike, carried out by the workers of course, in its struggle against feudalism in the 1848 European-wide revolutions. The twentieth century witnessed the great General Strike of 1905 in Russia and the Swedish General Strike of 1909. This was followed by general strikes in Limerick, Ireland and Winnipeg, Canada in 1919 and the great strike of 1920 in Germany against the failed Kapp putsch. The Belgian General Strike of 1960-61 and the famous events in France in 1968 stand out in the twentieth century. We have also seen the great Indian hartals – strikes in the countryside as well as in the urban areas – in 1921, emulated by the Sri Lankan working class in 1953 and 1980, in the Rand strike of 1922, the Ruhr General Strike of 1923, etc. In Nigeria, the labour movement has launched general strikes against rising petrol prices, while in Bolivia, there have been many general strikes but perhaps not as many as the estimated 200 military coups since independence! Highly significant as well are the state- and city-wide ‘general strikes’ of immigrant Latino workers in the United States, the citadel of world capitalism, in 2006.
Marxists have always understood – particularly in the era of capitalist crisis, marked by the outbreak of the First World War – that an unlimited general strike poses the question of power: which class runs society. So do the serious representatives of the capitalists. Lloyd George had declared to trade union leaders in 1919: “If you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us. But if you do so… have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen… have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?” The reaction of miners’ leader Robert Smillie was: “From that moment on we were beaten and we knew we were.”9 In other words, the trade union leaders of the time were not prepared to mobilise the working class to take power.
An interesting example from the history of the international workers’ movement is provided in the General Strike of 1909 in Sweden. This strike is important, as are other explosive movements in the history of the Swedish labour movement, if for no other reason than that it counters the current myth of that country as the quintessence of ‘social peace’, as a model of class compromise. It was not always so. In 1909, the LO (the Swedish TUC) with 190,000 members, came into a head-on collision with the employers and the government. From the beginning of the twentieth century, workers had discussed the idea of a general strike and in 1908 the Minister of the Interior declared that it is “a familiar and saddening fact, that our country in recent years more than any other has become the country of strikes, boycotts and lock-outs. We have beaten the world record in this regard…”
Swedish General Strike
The tops of the trade unions, as with the 1926 General Strike in Britain, of course, were quaking at the pressure of the workers for a general strike. The LO chairperson described such a strike as a “suicide attempt”, an echo of right-wing leader Jimmy Thomas’s declarations in 1925 and 1926. The employers threatened a lock-out, unless their conditions were met. The answer was a general stoppage of work because what was at stake was “the existence of the entire Swedish trade union movement”. The unions were not prepared but nevertheless there was massive support, described by the French socialist paper L’Humanité as “the greatest proletarian mobilisation we have seen in our days”. Lenin, in the newspaper Sotsial-Democrat, regarded it as “one of the biggest general strikes in our time”. There was massive support, including from England and the international working class. Moreover, many unorganised workers began to be drawn in.
At the same time , the LO and Social Democrat leaders, like their English counterparts 17 years later, made no real attempt to organise for victory. The Social Democrat leader Branting, for example, left for Germany in the most hectic period of preparations! The social democracy’s paper wrote: “Workers. Use beautiful summer days and the free time to make outdoor visits. Bring good literature to the forest hills and use all opportunities to increase your knowledge… Use your freedom well, which the strike has given you.” This refrain of moderate trade unionism was repeated in the 1926 General Strike. However, pioneer of the labour movement, Axel Danielsson, had predicted: “Without struggle the general strike is impossible. If it goes so far that a peaceful development is impossible, the proletariat has to prepare itself to step out onto the streets and with violence conquer the stored goods and the means of production… the workers [must not] wait with their arms crossed until the social capitulation of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, unless the question of power is posed a general strike is in the end a display of “folded arms”.
Most illuminating about this struggle was that the ordinary soldiers sided with the working class and if there had been a decisive struggle for power they could not have been used effectively against the workers’ movement. As in the 1926 General Strike, strike committees sprung up – 549 throughout Sweden. The failure to carry through this struggle to a successful conclusion led inevitably to attacks by the employers, wage cuts and subsequent disillusionment. Membership of the trade unions dropped. This example indicates that a general strike, the most serious struggle – one step removed from taking full power – puts the question of “either-or” on the agenda for the workers’ movement.10
Trotsky on the General Strike
This was true even in the period prior to the First World War as the example of Sweden shows. But because capitalism, in general, had not exhausted its progressive mission in developing the productive forces, science, labour and the organisation of technique, the general strike could be posed in a cloudy, imprecise fashion without being seriously put to the test. It could even in some circumstances get some short-term results. Even the great Polish-German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, the ‘mountain eagle’, overestimated the independent importance of the general strike when it was not linked to the working class taking power and establishing its own state. She ‘bent the stick’ in the direction of emphasising the spontaneous activity of the masses in the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and elsewhere. This was done in order to counter the dead hand of the trade union bureaucracy in Germany, the dangers of which she was the first to identify and warn against. Also, the social-democratic parties, like those in France and Germany under Jean Jaurès and August Bebel, promised that they would resort to a general strike in the event of a war, summed up in the decisions of the famous Basle congress of the Second International in 1912. But, as Trotsky commented subsequently, this call “assumed… the nature of theoretical thunder”.
Summing up the historical experience of the working class in the 1930s, Trotsky made the point: “A general strike, particularly in the old capitalist countries, requires a painstaking Marxist accounting of all the concrete circumstances.”11 Capitalism had reached a blind alley, signified by the First World War, when the productive forces had visibly outgrown the narrow limits of private capitalist ownership and the nation state. The system was in a cul-de-sac in which the struggle between the classes intensified. The interests of the ruling class faced a continual threat from the working class and the labour movement. But when fundamental and unpostponable issues are at stake, only a general strike linked to the overthrow of capitalism can fully succeed. This in turn can only be prepared by the whole preceding period of the workers’ movement and particularly by the more politically developed layers.
The general strike is an important weapon of struggle but it is not universal. There are conditions when a general strike may weaken the workers more than their immediate enemy. The strike must be an important element in the calculation of strategy and not a panacea in which it submerges all other strategies. The general strike is, in the main, a weapon of the weak against the strong, an entrenched state power that has at its disposal railways, telecommunications, police and army, etc. Trotsky comments: “By paralysing the government apparatus a general strike, either ‘scared’ a government or created the postulates of a revolutionary solution of the question of power.” It could be a means, in some instances, for workers under a dictatorship to fuse themselves together, beginning with sectional strikes leading to a general strike and the acquisition of strength by the workers to overthrow a regime.
But in other circumstances this weapon is inappropriate. For instance, at the time of Kornilov’s march against Petrograd in 1917, neither the Bolsheviks nor the soviets (workers’ councils) thought of declaring a strike. On the contrary, the railway workers continued to work so they could transport the opponents of Kornilov and derail his forces. The workers in the factories continued to work except for those who left to fight Kornilov’s forces. At the time of the October Revolution in 1917, there was again no talk of a general strike. The Bolsheviks enjoyed mass support and under these conditions to call for a general strike would actually weaken themselves and not the capitalist enemy. On the railways, in the factories and offices, the workers assisted the uprising to overthrow capitalism and establish a democratic workers’ state.
In the pre-1914 period, an era characterised by a general upswing of capitalism, it was possible under certain circumstances, for partial ‘general strikes’ to take place. There are instances where the government takes fright at the general strike and at the very outset, without taking matters to an open clash, makes concessions. Such was the situation in the Belgian General Strike of 1893 and in a much bigger scale in Russia in October 1905. Under the pressure of the strike the Tsarist regime in 1905 made “constitutional concessions”. In Belgium, the strike was called by the Belgian Labour Party with 300,000 workers participating, including left-wing Catholic groups. There were a number of clashes between demonstrators, police and troops. However, the strike was called off when the government granted male suffrage at 25 years of age. (The voting age had been raised to 30 in 1885. The strike victory cleared the way for the Belgian Labour Party’s election victories; it won 27 seats in 1894.)
The Left – no clear ideas on the General Strike
For some of the trade union leaders at least, the coming struggle in Britain was to have the features of the pre-1914 struggles, a mass mobilisation, where the mere flexing of muscles by the proletariat would be sufficient to compel the ruling class to step back. This was probably the attitude of Ernest Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and others. After all, it had worked on Red Friday in compelling the Baldwin government into its humiliating retreat. For others on the Right, such as J.R. Thomas, they could not avoid the coming confrontation. There was enormous pressure from below, including from the majority of members of Thomas’s union on the railways, who were as eager as all other workers to inflict defeat on their hated bosses. These right-wing trade union leaders consciously went along with the General Strike, moved to centralise power into their own hands, with the purpose of betraying it.
Thomas was to declare in August 1925 that he was “very far from happy” over the “magnificent victory” of the miners on Red Friday. He considered “nothing more dangerous for the future of the country than that employers and government were compelled to concede through force, what they had refused to concede through reason”.12 A.J. Cook, on the other hand, declared at the same time, that the victory showed that “labour could only get what it was strong enough to take”.13 But unfortunately, the full implications of precisely what “strength” meant in order to ensure victory for the working class was not fully understood by him. Later that month he declared: “Next May we shall be faced with the greatest crisis and the greatest struggle we have ever known, and we are preparing for it. We shall prepare a Commissariat department. I am going to get a fund, if I can, that will buy grub so that when the struggle comes we shall have grub [food] distributed in the homes of our people. I don’t care a hang for any government, or army, or navy. They can come along with their bayonets. Bayonets don’t cut coal. We have already beaten not only the employers, but the strongest government in modern times.”14 A month later he declared that Black Friday had gone for ever. The workers now possessed the power as could be seen by the actions of the prime minister in climbing down and granting the coal subsidy: “That action on the part of Mr Baldwin represented the revolution.” He added: “Take it from me, there would have otherwise been a revolution. I fear there will be trouble next May.”15
What a heroic figure A.J. Cook presents – particularly when set against the belly-crawling pro-capitalist lickspittles MacDonald, Thomas and Co. – in his absolute devotion to the cause of the miners. He showed admirable determination in demanding full support for the miners, even supporting the idea of a workers’ defence force against the plans of the government and army of blacklegs, which earned him the vilification and scorn of right-wing trade union leaders. But in these above remarks is also shown the weakness of Cook, a political naïveté. He shows elements of a syndicalist approach, probably carried over from his youth, with the idea of a prolonged ‘great strike’. Workers well stocked up with food could defeat the employers. Later on, before the outbreak of the General Strike, Cook declared that working class families knew that a strike was inevitable and should be laying in secret supplies of food. He unsuccessfully tried to win the Co-operative Movement to commit to providing workers with credit and food in the event of a strike. Disgracefully, the tops of the co-ops refused and, with some notable exceptions, most co-op outlets did not come to the assistance of workers or the miners. In a discussion, the dyed-in-the-wool cynic Thomas expressed scepticism about a strike. Cook replied to him: “I mean it… my own mother-in-law has been taking in an extra tin of salmon for weeks past.” The meeting at which this comment was made, the Industrial Committee of the TUC, sank into an astonished silence until Thomas commented: “By God! A British revolution on a tin of salmon”!16
The sarcastic remark of Thomas received the usual guffaws from the Right and has been commented on by sceptical capitalist historians since. But it does betray the political deficiencies of A.J. Cook, which was a huge weakness in a general strike situation. He was a sincere militant who remained true to the cause to the end. But his lack of a worked-out alternative policy to the Right, together with the other Left union leaders as a whole – Purcell, Swales and Hicks – proved to be fatal in the maelstrom of the events of May 1926 and after. A general strike poses the question of power but does not by itself solve it. For that, a programme for the working class to take power is necessary. This in turn requires a worked out revolutionary policy, a mass party and a tested leadership. This the sincere Left A.J. Cook did not have. The other Lefts had even less; during the strike they would go to the abyss, look over and draw back. Even before this, however, they had given notice of their future role by their capitulation to the Right in the Labour Party (to be dealt with later).
United Front
And the Communist Party was unable to take political advantage of the inadequacies of these individuals – who held great sway in the minds of the masses – not so much because of their own political limitations and inexperience but because of the approach which had been dictated by Moscow, which had led to the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. This was established following a joint declaration between the British and Soviet trade unions in April 1925. To understand the role that this committee played and the effects that it had on the Communist Party’s approach it is necessary to examine some of the background to developments in Russia at this stage. The isolation of the Russian Revolution had led to the beginning of the rise of a conservative bureaucracy, reflected within the Russian Communist Party and personified by Stalin in his struggle with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The original internationalist aim of the Russian Revolution, that its salvation lay in the international victory of the working class, was replaced gradually by the policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’ and the diplomatic manoeuvres which arose from this. An attempt was made to seek influence not through a systematic growth of national sections of the Communist International – such as the Communist Party of Great Britain – but by a policy of courting the Left of the labour movement. This coalesced with an undoubted mood of support for the gains of the Russian Revolution and the workers’ state, particularly when contrasted with the failures of capitalism in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere.
Instead of basing themselves upon this rising pro-Soviet and revolutionary mood and linking it to the development of a firm independent class-struggle policy and organisation, the Comintern leadership of Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev (before he broke with Stalin in 1925) proposed a bloc with the trade unions in Britain and particularly its left wing. This was all done under the signboard of the ‘united front’ policy, as mentioned earlier. There was pressure for trade union unity in Britain and throughout Europe which the Communist Party and the Communist International were correct to take cognisance of. But Trotsky and the Left Opposition objected to the downgrading of the role of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), which attempted to group together all the militant fighting organisations worldwide against capitalism. Without full discussion and behind the backs of the working class of Russia and of the Communist Party, Stalin and Co. in effect were linking up with the reformist International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), known as the Amsterdam International., at the cost of building a revolutionary international trade union centre.
A ‘united front’ policy of this kind, which reformists or centrists invariably seek to use to screen themselves from the criticism of the masses, played a baleful role in its effects on the young CPGB and in the General Strike itself. One aspect of this policy was trade union unity, the other was centred on international issues and particularly the “struggle for peace”, as it applied to the defence of Russia against imperialist attack and to China. Trotsky had consistently warned of the middle-class British Left leadership’s preference for the “love of the distant”. Radical in phrases on international issues, even revolutions far from the shores of Britain, these Lefts could pursue an entirely different policy at home. Yet foreign policy is the continuation of home policy. The Comintern under Stalin and Co. ignored this basic but vital revolutionary maxim.
These features were in full display in the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. The Communist Party was pulled in different directions. On the one side, its instinct was to criticise the Lefts, while on the other it feared to do this so as not to upset the Anglo-Russian applecart. J.R. Campbell, for instance, could write in Communist Review, the CP’s theoretical journal in October 1924, criticising the Left trade union leaders: “It would be a suicidal policy, however, for the CP and the Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left wing… It is the duty of the party and the Minority Movement to criticise its weakness relentlessly and endeavour to change the muddled and incomplete left-wing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint. But the revolutionary workers must never forget that the main activity must be devoted to capturing the masses.”17 The C P, however, never consistently pursued this course. The emphasis in the run-up to the General Strike should have been on a united front from below – without, of course, making the ultra-left mistake of not putting pressure and making demands on the Left leaders. Willie Gallacher declared: “The leadership [of the TUC] has passed into the hands of good proletarians like Swales, Hicks, Cook, and Purcell. And this proletarian leadership and the proletarian solidarity it was capable of organising and demonstrating was the real big thing that came out of the struggle.”18
CP unprepared
This uncritical stance was reflected in J.T. Murphy’s comments following the Trades Union Congress of September 1925: “When Swales delivered his opening speech the real temper of the Congress began to manifest itself. The more militant he became the more delegates responded to his fighting challenge.”19 This approach was not at all automatically accepted or to the satisfaction of all members of the party. At the party congress in May 1925 a delegate from Sheffield had drawn attention to the fact that the miners’ leader Arthur Cook had begun to drift away from some of the policies he had fought for in his election campaign. This Sheffield delegate pointed out: “After we have praised and said nice things about these left-wing leaders, what will the masses say about the Communist Party when these leaders fail them? We must give the necessary qualifications to our support of these left wingers.”20
This is precisely the gist of the criticism that Trotsky and the Left Opposition were making at this stage. The policies of the Right were clear. MacDonald, Henderson and Co. were the bridle on the working class and the buckle through which the strap was passed would be played by the likes of trade union leaders such as arch right-winger Thomas. Workers’ Weekly, in the run up to the General Strike, was full of warnings, it is true – although all the political implications had not been drawn out – about the role of the Right. But as far as the Lefts were concerned, the CP’s comments amounted mainly to mutterings about their role. Even in James Klugmann’s official history of the Communist Party, written later, Fred Bramley, then General Secretary of the TUC, who had denounced Cook as a “raving Communist”, is described as an “ardent protagonist of unity” between the trade unions of Britain and the USSR.21
This linking up of the British TUC and their Russian counterparts did provoke fury in the capitalist press. They warned the trade union leaders: “The General Council in fact have sold the pass.”22 But this sound and fury from the side of the capitalists disguised the fact that the right-wing General Council was using the screen of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee to justify a policy of inaction. The Communist Party, for its part, did issue warnings but of the most imprecise kind. On 28 August, 1925, Workers’ Weekly stated: “Thirty-four weeks to go to what? To the termination of the mining agreement and the opening of the greatest struggle in the history of the British working class… WE MUST PREPARE FOR THE STRUGGLE.”23 What form was that struggle to take? It is true that the Communist Party and the National Minority Movement called for councils of action, made criticisms against the Right, but still persisted in calling for “full power to the General Council”. They continued to do this even after the expulsion of the Communist Party from the Labour Party in 1925. Retrospectively, through the writings of its historian Klugmann, the Communist Party did later criticise this stand: “It can still be questioned whether this was a correct demand, whether it was correct to insist on full powers for the General Council to ‘direct the whole activities of the unions’, without even greater insistence that such powers would only be justified if it was certain they would be used for and not against the militant working class.”24
It would be impossible to “guarantee” that such powers would not be used by conservative bureaucratic officialdom at the top of the trade unions. This is why preparation from below should have been the most important aspect of even a small party’s approach in this situation. This does not preclude placing sharp demands on the TUC or demanding a concrete lead from the Left union leaders. The Communist Party did support the “idea” of councils of action, attempted to strengthen the trades councils, even when they were outlawed by the TUC and issued propaganda in favour of a workers’ defence force, which was all necessary in the situation of 1925-26. But what was missing above all was the political preparation which involved an understanding of the character of the conflict that was coming and the role of the leading political trends and figures in this. If a revolution takes place and the subjective factor is small and uninfluential, lacks support amongst the broad masses of the working class, then that revolution can go down to defeat. But a force which is small but nevertheless has a correct strategy and tactics, puts forward appropriate slogans and makes the clear criticism of vacillating Lefts at the right time can come through even a defeat with its position strengthened and with an enhanced position from which to fight in the next period.
1905 or 1923?
Trotsky posed the question before the General Strike that in the test which was to come, would the Communist Party face a 1905 or a 1923-type situation? In 1905 the Russian Marxists, particularly the Bolsheviks, came through the test of revolution with a growth in their authority particularly amongst the advanced sections of the working class, although the revolution was defeated. Nevertheless, this ‘dress rehearsal’ was vital in preparing the Russian working class with the Bolsheviks at their head for carrying through the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1923, on the other hand, a revolutionary situation was let slip by the German Communist Party under the misguided directions of the Comintern leadership of Stalin and co. Would it be a 1905 for the CPGB or a disastrous 1923? This could only be determined by a struggle of living forces and correct policies and organisation.
Even when a correct slogan was put forward by the C P, such as the need for councils of action and mobilisation from below of the working class, this was hedged around with caution. For instance, on the eve of the General Strike the acting secretary of the Minority Movement, George Hardy (Harry Pollitt had been jailed), proposed that work for the establishment of councils of action should be undertaken in every area but that “councils of action were to see that all the decisions of the General Council and the union executives were carried out”.25 The CP did not fully follow this course. The British working-class movement is burdened by a trade union officialdom which had developed and taken shape over a long historical period. This conservative, encrusted layer looked on any independent initiative of workers from below, any spontaneous action, with suspicion if not with outright hostility. While recognising the tendency of workers in Britain to move through the official union structures, the task of Marxists is to combine this with encouragement of movements from below and genuine organisations which reflect this.
J.T. Murphy, one of the leaders of the Communist Party, in his book ‘The Political Meaning of the General Strike’, says that the most that the CP expected from the General Council of the TUC was a repetition of the decision that led to the government retreat on Red Friday – the refusal to handle coal by the transport unions. This is despite the fact that in February 1926 Trotsky predicted that the withdrawal of subsidies would provoke “beginning with the next 1st May, a grandiose economic conflict. It is not hard to imagine what would be implied by a strike embracing not less than a million miners, backed, according to all indications by approximately a million railwaymen and transport workers.”26
This approach has to be contrasted to the balm dispensed by the theoreticians of the Communist Party. This was summed up most clearly in the semi-official Communist Party journal, Labour Monthly in 1925 and 1926. The building up of the Left is quite clear in articles such as that by M.N. Roy. Buttressing the Left credentials of Purcell, he wrote: “Speaking at Baku…Mr A.A. Purcell, the head of the British Trades Union delegation, declared that on returning home the delegation would organise a ‘Hands Off Egypt’ movement, to prevent British imperialism from throttling weak and defenceless Egypt. This attitude taken on behalf of the militant proletariat contrasts remarkably with the official view of the Labour Party on this grave question.”27
Labour Monthly also quoted approvingly Purcell’s speech at the Soviet Trades Union Congress, November 11-18 1924: “…I congratulate you upon the colossal success of your work on behalf of the working classes of the world… you are the directors of the Soviet Republic… You have carried through this work in the interests of the workers of the world… The unity must be a real, and not merely a formal one. It must be based upon the principles of opposition to capitalism… To leave the Russian Trades Unions outside any international organisation would be like playing Hamlet without the chief character… Our duty, our obligation, is to unite all our forces for the destruction of capitalism.”28 Yet how little Purcell was prepared to destroy capitalism was on view even before May 1926 but was absolutely clear in the strike itself. Nevertheless, Labour Monthly commented: “The tenor of Purcell’s speech was such as to seriously alarm the Right Wing clique in the International Federation of Trade Unions.”29
R. Palme Dutt was the editor of Labour Monthly and had shown a certain theoretical understanding in analysing the situation in Britain. He praised Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? In a survey after the General Strike in September 1926, he wrote: “In a recent article Trotsky has pointed out that the more revolutionary in principle a resolution was at Scarborough [the TUC Conference of September 1925], the more easily it was carried; but the closer it came to an even elementary task of action, the stronger was the opposition. International Unity with the Communist-led Trades Unions of Russia was carried unanimously by the same delegates who a few weeks later were voting the expulsion of Communist trade unionists at home from the Labour Movement… Thus the move to the Left was in practice a show move to the Left, reflecting the undoubted movement of working class opinion, but sterilised and neutralised by the skilful opportunist leadership who allowed no real change in actual policy. In consequence, the sequel of Scarborough by Liverpool, with its victory of extreme reaction and conspicuous collapse of the Left Wing, was not a contradiction of Scarborough but its completion.”30
But such warnings against the future role of the Left were not evident from the pen of Palme Dutt or others writing in Labour Monthly before the General Strike. Karl Radek (a member of the Left Opposition) had written in March 1925: “The members of the Left Wing of the Labour Party are not Communists; we know this very well. We know that they will develop towards a really revolutionary position with great hesitation. The British Communists, in criticising them, must show patience and self-control, and must act by means of calm explanation.”31
It would have been completely wrong then and now, for that matter, to criticise the inconsistent reformist Left in the shrill tones of the sectarian and ultra-left groups. Militant and the Socialist Party have never indulged in such methods. In Britain, for instance, in the recent period, in 2006 a small ultra-left grouping in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) denounced the union’s agreement on pensions with the government.32 This agreement was supported by the overwhelming majority of the left-wing National Executive Committee of the union. They nevertheless attacked this as a “shabby” deal and some of them accused the general secretary of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, of “betrayal”. Such an approach is completely counter-productive and does not raise the level of understanding of the militants of the working class; it substitutes abuse for argument and explanation.
Criticism of the deficiencies of the Left leaders, when it is required, is an absolutely essential task for a party claiming to be Marxist. Militant, for instance, supported all the steps towards the Left of those like Tony Benn, but we never hesitated to criticise in a positive way any deficiencies in his programme, as well as his tactics and organisation. This did not mean that we always received his benediction and praise. In point of fact, when we were part of the Left inside the Labour Party, its Marxist revolutionary wing, our members and supporters worked closely with him and others on the Left. But our refusal to be corralled into an uncritical ‘broad left’ in support of Tony Benn naturally raised his ire. He is not a Marxist and is not prepared to go outside the framework of left reformist ideas. The best way, as the experience of the General Strike and its run-up demonstrates in a negative fashion, is to help the Left find a correct orientation by subjecting it to criticism, to help it develop a more coherent, definitive position. By its very character, left reformism and centrism, which can develop at a later stage, are diffuse. When put to the test, invariably most reformists capitulate to the Right. The latter does have a coherent policy, resting as it does ultimately on bourgeois society, and the pressures which result from this on the trade union and labour leaders. They are pressured to conform to the needs of the capitalists and not those they were elected to represent. Before the left can gather together as a coherent, organised force, they must gather together their thoughts. There is no other way this can be done except through consistent Marxist explanation and criticism of the inadequacies of reformism, and of left reformism in particular.
The use of terms like ‘reformism’, ‘Left reformism’, and particularly ‘centrism’ may strike some of the younger, new generation just entering the labour movement as somewhat antiquated today. The dominance of neo-liberalism following the collapse of Stalinism and with it the idea of a “planned economy” has resulted in the corruption and political degeneration of most of the leaders of the labour movement. Left-wing ideas, including reformism which dominated the workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s, were on the retreat in the 1990s and the first part of this decade. But support for these ideas and those leaders who advocate them is reappearing – and for socialist and Marxist ideas as well – as class polarisation and the resulting strikes and conflicts in France, Germany, Britain, etc., demonstrate. It is therefore necessary for workers to discuss these ideas and the task of Marxists is to criticise them in a positive fashion.
The absence of such an approach is clear from the Communist Party’s journals and actions in the run-up to the General Strike. In June 1925 Labour Monthly carried the following comments on the Left in the General Council of the TUC and its support for “international trade union unity”: “Our friend Purcell very frequently, and very appropriately, speaks of the ‘mosaic’ of our movement.” There were 1,100 trade unions at the time! It goes on: “Everyone must agree with Swales [in the May Day Sunday Worker] that the most important achievement during the last twelve months has been the establishment of an agreement and contract with the Soviet trades union movement… MacDonald puts forward Amsterdam against the Anglo-Russian agreement. Purcell gave the fitting reply to MacDonald in the May Day issue of the Sunday Worker when he said that the real meaning of MacDonald’s proposal was ‘that we are to break off friendships with those who stand for world-wide trades union unity, and the world-wide fight for the eight-hour day, and accept the point of view of those whose attitude on these questions has been diametrically opposed to our own at numerous discussions in the past’. And this we have no intention of doing…” The author then adds: “It is most characteristic that he [MacDonald] borrowed practically all his arguments against the Anglo-Russian Trades Union Agreement out of The Times! It is obvious that things cannot go on in this way. The Trades Unions must acquire an influence on the policy of the Labour Party… But this revolution will only be possible if the Left elements in the Trades Unions conclude a bloc with the Left elements of the Labour Party. The MacDonald-Thomas Alliance must be replaced by a Purcell-Maxton alliance. Such a Left bloc must be wide enough to include Swales and Cook, Hicks and Pollitt, Kirkwood and Gallacher, Maxton and Saklatvala, Lansbury and Campbell.”33
Scarborough TUC
One month later we read in the same journal the following: “Against this die-hard resolution [of the General Council of the International Federation of Trade Unions] Mr Bramley, in the name of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, delivered [his] speech. In the circumstances it was a clever speech and a strong speech too. Bramley termed ‘an act of folly’ the attempt to settle the differences between Amsterdam and Moscow by correspondence rather than direct negotiations… Bramley said: ‘But when you begin to discuss Russia, you begin to suffer from some malignant disease which I am not able to say much about because I do not understand it… Why do you not follow the example of the British section, and look closely at the Russian problems, and deal with Russia as you are dealing with other countries? Get rid of the panicky fear that seems to invade and dominate your minds in dealing with Russia’…” Labour Monthly goes on to praise “this remarkable speech” but is then forced to add: “It is true that Mr Bramley, right through his speech, assiduously and explicitly repudiated Communism [and] the Minority Movement, that he openly declared himself to be a member of the extreme Right Wing of the trades’ union movement… Bramley’s speech is not simply a clever speech delivered by an astute trade union leader… It is much more than that. It is symptomatic of the slow but profound process of the revolutionising of the British Labour Movement that is taking place before our eyes.”34
Bramley’s anti-communist speech was therefore of no consequence, would have no bearing on the struggle unfolding in Britain because he was in favour of “international unity”. The CP leadership was in denial. This “international unity” was, in fact, a smokescreen behind which those like Bramley could hide from the British workers their right-wing policies at home. Instead of praising his “remarkable speech”, the CP should have been pointing to the glaring contradiction of verbal radicalism abroad and a diametrically opposed policy when it came to the great issues which confronted the working class in Britain.
The consequences of this policy were on full view at the Scarborough conference of the TUC in September 1925. Left and even militant resolutions were accepted by comfortable majorities so long as they were on general and international issues. The Congress accepted a resolution on the establishment of “well-organised shop committees” but only “in principle” and with 1.7 million votes against! A resolution which called for the “overthrow of capitalism” was passed. However, the closer that any proposal came to calling for action rather than general Left sentiments, the more the Right showed its opposition. The affiliation of trades’ councils to the TUC was ruled out of order. The Right gave a glimpse, through J.R. Clynes, secretary of the General and Municipal Workers Union, of the role they were about to play when he declared: “I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is our own… We should put our trust in our leaders.”35
Left resolutions were accepted but the Right was strengthened on the General Council, with Thomas coming back on after two years of absence and Ernest Bevin of the Transport Workers was elected. Yet in a report on this conference in Labour Monthly we read the following: “There can be no further doubt but that the Scarborough Congress has been the most important and momentous in the history of the British Trades Union Movement… The whole proceedings… have proved that there is now definitely in existence a growing revolutionary opinion which no intrigues or appeals to constitutional procedure could stifle… If the Left Wing on the General Council had boldly come out and asked Congress for complete power, giving the urgent reasons for the step being taken, it would have been a complete counter-offensive to the Right Wing… The speeches of Comrades Brown, Tomsky and Bramley indicated the importance of Britain to the international working class movement, and showed that, outside of Russia, the British movement is the real international leader…”36
It is true that some criticism of proceedings at Scarborough were aired in Labour Monthly. “The weaknesses were… the reluctance of the Left Wing of the General Council to come out openly and fight the Right Wing on every possible occasion, for there could be no doubt that the Right Wing leaders… had very effectively marshalled their forces… and they could have been completely crushed from the first day of Congress to the last if the Left Wing on the council had seized their opportunity… there is now the greatest opportunity in our history for those leaders claiming to be left-wingers to come out boldly and take a prominent place in the revolutionary movement – they must do this or they, too, will be forced to take up a position no different from that of the Right Wing.”37
But these mild criticisms of the Left were not systematic and did not drive home to the working class, through Communist Party members, the real political deficiencies of the Left or indicate the role that they in particular could play in the event of a head-on collision of the classes. Yet the role of the Right, and particularly the Left, was clearly exposed at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool barely a month later. Trotsky had commented about the Scarborough TUC apropos the Left: “This sort of leftism remains only as long as it does not impose any practical obligations. As soon as the question of action arises the Lefts respectfully surrender the leadership to the Rights.”38
This is a feature of the reformist Labour Left, with the exception of some like Tony Benn, who did to some extent confront the Right in the Labour Party in the election for deputy leader in the 1980s. However, he still clings today to a discredited ‘Labour Party’, which has transformed into a capitalist party. The political weaknesses of left reformism were shown in the battle of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s. In the upswing of the struggle, when the mass of the working class poured onto the political arena, in Liverpool in particular,39 and 25 left councils appeared to be standing in solidarity against the Thatcher government, the Labour Lefts and even some of those in the trade unions such as National Union of Public Employees official Tom Sawyer – who straddled both – appeared to be supportive. But at bottom they were as terrified of the determination of the working class to defeat Thatcher as the right within the Labour Party. Any movement of the ‘uncontrollable masses’ inevitably comes into collision with leaders whose political programme amounts to left phrases. One by one they peeled off from supporting the Liverpool struggle and most invariably ended up in the camp of the Right. Neil Kinnock, erstwhile Tribunite left winger, wielded the knife on behalf of the ruling class and the Labour Right at the 1985 Labour Party Conference. Although not completely obvious to everybody at the time – it was for Militant – this marked the beginning of the end of the Labour Party as a distinct workers’ party. Former left trade union leaders joined in the witch-hunt of Militant, such as Jack Dromey, of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and formerly an organiser of the low-paid Grunwick workers’ strike in the 1970s, who became the hammer of the left and particularly of Militant.
Labour Party Conference
Those Lefts, who the Communist Party placed so much faith in, were to play as baleful a role at the 1925 Labour Party Conference as their descendants were to do at the 1984 and 1985 Labour Party conferences and after. In 1924, the Labour Party Conference had rejected the affiliation of the Communist Party to the Labour Party but a motion that no member of the Communist Party be eligible for membership of the Labour Party was only carried by a small majority. This provoked big opposition with something like 100 Constituency Labour Parties calling for its rescinding at the 1925 conference. From the outset of the 1925 conference, its chairman struck a different note to what had been heard at Scarborough just one month before. C.P. Cramp of the railway workers declared that he recognised the class struggle but the movement needed to be creative. He then went on to spell out what this meant: “In our practice as a political party we do actually transcend the conflict of classes; we direct our energies to constructive work and ask for the cooperation of all classes.”40 These honeyed phrases were uttered on the very eve of the greatest industrial conflict the working class was to experience. In the run-up to the conference, the opposition to the exclusion of the Communist Party amongst the rank and file was powerful.
Rhondda Borough Labour Party, for instance, held a special conference towards the end of February 1925 and considered the question of Communist-Labour relations. On the affiliation of the local Communist Party to the Rhondda Borough Labour Party the vote was: 12,090 for, 5,068 against. On the endorsement of Communist Party members as Labour Party candidates: 11,367 for, 4,437 against. On the question of the right of individual Communists to Labour Party membership, the conference unanimously voted in favour. Interestingly, the CP in a statement calling for resistance to the right-wing witch-hunting methods of the Labour leadership, stated: “The Communist Party stands for the maintenance of the federal principle of the Labour Party.”41 This, of course, is the general principle upon which the Labour Party itself was founded and is something which should be central in the formation of a new mass workers’ party in Britain. However, the CP in 1925 was much more advanced and democratic than some erstwhile Left groups today, even some on the ‘far left’ like the Socialist Workers Party, who reject the federal principle in new formations of the working class.
In the 1980s it was Thatcher and Tebbit in the House of Commons, boosted by denunciatory articles of Militant in The Times, who demanded that the Labour leaders should act “responsibly” and drive us out of Labour’s ranks. The same task was undertaken by the capitalist press in the run-up to the Liverpool conference of the Labour Party in 1925. The Observer played first fiddle in the witch-hunt against Militant with an infamous article by Nora Beloff in 1975 denouncing Militant as an alleged “party within a party” within Labour. In 1925, the same journal demanded: “If these resolutions [demanding the exclusion of the CP] are carried, Labour will have nailed its colours… to the Parliamentary mast. Its break with the Minority Movement in the trade unions will be complete.”42 Sir Alfred Mond, the leading bourgeois industrialist, fulminated that the Labour leaders “must decide whether they wish to be regarded as responsible statesmen or not”. He asked “how much longer they were going to tolerate the canker which was eating at their hearts?”43 The right-wing Labour leaders duly responded to this pressure, and the Left remained completely silent at this conference. We saw a similar display of Pontius Pilate-ism at the 1985 Labour Party conference when Kinnock made his infamous attack on Militant. The Labour Left remained silent, with the exception of those like Eric Heffer and Tony Benn, while former Lefts like Blunkett danced to the tune of Kinnock.
In 1925, trade union leaders like Bevin were in cahoots with MacDonald in driving out the Communist Party after the Liverpool conference. MacDonald said: “As Mr Bevin assured you, he and I have a little bit of a row occasionally. Why not? Provided we are in the same spirit, holding the same view… Division on certain policies held by men with the same spirit, certainly within the same movement; but with different philosophies and different outlooks, no…”44 Bevin’s stance at Liverpool was not an accident and foreshadowed his role during the General Strike. The same goes for the erstwhile Lefts, who sat on their hands, remained silent, while their ‘allies’, the Communist Party, in the united front of the ‘Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee’, were cast out of the Labour Party.
Liverpool, a warning
The capitalist press was beside itself in praising the decisions of the Liverpool conference. In an uncanny echo of the 1980s, they hailed the decisions to expel the CP almost in the same phrases that would be used in relation to the expulsion of Militant 60 years later. The Financial Times declared: “Investment [read the capitalists], evidently, is greatly relieved by the testimony afforded at the Liverpool congress to the fact that the Reds are not going to have things their own way.”45 The Times followed suit with “so far so good… Communism must not only be condemned; it must be cast out.”46 Thomas joined in: “Smash the Reds or they will smash us,” he wrote.47
The Communist Party denounced the decisions of the congress. Harry Pollitt was to write later, in his autobiography: “The Liverpool conference contained the germ of the abject sell-out of 1931.”48 It could be added, also of the General Strike of 1926. And it was not just the Right but the Left leaders also, as we shall see, who were fully complicit in the sell-out which was to come. The Communist Party neither sufficiently criticised sharply enough the Left’s role at Liverpool, nor did it draw all the conclusions necessary about their future role in a head-on collision of the classes. Palme Dutt was to write after the General Strike was derailed in June 1926 in Labour Monthly: “Every prediction, policy and warning of the revolutionaries has been justified by the events of May.”49 Unfortunately, that was not the case. Any ‘criticisms’ amounted, as we have seen from the above, to a mild slap on the wrists of Swales, Purcell , Hicks and Co. Palme Dutt in November 1925, said Klugmann, “stressed the complete silence of the non-Communist Left who allowed MacDonald ‘to ride roughshod over them’”.50 And what is the comment of this historian of the Communist Party, many years after the event? “This was indeed a significant aspect of the conference. The left-wing trade union leaders, some of whom had taken a prominent part at Scarborough, failed completely to fight in the harder conditions of Liverpool.”51
Contrast this mild rebuke from a considerable historical distance to what Trotsky wrote, as a means of a warning to the Communist Party, in January 1926: “At the same time as the British unions fraternise with the Soviet trade unions which are under the leadership of communists, at Liverpool the British Labour Party which rests upon these same unions expels British communists from its ranks thus preparing a government-fascist operation to smash their organisations. It would be criminal to forget for one day that Lefts such as Brailsford52 and even Lansbury53 in effect approved of the Liverpool conference resolution and blamed the communists for it all. It is true that when indignation with the reactionary police-state spirit of the Liverpool conference revealed itself from the lower ranks, the ‘Left’ leaders readily changed their line. But to evaluate them one must take both sides of the matter into account. Revolutionaries need a good memory. Messrs. ‘Lefts’ do not have a line of their own. They will go on swinging to the right under the pressure of bourgeois-Fabian reaction and to the left under the pressure of the masses. In difficult moments these pious Christians are always ready to play the part, if not of Herod then of Pontius Pilate and facing the British working class there are many difficult moments ahead.”54
If the policy of political intransigence, recommended by Trotsky, had been adhered to consistently over a period of time, the British working class, particularly its most combative and politically developed layers, would have been much better prepared than they were in the events of the General Strike. Many of the middle-class Lefts, quite apart from those in the trade unions, had sympathy for Soviet power, for the Soviet trade unions and even, as we have seen, for a rapprochement with the Comintern so long as it remained at a distance. But they did not seriously challenge the hold of right-wing reformism in the Labour Party or seek to break out of the narrow limits of parliamentarianism. In this, as Trotsky pointed out, not ex post facto but in the course of the movements that unfolded in the course of 1925 and 1926, is an element of the deference that the middle class display towards a “strong state power”. Trotsky added: “Of course the petty-bourgeois who has turned his face towards the Soviet Union is more progressive than the petty-bourgeois who goes on his knees before the United States. This is a step forward. But one cannot build revolutionary perspectives on such a deference.”55
Working-class support for their class who had taken power in Russia was of a deep-going determined character and was demonstrated with the threat of a general strike that met and defeated Churchill’s plans to intervene in Poland in 1920. Radical middle-class leftism, characterised by the Left within the Labour Party at that stage, particularly gathered around the Independent Labour Party, was ephemeral and vacillating and could quite easily be turned into passivity when the Right attacked the Left, particularly the Marxists. It could even turn into a virulent anti-Marxism, as we have seen many times in the history of the British labour movement.
Within a fortnight of the Liverpool conference of the Labour Party, 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and subsequently imprisoned. The expulsion of the Communist Party by Labour’s right-wing political ‘police’ was the signal for the capitalist police and state to arrest its leaders. Something similar happened 60 years later when Kinnock engineered the eviction from the Labour Party of the leaders of the 47 Liverpool councillors, the ‘Mersey Militants’ like Tony Mulhearn, Harry Smith, who wasn’t expelled then but was driven out later, and Paul Astbury, followed shortly afterwards with the removal of the councillors from office, hefty fines and a threat to sequestrate their homes if they could not pay. In 1925, by their silence and acquiescence the Left were as responsible as the Right but in November, one month after the Liverpool conference, the Left’s failure to fight was put down to “bad organisation”. Labour Monthly commented: “The Right Wing at [Scarborough] preferred, like Brer Fox, to ‘lay low and say nuffin’, rather than to fight for their programme openly. At Liverpool the opposite was the case. The work was conducted by a well-organised and well-oiled machine. But at Liverpool the extreme flank of the Left Wing – the Communist Party – came out into the open. The left element proved to be disconnected and badly organised both at Liverpool and at Scarborough.”56
But in February 1926 some serious criticisms were directed at the reformist Left by William Paul (editor of the Sunday Worker). He wrote: “The determined attempt made at the Edinburgh, London and Liverpool Labour Party conferences to expel [the Communists] made a very deep impression upon those who imagined that they were left wingers because they used Left Wing phrases… When deeds were demanded the left wingers failed. None of the left wingers, outside of the small Communist group, dared to put forward an alternative programme [at the London and Liverpool conferences]… The main reason for the collapse of the Left Wing at the big conferences was their lack of organised contact and the absence of any common line of action. And this weakness, let it be emphasised, is still preventing the rise of a real Left Wing that means business… The Left Wing parliamentarians are not afraid to use bold phrases in the constituencies when they are amongst the rank and file. But they are not prepared to organise the rank and filers and give them a socialist policy.”57 If this approach had been consistently advanced and linked to concrete suggestions of what needed to be done by the Left and the working class, then it would have helped the working class to prepare for what was to come.
Battle lines drawn
The bourgeois were encouraged by the shift to the Right, and the open quiescence of the Left to this at Liverpool, as well as the quasi-Left phraseology at Scarborough, not backed by action. Nevertheless, they also prepared to build up their forces for a head-on collision if the trade union and Labour tops were not capable of derailing the movement. In October Churchill, irritated by the many threats of future trouble made by Cook, replied to him in a like manner: “Mr Cook had said openly that he would force a general election in the spring by means of a strike, or that he would force nationalisation by means of a strike. If those were the counsels which were to prevail they had to be fought to the fullest extent.”58 Churchill had been explicit in July about why the government retreated on Red Friday: “We decided to postpone the crisis in the hope of averting it, or, if not of averting it, of coping effectually with it when the time came.”59
Not only were the eyes of the world working class turned towards Britain, international capital was taking a keen interest in events here. The New York Times wrote in August that the government must “Seek to arm itself with legal powers to deal with a nationwide strike not only in coal mining, but in transportation and engineering services, in shipbuilding and the textile trades. For, behind the immediate threat of a coal strike, there stood visible to the eyes of Mr Baldwin the menace of the one big union quitting work and paralysing the industrial and commercial life of England. The government has been, and is now, without weapons to meet such an emergency.”60 The same journal, two weeks later, returned to the same theme, “urging not merely legal protection against future general strikes, but the formation of a citizens’ volunteer brigade such as Sweden had established during the great strike of 1909”.61
A rabid right-wing journal, La Revue de Paris, wrote in retrospect after the General Strike: “Had the trade unions ordered the General Strike at the date originally fixed by the Soviets, of 1 August 1925, the British government would have been conquered.” It went on to say that public opinion would have been with the government but would have been insufficiently organised. “Mr Baldwin, reckoning the disproportion between the forces of order and of revolution, played for time.”62 Interestingly Crook, an American writer on the General Strike, wrote that “the French notion that all large-scale industrial disturbances must mean revolution… is probably not far from the facts.”63 Leave aside the hyperbole about the “Soviets” being behind developments in Britain, nevertheless there is an understanding in these lines that, in Britain at least, a general strike could open the floodgates to revolution. There was to be much discussion later on the issue of the General Strike as to whether it was a revolutionary opportunity or not. But the serious representatives of capital, both in Britain and worldwide, had no doubts about the potential revolutionary situation that could flow from this titanic conflict between labour and capital.
One week after the Labour Party conference, the Tories met in Brighton and Prime Minister Baldwin informed them that the government was considering prosecuting the leaders of the Communist Party. The capitalists were eager to remove serious organisations capable of acting as a rallying point for the working class. Although it was small, insufficiently critical of the leaders of the Left, and thereby had not prepared fully politically from a Marxist point of view, nevertheless the CP did conduct energetic propaganda and agitation on the issue of factory committees, councils of action, raised criticisms of the Right and warned about their lack of preparedness for the coming conflict. One week after Baldwin’s speech, the police raided the Communist Party headquarters and twelve of the principal leaders of the party were arrested. They were arraigned at the Old Bailey on charges of seditious libel, for “publishing the writings of Mister Lenin”. 64
Jailings
Just as in the 1980s the attack on the Liverpool Militants encouraged the state to persecute the heroic 47 councillors there and those in Lambeth, fine them and drive them from office, so too the shift to the right in the Labour Party in the 1920s opened the way for repression, with its first victims being the CP leaders. This was just the start because within a week of their arrest, militant miners, members of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, working in the anthracite mines of the Amman Valley, were also in the dock. In fact, this area of South Wales was the scene of an incredible movement of the miners, reflected in the strike of the anthracite miners in 1925. the historians of the South Wales miners wrote: “New forms of action emerged. There was an unusual aggressive willingness: to escalate their strike; use mass mobile picket lines; a network of spies (which penetrated the police), riots and disturbances. It led to the control of the town of Ammanford [by the miners] for a week. There was a remarkable and widespread acceptance of prison sentences and gaoled leaders were feted like heroes.”65 In all 167 miners were tried over a three-week period, being accused of “terror” towards “His Majesty’s subjects”. The jury was composed of the Welsh landed proprietor class, with colonels, three majors, a captain and a knight dominating it. Fifty miners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment with one receiving 17 months behind bars.
However, the arrest and imprisonment of the 12 Communist Party leaders, taken together with the actions against the miners, indicated to the working class movement that general repression was in the offing against all those who stood in the way of the capitalists and their government’s plans to crush them. An unprecedented solidarity mood and campaign resulted from this involving more than 70 Labour MPs as well as literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw standing bail for the CP leaders. The mood generated on this even affected those who had remained silent while the CP was driven out of the Labour Party just one month before. Big meetings and mass marches of up to 15,000 to Wandsworth prison were organised demanding the release of the “class war” prisoners.
Leading Left figures in the Labour Party like George Lansbury – he was one of those who disgracefully stepped aside when the CP was expelled – were now compelled by the pressure of the working class to join in the campaign for the release of the prisoners. A “huge solidarity rally”66 was held in London’s Albert Hall, hired in the personal name of Lansbury on 7 March 1926. Lansbury later declared this “was one of the biggest meetings ever held in London.”67 Militant, in the 1980s, held two rallies in this venue, with a capacity of 5,000, until it became too small and we were forced to move to Alexandra Palace. Of the 1925 meeting Lansbury recalled: “I got the whole audience to stand and repeat after me the slogans for which the Communists were sent to prison. To call upon the workers not to go into the capitalist army or navy or air force, for no worker to join the military, and for those who were in the military or navy not to fire on their comrades who are workers.”68 Cook and the Communist Party had published leaflets demanding that soldiers “don’t shoot”. This was denounced as vehemently by the right-wing Labour and trade union leaders as the capitalists themselves.
The CP was not only “seditious” but was, according to the capitalist press, in the pay of Moscow financed by its “gold”, etc. This was as ludicrous then as the similar accusations against Militant in the 1980s. The pressure from below compelled trade union leaders like George Hicks to comment that the persecution of the Communist Party put them “in the same position as the trade unions were during the early part of last [nineteenth] century.”69 A.J. Cook, just before the arrests, in a message to the Sunday Worker, issued yet one more warning to the right wing in the labour movement: “I warn the right-wing leaders in our movement to cease their attacks upon the left wing. They are encouraging every element of reaction in this country to destroy our militant fighters. If these are beaten, the path lies open for the propertied interests to smash those who call themselves moderate.”70 The “moderates”, however, when push came to shove, would prefer to defend the “propertied interests” rather than risk going outside the bounds of capitalist society.
It is true that some right-wing Labour leaders like MacDonald were compelled to mumble that it was “a disservice” (to whom?) to prosecute the Communist Party at that stage. His main complaint, however, was that the CP’s “potentialities for sedition”, that is having an effect on the working class, had only been increased by the imprisonments!71 J.R. Clynes, Home Secretary in MacDonald’s government, complained bitterly that the Communist leaders were being “lifted to the level of martyrs”.72 R. Page Arnot, who was to play a significant role in the General Strike in the North East of England, points out in his book that the “arrests and persecutions [of the CP leaders] were judged to be part of the government’s preparedness for the coming offensive; it was an attempt to strike terror.”73
Fascists
If there was any doubt just how seriously the British ruling class were preparing dictatorial measures, if they should prove necessary, listen to the words of Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain as he excused the Mussolini regime in Italy at that time: “I believe [Mussolini] to be accused of crimes in which he had no share, and I suspect him to have connived unwillingly at other outrages which he would have prevented if he could.”74 Churchill, Chamberlain’s co-member of Baldwin’s cabinet, was also to talk in the 1920s and 1930s of his “admiration” of Mussolini – “your movement has rendered a service to the whole world” – and hoping that Britain could find a similar figure in its hour of need!75 Without a doubt, as we have seen with the formation of the OMS, the British bourgeois when faced with a similar dilemma as their Italian counterparts would not have hesitated to lean on fascistic methods, if not the small fascist organisations themselves, if they could have got away with it, in order to defeat the working class.
As early as 1923, ‘The Patriot’, the Duke of Northumberland’s paper, carried an advert from a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman, founder of the British Fascists, asking for recruits to a “British Fascisti” to act as an organised force to “combat the Red revolution”.76 In November 1925, the British Fascists in a manifesto described itself as: “A body of patriotic citizens who will place their resources at the disposal of a constitutional government in the maintenance of law and order, and will be capable of resisting, by force if absolutely necessary, any attempt at a revolution which aims at the forcible overthrow of the British Constitution and the Empire.” It declared its intention to enforce “severe measures against disloyalty, to suppress the Communist Sunday Schools, to abolish the dole and to uphold the fundamental principles of free speech provided it was not seditious”.77 As Florey pointed out, “at about the same time” as these comments were made, a headline appeared in the Daily Express: “Mussolini gags Italy – newspapers and parties to be suppressed – fascist ‘purge’ – the death penalty extended”!78
The more militant fascists left the parent body to form the National Fascisti in 1924: “They were a tougher, far more arrogant group from the middle and upper class.”79 It was they who kidnapped Harry Pollitt in Liverpool. When they dissolved into the OMS they were welcomed with open arms by the state. George Lansbury asked Baldwin on 16 November 1925, whether he was aware no action was being taken by the Director of Public Prosecutions in connection with the admission of an attack on a motor van of the Daily Herald, mentioned earlier. He also asked the Home Secretary if he was also “aware of the existence of certain fascist and other organisations and societies organised in armed forces – drilling – in uniform.”80
However, the “Chief Constable of Liverpool was not worried”81 about the wanton and mischievous exploits of the British fascists. According to The Times, “Liverpool will be the starting point of a new move on the part of the Fascisti. Arrangements have been made for members in the Liverpool area to become special constables and to drill at the hall of the city police. Captain W.J. Lewis, Commander of the Fascisti in the Lancashire and Wirral area, stated that officers of the organisation were to take the oath at police headquarters today, and the swearing in of other members would follow in due course. It was expected that between 2,000 and 3,000 would thus be enrolled… ‘We are trying to show the way to the whole country, but so far Liverpool is the only place where arrangements have been made with the police,’ [said Lewis]… An official of the Liverpool police said on Saturday if members of the Fascisti offered themselves as special constables there was no reason why they should not be enrolled, provided they were suitable and met the requirements laid down. If they joined they would be drilled in precisely the same way as the constabulary was drilled now.”
As we have explained above, British fascism was a very small and inconsequential force at this stage. Fascists were seen as auxiliaries by the state forces who were themselves preparing harsh measures, potentially dictatorial in character, against the working class in Britain. Therefore the pressure from Lansbury and other Labour leaders for prosecution of the fascists, even when their crimes were recognised, was ignored and the charges were dropped: “The reason given was because the evidence was insufficient to support the charges.”82
