Working class people learn more in one day of action than in years or decades of peaceful development. This applies to a strike in a single enterprise, in a district or region, or national action. But a general strike is the greatest school for driving home the realities of class society and the nature of its state. We have seen that the General Council of the TUC was not capable of doing this. On the contrary, by the end of the first week of the strike, they were desperately attempting to rein it in and secretly opened negotiations with the government via Herbert Samuel. A.J. Cook wrote later: “It seemed that the only desire of some leaders was to call off the General Strike at any cost, without any guarantees for the workers, miners or others.”1 Allen Hutt says of this statement by Cook: “That is exactly what happened; except that it was not some leaders but the whole General Council, including the Purcell-Hicks ‘Lefts’.”2
This, of course, was what Trotsky had been predicting all along. But the Communist Party was unprepared for this development. Right-wing union leaders like Thomas, in the final analysis, were props of the capitalist system and all that went with it. J.R.Clynes, at one with Thomas in the General Strike, explained: “J.H. Thomas, representing the railwaymen, found, early in the strike, that his duties took him to Buckingham Palace. King George asked him a number of questions, and expressed his sympathy for the miners. At the end of the talk, His Majesty, who was gravely disturbed, remarked, it is said: ‘Well, Thomas, if the worst happens I suppose all this – (with a gesture indicating his surroundings) – will vanish?’ Fortunately for Britain and the world, it did not come to the worst. The trade unions saw to that.”3
Favourable opportunity for CP
But how then did the Communist Party fare in this situation? It was a small party but, as we have seen, even between Red Friday and the beginning of the General Strike it had substantially increased its forces and, moreover, had the authority of the Russian Revolution at its back. This hugely favourable factor for the CP should not be underestimated. The authority and prestige of the Russian workers’ state was colossal in the eyes of the working class in Britain and elsewhere, confronted as it was with an endemic and chronic capitalist crisis. The revolution had not yet degenerated into the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship which repelled the world working class. An intense struggle was under way between the forces around Stalin and the Left Opposition on the future direction of Russia. The fact that the British trade unions tried to cover themselves with the authority of the Russian Revolution showed its attractiveness to the working class as a whole.
There are many examples in history of small parties growing rapidly when revolutionary events occur. The Bolsheviks went from roughly 8,000 members on the eve of the February Revolution in 1917 to over a quarter of a million by October. This gave them a mass base and allowed the party to lead the working class, with the peasantry behind it, to the overthrow of Russian landlordism and capitalism. The process of revolution was speeded up in Russia because of the First World War. It was compressed into nine months, largely because of the desperation of the masses to end the First World War; the revolution was literally a life or death question. This could only be achieved on the basis of the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky coming to power. In other revolutionary situations, however, the processes were more drawn out; in Spain, for example, between 1931 and 1937. Yet in this revolution, the POUM (the United Marxist Workers’ Party) grew from less than a thousand members before July 1936 to tens of thousands in 1937. The Chinese Communist Party grew from a handful – 51 in 1921 – to a mass force that could have taken power six years later in the revolution of 1925-27.
Of course, there can be no exact parallels that could be drawn for Britain in 1926. National traditions, the character of the labour movement, the state of preparedness and consciousness of the working class and other layers of society all have to be taken into account. “Tradition is the dead weight of history which lies on the brain of the living,” as Marx pointed out. For the oldest working class in the world, where the organisation of trade unions goes back to before the French Revolution, one of the “traditions” that weighed on the working class in 1926 was the existence of an encrusted, conservative trade union officialdom, which like barnacles on a ship drags it back and threatens it with paralysis. This stratum in “normal” times dissipates the collective strength of workers, invariably in defence of its own narrow privileges. In a period of social explosions, however, the authority of these “leaders” can be shattered. This can result in such a weakening of their influence, even in a labour movement where the official apparatus plays an important role. It can allow space for the rapid emergence of genuine revolutionary forces. For instance, in Germany in 1923, the official unions were pushed aside. The working class, in the course of a developing revolutionary situation, stopped paying dues to the official trade unions and looked to the shop committees which could have become the basis for genuine workers’ councils, which in turn, with the right leadership, could have carried through a revolution. In order to ensure that such opportunities can be seized – unique and often only existing for a limited time – there must be clarity amongst the leaders and ranks on the character of the period. This is not an easy task in the rapidly evolving movement. Appropriate fighting slogans and organisations are necessary which can lead the working class forward, ultimately to take power.
The fact that the Communist Party in Britain in 1926 did not have an adequate analysis, slogans or organisation which met the situation was not entirely of their own making. Farman describes them as “reluctant revolutionaries”4 But this was not true of the rank and file or most of their leaders. They were “the salt of the earth”, as we stated earlier, the flower of the British working class. They had displayed not a little courage and self-sacrifice – particularly when contrasted to MacDonald, Thomas and Co. They were prepared to go to jail for their class and pursued heroic work amongst the working class before, during and after the General Strike. Their political weaknesses arose from the advice they received from the Comintern. They were imprisoned in the mistaken tactic of the ‘Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee’, which was to have fatal consequences in the nine days themselves and afterwards.
In particular, there was a complete underestimation of the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the developing situation. For instance, in the Workers’ Weekly of 30 April 1926, a few days before the greatest event in British working class history was to unfold, Communist Party leader J.T. Murphy wrote an article with the title ‘Revolution not in Sight’. He pointed out: “Our party does not hold the leading positions in the trade unions… And let it be remembered that those who are leading have no revolutionary perspectives before them. Any revolutionary perspective they may perceive will send the majority of them hot on the track of a retreat… To entertain any exaggerated views as to the revolutionary possibilities of this crisis and visions of new leadership ‘arising spontaneously in the struggle,’ etc., is fantastic. Let us keep our feet well on the ground and our heads clear.” He went on, demonstrating in the process a complete underestimate of what was about to happen, “This is not the revolutionary crisis which is haunting the minds of the ruling class, but one of a long series of crises attending the decline of British capital-ism… If the trade unions were staffed and led by a mass Communist Party, welding the whole workers’ movement to working-class principles behind the revolutionary leadership of the Communist Party, the character of the present crisis would be different, and the nervous heroics of Jix would be more justified. But we have not a mass Communist Party yet. We have not won the leadership of the trade unions yet. We have not beaten MacDonald and his supporters yet.”5
Revolution
This was a completely inadequate explanation of perspectives for the struggle which loomed. The subjective weaknesses of the Communist Party seemed to be the main criteria to measure the objective reality. It also seems that Karl Radek, a member of the Left Opposition at the time, was of a similar mind as Murphy. When he spoke to Robert Boothby the latter reported his comments: “It is more interesting now there [in Britain] than here. But make no mistake, this is not a revolutionary movement it is simply a wage dispute.”6 This, as we have seen, was the theme of the right-wing trade union leaders. It certainly wasn’t the view of some of the Moscow leaders like Zinoviev who wrote later in the journal Communist International: “The masses gave evidence of marvellous organisation. During the first seven days the strike was developing on an upward grade. The masses formed the councils of action, which were in fact beginning to develop in the direction of district soviets of workers’ deputies.”7 As we have seen, the councils of action were not soviets, had not begun, unfortunately, “to develop in the direction of district soviets of workers’ deputies”. There were elements of dual power but also, contrary to what Murphy, the Communist Party leadership and what subsequent historians of the party have tried to prove, the nine days objectively displayed some of the features of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation.
Revolutionary opportunity?
Lenin gave four basic conditions for a revolutionary situation. Firstly, the capitalists cannot rule in he old way. The second condition is that the middle class are either hostile to the old regime or are neutral. Thirdly, the working class is prepared to go the whole way in confronting the system. The fourth and most vital condition is the existence of a mass party and the leadership able to lead the working class to take power. To see whether Britain in 1926 met all or some of these conditions it is necessary to understand what are the factors which distinguish revolution from ‘normal’ periods. One indication is when the masses step onto the scene of history and begin to take their fate into their own hands. This signifies the beginning of a revolution.
The working class of Russia in February 1917 made a revolution in overthrowing the Tsarist regime. However, they lacked sufficient consciousness of their own power then to carry through the socialist revolution. This only came after many ebbs and flows over nine months. The mass involvement of the majority of organised workers in Britain in the General Strike, drawing behind them the unorganised, signified the beginning of a revolutionary process. This would have been enormously facilitated by factory committees embracing non-unionists. Mass involvement was a key feature of the nine days. Moreover, the working class was rapidly beginning to generalise their experience within days of the General Strike breaking out. A typical report, carried in a number of histories of the strike, is the comments of the Dartford Divisional Labour Party: “After the third day of the strike, if you spoke about the coal owners the audience would listen with a polite indifference, but if you attacked the government, or even mentioned the word, you had the audience with you, and that with cheers and wild enthusiasm. The issue was the TUC and the government; the miners and the owners were secondary to this issue.”8
James Klugmann, historian of the Communist Party, interprets this and other similar statements as just the “beginning”. He states: “Nine days was not nearly enough to transform the hatred of the Tories, employers, coal owners, and the disgust with the General Council, into a positive, scientific, socialist, revolutionary outlook.” He even chastises members of the Communist Party and sections of the Communist International who, he says, should “not exaggerate” the stage of understanding of the working class during the General Strike. He argued that there was a “readiness to strike, but [also] a deep feeling of solidarity prevailed”.9 Lenin once said that a revolution does not develop in a “pure” form with one army lining up on one side “for the revolution” and another opposed! Revolutionary consciousness develops when the masses, and not all at once, come to the conclusion that “they cannot live like this any longer”.
That was unmistakably the mood which had developed in Britain in the run-up to and, particularly, during the 1926 General Strike. The worker referred to earlier from Ashton summed this up. He believed that, at long last, he and his class were now in the driving seat as the bosses came “cap in hand” looking for favours from the councils of action. The general mood was one of hatred for the system. There were elements of dual power and, as Churchill and Baldwin understood, a reaching out by the working class for an “alternative government”. That consciousness was developing with every hour and every day of the strike, which was the thing that most alarmed the “leadership” at the top.
As to the development of councils of action, Zinoviev exaggerated the situation. He compared them to the “structure and functions of the departments of the St Petersburg Soviet in the period of so-called ‘dual power’” (February – November 1917). Nevertheless these parallel sources of power would have developed by leaps and bounds had the example of the North-East and other areas been eventually taken up. This is tacitly admitted by Farman: “The strike committees were clearly intending to substitute their own authority for that of the government. It is probable that, if the strike had been prolonged, regional groupings of councils of action would have operated with an increasing indifference to the TUC and they may well have evolved into embryo soviets.”10 Not “embryos” but fully-fledged workers’ councils with more and more power concentrated in their hands were posed if the strike had gone on. The development of such organisations, even in their embryo, is in itself an unmistakable sign of a profound change in the situation.
It is true that it would not have been possible to sustain them if the strike had not culminated in a complete victory and the taking of power by the working class, something which was not possible given the character of the right-wing leadership of the TUC. But if councils of action had developed, filled out, become more like British ‘soviets’, even if only for a short period, this would have established an enormous historical reference point for the working class in future battles. Just as the Russian working class took the example of soviets in 1905 and applied them in 1917, so too would the British workers use a similar example from 1926 in the future. It was for this reason that the right-wing General Council acted to stultify the developments of councils of action in 1926. Subsequently, with the help of capitalist historians, they have belittled them, their role and potential in 1926.
Another condition of revolution is that the ruling class cannot rule in the old way; it splits into factions and divides amongst itself. This was an unmistakeable feature of 1926. There was general agreement amongst the ruling class on the need to drive down living standards, as the condition for restoring the health of their system. They would have preferred to have done this by pressure on the trade union leaders but, given the wellsprings of discontent pushing the latter into opposition, the capitalists could not achieve their objective in this way. They therefore decided, quite consciously, to take on the working class and inflict a defeat hoping it would have lasting effects. Even then there was a ‘hard’ wing of the capitalists (Churchill and Jix) and a ‘soft’ wing represented by Baldwin.
This was compounded by the difference with the Liberals; Lloyd George was making demagogic speeches denouncing the government and even hinting at support for the miners in this battle. He floated the idea of joining with MacDonald and right-wing Labour in a new ‘political realignment’. MacDonald was a discredited figure in the aftermath of the 1924 minority Labour government, both within the Labour Party and in the trade unions, even with right-wing figures like Bevin. If this ‘realignment’ with Lloyd George had taken place, it would have represented something similar to the creation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, led by Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rogers. This split the Labour vote and ensured the victory of Thatcher in the 1980s. The very fact that this was discussed in the tumultuous events of 1926 was itself a barometer of the extreme crisis which this symbolised for capitalism and its different political formations.
Middle class
What then was the mood amongst the middle class? Trotsky once described British society as one of the most “proletarian in the world”, with regards to both the numbers of workers and their specific weight in society. Such was the immense power of this class – three quarters of the population – they could have taken power by themselves. But one of the conditions for revolution is that the intermediate layers in society should either support the working class in the struggle or be at least ‘neutral’. Where they line up behind the bourgeois, they are potentially a source of reaction, support dictatorships and, in the case of fascism, are mobilised as a battering ram to smash and atomise the organisations of the working class. But the middle class in Britain, a minority but quite substantial in numbers, were not solidly behind Baldwin in this clash. It is true that the ‘gilded youth’ – bourgeois or petty bourgeois young people out for a ‘lark’ – were, in some senses, mobilised. But as we have seen by the fate of the OMS, they were largely ineffective in breaking the strike. While on the surface, most ‘respectable’ public opinion, usually denoting the middle class, appeared to be with the government, it was nevertheless very tentative. Hence, the reining in of Churchill and others when they threatened to go “too far” in using repressive methods. A confrontation leading to deaths on a sizeable scale would have fuelled the flames of working-class opposition and risked alienating the middle class.
The, at best, vacillating mood of the middle class in 1926 is indicated by the individuals who appeared on either side of the barricades. As mentioned earlier, A.J.P.Taylor was on the side of the strikers, considered himself a communist, and even considered G.D.H. Cole somewhat of a reformist: “Mr G.D.H. Cole is a bit of a puzzle, with a Bolshevik soul and a Fabian muzzle.”11 On one occasion, as the General Strike loomed, he drove with Tom Driberg, later a left-wing Labour M P, to the Communist Party headquarters in London, expecting orders for the “coming revolution”. He recounted that he found the doors there bolted and barred. “After much banging by us, there was a rattling of chains and an elderly Scotch Communist called Bob Steward appeared. He said ‘There’s no-one here. I am only the caretaker. Get along hame with ye.’ These were the only instructions I ever received from the Communist Party of Great Britain.” Bob Stewart was a founding member of the CPGB! Taylor admitted later that his experiences during the strike had had a deep effect on him, as the result of which he developed a great admiration for the British working class and felt that he should devote his life to their service. He also commented: “That was not all; the General Strike destroyed my faith, such as it was, in the Communist Party. The party that was supposed to lead the working class played no part in the strike except to be a nuisance.”12
Other subsequently famous figures who were on the side of the working class included Cecil Day Lewis, the poet, who became a member of the Oxford University Strike Committee, John Betjeman and even Hugh Gaitskell, as mentioned earlier. The great W.H. Auden was also friendly towards the strikers and the labour movement. G.K Chesterton, the author, also showed sympathy, writing: “There are many things we should like to know about the free hand given to ‘specials’ during the recent crisis. We should like to know, for example, how many of them had seen service in Ireland as Black and Tans, and if any person in authority knew that they proposed to serve the English strikers as they had once served Irishmen. We know that the ruling classes had determined on a civil war, but we should like to know how far the police were prepared to go in helping them.”13 Surprisingly, Graham Greene, who later moved towards the Left, was recruited into the ‘Special Constabulary’. He commented: “There was a wonderful absence of traffic, it was a beautiful, hushed London that we were not to know again until the Blitz, and there was the excitement of living on a frontier, close to violence… Our two-man patrol always ceased at the south end of Vauxhall Bridge, for beyond lay the enemy streets where groups of strikers stood outside the public houses. A few years later, my sympathies would have lain with them, but the great depression was still some years away: the middle class had not yet been educated by the hunger-marchers.”14
Although the 1930s were to deepen the alienation of the middle class from the establishment, and sections of middle-class youth were drawn in 1926 to the ‘specials’ as a kind of extension of a “rather violent rugger match”, nevertheless this did not denote a deep-set mood of support for the government by the middle class as a whole. Some, undoubtedly, were “prompted by a class instinct as powerful as that which motivated the strikers, well-fed young men from the fashionable clubs, universities and business institutions responded to Jix’s appeals in their thousands”.15 The headmaster of Eton, and fifty of his assistants, and the 85-year old Earl of Meath, founder of the Empire Day movement, joined the government side. But this was hardly a powerful club with which to batter into submission working class resistance. The mass of the middle class was watching and waiting. Decisive action and the continuation of the strike for any length of time would have undermined their support for the government with the possibility of the middle class being drawn over to the side of the working class.
Mass revolutionary party vital
This, it is true, was not a fully ‘mature’ revolutionary situation in the classical sense of the term, nor was it a “normal” situation, a struggle just for wages. Three out of the four conditions for revolution existed, at least in outline. The capitalists were split, the working class was looking for a way out and were in revolt against capitalism. Moreover, increased social tension overflowed from the safe parliamentary channels which had been skilfully used by the ruling class in the past to contain them. The main arena was not parliament – which was a sideshow to the main drama which was played out in the ‘street’. The middle class were not firmly behind the government and decisive action by the working class would have won them over to their side or at least neutralised them. It was the fourth condition, the subjective factor, the leadership and the mass party that was absent. Given its small number of members, it is true, as J.T. Murphy implies, that the CP would not have been able by itself to change the outcome of the strike. But it could have and would have come out of the strike immeasurably stronger with correct policies. Moreover, and more decisive in the long term, the understanding and consciousness of the working class would have been far higher in preparation for future battles.
Revolutions, in reality, rarely develop in a ‘classical’ form or in one act. Revolution is a process involving different phases. 1926 was a heightened stage of class polarisation. To have matured into a classical revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation would have required the presence of a mass party and mass leadership. J.T. Murphy was correct that the Communist Party was not yet this force. But it was prevented from becoming the basis of such a force by the theoretical, strategic and tactical limitations which were on display during the General Strike. From an overall point of view, the Communist Party militants, devoted as they were to the working class and playing a key role at rank-and-file level, were not fully prepared for the situation.
This is not to say that even the best revolutionary party can always be prepared for all eventualities. Only Lenin and Trotsky fully understood the significance of the February Revolution in October 1917 – the majority of Bolshevik leaders on the ground, Stalin, Kamenev, etc., supported the capitalist ‘Provisional Government’. This was, in effect, support for a ‘popular front’ government before coalitions between workers and capitalist parties were known by this name. However, the Russian working class had the priceless corrective presence of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik rank and file cadre which had been prepared by Lenin during the whole preceding period. This, unfortunately, was not the case as far as the young British Communist Party was concerned. Peter Kerrigan, a member of the Communist Party and chairman of the Central Strike Co-Coordinating Committee in Glasgow, later wrote: “For the nine days of the strike I was to be busy, almost to the exclusion of all other activity, with the work of the Central Coordinating Committee, of which I was first vice-chairman and then chairman. People ask me today: did I expect the betrayal of the General Strike? I always have to reply that, amid the struggle, I never thought of it.”16
This was typical of the position of Communist Party fighters at the time. The responsibility lay not on their shoulders but on the fact that they had not been adequately politically prepared, either for the kind of social rupture which the General Strike constituted or for the strategy and tactics to ensure its victory. Even as a small party, it is incumbent on a revolutionary party to pose the question of what is needed to ensure victory, to criticise the inadequacies of the leadership, both Right and Left, and, above all, to seize the opportunity presented to build a powerful platform which can become the base of a mass revolutionary party later. J.T. Murphy, while pointing to the numerical weakness of the Communist Party, nevertheless projected before the strike the possibility of it growing to at least 100,000. This was not a Utopian target given the explosive character of the events that were unfolding, and the points of support, small though they were, which the Communist Party had at that stage. With a different policy, even after the strike was terminated, this would have been possible.
