WeeklyWorker

06.06.1996

Why strike failed: Communist Party statement

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, June 4 1926

The General Strike was the greatest display of solidarity in the history of the British labour movement ...

The Communist Party declares that refusal to discuss the responsibility for the defeat of the strike is simply preparing further defeats.

Since the beginning of 1921 British industry has been torn by gigantic strikes and lock-outs ... which culminated in the General Strike of 1926.

The aim of all those struggles was resistance to attacks on the workers’ standard of life. They record not the personal failure of any individual capitalist or trade union negotiator or politician to arrive at ‘reasonable’ settlements, but the failure of British capitalism to guarantee to the workers even those miserable standards of life to which they were previously accustomed ...

The failure of the rightwing leadership is not just a temporary failure of courage or judgement, but a failure of the entire policy which they have pursued ... They have been agents of capitalism in the labour movement ...

From the moment when they entered negotiations, the General Council ... aimed at avoiding a struggle by inducing the miners to accept lower wages...

The General Strike was a weapon forced into the hands of the right wing against their will ... The pressure of the working class from below rendered it impossible for the General Council to openly desert the miners ...

The Communist Party ... asks the working class to repudiate with scorn the suggestion that the strike was weakening, and that it had to be called off to prevent collapse ...

Nor must the workers accept the argument now being used extensively that a mass struggle of the character which we have recently experienced must end either in revolution or the complete defeat of the working class. This is a travesty of the facts. The general strike challenging the capitalist system must either go forward to revolution or down to defeat, but a general strike for definite concessions, if led with the necessary courage, still holds possibilities for the working class, and the workers cannot throw aside this weapon meantime, for there is no other that can serve them in the struggle against the capitalist offensive ...

The lesson of the General Strike is not that the strike is a bad weapon and parliament a good one, but that the right wing, because of its anti-working class outlook, is unable to wield any weapon against capitalism ...

Only by the development of the Communist Party towards a mass Party can the workers be assured of an increasing struggle to fit the labour movement for its new tasks.