27.06.1996

Comintern on the Great Strike

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, June 25 1926

The executive of the Communist International has issued an important statement on the British General Strike ...

The relative character of capitalist stabilisation; the vindication of the general strike as a method of struggle; the bankruptcy of opportunism and the need to clear it out; the special importance of the trade unions in Britain in the workers’ progress towards the revolution; the correctness of the fight for world trade union unity and the need for maintaining and strengthening the Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Council; the proof positive that the Russian Communist Party remains a revolutionary party and has not become ‘respectable’; the exposure of democratic and parliamentary illusions; the justification of the policy of the Minority Movement and the Communist Party (“The Communist Party of Great Britain has, on the whole, stood the test of political maturity”); and the need for raising before the workers the concrete problem of power - all these topics are raised and discussed briefly.

In view of the constant argument about the ‘impossibility’ of a revolution in Great Britain ... it is worthwhile quoting the statement:

“The British Communist Party must show to the British workers that the victory of the working class is the only way out of the present blind alley.

It must show that at the time of their struggle for power and after their struggle for power, the British workers will have a reliable hinterland in the continental workers; that the Soviet Union would throw open its enormous markets to British socialist industry and that British workers would find allies and collaborators for the economic regeneration of Great Britain on a socialist basis, such allies being the countries at present struggling desperately against British imperialism.”