22.01.2026

On strike: Tyldesley miners outside their hall in 1926

Approaches to the General Strike

Class was pitted against class. The question of state power was posed. Anyone serious about achieving socialism in Britain must painstakingly and critically study the May 3-12 1926 General Strike. Marking the centenary, Jack Conrad begins a series of articles

These articles have their origins in the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike and then the miners’ 1992 last stand. Polemical arrows were - no surprise - shot in the direction of the Socialist Workers Party and Militant Tendency (now Socialist Party in England and Wales, Revolutionary Communist Party and Socialist Alternative). Though, naturally, the far more important ‘official’ CPGB provided the main object of critique, not least because it was a real party - a part, the vanguard, of the working class. And, of course, the CPGB was historically the British section of the Communist (Third) International with its organic connections with Bolshevism and the Socialist (Second) International.

Anyway, in 1986 the SWP’s founder-leader, Tony Cliff, (and son) wrote a dreadful study of the May 1926 general strike.¹ However, having argued against any kind of call for a general strike throughout the 1970s and 80s, the SWP did a complete U-turn in the 1990s. In fact, it raised, Lazurus-like, the old ‘TUC, get off your knees - call the general strike’ slogan (the Workers Revolutionary Party coined the slogan in 1976 and you will still find their News Line repeating it daily as an article of faith).

The SWP’s adopted slogan sounded radical. In reality it rang hollow. Making the TUC pivotal let the SWP off the hook. The TUC general council could be relied upon not to call the (or any other) general strike. The TUC was - and still is - essentially the same creature it was in 1926. General secretary Norman Willis was from the exact same mould as TUC general secretary Walter Citrine. What of Ron Todd, Ken Gill and Bob Crow? The left ‘firebrands’ of their day. Were they really any different from trade union bureaucrats, such as George Hicks, AA Purcell and Alonzo Swales, who provided a left face for the monumental act of betrayal in 1926? The only honest answer is ‘no’. And yet, if the pronouncements of Socialist Worker in the early 1990s were to be believed, reformists right and left could be pushed, pressurised and persuaded into becoming agents of revolution.

Evidently, the SWP of the early 1990s was well to the right of the 1926 CPGB that Tony Cliff so easily disparaged. When the SWP called for the general strike, it made no reference to the necessity of councils of action, a workers’ militia, high politics, subverting the army, let alone fighting for an alternative centre of working class leadership and initiative, which could not only rival the TUC, but the government itself.

For those SWPers who might be tempted to dismiss such talk as wild leftism, that was what Chris Harman, albeit inadequately, was arguing for in Socialist Worker Review back in 1985:

Once the point is reached where the slogan of the general strike is correct, you have to be ready to supplement it with other slogans that begin to cope with the question of power - demands about how the strike is organised (strike committees, workers’ councils), with how the strike defends itself (flying pickets, mass pickets, workers’ defence guards) and with how it takes the offensive against the state (organising within the army and the police).²

Of course, as already noted, during the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 (and before that in 1972 with the Pentonville five) the SWP was arguing against the call for a general strike. Despite the fact that it was both possible and necessary. Harman was trying to excuse the SWP’s evident timidity and scare its rank and file with the implications of the general strike slogan - not equip them tactically, strategically and programmatically.

The Tories were better servants of their class. Much better. They did everything they could in 1984-85 to prevent other workers joining the miners’ Great Strike (the longest mass strike in British history). They bent over backwards to buy off the Militant‑led Liverpool council, a railway strike and two national dock strikes. In its own way the SWP complemented them. It bent over backwards to rubbish the demand for a general strike.

If the idea of really taking a step along the road to revolution was not enough to scare the SWP rank and file, there was always the labour bureaucracy to reassure them. A general strike was impossible because “the Labour Party leadership and the TUC general council have sabotaged the movement in solidarity with the miners”.³ Undoubtedly true.

What changed?

Did the TUC undergo a sudden conversion between 1984-85 and 1992? Were objective circumstances so much more auspicious? ‘No’, ‘no’ and ‘no’ again. Either way, one would have thought that the decision to launch the call for a general strike would have been done with an extensive article by one of the SWP’s main thinkers, maybe Tony Cliff, Chris Harman or Alex Callinicos. More than that, this would have been followed by an open debate, with, inevitably, some branches and individual comrades staying loyal to the old line. But, no, on the contrary, it was done without debate. Then, as now, the SWP had neither programme nor democracy.

Militant did at least defend its call for a 24-hour strike with a short article by Peter Taaffe.⁴ ‘Why a 24-hour general strike?’ marked a significant left turn. Previously Militant had stuck to its version of the parliamentary road to socialism, enshrined in the periodically re-issued programmatic pamphlet, Militant: What we stand for, authored by none other than Taaffe himself. For a moment in October 1992 socialism was no longer reliant on waiting for the next general election and gaining a Labour government committed to a “socialist programme”. Instead comrade Taaffe argued that a TUC-called 24-hour general strike could, “as the appetite grows with the eating”, lay the basis for dual power and finally socialism through transforming organs of working class struggle into organs of working class state power.

Nevertheless comrade Taaffe’s method remained highly schematic. We argued that the retreat imposed on the Tory government by the miners should have been used to prepare for a general strike which “united all sectional struggles”, welding all into one around the fight to smash the Tories’ anti-trade union laws.⁵ Militant, by contrast, doggedly stuck to its one-stage-at-a-time call for a 24-hour general strike. Taaffe admitted that in itself it would be unlikely to stop the government in its tracks or force a reversal of its pit closure programme. He also honestly admitted the danger that the TUC would “sanction” a 24-hour general strike only “as a means of the working class letting off steam”.

So comrade Taaffe needed some deft centrist footwork to justify the claim that the “best slogan to prepare the working class for further battles is a 24-hour general strike”. Self-evidently a 24‑hour general strike could only be a protest action. What begins on midnight and says it will end on the following midnight lacks any internal dynamic in and of itself. Taaffe disagreed. It would be a “political earthquake”, after which things would never be “the same again”. Furthermore, he promised, a successful 24-hour general strike would be “a powerful warning”, and “could fuse the working class together in opposition not just to the government, but to capitalism itself”.

How could comrade Taaffe make such a claim for an unofficial one-day holiday? The reasoning was faultless, if formal. “Failure to retreat on the part of the government and ruling class would lay the ground for more decisive action.” First, it would seem, a series of 24-hour general strikes. Finally though, “an all-out general strike”, which “poses the issue of the working class taking power”. As can be seen, Taaffe treated working class action, up to and including “taking power”, as a series of punishments to be inflicted upon the government if it refuses to back down.

Practical

This stagism is defended in terms of practicality. Hence Militant’s case against an open-ended general strike in 1992 was founded on the contention that it would “not at this stage be supported by the great mass of the working class”. That may well have been true. But surely it was also the case that support for a 24-hour general strike would “not at this stage” have been supported by the great mass of the working class.

Marxists base their slogans on the concrete. By that we do not mean acting as a barometer. On the contrary, we fight for what is necessary. That involves actively linking the present with the future, the now with what needs to be. Of course, we ‘enquire’ - through discussions, through moving trade union resolutions, through standing in elections - into what the “great mass of the working class” thinks. But we do not meekly accept the popular verdict. We develop a dialogue, which - given the right conditions - can produce a mass movement, making what is necessary into a material force.

Militant’s method, if it were consistent, should see it lowering its sights to the point where its slogans meet the statistical average. That would lead it to bourgeois acceptability and absurdity: a one-hour strike, a one-minute silence? When did the great mass of the working class refuse to pay the poll tax? The highest estimate is that around a third of them did. Yet Militant’s slogan was ‘Don’t pay’. When did the great mass indicate their willingness to vote for its Militant parliamentary candidates? In the April 1992 election all three Militant comrades, including two sitting MPs, lost. Do the great mass of the working class support socialism? Unfortunately not. That has never stopped Militant advocating socialism, albeit, usually, of a reformist variety.

As with the SWP, nowhere in Taaffe’s ‘Why a 24-hour general strike?’ article, was the idea of insurrection mentioned. The necessity of the workers arming themselves, the inevitably of violence, was completely ignored. Yet Taaffe admitted that the “very essence” of a general strike, which was meant to flow from his 24-hour protest, “poses the issue of the working class taking power, establishing its own democratic workers’ government and state, and organising a socialist, planned economy”.

An indefinite general strike is diametrically opposite to a 24-hour Grand Old Duke of York affair, where the TUC safely marches us from Hyde Park to Parliament Square. Government ministers could not shrug it off. Nor could the stock exchange and currency dealers view developments with equanimity. A 24-hour general strike is great as a protest, as a means to demonstrate our strength and as means of organising. Without that, the day after will be the same as the day before … and maybe herald not revolution, but counterrevolution in one form or another (not least fascism). Moreover, by its very nature a reformist-dominated TUC would do everything in its power to keep things within the well-established conduits of protest politics and through to a quick compromise.

Those on the left who raise the perspective for a general strike, even if it is to be initiated by 24-hour protests, have a duty to link it with the measures needed to defend and take it forward, given the right circumstances, to insurrectionary conclusions. That Taaffe did not is no aberration. In Militant: What we stand for he dismisses the “cry” that Militant “would establish a socialist Britain by violence” as a “red herring”. According to him, “It is the capitalists, not the working class or the Marxists, who have always attempted by violence to overturn the results of elections that threaten their position.”⁶ True, but what about a dual-power situation, brought about by a general strike, defended by a well-organised workers’ militia, that has caused profound divisions in the enemy’s state machine?

Remember, the October revolution saw the Bolsheviks, having already won a clear majority in the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. However, their insurrection was followed by the approval won in the peasant soviets (representing the overwhelming mass of the population). Again that was followed by elections to the Constituent Assembly.

The fact of the matter is that Militant’s 1992 Why a 24-hour general strike? was not about junking the constitutional and parliamentary illusions of the 1990 Militant: What we stand for. What took place in 1992 was a left turn within the framework of centrism. We have no difficulty whatsoever in proving the point. One week, one edition after Taaffe was waxing lyrical about workers’ councils being a “new potential government power”, his paper’s “message to the Tories” was for a “general election now!⁵ Soon its slogan “For a 24-hour general strike” was being given equal prominence to the slogan, “Force a general election”.⁶

Without doubt if the general strike Militant says it wanted actually happened and actually proceeded to the point of dual power, then any left organisation calling for a general election would probably be making a big mistake ... unless we had already won “the great mass of the working class” (the great majority in a country like Britain).

Otherwise the ruling class would attempt to turn a general election into a means of negatively resolving a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation by turning to the middle classes and the backward, non-activated sections of the working class, outnumbering those who have arrived at revolutionary consciousness and conclusions. That is why the general strike as a tactic must be considered as part and parcel of a strategy of winning “the great mass of the working class”. To achieve that end, high politics - in other words, constitutional demands - are surely vital.

Strikes and more

We shall finish this - the first, introductory article - by touching upon pre-capitalist strikes before turning to the economic and political struggles of the modern, industrial working class.

Sketchy though it may be, pre-class societies provide us with tantalising evidence of what might be called strikes. Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist, suggests that some 200,000 years ago, presumably in Africa, there was a successful female sex strike.⁷ A general act of menstrual solidarity, supported by brothers and sons, which, he says, overthrew alpha male domination and paved the way for an original communism, maintained by a militant egalitarianism. This new social order revolved around a moon-governed cycle of sex strike and big game hunting with the full moon, and cooking, feasting and partying with the dark moon. Original communism allowed for the flowering of human culture that we know happened during the palaeolithic. The massive explosion of mining red ochre bearing witness to the human revolution (red ochre symbolising life and death: it is used to paint the body in ceremonies and burial rituals).

And, though it is completely non-historic (maybe pacifist invention?), Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata speaks for itself - no wonder it was banned by the Greek colonels regime in 1967. It has a storyline with a similar collective action, a sex strike, this time by the wives of the Athenian citizenry during the Peloponnesian war with Sparta. Surely this was more than a farcical idea designed to get belly laughs from the all-male audiences at the Theatre of Dionysus: for sexual gratification they had ready access to prostitutes or hetairai courtesans. Every fiction has a grain of truth. Who knows, perhaps in this case some dim memory of the female-led human revolution and the subsequent “world historical defeat of the female sex” that happened with the emergence of class society (Engels).⁸

There were also class strikes (though, it should be pointed out that the women in the ancient world could, quite legitimately, be called a ‘sex class’ because of their oppressed and exploited position). Scraps of papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus reveal how the pyramid-builders in Egypt unitedly downed chisel and mallet on repeated occasions to petition for improved rations and living conditions in the necropolis. It is also known that exhausted state slaves of Athens struck and occupied the silver mines of Laurium in 135-133 BC.⁹ The cradle of western civilisation had them walled in and left to starve.

In the corporate feudal town apprentices and journeymen, with the coordination provided by their well-established societies, could win real advances. Nevertheless their strikes were little more than small acts of indiscipline within a highly fragmented, workshop-based, patriarchal system of craft production. Other guild masters regarded them as not much more than a family squabble and an irritating example that others might follow. Writing about pre-industrial England, Edward Thompson makes the telling point that the “insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace”.¹⁰

The main collective form of class struggle employed by those below in ancient and feudal times was not the strike. From Spartacus to Wat Tyler, from Jesus of Nazareth to Thomas Müntzer, the popular classes punctured the supposedly seamless fabric of official society with utopian and sometimes despairing revolt - riot in the city, jacquerie in the countryside. Such uprisings could on occasion force upon the upper classes conditions which they regarded as onerous - not the least of which was democracy. However, for all their rights, the Athenian peasant-citizen, the Roman plebeian, the Icelandic yeoman farmer existed in a subordinate position within an oligarchical, slave-owning system.

There was always the danger of the aristocrats of birth or wealth regaining their unrestricted rule. The mob gets drunk quickly and just as quickly loses cohesion. Because of economic geography the peasant is dispersed to begin with. So, even when united revolt overcomes the tyranny of distance, the moment of collective triumph over the manor or town is never permanent. Peasants are pulled back to helpless separation by the irresistible need to plant and harvest. The rulers deserved to fail. But, even when the ruled successfully revolted, they could not provide a viable economic alternative which abolished the reproduction of class relations.

The nascent bourgeoisie - economically a powerful class within the womb of dissolving feudalism - introduced a dynamic element into the never-ending cycle of primitive revolt. When money did not serve them better, when there seemed no other way, the bourgeoisie was quite prepared to smash, terrorise and overturn. To perform such a political act the bourgeoisie needed a universal philosophy of emancipation. To remove kingly, aristocratic and church barriers to their developing economic order the bourgeoisie formed itself into a class of liberators. It not only put men of action - Oldenbarneveldt, Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Garibaldi - at the head of the popular movement: it used preachers, poets and pamphleteers - Calvin, Voltaire, Milton, Paine - as the “enchanter’s wand” to inspire the masses with promises of heaven on earth.

Hence the classic form of the bourgeois revolution was the barricade, behind which stood the people who had been won to believe they were fighting for liberté, fraternité and égalité or - given different times and countries - something equivalent. But, whatever dreams were spinning in their heads, objectively, while they remained under bourgeois hegemony, the participants fought not for the rights of man, but public debt and a home market fit for capitalist accumulation.

Haunting the rise of bourgeoisiedom and the consolidation of the capitalist state - whether monarchical or plutocratic - was the ever-present threat of popular democracy. Levellers and sans culottes wanted a political system that would have greatly curbed the power of capital. However, the greatest threat to capitalism was its own creation - the modern proletariat. Sucked into factories, mines and mills by the never-ending and most elementary needs of capital, dispossessed peasants, desperate day labourers, ruined artisans - and their wives and children – were transformed not only into a class of labourers, but a self-making class because of a common struggle against capital.

The Marx-Engels team were emphatic that individuals become a class only to the extent “they have to carry on a common battle with another class”.¹¹ For workers then, it was not only material conditions of everyday life - housing, education, leisure and work - which moulded them into a class. It was the war against capital: beginning with combinations to limit competition between themselves as otherwise atomised sellers of labour-power. Thompson considers that our working class was formed through self-making economic, political and cultural struggle between the years 1780 and 1832; by which time “most English (sic) working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers”.¹²

Marx and Engels were perhaps the first to grasp the universal nature of this new class. Other socialists and communists banked on the sectional interests of independent artisans, skilled craftsmen and small farmers. The likes of Henri de St Simon, Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon came out with various utopian schemes, designed to defend and restore their position. By contrast Marx and Engles looked to the proletariat as a whole and the objective movement of history. Because of its lack of property and relationship to other classes, the proletariat as a whole has an interest beyond merely improving its own immediate lot.

Economic

Those who own no means of production other than their ability to work have a ready and for them a self-evident weapon at hand to achieve their immediate ends, no matter how limited. The collective withdrawal of labour-power. That does not mean that, once a strike begins, there is a pre-set mechanism, which operates to take workers up an inexorable series of organisational, political and ideological steps, ending in final liberation.

In and of itself, what Marx called in his pamphlet, Value, price and profit, the “incessant struggle” in the workplaces can only be a matter of resistance to the encroachments of capital.¹³ No different, in essence, then to the resistance of artisans, slaves, peasants and journeymen of previous times. That produced pitying concern and offers of benign help from some aristocratic and bourgeois quarters. The working class had yet to constitute itself as a militant class. But, once it had, the real movement began to develop its own momentum and capability for qualitative self-development.¹⁴

When it came to this real movement, both Marx and Engels stressed the relationship and yet at the same time the difference between economic and political struggles. The strike to compel a particular employer or a particular group of employers to up wages or reduce hours is and will remain a purely economic struggle, and therefore a containable movement of the underclass. On the other hand, the movement to force through a general wage increase or a general limitation on the working day is political, in that it has as its objective the enforcement of general interests. General interests unite the working class against the capitalist class … and the “struggle of class against class is a political struggle”, which contains within it the seeds of a new social order.¹⁵ It is not an either-or situation. Through, or out of, the training provided by separate economic struggles the conditions are provided for a political movement, in which the working class struggles against the state. So a dialectical relationship.

Having been cleaved into separate categories by the rise of capitalism, economics and politics thereby come together again in the working class (the class that can become both the subject and object of history). After even the first few steps, the generalised economic struggle can take on new dimensions. Met by the forces of the employer and the state’s laws and courts, fighting in an integrated economy, where scabs can easily be brought in, police employed and production transferred, workers are predisposed to and actively search out the totalising world view of Marxism: ie, their own self-knowing, scientific theory. Through these politics the working class can put itself in the leadership of all those who are oppressed.

Even on the lowest level, the cooperation, discipline and primacy of need over profit means that within themselves strikes contain a kernel of both proletarian economics and proletarian state power. As I have said, that does not mean there is an A-to-B course from the trade union strike against the employer to the socialist order. Nevertheless, as we will see, the generalised strike poses a challenge to the system itself. May 1926 being a classic case in point.

Of course, the political movement of the working class comes about because there has already been a certain degree of previous economic development. Capitalism does our groundwork. With the further concentration and centralisation of production, workers thereby come to possess a huge, latent, economic and therefore political, power. One point, one area, one branch of production relies on and is connected with another in a mosaic of national and global interdependence. Strikes affect the immediate employers. They also, if they are generalised, even in symbolic form - eg, May Day and International Working Women’s Day - bind the working class together as a future ruling class: a ruling class that, uniquely, has a vital interest in abolishing all classes, including itself.

Without that there can only be a new form of domination. So, except temporarily, the working class has no interest in a new form of rule, a new form of “political power”.¹⁶ Whether or not politics ceases thereafter is a moot point. What we can say is that the politics of state power - therefore democracy, if we mean by that a form of the state - will “wither away” (Engels).¹⁷

Planned articles

We shall see later, in the next article, that Engels, in particular, took responsibility for combating illusions in the Chartist general strike strategy. We shall then, in another article, deal with the opportunist attempt to misuse the polemics of Marx and Engels against the anarchists to distort their whole theory of the class struggle. Having done that, we shall go on to show, during the 1905 revolution in Russia, how Lenin and the Bolsheviks learnt from the masses and combined the general strike as a tactic with the perspective of insurrection. We shall then examine Rosa Luxemburg and ask what significance there was in the different way she approached the question of the general strike, compared to Lenin.

Our second tranche of articles will deal with the historic conditions which led to the 1926 General Strike itself. Beginning with Britain as the workshop of the world, we trace Britain’s relative decline and the sustained challenge presented by the working class, from the great industrial unrest that began in 1910 and which lasted till August 1914. The platonic threat of the general strike slogan could not prevent the outbreak of world war. But world war produced the conditions for the general strike - conditions which persisted from the end of World War I to the actuality of May 1926.

These articles will show the creativity of the masses and the treachery of the labour and trade union bureaucracy. We shall in particular attempt to separate myth from reality, when it comes to the record of the CPGB, in order to present our own considered assessments and criticisms.

T Cliff and D Gluckstein Marxism and trade union struggle: the General Strike of 1926 London 1986.↩︎
C Harman ‘What do we mean by … The general strike?’ Socialist Worker Review January 1985.↩︎
C Harman Socialist Worker Review January 1985.↩︎
Militant October 30 1992.↩︎
Daily Worker October 23 1992.↩︎
P Taaffe Militant: what we stand for 1990, p42.↩︎
C Knight Blood relations: menstruation and the origins of culture London 1991. This was a groundbreaking book. Since it was first published our knowledge of pre-historic society has greatly increased. Hence some of the arguments contained in the book are now outdated. However, its essential thesis has more than withstood the test of both criticism and time.↩︎
K Marx and D Engels CW Vol 26 London 1990, p165.↩︎
See GEM de Ste Croix The class struggle in the ancient world London 1983, p562.↩︎
EP Thompson Customs in common London 1991, p42.↩︎
K Marx and F Engles CW Vol 5 London 1976, p77.↩︎
EP Thompson The making of the English working class Harmondsworth 1981, p11.↩︎
K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 20, Moscow 1985, p144.↩︎
By 1833 the Owenite movement was actively canvassing an “alliance between the trade unionists of England, France and Germany” (EP Thompson The making of the English working class Harmondsworth 1981, p912).↩︎
K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, New York 176, p211.↩︎
K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, New York 176, p212.↩︎
K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 25, London 1987, p268.↩︎