16.04.2026

Possibilities and perceptions

Marking the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, Jack Conrad highlights the failure of the ‘official’ lefts both in the trade unions and the Labour Party. However, while there was betrayal, there were also objective limits to what could have been achieved

A general strike can be dressed up as a purely economic dispute between workers and employers: its initiators can speak the language of reasonableness, compromise and negotiation. Yet, whatever the heartfelt wishes, orders and beliefs of those at the top, a general strike can never just be a routine trades dispute. It involves the working class organised as a class and can only but have a political dynamic that challenges the state ... therefore the state will respond as the state. The result? Class against class.

The necessity of safeguarding picket lines, turning out publicity, organising couriers to carry messages, decision-making, coordinating between different unions, ensuring that the vital needs of the population are met - all that leads to new, often unofficial and unconstitutional, answers. Initiative, inventiveness and latent energy are released from below. Above, conservative leaders find the situation slipping out of their hands. Workers think, debate, discover and gravitate towards revolutionary ideas.

Not that we should fall for the trap of direct action syndicalism and the ‘one big strike’. The idea that the general strike “can stop the flow of profits and shut down the system” and thereby ready the working class for taking over the means of production.¹ A perspective originated by the likes of William Benbow, Mikhail Bakunin and César De Paepe - we dealt with them in the first of these articles.² The line of reasoning is naively appealing: since no society can exist for long if production stops, all that workers have to do is to stop working and that will stop the capitalist system. The ruling class either humbly surrenders or unleashes the full might of the state and thereby forces workers to bring down the old society in its entirety. Except, of course, it does not happen.

Shortcuts inevitably prove illusory … though that does not stop illusions being renewed with each successive generation. The fact of the matter is that general strikes have repeatedly been defeated by the undiminished ability of the state to protect the interests of collective capital - even strikes on a mass scale rarely “paralyse the state”.³

Sometimes substantial concessions are given in the form of state subsidy. Trade union officialdom can thereby claim a victory and reassert its control over the sale of labour power by ensuring a smooth return to work. At other times, though, workers find themselves compelled to return to work through the state blocking strike pay, seizing trade union assets, withdrawing welfare benefits, etc. Then there is the last resort: the state unleashes unmediated violence - arrests, beatings, killings. This leading not to workers bringing the entire old order crashing down. How can they? They have no brigades, no divisions with ready access to, or training in, advanced weaponry.

Hence Marxists have always stressed the necessity of political action, not least using elections in order to agitate, educate and organise ... and thereby gain a demonstrable majority, and not only in big factories, mines and mills. Through organising the mass of class-conscious workers, including the unemployed, carers, retirees, etc, into a disciplined, programmatically-based political party, a Communist Party, it becomes possible to morally split the existing state machine - most importantly, the armed forces.

The rank and file have friends, partners, siblings, parents who are in, or who are influenced by, the party. Indeed they themselves could easily be card-carrying members. When given unacceptable orders, they will therefore rebel and place commanding officers under arrest. Something greatly facilitated if the demand for the abolition of the standing army and replacing it with a popular militia has already been achieved. With us, therefore, winning the battle for democracy is strategically central.

Stage-managed

Of course, as we have amply illustrated, the 1926 General Strike had all the hallmarks of a stage-managed, bureaucratic affair. That explains how establishment historians can get away with portraying it as an example of the British people’s moderate sensibilities and innate reasonableness.⁴ From the beginning the strike was consciously infused with religion, respectability and a daft TUC sense of ‘fair play’. The general council rightly thought itself the epitome of law-abiding responsibility. Nor can there be any doubt that the mass of workers had no intention of breaking the law, let alone making social revolution. Yet with each day that passed things began to change.

The situation itself eroded and broke down the barriers that kept the parallel sectional strikes apart. With every street corner debate and picket-line discussion, class solidarity hardened. The 400 or so councils of action helped overcome petty sectional divisions and, to a greater or lesser degree, secured a unified, horizontal approach. True, none of them ex­perienced a sudden rush of calls from the rank and file, demanding their transformation into organs of insurrection. But then there was no fusillade of bullets to teach. Britain 1926 moved according to a slower tempo than Russia 1905. Workers were still reformist and the British state was infinitely more skilful, confident and resourceful than the visibly tottering Asiatic despotism of Russian tsarism. Nonetheless, there was an unmistakable tempo.

From the start the TUC faced demands that the strike be extended to all workers. Those who had not yet been ordered to strike clamoured to join the fray. Local officials telegrammed that they were having the utmost difficulty in keeping them at work. There were many reports of ‘second line’ workers coming out alongside the ‘first line’ in spite of the TUC schedule. This was no matter of a dozen here and a dozen there. In all, 50% of engineering workers struck before they were given the official call. Non-unionised workers - ‘nons’ - joined the strike too: another piece of evidence exposing as a lie the TUC claim that the strike was called off because it was collapsing. In point of fact there were 100,000 more workers out the day after the TUC had capitulated and ‘ended’ the strike than the day before.

The TUC called it off on the ninth day, not from fear of failure, but of success. Throughout the strike surrender negotiations had been proceeding via all manner of circuitous routes. However, confronted by a government that showed not the least sign of compromise, and by increasing assertiveness and independence from below, the TUC was squeezed as if in a vice. To maintain its existence as intermediary between labour and capital and preserve union funds, the bureaucracy had to betray its own social base and end the General Strike with an unconditional surrender.⁵

If it lasted another week or fortnight, let alone the holy month, the bureaucratic straitjacket would have started to unravel and our Labourites would have been in real trouble. The mad dogs would have taken the lead and conceivably realised the “political revolution - the destruction of the constitution” (Stanley Baldwin’s baseless accusation levelled against the TUC).

A note of caution is worth adding at this point of the argument, though. The union tops never wanted to go for a “political revolution - the destruction of the constitution”. Nor had they accumulated the necessary funds to provide for strike pay for a ‘holy month’. Similarly, trade union members had not been encouraged to stock up with the basics in order to survive a long strike. So, when venturing into alternative history, my interest is more about the logic of a general strike, rather than an alternative history of the General Strike.

That said, clashes between workers and the police, as well as OMS specials, were becoming more and more frequent in the second week. Plymouth, Swansea, Southsea and Nottingham all experienced serious unrest. Five thousand besieged the police station in Preston in an attempt to secure the release of an arrested strike leader. In Edinburgh a football pitch was used to impound vehicles that did not carry trade union passes. Buses were overturned in Glasgow. The Flying Scotsman was derailed by striking Cramington miners. The main Newcastle to Durham road was blocked. In Lambeth people erected a barricade across Vauxhall Bridge and the Elephant and Castle became a concentrated hub of picketing. Strike-breakers were forced out from ‘black’ vehicles. When the authorities organised a two-mile-long food convoy from the London docks - protected by 16 armoured cars, cavalry and mounted police - it was the target of bricks, flower pots, anything that came to hand from the windows ranged above. The Horse Guards were camped in Hyde Park and Royal Navy ships stationed on the Clyde, the Tyne and the Mersey.⁶

With a third week, events would surely have escalated into full-scale battles. The cosy tea-and-football relationship between strike committees and the local constabulary in the quieter, more backward, areas could not have survived that. Indeed, in the hurricane of self-activity that would have resulted as soon as the TUC’s bureaucratic control slackened or began to break down, the councils of action would have begun to see themselves as alternatives to the existing state structure.

The intervention of troops might have momentarily driven the workers off the streets - that is probably true. But then, at the same time, the whole ideological apparatus of rule by consent in this country would have shattered. More, if there had been a serious fightback, then the minds of the workers in uniform would surely have been receptive to the revolutionary call - join your brothers and sisters, form soldiers’ and sailors’ councils of action.

Nowhere did things go anywhere near that far. Nevertheless, there were many, many examples of strike committees and councils of action beginning to show the signs of developing into organs of local power. Because most militant workers realised they were not only fighting against miners’ wage cuts, but against a future attack on themselves, because they had gained a real sense of themselves as a class, they were increasingly willing to circumvent the TUC’s pacifistic instructions.

Almost from the start certain councils of action began to exert tight control over their areas: deep social roots, militant politics, detailed planning and aggressive picketing were the decisive factors. Northumberland and Durham was particularly advanced, not least due to the sterling efforts of Robin Page Arnot. But it was far from alone. South Wales, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Sheffield were all exemplary. Showing the value of working in the Labour Party - the Labour-run Stepney council not only allowed, but actively encouraged, the council of action to operate from the town hall and other municipal buildings. Because of its proximity to the Wapping, Shadwell and Limehouse docks, there were intense, often violent, struggles over the transport of goods.⁷

Everywhere lorries and vans carried stickers stating that they moved ‘By permission of the TUC’. Councils of action had permit sub-committees. Quite rightly, food, coal, electricity, gas and other vital supplies were ensured to hospitals and other essential services. Capitalists would have to go ‘cap in hand’ to the council of action in order to be allowed to use union labour. Even on the fourth day “the cabinet was told that the use of mass pickets and a shortage of police was seriously hampering the [official - JC] movement of supplies”.⁸ A good case can be made for the Page Arnot argument that whoever was seen to deliver food, coal, electricity, gas and other vital supplies would win over wavering elements and middle class minds.⁹

Intervention by the police, OMS specials and the display of military force was answered by elementary measures of self-defence, ranging from pickets carrying walking sticks to full-blown workers’ defence corps. Perhaps the most famous example being Methil, Fife. At the beginning the corps consisted of no more than a 150 men. But after police attacks on picket lines that rose to 700. The whole town was “patrolled by the corps, organised in companies under an ex-NCO, and there was no further interference by the police with pickets”.¹⁰

From memory, a grainy photo shows the ex-NCO wearing a World War I helmet, sat upon a white horse, marching his comrades in military formation. He was, I believe, a member of the Social Democratic Federation (the Hyndmanite National Socialist Party returned to the SDF name in 1920).

Centrist posers

The CPGB stood out as the only serious revolutionary force. Yes, the trade union ‘official’ lefts fancied themselves as red-hot Bolsheviki - a centrist pose. They supported the October Revolution, albeit at a safe distance, thereby gaining from the continued popularity of the Soviet Republic among class-conscious workers. But they refused to apply its lessons to Britain. Meanwhile, they had their everyday business calling: bargaining with capitalists over the commodity price of labour-power.

As for the Labour left, not least the Independent Labour Party, it was muddled, unstable, prone to sentimental twaddle and operated as a loose holding house, rather than a politically coherent class party. Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, John Wheatley and a good few other Labour cabinet ministers were long-standing ILPers. And yet, despite their ‘strategy of acceptability’ being a monumental betrayal of even the most minimalist notions of reformist socialism, there were only token moves to disassociate from them. MacDonald was removed as editor of the ILP’s Socialist Review in 1925. However, the ministerial traitors were not expelled. In fact, they were given carte blanche to dupe voters in the 1929 general election with the promise of delivering the “Socialist and Cooperative Commonwealth”.¹¹

Nowadays, we inhabit the end game of that phenomenon. Labourism is in profound decline. The ‘strategy of acceptability’ has become an end in itself. Neither the Labour leadership nor the great mass of Labour voters profess any longer to believe in reformist socialism. And yet, while the old is hollowed out, reduced to a zombie-like existence, the new cannot be born - hence, in the interregnum, all manner of morbid symptoms appear.¹² Not only Reform UK, Patriotic Alternative, Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson. There is George Galloway’s Workers’ Party, Zack Polanski’s Greens, Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party and a whole host of other, smaller-scale, broad-front projects which effectively serve to divert would-be communist militants from doing anything worthwhile, anything serious. Clear lines of demarcation, discipline, robust debate and genuine commitment have certainly become an anathema in such circles. Hence, notions that such formations represent the future are themselves morbid symptoms.

True, after 1924 the ILP moved to the left, becoming the main internal opposition to the Labour right. At a grassroots level there was, especially during the General Strike, close cooperation with the CPGB. But leading ILPers, such as James Maxton, constantly vacillated and sought accommodation with the right. The ILP was certainly incapable of providing the single-minded leadership required to navigate the swirling currents, deadly rocks and violent storms encountered in any period of greatly heightened class struggle.

The state was acutely aware that the CPGB represented its main enemy in the working class movement. Orders were issued accordingly. During the nine days, out of the 5,000 arrests more than 1,000 of them were CPGBers. Something like 20% of our total membership. Party offices were raided, equipment confiscated, speakers harassed and news sheets banned.¹³ Even to carry a copy of the CPGB’s Workers’ Bulletin was to risk arrest. Yet, because of its outstanding role, the CPGB gained enormously in terms of respect and influence, particularly among the miners. They made up the bulk of the 5,000 recruits who joined the party during the General Strike and its immediate aftermath (a doubling of membership).

When on May 13 the TUC general council unanimously took the decision to call off the strike and leave the miners locked out, the CPGB damned the pack of them. It fought to maintain the strike through “emergency meetings” of all strike committees and councils of action and a campaign by the National Minority Movement to link key sections of the workers to the miners through advancing existing economic claims.¹⁴

Nevertheless, although it took some time before the mass of workers were back at work, this was due not to the success of the Communist Party, but to employers biding their time in order to weed out militants and impose harsh terms and conditions. The workers had been routed and were in no mood to fight on. Loyally and with a high sense of discipline, the ranks had done as they were asked, including by the CPGB. They had put their trust in the TUC and had been cruelly betrayed. It was right to complain that the “generals refused to lead”. But that should have been expected and prepared for. Calling for the “sacking” of the rightwing generals in June 1926 was too little, too late … after all, the leftwing generals were equally, if not more, treacherous.¹⁵

Having said that, nothing can take away from the selflessness and tireless hard work put in by CPGB members throughout the General Strike. During the seven-month lockout too the CPGB gave the miners unstinting support. Where the TUC and Labour Party accused the miners of wanting to tie them to a “mere slogan”, the CPGB backed them and their refusal to accept savage wage cuts and an end to national bargaining. It demanded moral and financial support from the whole workers’ movement and a coal embargo.

TUC and Labour Party right reformists saw the collapse of the General Strike as a vindication of their parliamentary cretinism. They had glimpsed the terrible prospect of civil war and recoiled in horror. NUR leader CT Cramp summed up the right’s collective sigh of relief with his infamous “Never again!” speech. Most left reformists came to the same conclusion. Yet few dared openly admit it. However, between glowing socialist promises and the ugly reality of betrayal there was a chasm. Attempting to maintain their anti-capitalist image in the eyes of militants, but determined to stay united with the right, the left reformist majority on the TUC general council tried to brazen it out.

There had been no betrayal. They had all voted to call off the strike and desert the miners, but talk of a sellout was, so they said, completely unfounded: indeed the General Strike “has not failed”.¹⁶ If every other section of society think otherwise - government, BBC, rightwing Labourites, intellectuals, bosses, rank-and-file workers, etc - then they must be deluded. Building workers’ leader Alf Purcell wrote in the Sunday Worker of “more real working class progress” being made in a “few days” than “in as many years previously … Those who talk about the failure of the general strike are mentally a generation behind the times in which we live.”¹⁷ A similar diagnosis informed the article penned by another ‘official’ left, TUC president George Hicks:

Was the general strike a victory or defeat? I reply: who has gained the most from it? The working class has gained infinitely more from the general strike than has the capitalist class … Of course, the general strike has been a success - a great victory. Those who talk about the general strike being a failure and of the uselessness of the general strike as a weapon must be living in a world of their own imagining.¹⁸

With the advantage of 20:20 hindsight, it is easy to see who was living in a fantasy world. Nonetheless, there are still those who refuse to face the facts. John Foster - once a Straight Leftist, but now an elder statesman of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain - seriously claimed that “the general strike was also an epic victory for the working class - and one which can be said to have changed the course of history”.¹⁹

The same official optimism saw Arthur Scargill consistently deny that the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike ended in defeat. No, it was some kind of victory: “the greatest victory in the strike was the struggle itself”.²⁰ Peter Taaffe made similar claims on behalf of the Militant-led Liverpool council in July 1984, when it refused to fight alongside the embattled miners. Instead they took Tory Danegeld worth up to £60 million … Of course, this was no “surrender”, he insisted, but a great “victory”.²¹ Well, yes, for Liverpool as a city. But not for the working class as a whole. And, once the Tories were out of immediate danger, they inflicted a crushing defeat on Liverpool - in March 1987, 47 councillors were removed from office and surcharged.

True, there can be defeats that are more valuable than victories … However, first and foremost that is decided by what the mass of workers themselves think. Have they overcome sectionalist prejudices? Have they swept away their old misleaders? Have they made key programmatic demands their own? Eg, the democratic republic and a popular militia. Have they come to look to the communists for answers?

A mass Communist Party - with its ability to educate, educate, educate - can make defeats such as 1926 into a potent material force, no matter at what historical remove. Nonetheless, a defeat remains a defeat.

1. Sadie Robinson ‘Workers hold the power’ Socialist Worker January 8 2021.↩︎

2. J Conrad ‘Classical Marxism and the general strike’ Weekly Worker January 29 2026.↩︎

3. Contrary to the assertion of the SWP’s Sam Ord: “Strikes on a mass scale can paralyse the state” (‘Mass strike - why do they matter’ Socialist Worker July 2 2022).↩︎

4. Eg, WH Crook The General Strike: a study of labor's tragic weapon in theory and practice Chapel Hill NC 1931; J Symons The General Strike: a historical portrait London 1957; W Citrine Men and work: an autobiography London 1964; AJP Taylor English history: 1914-1945 Oxford 1965; K Laybourn The General Strike of 1926 Manchester 1993.↩︎

5. Except for the miners, most union members received strike pay during the General Strike. Trade union coffers ended much depleted and might have become exhausted if it had lasted for a whole month. The TGWU, the richest union, spent £600,000 during the nine days, the NUR over £1 million. In total the General Strike reduced trade union funds from £12.5 million to £8.5 million: ie, it cost the trade unions around £4 million (www.unionhistory.info/timeline/1918_1939.php).↩︎

6. In the months before the strike the government built up an unprecedently large home army and positioned a good part of the fleet around the coast. John Foster estimates that there were nearly 80,000 troops garrisoned in Britain, as well as a naval force of 11 battleships and cruisers and 58 other vessels (J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The General Strike: 1926 London 1976, p47).↩︎

7. The standard account of the councils of action was written by Emile Burns in 1926 for the Labour Research Department. See The General Strike of May 1926: trades council in action London 1975.↩︎

8. J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The General Strike: 1926, London 1976, p46.↩︎

9. R Page Arnot The General Strike, May 1926: its origin and history London 1926.↩︎

10. E Burns The General Strike of May 1926: trades council in action London 1975, p143.↩︎

11. www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1929/1929-labour-manifesto.shtml.↩︎

12. Yes, I am alluding to Antonio Gramsci’s well known phrase - see Selections from the Prison Notebooks London 1971, p276.↩︎

13. The print unions did not help. Blinded by the most narrow-minded sectionalism, they refused to give exemption to the pro-TUC Lansbury’s Weekly, the Daily Herald and the CPGB’s Workers’ Daily. Only one issue appeared - that on May 3 1926. Having made no provision for secret printing, the party had to make do with the Workers’ Bulletin - a duplicated news sheet.↩︎

14. Workers’ Bulletin May 13 1926.↩︎

15. ‘Editorial view’ The Communist Review Vol 7, No2, June 1926.↩︎

16. TUC statement quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class, London 1937, p161.↩︎

17. Sunday Worker June 13 1926.↩︎

18. Ibid.↩︎

19. J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The General Strike: 1926, London 1976, p45.↩︎

20. A Scargill ‘We could surrender - or stand and fight’ The Guardian March 7 2009.↩︎

21. P Taaffe and T Mulhern Liverpool: a city that dared fight London 1988, pp154-55.↩︎