Car overturned in London during the 1926 General Strike (Pic: Wikimedia Commons)
Up to two million workers in Britain began nine days of strikes 100 years ago this week.
The General Strike of 1926 wasn’t for higher wages or shorter days—it was an act of solidarity with over a million striking miners.
It could have won, but went down to defeat at the hands of the union leaders.
To mark the centenary, Judy Cox and Charlie Kimber have written Revisiting The General Strike 1926—When Workers Were Ready to Dare.
Why is the book relevant to the “Palestine generation”?
CK: We’re looking at a world in deep crisis. The threat of war, climate disaster, the rise of racism and fascism and systematic poverty affect millions of people.
The central question is, what social force can transform this horror into a society that works for the majority and uses people’s energy and talents positively.
There is a big argument about whether the working class is still powerful.
The General Strike is an example of the militancy, class consciousness and the organisational capacity of workers.
The most important element to grasp is the potential of the working class to change the world.
JC: Researching this book put flesh on the bones of an argument.
The General Strike shows that working class people change in struggle and are capable of extraordinary achievements. And it shows how that process developed.
It’s also a continuation of working class activism of the 19th century.
These people were prepared to fight against enslavement, to fight for democracy and reforms that wouldn’t necessarily benefit them, but they knew would encourage resistance to the system as a whole.
I think that’s a strong element of the events of 1926.
What did the strike reveal about the militancy of the workers?
JC: I think a very strong element of the book is that it challenges the conventional view of the strike.
Our comrades Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein wrote a great book about the General Strike in 1986, just after the defeat of the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-5.
They emphasised how trade union leaders always sell workers out—which is true. But we emphasise the self-activity of the strikers, the new organisations they created, and how they could have won.
We show how, far from being a genial, moderate experience, the strike was riven with violence.
This violence was inherited from the First World War and ruling class offensives.
People were recovering from the trauma of the war and had experienced incredible violence.
But there was also the violence that working class people had to use to defend their way of life.
There’s a great quote in the book that says women in the Rhondda Valley in Wales were “ambidextrous”— “They can throw rocks at scabs just as well with their left hands as with their right.”
Women defied convention by intimidating scabs and confronting the police.
Women put their babies down in front of buses and lay down in front of buses, and when the bus stopped, they dragged the scab driver off and beat them up.
The General Strike lasted for nine days, but the miners were locked out for a further seven months after refusing to accept a pay cut and an hour on the day.
So it was in mining communities that you saw the biggest changes between men and women, brought about by women’s activism.
These were quite conservative communities. After the First World War, many women were getting into work, exploring new freedoms. But in the mining communities it was still very traditional.
So, it’s even more impressive that miners’ wives and families took the militant action they did.
Some of the pit villagers, really interestingly, turned traditions that had been used to humiliate “wayward women” into rituals to punish scabs.
Even though it was an incredibly difficult situation, women found a new sense of collective confidence and power.
A lot of literature at the time dealt with women—the changing relationships between men and women, women’s growing confidence.
CK: The General Strike punctured the myth that the English would never be part of a revolutionary movement.
If you look at the best examples of the councils of action, you really see how people organised in a way that went beyond the normal bounds of capitalist life and exploitation.
All of this shatters the idea that the British were quiescent and non-revolutionary.
But the history has been hidden. One of the functions of the ruling class—and its media, its academia and its education system—is to systematically obfuscate and suppress the knowledge that you can change the world.
JC: The parallels with state violence today are quite obvious. And we should remember that the embryonic fascist movement was also active at this time.
The first fascist movement in Britain was set up in 1923. The threat of violence from the fascists was a latent theme. The government used the state to crush workers and to support scabs. They arrested huge numbers of people. They used political and industrial repression.
There’s a folk memory that you cannot trust these people—that the state is on the side of property, bosses and the ruling class, against any left-wing resistance, anti-colonial resistance, any resistance by women.
And of course, it is against the mass resistance of working class people challenging the government and the bosses at the same time.
Could you say a bit about how the strike ended?
CK: The Communist Party (CP) played an extraordinary role in the General Strike.
It was incredibly well implanted in the working class.
But the fate of the strike was conditioned by the degeneration of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Because of this, the CP had abandoned its early principle of saying, “Don’t trust these left union leaders.”
It was also conditioned by the leaders of the TUC union federation and the Labour Party.
They deliberately engineered the end of the General Strike, isolated the miners and ran away from confrontation with the ruling class.
It was a defeat, absolutely. But there were also traditions that were established that went on to encourage, develop and sustain further working class struggles.
It’s also a story of resistance to defeat. We found telegrams from when the strike was called off by the TUC leaders.
These show the rage, bitterness and fury of workers towards the union leadership.
Famously, there were more people on strike on the day after it was called off than when the TUC had called them out.
That’s very important to remember. Yes, it was a defeat. But unless you also recognise the militancy, the potential, the transformative nature for many involved, you don’t understand it.
A crucial thing is that everybody had known the strike was coming and the state was prepared.
In June 1925, mine owners went on the offensive, threatening to slash miners’ wages and increase hours.
Miners and transport workers prepared to strike. The government and bosses backed down, agreeing to subsidise miners’ wages for nine months.
And the government used those nine months to bring in new laws, to brutally attack strikers and to arrange thousands of volunteer scabs.
JC: It’s often the case that the moment of triumph is the seed of the next disaster.
Having won this quite significant, albeit temporary, demand for subsidies, the TUC leadership decided that they could rest on their laurels.
But the ruling class saw this as something that they had to discipline the working class for.
Winston Churchill, who was chancellor at the time, said there was a need to “put the working class back in their kennels”.
Why did you feel it was important to discuss anti-colonial struggles and strikes in British colonies?
JC: Britain was a colonial power. So what happened in Britain affected what happened in India, and particularly in Hong Kong—where there was a mass strike and anti-imperialist movement in 1925.
You see these very poignant expressions of solidarity. We found reports on textile workers in India collecting money to send to strikers in Britain.
This is a very powerful symbol. Even workers who’d suffered the brutality of the British Empire could see that international solidarity would benefit them, as well as the workers in Britain.
CK: The empire was a factor in all British political calculations. But it’s not true that British workers were benefiting from this. They were engaged in class struggle with their rulers.
The imperial powers were losing their hegemony and in decline. They were hitting out on the international stage and attacking their own working classes.
You see an echo of that today with what’s happening in the US—it’s Venezuela, Iran, Gaza, and it’s Ice and the assault on working conditions.
The argument for the general strike has been lost to an extent. But, just as we were finishing the book, there was the Italian general strike for Palestine, which showed how powerful this can be.
And, of course, the action against Ice in Minneapolis, which although not a general strike, had workers taking up a political issue.
We have to think about how we can best use our power.
The great thing about a mass strike, when it is controlled from below, is that workers learn collectively who their friends and who their enemies are.
It can be a potential solvent of sexism and homophobia and racism.
People can learn about their power, their ability to change the world, to organise, to construct new forms of democracy. There were glimpses of that in 1926.
The General Strike wasn’t a revolution, but it could have been a process towards a revolution.
When people say, it couldn’t possibly happen again, they should consider that there are very big workforces today.
There were a million miners, but there’s over a million workers in the NHS. The issues that led to 1926 are still present.
If you want examples of the potential of workers to lead and to transform themselves in the course of transforming society, read the book.
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