Introduction
Fifty years ago, the British working class responded to a capitalist onslaught on its living standards with the biggest class-wide united action in its long and chequered history — the General Strike. Today, 50 years later, the working class again faces a deepening capitalist crisis and increasing ruling class attacks on its greatest historic gains — the welfare state, full employment and its trade union and political rights. In this article, we attempt to draw out the central lessons of those momentous days in May 1926 and the monumental betrayal and defeat in which they culminated.
There are two central questions which revolutionary Marxists must answer today when assessing the General Strike. First, the reason for the emergence and consolidation of a trade union bureaucracy which was apparently so easily able to call off the strike, without any of its aims achieved, and yet retain its position with the membership whom it had so cruelly betrayed. And, secondly, the character and extent of the action of the rank and file. How far did the councils of action establish 'dual power'? To what extent was this matched by a development in political consciousness? And, in the light of this, what assessment can be made of the intervention of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)?
By 1926 the trade union movement had assumed many of the features which still, today, characterise it. Of particular importance was the emergence of a layer of professional full-time officials, who in addition to day-to-day administration, took charge of the negotiations with the employers. Moreover, this body of men and women had been studiously courted by the government; trade union officials joined numerous committees, ministry commissions and governmental inquiries. The more astute of the ruling class realised this process could weaken the power of the unions from the 'inside', and succeed where straight-forward repression had failed. An observer of the unions at this time wrote: ''Nowadays the salaried official of a great union is courted and flattered by the middle class. He is asked to dine with them, and will admire their well-appointed houses....He goes to live in a little villa in a lower middle class suburb. The move leads to dropping his workmen friends .... A great strike threatens his Society in desperate war. Unconsciously biased by the distaste for the hard and unthankful work which a strike entails, he finds himself in small sympathy with the men's demands and eventually arranges a compromise on terms distasteful to a large section of the membership.''
Obviously, every large scale working class organisation must evolve a full time staff, the complexities and scale of modern industrial capitalism demands it. However, the values and attitudes inculcated in the course of building such a body (caution, stability, constitutionalism) are not those best suited to struggle, to mass action, and other 'interruptions' from orderly routine. In launching a fight of national proportions the trade union official has more to lose than his members have. His job, social status and freedom from the menial and repetitive work of those he represents is dependent on the continued existence and strength of the organisation. So it is that the decision to commit the union to struggle becomes based less and less on the interests of the members, and more and more upon the assumed need for stability of the organisation. The more the leaders come to regard the union as an end in itself, the less it is responsive to the needs of the membership, particularly in crucial moments of conflict.
It is this phenomenon to which we refer when we use the term 'bureaucracy'; trade union officialdom is, however, a working class bureaucracy and cannot totally detach itself from its origins. Thus, the General Council of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) was forced in the first place to call the strike, which later, without recourse to the membership, it was to call off.
It would seem reasonable to suppose that such a massive defeat as the General Strike would result in the weakening of the leadership that had led it so badly. Although considerable recriminations took place, these were not sufficient to cause the replacement of the leadership which, in fact, emerged from the whole debacle relatively unscathed. Paradoxically, it was the very defeat of the General Strike and the consequent weakening of the working class in relation to the capitalist class which permitted such an outcome. The ensuing demoralisation of the working class in fact led to a decline in the influence of revolutionaries in the trade unions while the General Council, despite leading the trade union movement into a defeat from which it took decades to recover, emerged in 1927 as a consolidated force.
Not all the lessons of the General Strike, however, are negative ones. The organisation of the rank and file into 'councils of action' was the first, and so far, the only foretaste of 'dual power' experienced by the British working class. The concept of 'dual power' is most fully developed in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky on the Russian Revolution. Here it is described as a situation of balance between two contending state forms: ''Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing — the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies.'' Of course, such a state of affairs does not arise overnight, and in the form presented by Lenin it obviously did not occur in the British General Strike. However, in so far as soviets are an alternative state organisation of the workers against the capitalist state, we can assess the extent to which the 'councils of action' were a step on the road towards the conquest of power. As we shall see, the activity of the councils went well beyond that of simple strike committees, and particularly towards the end of the strike almost all were involved in some form of administration of transport and supplies.
In this way the labour movement experienced, in the space of only a few years, both the zenith and the nadir of its power. Concentrated into these years are a wealth of lessons for revolutionaries and socialists today; our strategy for socialism can never be complete unless these are known and fully understood.
The Generals' General Strike
''The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin'' (Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister, 6th May 1926).
''The General Council does not challenge the constitution The sole aim of the Council is to secure for the miners a decent standard of life. The Council is engaged in an industrial dispute''. (TUC statement 7th May, 1926)
On Saturday, 1st May 1926, miners throughout Britain found themselves locked out of their pits until they could agree to substantial wage reductions. Baldwin and the mineowners made no secret of the fact that the negotiations with the miners were a prelude to a general cut in wages for all workers. This was revealed by a report of a discussion between the Miners' Federation and the Prime Minister published in the Daily Herald on July 31st 1925.
Miners: ''But what you propose means a reduction of wages.''
Prime Minister: ''Yes. All workers in this country have got to face a reduction in wages.''
Miners: ''What do you mean?''
Prime Minister: ''I mean all the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.''
Five days after this conversation the Government offered a nine month subsidy to the coal owners and a Royal Commission was set up to report on the condition of the industry as a whole. The subsidy was timed to expire on 30th April 1926. Early in March the Commission, under the chairmanship of Sir Herbert Samuel, produced its proposals; in the short term the Report supported the mineowners' demand for a reduction in wages but also called for reorganisation of the mines. The result was that neither side accepted the proposals, and Government intervention throughout a whole series of flurried last-minute negotiations between the 22nd and 30th April could not cobble together any compromise. In the late afternoon of 30th April a Privy Council meeting was called to declare a state of emergency under the 1920 Emergency Powers Act. Simultaneously, lock-out notices were posted at pits up and down the country and the Government's Supply and Transport Organisation (known as the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, O.M.S.) was activated at midnight of the same day.
The contrast with the capitulation of the Government in July 1925 is clear: in the face of united opposition to wage cuts for the miners from the labour movement the Government bought itself nine months in which to prepare; the TUC however had been less than enthusiastic in its response to the challenge. J.H.Thomas the leader of the Railway Workers proclaimed 12 days before the strike began that, ''.... instead of organising, mobilising and encouraging the feeling that war was inevitable, let them concentrate on finding a solution, honourable and satisfactory to all sides''. As the intransigence of the coalowners and the Government became apparent the TUC convened a conference of trade union executives, over 800 strong, to give the TUC power to call 'coordinated action' (the term 'General Strike' was studiously avoided because of its revolutionary overtones). This conference voted overwhelmingly (3,653,527 to 49,911) on 1st May 1926 to give such powers to the General Council. Such was the vigour and solidarity of the hour that even bureaucrats such as Bevin, the leader of the Transport Workers' Union, rose to the occasion. ''History'', he declared, ''will ultimately write up that it was a magnificent generation that was prepared to do it rather than see the miners driven down like slaves''.
But it was not all over. Drama turned to farce as the General Council once again informed Baldwin that they were prepared to continue discussion. A 'formula' was in fact arrived at, without the consent (or even knowledge) of the miners which specified 'some reduction' in wages. The trade union committee which negotiated this included Swales, a well-known 'left'; he said nothing though Birkenhead, one of the hard-liners in the Cabinet, was happy with the formula. Whether or not the TUC would have got away with this was never put to the test for they were summoned to Baldwin's office where he handed them a curt note informing them that all negotiations were terminated. The note said that ''overt acts have already taken place including gross interference with the freedom of the press''; this referred to decision of printers on the Daily Mail not to print an anti-strike editorial. The note seemed to imply an answer so the TUC committee trooped off to another room at No. 10 and discussed its implications at great length. At about 2.30 a.m. a deputation went to see the Prime Minister. To their astonishment they found the Cabinet Room and indeed the whole house in darkness. A servant informed them Baldwin had gone to bed. Incredulous the TUC dispersed, and its report rather forlornly described the position: ''the General Council had no option but to proceed with the strike programme on which the Conference had decided.'' It was not an auspicious start, and it was to be crowned by an even more disastrous finale.
Nine days after the Strike began, at noon on Wednesday 12th May, the General Council submitted to the Government's demand for unconditional surrender. The strike was called off without any commitment on the Government's part and without even the customary assurance that there would be no victimisation of the returning strikers. The decision was taken after discussions with Samuel, the convenor of the Royal Commission. He, as the TUC knew, held no brief from the Government; yet the formula arrived at by 11th May was handed to the miners as an ultimatum: either accept the Samuel proposals or the TUC will call off the strike. J.H. Thomas even implied that a secret promise had been obtained from the Government to honour this agreement, despite its public pronouncement that no negotiations could begin until the strike was unconditionally withdrawn. The miners' attitude, however, had not changed: any agreement involving wage cuts was unacceptable. The General Council then resolved to call off the strike on the understanding received from Samuel that the lock-out notices could be withdrawn and the men to resume work at old wages and hours. Of course, in the event the Government accepted no conditions for ending the strike; when the General Council arrived at Downing Street on the morning of the 12th no discussion took place at all. Baldwin merely noted the termination of the strike and the Samuel formula was not even mentioned. A participant recorded: ''G.C. flabbergasted at nothing settled about miners' lock-out notices. Retired and felt dismayed .... left at 1.10 disappointed and disgusted. Papers soon out about TUC surrender.''
Reading the debate at the TUC 'Inquest' conference on the General Strike held in January 1927 makes one think of a group of film makers who, having made a bad film, run it through frame by frame, trying to spot the exact moment where they went wrong. The miners singled out a statement made by the TUC on April 8th which failed to condemn all wage cuts. The General Council, on the other hand, claimed it was the miners' failure to abide by their agreement to hand over the conduct of the dispute to the Council (in fact no such agreement had existed: Smith, the miners' leader, referred only to a 'share' in negotiations); and further implied that their slogan 'Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day' had been obdurate and pigheaded. J.H.Thomas had a simple answer: the root of the problem, he declared, had been that A.J.Cook was a ''wild and woolly'' socialist!
In fact virtually no section of the official leadership of the strike had their hearts in it. On 2nd May, even after the Government called off negotiations, Bevin had taken the lead in devising a new and more comprehensive plan which was accepted by Cook and Smith; the miners executive, however, voted by twelve to six to reject it. During the strike itself the TUC devoted more energy to finding a pretext for calling it off than to ensuring its success. Whilst the Government had spent nine months preparing for the confrontation, the TUC spent the first days of the strike ensuring that only certain sections of workers came out, and that regional control of the movement remained under the control of individual unions, strike committees, and not 'Councils of Action'.
What of the Samuel Memorandum? At the first meeting of the miners with Baldwin the day after the strike was called off, the Prime Minister played cat and mouse with Smith and Cook until the latter furiously denounced the memorandum. From then on Baldwin was able to claim, when the question of its acceptance by the Government was raised, that the miners themselves had rejected it. By June he was strong enough to present his true position. In a reply to a Parliamentary question he said he had never accepted the Samuel Memorandum as a basis of settlement.
As the weeks became months after the general strike the miners executive retreated to Samuel once again, but by this time the coalowners — sensing outright victory — would tolerate no interference in the industry from the Government. Evan Williams, their negotiator, stated: ''We want a reduction in wages, an increase in hours and the abandonment of the national agreement''; nothing else, he declared, 'would be considered''. Six months after the General Strike, the miners were forced to return to work under these conditions, after a quarter of them had already been driven back by hunger and despair.
The failure of the General Strike, and the subsequent defeat of the miners, was a disaster for the British trade union movement. In 1927 trade union membership fell below the 5 million mark for the first time since 1916, and did not recover for many years; the number affiliated to the TUC fell even more steeply. Confusion and demoralisation took a deep root in the rank and file: in the four years up to 1926 an average 500,000 workers had been involved in strikes; in 1927 the figures were little over 100,000. The Government and employers' victory was consummated by the passing of the Trades Disputes Act in 1927, which among other things, made sympathy strikes illegal, severely limited the right to picket, made union members 'contract in' rather than 'contract out' of the political fund, and made it an offence for a worker to refuse employment when it was offered by an employer during an illegal strike. This savage piece of legislation was the prelude to a 'long hard winter' for the labour movement during the late 1920's and 30's.
In themselves these events graphically illustrate the extent to which the trade union leadership were separated from the direct control of the rank and file. The secret deals, the 'chats' with Government Ministers, and the rush to find 'formulas' without reference to those they commit, is typical of this. The lack of workers' democracy, so crippling even in normal times, proved in the emergency to be absolutely fatal.
Throughout the 1920's, bureaucracy in the unions was on the increase. This was due to two factors: the tremendous growth in absolute size coupled with a decline in rank and file activity, and the growth of national collective bargaining. This latter development, in removing the emphasis from the district to the national leadership and thereby greatly increasing the complexity and nature of the issues involved, undermined the ability of local rank and file leaderships to influence the course of negotiations. This more and more became the sole province of trained professional union officials, who were insulated from rank-and-file pressure by many layers of officialdom. The end result of this process was the emergence of an institutionalised method of approaching industrial conflict. Within the unions there emerged a layer of administrators whose interests became increasingly identified with those of the organisation as the organisation detached itself from the aspirations and will of the membership.
Bureaucratic consolidation affected not only individual unions but also the central body of the trade union movement. From its formation up to 1914 the Trades Union Congress had been little more than a talking shop, an arena for speech-making and the lobbying of MP's about proposed legislation. Moreover, it had avoided any involvement in industrial disputes, which were the concern of individual unions; the function of its central committee had been entirely parliamentary. However, during the War both the size and activity of the committee (now re-named the General Council) expanded. It was the role of the General Council as the spokesman of the unions in the War that established the precedent of its involvement in industrial disputes as a coordinator of the trade union movement as a whole.
This process had a contradictory effect. On the one hand, it was welcomed and encouraged by socialists as part of the process of weakening sectoral and craft differences, and the creation of a 'General Staff of Labour' to lead the workers as one. Yet also, in the context of declining rank and file activity and the massive expansion of the unions, its result was the creation of a 'super-bureaucracy', of the General Council, even more remote than the officialdom of the individual unions.
This is no better shown than by the events we have described. By taking upon themselves the power to run the whole dispute the Council were in a position to lead a four million-strong proletarian army against the class enemy. But they were also in a position to betray that army to the enemy as a whole.
The Rank & File's General Strike
Despite the weakness and vacillation of their leadership up to and including the strike, the rank and file response to the belated call from the General Council was immediate and by midnight on 3rd May only three unions out of some 1,000 had refused to respond. The Council had planned two stages of the withdrawal of labour, leaving many 'vital sectors' at work. But the enthusiasm from below ensured the virtual paralysis of industry from the first day. ''We have had from all over the country reports that have surpassed all our expectations .... '' recorded their first communique.
At a local level the Council had instructed Trades Councils to work ''in conjunction'' with local union officials in order to organise the dispute ''in the most effective manner for the preservation of peace and order''. In practice, this unworkable formula gave way in many cases to the involvement of direct representatives of workers of an area and not simply local union officials. Many of these improvised bodies assumed the title of joint or central strike committees, though in at least fifty-four towns they touched on raw nerves at Eccleston Square (the TUC Headquarters), by calling themselves 'Councils of Action'. It is indicative of the support the strike call received that many such organisations spent considerable time trying to persuade workers in so-called 'vital sectors' not to come out.
The extent and complexity of coordination at a local level contrasted starkly with the timidity and confusion in London. In spite of their limited mandate the strike committees undertook a wide range of activities, including the issue of permits, picketing, meetings, entertainment, relief of financial distress, communications and publicity. Several defied the Council's explicit instructions in one respect by forming workers defence corps, to protect meetings and pickets from police and Fascists. At Methil, strike centre of the East Fife coalfields, an already enrolled defence corps of 150 was increased by the Council of Action to 700 after a ''brutal assault'' by police and pickets, ''and there was no further interference by the police with pickets''. This, however, was exceptional; in the main the movement relied upon the traditional method of picketing, albeit on a huge scale, to deter strike-breakers. The nature and effectiveness of local activities naturally tended to reflect the strength or weaknesses of the local labour movement. In Bolton, where the Council of Action was ''the sole authoritative body all through'', nine separate committees were set up to handle office staff, organisation, transport, publicity, finance, public representatives, picketing, vital services and messengers. By the second day of the strike, 2,280 pickets had volunteered for duty. The transport committee mobilised 29 cyclists and 57 motor-cyclists which maintained daily contact with practically every town in Lancashire. In the Labour controlled borough of Stepney the town hall was placed at the disposal of the Council of Action and meetings and concerts were held every night of the strike.
In areas where communist influence was strong, elementary planning and organisation transformed the spontaneous enthusiasm of the workers into an efficient militant body capable of challenging the Government arrangements in the region. At Newcastle R. Page Arnot, a prominent CP member, drew up a detailed plan whose object was ''to defeat the civil commissioner appointed for this region''. The commissioner it was noted ''is appointed by the government armed with the Emergency Powers Act in order to break our strike. Our immediate aim is to prevent him doing that in this town. But in order to do that effectively we must offer a resistance throughout the whole region over which he has been given plenary powers. That is we must defeat the civil commissioner and all his strike breaking apparatus.'' Harry Bolton, chairman of Blayden Urban District Council, carried out his role under the plan by ordering all council staff suspected of being unsympathetic to the strike to take two weeks holiday. Those who remained were placed together with the council offices at the disposal of the strike committee. Page Arnot recalled that communications were maintained by a courier service of young miners on motor-cycles: ''The bike-less lads and lasses enrolled themselves in the mass pickets (200 strong at each of the two roads into Chopwell)...Pickets used often to come and see me in Burt Hall with their problems (e.g. apparently unshatterable windscreens).'' The organisation became so effective that the civil commissioners had to approach the unions to ask them to take over essential services due to the complete breakdown of the O.M.S.
From the surviving minutes and personal accounts one can perhaps capture best the flavour of the strike. In Darlington from the Recorded Rota Committee No.12 on Friday May 7th '8p.m. to 12p.m.' we read, ''Mrs. Simpson has walked here from Trimdon, and wishes to be forwarded to Kirby; Permission granted by full Committee. Smiths Bus Service asked for permission to convey passengers to Coniscliffe. Not granted.'' An Ashton sheet-metal worker recalled the attitude of the employers towards the local strike committee: they, ''...came cap in hand begging permission...to allow their workers to return to perform customary functions .. Most of them were turned away after a most humiliating experience ... I thought of the many occasions when I had been turned away from the door of some workshop in a weary struggle to get the means to purchase the essentials of life.''
A distinctive and relatively innovatory feature of the strike were the numerous bulletins and newssheets which sprang up to counter the propaganda of the Government's paper, The British Gazette. At least 70 local sheets were created, most within the first day or two of the strike; some had a circulation of as many as 10,000 copies daily and their effectiveness was evidenced by the vigour with which the authorities tried to suppress them. What is more, despite the TUC's instruction of May 5 that local committees were to ''confine their statements on the situation to the material supplied by the (TUC publicity) committee and add nothing in the way of comment and interpretation'', the local bulletins varied widely in political content with many of those in industrial areas transcending the timorous and deferential attitude of the TUC's national broadsheet, The British Worker.
In contrast with the studied conservatism and evasiveness of The British Worker, these bulletins took up the decisive questions of the day in a forthright and positive way: ''Therefore let the workers answer the bosses'', declared the Workers' Chronicle of the Newcastle Council of Action, ''with a challenge of their own: NATIONALISATION OF THE MINES WITHOUT COMPENSATION UNDER WORKERS CONTROL THROUGH PIT COMMITTEES''. This form of political counter-attack, unfortunately, was not typical: satire was a much more common weapon. ''We understand'', announced the Westminster Worker of May 12, ''that luncheon cars are to be put on trains running between Westminster and Blackfriars''. Others were less subtle. The Monmouthshire bulletin published an imaginary conversation between a striker and his young son: ''What is a BLACKLEG Daddy?'' ''A BLACKLEG is a TRAITOR, my boy: He is a man who knows not Honour or Shame!'' ''Were there many BLACKLEGS in the valley Daddy?'' ''No, my boy. Only the Station Master at Abersychan, and two clerks at Crane Street Station.''
Another and potentially more explosive feature of the strike was the employment on a wide scale of large numbers of pickets, in a minority of instances ''armed'' with clubs and stones. These became the basis of the workers defence corps, at least eleven of which came into existence. On 7th May the National Transport Committee of the TUC issued a circular noting the widespread abuse of permits and requested local organisations to 'review' all permits which had been issued. 'Review' was generally taken to be a euphemism for 'revoke' and in militant areas the committee attempted to enforce a total embargo on commercial road traffic through mass picketing. It was after this that most of the serious confrontations occurred between the police and O.M.S. and the strikers. In the Newcastle area a participant recalled the pickets were organised in 'military' style and the police completely out-manoeuvred. ''Their mobile squad raced up and down long stretches of road, but never seemed to be on the spot when required. The offending vehicle would have been dealt with, the picket would have melted away over fields and woodland, to reassemble at some pre-arranged spot; the police must have felt as if they were fighting a shadow''. Of course, the extent to which all this organisational self-activity and innovatory tactics were translated into a clear increase in political consciousness is debatable. Not all facets of the strike can be treated in such a celebratory manner, not least the fact that it could be called off by the TUC with so little organised resistance. If the content of the strike bulletins are any guide, it is certain that for sections of workers the dispute remained industrial and defensive in character. The notion of passive resistance was widespread in the bulletins: ''Keep smiling. Refuse to be provoked. Get into the garden. Look after the wife and kiddies ...'' advised the Cardiff Strike Sheet. There was a religious rather than revolutionary fervour about some of the bulletins; a blend which produced rather comical results. On Sunday 9th May the Wigan Strike Bulletin had the following message: ''My Dear Public, Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it Holy. Thou Shalt Love the Lord thy God, with all thy Heart, soul, mind and strength and thy neighbours as thyself. Daily Bulletin. News from all points. Situation magnificent. Everywhere solid.''
The national leadership pronouncements were profoundly deferential and the so-called 'left' on the General Council were impotent to change this. On 9th May the British Worker declared: ''The Prime Minister pleads for peace, but insists that the General Council is challenging the constitution. This is untrue the General Council does not challenge one rule, law, or custom of the constitution...'' All this was very true. But just as the Government's insistence that the General Council was organising a revolutionary movement carried very little conviction, so, at the other end of the spectrum, did the latter's attempt to reduce it to the level of an almost routine industrial dispute. Standing at the head of the biggest industrial movement of labour in world history to date, the General Council defended itself on its knees and pleaded for 'understanding' from the Government.
One of the points made at the 'inquest' conference in January 1927 by the Council was that the Strike could not have been greatly prolonged, that it was on the slippery slope, and within a few days would have disintegrated. Their own Intelligence Committee report of Wednesday 12th May however specifically contradicts this: '' ... many reports show that the strike is extending and that factories and workshops not directly involved are slowing or shutting down''. In fact, it was not fear of failure which motivated the General Council, but fear of success. The day after the capitulation J.H. Thomas said frankly in the House of Commons: ''What I dreaded about this strike more than anything else was this: if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened.'' As the news of the surrender slowly reached the rank-and-file, bewilderment quickly turned to anger. A striker at Sheffield records: ''When the news arrived it could hardly be believed, and the departure from the sheds of the first tramcars was regarded as the action of blacklegs.'' In many places, it was felt that the only possible interpretation could be that the strikers had won; the telegrams from the General Council had read 'The General Strike has ended, it has not failed' and The British Worker in its account of 'How Peace Came' made no mention of the General Council's split with the miners.
When the local Strike Committees discovered the real situation, their anger erupted into fury. Swansea forbade the distribution of Friday's issue, and in London, some of the voluntary drivers threw the parcels back into officials' faces. In Glasgow men marched in procession carrying placards which said 'Down with Thomas'. ''Alarm-fear-despair-a victorious army disarmed and handed over to its enemies'', said the Hull Strike Committee and scores of similar telegrams poured into Eccleston Square. At the eleventh hour, contemptuous of the sell-out of their national leaders and confronted with a variety of humiliating conditions when they tried to return to work, strikers turned en masse to their local leaderships; all over the country they pledged themselves not to return until all strikers in their own groups gained reinstatement without conditions. Twenty-four hours after the strike had been 'terminated', the number of strikers had increased by 100,000.
Undoubtedly, the very existence of trade unionism as an organised force in Britain was at stake in the three or four days following the strike. Had any considerable proportion of railwaymen, transport workers or dockers gone back on the terms originally offered them, the remainder could have hardly resisted. But they did not go back. In several places they showed that they had remembered what their leaders had forgotten, that unity was their only strength. In Hull the rail and tram workers refused to return because 150 tramway employees were threatened with the sack. In Manchester 30,000 rail workers held a demonstration to demand unconditional reinstatement. The terms eventually negotiated for the return to work were hard enough compared with the expectations of the men and women who had felt that victory was in their hands: but only the extraordinary unity shown by the rank and file prevented them from being much worse. What then, was the significance of the Councils of Action and the other organisational forms of mass activity in the General Strike? Certainly, they played an indispensable role in minimising the effects of the betrayal and preventing the ruling class from carrying forward its victory into an all-out attack on organised trade unionism. But did the Councils of Action carry within them the germs of British Soviets? Had they the potential to develop into organs of workers' power counterposed to the power of the bourgeois state? Or was the whole General Strike really just another, larger industrial dispute which gave rise to what were simply the most efficient organisational forms for its pursuance?
To a certain extent all these questions can be answered in the affirmative. A general strike which pits the whole of the working class against the policies of the capitalist class, its government and the state apparatus at its disposal of necessity contains within it a dynamic towards the posing of the question: which class will rule? Although it may start out from the most down-to-earth trade union demands, a general strike gives the masses a taste of their power as a class and lays the basis for them to undergo a whole series of radicalising experiences which flow from the internal dynamic of the General Strike tactic, irrespective of its initial political basis.
Why were the Councils of Action formed? Not because the masses wanted to form organs of dual power, but because they were regarded as efficient, useful ways of organising the strike and involving the maximum numbers of workers. Does this mean that the formation of Councils of Action had no potential to develop beyond forms of trade union struggle into organs of workers' power? Not at all; even within the period of nine days, the workers in the Councils of Action learned that if they were going to exist, they had to be able to defend themselves from the fascists and the police; if they were going to make decisions, they needed the coercive force to implement them. In order to organise effectively, they needed their own press and transport systems to maintain communication and counter the government's propaganda. In all these respects, the Councils of Action very rapidly began to assume certain important functions generally performed by the state; what is more, all these functions flowed directly from the character of the Councils themselves as independent organisations of the working class based on the self-activity of the masses. The experiences of the most advanced and strongest Councils, like Newcastle, and of the Italian Workers' Councils during 1919-21 shows very clearly how the unfolding of this sort of dynamic can lead to the complete collapse of the state machine thus imposing on the Councils themselves more and more of the functions previously performed by the state — distribution of food, complete control over transport, communications and so forth.
It does not follow, however, that just because a General Strike opens up a dynamic towards the development of organs of dual power, that these organs will necessarily develop to fruition. Already in 1893, with remarkable perspicacity, Engels wrote to Kautsky (on November 3rd) of three quite distinct possible outcomes of a General Strike: Firstly, the ruling class can give way to the initial limited demands of the strike as it did in Belgium in 1893; this, of course, will only happen when the state apparatus is in exceptional disarray in order to postpone a decisive confrontation until a more auspicious moment. Secondly, the relationship of forces can be so favourable to the bourgeoisie, that it can drown an ill-conceived, adventurist strike in the workers' blood. Finally, the strike can develop its inexorable dynamic towards the paralysis of the state machine, the widespread use of troops under increasingly unfavourable circumstances for the ruling class, the defection of sections of the bourgeois army to the workers' barricades and the successful seizure of power. With the experience of Britain in 1926 and France in 1934 behind him, Trotsky was able to write in polemic with the British centrists of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1935 that ''The world experience of the struggle during the last forty years has been fundamentally a confirmation of what Engels had to say about the general strike towards the close of the last century.'' (Writings on Britain, Vol.3., New Park, 1975, p101); an extra category had, however, been added to history by the TUC General Council in 1926 and the French reformists in 1934 — the general strike called from above without adequate preparation in order to head off the development of the mass struggle.
''The parliamentarians and the trade unionists,'' writes Trotsky, ''perceive at a given moment the need to provide an outlet for the accumulated ire of the masses, or they are simply compelled to jump in step with a movement that has flared over their heads. In such cases they come scurrying through the backstairs to the government and obtain the permission to head the general strike, this with the obligation to conclude it as soon as possible, without any damage being done to the state crockery.'' (p104-5). The fundamental lesson of general strikes in the history of the international labour movement can be summarised thus: a 'pre-revolutionary' situation can only come to fruition when there exists a powerful vanguard organisation able to reinforce and accelerate the tendency of sections of the masses to break, not just in practice, but also ideologically, from the hold of their traditional leaderships. Only when this task has been accomplished and the hold of the revolutionary party established amongst millions, can the logic of the struggle take on the character of a fight for state power.
It is to the problems of the Marxist vanguard in Britain in forging such an organisation in the period up to 1926 that we now turn.
Background to the Strike
We can only understand a complex and decisive event like the General Strike by setting it clearly in the specific conjuncture of British society and of the class struggle from which it arose; then we can see that the General Strike was not, as the reformist myth makers would have it, a dramatic interlude in an era of otherwise peaceful development, but the logical culmination of two preceding decades of economic crisis and social upheaval.
By virtue of being the first industrial capitalist economy Britain had been the first to evolve into a major imperialist power with an empire upon which 'the sun never set' of 400 million, with overseas investments of £4,000 million (almost half the world's total by 1914), dominating the development of the world economy. Yet this unchallenged strength was also a weakness: the super-profits to be gained in the colonies left little for capital investments at home in new machinery and technological improvements. The amount of capital invested per worker in Britain remained static between 1870 and 1913, whilst in Germany and the USA it was rising very fast. Consequently there was virtually no rise in the productivity of labour from 1900 onwards. Moreover, from 1870 the relations between capital and labour had been increasingly strained by the growth in power and organisation of the working class. In the late 1880's the growth of trade unionism began among the mass of unskilled workers. By 1890 Britain, with 8 per cent of its industrial workers in unions, had the most organised labour force of any major capitalist country. Trade union membership rose from 2 million in 1906 to 4 million (27 per cent of industrial workers) in 1914. Thus as the competition from other imperialist countries with a more sound technological base began to squeeze the economy at home, the employers found themselves confronted by a labour force well equipped to defend itself.
The available statistics point to a significant increase in strikes between 1900-1914, particularly in the latter four years. In 1911, 9 per cent of the total industrial population was involved in strikes, as compared with 2.6 per cent in 1902. The number of persons directly involved in strikes beginning in 1912 was 1.2 million compared with under 70,000 in 1905 and some 230,000 in 1908.
These strikes were important not only in their breadth but increasingly because they represented a revulsion against 'political' parliamentary channels as a method of social change. As the timidity of the Labour Party increased so it seemed did the combativity of the workers. Syndicalism, or as it was widely called 'direct actionism', extolled the simple creed of immediate industrial action to secure the improvement of workers' living standards. It achieved widespread influence for two major reasons: the chaotic craft-based structure of the existing unions and the weakness of the Marxist left in the workers movement. By 1909 there were no less than 1,168 union societies in Britain. Such in-built sectoralism and disunity was woefully inadequate for waging the wider national type of industrial struggle required to beat the employers. Thus one of the main demands of the syndicalists became amalgamation of unions, and the subordination of all craft and sectional interests to the needs of the workers as a whole, with one union for each industry. As an organised tendency or a political current syndicalism constituted only a small militant wing in the unions, but sympathy towards the practical elements of their creed — amalgamation, direct action and distrust of officials — spread far wider. (Perhaps the strongest evidence of the threat the movement posed, at least to the hegemony of the Labour Party, was that in 1912 two party leaders MacDonald and Snowden felt compelled to publish polemical attacks upon it.)
The spirit and temper of syndicalism is best expressed in the recollections of J.T. Murphy a future leader of the Shop Stewards and Workers Control Movement (SSM) and the British Communist Party who, in 1912, was secretary of the Sheffield Amalgamation Committee: ''I remembered that half the people had no work and we were called upon to vote only once in seven years or thereabouts. And I was not sure of how Labour would organise production if they did get a majority ... I thought that this idea of handing over ourselves to state officials was hardly the way to make the individual stand on his own feet ... the idea of industrial democracy seemed to me to give the right answer to the question of the self-development of the individual in cooperation with his fellow men.''
The rejection of the Labour Party's parliamentary reformism by people like Murphy was a healthy response to the efforts of the developing Labour bureaucracy to restrict the horizon of the workers' movement to seeking reforms within the framework of the capitalist system. However, because there was no Marxist party of any size rooted in the unions, many militants, in rejecting parliamentary reformism, also rejected political action as a whole. 'Politics' was equated with parliament and parties with reformism: thus syndicalism parodied the social democratic distinction between 'political action' (in parliament) and 'industrial action' (in the unions), but could not challenge it. A generation of working class leaders emerged from the pre-war struggles with a political outlook which reflected this contradiction.
In the turbulent years directly after the war the SSM was to find itself increasingly hamstrung by the syndicalist and propagandist basis of its political positions. It was the de facto leadership of the most advanced sections of the working class and yet it could not answer the two great problems of the immediate post-war years — the nationalisation of the mines and the threatened intervention of British troops in Soviet Russia. A major weakness of this body was its inability to reflect at a national level the strength of the movement locally. This lack of centralisation was exemplified by the action of the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC) in January 1919, in launching the '40 hours' strike without consulting the English section of the movement. Despite the militancy and intensity of this struggle, involving mass picketing and confrontations with the police on a large scale, it was not generalised beyond a few areas in Scotland, and no equivalent national campaign against unemployment and for a reduction in hours got underway.
On 13th February 1919 the miners voted by a six to one majority to strike unless their demands — for State ownership of the mines under democratic control, higher wages and shorter hours — were met. This decision was backed by the formal support of the railwaymen and transport workers, with whom the miners had formed a common front, the 'Triple Alliance'. Expert government prevarication succeeded in removing the strike threat on the simple promise of a 'full' enquiry. There seems little doubt that the alliance could have won if they had chosen to fight. Aneurin Bevan recalls a conversation between the leaders of the Alliance and Lloyd George in which the Prime Minister stated: ''We are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has already occurred in a number of camps ... if you strike, then you will defeat us.'' But they did not strike. By the time the promised report (which recommended a form of nationalisation) was published in mid-August of 1919, the Government felt the situation had improved sufficiently to risk rejecting the findings of its own commission. The miners' response was to launch a 'Mines for the Nation' campaign and demand that the TUC call a general strike to force the issue. However, having marched the rank and file 'up the hill' to the verge of offensive action, the leadership then proceeded to fritter away its energy, until by 1921 they found themselves struggling defensively against a national lock-out by the coal-owners.
The attitude of the unofficial movement in the mines linked to the SSM was highly coloured by syndicalist sentiments. In particular, no firm stance was taken on the issue of nationalisation. Whilst militants were, of course, generally in favour, their attitude is accurately summed up by this rank and file miner writing of the strong position obtained in local areas by trade union control: ''whether the official scheme for nationalisation and joint control is granted or not, the South Wales Miners are going on quietly with the work of taking control.'' Such attitudes were, of course, only viable in periods of economic stability when the bargaining power of the miners was at its strongest. By the end of 1920 the slump in the coal industry had completely undermined this power and paved the way for the lock-out of the following year.
Unemployment had began to increase rapidly by 1921, particularly in those heavy industries with a large export trade (in particular coal and engineering). This was combined with a steady drop in the relative position and living standard of workers in these industries. By 1924 real wages in the coal mines were 26% below their 1920 levels; and in iron and steel and shipbuilding they were down 20% and 14% respectively. In 1926, up to 48% of engineers were without work, and similar high figures were recorded for ship and cotton workers. Naturally the employers took this opportunity to weed out the militants and emasculate the power of the Workers' Committees. Already in June 1922 Murphy was asking: ''How can you build factory organisations when you have 1,750,000 workers walking the streets? You cannot build factory organisation in empty and depleted workshops.''
On April 1st 1921 the Government — having rejected the findings of the committee it had set up to avert the threat of a miners' strike — decided to return the mines to private ownership after the years of control during and after the War. The terms offered to the miners involved massive wage reductions and the Miners' Federation executive appealed to their allies in the Triple Alliance for support. On the 8th, both the railway and transport unions promised support for a strike beginning on the 12th. However, at a hastily convened conference on April 11th — involving the Government, mine-owners and the miners — the miners agreed to postpone the strike pending further negotiations. Round one to the Government! With sombre predictability, the negotiations failed, and on the 13th the Alliance again set a date for strike action — this time for the 15th. On the evening of the 14th, however, the then Secretary of the Miners' Federation, Frank Hodges, speaking at a meeting in the House of Commons, appeared to suggest that concessions could be made. Although Hodges was promptly repudiated by his executive the next day the damage had been done. The leaders of the railway and transport workers, anxious for an excuse to get off the hook, used Hodges' speech as a pretext to claim that the miners were avoiding an opportunity to open discussions and withdrew their strike notice. Thus died the Triple Alliance, and was born ''Black Friday''.
In the event the miners were locked-out by the owners (an action which was followed by employers' offensives against the engineers and dockers in 1923). After a bitter and violent struggle the miners were defeated. These developments heralded a major drive by the employers to destroy the gains made by the working class in the period since the beginning of the war; they also saw the first important industrial intervention of the newly-formed Communist Party of Great Britain.
Origins of British Communism
Of all the socialist organisations in existence in 1914 only one had unequivocally declared itself to be opposed to the First World War from the day it was declared: the tiny Socialist Party of Great Britain. In the British Socialist Party (BSP), the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a majority eventually came to adopt a pacifist or revolutionary attitude to the war: but it is evidence enough of the extent to which chauvinist attitudes had permeated the Left, that such a position was not adopted immediately. On the extreme jingoist wing of the British Socialist Party, its founder H.M. Hyndman, a pioneer of Marxism in Britain, could declare: 'Everybody must eagerly desire the defeat of Germany ... Prussia-ridden Germany is also the enemy not only of democracy and Socialism but of the entire human race.'
Nor were the syndicalists clear on their attitude to the war. The syndicalist-inspired Clyde Workers' Committee paper, The Worker veered towards the jingoism of Hyndman when they wrote that: ''Thousands of our fellows have sacrificed their lives fighting against the very Prussianism they now propose to foist on us here''. Their opposition to the war was — in common with many other syndicalists — based rather on the extent to which war production impinged upon the status and conditions of the skilled workers in the factories, than on any questions of political principle. On the Clyde, only John MacLean of the revolutionary wing of the BSP took a clear political stand against the slaughter and promptly received a three year prison sentence for his pains. The wartime industrial struggles exactly pin-pointed the contradictions of syndicalism; however big and militant the strikes were, unless they were limited to a clear opposition to the war, the political significance of the syndicalists' actions were at best confused and at worst reactionary. Even in 1917 when 'war weariness' had spread and disillusion with the war aims had become general, the campaigns of the engineers remained craft-based and non-political. The struggle against the conscription of more industrial workers into the Army was fought under the slogan 'Don't take me — I'm in the A.S.E.' (Amalgamated Society of Engineers). To quote Murphy: ''None of the strikes that took place during the course of the war were anti-war strikes. They were frequently led by men such as myself who wanted to stop the war, but that was not the actual motive.''
It is paradoxical that in the midst of this political confusion over the war, the syndicalist left took a decisive step forward in organisational terms. Up to 1915 syndicalist influence had been primarily based on the call for the fusion of existing unions 'from the top' into one union for each industry. As Murphy, the theoretician of the workers committees put it, amalgamationists ''had sought for a fusion of officialdom as a means to the fusion of the rank and file. We propose to reverse this procedure ... to make the amalgamation of the unions incidental and the amalgamation of the workers fundamental.'' Henceforth each workshop should elect a shop steward who would sit on a stewards committee representing the whole factory and linked to similar bodies in other factories.
It was these organisations which fought so successfully to defend the craft privileges of workers (particularly engineers) during the war, and propelled many previously unknown socialists into the leadership of mass movements against the trade union officials. A roll call of these men — MacManus, Gallacher, Bell, Murphy, Campbell — closely resembles the first Political Committee of the Communist Party after its formation in 1921. The failures and successes of this movement during the war left an indelible print on the character of the British Left in the post war years.
The Russian revolution of 1917 had a major impact on the political thinking of the vanguard of the British workers' movement. The experience of the Soviets seemed to embody the concrete organisational forms through which the working class could seize state power and, at the same time, seemed to bear a clear similarity to the methods and institutions forged by the British working class in its own struggles of the time. The Workers Committees, it seemed to British revolutionaries, were 'embryonic soviets'; the task was simply to extend these committees to embrace the whole working class. In 1919 Gallacher and Campbell wrote a pamphlet urging the formation of 'social committees' to complement the committees formed at the point of production, by organising in the neighbourhoods.
It was around the notion of soviets that the debate over the programme of the British Communist Party was to revolve. The understanding of exactly what constituted such a body and the task it should perform was sadly lacking. Systematic confusion existed between the united front of the whole working class and that of revolutionaries and socialists. By 1920, Gallacher was calling for a Communist Party, based on 'social committees' i.e. 'soviets', as a first step to uniting the existing Marxist organisations in Britain. But this was in the future; for the moment, British revolutionaries saw the creation of soviets as a natural extension of the most militant experiences of the domestic class struggle. Ironically these notions gained most influence amongst the left at precisely the moment that their power to actually implement them began to wane under the successive hammer blows of the employers' post war offensives.
It was at this point that the failure of the British left to understand and assimilate the other great lessons of the Bolshevik revolution came to the fore: in particular, the nature of the organisation required to lead the working class to power (a democratic centralist party) and the necessity for such an organisation to combine absolute intransigence on questions of principle with the utmost flexibility of tactical orientation corresponding to the precise nature of the conjuncture.
Nonetheless, the Russian Revolution gave immense prestige to the Bolshevik leaders and their project of creating a Communist International (CI) which would comprehensively break with the opportunist leaders of the Second International who had capitulated to their own ruling classes on the outbreak of the war. Despite this prestige, however, it was not until 1920 that the influence of the CI was able to unite the various currents of the left which had developed during the war into a united Communist Party. Even then, not all the forces of the far left were brought into the new party — John MacLean on the Clyde, the majority of the SLP in Scotland, and the SPGB all remained outside — and its political basis remained very confused. These problems were very closely linked with the political traditions from which British Communism developed and the conditions in which the new party was born.
The Struggle Against Sectarianism
What we look for when we analyse the developments leading to the General Strike and the events of the strike itself, are the lessons that can guide militants today. Inevitably, therefore, attention eventually focuses on the record of the CPGB in this period, unique as the only significant political organisation professing a revolutionary socialist programme. All of the bourgeois historians, whatever the merits of their scholarship in providing us today with valuable secondary sources, naturally tend to avoid this problem. Serious analyses of the CPGB in this period that place themselves firmly in the camp of the working class are all too few. (1) It's easy for all the commentators to agree that the General Strike marked a watershed in the class struggle, that it represents the most acute confrontation between the classes that has taken place in Britain, that it represented the most enormous defeat for the working class and a stunning victory for the ruling class, that the role of the trade union bureaucracy was one of outright betrayal and that from July 1925 (Red Friday), when the writing announcing an impending confrontation was clearly on the wall, the Conservative Government began carefully to prepare while the trade union leaders prepared nothing.
But for militants, it is here the problems start. The reasons for such a defeat are not the property of consensus that blames everything on the trade union bureaucracy and then cries over the spilt milk. There is no dispute about the role of Thomas, Bevin, Citrine and the rest in the majority of the TUC General Council. There is probably also agreement that the celebrated 'lefts', Cook, Swales, Hicks, Bromley and Tillett played a miserable and cowardly role for all that had been expected of them by thousands of militants. But the really important questions remain: what were the general tendencies at work in the class struggle leading to the strike that can define the political possibilities of the situation? No matter how puny the forces of the revolutionaries may have been, what were their tasks in these days? What is the record of the CPGB in this respect? What were the factors at work determining the character of the CPGB's political line? For all the defeat, what could have been salvaged by the work of militants to lay the basis for recovery to meet the increased offensive on living standards and trade union rights following the strike? We have already touched on the first aspect. We now have to look more closely at the background and political traditions of the CPGB.
Revolutionary Marxism in Britain has never been a mass political force. The party of the working class, the Labour Party, has no tradition of even a formal adherence to a revolutionary socialist programme, unlike some of its sister parties in Europe. So it was that the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain occurred in total organisational and political separation from the mass party of the workers and not, as with the major CP's on the continent, from ruptures from within this party. In fact, the forces and political influences culminating in the formation of the CPGB in 1920 were distinct in important ways from those producing the Labour Representation Committee and what became the Labour Party, from 1900. Although much influenced by the sectarian and dogmatic 'pseudo-Marxist' propagandism of the Social Democratic Federation (formed by Hyndman in 1883), to which at various times many leading militants of the future CPGB belonged, the driving inspiration which moulded the political reflexes of the eventual working class cadre of the CPGB, particularly in the engineering industry, came from the problems and tactics of unofficial workshop organisation in the factories.
The rapidity of the development of British imperialism's mass production industries towards the end of the nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of the First World War, created powerful shop stewards local organisations that existed in uneasy relation to the nascent regional and national union administrative structures which housed the growing union bureaucracy. We have already mentioned the great role played by the shop stewards movement, particularly through the Shop Stewards and Workers' Committee Movement and decisively during the First World War. It was on the anvil of resistance to the efforts of wartime governments to smash conditions and agreements in the factories that the character of local mass leaders later to play a leading role in the CPGB was hammered out.
Certainly, such leaders as Gallacher, Campbell and Murphy were revolutionaries committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the fight for socialism. Even in their formative years they had clear political positions. But their tradition and experience blended often vague propaganda for socialism with the political strategy of revolutionary syndicalism, which in practice produced little political perspective beyond mass factory organisation and mass struggles for vital, but politically limited demands. On his own admission, Willie Gallacher, one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers' Committee, could say of the Glasgow 40-hour strike in 1919: ''We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution .... for those of us leading the strike, we were strike leaders, nothing more; we had forgotten we were revolutionary leaders of the working class .... We were all agreed on the importance of the strike for the 40-hour week, but we had never discussed a general line against capitalism, and never could have agreed on it, even if we had discussed it. (2)
The revolutionary potential of this strike is arguable, tragically isolated as it was in the West of Scotland, but of the political limitations of the strike leaders' perspectives, given its relation to national developments and the policies pursued by the Government, there can be no doubt. The consistent failure of many leading militants up to and through the First War, to see much beyond the pursuit of advanced trade union demands by the most developed trade union methods possible was a weakness which was to haunt the CPGB from its very inception.
Syndicalism involved an idealisation of local workshop and factory organisation which became for many militants the limit of their political horizon. Without belittling the importance of such heroic struggles, which made possible the working class gains from the tremendous class battles up to 1920, it imbued a political myopia in many of the workers leaders who came to form the CPGB in 1921. Certainly, the years from the end of the Great War to the watershed of the end of the short post-war economic boom by late 1920 and the setback of Black Friday in April 1921 were years of the most gigantic working class struggles. In these years from 1919-21 disputes lost an annual average of 49 million working days in a period when trade union membership averaged around 6½ million. But they gave workers leaders a definite political stamp which was absorbed into the CPGB.
It is small wonder, with such a formation and experience of directly leading mass factory struggles, that the core of militants from the trade unions later to play a leading role in the CP and Minority Movement were not over-impressed with the Labour Party. They tended to view the gradual growth of the Labour Party with a certain disdain, as the creature of intellectual reformers and trade union officialdom. It appeared to promise little of relevance to the local problems of factory organisation, with its leaders' concern for Parliamentary reform by which to reverse legal attacks on trade unions and for legislation that would finally legitimise the position and legal rights of unions in industrial relations procedures. Championing 'super trade unionism' and a healthy suspicion of political parties that often bred a dangerous cynicism, several leaders soon to be prominent in the CPGB ignored to their cost the influence and attraction of the Labour Party to many thousands of militants. Such an attitude, no matter that it was formally corrected through the intervention of the Comintern in the fusion process that led to the formation of the CPGB, probably cost the newly born organisation many early opportunities for growth.
It was all very well for the future CP leaders to have a correct objective appraisal of the bourgeois reformist programme of the Labour Party and the urgent need to form a revolutionary Communist party. But amongst the various currents that came to form the CPGB there was not even theoretical and political coherence about the exact role such a new political party should play. Against the arguments of the Comintern, the leadership of the shop stewards movement (now in decline from its wartime heyday) maintained a confusion right into 1921 about the exact relation to be worked for between the CP and the factory leaderships. Furthermore, the old traditions of propagandism from the SDF and to a lesser extent the SLP and the syndicalist tendency to counterpose the work in the factory to 'political' work in the Labour Party, or any other workers' political organisation, simply added to the confusion over what precise party-building conception the new CPGB was to have, and in particular, led to a sectarian orientation to the Labour Party.
This confusion had much to do with the near organisational chaos and paralysis of the CP for at least two years after its formation. By the time of the celebrated 'Bolshevisation' urged on the CP by the Comintern, it was too late to rectify the damage caused by a wrong orientation to the Labour Party. The reorganisation was aimed principally at transforming and improving the industrial work. Nowhere in this period do we find the CPGB leadership grappling with the fact that for all the immensely positive gains made by the eventual recomposition of the several political groups (principally the BSP, SLP and ILP Left Wing) into the new CPGB by 1921, the established mass party of the class was not the CP but the Labour Party, and that it was impossible to ignore or 'go round' the Labour Party. Propaganda against its programme and record simply weren't enough. Definite tactics were vital to engage the thousands of militants in the Labour Party in joint work to win them to the CPGB.
By 1920 the Labour Party had over 2,000 local organisations compared with 150 in 1914. But no preparations up to 1924 were made to organise fraction work in the LP or undertake definite initiatives towards the membership of the LP. In fact, the orientation of the CPGB to the LP was restricted to the leaders of the ILP 'Left Wing' and the long saga of formal applications for affiliation (and the refusals). After the first application was turned down in August 1920, the CPGB comment in The Communist was 'So be it. It's their funeral, not ours.' No matter how much individual actions and campaigns later on in the mid-twenties were a great improvement on the early record (such as much of the work engaged in by the CPGB in the National Left Wing Movement, and the campaigns for support for affiliation in the TUC) it could not rub out the initial record and orientation.
When the eventual fusion of the various currents came about, the vast majority of the members forming the new CPGB came out of the Labour Party (BSP and ILP Left Wing); the joining of these forces with sections of the SLP and Communist Labour Party, along with members of the shop stewards movement, did of course mark a major step forward in the political realignment of the vanguard of militant workers. Naturally, the fact of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Third International in 1919 acted as the political magnet and the catalyst which drew the various currents together. Without the role played by the Comintern and particularly the impact of the Second Congress of the C.I., the CPGB would never have been formed. At least, by the beginning of 1921, there existed the nucleus of an organisation that could proclaim the politics of revolutionary internationalism and the struggle for working class state organs of dual power, Soviets — the strategic linchpin of the victorious Russian Revolution — as the road to workers' power in Britain.
However, while the formation of the CPGB marked a major political realignment and the creation of new opportunities for revolutionary socialists, we have to be careful not to suggest that what had occurred marked a coherent political recomposition of the workers' vanguard. True, all the principal leaders of the party who attended the 2nd CI Congress reached broad agreement on tactics with the Comintern leadership and among themselves. On all the major aspects of theory where syndicalist strategy parted company with Leninism, the CPGB leaders fell into line with Leninism and the line of the Comintern. But their near sudden conversion looks, in some cases, too much like St. Paul on the Damascus road to be true. What welded the CPGB together was the prestige of the CI and enthusiasm at the prospect of a viable organisation in Britain linked to the Russian achievement.
When we refer to the 'syndicalist past' of many of the leaders of the new CPGB we are recognising something far more important than spontaneous syndicalist hangovers being lumped, warts and all, into the new party. Most of these leaders, particularly those who were recognised as mass workers' leaders, were not simply under the influence of the traditions of the shop stewards movement. They were seriously political and had consistently theorised and argued the politics of revolutionary syndicalism. The similarities in the political biographies of these militants up to the founding of the CPGB bears this out.
Gallacher had joined the BSP but then broke with its practice and linked up with the revolutionary syndicalists to form the Clyde Workers Committee. He had first come into contact with syndicalist theory as early as 1913 on a visit to Chicago.
J.R. Campbell's political record prior to the CPGB is similar — from the ILP to the SDF to the SLP. J.T. Murphy, recognised eventually with some justification by the Comintern as the foremost British exponent of Leninism (and later to provide sterling political support for the stalinised International) had met and was a great admirer of Connolly and was a member of the SLP prior to the creation of the CPGB. Harry Pollitt, eventually General Secretary of the Minority Movement, was also very heavily influenced by syndicalism and moved from the ILP to the BSP before the CPGB.
Pollitt says of himself: 'I am afraid I was looked upon more as a militant trade unionist than as a Communist. There was a great deal of truth in this. All my activity had necessarily been in the workshop and trade unions, and naturally had influenced my outlook and way of looking at things.' Finally we can note that Tom Mann, with Pollitt and Murphy another major figure in the Minority Movement's CP leadership and President of the British Bureau of the RILU, had travelled from the ILP to the SDF and then the SLP before joining the CPGB. He also knew Connolly personally.
Such a listing of major figures from the leadership of the CPGB only serves to confirm the tenuous degree of political reorientation and integration from syndicalism to Leninism, given also that it was, in the main, these ex-SLPers who undertook the discussion on behalf of the CPGB on the political line of the Comintern. These material factors influencing the leadership of the CPGB — arising, in the main, from the political milieu of the CP leaders in the British situation — were to have profound consequences on the ability of the CPGB to meet the challenge of the early twenties and the General Strike.
The CPGB was eventually formed just as the advancing tide of working class struggle that had been rolling forwards from the end of the Great War came to an end, with the onset of the slump from 1921 to mid 1923. Unemployment rose to 14.1% of the employed population in mid 1921, or 2 million workers. In the engineering industry unemployment was as high as 27.9% in December 1921. Between 1921 and 1923 the trade unions lost 2 million members, more than the increase since 1918. The Government and the employers moved on to a massive offensive to take advantage of the unfavourable economic situation facing the working class. With the collapse of the Triple Alliance in April 1921, a defeat was sealed and the Government and mine owners could register a major victory in the decisive economic sector for the recovery of British imperialism — the coal industry. With decontrol, the mine owners moved in viciously to introduce wage cuts and local payment systems. The defeat of the miners was followed by a lock-out in the cotton industry and the defeat of the engineers in the lock-out at the beginning of 1922.
This was the context in which the CPGB had to begin the task of constructing an organisation that could not only rally the vanguard of worker militants in this dire situation, but could also become a powerful revolutionary instrument to combat the retreat and replace what many militants had hoped would be the spearhead of the fight-back — the Triple Alliance of the miners, engineers and transport unions. While the slump and the grave setbacks suffered principally by the miners but by other groups of workers as well marked a clear defeat, in no sense had the ruling class achieved its needs. Only a massive increase in the rate of exploitation through wage-cuts and a complete reorganisation of the mining industry could salvage the fortunes of British imperialism. In one sense, the retreat of the Triple Alliance postponed a real test of the relation of forces between the classes. Eventually, the confrontation would have to come in a naked contest of mass struggle. This test came in May 1926.
The record of the newly formed party as it set about its tasks in its first two years of existence was not particularly auspicious. The inexperience of its political leadership, coupled with their syndicalist prejudices and sectarian errors in relation to the Labour Party, all combined to dog the party with lack of clear perspectives and a plan of work. In particular, in response to the continual blandishments of the Comintern to apply a set of tactics aimed at rapidly and directly constructing a mass revolutionary party, the new CP moved at a snail's pace. Certainly it was true that there was a good deal of voluntarism in the Comintern's urgings to get on with the job. The failure of the revolutionary upsurges in Europe — Germany in particular in 1923 — provoked the Comintern to look too superficially for short-cuts in the toe-hold it had achieved in Britain with the formation of the CPGB.
The British situation in 1921-22 however was the last place to expect a breakthrough without the most detailed attention to tactics, initiatives and organisation. The new CPGB unfortunately lacked these. Formed in a period of working class defeat and retreat it never allowed itself a period of sober consolidation and the setting of perspectives. Its propaganda was broadly on the right note ('Stop the Retreat!' 'Back to the Unions!') but the planned disposition of its weak political resources was almost non-existent. The Comintern demanded from the CPGB an orientation to mass work, placing no barriers between itself and the workers, combined with the development of a centralised, disciplined organisation. Throughout the early '20's this twin notion informed all the discussion of the CI on Britain. Only vigorous mass work in the unions (organisational flexibility) combined with the maximum clarity and independence of line (political centralisation) could ensure the success of the 'cardinal task' of the British section to build a mass party.
Given the scope of its tasks, the first few years activity of the new party were not particularly encouraging. Organisationally the party adopted a federal structure, with members gathered in branches. Centralisation was non-existent. The second editor of their weekly paper Francis Meynell recalls that he only attended one meeting of the party leaders in his first six months during 1921. In industry the syndicalist prejudices continued. The much vaunted Miners Reform Movement, in which the CP had an important influence, remained a propaganda body throughout the 1921 lock-out, with an extremely loose organisational form quite unsuitable for rallying the membership independently of the officials. The reaction to 'Black Friday' was typical. It was one week until the party had any concrete advice for workers other than criticism of the leaders, and this only amounted to sending money to the Miners Fund and demanding the resignation of 'decent' officials in the Alliance. (3)
J.T.Murphy, now a leading member, writes of this period: ''We had made our political declaration of adherence to its (the CP) principles, but it is one thing to accept a principle and another to apply it in life. The CP was supposed to be a Marxist party, but there were few in it who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the writings of Marx. We had accepted the principle of democratic centralism but had hardly begun to apply them to the general structure and work of the party''. The party then underwent a fundamental reorganisation (the so-called 'Bolshevisation') electing proper leadership bodies, and forming the industrial membership into a cell structure. This undoubtedly improved the interventionist character of the CP, but again was not without its bad side effects. Centralisation is inevitably bureaucratic unless it is accompanied by the rigorous politicisation of the rank and file; the writers of the reorganisation report on the other hand saw the whole thing administratively. In reply to criticism they wrote: ''The greatest hindrance to the growth of our party is not the lack of political training, it is the number of practical difficulties that our members are meeting with ....''
National Minority Movement
The failure of the CPGB to take the initiative and deliver the goods of the Minority Movement much earlier than 1924 caused great concern to the Comintern. In 1923 the RILU conducted a special investigation of the British situation to find out why the trade union work was apparently producing so few results. Following this and a visit of the British leadership to Russia to discuss the situation, the whole work was reorganised and the first conference of the Minority Movement took place in August 1924, with some 200,000 represented. This initiative was in line with the united front policy of the CI, adopted in 1922, the essence of which for Britain was summed up by Lozovsky as, '...to create, to marshal, to integrate the opposition forces (so) the Communist Party will itself grow concurrently with the growth of the opposition.'' The central question such an organisation of this type would have to answer was the extent it would attempt to independently lead the working class, bypassing their traditional leaders to give more militant direction to the established organisations. Formally the NMM was quite clear: ''The NMM aims to organise the working masses of Great Britain for the overthrow of capitalism, the emancipation of the workers from oppressors and exploiters, and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth...'' Yet in the practice of the NMM this distinction was blurred, particularly on the attitude of the organisation towards the Labour 'lefts'.
In 1924 the party at least was relatively clear; in the Communist Review J.R. Campbell argued: ''It would be suicidal to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left wing.'' Here the left amongst the rank and file influenced by social democracy is not confused with the leadership lefts on the General Council, and thus the emphasis of the NMM work was to give an independent lead to these elements for the official left to support or otherwise. It was this attitude which also informed the attitude of the CP to the trade union international unity. Commenting on the significance of the TUC lefts' support for the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, the party's paper declared: 'Unity that only means a polite agreement between leaders is useless unless it is backed up by mass pressure .... The class struggle cannot be limited to an exchange of diplomatic letters.''
1924 was a year of partial recovery for the labour movement. Although unemployment remained high in the engineering industry it declined from a peak 28% in December 1921 to 14% in the same month of 1924; in the spring the Miners had successfully sought a revision of the 1921 agreement, forced on them by the lock-out; whilst the following winter the Railwaymen, the Engineers, the Shipbuilders, the Postal Workers, and the Dockers all submitted wage claims.
The NMM encouraged and profited from these trends, slowly building up support, securing affiliations and individual members. It achieved substantial success. At the next annual conference the number of organisations represented grew from 271 to 443, reaching a peak in March 1926 of 574. Because of the party's undoubted fine work in defence of the miners, the strength of the NMM was particularly successful in the Federation, most spectacularly with the election of an NMM supporter, A.J. Cook, to the position of General Secretary. Other notable achievements were recorded in the Engineering and Railway unions, and virtual leadership won in a number of minor trade societies, such as the National Union of Packing Case Makers and the French Polishers Union.
The upturn of the economy, the resurgence of pro-Soviet sentiment, and the absence of important right wing union leaders like J.H. Thomas, Harry Gosling and Margaret Bondfield and their replacement by recognised left wingers like Alonzo Swales, A.A.Purcell and G.Hicks, all reinforced the general leftward developments. The right wingers had departed to join the first Labour Government, which took office on 22nd January, 1924, (after the Prime Minister on the 21st had assured the King he would do all in his power to stop LP gatherings from singing the Red Flag!). Clearly the Movement, guided by the CP, was in an excellent position to profit from this situation, by fighting for the maximum unity of the vanguard around a programme of concrete action for the masses, not premised on the support of the official left wing. As Campbell put it in the party's theoretical journal in the same year: ''It would be suicide for the Communist Party and Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left wing .... It is the duty of our Party and Minority Movement to criticise its weakness relentlessly and endeavour to change the muddled and incomplete left wing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint. But the revolutionary workers must never forget that their main activity must be devoted to capturing the masses.' How was it that the March 1925 editorial of the same journal could declare that: 'The immediate task before the whole trade union movement in this country is the realisation of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee''? (4)
British Communism & the Comintern
The relation between the CI and its British section fluctuated sharply during the 1920's. From its early criticism of the 'vacillation' and 'ineffectiveness' of the party in 1921, the CI had, by 1924, come to regard Britain as something of a 'model' example of how the 'united front' policy was to be implemented. Unlike many of the CP's in Europe who were still caught in the aftermath of splits and divisions over affiliation to, and the current policy of the International, the British section remained from the 'bolshevisation' onwards a remarkably united party. This, combined with its numerical and ideological weakness, gave the authority of the CI over the CPGB a particular forcefulness in the early twenties; a position the CI did not achieve in relation to other sections (crucially, the German and Italian) until the mid twenties and later. Bourgeois historians have invariably portrayed this relation as one of total 'subservience'; a position which is parodied by the official version by the CP of its own history, where the CI is virtually ignored. In reality, the relations of the CI with its sections in the twenties were dominated by the complex relation between the internal power struggle in the Russian Party itself, and inter-penetration of the varying positions of the sections themselves. Just as the Russian Party was no monolith, so also its divergent influence had no one effect in each of the national parties. As the decade came to a close, and the Left and the Right oppositions were defeated, so this situation does become one of simple dominance of the Stalin faction in the Russian Party, and the activities of the CI more analogous to an extension of Soviet foreign policy. But to ascribe the conclusion of the process to all aspects of its development would be erroneous. It is therefore unfortunate that the most well known Trotskyist account of the CPGB in the early Twenties makes precisely this mistake. (5)
This latter approach is informed by exactly the same presuppositions as those of bourgeois historians: the victorious faction in the CI (by 1925) controls the line of the sections, as if they were extensions of the Soviet Party. The CPGB along with the rest of the sections are then dragged (at first reluctantly) down the path of counter-revolution. Specifically in Britain, this process was typified by the failure of the CP to prepare the workers for the betrayal of the 'left' on the General Council in the General Strike, because the former were too pre-occupied with ensuring the continuance of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, as a bulwark against reactionaries in Britain sabotaging the Soviet Union. The line of the British Party is thus seen as an extension of the Stalinist thesis of 'Socialism in One Country', the implication of which was that the continued existence of the Soviet Union was not dependent on international proletarian revolution but on the establishment of a series of diplomatic pacts with government or trade union leaders of a foreign power.
In the context of this article it is not possible definitively to [illegible]. This approach, fundamental errors of analysis arise in ascribing [illegible] as it is if one is to ascribe to the line of the CI (specifically that of 'socialism in one country') the main role in explaining the [betrayal] of 1926. It is impossible to trace the British links without [analysing] the totality of the internal struggle in the CI which produced the collapse of the party's independent political line, and its practical liquidation into the 'official left wing' in the events up to and during the General Strike.
Whilst the trade union intervention of the CPGB had after 1924 been commended by the CI as a 'model' of the united front policy, in other respects the party had come in for considerable criticism, primarily for deviations to the right rather than the left. For example, in June 1923 the Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI) 'severely criticised' its British section for failing to propagandise on the colonial questions, and said that its attitude towards the Indian and Irish situations was 'reformist'. Again in 1924 the party was criticised for being too soft on MacDonald. A year later the ECCI sent a 20 page letter to the CPGB advising a series of organisational improvements, including a call to ensure that members elected to trade union office were responsible 'solely to the Party'. But it was in a discussion on the 'English Question' in March 1926 that the CPGB representatives most clearly outlined their differences with the CI. The CI resolution, they claimed, 'painted Britain's position in too gloomy colours'; the ruling class still had 'immense resources and powers of influence'. Hardy, Secretary of the NMM, went on to argue that CP members who were elected to trade union office should have 'a certain amount of freedom'.
These positions of the CP were developing from the early months of 1925. This stemmed from two quarters: on the one hand, the party wished to accelerate the leftward drift of the 'left' leaders, and vacillated between dragging and cajoling them; whilst on the other hand, it underestimated the factors leading towards a decisive clash of the classes in British society. Speaking of his fellow Political Committee members on their release from prison in April 1926, J.T. Murphy wrote: ''Not one of us as we emerged from Wandsworth thought there would be such an event... We did not expect a general strike because there was not the slightest evidence in existence of the trade unions having prepared for such''. The confusion over the 'left' leaders was already present in the party in the aftermath of the euphoric events of 'Red Friday'. In July of 1925 the CP paper in the Labour Party ran a series of profiles of leading left-wingers uncritically extolling their virtues.
So, to what extent was all this a product of a CI theory of 'socialism in one country'? To answer this we must look at what was happening to the power struggle in the Russian party. To begin with, the theory of 'socialism in one country' was not originated by Stalin, but by Bukharin as early as November 1922. In the first stage of the struggle against Trotsky in 1923-4, Bukharin remained its principal exponent — yet he was not a member of the 'triumvirate' (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev) that led the first period of the anti-Trotskyist campaign. And crucially, whilst this stage of the dispute involved the development and nature of Soviet socialism, and the relation of international revolution, the triumvirate at no time up to mid-1924 advanced 'socialism in one country' as the thesis of the Russian party. It was when Stalin in early 1925 began tentatively to introduce this theory that it became a serious issue. And it was paradoxically this that broke up the 'triumvirate' against Trotsky, and forced Stalin to ally with Bukharin and Tomsky, on the right of the party. This pushed the two powerful figures of Zinoviev and Kamenev into opposition, and it was only after months of furious internal struggle that the Stalinist thesis was adopted at the December 1925 conference. After this, considerable [dissent remained, including from Zinoviev, who was] President of the CI until October 1926. Thus the issue of 'socialism in one country' did not become a major issue of debate in the leadership of the Russian party until June and July of 1925, not its policy until December, and with dissent from important leaders including the President of the CI itself. Within the CP, as with the previous campaign against Trotsky, this debate raised little direct discussion. The March 1926 debate had revealed that the serious difference between the CI and its British section lay over the latter's belief in the non-revolutionary character of the situation in Britain, and the consequent [inadvisability] of challenging the hold of the traditional leaderships over the mass of workers. Thus, whilst the drift towards a fully-fledged theory of 'socialism in one country' developed in the CI, influences from a domestic quarter of the CPGB drew it towards anticipating the international implications of the CI line. In his book Where is Britain Going? Trotsky to a degree foresaw these tendencies, stemming ultimately from the historical weaknesses of Marxism in Britain and the consequent pressure towards accommodation with the traditional left.
To a party of the CPGB's size, theoretical weakness and influence, combined with the accommodatory pressures of the class struggle in that period, any vacillation by the CI on the attitude towards the official 'left' wing would undoubtedly accelerate the reformist tendencies already present in its British section. Consistent intervention of the CI along the lines of Trotsky's book could have stemmed the tide and restored the independent practice of the CPGB, by stressing the need to prepare for the ''. . inevitability of major mass struggles'' in order to 'sift out' the real 'active' left from 'official lefts', for they ''fear the struggle more than anyone'' (Problems of the British Revolution, p18). But no such intervention was forthcoming. It was increasingly passivity and reliance on the lefts in practice which informed the activities of the CPGB. This was motivated not so much as a denial of the party's independent role, but by reference to its present weakness as an independent force, and that therefore it could maximise its influence by ensuring that the existing 'left' leadership was pushed as far as possible. So it was that on the eve of the General Strike, J.T. Murphy wrote of the role of the CP: ''It can only advise and place its forces at the service of the workers—led by others . . To entertain any exaggerated views as to the revolutionary possibilities of this crisis and visions of new leadership 'arising spontaneously in the struggle', etc. is fantastic . .''
The Party and the General Strike
There have been a number of examinations of the activities of the CPGB during the nine days of the strike; apart from those of the party itself, they are, from differing standpoints, uniformly critical. (7) Here we only concentrate on the attitude of the party towards the strike and, by way of an example, the activities of CP militants in the North East. The analysis of the CPGB was that the strike was not a revolutionary movement, and the business of the party was to ensure the continuance of the solidarity of the workers in the face of a rapidly weakening leadership. Thus: ''The Party entered the General Strike with political and organisational slogans that were inevitably defensive in character...'' wrote J.T. Murphy in the Conference report of October 1926. Reflecting the belief that the role of the party was to be the best organiser and administrator of the strike, the Party declared itself loyal to the General Council of the TUC. Similarly, George Hardy, then secretary of the NMM, recalled that he sent instructions on 2nd May for local groups to work for the establishment of Councils of Action which were ''under no circumstances to take over the work of the trade unions... The General Council and the union executives were carried out.'' The basic unpreparedness of the party is demonstrated by the quote from Murphy expressing his belief that none of the leaders of the CP believed a strike was likely, a 'surprise to everybody', a factor also expressed in the dislocation of the CP in the events themselves. Individual CP militants played an extraordinarily important role in the councils of action, and bore the brunt of considerable repression for their efforts (over 1,000 members were arrested during the strike). Yet this contrasts strongly with the minimal national impact of the party, whose slogans and activity reflected the analysis identifying the maintenance of the present struggle as central, rather than its escalation. This was nowhere more evident than in the North East, often cited as the high water mark of the CP's influence on the conduct of the strike. In Chopwell, a Council of Action was formed, representing every important working class body, under the chairmanship of Will Lawther, a member of the LP National Executive. This body adopted a 'Plan of Campaign' drawn up by Page Arnot, a leading CP member. Its single object was: 'To defeat the civil commissioner appointed for this region,'' who, it was noted, ''is appointed by the Government and is armed by the Emergency Powers Act in order to break our strike... we must defeat the civil commissioner and all his strike-breaking apparatus.''
The actual implementation of this, as we have recounted, involved the mass mobilisation of the workers in the area, and the virtual paralysing of the state administration, to the extent that the civil commissioner had to approach the Council of Action to ask them to run essential services — obviously a victory. Yet the basic political assumption is the same: that the object of the strike is defensive and industrial (summed up in the popular slogans 'Not a Penny off the Pay, Not a Minute on the Day' and 'Every Man Behind the Miners') and that the role of the CPGB was to be the best administrators and organisers of the strike in this limited framework. Of particular importance was the Party's failure to provide an independent line for the Councils of Action, either in their press or in those in which their membership had direct influence. To the CPGB, the sole role of the Councils of Action was that of the practical administration of the unusual problems created by the strike (food distribution, transport, etc.). They did not explain that it was in the extension and generalisation of these bodies from being merely bodies that coordinated the trade union action and took over some limited functions of the local state apparatus towards bodies of workers power on the Soviet model, that could mount an effective challenge to the state and not just take over some state functions, that the key to the political situation lay. This would have had the two-fold effect of limiting the room for manoeuvre of the TUC, and, in the context of a great mass movement, explaining in practice the communist notion of the soviet road to socialism. Of course, this line would not have been readily accepted by many workers, particularly during the first few days, but as the course of events progressed the status and authority of the CP's line would have undoubtedly improved. Moreover, this position would have to be identified as that of the Party, embodying a distinctive political prognosis of the situation. In fact, for all the heroic work of its individual militants, it was this failure to identify and spell out the clear potential of the strike and the power that could be generated from the germs of real workers' democracy that lay in the Councils of Action, coupled with a clear programme of political demands (and not simply limiting the purpose of the strike to the winning of the Miners' demands) that makes the CPGB's orientation to the strike so tragic. With a clear and independent programme the CP should have specifically spelled out, at least from Red Friday onwards in 1925, that a General Strike was on the cards, what should be the specific demands of the strike, that the strike, if prepared, could lead to a revolutionary situation. None of these tasks were carried out.
Apart from failing to call for the armed self-defence of the Councils of Action (in some places, the workers, particularly in Methil and Newcastle, did this anyway without any bidding from the CP's line) and their extension into direct organs of workers' democracy functioning as political forums and deciding on how to maintain the initiative, the CP failed miserably to politically pinpoint the demand 'Down With the Baldwin Government!', except in a half-hearted way. Nor did the CPGB develop the national logic of these positions and call for a national conference of delegates from Councils of Action to decide on the conduct of the strike and break with the leaders of the TUC. Hamstrung already at the beginning of the strike by sheer lack of political and organisational preparation, the CPGB's actual line in the strike itself did nothing to improve matters. What is more, the Party failed to draw the correct conclusions over the role of the 'official left' on the TUC General Council; whilst the Right were castigated the 'left' remained unmentioned: ''This strike was defeated not by the power of the capitalist class, but by the failure of the Right Wing leadership .... The Right Wing leaders refused to make working class counter-preparations . ... The lesson of the General Strike is... that the Right Wing because of its anti-working class outlook is unable to wield any weapon against capitalism.'' (Workers Weekly, June 4th, 1926). Not only did the party fail to note the impotence of the 'lefts' in the General Council and the LP, but continued to call for ''All power to the General Council'' (although this was linked to the strengthening of local cross-union committees in the workshop and locality). George Hardy writing in 1956, commented: ''.... we did not clearly understand the part played by the so-called 'left' in the union leadership. In the main they turned out to be windbags and capitulated to the Right Wing. We were taught a major lesson: that while developing a move to the left officially, the main point in preparing for action must always be to develop a class-conscious leadership amongst the rank and file.'' However, the CPGB in its public pronouncements gave no evidence of having learned any such lesson, in fact if anything the majority of the party leadership came to the opposite conclusions.
This appalling attitude produced an intervention by the ECCI supporting a minority on the Central Committee which charged that there had been 'vacillations to the right' in party line during 1925-6. (This is in itself further confirmation that ECCI influence at this time was not uniformly dragging its British section to the right.) This intervention produced a volte face by the Central Committee, and the theses adopted by the Party at its October conference talked of the 'sham' left wing who capitulated to the right. However, the ECCI also concluded that the ''CPGB passed its test of political maturity... and attacked the left sharply''. Once again the CPGB had become a football in the internal struggle between Stalin and the Left Opposition, and the assessment of its activities by the ECCI consequently suffered. Rather than draw the logical conclusion from the differing accounts of the lessons of the strike (which would have supported Trotsky's position) the ECCI simultaneously congratulated the British section, whilst in fact meaning opposite conclusions. When British Communists from within the Anglo-Russian Committee for their handling of the General Strike, a section of the CPGB leadership protested that this was 'interfering'. This use of the CI as a weapon in the internal power struggle in Russia was to gradually dominate its activities, and the positions of the varying sections were to become mere fodder to the ascendant Stalin faction. In this way the leadership of the international workers movement eventually became an appendix of a bureaucratic clique.
FOOTNOTES
1. Willie Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde (1936).
2. Harry Pollitt, Serving My Time (1940).
3. ''The British Party . . . was reproved for its ineffectiveness during the Miners' strike . .''—E.H. Carr on the [Anglo-Russian Committee] as part of the Stalinist policy of seeking alliances with non-revolutionary forces to counter imperialist pressure on the Soviet Union. By sitting on this committee, all the 'lefts' [betrayed the] workers, without taking one practical step in the class-struggle in Britain. This policy was carried to the extent of continuing with the Committee even after these same 'lefts' had failed in the General Strike. In the event it was the British unions which withdrew from the Committee in 1927.
5. A number of essays taking this line have been recently included in Essays on the History of Communism in Britain by A. Woodhouse and B. Pearce (London, 1975).
6. ''... the adoption of this (opportunist) line by the CPGB flowed directly — this [theory] of Socialism in One Country...'', Woodhouse and Pearce, op cit.
7. Woodhouse and Pearce, op cit, pp66-103; C. Farman, General Strike 1926, (London, 1972), pp167-182; J. Symons, The General Strike (1957), pp130-160.