General Strike Centenary

 

One hundred years ago there was a General Strike in Britain.

From the May 1966 issue of the SocialistStandard

‘London's Piccadilly was jammed with traffic. So was the Thames Embankment. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes—cars, vans, bicycles, horses and carts, almost anything on wheels— had been pressed into service.

This traffic chaos was news, but there were no newspapers. Out of Fleet Street came only a few bundles of single-sided cyclostyled sheets with a very brief digest of news snippets.

The railway stations were quiet except for the murmur of voices of bewildered people who had turned up with the hope of getting a train.

The docks were still and silent. Only at the gates, where groups of dock workers stood around, was there any sign of life.

The same pattern prevailed in towns and cities all over the country.

It was Tuesday, May 4, 1926--the first day of the General Strike. Workers whose Trade Unions had called on them to stop work, did so unanimously. The solidarity of the strike surprised even Trade Union officials and confounded thousands who had not expected the strike to take place.

During previous months, talks and negotiations, committees and commissions, reports and announcements telling how Trade Union leaders, the Government, the clergy and some prominent individuals were striving to find a solution to the deadlock, had led lots of people to believe that the strike would be cancelled at the last moment or that, if it was called, it would be a feeble affair, causing them little inconvenience. So, many awoke on that May morning without a thought that the day would be different to the one before.

For nine days the strike continued, more Unions joining in when called upon. At midday on the ninth day the General Council of the Trades Union Congress went to the Prime Minister and announced, “ . . the General Strike is being terminated today.” The news was broadcast at 1 p.m.

This abrupt ending caused more consternation inside Trade Union ranks than the calling of the strike had caused outside. Thousands of active, local Trade Unionists were struck speechless by the news. When they recovered their wits they set up a howl of protest and recrimination. They were the men who, during those nine days, had organised the pickets and demonstrations, arranged entertainment and recreation for the strikers, produced local strike bulletins, issued transport permits, planned help for the halt, the maimed and the blind and done the multitude of organisational jobs that had kept the strike solid. They had been the N.C.O.s of the battle. With confused ideas about the strike—theirs not, they thought, to reason why—they had done their job with enthusiasm. When, at the height of their zeal, they heard the retreat sounded, they were flabbergasted and enraged.

Angry voices accused the T.U.C. General Council of cowardice and treason. The General Council accused the miners of making impossible demands. Denunciation, recrimination, spite and mud-slinging were rife for weeks but, by the time of the next Trades Union Congress, the venom had subsided and members of the General Council were re-elected to office.

During the forty years since the General Strike the question has been frequently asked, “If the strike had not been called off so precipitately, could it have been brought to a successful conclusion?” The questioners have different ideas about what would have been a successful conclusion.

Their question implies that the Trade Unions planned the strike with a particular object in view, that the workers were led into the fight towards some preconceived goal. This is a complete misunderstanding of the event.

The threat to strike was an act of defence and defiance which the T.U.C. General Council did not expect to have to put into effect. They candidly admitted that they did not want the strike, that they did everything to avoid it including, as one of them said, grovelling to the Prime Minister. The Government forced them into the fight.

Ten months earlier the coal miners had given notice of their intention to terminate the miners' national agreement, to reduce their pay and increase their working hours. Failing acceptance of these demands, the miners were faced with a lock-out. They sought support from the T.U.C. and a committee of Unions representing miners, dockers, railwaymen and road transport workers planned to completely stop the handling of all coal if the lock-out notices were not withdrawn. At the final hour the notices were withdrawn, the Government granted the mine owners a nine months subsidy and set up a commission to investigate the coal industry.

The Trade Unions were delighted and the day of victory passed into the annals of working class history as “Red Friday”.

To those who did not blind themselves to what was happening around them, it was apparent that the employers and the Government had bought time to prepare for a show-down. The Trade Union leaders did the three monkey act; they saw nowt, heard nowt and did nowt.

The Government, without any effort at secrecy, instituted a strike breaking organisation, The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, mainly under the control of military and naval personnel. At the same time they held out hope to the miners by appointing a commission of enquiry into the coal industry.

Months later, when the commission reported, it offered the miners nothing and, with the end of the Government subsidy drawing near, the mine owners again submitted their demands.

With the Prime Minister acting the part of a benevolent mediator it was simple to misunderstand, if not ignore, the Government’s bellicose activities. After Red Friday it appeared logical to again threaten strike action as a counter to the mine owner’s threats. But with the passing days it became clear that the Government and employers were digging in their heels.

As zero hour approached, a conference of Trade Union delegates met in London and the T.U.C. General Council, acting as negotiating committee, met the mine owners and the Prime Minister daily. The Council found itself shuttled between an immovable Government and an irresistible delegate conference. When finally they reported their inability to move their opponents, the assembled delegates voted by 3,653,527 to 49,911 to empower the General Council to go ahead with the strike.

Despite the overwhelming vote, the General Council utilised the twenty six hours between the decision to strike and the appointed time for it to commence, to again try to get the miners’ lock-out notices withdrawn so that negotiations could continue without strike action. Eventually, a full cabinet meeting flatly refused even this modest request and the Prime Minister told the General Council that the proceedings must close because the strike had been called and because of overt acts, affecting the freedom of the press, that had already taken place. Printing Trade workers on the Daily Mail had refused to print an anti-working class article, and had walked out.

The Government utilised these last few hours to set its strike breaking machinery into operation. The King signed a proclamation declaring a state of emergency under the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Orders in Council were issued, army leave was cancelled and troops moved to industrial areas. The commissioners of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies were instructed to put their machinery in motion. The mine owners made a final offer to the miners to settle with reduced wages and increased hours. At midnight on Monday the strike was on.

Throughout the strike the Union leaders emphasised that it was entirely an industrial dispute. The Government insisted that it was a challenge to the state and the democratic constitution and would lead to civil war. Communists urged that the strike could be used to displace the Conservative Government in favour of a Labour one. A few scatter-brained individuals even saw the strike as an attack on capitalism by class conscious workers, with the prospect of a social revolution.

All the circumstances considered, it was obvious the workers could not win. The number involved in the strike action was about three million. (G. D. H. Cole put the figure at 2,751,000).) That was quite a small portion of the total working class. The remainder were sympathetically indifferent, apathetic or hostile. The Government, despite a mild pretence at being an unbiased referee, was doing its job of keeping law and order. That meant preserving capitalist law and preventing the workers from being disorderly. Strikes create disorder. From its position of strength the Government could not lose.

Had the Government been weaker, and resigned under the strike threat, its successor, whether Liberal or Labour, would have had to do the same job of running capitalism. Subsequent Labour Governments proved that. Under similar circumstances they did similar things in the attempt to make capitalism run smoothly. The present outcry against unofficial strikes is a continuation of the policy. The workers must be kept at work without interruption for the hours and wages that the current trade condition requires.

That the General Strike could have led to a social revolution is a fantastic notion. The three million strikers reacted to what they considered an injustice, not because they were conscious of their class status and certainly not because they understood capitalism and the need to overthrow it.

When the strike was over the workers showed how un-class-conscious they were. Trade Union policy during the following years was one of greater class collaboration than ever before and Trade Union leaders cemented themselves more securely in their jobs.

The strike should have revealed the true nature of capitalist government, the real function of the state and the futility of leadership. But very few learned.

The workers will continue to struggle within capitalism and, whatever political party is in power, the government will use the state machinery against them, to keep them from disrupting the system or damaging the prospect of profits.

The General Strike was one battle in a continuous war. It was not a Waterloo. It was more like a Dunkirk. Battles on the industrial field, whether won or lost, will leave the workers still a subject class. With the employers entrenched behind their state, it requires political organisation with a knowledge of Socialism to dislodge them.’

W.Waters

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-general-strike-of-1926-1966.html

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May Day and the Class Struggle

From the June 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘May Day demonstrations used to be held on the 1st of May: how they came to be changed to the first Sunday in May is one of life’s little ironies, or should we say one of working class life’s little ironies?

It happened during the first World War when the British and German sections of the working class were killing each other. Then the British Government suggested that in the interests of winning the war it would be greatly obliged if the Labour Party, who were also "winning the war” as well as organising May Day, would hold it on the first Sunday in May. To hold it on a week day would mean thousands of workers might be absent from munition factories and that would mean a drop in war production and what was more vital it would mean a drop in the rate at which the British uniformed workers were killing their German comrades.

It always rains on Sunday

After the first World War the Labour Party, presumably on the grounds that a week day demonstration would affect “peace production,” continued to hold May Day demonstrations on the first Sunday in May. There were also “influential people” who thought that if workers wanted to demonstrate they should demonstrate in their own time and not on a day normally devoted to the bosses. And further, as it could be shown statistically that the first May Sabbath was a case—”That it always rains on Sunday" — or nearly always, and so was likely to dampen the demonstrators’ ardour, everybody that is everybody apart from the workers seems to have reached a happy May Day solution.

The First of the May Days

There are, of course, four May Days historically considered. Two in the past, one in the present, and a hypothetical one in the future. May Days go back a long way, even the Greeks had a word for it, or more accurately a day for it. So did the Romans, Mais was a month of celebration, games and feasting a time when even austere Romans like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony took their hair down.

In Feudal England it was a day of celebration for the return of spring. On that day our forbears consumed quantities of cake and ale and made whoopee. It was sort of “Knees up Mother Brown” of the Middle Ages, and when the warmth of the day had subsided the young men full of cake and ale picked up the young women, also full of cake and ale, and bore them off into the woods, and a new warmth entered into the proceedings. It is even said, and I hope that I do our forbears no injustice that the girls entered the woods as immature maidens and came out of the woods experienced women. It seems that our working forefathers had more definite ideas about May Day than their modern counterparts.

Exit file First May Day

But Feudalism went and those sorts of May Days went with it—as a result of economic development a new class was emerging who were displacing the old Feudal order, a class of merchants and merchant adventurers who burst asunder the dosed Feudal economy and opened up the world. And what with piracy and plunder and the slave trade and colonisation they were so busy amassing vast wealth that they had little time for anything else, least of all for such things as May Days.

But the peasants and draftsmen of England not only lost their May Days, but their immemorial rights. The Land Enclosure increased in severity—as the 17th and 18th centuries went by a vast mass of peasants became landless and in some cases homeless. At the same time economic development led to a bitter, competitive struggle between the old craft guilds and the new merchant class and in the end the guilds went down in ruins before the impact of a new and superior method of wealth production and organisation.

Thus at the end of the 18th century and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a landless, unprivileged and unorganised mass were hungry to enter the new factories built by the new factory owners, i.e. the new ruling class which had emerged from this process of economic development. And these new factory owners equally hungry from the standpoint of profits to receive them into their factories. It was this uncouth, unorganised mass who were the nucleus and origin of the modern working class, yet an unorganised mass who were to become organised by the very process of production. And as the weight of misery and oppression bore more heavily upon their shoulders they were involved in the riots and machine breaking and other acts of violence. From this class struggle between owners and non-owners, the workers began to throw up their own class organs of defence, which later emerged as the modern Trade Union Movement. 

The Second May Day

It was out of this class struggle that the idea of a second May Day emerged. Not a May Day merely symbolical of a resurgence of nature, but of labour carrying a promise of a new life. The idea was mooted in France, Germany and England during the 19th century for by this time capitalism had become international and the working class had become international also, and it was felt by groups of workers in different lands that as they had common interests they should also have common aims.

Yet it was not until 1888 that the 2nd International set aside the first day of May to be a day symbolical of international working class solidarity, with an advocacy of the eight-hour day. The first May Day Demonstration was in 1890. On that and subsequent May Days, Negroes, Indians, Chinamen, Germans, Frenchmen, marched in the name of the International working class in different parts of the world, transcending their national boundaries.

In England on May Day, workers marched in various towns and cities and often many of their women marched with them. They marched to the open spaces and parks and those who lived by the sweat of their brow gathered round coal carts and platforms to listen to those who lived or were later to live by the sweat of their tongues. 

Workers of the World unite

It was the high tide of working class international feeling. A time when Marx's slogan, “workers of the world unite” seemed to have more significance than ever before—or since. These workers were not Socialists; perhaps the nearest they got to Socialism was a passionate conviction to remould things nearer to the heart's desire, but they felt a common purpose in face of a common enemy. But this promised spring-time of the working class movement never flowered. The early blush on its cheek, faded before the long, hard winter of growing national sentiment and reformism.

By the turn of the 20th century a change had come o'er the spirit of the dream. The workers still marched, they still gathered round the same coal carts and still listened to the same old speakers. But the old speakers were now saying new things. No longer did they cry, down with the powers that be, for they were trying to start a political movement with the help of the trade unions which hoped to become part of the powers that be and in fact did become part of them—eventually what is more, some of the old agitators and speakers who boasted of their lowly origins successfully took part in that process. So successfully that in their ripe, or rotten ripe old age they recorded their success by writing books like “From Doss House to Debrett" or “From Pigstyle to Parliament," a perhaps not unnatural evolution.

Excelsior!

And so the Labour movement began to carry banners bearing strange signs. There were some in it demanding votes for women. Demands for the nationalisation of the Railways and Mines. Munidpalisation of gas, water and later electricity. The fact that these things came about has little to do with the early demands of the Labour Movement, but for other reasons. There was even a demand for the building of Labour Exchanges.

These things were now represented as being steps towards what was then termed the Millenium. The only trouble was that the more steps they took towards the Millenium the further it got away. In fact, they took so many steps towards it that it finally disappeared altogether and has never been seen since.

Freedom for Everybody

At the beginning of the 20th century there appeared the first of the Freedoms. Big banners proclaimed: "Freedom for the Boers." In due course the Boers got their freedom, but like so many such freedoms it turned out to be the freedom of the few to deny any sort of freedom to anybody else. Then there were demands for freedom for the Poles, freedom for the Slavs, etc., in fact, the only thing the workers never demanded was freedom for themselves, freedom from the servility of class domination.

Then the Labour Movement got mixed up with international politics, but international capitalist politics not international working class politics. They began by declaiming against "secret diplomacy." Then the Entente Cordiale. They demanded "No trafficking with Russia” against "The Big Navy Bill,” "Abolition of the Territorial Army,” etc.

So the Labour Movement, and with it May Days, instead of being the sounding board of international working class sentiment, became a big drum for national rivalries and conflicting foreign politics. A sort of Empire Day in reverse, but much more effective in compounding, confounding, complicating and obfuscating the pattern of working class politics.

After the war, with the advent of the communists in May Day demonstrations and other activities, British Foreign Policy got mixed up with Soviet Foreign Policy and things got in a glorious muddle. Then the communists started the "Hands off Movement" " Hands off China," "Hands off Spain," "Hands off Czechoslovakia," etc., although this did not prevent violent hands from being laid on all of these countries. Then there was the great down and up phase: "Down with Bonar Law," "Down with Baldwin,” "Up with Ramsay Mac and Snowden. “Down with Ramsay Mac and Snowden,” "Up with Cook and Maxton," "Down with Cook and Maxton,” "Down with Churchill," " Up with Churchill," then "Down with Churchill ”—ad infinitum.

Down with Fascism

Then in the years prior to the second world war there was “Down with Fascism" and a demand for a democratic military alliance against Hitler—Russia was then part of the " democratic alliance.” To show how May Days were only consistent in their inconsistency there were at the same time demands for drastic disarmament by the Tory government and devoting the savings to road making and increased doles. There were even demands that future wars should be conducted minus bombers and tanks. Although in demonstrations during the second world war unlimited quantities of both for the Second Front were the subject of slogans.

Now there are no longer cries, such as “ Down with capitalism—" Down with war." Nor even that tanks and aeroplanes should not be used in war. Only the Hydrogen Bomb should be taken off the war list so that war might once again become humane, decent and friendly. Such then has been the rise and fall of the second May Day.

May Day in Russia

One cannot, of course, omit May Day in Russia. No doubt the communists' dialectic skill has more than anywhere else turned May Day into its opposite. The communist boast that Soviet May Days are bigger and better than anywhere else. Unlike any other government they have made them state subsidised ceremonies, replete with the panoply and pomp of circumstance. As a show they probably make even a coronation look like a seaside carnival. All the great ones in Russia occupy the seats of the mighty on this day—symbolical of international working class solidarity. In Czarist times the police and military marched with the workers, but they were only with them, not of them. Now under the formulae of the unity of opposites they are included.

Tanks and jet bombers are also thrown in to show that communist war weapons can kill quicker and faster than bourgeois ones, thus demonstrating the superiority of "Socialism" over capitalism. And perhaps if Engels could have seen these Soviet May Days he might have thought that his aphorism—"the irony of history turns everything upside down," was an historic understatement.

To draw an historic parallel, one might think of the British Government in the 19th century organising the workers' May Day. Of thousands of workers with banners headed by old Queen Victoria in the gilded state coach and as they wheeled into the park massed bands of the guard playing with a row tow row tow to the British Grenadiers. And Gladstone, Disraeli and choice spirits from the House of Lords standing on coal carts with faces grimed for the occasion, proclaiming "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains." Only the communists could turn such a May Day fantasy, into a Russian May Day nightmare.

No doubt in turning back the pages of May Day demonstrations we might laugh at our Victorian working class grandfathers. We tend to laugh at many things in the past especially the Victorian past if only perhaps to prevent us from laughing at ourselves, because that might not be so funny. Whether if they could' see across the years to the present May Day demonstrations they would "look forward in anger” one cannot say. But one feels whatever they did they wouldn’t laugh at us but blush for us instead.

May Days of To-morrow

It might be that when the clock of history has gone forward by establishing a rational society we might so faras May Day is concerned put the clock back and make it once more a day of celebration and merry making. Then there will be no need to demonstrate. No need to cry “Down with secret diplomacy,” because there will be neither secrets nor diplomacy. Nor to call for disarmament, because there will be no need to arm or disarm Neither shall we organise for the abolition of the Hydrogen Bomb because it, or a miniature specimen of it, will have been relegated to the museum of pre-human history. Men will at last have become truly human, and in the light of that development I will conclude by saying—MAY DAY IS DEAD—LONG LIVE MAY DAY.

Ted Wilmott.

Blogger's Notes:

"Yet it was not until 1888 that the 2nd International set aside the first day of May . . . " This might be a typo. The 2nd International wasn't formally launched until 1889.

The May 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard carries a notice for a May Day meeting, entitled "The Class Struggle and May Day", to be held at Denison House, 296 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London. The speakers listed were Lisa Bryan and Ted Wilmott. There's a strong chance that this article by Wilmott is the text of his speech at that meeting

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2025/06/may-day-and-class-struggle-1958.html

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