•Man, John, there's never been anything like it. If the blighters o'leaders dinna let us down we'll hae the capitalists crawling on their bellies in a week.
But it wasn't, despite the brave words of this Independent Labour Party supporter. Fifty years ago the leaders of the TUC, the true fathers of the cowardly bureaucrats of "left' and right that lead the unions today, inflicted upon the working class the worst defeat it has suffered this century. In the wake of the betrayal of the General Strike the miners struggled on for six months before being starved back to work.
UNCONDITIONAL Countless thousands of other workers were victimised. As a result of the unconditional surrender of the General Council on 12 May, the very existence of effective trade unionism was threatened as the bosses went on a vicious rampage to victimise militants and impose worse conditions. Had the railwaymen, transport workers or dockers gone back on the terms originally offered - and accepted by their leaders - few others could have resisted the wave of sackings and wage cuts.
The General Strike was the culmination of a decade of working class struggle that had flowered in the wartime shop stewards movement and burst out under the impact of the Russian Revolution. At the famous Leeds Convention in 1917 even Ramsay MacDonald, later the leader of the 1931 National Government, was forced to support the call for soviets of workers, soldiers and sailors deputies!
Aided by the post-war boom of 1918-20 and the amalgamations foreed by the militants, te unions underwent an unprecedented growth, reaching 6½ million members in 1919—20. Seventy thousand troops were involved in mutinies in South-East England, while in the great Clyde strike of 1919 pickets had consisted not of tens and hundreds but of thousands. In Yorkshire it was reported to the Government that 'a minority of very advanced workers' had inflamed prac tically the whole body of skilled men, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
REPRESSION In 1919 a working class revolution was within reach. Prime Minister Lloyd George knew it. Despite fierce repression, which saw tanks in the streets and machine guns on the rooftops in Glasgow, Lloyd George confided to the leaders of the trade unions that the Government could no. longer control the working class. But with J.H. Thomas playing the role he was to repeat in the General Strike, the movement was defused.
Even so, the militancy of the working class was unbroken. August 1920 saw the formation of a National Council of Action embracing all the main organisations of the labour movement, forcing the Government to withdraw from intervention in the war against the Soviet Union.
But the working class was to pay heavily for the missed opportunities of 1919-20. In 1921, with unemployment rising to over two million (15 per cent of the working class), the Government once again turned to the trade union bureaucrats to inflect savage wage cuts of up to 40 percent on the miners. The Triple Alliance of miners, rail and transport workers which had been built to fight such a possibility following the handing back of the mines to the private owners collapsed at the moment it was needed.
MEMBERSHIP Black Friday, 15 April 1921, set the pattern for other industries. A round of wage-cutting ensued as the recession deepened. Trade union membership had slumped to just over four million by the start of 1924 and the beginnings of a new upturn in the economy.
But things were far from settled between capital and labour. The coal owners might have their pits back, but the miners - followed by other sections of the working class -were fighting back. In the spring of 1924 the miners recouped the losses of 1921, followed that winter by new claims from the engineers, shipbuilders, postal workers and dockers. At the same time a Labour Government was brought to office, concluding a trading agreement with Soviet Russia which aroused new enthusiasm in the working class.
The ruling class quickly succeeded in removing MacDonald from office, but with the political outlet of a Labour Government blocked, the workers turned to direct action. On Red Friday, 31 July 1925, the Baldwin Government was forced to grant a subsidy to the pits to maintain miners' wages in the face of a united front of miners, rail workers, transport workers and engineers.
Such a situation could not last. Britain's economic position was deteriorating rapidly against that of the United States and other capitalist powers. The return to the Gold Standard had simply increased the price of British exports by 10 per cent. The hard pressed British export industries desperately sought ways to reduce costs — and wages were top of the list.
The confrontation had to come. On Red Friday the workers won a victory - and the DOSSIER COMPILED BY MICK GOSLING Government set a time-bomb. As Thomas Jones, the deputy secretary to the Cabinet in these years, wrote shortly afterwards: In July 1925 the Government were threatened with a concerted attack by the big unions. The country was ill-informed as to the merits of the coal dispute and the Government was uncertain as to how far it could rely on its emergency preparations. A breathing space was obtained by means of a subsidy and the appointment of a Royal Commission.?
But while the Government politically prepared, seeking to draw every section of society around it and against the workers by raising the question of 'the constitution', the leadership of the workers movement did nothing. While MacDonald wailed that the Government on Red Friday had handed seeming victory *to the very forces that sane, well considered, thoroughly well-examined socialism feels to be probably its greatest enemy', the TUC sat on its hands hotly denying any threat to the constitution, or that they were using industrial action for 'political' ends.
The situation tested every leader and would-be leader of the labour movement - and found them all wanting. The lefts', who had been pushed into action by the rapidly rising anger of the rank-and-file on Red Friday, were at one with the right in denying any political challenge.to the State, although the ruling class had chosen this issue as the field of battle. In the strike itself they made no attempt to differentiate themselves from the right. Their role is clearly described by Julian Symons in The General Strike: IMPORTANT "They were outnumbered, but they occupied important positions. One of them, Purcell, was chairman of the Strike Organisation Committee; George Hicks, John Bromley, Ben Tillett and A.B. Swales were leading figures on various committees. After the strike was over some of them spoke brave words to the effect that it had been a class struggle, yet during the nine days there is no suggestion that opinion in the General Council was seriously divided at any time.' Indeed, Hicks was one of the quietest in the small group that negotiated the betrayal formula with Baldwin and his cronies Only one force could have rallied the workers movement against the capitalist off ensive: the tiny forces of the Communist Party - and the far greater sections of the workers movement that taey muuenced through the Minority Movement in the trade unions and the National Left Wing Movement in the Labour Party. At the time of the strike, representatives of nearly a million workers -there were only four million in the unions - supported the Minority Movement, while over 50 Constituency Labour Parties and many more individual Labour Party members supported the National Left Wing Movement.
TASK Yet the Communist Party - following the Comintern line of subordinating the struggle of the working class to gaining 'an alliance with the lefts — never advanced a policy that clearly spelt out what was at stake and challenged for the leadership of the labour movement. Their central slogan, 'All Power to the General Council', did nothing to prepare the workers movement for the inevitable betrayal. Decades later the CP's official historian James Klugmann admits that the slogan 'was essentially incorrect.
Reversing earlier positions, the CP itself lent support to the idea that the strike was simply a struggle for the miners' demands. A correct policy of a united front towards the lefts, based on specific tasks and actions to take the struggle forward, became a blanket endorsement of the lefts' words, serving to act as a brake on the struggle. Even in the moment of defeat no clean break was made with the traitors, diplomatic relations being maintained for the sake of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee on which these same lefts sat.
In this special Red Weekly supplement on the General Strike we are not going to concentrate on the tremendous combativity and creativity demonstrated by the rank-and-file in the course of the strike, the flourishing of the Councils of Action, the consternation and bitterness expressed at the moment of betrayal. No one can doubt the tremendous spon taneous upsurge of the working class. But spontaneity of the class is useless without the politics to give it direction and organise its vanguard.
Here we concentrate on the one force that could have given that upsurge political direc tion, attempting to look in depth at the development of the Communist Party's relations with the lefts, the growth and potential of the Minority Movement, and the influence of the early bureaucratisation of the Soviet Un ion and the Third International on the CP's policies.
Obviously such an account is necessarily one-sided. But by studying these questions in a historical perspective, militants can better come to grips with the problems of construc ting both the united front and the revolutionary party today and confronting the bureaucratic misleaders of the labour movement.
6 General Strike Red Friday, 31 July 1925, was Red Weekly
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Oh, boy, it's the revolution at last!'