|
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume 56 Number 10, April 4, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
Photo: www.tuc.org.uk
This year marks the centenary of the 1926 General Strike. It was not merely a defensive action against wage cuts and longer hours. It was also a moment when the working class demonstrated, despite its defeat, that they had the potential to take up the solutions to the crisis of society, opening up the path to progress and a new society constituted by themselves, the working class. In those nine days, workers put centre stage the necessity to capture political power and take up the orientation of creating a new society.
In the General Strike, the working class demonstrated again its place at the centre of the forward march of society, as in the struggles led by the Chartists in the first half of the 19th century, or on Clydeside during the First World War. The General Strike clearly put the immediate need for a new system on the agenda, and opened up in particular the question of political power. Erupting at a time when revolution was very much in flow, the government treated the strike as a challenge to its authority, mobilising emergency powers and framing the conflict as a defence of the status quo. But the strike showed that the working class itself holds the answers.
Looked at from the standpoint of the present, the task that opened up in 1926 was the completion of the democratic revolution. The English Civil War established certain political forms, but the ruling elites have long since abandoned any coherence in the political theory they established out of that conflict. The liberal democratic institutions to which capitalist development gave rise lie in tatters. The completion of the democratic revolution means vesting sovereignty not in representatives of the person of state, but in the people themselves. The task of the working class is to constitute itself the nation and vest sovereignty in the people, to create a new society. The strike demonstrated that the working class must take control of what belongs to it, placing the resources of society in its own hands and creating a new society that guarantees the rights of all. The spirit of that time has its direct continuation in the present, even though the conditions now are very different.
The subsidised mineowner
Today we face increasingly open rule by police powers. This is a period of transition, marked by the destruction of old forms, the restructuring of the state, and the strengthening of police powers, and in which the fight of the people for the alternative has become imperative. Desperation to prevent this alternative from taking root has created political chaos, and the answer is being sought in police powers as the state is rearranged around their wielding. Against this critical state of affairs, the will to be of the modern democratic personality demands the alternative. A change in the direction of society and the economy is urgently needed, requiring the democratic renewal of political processes and institutions, and the mobilisation of the working class and people to take up this task.
The need is for an anti-war government, as the manifestation of the modern democratic personality that will do away with rule mediated by so-called representatives, who are in fact representatives of the person of state. This is a profound conception encompassing a government which is also pro-social and pro-worker. Alongside this, there is a need for a change in the direction of the economy; an independent programme to stop paying the rich and increase investments in social programmes. This programme embodies the political unity of the working class and people, in which the individual interest is harmonised with the collective, and the collective interests with the general interests of society. A modern state must be brought into being which enshrines the rights of all by virtue of being human and their concrete reality.
Thus the significance of the General Strike lies not only in what it
achieved or failed to achieve at the time, but in what it revealed: the working
class as a transformative force, capable of leading society forward. The
miners' slogan, "Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day",
expressed a refusal to accept further deterioration. But beyond that refusal
was an affirmation. That affirmation, born in the struggles of the 1920s,
remains the task of the working class today. Our spirit as we mark the
centenary of the General Strike is that we passionately declare: the economy
belongs to us, the working class, the producers, the most revolutionary class
by virtue of their concrete condition in society and the relations within it!
With the working class constituting itself the nation, guided and inspired by
its Marxist-Leninist Party, its general staff, a society fit for human beings
will be created and strengthened. The time is now for the working class to take
up this task!