THE OVERWHELMING FACT OF THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1926 is that it was pretty much a route and a complete disaster for the British workers and the Labour Party. It ended up with the workers it was alleged to have been called to benefit being far worse off, it led to the weakening of the Labour Party in ways it took Republican-fascists in the United States many decades to achieve through the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court. It was absurdly ambitious in its imagining and stupidly romantic as all romantic gestures as politics are stupid.
When I was a secular lefty, which is, by the way, far LESS RADICAL than I am now, I read the secular lefty saint and martyr Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the concept and history of general strikes and was struck that her analysis started with showing that no less a figure in the secular lefty pantheon than Engels gave reasons to be skeptical of the idea as a means of making any progress.
“The general strike, in the Bakuninists’ program, is the lever which will be used for introducing the social revolution. One fine morning all the workers in every industry in a country, or perhaps in every country, will cease work, and thereby compel the ruling class either to submit in about four weeks, or to launch an attack on the workers so that the latter will have the right to defend themselves, and may use the opportunity to overthrow the old society. The proposal is by no means new: French and Belgian socialists have paraded it continually since 1848, but for all that is of English origin. During the rapid and powerful development of Chartism among the English workers that followed the crisis of 1837, the ‘holy month’ – a suspension of work on a national scale – was preached as early as 1839, and was received with such favour that in July 1842 the factory workers of the north of England attempted to carry it out. And at the Congress of the Alliancists at Geneva on September 1, 1873, the general strike played a great part, but it was admitted on all sides to carry it out it was necessary to have a perfect organisation of the working-class and a full war chest. And that is the crux of the question. On the one hand, the governments, especially if they are encouraged by the workers’ abstention from political action, will never allow the funds of the workers to become large enough, and on the other hand, political events and the encroachments of the ruling class will bring about the liberation of the workers long before the proletariat gets the length of forming this ideal organisation and this colossal reserve fund. But if they had these, they would not need to make use of the roundabout way of the general strike in order to attain their object.”
You can go on to read her long, well researched, well reasoned, pamphlet which I take as an attempt to do exactly what she said could not be done in the second section of it, reason your way to a conclusion as to the chances of it being successful or a disaster with any degree of reliability.
In the unreal sphere of abstract logical analysis it can be shown with exactly the same force on either side that the mass strike is absolutely impossible and sure to be defeated, and that it is possible and that its triumph cannot be questioned. And therefore the value of the evidence led on each side is exactly the same – and that is nil. Therefore, the fear of the “propagation” of the mass strike, which has even led to formal anathamas against the persons alleged to be guilty of this crime, is solely the product of the droll confusion of persons. It is just as impossible to “propagate” the mass strike as an abstract means of struggle as it is to propagate the “revolution.” “Revolution” like “mass strike” signifies nothing but an external form of the class struggle, which can have sense and meaning only in connection with definite political situations.
If anyone were to undertake to make the mass strike generally, as a form of proletarian action, the object of methodological agitation, and to go house-to-house canvassing with this “idea” in order to gradually win the working-class to it, it would be as idle and profitless and absurd an occupation as it would be to seek to make the idea of the revolution or of the fight at the barricades the object of a special agitation. The mass strike has now become the centre of the lively interest of the German and the international working-class because it is a new form of struggle, and as such is the sure symptom of a thoroughgoing internal revolution in the relations of the classes and in the conditions of the class struggle. It is a testimony to the sound revolutionary instinct and to the quick intelligence of the mass of the German proletariat that, in spite of the obstinate resistance of their trade-union leaders, they are applying themselves to this new problem with such keen interest.
But it does not meet the case, in the presence of this interest and of this fine, intellectual thirst and desire for revolutionary deeds on the part of the workers, to treat them to abstract mental gymnastics on the possibility or impossibility of the mass strike; they should be enlightened on the development of the Russian Revolution, the international significance of that revolution, the sharpening of class antagonisms in Western Europe, the wider political perspectives of the class struggle in Germany, and the role and the tasks of the masses in the coming struggles. Only in this form will the discussion on the mass strike lead to the widening of the intellectual horizon of the proletariat, to the sharpening of their way of thinking, and to the steeling of their energy.
AND THAT WAS BEFORE A GENERALLY POSITIVE CONCLUSION FOR THE GENERAL STRIKE, IN THE ABSTRACT.
Subsequent history would show that when Marxists took power, one of their first targets were real trade unions. The really successful Russian revolution of 1917 resulted in their violent suppression and a level of bloodshed that never happened in places with even very imperfect democracies. The blood shed by the American labor movement was far less and it ended up getting workers something, albeit too little and too temporarily and too easily discredited by the commies who tried to take the credit for that progress. Marxism in real life has been a disaster for the real left. I suspect that is something Eddington realized, certainly after he knew what was going on in Russia and then the Soviet empire after the Revolution of 1917. Western lefties who ever looked to Marxism - always an anti-democratic ideology - as a source of strength and ideas were worse than idiots.
The political program of the secular left is made up by, often, very smart people who are monumentally stupid about real life, it is very well researched, very well written, written for persuasion of, especially, other very smart people but it is absurdly impractical for anything much in the real world. I think it has been when trade unions and political parties have been in the control of such smart idiots that they have failed most spectacularly because most people don't find their conclusions are going to do much of anything for them. Unfortunately that's only the best of them, a lot of the worst of the lefty movement are idiots who use ideology as a weapon to protect tiny little patches of turf which are, more often than not, entirely imaginary to start with.
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I did notice that her pamphlet was translated by one Brit Communist, Patrick Lavin the year before the General Strike, I found out who he was by googling his name and coming across an obituary of his Communist Grand daughter Deborah Lavin on the Communist Party of Great Britain magazine website. Apparently, among the things she disapproved of were transgender people (shades of Jordan Peterson) and environmentalists, or so I gather from reading about her there. Rather hilariously, for my purposes in researching her grandfather in regard to the General Strike, one of her complaints was this:
Clearly, Extinction Rebellion was given carte blanche to close down swathes of central London for over a week, and the question to ask is: when has an anti-war, pro NHS or housing demo been given similar freedom?
Sure, there were 1,000 arrests, but except for the handful of demonstrators who disrupted the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the police operated a catch and release policy, so that all the arrested were back demonstrating with hours.
This piece of theatre alone should show even the most political naive, that the Extinction Rebellion leadership is working hand in glove with the bourgeoisie, but for those a little slower on the uptake, there was also the stage-managed appearance via train of Saint Greta Thunberg of Sweden.
Funny kind of carte blache that leads to 1,000 arrests. She managed to sound a lot like Donald Trump and the Murdoch crew at FOX and a fanatical commie all at once. Or maybe she's jealous for them being able to do something the Brit commies could never pull off today.
I don't know how much her grandfather's translation of the pamphlet had to do with the Marxist faction of those who called the doomed General Strike, that might be interesting to know. She also seems to have had an enormous interest in the trivia of lefty history, in a way intellectual lefties have that in common with the kind of baseball fan who knows the record book and everything about it. I'd like to know the last time the party that she apparently gave her life to did anything that amounted to anything. Something you can ask of their even more pathetic counterparts in the United States, the kind of people who mount and frequent the Left Forum and carry out the romantic mythology of the General Strike and call for it to be tried here, where it has even less of a chance of working than it did there or in Germany which, despite being so ready for the revolution, Luxemburg was murdered and Nazism did, in fact, come. Deborah Lavin's obit is entitled "Onwards and Upwards," I'd call the irony cruel if not for the fact it's rather hilariously revealing of what a bunch of idiots such smart guys are.
But, the sun is out today, I have fava beans to plant and weeds to pull. Have run fuming that I have not retracted my slam against the sacred General Strike as most people who might hear that phrase wonder what it means.
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