Marx often commented that the weight of dead generations weighs on the minds of the living like a nightmare. The Communist Party of Great Britain has its own bad dreams: attempting to explain the betrayal of the General Strike fifty years on, when the very ‘left’ leaders they tail end today were those responsible for the 1926 defeat. 

All this became readily apparent earlier this month in the pages of the Morning Star and the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today. Not once was the Communist Party’s major slogan in the nine months after Red Friday (July 1925) – all power to the TUC General Council – mentioned and discussed. Not once was there criticism of the role of the left trade union bureaucrats, hot on words but going along with the rightwing Thomases and Citrines in practice.

Instead we had a series of articles whose main political conclusion was to build left unity, build the Communist Party, and increase the circulation of the Morning Star.

Vital

Yet the lessons of the General Strike are of vital concern to every serious militant. The history of our struggles must be learnt if past mistakes are to be overcome and future errors avoided. History is not dead. The way it is written and interpreted is permeated by the political understanding of the living.

The Communist Party’s contributions on the General Strike are in reality the ‘historical’ rewriting of its present political line. In the rest of this article we will look at this strategy, what it means read back into 1926, and what the real lessons less of the General Strike are for today. 

The underlying theme of the Communist Party’s strategy for socialism is the anti-monopoly alliance. It is argued that as capitalism has developed, the ruling class has in fact become smaller and smaller – essentially restricted to the heads of the great multinationals and the top echelons of the state bureaucracy. The aim of the CP is to work for the political isolation of this tiny fraction of the population by grouping together all other sections of society against it. 

State

The problem of the capitalist state and the necessity to overthrow it by revolution is neatly side-stepped by reducing the state apparatus to the reactionaries that run it. Remove the reactionaries – ‘democratise’ the civil service, police and army – and magically the capitalist state is removed. 

Within this perspective, the major political problem for the CP is ‘unity of the left’, because it is only by achieving a majority of Labour Left and Communist Party MPs in the House of Commons that the necessary legislation to bring about these changes will be made possible. ‘Unity’ as an in itself becomes of over-riding importance and the mass movement is reduced to a tap to be turned on and off according to the ebb and flow of events in Parliament 

Unions

In the unions, this means resolution-mongering, taking action only when the left bureaucracy at least supports it and a refusal to do more than mildly lecture these lefts when they capitulate to the Labour Government’s wage cuts and mass unemployment policies. 

It is this last aspect of the Communist Party’s strategy that militants will be most aware of, simply because the CP’s strength lies in the industrial field. The spectacle of having Jack Jones [the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) from 1968 to 1978] write in the Morning Star on the 35-hour week just after he had denounced a resolution at the Scottish TUC which proposed a fight for this very demand against the Government’s unemployment policies must have sickened many. 

Mick McGahey, leader of the Scottish miners and chairman of the Communist Party, wrote in the Morning Star on 7 May that ‘to celebrate the anniversary of the General Strike with a deal that ensures cuts in workers’ living standards is to commit the same crime as the betrayal of that great upsurge in May of 50 years ago.’ 

So Jack Jones, architect of a crime against the working class comparable to the betrayal of the General Strike. has the pages of the Morning Star opened to him! 

Similarly the Communist Party has been to the fore in enforcing the TUC’s new Rule 14 in trades councils [which compelled Trade’s Councils to only support policies already agreed by the TUC], riding roughshod in the name of ‘unity’ over the rights of bodies of the labour movement to decide their own policies. 

It follows from the CP’s dominant concern for ‘unity’ that the party is incapable of printing one line of criticism of the lefts’ role in 1926. Bill Wainwright wrote of ‘the greatest crime ever’ (Morning Star, 3 May) that ‘it was a classic case of the right wing in the TUC and Labour Party leadership demonstrating their role, outlook and basic policy as servitors of capitalism’ (our emphasis). 

Leaving aside the fact that the ‘lefts’ to a person supported the sellout, this article quietly refrains from mentioning that the CP’s major slogan in the nine months between Red Friday and the General Strike was ‘All Power to the General Council’. Militant resolutions galore were passed at the 1925 Scarborough Conference of the TUC, but the General Council singularly refused to prepare any action and unfortunately the young Communist Party fed the illusion that left rhetoric was practical reality.

Pollitt

In the wake of the Scarborough conference, CP leader Harry Pollitt declared: ‘In view of the overwhelming decision for complete solidarity registered at Scarborough, the new General Council will simply have to prosecute more vigorously the fight on behalf of the workers. True, the right wing of the Council is strengthened by the return of one or two people who do not give support to the idea that we are engaged in a class struggle, but I think that mass pressure from behind will force even them to toe the line.’ 

For different reasons the Communist Party today is telling the working class the same thing – and the results will be the same. Between 1924 and 1926, the Communist Party correctly sought to apply a united front tactic towards the ‘left’ leaders based on the specific demands of the Minority Movement’s programme. Indeed, this was the major reason for the Minority Movement’s initial success and growth to an organisation capable of attracting representatives of one million workers to its conference in March 1926 – a quarter of all trade unionists at that time.

The tragedy was that after Red Friday, 31 July 1925, the influence of the Stalinisation of the Third International and the presence of the British left  on the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee led the CP leaders to to ignore J.R. Campbell’s warning in September 1924: ‘It would be a suicidal policy, however, for the Communist Party and the Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left wing.’ 

It was only after the betrayal that the Communist Party denounced the role of the lefts. But by then it was too late, And the present day leaders of the CP fail to do even that.

Indeed James Klugmann, who in his history of the CPGB wrote of the slogan ‘All Power to the General Council’ that it ‘was certainly incorrect’, did not mention this in his Morning Star article on 1 May. But Klugmann does claim that the CP and the Minority Movement ‘called for preparation, indicated lines of action, emphasising the role of factory committees, trades councils, and above all councils of action.’

Calls only

The problem is what the CP actually did. Klugmann is correct to say that mass pressure forced the strike on 3 May –  indeed, the TUC voted 3,653,527 to 49,911 for the strike. But why in that case was it so easily sold out? The answer lies in the fact that  the CP – which was small, but gaining a massive audience in the period after Red Friday – only called on other people, the General Council, to prepare. Indeed, while the March conference of the Minority Movement on ‘preparedness’ called for Council’s of Action – and a few were already in existence – the whole direction of the CP’s policies was towards reliance on the existing leadership. 

This was spelt out by the acting general secretary of the Minority Movement, George Hardy, in a report to a special session  of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in March 1926: ‘We are not afraid of this giving all power to the General Council …should they use that power wrongly, it only means that we have got another additional task before us of forcing them in the right direction, which direction they will ultimately have to take’ (our emphasis). 

Continued

And this was continued in the General Strike itself. Hardy recalled in Those Stormy Years that on the eve of the strike: ‘….we sent out from Minority Movement headquarters instructions to our members to work for the establishment of Councils of Action in every area. We warned, however, that the Councils of Action were under no circumstances to take over the work of the trade unions….The Councils of Action were to see that all the decisions of the General Council and the union executives were carried out….’ 

A revealing indication of what this meant was contained in an interview in the Morning Star on 8 May with Robin Page Arnot, a veteran CP member who had just been released from jail in May 1926 and immediately went to North-East England to help organise the strike. An ‘all-in’ non-exclusive meeting was called by Chopwell and Blaydon area miners on 2 May to set up a Council of Action – more precisely, to adopt Arnot’s own proposals for the conduct of the strike. Arnot recalls the meeting: ‘No time to be spent tonight on discussion of purpose of strike (to aid the miners) or origin of possible ending, or national aspect or international aspect. Not concerned for next few days with any wider horizons; concerned only on concentrating on our limited objective, to defeat the civil commissioner aрpointed for the region and all his strike-breaking apparatus.’

It is true that in the North-East and particularly Newcastle the self-organisation of the working class such that it really did begin to change the power of the capitalist state, taking over completely the distribution of food and supplies  But if these embryonic elements of dual power were to be consolidated was precisely ‘time for politics’ that was needed.

The whole ideological attack on the ruling class was centred on the threat to the constitution. In seeking to defend the miners’ wages, that workers had – indeed, were forced by the ruling class – to challenge this self-same constitution. Yet the CP itself insisted that the strike was simply about the miners, failing to raise even the question of a Labour Government until the third day of the strike. 

To carry on the strike in face of the opposition of the bureaucracy, right and ‘left’, after 12 May meant saying openly that if defending the miners meant challenging the constitution, then to hell with the constitution. No amount of organisational creativity and self-sacrifice – a fifth to a quarter of the Communist Party’s members were arrested during the strike – could substitute for this lack of political preparation.

It is not surprising that the Communist Party can draw no lessons from the General Strike for the struggle for socialism today. For what are the major political lessons? That absolutely no trust can be put in the words of any labour leader. That if under the impact of the capitalist crisis certain of these leaders turn to the left and revolutionary socialists form alliances with them, this must be on the basis of specific demands and actions to take the struggle forward. 

Right turn

Yet as we have seen in recent weeks  in the CP’s half-hearted mobilisation for 26 May, when the ‘lefts’ of yesteryear like Hugh Scanlon and Jones turn sharp right the CP chases after them and makes no overt criticism. Finally, a word must be said on the way the Communist Party writes history. In contrast with the Stalinist practices of former years, sins of commission are now replaced by sins of omission. For all John Gollan’s talk of socialist democracy and the new ‘self-critical’ posture adopted by the CP leadership on past ‘mistakes’ like the Moscow trials and the Stalin’s purges, the CP is incapable of confronting its own history in the General Strike – precisely because it would mean confronting the political strategy they pursue today. That is also a lesson of the ‘lessons of the General Strike’ to be learnt!