Marxism and the Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926

by Tony Cliff, Donny Gluckstein

This book uses an account of the 1926 General Strike in order to re-examine key questions for Marxists today. How should socialists relate to the working class whose emancipation they seek? And in particular, to the mass struggles of the class? Where do trade unions stand in the struggle for socialism? What is the role of the trade union leaders? On all these key issues the 1926 General Strike was a textbook demonstration.

Genres: Nonfiction

411 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1986

About the author

Born in Palestine to Zionist parents in 1917, Ygael Gluckstein became a Trotskyist during the 1930s and played a leading role in the attempt to forge a movement uniting Arab and Jewish workers. At the end of of the Second World war, seeing that the victory of the Zionists was more and more inevitable, he moved to Britain and adopted the pseudonym Tony Cliff.

In the late 1940s he developed the theory that Russia wasn’t a workers’ state but a form of bureaucratic state capitalism, a theory which has characterised the tendency with which he was associated for the remaining five decades of his life. Although he broke from “orthodox Trotskyism” after being bureaucratically excluded from the Fourth International in 1950, he always considered himself to be a Trotskyist although he was also open to other influences within the Marxist tradition.

Reviews

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely important to read, and very topical given the despicable and craven behaviour of the NTEU officials, offering pay cuts without so much as a fight!

[Kaine Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book but a tragic and enraging history. The 1926 General strike was a momentous opportunity for the British working class to assert itself and for the communist party to force itself to the forefront of the class struggle. Instead of reaching this potential the strike remained in the hands of right wing Labour Party aligned bureaucrats while the Communists tailed behind them. The chief demands of the CPGB were for “all power to the general council” and the “formation of a Labour government”. Instead of providing a lead to the most militant sections of the working class and working to develop an alternative leadership to the union officials the communists fell in behind them and thus ensured the defeat of the strike. Also has a very useful pre history of the strike and a study into all the inadequacies of both the CPGB and Comintern approach to unions from the very start that serves as useful context as well.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The necessity for rank and file working class activity in the trade unions which can act independently of the bureaucracy is never better exposed than at the highest point of struggle in Britain since Chartism. From the clear starting point of Marxism that the working class can and must achieve their own emancipation by their own self acitivity, Cliff and Gluckstein carefully examine these 'Days of Hope' (and betrayal and then despair) in the historical context of the British labour and socialist movements. In the process, the mixture of the heroic and tragic that is involved in any major class confrontation is allowed to reveal itself through thorough research and thoughtful analysis.



The ruling class treated the General Strike as a political battle between the two contending classes; the trade union bureacracy, right or 'left', could never and would never have conceived of such a broad view of the battlefield. The leaderships never wanted a cross-sectional fight even to defend the miners. The Labour Party was ashamed of the strike beforehand, during and afterwards and thought it detracted from the oh-so-much more important task of securing votes in Parliament and the revolutionary left in the form of the Communist Party, despite the bravery of its membership, was not in the shape to lead and prepare the advanced workers not to rely on any part of the trade union bureaucracy. This was for a combination of domestic reasons (largely the CPGB's disparate and unresolved sindicalist and blackboard-socialist origins and its relative infancy and small size) and international reasons (the lack of experience and theoretical clarity of the Communist International in dealing with a mass trade union movement and its increasing Stalinisation as the Russian Revolution degenerated in isolation from the failed European revolutions of 1917-23).



The need for a revolutionary socialist mass party with a theoretical grounding in the classical Marxist tradition and with members in all parts of the working class, especially those sections most advanced and militant, able to give a lead and encourage the self-activity necessary to advance from a mass strike into revolutionary confrontation with capitalism is exposed by this episode as well as ever.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want a straightforward narrative of the strike this probably isn't for you - it only gets to that more than half way through. But if you want a thorough Marxist analysis of the trade union bureaucracy and the mistakes of the infant British Communist Party it's the book for you. Written in the midst of the defeat of the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-5, it is driven by a desire to draw the lessons from a downturn in struggle. As a result it somewhat underplays the radical aspects of the strike, for which the recent book by Cox and Kimber is a good corrective.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for trade unionists everywhere..