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The first few months of 1980 have brought to the fore the demand for a General Strike to bring down the Tory government. Such a demand naturally gives rise to further discussion on the lessons of the 1926 General Strike, betrayed by the TUC. With this in view, we are repriting in two parts an extended article on the General Strike by John Docherty, first published in a supplement to Socialist Press in April 1976.

For a long time after 1926, it was often considered that the Communist Party had done what it could.

Atter all, despite the arrest of most of its leaders in 1925, and of many hurdreds during the strike itself, the CP had played an active role in almost every area, been represented on numerous strike committees and councils of actior, and recruited large numbers of workers, especially miners after the General Strike.

The Communist Party alone, through its press, had warned in advance of the importance of the struggle and called for the establishment of councils of action, defence squads and other necessary/ forms of preparation.

All of these steps represented undoubted achievements. However, they were closely allied to a political line which was unable to bring out the strengths of tihe working class in such a way as to take the necessary steps to victory.

The last Party publication before the beginning of the strike echoed the views of the union leaders by saying that the proposed councils of action should not take over any of the duties that ordinarily belong to the trade u nions" , and in its trist statement after It started said, 'All that it needs now is for every man. to stand firm and the fight is won' It was a great achievement of Brian Pearce in a series of articles originally published in the late 50s, to draw attention to the origin and international character of the development of the early Communist Party in Britain, to describe how it built its industrial base and how it made the errors that it did in 1926.

Some ten years later, in 1967-69, Michael. Woodhouse systematically analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the British Communist Party in the crucial period of the early 20s, the only time it tried seriously to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class movement.

The main arguments of Trotsky, and following him, of Pearce and Woodhouse, about the struggle for revolutionary leadership in the British working class in the 1920s may be briefly summarised as follows.

Although it was an enormously positive step to establish the, Communist Party in 1920, to reorganise it on democratic centralist lines in 1922-23 and to make the necessary turn to mass work by setting up the Minority Movement in 1924, the Party failed to break decisively from its own sectarian and syndicalist roots and to develop a policy which could mobilise the working class independently of, its bureaucratic In the period from the collapse of the Labour Government at the end of 1924 to the great victory of 'Red Friday' in July 1925, the CP made some inroads into the mass movement, winning support in the trades councils, in the Miners Federation and many other areas.

Stalinist grip

This impetus was lost as the Stalinist faction consolidated its hold on the Communist International, supported a policy of alliance with sections of trade union 'lefts' through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, and turned the British Party away from the positive, independent policies for which it had begun to search in its first hesitant steps into the mass movement.

In 1925 Trotsky outlined in Where Is Britain. Going? the need for a decisive break from the trade union 'lefts" as well as the rights, the need for an ideological struggle against Fabianism and the decisive importance of the building of 'a correct and resolute revolutionary leadership'.

Closer

However, as the struggle which the CP correctly warned was inevitable grew closer and closer, there was, as Woodhouse puts it:

"Very little concrete evidence that the party did anything to break out of the limitations placed on preparation imposed on the rank and file by the trade union apparatus or that it saw its role as anything more than 'gingering up' the official leaderships"

One of the leading members of the Party at about this time presented a 'Plan of Action' to a strike committee in the NorthEast which repudiated a concern Part Two with any wider horizons', and restricted the committee to limited objectives.

It was only days later, and effectively after the end of the strike that the CP called for independent joint meetings of the councils of action or even posed in abstract general terms the replacement of the current leaders of the movement.

Trotsky

For many years after 1926, it was very difficult to discover how it came about that such a poor lead had been given to the embattled British working class.

Only in the late 1950s did Trotsky's writings on this period become generally available, showing that there was quite a different method in existence which called for the independent mobilisation of the working class in a way that challenges the bureaucratic leadership.

Since these views were first fought for by Trotsky within the Communist International in the 1920s, they have been subject to attack in a number of different ways.

'At first of course, the Stalinists developed a style of polemic which accused the opponents of their opportunist policies of being agents of fascism and counter-revolution.

It is of some interest to see the reappearance of such views in a pamphlet by Ernie Trory entitled Soviet Trade Unions and the General Strike.

This is written in a quaint Stalinist knockabout style, with long quotations from the works of Stalin, no references to any books containing a different point of view, and a complete ignorąnce of the difference between the various opposition tendencies within the Communist movement during the 1920s.

'Bloc

• It is of interest to note that• Stalin is quoted as describing the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee as a 'bloc' which could be used to organise a united movement against the capitalist offensive' • It was certainly nothing of the kind. • He also goes on to _mis represent. his opponents as supporters of breakaway 'dual unionism'. This in fact was Stalin's own policy for two years later.

Lies

The lies, distortions and pure ignorance contained in this pamphiet are easy enough to refute with the most elementary knowledge of what actually happened.

Nowadays the Stalinist leadership has to take more serious account of the careful analysis of the history of our movement undertaken in particular by Woodhouse and Pearce, though generally they prefer to exclude specific reference to this work, perhaps in the hope that people may not find out about it.

Thus the Party's 'official' historian James Klugmann agrees that the slogan 'All Power to the General Council' the most common one inhaps Party's press during 1925-6 'was certainly incorrect' , and even refers to the attacks on the trade union lefts after the end of the General Strike.

Correct line

Such points do little to support the view he continues to maintain that the line of the party was "overwhelmingly correct' submit the To tendentious views of Klugmann to careful analysis is rather like trying to study the specific gravity of suet pudding.

However, the defence of the Stalinist positions on these questions went a stage further with the publication of a collection of articles edited by Jeffrey Skelley and entitled The General Strike 1926..

Material

it must be said 'that this book contains some useful material, particularly in the new information it provides on local activities.

However, its main purpose is to associate the mistaken. but sincere and combative Communist Party of 1926 with the utterly rotten policies of today.

Thus Martin Jacques, who is both a university lecturer and a member of the CP Executive Committee writes about the period as if all that was involved was the manoeuvres of various sections of the bureaucracy, without any independent mobilisation of the working class. To see things in that way is to gratuitously insult those who once fought for something different.

It is left to Klugmann in another essay in the volume, entitled Marxism, Reformism and the General Strike to justify once again the line of the CP at the time, and indeed ever since.

Enormous length

• He writes at enormous length to arrive at the irrefutable proposition that reformists cannot lead struggles.

He concludes from this that It has been a tragic feature of British working class history' that resentment against the betrayal has been directed 'against individual betrayers and not against the most real enemy -reformist theory, reformist ideas.

If this odd statement means anything it must be that revolutionaries should not in fact struggle to replace the present counter-revolutionary leaders at all but should manoeuvre around them on the basis of revolutionary ideas This is certainly the kind of policy he considers to have been

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SOCLALIST PRESS, H'ednesday April 16,