MAY 5, 1818,was the birth anniversary was the birth anniversary of Karl Marx, the greatest theoretician of the working class. May 4 marked the centenary of the UK’s great General Strike of 1926. For nine days, millions of workers struck in support of coal miners who were locked out by their employers in a dispute over jobs and pay.
The coal mining industry was so central to the UK economy that it was viewed as the ‘backbone of the nation’. Of the total population of about 43 million in 1926, over one million adult males worked in the coal mines. The working conditions were hazardous. About a thousand miners were killed each year in the pits. The pay was low, and the working hours were long.
After World War I, Britain lost its position as the top coal exporter. The private owners of coal mines tried to recover export losses by proposing a 13% pay cut, ending national negotiations and extending working hours.
The Trades Union Congress pledged support to the miners. A general strike to begin at midnight on May 3 was approved. The next day, 1.5 million workers from transport, iron and steel, building, electrical, gas and printing industries went on strike. They were joined a week later by shipyard workers and engineers. The key slogan in response to employers’ plans for pay cuts and longer working hours was ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.’ In towns and cities across the country, councils of action or strike committees were set up in support of the coal miners.
Although the advanced industrialised capitalist economies had witnessed isolated sector-specific strikes for over 100 years, the 1926 General Strike stood out as a new form of simultaneous action by workers in multiple industries. The strike attracted global attention.
After the seizure of power by workers and peasants in the Soviet Union in 1917, Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the revolution, next in importance to Lenin, argued that for the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union to succeed, it must be followed by successful revolutions in Europe. He feared that if the Soviet revolution remained confined to one country, it would degenerate. He, therefore, hailed the outbreak of the General Strike in the UK, the most powerful imperial power then in the world, as a possible prelude to a socialist revolution.
He was disappointed as the trade union leadership, terrified by the working-class activism challenging constitutional norms, betrayed the militant working class and reached an agreement with the employers and the government without having won concessions on pay and working conditions.
The betrayal by the bureaucratic trade union leadership can be interpreted in the short-term as a failure of the General Strike. However, it is an error to characterise such mass activity as a failure because of the success such radical activity achieved in bringing multi-dimensional politico-economic changes and its impact, beyond the short term, on mass consciousness globally.
In India, the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), the brightest internationalist in the Indian movement for independence, was inspired by the General Strike and moved decisively towards a socialist vision to free India from British colonial rule. He played a key role in renaming the Hindustan Republican Army as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. He viewed the General Strike as undermining the economic and political power of the British Empire.
When the Great Depression (1929-1939) struck Britain and other advanced capitalist economies, renowned economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) caused a stir in economic theory and policy by arguing that the low purchasing power of the working class, caused by low pay, was the driving factor behind low aggregate demand, which was responsible for generating the economic depression.
It was a resounding vindication of the working class’s demands during the General Strike. The welfare state that emerged after World War II grew out of this economic turmoil.
During the turbulent decades of the 1920s and 1930s, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary witnessed varying levels of mass activity in their industrial sectors and in some countries even in their agricultural sectors.
In India, the closest equivalent to the General Strike was the May 1974 railway strike by two million railway workers. In a brilliant piece of research, Prerna Agarwal, a historian, has examined, in a forthcoming paper, the Indian railway strike and its repercussions on the Indian political economy. The Nehruvian model of state capitalism in post-1947 India had many features of the Keynesian welfare state, especially relating to pro-labour legislation.
When Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister, she outwitted her right-wing rivals in the Congress party by further deepening the pro-labour and pro-social welfare policies in her first ‘progressive phase’. Having defeated her rivals and established herself in power, she took an authoritarian turn to appease India’s top capitalist class, which was unhappy with the earlier pro-trade union policies. This was demonstrated most starkly in the scale and forms of repression on the striking railway workers. Agarwal reports that 50,000 arrests, 10,000 dismissals and 30,000 evictions from their homes in the railway colonies. Crushing the railway strike, Agarwal rightly concludes, was a prelude to the imposition of the 1975 Emergency.
The May 1974 railway strike in India and the May 1926 General Strike in the UK, despite different locations and time periods, had one commonality: the issues of low pay and harsh working conditions were central to them.
The recent emergence of the wave of industrial strikes in north and western India on the same issues of low pay and working conditions indicates that labour may be defeated, in some instances, as it was in 1926 and 1974, by the power of capital. But the labour-capital conflict remains the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, compounded further by the capital-environment contradiction manifested through the ecological crisis threatening our planet.
