The General Strike (1976)

From the May 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

On its 50th anniversary the tales of the General Strike, real and legendary, will be told. The strike action of those Trade Unionists and others who took part was not based on a clear recognition of the position of the workers under capitalism and the class struggle resulting therefrom. The workers were not class-conscious, and therefore their actions were not a challenge to the existence of capitalism. Nevertheless, under the present order workers have to defend their living standards against their employers, and to that extent the General Strike must rank as a landmark in the history of the British working class; as the most determined display of solidarity we have seen this century. That is encouraging to the Socialist — if workers can unite on one issue for a limited purpose, they can certainly unite on the greater issue of Socialism. “Unity is strength”, and “A house divided against itself shall fall”.

In 1925 the mine owners, faced with the re-emergence of Germany as a trade competitor, served notice on the Miners’ Federation to terminate the National Agreement ending the minimum wage and demanding severe wage cuts. Working hours were to be increased from 7 to 8 hours daily without extra pay, and District Agreements were to replace the existing National one. The miners put their objections before the TUC at a joint meeting held on 10th July 1925. The TUC supported the miners, set up a special commission, and issued instructions to all railway and transport workers forbidding the movement of coal and the handling of export coal. “All men engaged in delivering coal to commercial and industrial concerns will cease Friday night 31st July”. A specially summoned conference of Trade Union executive committee members gave unanimous support to these instructions.

Baldwin (the Prime Minister) summoned miners and mine owners to 10 Downing Street on the morning of Friday 31st July 1925 (“Red Friday”) and announced the granting of a subsidy to the coal industry amounting to about £25 million, extending over nine months. The wage cuts and other demands of the mine owners were postponed until April 1926. Evidently the government was not ready, but the nine months’ respite gave them time to set up their strike-breaking organization OMS (Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies), the appointment of civil commissioners, and the enrolling of large numbers of special constables and the formation of mobile police squads. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: “We therefore decided to postpone the crisis in the event of averting it, or if not averting it, of coping effectively with it when the time came”.

In the meantime a Royal Commission, presided over by Sir Herbert Samuel, presented its report. The report was very definite in demanding wage reductions and the lengthening of the working day, and it became clear that the government would back the mine owners. A. J. Cook, the miners’ leader, in his pamphlet The Nine Days recalls the attitude of Ramsay MacDonald and the Parliamentary Labour Party in relation to the evidence placed before the Commission. “The only difference of opinion was between the industrial movement and the political movement regarding compensation for the royalty owners. Strange to say, the leaders of the Parliamentary Labour Party who had been preaching Socialism for many years were the ones who opposed the policy of the Miners’ Federation and the Trade Union Congress in regard to the question of compensation or confiscation of royalties”.

Before the Commission report came out, the British coal owners declared publicly that they would never again meet the miners’ representatives, nor submit to National agreements, and that they would insist on District agreements. This was an attempt to break the solidarity of the miners since the building up of the Miners Federation. The Federation, at a meeting held on April 9th 1926, re-affirmed its total opposition to the mine-owners’ proposals. Later, on 14th April 1926, the TUC Negotiating Committee passed the following resolution: “This Committee reiterates its previous declaration to render the miners the fullest support in resisting the degradation of the standards of life, and to obtain an equitable settlement of the case with regards to wages, hours and a National agreement”. In April 1926 the coal owners announced that unless the miners accepted their terms, a reduction in wages and the working day lengthened by one hour, they would close down the mines as from 1st May. This effectively “locked out” one million miners.

A conference of the Trade Union executives was held on Saturday 1st May at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon St, London, and two decisions were made: (1) That no negotiations should take place until the lock-out notices had been withdrawn, and (2) that the General Council of the TUC should be empowered to go ahead with a General Strike. 3,653,529 voted for, 49,911 voted against, and 319,000 were unable to reply in time. Further, it was agreed that no-one should return to work at the end of the General Strike unless all Union agreements were maintained. The General Strike was set to commence on Monday 3rd May. On Tuesday 4th May, the absence of trams, railway trains, buses, newspapers, and road transport were the first obvious indications that the workers in the mass supported the strike decision. The strike was on in earnest.

The General Strike will be remembered for two things. Firstly, the enthusiasm and solidarity of the workers, and secondly, the cowardice and treachery of the TUC in calling it off nine days later behind the backs of the miners, and ratting on every resolution upon which the strike call was issued. The inglorious betrayal of the finest effort of the British working class on the industrial field should surely have taught the workers not to place their trust in leaders. Not a single concession was gained, and one million miners were left alone to fight the mine owners backed by the government with the tacit approval of the TUC and the Parliamentary Labour Party led by Ramsay MacDonald and J. R. Clynes. The miners were locked out for over three months after the strike, and forced by starvation and privation to accept the coal-owners’ terms of reduced wages (below 1914 level), more unemployment, and an increase in the working day by one hour. It is a sad commentary on the present attitude of the National Union of Mineworkers that their recent ballot within the last few weeks was a demand for the retention of overtime working.

The idea of using the weapon of a general strike as a means of abolishing capitalism is still held by anarchists, syndicalists, International Socialists, Communists, and others. Daniel De Lon, the patron saint of the SLP (now defunct), held that the political revolution would fail unless the workers backed up the political organization by the strike, which he described as the economic organization. The 1926 strike showed all too clearly that when there is a class struggle those who hold political power are in control. The workers in their millions had only two years earlier voted to power the Baldwin government, and it was that government which said that wages must come down, and was prepared to use the whole machinery of government to give effect to their policy. This task was made easier by the miserable collection of renegades, led by that arch swindler “Honest” Jimmy Thomas who would have sold his own grandmother. True to character, a few years later he was accused of selling secret information about the contents of the Annual Budget.

Had the general council of the TUC been composed of men of principle, loyal to the class they had the honour to represent, the capitalists would not have gained the victory they did. Union after Union was forced to accept wage cuts or increases in working hours. The Trades Dispute Act, passed a year later, was only opposed by the Labour Party because of the contracting-out clause which affected their income from the Political Levy.

Writing about the Strike fifty years later, what lessons were learned by the workers? Have they abandoned the idea of leadership inside or outside the Unions? The answer is no. Has the Trade Union organization and the TUC undergone a change of attitude on the question of class co-operation? Again, the answer is no. If anything, Trade Unions have become more insular: more concerned with the narrow issues affecting their individual members. They are completely steeped in capitalist ideology. Their world begins and ends with their members’ interests, not with the interests of the working class as a whole. The TUC is nothing other than a political wing of the present Labour government. Those who think in terms of a successful general strike with Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Len Murray, and the other untalented servants of capital, in place of J. H. Thomas, Swales, Hicks, Tillett and Pugh, etc. are deluding themselves. The present Trade Unions are hopelessly compromised with the Labour government, and this is to their disadvantage. They are expected to co-operate on wage reductions, redundancy policies, wage freezes, and hosts of other schemes which are of direct help to the capitalists. But the general strike is not a means or an aid to the establishment of Socialism. Joint action by groups of Unions against groups of employers can achieve benefits or prevent living standards from being depressed. This is the most that can be expected. The capitalist class will not, nor cannot, succumb to any other form of economic pressure as long as they control the State machine.

We do not make a distinction between workers organized in Trade Unions and those outside. Both have to understand how to use the political weapon. Both have to renounce leadership, whether it be industrial or political. Both have to understand the consequences of their social action before embarking on that action. Socialist understanding must come first, it cannot be learned later, because without this understanding and knowledge Socialism cannot be established.

May Day is the day upon which the working class of the world demonstrate their international solidarity. So far the working class have ignored the splendid proposition or prospect of a Socialist society. In doing so, they have denied themselves the opportunity to cleanse the world of the scourge of capitalism. Men live their lives in time, so why squander it? There is nothing we cannot do if we have a mind to. There is no force on earth which can prevent the establishment of Socialism when the will is there.

Jim D'Arcy

The lesson of the coal dispute. (1927)

From the January 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Mr. Cook has failed to learn. 

The dispute in the coal industry has prompted many writers to indulge in their favourite practice of pointing a lesson. Mr. A. J. Cook, as the chief representative of the miners, tells us in the New Leader, 26.11.1926, what is “The real lesson of the coal war,” “The lesson which the working class must, and will, draw from the greatest industrial upheaval in our history.”

Mr. Cook emphasises again and again the bitter hostility that exists between the Capitalist-class and the working-class. His first reference is to arbitration and conciliation.

“It seems to me that anyone who can suppose that the workers can to-day obtain either a living wage or tolerable conditions in industry by these means must be quite ignorant of the national and international facts of present-day capitalist industry.”

A realization of this fact during the dispute might have saved much time wasted, and dignity lost, searching for a basis of agreement. It should, moreover, be apparent that every attempt to reason concessions out of employers must, in the face of this antagonism be futile. Nothing has ever been won for the workers by conferences between employers and Labour leaders. The deciding factor is always power. If the workers are unable to damage Capitalist interests by withholding their labour-power, the oratory of their leaders cannot save them from defeat. What that defeat means for the working-class Mr. Cook informs us next:

“The growing intensity of our industrial disputes, waged now not to gain new privileges for the workers, but in desperate attempts to preserve old gains, proves conclusively what we, as Socialists, have long been saying. Keir Hardie himself summed up the lesson in his famous phrase, “You must either end capitalism or capitalism will end you.” We are now face to face with the fact that we can only end capitalism by creating and constructing a new social order. That is the historic mission of the working-class movement.”

Mr. Cook then outlines certain facts connected with Capitalist methods and development which he finds only lead him to the same conclusion : the clash of interests between the Capitalist-class and the working-class. He says :

“If this analysis of the present condition of capitalism is sound, then clearly there can be no identity of interest in present circumstances between the owners of capital and the workers.”

Mr. Cook arrives at this conclusion by means of a quite unnecessary recital of recent Capitalist developments, “overcapitalization, the return to the gold standard, the burden of war debts, the scarcity of markets and etc.” He fails to see that it is not in the development but in the nature of Capitalism that the source of class antagonism lies. Ownership of the means of wealth production by the Capitalist-class, and the merchandise character of human labour-power; the basic principles of Capitalist society, make harmonious relations between the two classes impossible.

A further process of reasoning brings Mr. Cook to the conclusion “that Capitalism can only exist with a permanent unemployed system connected with every industry,” and the further conclusion contained in the following :

“At the same time, every attempt to introduce new methods of production which increase output means that yet another consignment of workers is thrown on the industrial scrap heap. Next, as a result of facing economic facts,”

Mr. Cook says :

“Surely no one can now doubt that the object of the Government and the Capitalist Press— those twin brothers of oppression—is to smash the whole Trade Union and Labour Movement, and that they will be satisfied with nothing less.”

From these facts and conclusions we are asked to learn that :

“The lesson of this struggle is that Socialism is the only hope of the worker, his wife and his child; that we must equip ourselves for the control of industry; that, if we would accomplish our great purpose in our own day, we must start now.”

It will not be out of place here to summarise Mr. Cook’s most important conclusions :

1. The futility of arbitration and conciliation.
2. That there is no identity of interests between Capitalists and workers.
3. That new methods which increase output mean increased unemployment.
4. That the Capitalist Government is determined to smash the workers’ organisations.
5. That Socialism is the only hope of the workers.

These conclusions are now in a convenient form for reference. Mr. Cook in his subsequent remarks forgets that he has written them. We shall see how he throws them overboard in a few sentences.

Nos. 1, 2 and 4 go by the board in a single sentence :

“I appeal not only to workers but to every thinking man and woman in the country, no matter their class, to realise the gravity of the choice that lies before us.”

How is it possible for Mr. Cook to think, at one and the same time, that the Capitalists are determined to smash the workers’ organizations, and yet are capable of being influenced by a statement of the consequences?

If the interests of the two classes are opposed, how can the Capitalists be expected to respond to appeals for unity of thought with the workers?

No. 3 is next discarded in the most shameless manner. Still connecting the two classes as thinking men and women, he says :

“Cannot they realise what the I.L.P. has grasped—that a living wage and reorganised industry must go together, and that these two are the only hope of our country.”

The italics are not ours. Throughout the pages of “The Living Wage” the I.L.P. insists that new machinery, better organization, standardization and mass production are necessary to the “living wage.” Mr. Cook gives them his blessing in the same column in which he declares that such methods mean yet another consignment of workers thrown on the industrial scrap-heap. ”These two—a living wage and reorganised industry—are the only hope of our country,” he says, yet only a few lines above he had written, “Socialism is the only hope of the worker.” In that contradiction No. 5 went by the board; yet so eager was Mr. Cook “to start now” that he ruled Socialism out in the next paragraph to which he asserted its paramount importance :

“We must make every city, town and village ring with our first and most urgent demand—the nationalisation of the mines.”

Nationalisation of the mines is a question for those Capitalists who are dependent on the mineowners for supplies of coal. Neither the miners nor the working-class as a whole would be any nearer Socialism as a consequence, either of its achievement or its advocacy. The first step in that direction is one of knowledge. Not with nationalisation, but with the knowledge of Socialism must “every city, town and village be made to ring” before we can truthfully say we are well on the road to Socialism.

F. Foan

Editorial: The miners’ position. (1926)

Editorial from the September 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over four months the mine workers have struggled against the attempt to increase their hours of labour and reduce their wages. Their main means of resistance has been tightening their belts. In face of privation, daily becoming more intense, they have shown solidarity and resisting-power that is amazing, and a good omen for the day when they learn that the real solution of their difficulties lies in the organisation of society on the basis of common ownership of the means of production, and not in a struggle over wages and conditions of labour.

We have seen five pay-tickets of a South Wales coal-hewer (the hewer is the best paid man in the industry) who has been in the mines for nearly forty years. The tickets were taken at random between March and May, 1926, and the amounts he drew for each week were as follows :—

£1 11s. 9d.,​£3 9s. 2d.,​£2 4s. Id., 18s. 2d., £1 9s. 5d., and he had to pay a boy 4s. 6d. a day for part of the time. The actual pay-tickets of a miner disposes of the tales of the fabulous amounts they are alleged to earn.

Out of the total amount a coal-hewer, working on piece-work, gets for the coal obtained, he has to pay assistants and various charges—check-weigher, hospital, mine-examiner, stores, doctor, insurance, hall funds, etc.—all of which considerably reduces the actual money he is to receive for his work.

The attempt to worsen the miners’ position is backed by the plea that the industry cannot afford to pay the present wages. This plea is put forward by the pretended friends as well as the avowed enemies of the miners. Yet if ever there was an industry that had power for the wealth in abundance for idle parasites that industry is coal-mining. Mining companies during the last ten years have made large additions to their capitals and reserves without drawing a penny out of shareholders’ pockets. The profits of the industry have been enormous.

Here are one or two illustrations taken from recent years :—

North’s Navigation Collieries, Ltd., declared dividends of 20 per cent. a year for the years 1916-17-18-19, and 15 per cent. for 1920. In 1918 they also distributed a bonus of 25 per cent. For the five years ending in 1920, therefore, they paid, in all, 120 per cent. on the capital invested. In other words, the whole of the capital the investors put in was returned to them with an additional 20 per cent. as well—and they still had their original capital in the company on which to draw future dividends.—(Daily News, 11/4/21.)

The Weardale Steel, Coal & Coke Co. declared dividends of 19 ⅓ per cent. per year for the five years to 1920-21, 6 per cent. for 1922, and 10 per cent. for 1923, which makes a total of 112 ⅔ per cent. for seven years—all their money back with an additional 12 ⅔ per cent., and still the original capital to draw dividends on. On top of that, the company had a reserve of £610,000 which is equal to 84 per cent, of the issued share capital.—(Financial News, 16/11/23.)

The Old Silkstone Collieries, Ltd., an amalgamation of several other colliery concerns, sent out a prospectus which was printed in the Observer (10/12/22). This prospectus contains particulars of profits and output from 1913 to 1922 ; an examination of it gives very interesting information. The following list contains some of the figures :—

Note the steadily declining output with a steadily increasing profit ! 1913 was a record coal year for the United Kingdom, according to the Daily News, 24/6/14.

The annual average of profit for the nine years ending 1921 was £143,000, a total for the period of nearly one million three hundred thousand pounds. This profit was obtained on a total invested capital of £590,565. And they would have us believe that the industry is too poor to pay the present wages! !

What to the capitalist is yearly toll of diseased, maimed and killed in the mines? The interest on capital invested far outweighs the cost of its production, because the interest is taken by the capitalist while the cost is borne by the worker.

Whatever the result of the struggle in the mining districts may be, it is for the miners themselves to decide how far they are prepared to go, and what conditions they are prepared to accept. There are plenty of busybodies with full bellies who are urging them to make concessions in one direction or another, instead of leaving the sufferers to make what arrangements they themselves think fit.

50 Years Ago: On Industrial and Political Action (1976)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

What we have said should have made clear by now the only real solution to this, and all other economic troubles affecting the workers. If the workers had been as solid in voting for Socialism as they have been in striking on behalf of the miners what a different tale there would be to tell! And yet, as long as the workers support a condition of things which lays it down as a fundamental proposition that there shall employers and employed, capitalists and wage-earners; and at election time puts control of the governmental machinery into the hands of the masters and their supporters, they must expect defeat in their struggle for better conditions. The solution of the difficulties lies in the workers’ own hands. The substitution of common ownership in the means of wealth production in place of the present private property system, and the accomplishment of this end by voting delegates to the central seat of power at election times to carry out instructions formulated by their working- class electorate.

(From an article “The Strike” by Gilbert McClatchie, published in the Socialist Standard, June 1926)

In the minefield (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

To each side in the coal dispute, this is more than just another strike. For the NUM it is a struggle to keep miners in employment, whether this is profitable or not; it is also, for some strikers, a stroke at the heart of the Thatcher government which may end in Arthur Scargill becoming the champion of the Labour movement. For the government and Ian McGregor it is a matter of asserting that management must be allowed to "manage", by which they mean allowed to implement the principle that coal mines are like any other productive unit and must be closed if they run consistently at a loss. Both sides are aware of the events of 1973 and 1974, by now a part of left-wing folklore, when the Heath government blundered into a fight with the miners, the Three Day Week crisis and then to electoral defeat. In case anyone is hoping the miners will repeat that particular piece of history, it should be remembered that that alleged triumph for the organised working class resulted in the 1974-79 Labour governments, which were notable for their continual assaults on workers’ living standards, their strike breaking, their encouragement to cross picket lines and at the end the infamous Winter of Discontent. And what came out of that? When Callaghan called the election in 1979, class society was as strongly entrenched as ever. The means of life, including those parts of it which had been nationalised, were still owned by a minority of exploiting parasites while the useful, productive majority were still bound to submit themselves for exploitation in order to live. The miserable impotence and disarray of those governments persuaded millions of workers to vote for the Thatcher government who made no secret of their intention to curb the trade unions, if need be in the kind of fight to a finish which the miners may now be engaged in.

Back beyond 1973, there is an ominous resemblance—by no means accidental or insignificant—between what happened in the 1920s and what is happening today. At the end of the First World War many of the staple industries, on which the British capitalist class relied so much, were in decline; coal was affected by competition from continental rivals such as the Ruhr and Poland and the productivity of British mines lagged behind that of their most serious competitors. In 1925 a slump in coal exports contributed to the industry showing losses of about £1 million a month and the mine owners gave notice of their intention to negotiate a new agreement with the union based on a longer working day and a reduction in wages. The miners resisted and. as the TUC declared their support, a general strike seemed unavoidable. What deflected the strike was the government's agreement to provide a subsidy, which eventually amounted to £23 million, to keep the mines working.

The day the subsidy was announced 31 July 1925 — has also gone into folklore as Red Friday, an enduring triumph for the working class. The secretary of the miners’ union. A.J. Cook, trumpeted: "We have already beaten, not only the employers, but the strongest government in modern times".

There were two serious mistakes in this claim. The miners had not beaten anyone; the subsidy could only postpone or modify the operation of that law of capitalism — no profit, no production (which Ian MacGregor is trying to apply now). Baldwin's government had not been defeated; they had merely bought time to organise for a more conclusive confrontation with the workers. They used the time by setting up, in September 1925, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to recruit and train volunteers (or rather blacklegs) who would keep services running during a general strike. Administratively the country was divided into regions of government, each under a Civil Commissioner, and then into smaller areas under committees responsible for transport, police and other services. A grateful mine owner, probably not susceptible to left wing hysteria, praised ". . . the respite purchased by Mr. Baldwin" and the Prime Minister himself assured the critics of the subsidy on his own side:

  . . . if the time should come when the community had to protect itself, with the full strength of the government behind it. [its] response will astonish the forces of anarchy throughout the world. (House of Commons. 6 August 1925)

When the time Baldwin was referring to came, the state machine was ready as it had not been on Red Friday. The general strike lasted but nine days and it did not bring capitalism down, nor the government to their knees, nor even the coal owners to a more conciliatory mood. In fact the owners grew more obstinate with the passage of time, which tended to upset even the people who were supposed to represent their interests. J.L. Garvin described them in the Observer (25 April 1926) as ’tactless and irritating to the last degree” and Lord Birkenhead said he would have thought the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England had he not met the coal owners.

When the other unions backed out of the general strike the miners struggled on. Cook, who was by then the best loved or the worst hated man in the country, had declared in March 1926:

  We are going to be slaves no longer and our men will starve before they accept any reductions in wages.

And starve they did, as the months passed by and with each tightening of the screw by the owners and the government. Cook's rhetoric could fill no stomachs and some miners began to doubt the usefulness of struggling on. The trail back began — Warwickshire in July. Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in August — until in December Durham went back and the surrender was complete. The miners had to concede the longer working day and the cut in wages, which were cut yet again a couple of years later. Such was the suffering in the mining communities that the Lord Mayor of London, in the best traditions of capitalist charity, was moved to set up a Relief Fund. In the aftermath of bitterness, the breakaway Miners' Industrial Union was formed in the Midlands.

The 1984 battle is over pit closures but it too springs from the plight of the British coal industry in a time of world slump. The dispute goes back some way before the start of the strike, to the time when the government applied something of the Baldwin 1925 strategy, conceding the miners' case in order to prepare for a more final solution. It was in February 1981 that the government, in face of a threatened national coal strike, withdrew their plans to close ten pits during the next year. They did not then stand on the argument that it is impossible to keep "uneconomic” pits in operation; they accepted NUM policy on restricting coal imports and announced a subsidy of £300 million to finance these measures. Tory backbenchers were restless about the deal, as were the Institute of Directors. They need not have worried; a year or so later the government were ready to do serious battle and announced plans to shut down about 60 pits by 1991, some through exhaustion and others as loss makers. This opened the battle which is raging today, on the picket lines, in the courts and in the media.

This was not sudden or unexpected, except perhaps to those people who think that capitalism can be made to operate against its essential nature. After the Second World War it did not take long for the coal mines to feel the pressure of competition, from electricity — with nuclear power stations — oil and the re-emergent gas industry. During the 1960s the NCB tried to catch up, investing in powered supports and mechanised systems which increased productivity and helped cut the workforce by half but behind that production fell from 184 million tonnes a year to 134 million tonnes. In 1973, just before the Plan for Coal was agreed, it stood at 130 million tonnes.

The Plan for Coal was in fact a sign of a burgeoning optimism in the industry, partly due to the price advantage which coal regained as a result of the oil crisis of 1973- 74. which put its price per therm at about half that for oil. It was generally expected that the market for coal would expand and the unions, the NCB and the government planned for production to rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s to reach about 170 million tonnes in the year 2000. For the NUM these plans represented not just security of employment for the miners but also a strengthening of their bargaining power. However the whole exercise rested on the kind of assumptions which the economists and the politicians are continually making and which are continually found to be false. There was the politicians' presumption that the economic problems of 1974 were no more than a little temporary difficulty which could be cleared up with some adjustments in budgeting and taxation. There was the presumption that when that happened the coal industry would compete ever more successfully in the energy market. And the conclusion from both these presumptions was that it would make economic sense to keep open pits which, in more stringent circumstances, the NCB would want to close as loss makers. It was not just the 1974 Labour government which deceived itself in this way; in June 1980 Thatcher's Energy Secretary assured the Commons that "Coal is our greatest single natural resource . . . coal's prospects have never been better ".

As the crisis of 1974 deepened into a world recession, the hopes and plans were exposed as the work of people who had little real understanding of how capitalism operates. The market for coal did not expand, it contracted. Ian MacGregor recently referred to the "over supply world-wide" on short term markets and predicted that intensifying competition from American exports will bring about "a coal glut for Western Europe" (Guardian, 2 October 1984). Following their retreat in 1981, the NCB's return to the matter of closures in 1982 was in some ways the Thatcher government's 1926. except that now there is no Triple Alliance to support the miners in their resistance. In place of the hard-faced, complacent private owners there is Ian MacGregor, the nationalised boss and not one whit more sympathetic for that, the despair of those like the clergy who think the whole unfortunate matter could be settled in a cosy, family chat. And of course the successor to A.J. Cook is the combustible Arthur Scargill. as much loved and hated as Cook was in the 1920s.

These resemblances are not coincidental, for MacGregor. Scargill and the rest are filling roles in a script which is structured on the needs of this social system. Capitalism has not basically changed since 1926; it is still a society of class ownership, of conflict, of commodity production and of the boom/slump cycle. The administrators of the system cannot control these things, they can only respond to them. The miners are weakening now, as they did in 1926, because they belong to the class who depend for their lives on selling their working abilities. When a miner goes back to work it is not a victory for "the national interest", or "common sense", or democracy; it is a bitter acknowledgement of the essential poverty and degradation of all workers. of whatever industry, everywhere.

A defeat for the miners could lead to them being treated much as they were in 1926. forced to accept terms which are some way worse than were on offer earlier in the strike. That will be an acknowledgement of the other side of the class war, of the fact that the owning class are also the ruling class and that they dominate through their control over the coercive state machine. At the points where 1984 resembles 1926 there is more than a repeat of history. There is a signal for the strikers and for the working class as a whole. There is little to show for these sixty years of struggle except cracked heads and bruised bodies; capitalism, a repressive society of privilege against poverty, remains to be dealt with.

Ivan

40 Years On (1966)

From the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “General Strike" of May 1926 was of course not a general strike—but it did not need to be. It brought the level of production for the year down by about a third—equivalent to the effect of a major slump, and its cost to the capitalist class was put at £100 million or more. The industries wholly or partly called out on strike in support of the miners were transport, printing, iron, steel and metal and heavy chemicals, building, electricity and gas; and the Ministry of Labour estimated that the numbers involved totalled about 1,600,000, in addition to over a million miners. This was nearly half of all trade unionists at the time (5½ million) and nearly sixty per cent of the 4,366,000 who were affiliated to the T.U.C. Among the strikers, as Lord Citrine points out (he was Acting General Secretary of the T.U.C. in 1926) were “hundreds of thousands who had never been out on strike in their lives". The supporting strikes lasted for nine days though the miners continued after the others had gone back and some of the coal fields did not give up the struggle until December. ,

The total of working days lost in 1926 reached the highest figure of all lime, 162 million working days which may be compared to between two and three million days a year in recent times.

Lord Citrine, in an interview, published in the Sunday Times Magazine Supplement (10.4.66) claims that “It was not a defeat for the trade unions”, and if we leave aside for the moment the miners and the thousands of workers who were victimised, there is some truth in this. It was an unprecedented demonstration of working class solidarity, and employers, in face of it, did not feel emboldened to try a general move for wage reductions and longer hours and the official index of wage rates stood at the same level at the end of 1926 as it had at the end of 1925 (as also did the cost of living index).

For the miners however, it was different: in addition to wage reductions their hours were lengthened by half an hour or one hour a shift, with increases of 1½ to 2½ hours a week for surface workers.

In the twenty years before 1926 there had been a lot of propaganda in this country for the general strike, either in support of wage claims, or to stop war or as syndicalist “take and hold” action, but in the event the determining factor was the conditions of capitalism—the steep decline of the coal industry, and heavy and increasing unemployment: it stood at about 1¼ million, over 10%.

Workers feared that an attack on the miners if not beaten off would be followed by attacks on wages in other trades. The feeling was no doubt helped by the disappointment of many workers with the Labour Government which had had a nine months office in 1924. They wrongly concluded that that inglorious episode pointed to the uselessness of political action itself.

The Government had been badly frightened by the strike, imagining that it represented a revolutionary conspiracy by members of the Communist Party and agents of the Russian government. (The T.U.C. had refused an offer of financial aid from Russia.) When it was over the Government hurried to pass the 1927 Trade Disputes Act which restricted trade union activities in certain directions, made sympathetic strikes illegal and cut government workers unions off from illation to the T.U.C. and Labour Party, and international trade union organisations, etc., this in spite of the fact that Civil Servants did not strike and had not been called on to do so. The Act hit the T.U.C. since they lost some hundreds of thousands of affiliated members and doubly hit the Labour Party because individual trade unionists now had to contract in to pay the political levy instead of having to contract out if they objected to paying. (The whole of the 1927 Act was repealed by the Attlee government in 1946.)

A period of decline set in for the trade union movement and particularly for the T.U.C., to be hastened within a few years by the depression of the nineteen thirties, T.U.C. membership declined from 4,366,000 in 1926 to a low point of 3,295,000 in 1934; but since then expansion has been continuous and the present membership, 8,771,000 out of a total trade union figure of 10 million is a record.

Among the developments of the past forty years, both in the T.U.C. and in the unions as a whole have been the increased number of women trade unionists, the spread of trade unions to “non-manual” workers and the decline in the number of unions through amalgamations, though ’ big unionism” measured by the biggest union of all, the nearly 1½ million strong Transport and General Workers Union no longer has the glamour it once had.

Women trade unionists now exceed two million, compared to 832,000 in 1925; still however not more than one in four of women workers. Similar growth has been made among general clerical workers, bank and insurance clerks, civil servants and local government staffs, doctors and teachers.

With the decline of the coal industry from over a million workers to under 500,000 and of the railways the expansion of non-manual unions has shifted the balance in the T.U.C. helped last year by the application of the National Association of Local Government Officers' Association with 326,000 members.

The number of separate unions has dropped from 1,144 in 1925 to 591 in 1964 but over two thirds of total trade union membership is in the 18 unions with over 100,000 members all of which, except the National Union of Teachers, are in the T.U.C. Nevertheless the concentration of union membership in a small number of large unions has developed much less in Britain than in Germany, Sweden and some other countries and the British figure of only about 40 per cent of workers in trade unions also compares unfavourably.

The Swedish trade unions have recently, both because the recent wage negotiations were marked by threats of a general strike before eventual agreement was reached on a three year agreement. In Sweden the T.U.C. itself act as the negotiating body with the employers, something the British T.U.C. has no power to do though in 1926 the difficulty was overcome by the trade union executives being called to a conference in which they endorsed the strike plans of the T.U.C. General Council. But the real difference between Sweden in 1966 and Britain in 1926 is that the Swedish employers are faced with an acute labour shortage and were reluctant to have their booming trade interrupted by a strike (or by the lock-out they threatened at one stage). In Britain forty years ago the advantage was with the employers and especially with the coal owners—a shut down of the mines was almost a blessing to them.

Years of nearly full employment also encouraged a development which governments and employers favoured anyway, the widespread practice of unions and the T.U.C. being represented on joint productivity bodies with employers and the government, on organisations such as the National Economic Development Council, and of union officials being appointed to the boards of nationalised industries. The latest innovation is the government inspired plan to have trade unions invest funds in the Fairfield ship building company in order to save it from closure.

The argument advanced for this development by supporters of the Labour Party is that as they believe in planning it is logical that trade unions should at all levels have a hand in formulating and carrying out the plans for increasing production, and for sharing the product on the lines of the Government's Incomes Policy. It is based on a twofold illusion. Capitalism cannot be planned, either by those who own the means of production and distribution or by governments; still less by the trade union representatives invited in to be "consulted”, as will be shown the next time trade and production take a downward turn and unemployment rises.

The illusion goes much deeper than this. It shows itself in every conference of the T.U.C. and of the separate unions. The agendas are weighed down with scores of high sounding motions on all sorts of questions thrown up by capitalism at home and internationally, reflecting the emotional reactions of delegates but utterly useless from a practical point of view. Nobody takes the slightest notice of them, and most are soon forgotten by those who voted then. It is not merely that time spent on them is wasted but the real business of trade unions, looking after the interests of members as wage earners, suffers greater or less degree of neglect as a consequence.

And the question which ought to be the overriding concern of trade unionists as members of the working class, their interest in getting rid of capitalism and its wages system, and establishing Socialism, never gets heard at all. In this the trade union movement is little further advanced than it was forty years ago.

Trade union conferences go on passing resolutions for the nationalisation of industries, always in the belief that replacing the private capitalist by the state will somehow save the workers from the consequences of capitalism. They fail to lake note of the experience of the miners. Before and during the 1926 strike the trade unions and the Labour Party were advocating nationalisation of the mines as the one and only remedy. Evidence on those lines had been given to the Royal Commission on the coal industry, the report of which came out a few months before the strike, recommending nationalisation of coal royalties but not of the industry itself. The Miners Federation looked on nationalisation as a way to solve wage problems and to step the closure of uneconomic pits and loss of jobs. And now that the coal industry has been nationalised for twenty years the miners are complaining about exactly the same problem. At the T.U.C. at Brighton in 1965 Congress carried a National Union of Mineworkers motion in favour of a “National fuel policy” designed to save the coal industry against competing fuels. In his supporting speech the General Secretary of the N.U.M. stated that jobs in the coal industry were dropping at the rate of 40,000 a year and a quarter of a million had disappeared since 1954. And the miners delegate who seconded could see no difference between Tory and Labour policy for closing down uneconomic pits. How could it be otherwise? What counts for capitalism is costs of production and prospects of profits. If oil and gas are cheaper than coal, (and new finds of natural gas in the North Sea threaten a still cheaper competitor) coal is no longer king and miners must look for other jobs. And of course nationalisation has solved no wages problem and local strikes in the coal industry go on steadily at about a dozen or so a week year in year out.

This fortieth anniversary of the General Strike finds the trade unions facing likely new developments in trade union law when the Royal Commission on trade unions and employers associations finishes its work. When Webb wrote the 1920 introduction to his History of Trade Unions he was confident that the earlier indefinite and precarious state of trade union law had gone and that the legal and constitutional status of the unions “has now been explicitly defined and embodied in precise and absolutely expressed statutes”. How wrong he was. New court decisions, and the “unofficial” strikes which have come with low unemployment, not to mention the growing acceptance of the idea of strikes by civil servants and other workers, who in 1920 only half-heartedly adopted the implications of trade union organisation, have led to demands for amendments to the law and for the setting up of new machinery for avoiding and settling disputes.

Some of the pressure for change stems from the employers dislike of the intractable attitude of unions in a period of full employment, but it also comes from people who imagine that social structure has altered and made former trade union action unnecessary. But capitalism is not essentially different, and the class struggle has not disappeared. While it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the 1926 experience could be repeated a sharp worsening of trade, with consequent pressure on wages, could overnight produce large-scale conflicts no matter what the Royal Commission may recommend and no matter what new laws and new industrial conciliation bodies may be set up. What we as Socialists may hope is that workers will not go on deluding themselves that trade union action, necessary as it is, can solve their problems. Not action within capitalism but political action to establish Socialism is what the situation requires.

Edgar Hardcastle

Editorial: The Blackness of "Red" Friday (1925)

Editorial from the September 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Miners' Leaders and the Labour Press have hailed the outcome of the mining dispute as a tremendous victory for the Miners.

The Daily Herald, in large letters, blazoned it forth as “the greatest victory in Labour’s history.” Mr. Cook described it as “a great victory” and Mr. Purcell added that it was the greatest victory for trade unions in 25 years.

Black Friday compensated for by "Red” Friday is the style of jubilation quite common in "labour” papers.

When we seek the nature of the victory we find that it is a victory for the mine-owners.

The Government have agreed to secure the profits of the mine-owners by subsidising them to the tune of 20 odd millions. The miners are to continue working at the old rate of wages for nine months pending reports of a Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Government.

Mr. Cook’s colleagues in the minority movement announced during the dispute that "The miners’ officials have promised to fight for the 1914 standard of wages plus cost of living increases. They must be kept to that promise and the whole Trade Union movement must support' them.” (The Worker, Aug. 1.)

The "Great Victory,” however, means that the miners are to work at a wage 10 or 15 per cent. below that of 1914 and under conditions where there are 300,000 miners workless depending on insurance benefits or poor law doles when they can get them.

This happens in an industry where Mr. Cook admits the owners have made admitted profits of over 58 millions since 1921. So what the miners have won are wages (when they can get a job) far less than the 1914 level of poverty.

The long-continued demand of the miners for higher wages was swept upon one side by the owners insisting upon a reduction and the result of all the negotiations is that the miners will get no increase for at least nine months. The employers will get the profits they asked for. An inquiry will be held by "reliable gentlemen” and their report will be binding upon nobody. In the meantime the coal will be accumulated by mine-owners who can afford to wait till it is disposed of. During the nine months the Governing Class can make all preparations to deal forcibly with a strike on a large scale.

What can the miners prepare! At the very best they can arrange to entirely stop work and face the almost empty exchequer of the Union. Strike pay would last a very short time for in these days of reduced wages and unemployment the unions' funds are heavily depleted. Faced by want and menaced by force the miners’ outlook will be a black one.

Even with practically an industrial union like the Miners’ Federation and threatened by few blacklegs, their ability to cope with the worsening effect of capitalism has been nil. With all the experience of years of struggle the Miners' Leaders understand little of the situation they are in and so they are unable to advance the only remedy.

How little they appreciate the class struggle is shown by the speech of the President of the Miners’ Federation at the Scarboro' Conference. The Sunday Worker (July 19) gives the following report:—

  Mr. Herbert Smith, who presided, in his opening remarks, declared that the present crisis in the industry was largely due to the fact that the mine-owners had not attempted to take the miners into their confidence.   Whether or not the country believed in nationalisation, he said, it would be driven to adopt that as the only way to save the mining industry.
   He hoped the owners’ attempt to lower wages and lengthen hours would be opposed by the whole trade union movement.
   Continuing, Mr. Smith said that more than one in every four of the miners were unemployed, and two out of every three were earning less than £2 a week (italics ours).

The idea that the conflict between owners and workers is caused by the workers not being taken into confidence by the owners is a stupid one. What are the mine-owners to confide to the workers ? This is the old idea of conciliation between robbers and robbed and those who preach it are blind to the facts of economic life.

Mr. Smith’s foolish notion of nationalisation “as the only way to save the mining industry” is another idea that is injurious to the workers’ welfare and its advocacy by the leaders, including Mr. Cook, and supported by the Communists, shows how little they have learned of the system.

The demand the miners' leaders make that the mines be re-organised and made more efficient is one that all capitalists can support.

All the demands the miners can make upon the system will leave their position fundamentally the same. The shortening of hours, upon which they banked so much, has been accomplished, the 12-hour day has become 7, and there are infinitely more miners unemployed than ever before. Their past victories and the mining legislation have left them with wages that mean hopeless poverty and a greater struggle to make both ends meet than in the past.

The very efficiency of re-organisation of the mining industry will mean that fewer miners are required to get the same quantity of coal. Therefore, more unemployment.

Nationalisation will be a boon to owners of many mines, but to the workers it will mean a stabilising of their poverty with no greater chance for work than now. Actually, less workers will be required, because the wasteful methods under competition that labour leaders criticise will be abolished and with their abolition the men who do this wasteful work will be eliminated.

Examine these schemes and plans of the Miners’ Leaders ! Do they touch these causes of the miners’ present position? The stronger position of the owners due to combination of firms and rings; the development of substitutes for coal reducing the number of miners required; the markets abroad absorbing reparation coal under the Versailles and Dawes schemes, supported or arranged by Labour Leaders; and, above all these, the fundamental cause, the dependence of the miner upon the owners for permission to work with the resulting robbery of the worker.

Trade Unions, financially bankrupt, are faced to-day by the wealthy owners, made wealthier by the enormous surplus wrung from labour in the years of “good trade." The miners, like other workers, may “gain” some sudden concession in a competitive system by striking when there is a danger of losing trade to competitors. But in the long run the fact remains, as Marx put it 60 years ago in Value, Price and Profit, that on the economic field labour fights where capital is strongest. Trade Union leaders ignore the economic development of the system which, by its concentration of wealth and evolution of industry, makes all real and lasting improvement for the workers impossible within capitalism.

Instead of preaching nostrums such as conciliation and nationalisation, Socialists teach the working class to understand the class struggle and the causes of their slavery with the object of organising them as a class for the abolition of capital, and the establishment of Socialism.

Not the “Mines for the Miners” but the World for the Workers.

Editorial: The Crushing of the Miners. (1926)

Editorial from the August 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

The miners’ lock-out has lasted three months, during which every effort—political and economic—has been made to drive them back on the masters’ terms. The employers know well the slender resources of the workers, and they are evidently waiting till hunger has scourged the miners enough to force them back. In the meantime the owners are selling their huge stock of coal and realising the profits from the coal stores so kindly prepared by the miners in the nine subsidy months. The demand for an embargo on coal is being continually made by miners, but, after the huge betrayal of the General Strike, such a step will not be taken. The Labour Leaders in Parliament have been doing the employers’ work well, talking of "back to the Report,” "the Samuel memorandum,” "reorganisation,” and such capitalist schemes with the reduced wages and "increased unemployment” that these things mean. The miners were prevailed upon to stop criticising the General Council and to "work together for victory,” and on such empty words the joint meeting of trade union executives to hear the General Council’s report was not held. But since then the great "left wing” leader—Mr. Bromley—has been very useful to the masters by publishing parts of the "apologia” of the General Council. Mr. Bromley’s words have been used all over the country by the mine-owners to aid them in their work of crushing the miner. The reasons given by the Council for calling off the General Strike are the unyielding nature of the miners demands, but these very demands were the ones the General Council called the General Strike to maintain! Such are the gods of labour—right wing and left wing.

After backing the wrong horses for the General Council, boosting Messrs. Bromley, Tillett, Hicks and Company, the Communists again show their uselessness by demanding "A General Council with Greater Power,” "A New Leadership” (Workers’ Weekly, July 23rd, 1926). This, in spite of their idols of the left wing, proving to be enemies of the working class.

Left to fight alone for the miserable status quo of miners’ wages and hours, the miners have all the powers—political, financial and economic—working against them.

The employers are not content to use their money power against the miner. They with their fellow property owners control the powers of Parliament—by means of workers’ votes. The owners, therefore, pass Emergency Power Acts, Eight-hour Laws, Reorganisation Bills, and thus they cement their hold over the working class. The lesson then is plain—not a change of leaders—but control of political power by a working class understanding its historic mission of abolishing miners—and all other workers’ slavery.