Marxism And The Trade Union Struggle

The General Strike of 1926

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780906224250
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026889

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.

Part Three

THE NINE DAYS

Chapter Sixteen

Revolutionary mass strike or bureaucratic nightmare?

On the outcome of the 1926 strike depended the fate of millions of workers and their union organisations. The world had seen previous crises of this sort. Many had generated mass strikes in which the ruling class offensive was beaten off and the working class had made dramatic advances. Not all led to successful revolutions, but in the struggle the workers had been forged into a fighting unit. They had undergone a spiritual growth. They were changed so that they became able to change society. Even in defeat a substantial core of workers remained more class-conscious and determined than before.

By far the most brilliant exposition on such strikes is the classic work by Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, The Political Party and The Trade Unions. She sketches the rising wave of strikes in Russia in the ten years 1896-1905. In May 1896 a general strike of 40,000 textile workers took place in St Petersburg. This was followed by another general strike of the same workers in 1897. Following this, a whole number of small strikes took place until the next mass strike in March 1902 of the petroleum workers in the Caucasus. Then in November a mass strike of railwaymen in Rostov turned into a general strike. In May, June and July 1903, the whole of South Russia was aflame. Baku, Tiflis, Batum, Elizavetograd, Odessa, Kiev, Nikolayev, and Ekaterinoslav were in the grip of a general strike.

The year 1904 brought with it war, and for a time a pause in the strike movement, but this ended with the defeat of the Tsarist army and navy at the hands of the Japanese. In December 1904 a general strike broke out in Baku. Before this news had time to reach all parts of the Tsarist empire a mass strike broke out in St Petersburg in January 1905. This was the start of the Russian revolution of 1905. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her book:

The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetus of the St Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionary declaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling and class consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains. All the innumerable sufferings of the modern proletariat reminded them of the old bleeding wounds. Here was the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here were brutal foremen ‘driven off’ in a sack on a handcart, at another place infamous systems of fines were fought against, everywhere better wages were striven for and here and there the abolition of homework.¹

Mass economic strikes led to confrontation with the Tsarist regime, its police and army, and this led directly to political strikes. The latter awakened previously dormant workers to undertake economic strikes to improve their conditions, and the economic strikes again gave new impetus to the political strikes. The mass strike overcomes the separation of economics and politics that is inherent in reformism (as well as in its symmetrical opposite, syndicalism). The mass strike fuses together the struggle for reforms inside capitalism with the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The mass strike is a bridge between the here and now and the socialist future.

In the mass strike workers stop being onlookers of history, or a stage army; they step on to the historical arena shaping their future and forging themselves. Rosa Luxemburg writes:

In former bourgeois revolutions…the short battle on the barricades was the appropriate form of revolutionary struggle. Today, at a time that the working class must educate, organise and lead itself in the course of the revolutionary struggle, when the revolution itself is directed not only against the established state power but also against capitalist exploitation, mass strikes appear as the natural method to mobilise the broadest possible proletarian layers into action, to revolutionise and organise them. Simultaneously it is a method by means of which to undermine and overthrow the established state power as well as to curb capitalist exploitation… In order that the working class may participate en masse in any direct political action, it must first organise itself, which above all means that it must obliterate the boundaries between factories and workshops, mines and foundries, it must overcome the split between workshops which the daily yoke of capitalism condemns it to. Therefore the mass strike is the first natural spontaneous form of every great revolutionary proletarian action.²

Contrary to all reformists, who see a Chinese wall between partial struggles for economic reform and the political struggle for revolution, Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that in a revolutionary period the economic struggle grows into a political one, and vice versa:

The movement does not go only in one direction, from an economic to a political struggle, but also in the opposite direction. Every important political mass action, after reaching its peak, results in a series of economic mass strikes. And this rule applies not only to the individual mass strike, but to the revolution as a whole. With the spread, clarification and intensification of the political struggle not only does the economic struggle not recede, but on the contrary it spreads and at the same time becomes more organised and intensified. There exists a reciprocal influence between the two struggles. Every fresh attack and victory of the political struggle has a powerful impact on the economic struggle, in that at the same time as it widens the scope for the workers to improve their conditions and strengthens their impulse to do so, it enhances their fighting spirit. After every soaring wave of political action, there remains a fertile sediment from which sprout a thousand economic struggles. And the reverse also applies. The workers’ constant economic struggle against capital sustains them at every pause in the political battle. The economic struggle constitutes, so to speak, the permanent reservoir of working class strength from which political struggles always imbibe new strength.

In a word, the economic struggle is the factor that advances the movement from one political focal point to another. The political struggle periodically fertilises the ground for the economic struggle. Cause and effect interchange every second. Thus we find that the two elements, the economic and political, do not incline to separate themselves from one another during the period of the mass strikes in Russia, not to speak of negating one another as pedantic schemes would suggest.³

The logical and necessary climax of the mass strike is

the open uprisings which can only be realised as the culmination of a series of partial uprisings which prepare the ground, and therefore are liable to end for a time in what looks like partial ‘defeats’, each of which may seem to be ‘premature’.⁴

For Rosa Luxemburg,

[t]he most precious thing, because it is the most enduring, in the sharp ebb and flow of the revolutionary wave, is the proletariat’s spiritual growth. The advance by leaps and bounds of the intellectual stature of the proletariat affords an inviolable guarantee of its further progress in the inevitable economic and political struggles ahead.⁵

And what idealism workers rise to! They put aside thoughts of whether they have the wherewithal to support themselves and their families during the struggle. They do not ask whether all the preliminary technical preparations have been made. The mass strike can “generate such a tremendous volume of idealism among the masses that they appear to become almost immune to the most terrible privations”.⁶

Rosa Luxemburg’s account concentrates on the great dissolving effect of the mass strike on the boundaries between economics and politics in workers’ struggles. But she is also clear that it tends to dissolve other barriers as well—such as sectionalism and religion—at the same time as demonstrating the unbridgeable gulf between workers’ interests and those of the bosses and their state. Her description fits a number of mass strikes: Russia 1905 and 1917; France and Spain 1936; Hungary 1956; Poland 1980, and others.

However, there are many mass strikes that have little in common with Rosa Luxemburg’s description. Where the workers are highly organised in trade unions, the extent of their independence from the conservative trade union bureaucracy is largely a function of their confidence in facing the capitalists. The higher the level of organisation and confidence of the rank and file in fighting the capitalists, the more able are they to break the shackles of the trade union bureaucracy, and vice versa. The extent to which a strike is a product of rank-and-file initiative determines how near it is to the norm of the mass strike described by Rosa Luxemburg.

The bureaucratically-administered general strike

Unfortunately, Luxemburg’s analysis is sometimes used dogmatically, so that in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One: Socialists and the trade union movement
• Two: British Communism and the road to the General Strike
• Three: The Nine Days
• Notes
• Index