Weekly Worker 628 Thursday June 8 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

British brakes and Russian disputes

Jack Conrad argues that the problems of the CPGB in the 1926 general strike did not stem from Stalin alone

Summer Offensive 2006 No nonsense I have excellent news to report in this, the first of my weekly columns detailing the progress of this year’s Summer Offensive, the Communist Party’s annual fundraising drive. In the first seven days of the campaign, we have already received just under £3,210 towards our £30k minimum, with a number of comrades taking large chunks out of their individual targets. In particular, thanks go out to comrade PK, who has stumped up £700 - courtesy of a nicely timed rebate from the taxman. In addition, comrades MJ and MM have produced a sturdy £200 and £140 respectively, comrade AM has pushed her standing order contributions to the party up to £300 a month for the duration, comrade AD has given us £100 and PM £200, a no-nonsense start to his push for £1,000 by the end of July. The same comrade writes: “Last year I set myself a modest target initially - I was tight for cash and thought I would be stretched for both time and money. But I had a few good badge sales (the Make Poverty History event in Edinburgh and the SWP’s Marxism proved productive) and I also organised some extra classes where I teach. In the end I notched up just over £1,000. So this year I have decided to be more ambitious and set my target at £1k from the off. Again I am teaching once a week right through July and will use all the extra income for the SO.” (read full article) Click here to download a standing order form - regular income is particular important in order to plan ahead. Even £5/month can help! Send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX Donate online:

That the Communist Party made important mistakes in the 1926 general strike cannot be denied. Nor can those mistakes be put down to the prior arrest and jailing of 12 prominent leaders - Harry Pollitt, William Gallacher, Wal Hannington, William Rust, Albert Inkpin, Ernie Cant, Tom Bell, Tom Wintringham, Arthur MacManus, JT Murphy and Robin Page Arnot. Languishing in prison though they were, all the evidence suggests that they were among the main architects of the inconsistent, short-sighted and essentially centrist strategy pursued during and after the strike.

Because of its collective confusion, Leon Trotsky argued that the CPGB had acted like a “brake” on the general strike. A charge indignantly rejected in a resolution passed at the CPGB’s 8th Congress, which met over October 16-17: “Without the Communist Party and the Minority Movement, the pressure of the masses on the general strike would have been weaker and the general strike would never have taken place.”¹ The positive role of the CPGB cannot be denied. Nor the heroism and self- sacrifice of our members. And it is surely true that without the CPGB there would have been no general strike.

Needless to say, Trotsky was hardly of the view that things would have been better without the party. Simply that instead of a crushing defeat, there could have been victory. Not necessarily total victory, but a giant stride through which the working class begins to prepare for taking power. Given the objective possibilities, Trotsky thought that, had the party been bolder, more consistent, more critical of the left Labourites, then things would have turned out very differently.

Trotsky’s underlying argument surely stemmed from, was certainly coloured by, his own historical experience - crucially factional experience as an oppositionist. Trotsky, in many ways, like Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), was the personification of the revolution, not the party. Theoretically there was little of substance separating Trotsky from Lenin when it came to the character of the anti-tsarist revolution. Eg, the former envisaged Russia undergoing a ‘permanent’ revolution, while the latter spoke about ‘uninterrupted’ revolution. Two phrases that were often pitted against each other in heated factional disputes, but which in truth amounted to broadly the same strategy. Crucially, both men rejected the mechanical schema that Russia had to undergo a drawn-out capitalist stage before the workers and peasants could take power.

Politically, however, Trotsky was a left Menshevik, although organisationally he travelled light. He operated as an intellectual gadfly and with at most a small circle of followers and collaborators. After a brilliant record in the forefront of the 1905 revolution and then, following that, a dismal record of anti-Leninism, Trotsky finally joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, on the eve of the second revolution. Lenin had meantime done the serious work of building a Marxist organisation rooted in the working class and equipped with a steeled cadre.

Trotsky’s haughty standing aloof from the competing mainstreams of Russian Marxism - Bolshevism and Menshevism - before 1917 and a quick return to the position of an outsider after Lenin’s death in 1924 led him to the conclusion that the party was ‘naturally’ conservative, especially in the moment of revolution. The timidity, the procrastination and finally the August 1914 betrayal by the German SDP drew Luxemburg to a similar viewpoint and to a similar reliance on spontaneity. Instead of a carefully mapped-out political strategy, deep organisation and slowly accumulated strength and confidence among the masses, the liberty, unleashed creativity and sheer momentum of the revolution itself would ensure success.

Trotsky’s own Transitional programme now constitutes the classic statement of this economistic bowing to spontaneity - sadly most on the left nowadays regard it as both common-sensical and a towering intellectual achievement. Every opportunist ruse, every rotten compromise, every stab in the back is excused by the simple device of prefixing it with the word ‘transitional’. Meanwhile poor old Trotsky turns in his grave.

On occasion, it is undoubtedly the case that even the best Communist Party can hesitate, can manifest rightist tendencies. That said, the exact opposite symptoms occur. Eg, the Communist Party of Italy under Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) giddily dismissed the necessity of becoming the majority and simultaneously warned that parliamentary work was bound to sully revolutionary purity. There is no law involved. Rightism, conservatism and acting as a ‘break’ is not automatic, as Trotsky appears to suggest.

Despite the problems with the Old Bolsheviks in March-April 1917 - ie, the Menshevik drift of the Petrograd party centre under the caretaker Kamenev-Stalin leadership that Trotsky and present-day Trotskyites make so much of - the Bolshevik Party was quickly and decisively won to Lenin’s concretisation of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ embodied in the slogan of ‘all power’ for the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets. Likewise the ‘scabbing’ of Kamenev and Zinoviev - they had been Lenin’s closest lieutenants - over the proposed uprising that would sweep away Alexander Kerensky’s thoroughly discredited provisional government, while unfortunate, was by then from the extreme right of the Bolshevik Party and an isolated minority. Far from acting as a brake on the revolution, the Bolshevik Party proved to be the motor.

When it comes to the 1926 general strike, the main problem with ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism is that it consists of convenient pre-1917 amnesia on the one hand and an overdetermined need to demonise Stalin on the other. With this method the undeniable conservatism of the CPGB in 1926 is put down to a single cause and a single person. According to this version of events, the party, via pressure from the leadership of Comintern, adapted itself to the TUC, above all to its left wing, because of the diplomatic needs of Stalin.²

Pursuing his illusory vision of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin was meant to have put the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee and its preservation above the prospect of revolution in Britain. What was this body and what significance did it have? It was formed in 1923 at the initiative of a left-moving, left-posing TUC. Clearly a result of enormous pressure from below. Militant workers in Britain regarded Russia as theirs and wanted to defend the country against its numerous enemies. ARTUC also perfectly suited the plans made by Comintern to undermine the centrist Amsterdam Trade Union International and secure allies, no matter how unreliable, for the Soviet Union. ARTUC’s declared aim was to “promote cooperation between the British TUC general council and the All-Russian Trade Union Council in every way”. Unsurprisingly it was greeted with much frothing and furore by the capitalist press and right reformists alike.³

That the CPGB did not prepare the working class for the sell-out by the Labour lefts, and placed far too much emphasis on existing bureaucratised institutions instead of the new organs of struggle, is all true. But there is nothing to suggest that this was the result of Stalinite diktat or was “intimately bound up with the campaign against Trotsky”.⁴

After all, most of Trotsky’s epigones take political positions far to the right of the 1926 CPGB without the slightest overseas prompting, let alone international discipline. Eg, in the midst of the miners’ great strike of 1984-85 the Socialist Workers Party’s Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) offered this fighting assessment: “Today it’s a damned sight closer to 1927 than it is to 1925 and we have to draw the appropriate conclusion.”⁵ In other words, even though 100,000 miners remained on strike, they had already been soundly defeated. Such morbid reasoning now sees the SWP and the International Socialist Group reinventing the popular fronts of the 1930s in the form of Respect. As for the Socialist Party in England and Wales, it makes propaganda for another Labour Party with its Campaign for a New Workers’ Party. A trade union-based party specifically designed for domination by Bob Crow, Matt Wrack, Mark Serwotka, etc. The very types who in 1926 betrayed the general strike.

Frankly, the ‘orthodox’ Trotskyite version of history does not stand up to examination. It skips over the role of British national conditions and the centrism, syndicalism and economism of those who formed the CPGB (not least those industrial militants worshipped by the SWP’s founder-leader, Tony Cliff - they had a “tradition of hatred towards the union bureaucracy and an understanding of the need for rank and file independence”⁶).

Moscow was never the sole source of opportunism. There was a complicated pattern whereby communist parties were both pulled and pushed - on the one side by Comintern and on the other by national traditions and conditions. Certainly in 1926 there still existed considerable room for manoeuvre and independent initiative.⁷ Only in the late 1920s did that disappear.

Then, showing the inadequacy of the mythology, there is the awkward fact that the executive committee of Comintern was not the docile tool of Stalin and the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy it was shortly to become. From its foundation until November 1926 its president was Gregory Zinoviev. He was never an advocate of ‘socialism in one country’. A full year before Trotsky publicly joined the fray on this crucial question, he was already openly polemicising against “national socialism” - eg, insisting in his book Leninism that socialism in the Soviet Union was impossible without the progress of the world revolution. Socialism being communism as it “has just emerged after long birth pangs from capitalist society”.⁸ Zinoviev might have been aligned with Stalin against Trotsky in 1924, but in 1925 he led an opposition movement against Stalin and in 1926 he and Trotsky jointly headed the United Opposition.⁹

That goes a long way to explain why the executive committee of the Communist International was to the left of the CPGB during this period. Five days before the general strike was due to begin, Comintern was making it clear that the “strike could not remain an industrial struggle. It is bound to develop into a political struggle ... The fight for wages and conditions will raise before the working class the question of power.” That is to say, any indefinite strike puts the working class on a collision course with the capitalist state. Taking a considerably harder position than the CPGB leadership, Comintern noted that, “Even the leftwing leaders of the Labour Party and the unions are showing themselves unequal to the situation” and that “the greatest danger” came not from the government, but “treacherous leaders”. Again in contradistinction to ‘orthodox’ Trotskyite mythology, far from demanding a toning down of CPGB slogans, Comintern was urging that, “as the struggle develops, the party slogans must be carried to a higher level, up to the slogan of the struggle for power”.¹⁰

Immediately after the strike, even though the full extent of the TUC’s perfidy was apparent and the connivance of the left reformists had been revealed, the Communist Party’s skeleton central committee held back from a full-scale propaganda barrage. No doubt this was in an attempt to secure whatever support could be garnered for the beleaguered miners.¹¹ Despite the CPGB’s ongoing attempt to appease the TUC, despite the value placed on ARTUC, the Soviet trade union leadership - under future Right Oppositionist Mikhail Tomsky (1880-1936) - denounced the British left reformist trade union leaders for their “treachery” in an ‘Appeal to the international proletariat’, published in Pravda on June 8 1926. A charge defended and repeated by Stalin on more than one occasion.¹²

The CPGB leadership, showing its position in the communist spectrum, stubbornly declined to print the Soviet trade unions’ appeal. In Moscow the CPGB’s delegate to Comintern, JT Murphy, forcibly criticised the appeal in parochial terms. He regarded the whole thing as “interference” in the internal affairs of the British working class. Only after lengthy exchanges did Comintern, including Stalin, persuade him that it would have been unprincipled for the Soviet unions to “keep silent” - even if voicing criticism meant “a rupture of the bloc with the general council, in the break-up of the Anglo-Russian Committee”.¹³

Undaunted by all the evidence to the contrary, the SWP’s Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein try to make ARTUC the fulcrum for the degeneration of the ‘official’ CPGB in their co-authored 1987 book Marxism and trade union struggle (of course, they are not alone in this attempt). Ignoring the theoretical backwardness and lack of clarity displayed by the CPGB since its foundation in 1920, the father-and-son duo claimed that the “decisive shift of the Communist Party to the right” was “spurred on by the establishment of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee”.¹⁴

The whole project was wrong from start to finish, they say. This might have been Trotsky’s argument - but that was in 1928! As the agreement was being signed and sealed, he actively and enthusiastically went along with it. Just a few months before the general strike he still waxed lyrical. His speech to Soviet textile workers in January 1926 acclaimed ARTUC as the “highest expression of the shift in the situation of all Europe and especially Britain, which is taking place before our eyes and will lead to the proletarian revolution”.¹⁵

Ready to take up even a flimsy polemical weapon to fend off Stalin, the United Opposition urged a break with the TUC after the sell-out. In July 1926, under the signatures of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, Trotsky and Pyatakov, the United Opposition stated that, while it was absolutely correct to form the committee with the TUC, the time had arrived for a “break with them in event of their betrayal”.¹⁶ Maintaining the Anglo-Russian Committee allowed the TUC pseudo-lefts to keep their militant image intact, they said. Snubbing them with the maximum publicity would help the workers in Britain make the transition to communism.

Stalin had little problem parrying such politics with fulsome quotes from Lenin about “arrangements and compromises” with reactionaries. Although they specifically defended the “necessity for communists to work in the most reactionary trade unions”, in effect the United Opposition was on this occasion straying into ‘left’ communist territory: ie, it was unprincipled for communists to work in international versions of such bodies.¹⁷ For Stalin, as long as the communists in Britain and the Soviet trade unions kept their “freedom to criticise the reformist leaders”, then the Anglo-Russian Committee was permissible.¹⁸ Trotsky’s attempt to “torpedo” ARTUC would, he felt, only play “into the hands of the interventionists”.¹⁹ At the time there were warlike noises emanating from France and Britain.

It is quite clear that the controversy around ARTUC was primarily to do with internal struggles in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In an attempt to expose the atavism of Stalin’s theory of ‘socialism in one country’, the United Opposition tried to show that every international setback or defeat was his personal responsibility. In the conditions of 1926 that was understandable. But that does not mean we have to faithfully follow every twist and turn of past polemics or view every statement as the expression of profound truth to be venerated as doctrine. We shall leave that to others.

In all honesty a break with the TUC in May, June or July 1926 would have had little or no impact. The working class in Britain had already been defeated. The trade union and labour bureaucracy as a whole was moving rapidly to the right. So far indeed that in 1927 left reformist leaders were joining the anti-communist witch-hunt. In the climate of reaction the TUC had no compunction in taking the initiative to dissolve the committee. If Soviet unions had pre-empted them it would hardly have caused a political earthquake. Only those whose hearts are ruling their heads could seriously imagine that it would have resulted in British workers leaving behind reformist illusions and coming over to communism.

We should, except under exceptional circumstances, be the most consistent advocates of trade union unity, including international trade union unity. If that means unity in red unions, brilliant. If it means unity in reactionary unions, so be it. ‘Always with the masses’ - that is our slogan. To have kept quiet about the role of the TUC in the general strike would have been unforgivable. But to have unilaterally broken with the TUC would largely have been an empty gesture.

Consequences of defeat

Those who think world history in 1926 danced on events in Moscow not only fail to give due importance to life in Britain, but reveal a tenuous grasp of the political art. The advanced stratum of the working class can learn through the smooth, geometric abstractions of propaganda. Communists in the Britain of 1926 could have done with some didactic guidance on that score when it came to the double-sidedness of left reformism.

That said, we should never forget that the masses learn primarily through their own, infinitely richer living experiences. What is meant by that needs qualifying. After all, it is no good expecting workers to spontaneously come over to us simply by the negative experience of being misled by trade union bureaucrats. The same goes for experience of Labour governments or capitalism as a system.

Those misguided, strange or inexperienced comrades on the left who think broken promises, unemployment, wage cuts and attacks on democratic rights a good thing because they cause disillusionment with existing ideas and institutions and therefore enlightenment forget just how overarching, how dominant bourgeois ideology is. There is always a way out for capitalism - if the workers are prepared to pay for it. Without a viable alternative they always are. Passivity, cynicism and misdirected anger are the sad results, not the search for socialist solutions.

The organising and intellectual role of Marxists and their party is therefore crucial. Without conscious leadership, spontaneity, including anger and even rebellion is dissipated and always ends in disappointment. Only with a Communist Party can the working class theoretically remember and learn, train cadre, organise allies and at the right moment unleash the decisive blow.

Palme Dutt seems to have clutched at the straw of spontaneity in his analysis. Immediately after the TUC collapsed the general strike, he argued that it was “not only the greatest revolutionary advance in Britain since the days of Chartism, and a sure prelude of the new revolutionary era, but its defeat is a profound revolutionary lesson and stimulus”.²⁰ The masses had not been defeated. What had been defeated was “the old leadership”, along with its trade unionism, reformism, pacifism and parliamentarianism.²¹ In his opinion, “the British bourgeoisie has taught the proletariat a lesson of inestimable revolutionary value. The defeat of the general strike is itself a gigantic piece of revolutionary propaganda”.²² All that remained was for the Communist Party to assume, as it were, its rightful place as the leadership of the whole working class movement.

Subsequent events tell us that life did not and does not work in such a generous fashion. The end of the general strike was not the “final collapse” of the “methods of the old trade union economic struggle”.²³ Nor were the workers now face to face with the “legal and armed forces of the state”.²⁴

It might have been a 162-million-strike-days record in terms of statistics, but politically 1926 was a debacle. With it our rulers inflicted a strategic defeat on the working class and overcame the ‘direct-action’ enemy within, which had been challenging the established order since the great upsurge began in 1910. As can be seen from Table 1, the defeat of the general strike meant class combativity was sent reeling, not taken to a new, higher stage, as Palme Dutt hoped. The number of strike days crashed through the floor and trade union membership was further driven down in an orgy of union-bashing.

Table 1

Strike statistics, 1924 to 1935²⁵

Employers refused to take back ‘commies’ and ‘agitators’. They imposed all sorts of onerous terms and conditions. In November 1926 George Spencer led a section of the Notts miners in a split from the Miners Federation of Great Britain. It was a Union of Democratic Miners-type breakaway and therefore generously backed by government and employers alike. Parliament also passed the Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act in January 1927. It made illegal all sympathetic strikes, mass picketing and “intimidation” - ie, general strikes were outlawed. Civil service unions were banned from affiliating to the TUC. In short, there had been a qualitative tilt in the balance of class forces.

Instead of backs-against-the-wall resistance, the TUC and Labour Party added fuel to the reactionary fire. Crawling before capital, the establishment and the state, they became red-baiting advocates of Mondism, industrial peace and national efficiency.²⁶ Scabs betray and always find themselves betrayed. Having served its purpose, the TUC left wing found itself ousted by an ungrateful right and consigned to a neither-power-nor-glory purgatory.

Of course, British capitalism was still suffering from relative decline. Although the Bank of England would have had it otherwise, Britain could not maintain the gold standard. Despite the strategic defeat inflicted on the working class in 1926, sterling could not recover what Susan Strange calls its position as the top currency - the main currency of reserve and transaction in the world market - which it occupied between 1815 and 1918.²⁷ In 1931 the gold standard had to be abandoned and it was clear that the pound was losing its status as a master currency.²⁸ Nevertheless, there was another side to what was an integral part of the epochal decline of capital as a social form - the ability of British imperialism to manage it.

Although losing ground to rivals, Britain escaped another war with Germany until 1939 and kept the US in splendid isolation before the ‘arsenal of democracy’ entered World War II in 1941 (the war between Britain and the US - which Trotsky had predicted in his, in many ways masterful, Where is Britain going? - was fought, but in alliance against Germany).²⁹ Containment of the Soviet Union also proved successful. Under Stalin, the ‘world revolutionary centre’ began killing off its own children and seeking a permanent coexistence with capitalism. Then there was the division of Ireland. This kept Britain’s most troublesome colony quiet for the next 50 years.

So, without serious overseas distraction, Britain’s ruling class had a relatively easy time domesticating the TUC. Not least because it still held the world’s largest empire, British capitalism could temper its frontal assault on the working class. It could, while shifting the balance of class forces, strengthen the political role of the labour bureaucracy and most importantly, as can be seen from Table 2, refrain from driving down the real wages of those in work (remember, this was in a period of falling prices).³⁰

From within the Tory establishment, even before the general strike had met its final dénouement, Robert Cecil, LS Amery and Lord Percy were warning against further reductions in living standards. With the ending of the strike, Baldwin promised there would be no general cut in wages and even Churchill spent the summer of 1926 trying to persuade the coal owners to moderate their demands on the miners. This flexibility was the result of both continued economic reserves that came from empire and fear of revolution.³¹ As it turned out, those who bore the main burden of the reorganisation of capital in Britain, those who suffered poverty and degradation, were primarily not the employed, but the unemployed section of the working class - together with those subject to imperialist exploitation.

Table 2

Index of average real wages 1924-1935³²

Under these unfavourable conditions, the Communist Party found itself dangerously isolated from employed workers. Membership fell away in droves. Those remaining were mainly students, housewives and above all the unemployed who, unlike their employed brothers and sisters, maintained an organised opposition to capitalism and a readiness to fight.

An indication of the setback suffered by militants and in turn the Communist Party was the decision in 1929 to wind up the National Minority Movement. The main thrust of CPGB activity became the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and its great hunger marches of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Notes:

1. 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain: reports, theses and resolutions London 1926.

2. See M Woodhouse and B Pearce Essays on the history of communism in Britain London 1975.

3. The Times warned that the Anglo-Russian Committee opened the way for the “westward spread of communism among the workers” (April 22 1925), the Daily Telegraph damned the TUC for having “sold the pass” (May 12 1925) and the Daily Chronicle considered it a “breakaway from the saner trade unionism of this country” (April 8 1925). Nor did the anti-communist wing of opportunism approve of it. Ramsay MacDonald considered the committee as a step “towards international disunity” (Daily Herald May 4 1925), and the Polish Socialist Party dismissed the leaders of the TUC as “Bolshevik followers and sympathisers” (Robotnik April 21 1925). All quotes from J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 2, London 1969.

4. M Woodhouse and B Pearce Essays on the history of communism in Britain London 1975, p75.

5. Socialist Worker February 2 1985.

6. Quoted in T Cliff and D Gluckstein Marxism and trade union struggle London 1986, p125. Trapped in fragile dogma not of their own making, Cliff and Gluckstein were forced to argue in effect that the syndicalistic origins of some of the comrades who formed the CPGB more or less guaranteed a healthy tradition. On this most tenuous basis it is - or so they say - “wrong” to argue that the majority in Comintern was to the left of the party in Britain.

7. In their introduction to Gramsci’s Prison notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith argue that only by 1927 did “Russian developments become the determining factor” in Comintern policies. The period from 1924 to 1926 was, they say, a “transitional phase” in which “it is extremely important to stress the room for manoeuvre still remaining ... to an individual party”. After outlining the complex internal relationships in Comintern, they make the point that “it was possible for ‘leftist’ policies in countries like Germany and Italy to coexist with ‘rightist’ policies in countries like China, the United States, Britain or Yugoslavia. In each case, the determining factors were national rather than international” (A Gramsci Prison notebooks London 1973, ppxvii, xviii).

8. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p87.

9. See J Conrad From October to August London 1992, pp34-38.

10. J Degras (ed) The Communist International, 1919-1943 Vol 2, London 1971, p299.

11. In the same compromising spirit the Miners Federation of Great Britain general secretary, AJ Cook, withdrew The nine days, his damning indictment of the TUC’s role during the general strike.

12. In a widely reported speech on June 8 1926, Stalin described TUC leaders as either “downright traitors” or “spineless fellow travellers of these traitors” (JV Stalin Works Vol 8, Moscow 1954, p170). He also argued that, because the TUC “had no intention of raising the question of power”, the general strike was “doomed” to “inevitable failure”: a general strike “which is not turned into a political struggle must inevitably fail” (ibid p171).

13. JV Stalin Works Vol 8, Moscow 1954, pp205-214.

14. T Cliff, D Gluckstein Marxism and trade union struggle London 1986, pp125-6.

15. L Trotsky Writings on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, p149.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. JV Stalin Works Vol 8, Moscow 1954, p197.

19. Ibid.

20. Quoted in R Page Arnot Twenty years London, no date, p31.

21. Ibid p31.

22. Ibid p31.

23. Ibid p32.

24. Ibid p32.

25. Source: H Pelling A history of British trade unionism London 1963, pp262-3.

26. In November 1928 Sir Alfred Mond, chair of ICI, together with 21 other industrialists, wrote to the TUC suggesting cooperation. Their letter argued that “the prosperity of industry can, in our view, be fully attained only by full and frank recognition of the facts as they exist and an equally full and frank determination to increase the competitive power of British industries in the world’s markets, coupled with free discussion of the essentials upon which that can be based. That can be achieved most usefully by direct negotiation with the twin objects of restoration of industrial prosperity and the corresponding improvement in the standard of living of the population” (TUC Annual Congress Report London 1928, p220). The TUC accepted the invitation. The first discussion took place at Burlington House on January 12 1928 with Mond and the TUC’s Ben Turner alternatively taking the chair. The meetings became known as the Mond-Turner talks.

27. See S Strange Sterling and British policy Oxford 1971.

28. The master currency is the dominant currency in a particular currency area: eg, the Overseas Sterling Area.

29. See L Trotsky Writings on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, pp 5, 9.

30. While union membership fell from a high of 8.3 million in 1920 to a low point of 4.4 million in 1933, the number of trade union officials seems to have increased throughout this period (see HA Clegg, AJ Killick and R Adams Trade union officers London 1961, p38).

31. Six days after the general strike Lord Salisbury wrote the following cabinet memorandum: “I will not dwell on the familiar history of industrial suspicion and its disastrous effect ... [It] is not only widespread but has gradually grown in power, if not intensity, and has now developed into a settled determination to have a change. And this determination to secure a change has since the war assumed a dangerous and therefore urgent character. Up to that date the workers sought their ends in parliament ... It is, however, clear that they are beginning to lose faith in that road to relief. The favourite method is now direct action, which is, in its logical development, revolution …

“Unless government and parliament bestir themselves, the change of method may become stereotyped: revolution may become a conviction. The worst of it is that unconstitutional pressure and direct action have been proved to be effective and the present triumph of the forces of order is an exception …. If we look at the attitude of the workers and at their intentions - no doubt largely subconscious, but nonetheless formidable for that reason - the situation is essentially unstable” (quoted in J Foster, ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley The general strike: 1926 London 1976, p49).

32. B Mitchell, P Deane Abstract of British historical statistics London 1962, pp332, 345.

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