General Strike 1926

General strike in Britain in support of the miners, 1926

The striker’s alphabet

(From the St Pancras Bulletin, May 5-10 1926) A is for ALL, ALL OUT and ALL WIN, And down with the blacklegs and scabs who stay in. B is for Baldwin, the Bosses’ Strong Man, But he’s welcome to dig all the coal that he can C is for Courage the workers have shown, Class Conscious and Confident that they’ll hold their own. D is for DOPE that the Government spread— Dishwash for Duncos and Dubbs—“nuff sed”. E is for Energy that will carry us through, Everyone class-conscious, steadfast and true. F is for Fight, our fight to the end, For we’re solid together, not an inch will we bend. G is for Grab...

The story of the strike

By Stan Crooke At the close of the nineteenth and opening of the twentieth centuries the international working class had added the weapon of the general strike to its arsenal in the war against capital. In the decades before the British General Strike, Belgium, Russia, Sweden and Germany had all experienced general strikes — Belgium more than once. Drawing on the experience of such mass strikes, Trotsky wrote: “The general strike is one of the most acute forms of class war. It is one step from the general strike to armed insurrection… If carried through to the end, the general strike brings...

The workers’ councils

At the time when the General Council issued its call to Trades Councils, these bodies, taken as a whole, were organisations accustomed to monthly delegate meetings, with fortnightly or monthly meetings of Executive Committees. Practically in all cases there were no paid officials, and some even of the most energetic Councils had no premises of their own. With one or two exceptions, no preparatory work of any kind had been undertaken before the call was issued. For all practical purposes, the Councils were organisations suddenly asked to take on a new and urgent task, without any but the...

Workers’ defence

The problems facing the Councils of Action went much deeper than aid for arrested persons. The arrests themselves were in part based on political actions by the victims: as the reports show the members of the Communist Party were especially singled out for arrests under this heading. But the attack of the capitalist state machine was not confined to arrests of speakers or writers (or distributors) of “sedition.” From the time when the fascist organisation* and the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) came into existence, it became clear that the capitalist class was preparing a...

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