1926: The Watershed of Class History

Celebrate 1926? It was a defeat arising from a betrayal. Celebrate what? Only the parting of the ways for the labour movement. Here it was above all the General Strike that was a decisive test for the workers’ movement. Before then, with all its faults, there was a working class movement. Afterwards it disintegrated, and the name was taken over by class enemies… It was not the General Strike which caused this to happen, but it marked the process by which it happened here. It was a watershed of our class history. There were many currents within the working class movement. Not all went into the major sea of parliamentary reformism. But those that did were channelled off into minor streams.

We neglect at our peril the old syndicalist traditions which existed within the British working class movement before 1926. This is why, in ‘Black Flag’ we have always accentuated the need to discover our old traditions and history. To the extent socialism was a working-class movement, it was libertarian – just as in other countries. It was the canalisation of socialism by the middle-classes into planned [caus?]es that caused libertarian socialism to become a backwater explored only by sectarians.

During the First World War the working-class had rejected the bureaucratic top-heavy and reformist trade union leadership which had compromised itself with the State. The shop stewards’ movement had developed as a decentralising shop-floor corrective. In effect, there was one vertical movement (controlled from above downwards) and one horizontal movement cutting across it (controlled from the shop floor). This existed formally in many other countries: to ensure the ‘vertical’ movement was triumphant the full force of the State was used against the workers to whatever extent was necessary. Ever since the one gauge of democracy has been – not the extent to which society is managed by those who make it up – but the extent to which repression had to be used against the people to make them accept the fact of rule from above.

The difference between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ unionism was informal in this country; but it existed nevertheless. The TUC managed, after 1926, to break with the last vestiges of syndicalism and of independent action. More than ever they leaned to parliamentary participation in seeking to gain the struggles they could not gain by industrial action. The establishment had a bad fright in 1926 – it took them a long time to get over it – but the TUC General Council was even more frightened than they of the possibilities which the conflict had evoked. This is what made them lean more heavily on the Labour Party, which had been infiltrated and conquered by the middle class intellectual authoritarianism of the Fabians.

The influence of the Communist Party was from the first a treason to the whole conception of the working class movement. It made ‘revolution’ synonymous with State dictatorship. It tried to impose its own authority – not succeeding in Britain, it subordinated the struggle in 1926 to the leadership of the TUC General Council and thereafter to parliamentary socialism. It diverted all struggle into what were presumed to be ‘Left’ causes but were all concerned with the defence of the Russian dictatorship.

When the working class movement became Statist it ceased to be working class. It was pushed into defensive positions in the thirties – the fear of fascism, the struggle against sub-standard housing, the battle against unemployment. These were the battles of the ‘Old Left’ – succeeded by the ‘New Left’, still with Statist ideas, always with the fallback of supporting the Labour Party, still supporting dictatorial movement abroad, still wanting to subordinate the working class to an intellectual middle-class leadership – now a student one.

It plays on the fear of fascism when only its ghost appears; it struggles to get into sub-standard housing, by squatting rather than get out of it; and on the subject of unemployment it is divided between those who want the ‘right to work’ and those who want the right ‘never to work again’!

One looks with amazement at all that is left of the conception of the movement fifty years after 1926. What has it to do with us?, we ask. The workers ask it too. What has it to do with the class struggle or with social liberation? It deals in State reforms, in liberal measures, in State participation, in national liberation, in support for tyranny everywhere provided its labelled ‘Left’ by Moscow. But of the elements of democracy and socialism, not even to speak of syndicalism or anarchism, not a trace – but one.

It still pays lip service to workers control from time to time, and next year it is proposed that this will become ‘law’… the Old and the New Left will be at one in the Labour Party scheme for ‘management participation’. You want workers’ control? You shall have it… we shall simply give the name to something utterly different. Just as in Russia where the name ‘soviets’ implying something democratic and socialist – has been taken by the State and given to something utterly and completely in contrast! Just as in Germany where the name of socialism and of ‘folk’ – the people – was given to something utterly different to socialism and opposed to the people!

So it will be here. The name of the cause that cannot be eradicated will be taken as a label for its opposite. That is the very stuff of State oppression.

In fifty years not only have we gained nothing, we have lost everything, so far as aspirations to freedom are concerned The material benefits consequent upon the efforts of civilisation as a whole – lauded as being due to the State in totalitarian countries or to the Chancellor in power for the time being in parliamentary ones – mean that, inevitably, our living conditions have improved. But as for getting the whole benefits for ourselves we have taken many paces back.

We have not lost our traditions though the Statists would rewrite history. But we need beginnings too.

[Albert Meltzer]

Black Flag Vol.IV, No.8 (May 1976) https://libcom.org/article/black-flag-vol-04-08-may-1976