Karl Marx, the greatest theoretician ever of capitalism and the working class’ revolutionary role in building socialism, was born in Germany on May 5, 1818. After being expelled for his ideas and activism, he developed much of his revolutionary theory while living in the UK. On May 4, 1926, partly inspired by Marx’s ideas, workers in Britain, then the world’s most advanced capitalist economy, launched a nationwide stoppage: the General Strike. For nine days, millions of workers downed tools in solidarity with coal miners locked out by employers in a dispute over pay and jobs.
Back then the coal mining industry was the backbone of the UK economy. Out of the total population of about 43 million in 1926, over 1 million adult males worked in the coal mines. Their pay was low, the working hours long, and the working conditions so hazardous that at least a thousand were killed in the pits every year.
After the First World War, when Britain lost its position as the top coal exporter, the private owners of the coal mines tried to recover their competitive losses from exports by proposing 13 per cent pay cuts, an end to national negotiations, and a longer working day. The working class responded to this attack by proposing a general strike beginning at midnight on May 3. The next day, 1.5 million workers, from transport, iron and steel, building, printing, and electrical and gas sectors, went on strike, joined a week later by shipyard workers and engineers. The key slogan in response to employers’ plans to cut pay and a longer working day was “not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day”. In towns and cities across the country, councils of action or strike committees were set up in support of the coal miners.
Although the advanced industrialised capitalist economies had witnessed isolated sector-specific strikes for over a hundred years, the 1926 General Strike stood out as a new form of simultaneous action by workers in multiple industries. The Strike attracted global attention.
Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, hailed it as having the potential to break the Russian Revolution’s isolation in Europe. He was disappointed as the British trade union leadership, instead of providing revolutionary leadership, capitulated to the employers and reached an agreement to end the strike without achieving success on the key demands for better pay and working conditions.
In India, the General Strike attracted the attention of the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who was the brightest internationalist in the movement for independence. Inspired by the British working class’ General Strike activism, he moved decisively towards a socialist vision to free India from British colonial rule. He played a key role in renaming the Hindustan Republican Army, the key organisation of Indian revolutionaries, as Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. He could see the General Strike as undermining the economic and political power of the British Empire.
Shortly after the General Strike, Britain was struck by the Great Depression (1929-1939). John Maynard Keynes caused a storm in economic theory and policy by launching an attack on the orthodox neo-classical economics theory’s reliance on markets as equilibrating forces.
The third day of the national railway strike in 1974. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
He argued that the low purchasing power of the working class, caused by low pay and shaped by the existing markets, was the driving factor behind low aggregate demand, which was responsible for generating the economic depression. It was a resounding vindication of the working class’ demands during the General Strike. The birth of the welfare state after the Second World War emerged out of this economic turmoil, social unrest, and the theoretical break with the neo-classical paradigm.
During the turbulent decades of the 1920s and 1930s, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary witnessed varying levels of mass activity in their industrial sectors and in some countries even in their agricultural sectors.
Railway strike of 1974
In Indian history, the closest to the General Strike was the May 1974 Railway strike by over 20 lakh Railways workers. If we assume an average family of five, 1 crore Indians then were directly dependent on the Railways. TheRailways was not only the largest employer, it was truly the backbone of the economy through its backward and forward linkages, and as the key to the transport of industrial inputs and food grains all over the country.
The Nehruvian model of state capitalism in post-1947 India had many features of the Keynesian welfare state, especially relating to pro-labour legislation.
When Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, she outwitted her right-wing rivals in the Congress party by further deepening the pro-labour and pro-social welfare policies in her first “progressive phase”. Having defeated her rivals and established herself in power, she took an authoritarian turn to appease the top capitalist class, which was unhappy with the previous pro-trade union policies. This was demonstrated most starkly in the scale and forms of repression against the striking Railways workers.
Prerna Agarwal, a young historian, who has researched the Railways workers’ strike and its repercussions on the political economy, says that there were some 50,000 arrests and 10,000 dismissals, while 30,000 people were evicted from their homes in Railway colonies. Crushing the strike was a prelude to the imposition of the 1975 Emergency, according to her. Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian turn developed further and manifested itself in a most deadly form in her decision to seek a military solution to the political-economic crisis in Punjab in 1984.
The May 1974 Railway strike in India and the May 1926 General Strike in the UK, despite different locations and time periods, shared a commonality: the issues of low pay and harsh working conditions were central to generating working-class upheaval. Such upheavals have far-reaching politico-economic implications beyond the specific demands of those upheavals.
The recent wave of industrial strikes in northern and western India on the same issues of low pay and poor working conditions may be a prelude to more economic and political upheavals. Labour may be defeated as it was in 1926 and 1974 by the power of capital, but the labour-capital conflict remains the most fundamental contradiction of capitalism, compounded further by the capital-nature contradiction that is manifesting through the ecological crisis threatening the planet.
The ecosocialist vision, rooted in Marx’s theoretical work and further developed later, captures the double contradiction of the current phase of global capitalism.
Pritam Singh is Professor Emeritus, Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford.
Bill MacKeith is Executive Member, Oxford Trades Union Council.
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