07.05.2026

Considerations of defeat

Making the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee pivotal has become a shibboleth. But the argument does not add up. Jack Conrad says we should stop repeating tired clichés about the 1926 General Strike and learn to think instead

Undaunted by all the evidence to the contrary, Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein try to make the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee the fulcrum for the degeneration of the CPGB (of course they are far from alone).¹ Ignoring its initial crop of fly-by-night ‘official’ left recruits and subsequent lack of clarity when it came to trade union and Labour Party ‘official’ lefts, both the Great Leader and the Respected Son claim that the “decisive shift of the Communist Party to the right” was “spurred on by the establishment of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee”.²

The whole project was wrong from start to finish, say the SWP duo.³ This was Trotsky’s argument - in 1928. Nevertheless, when the agreement was signed in April 1925, he enthusiastically went along with it. Just a few months before the General Strike began he was still waxing lyrical. His speech to Soviet textile workers in January 1926 acclaimed the Anglo-Russian Committee 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”.⁴

Ready to take up even a flimsy polemical weapon with which to fend off Stalin, the United Opposition urged a break with the TUC after the sell-out of the General Strike. In July 1926, under the signatures of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Leon Trotsky and Yuri 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”.⁵ 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 from militancy to communism.

Stalin dug up ancient Lenin quotes ridiculing German ‘lefts’, who established pure, but tiny, ‘revolutionary’ trade unions, and his criticisms of Trotsky for ‘skipping over the peasantry’. More to the point, he accused the United Opposition of wanting communists in Britain to abandon the ‘old organisations’. To my knowledge, a complete red herring. His main point was, though, that the Anglo-Russian Committee put British workers into contact with Soviet unions and thereby hastened the day when the reformist leaders would be ousted. The Anglo-Russian Committee also helped the movement opposing new imperialist interventions against the Soviet Republic - for Stalin a clincher.

Was such a bloc by its very nature unprincipled? Surely not. According to Stalin, as long as communists in Britain and the Soviet trade unions kept their “freedom to criticise the reformist leaders”, then the Anglo-Russian Committee was permissible. He cited the denunciations not only of the likes of Walter Citrine, but ‘official’ lefts too. In point of fact, Stalin defended the Soviet trade unions from the localist protests of the British delegate to Comintern, JT Murphy. Murphy sought to “compel” them to cease-and-desist with their “criticising” of the TUC’s general council.⁶ Soviet trade unions had, of course, accused the TUC of “treachery” and called out the refusal to even “lift a finger” to help the locked-out miners. Not to have done that, said Stalin, would have been to “commit political and moral suicide”.⁷

Incidentally, refusing to brand the TUC general council as ‘traitors’, because by their very nature the likes of Walter Citrine, Ernest Bevin and JH Thomas stood a world removed from any authentic socialism and therefore working class principles, is politically dumber than dumb. Calling off the General Strike after just nine days and leaving the miners isolated is not something that should produce a knowing shrug of the shoulders from communists. These people, including ‘official’ lefts such as Alf Purcell and George Hicks, were elected leaders of mass organisations and in the eyes of their militant members they had done something unforgivable, something criminal. That had to be made into the common starting point of a prolonged struggle designed to replace reformist with communist leaders.

A ‘demonstrative break’ with the TUC might have helped to clarify matters for communists in Britain. But then again, so would Soviet leaders damning the pack of them “traitors” … and that is exactly what the Stalin-Bukharin faction of the apparatus did. There was, however, the other, defencist, prong to the Anglo-Russian Committee. Diehard reactionaries such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain would have been delighted by Soviet trade unions ditching their TUC allies. A self-inflicted wound. Trotsky’s attempt to “torpedo” the Anglo-Russian Committee would, Stalin reasoned, therefore, play “into the hands of the interventionists”.⁸

It is quite clear that the argument around the Anglo-Russian Committee was primarily to do with internal struggles in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In an attempt to counter the growing bureaucratisation, the United Opposition tried to show that every international setback was Stalin’s personal responsibility. In the conditions of 1926, understandable. But that does not mean that today we are obliged to faithfully echo past polemics as if they were the expression of some unvarnished truth. We shall happily leave that to others. Instead we freely plead guilty of re-examining the past in order to learn from the past.

Clean break

In all probability a ‘demonstrative break’ with the TUC in May, June or July 1926 would have had no significant impact in Britain. The working class had already been defeated. The bureaucracy as a whole was moving rapidly to the right. So much so, indeed, that in 1927 the ‘official’ lefts were joining the anti-communist witch-hunt. In such a climate of reaction the TUC had no compunction in taking the initiative to dissolve the Anglo-Russian Committee. If Soviet unions had pre-empted them, it would probably not have caused a political earthquake. A judgement, obviously. But only those whose hearts are ruling their heads could seriously imagine that a ‘demonstrative break’ would have resulted in masses of workers leaving behind reformist illusions and coming over to communism.

The advanced stratum of the working class can learn through theory, polemics and factional struggles. Communists such as JT Murphy clearly needed teaching a lesson or two when it came to exposing the ‘official’ lefts. Holding back from using frank language out of fear of upsetting, offending, alienating important allies is, yes, to “commit political and moral suicide”.

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

Those who think broken promises, unemployment, poverty and wage cuts are almost to be welcomed, because they cause disenchantment with existing leaders, ideas and institutions, forget just how overarching, how dominant bourgeois ideology is. So there needs to be more than negativity. The working class must be positively convinced that communists speak for them and should therefore be heeded, trusted and actively supported. Without that, disenchantment resolves into passivity, bewilderment, resentment … even large numbers angrily embracing overtly reactionary conclusions.

In denial

Rajani Palme Dutt, the CPGB’s main thinker, gave events a vastly overoptimistic spin. Immediately after the defeat of 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”. Not that the masses were defeated. What had been defeated was “the old leadership”, along with its trade unionism, reformism, pacifism and parliamentarianism. Palme Dutt’s judgement was that “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”.⁹ 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 collapse of the General Strike was not the “final collapse” of the “methods of the old trade union economic struggle”. Nor were the workers now face to face with the “legal and armed forces of the state”.¹⁰ Indeed capitalism’s defensive barriers against discontent below had been strengthened, not weakened.

It might have been a 162 million strike-day 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 defying, frustrating and challenging them since 1910 and the beginning of the Great Unrest. David Torrence says trade union power was viewed as “a boil that needed lancing” by the “British public”.¹¹ Obviously untrue, unless one equates systematically manufactured Tory popular opinion with the “British public”. No, it was our rulers who viewed trade union power as “a boil that needed lancing”.

Anyway, as can be seen from table 1, the defeat of the General Strike saw class combativity sent reeling, not taken to a new, higher stage, as Palme Dutt gallantly hoped. The number of strike days crashed through the floor and trade union membership was further driven down in an orgy of sackings.

Table 1

Strike statistics

Employers refused to take back ‘commies’, ‘militants’ and ‘trouble makers’. They imposed all sorts of onerous terms and conditions. In November 1926 George Spencer led a section of the Notts miners in a breakaway from the Miners Federation of Great Britain. The government introduced the Trades Disputes and Trade Unions Act in January 1927, which made all sympathy strikes, mass picketing and “intimidation” illegal. Civil service unions were banned from affiliating to the TUC too. In other words, there was a shift in the balance of class forces, as seen with April 14 1921 (Black Friday) … only more so.

Instead of ‘backs against the wall’ resistance, the TUC and Labour Party added fuel to the reactionary fire. Crawling on their bellies before the class enemy, they became red-baiting advocates of Mondism, industrial peace and national efficiency.¹² Scabs betray and always find themselves betrayed: having served its purpose, the TUC ‘official’ lefts were themselves ousted by an ungrateful right and consigned to a neither power nor glory purgatory.

Of course, British imperialism was still suffering relative decline. Though 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 May 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 1918.¹³ In point of fact, from 1931 the pound was losing its status as a master currency.¹⁴

Nevertheless, there was another side to decline - an ability to manage it. Though losing ground to its rivals, British imperialism successfully escaped war with Germany till 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 Trotsky had predicted in the many ways magisterial Where is Britain going? was fought out, but in alliance against Germany).¹⁵ Then there was the division of Ireland. Britain kept this most troublesome country quiet for nearly 50 years. Above all, containment of the Soviet Union worked. Sanctioned, sealed in by a cordon sanitaire, subjected to repeated war threats, during the 1930s the world revolutionary centre began eating its own children in a repeated series of bloody purges and meanwhile seeking a permanent coexistence with capitalism.

Domesticating

So, without pressing overseas distractions, Britain’s ruling class had a comparatively easy time domesticating the TUC. But there was more to it than that. Not least because it still held the world’s largest empire, Britain could temper its frontal assault on the working class at home. It could, while shifting the balance of class forces, strengthen the political role of the labour bureaucracy¹⁶ 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).

From within the Tory establishment, even before the General Strike had met its final dénouement, Robert Cecil, Leo Amery and Lord Percy were warning against further reductions in living standards imposed on vulnerable sections of the working class. With the ending of the strike the PM, Stanley Baldwin, promised that there would be no general cut in wages and even Winston 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 standing and fear of revolution.¹⁷ As it turned out, those who bore the main burden of the reorganisation of capital in Britain, those who suffered poverty and degradation, as it is today, were primarily not those in full-time employment: rather it was the unemployed, casual and home workers and those subject to imperial exploitation.

Table 2

Index of average real wages

Under these hugely unfavourable conditions the CPGB found itself dangerously isolated from employed workers. Membership fell away in droves. What remained became increasingly based on students, housewives and above all the unemployed, who, unlike many of their employed brothers and sisters, maintained an organised opposition to capitalism and a readiness to fight.

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

False diagnosis

The limitations of the CPGB in 1926, the loss of membership till the early 1930s and the ideological flip from ‘social fascism’ to ‘popular fronts’ do not in the least prove the thesis of the left academics, James Hinton and Richard Hyman, that the “basic weakness” of the CPGB in the 1920s lay in its failure to understand that “objective conditions” in Britain made it “impossible” to build a mass Communist Party.¹⁸ A thesis which, of course, is unconsciously (one presumes) repeated nowadays by all manner of so-called ‘Marxists’. Which is why Hinton and Hyman are still worth discussing (incidentally, they inhabited the Cliffite milieu in the early 1970s, Hyman being a member of the International Socialists from 1964-76).

Citing Lenin’s What is to be done?, Hinton and Hyman claim that Britain in the 1920s was more like Russia 1902 than Russia 1905 or 1917. “This was not the time to build a mass revolutionary party,” they say.¹⁹ Instead what should have been fought for in the 1920s was a “cadre party placing primary emphasis on the quality rather than the quantity of its membership”. In “such unfavourable circumstances” as the defeat of the General Strike this “less ambitious” strategy would, they maintain, have sustained “the British revolutionary tradition”.²⁰ Presumably, the CPGB would not have succumbed to the empty leftism of the late 1920s, let alone the popular frontism of the 1930s.

That is conceivably true. A sect would be quite content with regurgitating its immutable truths and initiating the chosen ones and twos into the mysteries for the next hundred years and more (think of the Socialist Party of Great Britain). But is the “British revolutionary tradition” before the formation of the CPGB anything to aspire to? Hardly. After all, we are not talking about the Chartists here: rather groups such as the Socialist League, the Socialist Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation, and mercurial individuals such as Henry Hyndman, Sylvia Pankhurst and John McLean.

Let us revisit Lenin’s answers to the question he poses in the title of What is to be done? They are certainly not the ones put forward by Hinton and Hyman. The key points of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet are as follows.²¹

Firstly, the importance of theory and a ruthless struggle against economism, and by extension revisionism, specifically in Russia those grouped around Rabocheye Dyelo, Credo and Rabochaya Mysl. Those who wanted to leave high politics to the liberal bourgeoisie and limit the working class to trade unionism should not be allowed to hide their opportunism under the guise of ‘freedom of criticism’. Marxism is not out of date, as they maintained: rather it is the scientific - ie, rational - theory of working class self-liberation. The foundation and massive growth of European social democracy, above all in Germany, being cited as living proof.

Secondly, the need to understand the limitations of spontaneity. Lenin was insistent that the theory of working class self-liberation comes from outside the economic sphere of employees versus employer (an orthodoxy he took directly from Karl Kaustsky and his 1892 booklet The class struggle). The task of communists was not to rely on trade union struggles step by step taking the working class to full political maturity. No, communists base themselves on the most advanced theory and thereby can provide a fully rounded programme, which, if grasped by the mass of workers, enables them to become the champion of all oppressed classes, the revolutionary vanguard against tsarism and a future ruling class.

Thirdly, Lenin repeated his plan outlined in 1901 in Where to begin for the organisation of communists. There had be to an end to “primitiveness”, by which he meant local groups of political activists doing what they could by way of agitation and propaganda. Nowadays we are still cursed with similar groups, which sometimes manage to huddle themselves together in this or that loose national network. Indeed this is the normal form taken by the ‘anti-sectarian’ left and is, of course, collectively incapable of rising above campaignism, trade unionism and sectionalism. Programmes and drawing sharp lines of political demarcation are either contemptuously dismissed or consigned to an endlessly delayed future. In Russia that did not just mean being politically ineffective: it meant arrest, prison sentences and Siberian exile. Against the tsarist secret police, the okhrana, the local groups did not stand a chance. Their average life expectancy was measured in months, sometimes just weeks, before discovery.

Fourthly, to create a real party it was necessary to lay the programmatic foundations and then build it through the girders provided by an illegal paper. Published and directed from abroad, this paper would conduct polemical war, equip workers with a systematic world view and organise day-to-day revolutionary activity. From the writing, editing, production and distribution of the paper, from the fund-raising, reporting and readership, would arise the outline, the basic structures, of the party. Inevitably, given the specific conditions of tsarist Russia, that posed not open-door recruitment, bottom-up elections and operating in full public view. No, members would have to be carefully vetted, trusted local secretaries appointed from above and the whole underground party apparatus staffed by professional revolutionaries (or revolutionaries by trade, if you prefer). In other words, a party that was as close as possible programmatically, organisationally and culturally to the model provided by the Social Democratic Party in Germany that objective conditions in Russia allowed.

Yet we know, when conditions changed in 1905, Lenin was quick to urge - indeed demand - the opening up of the party to the worker masses. By 1907 the Bolshevik wing alone numbered some 45,000 members. This transformation, as repeatedly argued, in no way entailed an abandonment of What is to be done? Ruthless polemical struggle continued, there was no tailing of spontaneity. What of the organisation of the party? Changed conditions required the combination of illegal activity with open activity, a legal press and bottom-up elections. For Lenin there was no principle involved here. After all, the only ‘principle’ concerning party organisation is that there are no timeless principles, no fixed set of commandments, no dogma. The party is a tool to make revolution. It exists, not for itself, but to organise the great mass of workers in their struggle to achieve self-liberation. Therefore everything about the party’s organisation must be flexible, ready to deal with new dangers and new possibilities.

If we approach Hinton and Hyman and their ‘cadre’ party in this light, we can see it is a recipe for sectarian posturing, sterility and failure. The reason for Lenin’s ‘cadre’ party was dictated not by fear of the working class masses, but objective conditions of Asiatic despotism and absence of open opportunities.

How do conditions stand on that score in mid-1920s Britain (or mid-2020s Britain for that matter)? We operate in conditions of relative freedom. Communists can freely publish books, pamphlets and papers, with only the occasional problem from the police. We can put forward candidates for parliament and local councils. We can work in the trade unions without facing bans and proscriptions, though not the Labour Party (or, nowadays, Your Party). We can sell our literature door to door, at work or on the streets.

That is not to forget the numerous prison sentences meted out to our comrades in 1926, the banning of the Daily Worker at the beginning of World War II or the constant stream of anti-communist disinformation that comes from every orifice and pore of bourgeois society. Nevertheless for our purposes here, Britain was and is just like Russia in 1905. Not that there is a revolutionary situation. Obviously not. But there is relative freedom for communists to openly organise, agitate and educate (freedoms won by the previous generations, not granted by the state).

Anyway, that means we face very different “objective conditions” to Russia 1902. The precondition for communist organisation is not an illegal paper, conspiracy, forged passports, ciphers and secret readers’ groups. As for the idea of aiming for a small, high-quality party, that is, in fact, to flatter, glorify, be satisfied with the low-quality confessional sects whose only worth lies in maintaining their particular revolutionary tradition.

Fundamentally, the high quality of communists comes not from their ability to slavishly mouth the barren mantras of this or that confessional sect. No, it comes from putting the Marxist programme into practice by leading millions of workers in economic, political and revolutionary struggles. Our aim is, and can only but be, a mass Communist Party.

1. It is worth reminding readers about the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. It was formed in April 1925 at the initiative of the left-moving TUC. This fitted in with the broad drive by Comintern to secure trade union unity and undermine the Amsterdam Trade Union International. The committee’s aim was to “promote cooperation between the British TUC General Council and the All-Russian Trade Union Committee in every way”. It was greeted with a furore by the British capitalist press.↩︎

2. T Cliff, D Gluckstein Marxism and trade union struggle London 1986, pp125-26. However, what they write is in this respect no different from the whole Trotskyite spectrum. Eg, M Woodhouse and B Pearce Essays on the history of communism in Britain (1975); P Taaffe 1926 General Strike: workers taste power (2006); C Kimber and J Cox Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: when workers were ready to dare (2026).↩︎

3. Remember, this from an organisation which prides itself on founding the popular frontist Anti-Nazi League and Stand Up to Racism, establishing Respect alongside George Galloway, the Muslim Association of Britain and various British-Asian businessmen and which today stands candidates as independents on the most minimal platforms. Put another way, the SWP is far to the right of the 1926 CPGB.↩︎

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

5. Ibid.↩︎

6. JV Stalin Works Vol 8, Moscow 1954, p207.↩︎

7. Ibid p208.↩︎

8. Ibid p197.↩︎

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

10. Ibid p32.↩︎

11. D Torrence The edge of revolution: the General Strike that shook Britain London 2026, p320.↩︎

12. 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.↩︎

13. See S Strange Sterling and British policy: a political study of an international currency in decline Oxford 1971.↩︎

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

15. See L Trotsky Writings on Britain Vol 2, London 1974, pp5, 9.↩︎

16. 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: a study of full time officers, branch secretaries and shop stewards in British trade unions London 1961, p38).↩︎

17. 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).↩︎

18. J Hinton and R Hyman Trade unions and revolution London 1975, pp50-51.↩︎

19. Ibid p51.↩︎

20. Ibid p73.↩︎

21. See VI Lenin CW Vol 5, Moscow 1977, pp347-528.↩︎