General strike

What do you, of course, what do you have for me this week, Richie?

I'm going to talk about the general strike that the date has been revealed.

So I'll tell you all about that.

Also the Palmer water taxi has had the go, well, it's the go ahead has been given already, but a couple of changes to it, but it is going to be, I'll give you the date that that's going to start as well, which could be quite interesting, I think.

Okay.

Well, Britain's traveling to Spain.

I emphasize the word Spain, not just the Balearics, because this is going to be a general strike on November the 11th.

Britain's traveling to or anybody traveling to Spain on that particular day should be braced for travel disruption as a result of the general strike.

W- A radical labor movement, I still think there's a room for that to be something that can be very, very important in creating a better world.

So is this, uh, Tom Morello officially coming out in favor of the 2028 general strike?

[laughs] Of c- I'm coming out in favor? Please.

[laughs]

How about the 2026 general strike?

[laughs]

The 2027 general strike.

The tomorrow afternoon general strike.

End of speech.

The General Strike, 1926.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

I do not think his record on the subject entitles him to censure and criticise the government.

What is the right honourable gentleman doing today? He is criticising us for not making a further prolongation of the subsidy.

He has criticised us for not doing that at a time when a general strike is actually about to take place in the country.

What did my honourable friend say nine months ago in July last? I have no quarrel with the right honourable gentleman opposite on that point.

If anybody knows about Ruskin College, for example, in this country, that was set up as a...

There's, I think, maybe one line in the General Strike book that mentions Ruskin College and the role that it plays.

But I actually went into a real rabbit hole about that, um, and it was reduced to one line in the book.

But [laughs] there's, there's a lot that could be said.

That's what the Soviets were in Russia.

They were workers' councils that began administering society.

An example that maybe the comrades are more familiar with, um, [clears throat] given that we've been talking about the general strike, is, is the Councils of Action during the general strike in nineteen twenty-six.

Those Councils of Action began by just being strike-coordinating committees.

And Kurt Eisner, as you mentioned, was assassinated on February 21st.

There was another general strike in central Germany on February 24th in the town of Halle.

It was nearly total.

It spread to Saxony on the 25th, Leipzig on the 26th.

He's kidnapped and disappeared.

His body is only discovered weeks later on March 19th.

That general strike ends on March 7th.

Around this time, there's also a big movement in Berlin.

And each of these uprisings, remaining local, was followed by a terrible repression.

The general strike, declared at Moscow in January last, did not succeed.

The workingmen had suffered too much during the great general strike in October 1905, and the partial strikes which followed.

And when the provocations of the government compelled the Moscow workingmen to strike, the movement did not generalize.

Only a few factories on the Presnya and a few railroad lines joined it.

The Grand Trunk, Moscow to St. Petersburg, continued to work, and troops were brought on into Moscow.

as to the troops stationed at moscow itself they showed signs of deep discontent and probably would have sided with the people if the strike had been general and a crowd of three hundred thousand workingmen had flooded the streets as they did flood in october last but when they saw that the general strike had failed they obeyed their commanders and yet the week during which a handful of armed revolutionists less than two thousand and the workers on strike in the presnya fought against the artillery and the soldiers and when several miles of barricades were built by the crowd by the man and the boy in the street This week proved how wrong were all the fireside revolutionists when they proclaimed the impossibility of street warfare in a revolution.

As to the Lietz and the Estonians in the Baltic provinces, their uprising against their haughty and rapacious German landlords was a great movement.

For nine days in May 1926, a general strike brought the UK to a standstill in what still remains the nation's largest ever work stoppage.

Among the participants in this moment of bitter class conflict were many of Britain's authors, whether in support of the strike or against it.

The result was that the general strike left an indelible, though often forgotten, mark on the literary production of at least the next decade.

This is Working Class Literature.

Oh you men of tiny pandy who dig the veins of coal, with me little pick and shovel I'll be there.

On board and on shore, and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos.

Discover more at viking.com.

With this being the centenary year of the 1926 general strike in the UK, we've recently produced a three-part series on the dispute, which saw one and three-quarter million workers walk out in solidarity with a million miners who had been locked out by their employers.