This lecture was delivered by Socialist Equality Party (UK) National Secretary Chris Marsden to public meetings in Sheffield, Manchester, Inverness, London and Glasgow, marking the centenary of the 1926 general strike.
“Trotsky’s central argument then, and ours today, is that militant struggle alone, directed to pushing the bureaucratised workers’ organisations to the left, is a road to defeat. An independent, internationalist, socialist and revolutionary party must be built.”
WSWS reporters spoke to some of those attending the lecture series held by the Socialist Equality Party (UK) last month marking the centenary of the 1926 general strike.
Reports from SEP branches in London, Sheffield and Inverness are featured.
An SEP stall next to Glass Works Square, where the rally assembled, promoted the party's public meetings this month across the UK.
The Socialist Equality Party has produced a new pamphlet which examines the general strike through the Marxist perspective of Leon Trotsky, revealing how the potentially revolutionary struggle of the working class was betrayed by the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party, which it was unable to successfully combat because of the disastrous, opportunist policies of Stalin’s Communist International.
By analysing this historic defeat, this pamphlet provides essential lessons for today, emphasising that an independent, internationalist, and revolutionary socialist party must be built to lead the working class against the ongoing crimes of the ruling elite.
“The terrible impact of the betrayal of the general strike cannot be overstated. Trotsky had argued that the very survival of British imperialism now rested not on the right-wing social democrats, but on the supposed lefts, without whom the right wing could not maintain its position in the labour movement.”
“Trotsky saw his political tasks as two-fold: To refute the position that capitalism had entered a prolonged period of stabilisation, with no prospect of a revolutionary development. And to oppose the right-centrist adaptation to social democracy, the trade union apparatuses and the colonial bourgeoisie.”
“Significantly, the sole figure in the text who strikes a discordant note, whose ideas are ‘wilder’ and cannot be reconciled with the defeatist framework of the book, is Leon Trotsky.
“The following review will answer Nine Days in May’s attacks on Trotsky, largely in his own words, and in doing so make clear that these writings are the working class’s indispensable guide to this critical historical experience.”
This speech was delivered by Thomas Scripps, Socialist Equality Party (UK) assistant national secretary, at the 2026 May Day Online Rally, organized by the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International:
“This historic struggle—whose immediate cause was the question of who would decide the fate of Britain’s mining industry: the workers or the capitalists—posed a direct and revolutionary threat to the capitalist state at the heart of the largest empire the world had ever seen...”
