In Britain we have had, to my counting, three “General Strike moments”. The 1842 Chartist “Plug Plot Riots“, the nine day general strike in 1926 and the threatened general strike in 1972 over the Pentonville Dockers. We’ll discuss those later.
Way back in 1832 a man named William Benbow wrote a pamphlet The Grand National Holiday and the Productive Classes which is, probably, the first time someone had advanced a theory of the general strike and its place in gaining a better society. Not for the first or last time Benbow’s activities got him slung in jail for sedition.
A revolutionary socialist, preacher and coffee shop owner he began his pamphlet with the words;
“LIFE, when good for any thing, consists of ease, gaiety, pleasure, and consequently of happiness. All men enjoy life but do not enjoy it equally. The enjoyment of some is so very limited, that it does not deserve the name of enjoyment; that of others is without bounds, for they have the means of procuring fully ease, gaiety, and pleasure. Thus happiness is circumscribed, and is becoming every day more and more so, that is, the numbers who are deprived of it are hourly increasing. Now, who are they who do enjoy; does their enjoyment proceed from their own merits; are they laborious,-do they work for the happiness they possess? We shall see. Let nothing but truth, glaring stark-naked truth, be stated.”
The rich (or the one in 499 as Benbow calls them, which is very reminiscent of the “we are the 99%” Occupy slogan) are described in flowery terms;
“They exist on disease and blood: crime and infamy are the breath of their nostrils. The 499 bleed for them, die of disease for them; by hard and cruel treatment they are hurried into crime and infamy, if crime and infamy can justly be imputed to beings who make an occasional effort to obtain a portion of the heaps they produce… lords and masters; and they are, without impunity, the possessors of all power, pomp, greatness, wealth, vanity, lewdness, beastiality, cruelty:- they are a living catalogue of all the vices and crimes that human nature has been forced to be the source of. “
The poor? They produce everything but enjoy nothing, not even bestiality;
“The existence of the working man is a negative. He is alive to production, misery, and slavery- dead to enjoyment and happiness. He produces and is miserable: others enjoy and are happy. The people then, since we call the mass the people, are the drudges of society ; they do every thing and enjoy nothing. The people are nothing for themselves, and everything for the few.”
The solution? A “unity in thought and action”. Don’t let anyone tell you that Marxists invented the idea of Praxis. He thought only fools would rely on someone else to do for them “what they should do for themselves.” Well, “To expect aid from Tories, Whigs, Liberals – to expect aid from the middling classes, or from any other class than those who suffer, (from the working classes), is sheer madness!… To expect good at their hands, to hope that they will break one link of the chain with which they bind us, to dream that they will ever look with pity upon us, is the vainest of all dreams. ”
So, the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class you say? However, do not despair oh liberal middle classes, you do have a role to play;
“Let us reflect upon it. MR. COKE, of Norfolk, is a very rich man, and a very liberal man. Now we ask, what does a liberal man amass wealth for, if not in order to be able to support liberal principles. MR. COKE’S heart will beat with joy when he finds such an occasion for his liberality, as we are going to give him. We see him already ringing for his check-book, and ordering droves of his oxen, and waggon-loads of his wheat to be sent to us holiday folks. “
This may of course be sarcasm of the highest order.
Benbow even laid out his idea of the relationship between the revolutionary visionaries and the working masses;
“We are the people, our business is with the people, and to transact it properly, we must take it into our own hands. The people are called upon to work for themselves! We lay down the plan of operation; we despair of all safety, we despair of liberty, we despair of equality, we despair of seeing ease, gaiety, pleasure, and happiness becoming the possessions of the people, unless they co-operate with us. We chalk down to them a plan; woe to them if they do not follow in its traces!”
The Grand National Holiday
So the rich have everything, the working classes nothing and we’re all agreed we can’t expect the liberal hand-wringers among our masters to give us something that we are not prepared to take for ourselves. So let’s use the fact that we are the producers to our advantage and… well… stop producing for a bit.
Like many on the left Benbow regarded the General Strike as both literally sacred and much more than simply a big strike. It was a festival of revolution, comparing it to ancient Hebrew customs so that “During the various festivals, no servile work was done, and servants and masters knew no distinction.” All debts would be forgiven, everyone bound in servitude would be set free and the land would be redistributed.
Less a withdrawal of labour and more a withdrawal of capitalism itself. It’s not much to ask after all is it? “We English must be in a pretty state, if in the midst of civilization and abundance, we cannot enjoy a month’s holiday, and cease from labour during the short space of four weeks!”
The Holiday would be the opportunity for a “congress of the working classes” where they could work out whether the rich were incompetent or evil, whether the land was being used in the best was for society as a whole and who were the landed gentry anyway? For Benbow the general strike implied democracy at its very core, both because it had to be organised in every area by ordinary working folk and because it was a challenge to the existing, wholly undemocratic society where less than 5% of the people could vote.
Getting it together
It’s not enough to call for a Grand National Holiday though – we have to prepare for it “Before a month’s holiday can take place, universal preparations must be made for it. It should not take place neither in seed-time nor in harvest-time. Every man must prepare for it, and assist his neighbour in preparing for it. The preparations must begin long before the time which shall be hereafter appointed, in order that every one may be ready, and that the festival be not partial but universal.”
He then goes on to describe in a fair amount of detail how the local committees shall function, which (named) lords and ladies shall give up their cattle and how “deputations” of an ever increasing size shall be sent to those who would not give up the spoils to “that grand-family; the human race”.
He ends with a theme that persists though-out the pamphlet, we have only ourselves to blame if we allow things to go on this way;
“We are too honest, too conscientious, too delicate, consequently the few who are neither honest, conscientious nor delicate dupe us. We must avoid all squeamishness; we are not only working for ourselves but for the human race and its posterity. We beg of the people to throw off all false delicacy. They must boldly lay hands upon that which is their own.”
Seven years after writing this pamphlet in 1839 the Chartists voted to take up the demand for a Grand National Holiday and the strike itself took place in 1842, mainly in the industrial north but with mass meetings and riots elsewhere. Dozens were arrested, Chartist leaders were jailed but then released, and the Holiday itself was part of a rising movement that bound economic and social justice together seeing them all as inherently democratic questions.
We don’t talk about William Benbow, or his brilliant, tempestuous pamphlet any more – but it would be the greatest of shames if it was forgotten.
Read more here about the Plug Plot Riots, or in other places, like books.