Реферат: General Strike Of 1926 Essay Research Paper

over to these ideas marked the final stage in the containment of the challenge

of labour to the existing social order". Besides the impact of the General

Strike both historians also emphasised other factors for this shift, such as the

changing eco-nomic environment , but as Jacques suggested:

"Mass unemployment, structural chance and the rise in real wages do not

them-selves explain the politics and ideology of working-class movement during

the inter-war period. Nevertheless, they provide an essential explanation. For

they help to reveal what might be de-scribed as the objective basis of the shift

to the right on trade union movement".

Although mass unemployment influenced the Labour movement from the beginning

by forcing the workers on the defensive, undermining multi-sectional

consciousness and weakening sectional solidarity, it was not until the Gen-eral

Strike that it played a crucial role in determining the politics and ideology of

the trade union movement.

This notion of a watershed has been challenged by several other historians,

above all by G.A.Phillips. He suggested that the General Strike had "a

significant short-term effect upon union strength -measured primarily in terms

of membership and its distribution- but almost no lasting consequences. On

industrial tactics, and especially the use of the strike weapon, their impact

was rather to provide a further restraining influence where inhibiting factors

were already in evidence, than to initiate any change of conduct".

Furthermore he emphasised this the reinforced trend towards industrial peace was

happening anyway, as well as the long-established faith in a regulated system of

vol-untary collective bargaining. Thus he described the shift to the right of

the whole Labour movement and the isola-tion of the Marxist left more as a

further strengthening of already familiar principles than as a significant

watershed. Moreover, the strike itself and especially its failure was the result

of the structural development of the trade union movement along these familiar

principles -especially the ‘labourist’ one- over two generations. Altogether,