For the third time in a decade, the British left has found its saviour. First it was Corbyn. Then it was Corbyn again. Now it's Zack. He's got a rent control policy and a TikTok strategy!

The lefties have a new golden boy. Flanked by articulate mancunian plumber Hannah Spencer, Zack Polanski’s Greens have, within a very short time of his leadership election, gained control of 5 more councils, won a by-election and increased their membership to over 200,000. In some polls, the Greens have even overtaken Labour. Polanski is media-savvy, combative, and willing to argue back against reform. He talks about cost-of-living issues and relates this to inequality and climate change. The Greens now seem like a serious political force, capable of taking a significant number of seats in the next general election from the Labour and Reform voter base, rather than being seen by most of the country as hopeless middle-class tofu-eating do-gooders.

This song sounds familiar. Que the slow chant of “oooohhhh jjjeerremmmy Cccooorrrbbbyyynnn” to the theme of the white stripes seven nation army at every single music festival in 2017. But as we know, instead of the People's Republic of Islington North taking power, we had Keir Starmer cancelling the £28 billion green investment pledge, cutting benefits for disabled people, selling weapons for the Israelis to carry out genocide, and a resurgent far-right street movement which threatens, via Reform, to take power. But don’t worry, because this time it's different, this time, Zack Polanski is going to sort everything out.

The State Is Not Neutral

Green Party politics, like Corbynism before it, has to pretend something that just isn’t true. That the state is a neutral instrument, that different political persuasions can pick and use as they would like. But this isn’t how the state works- its primary structural function is to maintain order for capitalism to continue to work. This matters for Polanski's greens because the institution he is trying to capture was not built for the purposes he wants to use it for, and will actively resist those purposes. What would have happened if Corbyn had actually won in 2017? In the weeks and months following a Corbyn government, in all likelihood, the pound would have tanked. This is because capital is mobile and answers to no electorate, and most importantly, knows how to send a message. The press would have gone into full overdrive, and the Bank of England Treasury would be in Corbyn's office, telling him exactly what the European Central Bank had told Alexis Tsipras and Syriza in 2015: moderate, or the money doesn’t work. And moderating means changing nothing; just like Syriza, who went on to enforce even more austerity, or Mitterand's government in France in 1981, which lasted 2 years before doing a complete U-turn.

Maybe Corbyn might have succeeded in passing some radical policies, not by getting his image right or managing the press better, but by having an organised movement outside of parliament capable of pushing his program through. For instance, unions ready to strike against the inevitable capital flight. Workers prepared to occupy workplaces to prevent closure. A street movement that would be ready to riot and control areas, making backing down more dangerous than pressing ahead- parliament being a ratification of something that was already happening in workplaces and the streets, rather than the thing itself.

This is what happened during Allende's socialist government in Chile: in response to factory owners leaving with all the investment, workers took over the factories and kept the government alive. Ultimately, a pact between the ITT Corporation, the CIA and Chile's military bombed the presidential palace, killed Allende, overthrew his government, and installed a fascist Junta. During Corbyn's time, a serving general reportedly said that the army would “take direct action” if Corbyn became prime minister, and MI5 ran files on Corbyn for decades. To see how this scenario might play out, it's worth watching the Channel 4 series “A Very British Coup”, in which a left-wing Labour leader is brought down by a coalition of MI5, newspaper magnates and the civil service. Whilst it's a work of fiction, the events it shows are very believable if you know the British state.

Feeling Green

But back to the Greens. The Green's program is all very nice. It proposes a windfall tax, green investment, and retrofitted homes. A slower ecological collapse, a nicer austerity, a softer police baton. It doesn’t even get to the starting line of what is needed. The scale of the transformation necessary to overcome ecological collapse is colossal. It means a total reorganisation of work, care and everyday life. It probably means everybody is only doing 10-15 hours of work a week, and turning all the office blocks into community launderettes, communal kitchens, vertical gardens and housing. It means abolishing the growth imperative and ending an economic system that requires infinite growth on a finite planet. In short, it means replacing capitalism with something else entirely. In contrast, implicit in every green policy document is roughly the same people as now, but with better institutions and stronger regulations, even if many Greens might say they want a completely different system. And all this implies that the British ruling class and state would even let this more wholesome, nicer version of capitalism happen, which is debatable. Polanski promises change while leaving the system itself untouched, asking us to trust elections and reforms, constantly deferring into the future the thing that would actually change things for the better: working-class power and social revolution. The longer we think we can change things by supporting one element of the state against another, the longer nothing will change. The only time we win anything is when we fight for it ourselves.

The NHS didn’t come about primarily because of the ‘radical’ Labour government. It came about because a large number of military personnel returned from the war and began occupying old army barracks for housing, and the ruling class had to choose between granting some concessions to the working class or facing revolution. Whilst Attlee signed the legislation, he was downstream of the forces that made his policies possible.

The system rewards what is containable and marginalises what isn’t. If you give people a charismatic candidate to canvas for, they’ll spend less time building the thing that could actually make a radical government possible. Working-class power and neighbourhood power. Making the working class so powerful that any government, whatever their political stripe, has to listen to us, and there are consequences if they don’t. Of course, movements are ecologies. So by all means, vote Green: reformists and revolutionaries do not need to be enemies. But we need to be honest about what electoral politics can and can’t do. A Reform, Labour or Conservative government would certainly be worse in many ways. The threat of a Nigel Farage premiership is very real. But don’t think that voting for the Green Party is the silver bullet to save us.

Sian is an anarchist-communist from the south-west.

One hundred years ago, two million workers joined Britain's largest-ever general strike. They faced up not just to their bosses and the government, but also their own union leaders. For over two weeks, this momentous event shook the very core of Britain.

The Origins of the General Strike

In 1817, William Benbow, a self-educated shoemaker, was released from prison after participating in a failed insurrection. He looked to formulate a new revolutionary strategy, which he called the "Grand National Holiday".

He toured the country for years promoting his idea. Then, in 1842, Staffordshire miners initiated a strike. They demanded not just better pay, but also political representation. Eventually, 500,000 workers across the country would join them, before it was crushed through a combination of military repression and lowered food prices. The first General Strike on earth had been defeated.

Following this defeat, craft unions that excluded unskilled workers dominated. Rather than fighting their bosses, they often tried to work with them. They built large financial reserves, and soon trade unions were more likely to be led by top-hatted officials in London than Staffordshire miners. A new organisation for these bureaucrats to coordinate with each other was formed: the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

The Triple Alliance

Unskilled workers continued to be pushed by their bosses to work faster, longer, and harder for less money. In the summer of 1888, unwilling to take it anymore, they erupted. Women working at the Bryant and May factory walked out against deadly conditions. They won, and were quickly succeeded by tram drivers, gas stokers, and dockers.

New general unions were formed, and over the next decade, union membership increased from 750,000 to 2 million. Whilst many top-hatted union officials remained, the rank-and-file of workers at the bottom countered them, organising unofficial strikes when their union leaders refused to endorse action.

They also agitated for a “Triple Alliance”: an agreement among the industrial unions to strike in support of one another. The union leaders, wanting to put their members back under their control, eventually formed such an alliance. Secretly, however, they hoped that its threat alone would prevent them from actually needing to follow through.

Black and Red Friday

In 1921, the mine owners announced pay cuts to offset declining profits. Miners called on the Triple Alliance for help; however, on 15th April, the unions announced they would not call a strike in support of them. Deemed “Black Friday”, the miners were eventually forced to accept the cuts.

By 1925, mine owners, with the government's support, again proposed further cuts to miners’ wages. However, this time, the TUC, under pressure from its rank-and-file, remained steadfast in its decision to call out its members for a general strike against this. The government backed off and agreed to subsidise miners' wages for nine months. Workers celebrated, proclaiming it “Red Friday”. But for this government, this was no defeat: they were simply buying time.

The 1926 General Strike Begins

The government spent the next year drafting a series of plans to deploy the military, police, and middle-class volunteers to break any future general strike. On the other side, union leaders did little. In fact, they were keen to avoid such a dispute altogether.

With the miners' subsidies soon to run out, the TUC began negotiations again with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. They begged for any sort of compromise. But this time the government was convinced to see their position through. The miners’ subsidies ended, and, refusing to work for lower wages, they were locked out of their pits.

Yet the TUC still refused to call a General Strike. Then, on 3rd May 1926, rank-and-file printworkers at The Daily Mail pulled the trigger. They refused to print an anti-union front page, and Baldwin cut off negotiations with the TUC, calling it an attack on free speech. The TUC was left with no option. The General Strike was finally on.

Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day!

The TUC only called out certain industries to join the miners: railways, docks, printshops, drivers, and iron and steelworks. However, many workers in industries not officially called out by the TUC still walked out on that first day. They mobilised under the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day!”

The government, however, also moved into action. They put into action a shadow structure of special constables and middle-class “volunteers” to break the strike. This was led by a secret government body called the "Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies", led by a group of admirals and aristocrats that incorporated entire bodies of organised fascists into itself.

Mass pickets managed to stop many of these “volunteers” from breaking the strike. In the docks, navy ships were used to transport middle-class scabs under the cover of nightfall. They worked under siege conditions, unable to leave the docks due to the pickets, sleeping on the destroyers brought in to guard them. Many, however, were useless: lacking practical experience, their incompetence often damaged the very machines they were meant to be working with.

Both the government and the TUC produced competing daily bulletins, respectively the “British Gazette” and the “British Worker”. Local “Councils of Action” also produced their own bulletins, usually far more radical in content than the TUC’s. Workers in the Surrey Docks had another method in the propaganda war: they took copies of the British Gazette to their pickets and used them for their bonfires.

Not Just Nine Days in May

On 8th May, the government landed its first major blow. The military was sent into the East London docks, and a hundred lorries, each loaded with flour and their own soldier: for the first time breaking the strikers’ blockade. Chaos ensued. On its journey across London, the working-class masses tried to get onto the road to block the convoy, but were violently beaten back by large numbers of police.

Spirits, although perhaps dampened, were not broken. Miners in Northumberland, two days later, tried to derail a scab cargo train, instead accidentally derailing the Flying Scotsman (although no-one was seriously hurt). Meanwhile, many of the TUC leadership were becoming increasingly anxious that the dispute would not be resolved quickly, and would soon get out of their hands.

Then, they found their opportunity. The seamen’s union - whose leader vehemently opposed the General Strike - had taken to the High Court members who had joined the strike. The court declared it illegal not just for the seamen to join the strike, but all non-mining unions. The TUC sent telegrams calling off the strike. Many strikers celebrated, believing this meant they had won, only to learn that no deal had been negotiated.

However, the next day, pickets continued. In fact, 100,000 more workers were on strike than the day before. Enthused by solidarity with the miners and by the betrayal of their leaders, who had called off the strike without any guarantee they would not be victimised, they carried on for many more days.

However, without a coordinated rank-and-file leadership emerging in the place of the TUC, many became demoralised. Local strikers managed to cut deals with their employers and return to work. The miners were again left to fight alone. Although putting up a fierce fight, they were starved back to work many months after. Unemployment rose, and trade union membership fell. Britain’s last General Strike - yet - was defeated.

Matthew Lee & Callum Cant are both union reps and editors of Notes from Below, a journal of worker-writing. They are co-authors of the upcoming book The Future In Our Past: The General Strike 1926/2026.