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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello, my name's David Rundserman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it's the return of our occasional series with the historian Robert Saunders in which we explore significant political anniversaries.

And this week is the 100th anniversary of Britain's

one and only general strike. It happened in May 1926. It's a totemic event in British history,

much mythologised, much misunderstood. We are going to be exploring what the dispute was really about and what was

really at stake.

Robert, I'd like to start with the idea of the general strike. And it is interesting that it

was at the time often the general strike,

not a general strike, capital G, capital S. It was a totemic idea. It was a singular idea.

And in early 20th century political thought, it was associated not just with Marxism,

but with that strand of Marxist thought called syndicalism. So I associate it, for instance,

with the French political theorist Georges Sorel, an eccentric syndicalist Marxist,

for whom the idea of the general strike, or as he called it, the myth of the general strike,

was the revolutionary concept. And he was a fairly blood-curdling political theorist. He wrote reflections on

violence. And the idea of the general strike for someone like him is that it was class war instantiated.

All the work has come out together and you force the issue. None of this revisionism, evolutionary

Marxism. You force labor and capital to the barricades, essentially.

...