History isn’t a comfort blanket. It’s a human-made map, imperfect, incomplete, sometimes misleading. The terrain changes, but the questions the Lucas workers asked, and the General Strike raised aren’t historical curiosities. They’re questions now.
From the 1926 General Strike to Zohran Mamdani on May Day in New York: Why workers keep turning to history.
“In a time of crisis, when crimes against humanity are being committed, it is absolutely necessary for workers to go on strike. This is a moral obligation on all of us. It is also our system that is complicit in what Israel is doing.”
Forty years ago, shop workers in Britain developed the Lucas Plan to save jobs by converting arms manufacturing to industrial production. The struggle for economic conversion, and against the deskilling of work through computer-controlled technology remains relevant today in the search for solutions to the environmental crisis and the employment crisis.
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