KEIR STARMER took office a century after the formation of the first Labour government.

He now pleads for a political future a century after the end of the 1926 General Strike.

Labour may be dying as a political project. Its huge majority in the Commons does not preclude that: the biggest majority the Liberal Party ever won, in 1906, was also its last.

The crisis gripping Labour is down to betrayal: its seizure by the Labour Together faction, the war against its own members, subservience to the “filthy rich.”

But it is also down to a wider crisis of working-class representation, of the size and power of the trade union movement.

The centenary of the General Strike matters because the 1920s were a formative decade. Parameters were set which have endured ever since.

Tony Blair described Labour as “not a very successful project,” because of its relatively few years in office compared to the Conservatives. New Labour’s declared mission was to “heal the Lib-Lab split” of the early 20th century: the emergence of an independent working-class party was a problem, depriving it of respectability and corporate backing.

But socialists can also conclude that Labour was “not a very successful project,” not that Labour governments have not been responsible for significant progress, but because Labour — the creation of the unions — has never delivered working-class power.

The General Strike of 1926 cannot be taken in isolation from the titanic struggles between labour and capital from 1919 on.

The role of revolutionaries, of communists, in these struggles was central. It was partly to split the “moderate” trade unionists from the militants that Liberals and Tories acquiesced in the formation of the first, minority Labour government. And it was because Labour backbenchers stopped that government from prosecuting JR Campbell, then editor of the Workers Weekly and later an editor of its successor the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) for an article calling on soldiers not to shoot striking workers, that the Tories and Liberals collapsed it.

Labour was not yet a “safe pair of hands.” Its first prime minister Ramsay MacDonald was, as he later showed. But its rank and file could not be relied upon to put ruling-class interests above those of their fellow workers. That dynamic has driven business and media hostility to Labour ever since.

The communist-led Minority Movement built the militancy so evident in the nine-day General Strike, and the government’s arrest of the entire Communist Party leadership ahead of it showed how feared it was. The communists organised the Councils of Action that took over supply in parts of the country during the strike, whose very success panicked right-wing union leaders into capitulation.

The tragedy of the 1920s was not the Lib-Lab divide, but the ruling-class effort to drive a wedge between revolutionary socialism and organised labour’s political voice.

It was not wholly successful: communists and revolutionaries have often been influential players in unions since, and their greatest influence has coincided with organised labour’s strongest advances, as in the 1970s.

But the 1920s ended early hopes of a federal Labour structure including communists. They saw it evolve into a party under fairly consistent pro-capitalist leadership, if one whose base and members have often been socialists. They saw — through forgeries like the Zinoviev Letter — the start of the long demonisation of communists as dupes or agents of foreign powers, undermining the politics of class.

The fate of the Labour Party is not clear, though its need to eject Starmer is.

But there is no road to socialism without rebuilding class politics — and for that we need a revival of militant, socialist trade unionism that rejects the false loyalties forced on us by our rulers and their institutions, from the monarchy to Nato and the EU. Reconciliation with the system has been our undoing for 100 years.