CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Past is Present: History is Organizing With Us Now

General Strike Commemoration march. Photo by Stanley Flanders Arlidge.

The workers who built Britain’s warplanes in 1976 had a problem. Their factory was about to close. Instead of conceding to a “downsizing”, they did something radical: they drew up a plan. Not a grievance or a strike notice, a plan; 150 products their hands and minds could make instead of fighter jets: solar panels, kidney dialysis machines, vehicles for people with disabilities, electric buses. “Socially useful work”, they called it. It became known as the Lucas Plan.

Nobody in power listened — with one significant exception. Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary in the Labour government, didn’t just listen. He was the one who issued the challenge: if closure is coming, what’s your alternative? He gave the workers the prompt that produced the plan and then watched as the Treasury, the corporate interests threaded through a nominally Labour cabinet and the institutional gravity of government itself, overrode him. The plan was shelved. Many of the workers were eventually let go. Benn spent the rest of his long political life (one of the longest-serving figures in British history), radicalized in part by exactly that experience: being in the room, having power on paper, and losing anyway.

And yet, fifty years later, people are still talking about the Lucas Plan. They’re still teaching it, still asking: what if?

This weekend offers a striking convergence. The Lucas Plan turns 50. The British General Strike of 1926 turns 100. And yesterday — May Day, 2026 — I stood in the sun, amidst Palestinian flags, and yes, even a hammer-and-sickle flag, and........

© CounterPunch