The Past is Present: History is Organizing With Us Now

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 watched New York City’s Democratic Socialist mayor, take the stage in Washington Square Park and lead the crowd in a chant of “labor strong”. Behind him, clear to see and understand, the words “No War. No ICE. No Billionaires.” In so doing, Mayor Zohran Mamdani became the first sitting mayor of New York City to address a May Day rally since Fiorello LaGuardia, a man he, again, tipped his rhetorical hat to.

Let that land for a moment. LaGuardia. The 1930s. Nearly a century.

As it happens, also in Washington Square, standing smiling at Mamdani yesterday, was historian Peter Linebaugh, the author of, among other classics, “The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day.”

Later, over dinner, he posed the question to the assembled potluck crowd: what does it mean that we are here again? Sitting, and crowding around, listening in, were some of the people he was alluding to — media makers, labor organizers, criminal justice reformers, artists, and educators. People organizing across sectors that the old playbooks said were unorganizable; people who those same playbooks told us rarely share a room, let alone a meal together.

Why does it matter that they, that we, (that I) keep looking back? Because, as Linebaugh teaches, the past keeps showing up, whether or not we invite it.

Capital’s memory is long. The playbook used to crush the 1926 General Strike — divide workers by sector, by race, and gender, and nation, to de-legitimize solidarity; to use media to frame strikers as threats to the public — is recognizable. It has only ever been updated, not retired. Union-busting consultants charge hundreds of dollars an hour to deploy strategies with century-old roots. The names change. The logic doesn’t.

So workers with long memories aren’t being nostalgic. They’re being strategic.

The Lucas workers didn’t just want to keep their jobs. They wanted to ask a question that cuts to the heart of every labor struggle: Who decides what work is for? Not who does the work. Who decides whom that work serves?

That question didn’t get answered in 1976. Nor did it get answered in 1926, when half a million British workers walked off the job in solidarity with miners being told to accept wage cuts and longer hours. That strike held for nine days before the national leadership folded. The miners held on for months more. They lost. At least, that’s how the history books write it.

But something was learned: about solidarity and betrayal and the difference between a movement and an institution that claims to lead one. About what it means to have an ally inside the system — and the system that ally is up against.

Those lessons traveled. They show up in how organizers talk today about the difference between mobilizing and building power. They show up in debates about what unions are for.

Mamdani’s appearance in Washington Square Park was a symbol. Symbols matter — not because they change material conditions on their own, but because they tell us something about what’s become possible to say out loud.

What’s possible to say out loud in 2026 is considerably more than it was twenty, or even ten years ago. That shift didn’t come from nowhere. It came from people who organized when it wasn’t popular, who lost campaigns but didn’t dissolve their committees, who studied what happened in Birmingham and Detroit and Port Elizabeth and yes, Lucas Aerospace, and who kept asking: what would it look like to actually win?

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 about solidarity and power and class, aren’t historical curiosities.

They’re the questions on the table right now, in break rooms and union halls and school halls, and group chats, wherever people are trying to figure out whether this moment is different, and how they are connected to each other if it is.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the Lucas workers were told their plan was impractical. Utopian. Beside the point.

They wrote it down anyway. They made 150 prototypes. They showed it was possible.

What are we making?

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