I am puzzled by your call for a general strike to kick out the Tory government.
If you are suggesting that the strikers should overthrow the government, then you are calling for an insurrectionary general strike, the purpose of the strike itself being to allow the workers to assemble their forces for an uprising (that is to say arrest Thatcher's government and put Labour in power). Do you really think this is appropriate at the present time?
Alternatively, you may have the idea that a general strike with folded arms would force the government to resign and hold a general election. But is this a sound strategy? The Tories have only to stand their ground and the strikers will either have to resort to overthrow, for which they will be ill-prepared, or return to work before food supplies run out. Trotsky used to say that general strikes exhaust the strikers before they do the enemy; he always insisted that 'it is only one step from the General Strike to armed insurrection'.
In any case, if the real aim of your general strike is to force the Tories to the polls, why aren't you calling now for an early general election? Then, if, after months of a mass campaign (with one-day general strikes by all means), the Tories refused to resign, the labour movement might begin to entertain the idea of revolutionary action — a pre-revolutionary situation. Your slogan would become more appropriate.
Of course, there is a possibility that some Tory outrage may provoke a spontaneous indefinite general strike (i.e. one not called by any political party). As we saw in May-June 1968, the strikers would soon be demanding socialism and revolution, facing the Labour Party with the need to seize power.
For this reason you must write discussion articles explaining the lessons of the great general strikes and revolutions of the past. However, you seem to me too eager to have workers rush headlong into the highest form of class struggle, while simultaneously keeping them in the dark about its implications.
Dave Bailey, Newham