Revolution 9 SYNDICALISM AND THE 'LABOUR UNREST

OUR LAST two articles in this series will be concerned with the years immediately before the First World War, the years of the great labour unrest, as the capitalist class came to call it, and the lessons which it contains for the struggles of today.

Out of all the tendencies which in the 1920-1921 period came together to form the British Communist Party (CPGB), the strongest was undoubtedly the syndicalist tendency which had its origins in the period after 1910 in the British trade union movement.

The early battles of the Communist International with the leaders of the CPGB were largely against the limitations in the ideas and methods of syndicalism.

Dynacansun ideas imported largely from France and America in this period, and, if it did not attain the status of a definite philosophy or systematic body of thought, it was based in general upon a growing opposition to the opportunism and class collaboration of the official leaders of the movement.

It counterposed against reliance on such leaders the development of strong rank-and-file action with the aim of creating new industrial, unions which could link workers together regardless of their skill and break down the old craft barriers which had originated in the period from the 1850s onwards.

POWER

At its highest level syndicalism involved the notion that out of these industrial unions the working class in the course of larger and larger strikes would be able to take power from the capitalists by taking over the means of production.

There is no doubt that one of the main stimulants to the growth of such ideas was the disillusionment with the performance and record of the Labour Party at Westminster. MacDonald and company, in the period after 1906, once the Trades Disputes Act had redressed the situation created by the Taff Vale judgement five years earlier, were quite content to play a tame second fiddle to the Liberals in parliaBut perhaps more important was the increasing servility of the established trade union leaders towards the employers and the capitalist state.

The trade union bureaucracy more and more set its face against any determined struggle against the employers and was becoming increasingly enmeshed into the institutions of state.

This was particularly true with the Liberal victory of 1905.

It was in the period after this that a systematic policy I would like information about developed of providing jobs for trade union and labour officials in 'the growing number of administrative posts associated with the social reform policy of the Campbell-BannermannAsquith government.

Elie Halevy in his 'History of the English People' has given some idea of the eitent and importance of this development.

He has estimated that the 1909 Trades Boards Acts created 800 posts with salarjes in some cases of £1,000 ber year; in 1910 Churchill created two posts at the Home Office, as Labour Advisers, one going to Shackleton of the textile workers and the other a Welsh miner, Tom Richards: in addition 30 posts were also created as sub-inspectors of mines and quarries, the jobs to be reserved for miners and quarrymen.

The 1911 National Insurance Act brought another large batch of similarly high paid Civil Service jobs to satisfy the growing appetite of the trade union officials.

Figures for 1912 reveal that over the previous six years places had been found at the Board of Trade for 117 active trade union workers at a total annual salary of over £25,000.

Over 120 jobs in the National Insurance Departments had been created for exunionists at a cost of £34,000. The Home Office contained nearly 50 posts filled by recruits from the unions with over 80 posts in other departments.

And to complete the developing hostility towards a bureaucracy which was finding such well-paid state jobs, most of the leaders of the Parliamentary Labour Party were union officials, this being almost inevitable in the days before MPs received a salary.

STERILIZED

Little wonder that A. P. Orage, a leader of the Guild Socialist movement could comment in 1914:

It is not generally realized how successfully the present government has sterilized the Socialist and Labour movement by enlisting in the ranks of the bureaucracy energetic young Fabians as well as prominent political socialists and Labour leaders.' But the strike wave after 1910, which affected nearly all industries, including the best organized and assuming near revolutionary proportion in the years 1913-1914, cannot be explained simply in terms of a 78840 growing contempt for the Labour bureaucracy. This period saw new economic problems facing capitalism which had a deep impact upon the thinking of the working class.

In the first place, these years saw a strong tendency for prices to rise rapidly and constantly to outstrip wages.

In part, the bitter struggles of the period represent a determined effort by the rank-and-file in the unions to maintain its living standards in the face of such rising prices.

ENGINEERING

Its ability to do so was reinforced by the relatively low levels of unemployment which existed after 1909, in contrast with the earlier years of the decade.

Secondly, under the impact of growing foreign competition, the pace of technical change quickened il a number of Most notable here was the engineering industry which witnessed in these years a speeding up of those changes which first began to assume significance in the 1890s: the breaking up of the old crafts and the creation of a large number of semi-skilled jobs.

These developments had a deep impact upon the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) which once more (in 1912) changed its constitution to open its membership to such layers.

But even these factors together, important though they were, cannot explain the violence of the eruption which occurred throughout the labour movement after 1910.

Of crucial importance was the growth of monopoly within the economy which, though less pronounced than in other capitalist countries, notably Germany, was beginning to effect a profound change throughout large sectors of the economy.

MONOPOLY

This trend towards monopoly, which brought with it a growth in the size of the typical industrial concern, was intimately linked to the growing intervention of the state into the economy.

Thus although technical change was comparatively slow in the coal industry, the miners were in the vanguard of the class struggle in this period and the ASE also saw important changes where technical development was perhaps most pronounced.

The ideas of syndicalism found a fertile ground amongst the most class - conscious workers, primarily because the growth of monopoly, and with it deep-going changes in the structure of industry and finance, posed a new generation of workers with new problems to which the existing institutions of the movement had little answer. Strikers clash with police during the 1912 transport strike.

In some respects the labour unrest' reproduced many of the features associated with the 'new unionism' of the late 1880s and early 1890s, but on a higher scale.

Again the dockers and other previously - unorganized sections were to the fore; like the earlier period this was one of comparative prosperity, in terms of the level of employment and the rate of industrial expansion and finally the two periods witnessed a rapid expansion in trade union membership.

The four years before the outbreak of war saw a phenomenal 60 per cent increase in trade union membership, concentrated particularly amongst seamen, labourers and dockers.

NEW FACTORS But there were also profound differences, which .indicate the presence of new factors in the situation. Right to the front of the struggles were the miners and the engineers, the former the base for the continuing support for liberalism in the working class during the 1880s and 1890s, the latter one of the earliest transport of the conservative 'new model' unions established at the start of the mid-Victorian boom in the mid-19th century.

So general indeed was the crisis facing the trade unions that even the hitherto ultra-conservative metal trades of the Black Country saw a strike involving over 50,000 in the summer of 1913, to be followed a few months later at the start of 1914 by a general lock-out of London building workers, again a union which had provided many of the most conservative and opportunist leaders of the 1870s and 1880s.

CRISIS

And like all pre-revolutionary periods, the years before 1914 saw not merely a series of political upheavals, but. a profound governmental crisis, notably over the power of the House of Lords and the question of Irish Home Rule.

Nearly all the great struggles which occurred during the years of the labour unrest' had one common feature; they invariably started as unofficial actions, opposed by the trade union bureaucracy concerned.

If they did receive support it was only so that the leaders could more easily head them off or get the rank and file to accept a 'compromise' offer resulting from the intervention of the government.

This struggle of the rank and file found expression in the ideas of syndicalism, and it was largely syndicalists such as Tom Mann, James Connolly, Noah Ablett, Richard Coppock, A. A. Purcell and A. J. Cook — the latter two later to be prominent 'lefts' at the time of the 1926 General Strike-who organized and led the strikes which took place.

Turning now to an outline of the main developments we can start with the transport workers who were to play a decisive role in the struggles over the coming four years.

At the end of 1910 several unions of dockers and other transport men had brought their forces together in the Transport Workers' FederaSTRIKE The rising cost of living and the failure to effectively tackle the problem of casualization found the dockers hardly any better off than in 1889.

Following a strike by seamen in June 19l1 for a uniform scale to cover all ports, dockers and carters struck in Manchester in July and the Port of London was soon closed down by an even bigger strike than its famous predecessor of 1889.

The Port of London Authorstrong general strike embracing dockers, seamen, carters, tramwaymen, and railwaymen, occurred.

Tom Mann was in the leadership of this struggle, which in this case actually saw the intervention of the troops and violent clashes in which two workers were shot.

The early months of 1912 saw a strike of Glasgow dockers and in May 100,000 dockers were out again in London against alleged breaches of the 1911 settlement and employment of non-union labour.

This time the London action met with little national response and eventually the Port Authority, backed by the government, was able to drive the men back to work defeated.

The summer of 191l also brought the big rail strike which was to transform trade unionism in this sector and bring about the major move towards industrial unionism part of the aim of the syndicalists as we noted above.

200,000 railwaymen were involved in this struggle, bringing determined opposition from the government, which once more, as in the first dockers' strike, retreated in the face of a grave international situation and the unions won de facto recognition from the employers.

TONYPANDY

The miners' struggle reached a climax after that of the railwaymen.

10,000 miners had been involved in strike action in the the early months of 1912.

It met with immediate response from the men and the strike received widespread support from the rest of the working class.

But once more the government intervened with an 'impartial' settlement, giving the form of victory to the men, the reality to the coal owners.

The Minimum Wage Bill, rushed into law by the end of March, merely prescribed machinery for the determination of district minima and a ballot favoured continuation of the struggle.

The leadership, however, took the men back to work, on the pretext that a two-thirds majority is necessary for the continuation of a strike.

TRICKERY

Commenting upon this typical piece of parliamentary trickery involved in the Minimum Wage Bill, Lenin wrote:

'But the lesson was too obvious. The interests of capital had conflicted too sharply for the gap to be covered by the appearance of concessions.

'It was clear whose interésts the Liberals were defending.

"The English workers had to recognize how important for them had become political organization, a political party.

In England, where according to the old English proverb, "parliament can do anything except make a man out of a woman"

the English workers have convinced themselves that in this all-powerful parliament they are nothing, despite their powerful