These aggressive ideas can be termed as syndicalist. An increasing and broadening trade union membership and the evidence of militant tactics succeeding where conciliation failed, encouraged large sections of the working class to organise for direct action.
This essay will concentrate upon some of the labour unrest which took place within the stated period, some of the suggested causes, who some of the leading syndicalists were, where the ideas came from and what some of the advocates of syndicalism were doing at this time.
Syndicalists advocated a system of industrial democracy won through militant trade union action. The syndicalists of the Unofficial Reform Committee put it thus:
Every industry thoroughly organized, in the first place, to fight, to gain control of, and then to administer, that industry. The co-ordination of all industries on a Central Production Board, who, with a statistical department to ascertain the needs of the people, will issue its demands on the different departments of industry, leaving to the men themselves to determine under what conditions and how, the work should be done. This would mean real democracy in real life, making for real manhood and womanhood. Any other form of democracy is a delusion and a snare.
Between 1910 and 1914 trade union membership rose from 2.1 million to 4.1 million, and strikes were running at four times the level of the previous decade a total of over 10 million days per year . This was at a time when there was a low level of unemployment, the economy was coming out of a period of depression which had left wages lagging behind prices. There can be no doubt that these economic conditions created an environment in which syndicalist ideas could flourish with the right sort of encouragement.
In this period there were many disputes as can be seen from the figures above but perhaps the most significant were the miners, transport and railways disputes. They were all wide spread and successful in their own right. They mobilised huge numbers of workers and won visible concessions. And “The success of the strikes clearly led to greater confidence in collective and militant action among previously acquiescent groups of workers”. For this reason it is worth looking at them in turn to see the level of actual and proto-syndicalism present.
The mine owners wanted to cut costs due to reduced profitability of coal production. They did this by keeping down miners wages and attacking fringe benefits such as “abnormal places” which paid miners more per ton of coal for working in areas of higher than average difficulty. The Cambrian Combine dispute, which began in 1910 and lasted for almost a year,
... had a small beginning. It commenced with a strike of a few men in the employment of the Cambrian Combine in the Rhondda Valley, with differences at one mine called the Ely Pit, Penygraig, over the price list of a particular seam.”
This dispute with such small beginnings spread into a strike of 12,000 miners. The strikers felt that they were “spearheading a national dispute” over abnormal places, and as the national officials of the Miners Federation failed to back them they formed an unofficial joint lodge committee to run it along self organised syndicalist lines. The level of ill feeling and violent tension can be measured by the ferocity of the Ton-y-Pandy riot in which rioters stoned police and were only finally deterred by armed troops. This was caused by the owners attempts to bring in blacklegs and was one of several such violent conflicts.
In January 1911, three of the executive of the South Wales Miners Federation were killed in a railway accident and a fourth resigned. This allowed four militants to be elected to take their place. The Cambrians eventually went back to work defeated in October 1911 but this had shown the national leadership the resolve of their members. On 1 March 1912 following a ballot supported by a ratio of 4 to 1, one million members of the Miners Federation voted for the first time to take national strike action in favour of a minimum wage. “Coal prices rapidly reached famine levels, rail services were cut, factories closed down and up to one million other workers were laid off.” Within the month the Government rushed through a Minimum Wages Bill and the Miners Federation called off the strike victorious. This victory strengthened the Miners Federation as it won the principle of the minimum wage and showed its ability to use national action to powerful effect.
A successful strike of seamen in 1911 sparked off numerous strikes in the transport industry. Many previously unorganised workers were involved along with previously unionised sections. These strikes had numerous causes and grievances to be remedied:
George Askwith, the ubiquitous Board of Trade conciliator, toured the effected areas, grinding out settlements. In Manchester alone he spent five days in the Town Hall co-ordinating the simultaneous negotiations of eighteen different unions, representing a bewildering variety of workers, all pledged not to go back until the other seventeen were satisfied. And the longer the settlements were delayed the more the strikers took on the character of a social war.
There was need to call out the army in many areas such as in Liverpool where a gunboat was positioned in the Mersey. By August 1911 most of the strikes were resolved in favour of the strikers.
In 1907 a railway strike was narrowly averted by Lloyd George’s intervention as conciliator. A scheme was negotiated which guaranteed conciliation rather than strike action and which failed to recognise the trade unions. This agreement became the unresolved grievance which triggered the first national railways strike of 1911. The mood of the members was strongly in favour of the strike with 76,825 in favour and only 8,773 against. There was much support for this action by other workers with Liverpool Dockers and in some area miners coming out in sympathy. This support led to the Government dropping its rash offer of troops to the rail bosses after only two days. The dispute was called off when a system of conciliation boards were set up which avoided union recognition in name only.
These disputes despite having separate immediate causes were linked by the mood of the time, by their use of sometimes violent direct action and by their uncompromising rank and file popularist nature.
For short hand they can all be said to be in some way syndicalist influenced, if not directly revolutionary they had episodes which took on an almost revolutionary character. Tempting though it is to look at this era as the practising and limbering up for a revolution which was cut short by the untimely intervention of World War One, in balance it would be more reasonable to agree with the following:
Syndicalism, whilst being the inspiration, was not necessarily the cause of the massive strike wave, rooted as it was in the worsening material conditions of employed workers. ....syndicalism represented the much grander project of winning, through industrial action workers control of the means of production as a whole, thereby consigning capitalism to the dustbin of history.
This sort of easily understood and common sense answer to the problem of greedy capitalists stealing the produce of the workers’ labour was exactly the kind of doctrine which fitted the time. And it was understood by many trade unionists as can be seen by the monthly circulation of 20,000 copies of The Syndicalist in 1912.There were also well attended ISEL conferences with 235 delegates claiming to represent 100,000 members and in 1912 and branch activity in London, Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Liverpool. It was also at this time that Tom Mann returned from Australia. He was a well respected and motivated trade unionist. Many would agree that:
...had the movement not attracted the support of trade unionists such as Tom Mann, James Connolly and Jim Larkin, it is likely that it would have remained the property of small sects without mass influence.
Tom Mann especially had a huge effect in heightening the profile of syndicalism. He was a regular visitor to the Rhondda during the Cambrian Combine dispute, (along with other syndicalists and many home grown ones such as Noah Ablett, W.H. Mainwaring and Tom Smith) , as well as a member of the Liverpool Docks strike commitee. He launched the Industrial Syndicalist monthly and the Industrial Syndicalist Education League in 1910. Both of which were important in organising and spreading syndicalist ideas and action.
“The growth of syndicalism was due to two main influences, one coming from America and the other from France” The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) were formed in Chicago in 1905 and the French Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) was formed in 1895. Both organisations were wet up in a largely unorganised setting unlike the craft based existing trade union structure already existing in Britain. Tom Mann visited Synicalists in France in 1910 after he returned from Australasia. Tom Mann claims the French example as his inspiration:
After our visit to Paris, Guy Bowman and I, with the support of a few representative trade unionists, decided to organize in Britain on lines similar to those which had been adopted by the French comrades.
There were a number of organisations formed to spread or organise syndicalist ideas in Britain between 1910 and 1914. These included the Plebs League, the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) and the Unofficial Reform Committee (URC) of the South Wales Miners. The URC were responsible for what many consider to be the definitive text on syndicalist organisation The Miners Next Step, published in 1912. Tom Mann and the above organisations argued that the syndicalist programme could best be followed in Britain by encouraging the members to change their existing unions along syndicalist lines. There were also dual unionist as represented by the Socialist Labour Party who saw the best way forward as creating completely new revolutionary unions separate from and hostile to the existing reformist unions. This was also the position taken by many anarcho-syndicalists whose main difference from other syndicalists was in their total hostility to the state. There were however also anarcho-syndicalists such as Bowman (who was a member of the ISEL and had travelled to France with Mann in 1910) who took the changing the existing unions line until 1913 when he led a split in the ISEL on dual unionist principles . There was some success in one at least of the syndicalist objectives of reforming existing unions. That is the National Union of Railwaymen was amalgamated from a number of existing rail unions and effectively created a one industry union with the exception of the Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. Also the Triple Alliance was formed in 1913-14 to unite in action railwaymen, miners and transport workers. However these were not syndicalist organisations designed only for direct action and controlled by the members but remained with similar centralist structures to their former organisations. Therefore these were as welcome developments to the right wing leadership as they were to the syndicalists.
In conclusion this was a period of massive industrial unrest which at times took on the appearance of a total class war (rioting in Ton-y-Pandy and gunboat diplomacy in the Mersey). It can be seen that although the vast majority of the working class were not convinced of syndicalist ideas a large and increasing number were being influenced and won over by the evidence of significant victories for militant action and the inability of the employers to listen to their reasonable requests without major force being used by organised labour. As this sort of Labour unrest had not appeared during times of equivalent economic conditions in the past it must be accepted that although the economic conditions allowed syndicalist ideas to be used to their fullest they were not the only factor and syndicalism was a major and beneficial to the forces of labour, influence in this period of unrest.
Ed. Geof Brown, The Industrial Syndicalist,1974, Spokesman Books
Mary Davis, Comrade or Brother, 1993, Pluto Press
James Hinton, Labour and Socialism, 1983, Wheatsheaf Books Ltd.
Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900-1914, 1976, Pluto Press
Tom Mann, Memoirs, first published 1923, this edition 1967, MacGibbon & Kee Ltd.
Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1992, Penguin
Unofficial Reform Committee, The Miners’ Next Step, first published 1912, this edition 1973, Pluto Press