Review: Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914
by Ralph Darlington, Pluto Press, 2023, £17.99 pbk
Labour Revolt in Britain is on the face of it an extensively researched account of one of the most significant periods of trade union militancy in British and Irish history, cut short by the outbreak of the First Imperialist War. Not since the Chartist movement in the 1830s and 1840s had there been such a period of sustained working class activity, one which coincided with struggles for Irish self-determination and women’s suffrage. The background was the increasing pressure that British capitalism had come under since the turn of the 20th century, expressing itself in economic stagnation and inflation. Falling living standards for the better-off unionised sections of the working class shook trade unions from a half-century of torpor briefly interrupted by the 1889-91 revolt of unskilled workers.
The trade union leadership, however, was not prepared to countenance any resistance until its hand was forced by a spontaneous outburst against the increasingly intolerable conditions starting in 1910. Between 1910 and 1914 there were over 4,600 strikes and 82.7 million working days lost; many of the strikes were what was termed as ‘great disputes’ involving 5,000 or more workers with at least 100,000 working days lost at any one time. Trade union membership rose by 60% from 2.56 million in 1910 to 4.14 million in 1914. During 1910, 385,000 workers went on strike, rising to 831,000 in 1911 and peaking in 1912 at 1.23 million.
Some of the most significant struggles were: a series of unofficial miners’ strikes over changed working conditions in Durham in 1910 involving 85,000 miners; a lockout of over 100,000 Lancashire cotton workers in October 1910 over the sacking of a union official; the 1911 London transport strike involving 70,000 workers (p92ff) during which it was later said that trade union leaders ‘had the singular satisfaction of governing London’ (p97) because of the strike’s solidity and impact on daily life; the August 1911 transport strike in Liverpool which closed the city down, and where troops were deployed on Home Secretary Winston Churchill’s instruction and two workers were killed; a national railway strike also in August 1911 involving hundreds of thousands of workers during which Churchill imposed martial law on much of the country and again mobilised tens of thousands of soldiers, 20,000 in London alone. In 1912, a national strike involving over 500,000 miners forced the government to concede the principle of a minimum wage; when members voted 244,000 to 201,000 to continue the strike the union executive over-ruled the ballot. The most significant and best-known struggle was the Dublin Lockout (p171ff) which lasted from August 1913 to February 1914 and ended in defeat after the Irish workers were abandoned by the TUC. Lenin said of this period in Britain that ‘the workers have learned to fight…a change has taken place in the balance of social forces, a change that cannot be expressed in figures but is felt by all.’
Darlington’s book does provide an extensive account of the period. Yet its claim to be a ‘distinct revolutionary Marxist assessment of what was one of the most important periods of trade union history’ (p9) is for the birds. Its treatment of the relationship between the trade union leadership and the working class turns out to be little more than radical sociology. Darlington claims his approach enables him to recognise the ‘highly contradictory nature of trade unionism – which both expresses and contains working-class resistance to capitalism – and its reflection in the underlying antagonism of interests between full-time union officials…and rank and file workers.’ (ibid) However he provides no historical background to this development. One would be forgiven for supposing that he would explain Marx’s assessment of the bourgeois tendencies of the English trade union leaders in the 1869-72 period, or of Engels, who wrote extensively about the political character of British trade union leaders up until his death in 1895. But far from it: he does not cite them at all in his ‘revolutionary Marxist assessment’. Nor does he cite the classic account of the period by the communist Theodore Rothstein in his 1929 book From Chartism to Labourism, reprinted in 1983, despite a bibliography of several hundred books and articles.
Marx and Engels recognised that the British working class was split between a ‘labour aristocracy’ whose material privileges depended on a share of Britain’s colonial plunder, and an impoverished majority. The overriding concern of the labour aristocracy was to defend the system that gave them such advantage. They could be very militant in protecting their higher wages and better working conditions, but their politics were reactionary through and through. Already in a letter to Bernstein in June 1879 Engels was arguing ‘For a number of years past (and at the present time) the English working-class movement has been hopelessly describing a narrow circle of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, not, however, as an expedient or means of propaganda and organisation but as the ultimate aim. The Trade Unions even bar all political action on principle and in their charters, and thereby also ban participation in any general activity of the working-class as a class.’
Both Marx and Engels argued that what they called a ‘bourgeois labour movement’ was possible due to Britain’s industrial and colonial monopoly. Lenin took this up and argued that a labour aristocracy existed to some extent in all imperialist countries, and that its political character of opportunism ‘is our principal enemy. Opportunism in the upper ranks of the working-class movement is not proletarian socialism but bourgeois socialism. Practice has shown that the active people in the working class movement who adhere to the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie itself.’ By omission, Darlington shows he rejects Marx and Engels’ positions, and especially their subsequent development by Lenin.
The politics of opportunism
Throughout the period that Marx and Engels were active in Britain, they viewed the trade union leadership politically as an appendage of the Liberals, the party of industrial and manufacturing capitalists. Trade union leaders were first elected as MPs only with the support of the Liberal Party, and this collaboration continued after the formation of the Labour Party – the so-called Lib-Lab alliance. This was an alliance directed against the mass of the working class: the initial strikes of the 1910-14 wave were directed against the trade union leadership and its opposition to any industrial action. The Labour Party in parliament did not just ‘frown on militant industrial action’ (p6) – it was in total opposition. When Darlington says that ‘union leaders were at “one remove” from the class struggle, a conservative social layer that mediated between workers and employers when they conflicted with each other’, he is using bourgeois sociology to obscure which side of the class struggle these officials lay on. By censoring their views, Darlington not only rejects Marx’s and Engels’ analysis of the character and material basis of the labour aristocracy, but prefers anodyne and politically empty terms such as ‘trade union officials’ and ‘trade union bureaucracy’. This sociology depoliticises the role played by those who occupy leadership positions at both a national and regional level within the trade unions, who may or may not be full-time officials but who are part of a privileged layer within the working class.
The Dublin Lockout
Nevertheless, throughout the book Darlington has to illustrate how the trade union leadership, lay or full-time, obstructed, undermined, policed and sold out working class struggles on behalf of the ruling class, although his language is nicely moderate when he says ‘union officials were often able to control the way disputes ended, agreeing settlements that fell short of rank-and-file objectives…irrespective of membership ballot results.’ (p199) These were apparently the results of Darlington’s ‘mediation’ rather than the opportunism of the sort Marx and Engels fought tooth and nail. Nowhere was such opportunism more evident than in the behaviour of British trade union leaders during the Dublin Lockout.
The conditions of the Dublin workers aroused enormous sympathy among the mass of the British working class as the Dublin employers attempted to starve the former into submission through a lockout imposed at the end of August 1913. Led by revolutionaries – James Connolly and Jim Larkin – the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) demanded sympathy action from the British trade union movement. Spontaneous boycott actions took place, encouraged by Larkin who toured Britain during November demanding official support. The TUC called a special conference on 9 December 1913 to head off pressure. In the days leading up to it Larkin went on the offensive, denouncing by name trade union leaders who were ordering an end to sympathy actions such as JH Thomas of the railway workers.
At the conference James Connolly presented the case for mass solidarity action with the Dublin workers. Beforehand, Larkin had published a manifesto in the Daily Herald which appealed directly to union members, warning that union leaders were preparing a settlement of the lockout; ‘Comrades in the British Labour movement…tell your leaders now and every day…that they are not there as apologists for the shortcomings of the Capitalist system, that they are not there to assist the employers in helping defeat any action of workers striving to live, nor to act as a brake on the wheel of progress’ (p175). But come the conference, the trade union leadership closed ranks against the Dublin workers. ‘Ben Tillett moved a resolution condemning Larkin’s unfair attacks on British trade union officials. He was then considered one of the most militant trade unionists in Britain and had only a few weeks earlier stood on platforms with Larkin calling for armed worker squads. He went on to ask the Congress to affirm its confidence in the ability of these officials to negotiate an honourable settlement. Armed squads were one thing. Attacking the leadership of the trade union movement quite another.’ (David Reed: Ireland, the key to the British revolution, p56)
Larkin responded, confronting Tillett with a choice: stand with the masses and against his fellow trade union leaders who were favouring conciliation, or desert the workers and go over to the other side. Tillett chose the latter course, and with him the TUC as a whole. ‘Mediation’ indeed: Darlington dismisses this outcome as ‘a blow to the British [sic] trade union movement’ rather than what it was – a deliberate betrayal and a consequence of the politics of opportunism. Larkinism had to be destroyed as a revolutionary trend of trade unionism and one which was becoming a threat to British imperialism’s occupation of Ireland. The trade union leaders therefore entered into an alliance with the British state to crush Larkin and the struggle of the Dublin workers.
Darlington’s stance is typical of the petit bourgeois left in Britain, which always wants to make nice to the trade union leadership because they share a similar privileged position. While proclaiming their Marxism, they studiously avoid those bits of Marx that they do not like, especially his materialist concept of the labour aristocracy and the ‘bourgeois labour party’. Engels is probably worse in their view, and Lenin’s further development a complete anathema. So, for all of Darlington’s research, you get no sense of the politics of the time: despite his claims to the contrary, his approach is steeped in academic moderation and sociological blandness, for example when he writes of ‘the inadequacies of Labour’s political project’ (p255) or about its ‘conciliatory and parliamentary reformist strategy of working within the system and accommodating to it’ (p270). From his description you would not draw the conclusion that Labour played a completely reactionary role throughout the period as it tail-ended the Liberals. To get a feel for the nature of opportunism, its domination of the British trade unions and its consequences for the working class, Rothstein’s book is unmatched.
Ellie Mack
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 295 August/September 2023
