Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14
Ralph Darlington, Pluto Press, £19.99

THIS survey of one of the greatest upsurges in labour action in Britain’s industrial history appears at an opportune time, amidst another significant wave of strike action.  The struggles of 110 years ago have, the author concludes, features “which remain of considerable relevance for contemporary union activists and socialists.”

Indeed, it is tempting to read this outstanding historical survey with one eye on the present throughout. Yet the strikes, large and small, that Darlington describes are also of an industrial and political period long left behind.

His heroes are coal miners, dockers, textile workers, Midlands metal workers, Cornish clay workers, and other trades now either dead or, at any event, radically diminished in number and social impact. Railway workers do provide a common thread between the two centuries of struggle, but this serves to draw attention to the central part played by railway transport in the production and realisation of surplus value for large sections of capital a hundred years ago, which is no longer the case.

There was also an elemental force about the mass struggles before the first world war.  

These were the battles of a rising trade union movement rooted for the most part in an impoverished proletariat living and working in barely supportable conditions. The “labour question” was then a novelty, joining with the struggles for Irish independence and women’s suffrage in a trifecta of crises for the rulers of the British empire.

The figures are impressive. From 1910 to 1914 around 2.5 million workers took strike action, peaking at over one third of trade union membership, which itself was twice as large in 1914 as it had been at the turn of the century.

The strikes were usually about improving or protecting wages or enforcing union agreements, but there was also the significant development of a novelty — sympathetic strikes taken in solidarity with other workers, strikes which then often generated independent demands by those taking such supportive action.

Very often disputes turned violent, usually as a result of the use by the Liberal government of the resources of the state to confront strikers in the interests of the employers. However, mediation and arbitration also formed part of the repertoire of the governing class in endeavouring to get the labour genie back in the bottle.

Darlington describes all this in impressive detail and narrative sweep. He has researched thoroughly, so we learn not just of the great strikes in the coalfields and on the railways, but also local disputes which drew new sections of the working class into action for the first time.

He also brings his own perspective to the period. His sympathies seem to lie with syndicalism, although he is nuanced in his acknowledgement of its limitations. He is also highly sceptical of the role of trade union officials, arguing that this was as movement driven “from below.”

Much of this is on the money, but I feel he goes too far in his occasional conviction that union officials constituted the main problem confronting insurgent workers. That prize surely belongs to the capitalist state and to the hegemony of the logic of the wage system.  

Tom Mann, omnipresent in these pages as he directed or encouraged one dispute after another, is even criticised for his reluctance to personally criticise trade union leaders.

The one labour leader who does pass muster on that score, Jim Larkin, led the greatest single dispute in those years, the Dublin Lockout of 1913, yet it went down to categorical defeat.

It would be facile to pretend that the Dublin setback was due to Larkin’s attacks on British union leaders, as opposed to massive military and clerical intervention on the side of the employers, but clearly his remonstrations did not save the day.

Darlington is perhaps on firmer ground in pointing out the shortcomings of the political left at the time. The hegemonic ethical Labourism of MacDonald and Snowdon was unsupportive, and even the Marxists of the Social Democratic Federation were largely uninterested, cleaving to Hyndman’s narrow conceptions of political action.

The right wing of the movement, political and industrial, was most alarmed by sympathetic action, yet their failure to arrest its development spoke to the fact that they were not in control of events.

As Darlington rightly outlines, the strike wave developed into a major test of class power, with organised labour becoming aware of its own potential for the first time. He cites the judgement of the Webbs that it was “an almost revolutionary outburst.”

It was brought to an end, of course, by the start of World War One, which saw the great majority of the working class and almost all its leaders, including the most militant, rally to the imperial flag. Yet the conclusion of hostilities saw the industrial struggle resume at an even more intensive level.

It is hard to read this narrative of explosive class combat over into contemporary conditions.

The continuing strike wave today has been far more rooted in public services, has consisted mainly in one-day actions repeated rather than continuous strikes, and has not polarised the leaders against the led. The intervention of the state has been more indirect.

If there are clear commonalities they lie in the absence of any political perspective, something which meant that in neither 1910-14 nor today is there any realistic anticipation that the strikes may lead to a struggle for socialism. A sort of diluted syndicalism is perhaps being reborn, but the weight of parliamentarianism is still more oppressive today than it was when much of the working class, and all women, had yet to secure the right to vote.

There was no thought then, except in Ireland, of linking industrial and anti-imperialist struggles, a limitation which reaped its bitter harvest in August 1914. Today, few unions associate their demands with anti-war agitation. The bifurcation of class interest and “national interest,” with the last being left to the stewardship of the bourgeoisie, remains entrenched.

Whatever limitations there may be in reading over the past into the present, Darlington’s book should be studied by the active trade unionists of today, as well as all interested in labour history. It brings a critical period to life and is a fine work of partisan scholarship.