A review of a Leninist book on the Labour Revolt in Britain before the First World War. While useful in its reporting on the strike wave, its analysis is flawed thanks to the prejudices of the author’s politics.
A Missed Opportunity
Ralph Darlington, Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 (Pluto Press, 2023)
Ralph Darlington is Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Salford whose research is concerned with the dynamics of contemporary and historical trade union organisation, activity and consciousness in Britain and internationally. This has meant he written extensively on syndicalism, including one book focused on it.[1] However, he is also a Leninist, a member of the British SWP, which impacts negatively on all his writings on syndicalism. This is the case with this book, Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 (Pluto Press, 2023).
Like many countries across the world, Britain experienced a rise in the influence of syndicalist and industrial unionist ideas and activism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The years immediately before the outbreak of the World War in 1914 experienced massive waves of industrial action within which syndicalists played a key role (indeed, it is sometimes referred to as “the syndicalist revolt”). As such, Darlington is right that a work on this unrest would be useful to activists today. Unfortunately, due to his politics, this is a missed opportunity.
An astute reviewer once noted that the biography of Lenin by Tony Cliff (leader of the SWP until his death in 2000) read like a life of John the Baptist written by Jesus Christ. This informs almost all writings by its members, with work after work explaining what revolutionaries in the past should have done if they had the benefit of the party’s politics. Darlington’s work reflects this patronising perspective although he generously allows the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to play a precursor role (in its initial years, for obvious reasons). Still, it must be easy for a Leninist doing any research on earlier radicals and movements for the conclusion is already known before they start, namely the need for a Bolshevik Party.
The book is not without its merits. Part II, on the strikes, is good as it provides a well-written account of the various disputes and how they formed part of a wave of unrest. His discussions in Part III on the dynamics of official and unofficial movements and the role of the union bureaucracy also have useful aspects. Likewise, his recognition that revolutionary politics do not automatically develop from struggles or even the best union organisation (echoing Malatesta, probably unknowingly as he shows no signs of any engagement with the anarchist critique of syndicalism).
Unfortunately, the other three Parts are marred by his ideological assumptions and prejudices. Part of this is his previously expressed downplaying the role of anarchists and anarchism and a corresponding exaggeration of the role of Marxists and Marxism (real or otherwise) in syndicalism.[2] This can be seen here, with the British Socialist Party (BSP) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) given as much prominence as the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) in terms of “the left” and its impact on the rise and development of the labour unrest. Anarchists are unmentioned beyond three passing references, two to individuals (Rudolf Rocker and Ted Leggett) and the mislabelling of the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) as “anarcho-syndicalist” (it was revolutionary syndicalist, albeit with a sizeable reformist minority).
Yet Darlington himself gives enough evidence to question this bolstering of the BSP. It is noted how it “could claim 40,000 members in 1912 [the year after its creation], by 1914 this figure had fallen to 13,755 (the majority of whom were merely card-holders)”.[3] He does not address what it means that Britain’s leading Marxist Party could plumet (or, as Darlington puts it, its “inability to effectively grow”[4]) in members during a period of unprecedented industrial conflict. He does, of course, point to “many SDP/BSP members [being] involved in trade union and strike activity and solidarity work”[5], but the activity of a few members does not warrant the space he gives to the party, particularly as it approximately the same as the ISEL despite it and its activists playing a far more significant role in events. The reason for so doing seems obvious enough but still unfortunate.
That BSP militants were involved in strikes or solidarity work is a criterion he does not extend to the anarchists for our inclusion in his account. Perhaps it could be argued that this was because the British anarchist movement was small, but he does include the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in spite admitting it was “a minuscule organisation with no more than 200 members by 1910 and perhaps 300 by 1914”[6]. Given that anarchists had been spreading what became known later as “syndicalist” ideas for many decades, played significant roles in various strikes and the syndicalist groups he does cover, this is unfortunate but sadly to be expected – Leninist anarcho-phobia is well known. So we get two passing references to individuals whilst John Turner, the anarchist head of the Shop Assistant’s Union, does not even merit that in spite of his prominent position in the labour movement, the ISEL and his obvious utility as a case study of the limitations and contradictions of working within reformist trade unions. Likewise, the anarchist press which he ignores, such as Freedom, were warning of the dangers of “Officialism” within the unions and that the attempts championed by Tom Mann (a leading British syndicalist) to amalgamate the existing unions could increase this.[7] The solution suggested to empower the rank-and-file and getting them used to taking action themselves should be the focus for activists is clearly of relevance.
This lack of engagement with the British anarchists points to a wider problem, namely a lack of historical, international and theoretical context. This is understandable given the ideological perspective of the author but it weakens the book and hinders those readers without a good grasp of socialist history (i.e., your typical Leninist) understand the labour revolt and the role of syndicalism within it.[8]
This can be recounted quickly enough. Syndicalist ideas on the key role of unions in both fighting and replacing capitalism, the general strike as the means of commencing the social revolution, opposition to “political action” in favour of (what became known as) direct action were raised within the Federalist-wing of the International. Kropotkin, amongst others, championed these before his imprisonment in 1883 and returned to them after the London dock strike of 1889 gave a clear example of their relevance and potential. French anarchists applied these ideas very successfully in the unions that eventually became the CGT and this was termed revolutionary syndicalism (from the French syndicaliste révolutionnaire, revolutionary unionism). The example of the CGT inspired similar movements across the globe, including the one in Britain (Mann visited the CGT when he returned from Australia in 1910). While anarchists supported the movement (albeit critically), it also appealed to Marxists disgusted by the reformism and opportunism of Social Democracy as it provided an analysis of why this degeneration occurred as well as an alternative strategy.
These developments were reflected in Britain, with a London meeting in 1891 – attended by Kropotkin, Malatesta and Turner, amongst others – recommending anarchist involvement in the labour movement, with Malatesta pointing to the “good example” of the Spanish movement.[9] This was reflected in Freedom and other publications, including the short-lived The General Strike (1903–4) and The Voice of Labour (1907, relaunched in 1914). These views undoubtedly influenced the wider socialist and labour movement – Mann’s links to anarchism date from the early 1890s, for example – so cannot be ignored as Darlington does without seriously undermining the objectivity and accuracy of any account.
This also impacts on Darlington’s suggestion that a fusion of the three major social struggles of the time – the labour revolt, the women’s suffrage movement and Irish Home Rule agitation – would have helped produce an even more revolutionary opportunity. For one social grouping noticeably lacking in his account is the immigrant community, then predominantly Eastern European Jews. They warrant two paragraphs[10] – this lack of discussion and that these were organised by Anarchists must, of course, be a coincidence. As it stands, excluding the immigrant struggle is unfortunate given its continuing relevance.
So while syndicalist ideas have developed independently before and after the First International, the history of syndicalism is intimately connected to the revolutionary anarchism which developed within its Federalist-wing. Indeed, the French Revolutionary Syndicalists themselves pointed to that (as did Kropotkin, Goldman, and Malatesta). As such, to fail to discuss any of this means that Darlington’s work is lacking and so misleading. After all, the labour unrest of 1910-14 can best be understood by recognising that syndicalist ideas grew wider in influence than the British Anarchist movement and so a critical mass of militants was finally reached which made the movement not only self-sustaining but expanding. This viable alternative undoubtedly drew in activists from Marxist parties who were disillusioned by them, along with news of successful syndicalist movements elsewhere (particularly in France).
Darlington, then, tries to exaggerate the influence of Marxism and the two main Marxist parties in the revolt but his descriptions of the strikes exposes the hopefulness of this. Yes, undoubtedly members of the BSP would have taken part in strikes and solidarity work but syndicalists – as his reporting shows – were at the forefront of such activity. Why the BSP is given such prominence given its anti-syndicalism – so sectarian that it saw it “haemorrhage members” at the end of 1912 when its majority reiterated its position on “political action”[11] – is no more hard to work out than the reason for the lack of anarchism in his account. Indeed, he objects to describing the mood of the period as one of “proto-syndicalism” as “a fairly misleading (and partisan) term” as well as “confusing and misleading.”[12] So the suggestion towards the end of the book that the Labour Revolt saw the growth in all sections of the left is somewhat undermined by his earlier admission that BSP membership had plummeted. That this period was marked the growth of the anti-parliamentarian left (anarchists and syndicalists) surely cannot be a coincidence.
Which raises another issue, namely Darlington’s inability to critically engage with the legacy of Marx and Engels on the labour movement. He reports upon, and rightly laments, the BSP’s hostility to industrial action and its focus on “political action” (i.e., taking part in elections) but makes no attempt to explain where they got such notions from.[13] There is no discussion of how this was the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the arguments of Marx and Engels in the First International and afterwards, when they stressed again and again the need to organise political parties and take part in elections. Yet the use of “political action”, as Bakunin had predicted, saw these parties become reformist (and even counter-revolutionary, as during the German Revolution of 1918-9) and so Darlington confuses what Social Democracy became with what it started as. The rise of syndicalism can no more be isolated from the fate of Marxism than it can from anarchist influence.
The whole focus of “political action” meant replacing collective struggle for, as one BSP leader noted, had “the workers generally used such political power as they have possessed . . . to capture the political machine . . . the present strike would have been absolutely unnecessary.”[14] At least the SLP recognised that political action needed to have a base in economic organisation and struggle. The appeal of syndicalism, with its application of socialist ideas in the constructive work in transforming unions into bodies that not only fight capitalism but also aim to replace it, should be obvious enough given this perspective. Indeed, what can be more individualistic than marking a ballot paper by yourself in a polling booth? This points to strength of the Amalgamation Committees syndicalists were active in within the unions, namely they along with strikes gave a constructive outlet for militants.
If Darlington criticises the Marxist BSP for its dismissal of economic struggle, he also criticises the syndicalists for failure on “political” issues. This seems confused at times for the syndicalists repeatedly commented upon “political” issues such as the nature and role of the State within capitalist society (which was why they tended to be non- or anti-parliamentarian). It also produces one of the most bizarre criticisms, namely that on the Liverpool transport strike of 1911. He bemoans the lack of discussion of Ireland in the agitation while simultaneously praising the solidarity it generated between Catholic and Protestant workers. It would not be hard to conclude that the strike leaders raising Irish Independence would have swiftly bolstered the sectarian barriers the industrial action was eroding. Yes, in time such questions would be raised by the workers themselves but it would have been suicide for the strike organisers to artificially raise them at the start. Of course, Darlington does not wonder why sectarianism in Liverpool continued after the replacement of syndicalism with Bolshevism within the ranks of the left, suggesting that the problem was more difficult to address than his glib comments would suggest.
He argues that by avoiding the issue, the syndicalists reinforced the sectarian politics of the time based on an old History Workshop article contrasting radicals in Glasgow and Liverpool. Yet this article seems to equate voting Labour with ending sectarianism and, as a Glaswegian, I had to laugh at its claim that Glasgow’s “working men and women by and large rejected sectarianism and embraced socialism”. Suffice to say, sectarianism remained an expression of working-class life as shown by the Orange Lodge and its marches and the number of actual socialists (rather than Labour politicians) elected was few, if any. As for “socialism”, well, that appears to mean voting for the Labour Party – or the “right-wing” Labour Party, as Darlington describes it. It should also be noted that the BSP and ILP failed to provide a “political” alternative in Liverpool and they embraced electioneering (we should not discount that this was precisely because they were seeking votes and so watered down their position to gain more).
Equally, the notion of this article that the syndicalists thought one mass strike would forge complete class consciousness and unity is a nonsense. “Would that the workers were reasonably prepared to overthrow the wretched system that compels us to work for the profit of a ruling class, and ready to co-operate intelligently for universal well-being,” Tom Mann wrote after the end of the Liverpool strike in Transport Worker in February 1912. “But we know that the workers are not ready to do this, and we must therefore fall back on something less ambitious for the time being.”[15] Darlington follows his source in attributing false notions to the syndicalists. Ultimately, it is hard to see how sectarian barriers could be undermined without fighting on the economic terrain first and it is the extremely petty to attack the syndicalists on this when they were simply not putting the cart before the horse.
Ultimately, this attack on the syndicalists success in Liverpool is reminiscent of the BSP position Darlington seems to oppose – the preference for “political action” to the detriment of economic struggle. Ultimately, the notion that (probably) losing a major strike by injecting “politics” into it can be considered better than winning one seems strange – unless you view “building the party” as being the be-all and end-all of activism.
Darlington also laments “the dismissive stance adopted towards the women’s campaign for the franchise” by syndicalists,[16] suggesting that these movements would have been better off uniting (somehow). Yet he also notes the role of Sylvia Pankhurst and her suffragette organisation in East London in the labour movement and that they were “expelled from the WSPU.”[17] He does not explore the difficulties in forging unity with those who “insisted that social questions and class were irrelevant to the women’s movement”.[18] He notes that the syndicalists argued that women’s suffrage would be as useless as men’s in terms of overthrowing capitalism, which as a Leninist he can hardly disagree with but here we are in the terrain, I think, of paying lip-service to struggles in order to gain recruits to the party.
Could the industrial and suffrage movement have united? It is possible that a strike wave in favour of women’s suffrage would have been powerful means of achieving it but the middle-class leadership of the suffrage movement did not support that. As for the syndicalists, why struggle for something which had not benefited male workers and where direct action was seen as a far more effective alternative to the ballot? Empowering men and women workers within the union movement was understandably considered as a more fruitful use of their limited time and resources. How these two movements could unite is left to the imagination of Darlington’s readers, but he provides enough evidence to suggest that such a cross-class grouping would have been inherently unstable if it had come about. As such, to blame this on a lack of appreciation of “politics” by syndicalists seems unfounded and superficial.
Given all this, it is fair to say that Darlington has ideological blinkers as regards Marxism, syndicalism and anarchism. This can also be seen from a footnote in which he references his earlier (flawed) book on syndicalism to suggest syndicalism “did not explicitly address the problem of how a revolutionary general strike to establish workers’ control would overcome the state’s monopoly of armed force in defence of the capitalist economic and social order”[19] when syndicalists repeatedly did so when explicitly questioned by social democrats on this very point.[20] French Syndicalists also addressed the issue.[21] Now, it is one thing to disagree with these answers or note potential weaknesses, it is another to suggest that they do not exist. Likewise, to say that syndicalists (if not the Marxian Industrial Unionists of the SLP) “did not consider the question of the conquest of political power” is technically correct but to fail to note that they aimed to destroy it expresses an ideological blindness – so, in a sense, they did see “the need for a political revolution as well as an economic one” just not the one Darlington approves of, namely the conquest of political power by a vanguard power.[22] That such “a political revolution” produced the dictatorship over the proletariat suggests the syndicalists were right.
Which brings us to the shortest (and weakest) part of his book, the fourth on the “Aftermath” of the revolt. Here his neo-Trotskyist prejudices and assumptions become explicit. Needless to say, while dutifully noting how syndicalist militants as Tom Mann and Willie Gallacher joined the CPGB (with obvious hopes for radicals today to draw the appropriate implications) he fails to mention that they remained in it under Stalinism (with actual relevant lessons for radicals today). For anarchists, this is not that surprising as they had ignored their own experiences in favour of Moscow after the war, so they had no issue with doing so again and again – no matter how contradictory, counterproductive or stupid these instructions were. It is no coincidence that the writings and activism which these militants are remembered for are those of their syndicalist period, not those in the CPGB.
Darlington does not discuss the context which drew these militants to Bolshevism. News from Russia was unreliable and many revolutionaries outside it projected their hopes and aspirations onto the new regime and the Bolsheviks – including libertarians who thought they had embraced many anarchist tactics and ideas. This meant that syndicalist papers recounted how industry under the Bolsheviks was being run by the workers themselves when, in reality, one-man management had been introduced and strikes broken by military force. By the time the British syndicalists embraced Bolshevism the orthodoxy was in favour of party dictatorship and state capitalism (while the former was acknowledged, the latter was not), the opposite of what they had previously advocated and, ironically, not what had attracted them to Bolshevism in the first place. In short, the apparent success of the revolution blinded them to the fact that, from a genuine socialist perspective, it had failed – just as the apparent success of Social Democracy blinded many to its degeneration.
Darlington fails to mention this, for obvious reasons. He does, however, sketch how “a distinct centralised, national combat organisation” would work miracles[23] but sadly does not explain why such a party has never existed or, being generous and taking the self-imagine of the various Trotskyist sects as reality, grown to be bigger than the BSP in 1914.
Part of the reason for this is that the actual Bolshevik Party in 1917 was not a centralised, disciplined body made up of seasoned professional revolutionaries. Rather it was a decentralised grouping (by necessity if not aspiration) whose membership was predominantly made up of recent joiners who were unwilling to await orders from above. Moreover, Lenin spent a significant amount of time that year fighting the inertia and conservativism of his own party’s bureaucracy. The disciplined vanguard party hoped for in What is to be Done? became a reality only after the party’s seizure of power and was a part of the gathering counter-revolution which consolidated that power at the expense of worker and soviet power. The messy reality of 1917 was replaced by an idealised account and this image informs Leninists ever since (as shown by Darlington’s alternative).
Perhaps rightly given the scope of this book, Darlington does not explore events after the formation of the Communist Party and so does not have to ponder why – if the solution to the limitations of syndicalism had been found – that Britain has not been as close to revolution as when syndicalism haunted the minds of its ruling class before and after the First World War. In another work, he (unwittedly) noted in passing some of the reasons for this, reporting on how “[i]n the immediate run-up to the General Strike [in 1926], almost the whole of the CP[GB]’s political bureau . . . was put out of action by a government crack down.”[24] Centralised leadership empowers the few at the top which, in turn, makes it easy for the authorities to behead the party. Worse, these few were also just order-takers for “the CP[GB] was part of a centralised world movement. In some respects it owned its very existence to the Russian Revolution and its leaders and members were profoundly influenced and guided by advice and guidance from the Moscow centre. . . In such circumstances the line of the Comintern was bound to be decisive”[25]. During the General Strike, Darlington agrees that this line proved to be disastrous. Still, we can rest assured that Darlington’s party has the right people at the top and all will be well.
As his account of the Liverpool Transport Strike of 1911 suggests, Darlington seems impatient, bemoaning that radicals then did not leap to the correct perspectives when, in fact, ideas change through struggle and developments take time. This can be seen in his account of the Shop Stewards’ movement during the War, a movement syndicalists were active in. He faults the shop stewards for “refus[ing] to agitate politically against the war on the shopfloor, albeit from a minority position”[26] as the Russian Bolsheviks did[27] and so limited themselves to wages and conditions. Again, this feels like a desire to subordinate economic struggles to politics rather than a serious strategy of building working class power.[28] This lack of explicitly anti-war agitation by syndicalist (and often Marxist) shop stewards can be explained by the context these struggles took place in. As one of these activists, J.T. Murphy, later recounted:
“None of the strikes which took place during the course of the war were anti-war strikes. They were frequently led by men like myself who wanted to stop the war, but that was not the real motive. Had the question of stopping the war been put to any strikers’ meeting it would have been overwhelmingly defeated. The stoppages had a different origin and a different motive.”[29]
So, again, while in the abstract these activists can be bemoaned for not pursuing a favoured path, the realty on the ground was different. Would it have been better for the Shop Stewards movement to be strangled at birth by its activists raising anti-war views? Or that it had been led by others, lacking a wider revolutionary perspective? Or would it be better to see it grow with the hope that anti-war views would be articulated as appropriate? After all, syndicalists (in Britain and elsewhere) managed to publicly oppose the war suggesting that it is not syndicalism’s opposition to “politics” which is the issue here but rather these specific syndicalists and the context they found themselves in.[30] It is not hard to conclude that Darlington would prefer no struggle taking place simply so that party could gain a few more members (at least for a while, given the turn-over rate of these vanguards).
This is, I feel, the logical conclusion from a perspective which views building a party as being of more importance than building a movement. Darlington rightly notes the important role The Daily Herald and its league played in the revolt, being a forum for all rebel movements (syndicalist, suffragette, or whatever). He does not dwell on the awkward fact that no Leninist newspaper would be what The Daily Herald was – indeed, the notion that such a paper would print anything about a rival group or theory that was not a travesty would express a touching naivety.
As such, Tom Mann’s lament when he resigned from the BSP that activists spent too much time on seeking electoral glory than building working class strength still rings true – although now that would include time spent on building whatever political sect they happen to be in. This is not to suggest that there is no role or need for a specific anarchist federation to influence the wider movement, simply that the Marxist party-fetish needs to be rejected.
The book ends by noting that the labour unrest had “some very distinctive features that were not replicated, or at least not quite in the same intense and wider-ranging fashion”[31] in later struggles without concluding that this was because there was no “party of a new type” around to sidetrack those conflicts and militants into the dead-end of Bolshevism. Yes, this period is an important one which shaped the British Labour movement for decades afterwards. It should be studied and lessons gained from it. Unfortunately, this book will not allow that to be done. Ultimately, it shows the promise of the Labour Unrest in creating a significant extra-parliamentary minority within the labour movement did not come to pass, mostly because Bolshevism replaced these tendencies.
What comes clear from Darlington’s account is that the anarchist stress on economic and social struggle and movements rather than “political action” was well-founded. The radicalising impact of strikes – of direct action in general – can be seen from the numerous anti-union laws imposed by various Tory governments over the years (and not reversed by New Labour). Indeed, much of the direct action and solidarity of the time would be illegal now – sympathy strikes, strikes decided upon at mass meetings, not giving two weeks’ notice, etc., etc., etc. These State inferences in the labour market shackling the unions has ensured that labour has managed to keep less and less of the wealth we produce, with it flooding upwards into the hands of the plutocratic few, as well as undermining the development of class consciousness. The ruling class clearly recognises where our power lies but most socialists did not seem to and most still consider standing for elections as a useful activity (in spite of over 100 years of evidence confirming the anarchist critique of it producing reformism).
The debates he recounts on dual unionism, “boring from within” and rank-and-file movements are still important. The latter for Darlington is considered a lesson from the period (after the need for a Bolshevik-style party). This is to be expected as the Clyde Workers’ Committee is usually referenced by Leninists when they discuss industrial strategy but the fact that it is always this example which is invoked should, perhaps, be cause for concern. Simply put, none of the strategies advanced have worked in their own terms whatever merits they may have but they are all aspects of syndicalism rather than Bolshevism and so should be re-evaluated without that legacy hanging over them.
Strangely, Darlington points out that the contradictory behaviour of reformist union bureaucrats “can be explained by the sophisticated syndicalist analysis of official trade unionism that developed”[32] but that is quickly forgotten in the next section (“Tom Mann and Union Officialdom”) when he suggests that Mann “seemed to think that a militant rank-and-file, committed to direct action and grassroots union democracy, would be able to force incumbent union officials either to act in the interests of members or be pushed aside from below.”[33] This is not that far from the Clyde Workers’ Committee’s famous summation of its role:
“We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of Delegates from every shop and untrammelled by obsolete rule or law, we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file.”[34]
Which suggests that encouraging a sense of power within workers and encouraging our ability to act for ourselves is far more important than any given strategy. Indeed, we should reject a “one-size fits all approach” to industrial organising and recognise that some strategies are more appropriate than others in specific situations.
Darlington, however, bemoans how “syndicalists concluded that all leadership, whether from official or unofficial sources was bound to stifle the independence and initiative of the rank-and-file”[35] Yet it is not hard to conclude that they had a point – empowering the rank-and-file is more fruitful than getting them to follow a new set of leaders. He suggests that “the syndicalists did provide a form of informal leadership, particularly when they urged them to take strike action, often independent of union officials”[36] yet this is confounding two radically different notions – that of leading and that of giving a lead, or a leadership of people and a leadership of ideas. The former keeps people dependent on others, the latter builds the confidence and empowerment to act for yourself. This feeds into Darlington suggesting, against the syndicalists, that changing the form of the unions would not change their content yet this fails to recognise that form and content interact. Certain forms of organisation encourage the participation, debate and self-activity by which the members ideas (content) change while others hinder it.
While this is irrelevant to Leninists – who argue how we organise now need not reflect the socialist society we aim for – it is not for those seeking to learn from history rather than repeat it. After all, the tragedy of this period is that militants who had originally supported the Bolsheviks because they thought that their ideas on radical democracy, workers’ control and anti-capitalism had became advocates of a regime based on party dictatorship, controlled workers and state-capitalism. The farce is that, given what we know now (and then, given the accounts of anarchists like Goldman and Berkman, amongst others), Darlington wants to repeat it. The interrelationship between means and ends, of form and content, needs to be stressed, not dismissed.
Before Darlington’s book, the only significant work on this period was Bob Holton’s British Syndicalism 1900-1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1976). Sadly, that remains the best account of British Syndicalism and Darlington’s must be considered a missed opportunity. While his account of the strike wave is excellent and more comprehensive than Holton’s, the book is marred by the politics of its author and his preconceptions, biases and prejudices do not allow him to draw obvious conclusions from the evidence he provides. It may be argued that his book is on the Labour Revolt rather than Syndicalism but the two are interwoven and to downplay the latter ensures that the former cannot be fully understood nor lessons gained.
End Notes
[1] Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the transition to communism: an international comparative analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), republished as Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). For a critique, see my “Syndicalism, Marxist Myth and Anarchist Reality”, Black Flag, No. 235 (May 2012).
[2] See, for example, “Syndicalism and the Influence of Anarchism in France, Italy and Spain”, Anarchist Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2009) and my response “Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism”, Anarchist Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 2012).
[3] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 43. By the time of the unity discussions that eventually formed the CPGB after the war, the BSP had dropped to “about 6,000 members” (Ralph Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press], 69).
[4] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 43.
[5] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 43.
[6] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 45.
[7] Iain McKay, “Tom Mann and British Syndicalism”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 3 (Autumn 2021)
[8] Darlington also fails to mention Guild Socialism beyond a passing mention of the “Guild Communist Group” being one of the groupings involved in the creation of the CPGB. (Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 279). Given that this was a particularly British reaction to the rise of syndicalism, this seems a strange omission.
[9] “Anarchists and the Labour Movement”, The Commonweal, 7 November 1891. Kropotkin ten years previously had likewise pointed to the Spanish movement as an example to follow (“Le Mouvement Ouvrier en Espagne”, Le Révolté, 12 November 1881).
[10] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 150-1.
[11] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 263.
[12] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 248.
[13] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 258-9.
[14] Harry Quelch, quoted in Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 259.
[15] quoted by Bob Holton, British Syndicalism 1900-1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 57.
[16] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 268.
[17] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 37. Also 218.
[18] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 216.
[19] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 269.
[20] For example: “In the plainest of English language, which neither man nor woman here could misunderstand, I commented upon the existence of that power. I also made the straightest possible reference to the means whereby I would deprive them of that power. Isn’t that so?” (Tom Mann and Arthur M. Lewis, Debate between Tom Mann and Arthur M. Lewis : at the Garrick Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, Sunday, November 16, 1913 [Chicago : C.H. Kerr, 1914]), 40.
[21] Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, How we shall bring about the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth (London: Pluto Press, 1990).
[22] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 269.
[23] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 269.
[24] Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy, 117.
[25] Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy, 122.
[26] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 276.
[27] Or are asserted to have done, as no reference is provided – presumably because that is the official line.
[28] Need it be mentioned that protests and strikes which produced the February Revolution began with economic demands? Or that the local Bolsheviks opposed these direct actions which brought down the Tsar?
[29] Quoted by Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy, 42.
[30] Murphy’s 1917 pamphlet The Workers’ Committee not mentioning the war is used as an example of this. (Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 276) A more charitable (and perhaps more accurate) explanation would be that Murphy’s pamphlet is expounding upon general organisational forms and strategies, so discussion of current affairs (no matter how important) would distract from that (as well as dating the document unnecessarily). It is a pamphlet on general workplace organisation rather than arguing for a specific strategy in response to specific attacks or issues. As such, Darlington is complaining that a pamphlet written for a specific purpose did not other issues which are outwith its scope.
[31] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 279.
[32] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 200
[33] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 203
[34] Quoted by Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy, 15.
[35] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 208.
[36] Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14, 208.