The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Superficially Chartism seems to have been as signal a failure as the Peasants’ Revolt, the Jack Cade rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the campaigns by Levellers and Diggers and the Jacobite Risings. The deferential working class after 1850 was a disappointing outcome for those who had looked for so much from the People’s Charter in 1838. In time, most of the famous Six Points were conceded by the ruling class, though usually grudgingly and on its own terms. The property qualification for MPs was removed in 1858 as no longer being relevant, but some anomalies, such as university voting, were not finally phased out until 1948. The secret ballot was granted in 1872 by Gladstone and his first government; Gladstone in many ways, most notably on Ireland, inherited the acceptable and transmogrified aspects of O’Connorism. Universal male suffrage was a long time coming. The Second Reform Bill added a million men to the electorate and the Third Reform Bill of 1884 another 2.5 million, though it still left one-tenth of adult males ineligible to vote.160 The real breakthrough came only in 1918 with the Representation of the People Act, which in adding 13 million people to an existing electorate of just 8 million created the ‘evolutionary gap’ or breakthrough which enabled the Labour Party to displace the Liberals as the second party in a two-party system. The Chartist demand for equal constituencies was aimed at the multi-seat constituencies of the rotten borough type, so that in one sense it was a demand successfully accomplished. But if we mean by equal constituencies equal-sized constituencies, this has still not been attained. The same is the case for annual parliaments, whose prospect seems further away than ever, and even more utopian today than in 1838. With a first-past-the-post electoral system and wasted votes, the consequent two-party system has led to party machines making a mockery of democratic representation and the bizarre phenomenon of prime ministers with more formal powers than Roman emperors. Payment for members of parliament was achieved in 1911, and in those golden days the MP’s salary was six times the average wage. Nowadays it is just two and a half times, but there are twice as many members as in Chartist days, with the Commons top-heavy by at least a third in the view of the best authorities. Against such a mixed picture of success can be set the undoubted fact that Chartism, and especially organs like the Northern Star, did a huge amount to increase working-class consciousness long-term, giving a medium for the articulation of hopes and aspirations nowhere else available in the world of the media.161 Even the much-maligned Land Plan, which seemed a flight from reality, takes on a different hue when viewed from the perspective of early twenty-first-century green concerns and the emphasis on ecology, smallholdings and the world population crisis, thus fulfilling the hopes of those at the time, who saw the plan as the harbinger of great possibilities.162 Others trace Gladstonian liberalism and the suffragettes to the Chartists. The saddest comment on the movement is perhaps this. In an account of his life given to his brother, O’Connor played up his athletic feats, his duels, his courtroom dramas and his victories over O’Connell, but barely mentioned the Chartists.163 Perhaps the most wondrous thing about the movement was that, with uncertain and lacklustre leadership, and governments holding all the cards against them, these reluctant revolutionaries did so well.

  12

  The General Strike: Prelude

  THE GENERAL STRIKE of 1926 presents peculiar problems of interpretation, and needs even more nuanced treatment than previous revolutionary episodes. While there can be no doubt that it was a ‘revolutionary moment’ – in that the opportunity to overthrow an entire political and economic system did, however fleetingly, exist – almost none of the radical actors had revolutionary aims. Yet the government paranoia about ‘red insurrection’, even if deliberately exaggerated, did contain some rationality, since the general strike was the hottest of topics in the early twentieth century. If we return to our trusty trio of revolutionary stages – preconditions, triggers and precipitants – it is clear that part of the deep-seated causality we have to deal with relates to Marxist ideology about the general strike. It should be stated straight away that the concept ‘general strike’ by no means implies revolution. One study at the theoretical level finds four types: the radical, anarchist, syndicalist and socialist conceptions.1 The basic notion is almost as old as history itself, for in ancient Rome in 449 BC the plebeian order used the threat of it to secure reforms and concessions from the patricians: this was the so-called secession plebis.2 Indeed, if one was purely interested in taxonomy, one could extend the classifications manyfold, since it was a popular tactic in the early twentieth century to use the threat of a general strike to try to prevent war: both Jean Jaurès in France and Keir Hardie in England were advocates of this kind of strong-arm pacifism.3 This approach was also attempted to try to salve wounded nationalism and to wring concessions from the occupying power in Japan after 1945, but the ‘American Caesar’ General Douglas MacArthur outlawed it in 1947.4 The term ‘general strike’ is also used loosely to denote a total work stoppage in a given city or community – the ‘general strike’ in Naples, say. Cutting through the luxuriant thicket of usage, we may say that there are really only two kinds of authentic general strike: the total cessation of work within a given nation-state to achieve purely economic and political ends – higher wages, new labour laws, the reform of the voting system, etc; and the general strike used as the prelude to root-and-branch socio-economic revolution. The economic or reformist general strike is really a large-scale sympathy strike. In a sense it can be perceived as a purely negative or defensive phenomenon – what has been termed the ‘general strike of protest’. In British labour history until 1926 there had never been any serious talk of the revolutionary general strike; it was always the reformist variety that was at issue, and even that was in a lukewarm way. The first glimmerings of the idea came in the 1830s when William Benbow, a radical cobbler and lay preacher, came up with the notion of a ‘Grand National Holiday’.5 The Chartists certainly considered the idea, especially in 1842, but they were both too disorganised and ideologically primitive to get a proper handle on it; Robert Owen, on the other hand, opposed what he saw as a manifestation of blatant class warfare.6 Thereafter the idea languished until the 1889 dock strike; once again it was threatened but never seriously entertained.7

  If the rulers of the British political elite had paid closer attention to the rising Labour movement in their own country, they would have realised that revolutionary aspirations for the general strike did not exist there. Instead, they worried about the power and influence of Marxism on the continent and its supposedly baneful influence on the proletariat in their own island. In so doing they proved themselves woefully inadequate as psychologists of human nature. Yet even if they had attended carefully to the ideological debates between continental Marxists, they would have found profound rifts and divisions. Marxism was probably at its high-water mark in the period 1848–1914, with all the following (apart from Marx and Engels) well to the fore in the impassioned doctrinal debates that raged about the best tactics to bring about the ‘inevitable’ demise of capitalism: Proudhon, Blanqui, Bakunin, Kautsky, Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. Marx himself had little to say about the general strike, but his arch-collaborator Engels did, and found it both irrelevant to the question of revolution and a prime example of ‘false consciousness’. His violent opposition to the idea of the general strike found expression in some splenetic animadversions. On the Belgian national strike in 1891 he had this to say: ‘I almost wish the Walloon coal workers, who have provoked the general strike nonsense this time, will put it into practice in Belgium to try to win universal suffrage. They will be mercilessly cut up, and the nonsense will be buried.’8 Here Engels made the elementary mistake of failing to distinguish between the revolutionary general strike and the reformist variety; the elite might well yield to demands articulated under the latter heading, but never to the former. As it turned out, the Belgian national strike that year did secure universal suffrage, even though the Catholic party in Parliament gerrymandered the outcome in f
avour of the bourgeoisie. Even more vociferous was Engels’s denunciation of the threatened general strike during the London dock strike of 1889, which he saw as a mindless gesture of despair:

  Now this was playing va banque, staking £1,000 to win, possibly, £10; it was threatening more than they could carry out; it was creating millions of hungry mouths … they could not feed; it was casting away wilfully all the sympathies of the shopkeepers and even the great mass of the bourgeoisie who hated the dock monopolists, but who would now turn against the workers.9

  The outcome of that strike enabled Engels to breathe again, for the unions sympathetic to the dockworkers concluded that a general strike would be counterproductive; in any case, before the issue could be exhaustively debated within the Labour movement, the shipyard workers caved in.10 In general, the more orthodox the Marxist, the more scepticism there was about the general strike, and the more maverick the ‘Marxist’ the more popular the idea was. Lenin, too, saw no value in the general strike unless it was the immediate prelude to an armed insurrection which had been meticulously planned by a workers’ party. Employing his favourite ‘put down’ for workers’ movements not directed by a ‘vanguard’ Communist Party, Lenin stated that the general strike was merely another example of the limited ‘trade union consciousness’ which the proletariat unaided by the Communist Party could never transcend.11 Kautsky, who tried to avoid the ‘bourgeois deviationism’ of Bernstein on the right and the anarchism of Rosa Luxemburg on the left, argued that a general strike was obviously useless, since the workers would either end up starving before obtaining their demands or, if they used violence, would find themselves machine-gunned by repressive regimes backed with all the power of modern technology.12 Here Kautsky was faithfully echoing Engels’s line that the age of the barricades and street revolts was over; to succeed in revolution you had first to win over the proletarian elements in the police and the army.13

  Yet within Marxism’s broad church there were many dissenters and heterodox opinions. Eduard Bernstein, a ‘right-wing’ Marxist, argued that it was the traditional Marxist notion of revolution that was dangerous folly, and that the gradualism implicit in a reformist general strike was a valuable exercise in consciousness-raising. So far from being ‘general nonsense’, as its critics alleged, the general strike was actually the logical corollary of universal suffrage, since attempts to dilute, vitiate or nullify universal suffrage (through gerrymandering, plural votes for the rich, etc) had to be resisted by extra-parliamentary means.14 Echoing the century-long bifurcation between French and German radical thought, the French Marxist Jules Guesde argued that the general strike was not a revolutionary weapon at all but a tool of capitalism, since it handed employers a pretext to stage lockouts, starve strikers into surrender and generally place the workers on the defensive.15 In sum, there was a wide spectrum of attitudes among Marxists towards a general strike. Some thought, like Bernstein, that the mere threat of it would scare governments into making concessions; others, like Lenin, thought it would work only as a prelude to an armed insurrection; still others that it would spontaneously generate a revolution. The most famous apologist for ‘spontaneous revolution’ was Rosa Luxemburg. She criticised both the social-democrat and the anarchist reading of the general strike, and (albeit implicitly) the Leninist view. According to the social-democrats, the workers were mere tools, to be ordered out by unions or party at their whim. According to the anarchists, all that was needed for success in a general strike was that workers should be ready and willing to strike when called on. According to the Bolsheviks, the proletariat need the guidance of a vanguard party. For Luxemburg, however, the general strike was always an inchoate form of ‘spontaneous combustion’ (the form in which she expected the revolution to occur). Communist parties had a role to play in the process, but simply to educate the workers about the realities of class struggle not to direct them from above.16 Particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1905, she saw the general strike as a key element in the revolutionary struggle – the proletariat’s battering ram, as it were. An educated and class-conscious proletariat would know instinctively when the time was right to launch the strike ‘spontaneously’ – just as an apple falls from the tree of its own accord. For her – and this aligned her closely to anarcho-syndicalism – it did not matter so much whether this or that general strike was contingently successful (though critics said this in itself made nonsense of ‘spontaneous combustion’). Consciousness-raising was all important, and one day all the hard work would pay off in a general strike that broke through to the revolution. Although she was critical of most other elements within the mainstream of Marxism, her most withering scorn was reserved for people like Eduard Bernstein and the gradualists, who preached the benefits of the reformist strike. As she put it: ‘A general strike forged in advance within the fetters of legality is like a war demonstration with cannons dumped into a river within the very sight of the enemy.’17 For her the reformist national strike and the revolutionary general strike had no connection with each other at all and were inherently in conflict, just as much as contradictory propositions in logic were ruled out by the law of excluded middle.18

  The two Marxists who devoted most attention to the concept of the general strike were Leon Trotsky and the French thinker Georges Sorel (though many dispute that Sorel justifies such an epithet). Sorel came to political philosophy in his forties after a career as an engineer and an early ‘formation’ in Jansenism. Sorel’s thought is turbid, apocalyptic and bewilderingly eclectic, and he comes close to the definition of ‘crank’. On any strict interpretation of Marxism, Sorel could not really be thought to have much connection with that dispensation, and it is significant that he was a major influence in Mussolini’s Italy.19 Sorel’s interpretation of Marxism was partial and selective. He liked the economic and realistic side of Marxism, not the philosophical or Hegelian one, but considered Marx himself just one in a polygon of important thinkers, not the infallible oracle of Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Other major influences were Nietzsche, Proudhon, Tocqueville and Bergson.20 Sorel was a voluminous and expansive writer, so it is peculiarly difficult to offer a thumbnail sketch of his thinking, but half a dozen topics seem salient. First, there was his emphasis on heroic endeavour, which recalls Carlyle or Nietzsche’s ‘moral strenuousness’. Sorel was a very ‘masculine’ theorist, for all his most favoured societies are ones where martial valour, self-reliance, the cult of the individual and what Machiavelli called civic virtù are uppermost: the Swiss communes, the pre-1745 Scottish clans, the primitive peasant societies of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, the world of Homer’s heroes, the Norse legends, etc. Greatness and heroism, plus anything that can energise or revive mankind, and a disdain for money and materialism, are his supreme values. The liking for heroic societies easily shades into primitivism. What Sorel liked about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was precisely what repelled most Westerners: what seemed to him an abandonment of the cult of St Petersburg and Peter the Great, with its associated modernism and ‘window’ to the West, in favour of Moscow, the traditions of Ivan the Terrible and, beyond him, the Mongol legacy. Secondly, there is his anti-rationalism.21 The philosophy of the Enlightenment, the notion of human perfectibility, Benthamite utilitarianism and English empiricism are all objects of contempt; even Marxism is ‘true’ only in a pragmatic sense, not the ‘scientific’ one urged by Marx’s most loyal disciples, and it would be far better if Marxists stopped trying to imagine life under a Marxist utopia and instead confronted the neglected (by them) topic of metaphysical evil. Socialism, for him, should be ‘a revaluation of all values’.22 That ‘utopianism’ is a dirty word in Sorel’s vocabulary brings us to the third salient point of his thought: his pessimism. He likes the pessimistic side of Marxism, Calvinism, Jansenism and the culture of the early Christians (for Sorel, in the teeth of historical evidence, argues that the early Christians were pessimists who withdrew from ordinary life to await the Second Coming). The villains in his portrait
gallery were Socrates, the Jesuits, the eighteenth-century philosophes and utopians and ameliorist socialists, all of them tainted with the disease of optimism. The fourth significant aspect of Sorelianism was his anarcho-syndicalism. Sorel shared the anarchist hatred of the State and thought the proper units for a healthful organisation of society were the cooperative syndicates of craftsmen. Social life should simply be aggregates of production units, and the object of socialism should be to apply the workshop system to the whole of political life. Class itself was simply ‘a collection of families’.23 Perhaps reflecting his engineering background, Sorel always placed great value on the social therapy of work; what he most detested about the Marxist ‘blueprint’ for communist society was the breakdown of division of labour in order to generate a surplus of leisure; to him this was merely bourgeois hedonism in another form. Anarcho-syndicalism also had a messianic flavour. It wanted no truck with bourgeois society, whereas orthodox Marxists thought that there were valuable aspects of that culture which could be retained in the new society. The anarcho-syndicalists also despised organised religion, trade unions and political parties (even Communist parties), parliaments and all aspects of the ‘indirect democracy’ involving representation.24