by Frank McLynn
The fifth core element of Sorel’s thought was his treatment of ‘myth’ and his consequent views on revolution. For Sorel the greatest of modern ideas was the general strike, but by this he meant, not the actual national strikes taking place in, say, Sweden, Belgium or England, but an apocalyptic myth of the general strike, involving the holocaust of existing society and the apotheosis of the proletariat. Sorel defined myth as any set of ideas which would lead to a call for action: the myth of the general strike, then, was meant to inspire solidarity, heroism and self-sacrifice and to make the proletariat aware of its awesome power. In contrast to Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the myth of the general strike in Sorel’s thought was purely destructive: it was not meant to usher in communist revolution but simply to destroy existing society at a stroke. At times Sorel came close to Trotsky’s notion of ‘permanent revolution’, for in his view it did not matter whether this or that contingent general strike was successful or not; the education of the proletariat would go on. In line with his admiration for heroic conquerors, insofar as Sorel thought seriously about revolution at all, he conceived of it as something like the process whereby Cortés destroyed the mighty Aztec Empire almost overnight but put nothing worthwhile in its place. It can thus be seen that, in Sorel’s thinking, the general strike was not an adjunct or prelude to revolution but really had nothing to do with it at all, or, as he expressed it delphically, myth is an act of creation, not prediction, and the whole point of socialism can be subsumed in the myth of the general strike.25 The aim of the general strike, if it has one besides heroic gigantism, is the rejection of any future hierarchy.26 This was why Sorel was violently opposed to the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as famously promulgated by Lenin. Not only would this end by simply replacing one elite with another instead of generating an egalitarian society, but the involvement of the middle classes always spelt death for the proletariat, which had to remain clean and uncontaminated by intellectualism. Yet the dizzying combination of Marxist historical realism, Bergsonian intuitionism, Nietzschean heroism, anarcho-syndicalism and – a key aspect – revolutionary voluntarism27 does not exhaust Sorel’s theoretical panoply. There remains the sixth factor: his emphasis on violence. All revolutions have to envisage violence, if only because no socio-economic elite ever goes gently into the night, but in Sorel violence acquires a new dimension. Sorel actually believed that violence acted as a moral educator for the working class, as it exposed the hidden violence of bourgeois society, with its sham ‘pseudo-democracy’. Far more honest than the system of judges and law courts operating a bogus system masquerading as ‘the rule of law’ was the lynch law of frontier societies or the vendetta of Corsica and Sicily, which had an authenticity not possessed by the violence of police and the military in ‘civilised’ societies’.28 This was all part of the ‘myth’ of the general strike as an apocalyptic event which would purify and renew mankind. Yet the alleged distinction between police and military violence on the one hand and ‘authentic’ primitive violence on the other was a very fine one. It is not surprising that Sorel was popular in fascist societies. As has been well said: ‘A morality that regards violence in itself as a source of heroism or greatness is very near to being an instrument of despotism.’29
Theoretical debates in Marxism and bastardised Marxism may seem a long way from the mundane world of national strikes, but they were significant. The British ruling class in the 1920s was largely educated and sophisticated, and many of these ideas had been absorbed, albeit at second or third hand, fuelling what looks like absurd paranoia in the 1920s. And there was nothing theoretical about the upsurge of syndicalism in Britain in 1910–14, promoted by the great labour organiser Tom Mann, a veteran along with John Burns and Ben Tillett of the 1889 dock strike. Despairing of revolution in England, Mann departed for Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century but returned in 1910 to spread the gospel of anarcho-syndicalism. In 1912 he was convicted under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act for publishing an article in his organ the Syndicalist – ‘An Open Letter to British Soldiers’ – urging them to refuse to shoot at strikers. Sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, he was released after public pressure led to the quashing of the sentence.30 If Sorel’s legacy and influence were mixed, the mainstream Marxists fared better. There could hardly be any mistake about the importance of Trotsky’s thinking to the universe of the 1926 General Strike in Britain, as he devoted a major essay expressly to that very subject. Trotsky and Sorel ran along the same lines in advocating the importance of the general strike for building up the confidence of the proletariat but thereafter they diverged sharply, for Trotsky laid great emphasis on the ‘soviets’ as the embryonic form of a future workers’ government.31 Although Trotsky would have little time for Sorel’s unfocused apocalyptic violence, he agreed with Engels and Lenin that the age of street barricades was over, that the key element in any general strike was to win over the proletarian elements in the police and the military. This would happen only if the working class displayed a fearless face, seemingly unafraid of death and determined to do whatever it took and to bear any sacrifice to prevail: ‘One may undertake a general strike only when the working class, and, in the first place, its advance guard, are prepared to carry the struggle through to the end.’32 In such circumstances, Trotsky thought, the rankers overwhelmingly drawn from the working class would be bound to question their role. He certainly had more than a glimmering of a case here: the British government admitted that in 1919–20 it had tried to bribe the military with enhanced pay and perks, fearful that returning servicemen might turn their triumphal guns against the Establishment itself.33 For Trotsky, unlike Sorel, a general strike had no meaning unless it was the prelude to armed insurrection; a genuine general strike was bound to end in violence. ‘If arms are not resorted to, it is impossible to organise a general strike; if the general strike is renounced, there can be no thought of any serious struggle.’ And again: ‘The General Strike is one of the most acute forms of class warfare. It is only one step from the General Strike to armed insurrection.’34
If Trotsky and Sorel typified the thoughts on the general strike that were swirling around in the zeitgeist of the 1920s, in a British context they were certainly not operating in a vacuum, as the years 1910–14 and 1919–21 saw the most serious industrial unrest in the nation’s history; only the interruption of World War One in 1914–18 prevented this from being a non-stop decade of turbulence. After the failure of Chartism, for sixty years the British Labour movement was quiescent, with occasional exceptions such as its success in the 1889 London Dock Strike. But in 1910–14 the country was rocked by industrial turbulence of a kind not seen since the 1830s and 1840s. Some statistics are eloquent. Between 1900 and 1909 an average of 3.5 million working days were lost each year through strikes and lockouts. In 1910 the figure was 12 million days and in 1912 over 38 million. Miners, seamen, dockers and carters were particularly to the fore, and at one time or another in 1911–12 every port, coalfield and railway in the country was on strike. Nine per cent of the total industrial population was involved in strikes in 1911 as against an average of 2.9 per cent for the period 1902–10. In 1904, 67,653 persons were involved in strikes but this number shot up to 1,232,116 by 1912.35 Even more worrying was that, by British standards, the new strike wave was marked by an unprecedented violence. There was widespread looting in the Tonypandy riots of 1910, and the firing of the dockyards at Hull conjured uncomfortable memories of the Newport rising. Historians dispute the causes. Some attribute it to the failure of wages to keep pace with prices and profits after 1900.36 Others say that Edwardian England saw a reduced rate of economic growth, stagnant productivity and, above all, failure to invest in new technology: by 1900 this made the railways and the steel industry dinosaurs when compared with the sharpest competitors in Germany and the USA.37 Still others, inferring from the fact that many workers in 1910–14 who on paper should not have been striking nevertheless were striking, speak of a �
��syndicalist uprising’, with syndicalism a spontaneous challenge from workers tired and disillusioned with the ‘softly, softly’ approach of the Trades Union Congress and the reformist and collaborationist stance of the Labour Party, which was in the doldrums in these years.38 Certainly some ‘mixed’ causal approach seems most likely to untangle this complicated skein. One fruitful suggestion is that these years saw both a resurgence of old unionism, typified by the strikes in the coal, cotton and building trades and the appearance of a new unionism, associated with transport workers and particularly linked to the docks and railways; the locus classicus was the nationwide strike on the railways in 1911.39 Yet another interpretation, dating from a classic study in the 1930s, is that 1910–14 saw a ‘systemic crisis’ as Edwardian England lurched into the social equivalent of a ‘hole in the ocean’. Not only was there continual international tension, as Germany challenged the Royal Navy’s superriority at sea, and with crises in Morocco and the Balkans, but Britain itself was beset by a threefold internal challenge: from the Unionists in Northern Ireland as the Liberal government promised Home Rule to a united Ireland; from the suffragettes, whose campaign reached its zenith in these years; and from labour unions, at the very time the country tore itself apart with the constitutional crisis over the reform of the House of Lords – an issue which necessitated two general elections in 1910 before the bill curbing the Lords’ power was passed the following year.40 Some historians have tried to deny that these phenomena were interconnected and claim that they each have separate causes, but the best recent scholarship sustains the older view. Even more ingeniously, there is yet another thesis in the field, purporting to show that 1910–14 was another of those periods of ‘general crisis’, with workers manifesting a new rebelliousness not just in Britain but also in Germany, France, USA, Canada, Russia, Italy and Spain.41
The years 1910–14, then, saw strikes in every significant industry and every corner of the United Kingdom, and this pattern was picked up in 1919–21 immediately after the war.42 In 1919 35 million working days were lost to strikes, and on average every day there were 100,000 workers on strike – this was six times the 1918 rate. There were stoppages in the coal mines, in the printing industry, among transport workers, and in the cotton industry, where 450,000 workers were on strike for eighteen days, and among iron-moulders, throwing 150,00 men out of work. More worrying to the elite were the mutinies in the military and the two separate police strikes in London and Liverpool over union recognition. Altogether 6,000 officers struck in August 1918 when called out by the National Union of Police and Prison Officers. In August 1919, after being forbidden union membership, the police came out again, but this time the response was patchy. In London, out of 19,000 policemen only 1,083 stopped work; in Liverpoool, however, the figures were 932 out of 2,100, and the shortage was such that the army had to be called in to quell riots. Altogether around 3,000 strikers were dismissed. The elite had learned its lesson, and thereafter made sure that adequate pay and conditions secured the loyalty of the ‘thin blue line’.43 In Glasgow in January the army was called in to deal with riots and protests against high rents in Glasgow which, together with the official mass strike in the city, combined to form the fearsome image of ‘Red Clydeside’.44 There was another serious strike in another part of the Celtic fringe, this time in Belfast. The spirit of revolution was truly in the air, fostered by the uprisings in Germany and Hungary that year and the continuing Bolshevik success in Russia. The British elite meanwhile was not just immersed in the Big Four negotiations for what would become the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, but was also preoccupied with major troubles in Ireland and India. The prime minister, Lloyd George, confessed that a revolution was likely and that he had few resources to pit against the putative revolutionaries.45 His opinion was shared by many later analysts, who considered that the working class missed its best chance in 1919 when elite opposition was divided and fragmented and technology had not swung decisively in the government’s favour, as it would do by 1926. Lloyd George’s doubts did not put an end to his reflex Machiavellianism: a railway strike in the same year was thought to have been deliberately provoked by him.46 1919 was also the year in which the miners entered definitively into the political frame. The crisis in the coal industry was the trigger that would nudge the nation decisively in the direction of a national strike; such an eventuality was not inevitable, but lamentable failures by successive prime ministers to deal methodically and coherently with the problem meant that already by 1919 the country was headed in a dangerous direction. Sometimes a revolutionary situation is brought about not so much by repression and reaction but sheer laziness, short-termism and incompetence, and so it proved in the early 1920s. Paradoxically, the leftist impetus of these years catapulted the Labour Party to power, though the party was the least revolutionary body conceivable.47
The problems in the British coal industry were cultural, structural and, above all, financial. Pre-World War One Britain had relied heavily on the export trade in coal, iron and steel and textiles, and these ‘traditional’ industries were located in regions (Lancashire, Yorkshire, Clydeside and the Lowlands of Scotland, South Wales) with their own distinctive customs, traditions, mores, folkways and ethos, at odds with and remote from the general hegemonic culture of the wider nation. This was particularly the case with the coal industry, for miners were geographically and culturally isolated even from their brethren in the wider trade union movement. Miners were accustomed to long and bitter strikes, lasting three, six, nine, even twelve, months, but other members of the working class were not.48 Structurally the mining industry was wildly heterogeneous, with conditions varying enormously from county to county, colliery to colliery and sometimes even varying between different pits in the same coalfield. This produced a nightmare, since most pay agreements were local, not national, so that district federations rather than the national union were the important factor; this was why delegates to the national conference of the union came with binding mandates. The local pay agreements produced startlingly different results in miners’ pay. Between 1921 and 1925 skilled miners in Nottinghamshire received 17s 3d per shift, and unskilled ones 13s 7d. By contrast in Durham the rate was, respectively, 8s and 5s 10d and in Bristol 7s 4d and 6s 4d.49 Worst of all problems was the economic crisis afflicting coal. The industry was huge – by 1914 coalmining employed one-tenth of the labour force – but output per man had been declining since 1880 (199 tonnes per man in 1920–4 as against 247 tonnes in 1910–14 and 310 tons in the 1880s). Declining productivity was largely the fault of poor management, with little technical innovation or farsighted investment in evidence, so that by 1926 the Ruhr coalfields in Germany produced 80 per cent of its coal by mechanical means while Britain produced just 25 per cent. The result was that labour costs in mining accounted for 65–75 per cent of the total costs of production.50 The dangers of work in the coalfields were terrific. In the 1920s the average life expectancy of a miner was fifty. In 1922–4 3,603 miners were killed in pit accidents and 597,198 injured – and this was in a context where injuries which did not keep a man off work for more than seven days were not recorded.51 Hardly surprisingly, the miners were both heavily unionised and inclined to be militant. By the 1920s more than a million of them were members of the national union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB). Founded with 36,000 members in 1888, it had acquired 200,000 by 1893 and 360,000 by the turn of the century.52 This was in line with the wide rise of trade unionism. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in 1868, and by 1920 some 45 per cent of Britain’s workforce belonged to a union. The Miners’ Federation was the giant that straddled the scene, but other powerful bodies were beginning to make their presence felt in the early 1920s, especially the Transport and General Workers’ Union (established in 1922), the Amalgamated Engineering Union (founded 1921) and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (1924), each with over 0.25 million members. By 1926 the TUC represented 6.5 million workers.53
&
nbsp; The results of the First World War would eventually bring the British coal industry to near-terminal crisis, although the implications took a long time to percolate, both in objective terms and subjective perceptions. Total coal output fell after 1914, and the heavy use of coal in wartime severely curbed British exports, with Germany, Poland and the USA the particular beneficiaries. In 1919 Lloyd George proposed to return the mines, under government control and direction during the war, to private hands but was threatened with a general strike on the issue by a new and powerful combination of unions, the so-called Triple Alliance of mine workers, railwaymen and transport workers. The alliance had been formed before the war and in 1914 threatened Prime Minister Asquith with a general stoppage – a threat overtaken by the outbreak of war. Now reformed and stronger than ever, the Triple Alliance warned Lloyd George that renewed privatisation, with its concomitant pay cuts, would lead to a national strike. The miners wanted a pay rise of 30 per cent, a six-hour working day and nationalisation of the mines, and voted 6–1 in favour of a strike to secure these terms.54 Beset by industrial and international problems on all sides, Lloyd George got the Triple Alliance to suspend the threat until a royal commission on mining had reported. But he cunningly chose the composition of the commission so that paralysis would result. Heading the commission was the lawyer John Sankey (1866– 1948). Working with him were three miners’ representatives, three mine owners, three industrialists and three economists. Best known to the general public were the two leftist economists Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney and their liberal colleague, the aptly named Leo Chiozza Money.55 Hardly surprisingly, this diverse group produced three separate reports. The phalanx of economists and unionists recommended that the miners’ claim on pay and hours be met in full. The owners offered 1s 6d a day pay increase and a seven-hour working day, while Sankey and the industrialists opted for a middle course of a seven-hour day and 2s a day pay rise, plus some fringe benefits. The issue of nationalisation engendered four reports. The economists and unionists broadly agreed on this, the mine owners took the line that only reprivatisation would do, while the industrialists tried to find a third way between nationalisation and private ownership. On this issue Sankey cast the deciding vote for nationalisation, giving a narrow 7–6 majority.56 Lloyd George seized on the lack of unanimity to reject nationalisation, and opted instead for fudge and short-termism – a decision for which Stanley Baldwin would ever afterwards blame him, as this one measure more than any other was to precipitate the General Strike of 1926.57 While he dithered on the other recommendations, and with the mines still under government control, the miners struck in October 1920. Lloyd George rushed an Emergency Powers Act through Parliament, allowing for imprisonment without trial and the deployment of the military in an emergency (‘emergency’ to be defined, naturally, by the government), but meanwhile settled on the miners’ terms, privately vowing that there would be a return match when he would settle decisively with them.
