Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 25
derived from syndicalisme, which simply means ‘trade unionism’, the French equivalent
for the English ‘syndicalism’ being syndicalisme révolutionnaire: revolutionary
trade unionism. When Mann returned to England in May 1910 after eight years in
Australasia, Guy Bowman was one of the group who met him at the Royal Victoria
Dock, London. Virtually the first thing Mann said to Bowman was ‘Let’s go and see
the men of Direct Action’, and within three weeks the two men were in Paris talking
to leading members of the CGT. 38 British syndicalism was also strongly influenced
by American industrial unionism: of the IWW, founded in 1905, and of Daniel De
Leon’s semi-parliamentarian, semi-syndicalist Socialist Labour Party. A Socialist
Labour Party (SLP) had been launched in Britain in 1903 as a breakaway from the
SDF’s Scottish section, was to be centred on Clydeside and, in its advocacy of ‘dual
unionism’, only during the war relaxed its prohibition of members accepting union
office. William Paul, a leading theoretician of the SLP, was in 1917 to subject the
Fabian and ILP programme of municipal and state enterprise to a cogent critique,
maintaining that the extension of state control would merely reinforce capitalism
and ‘bring with it armies of official bureaucrats, who will only be able to maintain
their posts by tyrannizing and limiting the freedom of the workers’, the proletariat
becoming little better than serfs, and in contrast advocating industry being ‘democratically
owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks
industrial administrative committees’, leading to the replacement of ‘the capitalist
political or geographical State’ by a ‘central industrial administrative committee’. 39
Syndicalism combined a Marxist analysis of capitalism with, roughly, an anarchist
strategy, the means being the work-to-rule, the go-slow (ca’canny), the irritation
strike, sabotage. This wasn’t a negative, anti-social conception for, as Emile Pouget
stressed in Le Sabotage, the militancy was directed ‘only against capital; against
the bank-account’: ‘The consumer must not suffer in this war waged against the
exploiter.’ 40 All disputes between capital and labour were seen as contributing to the
class consciousness of the workers and preparatory to the final struggle, envisaged as
a revolutionary general strike that would enable the syndicalist unions to take over
the running of all major social arrangements and establish a stateless co-operative
commonwealth.
Britain experienced a series of massive strikes during ‘the labour unrest’ of
1910–14. The first dispute with a syndicalist dimension was a lockout at a colliery
in Tonypandy, in the Rhondda, from September 1910. In November miners
38 Geoff Brown, ‘Introduction’, to The Industrial Syndicalist (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1974),
pp. 11–13.
39 William Paul, The State: Its Origin and Function (Glasgow: Socialist Labour Press, n.d.), pp. 183,
197–8. See also James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1973), pp. 46–7. Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London: Croom
Helm, 1977), despite its title, is a history of the SLP.
40 Cited by E.J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), p. 280.