CHAPTER VII
THE LABOUR PARTY’S ADOPTION OF SOCIALISM
5. APPROVAL OF DIRECT ACTION.
The Meaning and Qualities of Direct Action—Direct Action on the Clyde, 1916—Conversion of the Labour Party to Use of Direct Action-Establishment of the Council of Action—Setting-up of Local Soviets.
Perhaps the greatest menace to ordered constitutional government is the Labour Party’s acceptance of the method of direct action for enforcement of its policy upon an unconforming community. Many distinguished leaders of the Party have declared against the social dangers of wielding such a weapon, but in spite of such admonitions the Party has resorted to it, and created an elaborate machinery for its application; whereupon those distinguished leaders turned round and supported it as forcibly as they previously condemned it. Once any section of the nation becomes addicted to the facile use of such a species of organized tyranny—because it is nothing else—however humanitarian be the alleged aim or purpose, the death-knell of law and order has been sounded.
The Meaning and Qualities of Direct Action
In the revised edition of their History of Trade Unionism (1920) Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb point out (p. 664) that when they published in 1897 their Industrial Democracy the term “direct action” was unknown. In point of fact, this name for the principle or practice of social coercion through economic pressure made its advent into this country from France and the United States of America in 1905. By 1912 it had passed into full currency among advanced sections of organized Labour in Scotland and parts of England, and in practice almost invariably implies either a sectional Strike by a particular group or groups of labour, or a general strike by all groups of labour combined. All strikes are not, however, direct action. Wage-earners reasonably contend that as any individual workman has the right to refuse to enter into or continue under a contract of service, any group of workmen or all groups acting together in a strike are entitled to exercise a like freedom. Mr. and Mrs. Webb are disposed to call such a strike “an economic strike” and to use the phrase a “non-economic strike” to designate a strike undertaken “not for an alteration in the conditions of employment of any section of the trade union world, but with a view to enforce, either on individuals, on Parliament, or on the Government, some other course of action desired by the strikers.” It is only strikes of the latter type that they place in the category of direct action; in other words, they make the purpose of the strike the test. That is too limited a definition of direct action, but it would include such a case as the refusal in 1917 of the National Union of Sailors and Firemen to work vessels by which two members of the Labour Party were preparing, at the instance of the Government, to travel on their way to Petrograd; also a like refusal of the same Union in 1918 to carry Mr. Arthur Henderson and M. Camille Huysmans across the Channel en route for Paris, the object of the Union being to prevent the organization of an International Socialist Conference. Another case of the same kind was the action of the Electrical Trades Union in 1918 in “calling out” their members engaged in the Albert Hall in London with instructions to appropriate the fuses—which did not belong to them—so as to keep the Hall in darkness and prevent it being used for any purpose, as a reprisal against the proprietors for cancelling the letting of the Hall for a Labour demonstration. Further illustrations of the “non-economic strike” were the threats of the compositors and printers in certain London newspaper offices to cease work during the railway strike in 1919 because of the adverse criticism of the railwaymen by the editorial staff; the threat of the miners to close down the coal mines in 1919 unless compulsory military service was abolished, and unless military and naval action by the British Government against the Soviet Government of Russia was discontinued; the scheme for a strike put forward by the miners in August and September 1920 under the guise of a claim for increased wages, but really for the political purpose of forcing the nationalization of the coal industry.
The very name “direct action” indicates that the action in question is alternative to some other action regarded as indirect, which is invariably the orderly method of procedure, prescribed by industrial agreement, or by the rules of the Trade Union, or by the Constitution of the country. Hence, in my opinion, the fundamental quality of direct action is its anarchic character. Some groups or individuals in the Labour movement resort to anarchic action in preference to orderly procedure, deliberately as recalcitrant minorities, who, bound by the formal agreement of majorities, intend to prevent the view of the majority being carried into effect. Others, impatient reformers who regard orderly methods as too cumbersome and dilatory, and are either not able or not prepared to work for gradual amendment, follow their example. And one further sees direct action adopted with the ulterior object of wrecking existing craft Trade Union organization, as for instance by revolutionary Unionists in old skilled Unions like the Amalgamated Engineering Union, or by revolutionary Syndicalists who wish to exercise and develop all the latent power of manual workers so that the weapon of the general strike may be sharp and bright on the day when it is to be used to hack down the Constitution, and usher in the social revolution. These, however, are special reasons. In the minds of great and slow thinking sections of Labour, direct action has come to be regarded as the easiest and quickest, sometimes as the only, road to political power. Labour is greedy for political power; it intends to make its political fortune, in the words of Horace, “Si possis, recte; si non, quocunque modo....”
The anarchic character of direct action constitutes its real danger far more than its non-economic purpose, if the purpose be non-economic, which it very frequently is not. Just as any anarchic method betokens, so does it beget, a lawless as distinguished from law-abiding quality of mind. Human nature is not lawless in one sphere of its activity and constitutionally minded in another, anarchic, for example, in industrial affairs and orderly in politics. The same strain runs right through; an undisciplined individual makes as bad a citizen as he does a Trade Unionist. It was the anarchic character of direct action that impressed itself most strongly on the writer’s mind during the anxious years 1914-1918 before any non-economic strikes such as those described above had occurred.
Direct Action on the Clyde, 1916
Take for instance the strikes of March to April 1916, in the engine shops of Clydeside, which the writer had to handle. The Government had made with the Trade Unions the “Treasury” Agreements of March 1915, providing for the suspension of Trade Union customs in order to accelerate and increase output. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers Executive Council had formally submitted the agreements by ballot to its members, who by a large majority had accepted them. Acting under the agreements the Government proceeded to introduce women into engineering shops throughout the country with the co-operation of the A.S.E. Executive. But on Clydeside members of the A.S.E. refused to allow women to enter the shops on the agreed conditions, or at all.
Many of the shop stewards[5] in the engineering shops on Clydeside were members of the Socialist Labour Party. The principles of the S.L.P., copied from those of the I.W.W., involve (see p. 54) class-warfare, the destruction of the official Trade Unions and of all industrial organizations except those of a similar type and creed to the I.W.W. itself, the overthrow of all existing forms of constitutional government and their replacement by a government of manual workers. The method to be employed is direct action. Mr. Beer, in his History of British Socialism (Vol. II, p. 393), says: “The S.L.P. theories came nearest to those of Lenin and Trotsky.”