On Clydeside in March 1916, the S.L.P. shop stewards saw their revolutionary opportunity. The writer held innumerable conferences with them trying to introduce harmoniously the agreed scheme of dilution of labour, but as fast as he made progress with the assistance of the Executive Council of the A.S.E. and their local Glasgow officials, it was countered by preparations for obstructive direct action. Finally, the direct actionists matured their plans. It is a principle of theirs always to use the sharpest weapons. There was one immediately to hand. The army in France was in dire need of heavy howitzers to smash the system of trenches which the Germans had commenced to consolidate; Mesopotamia urgently required flat-bottomed barges. These two classes of munitions were being manufactured in engineering shops and shipyards on the Clyde. The direct actionists therefore brought out, or tried to bring out, on strike, all employees in every shop and yard where the howitzers or any part of the howitzers or the flat-bottomed barges were in course of construction, with almost complete success, and with disastrous national results. But the Government met direct action by action more direct, and deported from the Clyde the ringleaders, and the strike collapsed. In this direct action strike the purpose was to nullify the agreement between the Government and the Trade Unions as to the introduction of women into the engineering trade, and to destroy the old craft organizations of the A.S.E. and set up a new industrial organization for that trade. The purpose, therefore, was economic, but the method was anarchic.
Subsequently, the Clyde Workers’ Committee (a committee of Clydeside shop stewards working in co-operation with the Socialist Labour Party) established revolutionary Workers’ Committees in various parts of England, and were behind similar direct action unofficial strikes, repudiated by the Executives of all the Unions concerned, in Barrow-in-Furness in June 1916, on the Mersey in the autumn of 1916, in the engineering shops of England in May 1917, and at other times. These were all economic strikes against trade agreements and arrangements constitutionally concluded between the Government and the Unions. That such anarchic strikes are entirely subversive of all law, order and government in a Trade Union organization as well as in the body politic needs no emphasis. They are just as dangerous to society as any strike regularly declared by a Trade Union for a non-economic purpose.
Conversion of the Labour Party to Use of Direct Action
But to revert to the non-economic strike: Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, who have a wide knowledge of the currents and under-currents of opinions in the industrial world, say on p. 672 of their History of Trade Unionism (1920):
“With regard to a general strike of non-economic or political character, in favour of a particular home or foreign policy, we very much doubt whether the Trades Union Congress could be induced to endorse it, or the rank and file to carry it out, except only in case the Government made a direct attack upon the political or industrial liberty of the manual working-class, which it seemed imperative to resist by every possible means, not excluding forceful revolution itself.”
The kind of direct attack by the Government which the writers had in mind was action such as disfranchisement of the bulk of the manual workers, or deprivation of the Trade Unions of their present rights and liberties, or confiscation of their funds. Short of attempted measures like these, it was the considered opinion of those eminently competent writers, looking out over the Trade Union world as recently as the autumn of 1919, that direct action would be rejected by the Trades Union Congress. But the Portsmouth Congress of 1920 was yet to come.
The specific issue of direct action, in connection with the operations against Russia, was brought before the Trades Union Congress in September 1919, but was strategically shelved. Resolutions were, however, passed demanding the cessation of operations against Russia and the nationalization of coal. To enforce these demands, the Parliamentary Committee was instructed in the former case to call a special Trades Union Congress to decide what action should be taken; in the latter to decide “the form of action to be taken to compel the Government.” This special Congress was held on December 9, 1919—by that time nationalization had become the real issue—but pending the effect of more forcible propaganda, direct action to enforce nationalization was deferred until March 1920. In March, another special Congress was held at which two means of enforcing nationalization were outlined to the Congress—one a general strike, the other intensive political propaganda. Congress decided (p. 63) on a card vote against direct action and in favour of intensive political propaganda in preparation for a General Election.
The solidarity of the Party was seriously endangered by the decision; the direct actionists included influential sections of miners, railwaymen, transport workers and engineers, to many of whom direct action had become an article of belief. Many moderates and extremists, therefore, strove to find an issue on which direct actionists and constitutionalists could be persuaded to co-operate. The production of munitions of war for use in Ireland and against Russia was chosen as the issue. It was cleverly contrived, and at a special meeting of the Trades Union Congress in July 1920, a resolution was passed in favour of a general strike to compel the Government to desist from armed intervention in Ireland and in Russia, and instructing the affiliated Unions to make the necessary domestic arrangements for such a strike. Moderate Labour was thus impaled on the horns of an adroit dilemma, and the more pacificist it was, the more it was impelled to vote for direct action. The Labour Party congratulated itself that it had restored its all-essential solidarity; but the solidarity achieved was more apparent than real—Trade Union domestic arrangements for a general strike progressed with no enthusiasm.
Then came the Polish imbroglio which the extremists exploited to the full in order to establish direct action as the recognized weapon of organized Labour in this country. It is important to follow this development. On August 6, 1920, the Labour Party, without the slightest justification, publicly charged the Government with meditating a war against Soviet Russia in support of Poland, and claimed that the workers would be justified in refusing to render labour services in such a war. A special emergency meeting of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, the National Executive of the Labour Party, and the Parliamentary Labour Party met on August 9. “It felt certain,” so the resolution ran, “that war was being engineered between the Allied Powers and Soviet Russia,” and “warned the Government that the whole industrial power of the organized workers would be used to defeat this war.” Arrangements were made for a national conference of Labour, and all affiliated organizations were advised to instruct their members to “down tools” on instructions to that effect from the national conference.