[686]Minutes of Evidence, Royal Commission on Labour: “Report of Evidence from Co-operative Societies and Public Officials,” 1893, C 7063-1 (Q 2098, 2117-8).
Mr. Tom Mann was also in favour of the Consumers’ Co-operative Movement, and had in those days a distinct bias for legal enactment over direct action in determining the conditions of employment. “I should have said,” he stated in the witness-chair, “that I, as a Trade Unionist, am of opinion that in my capacity of citizen I have just as full a right to use Parliament for the general betterment of the conditions of the workers, of whom I am one, as I have to use the Trade Union; and when I could use the institution of Parliament to do that constructive work that I sometimes use the Trade Union for, and could use Parliament more effectively than I could the Trade Union, then I should favour the use of Parliament, not necessarily in order to enforce men to do something which they might not wish to do, but because it was the more effective instrument to use to bring about changed conditions” (Ibid. Q 2531).
[687]An interesting sidelight is afforded by the reprobation by the German Social Democratic Party, in 1894, of Eduard Bernstein for translating our History of Trade Unionism, on the ground that Trade Unionism had no place in the Socialist State, and that it was needless to trouble about it!
[688]See, for convenient summaries, Syndicalism in France, by Louis Levine, 1911, and What Syndicalism Means, by S. and B. Webb, 1912; see also American Syndicalism, by J. Graham Brooks, 1913.
[689]Socialism made Easy, by James Connolly, 1905, pp. 13, 16-17.
[690]The Miners’ Next Step, 1912.
[691]The Syndicalist, January 1912. Column entitled, “What we Syndicalists are after” (by Tom Mann).
[692]The Industrial Syndicalist, March 1911. “The Weapon Shaping” (by Tom Mann; p. 5).
[693]Ibid., April 1911. “A Twofold Warning” (by Tom Mann). We are concerned, in this volume, only with the effect of these new movements of working-class thought upon British Trade Unionism, and this is not the occasion for any complete appreciation of Syndicalism or Industrial Unionism. The Syndicalist Movement in this country had died down prior to the war, but the Industrial Unionist Movement simmered on in the Clyde district and in South Wales. Its chief organisation is the Socialist Labour Party, which is not, and has never been, connected either with any other Socialist organisation in this country or with the Labour Party that is described in the next chapter. It was, we think, the moving spirits of the Socialist Labour Party who were, as Trade Unionist workmen, mainly responsible for the aggressive action of the Clyde Workers Committee between 1915 and 1918, and also for the rise of the Shop Stewards Movement, and for its spread from the Clyde to English engineering centres. At the present moment (1920) the Socialist Labour Party, owing to the personal qualities of its leading spirits, J. T. Murphy and A. MacManus, holds the leading position in this school of thought, which received a great impulse from the accession of Lenin to power in Russia. But it remains a ferment rather than a statistically important element in the Trade Union world.
[694]The revival of the Owenite proposal to develop existing Trade Unions into great Associations of Producers for the carrying on of each industry must be attributed perhaps to Mr. A. J. Penty (The Restoration of the Gild System, 1906), or to Mr. A. R. Orage, aided by Mr. S. G. Hobson, in a series of articles in The New Age, 1911 (afterwards published in a volume, National Guilds, 1913, edited by A. R. Orage). But The New Age had a limited circulation in the Trade Union world, and the plan proposed was not worked out in detail. The idea was afterwards developed by Mr. G. D. H. Cole and his associates, and widely promulgated in the Trade Union world. An organisation for this propaganda, the National Guilds’ League, was started in 1915, and has now a membership of several hundred, amongst whom are included some of the younger leaders of the Trade Union Movement. It publishes a monthly, The Guildsman, edited by Mr. and Mrs. G. D. H. Cole. The various books by Mr. Cole—especially The World of Labour, Self-Government in Industry, and Labour in the Commonwealth—should also be consulted.