The victory of the London Dockers and the impetus it gave to Trade Unionism throughout the country at last opened the eyes of the Trade Union world to the significance of the new movement. It was no longer possible for the Parliamentary Committee to denounce the Socialists as a set of outside intriguers, when Burns and Mann, now become the representative working-men Socialists, stood at the head of a body of 200,000 hitherto unorganised workmen. The general secretaries of the older Unions, forming a compact official party behind the Front Bench, were veering around towards the advanced party. Their constituencies were becoming permeated with Socialism. In many instances the older members now supported the new faith. In other cases they found themselves submerged by the large accessions to their membership which, as we have already seen, resulted from the general expansion. The process of conversion was facilitated by the genuine admiration felt by the whole Trade Union world for the great organising power and generalship shown by the leaders of the new movement, and by the cessation of the personal abuse and recrimination which had hitherto marred the controversy. At the Dundee Congress of 1889, as we have seen, Henry Broadhurst, and his colleagues on the Parliamentary Committee, had triumphed all along the line. Within a year the situation had entirely changed. The Stonemasons, Broadhurst’s own society, had decided, by a vote of the members, to support an Eight Hours Bill, and Broadhurst, under these circumstances, had perforce to refuse to act as their representative. The Executive Council of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers chose Burns and Mann as two out of their five delegates, impressing upon them all a recommendation to vote for the legal limitation of the hours of labour. Both the old-established societies of Carpenters gave a similar mandate. The Miners’ Federation this time led the attack on the old Front Bench, and the resolution in favour of a general Eight Hours Bill was carried, after a heated debate, by 193 to 155. Broadhurst resigned his position as Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee on the ground of ill-health. George Shipton, the secretary of the London Trades Council, publicly declared his conversion to the legal regulation of the hours of labour. The Liverpool Congress was as decisive a victory for the Socialists as that of Dundee had been for the Parliamentary Committee. The delegates passed in all sixty resolutions. “Out of these sixty resolutions,” said John Burns, “forty-five were nothing more or less than direct appeals to the State and Municipalities of this country to do for the workman what Trade Unionism, ‘Old’ and ‘New,’ has proved itself incapable of doing. Forty-five out of the sixty resolutions were asking for State or Municipal interference on behalf of the weak against the strong. ‘Old’ Trade Unionists, from Lancashire, Northumberland, and Birmingham, asked for as many of these resolutions as the delegates from London; but it is a remarkable and significant fact that 19 out of 20 delegates were in favour of the ‘New’ Trades Union ideas of State interferences in all things except reduction of hours, and even on this we secured a majority that certainly entitles us Socialists to be jubilant at our success.” [564]
But whilst the new faith was being adopted by the rank and file of Trade Unionists the character of the Socialist propaganda had been undergoing an equal transformation. The foremost representative of the Collectivist views had hitherto been the Social-Democratic Federation, of which Burns and Mann were active members. Under the dominant influence of Mr. H. M. Hyndman, this association adopted the economic basis and political organisation of State Socialism. Yet we find, along with these modern views, a distinct recrudescence of the characteristic projects of the revolutionary Owenism of 1833-34. The student of the volumes of Justice between 1884 and 1889 will be struck by the unconscious resemblance of many of the ideas and much of the phraseology of its contributors, to those of the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Pioneer of 1834. We do not here allude to the revival, in 1885, of the old demand for an Eight Hours Bill, a measure regarded on both occasions as a “mere palliative.” Nor need we refer to the constant assumption, made alike by Robert Owen and the Social-Democratic lecturers, that the acceptance of the Labour-value theory would enable the difficulty of the “unemployed” to be solved by organising the mutual exchange of their unmarketable products. But both in Justice and the Pioneer we see the same disbelief in separate action by particular Trade Unions, in contrast to an organisation including “every trade, skilled and unskilled, of every nationality under the sun.”[565]“The real emancipation of labour,” says the official manifesto of the Social-Democratic Federation to the Trade Unions of Great Britain in September 1884, “can only be effected by the solemn banding together of millions of human beings in a federation as wide as the civilised world.”[566]“The day has gone by,” we read in 1887, “for the efforts of isolated trades.... Nothing is to be gained for the workers as a class without the complete organisation of labourers of all grades, skilled and unskilled.... We appeal therefore earnestly to the skilled artisans of all trades, Unionists and non-Unionists alike, to make common cause with their unskilled brethren, and with us Social-Democrats, so that the workers may themselves take hold of the means of production, and organise a Co-operative Commonwealth for themselves and their children.”[567] And if the “scientific Socialists” of 1885 were logically pledged to the administration of industry by the officials of the community at large, none the less do we see constantly cropping up, especially among the working-class members, Owen’s diametrically opposite proposal that the workers must “own their own factories and decide by vote who their managers and foremen shall be.”[568] Above all we see the same faith in the near and inevitable advent of a sudden revolution, when “it will only need a compact minority to take advantage of some opportune accident that will surely come, to overthrow the present system, and once and for all lift the toilers from the present social degradation.”[569] “Noble Robert Owen,” says Mr. Hyndman in 1885, “seventy years ago perceived ‘the utter impossibility of succeeding in permanently improving the condition of our population by any half-measures.’ We see the same truth if possible yet more clearly now. But the revolution which in his day was unprepared is now ripe and ready.... Nothing short of a revolution which shall place the producers of wealth in control of their own country can possibly change matters for the better.... Will it be peaceful? We hope it may. That does not depend upon us. But, peaceful or violent, the great social revolution of the nineteenth century is at hand, and if fighting should be necessary the workers may at least remember the profound historical truth that ‘Force is the midwife of progress delivering the old society pregnant with the new,’ and reflect that they are striving for the final overthrow of a tyranny more degrading than the worst chattel slavery of ancient times.”[570]“Let our mission be,” he writes in 1887, “to help to band together the workers of the world for the great class struggle against their exploiters. No better date could be chosen for the establishment of such international action on a sound basis than the year 1889, which the classes look forward to with trembling and the masses with hope. I advocate no hasty outbreak, no premature and violent attempt on the part of the people to realise the full Social-Democratic programme. But I do say that from this time onwards we, as the Social-Democratic Labour Party of Great Britain, should make every effort to bear our part in the celebration by the international proletariat of the First Centenary of the great French Revolution, and thus to prepare for a complete International Social Revolution before the end of the century.” [571]
The year 1889, instead of ushering in a “complete International Social Revolution” by a universal compact of the workers, turned the current of Socialist propaganda from revolutionary to constitutional channels. The advent of political Democracy had put out of date the project of “a combined assault by workers of every trade and grade against the murderous monopoly of the minority.”[572] For a moment, at the very crisis of the dockers’ struggle, the idea of a “General Strike” flickers up, only to be quickly abandoned as impracticable. When the problems of administration had actually to be faced by the new leaders the specially Owenite characteristics of the Socialist propaganda were quietly dropped. In January 1889 John Burns was elected a member of the London County Council, and quickly found himself organising the beginnings of a bureaucratic municipal Collectivism, as far removed from Owen’s “national companies” as from the conceptions of the Manchester School. Tom Mann, as president of the Dockers’ Union, could not help discovering how impracticable it was to set to work his unemployed members, accustomed only to general labour, in the production for mutual exchange of the bread and clothing of which they were in need. And whether working in municipal committees, or at the head office of a great Union, both Burns and Mann had perforce to realise the impossibility of bringing about any sudden or simultaneous change in the social or industrial organisation of the whole community, or even of one town or trade.
Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Burns and Mann left the Social Democratic Federation, and found themselves hotly denounced by their old comrades.[573] With the defection of the New Unionists, revolutionary Socialism ceased to grow; and the rival propaganda of constitutional action became the characteristic feature of the British Socialist Movement. Far from abusing or deprecating Trade Unionism or Co-operation, the constitutional Collectivists urged it as a primary duty upon every working-class Socialist to become a member of his Trade Union, to belong to the local Co-operative Society, and generally to take as active a part as possible in all organisations. Instead of denouncing partial reforms as mischievous attempts to defeat “the Social Revolution,” the New Unionist leaders appealed to their followers to put their own representatives on Town Councils, and generally to use their electoral influence to bring about, in a regular and constitutional manner, the particular changes they had at heart. Instead of circulating calumnies against the personal character of Trade Union leaders, they flooded the Trade Union world with Socialist literature, dealing not so much in rhetorical appeals or Utopian aspirations as in economic expositions of the actual grievances of industrial life. The vague resolutions of the Trades Union Congresses were worked out in practical detail, or even embodied in draft bills which the local member of Parliament might be invited to introduce, or driven to support.
The new policy, adopted as it was by such prominent Socialists as Burns, Mann, and Tillett, and Mrs. Besant, appeared, from 1889 onward, increasingly justified by its success. The Collectivist victories on the London School Board and County Council, the steady growth of municipal activity, and the increasing influence exercised by working-men members of representative bodies, went far to persuade both Socialists and Trade Unionists that the only practicable means of securing for the community the ownership and control of the means of production lay in a wide extension of that national and municipal organisation of public services towards which Parliament and the Town Councils had already taken the first steps. In those industries in which neither national nor municipal administration was yet possible, the Socialists demanded such a regulation of the conditions of employment as would ensure to every worker a minimum Standard of Life. The extension of the Factory Acts and the more thorough administration of the Sanitary Law accordingly received a new impulse. In another direction the drastic taxation of Rent and Interest, pressed for by Land Nationalisers and Socialists alike, was justified as leading eventually to the collective absorption of all unearned incomes. In short, from 1889 onward, the chief efforts of the British Socialist Movement have been directed, not to bringing about any sudden, complete, or simultaneous revolution, but to impregnating all the existing forces of society with Collectivist ideals and Collectivist principles. [574]
With the advent of the “New Unionism” of 1889-90 we close this chapter. We shall see, in subsequent chapters to what extent, and in what way, the Trade Union Movement was permanently affected by the new movement. But we append at this point a brief account of what seem to us, first, the ephemeral features and, secondly, the more durable results of an impulse which did not wholly spend its force for a whole decade.
If we were to believe some of the more enthusiastic apostles of the “New Unionism,” we should imagine that the aggressive trade society of unskilled labourers, unencumbered with friendly benefits, was an unprecedented departure in the history of labour organisation. Those who have followed our history thus far will know better than to entertain such an illusion, itself an old characteristic of Trade Unionist revivals. The purely trade society is as old as Trade Unionism itself. Throughout the whole history of the movement we find two types of societies co-existing. At special crises in the annals of Trade Unionism we see one or other of these types taking the lead, and becoming the “New Unionism” of that particular period. Both trade society and friendly society with trade objects were common in the eighteenth century. Legal persecution of trade combination brought to the front the Union cloaked in the guise of a benefit club; and it was mainly for organisations of this type that Place and Hume won the emancipation of 1824-1825. In 1833-34 we find Place deploring as a mischievous innovation the growth of the new “Trades Unions” without friendly benefits. Twenty years later we see the leadership reverting to the “new model” of an elaborate trade friendly society which, for a whole generation, was vehemently denounced by employers as a fraud on the provident workman. The “New Unionism” of 1852, described by so friendly a critic as Professor Beesly as a novel departure, became, in its turn, the “Old Unionism” of 1889, when the more progressive spirits again plumed themselves on eliminating from their brand-new organisations the enervating influences of friendly benefits.
A closer examination of the facts shows that this almost rhythmical alternation of type has been only apparent. The impartial student will notice that whilst the purely trade society has been persistently adhered to by certain important industries, such as the Coal-miners and the Cotton-spinners, other trades, like the Engineers and the Ironfounders, have remained equally constant to the trade friendly society; whilst others, again, such as the Compositors and the Carpenters, have passed backwards and forwards from one model to the other. But besides this adaptation of type to the circumstances of particular industries, we see also a preference for the purely trade society on no higher ground than its cheapness. The high contributions and levies paid by the Cotton-spinners to their essentially trade society are as far beyond the means of the Agricultural Labourer or the Docker as the weekly premiums for superannuation, sick, and other benefits charged to the Amalgamated Engineer. When, as in 1833-34, 1872, and 1889, a wave of enthusiasm sweeps the unskilled labourers into the Trade Union ranks, it is obviously necessary to form, at any rate in the first instance, organisations which make no greater tax upon their miserable earnings than a penny or twopence per week. The apparent rhythm of alternations between the two types of organisation is due, therefore, not to any general abandonment of one for the other, but to the accidental prominence, in certain crises of Trade Union history, of the Unions belonging to particular trades or classes of wage-earners. When, for instance, the cotton-spinners, the builders, and the unskilled labourers of 1834 loomed large to Francis Place as a revolutionary force, the purely trade society appeared to him to be the source of all that was evil in Trade Unionism. When, in 1848-52, the iron trades were conspiring against piecework and overtime, it was especially the illicit combination of trade and friendly society which attracted the attention of the public, and called forth the denunciations of the capitalist class. And when in 1889 the dockers were stopping the trade of London, and the coal-miners and cotton-spinners were pressing upon both political parties their demands for legislative interference, we see George Howell voicing the opposition to exclusively trade societies as dangerously militant bodies. [575]
If the purely trade society is no new thing, still less is the extension of Trade Unionism to the unskilled labourer an unprecedented innovation. The enthusiasm which, in 1872, enrolled a hundred thousand agricultural labourers in a few months, produced also numerous small societies of town labourers, some of which survived for years before absorption into larger organisations. The London and Counties Labour League, established as the Kent and Sussex Agricultural and General Labourers’ Union in 1872, has maintained its existence down to the present day. The expansion of 1852 led to the formation in Glasgow of a Labourers’ Society, which is reputed to have enrolled thousands of members. But it is with the enthusiasm of 1833-34 that the movement of 1889-90 has in this respect the greatest analogy. The almost instantaneous conversion to Trade Unionism after the dock strike of tens of thousands of the unskilled labourers of the towns recalls, indeed, nothing so much as the rapid enrolment of recruits among the poorest wage-earners by the emissaries of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.
But however strongly the outward features of the wave of 1889-90 may remind the student of those of 1833-34, the characteristics peculiar to the new movement significantly measure the extent of the advance, both in social theory and social methods, made by the wage-earners in the two intervening generations. Time and experience alone will show how far the empirical Socialism of the Trade Unionist of 1889, with its eclectic opportunism, its preference for municipal collectivism, its cautious adaptation of existing social structure, and its modest aspirations to a gradually increasing participation of the workmen in control, may safely be pronounced superior in practicability to the revolutionary and universal Communism of Robert Owen. In truth, the radical distinction between 1833-34 and 1889-90 is not a matter of the particular social theories which inspired the outbursts. To the great majority of the Trade Unionists the theories of the leaders at either date did but embody a vague aspiration after a more equitable social order. The practical difference—the difference reflected in the character and temper of the men attracted to the two movements, and of the attitude of the public towards them—is the difference of method and immediate action. Robert Owen, as we have seen, despised and rejected political action, and strove to form a new voluntary organisation which should supersede, almost instantaneously and in some unexplained way, the whole industrial, political, and social administration of the country. In this disdain of all existing organisations, and the suddenness of the complete “social revolution” which it contemplated, the Owenism of 1833-34 found, as we have seen, an echo in much of the Socialist propaganda of 1884-89. The leaders of the New Unionists, on the contrary, sought to bring into the ranks of existing organisations—the Trade Union, the Municipality, or the State—great masses of unorganised workers who had hitherto been either absolutely outside the pale, or inert elements within it. They aimed, not at superseding existing social structures, but at capturing them all in the interests of the wage-earners. Above all, they sought to teach the great masses of undisciplined workers how to apply their newly acquired political power so as to obtain, in a perfectly constitutional manner, whatever changes in legislation or administration they desired.