Strike waves, union growth and the rank-and-file/bureaucracy interplay : Britain 1889-1890, 1910-1913 and 1919-1920

Gerald Friedman's Reigniting the Labor Movement was a highly ambitious, unashamedly partisan, historical and transnational comparative analysis of the rise and demise of the labour movement, which identified the way in which rank-and-file workers' spontaneous and innovative strike militancy represents an ‘incipient rebellion against the capitalist system’. In the process, the book made a compelling case for the restoration of past militant worker action as an essential means of ‘reigniting’ the contemporary labour movement. While I find myself in considerable sympathy and agreement with much of the overall analysis, there are distinct but related features of Friedman's thesis that are critically explored in this article. These concern the nature of the relationship between strike movements and union membership growth, and the process by which the unions that emerge from periods of radical labour unrest then seek to dampen down worker militancy in order to bargain with employers/state within the confines of capitalism. My reassessment of Friedman's analysis, framed specifically within the national context of the UK during the historical window of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (specifically 1889–1920), aims to illustrate what I regard as five of the main problematic features of the study

Re-evaluating syndicalist opposition to the First World War

It has been argued that support for the First World War by the important French syndicalist organisation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) has tended to obscure the fact that other national syndicalist organisations remained faithful to their professed workers’ internationalism: on this basis syndicalists beyond France, more than any other ideological persuasion within the organised trade union movement in immediate pre-war and wartime Europe, can be seen to have constituted an authentic movement of opposition to the war in their refusal to subordinate class interests to those of the state, to endorse policies of ‘defencism’ of the ‘national interest’ and to abandon the rhetoric of class conflict. This article, which attempts to contribute to a much neglected comparative historiography of the international syndicalist movement, re-evaluates the syndicalist response across a broad geographical field of canvas (embracing France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Britain and America) to reveal a rather more nuanced, ambiguous and uneven picture. While it highlights the distinctive nature of the syndicalist response compared with other labour movement trends, it also explores the important strategic and tactical limitations involved, including the dilemma of attempting to translate formal syndicalist ideological commitments against the war into practical measures of intervention, and the consequences of the syndicalists’ subordination of the political question of the war to the industrial struggle