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Title: School for Syndicalism
Author: Tom Brown
Date: August 1964
Language: en
Topics: syndicalism, capitalism, class, Labor Movement, Newcastle
Source: Retrieved on 4th October 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/612kss
Notes: Published in Direct Action: monthly newspaper of the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (IWMA), August 1964 (vol.5, no. 8 (38)) p5-6.

Tom Brown

School for Syndicalism

One’s first day at work is an important day. In my case it was also a

very long day. Hurrying along the damp, dark streets at 5.30 on a

winters morning, with a tin tea can and a parcel of bread (there were

few canteens at that time), I felt like a workman, though a very small

one. The first world war was still raging and my first inside view of

the factory was of rows of 60-pounder and 18-pounder field guns,

anti-aircraft and mountain guns, tanks and anti-sub artillery, then

lines of machines turning gun barrels or milling breech blocks.

It was noisy, bewildering and rather threatening, but youth is buoyant

and I soon adapted myself to my new environment. I soon learned that

some persons were jolly, some indifferent and some aggressive. Many of

the latter wore bowler hats and thick watch chains, one was known as

Simon Legree [1]. The jolly men taught me that when you are pushed, you

push back. I was an apt pupil. I was too small to do any actual heaving,

but, like most of the lads, developed a form of public relations which

appeared to be based on ju-jitsu.

But it wasn’t always like that. There was one foreman who claimed he

remembered the days when his like were allowed to strike apprentices.

One day he found six of his boys warming themselves in the smithy.

Taking a hazel rod from a pickle tank, the proverbial “rod in pickle”,

he crept up behind the boys and lashed out at them. Though taken by

surprise, they quickly recovered and four of them held him down while

two lashed him with the hazels, to the sound of his yells and the

laughter of the smiths.

I soon realised that the new life I had entered was a kind of social

war, the scene suitably furnished by the ever-present artillery. On the

one side were the overseers, the lowest agents of the invisible but

powerful enemy, the informers, the anti-unionists, the few who hankered

after being scabs and who whispered, “Don’t trust unions and such like,

keep your nose clean and you’ll get on”, and the management. Facing

them, bold and contemptuous, were our people. I was learning sociology

without books.

I soon went on to learn that there were issues in this conflict that a

man or a small group could not win by themselves and men turned to “the

Union.” This I thought I understood. I had seen the pictorial banners of

Northumberland and Durham miners, the favourite picture showing a boy

trying in vain to break a bundle of about a score of sticks and an old

man breaking his sticks one at a time. The slogan beneath proclaimed

“United we stand, divided we fall”, or “Unity is Strength”.

But while we had one enemy, the employer, backed by “the authorities”,

and we were one in circumstance and purpose, “the Union” was really many

unions. The craftsmen had their own unions, each craft at least one

separate union, the engineers several unions for one craft, and the

“semi-skilled” machinists their union. The “unskilled”, after

generations of being shut out, were now in several general unions. But

women, now nearly 50 per cent of the labour force, were not allowed to

join any union and had to form one for themselves. Only some of the

draughtsmen were members of a union and the clerks disdained to be

organised, accepting a lower wage in return for an intangible “dignity”.

Even worse, the machinery of the trade unions, like the Labour Party,

had become part of the war machine, giving away all hard-won rights. My

school-bred and newspaper-fed patriotism was cracking at the edges, for

the class enemy had not suspended his predation. What had happened to

the banner and slogans of unity?

But “Union” was more than officers and organisation, it was an idea.

Almost within living memory, men and women had died on the scaffold for

that idea and still men knew that Union meant bread, human dignity and

the hope of liberty. War or no war, the social struggle went on. I

learnt two new terms, Syndicalism and Revolutionary Industrial Unionism.

Soon they seemed to mean the same thing, though I was some time in

understanding them. The first had a 1789 sound, I thought, like the

Committee of Public Safety, but the latter seemed apt to engineering.

Later, when I became involved, I found that the new ideas stemmed from

European Syndicalism and the IWW [2], the latter having small groups in

Britain and support from Wobbly seamen from the US and Australia. The

Socialist Labour Party also advocated industrial Industrial Unionism,

having been affiliated to the IWW, which they left after having

disagreed with the “without affiliation to a political party” clause.

The Syndicalist, like the IWW groups, were small but the influence of

all these groupings was enormously greater than their numbers would seem

to justify. Little wonder that the Government and the employers imagined

a vast and wealthy organisation, plotting against the powers that be.

But a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

I recently read in Anarchy the pontifical statement, “it seems to me

that Malatesta’s main contentions still hold good that those anarchists

who are prepared to act in the industrial sphere should work within the

existing unions rather than propagate the idea of a new union movement.”

(Anarchy 40, p. 173) [3]. Unfortunately, while many of us know of Tom

Mann, James Connolly and Larkin, no one knew about Malatesta and his

alleged advice. A man without a pope is apt to be a pragmatist, so these

grimy workers just did the best they knew – and very effective it was.

Firstly, the trade unions, through their officials, had gone over

completely to the side of the State at war, and were as much a part of

the war machine as were the Brigade of Guards or the Royal Navy. With a

stroke of the pen, all the rights won by a century of hard fighting were

signed away. While rents and prices soared, there was to be no wage

increase. Safety measures were swept away, a working week of more than

66½ hours was compulsory, industrial conscription was agreed to by the

unions, with penal measures against the rebellious or weary. Military

conscription reinforced this dictatorship. Even the Webbs had to admit,

“the individual workman realised that the penalty for any failure of

implicit obedience to the foreman might be instant relegation to the

trenches”. (History of Trade Unionism, p. 639).

In return, the employers’ war profits were to be limited (to a certain,

highly inflated, standard), but this “Munitions Levy” was never enforced

and within a year was formally abolished.

On the Clyde, factory committees of syndicalist and IWW form were

created and, because their ideas suited the needs of the hour, spread

with rapidity to Tyneside, the Mersey, the Midlands and throughout the

land. Life would not wait until the paralytic unions resumed business,

“after the war”.

The “new union movement” overcame at one bound the hundredfold divisions

of the workers. All crafts, the semi-skilled and unskilled, the boys and

the women, were drawn together in frequent mass meetings. They elected

and withdrew their delegates, now known as shop stewards, whenever

necessary. They acted as one force. In the factory in which I worked

were number of Belgian workers; they, too, joined in, as did a body of

soldiers who, because of their skill, had been drafted to the works.

We were now powerful. We struck work, we demonstrated, we hoisted our

wages and curbed the overseers. State and employers consulted our

delegates, after threats of prison had failed. The impetus of this

movement has lasted until this day. Now every worker knows the value of

a workshop organisation to his daily bread. It remains for us to broaden

the ideas of this valuable experience. Our factory movement may not have

been pure enough for coffee-bar revolutionaries, but we answered the

plain man’s question: “Does it work?”

[1] the name of a cruel slave driver in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin.

[2] Industrial Workers of the World: members are known as ‘Wobblies’

[3] ‘Anarchism and Trade Unionism’ by Gaston Gerard. See:

libcom.org

and

libcom.org