Comrade or Brother? A History of the British Labour Movement by Mary Davis
Pluto Press, £15.99
IN VIEW of the 25th anniversary of the era-defining miners’ strike, this new and revised edition of Mary Davis’ history of 200 years of labour struggle is a timely release. At the centre of the study is the dichotomy between a rich radical socialist tradition and an equally influential reformist current.
The latter tendency was perhaps best exemplified by the Labour leader Keir Hardie who, at the beginning of the 20th century, identified his and the Labour Party’s politics as labourism, a “theory and practice which accepted the possibility of social change within the existing framework of society”. A syndicalist pamphlet of 1912, The Miners’ Next Step, presents a different conception of working class politics: “An industrial vote will affect the lives and happiness of workmen far more than a political vote; hence it should be more sought after and its privileges more jealously guarded.”
The distinguishing characteristic of this study is that it does not focus exclusively on formal working class organisational institutions – it is not a history of trade unionism as such. This story incorporates women, ethnic minorities and the unorganised majority of working people, examining the dynamic interaction between the formal labour movement and the working class as a whole. Davis observes that the workforce for much of the 19th century was characterised by a schism between the labour aristocracy and the unorganised majority.
It was not until the new unionism of the 1880s that organisation would be based upon the principle of mass recruitment, the failure of a series of strikes in the early 1890s providing the impetus for the labour movement to turn to politics in the shape of the Independent Labour Party. Davis charts the gradual decline of the Labour Party as a voice for working people, concluding that its “eventual strength and importance as a party able to form the government of Britain turned tail and ultimately mastered its creators”. Consideration is also given to the question of whether the entrenchment of a labourist consensus served to deprive Marxist political parties of the kind of mass support attained by their continental European counterparts.
Davis’ indictment of the trade union movement’s unconvincing record on gender and race, along with her analysis of a number of controversial strategic compromises by union leaderships in key disputes, serve to underline her warning against a simplistic conception of trade unions as organs of pure class strugglee. Despite its uncompromisingly critical tone, her study carries a hopeful message. For if at various points in the past 200 years the labour movement has appeared attenuated, fragmented and weak, it has also shown an “uncanny ability to rebuild and renew itself” which its modern day obituarists would do well to bear in mind.
Nathaniel Mehr
