A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (52 page)

Not all investment went to the colonies. Much of British investment went to the US, and quite a lot went to Latin American countries like Argentina. This has led some to claim that there was no connection between overseas investment and imperialism. However, the point is that colonies offered the capitalists of the colonial power protected outlets for investment. They also provided military bases to protect routes to investment elsewhere. For Britain possessions such as Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, South Yemen and the Cape were important not just as sources of profit in their own right, but as stopping-off places to India—and India, ‘the jewel in the crown’, was also a stopping-off place to Singapore, the tin and rubber of Malaya, the recently opened markets of China, and the rich dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The empire was like a woven garment which stopped British capitalism catching a cold: a single thread might seem of little importance, but if it snapped the rest would start unravelling. At least that was how those who ran the empire, their colleagues in the City of London and their friends in British industry saw things.

Britain was not the only imperial power. France controlled almost as much of the world, Holland had the giant archipelago we now call Indonesia, Belgium held an important chunk of central Africa, and the tsar had a huge area of territory to the east, west and south of Russia proper, all the way to the Indian border and across to the Pacific port of Vladivostok.

But Germany, the European power with the fastest industrial growth, was left virtually without an empire. Its heavy industry was increasingly organised through ‘trusts’—associations of companies which controlled production all the way from the extraction of raw materials to the disposal of finished products. They had grown up alongside the state and had none of the old small-capitalist distrust of state power which still characterised many British capitalists. They looked to the state to protect their domestic market through tariffs (taxes on imports) and to aid them in carving out foreign markets.

They looked in four directions: to China, where Germany grabbed its own treaty port; to Africa, where it was able to seize Tanganyika, Rwanda-Burundi and South West Africa; to the Maghreb, where Germany challenged France and Spain for control of Morocco; and to establishing a corridor, centred on a projected Berlin-Baghdad railway, through south east Europe and Turkey to Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. But in whatever direction Germany’s capitalists and empire-builders moved, they bumped up against the networks of colonies, bases and client states run by the established empire—against the Russians in the Balkans, the French in north Africa, the British in the Middle East and east Africa, and everyone in China.

To put it crudely, the growth in profitability which had produced a recovery from the ‘Great Depression’ and enabled capitalism to concede some improvements in living standards to its workers depended upon the spread of empires. But as the empires spread they tended to collide with each other.

Those who ran the empires knew that the outcome of such collisions depended upon the strength of their armed forces. Therefore, Germany set about building battleships to challenge Britain’s domination of the seas, and Britain retaliated by building ‘Dreadnought’ battleships of its own. France increased military service in its conscript army from two years to three, so as to be able to match the German military. Tsarist Russia set up state-run arms factories, and designed its railway system with potential wars against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in mind. The drive towards war was the flipside of the illusion of stability which imperialism brought to capitalism—and which so impressed reformist socialists like Bernstein.

Syndicalists and revolutionaries

The struggle between classes did not stop in this period. At some points and in some places it appeared blunted or was deflected into a purely electoral sphere. This was especially true in the country where the socialist party was strongest, Germany. But elsewhere there were some bitter confrontations. There had been a wave of agitation over the working day in the US in the mid-1880s, and there were bitter struggles in steel (the Homestead lockout of 1892), on the railroads (the Pullman strike of 1894), and in mining (the Pennsylvania anthracite strike of 1902). The US employers smashed these movements, using armed police and Pinkerton private detectives to shoot down strikers.

In Britain economic recovery in the late 1880s was accompanied by a wave of strikes and unionisation among unskilled workers, starting with the famous ‘match girls’ strike’ in the East End of London and the dock strike of 1889. Employers took advantage of renewed economic recession in the early 1890s to destroy many of the new unions through strikebreaking (as with the use of professional strikebreakers in Hull), starving people back to work (as in a long strike of mainly women mill workers in Bradford), lockouts, and legal action to seize union funds (as in the case of the Taff Vale railway strike). In France there were some bitter strikes in the 1880s and 1890s. A six month strike by 2,000 miners in Decazeville early in 1886 resulted in the deployment of troops and numerous arrests, and troops fired on striking textile workers at Fourmies in northern France on 1 May 1891, killing ten and wounding more than 30, including children.
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There have been claims that imperialism led to the ‘bribery’ of workers in Western Europe and North America from the profits of ‘super-exploitation’ in the colonies—or at least to the ‘bribery’ of a privileged ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers—and that this explained the influence of reformist socialism such as that of Bernstein. But many groups of workers received a hammering in the peak years of colonisation, when the flow of investment out of Western Europe was at its greatest. They were by no means all unskilled workers. In Britain, the biggest imperialist power at the time, many of the strikes and lockouts of the 1890s involved skilled engineers, printers, and boot and shoe workers resisting cuts in wages and conditions. The classic working class novel about the early 1900s, Robert Tressell’s
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,
is about skilled painters and decorators. The stability enjoyed by capitalism in Western Europe and North America did not come from bribing groups of workers, but from the way in which imperialism reduced the tendency towards crises in the system, creating an atmosphere in which reform seemed possible and ‘practical’.

In any case, the period of relative class peace began to draw to an end with the onset of the new century. The spread of capitalist relations entailed a growth and transformation of the working class. Old craft industries like shoe-making, printing, typesetting, shipbuilding and engineering were restructured in accordance with the most up to date capitalist methods. Mining and iron and steel production expanded everywhere; new industries like chemical and electrical manufacturing emerged. Alongside the textile workers in the mills which typified Britain’s industrial revolution there were now many millions of workers in heavy industry around the world. There were also the first moves towards mass production, based on vast numbers of semi-skilled workers tied to the rhythms of the assembly line. In 1909 Henry Ford began selling the first motor car aimed at a mass market, the famous Model T (or ‘Tin Lizzy’). In 1913 he opened his Highland Park plant in Detroit, with its tens of thousands of workers. Within two decades, millions of workers in a dozen countries would be working in similar places. Meanwhile, the system as a whole showed signs of new economic instability. Real wages began to fall in most industrial countries in the early 1900s. The economic crises that Bernstein had claimed were a thing of the past returned with a vengeance.

This led to a new international wave of workers’ struggles, with a scattering of bitter strikes in most countries. New groups of activists began to organise along different lines to those of the established socialist parties, with their parliamentary orientation, and the established union leaders, with their fixation on negotiating with the employers.

The Industrial Workers of the World, formed in the US in 1905, led militant strikes in the mining, lumbering, dock and textile industries, and organised black, women and unskilled workers who were ignored by the established, ‘moderate’ American Federation of Labour. The Confédération Général de Travail (CGT) in France followed a similarly militant approach, insisting that workers’ revolution could come about through trade union methods of struggle, and rejecting any participation in parliamentary politics. Its approach became known internationally as ‘syndicalism’, after the French for trade union,
syndicat
. The Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) in Spain was founded by anarchists as a revolutionary alternative to the Socialist Party leadership of the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). In Ireland a militant organiser of one of the British dockers’ unions, Jim Larkin, led a massive strike in Belfast in 1907, which united Catholics and Protestants, and even sparked discontent among the police. Larkin then founded a new union, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Back in Britain there was an attempt to set up branches of the IWW, and Tom Mann, an engineering worker who had played a leading role in the dock strike of 1889, returned from Australia and South Africa to preach his own version of syndicalism based on rank and file unity within the existing unions.

The sense that there was an alternative to the parliamentary approach received an enormous boost from events in Russia—the revolution of 1905. Russian tsarism had been a centre of counter-revolution ever since its role in imposing the restoration of the old regimes in western Europe in 1814-15. Even moderate liberals regarded it as an abomination. But tsarism came close to collapsing in 1905. Successive waves of strikes swept through Russia after troops opened fire on a demonstration of workers in the capital, St Petersburg. The demonstration had been led by a priest, Father Gapon, who ran a state-sponsored union connected to the secret police, and the workers had merely called on their ‘Little Father’ (the tsar) to stop listening to ‘bad advisers’. But after the shootings the tone of the strikes became increasingly revolutionary. Socialists produced openly revolutionary newspapers. There was mutiny in the Black Sea fleet, led by the battleship
Potemkin
. And there was an attempted uprising in Moscow in December led by the militant ‘Bolshevik’ faction of the Social Democratic Party, whose leader was Vladimir Lenin. A new sort of organisation, based on elected delegates from the major workplaces and presided over by the 26 year old Leon Trotsky, became the focus for the revolutionary forces in St Petersburg. Its name, ‘soviet’, was simply the Russian word for ‘council’, and its real significance was not fully grasped at the time. But it represented a new way of organising revolutionary forces, different from the
journée
street-based risings of the French Revolution or even from the Paris Commune. The Commune had been based on delegates from working class residential districts—a form of organisation which suited a city still comprised mainly of small workshops. The soviet fitted a city transformed by the industrialisation of the previous 30 years, with its enormous factories.

St Petersburg was just such a city, although Russia as a whole was still largely backward. The great mass of the population were peasants, tilling the soil using methods that had hardly changed since late medieval times. Tsarism was based on the aristocracy, not the class of Russian capitalists, so many of the goals of the 1905 Revolution were the same as those of the English Revolution of the 17th century and the French Revolution of the late 18th century. But tsarism had been forced to encourage pockets of growth of large-scale capitalism in order to produce arms and railway equipment, and it had turned a couple of million people into industrial workers. Their presence transformed the character of what would otherwise have been simply a French-style bourgeois revolution. Most socialists in Russia did not realise this. A large number believed Russia could avoid going through capitalism at all and move straight to a form of socialism based on the peasant village. All that was required was armed action to break the power of the state. These socialists were known as
narodniks
(‘friends of the people’), and formed the Social Revolutionary Party. There were Marxists who saw that capitalism was developing, but many belonged to the ‘Menshevik’ tendency of the Social Democratic Party, which believed workers merely had to help the bourgeoisie make its revolution. Even Lenin’s Bolsheviks spoke of a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’. But Leon Trotsky went further: he said that the involvement of workers could make the revolution ‘permanent’—a phrase first used by Marx after 1848. They had necessarily shifted the revolutionary movement from raising simply democratic demands to raising socialist demands.
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In Western Europe it was Rosa Luxemburg who best appreciated the importance of 1905, having experienced it first hand in Russian-occupied Warsaw. In her pamphlet
The Mass Strike
,
³⁴
she argued that it showed how strike movements could spontaneously begin to raise political questions, opening up a non-parliamentary strategy for change. Her arguments received little hearing inside the German socialist movement, and the crushing of the revolution by tsarism seemed to reduce their importance.

Yet the years after 1910 were to see a rash of fresh strikes, bigger and more bitter, in North America and Western Europe. In the US there was the famous Lawrence strike in Massachusetts, where 20,000 women workers from a dozen national backgrounds followed the lead of IWW agitators Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. In Britain there was the ‘Great Unrest’, centred on huge strikes on the railways, in the ports and in the mines, but spilling over into dozens of industries, often involving unskilled, non-unionised workers. In Ireland there was the five month Dublin Lockout of transport and other workers in 1913. In Italy there was Ancona’s ‘Red Week’ of bloody clashes between workers and the police after an anti-militarist demonstration, a strike of 50,000 metal workers in Turin (where two workers were killed by soldiers), and a wave of agitation across northern Italy which it took 100,000 troops to suppress.
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Even in Germany, where the general level of struggle was still below the European average, there was a bitter miners’ strike in the Ruhr. Finally, in Russia, a massacre of striking gold miners in Lena in 1912 was followed by a resurgence in workers’ struggles, permitting the two rival factions of the Social Democratic Party to produce semi-legal newspapers, and culminating in the raising of barricades in St Petersburg in the summer of 1914.