An Introduction to “Mr. Bernard Shaw on Syndicalism”
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.41.2.0434
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoOn 30 March 1912, a short article that purported to be an interview of Shaw, “Mr. Bernard Shaw on Syndicalism,” appeared in the four-page Dublin labor weekly, The Irish Worker. The paper was the organ of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) and was then edited by its founder, and the union's general secretary, James Larkin.1 Dan Laurence lists the article in his bibliography, but he and David Greene did not include its text in The Matter with Ireland. The short article is most decidedly a self-interview, with its creation of a scene, as if a play, with the “characters” of Shaw and “O. R.,” the paper's “our representative.” Given the financial restraints of Larkin's paper in March 1912, it is highly unlikely that the paper could have sent a representative to London. However, it is unclear if Larkin wrote to Shaw for his views on syndicalism, or if Shaw took it upon himself to send the article, unsolicited, to Dublin. While the context of the article does not reveal the answer, it does reveal Shaw's effort to resonate for Dublin labor at a crucial moment for labor in Britain.Syndicalism, in relation to trade unionism, was emerging within Western labor as a tactic, a weapon, against employers during the first decade of the twentieth century. Essentially, it argued that all workers, regardless of skill levels, gender, and religious differences, should be united against employers, the profiteers. The English labor leader Tom Mann, returning to England after years of trade union work in Australia and New Zealand, gave voice to the tactic in his 1909 pamphlet “The Way to Win.” Mann was seeing trade unionism as the way to advance socialism, rather than parliamentary means alone. The year before, in 1908, the Edinburgh-born Irish socialist and trade union organizer James Connolly published his pamphlet “The Axe to the Root” while in America, in which he too advocated for the syndicalist tactic. Connolly described the tactic by recalling the 1905 strike of New York's subway and elevated railroads, where despite the fact that “conductors, motormen, ticket-choppers, platform men, repairers, permanent way men, ticket sellers—all went out together,” the strike collapsed because the workers who operated the power houses for the system remained in their jobs, allowing scab labor to run the trains.2 Syndicalism's argument was for unionizing all workers, which fed the idea of large unions representing many different workers across the industrial landscape, as well as cultivating ties to other unions that can be relied on to call sympathy strikes to create massive strikes, even national strikes.3In February 1912, the Miners Federation in Britain called for a massive strike in syndicalist terms, leading “more than a million coal miners” into the strike, “demanding a national wage.”4 On 4 March 1912, Shaw replied by letter to Clarence Norman's request for Fabian involvement in the strike. Shaw replied: “We—poor old chaps—are not going to play any part at all. This job is business, not talk.”5 However, the situation would change for Shaw, at least on a personal level. A few days after Shaw's letter to Norman, Tom Mann was arrested for sedition over his public plea to the military: “Don't Shoot” when called out against the striking miners.6 A demonstration was scheduled to protest against Mann's arrest for 3 April by the Free Speech Defense Committee, to be held in the London Opera House. Shaw committed himself to address the demonstration, specifically the censorship of Mann, rather than the strike.In Dublin, Larkin was leading the ITGWU along syndicalist terms, despite strike defeats against Irish railways in 1911 that prompted industrial employers to form the Dublin Employers Federation to counter inroads by the ITGWU, and sympathizing unions. Larkin had begun preparing for more confrontations with the transport industries, since transport disruption could disrupt major employers. He utilized The Irish Worker to attack the Cork-born Dublin capitalist William Martin Murphy, who chaired the Dublin United Tramways Company and owned Dublin newspapers The Irish Independent and Irish Catholic.7 No doubt, Larkin would have keenly observed the March 1912 Miners Federation Coal strike, as well as being aware of Mann's arrest. 8 In 1911, Larkin had published in The Irish Worker an unsigned article, by one of Mann's English comrades, titled “Open Letter to British Soldiers,” which was a precursor to Mann's “Don't Shoot” pamphlet that led to his arrest.9 Not only was Larkin aware of Mann, Mann knew Larkin. In his 1923 memoirs, Mann wrote: “Bros. Jim Larkin, in Dublin, and Jim Connolly, in Belfast [and later Dublin], were very forceful personalities, and were building up a great industrial movement, in many respects a pattern to others…. I honestly believe that the formation of the Irish Transport [and General] Workers' Union, with all it foreshadowed, gave more hope for drastic change than anything that had ever been tried before.”10 Given the interest in Shaw among Dublin socialists and labor, there should be no surprise that “Mr. Bernard Shaw on Syndicalism” appeared in the ITGWU's paper, four days prior to Shaw speaking on behalf of Mann.11 The article afforded Shaw the ability to suggest that socialism was compatible to syndicalism—at least for the moment.12“Mr. Bernard Shaw on Syndicalism” opens by setting the scene, which is outside “Adelphi Terrace, yesterday afternoon. Mr. Bernard Shaw approaches No. 10.” Readers were told what Shaw was wearing, along with his gait as he approached: “his whole bearing suggesting that if God's in his heaven, ‘G. B. S.’ is in Adelphia Terrace, and all's right with the world.” The premise of the “interview” leads “O. R.” to ask if a certain newspaper article is correct in suggesting that Shaw is writing a book to defend syndicalism, “in essay form.” Shaw remarks that it is entirely false. On replying to O. R. saying that “as a Socialist you would be opposed to Syndicalism,” Shaw replies in the negative, adding: “but as I am going to speak on this subject in a few days at the London Opera House, I don't want to give away beforehand what I am going to say.”13 O. R. then asks, “But is not Syndicalism individualism collectively applied?” On retrieving his “latchkey” from a pocket, Shaw states: “It is much more than that.” Shaw explained that in the present there was the “Trust” of conglomerated industrial employers, and there was syndicalism among organized labor, “or (and here Mr. Shaw beamed) you can have Socialism! You will see, therefore, why I, as a socialist, am not opposed to Syndicalism.”14Shaw's comments during the Mann rally of 3 April were reported in the New York Times, 4 April, via “Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to the New York Times.”15 The coverage, dated 3 April, began with: “At a demonstration organized by the Free Speech Defense Committee and held in the London Opera House to-night to protest the prosecution of Tom Mann and other syndicalists, George Bernard Shaw delivered a speech, which was greeted by roars of laughter.” The article relayed that Shaw commented on Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, saying that “[Asquith] could not insert the minimum wage figures for miners in an act of Parliament, but Parliament has always been engaged in naming the figures of a minimum wage.” Shaw pointed out that Parliament had established wages for judges, as well as the wage for MPs. Shaw further suggested that given Asquith's reasoning behind his failure to grant the national wage miners were striking for, Asquith should have to negate the king's annual salary. Shaw then played on Mann's “Don't Shoot” appeal: “Suppose the King goes on strike. Consider my position, if he did so. If I appeal to the soldiers not to shoot him I could be sent into penal servitude. If I asked the soldiers to shoot him I could be beheaded at Tower Hill.”16 It appears that Shaw's speech was consistent with his advocacy of the time for equal incomes, and seemingly supported Mann, a syndicalist, without unequivocally supporting syndicalism. After all, with the emerging employers' trusts, with their lockout strategy, and trade unions with syndicalism, the resolution would have to be socialism.In The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), Shaw argued—as he had been suggesting for years—that industrial organized trade unions had led workers into capitalism: Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called trade disputes, are fought: and the number of days of work lost to the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty, and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they can out of their labour exactly as they find the landlord doing with his land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to a standstill until either Property drives Labour by main force into undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labour gains the upper hand, and the long series of changes by which mastery of the situation has already passed from landlord-capitalist to the individual employer, from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialist in general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized Labour.17 Shaw's argument leads to his position that only socialism “promises a way out,” and presumably will deliver if really embraced.18
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