The Syndicalist Challenge

Abstract

The mass strike movement which shook Britain in the period immediately preceding the Great War alerted many on the British Left to the new ideas of Syndicalism which had been recently formulated on the Continent and in the United States. At a time when the Labour Party seemed hopelessly compromised by parliamentary politics, and when the trade union leaders were safely shielded from the concerns of their members by a comfortable bureaucracy, a new Left began to look to the direct action and spontaneous democracy of the working class at the point of production, the factory. In doing so, they presented the greatest challenge to labourism since Marx.