Workers and empire: Learning from early 20th century resistance politics in Imperial Britain

In the second part of Workers and Empire, Christopher Reid surveys the relationships between working class revolts in the centre and the periphery of the British empire, and draws lessons from George Padmore, CLR James, and George Orwell.

by Christopher D. Reid

Resistance abroad vs. resistance at home

British strikers detained by soldiers still had rights under common law in Britain and had to be turned over to the local courts. This was not done in the periphery. Dissidents in the colonies, under State of Emergency statutes, were subject to corporal punishments, deportations, detentions without trial, forced migration, torture, arbitrary killing, sexual assault, and psychological terror. All that can be said, generally, about militarized violence in this period is that ruling elites throughout Imperial Britain had become comfortable with it when used against groups they had disenfranchised.

During the early 20^th century there was rebellion not only in Britain, but throughout its Empire. The reasons were largely the same: poor pay and working conditions. Added to these grievances — and the primary driver of the uprisings that followed them— was the building up of a racial order in the colonies.

The creation of racial laws that made British colonies, in effect, racial states had existed since the mid-17^th century. They were first introduced in the Caribbean, Ireland, and the American colonies. In the case of British North America and the Caribbean, ruling elites used these laws to turn poor whites and local weak white elites into a kind of permanent militia to check rebellious enslaved Black people and powerful indigenous nations. The racial state was a required tool of a slave empire.

By the early 20^th century, slavery and the American colonies were gone, yet racial laws were even more vigorously applied in the Second British Empire. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, London was indifferent to the racial laws passed in the colonies; beginning in the 19^th century, the British government took a more hands-on approach to their creation and enforcement.

To re-iterate, common law in Britain only applied to subjects in the country; subjects in the colonies were governed by Parliament-sanctioned State of Emergency statutes, which authorized abuse and murder of all sorts. But the beating, jailing, and killing of dissidents were not the only things contributing to discontentment.

Political disenfranchisement was widely resented. There was also the fact that it became nearly impossible to prosper or even make ends meet under British rule. White British journalists and thought leaders of the time talked up the idea of the ‘Oriental’ despot who oppressed his people through financial plunder and arbitrary government. But no such living figure could compare to the heavy taxes, fines, and fees imposed by Britain’s imperial authorities, as well as the numerous occupational restrictions and ever-expanding criminal code.

This racial leviathan had been shaken a number of times in the 19^th century — with uprisings in Ireland, Jamaica, India, and Egypt. The First World War brought a significant shift in momentum. The war was a disaster for Europe. Colonized people could see this, and they meant to exploit the extreme vulnerability of the white man.

There was, after the war, an explosion of anti-colonial protest, violence, and counter-violence throughout the empire. These were often organized and led by nationalist elites, but were carried forward by workers, in many instances trade unionists, in the different nations. Further propelling these revolts was the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the success of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War in 1922, and the ultimate survival of the newly formed Soviet Union. The latter became a beacon of hope to the oppressed peoples of the world; it showed them what was possible for the disempowered.

At this point, there are obvious questions: how were these rebellions in the colonies linked to the labour revolts in Britain? Were white British workers aware of and sympathetic to the former? The short answer to the last question is an emphatic no.

In general, white British workers supported the Empire and strongly resented the growing presence of Black workers in the country — workers who had been brought here to make up for the labour shortages caused by the drafting of young men for the war.

There was an intense and persistent backlash against migrant workers. In his book, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, my colleague Satnam Virdee rightly states that there was a ‘working-class deployment of racism, including violence and discrimination against Jewish migrants, as well as those from the British colonies’.

As for the awareness of British workers to what was going on in the colonies, I must first state that there was a vibrant intellectual culture among the British working-class. As Jonathan Rose unveils in his landmark work, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, there were working-class libraries, peoples’ colleges, and newspapers dedicated to labour issues. Many workers could read and were dedicated to the things of the mind. The trouble was that no mainstream newspaper and not even papers that targeted working-class audiences covered the troubles in the colonies.

The subaltern speak

Though white workers were unaware of the fight of their comrades in the colonies, the workers in the colonies were aware of the labour uprisings in Britain and the Irish national liberation movement. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, a growing cohort of writers and journalists from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean established themselves in London and got themselves published in journals in their home countries. They constituted the organisational and intellectual vanguard of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism in the British Empire.

These Black and Brown writers and activists also taught race, so to speak, to a small number of white British radicals. Among the latter were the feminist, suffragette leader, and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, who gave space in her newspaper to Black voices; and the poet and activist Nancy Cunard, an heiress who used her privately owned press and her aristocratic privilege to promote Black voices in her famous anthology Negro.

There was an even smaller number of white leftists who had little or no direct contact with Black activists, but managed to work out for themselves the connections between global working-class struggles and to confront racism openly and honestly.

The widespread obliviousness of white workers to what was going on in the periphery eventually faded, as the momentum of national independence increased after the Second World War and could no longer be ignored by the mainstream and labour press. Progress was also made in liquidating the racial prejudice of white workers. This effort continues to the present day.

The point I want to make here is that change was made possible by a small group of individuals willing to provide radical critiques of the status quo and offer new ways of seeing working-class resistance politics.

Obviously, I cannot recount all the names and works that are worth noting. I cannot even give provide a fair sample. So, I will briefly run through three individuals whose work as activists is significant to the last point. They are George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and George Orwell.

All three men were born in the periphery: Orwell in India; James and Padmore in Trinidad. Interestingly, Orwell and Padmore were born in the same year, 1903, while James was born only a couple of years earlier. They all came of age during the period I have covered. They grew up with the convulsions of Empire. All of them were also born into middle-class families and had first-rate educations.

George Padmore

A short-hand for summarizing Padmore’s lifetime of political activism is to say that his tendency was to organize action through an organizing idea. He got his start as a journalist in Trinidad; and he got a political awakening while covering labour unrest throughout the island at the end of 1919. In 1925, he moved to the United States, where he immediately submerged himself in the various seas of radical Black activism. From the radical environment of the country’s historical Black colleges and universities to the streets of Harlem, where he joined with other Caribbean-born crusaders and witnessed the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Padmore got his first dose of political education in America.

He eventually joined the Communist Party, but broke with it in 1933. He settled in London in 1935; and it was here where he cemented his legacy as a political activist. For the next 25 years, he wrote nothing that did not have a clear political purpose. He produced reportage published in newspapers in the Caribbean and Africa, as well as pamphlets and books that opposed empire, fascism, and white supremacy and linked the struggles of Black peoples throughout the world. His writings inspired and helped guide national liberation struggles, especially those in Africa. This is what I mean by describing him as being an activist who organized action by forging organizing ideas.

C.L.R. James

James was an exceptional literary artist. One of the great things about such persons is that they are best understood through their own words and can be read again and again with pleasure. Though never a member of the Communist Party, he remained a lifelong Marxist in perspective. James and Padmore went to the same primary school together in their native Trinidad. When they met again in London in 1935, they struck up a friendship that lasted until Padmore’s death in 1959.

Unlike his friend, James concerned himself with the cultural as much as the political. In fact, he is one of the most important figures of the 20^th century cultural Left. I implore you to read his book The Black Jacobins. I would go so far as to say that the book should be read by all progressive political activists. It is not to be read as literal history, but for its value as literary history. In the fine tradition of Macaulay, Michelet, and Thomas Carlyle, James makes of the Haitian Revolution a great drama—with the Black worker as the hero of the story.

George Orwell

Orwell wrote too much and too much has been written about him to even attempt a summary of his work as a political activist. Here, I will stress only a few relevant points.

First, I think Orwell’s service in Spain more than qualifies him as a political activist.

Second, there is no doubt in my mind that he believed that worldwide socialist revolution from the bottom-up was the only way to cure the social ills and economic injustices of capitalism. He thought that each nation had to carry this out in its own way. This belief in the aspirations of the working class, their ability to organize themselves and fight for their own future is one of the ideas in his most famous novel, 1984 —a book that I find shocking and terrifying every time I read it— and in Animal Farm. It is also in The Road to Wigan Pier and in his long essay The Lion and the Unicorn.

Third, Orwell became a great hater of the British Empire after his service in Burma in the mid-1920s. This feeling never left him. He worked out on his own the connections between capitalist tyranny and imperialist tyranny. Some of this feeling is reflected in his essay, “Shooting an Elephant”. His first novel, Burmese Days, also reflects it. Not to turn the literary into the literal, but I believe one of the main ideas worked out in that novel loosely corresponds to the proposition: If you want to be an imperialist, you must become a racist. This is what a racist looks like.

But my favourite of his writings on the subject is in his lesser-known essay, titled “Not Counting Niggers”, published in 1940. Here, he puts the matter plainly:

…how can we “fight Fascism” except by bolstering up a far vaster injustice? For of course it [the British Empire] is vaster. What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so.

I want to now gather the possible lessons to be learned into a few general themes.

Lesson one: Finding a common language

I said before that in order to join with others in a common cause, the political activist must lower mental barriers. I now want to take this notion further.

Although George Padmore was a life-long Marxist, he circulated within liberal streams of British society. His arguments remained rooted in his stance against imperial domination. However, he was multi-lingual, so to speak. He was able to translate his Marxist approach to description and analysis into terms that his non-Marxist political friends could understand.

The point here is that to be effective as a political activist you and those you want to work with must agree on a shared vocabulary for diagnosing public problems and proposing solutions for them.

Lesson two: Forging an organizing idea

I would like to first make a distinction between a national organization and an organizing idea. A national organization has rules, procedures, practices, a permanent staff, and a charter that sets forth its purpose. Over time, a national organization will adapt to the bureaucratic machinery of society to preserve itself and its relevance, with the aim of protecting the interests of its members.

The creation of an organizing idea, on the other hand, is searching and experimental. It consists of identifying immediate problems or long neglected social illnesses, of innovating strategies and tactics to overcome entrenched interests, and of communicating all of this in an intelligible form. The organizing idea is made for clear expression because it is forged in the fires of dispute and agitation.

The miners who led the Welsh strikes were syndicalists, whose response to the grievances of their comrades encompassed problems, demands, strategy, and action all at once. The same can be said for George Padmore, in his journalism and in his starting of one pressure group after another. And in The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James gives vent, at intervals, to the tribulations of working people; through the figure of Toussaint Louverture he provides instruction, not only on the organization of a revolutionary army, but on the preservation of a revolutionary society.

The key word in this phrase is organizing. Many readers have no doubt been part of campaigns against fresh cruelties and outrages. You have felt the immediacy of the moment and the need to build a new coalition to deal with it. In most instances, this has little or nothing to do with the day-to-day priorities and operations of established national organizations. It involves instead devising strategies and articulating and modulating words and images to keep the campaign steady, growing, and effective.

Lesson three: Leadership

There is a need for leadership in political activism. This may seem like a tricky issue given that our subject is about rebellion against authority. But history suggests that the most effective campaigns had individuals who could rally people and articulate demands. I know there has been some talk about leaderless movements. I don’t buy into this notion. Leaders inspire, guide, and encourage, and they provide, or aspire to provide, behaviour that can be modelled.

Let’s go back to the strikers in Wales and Scotland. The readiness of those workers to engage in militant strike action was driven by activist leaders in their own ranks. There were individuals who instigated debates in the workplace and made practical arguments for action. They shared a perspective with their comrades that got them to see the possibilities of success and the means to seize it.

The activist leaders in the Welsh and Scottish uprisings served as catalysts of strike activity, not as manufacturers of discontent. Agitation would have been unlikely to fall on receptive ears, unless there were genuine grievances and justifiable demands to agitate about.

Frederick Douglass, always a good touchstone for political activism, said that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand’. I believe a corollary of this statement is that one of the immediate aims of political activism is to get power to concede something. Getting power to yield to a point, however minor, is progress. The achievement lies in the fact that you got the people you have challenged to do something they would not have done had it not been demanded. For the activist leader, this can take some of the sting out of the dreaded word ‘compromise’.

Lesson four: Delimiting democracy

Democracy is also on all our minds at present. I knew it would be important to deal with it in some way in the context of political activism, but I didn’t know how until I spoke to my dear mother a few days ago. She keeps me grounded in political matters by giving me the perspective of an elderly working-class black woman.

She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Has been a lifelong member of the Democratic Party. Never completed High School, but had a career as a Nurse’s Aide. We were speaking about the current presidential contest when she made the most striking statement. It is worth quoting exactly:

‘Everybody’s goin' around talkin' about democracy. I don’t know what that is. I just want the same rights as everybody else, and I don’t want a crazy fool for president.’

I cannot state the case any better. I can only add a few footnotes to it.

Democracy, as it is experienced, is a fight for the principle of equality. Not that we are all the same, but that we should all be treated the same among ourselves, under the law, and by our government. Even if we give a technical definition of democracy as rule by the people directly or through representatives, it is still up to the people to ensure that the principle of equality remains in force: that we do our utmost to challenge and defeat the tyrannies, oligarchies, and monopolies that inevitably arise in every human society.

Yes, we need representative government, laws, civil rights, and civic organizations such as trade unions. Yet democracy cannot be limited to the procedures and channels of such institutions. The animating idea of political activism is to fight for more. To do so, as I hope the examples of the Welsh miners, Scottish cloth workers, and anti-colonial activists have shown, it is often necessary to not only work outside these constraints but to challenge their current forms. In short, it is better to view democracy not as a set of institutions, but as an attitude and mood that inspires us to struggle for more pluralism and less inequality in the world.

Christopher D. Reid is an independent researcher. He has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and graduate degrees in Human Relations and Philosophy. For the last ten years, he has studied the history of race, resistance, and political economy in the British and American Empires.

Workers and empire: Learning from early 20th century resistance politics in Imperial Britain – Part 2

Resistance abroad vs. resistance at home