Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [290]
At Copenhagen it spoke through Keir Hardie, who proposed a resolution jointly with Edouard Vaillant of France, recommending that “the affiliated Parties and Labour organizations consider the advisability and feasibility of the general strike, especially in industries that supply war material, as one of the methods of preventing war and that action be taken on the subject at the next Congress.” When proposing it, Hardie acknowledged that the workers were not ready to strike against war but he clung to the hope that they would be ready when the time came. “We must give them a great lead,” he said. His resolution was supported by Vandervelde and by Jaurès, who was the more disposed to be sympathetic because he was in the midst of an effective effort, which partly depended on acceptance of the general strike, to draw the CGT closer to the SFIO. Further, his concern over the bureaucratic trend of the German party led him increasingly to consider the need for mass tactics.
The Germans and Austrians were solidly opposed to Hardie’s motion on the same ground as before: that to advocate a strike in the event of war might lead to prosecution for treason and confiscation of funds. Bebel, ill and growing old, was absent, but even without him, German pressure secured a negative vote. As a compromise the resolution was referred to the Bureau in Brussels for reconsideration at the next Congress. To go on record even to this extent worried the Germans. They were only reluctantly persuaded to agree by Vandervelde’s argument that if they refused, the British and French might pursue the plan independently. A resolution on anti-militarism was passed, virtually the same as that of Stuttgart, with the addition that organized labour in member countries “shall consider whether a general strike should not be proclaimed if necessary in order to prevent the crime of war.” As nervously if not quite as quickly as capitalists had disposed of Disarmament at The Hague, Socialists disposed of the general strike.
Within weeks hard proof was given of labour’s inability to win a transport strike. In France in October Premier Briand broke a general strike of railwaymen against all private and state-operated lines by conscripting the workers into the army for a period of three weeks, making absence from work subject to a charge of military desertion. On the excuse of national defense, Briand defended his action as dictated by a patriotic conscience. Even to an old Socialist his conscience did not dictate pressure on the companies for the wage increase the railwaymen were demanding.
History had reached 1910. The transfer of power to a new class whose signals Balfour had seen in the British general election of 1906 was a process in the making, not a fact. In a test of strength, as in the French railway strike, labour could not command real power. International action was hallucination. While the Socialists kept on talking about it and believing in it, they were dealing more in a hope and a theory than in flesh and bones. One genuine attempt at international working-class action was made at this time. While the Socialists in Copenhagen were discussing a possible general strike in war industries, the very men who would be crucial to it, the International Transportworkers (ITF), by nature the most international of the unions, were also in session in Copenhagen. Once during the Boer War pro-Boer Dutch members had urged an international boycott of British shipping but the ITF leaders had flatly turned down the proposal on the ground that it was just not possible at that stage to interest