There is no hard and fast line between industrial action and political action.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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Quite frankly, I should have liked to see a general strike proclaimed against the outbreak of war in 1914; and I conceive the power to act in that way as a necessary and wise protection of a people against a government which proposes such…
You cannot compartmentalize life; and where grave emergencies arise, the weapons to be utilized must be fitted to meet them.
A government which knew that its declaration of war was, where it intended aggressive action, likely to involve a general strike, would be far less likely to think in belligerent terms.
I do not forget that the German Republic was saved from the Kapp Putsch by a general strike.
When the issue in dispute seems to the trade unions so vital that only by a general strike can they defend their position adequately, they will, in those circumstances, defend their position whatever the law may be.
A legal command is, after all, a mere static form of words; what gives it appropriateness is its relevance as just to the situation to which it is applied.
And its relevance as just is made not by those who announce that it is to be applied, but by those who receive its application.
The secret of avoiding general strikes does not lie in their prohibition but in the achievement of the conditions which render them unnecessary.
Nor is the denial of the right to declare a general strike a necessary protection of the total interest of the community.
A government which meets the threat of a general strike is not entitled to public support merely because it meets the threat.
It is no more possible to take that view than it is to say that all governments deserve support when they confront a rebellion of their subjects.
Everything depends on what the general strike is for, just as everything depends on the purpose of the rebellion; and the individual trade unionist must make up his mind about the one, just as the individual citizen must make up his mind…
Law in this realm is, in fact, largely futile.
The limitation of liberty in this realm seems to me, therefore, neither just in its purpose nor beneficent in its results.
It is an abuse of power when an employer dismisses his workmen because he does not like their political opinions.
It is an abuse of power when the owners of halls in Boston refuse to hire them to the promoters of a meeting in memory of Sacco and Vanzetti.
It was an abuse of power when British naval officers connived at the attempted internment of the Belgian socialist, M.
It was, I think, an abuse of power when the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge refused to admit Nonconformists as students, or Parliament to seat Mr Bradlaugh because he was an infidel.
But the trade unions are no more likely, on the historic record, to abuse their power than is Parliament itself.
The latter, if it wished, has the legal competence to abolish the trade unions, to disenfranchise the working classes, to confine membership of the House of Commons to persons with an independent income.
We know that Parliament is unlikely to do any of these things because omnicompetence, when gravely abused, ceases to be omnicompetent.
The army and navy and the police, in particular, occupy a special position in the state; if they were free, like ordinary citizens, to withdraw their labour as they pleased, the executive power would be in an impossible position.
But it is important, in the framing of these regulations, that the conditions of service should be just.
They should be made and administered in conjunction with those who are affected by them; and in their application or change executive action should not be the final court of appeal.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
