Claiming the City by Shelton Stromquist

Author:Shelton Stromquist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

While national leaders may have found some comfort in this species of unity, a continuing challenge from below at the local level promised to realign class power and potentially disrupt longstanding elite and employer dominance in local governance. As Cronin has astutely noted, processes of class formation in neighborhoods, intensified by protests over food and housing shortages, cut across segments of the working class and “imparted a wider sense of class loyalty and class antagonism to the events of 1917–20 than probably would have developed in a more purely industrial situation.”92

Early in the war, the cooperative posture of national trade union leaders toward war mobilization may have dampened any eruption of concerted strike action. However, by 1917, as the consequences of intensified war production took hold especially in the munitions industry and diluted the customary practices in the skilled trades, a new climate of conflict took shape. Industrial grievances now intersected with consumption issues and with the state’s conscription of men for military service to shatter industrial peace. While local struggles on the Clyde and in the mining villages of South Wales did not represent the whole of Britain, those sites of conflict were symptomatic of broader discontent that flared in strikes against government policies perceived to be forms of “industrial conscription,” in Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, and elsewhere.93 The extraordinary importance of munitions and shipbuilding in wartime strikes is evident in a comparison with prewar levels. In the decade and a half before the war, only 16 percent of days lost to strikes were in engineering and shipbuilding, but these sectors had nearly one-third of all wartime strikes.94

The impositions of the “servile state” through conscription, coercion of workers and their unions, and curtailment of freedoms of speech compounded industrial and consumption conflicts. The challenge to existing inequalities—which had already been gaining force in the prewar years—took on new relevance when the sacrifices demanded by wartime were so patently unequal. This new political alchemy created conditions which, with the eventual broadening of the franchise, opened up unprecedented political space at local and national levels. The new Labour Party constitution of 1918 attempted to codify, albeit in moderate terms, the new claims for public control of the economy that wartime conditions had encouraged.95

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