ABSTRACT
Necessities, as well as ideology, have long encouraged trades unionists and others in the labour movement to try and widen the scope o f solidarity beyond national boundaries. I argue here, though, that this does not necessarily increase ‘internationalism’. Much depends on how the arena is defined. Obviously, once dangers are seen as erupting from outside a particular arena (with, to take the month o f August 1914, the German invasion o f Belgium or, for German workers, the simultaneous Russian invasion o f E. Prussia), they may, for a time, have basic effects on struggles within it. During the year immediately preceding August 1914, in fact, there was massive practical evidence that a widening o f solidarities was, to most British trades unionists and their political allies, more natural within a (white) Empire-wide arena than within, say, a European one. It seemed more natural because it seemed more necessary. The latter belief motivated those on the left o f the British labour movement at least as much as others, and it made the response at least as much a left-wing one, too. Thus the loosely revolutionary-syndicalist Daily Herald concentrated on the whole agitation. Not least, it printed the cartoons o f Will Dyson (whose style seems like some mixture of, say, Aubrey Beardsley and Joe Hill) over the whole o f its front page. And, during the first months o f 1914, Dyson commented on South Africa far more than on any other issue. The response, encom passing the whole labour movement, climaxed in London’s Hyde Park on 1 March 1914, at a demonstration which both The Times and the Annual Register (let alone the Herald) agreed numbered hundreds o f thousands and amounted to ‘one o f the largest . . . ever seen in London’ .13 Neither o f these publications was normally enraptured at such a sight. Perhaps, therefore, they hint at part o f the explanation for why the whole effort has been obliterated
from historical memory. It was not merely overtaken by far larger ‘events’ ; it also lubricated the widespread August 19 14 switch from class to national solidarities.
