ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the early phases of one such shift away from parliamentarism and conciliatory trade unionism towards militant direct action and social confrontation that occurred between 1910 and the defeat of the General Strike of 1926. The aim is to assess how far these developments represented the development of revolutionary syndicalism in Britain. An alternative method of conceptualizing revolutionary syndicalism taking such characteristics into account is to regard it as a social movement operating on both formal and informal levels. The history of prewar British syndicalism can be divided into two phases. The first, stretching from around 1900 to 1910, saw the emergence of a very small hard core of revolutionary propagandists together with a proliferation of tiny organizations. The second phase of British revolutionary syndicalism began around 1910 and was not finally brought to an end until the failure of the General Strike of 1926.
