Resumen de Smashing the Subversive Unemployed: State Containment and Coercion of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, 1921–39

Emanuel Bourges Espinosa

• Existing scholarship on the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) has not addressed the rationale of state action against unemployed dissent. This paper argues that the NUWM disrupted a tentative and fragile accord between the state, capital, and labour to institutionalize industrial conflict, necessary to secure governability and social order. The interwar British state used its intelligence and coercive apparatus, the law, and the police against the NUWM. The paper offers an analytical perspective which emphasizes the influence of the interwar economic constrictions on the capacity for state action and explains the need for its officials to reject expressions of industrial discontent and protect the notion of industrial peace as a raison d’état.