‘Ca Canny’

‘Whenever communities in struggle find more conventional methods of resistance closed to them, direct action and sabotage will be employed.’

                        Salvatore Salerno

Sabotage is a term with a French origin and a Scottish inspiration. In the Glasgow docks at the end of the nineteenth century, dockers were subject to new forms of control because they were part of a large labour force in an era of high unemployment. When only a limited number of people have a certain skill, those workers have a great deal of power, and when they engage in resistance they can’t just be replaced. The picture was different on the docks. With lots of labour coming in, workers in resistance could be replaced all the time. At this changing-point in Scottish industrial history, dock workers realised that they needed to bring new tactics of resistance into play.

While dock workers were building power, Glasgow was buzzing with a completely different question. At the end of the nineteenth century the city was a melting pot of people cleared from the Highlands and people who had come from Ireland due to so called ‘famines’ and forced removal from land. Glasgow, as an industrial center connected Ireland and the Highlands, and that connection was a conveyor belt of ideas between those resisting clearances and those resisting bosses. 

Thousands of Irish migrants had brought the land question to Glasgow, and in debates and meetings people discussed the struggles in Ireland for control over the land. Many different tactics had been tried, from rent strikes and refusals to pay for land, to more violent forms of resistance. 

Quite often we understand the clearances as a great and terrible sadness in Scotland’s history, where people had no option but to leave the land they had been on for generations, and come to the foreign land of the lowlands. It creates the idea of two cultures, and a split or divide in the heart of Scotland. However, it can also be seen as a moment of strength, the connections between cultures and common experiences helped generate new kinds of resistance.

Like thousands of Irish migrants, Edward McHugh had come to Scotland as a child, and initially worked as a docker in Greenock. When he was 16 he moved to Glasgow and worked for a typing press, before returning to the docks to organise. McHugh was also involved in the Land League, whose members traveled to Skye to support pockets of resistance to landowners. In a northern corner of Skye, for instance, groups of crofters, who had been pushed from land, came together to orchestrate land raids: denied the right to have their flocks on land, they opened the gates and let their livestock into the fields. The tactic spread, which is what the sheriffs and landowners feared most. In this upswell, McHugh and others joined meetings to hear about the organic tactics of rent strikes and land raids that had been passed through generations of islanders. Sheriffs accused the Land League of bringing violent Fenian tactics from Ireland, even while they were calling in police from Glasgow to scuffle and fight with islanders.

The tactics promoted by the Land League were diverging from the political focus of the Irish struggle to nationalise land - concentrating instead on the power of steady, constant resistance. The strategy behind this was that when individual actions failed, the attrition and the constant activity still wore away the enemy. Land raids and rent strikes can sometimes seem short-termist. Raiders were dispersed, and those who refused to pay were often jailed or fined, but they contributed to the building of a new movement that came to be referred to as the land war. These tactics and strategies became known to the workers in Glasgow involved in ceaseless activity of their own as part of the class war.

Back in Glasgow in 1889, Edward McHugh was involved in a huge dockers’ strike which became known as the Ca Canny strike. The Ca Canny was a new tactic developed by McHugh and his fellow workers. Initially the 1889 strike was a conventional strike: the dockers stopped working, pledging not to return until they had higher pay. What the bosses did was to bring in other workers, ‘scab labour’ in the form of agricultural workers from around Glasgow. The dockers soon began running out of money, and eventually had to admit defeat: they had to return to work. 

On the return to work, the head of the union made a speech to the dockers:

You are going back to work at the old wage. The employers have repeated time and again that they were delighted with the work of the agricultural labourers who have taken our place for several weeks during the strike. But we have seen them work. We have seen that they could not even walk a vessel, and that they dropped all the merchandise they carried; in short, that two of them could hardly do the work of one of us. Nevertheless, the workers have declared themselves enchanted with the work of these fellows. Well, then, there is nothing for us but to do the same: work as the agricultural labourers work.

So that is what they did. They went back to work and worked in the manner in which they had seen the scab labourers work. They dropped things overboard and slowed down their pace until the bosses realised that their profits were simply draining away. Within a few weeks the dockers got their pay rise. This tactic, the Ca Canny, had won where the strike had failed.

This tactic ignited radical workers in other places. This success became famous in London, where the International Shoreman’s Union issued a manifesto that spoke about the Scots’ success. It read:

What does ‘Go canny’ mean? It’s a short and useful word to designate a new tactic employed by workers instead of going on strike. If two Scotsmen are walking together and one is going too fast, the other says to him, ‘go canny’, which means ‘slow down’. The bosses declare that labour and skill are ‘merchandise for sale in the market’, like hats, shirts, and beef. Perfect, we answer, we’ll take you at your work. If it is merchandise we’ll sell it, like the hatmaker sells his hat and the butcher his meat., They give bad merchandise for bad prices and we’ll do the same. The bosses have no right to count on our charity. If they refuse to discuss our demands, well, we’ll put in place a go canny, to slow down, while waiting for them to listen to us.

On the other side of the Channel, the French left had its eyes peeled. French socialists had suffered many defeat in the mid-nineteenth century, and in the 1890s were in a process of rebuilding strength. Among them was the anarchist Emile Pouget, who got very excited when hearing about the successful Ca Canny tactic. After he’d read the London manifesto, he brought the news home to the Congres Corporatif, a gathering of thousands of workers in Toulouse in 1897. 

The Glasgow workers tactic of working like scabs in order to regain power against bosses reminded Pouget’s of the contemporary symbol of the French agricultural worker - the ‘sabot’, a wooden or wooden shoe. Building on the word sabot he championed the French version of the Ca Canny method: sabotage. These words come from his speech about the new tactic:

Sabotage is the conscious shirking of duties, it is the botching of a job, it is the grain of sand cunningly stuck in the fine gears so that the machine remains broken down, it is the systematic sinking of the boss. All this practised on the sly, without making a fuss, or showing off. Sabotage is the younger cousin of the boycott, and hell, in a whole string of cases where a strike is impossible, it can render damn good service to the proles.  

This is a story that says important things about the history of resistance, and of forms of resistance that run against the official grain. Within the annals of official trade unionism, strikes are elevated as the gold standard - the pinnacle of collective action. However the system of striking developed by trade unions in the twentieth century, requires a lot of formal processes and procedures, ballots and bureaucracy. When members are balloted, they are asked if they support ‘strike action’ and ‘action short of a strike’. This is presented as a fixed hierarchy of action. 

Time and again when formal trade unionism and official strike action provide no way forward, workers take it upon themselves to find different methods. These methods are often described as violent – including by trade unions – but often are safer than conventional strikes. Sabotage is a way, without going on a full strike, to stay on the workshop, to stay put, and to regain control over the process of production by slowing down, and regaining control over your own worth and skills as a worker. 

This is what got the French so excited, and inaugurated a broad series of new tactics which involved staying on the workplace. These new tactics would later cycle back round to inspire factory occupations or factory work-ins, in France, Scotland, and beyond.

As part of researching for Scottish Histories of Resistance, we spoke to a worker from Wallacetown Engineering lock-in in Prestwick. In 1980 an engineering plant was bought, and the new owners, wary of the presence of communists in the union, attempted to make the union leader and many others redundant. In response the communist union leader, Alex Baird, orchestrated a lock-in. This was another form of sabotage, an alternative to striking, but one that did not have the blessing of the official engineering union until Alex travelled to London and presented the case to the sceptical officers. The action resulted in victory and the reinstatement of Alex and the other suspended workers. 

While British unions had always been resistant to these tactics, American organisers took them up and ran with it. In the USA at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, unions were developing faster and with more fluidity than in the UK, using more trial and error and taking up any tactics at their disposal. This fluid unity was embodied by the famous Industrial Workers of the World, a union that operated mostly in workplaces that we now think of as precarious, where people had short contracts (week to week or even day to day) under conditions that many established trade union officers would consider difficult to organise in. 

Actually, there were many successes organising in these industries. Their strength was that people had a range of resistance tactics at their fingertips, passed down like tools from one set of hands to another. As these became known by people across states and industries, the understanding spread that the important thing was not to build up a strong durable union in this or that one place or to hold on forever in its union branches and union systems. What mattered was for as many people as possible to be part of one big union. The One Big Union, the ‘OBU’, was always the aspiration of the IWW. 

Like the crofters in Skye who took part in one land war even though they had never created one organisation, the workers of the IWW addressed the question of how you could have one huge movement under an apparently disorganised organisation, as long as people thought and fought as one. The history of precarious worker resistance, land resistance, and many other movements of resistance, is an answer to that question. And one vital spark of that united tradition emerged when ideas from the land struggles in Ireland and from the crofters’ resistance to the clearances inspired the Ca Canny in Glasgow. Stories like this are not fables about the best or purest kind of tactics of resistance. Tactics are not written on stone once and for all, but are crafted, invented, reinvented and implemented, by different people throughout history, in response to their unique circumstances. In this time of increasing pressure on working people, we would consider it wise to look to history for inspiration of how to regain workers power today!

Cailean Gallagher, Edinburgh, 15th August 2023

This draft is based on work by Amy Tait, Paul Malgrati and myself in 2022, and in particular it uses material from an online video course called Ca Canny: a Workshop on Scotland's Hidden Treasure on the Sma Shot School established by Amy Tait. It draws on a wider body of research that is referenced below. Readers are particularly invited to read the articles xxx. The videos are here:

Introduction: youtu.be/JwP97po-koY

McHugh’s Early Life: youtu.be/SegODK9_LGQ

Glasgow in the late 19th Century: youtu.be/h-sQy5jzB3A

McHugh in Skye: youtu.be/iiKwqXgbyOU

The Ca Canny: youtu.be/o2465AMyP2E

London Dockers: youtu.be/akJi4cvDwRw

Pouget: youtu.be/nBqobvkWgU4

America, Sabotage, and the Dust Bowl: youtu.be/gIP9-u4MzkM

Course Conclusion: youtu.be/JUuQP802j1w