European Labour Protest 1848–1939

Dick Geary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032036809
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000424232
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1981, examines the issues inspiring working-class movements after 1848 in France, Germany and Britain, with some consideration also of Austria, Italy, Spain and Russia. It concentrates on the attitudes of the ordinary working men, rather than the ideologies and the leaders, and considers the many different forms and manifestations of their grievances and means of expression. What emerges is the complexity of the connection between economic circumstances and protest, and the existence of wide divergences of behaviour amongst the European working class.

1 Introduction

In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe government authorities and the traditional ruling strata viewed various forms of lower-class protest almost always as the work of ‘agitators’, ‘conspirators’ or preferably ‘outsiders’. Thus the British government of 1842 attempted to portray the confused strikes and riots of that bitter year as a coherent and concerted conspiracy, the so-called ‘Plug Plot’. Thus King Frederick William IV of Prussia chose to believe that the revolution of 1848 had been ‘systematically prepared’ by unsavoury characters dwelling in foreign parts; and thus many European governments mistook the insurrection of the Paris Commune in 1871 for the work of an international organisation of conspirators, Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association (the First International). As late as 1918 many German aristocrats, and not only they, could believe quite firmly that the November Revolution of that year was brought about by the machinations of Slavs and Jews.

That the upper crust should see the mechanics of protest in such a blinkered fashion is hardly surprising. To lay the blame for disruption on a small minority of ungrateful misfits, ‘alien scum’ or even ‘politically motivated’ trade union leaders was and in some quarters still is good propaganda. The limited horizons of an entrenched but fearful elite are further and easily explained in terms of the isolation or limited social intercourse of such a group. What is more difficult to explain and certainly less excusable is that historians of the socialist and labour movements have themselves so often resorted to a modified version of the conspiracy theory. In this context British labour historiography is the exception rather than the rule. The relative absence and insignificance of inspiring ideological controversy or institutional socialism in Britain before the turn of the century in a sense obliged historians to turn their attention to the ‘grass-roots’ activity of ordinary working men (and more rarely women) in the absence of anything more exciting. On the Continent, however, things were different. The early appearance of revolutionary socialism in France and Germany and the subsequent emergence of mass Communist movements there and elsewhere, the Civil War in Spain and even more the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia immediately and understandably excited interest and have since held the attention of laymen and scholars. An unfortunate consequence of this, however, has been that at least until recently what passed as the history of working-class movements in the various countries of Europe was in reality nothing of the sort. Only a few years ago what purported to be a course on ‘European Labour Movements’ in an English university consisted primarily of an examination of a series of intellectual and ideological debates — Marx v. Bakunin, Kautsky v. Bernstein, Russian populism, French anarcho-syndicalism - rather than a study of the activities of labouring men and women.¹ Such areas of enquiry are perfectly legitimate, of course; and it is hardly surprising that academics should be interested in matters intellectual. But the relationship of these ideologies to the concrete historical development of the labour and socialist movements is at best tangential. Even at the level of the leadership of what has often been regarded as the most doctrinaire of all European socialist parties before 1914, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), there is overwhelming evidence of at best misunderstanding and more often of ignorance of or indifference towards Marxist theory.² If this was true of labour’s ostensible leaders, then how much more problematical it is to assess what Marxism meant to the rank and file of the party. We do know, however, that when they did borrow books from trade union or party libraries — and most did not — they normally took away works of escapist fiction.³ For France we know that the industrial behaviour of supposed anarcho-syndicalists differed little from that of their non-anarchist colleagues; whilst one eminent leader of the French anarcho-syndicalist trade union organisation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), on being asked his opinion of the theories of Georges Sorel, replied that he only read Alexandre Dumas!⁴ Much of what follows will provide further evidence of ideological ignorance or confusion on the part of the membership of various socialist parties and radical groups.

Obviously there have been innumerable studies of the non-ideological history of European labour; but most of these have been institutional histories of political parties and trade unions. Such work needs to be done; but most of it has been written from the top downwards: divisions within the labour movement have been seen through the eyes of union and party leaders rather than through the ordinary experience of the working-class rank and file. Most arguments to the effect that the German labour movement became less radical in the period before the First World War, for example, are based on an analysis of the behaviour and attitudes of the party leadership of the SPD; whilst the Russian Revolution has usually been analysed in terms of the history of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties and the personality of Lenin rather than the work experience of ordinary Russians, despite recent attempts to correct the balance.⁵

There are several reasons why the institutional and leadership approach fails to do justice to the history of the European socialist movement. In the first place, most of the socialist parties which came into existence in the nineteenth century and some of their Communist successors were mass political movements, involving thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of members: on the eve of the First World War the SPD had a membership of over a million, for example. In addition these organisations, at least in their early days, were democratic and their rank and file had some, albeit a declining, influence on the decisionmaking process. There were also occasions on which rank and file opposition to official leadership became manifest, as we shall see. Hence any adequate attempt to grapple with the history of the SPD, of the French Socialist Party, the SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), or of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), will have to take into account the attitudes and activities of the working-class rank and file.

At this point, however, further difficulties arise. Even if we were able to construct an adequate history of the organised socialist movement, vast areas of labour protest would remain unexplored. Many workers joined trade unions and the ranks of industrial protest -strikes, for example - and yet refused or did not consider extending their support to organised socialism, most obviously in Britain. Perhaps even more significantly, most workers belonged to no organisation at all before 1914, even in the advanced industrial nations of Europe: on the eve of the First World War no more than 9 per cent of the French, 25 per cent of the German and slightly more of the British labour force had been recruited into economic or political organisations. Not only that, but many workers who had never been organised previously often participated in strikes and even more radical forms of activity. The ‘unorganised’, for example, played a major role in the strike waves of 1905 in Germany and Russia, in the revolutionary events in the latter country in 1917 and in the former in 1918, as they also did in the French upheavals of 1936. Any study of labour protest, therefore, cannot restrict its concerns solely to ideologies, institutions or leaders.

It is true that a great deal of time and effort has recently been expended in the analysis of strikes and in particular of strike demands.⁶ The argument goes that these will tell us exactly what mattered to ordinary workers, far more so than the reflections and statements of their would-be leaders. However, it is not clear to me that strike demands will indicate the whole range of working-class grievances and ambitions: strikers will often ask for what they think they can get, rather than for everything they desire. More importantly, failure to strike by no means necessarily indicates satisfaction with the existing economic, social and political order. As we will see, there are circumstances in which to strike is either impossible, dangerous or simply counter-productive; yet at the same time these non-striking workers could protest in a variety of ways: by lowering productivity, absenteeism, the threat of going on strike.

This last point raises yet further problems. This book is primarily concerned with collective protest; but what of individual protests against industrialism or the capitalist system? Is increased alcoholism a form of protest? Might not the most effective form of protest to the new industrial order in mid- and late-nineteenth century Europe have been emigration to the New World? Is absenteeism a continuation of ‘pre-industria’ behaviour in a novel setting or a genuine objection to prevailing economic reality? The answer might vary from case to case, from individual to individual; but what the present work is concerned with is collective responses to the problems of industrial society and primarily those that have taken some organised form, even if only for a short period of time. In particular, it is concerned with why certain groups of workers did join together to combat exploitation and oppression.

When the emphasis is shifted from political and trade union leaders to the experience of ordinary working people, then attention must move away from ideological considerations towards the real grievances of the worker, both in the factory and at home. Most obviously there is a connection between raw economic data and labour protest. Inflation, for example, provided the stimulus to strike activity in several European countries between 1910 and 1914, as it did to the massive post-war upheaval in Central Europe. Yet it would be extremely dangerous to assume that poverty or impoverishment are the direct causes of radical labour protest. In fact, the relationship between living standards and labour protest is highly complex: the first groups of industrial workers to participate in organised protest, form trade unions and join socialist political parties were almost invariably recruited from the relatively well paid sections of the work-force. This would suggest that the simple explanation of industrial and political militancy in terms of poverty will not do, despite the fact that the theory is far from dead.⁷ It is true that economic insecurity has favoured radicalism in certain circumstances: the background to Luddism, ‘physical force’ Chartism and the riots of 1842 in England was acute unemployment. This also provided the mainstay of support for the German Communist Party (KPD) between the wars. Yet unemployment could also militate against trade union organisation and reduced the temptation to strike throughout most of this period: in times of high unemployment the militant worker could be replaced relatively easily and his bargaining power was thus significantly reduced. Again it was the more secure workers who first organised and participated in strikes most frequently. The relationship between skill, high wages and job security is equally clear; and it is of the utmost significance that it was such skilled workers who formed the rank and file of trade unions and political parties of labour in Britain, France and Germany before the First World War. The unskilled, on the other hand, both before and after 1914 were to prove much more difficult to mobilise for any length of time, although they were to prove especially volatile at times of economic and political crisis.

In addition to wage rates, levels of unemployment and skill differentials, factory size appears to have had some, albeit a disputed, influence on the structure of industrial and political protest. In some places, for example in Russia between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Emergence of Organised Protest
• 3. Maturation and Organisation, 1890-1914
• 4. War, Revolution and the Rise of Communism
• 5. Conclusion
• Bibliographical Notes
• Index