Mary Nolan
2018 marks the culmination of four years of centenary commemorations of World War I, a war that marked the end of a real or imagined long nineteenth century of peace, progress, and European global hegemony, a war that marked the beginning of the thirty years war of the twentieth century. Rich histories and artistic treatments have explored the contested origins and responsibility for the war’s outbreak, the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas, the social and psychic toll of immobilized men and newly mobile women, and the mass death on a scale not seen in the previous hundred years. The collapse of multiple empires, the emergence of new and fragile states, and the reshuffling of colonies have been investigated. But little attention has been paid to the complex ways in which Europe’s working classes shaped and were shaped by World War I. The centenary of the Russia Revolution received only modest historiographical attention and little if any public commemoration. The pervasive working-class political and economic protests that shook Britain, France, Germany, and Italy during and after World War I are receiving even less.
This makes the reissue of Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 particularly welcome. James Cronin and Carmen Sirianni’s edited collection of comparative essays and case studies provides an opportunity to recall or to discover for the first time the vibrant historiography on working-class radicalization, diverse forms of labor protest, and demands for workers’ control in the wake of the dislocations and hardships of prolonged total war. It remembers the now all but forgotten militant upheavals at war’s end in France and Britain and the revolutions that failed in Germany and Italy but that nonetheless pioneered new forms of working-class activism and articulated new visions of work and politics. By exploring this moment of turmoil and rupture, of hope and despair, of alternatives and their foreclosure, Work, Community, and Power prompts us to think about the conditions of possibility for radical protest and fundamental change in work and politics and the structural and conjunctural limitations on those possibilities.
The wartime and postwar protests of workers across Europe, the challenges to established unions and socialist parties, and the emergence of anarcho-syndicalist movements and new communist ones were once central issues in heated political debates and contested public memory. They were subjects of intensive investigation and contestation by historians, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Work, Community, and Power is a product of that era when historians were developing new kinds of labor history and social history from below. Many, like the authors of the essays in this volume, were part that historiographical project. They were also a part of the 1968 political generation that was disillusioned with the Soviet Union and its model of revolution and critical of democratic capitalist regimes and the Vietnam War. They explored the revolutions, near revolutions, and pervasive working-class protests that shook Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S. at war’s end to see if they suggested the possibility of a third way between Bolshevism and cautious parliamentary democracies. They asked whether radical change had been on the agenda then and might be again now.
That moment has long since passed. Labor history now sits on the margins of research and teaching, at least for those focusing on the U.S. and Europe. Culture and discourse occupy center stage, postmodern approaches have supplanted social history, and capital attracts more attention than labor. Class, the category central to Work, Community, and Power, has been displaced by race, gender, and sexuality, even though all these identities coexist and co-construct one another. Historical events as much as historiographical fashions explain the current neglect of work and protest in the first decade of the twentieth century. Deindustrialization and the emergence of post-Fordist economies across Europe and the U.S. have led to the decline and restructuring of working classes and a dramatic shrinkage of trade unions. The revolutions of 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union decimated leftist parties and eliminated the threat or promise of an alternative to capitalism in its increasingly neoliberal form. The recent emergence of a radical populist right makes the late 1920s and 1930s in Europe seem a more relevant object of study than war, protest, and revolution.
All this notwithstanding, there are several substantive and methodological reasons to revisit, but also to rethink, the working-class protests explored in this volume. The varied essays on the U.S., Germany, Italy, Britain, France, and Russia show clearly how central working-class activism was to the tumultuous ending of World War I and how central its repression or containment was to the construction of postwar orders that disappointed the hopes of so many workers. They insist that attention must be focused not only on the pro-war stance of socialist movements in most countries and their timidity post war but also, indeed primarily, on the dissenting views of workers and their development of new demands and practices to challenge both the prewar order and postwar efforts to contain change. The essays effectively use Charles Tilly’s theory of resource mobilization to unpack the multiple networks, organizations, and ideas at work, in communities, and in families on which workers drew to articulate new ideas and engage in new kinds of activism. The essays combine detailed attention to workers’ ideas, organizations, and practices in and outside of work with consistent attention to structural factors that both opened spaces for dramatic protests and limited the possibilities for their success. While often sympathetic to the projects advocated by working-class radicals, the authors are well aware of the multiple divisions within the working classes of every country, the lack of preparation for carrying through their far-reaching aspirations for workers’ control on the shop floor and for a thorough democratization of politics. They carefully analyze how important the severity of the wartime economic crisis, the prior degree of industrialization and urbanization, and above all the strength and resilience of the state apparatus was to the realization or repression of working-class demands. The collection offers a persuasive comparison of why workers gained least in Britain, France, and the U.S., tried but failed to achieve radical transformations in Italy and Germany, and succeeded in seizing political power but not realizing workers’ control in Russia.
Methodologically, Work, Community, and Power illustrates the richness of social history with its detailed reconstructions of work, community networks and institutions, and family relationships. It argues for the importance of contextualizing moments of dramatic protest within the longer-term processes of working-class formation and activism. In its careful attention to the ways the history of capitalism and labor shape one another, it suggests the limits of current histories of capitalism that ignore labor in favor of business and finance. In a period when transnational history is prominent, the collection shows the enduring value of carefully crafted comparative work.
The reissue of Work, Community, and Power also provides an occasion to acknowledge its omissions and limitations. Published before the linguistic turn, the essays do not attend to the discourses that shaped but did not determine both working-class action and state responses. The challenge is to combine both discursive and social historical approaches. Of equal importance, the essays barely mention women and do not deploy gender as a key category of analysis. Thus, they barely note the extensive women’s protests that began around issues of food prices, war allowances, and high rents and escalated to demands for social and political rights. By focusing so much on how and why workers strove for control at the point of production, the collection downplays demands for full citizenship and an expanded array of social and economic rights. Finally, although the essays attend to the structural factors that both created the conditions of possibility for radical protest and limited the chances of its success, they do not explore sufficiently how the disorientation, defamiliarization, and trauma of war and its end shaped hopes and imaginings of a possible new order and created confusion and fear about realizing it.
The working classes that existed in Europe and the U.S. in the first decades of the 20th century are long gone and the conditions that encouraged demands for workers’ control as envisioned during and after World War I are not likely to recur. Revolution is certainly not on the agenda. But for those seeking to reform the dominant neoliberal capitalist order and curb the emerging radical right, there is much to learn from the failures of working-class protests during and after World War I and also from their partial and temporary successes in bridging divisions among workers, linking work and community, and daring to imagine radical alternatives to the status quo.
MARY NOLAN is Professor of History at NYU.