Chapter One

Rethinking the Legacy of Labor, 1890–1925

James E. Cronin

I

No variety of historical or sociological analysis is more bound up with politics than the study of labor. Labor movements, if they amount to anything, aim at political power; unions, however much oriented toward economic issues, carry on their work in a thoroughly political context. The structure of governmental power, the framework of law, and the mode of representation all shape the opportunities for working-class organization and activity. More important still, the very existence of the working class in modern society has given rise to major political movements that claim, rightly or wrongly, to represent its interests and that seek its allegiance. It is almost impossible, therefore, to separate the study of workers as a class from politics in general and from labor and socialist politics in particular.

This intertwining of the political and social dimensions of labor has not found an accurate reflection in historical analysis but has instead resulted in two distinct literatures and visions of labor’s legacy. The tradition that focuses on politics has provided detailed studies of socialist groupings and leaders of working-class parties and of left-wing thinkers and schools of thought. From this research derives an image of impotence, marginality, and defeat, for—as even the most sympathetic chronicler knows—such movements and ideas have met with more setbacks than successes. The second tradition is what might be called the institutional approach to labor studies—that is, the almost exclusive attention to organized workers, their spokesmen, and unions. To oversimplify just a bit, the dominant impression to emerge from this work is very nearly the direct opposite of the political tradition. It is an image of a labor movement constantly growing in size, strength, and sophistication, becoming increasingly bureaucratic in form and structure and gradually more integrated into the prevailing political order.

Curiously, and despite their differences in method and substance, the two images have often been combined in various synthetic and superficial accounts. The product has been an extremely vague and imprecise but (perhaps because of its vagueness and imprecision) surprisingly powerful composite picture of the working class as bureaucratically and self-interestedly organized within modern industrial society and of socialists as essentially marginal in impact. Even when socialists or communists have held leadership positions and when their rhetoric appears to have achieved a broad resonance, they are seen as incapable of exerting genuine influence upon the largely inert masses they are supposed to lead.

Though this perspective is considerably less fashionable now than it was just a short time ago, it remains resilient. Parts of the model are regularly questioned and rejected, but without an alternative vision to replace it, the old view persists. And the very weakness of the old approach is also its greatest strength. It is clear and simple. Such clarity, of course, is attained at the cost of leaving out what should be the core of labor history—the working class itself. Bringing the workers back in, however, is a difficult process indeed, one that results in the first instance in much greater complexity and, frankly, confusion. In consequence, much of the best recent work on the history of the working class in Europe and America cannot be, or at least has not yet been, synthesized into an interpretation that rivals the prevailing orthodoxy.

The second major source of strength for the conventional historiographical wisdom on labor is that it articulates so clearly contemporary attitudes toward the working class. There is a profound pessimism abroad about both European and American workers, and the dismissive rendering of labor’s past fits well with this sentiment. It affects, moreover, as many Marxist or radical scholars as conservative ones, having an apparently equal impact on those who lament the failure of labor and the left, and on those who celebrate it. Since the essential thrust of contemporary analysis is to ask, as Jeremy Seabrook has asked of the British labor movement, “What Went Wrong?”, the received historical image of labor is extremely functional.

There is, in short, a strong presentist bias in the analysis of and discourse about the working class, which militates against a more sophisticated reinterpretation. Reinforcing this is the fact that the revision of labor history has begun, as it must, with the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, i.e., with the era of industrialization in western Europe and America. Even in Britain, when labor history has a lengthy record of achievement, scholarship rarely has reached 1914 and virtually never touches upon later events. The enormous advances made by scholars such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm in the understanding of labor during the early years of industrialism have thus had little impact upon the perception of labor in the more recent past, whether in Britain or elsewhere.¹ Their efforts to show the richness and vitality of workers’ lives, beliefs, and protests and to locate the workers’ politics and collective efforts more precisely in society have for this reason simply not engaged or confronted the much more negative image of labor in the twentieth century.

All of this suggests the need to move decisively into the twentieth century as the key to constructing an alternative reading of the history and present condition of the working class. This volume, which centers upon the era of the First World War, is intended as a first step in that direction. It aims to carry forward the novel techniques and insights developed by the best recent work in the social history of labor and, in so doing, show their import for contemporary analysis. It will also be necessary, however, to shift the focus of research somewhat to deal with certain emergent phenomena of the early twentieth century, such as the increasing role of technology and the state in social and economic life.

Apart from these historiographical concerns, analyzing the story of working-class activity in the first quarter of the century has an intrinsic appeal and significance, for it was an era of great turbulence, of mass insurgency, of feats of organization, and of intense debate. Out of this varied activity, moreover, came critical innovations in tactics and theory: it was the moment of general strikes, of workers’ councils and soviets, of syndicalism and industrial unionism; and it was the experience from which emerged the theoretical contributions of Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin, the Austro-Marxists, and the Russian Bolsheviks, not to mention those, like Sorel, on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The labor and socialist movements were alive, growing, and hopeful, and they offered a fundamental challenge to the existing order of things.

It is, in sum, a moment well worth capturing, recreating, and studying historically. To do so, however, it is necessary as a preliminary to cut through the thick accretion of opinion sharply critical of the parties and politics of the Second International that also, by implication at least, has hampered the appreciation of the labor movements within which socialists operated. One must, in other words, rethink the problem of Social Democracy as the essential preliminary to the analysis of the working class per se.²

II

It is, of course, almost impossible to disentangle the history of workers during the first quarter of the century from that of Socialism and Social Democracy. Social democratic parties grew in step with the formation of the working class and its increasing political activism; they sought to represent the class and succeeded in winning its overt political allegiance; and the trade unions that took root among workers were normally linked to social democratic politics and policies. Most important, the network of local social institutions through which many workers, especially in Germany, Austria, and Italy, led their lives was frequently part of the subculture of Social Democracy. The identification of the history of labor with that of Social Democracy is thus neither foolish nor mischievous.

It is, however, mistaken, and the mistake leads to considerable confusion. For Social Democracy was an explicitly political movement about whose effectiveness and merit it is reasonable to reach narrowly political conclusions, while the evolution of the working class and its collective activity requires a quite different sort of analysis. The specific problem in this case is that the largely negative estimate reached by a variety of judges on the social democratic record has led to a similar general discounting of the effectiveness, richness, and viability of working-class culture, organization, and activity in the very same period.

The process by which the critique of the failures of the Second International passed over into a downgrading of the efforts of working men and women to fashion institutions and a movement was itself a highly political phenomenon. The classic texts, of course, are the contemporary writings of Michels and Lenin. As is well known, Michels’ study of the “oligarchic tendencies of organization” focused primarily upon Social Democracy, and he developed a trenchant critique of the bureaucratic, cautious evolution of that movement. To Michels, writing in 1911, the logic of socialist politics in a hostile society was for the party to organize “the framework of social revolution. For this reason it endeavors to strengthen its positions, to extend its bureaucratic mechanism, to store up its energies and its funds.” Gradually, however, the preservation of the apparatus becomes not the means but the end of politics; and this organizational imperative is reinforced “by the personal interest of thousands of honest breadwinners whose economic life is so intimately associated with the life of the party.” In the end, “the external form of the party, its bureaucratic organization, definitely gains the upper hand over its soul.”³

Michels’ diagnosis was amply confirmed by the decisions of socialists in almost all countries to join with other classes in defense of the national interest in August 1914. In retrospect, these actions seem almost inevitable: all over Europe, the left and the unions were on the defensive; even where they were strongest, the socialists were powerless to prevent war; and the “realistic” logic of maintaining the movement’s capacity to defend the workers in wartime easily prevailed over the prospect of futile demonstrations in support of internationalist principles.⁴ Still, the betrayal of principle could not be disguised, and it served to break apart the socialist movement. In general, the antiwar forces could trace their roots back to the left oppositions that had surfaced in most parties prior to the war, and the prewar moderates were clearly the core of the patriotic socialists. But there were anomalies, like Ramsay MacDonald in Britain and Eduard Bernstein in Germany, and, in addition, there existed a large body of centrist, pacificist opinion doomed to impotence by the extremism of the situation.

The split in the left rather quickly produced several diagnoses of the “material bases” of reformism, the most penetrating of which was Lenin’s. Lenin, together with Zinoviev, argued that imperialism allowed for the creation of an “aristocracy of labor” within the core nations of world capitalism. Imperialism generated the “superprofits” with which it was “possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy.” Most important, “this stratum of worker-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings, and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International.”⁵

Lenin’s critique is of great historiographical significance, for he gave a social basis to the essentially conservative and almost mystical argument of Michels. What for Michels was the inevitable product of organization and bureaucracy became for Lenin the political manifestation of a specific conjuncture and social formation. More materialist than Michels, Lenin’s argument implied an even more penetrating criticism of sections of the working class itself. In this early formulation, moreover, Lenin himself was apparently unsure of how broadly his strictures should apply. He slipped casually in his writing from speaking of a “stratum” of the labor aristocracy to discussing the group as a whole and compounded the confusion by attempting to link this material phenomenon with Social Democracy generally. He was obviously willing to contemplate the possibility that the rot had spread far and deep among the working class in the industrial countries.

The Leninist critique was based upon a particular reading of the history of labor and socialism in Europe. Ironically, though, it ran roughly parallel in some of its main contours to the themes of the dominant American school of labor history and labor economics. While Lenin was dissecting the sources of reformism in the European working class, John R. Commons and, later, Selig Perlman were constructing theories and interpretations of labor in America that took reformism as a virtue and, more important, as the almost inevitable product of modern industrial capitalism.⁶ Gradually, the Commons/Perlman approach was further transformed, in several stages, into a thoroughly functionalist approach to labor and industrial relations.⁷

Essentially, it came to be argued in the 1950s and 1960s that union organization and, in Europe, Social Democracy as a whole served a useful, functional role in society by providing a mechanism to adjust first-generation proletarians to modern capitalism. There is, to be sure, a genuine correspondence between this notion and the Leninist view of the social democrats as “the principal (social) prop of the bourgeoisie” in the imperialist era. But there was a critical difference, for Lenin’s explanation stressed the temporary, contingent nature of the incorporation, while the functionalist view saw integration as normal and pervasive in the modern social order. Moreover, the concept of integration was embedded in a tradition whose assumptions were quite antithetical to Leninism, to materialism and, it may be suggested, to a historical approach more generally. This American functionalist tradition assumed first, the stability of the social formation, and second, a rather close fit between the demands of the system for social control and the institutions and ideas of the society in ordinary circumstances. Social conflict and problems of integration, control, and resistance are thus manifestations of temporary dysfunction caused, in most cases, by the extraordinary pace or unanticipated and indirect consequences of social change. The classic formulation of this view of labor was straightforward and crude: “One universal response to industrialization is protest on the part of the labour force as it is fitted into the new social structure.”⁸

It is the transition to industrialism that poses the greatest problem for social integration, according to the functionalist model. But this is also where Social Democracy can play its most useful part, for it is a movement uniquely suited to socializing new recruits to industry to its demands while affording a safe outlet, through its rhetoric and political posture, for discontent. Two historical works have been crucial in arguing for this view of prewar Social Democracy.⁹ The first was Gunther Roth’s book The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration, which was unabashed in its functionalist orientation.¹⁰ The second was Dieter Groh’s massive study of “negative integration” in which the argument was made in great detail:

The process of the negative integration of the Social Democratic worker was . . . enforced through the development of the Social Democratic organization. The strong, internal group integration which underlay the gathering of workers in this organization, eventually led to the formation of an “integration party.” [Sigmund Neumann.] This party, in ideal cases, took care of its members from the cradle to the grave, from the workers’ kindergarten to the cremation cooperative . . . this contributed in an indirect manner to the integration of the worker into state and society. For the Social Democratic organizations were tied to so many aspects of the existing order that there was not even a need for the government to point out dangers to the organizations in order to prevent any planned action, for the labour movement, as an educational and cultural movement in the broadest sense, possessed an affirmative character in relation to German society. The Social Democrats did not question the accepted cultural, ethical, and moral norms of bourgeois society. Indeed they guaranteed the much discussed “embourgeoisement of the proletariat.”¹¹

However un-Leninist or un-Marxist the integration argument may be, some at least of its proponents see themselves as continuing and developing Lenin’s original critique. Whatever the authors’ intentions, the position is profoundly conservative, not simply in its origins and assumptions but also in what it ends up saying about the working class in the first part of the century. It reads back into their wage struggles a petty-bourgeois, consumerist mentality; it views their difficult struggles for organization as the growth of bureaucracy; and it derides their quite considerable achievements in carving out a “social space” for working class culture in the new urban environment as a capitulation to corporate status within bourgeois society. Most important, in interpreting the formation of organizations and formal institutions as an integrating mechanism, it implicitly makes a virtue of weakness and a vice of strength.

The net effect of viewing labor’s past in this way has been to downplay and degrade much of the self-activity of workers in waging strikes; establishing unions; elaborating social networks; founding, fighting for, and attending schools; safeguarding their persons; and even participating in politics. And though the argument for integration has been made most forcefully in the German case, it has also come to pervade analyses of British, French, and other experiences. British workers, it has recently been suggested, were simply reinforcing the ties that bound them to their masters in creating their own strong communities, unions, and, ultimately, political party in the years up to 1914. They evolved “a dense inward-looking culture, whose effect,” it is said, “was both to emphasize the distance of the working class from the classes above it and to articulate its position within an apparently permanent social hierarchy.”¹² Therefore, the effect of activities aimed at creating a socialist world was to reinforce bourgeois hegemony.

Similar arguments have been made for French, Belgian, and other workers, most notably by Peter Stearns.¹³ He sees the era up to 1914 as the time when industrial society, and with it the working class, “matured” across Europe. Thus, strikes came to be concerned more with wages than control over the production process, and unions and strikes together came to be viewed instrumentally rather than as confrontations in the class war. Overall, Stearns admits, the integration of workers before 1914 was incomplete, especially in southern and eastern Europe, but there can be no question that the modernization process was working to adjust and integrate workers into the new world of industrial capitalism. Needless to say, such arguments have achieved an even greater currency in America.

Despite the different sources from which the argument for integration has come, the combined effect has been to view the evolution of the working class in much the same terms as that of its institutional embodiments, particularly Social Democracy. In consequence, both have been interpreted as exhibiting the effects of embourgeoisement and integration, manifested in the progressive incorporation of the subaltern classes into the smooth functioning of advanced capitalism.

III

In many minds, therefore, the distinction between the history of socialists and that of the workers they attempted to organize and speak for has become blurred, and the critique of the one has implied a cynicism and condescension toward the other. There are signs, however, that this confusion is being recognized for what it is and that a new, more subtle view of both histories is being developed. The authors gathered together in this volume seek to further the process of rethinking the interconnected (but not identical) record of labor and the left in this crucial period of their evolution.

The initial spur to revise the conventional interpretation came, somewhat surprisingly, from historians of politics, war, and diplomacy. During the 1960s, the rather sterile debates on the origins of the Great War and the meaning of the Versailles settlement were transformed by the insight that both phenomena had as much, if not more, to do with internal social developments in different countries as with the imperatives of geopolitics. Building on the inspired interwar writings of Elie Halévy and Eckart Kehr, historians such as Arno Mayer, Fritz Fischer, and others began to look at Germany’s drive to war, at the decisions of Britain and Germany actually to declare war in 1914, and at the politics of Versailles as integrally linked to the political and social crises through which Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and even the United States were passing, each to a greater or lesser degree.¹⁴

Logically, such a novel perspective implied reconsideration of the various insurgent movements that had been growing up, particularly within Europe. It also suggested, and quite correctly, that the dominant elites took such movements extremely seriously, even if in retrospect their fears seem to have been misplaced. And one could of course go much further and argue that such fears were actually justified for two historical reasons: first, socialist parties and trade unions were gaining strength rapidly from 1900 in all countries, and workers were beginning to use their collective strength for strike action toward political ends, such as suffrage, and toward purely economic goals; and second, the political systems in which this insurgency was developing were sufficiently archaic in their operation and undemocratic in their structure as to be genuinely incapable of incorporating and absorbing these movements for change.¹⁵

The second source of historiographical revision has come from within social and labor history. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in working-class history and collective action. While most research in this area has been focused on the early years of transition to industrial society in Britain and Europe, the theoretical results are obviously more broadly applicable. The essential finding of almost all of this work is that working men and women in the past were more articulate and sensible, less traumatized by their environments, and possessed of a much richer culture and set of beliefs than was ever thought before. Historians have come to reject ideas stressing the deprivation and despair of daily life and the desperate character of protest, and to view collective action instead as the product of collective strength, of the interaction between popular mentalities, working people’s social networks and relations, and the prevailing economic and political conjuncture.

This perspective has remained implicit in the work of many of the best labor and social historians, such as Hobsbawm, Thompson, and Georges Haupt, and it has been made explicit by the historical sociologist Charles Tilly.¹⁶ Tilly seeks to replace the extant functionalist theory of conflict, with its model of social change producing psychic disruption, alienation, and unrest, by an emphasis upon the mobilization of resources as the key to collective action. Such sociological work is especially important for this volume because, in generalizing about the underpinnings of resistance, it allows for the application of the insights of social historical work on early industrialization to the more recent history of the twentieth century. More specifically, it facilitates reinterpretation of critical aspects of the history of the workers’ movement in Europe. For what appears, in the traditional view, to be a factor producing integration may be recast as a source of political strength and opposition. The complex web of union organization, community life, and institutions of social support can be reinterpreted in the mobilization perspective as products of working-class activity and as institutions creating social and political space within a hostile society, rather than as bureaucratic adaptations to the system. Thirdly, one of the net effects of the combined work of social historians and historical sociologists is to direct future research at the nature of work, community, family, and everyday life and at how changes in them affect the capacity and willingness of ordinary people to act together for common ends.

The third tributary to the revisionist stream has a more explicitly political origin. The resurgence of conflict in western Europe in the 1960s among workers and students led, for a variety of reasons, to a renewed intellectual interest in the history of workers’ councils and their democratizing potential and in the intellectual justification of councils in anarcho-syndicalist thought or in Gramsci’s Marxism. Though the political thrust behind such an interest has begun noticeably to fade, the temporary enthusiasm did serve to launch serious work into a much neglected area of European social history, and a number of important studies have appeared on the shop stewards’ and council movements that appeared near the end of the Great War in Italy, Germany, Britain, Austria, and elsewhere.¹⁷

These movements varied a great deal from one region and industry to another, and their impact was correspondingly differentiated. Yet in every country they showed the enormous potential for working-class action to proceed beyond the bounds set by the structures of union organization and parliamentary politics. Second, and most important, the council-type movements in most cases drew particular strength from those sections of labor involved in armaments, metal working, and heavy industry in general, and attracted especially the new, semiskilled entrants to industry whose position had been curiously elevated during the boom in war production. These correlations indicate that not only could workshop-based organizations be pressed into service during a time of unusual political crisis but that such forms of organization might well be the most effective means of mobilizing workers in those new industrial sectors whose development would loom so large in subsequent dacades.

The focus on the link between the council movement and the workplace has tended more recently to merge into a broader concern for the impact of the labor process upon workers’ collective action. Stimulated largely by Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, a number of historians, economists, and sociologists have begun to undertake serious work on the manner in which technical development and the changing structure of business enterprise affect the organization of work, the level of skills and the degree of autonomy retained or acquired by the workers, and the shifting potentials for organization and protest. Moreover, since the first major attempt by capital to gain effective control over the details of the labor process appears to have occurred during the period of rapid growth beginning in 1895 and continuing up to the Great War, the issue of work is of great importance in understanding the challenge of labor in this era.¹⁸

IV

Taken together, these three sets of developments have prepared the way for a new view of the social and political history of labor in the early twentieth century. Such a new synthesis, to be sure, is still inchoate, and much detailed investigation remains to be done in many local contexts before a definitive picture emerges. Nevertheless, we feel that the main contours of such a synthesis can at least be glimpsed and hope that some of them will emerge clearly in the essays gathered in this collection. The authors brought together here can in no way be said to constitute a “school” of thought or interpretation, but they do share an awareness both of the dominant image of labor as increasingly “incorporated” in this period and of the obvious inadequacy of this approach. They are all influenced, in addition, by the new trends in historical and sociological writing that are making this view appear outdated and oversimplified. Most important, they each seek to build upon the insights of recent work in order further to elaborate the complex interactions between economic change, the evolution of social structure, and workers’ collective action.

The essays are of two sorts—slightly more than half are comparative analyses of aspects of economic and social change and workers’ responses, the rest are more specialized case studies that seek to illustrate the broader comparative arguments as well as provide important local detail. Cronin’s essay on labor formation and class insurgency provides a general overview of the structural transformation of the European working class and its social and political consequences. Too much labor history is written as if the subject—the workers—were a stable, easily identified group to whom things happen and that reacts with varying degrees of organization, protest, and acquiescence. What this and several of the other pieces show is that the very nature of the working class was changing during the “long wave” of 1896–1920. Growth was centered particularly in the new industries of the “Second Industrial Revolution”—electricity, chemicals, and steel—rather than in the older textile, iron, and coal industries, which had been pioneered by the British in the nineteenth century.

Inevitably, these new sectors employed different technologies and organized work in quite different ways than the old industries, and the workers in these newer, larger, more technically advanced factories had to submit to new patterns of production and daily life. Skill levels shifted and work routines were altered in such a fashion as to create a labor force that was more homogeneous than before and that tended to be semiskilled rather than skilled and apprenticed on the one hand, or unskilled, casual, and untrained on the other. Thus the internal structure of the working class was greatly transformed. This reshaping occurred in the context of a rapid expansion of the working class, its ranks swelling with rural migrants from the local countryside and from more distant sources like Poland, southern Italy, and Ireland. The mass militancy of the years 1910 to 1925 was, it appears, as much the result of the initial mobilization of this new, reconstituted working class as it was a radicalization of those stable sectors of labor that had been active prior to 1910.

The next two essays, by Larry Peterson and David Montgomery, respectively, explore the strategic and organizational implications of these changed economic and social structures for workers’ movements in Europe and America. Peterson shows the vitality and viability of industrial unionism and syndicalism across both continents and documents their direct and indirect influence. While Peterson’s emphasis is on the years before the war, Montgomery shifts the attention to the wartime and postwar insurgencies and elaborates the comparison between Europe and the United States. He also seeks to incorporate in his analysis the critical role of community and community formation in sustaining working-class militancy.

It may well be that the aspect of the restructuring of the working class, the implications of which are least well understood, is the way it transformed the social and political life of the major urban centers.¹⁹ What had previously been enclaves of administration, exchange, consumption, and cultural production became the settings for industrial production and class confrontation. Patterns varied from town to town and still more across national boundaries, but everywhere the cities, or rather sections of the cities, became centers of an intense working-class community life and a distinct working-class culture that was at least partially autonomous and freed from direct supervision.

The cultural presence of the working class in these growing urban environments was reflected in the most diverse manifestations—in patterns of residential segregation, in styles and levels of consumption, in architecture and fashion, in leisure and, of course, in local politics—and it can be studied within and through any of these spheres. Several essays in this volume deal indirectly with this urban dimension of class formation; one, by Mary Nolan, does so directly. Nolan, in her essay on Germany during the revolutions of 1918—19, examines the social structure of two Ruhr towns–Hamborn and Düsseldorf—to discover the roots of the insurgencies that swept both areas in the revolutionary years.

After this in-depth study, we move to a rather more general analysis of labor and technology in France by Gary Cross. Cross seeks to explain the paradoxical fact that French workers, whose prewar organizations and ideology were more closely attuned to the rhetoric of syndicalism and “workers’ control” than those of other workers, exhibited after the war less enthusiasm for workers’ control, and probably less radicalism in general, than workers in virtually the whole of Europe. He finds the answer in the peculiar characteristics of the French economy, in the weakness of union organization, and in the unusual strength of Taylorist and “productivist” tenets among the French left.

Cross’ piece reminds us of the truly dramatic nature of the changes affecting industry and its workers in the early twentieth century and the consequent fluidity of industrial structure. This served further to call into question political and social arrangements and the general distribution of power and authority in society. A measure of the flux was the variety of proposals, experiments, and movements for reshaping work and political life in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The last four essays in the book deal primarily with these responses to the crisis of 1917–20 in Europe and America.

Steve Fraser tells the intriguing story of the collaborative venture in industrial production of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Russian Bolsheviks. This unique international exchange allows for a panoramic and revealing portrait of the intellectual and political crosscurrents of the early 1920s. In the following article, Melvyn Dubofsky explains the ramifications of the mass insurgency of the war and postwar years on industrial and labor policy and is able to argue convincingly for the importance of the experience of 1917–20 in shaping subsequent American politics.

In the penultimate essay, William Rosenberg examines the interplay among political democracy, the “democratizing” of social relations, and workers’ control on the Russian railroads in 1917. In doing so, he illuminates in fascinating detail the dynamic popular movement that lay beneath the Bolshevik seizure of power. Rosenberg also succeeds in showing the limitations of and contradictions in the Russian situation, thus raising difficult questions about the possibilities inherent in early twentieth century society.

These questions come to the fore more explicitly in the final essay, by Carmen Sirianni, who looks at the outcomes of the various movements for workers’ control in Europe during and after the War of 1914–18. Ultimately, labor insurgency runs up against the power of the state, and the result of that contest determines the subsequent ability of workers to control the workplace and most other aspects of their lives. Sirianni argues that the specifics outcomes were shaped by two factors: the relationship between incipient workshop organization and existing trade unions and political parties on the one hand, and on the other, the degree of crisis gripping the political system itself. The latter factor proved critical and has no doubt been underplayed by previous writers on the history of labor and the left, who often write as if the success or failure of insurgency was due solely to the strengths or shortcomings of the movement.

The essays, therefore, cover a wide array of topics and range over much of Europe and America. Though by no means exhaustive, they touch upon a span of experience broad enough to suggest a general analytical usefulness. And, of course, the aim of this collection is only partly to provide answers; it is also to stimulate further research along similar lines by other scholars. Whether that occurs will perhaps be the ultimate testimony to the value of our project.

Notes

1. This is so despite the evident interest that Hobsbawm, Thompson, and others take in contemporary politics. Cf., for example, E. P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (London, 1980), and E. J. Hobsbawm, et al., The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981). The latter, because it focuses so directly upon labor, ought to provide more illumination on aspects of working class history than it in fact does.

2. The process of reinterpreting Social Democracy in its historical context has been begun, but just barely. In the most recent survey of the German experience, for example, the old framework remains intact: W. L. Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party, 1875–1933 (London, 1981). Also disappointing in this regard is Adam Przeworski’s otherwise thoughtful analysis, “Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon,” New Left Review 122 (1980), 27–58. More helpful are Dan S. White, “Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 2 (April 1981), 251–272; and Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” Social History 5, no. 2 (May 1980), 249–271, esp. 254–258. Both are better at criticizing the existing interpretation, however, than in outlining a new analysis.

A major factor stimulating the reevaluation of Social Democracy is the recent political successes of “Eurocommunism” and “Eurosocialism.” On the former, there is a large but generally quite ahistorical literature. See, however, Carl Marzani, The Promise of Eurocommunism (Westport, Conn., 1980); Carl Boggs and David Plotke, eds., The Politics of Eurocommunism (Boston, 1980); and Bogdan Denitch, ed., Democratic Socialism (Totowa, N.J., 1981).

3. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York, 1959), 368, 373, 394.

4. See in particular Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War (Oxford, 1972), on the context in which these fatal decisions were taken.

5. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: Selected Works, vol. I (New York, 1967), esp. 683.

6. Maurice Isserman, “God Bless Our American Institutions: The Labor History of John R. Commons,” Labor History 17 (Summer 1976), 309–329; Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928; reprint ed., New York, 1949); Mark Perlman, Labor Union Theories in America (Evanston, 1958). See also Mike Davis, “Why the U.S. Working Class is Different,” New Left Review 123 (1980), 3–44.

7. The boldest, most self-assured statement of this view was probably Abraham Siegel, “Method and Substance in Theorizing about Worker Protest,” in Aspects of Labor Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research (Princeton, 1962), 21–52.

8. C. Kerr, F. Harbison, J. Dunlop, and C. Meyers, “The Labour Problem in Economic Development,” International Labour Review 72 (1955), 13–14.

9. We move rather quickly here to the literature of the 1960s for several reasons. First, much of the work on Social Democracy appearing from 1920 through the 1950s either simply rehashed the arguments of Lenin and Michels or else was concerned primarily with explaining the relationship between the failure of the left and the triumph of the fascist right in the interwar years. Though much useful information was unearthed, little new was added in terms of interpretation. Second, although Sigmund Neumann anticipated much of the argument of the late 1950s and 1960s in his work on political parties in Weimar and was, indeed, probably the first to use the term “integration” in describing the Social Democrats as an “Integrationspartei,” this particular reading of the past did not really become dominant until the functionalist revolution in American social science, to which its intellectual triumph owes so much. On the state of the debate in the 1950s, at least as it affected German Social Democracy, see W. H. Maehl, “Recent Literature on the German Socialists,” Journal of Modern History 33, no. 3 (September 1961), 292–306; and Klaus Epstein, “Three American Studies of German Socialism,” World Politics 11, no. 4 (July 1959), 629–651. On Neumann’s views, see S. Neumann, Die deutschen Parteien, Wesen und Wandel nach dem Kriege (Berlin, 1932). One rather curious result of this interpretive disjuncture is that the truly seminal work by Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955) does not fit easily into either the old interpretation worked out by Michels and Lenin or the orthodoxy of the later postwar period. In fact, its findings are quite compatible with the new directions mapped out in these essays, but it has often been misinterpreted as fitting neatly into the integration perspective.

10. G. Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963).

11. D. Groh, Negative Integration und Revolutionärer Attentismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1973). English quotation from Groh, “Waiting For and Avoiding Revolution: Social Democracy and the Reich,” Laurentian University Review 5, no. 3 (June 1973), 98. More recently, Groh’s position has been substantially revised. See his “Preliminary Remarks on the Making of the German Working Class,” Working Papers of the Research Group on Base Processes and the Problem of Organization, no. 21, Konstanz, 1981.

12. G. Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974), 460–508; S. Meacham, A Life Apart: The British Working Class, 1890–1914 (London, 1977).

13. P. Stearns, Lives of Labor (New York, 1975); and “Measuring the Evolution of Strike Movements,” International Review of Social History 9 (1974), 1–27.

14. The most explicit and theoretical statement is contained in Arno Mayer, The Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956 (New York, 1971). On Versailles, see Mayer’s The New Diplomacy (New Haven, 1959), and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967). Fritz Fischer’s work made a somewhat later impact than Mayer’s but it was quite profound. See his Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London, 1967) and also War of Illusion (London, 1975). The latter is especially concerned with internal developments.

Kehr’s important work was long ignored but revived and reprinted largely through the efforts of Hans-Ulrich Wehler. His essays were printed under the title Der Primat der Innenpolitik in German (Berlin, 1965) and translated as Economic Interest, Militarism and Foreign Policy: Essays on German History, ed. Gordon Craig (Berkeley, 1977). Halévy’s essay was first written in 1929 and is available as “The World Crisis of 1914–18: An Interpretation,” in The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War (New York, 1965), 209–247.

15. On the “backwardness” of political structures in Europe, see Arno Mayer’s provocative new book, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York, 1981); and on Russia in particular, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 328–360, and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979), 81–99.

16. The Tilly argument has been made many times and in many contexts. A most thorough statement is provided in Charles, Louise, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

17. The literature on both the theory and the practice is by now quite extensive. Among the better studies are James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973); Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920 (London, 1975) and Gwyn Williams, Proletarian Order (London, 1975). The extensive German literature is evaluated in W. J. Mommsen, “Die deutsche Revolution, 1918–1920: Politische Revolution und Soziale Protestbewegung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978). See also Larry Peterson, “From Social Democracy to Communism: Recent Contributions to the History of the German Workers’ Movement, 1914–1945,” International Labor and Working Class History 20 (Fall 1981), 7–30.

18. See Richard Price, “Rethinking Labour History: The Importance of Work,” in J. Cronin and J. Schneer, eds., Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain (London, 1982), 179–214; and Price’s forthcoming review essay on the labor process in the Journal of Social History. A second major source of inspiration for such work has been Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). For an attempt to generalize a theory of worker behavior from such a starting point, see Charles Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge, 1982).

19. Several recent studies, however, have added significantly to the historical analysis of the urban aspects of labor organization. See David Crew, Town in the Ruhr (New York, 1979); Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf 1890–1920 (Cambridge, 1981); John Merriman, ed., French Cities in the Nineteenth Century: Class, Power, and Urbanization (London, 1982); and Ira Katznelson, City Trenches (New York, 1982).