Chapter Two

Labor Insurgency and Class Formation: Comparative Perspectives on the Crisis of 1917–1920 in Europe

James E. Cronin

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture.¹ This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe’s workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecendented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest; mass strikes broke out in Glasgow, Oslo, Barcelona, Turin, and elsewhere.² And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers.³

Relatively quickly, the hopes of 1919–20 were dashed, popular resistance was crushed, and the established interests were largely restored to dominance. To be sure, the victory of the right was not simply and smoothly achieved, and it remained precarious, particularly in central and eastern Europe, where formally democratic regimes cloaked bureaucratic, military, and economic structures of decidedly authoritarian and anachronistic character. Many factors contributed to this essentially reactionary outcome—the postwar depression and the consequent erosion of shopfloor militancy; the fragmentation of the left; the augmented power and technical competence of armies, bureaucracies, and other elements of the state apparatus; the general level of economic development and class formation; and the international political balance. Conservative stabilization was in this sense “overdetermined,” and is thus far less interesting than the origins of the massive, if nonetheless unsuccessful, upheavals.⁴

Most historians offer a straightforward explanation of the great unrest: the privations and frustrations of war led to an outburst of raw anger and revolt. Such an analysis has economy and simplicity to its credit, and possesses some obvious empirical validity—things were tough during 1914–18. But it is marred by one overriding deficiency: it detaches the events of 1917–20 from the general evolution of class relationships prior to the war and is thus incapable of explaining the strong elements of continuity that connect the postwar with the mounting prewar militancy. The aim of this article is to analyze the events of 1917–20 in terms of more long-term processes of class formation. Specifically, it will be argued that the outburst beginning in 1917 was produced primarily by the interaction between the grievances and hardships induced by the war and the enhanced capacity for collective action created by technical changes at the point of production and the simultaneous consolidation of working-class communities in the major urban and industrial centers of Europe.

A brief review of the various national experiences during 1917–20 will establish the basic facts to be probed and analyzed. To begin with, perhaps the most arresting feature of the movements in the different countries was their similarity and simultaneity. The insurgency of 1917–20 was of truly international scope. Paradoxically, the war that at its inception marked the dissolution of internationalism ended with a strike wave of international dimensions.⁵ The general strike against the war never materialized in 1914, but it almost happened in January 1918, and this was followed the next November by a widespread revulsion against the war and the war-makers manifest in industrial conflict and political protest. Little in the way of international planning or coordination was behind any of these events, but there was a good deal of emulation of and political inspiration from revolutionary Russia.⁶

The militancy of 1917–20 was also massive and became increasingly so. The movement developed its own momentum: Beginning with some isolated, though symbolically important, strikes and mutinies in 1917, it grew to envelop most of the urban working class in Europe by 1919–20. Participation in strikes is only a crude indicator of involvement, but the increasing number of workers taking part in industrial action between 1917 and 1920 suggests the dimensions of discontent (see Table 2–1). Union membership grew correspondingly, as did the electoral pull of socialist and labor parties.

How many of these strikers and voters were active revolutionaries? We cannot know for sure. The Director of Intelligence at Scotland Yard estimated that as many as 10 percent of the workers in Britain favored violent revolution in January 1920, and admitted further that a clear majority was in favor of some sort of social revolution.⁷ In Germany, the victory of the majority Socialists over their Spartacist and Independent Socialist opponents in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in January 1919 has often been cited as proof of the essential moderation of the workers, but the argument is not convincing. Election results seldom reveal the deeper aspirations of voters and are most unreliable at a time of upheaval. In addition, various factors influenced elections on the local level—the degree of organization, the tendency to vote for known quantities, and so on—which in the short run probably worked to the advantage of the right-wing socialists. In places where the radicals developed a strong organization and fielded popular candidates, however, they did quite well. For example, the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) gained 27.6 percent of the vote in Berlin, 22.5 percent in Düsseldorf, 38.6 percent in Leipzig, and 44.1 percent in Halle-Merseburg. Most important of all, the dominance of the moderates was short-lived, coming as it did only “at the beginning of a process of radicalization,” a process that ultimately involved the establishment of a “soviet” government in Bavaria in 1919, the affiliation of the bulk of the Independents to the Comintern, the general strike against the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, and the ensuing “Ruhr Red Army” revolt.⁸

Questions about the revolutionary zeal of the masses are always hard to answer, in part because they are often incorrectly posed. They tend to assume a relationship between consciousness and behavior that is more direct and intimate than seems ordinarily possible to obtain. Workers’ attitudes are seldom made explicit enough to judge their precise ideological content; and it would appear that their actions are governed much more by the structured possibilities for resistance than by their desires or discontent. It is not that the sentiments of working people are uninteresting or invariant or that their hopes are not occasionally raised and their horizons lifted; it is rather that for workers the process of radicalization normally involves an increase in mass participation and an escalation of tactical militancy. For the bulk of the working class, the political pendulum swings back and forth between engagement (which is usually of a left-wing or “democratic” variety) and sullen resignation, rather than between left and right. What was most significant and threatening, therefore, about events in Germany and elsewhere throughout 1919–20 was not the slogans and demands of the movement but the sustained level of popular activism.

Insurgency affected equally large numbers in France, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. As Lloyd George explained in a famous passage in March 1919,

the whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt among the workmen against prewar conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.⁹

Thus in France, perhaps the least troubled of European nations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labor) (CGT) grew by three times between 1914 and January 1920, and the metal workers’ union increased from 7,500 members in 1912 to over 204,000 in December 1918. The new recruits to the labor and socialist movements were eager and volatile and showed little patience with the staid politics of a Thomas or a Renaudel. Their propensity for swift, spontaneous action led to massive strikes and demonstrations, such as the Paris protest of 6 April 1919 to denounce the acquittal of Jaures’s murderer involving over 100,000 working people, and served to create what Le temps (15 April 1919) called a “ferociously revolutionary milieu.” To the left-wing spokesman Pierre Monatte, writing in La vie ouvrier (11 June 1919), the path ahead in 1919 seemed obvious: “From discontent to discontent, from strike to strike, from a semi-economic and semi-political strike to a purely political strike. We’re going straight to the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the Revolution.” Ultimately, the road to revolution was blocked, defeat coming with the collapse of the general strike of May 1920, the so-called civic battle of the Marne. Still, from November 1918 until that final failure, the process of radicalization seemed irreversible.¹⁰

For the most part, rural France remained calm during 1917–20, but in Italy conflict engulfed both the cities and the countryside. Unrest began in May 1917 in Milan, surfaced again in the August revolt at Turin, and, after a lull during the last year of the war, revived again in late 1918. The beginning of 1919 witnessed a broad strike wave and rapid growth of the trade unions, the Socialist Party, the Catholic unions, and the Catholic Popular Party (Popolari). Strikes, land occupations, and food riots, particularly during June and July 1919, continued unabated for the entire bienneo rosso of 1919–1920, culminating in the occupation of the factories in September 1920. “A real class war” raged in both the urban centers and the rural districts, and probably only the fragmentation of the popular forces prevented the toppling of the regime.¹¹

Hungary was the one place besides Italy and Spain where discontent erupted simultaneously in rural and urban areas; and for a very brief time the streams of anger fused behind Béla Kun. Kun’s soviet regime arose essentially as a government of national emergency, aiming to “obtain from the East what has been denied to us by the West.”¹² This nationalist component notwithstanding, the real center of revolutionary sentiment was in the Budapest working class, particularly among the metalworkers, railwaymen, and building workers. The munitions factories especially were left-wing strongholds, while in the countryside scattered settlements of miners and steelworkers formed “communist beachheads.” The mass character of the movement was incontestable and caused the hesitancy with which the powers at Versailles approached intervention. In the end, what sealed the fate of Kun was not the strength of Horthy’s counterrevolutionary forces, which were quite weak, but the disaffection of the peasantry from the government’s land reforms and, in the summer of 1919, the growing hostility of even the urban workers to the regime.¹³

The situation in Austria differed in two major respects from that in Hungary. The Austrian peasants, for all their privations, were a consistently stabilizing force hostile from the beginning to “Red Vienna.”¹⁴ As Otto Bauer would later argue, “The peasant proceeded to adopt an attitude of defiance. . . . Peasants’ councils struggled with workers’ councils for control of the administrative machinery. . . . The peasant knew that he was stronger; he had plenty of food in his cupboard, and he could blockade the town. If it came to civil war, it was not the peasant but the workers who would starve.”¹⁵

The second difference was the Austrian Social Democrats, who were incomparably better organized than their Hungarian counterparts (and much less moderate than their German comrades).¹⁶ In consequence, they were more capable of absorbing the surge of militancy within normal forms of party and trade union activity and organization. On the other hand, the genuine radicalization of the workers probably went further and penetrated deeper in Austria than in any other Western nation. As early as May 1917, the railway workers’ journal proclaimed its solidarity with “the heroic Russian proletariat”; in May and June of 1917 the Viennese metal and munitions workers launched a wave of strikes; and in December the workers of Linz elected the first “workers’ council.” In January 1918, a general strike centered in Vienna swept through Austria and involved over a half-million workers. Led by militant shop stewards operating through local councils, the movement mixed economic and political demands: the restoration of food rations and a democratic peace. Though the strike petered out toward the end of January, it seemed to presage a more thorough and revolutionary outbreak should the Hapsburg regime begin to crumble under the pressures of war and resurgent nationalism.¹⁷

With defeat and the establishment of an Austrian republic in November 1918, mass mobilization commenced again. To many, a revolutionary outbreak appeared imminent in early 1919, as the Bavarian and Hungarian examples encouraged local communists to think in terms of a Soviet Austria. With some foresight, however, the Austrian Social Democrats headed off the threat by encouraging the growth of workers’ councils and by founding a people’s army, the Volkswehr. By thus co-opting rather than resisting the councils, the party was able to turn the latter against the far left and enlist the support of the bulk of the workers against the attempted communist risings of 17 April and 15 June 1919. Still, the price of this maneuver was support for workers’ demands and the enactment of a series of reforms that became a model of social progress during the interwar years.¹⁸

Events across the English Channel never approached the dramatic intensity of the social confrontation in central and southern Europe, but in Britain, too, the years following the war saw a major challenge from below. The major source of working-class resistance during the war came from the engineers in munitions, who generated a fairly widespread shop stewards’ movement by 1917.¹⁹ In June of that year, a coalition of left-wing socialists and shop stewards held a convention at Leeds that endorsed the peace proposals of the Russians and called for the establishment of workers’ and soldiers’ councils in England.²⁰ Strikes became larger and more frequent throughout 1917 and 1918, and demands became bolder. For all his political astuteness, Lloyd George could not convince labor that his policies would really create a “land fit for heroes to live in,” and so they took to the streets.²¹ In the lead, once again, were the metal and munitions workers, whose strike for the eight-hour day in Glasgow during January 1919 approached insurrectionary proportions. The authorities felt their position was quite precarious, for the troops were mutinous and demanded immediate demobilization. As 1919 progressed, various groups of workers pressed their demands, particularly the miners, railwaymen, and dockers, who were formally united in the “Triple Alliance.” The government temporized and sought to break up this threatening array of forces. The miners got a Royal Commission under Lord Sankey to study their position; the railwaymen struck alone in September and won a major victory; and the transport workers, led by Ernest Bevin, got their own commission under Lord Shaw in 1920. Tensions remained high throughout 1920, and in the summer the threat of a general strike dissuaded the government from its contemplated action in support of the reactionary Poles. The climax of the unrest came in April 1921, when it became clear that the miners’ demands were not going to be met and that the mine owners were to be confirmed in their old positions of power in the industry. The miners decided to strike and called for support from their erstwhile allies, who only too gladly found various excuses to back away from the general strike planned for April 15, 1921. This day, “Black Friday,” marked the effective end of the postwar militancy, although the miners held out on their own for several long, bitter months.²²

Industrial protest was truly ubiquitous throughout Europe. Even the Swedes and the Swiss experienced quite impressive upheavals, and in most major industrial centers the bulk of the working class was disaffected.²³ This did not, of course, guarantee the success of insurgency. Most important, governments were not only willing, when pressed, to resort to force, but in most regions they had or would have had the support of much of the population. It is often forgotten that even at the end of the war the industrial working class in most of Europe was counterbalanced and outmanned by large numbers of peasants and petty proprietors, both clinging to their tenuous non-proletarian status, and by newly rising middle and lower-middle class elements. This was particularly true in east-central and southern Europe, where industrialization and urbanization had come late and proceeded unevenly, resulting in a state of “partial modernization,” as Maier calls it, which called into existence a militant urban working class but which also left the power of preindustrial agrarian and bureaucratic elites at least formally intact.²⁴ Only in Britain could it be said that a working-class majority existed, but there a long history of parliamentarism guaranteed that social upheaval would not result in a crisis of political legitimacy.²⁵ In short, the process of class formation under capitalism had created a modern working class but had not yet proceeded to eliminate or “proletarianize” those middle strata of the population that often tilt the balance in revolutionary situations.

In view of this, the mass, sustained character of labor militancy is still more impressive and more in need of analysis. Particularly noteworthy was the apparent spontaneity of the riots, strikes, and demonstrations of 1917–20. Decades of agitation may well have planted the seeds of radicalism, but the socialist parties and trade unions were notoriously ineffectual, first in opposing the war and then in leading the opposition to it. On the contrary, the civic peace—union sacrée, Burgfriede—of the early war years led to the entry of socialists into bourgeois governments, the recognition of unions by previously hostile industrialists, and the daily involvement of labor officials in the formulation of policy, the adjudication of disputes, and the administration of economic controls and rationing systems. This absorption of upper- and middle-level leaders of the unions virtually guaranteed that insurgency would be expressed outside the ordinary patterns of party and trade union activity.²⁶

Much to their embarassment and dismay, the various left oppositions within the labor and socialist movements were scarcely any closer to the rank and file. Contemporary commentary was nearly unanimous in depicting the militancy near the end of and after the war as spontaneous, at best organized in a loose, informal fashion by relatively unknown leaders, mostly recruited from the shop floor or in working-class communities. Conversely, both the left-wing and moderate socialists were bypassed at crucial moments.²⁷ Thus Toni Sender, an Independent Socialist, has described how the November Revolution broke out in Stuttgart without any planning or leadership, how she and Robert Dissmann worked overtime giving some sort of form to the workers’ demands, and how, very soon, they began chasing after the militants in hope of restraining them from inopportune acts of violence. Even relatively hardheaded leaders, such as Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were carried away against their better judgment by the workers’ apparent readiness to follow the militant slogans of the left.²⁸ The apocalyptic tone of so much that was said or written in 1919–20 was a refracted testimony to the elemental nature of the social explosion. It is not surprising, of course, that militants should wish to circumvent or go beyond the narrow strategies favored by established leaders; what is surprising and interesting is that they did it so successfully, so massively, and against such odds. That is the real puzzle of those years. How is all this—particularly the unusual scope and the mass character of events during 1919–20—to be explained?

Most commonly, “misery and exhaustion” from the war are seen as sufficient causes of the upheaval.²⁹ Certainly, ordinary people in all the belligerent nations became tired of the slaughter after hopes of a quick victory faded in 1915. By 1916, the implications and terrible costs of the conflict were becoming clear, and voices of dissension began to be raised and heard. The various mutinies, strikes, and food riots of 1917 were largely motivated by antiwar sentiments and had definite political overtones. From the summer of 1917 to November 1918, however, there was very little mass action of an obviously pacifist character, certainly not among the workers. In fact, domestic morale in most countries was distinctly better in the last year of the war. Only when defeat loomed imminent did the old institutions begin to crumble in the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern domains. No doubt the war served partially to discredit political leaders and entire regimes, but the governments of Europe showed a remarkable ability to continue to wage war against the wishes of their subjects.³⁰ Pacificism as a political force remained weak through the end of the conflict.

More important than simple war-weariness and the growth of antiwar sentiment was the impact of economic hardship. Prices of food, housing, and coal shot up sharply during the war and wages failed to keep pace (see Tables 2–2 and 2–3). By the winter of 1916–17, shortages were severe throughout Europe, especially within the central powers. In the Dual Monarchy, the Hungarians cut off most grain shipments to the Austrians, while in Germany efforts to provision the cities foundered on the sullen resistance of the peasants and the temptations of the black market. By the last half of 1918 the Germans were subsisting on a mere 12 percent of the meat, 13 percent of the eggs, and 48 percent of the flour consumed in peacetime; only the consumption of sugar and potatoes was maintained at near normal levels.³¹ In England, commissioners toured the country in 1917 hearing complaints on the causes of industrial unrest—everywhere food prices and inequities of distribution headed the list of grievances.³² Not too surprisingly, working-class protest during and after the war often took the form of consumer actions. Rent strikes occurred in Glasgow and Budapest, and tenants’ agitation also sprang up in Vienna.³³ Food riots, which broke out in France, Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere, were a near universal response of workers. In Italy the greatest threat of revolution came in the midst of the food riots of June and July 1919, and the Austrian general strike of January 1918 was touched off by a reduction in the bread ration. The “moral economy” of the preindustrial poor may well have given way to a more calculating mentality among the workers long before 1914, but the deprivations of war served to resuscitate this waning form of popular protest.³⁴

The contribution of rapid inflation to the development of class consciousness is difficult to overstress because rising prices did more than simply erode buying power. Inflation tends to break custom, wiping out historical relativities and established differentials and introducing an element of uncertainty and chaos into bargaining. In normal conditions, workers frame wage demands primarily in relation to the wages paid to comparable groups of workers in nearby plants or towns. Horizons are limited and expectations exceedingly modest. When prices begin to rise too fast, these stabilizing, conservative habits are altered, and workers are encouraged to expand their “orbits of comparison,” a process that leads quite naturally to a spiraling of expectations and demands and, when these are resisted, to an intensification of class antagonism.³⁵

All this, to which could be added a wealth of contemporary anecdotes about the hardships of the war, constitutes eloquent testimony to the effect of economic distress, coupled with simple poverty and hunger, in fostering rebellion. Still, it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on economic distress as a precipitant of militancy. On theoretical grounds alone, hardship is unlikely to spark political and social activism. Numerous recent studies have shown quite the opposite: Revolutions and mass insurgencies seldom take place during periods of acute suffering but tend rather to arise in more buoyant and prosperous times; nor are the participants in such actions ordinarily the most poverty-striken and objectively oppressed sections of the population.³⁶ More concretely, the timing of protest in 1917–20 was not closely synchronized with the ups and downs of food prices and real wages, at least not after January 1918, and the leading participants were not those worst hit by the dislocations of the war economy.

It is well known, for example, that the most prominent activists in all countries were the metal and munitions workers.³⁷ Yet because they were deemed essential to the war effort, these were the most favored group of workers, and their wartime earnings rose accordingly. Austrian metal workers received special wage supplements subsidized by the state beginning in June 1918; their English counterparts had received a bonus one year earlier.³⁸ In Germany the wages of men in the war industries were almost 40 percent higher, relative to prewar levels, than those available to workers in civilian industries.³⁹ Roughly the same situation prevailed elsewhere in Europe, as the demand for steel, iron, ships, and guns intensified.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, these “aristocrats of labor” formed the industrial vanguard of the militancy. Just what other forces propelled them to leadership we shall soon see; suffice it to say here that poverty was not of primary importance.

Nor is the picture of poverty entirely unrelieved for the bulk of the population during and just after the war. The demographic evidence is quite the opposite: Before the war, most countries in Europe were slowly lowering overall death rates, particularly their rates of infant mortality. The war inevitably caused a temporary reversal that lasted through 1918. By 1919, however, the downward trend was reinstituted. Infant mortality was below prewar levels in Austria and Hungary, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England and Wales; overall mortality was scarcely above normal rates, and by 1920 it too was generally lower. This demographic success, moreover, was achieved despite continuing economic dislocation produced by the extended blockade, demobilization, and political and social conflict.⁴¹

The point is not to minimize the sufferings borne by the home populations during the war. These were devastatingly real, and left psychological and physical scars as well as demographic asymmetries. But there were countervailing tendencies toward the more effective distribution of necessities. Given the glaring abuses of the black market and the inefficiencies of rationing, it is easy to overlook the substantial improvements that occurred in the lot of the very poor. It is necessary to remember, too, that for many so-called casual workers and their families—and these included almost all dockers, most labor in the building trades, and the majority of agricultural laborers—the onset of war marked the first time in living memory when they could obtain steady work throughout the year. Employment opportunities improved still more dramatically for women, whose earnings now contributed much more substantially than before to family incomes.⁴²

The evidence suggests, therefore, that the combination of war-weariness and economic distress, while very important, cannot by itself explain the events of 1917–20. It surely provided plenty of raw material for exacerbating workers’ sense of injustice and deprivation, but it did not guarantee the form their anger would take or that workers would find the resources and develop the organization necessary to express their discontent. To be able to launch such massive, insurgent actions, workers needed to formulate their complaints as domestic social and political critique and to devise forms of organization based on new bases of collective strength and identity.

Perhaps the most important factor darkening workers’ perceptions of the states and societies in which they lived was the failure of political intervention in the war economy. There was a new visibility to the links between government policy and economic oppression and dislocation. By undertaking to ensure supplies of war materials and vital necessities for the home population and by frequently failing at the task, political regimes and their collaborators at the top of the industry were both seriously discredited. It was only logical for ordinary people to blame the political and economic elites for the shortages, the inequities of the black market, and rising prices, and for material grievances to become transformed into challenges to established authorities in government and industry. In addition, the state’s groping attempts to stimulate production almost inevitably appeared to workers as pro-management interventions and virtually guaranteed a hostile response from labor’s rank and file.⁴³

The specific forms of state intervention applied during the war were thus critical in enabling workers to locate the source of their subsistence difficulties domestically, and gradually to substitute the industrialists and politicians for the external enemy as the targets of their anger. This profound ideological transformation, ultimately a reflection of the long-term centralization of power and the bureaucratization of everyday life in industrial society, created the underlying intellectual justification for the strikes and protests of 1917–20.⁴⁴

If developments at the national level and in elite circles were crucial in changing workers’ attitudes, it was a cumulation of changes visible primarily at the local level in the social organization of production and in the nature of working-class communities that, on balance, strengthened worker’s abilities to act collectively and to translate grievances into militancy. The roots of these developments go back to at least the 1890s, but they came to fruition under the impact of the Great War. There occurred a structural transformation or reconstitution of the working class that involved both a new type of industry and a new social environment. Economic growth from the 1890s onward was concentrated in the sectors being remolded and stimulated by the “second industrial revolution,” the revolution of steel, electricity, and chemicals.⁴⁵ The novelty of these industries transcended the products and also encompassed their processes of production, styles of industrial organization, and techniques of labor utilization and control.⁴⁶ The factories built after 1890 were bigger, housed more machines of greater speed and efficiency, and required a labor force that was only semiskilled. Ideally, that labor force was also pliable and dependent enough to be fitted in smoothly around the technical requirements of the latest generation of capital equipment. In its very essence, the phase of industrialization that gathered momentum near the end of the nineteenth century was inimical to skilled, craft labor, and tended inexorably toward the creation of a different labor force, typified by the semi-skilled machine tender in mass production. Skilled workers resisted the process with a series of strikes—at Renault’s Billancourt works and at the Bosch factory in Stuttgart in 1913, among engineers at Hull and shoemakers in Paris earlier—but only in Great Britain, and even then not universally, were skilled workers sufficiently well organized to resist, or better, deflect for a time, the imperatives of technological change driven on by the quest for profit.⁴⁷

The remaking of the working class conditioned the content, intensity, and expression of protest. The now permanently aggrieved craftsmen, particularly in the engineering industry, became firm supporters of the left. As Hobsbawm argues, “The metal-workers, hitherto rather conservative, became in most countries of the world the characteristic leaders of militant labour movements.”⁴⁸ This happened in most every center of the new metallurgical industries: Berlin, Glasgow, Milan, Budapest, and, during the war, a host of other cities such as Paris, Hamborn, Merseburg, Mülheim, and, of course, Turin. Thus, Gramsci wrote of the Turin metallurgical workers as the vanguard “who do not have . . . the petty-bourgeois mentality of the skilled workers of other countries.”⁴⁹ In fact, the restrictive mentality had begun to dissipate elsewhere under quite similar pressures, especially after 1914. The centrality of the metals and engineering industry to the war effort led to an intensified process of rationalization of factory life in metal production, vehicles and armaments, and chemicals. Concretely, the changes involved a suspension of customary work rules and manning regulations and the substitution of female or semiskilled workers for skilled male labor. This “dilution,” carried through under harsh conditions and with little subtlety, simultaneously angered the skilled workers and created new job opportunities and possibilities for collective action for the newer laborers in basic industry.⁵⁰

The replacement of craft workers by less skilled recruits to industry was not confined, however, to the metal or munitions industries, or indeed to the war years. Rather, it was the clearest and latest example of a general tendency throughout the economy to reorganize the workplace for maximum profit and efficiency. Even in the absence of major technical change, employers sought by more careful control and supervision, by the elimination of waste, by the abridgement of existing labor prerogatives, and by a general speeding up of machines and the flow of goods to stimulate workers to greater efforts. Even in Europe’s oldest industrial center in Lancashire, textile workers faced intensified pressures for production before 1914, and between 1910 and 1914 launched a series of strikes over issues quite unrelated to wages.⁵¹

The changes were still more dramatic for workers in less modern employments. Economic growth from the mid-1890s transformed one industry after another by mechanizing many trades hitherto conducted on a small workshop basis, such as shoemaking and tailoring, and by imposing more regular work routines and more rational management strategies on previously casual employments, such as dockwork, carting, and brickmaking. The introduction of cranes for dockwork and construction, for example, was a major step in the modernization of those sectors. Gradually the chasm between the old “aristocracy of labor” and the unskilled, underemployed laborers was filled by the rise of the semiskilled and the assimilation of both extremes toward this intermediate position.⁵²

The war markedly accelerated this reshaping of the working class. As the new industries were expanded to meet the needs of war production, the proportion of semiskilled necessarily increased. Fiat, for instance, expanded its labor force from 7,000 before the war to 30,000 at its end; Turin, Italy’s Petrograd and its center of radicalism, doubled its working-class population.⁵³ Munich, primarily a cultural, bureaucratic, and commercial center in 1910, acquired a base of heavy industry and with it the raw material for the uprising of 1919.⁵⁴ Krupp’s at Essen expanded its work force from 34,000 in 1914 to some 100,000 in 1918.⁵⁵ Glasgow’s engineering factories sucked up thousands of new recruits, leading to the severe housing crisis that culminated in the successful rent strikes of 1915.⁵⁶ Comparable shifts occurred in France, where the heavy industries of the northeast were lost to the Germans early in the war and were relocated and rebuilt around Paris and St. Etienne.

During the war, the labor force in building, textiles, and other nonessential industries contracted sharply, while the numbers in the metal industry, armaments, chemicals, and mining grew substantially. This reorientation not only contributed to the long-term shift in the composition of the working class, it also gave more weight in the short run to the younger, more dynamic, and often more radical elements, while eroding the strength of the old bastions of conservative trade unionism and socialist moderation. Particularly in Germany, the contrast between the new and old industries and the new and old insurgents was stark and became the basis for a bitter generational split within the left: Noske, for example, complained crankily that “the most turbulent and disobedient elements in Kiel [during the mutiny] were the very young,” and the same point was frequently made about industrial militants.⁵⁸ The prewar socialist and labor parties had their social roots among the skilled and the organized not just in France but in England, Germany, Italy, and Austria.⁵⁹ The emergent factory proletariat, on the other hand, had remained largely unorganized and unrepresented. When the wartime labor shortage gave these workers some additional social leverage, they organized massively and became the core, if not always the articulate leadership, of the postwar insurgency.⁶⁰ Their enhanced bargaining was nowhere more evident than in the drastic narrowing of the gap between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers, as Table 2–4 reveals for Britain and Germany and as contemporary testimony attests to for other nations as well.

The effect of the war, then, was to bring to a head the process by which the gradual accumulation of technological and organizational changes at factory level created a modern proletariat. From this perspective, the explosion of activism from 1917 to 1920 represented the entry into fuller social and political life of this remolded working class, and the shop steward or “works council” organizations were an especially appropriate form of activity. They served as vehicles for the involvement of those “emergent” sections of the working class that had yet to be absorbed by the old union structures and that were best served by organization on the shop floor itself. It seems, in fact, that in most countries a greater proportion of the semiskilled and unskilled, as well as women, workers were organized and active in the postwar insurgency than at any other time in the twentieth century.⁶¹

With the alteration in the composition of the working class came a dramatic expansion in its size, and this increase ushered in a new phase of urban growth. Between 1890 and 1920, Europe experienced a more rapid urbanization than even before or since; it also was a unique form of urbanization. With the coming of the trolley and tram, the European city extended its limits radially, thus facilitating the dispersion of industry from the central core to the periphery. Still, the rise of mass transport was not sufficient to effect that divorce between workplace and residence that has allegedly come to characterize city life recently.⁶² During this intermediate stage of urbanization, workers’ quarters remained in close proximity to the newly built plants that produced metal and metal goods, armaments, chemicals, and even some automobiles; and these quarters became the centers of an intense community life that developed out of the physical overlapping of the spheres of production, consumption, leisure, and collective action.

Between 1890 and 1920 the European working class seems to have envolved a network of social relations in the neighborhoods of the city that eventually thickened into an extremely supportive subculture. Various factors conjoined to bring this about: The peculiarities of early twentieth-century mass transportation and the compelling logic of land values produced about this time a growing segregation of social classes in the urban region; and as workers’ neighborhoods became increasingly homogeneous, the local style of life became more distinctly proletarian. Out of the initial chaos of urban and industrial migration eventually came more solid communities, the common locus of friendship, kinship, work, and play. Thus Roberts describes the stabilization of working-class life in Salford, just outside Manchester, before the war:⁶³

Throughout a quarter of a century the population of our [urban] village remained generally immobile: the constant shifts of near-by country folk into industrial towns . . . had almost ceased. . . . A man’s work, of course, usually fixed the place where his family dwelt, but lesser factors were involved too: his links, for instance, with local kith and kin. Then again, he commonly held a certain social position at the near-by pub, modest, perhaps, but recognized, and a credit connection with the corner shop. Such relationships, once relinquished, might not easily be re-established. All these things, together with fear of change, combined to keep poor families, if not in the same street, at least in the same neighborhood for generations.

Even where substantial migration continued through the war years, there is evidence that working-class communities nonetheless achieved a stability and cohesiveness noticeably lacking prior to 1900.⁶⁴ In addition to the increase in the social homogeneity of residential arrangements and the compacting tendencies of the new technology, several other changes seem to have contributed to the formation of more closely knit communities. The progressive nuclearization of the family, so prominent among the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, seems to have begun to affect working-class family life at about this time, and the decline of domestic service as an occupation for young women and the parallel decay of apprenticeship for boys probably worked in the same direction.⁶⁵ Most likely more secure job prospects also discouraged mobility and led to greater local cohesion. Whatever the precise mix of influences, the trend was universal throughout Europe and was reinforced by the war. The onset of war brought to an end a great era of city building, and this cessation of construction meant that existing communities remained intact.⁶⁶ Because of the serious housing shortages produced by the forced expansion in certain areas of war-related industries, the influx of labor migrants had to be absorbed into the existing housing stock.⁶⁷ Moreover, the strains placed upon individuals and families by mobilization meant an extension of the range of services and supports provided through the informal networks of the neighborhood.

The most detailed study has focused upon the process in Great Britain.⁶⁸ “The First World War,” it has been argued, “was an event of unparalleled significance in the housing history of British cities.” “Changes initiated by the war” caused cities to “diverge radically from the predominating patterns of the previous forty years.” The era of industrial and urban growth dating from 1880 and continuing to 1914 had been somewhat contradictory: though there was a marked increase in residential segregation by social class, there remained very high rates of local and long distance mobility that would have tended to retard the consolidation of working-class communities. However, “mobility collapsed during the war and never really recovered afterwards.” As a result, neighborhoods became even more segregated by class and by the stage in the life cycle of its inhabitants and grew much more homogeneous and solid.

The actual process of community building inevitably took different forms in various countries. Again, it has been described most thoroughly in Great Britain, where proletarian social life revolved around the pub and the music hall, the workingman’s club, and, on occasion, the local union branch.⁶⁹ In France, the workers’ subculture was equally apolitical and even less formal, centered on the cafe or cabaret, the informal links of the immediate neighborhood, and the small workshop.⁷⁰ In Germany, Austria, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Italy, formal socialist institutions played a greater role. The Austrian Socialist Party, for instance, had its own schools, choir groups, and sports clubs as well as the usual array of party and union activities.⁷¹ Whether explicitly political in form or not, the result was a comparable strengthening of the network of associations through which workers led their lives. Upon the grounding of these firm community bonds arose the characteristic forms of working-class culture and leisure about which historians are just beginning to become aware.⁷²

Everywhere there were political consequences and implications as well, for it was precisely in these years that the distinctive social geography of twentieth-century elections was established. The extension of suffrage to the working class occurred first in the towns, and in this arena working-class political activity blossomed and achieved its main successes. In the big cities of Europe, working-class communities began gradually to vote en bloc for one or another left or labor party, particularly after the war. Entire neighborhoods in London, such as Hackney and Battersea or Islington, would vote Labor religiously; the “red suburbs” of Paris made French Communism almost solely “a Parisian movement,” as one of its enemies happily announced in 1924; and in Vienna the workers’ districts formed a solid phalanx of SPD voters right up to the fascist takeover in 1934. It seems workers voted as whole communities united around one or another political formation, not as isolated electors exercising individual choice, as in the classic bourgeois ideal.⁷³

Besides the ordinary and obvious function of enhancing social interaction and providing psychic sustenance, then, these urban social networks formed the underpinning of social and political mobilization. This was particularly the case during the crisis years of the war when they served as nodes of organization. Several commentators have noted the specifically urban character of labor militancy during and after the war; but the social, as opposed to the simple geographical, implications of this fact have been overlooked by all but a few writers.⁷⁴ In a period such as 1914–18, when normal channels of protest are blocked or atrophied, other less formal linkages between social actors are pressed into service as the basis of new political forms. As one Italian analyst has argued, workers’ resistance “was forced everywhere to express itself in new forms, often unorganized and ‘spontaneous.’”⁷⁵ The web of associations at the workplace represented one such linkage, and as the established union leaderships were coopted into government administration or into active collaboration with the employers, it became the grounding for the emerging shop stewards or works councils. The social networks running through the working-class neighborhoods seem to have played an equally important role in facilitating collection action.

Several facets of the movement of 1917–20 point to this role. Most obvious was the prominent place of women in stimulating and participating in the various actions centered in the community. Whether women were quite so minimally involved in prewar social movements as previous research suggests, it seems nonetheless clear that the peculiar conditions of wartime allowed an explosion of women’s acitvity.⁷⁶ More closely integrated into local neighborhoods than their husbands, lovers, sons, or brothers, working-class women were more keenly aware of subsistence matters and, because of their extensive networks of support and sociability, readier to move into action over threats to the social resources available to the community. The best documented case is probably Barcelona, where a veritable “women’s war” over food and fuel took on insurrectionary proportions in the early part of 1918. The movement was organized and led entirely by women and succeeded in wringing major concessions from the authorities. The defensive character of such struggles may well have limited their long-term impact upon the political system and on the sexual division of labor, as Temma Kaplan has argued, but in the context of the postwar crisis they were extremely significant and undoubtedly enhanced the nature of the working-class challenge.⁷⁷

In fact, on many occasions and in many places during 1919–20, men and women protested jointly over issues of consumption: over prices, rationing, and shortages of food, housing, coal, and other essentials. As noted above, testimony to the British Commission on Industrial Unrest was unanimous in attributing the mounting unrest to grievances over consumption. Such complaints were at the root of the frequent and violent food riots and the rent strikes that occurred in the most advanced and radical centers, and many of the major industrial actions were precipitated by problems faced by workers as consumers. Characteristically, however, efforts to organize working people as consumers have tended to be launched not in the factory but in the context of the local community. Without the strengthening of neighborhoods and social institutions based on residential proximity, it would seem very difficult to explain the prominent consumerist component in the collective actions of 1917–20.

By a similar logic, the whole style of the postwar insurgency—its apparent disorganization, the frequency of seemingly spontaneous street demonstrations, the tendency for institutions such as the Italian camera del lavoro and casa del popolo, the German “peoples’ house,” the Austrian Volkheim and the English trades’ council to become the centers of agitation instead of the established parties, and so on—suggests that the organizational consequences of urban life were critical ingredients enabling workers to sustain militancy during and after the war.⁷⁸

There would seem, too, to have been a connection between the intense class consciousness of the movement of 1917–20 and its community and consumerist background. Organization at the point of production is notoriously sectional: the stratification of work roles limits the appeal of ideas about “one big union” and one common interest, except in relatively rare circumstances. While such circumstances were becoming more common during precisely this period, the norm was still quite otherwise, and differentials based on skill, sex, and racial or ethnic discrimination remained in force. By contrast, the problems of high food prices, shortages, inequitable rationing, skyrocketing rents, and a deteriorating housing stock transcended the narrowness of purely factory styles of organization and tended to pit all workers in a unified struggle against the rich, the war profiteers, and the bungling bureaucrats. Notions of class solidarity found much more fertile soil in protest over consumption; and the consumerist element imparted a wider sense of class loyalty and class antagonism to the events of 1917–20 than probably would have developed in a more purly industrial situation.⁷⁹

It seems reasonably clear, therefore, that the social consequences of the shifts in industrial structure and in urban spatial arrangements provided the essential preconditions for the wave of strikes and organization that swept over Europe beginning in 1917. Of course, these preconditions had to be combined with the deprivations of the war to produce an outburst of such magnitude, but grievance and anger alone were not sufficient. The expression of discontent required organization, and that necessitated various kinds of resources, opportunities, and ideas. The restructuring of daily life in the factory and in the urban neighborhood shifted every so slightly the balance of collective strengths toward the workers, at least for a time, and enabled them to launch a wave of strikes and insurrections that shook European society to its roots and terrified its ruling classes. It was also this new-found strength and sense of competence that prompted Gramsci and his generation of militants to think through the meaning of working-class hegemony and imagine a future based on vastly different forms of industrial and political organization. The contemporary relevance and potency of that intellectual legacy is reason enough to study those unique conditions that produced it.

Notes

This is a revised version of the paper first published in Social Science History 4, no. 1 (Winter 1980), 125–152.

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Seminar in Twentieth-Century European History at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Comments made there were extremely helpful in preparing the present revision, and I am most grateful for them.

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Religion and the Rise of Socialism,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Spring 1978), 14–33.

2. J. Kemmy, “The Limerick Soviet,” Saothar, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society 2 (1975–1976), 45–52; Sten Sparre Nelson, “Labour Insurgency in Norway: The Crisis of 1917–1920,” Social Science History 5, no. 4 (Fall 1981), 393–416; Bela Kirschner, “Society and Nation in the Hungarian Republic of Councils,” in Henrik Vass, ed., Studies on the History of the Hungarian Working Class Movement (Budapest, 1975), 125–153; and on Spain, Gerald H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914–1923 (Stanford, 1974), esp. 158–168.

3. Arno Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New Haven, 1959); Albert S. Lindemann, The Red Years: European Socialism Versus Bolshevism, 1919–1921 (Berkeley, 1974).

4. The best comparative accounts are Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), and Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, 1918–1919 (New York, 1967); but see also the essays in Charles Bertrand, ed., Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922 (Montreal, 1977).

5. G. Haupt, Socialism and the Great War (Oxford, 1972), esp. 216–249.

6. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy, 284–343; M. Ferro, The Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 1973), 189–203.

7. Directorate of Intelligence (Home Office), “A Survey of Revolutionary Movements in Great Britain in the Year 1920,” PRO, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/118, C.P. 2455.

8. G. Feldman, E. Kolb, and R. Rürup, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1917–20),” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 13 (1972), 84–105; R. Wheeler, “‘Ex oriente lux?’ The Soviet Example and the German Revolution,” in Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations, 39–49; Dick Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution, 1914–23,” in R. J. Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), 267–286; and P. Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution (Düsseldorf, 1963); David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution (Ithaca, 1975).

9. Fontainebleu Memorandum, March 25, 1919, quoted in Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, 581–583.

10. Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924 (Stanford, 1966), 117–137; Annie Kriegel, Croissance de la C.G.T., 1918–1921 (Paris, 1966), 67–97; Kriegel, Aux origines du communisme français, 1914–1920 (Paris, 1964), 1, 238–247, 408–494; V. Lorwin, The French Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 51–55; M. Gallo, “Quelques aspects de la mentalité et du comportement ouvrièrs dans les usines de guerre, 1914–1918,” Le mouvement social 56 (July–Sept. 1966), 3–33.

11. Adrian Lyttelton, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Italy, 1918–1922,” in Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations, 63–73; G. Williams, Proletarian Order (London, 1975); P. Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories, Italy 1920 (London, 1975); Roberto Vivarelli, “Revolution and Reaction in Italy, 1918–1922,” Journal of Italian History 1 (1978), 235–263.

12. R. L. Tôkés, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (New York, 1967), 133.

13. I. Deak, “Budapest and the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918–1919,” Slavonic and East European Review 46 (1968), 129–140; Kirschner, “Society and Nation,” 137.

14. C. A. Macartney, The Social Revolution in Austria (Cambridge, England, 1926); G. Ranki, “Structural Crisis in Agriculture in Postwar Years,” in Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations, 105–116.

15. Otto Bauer, “Problems of the Austrian Revolution,” in T. B. Bottomore and P. Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism (Oxford, 1978), 161.

16. C. A. Gulick, Austria: From Habsburg to Hitler (Berkeley, 1948), I, 15–65.

17. Ingrun LaFleur, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Austrian Socialism—The January 1918 Strike,” Journal of the Great Lakes History Conference 1 (1967), 82–96.

18. See esp. Gulick, Austria, I, 69–83, on the co-optation of the insurgents, and p. 175 ff. on the extensive social reforms instituted under Socialist auspices, esp. in Vienna; I. Duczynska, Workers in Arms: The Austrian Schutzbund and the Civil War of 1934 (New York, 1978); also Ernst Winkler, Die österreichische Sozialdemokratie im Spiegel ihrer Programme (Vienna, 1971); and D. Langewiesche, Zur Freizeit des Arbeiters: Bildungsbestrebungen und Freizeitgestaltung österreichische Arbeiter im Kaiserreich und in der Ersten Republik (Stuttgart, 1980).

19. J. Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973).

20. S. Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).

21. Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain (London, 1969); J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War (London, 1974).

22. On Lloyd George’s role in all this, see Ralph Desmarais, “The British Government’s Strike-Breaking Organization and Black Friday,” Journal of Contemporary History 6 (1971); and Peter Dennis, “The Territorial Army in Aid of the Civil Power in Britain, 1919–1926,” Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 705–724.

23. On Sweden, see C. G. Andrae. “The Swedish Labor Movement and the 1917–1918 Revolution,” in S. Koblik, ed., Sweden’s Development from Poverty to Affluence, 1750–1970 (Minneapolis, 1975), 232–253.

24. A. Mayer, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 409–436; J. Kocka, “The Problem of Democracy and the Lower Middle Classes in the First Third of the 20th Century: Some Results and Perspectives of Research,” XIV International Congress of Historical Sciences, 1975; C. Maier, “Political Crisis and Partial Modernization: The Outcomes in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy after World War I,” in Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations, 119–130.

25. R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1961).

26. The process was extremely widespread but particularly important in countries or in industries where unions or socialist parties had previously occupied an unrecognized or, in some cases, almost outlaw status. Thus, the legitimacy gained by the trade unions and the SPD in Germany during the war was quite dearly cherished, as was the instant respectability granted in England to the unions of dockers and railway workers. See Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966); P. S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen (London, 1963); A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin I (London, 1960).

27. W. J. Mommsen, “Die deutsche Revolution, 1918–1920: Politsche Revolution und Soziale Protestbewegung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978), 377; N. Papayanis, “Masses révolutionnaires et directions réformistes: les tensions au cours des grèves des métallurgistes français en 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (Oct.–Dec. 1975), 51–73; B. Pribićević. The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control (Oxford, 1959).

28. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, II (London, 1966), 760–761.

29. R. Rürup, “Problems of the German Revolution, 1918–19, “Journal of Contemporary History, 3 (1968), 134.

30. P. Renouvin, “L’opinion publique et la guerre en 1917,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 15 (1968); Roland Stromberg, Redemption by War (Lawrence, Kansas, 1982), 151–176.

31. G. Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley, 1977), 108–138; Robert Moeller, “Peasants, Politics and Pressure Groups in War and Inflation: The Case of the Rhineland and Westphalia, 1914–1924,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980, provides a detailed account of the split between rural and urban produces at the end of the war.

32. Great Britain, Reports of the Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest, British Parliamentary Papers, 1917–1918, XV (Cd. 8662–8669, 8696).

33. Hinton, First Shop Stewards’ Movement, 125–127; Tôkés, Béla Kun, 120; Gulick, Austria, 421–423.

34. Lyttelton, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Italy,” 68–70; Williams, Proletarian Order, 71; LaFleur, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Austrian Socialism.”

35. On this more theoretical point, see R. Hyman and I. Brough, Social Values and Industrial Relations (Oxford, 1976), 230–246.

36. Charles, Louise, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979), 3–43.

37. J. M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967), 73–74. See also the personal testaments of the leaders of the Berlin shop stewards: R. Müller, Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik (Vienna, 1924), esp. 55–61; and Emil Barth, Aus der Werkstatt der deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1919); and the debate over Russian metal workers: Leopold H. Haimson, “Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1906–1917,” Slavic Review 4 (1964); G. R. Swain, “Bolsheviks and Metal Workers on the Eve of the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 273–291.

38. Gulick, Austria, 42; Hinton, First Shop Stewards’ Movement.

39. G. Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960) 209–212.

40. In general, see Hardach, The First World War.

41. The data are available in B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (New York, 1975). See also J. M. Winter, “The Impact of the First World War on Civilian Health in Britain,” Economic History Review 30 (1977), 487–507.

42. Ferro, The Great War, 170–171; Jonathan Schneer, “The War, the State and the Workplace: British Dockers during 1914–1918,” in J. Cronin and J. Schneer, eds., Social Conflict and the Political Order (London, 1982), 96–112.

43. See Gerald Feldman, “Demobilization and the Post-War Social Order in Europe,” German Historical Institute, Conference on Demobilization, London, May, 1981.

44. Tilly, et al., Rebellious Century.

45. For a general survey, see David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, England, 1969), chapter 5.

46. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Custom, Wages and Work-Load,” in Labouring Men (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), 421–427.

47. The ambiguities of the resistance of craft workers to the new technologies has been sharply debated by Jean Monds, “Workers’ Control and the Historians: The New Economism,” New Left Review 97 (1976), 81–100; and James Hinton, “Rejoinder,” 101–104.

48. Hobsbawm, “Custom, Wages, and Work-Load,” 424.

49. A. Gramsci, in his report to the Comintern in 1920, cited in Williams, Proletarian Order, 87.

50. The process is described for Britain by Hinton, First Shop Stewards’ Movement. For Germany, see Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor; and also Fritz Opel, Der Deutsche Metallarbeiter-Verband während des ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover, 1957). For France, see B. Abhervé, “Les origines de la grève des métallurgistes parisiens, juin 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (Oct.–Dec. 1975), 75–85; and for other countries, Dick Geary, European Labour Protest, 1848–1939 (London, 1981).

51. Joseph White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy (Westport, Conn., 1978).

52. P. Stearns, Lives of Labor (New York, 1975), esp. pt. II, and “The Unskilled and Industrialization: A Transformation of Consciousness,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976), 249–82; A. Levine, Industrial Retardation in Britain (London, 1967); J. J. Carré, P. Dubois, and E. Malinvaud, French Economic Growth (Stanford, 1975), 162–166; D. Groh, “Intensification of Work and Industrial Conflict in Germany, 1896–1914,” Politics and Society 8 (1979), 349–397.

53. Williams, Proletarian Order, 56.

54. A. Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria (Princeton, 1965); T. Dorst, Die Münchener Räterepublik (Frankfurt, 1966), 149.

55. Feldman, “Socio-economic Structures in the Industrial Sector and Revolutionary Potentialities, 1917–22,” in Bertrand, Revolutionary Situations, 160.

56. Hinton, First Shop Stewards’ Movement, 109–113, 125–127; S. G. Checkland, The Upas Tree (Glasgow, 1975).

57. H. Sellier and A. Bruggeman, Paris pendant la Guerre (Paris, 1926); M. Brelet, La crise de la métallurgie. La politique économique et sociale du comité des forges (Paris, 1923); A. Fontaine, French Industry during the War (New Haven, 1926); Meaker, Revolutionary Left in Spain.

58. Noske, cited in Geary, “Radicalism and the Worker,” 277, and, on the general point, 276–283. See also R. F. Wheeler, “German Labor and the Comintern: A Problem of Generations,” Journal of Social History 6 (1974), 304–321.

59. B. Moss, Origins of the French Labor Movement, The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley, 1976); Neufeld, Italy, 316–394; Geary, European Labour Protest, 91–98.

60. R. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg (Stanford, 1966), shows this very clearly, esp. 131–147. See also von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution, 1918–19 (Düsseldorf, 1963); Geary, European Labour Protest, 138–140.

61. Conversely, the magnitude of the failure of 1919–20 is perhaps best measured by the drifting away of these newly organized groups from the labor movement and the left after 1920. See, for example, the interesting figures in A. Kriegel, The French Communists (Chicago, 1972), 65–70, on female participation in the PCF during the interwar period; also Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg; and J. Saville, “May Day 1937,” in A. Briggs and J. Saville, eds., Essays in Labour History, 1918–1939 (London, 1977), 232–284.

62. J. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton, 1975); Robert Dickinson, The West European City (London, 1951), 463–464.

63. R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Harmondsworth, 1973), 29–30.

64. The process by which a distinctively proletarian subculture was formed in the urban environment has been treated very minimally in the history of labor movements. Lately, it has been more often discussed, but usually from one of two equally distorted perspectives. One approach has been to see the strength of the new communities as a force integrating workers into advanced capitalism and reconciling them to a status of permanent subordination. The other approach has been to focus upon the quaint details of everyday life in a romantic view of the warm, friendly social relations common to working-class neighborhoods. Typical examples of the former are G. Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963); G. Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974); and, to some extent, S. Meacham, A Life Apart: The British Working Class, 1890–1914 (London, 1977). The other approach is perhaps most evident in such works as R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957) and the vast sociological literature on the life-styles and values of the “traditional” worker. See, for example, the articles in M. Bulmer, ed., Working-Class Images of Society (London, 1975). For a critique, see Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 204–220. For more recent approaches, see D. Geary, “Identifying Militancy: The Assessment of Working-Class Attitudes towards State and Society,” in R. J. Evans, ed., The Culture of the German Working Class (London, 1981), 220–246; Alf Lüdtke, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: ‘Eigensinn’ and Politics among Factory Workers in Late 19th and Early 20th-century Germany,” (Davis Center, Princeton, 1982) on Germany; and Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent (Cambridge, 1981) on Italy.

65. E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), treats the overall transformation of family styles. The lag in the evolution of working-class patterns is clearly reflected in fertility differentials between social classes that only narrowed after 1900. On these, see J. Knodel, The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (Princeton, 1974), chapter 3; M. Livi-Bacci, A History of Italian Fertility (Princeton, 1977); and, more generally, G. Z. Johnson, “Differential Fertility in European Countries,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton, 1960), 36–72. On apprenticeship and domestic service, see Stearns, Lives of Labor, 48–50, 60; T. McBride, The Domestic Revolution (New York, 1976); and C. More, Skill and the English Working Class (London, 1980). On family structure and class in Germany and France, see L. Niethammer and A. Brüggemeier, “Wie wohnten Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976), 61–134; and Jean-Louis Robert, “La CGT et la famille ouvrière, 1914–1918: première approche,” le Mouvement social 116 (1981), 47–66. Whether changes in patterns of social mobility correlated in any fashion with the stabilization of working-class communities is not at all clear. In a recent article, H. Kaelble suggests that, after 1900, German rates of social mobility increased slightly, while those of other western nations declined. In consequence, Britain, France, and Germany all exhibited relatively modest and similar rates by approximately 1920. This suggests an overall firming up of the class structure, with a tendency for vertical movements to be of rather short distance: specifically, opportunities for moving upwards in business for workers were replaced by opportunities to enter the white-collar work force. This at least does not contradict the arguments proffered here. See H. Kaelble, “Social Mobility in Germany, 1900–1960,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 439–461, and Historical Research on Social Mobility (New York, 1981).

66. Dickinson, West European City, 463.

67. National Civic Federation, Commission on Foreign Inquiry, The Labor Situation in Great Britain and France (New York, 1919).

68. R. M. Pritchard, Housing and the Spatial Structure of the City (Cambridge, 1976).

69. Meacham, A Life Apart, is the most recent analysis—see the literature cited there for earlier work. One important group omitted from Meacham’s study is the miners, about whose closely knit communities so much has been said. The first two decades of the century seem critical for this group as well. See C. Storm-Clark, “The Miners, 1870–1970: A Test Case for Oral History,” Victorian Studies 15 (1971), 49–74.

70. M. Marrus, “Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974), 115–141. Cf. also T. W. Margadant, “Primary Schools and Youth Groups in Pre-War Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978), 323–36.

71. Gulick, Austria, passim; D. Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1973); D. Bell, “Worker Culture and Worker Politics: The Experience of an Italian Town, 1880–1915,” Social History 3 (1978), 1–21.

72. See esp. R. Wheeler, “Organized Sport and Organized Labour: The Workers’ Sports Movement,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978), 191–210; G. Ritter, “Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Problems and Points of Departure for Research,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978), 165–189.

73. H. Pelling, The Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967); D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (New York, 1969), 247–263; R. Wohl, French Communism, 386; F. Goguel, Géographie des élections françaises sous la IIIe et la IVe République (Paris, 1970); É. Blanc, La ceinture rouge (Paris, 1927); I. Duczynska, Workers in Arms (New York, 1978); D. White, “Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 251–272.

74. For example, G. Ranki, “Structural Crisis in Agriculture in Postwar Years,” and C. Maier, “Political Crisis and Partial Modernization.”

75. E. Soave, cited in Cammett, Antonio Gramsci, 73.

76. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography,” History Workshop, no. 6 (1978), 121–138; Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978).

77. Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring, 1982).

78. Williams, Proletarian Order, 23–24; A. Clinton, “Trades Councils during World War I,” International Review of Social History (1970), pt. 2. The local context of German events has become increasingly clear with the publication of a number of excellent local studies. Among these, see Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg; Erhard Lucas, Frankfurt unter der Herrschaft des Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, 1918–19 (Frankfurt, 1969); Lucas, Marzrevolution 1920, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1974); Lucas, Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt, 1976); the various studies in R. Rürup, ed., Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte im rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebeit (Wuppertal, 1975); and F. Boll, Massenbewegungen in Niedersachsen 1906–1920 (Bonn, 1981).

79. Williams, Proletarian Order, 24, makes essentially this point in connection with the urban nature of the camera. Whereas “unions tended to appeal to the more skilled, prosperous, and sophisticated,” the camera “tended to breed a populist and communal, sometimes a class, rather than a trade or craft, mentality. It embraced a wider range of workers.”