Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe before 1914

286 Pages·1989·5.182 MB·English

by  Dick Geary (editor)

IDD
LABOUR AND SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS
IN EUROPE BEFORE 1914

LABOUR AND SOCIALIST
MOVEMENTS
IN EUROPE BEFORE 1914
Edited by
Dick Geary
I
BERG
Oxford I New York I Munich
Distributed exclusively in the US and Canada by
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First published in 1989 by
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Paperback edition 1992
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Labour and socialist movements in Europe before 1914.
1. Europe. Labour movements, history
I. Geary, Dick
335'.0094
ISBN 0-85496-200-X ISBN 0-85496-705-2 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Labour and socialist movements in Europe before 1914 / edited by Dick Geary
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Labor and laboring classes--Europe-History. 2. Trade-unions-
Europe-History. I. Geary, Dick. II. Tide: Labor and socialist movements in
Europe before 1914.
HD8376.1.23 1989 322'.2'094- dc19
ISBN 0-85496-200-X ISBN 0-85496-705-2 (paperback) 88-21418
CONTENTS
List of Tables Vl
Introduction Dick Geary 1
1. The British Labour Movement before 1914
Gordon Phillips 11
2. Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour
before 1914 Roger Magraw 48
3. Socialism and the German Labour Movement
before 1914 Dick Geary 101
4. Labour and Socialism in Tsarist Russia
Christopher Read 137
5. Socialism and the Working Classes in
Italy before 1914 john A. Davis 182
6. The Labour Movement in Spain before 1914
Paul Heywood 231
Notes on Contributors 266
Index 268
V
LIST OF TABLES
3.1 Number of employees per firm in Germany in 1882
and 1907 102
3.2 Number of workers covered by collective wage
agreements in certain industries in Britain and
Germany 123
6.1 Occupation of the active Spanish labour force
according to census data, 1877-1910 235
6.2 Spanish population statistics 1861-1920 235
6.3 Growth of the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol
1891-1912 248
6.4 Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol Congresses,
1888-1915 248
6.5 Membership of the Union General de Trabajadores,
1888-1914 254
6.6 Growth of the Union General de Trabajadores in
Vizcaya 258
6.7 Membership of the Sindicato de Obreros Mineros
Asturianos, 1911-15 263
Vl
INTRODUCTION
Dick Geary
Since the 1960s there has been an enormous outpouring of works on
the labour history of most European countries. Traditional studies
of socialist ideology and national organisations (trade unions and
political parties) have been supplemented by local and regional
studies, a point of considerable significance, given the fragmented
history of labour, even in individual nations. Generalisations about
the working class have been further undermined by the analysis of
individual trades and crafts, and of conflicts within them: conflicts
as often between skilled and unskilled, male and female, as between
workers and their employers. The study of everyday life, of prac
tices on the shop-floor and in the community, at work and at play,
has enriched our understanding of the complexity of those factors
which enable certain groups of workers to organise and engage in
successful collective action, whilst others rarely figure in the pages
of the history books on account of their apparent docility and
passivity.
In the light of the above one might assume that the time was well
past for another collection of 'survey essays' such as this, in which a
group of relatively young historians write about the country of their
interest and expertise. But such an assumption appears decidedly
wrong to this editor for a number of reasons. The very mass of
monographic research pursued in the last few years demands some
attempt to integrate it into an overall and less specialised perspec
tive, especially as even the professional historian, let alone the
average student or layman, has scarcely the time or energy to absorb
all the newly discovered data and reinterpretations. Furthermore,
much of the most important work on European labour history of
1
2 Introduction
recent origin has appeared in languages not at the disposal of most
English readers. Thus the following chapters incorporate the results
of research otherwise unavailable to many. A final justification for
this volume is that the individual authors do not merely survey the
work of others but produce the fruits of their own research and
make their own intervention in areas of controversy.
A collection such as this cannot hope to be comprehensive:
obviously some important cases are omitted, as, for example, those
of Belgium, Austria-Hungary and Scandinavia. The following
chapters do, however, deal with several of the most important
labour movements in Europe before the outbreak of the First World
War, namely those of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and
Russia. The inclusion of British material in works on 'Europe' has
not been too common in publications on this side of the Atlantic,
but is something that here requires not the slightest justification.
Britain was the world's first industrial nation and the mother of the
world's oldest labour movement. As early as the 1830s there already
existed within these shores trade associations (unions) of some
permanence; and by 1914 the British trade unions had a member
ship which far outnumbered that of any other European nation.
British workers had already lived through a series of conflicts, not
least in the stormy days of Chartism, that were to engulf the
continent at a later date with the onset of industrialisation. Their
organisations and aspirations became for some Europeans a model
to be emulated and were followed with great interest by no lesser a
personage than Karl Marx. For others the trajectory of the British
labour movement, especially the predominant reformism after the
middle of the nineteenth century, demonstrated precisely what was
to be avoided. Yet perhaps the most important reason for including
a study of British labour in this volume is precisely because of the
way in which the British case differed from developments across the
channel: the relative liberalism and non-interventionism of the
British state, the willingness of many British employers to deal with
trade unions, the continuing strength of liberal/c onstitutionalist
values amongst sections of the population outside the working class
- all of these factors go some way towards explaining the relative
moderation of British workers, the dominance of trade-union rather
than radical political strategies, and the relatively small support
achieved by explicitly socialist organisations. In fact there seems to
exist a dynamic interaction between middle-class and working-class
politics. Where a national bourgeoisie is weak or tied to an existing
Introduction 3
and authoritarian state, as in Russia before the First World War, or
in countries in which the middle class increasingly abandons liberal
values and comes to support semi-authoritarian political systems, as
was to some extent the case in Imperial Germany and pre-war
Spain, there the prospects of working-class liberalism appear to be
weaker, whilst political radicalism on the part of labour becomes
more marked. Conversely the Republican traditions of at least some
sections of the French bourgeoisie and the buoyant liberalism of the
British middle class enabled a fair proportion of workers to remain
in the liberal camp.
The authors of the individual chapters in this volume have not
been tied to an identical timespan for the obvious reason that the
onset of industrialisation and the subsequent emergence of a mod
ern labour movement varied so enormously from country to coun
try, with Britain at one end of the spectrum, as it were, and - with
certain regional exceptions - Spain and Russia at the other. What
the chapters try to do is to provide an overview of and explanation
for the development of the various national labour movements in
the period before the outbreak of the First World War; to examine
what kinds of workers became involved in different forms of
collective action (skilled or unskilled, male or female, urban or
rural, those in small or large concerns, those living in different kinds
of communities and localities) and why; and to account for the
differing ideologies and values that did as much to divide as to unite
labour in this period. A necessary consequence of this is that the
emphasis in each individual chapter is not necessarily the same but
rather reflects both national peculiarities and the preoccupations of
recent historiographical controversy. If any generalisation can be
made, it is that generalisations about the European 'working class'
are best avoided. Revolutionary socialism found a large audience in
Tsarist Russia but scarcely any in Edwardian England. In France,
Germany and Italy there did develop socialist parties of some
significance before 1914; but in all these cases, these parties were
riven with internal conflicts, some personal, some ideological and
others determined by the different economic and social situation of
various groups of workers. The pre-war socialist parties in France,
Germany and Italy encompassed radicals and reformists, revolution
aries and non-revolutionaries, Marxists and non-Marxists; and to
some extent the split of the socialist movement into social
democratic and communist camps in the inter-war years was a
consequence not only of new economic developments or the in-