A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  This led to a new international wave of workers’ struggles, with a scattering of bitter strikes in most countries. New groups of activists began to organise along different lines to those of the established socialist parties, with their parliamentary orientation, and the established union leaders, with their fixation on negotiating with the employers.

  The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), formed in the US in 1905, led militant strikes in the mining, lumbering, dock and textile industries, and organised black, female and unskilled workers who were ignored by the established, ‘moderate’ American Federation of Labor. The Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) in France followed a similarly militant approach, insisting that workers’ revolution could come about through trade union methods of struggle, and rejecting any participation in parliamentary politics. Its approach became known internationally as ‘syndicalism’, after the French for trade union, syndicat . The Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) in Spain was founded by anarchists as a revolutionary alternative to the Socialist Party leadership of the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). In Ireland a militant organiser of one of the British dockers’ unions, Jim Larkin, led a massive strike in Belfast in 1907, which united Catholics and Protestants, and even sparked discontent among the police. Larkin then founded a new union, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Back in Britain there was an attempt to set up branches of the IWW, and Tom Mann, an engineering worker who had played a leading role in the dock strike of 1889, returned from Australia and South Africa to preach his own version of syndicalism based on rank and file unity within the existing unions.

  The sense that there was an alternative to the parliamentary approach received an enormous boost from events in Russia – the revolution of 1905. Russian tsarism had been a centre of counterrevolution ever since its role in imposing the restoration of the old regimes in western Europe in 1814–15. Even moderate liberals regarded it as an abomination. But tsarism came close to collapsing in 1905. Successive waves of strikes swept through Russia after troops opened fire on a demonstration of workers in the capital, St Petersburg. The demonstration had been led by a priest, Father Gapon, who ran a state-sponsored union connected to the secret police, and the workers had merely called on their ‘Little Father’ (the tsar) to stop listening to ‘bad advisers’. But after the shootings the tone of the strikes became increasingly revolutionary. Socialists produced openly revolutionary newspapers. There was mutiny in the Black Sea fleet, led by the battleship Potemkin . And there was an attempted uprising in Moscow in December led by the militant ‘Bolshevik’ faction of the Social Democratic Party, whose leader was Vladimir Lenin. A new sort of organisation, based on elected delegates from the major workplaces and presided over by the 26-year-old Leon Trotsky, became the focus for the revolutionary forces in St Petersburg. Its name, ‘soviet’, was simply the Russian word for ‘council’, and its real significance was not fully grasped at the time. But it represented a new way of organising revolutionary forces, different from the journée street-based risings of the French Revolution or even from the Paris Commune. The Commune had been based on delegates from working-class residential districts – a form of organisation which suited a city still comprised mainly of small workshops. The soviet fitted a city transformed by the industrialisation of the previous 30 years, with its enormous factories.

  St Petersburg was just such a city, although Russia as a whole was still largely backward. The great mass of the population were peasants, tilling the soil using methods that had hardly changed since late medieval times. Tsarism was based on the aristocracy, not the class of Russian capitalists, so many of the goals of the 1905 Revolution were the same as those of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. But tsarism had been forced to encourage pockets of growth of large-scale capitalism in order to produce arms and railway equipment, and it had turned a couple of million people into industrial workers. Their presence transformed the character of what would otherwise have been simply a French-style bourgeois revolution. Most socialists in Russia did not realise this. A large number believed Russia could avoid going through capitalism at all and move straight to a form of socialism based on the peasant village. All that was required was armed action to break the power of the state. These socialists were known as narodniki (‘friends of the people’), and formed the Social Revolutionary Party. There were Marxists who saw that capitalism was developing, but many belonged to the ‘Menshevik’ tendency of the Social Democratic Party, which believed workers merely had to help the bourgeoisie make its revolution. Even Lenin’s Bolsheviks spoke of a ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’. But Leon Trotsky went further: he said that the involvement of workers could make the revolution ‘permanent’ – a phrase first used by Marx after 1848. They had necessarily shifted the revolutionary movement from raising simply democratic demands to raising socialist demands. 33

  In western Europe it was Rosa Luxemburg who best appreciated the importance of 1905, having experienced it first hand in Russian-occupied Warsaw. In her pamphlet The Mass Strike , 34 she argued that it showed how strike movements could spontaneously begin to raise political questions, opening up a non-parliamentary strategy for change. Her arguments received little hearing inside the German socialist movement, and the crushing of the revolution by tsarism seemed to reduce their importance.

  Yet the years after 1910 were to see a rash of fresh strikes, bigger and more bitter, in North America and western Europe. In the US there was the famous Lawrence strike in Massachusetts, where 20,000 women workers from a dozen national backgrounds followed the lead of IWW agitators Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. In Britain there was the ‘Great Unrest’, centred on huge strikes on the railways, in the ports and in the mines, but spilling over into dozens of industries, often involving unskilled, non-unionised workers. In Ireland there was the five-month Dublin Lockout of transport and other workers in 1913. In Italy there was Ancona’s ‘Red Week’ of bloody clashes between workers and the police after an anti-militarist demonstration, a strike of 50,000 metal workers in Turin (where two workers were killed by soldiers), and a wave of agitation across northern Italy which it took 100,000 troops to suppress. 35 Even in Germany, where the general level of struggle was still below the European average, there was a bitter miners’ strike in the Ruhr. Finally, in Russia, a massacre of striking gold miners in Lena in 1912 was followed by a resurgence in workers’ struggles, permitting the two rival factions of the Social Democratic Party to produce semi-legal newspapers, and culminating in the raising of barricades in St Petersburg in the summer of l914.

  The time when imperialism’s bloody adventures in the colonies could stabilise the system at its centre was passing. But before anyone had a chance to see where this would lead, blood was to be shed on an unprecedented scale across Europe.

  The road to war

  The fact that imperialism meant wars between colonial powers as well as the enslavement of colonised peoples had been shown as early as 1904, when Russia’s drive east towards the Pacific led it into direct conflict, in northern China, with Japan’s drive west through Korea. Its defeat in the war which followed helped precipitate the 1905 Revolution. Twice it seemed as if a similar clash of interests in Morocco might lead to war between France and Germany, in 1906 and 1911.

  But the truly dangerous area was south east Europe, the Balkans, where each of the Great Powers regarded particular local states as its clients. There were wars between these states in 1912 and 1913. First Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria fell upon the remaining Turkish territories of Macedonia and Thrace, leaving Turkey with only Istanbul and a narrow strip of eastern Thrace. Then Greece, Serbia and Romania, encouraged by the Great Powers, fell upon Bulgaria. The wars were marked by atrocities on all sides. Sections of the urban middle classes wanted to create and expand ‘modern’ linguistically uniform national states. But the rural populations were almost everywhere mixtures of different
ethnic groups speaking different dialects and languages. The only way to carve out secure ‘ethnically pure’ national states was through wars involving the expulsion and even extermination of civilians who did not fit the necessary criteria. The first war ended in the Treaty of London, and the second in the Treaty of Bucharest. But these did nothing to remove the underlying pressures leading to war, and the same pressures existed in much of Austro-Hungarian eastern Europe as in the former Ottoman areas. The whole region was a gigantic explosive cocktail.

  Just how explosive was shown in July 1914, when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand paid an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian-run province of Bosnia. He was assassinated by a nationalist who stood for driving out the Austrians and integrating the province into neighbouring Serbia.

  What happened next is well known: the Austrian government declared war on Serbia; the Russian government feared a challenge to its own position and declared war on Austria; Germany identified its interests with Austria’s and moved against Russia; France felt it had to prevent Germany defeating Russia and becoming the dominant European power; Britain threw its weight behind France and went to war against Germany, using the movement of German troops through Belgium as an excuse. Within a week, 44 years of peace in western Europe – the longest period anyone could recall – had given way to a war involving all the major states.

  Wars, like revolutions, often seem to be triggered by the most minor of events. This leads people to see them as accidental, a result of a random chain of misjudgements and misunderstandings. But, in fact, the minor events are significant because they come to symbolise the balance between great social or political forces. A sparkplug is one of the cheapest components in a motor car, and cannot move anything by itself. But it can ignite the explosive force of petrol vapour in the engine. In the same way, an assassination or a tax rise can be of little importance in itself, but can bring about clashes between states or great social forces.

  Behind the long chain of diplomatic activity in the summer of 1914 lay a very simple fact. The rival imperialisms which had emerged as each capitalism tried to solve its own problems by expanding across state boundaries now collided right across the world. Economic competition had turned into competition for territories, and the outcome depended on armed might. No state could afford to back down once the chain of confrontations had been set off by the Sarajevo assassination, because no state could risk a weakening of its global strength. The same imperialism which had stimulated economic growth and a belief in the inevitability of progress was now to tear the heart of Europe apart.

  Chapter 2

  World war and

  world revolution

  4 August 1914

  Almost everyone involved in the war thought it would be short. The German crown prince spoke of a ‘bright and jolly war’. He expected a repetition of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the French army was defeated within weeks. French soldiers wrote ‘à Berlin’ on the railway carriages taking them to the front. ‘It will all be over by Christmas’ was the common British refrain.

  At first the war was popular. Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin witnessed ‘the mad delirium … patriotic street demonstrations … singing throngs, coffee shops with their patriotic songs … violent mobs ready to whip themselves into delirious frenzy over every wild rumour … trains filled with reservists … pull out amid the joyous cries of enthusiastic maidens’. 36 Trotsky wrote, ‘The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in Austria-Hungary seemed especially surprising … I strode along the main streets of the familiar Vienna and watched a most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring … porters, laundresses, shoe-makers, apprentices and youngsters from the suburbs’. 37 In London ‘an immense and tremendously enthusiastic crowd’ gathered outside Buckingham Palace’ on 4 August. 38 Victor Serge, in a French prison, described how ‘passionate singing of the “Marseillaise”, from crowds seeing troops off to the train, drifted across even to our jail. We could hear shouts of “To Berlin! To Berlin!”’ 39 Even in St Petersburg the strikes and barricades of only a few days earlier seemed forgotten. The British ambassador Buchanan later spoke of ‘those wonderful early August days’ when ‘Russia seemed to have been completely transformed’. 40

  The popularity of the war was not necessarily as deeply ingrained among the mass of people as the enthusiastic demonstrations and singing of patriotic songs suggested. Historian David Blackbourn writes of Germany, ‘The patriotic demonstrations of late July involved relatively small groups, with students and young salesmen prominent. Working class areas like the Ruhr were quiet … Older observers noted a contrast with the enthusiasm of 1870’. 41 Shlyapnikov, a revolutionary worker in St Petersburg, contrasted the enthusiasm for the war among the middle and upper classes with the more subdued mood in the factories:

  The St Petersburg press did much to kindle popular chauvinism. They skilfully blew up ‘German’ atrocities against Russian women and old men remaining in Germany. But even this hostile atmosphere did not drive workers to an excess of nationalism. 42

  Ralph Fox told how, as a young worker in London, it was possible to organise weekly anti-war meetings in Finsbury Park. 43

  Trotsky explained the mood more as a reaction to people’s normal humdrum lives than any deep-seated nationalism:

  The people whose lives, day in day out, pass in the monotony of hopelessness are many; they are the mainstay of modern society. The alarm of mobilisation breaks into their lives like a promise; the familiar and long-hated is overthrown, and the new and unusual reigns in its place. Changes still more incredible are in store for them in the future. For better or worse? For better, of course – what can seem worse than ‘normal’ conditions? … War affects everybody, and those who are oppressed and deceived by life consequently feel that they are on an equal footing with the rich and powerful. 44

  Different social classes are never fully segregated from one another. The mood of those at the top influences those just below them, and the mood of those in the middle influences those at the bottom. The determination of Europe’s ruling classes to go to war with one another was transmitted in a thousand ways to the middle classes and sections of the working class – through patriotic speeches and newspaper stories about ‘enemy atrocities’, through marching bands and popular songs, and through declarations by novelists, poets and philosophers. The German historian Meinecke described the outbreak of the war as filling him with ‘the profoundest joy’. The radical French novelist Anatole France recalled (with a sense of shame) making ‘little speeches to the soldiers’. The philosopher Bergson described the war as one of ‘civilisation against barbarism’. The English poet Rupert Brooke wrote that ‘nobleness walks in our ways again’, 45 and the novelist H G Wells enthused about a ‘war to end war’. Schoolteachers repeated such statements to adolescent boys, urging them to go off and fight. Anyone who dissented was guilty of ‘stabbing our boys in the back’.

  There were still wide groups of workers who could be expected to resist such pressures. Socialist movements and groups of trade union militants were accustomed to lies in the press and attacks on their principles. Many had flocked to rallies of thousands in London, Paris and Berlin on the eve of the war to hear their leaders call for peace. But once war broke out, those same leaders rushed to support it. The German and Austrian Social Democrats, the British Labour Party and TUC, the French Socialist Guesde and the syndicalist Jouhaux, the veteran Russian Marxist Plekhanov and the veteran Russian anarchist Kropotkin – all were united in their willingness to back their rulers against others. Those who had doubts – for instance, Kautsky and Haase in Germany, and Keir Hardie in Britain – kept quiet in order to preserve ‘party unity’ and to avoid being accused of betraying ‘the nation’. ‘A nation at war must be united,’ wrote Hardie. ‘The boys who have gone forth to fight their country’s battles must not be disheartened by any discordant note at home’. 46

  Decades of abiding by the rules of capitalist democracy were having their ef
fect. Pursuit of reform within the structures of the capitalist state led to identification with that state in its military conflicts. In the warring countries only the Serbian Socialists and the Russian Bolsheviks came out in unremitting hostility to the war. The Italian Socialists also opposed the war when Italy finally allied itself with Britain, France and Russia. But their attitude owed much to a split within the Italian ruing class over which side to support – and the left-wing editor of the party’s daily paper, a certain Benito Mussolini, split away to wage virulently pro-war agitation.

  The belief in a quick victory proved completely misplaced. In the first months of the war the German army did manage to race through Belgium and northern France to within 50 miles of Paris, and the Russian army advanced far into German East Prussia. But both were then forced back. The Germans retreated before the French and British armies at the Battle of the Marne to form a defensive line of trenches some 30 miles back. The Russians suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Tannenberg and were driven from German territory. The ‘war of manoeuvre’ (of quick-moving armies) became a war of attrition, with each side suffering enormous losses as it attempted to break through the strongly entrenched positions of the other side. The expected four months of hostilities turned into more than four years, and spread from the eastern and western fronts to Turkey, Mesopotamia, the Italian–Austrian border and northern Greece.