The Rupture of War Crisis and Reconstruction of the Left, 19141917

The Rupture of War Crisis and Reconstruction of the Left, 19141917

Few countries went untouched by popular insurgencies in 191718, and shorter-lived revolutionary experiences in Germany, Austria, Hun- gary, and Italy followed Russias example. In the east and on Europes western periphery in Ireland, moreover, the twin motifs of the national and the revolutionary powerfully coincided as national revolutions transformed the wreckage of the Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman, and Hohenzollern multinational empires. The war in the west was primarily a struggle between states and armies for the redistribution of power, whereas in the east the war released from state control crucial national, class, and social antagonisms, opening a veritable Pandoras box of sub- version.¹ The revolutionary turmoil following 1917 was decisive for the future, not least by provoking counterrevolutionary opportunities for fas- cism. More immediately, it split the European socialist movement: after benefiting from long-term social democratic coalescence before 1914, working-class movements were henceforth irreparably divided between so- cialists and Communists.

With the possible exception of the 1860s, the war brought the single most concentrated pan-European societal transformation since the French Revolution. Quite apart from the appalling death toll, the Eastern Fronts more mobile warfare shifted huge populations around the map. And the wars impact reached into every sphere of social life. It recast the relation- ship between government and economy, bringing unforeseen centralization to production, distribution, and consumption, promoting the expansion of some sectors over others (arms and war-related production over consumer goods), and spawning new triangular relations between state, capital, and labor. This required as much political and ideological as economic mobi- lization. The patriotic upswing of the war rested on a new form of the social contract: in making their demands on popular loyalties, governments encouraged expectations of postwar reform, and in popular perceptions wartime sacrifices would certainly be rewarded by an expansion of citizen- ship. This meant a huge change of consciousness. In the popular imagina- tion, it was understood: at wars end things would have to change.

THE CRISIS OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

The war ambushed Europes socialists. Ironically, it came at the peak of a European peace campaign, as both the Tenth International Socialist Con- gress and the Twenty-first Universal Peace Congress were scheduled to meet in AugustSeptember 1914 in Vienna, precisely the storm center of the diplomatic crisis that launched the war. Balkan tensions were certainly long familiar, and hopes of containing Franz Ferdinands assassination at Sara- jevo on 28 June also persisted, even after the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia

on 23 July. Yet by the time the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) con- vened on 2930 July, war between Austria and Serbia was set.

The Bureau kept a brave face, moving the forthcoming Congress from Vienna to Paris and appealing for international arbitration. As Hugo Haase, cochairman of the SPD, said, antiwar protests by the Second Inter- national might be ineffective, but at least we can have the satisfaction of having done our duty.² But within a day Russian general mobilization had destroyed prospects of confining the war to the Balkans. By 1 August the parameters had completely changed. The International was powerless to stop the war. Even the socialists more prosaic fallback option, coordinat- ing country-by-country parliamentary opposition to war credits, proved a forlorn hope.³

Recognizing the Internationals powerlessness, socialists rapidly moved into actively supporting the war. On 4 August, German and French So- cialists voted their governments war credits, the former after an agonized debate. Socialists in Belgium, Britain, Austria, and Hungary adopted na- tional defensism, as did the socialist parties in neutral Switzerland, Hol- land, Sweden, and Denmark. Dissident minorities barely dented the shield of patriotic resignation. In the belligerent countries, only the Serb and Rus- sian Lefts diverged from the patternthe two Social Democrats in the Ser- bian legislature condemned both the Austrian ultimatum and their own governments nationalism, while in the Russian Duma Bolsheviks and Men- sheviks joined Alexander Kerenskys Labor Party in opposing the war. Among the neutrals, both the Italian Socialists and the Narrow faction of the Bulgarian Social Democrats condemned the war in 1914, keeping this stance even after their governments entered the conflict in 1915. But despite these exceptions, for all practical purposes the old internationalism was buried.

In the climax of the July Crisis, the Lefts eyes had turned to Berlin, for the SPD was the Internationals senior party, the defender of its stated traditions. Initially, the party executive had called mass rallies for peace, reaching their climax on 2830 July, just as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This was a big show of strengthwith 30,000 demonstrators in Berlin, 35,000 in Dresden, 50,000 in Leipzig, 20,000 in Du sseldorf and Hanover, 10,000 in Bremen, Cologne, and Mannheim, and so forth. But the meetings were indoors, with no unfolding campaign of open-air rallies and street demonstrations. There was certainly no thought of a general strike. The SPD avoided directly contesting the public mood of ebullient chauvinism, and this made it easier to demobilize the membership when

peace turned to national defense. Vorwarts already sounded that note on 30 July, and on 23 August the Free Trade Unions and SPD Reichstag group made it official. On 4 August 1914, the party voted unanimously in the Reichstag for the German governments war credits.⁴

Motivations varied. Resignation played a big part, reflecting exagger- ated fears of the Prusso-German states repressive powers. The leadership

refused to risk the organizations accomplishments in all-or-nothing show- downs and dismissed the efficacy of revolutionary actions. Besides, French labor would not reciprocate a German general strike, they thought, a skep- ticism confirmed by the assassination of Jaure`s, internationalisms most pas- sionate French defender. With mounting evidence of popular war enthu- siasm, SPD leaders doubted even their own militants response to an antiwar call. The governments casting of the conflict as a war against tsar- ist aggression was the coup de grace. Given the historic connotations of tsarist reaction and Slavic backwardness for the German Left, this gave the SPD positive arguments for joining the patriotic bloc. Of course, this kind of progressive justification worked for the French too, allowing them to vilify the Germans. As Haase told a French comrade over lunch in Brussels:

If France alone were involved our attitude would be simple. But there are the Russians. What the Prussian boot means to you the Russian knout means to us.⁵

Beneath the duress lurked ulterior agendas. Most SPD leaders evinced a hardheaded but class-conscious pragmatism, infused with nationalism. They expected a reformist breakthrough once labor had shown its loyalty. As one leading SPD reformist, Eduard David, told the government, the hundreds of thousands of convinced Social Democrats who are giving their all for the war effort expected some acknowledgement of their own wishes in return.⁶ This meant the long-demanded introduction of universal suf- frage in Prussia, plus a package of social reform. For the unions, it meant legally sanctioned collective bargaining and full involvement in running the economy. In short, the wartime emergency promised the lasting basis of the labor movements acceptance into the nation.

Purely nationalist motives were inseparable from this reformist cal- culation. Deserting the fatherland in its hour of danger was a stigma the SPD refused to bear, not least when the aggressor seemed the standard- bearer of European reaction. The summons to national unity was the chance to come in from the cold. For Ludwig Frank, one of the movements reformist stars, who volunteered in 1914 and died on the Western Front in the first German offensive, this took particularly dramatic form. As he wrote from the front: Instead of a general strike we are waging a war for the Prussian suffrage. Or, in another of his phrases: We are defending the fatherland in order to conquer it!⁷

The case for renouncing revolutionary internationalism in favor of German-bound democratic reform was not new, but wartime allowed such thinking to bloom. Reformists spoke more confidently of converting social democracy into national democracy, of achieving a parliamentary dem- ocratic form of government headed by the monarchy.⁸ The most forthright advocates had opened contacts with the government in 1914: Eduard Da- vid, Albert Su dekum, and Max Cohen-Reuss. With backing from the SPD Executive and Karl Legien, chairman of the Free Trade Unions, they quickly set the tone in parliament and the SPDs public statements. Party discipline

was tightened, and left-wing strongholds, like the board of Vorwarts, were eventually purged. The logic became clearer as the war wore on. This SPD right adjusted with remarkable ease to Germanys violation of Belgian neu- trality and the invasion of France, tacitly abandoning the formula of an antitsarist defensive war. By August 1915, they were opposing the partys initial line of peace without annexations. The SPD adopted a war aims statement, drafted by David, which was indistinguishable from more mod- erate expansionist programs in the nonsocialist camp.

THE LEFT REGROUPS

Socialists elsewhere matched the Germans in patriotism.⁹ In Britain and France, the consensus absorbed them more deeply: Jules Guesde and Mar- cel Sembat joined the French government on 28 August 1914; six months later three members of the British Labour Party accepted office. Socialists on all sides produced high-sounding justifications. Austrians and Hungar- ians were defending European culture against eastern despotism; Germans were doing the same, while freeing oppressed peoples from tsarist tyranny; the British and French were defending democracy against the Prussian jack- boot. The Jacobin heritage of revolutionary war was adapted for nationalist purposes in France, as was the democratic anathema of tsarism in Ger- many. In contrast, the Italian Socialists antiwar stance becomes all the more impressive, despite the PSIs practical passivity after Italian interven- tion in May 1915. In Russia, a politically reactionary tsarism made it easier for the Left to hold out against the war, whereas Italian Socialists faced similar pressures to their German, French, or British counterparts.

Embracing patriotism came more easily in Britain and France, where longer traditions of parliamentary or republican government allowed the war to be packaged as a defense of democracy against militarism. But for the SPD in Germany, national defensism became a route to the same parliamentary ideals. Heavily trade-unionized in its wartime politics, the SPD advanced confidently toward a reformist future, contemptuously dis- missing its left-wing critics, while keeping a nervous eye on popular dis- content. Across Europe, the Left were simply disarmed by patriotisms ap- parent universality in 1914. The workers were swept by an irresistible wave of nationalism, Albert Merrheim later claimed, and would not have left it to the police to shoot us. They would have shot us themselves. But there was also a sense of historic opportunity, which called on the Left to act. In the words of Leon Jouhaux, the CGT secretary-general: We must give up the policy of fist-shaking in order to adopt one of being present in the affairs of the nation. . . . We want to be everywhere where the workers interests are being discussed.¹⁰

By the autumn of 1914, right-wing socialists were digging themselves into the new nationalist positions. At their Vienna meeting in April 1915

the socialist parties of the Central Powers might speak the rhetoric of na- tional independence and anti-Russian defense, but the German armys march through Belgium had placed the SPD at an acute moral disadvan- tage, accused by their former comrades in France, Belgium, and Britain of endorsing their governments military aggression. In London on 14 Feb- ruary 1915, all three of the latter parties, plus Socialist Revolutionaries from Russia (neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks were invited), waxed el- oquent in these denunciations: the war against Germany was a war for democracy, and Germany defeated was democracy saved.

Socialists in the neutral countries attempted mediation. Several initia- tives were rapidly hatchedfrom the United States, Sweden, the Nether- lands, Italy, and Switzerlandbut to no avail. The efforts at reforging so- cialist unity caught hold only later with two external events: Woodrow Wilsons peace initiative, begun in December 1916, and the Russian Rev- olution of February 1917. Feverish activity ensued, as the SPD, western socialists, and the neutral socialist leaders each maneuvered for influence with socialist groupings in Russia. The Dutch, led by Pieter Troelstra, fi- nally bypassed the recalcitrant Belgians and on 15 April 1917 called an international conference in Stockholm under their own name, forming a Dutch-Scandinavian organizing committee on 10 May. All ISB affiliates were invited to attend, including minority factions produced by the war. But whether the Allied socialists would sit down with the Germans re- mained the crucial question.¹¹

Over the same period in Switzerland, an avowedly oppositional, largely unofficial movement sought to recapture national parties from the social patriots and reformists. By the spring of 1915, there were indeed signs of a left-wing revival. In Germany, a third of the SPDs parliamentary group now opposed the war credits. Radicals formed the Group International, while moderates ventured into public criticism of the leadership.¹² On May Day in France the Metalworkers newspaper opposed the war. Meanwhile, international conferences of women and then youth met in Bern, while the Swiss left-socialist journalist Robert Grimm fanned the flames, helped by the Italian party and Russian and Polish exiles. International conferences in the villages of Zimmerwald (September 1915) and Kienthal (April 1916) near Bern were the result.

Zimmerwald was a vital forum of the emergent left, giving rise to the International Socialist Commission (ISC). Psychologically, after the debacle of 1914, its significance was immense, although under wartime conditions it was less clear what could be done. Lenins answer, at one Zimmerwald extreme, was to demand a new International. But this was a distinctly minority viewpoint, confined to the notoriously fractious Bolsheviks and a few others. The rest, notably the French and Germans, balked at breaking the civil truce. Most delegates couldnt write off their old allegiances. Only a campaign for peace, rather than new revolutionary slogans, they argued,

would overcome the workers demoralization. The main consensus was an amorphous commitment to peace in a revived Second International.¹³

By Kienthal, things had radicalized. The main resolution now attacked the reformist leaderships of the belligerent parties and the passivity of ISB. Originally, it also proposed sanctions: first, the ISB executive should be rebuilt from the nonbelligerent parties; then affiliated parties should expel socialists still holding government office, refuse the war credits, and break the civil truce. This marked a clear leftward shift. Only the French delegates applied a brake, opposing the submitted resolution at every point, while Pavel Akselrod, the Menshevik, acted the incorrigible conciliator. Real in- transigence came from Lenins Bolsheviks, who denounced all cooperation with ISB. They couldnt carry the majority, which still shied from a break. But the core of the Zimmerwald Left had grown from 8 to 12, with fluc- tuating support on particular issues.¹⁴

What was the Zimmerwald constellation? Most obvious was the prom- inence of the Russian and east European periphery, which provided the strongest cluster of national parties officially joining Zimmerwald. These included the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Dem- ocrats, the Latvian party, the Bund, the Social Revolutionaries, the SDKPiL, and the Serb, Romanian, and Bulgarian (Narrow) Social Democrats. The roster was completed by the PPS-Left, the Polish strand of SPD opposition

(Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Radek), and the Parisian Golos/Na- she Slovo group influential in French antiwar circles. The groundwork was laid by Christian Rakovsky, the Romanian delegate and future Bolshevik, who solidified contacts in Milan, Paris, and Switzerland before uniting the Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian parties into the Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Federation, the first internationalist regroupment of the war. Finally, the southern periphery was also key. The Portuguese Socialists affiliated, sending Edmondo Peluso to Kienthal. But the Italian Socialists were the decisive organizational support and the largest western European party to join.

The Swiss Social Democrats were the other major affiliate: though the leadership disavowed Grimm in October 1915, party Congress vindicated him overwhelmingly next month, accepted the Zimmerwald Manifesto, and joined ISC.¹⁵ Otherwise, ISC attracted small oppositional groups in the west: the Tribune Group in Holland; the Social Democratic Youth League in Sweden; the International Socialists of Germany, formed by Julius Bor- chardt after Zimmerwald, plus the more circumspect Group International; the Committee of International Action formed by French Zimmerwaldians in November 1915; and the British Socialist Party (BSP) and ILP in Britain. Broader Zimmerwald sympathies were crystallizing in Germany and France. In 1915, the SPDs antiwar opposition reached from the radical Group International to moderates around Haase, Kautsky, and Bernstein, with local pockets in Berlin, Bremen, Stuttgart, and Dresden. Then the SPD

majority pushed things to a split: Liebknecht was expelled from the parlia- mentary group by 60 to 25 votes, whereupon a second radical, Otto Ru hle of Dresden, resigned in solidarity. Joined by 18 deputies expelled for voting against the emergency budget, they formed the Social Democratic Working Group inside the existing party. Throughout 1916, left-wing resolutions also advanced in the French SFIO.

How far was there a coherent antiwar position between the extremes of right-wing social democracy and Lenins revolutionary demand for a split? Did antiwar grievances imply politics that were revolutionary rather than simply pacifist? Did opposing the war entail anticapitalist intent? Certainly, linking peace abstractly to the victory of socialism no longer satisfied the Bolsheviks, who wanted a clean break with the Second Inter- national. But they rallied only 8 of the 38 Zimmerwald delegates and 12 of the 39 at Kienthal, and the broader left still shied from a break.¹⁶ Yet the main thrust at Zimmerwald was peace, to get the Left moving again; by Kienthal, Lenins drive for clarity was enlisting the avowed revolution- aries. During 1916, this galvanized the bigger delegationsthe Italians, Poles, non-Bolshevik Russians, somewhat the French, and the Spartacists

(as Group International became known), the Bremen Left, and Interna- tional Socialists in Germany. Next, the broader Franco-German parliamen- tary lefts needed moving too.

These alignments prefigured the revolutionary years 191721. The broader antiwar Left often reverted to social democracy during the 1920s Communist-Socialist split. This applied to the Swiss Zimmerwaldians, some of the French, most leading Italians, and most German oppositionists. On the other hand, younger Zimmerwaldians born in the 1880s helped launch the same countries Communist parties and figured prominently in the Comintern. Polish Zimmerwaldians formed the nucleus of the interwar Po- lish Communist Party, and continuity from Group International to the German Communist Party was especially strong. Above all, Bolshevik lead- ership remade itself via Zimmerwald. The future Central Committee of the

1917 Bolshevik Party and leading personalities of the Soviet state descended from the internationalists of 191417. Originally heterogeneous, their out- looks were sharpened into focus by Lenins relentless revolutionary line. Finally, what was missing from Zimmerwald? First, no big western or central European party was officially present, including the prewar north- central European social democratic core: British Labour, SFIO, the Belgian and Dutch parties, the Scandinavian parties (partly excepting the Norwe- gian), and German, Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian Social Democrats; only their sectarian rivals and vocal minorities joined the ISC. Second, the tsarist empires non-Russian nationalities were unrepresented. Latvian and Polish Zimmerwaldians explicitly rejected national self-determination, and the Jewish Bund sent no delegates for exactly that reason. None of the national revolutions of 191721 in ex-tsarist landsFinland, Ukraine,

Georgiaruffled Zimmerwalds surface; nor did those of ex-Habsburg east- central Europe in 191819.¹⁷ Third, aside from three American affiliates and the International Socialist League of South Africa, the extra-European world was entirely missing. This contrasted markedly with the global in- terest aroused by the Russian Revolution and the Third International.

THE RADICALIZATION OF LABOR Beyond Zimmerwald was a slowly emerging grassroots resentment against the wars privations.¹⁸ Of course, popular politics were severely constricted by wartime conditions. Not only were civil liberties curtailed by emergency regulations but the public climates of civil truce directly attacked dissent. Constraints were as much ideological as police-repressive. An enormous commitmenteither moral courage or bravadowas needed to come out publicly against the war. Indeed, many local labor movement institutions responded to the war by positively mobilizing social solidarity. This was especially marked in France, where socialists organized massive social pro- vision for soldiers families and others in need during 191415, offering communal meals and other supports.¹⁹ Even when discontent emerged, the civil truce perpetuated a particular language, taking the idealized patriotic consensus for its common ground.

As the war dragged on, the Left found this a weakness and a strength. Appeals to patriotic community created potential openings for left-wing agitation as well as initially silencing it. In the Rights calculation, war was certainly intended to banish opposition. As Wilhelm II famously declared on 4 August 1914: I know no more parties; I know only Germans.²⁰ But this could easily backfire. Patriotic consensus bent not only to the insistent pressure of trade union pragmatists for a reformist payoff but also to pop- ular ideals of social justice. Placing themselves inside the consensus freed working-class advocates to demand a more equitable distribution of the wars burdens, often via militant direct action, secure in the moral justifi- cations that government appeals to common sacrifice delivered. War en- thusiasm gave the Left vital leverage once hardships started to pinch, be- cause grievances could employ the very language that official patriotism approved. Class inequities aggravated by the scarceties of the war economy were an obvious ground for populist complaint.

Within a year, working-class hardships tugged on the rhetoric of patri- otic sacrificeas shown by, for example, the food protests in Berlin in the spring of 1915 or the Clydeside rent strikes of MayNovember 1915. Civil truce couldnt stifle class combativity in the economic sphere. As war con- tinued, the egalitarianism in socialist editorials was matched by broadening working-class resentments of food shortages and the black market, declin- ing real wages and worsening conditions at work, the militarization of the

economy and escalating carnage at the front.²¹ The gap between govern- ment exhortations to common sacrifice and most peoples experiences of inequality fueled discontent.

In Germany, the watershed was the summer of 1916. Food shortages brought demonstrations in Du sseldorf, Frankfurt, Kiel, and Hamburg, with extensive rioting elsewhere, especially violent in Leipzig, Worms, Offen- bach, Hamborn, and Hamburg. This coincided with the Battle of the Somme and the worst casualties of the war. Antiwar demonstrations by SPD leftists occurred in Dresden, Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and Bremen. At the center were partially spontaneous actions supporting Karl Liebknecht, sentenced to penal servitude in June 1916 for opposing the war. Some 60 percent of workers in 65 Berlin factories (55,000 workers) responded to the strike call of shop stewards in the metalworkers union, with similar actions in Braunschweig and Bremen.

Behind this activity lay the restructuring of the working class in the war economy. Enormous numbers of men were in the army, which more than doubled in Germany from 5 to 11 million during the war. This not only depressed the industrial workforce but also required massive recruitment of women and youth into previously male industries. By 1918, women workers had risen from 22 to 34 percent of the total. In two years, female labor in German metalworking rose from 7 to 23 percent of the total and in electricals from 24 to 55 percent. In France, a quarter of the war industry workforce was female by 1918, and in the Paris metal industries it was a third. In German mining, iron, steel, metalworking, and chemicals there were six times more women in 1918 than 1913. Asimilar increase occurred in France, and in Britain the number of women in metals and chemicals grew from 212,000 to 947,000 by November 1918.²²

Economic mobilization involved comprehensive retooling of the econ- omy. Industries disconnected from the war necessarily suffered. Labor shifted into branches producing directly for the war, whose workforce in- creased by 44 percent in Germany 191418, with peace and mixed industries declining by 40 and 21 percent, respectively.²³ In tracking labor radicalism, historians have focused on the big conglomerations of war pro- duction, such as the German metal and engineering centers of Berlin, the Ruhr, and Stuttgart; the chemicals plants of Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, and Merseburg; comparable munitions complexes of Vienna, Budapest, Pilsen, and Turin; and the equivalent centers of Britain and France. But in smaller centers of industrial conversion the impact was hardly less intense.

Recruitment for war also involved huge migrations. In Italy, Turins population grew by one-fourth during 191118, doubling its wage-earners from 79,000 to 185,000 (or a third of total population).²⁴ Other economies couldnt meet their labor needs from the countryside: Britains alternative source was women, Germanys, conscripted foreigners.²⁵ It was the inter- action of these newcomers with the labor movements existing traditions

that proved explosive. In the most radical centers, an unruly influx of fe- male, young, and unskilled or semiskilled new recruits proved ready to follow the lead of the highly paid, exempted skilled workers who capital- ized upon both their indispensability and their self-conceived role as the vanguard of the working class.²⁶ Such war workers might be relatively protected against conscription and less badly hit by eroding standards of living. But dilution by hastily trained new labor threatened the work hierarchies, wage differentials, and craft traditions of the skilled men, the backbone of prewar unions and socialist parties.

In this sense, the war transformed the labor movements relationship to the overall working class, which was being drastically recomposed. By

1917, 64 percent of German trade unionists were at the front, and SPD membership had plummeted from over a million to only 243,000. Not surprisingly, socialisms most stalwart supportersnonconscripted skilled men in metalworkingstarted resenting the civil truce and its effects. Yet they found themselves surrounded by workmatesfemale, young, un- trainedwho were the opposite of the stereotypically class conscious. This changing sociology of labor was key for the snowballing grassroots mili- tancy of 191718. Neither previously unorganized new labor nor polit- ically experienced old labor could be contained. Where one lacked the formative loyalties of the movements pre-1914 traditions, the other felt those traditions damaged by the war economys needs.

By opening unprecedented access to decision-making in state and in- dustry, the centrally regulated war economy brought genuine gains for union and socialist party leaders. Right-wing socialists expected to parlay their patriotism into reforms by astutely managing organized labors new- found influence. But shopfloor workers mainly experienced these institu- tional gains as hardships. Beyond the wars human misery of killing, maim- ing, and separation and the horrible effects of a long war on living standards, official labors influence was bought at the expense of the workers shop-floor needs. If regulating the war economy was perceived as a form of socialism by right-wing socialists and union bureaucrats, for the ordinary worker it meant speedups, suspension of factory regulations, lower safety standards, the freezing of basic union rights, and general loss of control.

Thus the socialists integration into government was matched by rank- and-file alienation. In Britain, for example, national control of the labor supply was achieved via the Treasury Agreement of government and unions in March 1915, greatly toughened by conscription via the Military Service Acts of JanuaryJuly 1916. For overriding established labor rights and practices in this way, labor leaders certainly secured something in return: a system of military exemption for skilled workers; a framework of indus- trial conciliation, including the Ministry of Labour, Industrial Unrest Com- missions, and the Whitley Committee on Industrial Councils; and postwar

promises of social reform. When the Lloyd George Coalition was formed in December 1916, Labours entry to the Cabinet and the creation of the Ministry of Labour were essential to this political realignment.²⁷

This dovetailed with the official labor movements own reformist hopes, articulated in Britain via the War Emergency Workers National Commit- tee.²⁸ Elsewhere in Europe, the states regulatory actions were more au- thoritarian, involving rapid militarization of the labor force and tighter controls. This was notably so in Italy, where Central and Regional Com- mittees of Industrial Mobilization administered a draconian system of mil- itary discipline in all firms linked to the war effort, subordinating workers to given terms of employment on pain of dismissal, military prison, or dispatch to the front. In the wars last 10 months, 19,018 workers were sentenced to hard labor and another 9,522 to ordinary prison for aban- doning their jobs or other infractions, representing some 10 percent of all

military or exempted workers in designated auxiliary industries.²⁹

So the gains enjoyed by labors leaderships could be hard for ordinary workers to see. Unions were represented on the Italian Committees of In- dustrial Mobilization, became heavily involved in arbitration, and acquired the de facto legitimation the British unions gained from managing conscrip- tion. But while the Metalworkers Union (FIOM) and its secretary, Bruno Buozzi, might feel well pleased, they were resented among metalworkers, including the FIOMs own members, who grew from 11,000 to 47,000 during the war. Italian rank-and-file militants turned increasingly against the Mobilization system, organizing via their own Internal Commissions. Here, the promise of labors integration started generating its oppositea combative movement of class hostility, stressing the incompatibility of la- bors interests with capital. The British version of the Internal Commissions was the shop stewards movement, spreading from Clydeside in 191516 to Sheffield and other centers of munitions. In the words of the Clyde Workers Committee: We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately if they misrepresent them.³⁰

After two years of war, this created big tensions in all national labor movements. The German Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (December 1916) encapsulated the contradiction. On one side, it was a striking success for the trade union and SPD right. Though aimed originally at full-scale mili- tarizing of labor to channel workers into industries needing them most, the measure was partially stolen by Karl Legien and his fellow socialists as it passed through the Reichstag. It created arbitration boards with union rep- resentation, extending potentially to general questions of wages and work- ing conditions. For Legien, this was a decisive gain of union recognition, wrested from government over employers bitter opposition. It stopped the drainage of union membership. For the SPD right, it was a key fruit of the new collaborative course. Yet the Law deepened unions complicity in po- licing their own members. If in practice the job-changing of skilled metal-

workers was little reduced, the Law scarcely allayed their grievances. In the depths of the wars worst winter, the leaderships latest patriotic act only widened the gap between the movements official policies and its rank-and- file desires.³¹

THE BROADENING OF DISCONTENT By late 1916, a conjunction of factors brought radicalization on a European scale. The cruel hardships of the war, the return of rank-and-file industrial militancy, the regroupment of the revolutionary left at Zimmerwald, and the growth of antiwar politics in the socialist mainstream all brought the patriotic consensuses of 1914 under strain. The dominant grouping still comprised the reformist majorities of most prewar socialist parties, whose leaderships opted for national defense in August 1914. These included not only the parties of the main combatants, with the ambiguous exception of imperial Russia, but also the northern neutrals in Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden. Exceptions were the parties in Italy, Switzerland, the Balkans, and the territories of the Russian empire, but even there opposing the war didnt prevent strong reformist currents from emerging.

As war dragged on, it grew harder to keep the broadest patriotic con- sensus together. Opposition grew in the French and German movements during 1916, with an evenly balanced executive at the SFIOs December Congress and the forming of the SPD opposition in March. By early 1917, this had gone further. While none of the German opposition wanted to break with the larger movement and their own past, the SPD leadership left them no choice. The party executive moved against the Lefts strong- holds and seized control of its newspapers. When the opposition tried to defend themselves against further reprisals, the executive moved for expul- sion. Aseparate party became the only choice, and on 68 April 1917 the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was launched.