A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (58 page)

Spain had not taken part in the war because its rulers were split between the pro-German sentiments of the court and the pro-Anglo-French sentiments of the bourgeoisie (and the Socialist Party of Pablo Iglesias). But rising prices had devastated the living standards of its industrial and agricultural workers. There had been a widespread but unsuccessful general strike in the summer of 1917, and a new wave of militancy erupted as 1918 progressed.

The years 1918-20 were known as the
Trienio Bolchevista
(‘the Bolshevik three years’) in southern Spain, with its vast estates manned by seasonally employed day-labourers. There was ‘a rising wave of organisational activity, strikes, confrontations and meetings’,
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encouraged by news that the Bolsheviks in Russia were dividing estates up among the poorer peasants. ‘Here, as everywhere else,’ wrote the American novelist Dos Passos, ‘Russia has been the beacon fire’.
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Three great strikes swept the area, with labourers occupying the land, burning down the houses of absentee landlords and sometimes setting fire to the fields. ‘Bolshevik-type republics’ were proclaimed in some towns, and it took the dispatch of 20,000 troops to break the momentum of the movement.
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The agitation was not confined to the south. During a week long strike in Valencia workers renamed various streets ‘Lenin’, ‘Soviets’ and ‘October Revolution’, and widespread bread riots in Madrid led to the looting of 200 shops.
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The most serious struggle was in Catalonia early in 1919. Workers struck and occupied the La Canadiense plant, which supplied most of Barcelona’s power, paralysing public transport and plunging the city into darkness. Some 70 percent of the city’s textile plants went on strike, as did the gas and water workers, while the printers’ union exercised a ‘red censorship’. The government imposed a state of emergency and interned 3,000 strikers. But this did not stop what seemed like a capitulation by the employers. There was a short-lived return to work until the government provoked a new strike by refusing to free some imprisoned strikers. It brought troops with machine-guns into the city, armed 8,000 bourgeois volunteers, closed down the unions and crushed a general strike within a fortnight. The back of the workers’ movement in Catalonia was eventually broken as gunmen in the pay of the employers shot down union activists. Anarchist CNT members like Garcia Oliver, Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durutti retaliated by assassinating ruling class figures. Their activities only served to further fragment the workers’ forces. But a deep-seated class hatred remained within the Catalan working class, to explode at intervals over the next 17 years.
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The rising tide of workers’ struggle in 1919 was not confined to Europe. The US witnessed the biggest attempt yet to unionise its unorganised industries, with a bitter strike of 250,000 steel workers. Australia exploded in ‘the most costly series of strikes yet known…in 1919, some 6.3 million days were lost in industrial disputes’.
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Winnipeg in Canada experienced a general strike as part of a wave of agitation across western Canada and the north west coast of the US.

The revolutionary upheavals in Western Europe peaked in 1920 with decisive struggles in Germany and Italy.

The series of regional civil wars in Germany inflicted massive casualties on workers as they moved from a parliamentary to a revolutionary perspective—the usual estimate of the number of dead is 20,000. But the country’s traditional rulers were still not happy, and many now felt strong enough to dispense with the Social Democrats and take power themselves. On 13 March troops marched into Berlin, declared the government overthrown and appointed a senior civil servant, Kapp, in its place.

The thugs armed by the Social Democrat leaders had moved from attacking the left to attacking those same leaders. It was a step too far, and produced a bitter reaction among rank and file workers who had accepted the Social Democrats’ past excuses for working with the generals. The head of the main trade union federation, Legien, called for a general strike, and across Germany workers responded.

In key areas, however, the response was not just to stop work. People also formed new workers’ councils, took up arms and attacked columns of troops known to be sympathetic to the coup. In the Ruhr thousands of workers, many with military experience, flocked to form a Red Army which drove the national army, the Reichswehr, from the country’s biggest industrial region. Within days the coup had collapsed. The Social Democrat ministers returned to Berlin and made a few left wing noises before throwing in their lot once more with the Reichswehr as it used its normal bloody methods to restore ‘order’ in the Ruhr.
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In Italy 1919 and 1920 were known as ‘the two red years’. Workers started a wave of strikes and flocked into the Socialist Party, which raised its membership from 50,000 to 200,000, and into the unions. Strike wave followed strike wave. The summer of 1919 saw a three day general strike in solidarity with revolutionary Russia. In the spring of 1920 Turin metal workers waged a bitter but unsuccessful strike aimed at making the employers recognise factory councils—which were viewed by revolutionaries around Antonio Gramsci’s journal
Ordine Nuovo
as the beginning of soviets.

The militancy reached a climax in August. Engineering workers in Milan reacted to a lockout by occupying the factories. Within four days the movement had spread throughout the country’s entire metal working industry and involved 400,000 workers: ‘Wherever there was a factory, a dockyard, a steelworks, a forge, a foundry in which
metallos
worked, there was a new occupation’.
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An estimated 100,000 workers in other industries followed the metal workers’ example. People no longer regarded this as a simple economic struggle. They began to make and store weapons in the factories. They kept production going because they believed they were inaugurating a new society based on workers’ control: ‘These hundreds of thousands of workers, with arms or without, who worked and slept and kept watch in the factories, thought the extraordinary days they were living through “the revolution in action”.’
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The government was paralysed. In the south, peasants returning from the war had begun to spontaneously divide the land. Soldiers in Ancona had mutinied to avoid being sent to fight in Albania. The prime minister, Giolitti, feared unleashing a civil war which he could not win. He told the Senate:

Instead he operated on the assumption the metal workers’ union leaders would concede a peaceful outcome to the dispute and the Socialist Party leaders would not challenge the union leaders’ decision. This would leave the employers free to fight another day. He was proved right. The Socialist Party formally decided the occupations were the responsibility of the union leadership, and a special convention of the main union federation then decided by three votes to two to reject calls for revolution and reach an agreement with the employers. The core of the movement, the metal workers in the major factories, felt demoralised and defeated. They had fought for a revolution and all they had got were a few minor and temporary improvements in wages and conditions.

Revolution in the West?

The Ruhr Red Army and the Italian occupations of the factories give the lie to the argument that there was never any possibility of revolution in Western Europe—that it was all a fantasy in the minds of Russia’s Bolsheviks. In the spring and summer of 1920 very large numbers of workers, who had been brought up in capitalist society and taken it for granted, embarked upon struggles, and in doing so turned to a revolutionary socialist view of how society should be run. World revolution was not a fantasy in August 1920, with the Russian Red Army approaching Warsaw, the memory of the defeat of the ‘Kapp Putsch’ in the mind of every German worker and the Italian factories on the verge of occupation.

It did not happen, and historians of socialism have been discussing ever since why the revolution in Russia was not repeated. Part of the reason clearly has to do with objective differences between Russia and the West. In most Western countries capitalism had grown up over a longer historical period than in Russia, with more chance to develop social structures which integrated people into its rule. In most Western countries, unlike Russia, the peasantry had either been granted land (as in southern Germany or France) or obliterated as a class (as in Britain), and therefore was not a force with the potential to challenge the old order. Most Western states were also more efficient than the aged ramshackle state apparatus of tsarism, and so had managed to survive the trauma of the war better.

But such objective factors cannot explain everything. As we have seen, millions of workers in the West did move towards revolutionary actions and attitudes, even if this happened a couple of years after the same shift in Russia. But moving to a revolutionary attitude, or even engaging in revolutionary action, is not the same as making a revolution. That requires more than a desire for change. It requires a body of people with the will and understanding to turn that desire into reality—the will and understanding provided in the great bourgeois revolutions by Cromwell’s New Model Army or Robespierre’s Jacobins. Such bodies simply did not exist in Germany and Italy in the vital months of 1920.

The socialist movements in Europe had generally grown up during the years of relative social tranquility between 1871 and the early 1900s. They had gained support because of the bitterness people felt at the class divisions in society, but it was mainly passive support. They had built a whole set of institutions—trade unions, welfare societies, cooperatives, workers’ clubs—opposed in principle to existing society, but in practice coexisting with it. Through the running of these institutions they enjoyed a secure livelihood and even, as elected representatives, a certain level of acceptance from the more liberal members of the ruling class. They were in a position in some ways analogous to that of late medieval merchants and burghers, who combined resentment against the feudal lords with a tendency to ape their behaviour and their ideas. Many of the feudal lower classes had tolerated such behaviour because they took the existing hierarchies for granted. So too the rank and file of the workers’ movement were often prepared to put up with their leaders’ behaviour.

The mass strikes of the years immediately before the war had given birth to militant and revolutionary currents which challenged these attitudes, and the war had produced further splits. There tended to be an overlap between hostility to the prevailing reformism and hostility to the war, although reformists like Bernstein and Kurt Eisner did dislike the war. By its end three distinct currents had emerged.

First, there were the pro-war Social Democrats of the Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske sort, for whom support for the war was an integral part of their acceptance of capitalism. Second, there were the revolutionaries, who opposed the war as the supreme barbaric expression of capitalism and who saw revolution as the only way to end it once and for all. Third, there was a very large amorphous group which became known as ‘the centre’ or ‘the centrists’, epitomised by the Independent Social Democrats in Germany. Most of its leaders accepted the theory and practice of pre-war socialism, and saw their future essentially as operating as parliamentarians or trade unionists within capitalism.

During the war the centrists called for existing governments to negotiate peace, rather than for mass agitation that might disrupt the war effort. After the war they sometimes used left wing terminology, but were always careful to insist that socialist aims could only be achieved in an ‘orderly’ manner. Typically, Hilferding of the Independent Social Democrats in Germany attempted to frame constitutional proposals which combined soviets and parliament. They repeatedly proposed plans for peaceful compromise that stalled the upsurge of workers’ activity to the advantage of the other side. As the revolutionary socialist Eugen Leviné told the court which sentenced him to death for leading the Bavarian soviet, ‘The Social Democrats start, then run away and betray us; the Independents fall for the bait, join us and then let us down, and we Communists are then stood up against the wall. We Communists are all dead men on leave’.
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Organisations of the centre typically grew very rapidly in the aftermath of the war. They had well known parliamentary leaders and a large press, and attracted very large numbers of bitter and militant workers. The German Independent Social Democrats probably had ten times as many members as Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartakus League in November 1918.

The Italian Socialist Party was the same sort of party as the German Independent Social Democrats. The approach of its leaders to politics was essentially parliamentarian, although they used revolutionary language and some, at least, did want a transformation of society. It also contained openly reformist elements—most notably a leading parliamentarian, Filippo Turati. It grew massively as the tide of struggle rose but also failed to provide the sort of leadership that would have channelled the anger and militancy of workers into a revolutionary onslaught against the state. The best known leader of the party, Serrati, admitted eight months after the occupation of the factories, ‘While everyone talked about revolution, no one prepared for it’.
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Pietro Nenni, who was to be a dominant figure in the Socialist Party for another 60 years, admitted, ‘The party was nothing but a great electoral machine, equipped only for the [parliamentary] struggle which, in theory, it repudiated’.
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Angelo Tasca, a Turin activist, recalled, ‘The method of the workers’ and socialist organisations…was alternatively to advise calm’ to ‘the over-excited masses…and promise them revolution’.
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‘Political life in Italy became one long meeting at which the capital of the “coming revolution” was squandered in an orgy of words’.
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