Struggle and Mutual Aid by Nicolas Delalande

Author:Nicolas Delalande [Delalande, Nicolas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

6 | SOLIDARITY AND THE MASSES

A storm was gathering over Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Everywhere the working masses were organizing and mobilizing into unions, parties, and cooperatives. The workers’ movement was no longer marooned on the margins of politics, while anarchist militants sowed terror all over Europe with their “propaganda by the deed.” Socialist members of parliament were elected in Germany, Sweden, France, and Belgium; strikes proliferated, reaching a paroxysm in the years 1905 to 1912. In the United States, social agitation continued unabated despite the decline of the Knights of Labor. The Pullman strike of 1894 in Chicago brought down a bastion of industrial paternalism. Even though no great political victories were won, American socialist leaders like Daniel De Leon or Eugene V. Debs (who ran several times for president at the head of the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901) were careful to build up links between socialists and syndicalists, in stark contrast to the “pure and simple politics” of the AFL, which remained stuck in the logic of professional unionism. Finally, in 1905 a revolutionary internationalist organization emerged in the United States, with the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

The end of the economic depression restored confidence and hope to workers both male and female, who coordinated campaigns across frontiers for such causes as the eight-hour day and the six-day week (with Sundays off). Meanwhile the numbers of union organizers and strikers increased beyond measure; the option of repression, which the authorities continued to use in France — notably at Fourmies in 1891 and at Villeneuve Saint-Georges in 1908 — provoked general outrage. Important social reforms began to be secured from the 1890s onward, and from these evolved the first forms of social protection, the right to work, and a formal recognition of the political rights of workers. In the United States the progressive movement, allied with independent social reformers, called for a regulation of capitalism and a general improvement of the condition of the working classes. All this was directly inspired by what was going on in Europe at the time, particularly in Germany.[1]

The massing of worker action depended on a parallel movement: the organizing and structuring of syndicalism internationally. It was no longer limited to skilled artisans united across frontiers, it also affected workers in heavy industry such as miners, dockers, transport workers, and textile employees. Now more numerous and better organized than ever before, workers were more likely to emphasize their class identities, even though their corporative allegiance remained fundamentally important too. Because of this, the strikes affecting every country in Europe took on a fresh dimension: henceforth they were to involve tens of thousands of strikers for several months at a time, under the persistent scrutiny of international public opinion. Local and transnational solidarities became essential tools of social struggle: the metaphor of war, so often used at the time to describe this new type of conflict, implied that thousands of workers and their families would need to be protected from extreme poverty and hunger.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.