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A Short History of the European Working Class Wolfgang Abendroth A Short History of the European Working Class A Short History of the European Working Class Wolfgang Abendroth Monthly Review Press New York and London Copyright © 1972 by New Left Books All Rights Reserved Originally published as Sozialgeschichte der europäischen Arbeiterbewegung hy S uhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, copyright Ο 1965 by Suhrkamp Verlag Translated by Nicholas Jacobs and Brian Trench Postscript translated by Joris de Bres Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-81766 First Printing Monthly Review Press 116 West 14th Street, New York, N. Y. lOOl I 33/37 Moreland Street, London, F C l Manufactured in the United States of America Foreword 7 1. The Beginnings up to the Defeat of 1848 9 2. The First International 27 3. Working-Class Parties and Trade Unions 41 4. The Second International up to the First World War 51 5. The Working-Class Movement between the Russian Revolution and the Victory of Fascism 69 6. The Working-Class Movement in the Period of Fascism 101 7. The Working-Class Movement after the Second World War 125 Postscript, 1971 157 Further Reading 198 Foreword Ever since the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth, the origin­ ally bourgeois movement for liberty and justice has changed the world. The concept of freedom has become a fundamental principle of all political organizations and ideologies, even where it was once denounced by governments and by feudal and absolutist political theorists as utopian and criminal nonsense. The working class trans­ formed this call for liberty from being a political slogan and made it a social demand. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, this demand has been made not only on behalf of the white race but of all man­ kind, including that great majority which the colonial expansion of industrial capitalism had initially subjected to exploitation and oppression. There have been times when the activity of the working-class movement has differed widely from its original claims, and it has not yet attained its goal. In the United States and in West Europe it has achieved a material standard of living which only fifty years ago ruling class theorists would have regarded as a dangerous dream threatening civilization with idleness and sensuality. In East Europe it has transformed the structure of society but undergone a period of despotism, just as after 1789 the bourgeois revolution in France appeared to end in the Napoleonic Empire, although it had swept away the basis of feudalism. In capitalist countries where the working class has the highest material living standards - in the United States and in West Eur­ ope - the labour movement appears to be paralysed within the self-imposed limitations of trade union conformism and to have, adopted the ideology of the ruling class. In exactly the same way, 8 after the foundation of the Reich in 1871 the German bourgeoisie welcomed the Hohenzollems, idolized Bismarck, and turned its back on the struggle for parliamentary democracy - all for the sake of economic prosperity. Was this, and is not its modern counterpart, not just a passing, if significant, phase of historical development ? And would it not be unpardonable provincialism to assume that the present situation in West Europe or anywhere else, constitutes the final outcome and end of world history ? Only a study of the development of the working-class movement in its historical totality can help us in the search for a full answer to this question - an answer on which all our efforts to gain a clear understanding of our present world depends. The working class movement began as a product of European history. It is therefore logical to start by limiting our study to Europe, although it should not be forgotten that the revolutions beyond its confines are now putting into practice ideas which have their origins in the European working-class movement. It is the aim of this book to further such study, and its form and content are determined and limited by this aim. I have intentionally omitted all scholarly apparatus because my purpose was to write a readable analysis and not a text-book. That does not mean that I have not made use of the relevant literature. But I do not want to give the impression that this book is more than a short outline. It is not the comprehensive history of the European working-class move­ ment which, despite many preliminary studies - above all Julius BraunthaPsHistory of the International - has still to be written. Wolfgang Abendroth ιφ5 Author’s note : The original edition of this book was written seven years ago. For this English-language edition I have added a post­ script on the recent history of working-class parties and trade unions in Europe. 7 9 7 / I The Beginnings up to the Defeat of 1848 From the mid sixteenth to the last third of the eighteenth century, the characteristic form of capitalist production was manufacture. In its first phase, artisans of different trades worked in one workshop with unskilled labourers under the control of a single capitalist. Later, manufacture developed into a form of collaboration between artisans of the same trade whose previous work was divided into different operations and separated. Each worker’s contribution to production as a whole was thus reduced to a series of mechanical actions and production costs could be lowered. Both these forms of manufacture destroyed the professional pride and future hopes of the apprentice. Objectively, in the era before manufacture, the workers also depended on selling their labour-power but they still had a real chance of eventually becoming independent. As long as the laws of the guilds limited this independence, it was the declared aim of the apprentice clubs, besides securing better work and living conditions, to go beyond these limits. In exceptional circumstances, their demands sometimes went still further. They were however unable to generate a movement with any continuity. The further evolution of manufacture changed this, even when the work of dependent producers was not concentrated under one roof but took the form of home industry. With the introduction of manu­ facture, work lost the tangible, meaningful unity it had still retained for the master craftsman’s apprentice. The social division of labour led to the subordination of the individual who became a completely isolated component, cut off from any sense of the meaning of the process as a whole and subjected to rigorous discipline. The indus­ trial revolution in the last third of the eighteenth century only carried this process to its logical conclusion. ΙΟ The origin and centre of this continuously expanding revolution was the machine. The worker capable of handling a single tool was superseded by a mechanism capable of operating a number of similar tools simultaneously. The human organ was superseded by mechani­ cal organization, independent of the limitations of human power. This totally transformed the whole productive process. Whereas in manufacture the organization of social labour was purely subjective - a combination of different operations - the new modern industry had in machinery a purely objective productive organism which con­ verted the labourer into a mere appendage of an already existing material condition of production. Henceforth it was no longer necessary to have either particular physical strength or hard-won practical skill to do most of the work. This brought with it a drastic increase in female and child labour, with disastrous consequences for the physical and mental well-being of the population; conse­ quences which characterized the first decade of nineteenth-century European capitalism and were repeated in the twentieth-century industrialization of the former colonies and o f‘developing countries’ with capitalist property relations. Capitalists are forced to seek maximum profits, so in its first phase industrialization automatically led to the continuous utilization of machinery. Thus, the triumph of the machine led to the lengthening of the working day and the intensification of labour. In the early period of manufacture, despite differences of interest between vari­ ous social groups, the workers tolerated the system. This was par­ ticularly true of peasants, deprived of their existence on the land by the systematic enclosures carried out by powerful landlords, and for whom the new industries provided an alternative livelihood. Never­ theless, this period also saw conflicts over wages and working hours and it was these conflicts that gave the workers their first taste of the differences of social interest between themselves and their employers. Now, with the coming of industrialization, the machines themselves competed with workers as means of production, throwing them out of work and creating an industrial reserve army wherever they were introduced. It was possible for such workers to find employment elsewhere, but under worse conditions. As Ricardo said : ‘The same factor which can increase income from the land (for landowners and Beginnings up to the Defeat o f 1848 11 capitalists) can simultaneously create a population surplus and make conditions for the labourers worse.’ Thus it was hardly surprising that the workers’ first reaction was to destroy the machines. Seventeenth-century Europe had already seen revolts against the first ribbon and lace looms. At first the machines had been forbidden. The Elector of Saxony only allowed them in 1765. The first mechanical wool-shearing machines were destroyed by English workers in 1758. To control the continuing mass panic, Parliament passed a law threatening anybody found guilty of destroying factories or machine-breaking with execution. The workers in turn repeatedly petitioned Parliament for the out­ lawing of machines. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they again resorted to more violent mass action. From 1811 onwards the movement grew so strong that, despite Byron’s outspoken appeal against such a law in the House of Lords in 1812, the government repeatedly fell back on legislation which made machine-breaking a capital offence.
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