WORKING CLASS

The concept of class became a central organizing myth of nineteenth-century Europe. A narrative was constructed telling of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the working class's challenges to its hegemony. The invention of this terminology in approximately 1830 cannot be explained simply by the structural social changes generated by industrialization. Eighteenth-century Britain already had wage laborers in artisanal trades, protoindustry, agriculture, and new factories. They engaged in strikes, grain and anti-enclosure riots, and machine breaking—struggles underpinned by craft and community solidarity and justified as defense of a moral economy against emerging free-market practices. But the participants in these class conflicts before the emergence of a working class were called, variously, the crowd, the mob, or the people. Crucial changes in vocabulary emerged from the French Revolution. The bourgeoisie denounced "idle, parasitic" aristocrats and proclaimed its own virtues: industry, productivity, rationality, and moderation. British advocates of parliamentary reform eulogized the disenfranchised middle class of expanding industrial towns, claiming for them similar qualities. The rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the rights of man was sufficiently inclusive to arouse popular support. However, both the Revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain excluded workers from enlarged franchises. Outraged by this betrayal, politicized workers appropriated aspects of bourgeois discourse. They asked whether workers were not the truly productive class. A new terminology was born, generating mobilizing myths that were capable of providing a sense of identity for disparate groups and constructing a sociopolitical constituency. Soon contributions from Lyon silk weavers to a Saint Etienne miners' strike funds included messages of solidarity to "fellow members of the working class (la classe ouvrière)."

the construction of a class identity

Older usages persisted, however. In England, Chartist rhetoric still used the tropes of eighteenth-century radicals' denunciation of aristocratic "Old Corruption." Workers responded to narratives of "the people" promulgated by English Gladstonian liberals or French republicans. Yet workers proved adept at appropriating bourgeois discourses on property, domesticity, and family values for their own (class) purposes. Spitalfields silk weavers defended their threatened jobs by citing their rights to "property in labour" and insisted on male workers' need for a "family wage" to support their wives and children. Hence the concept of the working class emerged as a result of changing self-awareness, marked by a sharp linguistic shift.

Stories told by individuals and groups about themselves nurtured class consciousness. Most of the hundreds of nineteenth-century worker autobiographers used class as the central category for their interpreting life experiences, viewing the world through the prism of class differences. These were not typical workers. Most workers with the literacy and inclination to write were male and skilled and they valued education not because it would bring them social promotion but for the self-emancipation it offered, and for its use in the emancipation of what they considered their class. Their fascination with ideas led some of them to be dismissed as eccentrics by their workmates. Some were scathing about the fecklessness, lack of intellectual curiosity, and brutality of some fellow workers. Although some made contacts with bourgeois liberals, most rejected liberalism. Marginal to their own class, they were acutely aware of nuances of class distinctions. Some were what Antonio Gramsci later called organic intellectuals—still close to their own class yet aware of broad issues and active in constructing a plebeian public sphere. Crucially, the stories they told about themselves shaped a working-class identity by imposing coherent narratives on the flux of complex social realities. These—secular versions of Christian conversion stories—emphasized how early poverty, exploitation, and humiliations were transformed once reading opened their eyes to the system of capitalist exploitation. They metamorphosed from victims into agents. Their duty was to educate their fellow workers who, once aware of their situation, could build a better society. Whereas the United States constructed narratives of individual upward mobility that might be possible for ambitious immigrants, Europe produced narratives of class salvation via collective struggle. These autobiographers also reminded readers of both the history and myths of workers' struggles. One prerequisite for a critical, counterhegemonic view of the world, critical of dominant bourgeois identity, was consciousness of who one was, rooted in a sense of where one had come from.

class and solidarity

By 1914 the working class had become a sociopolitical actor. Karl Marx's goal, "the constitution of the working class into a political party," appeared achievable. Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), with one million members, secured 34 percent of the vote. Trade unions, once confined to craft elites, were becoming centralized, industrial, mass organizations. Britain and Germany each had four million union members by 1914. France regularly experienced over a thousand strikes per year, five times the 1880s average. Strike rituals—street demonstrations, appeals for worker solidarity—became part of everyday experience in industrial Europe. Whereas elites once feared disorder and disease from what they considered to be criminal and dangerous classes, now they devised strategies to counter challenges from organized labor, including electoral concessions, welfare and municipal reforms, and social imperialism.

Widespread structural proletarianization underlay these developments. But one cannot simply assume levels of working-class consciousness or mobilization from the processes of industrialization. Marx had explained the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 by arguing that, outside of Britain and parts of France and Germany, Europe's proletariat remained small and immature. The success of future revolutions required industrialization. Subsequent trends partly confirmed Marx's predictions of a polarization between capital and labor. Some homogenization of labor occurred. Artisanal trades declined and casual and migrant workers were recruited into semiskilled jobs in large mechanized factories, mines, steel works, and on railways. However, no monolithic trend emerged, rather development was combined and uneven. Everywhere, the heavy industry of the Second Industrial Revolution coexisted in symbiotic relationship with dispersed, archaic sectors, and relied on pools of migrant or protoindustrial labor. Despite Germany's spectacular industrial development—coal and heavy engineering, chemicals and railways—28 percent of its labor force remained agricultural in 1900; substantial artisanal and protoindustrial sectors remained (Solingen cutlery; Saxon textiles). France remained 60 percent rural, with peasant proprietors and sharecroppers outnumbering agricultural laborers. Northern coalfields, Lorraine steel, and heavy engineering in Parisian and Lyonnais banlieues (suburbs) coexisted with small, high-quality artisanal production. Two-thirds of Italy's industrial workers were in the Milan/Turin/Genoa triangle. Spain's industries (Asturias coal; Bilbao steel and shipyards; Catalan textiles and engineering) were islands in a rural sea. After the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, tsarist Russia's state-sponsored industrialization quintupled the industrial workforce, to three million, between 1890 and 1914. But alongside St. Petersburg's large engineering plants, Moscow textile factories, and Donbas coal mines, a huge peasantry remained. The proletariat exceeded 50 percent of the population only in Britain. Yet there, as in France and Germany, many new workers were white-collar employees (bank clerks, shop assistants) whose identification with blue-collar proletarians was problematic.

Such structural developments engendered changes in family patterns and communities. Artisans' children, who once married largely within their craft communities, now chose marriage partners from a wider working-class background. Wage differentials between British skilled and unskilled occupations narrowed steadily. Upward mobility remained rare: 90 percent of British manual workers' sons themselves did manual jobs. Hereditary working-class communities emerged—later idealized for their neighborly values, which contrasted with bourgeois individualism and the crass commercialism of an emerging mass consumer culture. The Paris Commune of 1871 was underpinned by community solidarities of popular faubourgs (suburbs) after Georges-Eugène Haussmann's large-scale urban renewal projects threw together displaced inner-city artisans and recent migrants. But no single, model working-class community existed. Metallurgical workers might live in single-industry company towns, such as the Schneider family's Le Creusot, run by one paternalist employer, or in industrial cities such as Düsseldorf. Large cities provided workers with a range of potential industries and employers, and wider possibilities of relations with other social groups. Yet there was often little contact between the older Parisian faubourgs and the industrial banlieues that emerged around the city's periphery. Lifestyles, cultures, and experiences inevitably differed widely between these and other types of community. Marx assumed that industrial concentration, by drawing workers together and creating shared experiences and grievances, would nurture class consciousness and organization. "Class-in-itself" would emerge naturally from "class-for-itself." However no simple correlation existed between levels of industrialization and worker militancy. Some workers in dispersed sectors proved more militant than others in what Marx considered more advanced sectors. Agricultural laborers, who were widely assumed to be deferential, supported anarchosyndicalist strikes in Apulia and the Po Valley in Italy, Andalusia in Spain, or the lower Languedoc vineyards in France. Half of unionized Italian workers in 1914 were in the Agricultural Workers' Federation (Federterra). The proletarianized peasants of southwest Russia were prominent in the Revolution of 1905. The Captain Swing revolt of rural workers in southern England in the early 1830s suggested that even "Hodge"—the stereotypical deferential, cowed English laborer—might resort to machine breaking and cattle maiming. Protoindustrial textile workers—favored by capitalists as a cheap, dispersed, and quiescent labor force—organized strikes in Dauphiné, France, and northern Italy in the 1890s. Marxists were suspicious of what they considered to be backward rural migrants to the city, whom they stereotyped as prone to drink and violence. Yet in late tsarist Russia, many such immigrants were radicalized by ongoing social conflict in their native villages, where some owned plots of land, and by their capacity to recreate the solidarities of the village commune (mir) in their urban neighborhoods.

Cross-national comparisons bring into question any rigid occupational determinism. Skilled engineering workers provided the backbone of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany as well as key Bolshevik cadres in St. Petersburg, Russia. In Paris in 1900s, they supported syndicalist strikes against "scientific management," which threatened their shop-floor autonomy. Yet the Victorian labor movement's reformism has been ascribed to the moderation of a relatively privileged labor aristocracy—including engineers, whose union proved keen to exclude the unskilled and avoid strikes by bargaining with employers.

Yet occupational groups were strongly marked by the nature of their jobs. Dockers were low-skilled,

low-status workers operating in casual labor markets within tough waterfront cultures (Barcelona, Marseille, Hamburg). Their levels of unionization were erratic, and their strikes marked by violence against strikebreakers. By contrast, printers were natural labor aristocrats—literate, self-taught worker-intellectuals, and among the first to unionize. Even Russian printers were moderates—requesting respect from employers and the state; they were pushed reluctantly toward menshevism only by tsarist brutality. Miners' politics varied widely with location and with the national political culture but the shared dangers of mining created intense workplace solidarity, reinforced by the strong community identities of isolated pit villages.

radical artisans and industrial workers

Radical artisans dominated the early labor movements. Paris was Europe's revolutionary capital. The thousands killed or arrested during the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx called the first example of the working class in power, were tailors, shoemakers, building craftsmen, and furniture makers—an occupational profile strikingly similar to that of the sans-culotte activists of 1793. In Britain the factory system came earlier than in France. Northern mill workers were active in Chartist agitation and strikes in the 1830s. But skilled workers—handloom weavers, London craftsmen, and Sheffield cutlers—were central to early labor protest. Militancy among France's emerging industrial proletariat was sporadic and unorganized. Many miners and forge workers lived in tightly controlled, isolated, paternalist company towns such as Decazeville. Textile mill workers were often women and children—unskilled, new to industrial work, lacking organizational traditions. The notorious slums of Lille engendered more drunken despair than they did organized protest. France relied on artisanal skills for high-quality goods—silks, porcelain, fashions, and furniture—for niche markets. But the skilled trades faced varied threats. Less skilled, sometimes rural, labor was employed to do simpler, subdivided tasks. Apprenticeship training deteriorated. The chances of journeymen becoming small masters declined. Trades came to be dominated by merchants, who put out raw materials and orders and controlled credit. Nevertheless, artisans possessed the resources to resist. Their skills were still required in up-market sectors. High literacy sustained a radical artisan press. Craft-dominated neighborhoods (the silk weavers' Croix-Rousse in Lyon; Faubourg Saint Antoine in Paris) had community solidarity, mutual aid, and cooperative schemes. Journeymen and small masters, united by their hatred of big merchants, often drank and sang together in cafés or goguettes (popular singing societies). They drew on traditions of artisanal organization, such as that of the compagnonnages, associations that aided "tramping" journeymen, which had roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where once artisans dreamed of a republic of small, independent producers, the inexorable advance of capitalism pushed them toward collective solutions. In 1848 French artisans hoped that an associationist republic—one sympathetic to their cooperative aspirations—would establish banks offering cheap credit and put out orders to producer cooperatives, which had fifty thousand members in Paris alone.

However, before one accepts that labor movements originated in the work-based culture and grievances of artisans, question need to be raised. Were French artisans militant less because of occupational grievances—which were present in other industrializing societies—than because their political aspirations were raised in the decades after the revolution by contact with neo-Jacobin republicans? Was the craft-proud radical artisan a myth constructed by radical journalists, some of them former artisans—an image designed to counter bourgeois stereotypes about the drunken, brutal dangerous classes? Artisans in relatively secure trades (for example, carpenters) proved less militant than shoemakers and tailors, many of whom wished to escape from trades degraded by the practice of sweating, which forced them to work ever-longer hours performing increasingly subdivided tasks for inexorably declining wages. Were artisans less precursors of later proletarian activists than reactionary radicals, their desperate rearguard actions fueled by awareness that the industrial juggernaut would overwhelm their culture and communities? Factory proletarians, by contrast, could envisage no alternative to the new industrial system on which their jobs depended. They took time to develop the solidarity required for effective class mobilization. Hence the gap in popular protest—in Britain after 1850, in France after 1870—as artisan radicalism faded and before new proletarian militancy surfaced.

Multiple frictions existed within the artisanal world. Pressures on specific trades could lead to conflicts between journeymen and masters, as happened in Germany, where masters' guilds persisted. Generational tensions also existed. In Paris in 1848, older journeymen fought on the barricades but younger workers were recruited into the Garde Mobile (Mobile Guard) to fight for order. Journeymen's compagnonnages had a heritage of internecine, ritualized violence and job competition that could obstruct trade union solidarity. But the major myopia of artisan culture was the issue of gender.

gender

The construction of the working class was always gendered. Although some utopian socialists did support women's rights and employment opportunities, Chartism championed male suffrage. Misogynistic artisanal spokesmen portrayed "cheap and docile" female workers as the primary threat to their jobs and skills. Textile mills, which destroyed the handloom weavers' livelihoods, employed mainly female and child labor. Seamstresses replaced male tailors. Friedrich Engels depicted the "unsexing" of Manchester workers, whose patriarchal power ebbed away when their wives and daughters worked in the mills while the men performed domestic chores. Their status was bound up with the independence derived from what they considered honorable labor and property in skill. British trade unionists campaigned for votes for "heads of families" and for a family wage. Capitalist exploitation of female labor was considered an evil, exposing women to physical degradation and sexual harassment, depriving workers' homes of women's domestic skills. Trade unionists welcomed protective legislation, hoping that restrictions on the hours women could work would disqualify them from key jobs.

Labor movement iconography depicting brawny steelworkers and miners reflected the male domination of key Second Industrial Revolution industries. Yet the ideal of the wife remaining at home was attainable only for skilled workers. Women constituted a high proportion of the labor force—over 35 percent in France, where many married as well as single women worked. Yet women's work was imagined as marginal and supplementary, even for single women. With rare exceptions, as for example in tobacco factories, women's jobs were viewed as unskilled. Many worked in deplorable conditions in the sweated domestic trades, beyond the reach of factory inspectors or unions. Unsurprisingly, women rarely expressed a strong sense of identity with their jobs.

By 1900 the SPD was arguing in principle for women's equality as workers and citizens while denouncing "bourgeois feminism" and insisting that female oppression was a product of capitalism and could be abolished only after the revolution. Marxist textile unions in Germany and northern France recruited female workers, but their male leaders marginalized women's specific demands to focus on men, who were able to vote. Women's proportion of French union membership doubled to 10 percent between 1900 and 1914, but the printers' craft union fought rearguard actions

against admitting them. Yet working-class women were active in protests outside the sphere of organized labor. They had long participated in food riots. Miners' wives policed pit villages during strikes, harassing and shaming strikebreakers. In Italy and southern French vineyards, women on picket lines dared troops to shoot the "weaker sex." Women's networks underpinned neighborhood solidarity, organizing tenant protests against landlords and providing abortion advice. As left-wing parties began to win control of some town councils in Britain, France, and Italy by the 1890s, their municipal socialism aroused women's interest, since it offered the possibility of child care, health clinics, and similar services. Despite this, when women were enfranchised in parts of Europe after 1918 many proved reluctant to vote for workers' parties, which they perceived as male dominated and insensitive to women's concerns.

the left and the right

Labor movements sought to construct a cohesive working class that would act as a class by shaping disorderly social realities into a coherent narrative. But prioritizing the story of certain types of workers risked ignoring or alienating others. Workers—as postmodernists emphasize—had a variety of potential identities. Class, which was constructed in the workplace, was but one. The European right wing's strength in the era of mass politics lay both in its appeal to popular strata—peasants, the petty-bourgeoisie, white-collar workers—who were alienated by the proletarian discourse of socialism and in its appeal to elements of a working class fragmented along lines of religion, nationality, and ethnicity.

There was no necessary incompatibility between being a devout Christian and a class-conscious worker. The Christian socialism of Britain's Independent Labour Party was rooted, like popular liberalism, in the nonconformist chapels of northern England. Images of Christ the carpenter adorned the walls of French producer cooperatives in 1848. However, Catholicism's ties to the right wing meant that the French labor movement was stronger where workers were recruited from anticlerical rural regions—the Limousin, the Centre—than from clerical bastions such as Brittany. Catholic workers were alienated by the Left's militant anticlericalism. In 1871 the Paris Commune executed clerical hostages. Churches were burned during Barcelona's semana trágica, the "tragic week" in 1909 during which a popular insurrection took over the city. Spanish anarchism tapped the fury of a religious people outraged by the clergy's alliance with the rich. Obreros conscientes (self-educated "conscious workers"), spreading the anarchist gospel to wretched landless laborers of Andalusian latifundia, preached of a millennium of social justice once the countryside was purged of taxmen, landowners, the Civil Guard, and priests. Catholic workers in devout regions such as Galicia and New Castile supported the right wing. The gulf between anticlerical male workers and their devout womenfolk was a feature of Latin Europe, fueling the men's suspicions that women's irrational superstition made them unfit for socialism. German socialism recruited among lapsed Protestants. Catholic workers in the Rhineland and Ruhr often supported the Center Party and Catholic unions.

Religious and ethnic tensions overlapped. Flemish migrants in northeastern French textile towns were criticized by French workers for their clericalism as well as for being strikebreakers. The Catholicism of Liverpool's Irish immigrants provoked a Tory vote among native Protestant workers. Ruhr trade union leaders oscillated between criticizing Polish miners for their docility and clericalism and lamenting their propensity for ill-disciplined wildcat strikes. French steel magnates in Lorraine exploited the cheap labor of Italian immigrants—who lacked the vote—while simultaneously playing on the xenophobia of French workers, who monopolized the skilled jobs, received company housing and voted for the radical Right in the 1890s. Jewish artisans in Paris's Marais district or London's East End were the targets of populist anti-Semitism.

In a Europe of economic rivalries and social Darwinism, workers were not immune to the lure of social imperialism. Elites had long exhibited what might be called class racism, viewing workers as a dark, inferior species—criminal and dangerous classes, who were diagnosed in quasi-biological terms and categorized by emerging criminology as pathologically degenerate. Eugenicists debated restricting the breeding of the poor in the East End slums of outcast London. But welfare legislation was introduced to improve the imperial "racial stock" and workers were re-classified as white. Birmingham workers voted for Tory municipal reformer Joseph Chamberlain, who argued that imperial protection guaranteed the export markets on which jobs depended. On the eve of 1914, mass demonstrations denounced South African mine owners for opening skilled jobs to black workers.

reformist and revolutionary labor movements

However, socialist parties were built, and they countered the power of organized capitalism, including cartels and employers' associations. The German model—a mass party affiliated to industrial unions—set the pattern for northern and central Europe, achieving 40 percent electoral support in Finland and 25 percent in Austria, despite growing tensions between German and nationally conscious Czech workers. However, no two societies had identical experiences of class formation and mobilization. The peculiarities of each labor movement reflected historical experiences, culture, the nature of the particular state, employer strategies, and the ideologies available to workers. A plausible—if banal—generalization is that liberal states engendered reformist labor movements and authoritarian regimes engendered radical or revolutionary labor movements.

This latter was clearly true of tsarist autocracy. Unions were illegal in Russia, political protest was clandestine, and troop massacres of workers' demonstrations (Bloody Sunday in 1905; the Lena goldfields shootings in 1912) eroded residual popular loyalty to the tsar. Pragmatic reformism was impossible. While populists placed their hopes in the huge, discontented peasantry, Marxists targeted the small but rapidly growing urban proletariat, particularly St. Petersburg's skilled metalworkers. Yet it is difficult to locate Russian protest in any specific section of the working class, for it involved broad strata of the people. The urban population's ties to village Russia made it difficult to disentangle worker and peasant grievances. Workers' attitudes toward the revolutionary intelligentsia were ambivalent; gratitude was tinged with resentment at their claims that only intellectuals could bring full class consciousness to the workers and channel spontaneous protest into coherent strategies.

The liberal British model was very different. The first industrial nation eliminated its peasantry before 1800. By 1900, it was 80 percent urban. It had a parliamentary tradition. The franchise was gradually extended to broad strata of the working class. The early Industrial Revolution had been a bleak age, marked by appalling slum and factory conditions, periodic mass unemployment, and stagnant real wages. But during the mid-Victorian economic boom, wages rose and employers accepted negotiation with unions, which had been legal since the 1820s. Many trade unionists supported the Liberal Party of Prime Minister William Gladstone, perceived as sympathetic to workers' democratic interests. Popular politics and labor relations became harsher in the Great Depression of 1873–1896. Rising unemployment and employer intransigence challenged illusions of ongoing progress under capitalism. Eventually the Labour Party (1900) emerged because of worker alarm at legal threats to union rights. But the party, which was designed for the pragmatic defense of trade union interests, not to build socialism, attracted only 7 percent of the vote. The British paradox is, thus, that the world's first and largest proletariat produced a small, nonsocialist, workers' party. A dense working-class culture did exist, a distinctive lifestyle identifiable by the 1870s that persisted into the 1950s. This was a world of flat caps, fish and chips, Saturday afternoon soccer, seaside rail excursions, hobbies, and allotment gardens. Its communal and collective values were incarnated in friendly societies (consumer cooperatives with millions of members) and unions. Yet it was an introverted culture, more fatalistic and consolatory than radical, exhibiting little aspiration to challenge bourgeois hegemony. Valuing the liberties guaranteed by the state, including the freedom to bargain collectively, it otherwise wished to be left alone. Monarchy was widely accepted as symbolic of British fair play and a regime that rarely used troops against strikers. Socialism revived after 1880 but found difficulty in penetrating this culture.

In Germany, certain factors encouraged a similar integration of labor into the national political scene. Universal male suffrage came relatively early (1870), as did welfare legislation (the 1880s), which was introduced to woo workers from socialism. Real wages rose gradually. Workers could take patriotic pride in Germany's burgeoning industrial strength, and many were employed in defense industries. However if the labor movement's daily practice was pragmatic, the SPD's official ideology was Marxist. Its revolutionary stance was a response to the more authoritarian face of the Reich. Real power lay with the Junkers, army, and bureaucracy, not with a largely impotent Reichstag. The regime treated labor as enemies of the Reich. Three-tier local suffrage systems kept the left from municipal power. Anti-union laws (1878–1890) and intransigent heavy industrialists hindered the development of collective

bargaining and reformist unionism. Heavy indirect taxation penalized working-class consumers and funded armaments programs. By 1914 labor reformists and radicals were evenly balanced, the latter insisting that hopes of gradual democratization of the Reich were illusory.

Socialism in Germany emerged in the 1870s alongside an emerging working-class culture and before unions were free to organize. It sought to mold working-class life, nurturing an unparalleled alternative culture of libraries, choral and theater groups, and sports clubs. Ninety-five socialist papers sold 1.5 million copies daily. The ideological impact of this remains unclear. Perhaps workers borrowed escapist novels from party libraries rather than Marxist tracts. An emphasis on the classic German musical and literary repertoire may have encouraged bourgeoisification of the tastes of respectable elements of the working class. Fears of jeopardizing this associational infrastructure may have made party officials reluctant to undertake open resistance to the Reich. Meanwhile, millions of workers outside this subculture, including rough elements of the working class, remained vulnerable to the lure of official patriotic propaganda and of an emerging mass commercial culture.

Reformist strands in French working-class culture were encouraged by the democratic Third Republic. Since the Revolution, labor activists had collaborated with radical republican lawyers and doctors who had flirted with associationist socialist rhetoric. Trade unions were belatedly legalized (1884). The republic sought to normalize industrial relations through arbitration procedures, encouraging reformist trends in the miners' unions through state enforcement of pit safety. Republican secular education appealed to working-class anticlericalism and fed their republican patriotism. Workers' autobiographies spoke affectionately of dedicated republican schoolteachers. Yet the republican/revolutionary tradition was deeply ambiguous. Workers felt betrayed by failures to implement the revolution's egalitarian promises by establishing a social republic. It was republicans who suppressed the Paris Commune in 1871 and still used troops to shoot strikers in major incidents (1891, 1900, 1908). Intransigent employers, reluctant to accept collective bargaining, used company paternalism or scientific management to deny unions shop-floor influence. Welfare was introduced later in France than in Germany and was less extensive. A revolutionary legacy of popular direct action inspired syndicalists, who dominated the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) union confederation in the 1900s. Syndicalism's emphasis on worker control appealed to craftsmen and skilled workers, who had once supported producer cooperatives. But it attracted unskilled laborers, dock workers, vineyard laborers, and dissident miners and rail workers critical of their unions' reformism. Bourses du Travail, where workers from various occupations met, coordinated regional strike strategies. The French labor movement was notoriously fragmented. Despite the foundation of a single Socialist Party in 1906, squabbling between reformist, Marxist, and quasi-syndicalist factions persisted. French socialist voting (16 percent) and union membership (10 percent) were below the levels in much of Europe. Yet levels of strike militancy and direct action were high.

After 1900, under Giovanni Giolitti, oligarchic Italian liberalism sought to integrate an emerging working class and woo reformist socialists by extending the franchise (1912) and introducing modest welfare measures and industrial relations reforms. But popular national identity remained weak in a peninsula fragmented by linguistic and regional diversities. Po Valley and Apulian landowners, suspicious of Giolitti's conciliatory strategy, hired gunmen to break strikes. Troops were also used against strikers, although fewer proletarian massacres took place than had happened in the 1890s. Maximalist socialists, who indulged in revolutionary rhetoric, and syndicalists were influential, particularly outside the northern industrial towns, whose workers were the principal beneficiaries of Giolitti's policies. Camera del lavoro, drawing together both skilled and unskilled workers from a variety of occupations, sustained a radical subversive culture (souversismo) that was at odds with the cautious reformism of the Socialist Party and the union confederation leaderships.

diversity and change

The European working class was too diverse to embrace any single strategy or ideology. Many patriotic, religious, deferential, or female workers were beyond the reach of organized labor, although some joined Catholic, company, or other unions. Much worker protest was unorganized. Despite integrationist governmental strategies and rising real wages in western, northern, and central Europe, the scale of labor unrest in the decade before 1914 suggests widespread—although diverse and uncoordinated—frustration and anger. Even Britain experienced quasi-syndicalist strike waves from 1911 through 1914, with miners, rail workers, and dock workers expressing dissatisfaction with union bureaucracies and Labour Party reformism. Syndicalist aspirations for job control, dismissed as archaic by centralized industrial unions, still resonated with craft workers such as the Solingen cutlers in Germany. From Paris to St. Petersburg, skilled workers, faced with the tough work discipline imposed by scientific management, which eroded shop-floor autonomy, responded with small-scale acts of everyday protest—mocking foremen, slowing down their work, sabotaging, and pilfering. In the rapidly expanding Ruhr mining towns of Germany, with low levels of union organization, workers clashed violently with management and police. Labor organizers struggled to contain what they considered the less respectable forms of worker protest. SPD leaders were delighted by a massive Hamburg suffrage reform demonstration in 1905 but blamed lumpen, criminal elements from the docks for subsequent looting and clashes with the police.

The disintegration of labor movement and of working-class communities in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Europe has prompted skepticism about working-class agency in earlier periods. Postmodernism's emphasis on multiple, flexible identities questions the primacy of work-based identities. It has become difficult to envisage a world where millions of people proclaimed themselves working class and proud of it and saw themselves as the salt, not the scum, of the earth. It is true that many workers' allegiance to labor movements was conditional, pragmatic, and instrumental. No working class is ever definitively made. Capitalism endlessly undermines communities, establishing new industries in fresh locations where workers struggle to establish new solidarities. Doubtless, workers' grasp of socialist theories was sketchy. Yet many workers did believe that history was on their side. The reports of police spies who listened to Hamburg workers' conversations in bars suggested that many ordinary workers had internalized the SPD's vision of the world.

Outside of the repressive regimes of eastern and southern Europe, labor movements had benefited from the liberal constitutional systems established after the 1860s. But, as European liberalism proved reluctant to adapt to mass politics, it was workers' movements that carried progressive hopes for a future world of social justice. Perhaps the march to war in August 1914 suggests that in the last resort patriotism trumped class identity and internationalist class solidarity. Yet many French workers imagined that they were defending their republican homeland against reactionary Kaiserism, just as German workers believed they were defending their hard-won gains against repressive tsarism.

Many such workers, and their counterparts across Europe, participated in the massive labor unrest of 1917 through 1921, which swept away three empires.

See alsoChartism; Class and Social Relations; Cooperative Movements; Engels, Friedrich; Industrial Revolution, Second; Labor Movements; Marx, Karl; Peasants; Socialism; Syndicalism; Utopian Socialism.

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