Labor Insurgency and Class Formation

Abstract

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).

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