Workers, Politics, and Protest

As the nineteenth century entered its final decades, workers organized formal unions, which attracted the allegiance of millions. Unions reacted to workplace hardships, demanding a say in working conditions and aiming, as one union’s rule book put it, “to ensure that wages never suffer illegitimate reductions and that they always follow the rises in the price of basic commodities.” Businessmen and governments viewed striking workers as insubordinate, threatening political unrest and destructive violence. Even so, strong unions appealed to some industrialists because a union could make strikes more predictable (or even prevent them) and present worker demands coherently instead of piecemeal by groups of angry workers.

From the 1880s on, the pace of collective action for better pay, lower prices, and better working conditions accelerated. In 1888, for example, hundreds of young women who made matches, the so-called London matchgirls, went on strike to end the fining system, under which they could be penalized an entire day’s wage for being a minute or two late to work. The fines, the matchgirls maintained, helped companies reap profits of more than 20 percent. In 1890, sixty thousand workers took to the streets of Budapest to agitate for safer working conditions and the vote; the next year, day laborers on Hungarian farms struck, too. Across Europe between 1888 and 1890, the number of major strikes and demonstrations rose by more than 50 percent, from 188 to 289.

Housewives, who often acted in support of strikers, carried out their own protests against high food prices. They confiscated merchants’ goods and sold them at what they considered a fair price. “There should no longer be either rich or poor,” argued Italian peasant women. “All should have bread for themselves and for their children.” Housewives often hid neighbors’ truant children from school officials so that the children could continue to help with work at home. When landlords evicted tenants, women gathered in the streets to return the ousted families’ household goods as fast as they were removed. Meeting on doorsteps or at markets, women initiated rural newcomers into urban ways. In doing so, they helped cement the working-class unity created by workers in the factory.

Governments increasingly responded to strikes by calling out troops or armed police, even though most strikes were about working conditions and not about political revolution. Despite government force, unions did not back down or lose their commitment to solidarity. Craft-based unions of skilled artisans, such as carpenters and printers, were the most active and cohesive, but from the mid-1880s on, a movement known as new unionism attracted transport workers, miners, matchgirls, and dockworkers. These new unions were nationwide groups with salaried managers who could plan a widespread general strike across the trades, focusing on such common goals as achieving the eight-hour workday but also paralyzing an entire nation through work stoppages. Large unions had the potential for challenging large industries, cartels, and trusts.

Working-class political parties developed from unions. Workingmen helped create the Labour Party in England, the Socialist Party in France, and the Social Democratic Parties of Sweden, Hungary, Austria, and Germany—most of them inspired by Marxist theories. Germany was home to the largest socialist party in Europe after 1890. Socialist parties held out hope that newly enfranchised male working-class voters could become a collective force in national elections, even triumphing over the power of the upper class.

Those who accepted Marx’s assertion that “workingmen have no country” also founded an international movement to address workers’ common interests across national boundaries. In 1889, some four hundred socialists from across Europe met to form the Second International, a federation of working-class organizations and political parties that replaced the First International, founded by Marx before the Paris Commune. The Second International adopted a Marxist revolutionary program, but it also advocated suffrage (in countries where it still did not exist) and better working conditions.

Members of the Second International determined to rid the organization of anarchists, who flourished in the less industrial parts of Europe—Russia, Italy, and Spain—where Marxist theories of worker-controlled factories had less appeal. In an age of tough international competition in agriculture, many rural workers sought a life free from governments that backed the landowners’ interests. Thus, many advocated extreme tactics, including physical violence. “We want to overthrow the government . . . with violence since it is by the use of violence that they force us to obey,” wrote one Italian anarchist. In the 1880s, anarchists bombed stock exchanges, parliaments, and businesses. Members of the Second International felt that such random violence was counterproductive.

Workingwomen joined unions and workers’ political parties, but in much smaller numbers than men. Unable to vote in national elections and usually responsible for housework in addition to their paying jobs, women had little time for party meetings. In addition, their lower wages hardly allowed them to survive, much less pay party or union dues. Many workingmen also opposed women’s presence in unions. Contact with women would mean “suffocation,” one Russian workingman believed, and end male union members’ sense of being “comrades in the revolutionary cause.” Unions glorified the heroic struggles of a male proletariat against capitalism. Marxist leaders maintained that capitalism alone caused injustice to women and thus that the creation of a socialist society would automatically end gender inequality. As a result, although the new political organizations wanted women’s support, they dismissed women’s concerns about lower wages and sexual harassment.

Popular community activities further strengthened worker solidarity. The gymnastics and musical societies that had once united Europeans in nationalistic fervor now served working-class goals. Socialist gymnastics, bicycling, and marching societies promoted physical fitness because it could help workers in the “struggle for existence”—a reflection of the spread of Darwinian thinking to all levels of society. Workers also held festivals and cheerful parades, most notably on May 1—a centuries-old holiday that the Second International now claimed as a labor holiday. Like religious processions of an earlier time, parades fostered unity. As a result, governments frequently banned such public gatherings, calling them a public danger.