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Keeping the Faith: The German Syndicalists in the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Wayne Thorpe
Wayne Thorpe
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

In December 1918, in its first conference since the outbreak of the Great War, the revolutionary syndicalist Free Association of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften — FVdG) noted that it was the only trade union organization in the country that did not have to readjust its program with the return of peace. The syndicalists were alluding to the fact that theirs had been the only German workers' organization to have adopted an internationalist rather than a patriotic response to the war. The FVdG had neither supported the national cause nor endorsed the Burgfrieden, or civil truce, whereby all factional disputes were to be set aside and all sectoral interests subordinated to the higher interests of the imperiled nation. Its opposition to the war, its refusal to cooperate with the state and the employers, moreover, had made the FVdG a beneficiary of the growing radicalization of German workers. In the immediate postwar period it expanded at a rate six times greater than any other labor organization in the country.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 195 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2000

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References

1. Der Syndikalist, 4 January 1919.

2. Der Pionier, 15 October 1913.

3. The 1914 membership figure is from the FvdG, Protokoll über die Verhandlungen vom 11. Kongress, (Berlin, 1914), 20Google Scholar (congress proceedings cited hereafter as Protokoll FVdG, with congress year); 1907 figure: Protokoll FVdG 1908 (Berlin, 1908), 24. There has been little published on the syndicalists during the war, but on the pre- and postwar period, see Bock, Hans Manfred, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus 1918 bis 1923 (Meisenheim/Glan, 1969)Google Scholar; Vogel, Angela, Der deutsche Anarcho-Syndikalismus (Berlin, 1977)Google Scholar; Müller, Dirk H., Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918 (Berlin, 1985)Google Scholar; Rübner, Hartmut, Freiheit und Brot: Die Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (Berlin, 1994).Google Scholar

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29. Protokoll FVdG 1914, 21.

30. As of October 1914: Mitteilungsblatt, 27 March 1915.

31. Rundschreiben. 15 November 1916, 1 February 1917; metalworkers: Mitteilungsblatt, 6 February 1915.

32. See for example Rundschreiben, 1 October 1916 (woodworkers); Mitteilungsblatt, 21 November 1914, 20 February 1915 (carpenters); Mitteilungsblatt, 30 January 1915.

33. Some examples of the campaign against collective bargaining: Mitteilungsblatt, 5 June 1915; Rundschreiben, 15 December 1915; 1 October, 15 November 1916.

34. Mitteilungsblatt, 6 March 1915. See also Rundschreiben, 15 February 1917.

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43. Quoted in Rundschreiben, 1 June 1916.

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54. Friedeberg, , Parlamentarismus und Generalstreik (Berlin, 1904), 25.Google Scholar Friedeberg reiterated his views in a series of articles in Die Einigkeit, 16 September–7 October 1905. On Friedeberg's influence on the FVdG, see especially Müller, , Gewerkschaftliche Versammhungsdemokratie. 173–82Google Scholar; also Rübner, , Freiheit und Brot, 28–30Google Scholar; Vogel, , Der deutsche Anarcho-Syndikalismus, 57–58.Google Scholar

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67. See for example Syndikalisten (Stockholm), 18 October 1913; La Protesta (Buenos Aires), 5 November 1913; Solidaridad Obrera (Barcelona), 16 October 1913; De Arbeid (Amsterdam), 13 October 1913.

68. Die Einigkeit, 18 October 1913; 25 July 1914.

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74. See the annual reports of the NAS: Jaarverslagen 1916 en 1917, 60, 63; Jaarverslagen over 1918 en 1919, 74.

75. Figures for social democratic, liberal, and Christian trade unions adapted from Moses, Trade Unionism in Germany. 1:211; figures for syndicalists adapted from Manfred Bock, Hans, “Anarchosyndicalism in the German Labour Movement: A Rediscovered Minority Tradition,” in Revolutionary Syndicalism: An international Perspective, ed. Marcel van der, Linden and Thorpe, Wayne (Aldershot, 1990), 61, 68.Google Scholar

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80. See the NAS-SAC correspondence. 24 June to 20 November 1919, SAC Archive, EXIII–l; Diego Abad de Santillan. “La Asociacion Internacional de los Trabajadores: su historia, sus ideas, su porvenir.” La Revista Internacional Anarquista, 15 January 1925.

81. Die internationale Gewerkschaftsbewegung: Organ des internationalen Gewerkschaftsbundes, July 1921, 29, 54–55.

82. Bericht über die Internationale Syndikalistische Konferenz gehalten zu Berlin vom 16. bis 20. Dezember 1920 (Amsterdam, 1921); Der Syndikalist, no. 51/52 (1920); De Arbeid, 1 January 1921; La vie ouvrière (Paris). 14 January 1921.

83. On the 1920 and 1922 Berlin gatherings, see Thorpe, Wayne. “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923 (Dordrecht, 1989), 149–60, 244–56.Google Scholar

84. Syndicalist resistance continued after 1933. Nearly ninety syndicalists appeared in a Ruhr court in 1938. for example, charged with acts “preparatory to the commission of high treason,” and as late as 1940 FAUD members were smuggling endangered dissidents over the Dutch border. Bock, “Anarchosyndicalism,” 75. See also, Klan, Ulrich and Nelles, Dieter. Es lebt noch eine Flamme: Rheinische Anarcho-Syndikalisten/-innen in der Weimarer Republik und im Faschismus (Grafenau-Döffingen. 1986)Google Scholar; Theissen, R. et al. , Der Anarcho-Syndikalistische Widerstand an Rhein und Ruhr (Meppens-Ems, 1980).Google Scholar On exiled German syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War, see Souchy, Augustin. Anarcho-Syndikalisten über Bürgerkrieg und Revolution in Spanien (Darmstadt, 1969)Google Scholar; Degen, Hans Jürgen and Ahreus, Helmut, eds., Wir sind es leid, die Ketten zu tragen …: Antifaschisten im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg (Berlin, 1979).Google Scholar

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87. The French CGT, which had no social democratic trade union rival, and in which revolutionaries and reformists mingled, supported the war, although even within it an antiwar minority soon emerged.

88. See Roth, Guenther. The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, 1963)Google Scholar; Groh, Dieter, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Atteutismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt am Main, 1973)Google Scholar: Lidtke, Vernon, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

89. There are, to my knowledge, no specific studies of syndicalist associational life in wartime such as Rübner (Freiheit und Brot) provides for the Weimar period.

90. Die Einigkeit, 25 July 1914.