Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [288]
As drafted by a committee under Bebel’s direction, the final result managed to accommodate all points of view, short of Hervé’s insurrectionary strike, in a form calculated neither to alarm the public prosecutor in Berlin nor alienate any important section of the Congress. Bebel had prevailed. The resolution did not mention general strike. It reaffirmed the class struggle, the nature of war as inherent in capitalism and the demand for citizen armies to replace standing armies, but stated that “the International is not in a position to prescribe in a rigid form the action to be taken by the working class against militarism.” It recommended the usual “ceaseless agitation” and declared in favor of arbitration and disarmament. The addition sponsored by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, pruned to respectability, pledged the working classes and their parliamentary representatives to exert their utmost efforts to prevent the outbreak of war “by using the means which seem most effective to them”; if war should nevertheless break out they were to work for its speedy termination and meanwhile “exploit the crisis with all their strength thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalism.”
In 1909 a people suddenly rose in a strike against war with tragic results. It was not an organized movement but, as in the Russian rising of 1905, a spontaneous outbreak. Red Week in Barcelona, called by the Spaniards la semana tragica, was a mass protest against the conscription of soldiers for a campaign in Morocco which was considered by the workers a war in the interests of the Riff mine-owners. A strike initiated by the Labour Federation of Barcelona became overnight an outpouring of the people themselves, especially the women, against war, rulers, reaction, the Church and all the elements of an oppressive regime. Stamped out in gunfire and blood, the rising aroused Socialist wrath over the trial and execution of one man, Francisco Ferrer, but excited no concern for the problems or techniques of revolt.
In the same year, a general strike was called by the National Federation of Labour in Sweden in protest against the increasing use of lockouts by employers. Involving nearly 500,000 strikers and lasting a month, it was broken by the Government’s threat of permanent dismissal and loss of pensions and by the success of the upper classes in organizing brigades to carry on essential services. Activity was easier to organize than the inactivity of folded arms.
In the same year, the shadow of war moved nearer when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in a challenge which Russia, not yet recovered from her troubles, had to swallow, the more so as the Kaiser proclaimed his stand in “shining armor” at his ally’s side. Austrian Socialists could not resist a thrill of national pride. The Socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung of Vienna published a series of chauvinist articles which caused the Serbian bourgeois press malicious joy in pointing out that international solidarity of the working class was not so solid as supposed.
In England the anti-German wave swept up Blatchford, who for all his Socialism had, as an old soldier, supported the Boer War. With Hyndman he now conducted a campaign for conscription in his paper, the Clarion. Branding them as betrayers of Socialism, Keir Hardie still believed “absolutely that organized labour would never take part in another orgy of workmen’s blood.” Nor was he alone. The mystique of the working class standing as one, in heroic consciousness of itself, was strong. Sam Gompers, born to the working class himself like Hardie, and concerned all his life with workingmen and their affairs, believed in it. When he came to Europe to attend an international Trade Union Congress in 1909, the primary impression he took away was “the fact of the solidarity today in the sentiment of the masses of Europe.” Still the unconscious Socialist, he believed the struggle