The Great War Triggers an International Strike Wave

9 November 1918: Call for a Berlin General Strike

By Jay Winter

From: "The Second Great War, 1917-1923," Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar, Vol. 7. 2018

My argument is that  there was a fundamental difference in the way war was waged in 1914–17 compared to 1917–24. What separates these two phases is that prior to 1917, war mobilization entailed the forced unification of social classes and ethnic groups behind the war effort. To be sure, this effort succeeded in a muffling or masking of internal conflicts in order to provide the armies with the men and materiel needed for victory. After 1917, internal conflicts re-emerged, perhaps with added force because of their suppression over a period of three years, and turned a culture of war mobilization on both sides into a culture of war anxiety. The first aimed at unity; the second focused on internal divisions, hatreds, and resentments, some of long standing, some just invented.

In effect in early 1917, all combatants faced the emergence of a second war culture different from the culture of war mobilization of the first 20 months of the war. Alongside l’Union sacrée the suspension of partisan politics was a host of fractures, in which the suspicion or worse of one’s fellow countrymen provided the basis for attacks, rhetorical or physical, which had focused, in the first part of the war, on the foreign enemy. Now the enemy lived within, and posed a threat to the nation and the war effort. This was as true of Irishmen in revolt against Britain in 1916, as it was of Jews in  Imperial Germany, whose supposedly low levels of military participation became the subject of a botched army Census which wound up proving the  opposite. Jews were disproportionately present at the front. The Jew Census was quickly shelved, the archives destroyed, but the sentiments behind it festered. 

On the Ides of March 1917, with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the old  order on both sides faced a new menace: the prospect of social unrest leading to revolution and civil war. The specter of trans-national class conflict intersecting with global military conflict, justifies our sense of rupture in the midst of the Great War. That threat fed the new culture of war anxiety, which emerged as the material and human toll the conflict exacted spiraled to unprecedented levels. What requires us to divide the war into two parts is this rupture, this sense that the bitterness felt about domestic traitors grew from early 1917 onward and deepened ominously after the Armistice of  November 1918. The politics of domestic division and hatred dominated political, economic, and social life for years thereafter. 

This difference between imperial and revolutionary perspectives was made blindingly explicit when, on 23 November 1917, the new Bolshevik regime in Russia published verbatim in Pravda documents from the tsar’s Foreign Ministry, producing undeniable evidence of the imperial future the Allies had in mind. These imperial ambitions became problematic when the United States entered the war in April 1917. President Wilson’s commitment to open diplomacy and the principle of national self-determination cut right across the imperial outlook and designs of the other belligerents. If tens of millions of men had suffered and died on both sides so that imperial power could change hands, then those betraying these nations at war were the liars and hypocrites in power. 

Multiple social divisions re-emerged in a deepened form, in this, the first phase of the second Great War, and on both sides. Independently of the Russian Revolution, domestic conflict broke out in industry. After three years of industrial mobilization, the first stage of a series of massive strike waves spread through Europe. [As shown in this graph] these strike waves lasted until roughly 1923. 

Click on Image to Enlarge

Scale on Left Represents Man-Hours Lost Due to Strikes

The phenomenon was both war-related in the way it reflected wartime inflation and inequality of sacrifice and followed secular trends. Since the 1880s, moments of major trade union growth were often followed by strike activity. The year 1917 presented no exception; there had been a massive influx into trade unions in all combatant countries after 1914. Furthermore, the intensity of the strikes in 1917 and after suggested that the postponement of workers’ demands on wages and conditions of labor, which had occurred in all belligerent countries and some neutral ones since 1914, acted like the lid of a pressure cooker. Inflation fueled the fire, and trade unions and other social groups, in particular women protesting shortages and  outrageous food and fuel prices, took to the streets or downed tools. They  did so despite understanding the desperate needs of the war machine. Indeed, the March revolution in Russia was triggered by a women’s protest over bread prices.