Between Revolution and Reformism. The European Working Class Movement in 1917 [antikvár]

As early as 1916 the signs of war-weariness began to show everywhere in Europe. lts manifestations were many. The split within the parliamentary faction of the German social democrats became final. In the Austrian socialist movement the pacifist groups had already voiced their dissenting opinion in Der Kampf and at the party conferences, but they remained a hopeless minority. By assassinating Stürgkh, the Austrian Premier, Friedrich Adler wanted to rouse the Austrian working class from its stupor and to make it take action against the war. In France the opposition to the war put up by the CGT and the socialist party gained in strength; it was growing ever more militant and this was shown by the conferences held at the end of the year. In England, the ILP took a position against the war, yet displayed an un-revolutionary attitude, while in the other socialist party, the British Socialist Party, the process which ended with the exclusion of the former from the Party, the nationalist party leadership (H. M. Hyndman, H. W. Lee etc.) was finished by the spring of 1916. The new party leadership was not only internationalist but radical as well, and the new daily of the BSP, The Call, was sympathetic to revolutionary solutions. Likewise, the two smaller English socialist parties, the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party, contin-ued to be internationalist and radical-minded. It was more significant that the discontent of the workers due to economie causes had assumed a political nature already several times in 1915, and an anti-war and very radical mass movement was in the process of developing in the winter of 1915 and early 1916. lts leadership was undertaken by the shop stewards.The underlying cause of all discontent was the war. The various elements of this feeling, whether the principal causes stemmed from socio-economic factors or from the political objectives of the movement, were interwoven and, though on several occasions in 1916 there were strikes of a clearly economie nature, in the following year the strikes were assuming a political colour in most cases.The great historie change, however, was undoubtedly ushered in by the revolution of February-March 1917 in Russia.