'Her Heart and Soul were with The Labour Movement': Using a Local Study to Highlight the Work Of Women Organizers Employed by the Workers' Union in Britain From the First World War to 1931

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Hunt
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Local Study ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Instinct and Organization: Intellectuals and British Labour after 1931

1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Dare
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Status ◽  
First World

In the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, the estimate outside Britain of the status of intellectuals in the British Labour movement grew to prodigal dimensions.

scholarly journals Protest und Streiks in der Schweiz in der zweiten Hälfte des Ersten Weltkriegs

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Bernard Degen ◽  
Christian Koller
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Linguistic Groups ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World ◽  
General Strike

Zusammenfassung Switzerland was spared direct involvement into the First World War, nevertheless the global conflict had tremendous political and economic impact on the neutral republic. Major antagonisms emerged between the different linguistic groups sympathising with opposing belligerent coalitions as well as between different social strata. Food and fuel shortages and wartime inflation as well as a lack of integration of the labour movement into the political system and its partial shift to the left resulted in a wave of strikes and protest in the second half of the war that continued into the first two post-war years. Its culmination was a national general strike in November 1918 lasting for three days upon the war’s conclusion, and that in bourgeois circles was wrongly considered an attempted revolution. Whilst this is considered the most severe crisis in modern Swiss history, from a transnational perspective, it was no more than a relatively mild variation of the worldwide upheavals going on at the time.

The Posthumous Lives of Thomas Muir

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pentland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the ways in which Thomas Muir was used by political activists, historians and writers in both Great Britain and Australia in the centuries following his death. It analyses Muir's posthumous lives as a case study of how, when and why revolutionary figures of the 1790s have become politically usable. It discusses three important contexts that help explain both revived interest in Muir and changed interpretations of his political significance: one was provided by two global conflicts, the First World War and the ‘age of revolutions’ between 1790 and 1848; the other was provided by the success of the Labour movement in the West of Scotland. The chapter shows how the transnational dimension of Muir's life has been at least partially recovered and his legacy shaped and deployed by an emerging Australian nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century.

MacDonald, Henderson, and the Outbreak of War, 1914

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 871-891
Author(s):  
Christopher Howard
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.

Repression, solidarity, and a legacy of violence: Spanish anarcho-syndicalism and the years of 'pistolerismo', 1919‐231

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Andrews
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Action Groups

Abstract During the First World War, the Spanish Labour Movement gained steadily in strength, and by 1919 the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) had over 700,000 affiliates. However, the ascendance of the anarcho-syndicalist movement met with severe government repression, especially in Catalonia. In November 1920, the authorities unleashed an all-out offensive against the CNT, arresting members and ordering raids of union offices. Shootings between anarchists and the hired guns of the employer class occurred with increasing regularity, and anarchists were frequently arrested and tortured by the authorities. Whilst acknowledging the difficulties that militants faced during these years, and the damage that the violence did to the movement in the long term, this article assesses the ways in which militants resisted the repression, and the symbolic importance that the anarchist action groups assumed for militants in later struggles.

For Class and Country

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Swift
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The First World War has often suffered from comparison to the Second, in terms of both public interest and the significance ascribed to it by scholars in the shaping of modern Britain. This is especially so for the relationship between the Left and these two wars. For the Left, the Second World War can be seen as a time of triumph: a united stand against fascism followed by a landslide election win and a radical, reforming Labour government. The First World War is more complex. Given the gratuitous cost in lives, the failure of a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ to materialise, the deep recessions and unemployment of the inter-war years, and the botched peace settlements which served only to precipitate another war, the Left has tended to view the conflict as an unmitigated disaster and unpardonable waste. This has led to a tendency on the Left to see the later conflict as the ‘good’ war, fought against an obvious evil, and the earlier conflict as an imperialist blunder; the result of backroom scheming, secret pacts and a thirst for colonies. This book to moves away from a concentration on machinations at the elite levels of the labour movement, on events inside Parliament and intellectual developments; there is a focus on less well-visited material. This book argues that labour patriotism characterised the left’s stance on the First World War, the anti-war stance was marginalised, and this patriotism both held the labour movement together and ensured greater electoral success after 1918.

Belgium

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno De Wever
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Belgian Society ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
The First World War ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
First World

On the eve of the First World War, Belgium boasted a long tradition of stable civil democracy. Between the two wars, however, its government was challenged by fascist movements, which nevertheless did not succeed in destabilizing the country. In that respect, fascism in Belgium developed in a similar way to that in other West European democracies. Belgian liberal democracy and its nation state came under the pressure of two movements that were at odds with Belgian society as it developed after the First World War. In the first place, there was a reactionary Catholic and French-speaking Belgian nationalist movement that could not resign itself to the increased power of anticlerical and left-wing political forces in general, and of the socialist labour movement in particular. In the second place, there was a Flemish nationalist movement that was looking for confrontation with the Belgian state.

scholarly journals Contribution to Research of the position and activity of Labour movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the First World War until the beginning of the Husin Rebellion

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Denis Bećirović ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

Based on archival material and relevant literature, this text analyses and presents the activities of the labour movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first years after the end of the First World War. During this period, the struggle for workers'rights, mostly through strike actions, resulted, among other things, in an increase in wages, the introduction of eight-hour working days in most companies, the exercise of the right to elect workers' commissioners and trade unions. The workers managed to get other benefits related to the economic position of the workers, such as retail co-operatives, apartments, assistance in purchasing work suits, etc. Workers' representatives fought for a radically better position and a new place in society. In addition to eight-hour working days, higher wages and other demands to improve the material position of workers, strikes against the political disenfranchisement of workers were conducted during this period, as well as for political freedoms and democratisation of political life in the country. During 1919 and 1920, several strikes about pay were organised by miners, construction workers and metalworkers in the forest industry, catering workers and employees in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bijeljina, Brčko, Zenica, Breza, Mostar, Zavidovići, Dobrljin, Lješljani, Maslovarama and Rogatica. It was part of over 125 strikes by workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the period of legal activity of the Socialist Labour Party of Yugoslavia (SLPY) (c), i.e. the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and its close trade unions. At the initiative of the SLPY (c) and united syndicates, public political assemblies were organised in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Mostar, Brčko, Derventa, Vareš and Drvar, at which demands were put forward to dissolve the authorities, and organise democratic elections for the Constituent Assembly and demobilise the army. The aggravation of the political situation in the first post-war years was noticeable in many local communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In a number of cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there were physical confrontations between workers and security bodies of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One such example occurred, in Zenica in mid-October 1920, when police banned the Communists' attempt to hold an assembly despite a previously imposed ban. On that occasion, the gathered mass of 2,500 workers refused to disperse and demanded that the assembly be held. After the police and the gendarmerie tried to disperse the gathered workers, there was open conflict. Workers threw stones at security officials, and they responded by firing firearms. The rally was eventually broken up, one worker was wounded and twelve workers were hurt during a clash with police. Owing to the increasing engagement of workers' representatives, the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina worsened. It was not uncommon to have open conflicts between workers and government officials. After the collapse of the Husino uprising, the position of workers deteriorated. Also, this paper discusses the impact of the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe on the labour movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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