Preliminary Programme

Shortly after World War 1, the German labor movement changed dramatically. The dominance of Social Democracy was weakened by several new labor organizations with very differing agendas. Among the latter was the anarcho-syndicalist Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (Free Workers' Union Germany, short FAUD), blaming the social democratic unions for not taking an internationalist, antimilitarist and anti-nationalist stance during and after the war.
This paper discusses the internationalism and anti-nationalism of the syndicalist union during its early years. The FAUD began to form (like the socialist and communist organizations) transnational networks, provided international solidarity and continued to criticize the nationalist politics of its opponents. In the eyes of the syndicalists, class and nation were mutually exclusive concepts. The true revolutionary could only defend its class, the bourgeoisie would always refer to the nation. In 1923 however, with the Occupation of the Ruhr, the inter- and anti-nationalist position of the FAUD was challenged. While other parts of the labor movement supported general strikes and the passive resistance against the occupational forces, the FAUD – as one of the very few organizations – refused to follow any nationalist agenda. Instead, its members tried to continue to represent workers' interests, even if that meant to negotiate with the French and Belgian occupants. I will focus on these anti-nationalist/internationalist practices and evaluate how the syndicalists tried to defend their decision in front of their several critics
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Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905–1907 Revolution. Harboring long-lasting strikes and breeding bellicose street fighters, Poland witnessed an unprecedented political upheaval manifest in the emergence of mass parties, labour unions and a new public culture. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region, Poland remained relatively calm. What were the processes responsible for the withering-away of social-revolutionary tendencies, or asking the question other way around, how the process of popular nationalization went on during the inter-revolutionary decade? In order to address this question, I analyze an extensive database documenting contentious events in Russian Poland between 1907 and 1918. I aim at offering a broader outlook of dispersed and variegated popular unrest, where both class and nation as communities of reference were forged out of the general grievances such as lacking dignity and economic deprivation. (Show less)

The Grand Duchy of Finland witnessed a radical parliamentary reform as a result of the General Strike of 1905, and one of the most conservative estate-based political systems in Europe was replaced with a unicameral assembly based on universal suffrage. Socialists polled 37 percent in the first election of 1907, becoming the largest European socialist party. Despite parliamentary integration, Finnish socialists attempted a revolution in 1918 and failed. This paper scrutinizes socialist revolutionary experiences and expectations in the early twentieth century from the perspective of ‘temporality’, that is, the way human beings understand the flow of time. A new light will be shed on the experimental link between the political ruptures of 1905 and 1917–1918, by combining traditional conceptual-historical approaches with quantitative corpus-linguistic methods. Primary sources consist of i) digitized labour newspapers and ii) handwritten newspapers produced by ordinary working people. This selection enables comparing temporal experiences between the top and grassroots levels of the Finnish labour movement. The underlying hypothesis is that identifying the changes in socialist temporality will improve our historical understanding of the actual revolutionary events in Finland. (Show less)