A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

788 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World

Between 1890 and 1914, strikes increased dramatically, particularly in
Western Europe, becoming a social fact of modern life. Workers hoped that
they could force government officials to pressure employers to bargain with
them. They struck when employers seemed most vulnerable; for example,
when they had recently received relatively large orders for products. The vast
majority of strikes were undertaken by skilled, organized workers in large­
scale sectors such as textiles, mining, and metallurgy, whose unions had
resources upon which to fall back. Strike movements reflected a more gener­
alized sense of class consciousness among many—but hardly all—workers.
Strikes reflected not only growth in union membership but also changes
in the organization of industrial work. In addition to low wages and the
length of their workday, workers also resented factory foremen. Represent­
ing the company’s interests, the foremen sought to impose industrial dis­
cipline on workers, some of whom had worked on farms or in domestic
industry and had more or less controlled their own time. Now they were for­
bidden to enter and leave the factory as they wished when they had nothing
to do, or in some cases even to talk on the job.
Techniques of scientific management of assembly-line production—
“Taylorism,” after Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), the American engineer
who developed them—included careful counting of the number of units
assembled by each worker in an hour. Many workers objected. Such indus­
trial discipline placed factory workers more directly under the control of fac­
tory managers by measuring worker performance, tying pay scales to the
number of units produced, which put more pressure on workers. Taylorism
wore out workers. Noting that virtually all the factory workers employed by a
Philadelphia manufacturer who had become enamored of scientific man­
agement were young, a British visitor asked repeatedly where the older work­
ers were. Finally, the owner replied, “Have a cigar, and while we smoke we
can visit the cemetery.”

Socialists

The Socialist First International Workingmen’s Association was founded in

1864 in London. Members represented a bewildering variety of experi­

ences and ideologies. Karl Marx emerged as the dominant figure in the

International. He was convinced that the unprecedented concentration of

capital and wealth meant that the final struggle between the bourgeoisie

and the working class was relatively close at hand. Marx’s inflexible beliefs

ran counter to the views of the majority of French members, some of whom

were anarchists, and to the moderate, reformist inclinations of the more

prosperous British workers, as well as their German colleagues.

The First International was dissolved in 1876 amid internal division, hav­

ing been weakened by repression in many countries. Nonetheless, socialism

emerged as a major political force in every major European nation. In 1889,

at the centennial of the French Revolution in Paris, delegates to a socialist