Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/52



In France the after-war revolutionary crisis reached its greatest intensity during the general strike of May, 1920. This wide-spread movement shook French society to its foundations. It started as a general strike of railroadmen, but soon developed into a nation-wide walkout of transport workers, miners, electricians, gas workers, etc. The ruling class understood the agitation as a direct attempt at revolution and treated it accordingly. They victimized thousands of the workers in various ways, and jailed scores of the more militant leaders, charging them with conspiring at revolution. Eventually the upheaval was crushed, chiefly because of he inefficiency and cowardice of the reformist trade union officials. By the loss of the great strike French Labor suffered the severest defeat in its history.

Before examining the course of the famous May strike and the bitter intra-union war resulting of it, we should glance briefly at the history of trade unionism generally before the strike. Originally the French labor unions, like those of nearly every other country, were in the hands of reformists, men who saw in them merely instruments for protecting, or possibly raising somewhat, the standard of living of the workers under capitalism. The two branches of the avowedly revolutionary movement—the Socialists and the Anarchists—had very little understanding or appreciation of the trade unions. About all that the Socialists used them for was as vote-catching machines for their political parties, and as for the Anarchists, they despised them altogether.

This general attitude of the revolutionists towards the trade unions persisted pretty much from the latter's origin in the early '70s down to the middle '90s. Then an epoch-making change took place. Suddenly the Anar-