Strikes have always held great fascination for historians of the working class. Collective work stoppages tear the tissue of “normal life,” and in doing so they provide historians with revealing glimpses of class relations and attitudes, which arise from but are disguised by the daily production and distribution of commodities. Because strikers have disobeyed social norms, which reflect capitalist ways of making and acquiring things and which are enforced by socially legitimized economic and legal sanctions, they must reorder relationships among themselves in accordance with their own social code and apply their own group sanctions to its violators.

In recent years many studies of strikes have analyzed particular episodes in detail, in an effort to shed light on the social relations of some epoch through local history (Gutman, 1963; Zeigler, 1977; Ham-mett, 1975; Cumbler, 1974). An older tradition, running from Dacus through Brecher, examined a series of strikes in order to derive political lessons from them (how to dampen or fan the flames of discontent) [Dacus, 1877; Brecher, 1972; Crook, 1931].

Relations between workers and managers underwent a profound transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. Employers began a systematic attempt to control production and rationalize shop floor processes through technological innovation, subdivision of tasks, and the scientific management (or Taylorism) movement. A concern for a tractable labor force compelled the development of the profession of personnel management and “corporate welfare” work on the part of employers. The all-round skilled craftsman, trained by a union apprenticeship and able to work in any area of the trade without management instruction and supervision, was replaced by the semiskilled machine operative trained by the company to work on a few tasks using modified and specialized machinery. On the other side, craftsmen accustomed to autonomy in their work and governed by a collective ethic felt their organized power threatened by this management offensive that debased skill, imposed new forms of discipline, and promoted individualism and competition. Craftsmen challenged management's encroachment upon the shop floor through militant union action, but in doing so they were forced, by the “dilution” of their trade (the British term for the destruction of skilled jobs), to rethink their traditional reliance on exclusive craft knowledge. The key to any new strategy was the ability of craftsmen to transcend old craft lines, join with the less skilled workers whose jobs were created by management reorganization, and formulate new demands. The World War I years and the production crisis produced by the war saw the permanent institutionalization of the “new factory system” in the United States and elsewhere. The metal trades were the industrial sector most affected by management reorganization, and during the war years this sector was the most strike-prone (Nelson, 1975; Taylor, 1967; Braverman, 1974; Montgomery, 1974, 1976; Nadworny, 1955; Hinton, 1973; Bing, 1921).

The modern working class is not especially noted for its optimism or idealism. Indeed, the industrial proletariat may well have pioneered in the adoption of those secular and cynical life-styles and values that have come increasingly to pervade twentieth-century society and culture (Hobsbawm, 1978a). This makes it all the more surprising, then, to rediscover the deep feelings and high expectations with which Europe's workers launched the greatest wave of strikes in their history just after World War I. For a brief moment, the apocalyptic hopes of the left-wing socialists and the fantastic fears of the forces of order seemed about to come true: Soldiers deserted en masse and turned against their officers and their governments; workers in almost every industry struck for unprecedented demands; workers’ councils were established from Limerick to Budapest (Kemmy, 1975-1976). And if Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Gramsci were wrong in their optimism, they were no more misguided than their panic-stricken opponents, such as Churchill, Lloyd George, the diplomats at Versailles, and the various generals and police commanders charged with controlling and suppressing the volatile crowds of urban workers and discontented ex-soldiers (Mayer, 1959, 1967).