Workshop on the topic of anti-labour politics in the context of the counter-revolution that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917.
The workshop will result in an edited volume, which will bring together comparative and trans- and international research on various kinds of anti-labour, strikebreaking, paramilitary, and related organisations on the far right.
Scholarly interest in strikebreaking and anti-labour organisations, very much in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, is receiving a revival in interest. However, much of this new literature focuses on the pre-1914 period. The literature on the topic after the First World War remains scattered and fragmentary, focussing on national organisations though historians, focusing on transatlantic comparison, have emphasised that the political cultures of anti-communism ‘were made and remade through concerted political action’ of which strikebreaking was a core component.
Great War veterans and their relationship to the rise of fascism in interwar year has also received transnational treatment albeit without noting their importance to strikebreaking and anti-labour agitation. The research has identified a period of politically and ideologically formative continued paramilitary violence after the end of the First World War, driven by the dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution.
This period of violence was characterised by the disintegration of empires and the haphazard and contested formation of new nation-states in their wake, a process of border formation that was strongly influenced by ideologies of socialism, nationalism, and reaction. Central-Eastern Europe in particular saw the development of an extensive transnational network of extreme-right paramilitaries which pursued a variety of reactionary aims, but were united in their opposition to ‘Bolshevism’ and organised labour.
As recent research has shown, this network continued to develop across both time and space. As the violence subsided, counter-revolutionary actors continued to organise against organised labour and the left, forming a host of different organisations to counter potential uprisings, strikes, and other forms of leftist unrest, all under the banner of anti-Bolshevism. Various types of counter-revolutionary formation spread far beyond the heartlands of the initial violence, creating a transnational network that drew in countries all over Europe, and the world.