"...that a mining and agriculture economy like Chile's would be the first to genuinely install a revolutionary proletarian socialism when the time came in late 1924 would have shocked European Marxists, but perhaps it should not have; for all the many issues that the Socialist Party of Chile faced, it had a clear charismatic and intellectual leader in Luis Emilio Recabarren, created internal space for disagreements to be aired out respectfully and settled democratically, and by the standards of left-wing parties the world over a remarkable level of cohesion and ability to avoid both mission creep and niche ideological disputes or personalist feuds that led to circular firing squads and factionalism.
By contrast, European Marxism had plenty in the offing of charismatic personalities but also a fair share of schismatic personalities, and the "Red Schisms" of 1916-17 proved to be a near-fatal blow to the cause of European socialism that would require the Central European War's turbulent aftermath to recover from, and even then republican socialism in Belgium and France would need to wait close to a decade to truly synthesize and supplant staid social democracy and progressive liberalism as counter-reactionary forces. Central to the upheavals that occurred almost uniformly across Europe during this narrow window of time - with the curious exception of France, where the left of the SFIO and the moderate social democrats of the URS were able to cooperate against the increasingly erratic monarchist regime - was the aftershocks of two of the most important events in early 20th century Europe - the Revolutions of 1912, which had been more of a social rather than political or economic revolution, and the failure of the 1915 Belgian general strike. After a brief lull in radical politics after the 1870s and 1890s waves of anarchist violence, 1912 had seen a considerably more sophisticated and popular labor movement explode across the European political spectrum, successfully winning elections (with particular triumphs in Spain) and through mass action bringing countries to a standstill, as was the case in the major strike waves that roiled Britian in the "Great Unrest." The failure of the general strike in Belgium in 1915, meanwhile, had built upon this modernizing laborist politics both by making the cause of labor rights one of pan-European interest once again, and by re-injecting syndicalism as a formal ideology back into the mainstream of the European left, synthesizing the passe anarchism of the last decades of the 19th century with the complex organization of modern labor unions and pressing past ideas such as socialist reform or communitarian "vanguardism" towards the new leading edge of revolutionary thought. [1]
Ironically, syndicalism was a thought process that had been born in anarchism but had needed to germinate overseas before being properly brought back to Europe. The International Workers of the World had staked out a position of total industrial unionism and not only survived but, for a moment, thrived; even as it was eclipsed by more conservative, traditional unionism by the time the Great American War had broken out, ideas like sectoral bargaining and the end of craft unions remained its legacy for decades to come and dramatically reshaped the landscape of American labor even as less revolutionary middle-class voices won out. Syndicalism had found its most intensive home in Mexico, where the IWW-affiliated Casa de Obrera Mundial had organized an anarcho-syndicalist paramilitary into an outright revolt at the height of the war, branding itself the Sindicato General de Mexico and announcing that all members of all unions were automatically members in this "single union" that discriminated not by industry, creed, class, gender or race. The SGM had been the direct inspiration for the Sindicat-Generale Belgique, and all "General Syndicates" to come.
What the most radical socialists in Europe found attractive about revolutionary syndicalism was that it promised one of the most alluring prospects of anarchism - the replacement of the state - without opening the door to what they by 1916-17 considered one of the most dangerous through-currents in democratic socialism, that being the potential absorption of the socialist cause by the establishment and thus the subornation of the worker to the state. To the arch-radicals of mid-1910s Europe, the French experience was Exhibit A of this phenomenon; the ultra-Catholic monarchy had instituted a robust welfare state and strong worker's protections and directly associated such ideals with nationalist patriotism and presented them as godly and noble causes, thrusts which undercut the material appeal of socialism and had, for decades, left left-wing politics in France the terrain of progressive laicistes in Paris more focused on secularism and vague ideals of republicanism than they were on the need for a revolution of the world working class.
Syndicalism thus spoke directly to this current. The State, which was in their view in the end the ultimate arbiter and purveyor of capitalist violence through its policing powers, would be abolished and replaced by "one big union" that represented all workers equally under the law, and this new form of governance was the final form of the proletarian world Marx had envisioned. The great enemy of syndicalism thus became not necessarily the bourgeoisie as a class but the concept of nationalism itself, and the self-devouring orgy of the Red Schism followed promptly as ideological opponents were denounced not as reactionaries, or revisionists, or tools of capitalism, but as nationalists. (The irony that General Syndicates identified themselves by their country of origin was certainly lost on them).
The syndicalists who could not seize power of their own parties elected to decamp from them. Alceste de Ambris, perhaps Italy's most doggedly famous figure of the hard left, announced his resignation from the PSI, in part because of the dominance of moderate "collaborationist" figures such as Filippo Turati and Giacomo Matteoti over its governing organs, and in part because he could not wrest control of the PSI's vitriolic newspaper Avanti! from the bullheaded young left-nationalist Benito Mussolini (who, nonetheless, remained close friends with Filippo Corridoni, who would come to head the Unione Sindacale Italiana, the chief syndicalist organization which de Ambris came to join). The German left, possibly the most well-organized in continental Europe, saw a smaller-scale version of such a breach, as socialists disillusioned with the "accommodative" electoralism of the SDP under Friedrich Ebert in the years since August Bebel's death began to organize into new "working groups" inside the Reichstag, led by the affable Hugo Haasse, as well as left-wing paramilitaries led by figures such as Karl Liebknecht which in time came to identify pointedly with syndicalism and anointed themselves the Generalsindikat-Deutschland in February of 1918, a mere thirteen months before the Central European War's outbreak, with Liebknecht as their chief propagandist. Similar stories played out across Europe - the MSZDP in Hungary was denounced as bourgeoise and revisionist by its secessionsit syndicalist members who, ironically, also viewed anti-Habsburg nationalists as their greatest ally against Vienna; the RSDLP in Russia, already swimming against the tide in Europe's most autocratic state, were crippled by internal disagreements between socialist, syndicalist and communitarian factions that all debated who, exactly was the vanguard of the revolution,
Possibly the most acute division, however, occurred in Sweden, where the tensions between the parliamentary Social Democratic Worker's Party and its youth league finally erupted in the party congress of June 1917 and saw party leader Hjalmar Branting, already in declining health, clubbed to death by Karl Kilbom, who quickly fled into exile in the United States for the rest of his life. The Youth League's resentments were numerous - the SDAP had shifted from revolutionary socialism to reformist social democracy under Branting even after the rejection of bills for universal suffrage and the increasingly autocratic behavior of the government since the Courtyard Speech in 1914, and the SDAP had not, as men such as Zeth Hoglund and Kilbom had demanded, triggered a general strike to prevent the Swedish-Norwegian War of 1905, at that time the most recent general war on European soil. The Socialist Youth Party - Ungdomssocialistiska Parti - may not have borne the title "general syndicate," but it was for all intents and purposes an explicitly syndicalist party, and it rejected political organizing and instead promoted armed revolutionary struggle as its outlet at a level unseen elsewhere in industrial Europe, helping condemn the diminished SDAP, and Swedish left-liberalism more generally, to minority status for decades to come under not just repression from the right-wing majority but also its own internal feuds that took half a century to heal the rage over the "Branting Affair."
Curiously, it was Spain that saw little such activity in the heady, prewar days of the late 1910s, and that was for a few reasons. Spain had been the epicenter of European anarchism since its initial evolution in the 1870s, inspired by the writings of Bukharin and carefully encouraged first my figures such as Francisco Pi y Margall and then built upon in the subsequent decades either through tacit acceptance by radicals such as Manuel Ruiz Zorilla or directly encouraged by men such as Alejandro Lerroux or Francisco Ferrer. Thus, the foundation of the PSOE had never included the genuine hard-left in Spain, which had always marched to the beat of its own drum and whose revolutionary zeal was intermixed with feuds stemming from the republican debates of the 1870s in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1868 as well as a healthy dose of Catalan nationalism.
It could thus be argued that it was in other countries that the era of the Red Schisms helped neuter socialism at the hour that perhaps Europe needed a push against rampant nationalism the most, and that the spectacular infighting and splintering of mainstream leftist parties that had achieved parliamentary acceptance only recently augured the eruption of one of the continent's most destructive wars just a few short years later..." [2][3]
- Socialism and Europe
[1] Essentially what is happening here is the OTL Bolshevik brand of communism never gets to take off, so industrial syndicalism quickly replaces it as the main line of thinking on the hard left. I realize that this has been done before in other timelines, but I think it suits CdM quite well.
[2] Of course this is a bit contradictory, as the "mainstream" European social democrats and socialists include arch-nationalists like Mussolini, but it's worth the foreshadowing
[3] This thing rambled on a bit and I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out but hopefully it sort of captures the landscape/excuses some of my decision-making long-term in Europe, particularly ahead of the war's outbreak
