Origins and Meaning of WWI

John Zerzan
Telos no. 49, Fall 1981.
Published in John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal, Part Two, pp. 145–164; C.A.L. Press/ Paleo Editions,
2nd Revised Ed., Columbia, MO 65205-1446, USA, 1999.

World War I, in Jan Patocka’s words, “That tremendous and, in a sense, cosmic
event”1 was a watershed in the history of the West and the major influence on our
century. Regarding its causes, nearly all the discussion has concerned the degree of
responsibility of the various governments, in terms of the alliance system (ultimately,
the Triple Entente of England, France and Russia and the Triple Alliance of Austria-
Hungary, Germany and Italy) which, it is alleged, had to eventuate in worldwide war.
The other major focus is the Marxist theory of imperialism, which contends that
international rivalry caused by the need for markets and sources of raw material made
inevitable a world war. Domestic causes have received remarkably little attention, and
when the internal or social dynamics have been explored at all, several mistaken
notions, large and small, have been introduced.
The genesis of the war is examined here in light of the social question and its
dynamics; the thesis entertained is that a rapidly developing challenge to domination
was destroyed by the arrival of war, the most significant stroke of counterrevolution
in modern world history. If the real movement was somehow canceled by August
1914, it is clear that the usual reference (in this case, Debord’s) to “the profound
social upheaval which arose with the first world war”2 is profoundly in error.
Some observers have noted, in passing, the prevalence of uncontrolled and
unpredictable violence throughout Europe prior to the war, perhaps the most telling
sign of the haunting dissatisfaction within an unanchored society. This could be seen
in the major nations—and in many other regions as well. Halevy, for example, was
surprised by the 1913 general strikes in South Africa and Dublin, which “so strangely
and unexpectedly cut across the feud between English and Dutch overseas, between
Protestant and Catholic in Ireland.”3 Berghahn saw that Turkey as well as Austria-
Hungary “were threatened in their existence by both social and national revolutionary
movements.”4 Sazonoz’s Reminiscences refer to the sudden outbreaks of rioting in
Constantinople, and to the Dashnaktzutium, Armenian radicals, of whom it was
“difficult to discern” if they were more directed against Turkey or intent on fomenting
a revolution at home.5 And Pierre van Paasen’s memoirs tell of a social peace
disintegrating in prewar Holland: “A new spirit invaded the community. For one
thing, the shipyard workers no longer drifted home at nights in small groups or
singles. They came marching home...all of them singing, singing as if they wanted to
burst their lungs, so that the windows rattled. What had come over these fellows?”6
Instead of analysis of this telling background, the coming of war is typically
trivialized by a concentration on the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz
 2

Ferdinand, and the nature and duration of the ensuing carnage falsified as a surprise
development. In fact, neither of these approaches to the meaning of the war hold up
under a moment’s scrutiny.
On the face of it, the Serbian militant who shot the Hapsburg Archduke did not so
simply plunge Europe into hostilities; this can be seen first of all by the fact that six
weeks passed between the June act and the August mobilizations. Zeman writes of
this: “Indeed, in all the capitals of Europe, the reaction to the assassination of the heir
to the Hapsburg throne was calm to the point of indifference. The people took little
notice; the stock exchange registered hardly a tremor.”7
As for the “surprise” as to the length and design of the war itself, it must be stressed
that trench warfare—the hallmark of World War I was anything but new. Employed
50 years before in the American Civil War, in the Crimea, and at Palevna (1877-78),
as in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it is little wonder that military authorities
predicted it. Ivan Bloch’s six-volume The Future of War emphasized trench warfare
and the totality of modern war; the work was discussed in ruling circles from the
1890s on. The adjustment of the record brings us closer to the thesis of war as a
needed discharge of accumulated tensions, requiring a form and duration equal to the
task of extinguishing radical possibilities.
L. T. Hobhouse viewed domestic problems in Europe as successively more
clamorous, creating a crescendo of urgency. “Thus the catastrophe of 1914 was... the
climax of a time of stress and strain.”8 Similarly, Stefan Zweig wrote of the outbreak
of war: “I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus force, a tragic consequence
of their internal dynamism that had accumulated...and now sought violent release.”9
The scale and conditions of the war had to be equal to the force straining against
society, in order to replace this challenge with the horror and despair that spread from
the battlefields to darken the mind of the 20th century West.
Beyond the initial value of war in promoting centralization and acceptance of
authority, a far larger objective can be seen. In Wells’ words, “greater happiness, and
a continual enlargement of life, has been
checked violently and perhaps arrested altogether.”10 Vibrant before the four years of
death was the desire and expectation of significant change, not to be confused with the
bourgeois ideology of positivism, ossified and insipid, which was being challenged in
popular life.11
The monotonous, uniform present of industrial society, complete with Weberian
forecast of increasing bureaucratization, was indeed becoming more and more
miserably palpable. And leftist ideology seems just as increasingly threadbare as
measured against this reality. War provided an escape from both daily life and the
chance of its transcendence. By 1914, whatever emancipatory visions Marxism might
once have represented were moribund; with the war, anarchism, which had seemed to
Laurence Lafore “imposingly vigorous”12 was also demolished.
To examine the generalized internal crisis and the means by which it was successfully
deflected and destroyed by World War I, the various countries—beginning, in rough
order, with the less developed and ending with Germany and England—are surveyed
here.
The act that eliminated the would-have-been Emperor of Austria-Hungary was by no
means an atypical one: Russian Prime Minister Stolypin had been assassinated in
1911, as was Canalejas, Premier of Spain in 1912, and King George of Greece in
 3

1913, to cite other prominent fatalities. In fact, there were several attempts upon the
lives of Hapsburg royalty during the imminent prewar years, and even more than one
against Franz Ferdinand on that particular notorious summer 1914 afternoon. All the
more suggestive, then, that the Archduke paid his state visit on the anniversary of
Kossovo, the national day of that restive vassal nation of the Hapsburgs. Similar in
provocation would have been a visit by the British royalty to Dublin on Easter Sunday
in, say, 1916. And in passing, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the universally
agreed upon figure for this and other Balkan dramas, the nationalist (or nationalist
student, more exactly), is rather too readily typecast. Valiani noted the revival of
anarchist affiliation and influence in Serbia and Bosnia,13 and it is well established
that Franz Ferdinand’s assassins were hardly exclusively nationalist. War, of course,
always requires a good excuse, especially when the state’s real enemies are, more
clearly than usual, its own citizenry; the Sarajevo outrage was tailor-made to the
needs of the ailing regime.
The latifundist system of feudal rule on the land, allied with a quite usurious brand of
capitalism, provided the background for a very potent social revolutionary dynamic
that outweighed even the nationalist-separatist stresses of the exceedingly polyglot
empire. In the ancient capital, a descending lassitude mirrored the crumbling rule; the
leitmotif of countless works is Vienna’s strange atmosphere of “something coming
visibly to an end.” Hofsthmannthal’s Elektra cries, “Can one decay like a rotten
corpse?” His striking play of the same name is the perfect artifact of imperial Vienna,
in its vision of disaster. In fact, the drama is an extremely apt allegory of Europe at
large, portraying the obsessive need for a bloodletting out of a terror of death.
As Norman Stone put it, “Official circles in Austria-Hungary calculated general
conflict in Europe was their only alternative to civil war.”14 Thus the ultimatum served
on Serbia, following the death by Serbians of Franz Ferdinand, was merely a pretext
for war with Russia and that general conflict. War was declared on Serbia, with the
corresponding involvement of Russia, despite the acceptance of the ultimatum;
Serbia’s capitulation, widely hailed as Austria’s “brilliant diplomatic coup,” therefore
meant nothing. The immense significance of Austria’s internal problems demanded
war and a more complete reliance on its perennial school of civic virtues, the
Hapsburg army.
Very critical to the success of this tactic was the organizational hegemony of the
Marxian mass party over the working classes. The Austrian Social Democratic Party,
most degenerate of the European left, was actually committed to the maintenance of
the monarchy and its federative reorganization.15
When war came, it was billed as an unavoidable defense against the menacing eastern
behemoth, Russia. The left, of course, cast its parliamentary votes in favor of war and
immediately instituted war measures against work stoppages and other forms of
insubordination. Although some Czechs threw down their arms upon being ordered
against Russia, hostilities were initiated without serious resistance.16 But, in the
worlds of Arthur May, “Disaffection and discontent among the rank and file” took
only months before the prosecution of the war was “seriously affected.”17
Food riots were common by 1915 and had spread to the heart of Vienna by late 1916.
Professor Josef Redlich’s journal recorded that the population seemed pleased when
Prime Minister Strugkh was shot to death by a renegade Socialist in October 1916.
The Social Democratic Party was completely dedicated, meanwhile, to the
 4

“cooperation of all classes,” and it organized scores of peace meetings—not of an

antiwar variety, but to restrain the masses from breaches of the “domestic peace.”18
With people wearied, bled dry by four years of apocalypse, rule was preserved
following the collapse of the dynasty by the remaining servants of power. The Social
Democrats continued their basic role with the equally anti-revolutionary Christian
Democrats—and were to govern Austria for 15 years, paralleling in many ways that
postwar prelude to German National Socialism, the Weimar Republic. In Hungary, six
months of Social Democratic rule was followed by the bureaucratic-totalitarian efforts
of Bela Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic (with Lukacs as Commissar of Culture);
four months of this Leninist failure were enough to usher in the Horthy regime, what
was to be a quarter-century of reaction.
War, in the case of Russia, did not prevent a revolution from occurring, but its
mammoth ravages dictated the instant deformation of that revolution—the victory of
the Bolshevik project. The class structure of Romanov society was too bankrupt to
avoid demise; Z.A.B. Zeman wrote, for example, of the “amazing ease of the dynastic
collapse in Russia.”19 But the unparalleled destruction and suffering of the millions of
combatants (and non-combatants) in itself rendered a whole, breathing revolution
impossible.
The Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on small, Slavic Serbia enabled a barely
sufficient response to the Kremlin’s consequent call to arms; Pan-Slavism, not
Czarism, was the last pro-war chord that could be successfully struck by a doomed
regime. Russia’s war with Japan had been a clear attempt to direct internal ferment
into calmer, patriotic channels; defeat set off the 1905 revolution. In 1914, only a
victorious war could conceivably offer hope for the status quo. Barring war, “within a
short time,” as Germany’s Prince von Bulow wrote, “revolution would have broken
out in Russia, where it was ripe since the death of Alexander III in 1894.”20
From 1909, various international incidents and crises, mainly in North Africa and the
Balkans, arose with regularity to try to divert popular attention in Europe from the
gathering social crisis. Throughout the West, authority was deeply on the defensive in
this final period, and Russia is not an exception: since at least 1909 state weakness
was a glaring constant. By then the memories of post-1905 repression were fading and
“the temper of the factory workers was turning revolutionary again,” according to
Taylor.21 And discontent was rising even faster due to the more reactionary policies of
the regime following Stolypin’s assassination in 1911. When the workers of the Lena
gold fields were attacked by troops in April 1912, this act of savagery not only failed
to cow the oppressed, but in fact it aroused workers all over Russia to a new wave of
challenge.22 In the two years before the war, the curve of social disorder steadily
mounted, meaning that another year of peace would surely have seen new and even
more serious upheavals.
Edmund Wilson observed that “by 1913 and 1914 there was a strike wave even bigger
than that of 1905.” By the spring and early summer of 1914, a movement, initiated
especially by the Baku oil workers and women factory operatives of St. Petersburg,
had brought “the proletariat again to the barricades.”23 As Arno Mayer succinctly put
it, “during the first seven months of 1914, industrial unrest reached unparalleled
intensity, much of it politically and socially motivated.”24 Thus the guns of August
roared, the timing all but unavoidable.
 5

The war to save oppressed and threatened Slavdom, launched with a momentary
enthusiasm, was soon flagging. Meriel Buchanan’s biography of her father, the British
ambassador to Russia, bemoaned “how brief and frail was that spirit of devotion and
self-sacrifice, how soon doubt and despair, impatience, lassitude, and discontent crept
in.”25 Widely recounted was the lament of state ministers by mid-1915: “Poor Russia!
Even her army, which in past ages filled the world with the thunder of its
victories...turns out to consist only of cowards and deserters!”26 Certainly by the
widespread mass strikes of January and February 1916, the civil truce had been
definitively broken.
The anarchist tide rose swiftly during the war for a time, despite the general draining
effect of the gigantic bloodshed and the specific disillusionment caused by the pro-
war position of Kropotkin. This latter accommodation to state power, widely seen of
course as a betrayal of principle, was in fact shared by a majority of Russian anarchist
ideologues, especially in Moscow.27 The capitulation at the top led to the greater
success of syndicalism among many anti-authoritarians, a more “practical,” less
“utopian” ideology. Another moment of the dimming of radical perspectives.
Kropotkin—like Rocker—located the reason for war in the competition for markets
and the quest for colonies, ignoring, with the Marxists, the overarching domestic
dynamic for an external, mechanistic etiology. And his untiring efforts to urge on the
troops of the Entente to the greater killing of the Central Powers’ counterparts evokes
Marx and Engels, who could always be counted on to identify the more “progressive”
state to support in a given war.
The collapse of the Romanov autocracy in March 1917 demonstrated that the spiritual
exhaustion of the proletariat was not so advanced as to allow the greatly overdue
dynasty any further borrowed time. Lenin, who had been surprised by every
revolutionary outbreak in Russia,28 could see in mid-1917 that the disintegration of the
provisional government was soon to be a reality. His victory in that maimed
dimension and the consequent Bolshevik counterrevolution is an all too familiar tale
in its details.
Italy, turbulent through the 1890s and the first decade of the century, arrived at the
prewar years in a volatile state. Propaganda in favor of conquest and expansion had
failed to distract the submerged classes from the essential; at the elections of 1913
only three Nationalists were elected to the chamber.29
The months preceding the war were marked by rioting and strikes on a wide scale,
culminating in the famous Red Week of early summer. During demonstrations by
anarchists and republicans, violence broke out on the Adriatic coast; this week of June
1914 was to see its quick spread, into a general strike and countrywide riots. F. L.
Carsten provides particulars: “In the Romagna and the Marches of Central Italy there
were violent revolutionary outbreaks. Local republics were set up in many smaller
towns, and the red flag was hoisted on the town hall of Bologna. Officers were
disarmed; the military barracks were beseiged in many places.”30
The populace displayed, in outlook and methods, an anarchic, autonomous temper
that found its reflection in the anti-war position of the whole left. In this moment the
syndicalist discovery of the myth of the nation seemed far away; that a national
syndicalism was but a year off could hardly have been forecast with practical results.
An overwhelming sentiment for neutrality canceled Italy’s alliance with Austria-
 6

Hungary and Germany, and rendered war far too dangerous a card to be played in
hopes of defusing class war—for the time being.
By the spring of 1915, every major European nation had been at war for over half a
year, with Italy being drawn steadily toward the abyss despite popular resistance. A
friend of von Bulow states in May, “how the [Italian] Minister of the Interior had said
to him that if there were a plebiscite there would be no war.”31 Zeman, likewise
speaking of May 1915, observed that “Rome came to the verge of civil war.”32
Foreign elements engineered, with paid demonstrators, pro-interventionist riots
against the neutralists—who received no police protection and suffered a vicious pro-
war press. Rennell Rodd and others who thought they saw spontaneous enthusiasm
for war there were largely deceived.
In mid-May the Turin workers declared a general strike, while the Socialist Party
debated its position regarding Italy’s apparently imminent participation in the war.
“All the factories were closed, all public services completely paralyzed. The strike
was total among all categories of workers,” according to Mario Montagna’s memoirs,
quoted by John Cammett. Cammett continues the narrative: “The entire working force
of the city gathered before the Chamber of Labor, and then slowly marched—without
the urging of speeches—toward the Prefecture to protest the war.”33 Fighting ensued
but the strike came to an end on May 19, chiefly due to the isolation and
demoralization brought on by the Party’s refusal to support this self-authorized
initiative. Meanwhile, the “revolutionary” syndicalists had become the first section of
the Italian left to advocate war, arguing that reactionary Austria must not be allowed
to defeat progressive France. On May 23, Italy entered the war.
Mussolini’s radically rightward shift, in full swing at this time, is a particular
symptom of the intense frustration caused by the left’s inaction and betrayals. The
young Gramsci, in fact, showed a passing sympathy for Mussolini’s new pro-war
position and his disgust with the passivity enforced on the proletariat.34 When
oppositional ideology and its arbiters assume such a renunciation of movement, the
way is prepared for steadily more backward forms for thwarted class energies to
assume. Forward avenues seem completely blocked and there was thus little
alternative to the channel and dictates of war.
Giampero Carocci, among others, noted that after three and a half years of war, “the
majority of workers and some of the peasants (particularly in the Po Valley, in
Tuscany and in Umbria)” still “longed for revolution”35—but the pervasive postwar
discontent was of an anxious, pessimistic kind.
The occupation of the factories, in the fall of 1920, bears the full imprint of a
proletariat cheated and blocked by the left and battered by war. Despite the enormous
scale of the takeovers, both the industrialists and the government simply let the
neutered movement take its course, without state interference. In early September, the
apparent conquests provoked some alarm, to be sure, but the ever more weary and
confused workers stayed politely in the factories under control of the unions and the
left;36 “communist leaders refrained from every initiative,” reported Angelo Tasca.37
The restless and anxious occupiers saw neither the outlet to expand their action nor
the energies by this point, to forge new ones. The seizure of virtually the entire
industrial plant of Italy—not to mention the extensive land takeovers—simply died
away, leaving a feeling of total defeat.38 Mussolini’s accession to power followed this
fiasco by less than two years.
 7

Recent historical analysis, especially that of A. James Gregor, has demonstrated the
substantive continuity between Italy’s most militant socialism—syndicalism—and
fascism, with the war serving as essential mode of transition. The career of Mussolini,
from activist and major theoretician of syndicalism to activist and architect of fascism,
by way of World War I, is only one connection.39 Syndicalism, then national
syndicalism, provided the core social and economic content of ascendant fascism. The
congruence begins with a common mass-mobilization, industrialization basis but does
not end there; the essentials of nascent fascism were, in Gregor’s words, “the product
of syndicalist lucubrations, syndicalist sentiment, and syndicalist convictions.”40
At the end of the century, French socialists and anarchists were swept into the
mainstream of controversy over the legal treatment of Dreyfus, an army officer
convicted of espionage. The arms of the republican family hence embraced new
elements, whose integration had been open to question; in Dreyfusism we see an early
appearance of the popular front, the recuperative answer to reaction, real or otherwise.
The depths were quickly plumbed. It is here that the Socialist Millerand, scandalizing
the slow, became the first of his ideological brand to enter a government. A
government, by the way, that had been recently disgraced by the infamous Panama
finance scandal and which counted as its minister of war General Gallifet, butcher of
the Commune. Minister of War Millerand would be the most chauvinist of prewar
officials, later joined by his Socialist colleague, Albert Thomas, wartime minister of
munitions.
It is not a surprise that so-called revisionism led to nationalism, nor that this course
and its electoral methods would alienate the oppressed with its crass opportunism. In
fact, there were many signs of a widespread disinterest in politics; Clemenceau’s
seventeen-point social reform program of 1906, for example, elicited no popular
response.41 An acute Cabinet instability began to emerge, due in part to the fact that
the enrages of the far left made it increasingly harder for Marxists to cooperate with
the center left. Oron Hale averred that the working class movement drifted away from
parliamentarism toward radicalism in the five years before 1914.42 And it was just
before this period that Sorel, with customary acidity, warned: “A proletarian violence
which escapes all valuation, all measurement, and all opportunism may jeopardize
everything and rule socialistic diplomacy.”43
But even in terms of orthodox political maneuvering, light is shed upon the threat to
the existing order. An order, one might add, exhibiting such signs of decay as
persistent financial scandals. The amazing murder of the editor of Figaro by the
finance minister’s wife brought these to new heights in March 1914.
The April elections, whose chief issue was the 1913 law prescribing three years’
military service, returned “the most pacific chamber the country had ever known,” in
the words of Alfred Cobban.44 The conscription law, by the complete failure of
nationalist-rightist candidates, had been clearly repudiated.
Albrecht-Carre, Taylor, and others have spoken of this shift away from militarism at a
time when France, according to von Bulow, “was the only European country in which
in certain influential quarters, not in the people, it was justified to talk of ‘war
fever.’”45 Prince Lichnowski, German ambassador to England, provided a still more
complete picture in a diary entry of April 27: he described the French people’s calm
and “thoroughly pacific mood,” while noting the difficulties which internal affairs
presented to the governments.46
 8

The April polling “proved,” in Cobban’s words, “that even in the existing state of
international tension French opinion was profoundly pacific and non-aggressive.”47
President Poincare, in June, was forced to appoint a left-wing regime under Viviani.
Reversal of the conscription law was the first order of business; nevertheless, the
radical and socialist deputies agreed not to press for this in exchange for vague
promises regarding future passage of an income tax law, an obvious betrayal.
When the war crisis was played out in early August and Juares, dean of the left, was
assassinated by a chauvinist fanatic, it was Viviani who issued the left’s call for
nationalist unity; at this moment of spontaneous anti-war demonstrations, he
announced that, “in the serious circumstances through which our country is passing,
the government counts on the patriotism of the working class.”
That the proletariat would have been the object of fear is evidenced by its growing
militancy. Whereas in the 1890s there had been hundreds of small, local strikes, there
were 1,073 in 1913, involving a quarter of a million workers. A good deal of alarm
was generated by the scale and persistence of the strikes, seen by many as “symptoms
of a profound unrest and social sickness,” according to David Thomson.48 Strikes of
postal and telegraph workers in Paris called the loyalty of state employees into
question, while agricultural workers’ strikes often led to riots and the burning of farm
owners’ houses.
Radical tendencies on the terrain of work cannot, however, be attributed to prewar
syndicalism with much accuracy. Syndicalist ideology proved an attraction for a time,
due to revulsion with the dogma of socialist reformism, but there was—according to
Stearns and others—no positive correlation between syndicalist leadership and strike
violence, for example.49 In fact, syndicalist leaders had to combat violence and
spontaneous strikes just like any other brokers of organized labor. Syndicalist unions
served the same integrative function as the others and manifested the same movement
toward bureaucratization. It is hardly surprising that after 1910 there was growing talk
of a “crisis of syndicalism.”
During the first decade of the century, Gustave Herve’s doctrine of total military
insurrection against the officer class became quite popular. Elie Halevy saw that “no
sooner conceived, it spread like wildfire to many countries outside France.”50 He
added that on the eve of war it was “still rampant in the rank and file of the French
army.”51
Herve, editor of La Guerre Sociale, had called for revolution as the response to
mobilization for war. But increasingly the socialist statesman, when war came he
climaxed his anti-war career by begging to be allowed to serve in the army. Recalling
Viviani’s pro-war speech over the bier of Juares, we find a fast evaporation of
internationalist verbiage and observe how thin some of this rhetoric had been all
along. The young males of the nation marched, leaving behind debasing
contradictions of the left with a sense of relief.
By the end of 1916, however, desertions were occurring at a rate estimated at 30,000 a
year, Spring 1917 saw wholesale desertion replaced by outright mutiny, causing open
panic among the military high command. Whole divisions from the Champagne front
were involved, for example, amid cheers for world revolution, for firing on the
officers, and for a march on Paris.52 But exhaustion and a sense of futility, built up of
the war’s mammoth violence and the long list of confusions and disillusionments that
 9

predated the war, were joined by the universal united front of unions and the left, to
enforce the war and safeguard class society.
France was the grand mutilee of the war: 1,400,000 dead, one of every 24 in the land.
Out of all this, not even the postwar parodies of revolution would visit France.
Although the United States stands apart from Europe’s traditions and conditions, it is
also true that revolution, or its approach, is a world phenomenon as of the era under
scrutiny. Taking a very few words’ detour, many features paralleling prewar Europe
are discernible in the American situation.
Henry May found that “During the prewar years, passion and violence seemed to
many observers to be rising to the surface in all sorts of inexplicable ways.”53 And as
in Europe, organized ideology could not find its vehicle in this upsurge. The tame
Socialist Party was ebbing after having reached its peak in 1912, and the IWW,
syndicalist alternative, failed to have much impact at any point.
The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, sitting between 1910 and 1915,
concluded that unionization was the answer to a violence, in Graham Adams’ words,
“which threatened the structure of society.”54 This recommendation was hailed by
moderate and radical unionists alike,55 and brings to mind the advice of a few that the
IWW’s industrial unionism was the specific brand needed to stabilize American
capital relations. In fact, government-sponsored unions established the control
apparatus of scientific management, under the War Industries Board, and survived
long enough to administer the crucial blows to the three major post-war strikes, those
in coal, steel, and Seattle, in 1919.
John Dewey had predicted that the war would introduce “the beginnings of a public
control,” and defended it thusly as a needed agency of socialization.56 But America’s
entry was far from basically popular; Ellul concluded that U.S. participation “could be
produced only by the enormous pressure of advertising and total propaganda on the
human psyche.”57
Zeman quotes a far from atypical, if anonymous, historian: “We still don’t know, at
any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the U.S.
into the First World War.”58 John Higham provides an acceptable if understated reply:
“Perhaps a vigorous assertion of American rights functioned...to submerge the drift
and clash of purpose in domestic affairs.”59
Before examining the two most developed countries, Germany and England,
something of the depth of the prewar turmoil—and its pacification—can be seen in
even the briefest glimpse at cultural changes.
Stravinsky, whose Le Sacre du Printemps virtually incarnated the promise of a new
age, reminds one that the new music was noticeably supranational in its composition
and appeal.60 Between 1910 and 1914, more precisely, nationalism receded as a force
in music, as it had in other fields. In painting, the movement toward pure abstraction
emerged simultaneously and independently in several countries during the five years
preceding the war.61 Cubism, with its urgent re-examination of reality, was the most
important element of the modern school and by far the most audacious to date—
notwithstanding the frequent and entertaining accusation, in Roger Shattuck’s words,
that it was “an enormous hoax dreamed up by the hashish-smoking, pistol-carrying,
half-starved inhabitants of Montmartre.”62
 10

Alfred Jarry’s nihilistic anarchism, especially in his Ubu plays,63 constituted a one-
man demolition squad, over a decade before Dada. In Apollinaire, the new freedom
and urgency in poetry, especially in French poetry, is obvious. Apollinaire, however,
can also be viewed as an art-historical metaphor: having reached his height from 1912
to 1914, he volunteered in 1914 and was wounded in 1916. His passion and
spontaneity were drained away, replaced by patriotism and a sense of artistic
discipline; he died of his head wound in the last month of the war, November 1918.
Apollinaire recalls vividly the condition of Jake in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises,
emasculated by the war.
Shortly before the war, a group of young players, eventually known as the
“hypermodern” school, revivified chess in practice and principle, as exemplified most
brazenly by Breyer’s “After 1. P-K4, White’s game is in the last throes.”64 This arcane
case aims at underlining the point that throughout culture, in every area, an
unmistakable daring, straining at limits was underway. “More freedom, more
frankness, more spontaneity had been regained (in the decade before 1914) than in the
previous hundred years,” as Stefan Zweig looked back on it.65
The war drew a terrible dividing line across the advance of all this. The first battle cry
of Dada in 1916 was already really the end of it, and the modernist movement of the
1920s acted out a drama conceived, dedicated and developed before the war.
The most anti-bourgeois moments of futurism, all of which were certainly pre-war,
prefigured Dada in content and also stylistically (e.g., the use of incendiary
manifestos). “In postwar Dada, the Futurist enthusiasm had been pacified, ironized
and introverted,” according to R. W. Flint.66
Shattuck mentions the “disintegrating social order” and a “sporty proletarian
truculence” inspired by the avant-garde.67 The lines of inspiration and energy were
probably flowing, most importantly, the other way around but the connection itself is
valid.
In H.G. Wells’ Joan and Peter the younger working class generation is described as
“bored by the everlasting dullness and humbug of it all.”68 If Paul Ricoeur could ask,
over 50 years later, “if there is not, in the present-day unrest of culture, something
which answers correlatively to the fundamental unrest in contemporary work,”69 his
question also fits the earlier world perfectly. For that previous unrest of work, the
technological speedup of 1914-18 gave the answer; the “struggle against
idiosyncrasy,” toward completely standardized tools and tasks, received its final,
critical impetus from the war.70 “The time of full mechanization, 1918-1939,” to use
Siegfried Giedion’s phrase,71 was inaugurated.
Getting back to culture, a revolution of art forms gave clear testimony to the social
crisis—not that the revolt against the rule of forms was always confined there.
German expressionism, a pinnacle of pre-war cultural revolt, aimed not only at
shattering conventions but at the construction of a “Utopian order, or disorder,
believed to be freer and more life-enhancing than any to be found in the advanced
industrial world just then approaching a new height of development,” in the
judgement of Hilton Kramer.72
The aspirations and innocence of these revolutionary artists were cruelly destroyed by
the war. In its aftermath, the bitter expressionist protests of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix
bespoke the shock and disillusionment, as with the surrealist nightmares of Dali.
 11

Literature is another example of the same result: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats and so
many others—without exception, it appears, prophets of decay and death.
The authoritarian welfare state of Bismarck, several decades from its inception by the
prewar years, enforced a state of affairs in Germany which was far from secure. The
Eulenburg scandal, in two years of trials after 1907, aired intrigue, blackmail and
rottenness in the Kaiser’s immediate circle, causing state prestige to sink. Ballin, the
Hamburg capitalist, spoke to the government in 1908 of “the growing domestic
crisis,” hoping that a tax decrease might help defuse it.73 Already in March 1909 was
the war alternative proposed, as Lyncker, chief of the military Cabinet, considered an
“external conflict desirable” to move the nation out of “internal difficulties.”74
Prince von Bulow recalled “a general disgruntlement,” which he summarized in this
way: “If in Bismarck’s day people talked of ‘disgust with the Empire,’ it was now a
case of ‘disgust with the government’—a disgust which gained ground every day.”75
More specifically portentous was this high-placed opinion, also from his memoirs:
“At the end of 1912 I heard from Dusseldorf that Kirdorf, one of the biggest Rheinish
industrialists...had declared that if this goes on another three years Germany will have
landed in war or revolution.”76
Inflate 1913 and early 1914, the arrogant gestures of German officers against civilians
in Alsace constituted the “Zabern Incidents,” and aroused, in Carolyn Playne’s words,
“general indignation.”77 Indeed, a great outcry went up and the Reichstag voted, albeit
somewhat impotent-ly, a 293-54 no-confidence resolution. James Gerard saw this as
an occasion of waning government power, and wrote that the German people seemed
“to be almost ready to demilitarize themselves.”78
To John Flynn, the Zabern hubbub merely contributed to the deepening of a domestic
split which had already virtually paralyzed the country. As he viewed it, “There was a
spirit—and a growing one—of resistance to arbitrary tendencies.”79 In this context the
naval indiscipline aboard the S.S. Vaterland at Auxhaven in the spring of 1914 is
similarly revealing. There the bold, spontaneous action of the 1,300 crewmen forced
an immediate and unconditional acceptance of their demands, recalling the revolt in
the Brazilian navy of late 1910.
Arthur Rosenberg described the political and social tension of Germany as “typical
of a prerevolutionary period,” concluding that without war in 1914, “the conflict
between the Imperial government and the majority of the German nation would have
continued to intensify to a point at which a revolutionary situation would have been
created.”80 Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on the eve of war complained of the
absence of nationalist fortitude in the land, lamenting this as a “decline of values,”
and a “spiritual degeneration.” Complaining further of what he saw as the ruling
classes’ “solicitude for every current of public opinion,” he defined his war policy to
Riezler as a necessary “leap into the dark and the heaviest duty.”81
At the same time, it is rather clear that this rising crisis, requiring the war to stem it,
was not at all the doing of the left. Of the Social Democrats and their millions of
adherents a hollowness was manifest. D.A. Smart wrote of the “widely felt stagnation
in the party”82 in 1913; Spengler, in the introduction to his Decline of the West, saw
both the approaching world war and a “great crisis...in Socialism.” Far from
inconceivable, then, is the notion that the rulers feared a breakdown of their
dependable official adversaries, not the party or unions themselves, especially given
the signs of uncontrolled movement.
 12

Industrial anger, in the shipyards, for example, was on the upswing and was most
often directly combatted by the unions. The alienation of trade union membership,
which was to characterize the latter part of the war, was strongly developing: local
groups were breaking away from the central confederation in textiles, paint and
metals.83
The Social Democratic Party, a function of the trade unions, was a loyal handmaiden
of the state; its support of government tax bills made possible the military alternative,
guaranteeing a harvest of proletarian cynicism. In 1914, Austin Harrison put it another
way: “All kinds of men, German bankers, for example, often voted for the
Socialists.”84 The workers’ penchant for “sudden, unorganized” strikes, which has
puzzled many commentators, underlined the contradiction and its threat.
During July, various Party leaders met with Bethmann-Hollweg, enabling him to
reassure the Prussian Ministry of State on July 30 as to the left’s abject loyalty:
“There would be no talk of a general strike or of sabotage.”85 Utilizing the socialist
tradition of defending war by advanced powers against less developed ones as
progressive, “opposition” and government were in agreement on anti-czarism as the
effective public banner.
While making plans for preserving the Party machinery, Social Democracy voted
unanimously for war credits on August 4, with an accompanying statement which
stressed imperialism as inevitably generating war and explicitly refused any
responsibility for the war. Robert Looker aptly termed this “a depth of political and
moral bankruptcy...of such enormity that it went far beyond the crimes of particular
leaders or parties.”86
Rosa Luxemburg in early 1915 wrote that “the collapse itself is without precedent in
the history of all times.”87 But it is interesting that she upheld the war (as legitimized
by its enemy of autocratic Russia) for literally years until public pressure was
overwhelmingly against it; similarly, she was neither in the lead of the rising of
November 1918, which released her from prison, or of the Spartacist revolt, which she
grudgingly backed. The Social Democrats—and the unions—were co-responsible
with the army for managing the war effort in general. Their police role most
importantly was the investiture of all the military authorities’ security measures with a
fading aura of “socialism” toward the prevention of popular uprisings. When
Luxemburg wrote in 1916 that “The world war has decimated the results of 40 years’
work of European socialism,”88 it would have been far more accurate to say that war
revealed those results. And as if this role, in bringing on and protecting the process,
were not enough, the Social Democrats, as the effective agency of state power
surviving the war, drowned the abortive postwar rebellions in blood. Of course, the
road to new horrors was wide open. As Lukacs recorded, “I witnessed the rise of
fascism in Germany and I know very well that very many young people at that time
adhered to fascism out of a sincere indignation at the capitalist system.”89
Returning for a moment to the actual arrival of war, there was indeed a sincere
“indignation” reigning in 1914. Part of this was a nihilist dissatisfaction by many of
ruling class backgrounds. Hannah Arendt detected, among those most permeated with
the ideological outlook and standards of the bourgeoisie, a common absorption—with
“the desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake
life.”90 Ernst Junger expressed an exuberant hope that everything the elite knew, the
whole culture and texture of life, might go down in “storms of steel.”91
 13

At the brink there was a certain relief, as well, caused by the decision itself. War gave
a release to the exhausted nerves caused by the tension of weeks of waiting—
followed, commonly, soon afterward by a confused despair.92
In October 1914, the diary of Rudolf Bindung, a young calvary officer, already
contained virtually the whole lesson of the war: “An endless reproach to
mankind...everything becomes senseless, a lunacy, a horrible bad joke of peoples and
their history...It was the end of happy endings in life as in art.”93
Never before, and nowhere more so than in England, had power— economic,
political, administrative, military—achieved such a high degree of consolidation. Yet
at this apogee its actual fragility was becoming palpable, in the tendency, in England
and across Europe, toward unfettered and unpredictable mass opposition. That there
existed a widespread challenge to the cohesion and integrity of nationalist states is
unmistakable.
The crises since 1909 regarding North Africa and the Balkans, above all, have been
mentioned; “foreign affairs” progressed into a much closer parallel to its “domestic”
counterpart; with a much larger qualitative diversion finally needed to transcend the
mounting social disharmony. The Agadir, Morocco, crisis of July and August 1911
exemplifies this development. During the seamen and dockers’ strike, which was
marked by unprecedented violence, especially in the ports of Liverpool and London,
the arrival of the German gunboat Panther in Agadir became the occasion for growing
official furor. When railway workers joined the strike, troops were called out and
fighting ensued. The clash at home was settled on emergency terms, thanks to the
Moroccan issue. Thereafter, domestic industrial warfare and foreign crisis both
seemed to grow with equal intensity.
Another area of outbreak in England was a reaction to bourgeois suffocation, as seen
in the strange physical fury of the votes for women cause. The mad fortitude exhibited
by feminists in the period of 1910-1914—including pitched battles with police, and
arson of cricket pavilions, racetrack grandstands, and resort hotels—certainly belied
the utterly tame objective of female suffrage, an obvious reason for characterizing the
movement as an outlet for suppressed energy. Reverend Joseph Bibby wrote of the
suffragettes, “who set fire to our ancient churches and noble mansions, and who go
about our art galleries with hammers up their sleeves to destroy valuable works of
art.” Having felt this explosion and the growing proletarian resolve, Bibby in 1915
welcomed the “chastening” effects of the war on these passions.94
The prewar Edwardian epoch was an age of violence wherein, according to
Dangerfield, “fires long smoldering in the English spirit suddenly flared, so that by
the end of 1913, Liberal England was reduced to ashes.”95 The memoirs of Emanuel
Shinwell also testify to this quickening time: “The discontent of the masses spread,
the expression of millions of ordinary people who had gained little or nothing from
the Victorian age of industrial expansion and grandiose imperialism.”96
The seeding time of 1914, in its ferment and fertility, seemed more than ripe for
increasingly radical directions. R.C.K. Ensor felt that an undistracted concentration
upon home issues may well have brought a revolution, especially, he thought, as
reflected by the “prewar loss of balance about home rule.”97
The social and parliamentary impasse over self-determination for Ireland—whether it
should encompass the whole of the country or exclude Ulster in the north—boiled
over in the summer of 1914. The south was ready to fight for a united Irish home rule,
 14

the loyalty of English troops was crumbling, and it looked, to R.J. Evans, for instance,
“as if Britain was at last breaking up through her own weakness and dissension.”98
Colin Cross wrote, apropos of the crisis over Ireland—and the industrial strife and
suffrage violence as well—that “Had there been no European war in Summer 1914,
Britain might well have lapsed into...anarchy.” As Irish workers and peasants moved
toward revolt, a divided England appeared “nearer to civil war than at any time since
the 16th century,” according to Cross.”
The whole English party system began to founder at the time of the Irish dilemma,
especially given the split in the army. James Cameron summed up this moment with
some eloquence: “From a hundred obscure places in Britain, from small-time barbers
and ice-cream dealers and Diplomatic Secretaries the message went back to the
European Foreign offices: the United Kingdom, if you could call it such, is riddled
with dissension; indeed, there is the considerable likelihood of civil war.”100
Harold Nicolson saw the background of the industrial upheavals of 1910-1914, with
its unfolding “revolutionary spirit,” as creating veritable panic among the upper
classes; this “incessant labor unrest” plus the home rule clash brought the country, in
his view, “to the brink of civil war.”101
Plainly, class tensions were becoming unbearable, “too great to be contained in the
existing social and world setting,” in the words of Arthur Marwick.102 In 1911
William Archer had conjectured that some “great catastrophe might be necessary for a
new, viable world social order.”103 For England, as elsewhere, the whirlpool of
contestation had grown critically turbulent over the four years leading up to mid-
summer 1914. “The cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-
minded of my people” George V warned participants of a Buckingham Palace
conference on July 21, 1914.104
Indeed, it can be argued that to look more closely at the attitudes assembling the
social crisis is to see nothing less than a nascent refusal against the whole miasma of
modern organizational mediation.
A major social welfare enactment, for example, the National Insurance Act of 1911,
served only to increase the discontent of the laboring classes.105 And it was this act
that accounted for growth in the trade unions, as the union bureaucracies provided
functionaries needed for its administration. More distance from the workers, a greater
closeness between unions and government. A1912 bill proposing to greatly extend the
franchise met with universal indifference.106
The Labor Party, voice of the unions and proponent of social legislation, likewise
struck no chord with the populace; owing largely to the repulsion its bureaucratic
nature evoked among the young especially, it engendered no enthusiasm at all.
But the voracious appetites at large could be clearly seen in the many major labor
battles from 1910 on—and in their propensity for arson, looting, and violence, as well
as the strong preponderance of unauthorized, anti-contract wildcat work stoppages.
Halevy saw the unrest as “verging at times on anarchy,” and determined that it was a
“revolt not only against the authority of capital but against the discipline of trade
unions”107—as if union discipline was not an essential element of capital’s authority.
By 1912, syndicalism, and its close cousin, guild socialism, were attracting much
attention. But popular excitement was actually a bit more elusive, not surprising since
 15

these projections, staffed by union officials and based on union structures, were all but
indistinguishable from industrial unionism itself.
Unexceptionally, English unions, too, were strengthened by the war, but worker
rebellions managed to continue, against high odds. The whole summer of 1916, for
instance, featured much resistance throughout the provinces in England and along the
Clyde to the north. By this time, and versus the disabling wartime array of forces, the
struggles were not only against the state and the employers but especially in
opposition to the union administrations. New mediation was called for and provided
by the shop steward movement of union reform, a diversion essential to the
containment of the workers. The Whitely Councils, a form of co-determination which
increasingly emphasized the role of unions, was another wartime development aimed
against proletarian autonomy. The parliamentary committees at work on a council
formula recognized that the constant strife was the doing of the “undisciplined,” not
the unions. They “wanted to find a cure for the malaise that, before the war, had every
year weighted more heavily on industry, and, in consequence, on all of English
politics.”108
A “Triple Alliance” among the miners’, transport workers’, and railwaymen’s unions
was formed during the spring and summer of 1914, leading not a few to the prediction
that a general strike would have occurred in the fall, but for the war, as the
culmination of the strike wave. This thesis totally confuses the official enemies of
domination with its real ones.
In fact, the strikes were definitely not initiated by union leaders, architects of the
Alliance, but in every case broke out locally and unofficially. The Alliance was not,
according to G.A. Phillips, “a concession to the pressures of rank and file militancy;
on the contrary, it was designed specifically to control and discipline such militancy.”
Union officials forged the new structure out of an immediate and overriding need to
avert work actions, not facilitate them. Its constitution proclaimed that “every effort
shall proceed among the three sections to create effective and complete control of the
respective bodies.”109 Concerning the actual arrival of war, even as the axe began to
fall, “Nobody was ‘for’ the war, or cared at least to be expressly held to be so, and
great numbers were urgently and articulately against it,” in the judgment of
Cameron.110 Reginald Pound grasped the groundwork for the event: “Probably for the
considerable part of the male population the war came, above all, as a relief from
pointless labor, one of the major and possibly most dangerous discontents of 20th-
century civilization.”111
World War I canonized the daily misery of the modern world, presenting its
apotheosis of authority and technology most precisely in terms of work. Carl
Zuckmayer’s experience as a soldier summed up power’s universal message that work
is all: “the monstrous boredom, the exhaustion, the unheroic, mechanical day-to-day
of war in which terror, fear, and death are inserted like the striking of a timeclock in
an endless industrial process.”112
In a world where the spectacle of opposition nowhere seriously asserted the abolition
of wage-labor and its context, this frontal assault was as possible as it was necessary.
The prewar revolution was smashed. It took 50 years for the recovery to begin.

NOTES
 16

1. Jan Patocka, “Wars of the 20th Century and the 20th Century as War,” Telos 30, (Winter
1976-77), p. 116
2. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1977), thesis 97.
3. Elie Halevy, The World Crisis of 1914-1918, (Oxford, 1930), p. 17
4. V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York, 1974), p. 14.
5. S.A. Sazanov, Reminiscences: Fateful Years, 1906-1916(London, 1925), pp. 123, 140.
6. Pierre van Paasen, Days of our Years (New York, 1946), p. 46.
7. Z. A. B. Zeman, The Gentleman Negotiators (New York, 1971), p. 46.
8. L. T. Hobhouse, The World in Conflict (London, 1915), p. 15.
9. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York, 1943), p. 197. 10. H. G. Wells, The Salvaging of
Civilization (New York, 1922), p.
11. This general idea is sometimes mentioned in passing, rarely explored or developed. David
Thomson saw that “The established authorities were everywhere subject [by 1914] to a recurrent
challenge which struck at the roots of their power—the challenge of mass revulsion against the
exacting disciplines of industrial urban civilization,” Thomson, Europe since Napoleon (New York,
1962), p. 505.
12. Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (Philadelphia,
1965), p. 15.
13. Leo Valiani, The End of Austria-Hungary (New York, 1973).
14. Norman Stone, “Hungary and the Crisis of 1914,” in Laqueur and Mosse, eds., 1914: The Coming
of the First World War (New York, 1970), p. 147.
15. Peter F. Sugar, “The Nature of the Non-Germanic Societies under Hapsburg Rule,” Slavic Review,
XI: I (March 1963), p. 29.
16. Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Hapsburg (London, 1963), p. 448.
17. Arthur J. May, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914(New York, 1968), p. 492.
18. Bottomore and Goode, eds., Austro-Marxism (Oxford, 1978), p. 132: Marxist leader Max Adler, in
“The Ideology of the War” (1915), warned that “the class standpoint of the proletariat does not in any
way diminish its duty and natural inclination to defend the fatherland.”
19. Zeman, op. cit.} p. 146.
20. Hans von Bulow, Memoirs of Prince, von Bulow, Vol. 3, (London, 1932), p. 148.
21. Edmund Taylor, The Fall of the. Dynasties (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), p. 243.
22. Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow of the. Winter Palace (London, 1976), pp. 452-453.
23. Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (Garden City, N.Y, 1953), p. 453
24. Arno Mayer, “Domestic Causes of the First World War,” Brody and Wright, eds., Elements of
Political Change (New York, 1967), p. 207.
25. Meriel Buchanan, Diplomacy and Foreign Courts (London, 1925), p. 169.
26. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y, 1959), p. 17.
27. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (New York, 1978), pp. 118-119.
28. Zeman, op. cit., p. 10.
29. F.L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (Berkeley, 1971), p. 20
30. Ibid., p. 45.
31. von Bulow, op. cit., p. 254
32. Zeman, op. cit., p. 10.
 17

33. John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford,
1967), p. 36.
34. Gramsci expressed this attitude in his first signed published article, in October 1914. James Joll,
Antonio Gramsci (London, 1977), p. 42.
35. Giampero Carocci, Italian Fascism (London, 1974), p. 10.
36. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920 (London, 1975), pp. 74, 76.
37. Quoted by Spriano, Ibid., p. 77.
38. Carsten, op. cit., pp. 53-54.
39. A. James Gregor, The Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley,
1979).
40. Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton, 1979), p. 90.
41. Oron Hale, The Great Illusion, 1900-1914 (New York, 1971), p. 202
42. Ibid.
43. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York, 1941), p. 78.
44. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modem France, Vol. 3 (Middlesex, 1963), p. 104.
45. von Bulow, op. cit., p. 173.
46. Prince Lichnowski, Heading for the Abyss (New York, 1928), p. 362.
47. Cobban, op. cit., p. 102.
48. David Thomson, Democracy in France Since 1870 (Oxford, 1969), p. 174.
49. Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor (Rutgers, 1971), p. 69.
50. Halevy, op. cit., p. 14.
51. Ibid., p. 20.
52. Taylor, op. cit., p. 238.
53. Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence. (New York, 1959), p. 334.
54. Graham Adams Jr., The Age of Industrial Violence, 1910-1915 (New York, 1966), p. xii.
55. Ibid., p. 219.
56. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963 (New York, 1965), pp. 202-203.
57. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York, 1967), pp. 365-366.
58. Zeman, op.cit., p. 162.
59. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York, 1968), p. 195.
60. Hale, op. cit., p. 163.
61. Ibid., p. 153
62. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York, 1967), p. 283.
63. Ibid., p. 279.
64. Harry Golumbek, The Game of Chess (London, 1954), p. 222.
65. Zweig, op. cit, p. 195.
66. R.W. Flint, ed. Marinetti (New York, 1972), p. 14. 67 Shattuck, op. cit., p. 353.
68. Discussed by Carolyn E. Playne, The Neuroses of Nations (London, 1925), p. 49.
69. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, 1965), p. 213.
70. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (London, 1969), p. 316.
 18

71. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1969), p. 41.
72. Hilton Kramer, “German Expressionism,” San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, October 12, 1980.
73. Berghahn, op. cit., p. 78.
74. Ibid., p. 81.
75. von Bulow, op. cit., p. 103.
76. Ibid., p. 102.
77. Playne, op. cit, p. 88.
78. James Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York, 1917), p. 75. Gerard saw the popular
reaction to the Zabern incidents as “perhaps the final factor which decided the advocates of the old
military system of Germany in favor of a European war” (p. 91).
79. John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (New York, 1973), p. 81.
80. Arthur Rosenberg, Imperial Germany (New York, 1970), p. 58.
81. Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York, 1978), p. 337.
82. D.A. Smart, Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (New York, 1977), p. 20.
83. Ibid., p. 21.
84. Austin Harrison, The Kaiser’s War (London, 1914), p. 197
85. James Joll, The. Second International (New York, 1956), pp. 166-167,
86. Robert Looker, ed., Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings (New York, 1972), p. 40.
87. Ibid., p. 197.
88. Ibid., p. 222.
89. Theo Pinkus, ed., Conversations with Lukacs (Cambridge, 1975), p. 148.
90. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism (New York, 1968), p. 26.
91. Quoted by Arendt, Ibid.
92. Hannah Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany: An Inner Chronicle (New Haven, 1948), pp. 30-32.
93. Reginald Pound, The Lost Generation (New York, 1964), p. 73.
94. Joseph Bibby, The War, Its Unseen Cause and Some of its Lessons (London, 1915), p. 12.
95. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1961) p. viii.
96. Emanuel Shinwell, I’ve Lived Through It All (London, 1973), p. 12.
97. R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1936), p. 557.
98. R.J. Evans, The. Victorian Age. (London, 1950), p. 46.
99. Colin Cross, The Liberals in Power, 1905-1914 (London, 1963), p. 171.
100. James Cameron, WWI (New York, 1959), p. 21.
101. Harold Nicolson, King George the Fifth (London, 1952), p. 163.
102. Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the. First World War (Boston, 1966), p. 10.
103. William Archer, The Great Analysis (London, 1911), p. 19.
104. Zara S. Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1977), p. 153.
105. Elie Halevy, A History of the English People, 1905-1915 (London, 1934), p. 457.
106. Ibid., p. 436.
107. Ibid., pp. 446,451.
108. Elie Halevy, The Era of Tyrannies (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), p. 106.
 19

109. G. A. Phillips, “The Triple Industrial Alliance in 1914,” Economic History Review, XXIV: 1
(1971), p. 63.
110. Cameron, op. cit., p. 46.
111. W. Pound, op. cit., p. 28.
112. Quoted in Eric J. Leed’s “Class and Disillusionment in World War I,” Journal of Modern History,
50 (December 1978), p. 691.

Scan & OCR: anarhija/ blok 45, Beograd, 2010, [email protected]