bers. In Germany, in 1913, there were 3,500,000 members, and in 1920, they had 12,000,000 members. In the United States, where the changes were not so stormy as in other countries, in 1913, there were 2,700,000, and in 1919 5,000,000. In France the official statistics for 1913 shows 1,000,000 and in 1919 2,500,000 members of trade unions. Such growth of membership we have also in the unions of Italy, Belgium, and which is more characteristic, even in the neutral countries. We see that the workers joined the trade union organizations in great masses.
The Reasons for Growth
What are the reasons for such unprecedented growth? First of all the uncertainty created in the ranks of the workers right after the end of the war as to the future. The beginning of demobilization created before the working class an array of very important problems, and before the wide masses arose the question of how to retain and safeguard their interests. Individual workers, during the war, felt themselves somewhat independent, although of course the more conscious part joined, the unions. But the masses, the millions, did not go to the unions. At the end of the war the general uncertainty, the threat of loss of war-time gains, created an atmosphere which stimulated the joining of any organization where they might collectively decide their problems.
After the war, individual workers felt less independent than during the war. The colossal world events which they lived through, participants of which they had been, forced them to think matters over.
We know that the war itself which resulted from the imperialist contradictions, had as one of its main aims the killing of the socialist movement (at least many of the bourgeoisie were of that opinion), but in fact, although the first year it seemed did kill all the revolution that had been in the working class yet—at the end of the war—notwithstanding the colossal blood-letting which they had just lived through—in the masses had grown up a great discontent that had to find some organized expression. This uncertainty of the tomorrow, the general social dissatisfaction, forced the individual workers to seek a shelter, a collective family, called forth the attraction to the trade unions.
The masses went into unions looking for a better life, for better conditions of work, looking for answers to those cursed questions that were placed before them by the war. In this colossal stream into the unions went class conscious and also less conscious elements: Those who had already found answers to the questions placed before them by the war, and those who were looking for these answers. The working class went to the unions, and that is the most characteristic feature of the post-war period.
