Women-led organizing often remains outside or on the fringes of unions, particularly during the late 19th century into the early 20th century. Not only does this limit the number of women who could engage long-term in shop floor organizing but it also reduces the prospects for contemporary research aiming to achieve a nuanced understanding of the structural challenges women workers faced. Since most women workers and organizers neither had direct access to friendly media outlets nor had their own correspondence and private documents preserved, the collective history of women’s shop floor resistance was often written by witnesses and allies, including journalists and Social Democratic politicians. These individuals were not only predominantly male but, when it came to labor movement activism, their motivations were slightly different from those of the women workers whose activism they documented. These constraints were especially present in minor, low-profit sectors of late-19th-century Austria-Hungary, such as jute bag production, which primarily relied on the labor of poorer women from neighboring peasant households.
In the case of the central subject of this article—the jute factory strikes in Újpest, an industrial hinterland of Budapest, the Hungarian capital—it was artist and editor Lajos Kassák, a renowned figure of the 20th-century Hungarian avant-garde, who worked for a few months in the jute factory and, almost 20 years later, published commentaries on the organizational work done there. Kassák discusses the jute workers’ strike activism in his autobiographical novel, Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man]. In addition to addressing the exclusionary behavior of unionized male workers toward the women of the jute factory, he also commemorates the creativity and engagement of a young worker, Klára Balázs whose contribution would have otherwise been lost without a trace despite her central role in organizing the jute workers. At the same time, Kassák underplays the women’s experience with striking to portray himself as the prime mover behind the organizing successes among the jute workers. The way Kassák depicts Balázs, and other women in the factory is clearly simplified and presented in a light that supports the broader narrative arc of his novel. Still, I argue that by examining the direct social and historical context in which the novel was written, we can achieve a better understanding of the motivations that shaped his one-sided portrayal of the jute workers.
The same applies to the Social Democratic press. Social Democratic organizers and journalists too blamed the lack of a strong union culture in women-dominated sectors on women’s supposed disinterest and general passivity. The complexity of organizing in a sector where revenue was secured through the extensive exploitation of an abundantly available, unskilled labor force of young, working-class women was rarely addressed. This, of course, does not mean that the Social Democrats were unaware of the realities of such factory work. In both the case of Kassák’s novel and the strike reports, the implicit claims of the texts go beyond the objective description of relevant events. Népszava [People’s Voice], the main journal of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary (MSzDP), followed the agenda of the MSzDP, whose politicians and union representatives had several confrontations with the jute workers. Meanwhile, Kassák wrote his novel in the early 1920s, during the years he spent in Viennese exile, as he had to leave Budapest after the fall of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. The narrative arc of Kassák’s novel is embedded in the context of Kassák’s Viennese exile that defined Kassák’s thoughts on unionist organizing in the early 1920s, when he already abandoned factory work but continued to collaborate with Social Democratic cultural institutions that provided him platform to promote and publish his literary works while being physically absent from Budapest.
Therefore, by focusing on the series of jute factory strikes between 1896 and 1908, the article compares the strike reports of the Social Democratic press with relevant passages from Kassák’s novel. First, it provides an introductory overview of the socioeconomic background of the jute factory workers and their households, assessing how that corresponded to the general patterns of industrialization in Budapest at the time. Then the paper discusses how the reports in Népszava interpreted the jute factory strikes and what organizational techniques Kassák found the most forward-looking. The third and final part of the article details the personal stakes and social circumstances that shaped Kassák’s narrative almost two decades after he had left the factory. Each section highlights contradictions among the available sources and the factual discrepancies they contain, and offers context-based explanations for the conflicting narratives.
Workers’ resistance in the light of macroeconomic trends and patterns of labor division
Beginning with the economic trends and factors impacting shop floor organizing helps to foreground the hardships women faced when it came to union organizing. This approach leads us to two main domains of inquiry: one related to the role of the gendered division of labor in the capitalist economy, and the other addressing the sectoral specificities of Hungarian jute production. While the latter deals with the consequences of cartelization on the regional organization and centralization of jute bag production—and consequently helps estimate management’s willingness to bargain with its workers—the former gives us a general impression of what sort of organizational techniques were available for women workers in low-profit industries. The two were entangled since low bargaining power also limited the forms of resistance available. Gender is relevant not only because women always held inferior positions in the formal labor market but also because factory workers, in general, never exist in society as isolated individuals but they were integrated in the macroeconomic systems with the whole of their households. Most working women had to contribute to their households’ survival in more ways than factory work, and they were rarely considered permanent wage earners whose labor conditions at the factory would have long-term impacts on the household. Therefore, understanding their households’ basic income-pooling strategies, needs, and resources acquires additional relevance as these aspects also directly shape shop floor resistance.Footnote 1
Between 1880 and 1900, the proportion of women in the industrial workforce in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy doubled to 20 percent from 10 percent. Nevertheless, this newly entering workforce was not evenly distributed among different sectors. Female industrial labor was concentrated in sectors with low investment rates and low wages, like the food and textile industries.Footnote 2 Paying women less was important for maintaining the moderate prices of raw materials and food on the local, and, in the case of exports, international level, therefore besides exploiting the peasantry, cheap female labor secured the relatively high purchasing power of the wages of skilled male workers.
The agrarian crisis that dominated the late 19th century had a direct impact on the division of labor within peasant households. Sending young women off to textile factories was a coping strategy for poorer peasant families, where the household expenses were covered mainly by subsistence production.Footnote 3 Jute factories almost exclusively employed young, unskilled women, who typically left the factory after getting married at the latest. They produced bags for the local milling industry. The income from this kind of factory work only made up for periodic or seasonal shortfalls in the family budget. According to the Social Democratic journal Nőmunkás [The Woman Worker], the majority of the workers at the Újpest jute factory came from such households and took up only short-term employment.Footnote 4 Kassák also notes that the workers were “peasants from Újpest who had a small plot of land or a family farm, but factory work was so marginal to their lives that they could not be involved in any movement activism.”Footnote 5 The gap emerging between the labor movement and women workers was not exclusively caused by the divergent socialization of the peasantry and the urban working-class, but a result of the distribution of different types of income sources within their households. Therefore, in order to discuss the long-term engagement of the jute workers in the labor movement, in addition to union activism, we must also take into account those initiatives that addressed other forms of household income-pooling beyond formal wage income, whether it be subsistence production, as in the case of the agrarian socialist movements, regulation of household expenditure (Antialkoholista Páholy [Anti-Alcoholics Lodge]), or social reproduction (Újpest Gyermekbarát Egyesület [Children’s Friend Society]). Kassák mentions Klára Balázs in connection with both the Anti-Alcoholics Lodge and the Újpest Workers’ Home but we do not know anything about her household and her family’s main income sources.Footnote 6 Nevertheless, her example shows that among women engaged in labor activism, union membership was important, but institutions that addressed income management at the household level could reach out to women more efficiently even among those who took up factory work.
The reproductive labor done by working-class women meant an even greater return to industrial capital than their labor on the shop floor. The integration of semi-proletarian householdsFootnote 7 into capitalist production happened in such a way that informal work, whether paid or unpaid, offered working-class women more advantageous bargaining positions during rent strikes than they typically had in their formal workplaces. The 1900s tenant movement is the best known among the rare examples in Kassák’s novel, where women’s engagement in labor movement activism comes to the forefront. A housing shortage in the 1900s, along with a consequent steady increase in rents, triggered a series of rent strikes in Budapest. At the peak in 1910 and 1911, when Kassák’s own block was also organizing against their landlord, more than 200 buildings went on strike, involving over ten thousand tenants.Footnote 8 These efforts were led by multigenerational working-class households, with both male and female family members actively participating. In most cases, the strikes ended with some form of positive outcome, allowing tenants to temporarily avoid further rent increases.
The late-19th-century urbanization and industrialization in the Hungarian capital did not lead to extensive proletarianization. Most tenants from working-class backgrounds could only cover a minor part of their households’ expenses through formal wage income. They often shared a one-room-and-kitchen flat with their extended family and, frequently, with lodgers. Since these semi-proletarian households ensured the constant influx of cheap labor force into Budapest and its environs, it was in the interest of both city leadership and local industrial capital to end the constant rent strikes.Footnote 9 Allowing the striking tenants to move back into their homes by mutual agreement meant that the rapid industrialization of the urban agglomeration could continue at a low-cost rate, benefiting the industrial capital. Rent boycotts forced a significant number of landlords to sign a collective agreement, and the 1908/1909 tenancy law reforms provided some sort of termination protection, even though the new regulations benefited only the small portion of tenants who had at least a quarterly contract. After the introduction of the new law, rent strikes were not only fought in the streets but in the courts, and since it was in the interest of the city leadership to curtail the rent crisis, tenants could often successfully defend their cases with the help of MSzDP-affiliated lawyers specializing in property law.Footnote 10
Kassák’s novel includes the 1910 rent strike that took place on Visegrádi Street in Budapest. As with the jute factory strikes, the proportion of organized workers among the tenants was negligible, and to protect their interests and prevent rents from going up they had to engage in an almost constant confrontation with the owner. Nevertheless, in 1908, they forced the landlord to sign a collective agreement and in May 1910, they successfully protested against the announced rent increase.Footnote 11 Kassák writes the following about the women who participated, “It took them a while, but they came to understand the importance of this struggle, and they, who had always stood aside and refused to show solidarity with the others, now took the lead, and became the bravest and loudest.”Footnote 12 He depicts the jute factory workers as much less militant in his novel, calling them “uninterested souls” who finally joined the union but never took the strike seriously enough.
At the strike camp, the atmosphere was good. The girls were happy in this freedom, they danced and frolicked because they thought of this deadly serious struggle as just a time to have fun, expecting that when they finally decided to go back to the factory, they would already have fewer working hours and improved wages.Footnote 13
In the fall of 1910, the tenants’ movement on Visegrádi Street faced significant setbacks. The main challenge that the tenants encountered was that, unlike in other, more successful instances, the building was not owned by a private investor but by a regional retail bank, which could absorb the loss of revenue from unpaid rent, thereby prolonging the conflict.Footnote 14 The eviction of some of the tenants in late November proved intimidating enough to discourage further strike action. Kassák, however, focuses only on the peak of the tenant strikes, when both the tenants and the MSzDP believed they held a relatively favorable bargaining position. Kassák may have understood from his own experience that successes and failures often depend more on economic circumstances than on the strikers’ militancy. However, since he speaks from the perspective of a strike organizer in both cases, he emphasizes the strikers’ general attitude while offering limited commentary on the differences in bargaining power in the given situations.
The jute workers may have seemed less invested than their peers involved in the rent strikes, but they also had to organize under even fiercer constraints. The main reason behind the jute workers’ lack of meaningful bargaining power was that the establishment of the new jute factory on the outskirts of the Hungarian capital followed the global trends of sectoral peripheralization. This practice of relocating production to places where the costs of production is lower negatively affected both wages and general working conditions. While British and other core-based companies were able to outsource production directly to the global peripheries, minor industrial actors, like the Austrian consortiums, introduced spatial fixes on a regional level. This spatial fix came not only with the advantage of lower-wage costs compared to Austria but was also built on the constant fluctuation of the labor force, which enabled firms to intensify exploitation of their employees. Since workers of the new Hungarian production sites did not plan to stay long, employers felt no need to invest in the long-term reproduction of the labor force, and outsourced these costs to households instead.
In 1879, in response to rising competition emerging from the globalization of jute production, Germany increased protective tariffs on jute yarn and fabrics, which slowed the expansion of the Austrian jute industry. In response, the Austrian company did not open new production sites until Austrian protective tariffs were also raised.Footnote 15 In Hungary, following regular patterns of the Eastern-European economic integration, the pacing of industrialization in different sectors varied depending on the level of state subsidies available.Footnote 16 Accordingly, the jute industry first appeared in the country only after the government offered tax relief for the establishment of new production sites. Taking advantage of the Industrial Development Act of 1881, the jute factory of Újpest was founded in 1883 by the Erste Österreichische Jutespinnerei- und Weberei A.G. as a part of the Austria-based Hanf-, Jute- und Textilindustrie-Aktiengesellschaft (HITIAG) Group. As a result, the Újpest-based jute workers had to organize against a major cartel with multiple production sites, many of which offered better wages and labor conditions than the factory in Újpest. Moreover, wage differences further hindered the possibility of engaging different production sites in solidarity actions and synchronizing strikes across different factories within the same cartel.
The jute factories produced bags for the Monarchy’s mills, meaning that the profit rates were heavily dependent on agricultural performance and Hungary’s position on the international grain market. Flour produced by the milling industry was one of Hungary’s most important exports, but international demand had declined by the turn of the century,Footnote 17 while the number of jute factories continued to rise in the region.Footnote 18 The mills responded to the increasing competition by cutting back on production, and these measures had a direct impact on jute industry workers. According to a strike report from 1896, factory management reduced working hours due to production restrictions. Since spinners and weavers were paid performance wages, the reduction in working hours meant a direct loss in income.Footnote 19 To make up for the shortfall, they asked for a moderate wage increase, which was eventually negotiated but only for the weavers (the sources do not mention spinners), with no change in wages for auxiliary workers.Footnote 20
In order to ensure profit, the Monarchy’s jute factories organized themselves into a cartel and set a production ceiling in 1901.Footnote 21 The centralized sale of goods made the jute companies profitable overall,Footnote 22 but the cartel was not an isolated economic entity. Since its price-raising strategy was directly detrimental to the interests of the milling industry, mill operators kept trying to obtain bags by circumventing the cartel.Footnote 23 By 1903, the cartel’s factories had again built up substantial stocks, and a 25 percent cut in production was imposed by management. Népszava reported that, since workers in Újpest were already working only 5 days instead of the 6 days at the start of the year,Footnote 24 continuing with this managerial tactics was only possible by laying off workers and temporarily halting production.Footnote 25 Since the factory management did not want to lose their state subsidy, they could not officially suspend production;Footnote 26 instead of dismissing workers, therefore, they almost halved the weekly wages of the spinners, who in response immediately went on a spontaneous strike. After the spinning machines stopped, those who were linked to the spinners in the labor process were also left without work, and soon all the workers in the factory went on strike demanding “10-hour long workdays and the restoration of the previous wage system. They also complained that they were being fined without cause and treated harshly.”Footnote 27
Strikes in the factory between 1903 and 1908: the portrayal of the jute workers in the Social Democratic press and in Egy ember élete
Besides Népszava, Textilmunkás, the periodical of the Textile Workers’ Federation, the conservative media (Független Magyarország [Independent Hungary]), and the police regularly reported on the strikes, detailing the workers’ specific demands along with summaries of the speeches delivered at strike meetings. Based on these sources, I reconstruct the timeline of the jute factory strikes to reveal relevant events and details that were missing from the accounts of Kassák and Népszava. Discussing the ups and downs of strike activism in the factory also helps challenge the biased assumptions that dominate the portrayal of the jute workers in the discussed texts. In the case of Kassák’s novel, this approach further provides an opportunity to highlight the differences between the labor conditions Kassák experienced as a skilled locksmith and those to which the jute workers were subjected.
Though the jute factory had only formally had a union since 1896, a significant number of workers participated in socialist mass events, marches, and demonstrations even before 1896. In 1890, when the factory’s working hours were still 12 hours long on weekdays, the jute factory workers “increased the crowd by three hundred women” at the May Day march, demanding 8-hour workdays.Footnote 28 In the same year, when the striking jute factory workers tried to join bakers on strike, they were denied entry to their strike camp, with the bakers saying, “Let the priests strike among us first—then the jute girls can come!”Footnote 29 Even if this anecdote may not represent the whole truth, it is still telling that Népszava published these comments without showing any solidarity with the jute workers.
As women’s involvement in production progressed, the frequency of women workers’ strikes also notably increased. The 1901 seamstresses strike in Budapest, the 1902 garment factory workers’ strikes in Debrecen and Bratislava, and the jute factory strikes together played a significant role in prompting Social Democrats to address the “woman question.” By 1903, there was no doubt that Népszava and the MSzDP should support the striking jute workers. Népszava collected donations on their behalf: in addition to cash, and they received 300 loaves of bread from the local bakers,Footnote 30 the same sector whose workers 10 years earlier supposedly refused to share their strike camp with the jute factory girls.
In April 1903, in the month immediately preceding the jute factory strike, the MSzDP Congress included demands for the equal rights of women and the simplification of the legal framework for marriage and divorce in its program.Footnote 31 When the strike erupted in May, party members Gyula Alpári and Ágoston Pelczéder joined the workers and spoke at the strike meetings. Eighteen-year-old Mariska Gárdos, who later participated in the foundation of the National Association of Women Workers, also gave a speech, addressing the adolescent and teenage girls who worked at the factory while their upper-class peers were still in school.Footnote 32 According to Friss Újság [Fresh News], the first strikers stopped working on May 20,Footnote 33 and on June 9, Népszava reported on the success of the strike, even though the concessions offered by the management fell woefully short of the original objectives. They only ensured that the workers could take up work without serious repercussions,Footnote 34 but factory management withdrew the agreement the next day, dismissed the workers by issuing their labor booklets,Footnote 35 and started advertising for new recruits.Footnote 36
It became clear to the Social Democratic leadership that the strike was serving the interests of management by halting production. On June 23, Népszava published a report detailing the circumstances that led to the strike’s failure. The article highlighted major communication difficulties between the party delegation and the workers. It claimed that the party delegation overestimated the workers’ willingness to strike, because no one informed the delegation that the majority of the one thousand workers did not go on strike voluntarily, but were left without work due to the work stoppage at the spinning machines. The article attributed the lack of communication between the two sides to the low number of organized workers, and concluded that the recent failure paired with the general discontent within the factory would drive the workers to the union and the conflict would ultimately resolve itself.Footnote 37 However, it is unlikely that the party representatives were unaware of the circumstances that led to the strike. Since Független Magyarország reported immediately after it broke out that the spinners’ work stoppage had caused the production to halt,Footnote 38 Népszava and the MSzDP must have also been aware of this fact. The criticism that nonunionized workers were to blame for the failed strikes kept reappearing in the journal. In 1912, Népszava even claimed that the jute factory workers “began their previous strikes always in an unorganized manner and therefore had to return [to the factory] without results.”Footnote 39
When the MSzDP claimed that the possibility of wage improvement was conditional on an increase in union membership, it made promises that contradicted the realistic prospects of the local organization. The steady rise in the number of unionized workers was essential to MSzDP, not the least since union membership practically equaled party membership, considering that the Party built its own networks through the federalization of the local workers’ organizations. Traditional unions, however, were not designed to accommodate the cheap and constantly fluctuating workforce of the textile industry. Even after the First World War, only 15 percent of textile workers formally joined a labor organization.Footnote 40
From Egy ember élete, we know that Kassák arrived at the jute factory only a few years after the major strike of 1903, and according to him—but contrary to the predictions of Népszava—union membership continued to plummet. Before getting hired at the jute factory, Kassák worked as a skilled locksmith in several other factories on the outskirts of Budapest. He began working in the textile sector only after he was blacklisted from employment in the high-profit sectors due to his previous involvement in factory strikes and labor union activism. By his own admission, Kassák went to the factory’s gatehouse “out of habit” and did not expect to be hired at the tool shop. Nevertheless, after he started working there, he soon found a young socialist woman he could count on in shop floor organizing. In Egy ember élete, Kassák recollects how his professional friendship and camaraderie with Klára Balázs started, “During a midday break, I met a weaver, and in this girl I found a valuable socialist agitator. Her name was Klára Balázs, she was a member of the Újpest Workers’ House and the Anti-alcoholic Lodge. I had never met before such a serious and intelligent woman among the workers.”Footnote 41
Balázs’s name had been mentioned in the strike coverage before Kassák’s arrival.Footnote 42 In 1908, she attended the annual congress of the Textile Workers’ Federation as a member of the executive committee,Footnote 43 spoke at the organization’s meetings in various districts of Budapest, and agitated for trade union membership.Footnote 44 In the same year, Kassák and Balázs jointly organized a wage strike in the factory and demanded a 25 percent wage increase.Footnote 45 Kassák chaired the strike meeting,Footnote 46 but the police reports only mention Balázs as the legal representative of the striking workers,Footnote 47 meaning that despite being only 19-years old at the time,Footnote 48 she must have been higher up in the organizational hierarchy than the 21-year-old Kassák.
We know very little of Balázs; she was born in 1889 in a working-class family and she worked in the factory as a weaver. Weavers and spinners were semi-skilled workers, almost exclusively women. Their task was to supply the spinning and weaving machines with material and ensure the uninterrupted flow of production. Unskilled workers, who performed simple, not yet mechanized tasks such as bagging and yarn spooling, were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Spooling the yarn was done by 12- to 14-year-old adolescents. The few skilled, male employees at the factory were the foremen who supervised production and the locksmiths who maintained the machinery.Footnote 49
Kassák, when he details how jute factory workers were perceived by skilled, male union workers, writes, “Until now, we have taken these peasants for dumb, thick-headed coolies.”Footnote 50 Besides the obvious misogyny, this comment might also reflect that the semi-skilled and unskilled workers’ attitude on the shop floor was different from what Kassák had encountered in the leading sectors. In the case of skilled labor, union advocacy was directly linked to self-education and the unions’ monopoly over quality assurance regarding the labor provided. By contrast, in factories like the jute factory, absenteeism and passivity were rational strategies for self-protection to reduce the likeliness of accidents resulting from fatigue, as well as the only available practice for workers to prevent the otherwise inevitable long-term health damage. This aspect of unskilled labor comes up in Kassák’s novel but not in the context of the jute factory, instead Kassák mentions this problem when detailing his partner’s Jolán Simon’s own survival strategies at the light bulb factory:
I ruined my lungs there, and I might have died by today. I didn’t take the trouble seriously at the time. We did at least two durchmarsFootnote 51 (sic!) every week. But I kept my wits about me, and whenever I could, left work and looked for a place to sleep. I was a tiny little woman, and the others thought that my days were already numbered. Appel, the foreman, was good to me, he was a member of the Order of Good Templars, and so he forgave me many things.Footnote 52
The everyday routines must have looked similar at the jute factory, where women were also forced to engage in physically demanding and dangerous tasks. According to Kassák, not only were the workers passive and neglected the union bureaucrats but the jute factory also remained out of sight of the MSzDP. There was no meaningful attempt to foster political agitation or serious organizational work on the part of the trade union and the Social Democrats, “No one even considered them worthy to approach them with the intention of organizing, and now we have realized that there were many thoughtful and progressive people among them.”Footnote 53 This claim, however, is partly contradicted by the fact that there had been intense strike activism less than a year before Kassák arrived at the factory. Those events not only required engagement on the side of the workers, but they also forced the Textile Workers’ Federation to notice the jute factory. The spring of 1907 saw one of the longest strikes in the factory’s history, lasting two months. On March 23, 1907, eighty spinners stopped working and, after the spinning machines stopped, 800 workers followed the spinners’ example and left the factory.Footnote 54
Simon Herczog represented the Textile Workers’ Federation at the strike meetings, and in the beginning argued that, “there is no guarantee that this struggle will end in victory.”Footnote 55 He suggested, “that the workers should resume work the next morning.”Footnote 56 Despite the Federation’s pleas, sixty-six spinners remained on strike so production could not be restored.Footnote 57 Because of the good harvest, the management had expected higher profits than in previous years,Footnote 58 and after almost 2 months on strike, they reduced the 11-hour workdays by half an hour and granted a 5 percent wage increase.Footnote 59 Since the workers had demanded a 25 percent wage increase, the 5 percent offered was not necessarily taken as an evident success. According to the police reports, at a strike meeting Balázs “complained vehemently that the strike, which had been going on for seven weeks, had not succeeded because they [the workers] would not pay attention to the strike law and some of them had gone back to work.”Footnote 60 Meanwhile, given the weak bargaining power in the sector, Herczog argued that management’s concessions represented a victory per se.Footnote 61 According to the Federation’s own periodical (Textilmunkás), the strike was an obvious success because it earned the union a number of new members and Balázs was appointed as the head of the reorganized local union.Footnote 62 During the following autumn, the workers went on strike again in solidarity with two dismissed locksmiths. The entire community of about 1,000 workers was mobilized, and two weeks later, when the management rehired the locksmiths in question, the workers restored production with the same discipline as they left the factory.Footnote 63
Regular strikes were not limited to 1907; the history of the factory was marked by constant strikes from the very beginning. The majority broke out for two reasons. First, whenever there was an overproduction crisis in the sector, factory management reduced workers’ wages in an attempt to compensate for the company’s loss.Footnote 64 Second, the foremen regularly used physical abuse against young, women workers, and the violent harassment often resulted in this form of resistance.Footnote 65 Kassák does not mention any of these events in Egy ember élete. Whether Kassák deliberately underrepresented the organizational work done prior to 1908 in order to amplify the value of his own contribution, or there was already little semblance of the previous year’s achievements by the time Kassák arrived at the factory, real structural conditions made Kassák’s narrative plausible-sounding. Solidarity with laid-off workers and the high propensity to strike did not compensate for poor bargaining power and the difficulties of organizing a regularly fluctuating labor force. With the changing of agricultural seasons or simply due to the bad working conditions, each year a number of workers left the factory. This fluctuation may have hindered the growth of the local union within a few months, but the results of the 1907 strikes could not have been completely forgotten,Footnote 66 especially since it accelerated Balázs’s advancement in the trade union hierarchy.
The novel’s narrative: the role of cultural production in the reproduction of the labor movement
Despite being published in Hungarian, Kassák’s magazine Ma [Today] emerged through extensive networking with figures such as Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, and George Grosz.Footnote 67 While in Ma, Kassák focused on theorizing Dadaism and Constructivism, by the final volume, he had begun experimenting with a sociographic tone, and Egy ember élete offers semi-autobiographical accounts of early-20th-century working-class lives in the industrial neighborhoods of Budapest. In the sections where Kassák discusses his time at the jute factory, he not only describes the differences in attitudes toward work and union organizing between skilled male workers and jute workers but also points out the different organizational tactics used by Balázs compared to the Federation’s approach to union organizing. Kassák’s account provides, on the one hand, insight into the creativity and engagement of Balázs, while, on the other hand, ignores those aspects of Balázs’s efforts that followed a more traditional, economist approach. This artificial separation between the cultural and economic sides of union organizing would not have worked on the factory’s shop floor, but it reflects the sort of debates Kassák entered in with Social Democratic intellectuals at the time of writing his novel.
In the period between the jute factory strike in 1908 and the first publication of Kassák’s account in 1927, a change in hegemonic relations also changed the conditions under which alliances could be formed between the MSzDP and Hungarian left-wing intellectuals.Footnote 68 In 1922, although the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been replaced by Miklós Horthy’s conservative regime, the MSzDP entered the parliament and began practicing a moderate electoral politics, accompanied by tighter control over the organizations in its network,Footnote 69 which led to several confrontations with both the trade unions and the Social Democratic intelligentsia. As a result, intellectuals, including members of the editorial board of Ma,Footnote 70 moved toward the less bureaucratic, illegal Communist Party. Those intellectuals, who primarily relied on Social Democratic platforms for an audience for their creative output, also had to renegotiate the content of their informal alliances with the Party. Egy ember élete carries the marks of this negotiation.
After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, along with many other left-wing intellectuals who openly supported the Commune, Kassák was forced to leave the country and was only allowed to return at the end of 1926. During those years, Kassák re-established Ma in Vienna, but despite building his reputation as an intermediary figure who created a bridge between core and noncore avant-grade movements, he considered his years spent in Vienna as a temporary exile.Footnote 71 He constantly prepared to move back to Budapest, but the success of his return heavily relied on how efficiently he could access the already existing cultural infrastructure of the MSzDP.Footnote 72 Népszava, despite being slightly more conservative than Ma, played an important role in bringing Kassák’s work to the Hungarian-speaking public.Footnote 73 Party lawyers and Social Democratic politicians also assisted him with legal advice and advocacy in his return to Budapest. Throughout his Viennese exile, Kassák was in constant debate with other party-affiliated authors about the relevance of his writing to the workers’ movement. Despite the regular polemics, since he was partially dependent on MSzDP networks, he sought to legitimize his own avant-garde artistic practices within the workers’ movement and its party institutions.Footnote 74 Egy ember élete was serialized and published in Nyugat, the leading Hungarian modernist periodical. Kassák began writing his novel in 1923, and the first section was published in 1924. In the same year, he wrote the essay Álláspont [Standpoint], in which he openly criticized Social Democratic politics for its economismFootnote 75, and, following the cultural politics of Red Vienna, advocated for establishing party schools, where instead of “recruiting party members” the emphasis would fall on “building a new human resource” through the dissemination of “more versatile knowledge.” The stance was based on his claim that, “[t]oday’s revolution desires from us not barricade fights, but intellectual products documenting our humane virtue.”Footnote 76
The role in which Kassák portrays himself in his novel cannot be dissociated from the fact that at the time of writing he advocated for emphasis on cultural work in the labor movement and sought to present the content of his avant-garde periodical as relevant to workers’ culture. Although his experiments with abstraction deviated from the artistic vision of the Social Democratic mainstream and were judged by Népszava journalists as inaccessible to the working class, Kassák did not want to further distance himself from the MSzDP. In Egy ember élete, he provides tangible examples of those organic intellectuals (in Antonio Gramsci’s terms) whose dependency on such alliances remained transparent compared to that of traditional intellectuals whose social position was secured earlier, in previous hegemonic regimes. In the novel, Balázs’s character also appears as an organic intellectual but, as Kassák argues, besides developing her allegiance to the union through compromises, her success was also made possible through confrontation with the Textile Workers’ Federation, and by shifting her activism from unionist economism toward cultural work and symbolic acts of community-building. Gramsci did not connect the concept of the organic intellectual directly to the cultural spheres of production since, according to him,
Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.Footnote 77
Consequently, organic intellectuals can organize along the lines of group-consciousness and can meaningfully contribute to the representation of the interests of their own social group.Footnote 78 This section of Kassák’s novel, on the other hand, deals with a specific type of culturally well-informed, organic intellectual whose social embeddedness transgresses the usual spheres of MSzDP alliances. Thus, its narrative implies that cultural work, including that of Balázs and Kassák, can create a bridge between the traditional Social Democratic scenes and social groups marginalized on the periphery of the workers’ movement, such as the women workers of the jute factory.
Accordingly, in the novel, special emphasis is placed on the distance between traditionalist union bureaucrats and the women workers. This distance has a practical aspect, as the Federation’s bureaucrats had only sporadic contact with the factory employees, while Balázs worked with the other weavers and occupied the same place in the wage hierarchy.Footnote 79 Compared to Balázs, Kassák worked somewhat more isolated in the tool shop, but he often engaged in confrontation within the Metalworkers’ Union where he belonged based on his training, and these conflicts pushed him to look for camaraderie among nonunion members. According to Kassák, as a result of the efforts he and Balázs put into community building, “[t]he hooligan factory became the strongest unit of the socialist organization.”Footnote 80 Kassák also emphasizes that, though the everyday conflicts between the trade union and the workers had practical, organizational, and economic reasons, in addition to the underlying organizational problems, a number of cultural and discursive practices excluded women from the workers’ movement. This was especially the case since mainly peasant girls came to the factory, whose appearance and habitus were clearly distinct from the sociocultural milieu of the urban working class and as such they were not even considered working class or allies.
For all these reasons, Kassák and Balázs first approached the jute workers with seemingly minor, rather symbolic acts; for example, they organized a dance ball,Footnote 81 where the women of the jute factory and the wider working-class community of the neighborhood could meet informally. According to Kassák, this event gained specific importance because otherwise skilled, male workers would not interact with these women, or as Kassák puts it, “young apprentices, who would not have spoken to these Panca MarisFootnote 82 in the street, slowly wandered into the hall, and fell into the dance.”Footnote 83 Kassák and Balázs, at Balázs’s suggestion, also organized a twice-weekly, informal “house” court for the workers in the Újpest Workers’ Home to provide them a forum “where personal conflicts between workers could be settled peacefully.”Footnote 84
The Workers’ Home offered a place where local workers, whether unionized or not, could socialize and engage in nonunion-related activities. Besides dance classes, it housed cultural evenings, educational lectures and was in contact with the local Children’s Friend Society and the Workers’ Tourist Association.Footnote 85 Balázs and Kassák both spent much of their free time in the Workers’ Home’s collective spaces, where they could also access the recent editions of the leading cultural periodicals. “Klára and I managed to make the Workers’ Home order Budapesti Napló [Budapest Journal], which published poems of Ady and Kosztolányi on Saturdays. These were such wonderful evenings, engaging our nerves and thoughts without drinks and café music!”Footnote 86
In his novel, Kassák emphasizes that Balázs closely followed both working class and modernist literature; made friends with young, working-class artists; and not only gave public speeches during strikes but regularly recited poems. Compared to how much we learn about her engagement with literature, little is revealed about the details of her work in the trade union. By giving such prominent role to her interest in literature, the novel’s narrative implies that the cultural institutions of the Social Democrats, such as the workers’ homes and choral societies, played an essential role in the political socialization of Balázs. They provided her with an opportunity to develop a class consciousness that went beyond traditional union-consciousness. This consciousness, earned through cultural consumption, was not only less dependent on one’s given place in the wage hierarchy but also granted greater agency in union work and organizing.
The house court, established by Balázs and Kassák, shifted the site of unionist activism from the factory to the Workers’ Home, and according to Kassák became an effective forum for agitation as it gave them an opportunity to establish personal contacts with the workers and develop trust within the community. Kassák and Balázs were careful to ensure that the workers did not associate their activities directly with the trade union bureaucracy. “We did not allow the secretary and president of the central trade union [Textile Workers’ Federation], who were typical Jewish men in all their appearance (sic!),Footnote 87 to be among them. They were not angry about this, they were assisting workers in accessing insurance coverage, and they knew that the increase in membership was attributed to their merits anyway. They let us work freely.”Footnote 88 Kassák’s account leaves some room for the implication that symbolic acts, such as the dance ball and the informal court, were effective because women workers were more receptive to emotional manipulation than economic reasoning. “These peasant people were still completely virgin soil for socialism, and since we approached them on an emotional rather than a scientific basis they were inclined to listen to us, they joined the union, and started showing up at the [Workers’] Home in the evenings.”Footnote 89 In fact, symbolic acts succeeded over traditional union tactics of economic agitation because union bureaucrats did not have much to offer to the workers.
With all these claims, Kassák posits a sharp distinction between the economic and cultural side of movement-building and argues that cultural institutions play a crucial role in linking hard-to-organize working-class groups into the labor movement. This conception, if contrasted with what we know about the jute workers’ strike activism, reflects little of what has been done by the organizers on the shop floor of the factory. It resonates, however, well with how Kassák saw his own role in the workers’ movement in the 1920s, when he had already moved further away from traditional unionism. Furthermore, this binary view of the cultural and the economic frames women workers as inexperienced and emotion-driven, while allowing Kassák to frame himself in contrast to them as an experienced, professional leader. His autobiographical work served to document the author’s own successes as a union organizer, supporting Kassák’s later call for an established place within the Hungarian labor movement, even during the years when his artistic experiments, as well as his Viennese exile, drove him further away from the Social Democratic Party and its cultural institutions. Kassák’s account shows that symbolic actions were necessary because the male-dominated urban working class and its institutions tended to be neglectful or openly hostile towards women workers. The partial success of the 1907 strike, however, suggests that there was a more dynamic relationship between the economic and cultural sides of organizing in the factory. Besides symbolic techniques of community-building, the partial successes earned in 1907 proved to the workers that there might be some room for bargaining, and this may have helped Balázs and Kassák to achieve a significant growth in union membership. Kassák, of course, knew that shop floor resistance cannot be separated from material demands, and he also acknowledges in his novel that they could only achieve a major increase in the number of the union members through economic agitation; the workers joined the union because Kassák and Balázs promised them “that this would improve their situation in monetary terms”Footnote 90 and the promised wage improvement was almost immediately turned into a strike demand.
Taking the relatively good performance of the agricultural sector and the partial successes of the strikes in the previous year, Kassák and Balázs could rationally assume that in the event of an organized strike, further concessions could be forced on the factory management. According to Kassák, the Textile Workers’ Union did not support this idea, fearing that a failed strike would curtail the union membership.Footnote 91 At the same time, to retain new members, Balázs and Kassák had to demonstrate that they were serious about the goals to which the workers were committed. They sent a letter to management on April 20, 1908, demanding a 25 percent pay increase, 10-hour working days, humane treatment, and recognition for the union’s representatives. Instead of a response, on May 8, the management deducted 40 cents a day from the daily wage of the workers in the picklingFootnote 92 department, who in response stopped working, thereby bringing the factory’s production to a halt.Footnote 93
According to Kassák, the strike continued in an organized manner because together with Balázs, they managed to build an extensive network of trustees, including all the “indispensable” labor force of the factory, although the management showed no interest in negotiation.Footnote 94 The police reported less than two weeks after the strike started, that “the factory management dismissed the striking workers and issued their labor booklets through the District VII Magistrate Office. Some of the dismissed workers reported for work on May 18, and in the following days were rehired by the management as new workers under the same conditions.”Footnote 95 None of the demands were granted, and Balázs and Kassák were both immediately dismissed. Neither of them were employed as a factory worker again. In Egy ember élete, Kassák writes that Balázs later “opened a coffee shop” and then moved to the countryside, where she began working as an actress.Footnote 96
Conclusion
Labor activists at the jute factory like Balázs and Kassák had to navigate the late-19th-century depression and the consequent monopolization and peripheralization of industrial production. Jute production only appeared in Hungary after international competition forced an Austrian firm to seek cheaper labor in the peripheries of the Monarchy, and the new sites were also heavily impacted by the production restrictions imposed by the newly founded jute cartel. In Eastern Europe, these tendencies also coincided with the rapid industrialization of urban centers, which happened in conjunction with the impoverishment of the peasantry and the emergence of thousands of semi-proletarian households, in which factory labor provided only a marginal part of their total income. The women of these households were more likely to end up engaged in multiple, different, short-term income-pooling activities, both wage-earning and subsistence-related ones. The resulting absence of steady and transparent employment for women challenged union activism at its core, as unions could only function with a stable membership able to finance basic expenses of unionist organizing. In sectors employing cheap female labor none of these conditions were met. Still, the lack of women’s bargaining power should not be treated as universal. The partial successes of the rent strikes, for example, were a result of the high added value of invisible female labor. Women’s bargaining power varied from sector to sector. Therefore, instead of drawing direct comparisons between different women-led strike movements, one should first of all, question how the interplay between global tendencies and local specificities shaped resistance techniques.
In case of precarious groups, such as the jute workers, the available sources tend to document them from an outsider perspective. Therefore, our inquiries should also extend to the direct socioeconomic context of those texts that shaped the image of the jute workers in the eyes of the public. Consequently, this article contrasts various Social Democratic narratives, ranging from union periodicals to Kassák’s work, with the historical context that defined the conflicts emerging between women workers and union representatives. It also examines the institutional background and political alliances of those whose accounts were used in the reconstruction of the discussed events. The sources, in this case, should be considered as the main sites of symbolic production and reproduction of political alliances, which were formed independently of those local economic constellations that primarily defined the outcome of the jute factory strikes.
Open access
