The January strike in Austria-Hungary

On 14 January 1918 the workers of the Austro-Daimler works in Wiener Neustadt, which produced aero engines and motor vehicles for the army, downed tools. The immediate cause was the announcement that the already meagre flour rations would be cut by half. Other factories in the district followed them. So began the strike which within a few days became the largest in Austrian history and spread to almost all the industrial districts of the monarchy.

It had long been brewing. Since the first hunger winter of 1916/1917 strikes and food riots had broken out time and again in Vienna. After the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Decree on Peace, meetings in solidarity with Russia were held all over Europe, and at one of them, in Vienna on 11 November 1917, the slogan was heard: “Give us peace or we will lay down our work”. The workers followed the negotiations at Brest closely. When at the end of December it became clear that Germany did not intend to give up the occupied Polish, Lithuanian and Courland lands, and in January the talks with Trotsky stalled over annexations, the factories began to fear that the longed-for peace would founder on German demands. Then came the news of the ration cut.

On 15 January the strike spread without any leadership, from works to works, across the south of Lower Austria, and in Vienna the locomotive works in Floridsdorf stopped. On 16 January the workers of the Viennese armaments works left their machines, and in time the movement engulfed Styria, Bohemia and Hungary. The peak came on 18 January, when about 110,000 people were on strike in Vienna alone. The total number of strikers is disputed. The Austrian State Archives give 350,000–370,000, the Vienna city encyclopaedia about half a million, the historian Wolfdieter Bihl more than 700,000, and some studies even close to a million. The strikers were now demanding not only better supplies but an immediate end to the war. On the Russian model they elected workers’ councils in the factories and districts, from which the Vienna Workers’ Council emerged. The leaflets were written by a group of young radicals who met in premises in the Schlösselgasse. According to later findings many of them were drafted by an officer of the War Press Office, Lieutenant Egon Erwin Kisch.

The strike also took the Social Democrats by surprise. Their leader Victor Adler knew that the army would not hesitate to use its weapons, but at the same time he wanted to use the movement to force the government to abandon its annexationist plans at Brest. On the very first day of the Vienna strike the party leadership formulated demands, which the workers’ council adopted, and opened talks with the government of Prime Minister Ernst Seidler. On 19 January a delegation of the council received a statement from the Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin, who was at Brest, that the peace negotiations would on no account founder on territorial demands. Seidler promised better food supplies, a relaxation of the War Service Act, which subjected workers in armaments works to military discipline, and the democratisation of the franchise for municipal councils. The text of the government declaration was largely drawn up by the Social Democratic leadership itself.

On the night of 19/20 January, after a stormy session in the workers’ hall in the Margareten district, the Vienna Workers’ Council adopted the party’s motion to return to work from Monday 21 January. In some districts the strike continued until 22 January. Afterwards the leaders and many activists were arrested or conscripted. Kisch remained undiscovered. The unrest did not die down: on 22 January the workers of the arsenal at Pola went on strike, joined by sailors from the ships in the harbour, and on 1 February a sailors’ mutiny broke out in the Bay of Kotor. The January strike showed how weary of the war the monarchy was. At the end of January a similar wave of strikes swept through Germany.