Denmark during World War I
Everyday life for Danish workers during World War I (1914-1918) was characterised by high unemployment rates, food rationing, and severe shortages of fuel and housing. Up until the outbreak of war, the Social Democrats had gained greater influence in Danish politics. For example, Social Democrat leader, Thorvald Stauning, had won the party’s first ministerial post in 1916 in a government led by the Radical Left.
But gradually, large groups of workers began to organise outside the party. They did not believe that the existing trade union movement’s line of negotiation and the Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary work could solve the problems of unemployment and the lack of basic necessities. Instead, the syndicalists wanted to base the fight for socialism on union organisation in individual companies and so-called direct action, which could take the form of strikes, sabotage, and boycotts.
These workers, who called themselves syndicalists, were revolutionaries. In light of the Russian Revolution (1917), it became clear that the Social Democracy was not a revolutionary party, and for the first time in its history, its position as the unifying force of the working class was seriously challenged.
The syndicalists storm the stock exchange
One of the most significant events in the history of Danish syndicalism was what became known as the Storming of the Stock Exchange on February 11th, 1918, when militant syndicalists attacked one of the central symbols of working-class frustration during World War I: the Copenhagen Stock Exchange.
The attack resonated with the times. It happened at a time when Europe was on the brink of revolutionary upheaval. The newspaper København, which was notoriously at odds with the syndicalists, read:
“It is only a few days since the Bolsheviks, in their appeal to the German workers, conjured up the red spectre of Communism, which would flood all Europe, and warned that the midnight hour was near. And yesterday, for the first time, this spectre stared our own peaceful city straight in the eye. Even the most blind opened their eyes and saw its hateful and twisted features. Even the deafest heard the echoes of the shouts and gunshots when, in the afternoon, syndicalists and mobs together stormed the Stock Exchange.”
A break in the history of the labor movement
The fear of revolution was not without reason. Later that year, two syndicalists travelled to Germany, where the revolution had broken out, in an attempt to get the revolutionary soldiers to help with a similar upheaval in Denmark. There was never a revolution in Denmark, but the storming of the Stock Exchange in February 1918 can be seen as a central break in the history of the labour movement between two movements – one revolutionary and one social democratic.
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