THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM
I
Socialism began in France, that yeast-pot of civilization. It began
while the Revolution was still filling men's minds with a turbulent
optimism that knew no limit to human "progress."
Saint-Simon (Count Henri de) may be considered the founder of French
Socialism. He was of noble lineage, born in 1760, and died in 1825. He
took very little part in the French Revolution, but was a soldier in
our Continental army, and always manifested a keen interest in
American affairs. Possessed of an inquiring mind, an ambitious spirit,
and a heart full of sympathy for the oppressed, he devoted himself to
the study of society for the purpose of elaborating a scheme for
universal human betterment.
Before he began his special studies he amassed a modest fortune in
land speculation. Not that he loved money, he assures us, but because
he wished independence and leisure to do his chosen work. This money
was soon lost, through unfortunate experiments and an unfortunate
marriage, and the most of his days were spent in penury.
He attracted to himself a number of the most brilliant young men in
France, among them De Lesseps who subsequently carried out one of the
plans of his master, the Suez Canal; and Auguste Comte, who embodied
in his positivism the philosophical teachings of Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon believed that society needed to be entirely reorganized on
a "scientific basis," and that "the whole of society ought to labor
for the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the
poorest class. Society ought to organize itself in the manner the most
suitable for the attainment of this great end."[1]
The two counteracting motives or spirits in society are the spirit of
antagonism and the spirit of association. Hitherto the spirit of
antagonism has prevailed, and misery has resulted. Let the spirit of
association rule, and the evils will vanish.
Under the rule of antagonism, property has become the possession of
the few, poverty and misery the lot of the many. Both property and
poverty are inherited, therefore the state should abolish all laws of
inheritance, take all property under its dominion, and let society be
the sole proprietor of the instruments of labor and of the fund that
labor creates.
Through the teachings of Saint-Simon runs a constant stream of
religious fervor. In Christianity he found the moral doctrine that
gave sanction to his social views. He sought the primitive
Christianity, stripped of the dogmas and opinions of the centuries. In
his principal work, _Nouveau Christianisme_ (New Christianity), he
subjects the teachings of Catholicism and Protestantism to ingenious
criticism, and finds in the teachings of Christ the essential moral
elements necessary for a society based on the spirit of association.
Saint-Simon was a humanitarian rather than a systematic thinker. His
analysis of society is ingenious rather than constructive. His
teachings were elaborated by his followers, who organized themselves
into a school called the "Sacred College of the Apostles," with Bazard
and Enfantin as their leaders. They were accused, in the Chamber of
Deputies, of promulgating communism of property and wives. Their
defense, dated October, 1830, and issued as a booklet, is the best
exposition of their views. They said that: "We demand that land,
capital, and all the instruments of labor shall become common
property, and be so managed that each one's portion shall correspond
to his capacity, and his reward to his labors." "Like the early
Christians, we demand that one man should be united to one woman, but
we teach that the wife should be the equal of the husband."
On the question of marriage, however, the sect split soon after this
defense was written. Enfantin became a defender of free love, and
inaugurated a fantastic sacerdotalism which drove Bazard from the
"Sacred College."[2]
The second French social philosopher of the Utopian school was
Francois Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He was a bourgeois, son of
a draper, and brought as keen an intellect as did his noble
fellow-countryman, Saint-Simon, to the analysis of society, and a much
more practical experience. In his youth he had been employed in
various business enterprises. He recalls, in his works, several
experiences which he never forgot. As a lad, he was reproached for
telling a prospective customer the truth about some goods in his
father's shop. When a young man of twenty-seven he was sent to
Marseilles to superintend the destruction of great cargoes of rice
that had been held for higher prices, during a period of scarcity of
food when thousands of people were suffering from hunger. The rice had
spoiled in the waiting. The event made so profound an impression upon
his mind that he resolved to devote his life to the betterment of an
economic system that allowed such wanton waste.
To his mind the problem of rebuilding society was practical, not
metaphysical. But underlying his practical solution was a fantastic
cosmogony and psychology. He reduced everything to a mathematical
system, and even computed the number of years the world would spin on
its axis. He believed that God created a good world, and that man has
desecrated it; that the function of the social reformer is to
understand the design of the Creator, and call mankind back to this
original plan, back to the original impulses and passions, and
primitive goodness.
This could be done only under ideal environment. Such an environment
he proposed to create in huge caravansaries, which he called
phalansteries. Each group, or phalange, was composed of 400 families,
or 1,800 persons, living on a large square of land, where they could
be self-contained and self-sufficient, like the manors in the feudal
days. The phalanstery was built in the middle of the tract, and was
merely a glorified apartment house. Every one chose to do the work he
liked best. Agriculture and manufacture were to be happily blended,
and individual freedom given full sway. Each phalange was designed to
be an ideal democracy, electing its officers and governing itself. The
principle of freedom was to extend even to marriage and the relation
of the sexes.
It was Fourier's belief that one such phalange once established would
so impress the world with its superiority that society would be glad
to imitate it. Ere long there would be groups of phalanges
co-operating with each other, and ultimately the whole world would be
brought into one vast federation of phalanges, with their chief center
at Constantinople.
The general plan of this apartment-house utopia lent itself to all
sorts of fantastic details. It gained adherents among the learned, the
eager, and even the rich, and a number of experiments were tried. All
of these have failed, I think, excepting only the community at Guise,
founded by Jean Godin. Here, however, the fantasies have been
eliminated, and the strong controlling force of the founder has made
it prosperous. There is no agriculture connected with the Guise
establishment.
A number of Fourier colonies, most of them modifications of his
phalanstery idea, were started in the United States. Of thirty-four
such experiments tried in America all have failed. The most famous of
these attempts was Brook Farm.[3]
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was the great English utopian. He was the son
of a small trader. Such was his business ability and tenacity of
character that at nineteen years of age he was superintendent of a
cotton mill that employed 500 hands. His business acumen soon made him
rich, his philanthropic impulses led him to study the conditions of
the people who worked for him. In 1800 he took charge of the mills at
New Lanark. There he had under him as pitiful and miserable a group of
workmen as can be imagined. The factory system made wretchedness the
common lot of the English workingman of this period. The hours of
labor were intolerably long, the homes of the working people
unutterably squalid, women and tiny children worked all day under the
most unwholesome conditions; vice, drunkenness, and ignorance were
everywhere.
Owen began as a practical philanthropist. He improved the sanitary
conditions of his mills and town, was the first employer to reasonably
shorten the hours of work, founded primary schools, proposed factory
legislation, and founded the co-operative movement that has grown to
great strength in England. He was one of the powerful men of the
island at this period. He had the enthusiastic support of the queen,
of many nobles, of clergy and scholars. But in a great public meeting
in London he went out of his way to denounce the accepted forms of
religion and declare his independence of all creeds, an offense that
the English people never forgive.
By this time he had perfected his scheme for social reform. He
proposed to establish communities of 1,000 to 1,200 persons on about
1,500 acres of land. They were to live in an enormous building in the
form of a square, each family to have its own apartments, but kitchen
and dining-room to be in common. Every advantage of work, education,
and leisure was planned for the inmates.
A number of Owenite communities were founded in England and America.
The one at New Harmony, Ind., was the most pretentious, and in it Owen
sank a large portion of his fortune. None of the experiments survived
their founder.[4]
The Utopians were all optimists--the source of their optimism was the
social philosophy that prevailed from the French Revolution to the
middle of the last century. It was the philosophy of an unbounded
faith in the goodness of human nature. A good God made a good world,
and made man capable of attaining goodness and harmony in all his
relations. The evil in the world was contrary to God's plan. It was
introduced by the perversity of society. The source of misery is the
lack of knowledge. If humankind knew the right way of living, knew the
original plan of the Creator, then there would be no misery. You must
find this knowledge, this science, and upon it build society. Hence
they are all seeking a "scientific state of society," and call their
system "scientific." From Rousseau to Hegel, the theory prevailed that
evil is collective, good is individual; society is bad, man is pure.
Cabet expresses it clearly. "God is perfection, infinite,
all-powerful, is justice and goodness. God is our father, and it
follows that all men are brethren and all are equal, as in one
all-embracing family." "It is evident that, to the fathers of the
Church, Christianity was communism. Communism is nothing other than
true Christianity...." "The regnancy of God, through Jesus, is the
regnancy of perfection, of omniscience, of justice, of goodness, of
paternal love; and, it follows, of fraternity, equality, and liberty;
of the unity of community interests, that is of communism (of the
general common welfare), in place of the individual."[5]
This edenesque logic was dear to Fourier, who left more profound
traces on modern thought than the fantastic Saint-Simonians.[6]
Fourier began with God. "On beholding this mechanism (the world and
human society), or even in making an estimate of its properties, it
will be comprehended that God has done well all that He has done."[7]
Man has only to find "God's design" in order to find the true basis of
society; and man's system of industrially parceling out the good
things of life among a few favored ones, is the "antipodes of God's
design." The finding of this design is the function of "exact
science"; man, who has stifled the voice of nature, must now
"vindicate the Creator."[8]
Saint-Simon's whole system rests on this principle: "God has said that
men ought to act toward each other as brethren." This principle will
regulate society, for "in accordance with this principle, which God
has given to men for the rule of their conduct, they ought to organize
society in the manner the most advantageous to the greatest
number."[9]
The social philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century did not
believe that this rightness should be brought about by violence. "What
I should desire," says Godwin, "is not by violence to change its
institutions, but by discussion to change its ideas. I have no
concern, if I would study merely the public good, with factions or
intrigue; but simply to promulgate the truth, and to wait the tranquil
progress of conviction. Let us anxiously refrain from violence."[10]
Owen, who lived a few decades later, came into contact with the
theories of the succeeding school of thought. His utopianism remained,
however, upon the older basis. He taught that the evils of society
were not inherent in the nature of mankind. The natural state of the
world and of man was good. But the evils "are all the necessary
consequences of ignorance." Therefore, by education and environment he
could "accomplish with ease and certainty the Herculean labor of
forming a rational character in man, and that, too, chiefly before the
child commences the ordinary course of education."[11]
The Utopians are hopefully seeking the universal law which will
re-form society. This was a natural view of things fundamental, to be
taken by men who had witnessed the political emancipation of the Third
Estate and had seen "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" carved over every
public portal in France, and the abstract principles of justice
debated in parliaments. A feeling of naive simplicity runs through all
their writings. Just as civil liberty, they believed, had come by the
application of an abstract principle of natural law, so social and
economic freedom would come by the application of one universal
abstract principle of human conduct. From this simplicity came a
violent reaction, which reached its climax in the anarchy of
Proudhon.
II
The Utopian period of Socialism may be said to end, and the
revolutionary era to begin, with the year 1830. The French Revolution
was a bourgeois uprising. But behind it was the grim and resolute
background of the proletarian mass. When the Third Estate achieved its
victory, it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the
exclusion of its lowly allies. From 1830 to 1850 the ferment of
democratic discontent spread over Europe and forced the demands of the
workingman into the foreground. The first outbreak occurred in France,
in 1831, when the workingmen of Lyons, during a period of distressing
financial depression, marched under the banner, "Live working, or die
fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves.
This second chapter of the development of Socialism begins with a red
letter.
Louis Blanc (1813-82), the first philosopher of the new movement,
struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government.
This differentiates him from Fourier and Saint-Simon, and links him
with the leading Socialist writers of our day. He published his
_Organisation du Travail_ (Organization of Labor) in 1839. It
immediately gave him an immense popularity with the working classes.
It is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is
forceful in its denunciation of existing society.
He said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without
improving them materially. This improvement would not come from
above, from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the
working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform
was democracy. The proletarian must possess the power of the state in
order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him
in its grasp.
This democratic state should then establish national workshops, or
associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be
provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. He
believed that, once established, they would soon become
self-supporting and self-governing. The men would choose their own
managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this
beneficent system would spread to all communities.
He was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate
empire"--there must be a hierarchy of ability.
Louis Blanc believed in revolution as the method of social
advancement. He was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of
1848, the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. As
a member of the provisional government, he may be called the first
Socialist to hold cabinet honors. And, like his successors in modern
cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new
social order. It is true that national workshops were built by the
French government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans.
His enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than
honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[12]
Louis Blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian
conception that man was created good and innocent. He blames society
for allowing the individual to do evil. But he does take a step toward
the Marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was
created with certain endowments of strength and intellect and that
these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. The empire
of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of
man's greatness.
The doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by Proudhon
(1809-65). He was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never
forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. He was a precocious lad,
was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the
study of political economy. In 1840 he brought out his notable work,
_Qu'est-ce que la Propriete?_ (What Is Property?), a novel question
for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "Property is theft,"
ergo "property holders are thieves."
Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a
peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown
on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He
was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser
of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond
the confines of logic.
Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and
consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me
eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent
anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It
is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the
individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism
established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property.
Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop
of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to
a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong
because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is
equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the
weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a
dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the
most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one
day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure
of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal
medium of exchange.
Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit
rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a
national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and
receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article.
These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of
purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even
proposed to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and
when it was rejected--only two votes were recorded for it--he tried to
establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the
necessary capital and his plan failed.
Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of
individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he
taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of
intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in
the union of order and anarchy."
For his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the
bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years
in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar
cause by fleeing to Brussels.
The ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he
achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by
his theory of anarchy.
One cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant
rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. Not man originally pure and
good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable
of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from the man of mercy
and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. Proudhon
frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a
condition of equality through the destruction of property and of
government. But in destroying property he retains possessions, and in
establishing anarchy he maintains order. "Free association,
liberty--whose sole function is to maintain equality--in the means of
production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the
only just, the only true form of society."
"The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is
oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order
and anarchy."[13]
Proudhon has had a large influence on modern Socialism. His trenchant
invectives against property and society are widely copied. From his
utterances on government the Syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain
have drawn their doctrine. The general strike is the child of his
paradoxes. He wrote as the motto for his most influential book, _What
Is Property?_, "Destruam et aedificabo" (I will destroy and I will
build again). But, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed
to reveal a new and better order.
The way to modern Socialism was paved in Germany. The teaching of
Hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over Europe
in the '40's. Hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. He
gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. Everything that exists is
worth destroying, may be taken as the primary postulate at which the
Young Hegelians arrived. Truth does not exist merely in a collection
of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the
alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has
developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is found only
in experience. Nothing is sacred merely because it exists. Existing
institutions are only the prelude to other and better institutions
that are to follow. This was roughly the formula that the radical
Hegelians blocked out for themselves when they split from the orthodox
conservatives in the '30's.
In 1843 appeared Feuerbach's _Wesen des Christentums_ (Essence of
Christianity), putting the seal of materialism upon the precepts of
the Young Hegelians.[14] The God of the utopians was destroyed.
Things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man.
Things as they are, are the result of evolution, of growth; nothing
was created as it is, and even "Religion is the dream of the human
mind."[15]
Out of this atmosphere of philosophical, religious, and political
rebellion sprang the prophet of modern Socialism, Karl Marx,[16] a man
whose intellectual endowments place him in the first ranks among
Socialists and link his name with other bold intellects of his age who
have forced the current of human thought. There have been many books
written on Marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to
academic and popular scrutiny. His treatise, _Capital_, is the
sacerdotal book of Socialists. It displays a mass of learning, a
diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a
completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in
the literature of social philosophy. Whatever may be said of the
narrow dogmatism, of Marx, of his persistence in making the facts fit
his preconceived notions, of his materialistic conception of history,
or of the technical flaws in his political economy, he will always be
quoted as the founder of modern scientific Socialism and the Socialist
historian of the capitalistic regime.
I must content myself with a bare statement of his theories.
The economic basis of Marx is his well-known "Theory of Surplus
Value." It was not his theory in the sense that he originated it.
Economists like Adam Smith and especially Ricardo, Socialists like the
Owenites and the Chartists in England, and Proudhon in France, had
enunciated it; and in Germany Rodbertus, a lawyer and scholar of great
learning, had elaborated it in his first book, published in 1842.
Marx, with German thoroughness, developed this theory in all its
ramifications.
All economic goods, he said, have value. They have a physical value,
and a value given them by the labor expended on them. Labor is the
common factor of economic values. And the common denominator is the
time that is consumed by the labor. Labor-time, therefore, is the
universal measure of value, the common medium that determines values.
But this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist
at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare
cost of living. The reward for his labor is called a wage. This wage
does not by any means measure the value of his services. What, then,
becomes of the "surplus value," the value over and above wages? The
capitalist appropriates it. Indeed, the great aim of the capitalist is
to make this surplus value as big as possible. He measures his success
by his profits.
"Surplus value," or profit, is, then, a species of robbery; it is
ill-gotten gain, withholding from the workman that which by right of
toil is his.
How did it come about that society was so organized as to permit this
wholesale wrong upon the largest and most defenseless of its classes?
It is in answer to this question that Marx makes his most notable
contribution to Socialistic theory. With great skill, and displaying a
comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of English
industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial
society. He follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval
paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when the
voyages of discovery opened virgin fields of wealth to the trader,
into the period of inventions when the industrial revolution changed
the conditions of all classes and gave a sudden and princely power to
capital, establishing the reign of "capitalistic production."
Always it was the man with capital who could take advantage of every
new commercial and industrial opportunity, and the man without capital
who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel
circumstances. In every stage of development it has been the constant
aim of the capitalist to increase his profits and of the workingman to
raise his standard of living.
Marx then declares that, in order to have a capitalist society, two
classes are necessary: a capitalist and a non-capitalist class; a
class that dominates, and one that succumbs. There have always been
these two classes. Originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and
now it is free. But free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and
slave-labor only in that it has a legal right to contract. The
economic results are the same as they always have been: the capitalist
still appropriates the surplus value.
The method of production, however, is very different in our
capitalistic era from the earlier eras. The industrial system herds
the workmen into factories. Property and labor is no longer
individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social
production and capitalistic appropriation." Here is the eternal
antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the
small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil.
These factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever
there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. They flood the
markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual
ambitions. Each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and
self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them
at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called
"over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This leads
to panics and all their attendant woes--woes that are further heaped
upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery,
which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor
market into the street.
These crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and
fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws
of struggle and survival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their
fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the
number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian
dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence;
the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer.
In this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and
anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social
potencies. The proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees
how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of
the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better
society. This will mean the appropriation of the means of production
and distribution by society. Private capital will vanish; surplus
values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be
master and servant, capitalist and laborer.
This is the Socialistic stage of society. It will be the result of the
natural evolution of human industry. Its immediate coming will be the
result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm,
is written in the nature of things. Man cannot prompt it, he cannot
prevent it. He can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the
birth-pangs" of the new time.
Of this new time, this society of to-morrow, Marx gives us no glimpse.
His function is not to prophesy, but to analyze. He is the natural
historian of capital. He described the development of economic society
and sought to ascertain its trend. In the first chapter of _Capital_
he says: "Let us imagine an association of free men, working with
common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their
individual powers into one social labor power. The product of this
association of laborers is a social product. A portion of this product
serves in turn as a means of further production. It remains social
property. The rest of this product is consumed by the members of the
association as a means of living. It must consequently be distributed
among them. The nature of this distribution will vary according to the
particular nature of the organization of production and the
corresponding grade of historical development of the producers."
This is the only mention of the future made by Marx. It is a dim and
uncertain ray of light cast upon a vast object.
The formulae of this epoch-making study may be summarized as follows:
1. Labor gives value to all economic goods. The laboring class is the
producing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products
of its labor by the capitalistic class, which appropriates the
"surplus value."
2. This is possible because of the capitalistic method of production,
wherein private capital controls the processes of production and
distribution.
3. This system of private capitalism is the result of a long and
laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the
industrial revolution.
4. This industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution,
(b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle
class, (d) the development of a two-class system--capitalist and
producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer.
5. This will not always continue. The producers are becoming fewer
each year. Presently they will become so powerful as to be
unendurable. Then society--the people--will appropriate private
capital and all production and distribution will be socialized.
It is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this
remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories.
Marx was born in Treves in 1818, of Jewish parentage. His mother was
of Dutch descent, his father was German. When the lad was six years of
age his parents embraced the Christian faith. His father was a
lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis.
The home was one of culture, where English and French as well as
German literature and art were discussed by a circle of learned and
congenial friends. Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and
Berlin. He took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but
followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university
professor.
The turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. There was
no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic
life. In 1842 he joined the staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_ at Cologne,
an organ of extreme radicalism. His drastic editorials prompted the
police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to Paris, where he
met Frederick Engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his
views, and sharer of his labors. The Prussian government demanded his
removal from Paris, and for a time he settled in Brussels. He returned
to Germany to participate in the revolution of 1848, and in 1849 he
was driven to London, where, immune from Prussian persecutions, he
made his home until his death, in 1883.
In 1842 he married Jennie von Westphalen, a lady of refinement,
courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politics.
Her brother was at one time a minister in the Prussian cabinet.
Marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up
his German citizenship. He never forgot this fact. He concluded his
preface to the first volume of _Capital_, written in 1873, with a
bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Prussian
German Empire." He lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle
against want and disease.
From his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an
international view, of human affairs. This gave him an immediate
advantage over all other Socialist writers of that day. At Bonn he was
caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through the
universities. This carried him far into the fields of materialism,
whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic
development of the race. He received not alone his philosophy from the
"Young Hegelians," but his dialectics as well. It gave him a
philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal
experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to
him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty
contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution.
There are four points which gave Marx an immense influence over the
Socialistic movement. In the first place, he put the Socialistic
movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. Think what this
means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the
workingman. But he did more than this: he made the proletarian the
instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic
thraldom. This was to be accomplished by class war and social
revolution. Marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his Socialism when he
links it to the necessities of nature. By natural law a bourgeoisie
developed; by natural law it oppresses the proletarian; by natural
law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone
can attain their freedom. Capitalism becomes its own grave-digger.
Liebknecht said in his Erfurt speech (1891): "The capitalistic state
of the present begets against its will the state of the future."
In the third place, Marx gave a formula to the Socialist movement. He
defined Socialism in one sentence: "The social ownership of the means
of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the
vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he
coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor
of scientific terminology.
And finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. He laid down
no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation.
This offended no one and left Socialists of all schools free to
construct their own details.
The Marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be
fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several
decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not
taking place. The refutation of his theory of value by the Austrian
economist, Adolph Menger, is by economists considered complete and
final. The materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of
his work, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than
to a sober interpretation of the facts. Further, the two practical
results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his
materialism--namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the
ever-decreasing number of capitalists--are not borne out by the facts.
The number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the
development of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being
recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of
the two-class system. And finally, the method by revolution is being
more and more discarded by Socialists, as they see that intolerable
conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity
to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for
existence.[17]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _New Christianity_, p. 38, English edition, 1834.
[2] Saint-Simon's principal writings are: _Lettres d'un Habitant de
Geneve_, 1803; _L'Organisateur_, 1819; _Du Systeme Industriel_, 1821;
_Catechisme des Industriels_, 1823; _Nouveau Christianisme_, 1825. See
A.J. BARTH, _Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism_, London, 1871; REYBAUD,
_Etudes sur les Reformateurs Modernes_, Paris, 1864; JANET,
_Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme_, Paris, 1878. _New Christianity_
was translated into English by Rev. J.E. Smith, London, 1834.
[3] The best popular exposition of Fourierism is GATTI DE GAMMONT'S
_Fourier et Son Systeme_. His most eminent commentator is Victor
Considerant, whose _Destinee Sociale_ is the most complete analysis of
Fourier's System.
[4] It is interesting to note that the word "Socialism" first became
current in the meetings of Owen's "Association of All Classes of All
Nations," organized by him in 1835.
[5] _Le Vrai Christianisme_, Chap. XVIII, edition of 1846.
[6] An apt selection from the works of Fourier has been made by Prof.
Charles Gide, prefaced by an illuminating Introduction on the life and
work of Fourier. An English translation by Julia Franklin appeared in
London, 1901.
[7] _Le Nouveau Monde_, Vol. I, p. 26.
[8] _Theme de l'Unite Universelle_, Vol. II, p. 128.
[9] _New Christianity_, p. 2, English edition, 1834.
[10] _Political Justice_, Vol. II, pp. 531, 537.
[11] _Third Essay on a New View of Society_, pp. 65, 82.
[12] See EMILE THOMAS, _History of the National Workshops_.
[13] _What Is Property?_ Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 286.
[14] In 1845 Marx made this note on the work of Feuerbach: "The point
of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view
of the new materialism is human society or the unclassed humanity
(vergesellschaftete Menschheit).
"Philosophers have only differently _interpreted_ the world, but the
point is to _alter_ the world." See FREDERICK ENGELS, _Ludwig
Feuerbach und der Ausgang der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie_,
Stuttgart, 1903.
[15] _Essence of Christianity_, Preface, p. xiii.
[16] For a concise statement of the development of Marxian Socialism
out of the German philosophy of that period, see FREDERICK ENGELS,
_Die Entwickelung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft_,
Berlin, 1891. It is the third chapter out of his _Duehring, Umwaelzung_.
[17] For a criticism of the teachings of Marx, see SOMBART, _Socialism
and the Social Movement_, Chap. IV.