THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM--THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION
From the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in
the history of Socialism is its entrance into politics. This endows
the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will
bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other
he possesses. Because the modern state is democratic, and the
democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. The revolutions
attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared
with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts,
parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a
determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness.
Scarcely half a century elapsed between the French utopians and the
time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and
arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for
political privilege. In the interval, revolution had its brief hour,
and reaction its days of waiting.
The French Revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian
movement. It was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of
those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by Rousseau
and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. While this revolution
was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a
revolution in the sense that Marx, for instance, uses the word, it
must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution.
The dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of
unspeakably poor. They were not machine workers whose abjectness came
from factory conditions, like the workmen of England a few decades
later. They were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with
a class grievance; proletarians in the literal sense of the word,
poor, ragged, hungry, wretched.
Such democracy as was achieved by the revolution was bourgeois. The
powers of monarchy were transferred from the "privileged" classes to
the middle class, who, in turn, became the privileged ones. The day of
middle-class government had come. The class that had financed the
fleets of adventurers to new and unexploited continents, and had
backed the inventions of Arkwright and Hargreaves, were now in power
in politics as well as in commerce and industry. A unity of purpose
between industry and statecraft was thus achieved; new ideals became
dominant. The patriarchal precepts of the feudal manors were
forgotten. The people were no longer children of a great household
with their king at the head. The king, when he was retained, was shorn
of his universal fatherhood, and remained a mere remnant of ermine and
velvet, a royal trader in social distinctions.
While the old ideal, the feudal ideal, prevailed, governing was the
_duty_ of a class. The newer ideal made governing an incident in the
activities of a class whose dominating impulse was the making of
profits. These ideals are at polar points; one deals with things, the
other with men.
The change in the form of government was wrought while the people were
talking about the glittering abstractions of equality, liberty,
justice, as if they were commodities to be exchanged in the political
markets. The newer form of government marked an advance on the older.
It represented a step forward in human political experience. A larger
group of citizens was drawn into the widening circle of governmental
activities. It was an inevitable step. The discovery of the New World
and the invention of machinery were making a new earth--an
unattractive earth, but nevertheless a new one. The balance of power
was shifting from hereditary privilege to commercial privilege, and
nations were fulfilling the law of human nature, that the power of the
state reposes in the hands of the dominant class. The dominant class
is actuated by its dominant idea. In the aristocratic class it is
politics, in the middle class it is trade.
All this inevitably accentuated the proletarian's position in the
state. Under the older regime, as historians of our economic
development have clearly shown, the antagonisms and grievances were
fewer. The trader and the craftsman were overshadowed by the lord and
the bishop. Social, political, and economical values were distributed
by custom and imposed by heredity, rather than by individual effort or
individual capacity. When, therefore, this great change came over
society, a change that would have been unthinkable in the days of
Charlemagne or of Elizabeth,--a change that virtually destroyed the
most powerful of the classes and put human beings onto a basis of
competition rather than of birth, and shifted power from tradition to
effort, and transferred values from prerogatives to gold,--then the
whole class problem changed, and entirely new antagonisms were
created.
The first movements of the new proletarians were mob movements.
Actuated more by a desire to revenge themselves than to better
themselves, they gather in the dark hours of the night and move
sullenly upon the factories, to destroy their enemies, the machines.
They pillage the buildings and threaten the house of their employer,
whom they consider the agent of their undoing. In France and Germany,
and especially in England, these infuriated workmen try to undo by
violence what has been achieved by invention.
When their first fury is abated and they see new machinery taking the
place of that which they have destroyed, and new factories built on
the foundations of those they have burned, they see the impotence of
their actions. In England a new movement begins. They try to re-enact
the Elizabethan statute of laborers, to bring back the days of
handicrafts, of journeyman and apprentice. They soon learned that the
old era had vanished, never to return. The workingman possessed
neither the power nor the ingenuity to bring it back. He turned, next,
to possess himself of the machinery of the state.
Political conditions paved the way. France, after her orgy, had fallen
back into absolutism. Germany and Austria had remained feudal in the
most distasteful sense of the word; the nobility retained their
ancient privileges and forsook their ancient duties. The landlord
class even retained jurisdiction over their tenants. The old industry
had been destroyed by Napoleon's campaigns; the new machine industry
did not establish itself until after the enactment of protective
tariffs and the creation "Zollverein," in 1818. This cemented the
bourgeois interests. Manufacturers, traders, and bankers achieved a
homogeneity of interest and ambition which was antagonistic to the
spirit of the _junker_ and the feudalist. The new bourgeoisie wanted
laws favorable to trade expansion. They needed the law-making
machinery to achieve this. By 1840 the upper middle class had become
feverish for political power. They imbibed the doctrines of the
literature of that period which preached a constitutional
republicanism. Hegel gave the weighty sanction of philosophy to the
overthrow of absolute monarchy.
The great mass of the people were, of course, workingmen, small
traders, and shopkeepers, and the rural peasantry. The small trader
was dependent upon the favors of the ruling class on the one hand, and
of the banker and manufacturer on the other hand. When the interests
of these two clashed he was alarmed, for he could neither remain
neutral nor take sides. The peasants were abject subjects, little
better than serfs. The laboring men, as we shall see presently, were
achieving a mass consciousness.
In Germany Frederick William, the Romantic, was face to face with
revolution. This was not an economic revolution. It was a political
revolution. It was joined by the communists and the Socialists. Marx
himself, was a leader in the revolt, and one of its most faithful
chroniclers. In 1844 the weavers of Silesia rose in revolt. There was
rioting and bloodshed. This was followed by bread riots in various
parts of Germany. In 1848 the whole country was in the turmoil of
revolution, a revolution led by the upper middle class, but prompted
and fired by the zeal of the proletarians, who, in some of the
cities, notably Berlin, became the leading factor in the uprising.
Marx says: "There was then no separate Republican party in Germany.
People were either constitutional monarchists or more or less clearly
defined Socialists or communists."[1]
In Austria conditions were even more reactionary than in Germany.
Metternich, the powerful representative of the ancient order of
things, had a haughty contempt for the demands of the constitutional
party. With the hauteur of absolutism he not only retained political
power in the feudal class, but suppressed literature, censored
learning, and rigorously superintended religion. A greater power than
caste and tradition was slowly eating its way into this country, which
had attempted to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This was
the power of machine industry. It brought with it, as in every other
country, a new class, the manufacturers, who, as soon as their
business began to expand, sought favorable laws. This led them into
political activity, which, in turn, brought friction with the
feudalists. Both sides took to the field. The revolution broke in
Vienna, March 13, 1848, seventeen days after the revolutionists had
driven Louis Philippe out of Paris, and five days before the Prussian
king delivered himself into the hands of a Berlin mob.
It was in France that the revolution assumed its most virulent
character. In Paris the revolution was "carried on between the mass of
the working people on the one hand and all the other classes of the
Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other."[2] This
Parisian proletarian uprising was the red signal of warning to Germany
and Austria. The bourgeois were now as anxious to rid themselves of
the Socialist contingent as they had been eager for its support when
they began their struggle for political power. Compromises between
feudalists and commercialists were effected, and a sort of
constitutionalism became the basis of the reconstructed governments.
Of these revolutions Marx says: "In all cases the real fighting body
of the insurgents, that body which first took up arms and gave battle
to the troops, consisted of the working classes of the towns. A
portion of the poorer country population, laborers and petty farmers,
generally joined them after the outbreak of the conflict."[3]
They were not merely bourgeois uprisings. The Parisian revolution was
virtually a proletarian rebellion. Here "the proletariat, because it
dictated the Republic to the provisional government, and through the
provisional government to the whole of France, stepped at once forth
as an independent, self-contained party; and it at once arrayed the
entire bourgeoisie of France against itself.... Marche, a workingman,
dictated a decree wherein the newly formed provincial government
pledged itself to secure the position of the workingman through work,
to do away with bourgeois labor, etc. And as they seemed to forget
this promise, a few days later 200,000 workingmen marched upon the
Hotel de Ville with the battle-cry, 'Organization of labor! Create a
ministry of labor!' and after a prolonged debate the provisional
government named a permanent special commission for the purpose of
finding the means for bettering the conditions of the working
classes."[4]
It is evident that Marx considered the revolutions of 1848-50 as a
compound of proletarian and bourgeois uprisings against _feudal_
remnants in government. He is not always clear in his own mind as to
the direction of these movements. But we now know that the direction
was toward democracy.
The French, or Parisian, uprising was more "advanced" than the other
Continental attempts. The Parisians had piled barricades before; they
were experienced in the bloody business.
They tried again in 1871. This time the workingmen ruled Paris for two
months. It was a bloody, turbulent period. Marx characterized it as
"the glorious workingman's revolution of the 18th of March," and the
Commune "as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon
which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule."
Its acts of violence he extolled, its burning of public buildings was
a "self-holocaust." This "workingman's Paris, with its Commune, will
be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."[5]
So the attempt to possess the state by revolution has been tried by
the proletarian. The revolutions were all abortive. The Socialists say
they were ill-timed. Writing in 1895, Frederick Engels, the companion
of Marx, could see these uprisings in a different perspective. He
acknowledged the mistake made by the Socialists in believing that they
could by violence somehow become the deciding factor in the
government, and therefore in the economic arrangement of society.
"History has shown us our error," he says. "Time has made it clear
that the status of economic development on the Continent was far from
ripe for the setting aside of the capitalistic regime."[6]
These revolutions were not merely bourgeois, as is so often affirmed.
There was everywhere a large element of Socialistic unrest. They were
revolutions begun in the fever heat of youth--"Young Germany," "Young
Austria," "Young Italy," were moved by "Young Hegelians" and "Young
Communists." They embraced bourgeois tradesmen and proletarian
workingmen, who, in their new-found delirium, thought that with "the
overthrow of the reactionary governments, the kingdom of heaven would
be realized on earth."[7] "They had no idea," continues Kautsky, who
speaks on these questions with authority, "that the overthrow of these
governments would not be the end, but the beginning of revolutions;
that the newly won bourgeois freedom would be the battleground for
the great class war between proletarian and bourgeois; that liberty
did not bring social freedom, but social warfare."
This is to-day the orthodox Socialist view. It believes that these
revolutions taught the proletarians the folly of ill-timed violence;
revealed to them their friends and their enemies; and, above all, gave
them a class consciousness.
Let us turn, for a moment, to a proletarian movement of a somewhat
different type, the Chartist movement in England. The flame of
revolution that enveloped Europe crossed the Channel to England and
Ireland. But here revolution took a different course. In Ireland it
was the brilliant O'Connell's agitation against the Act of Union; in
England it was the workingman's protest against his exclusion from the
Reform Act of 1832, an act that itself had been born amidst the throes
of mob violence and incipient revolution.
The Chartist movement was promulgated by the "Workingmen's
Association." It was a workingman's protest. Its organizers were
carpenters, its orators were tailors and blacksmiths and weavers,
surprising themselves and their audiences with their new-found
eloquence, and its writers were cotton spinners. The Reform Bill had
been a bitter disappointment to them. It gave the right of suffrage to
the middle class, but withheld it from the working class. A few
radical members of Parliament met with representatives of the
workingmen and drafted a bill. O'Connell, as he handed the measure to
the secretary of the association, said: "There is your charter"--and
the "People's Charter" it was called. Its "six points" were: Manhood
suffrage, annual Parliaments, election by ballot, abolition of
property qualifications for election of members to Parliament, payment
of members of Parliament, and equitably devised electoral districts.
These are all political demands, all democratic. But economic
conditions pressed them to the foreground. The "Bread Tax" was as much
an issue as the ballot. They demanded the ballot so that they might
remove the tax. "Misery and discontent were its strongest
inspirations," says McCarthy.[8]
Carlyle saw the inwardness of the movement. "All along for the last
five and twenty years it was curious to note how the internal
discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any
orifice; the poor patient, all sick from center to surface, complains
now of this member, now of that: corn laws, currency laws, free trade,
protection, want of free trade: the poor patient, tossing from side to
side seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none."
One of its own crude and forceful orators said on Kersall Moor to
200,000 turbulent workingmen of Manchester: "Chartism, my friends, is
no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the
ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question. The charter means a
good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working
hours."[9]
The protest of this discontent became the nearest approach to a
revolution England had encountered since Charles I. Monster meetings,
for the first time called "mass meetings," were held in every county,
and evenings, after working hours, enormous parades were organized,
each participant carrying a torch, hence they were called "torchlight
parades." These two spectacular features were soon adopted by American
campaigners. A wild and desperate feeling seized the masses. "You see
yonder factory with its towering chimney," cried one of its orators.
"Every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and
children." And again: "If the rights of the poor are trampled under
foot, then down with the throne, down with aristocracy, down with the
bishops, down with the clergy, burn the churches, down with all rank,
all title, and all dignity."[10]
In their great petition to Parliament, signed by several million
people, the agitators said: "The Reform Act has effected a transfer of
power from one domineering faction to another and left the people as
helpless as before." "We demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to
be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the
powerful, must be secret." The whole movement had all the aspects of a
modern, violent general strike. Its papers, _The Poor Man's Guardian_,
_The Destructive_, and others, were full of tirades against wealth and
privilege. When the agitation became an uprising in Wales, there was a
conflict between the Chartists and the police in which a number were
killed and wounded. In the industrial centers, soldiers were present
at the meetings, and the outcry against the use of the military was
the same that is heard to-day. A number of the leaders were tried for
sedition, and the courts became the objects of abuse as they are
to-day. It was a labor war for political privilege; a class war for
economic advantages.
SUMMARY OF THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION
These revolutions were political in that they were a protest against
existing governmental forms. The revolutionary proletarian was found
in all of them. He not only stood under the standard of Daniel Manin
in Venice, when that patriot again proclaimed a republic in the
ancient city, and shared with Mazzini his triumph in Rome, and fought
with Kossuth for the liberty of Hungary; but he formed also the body
of the revolutionary forces in Germany, Austria, and France.
In all the Continental countries the uprisings were directed against
the arrogance and oppression of monarchism, and against the
recrudescence of feudalistic ideals. In France Louis Philippe had
attempted the part of a petty despot. He restricted the ballot to the
propertied class, balanced his power on too narrow a base, and it
became top-heavy.
While the workingmen of Germany and Austria were taking up arms under
command of the middle class against the feudal remnants, the
workingmen of France were sacking their capital because of an
attempted revival of monarchic privilege, and the workmen of England
were marching and counter-marching in monster torchlight parades in
protest against middle-class domination.
The panorama of Europe in these years of turmoil and blood thus
exhibits every degree of revolt against governmental power, from the
absolutism of Prussian Junkerdom and the oppression of the Hungarians
by foreign tyranny, to the dominance of the aristocratic and
middle-class alliance in Great Britain.
The bread-and-butter question was not wanting in any of these
political uprisings. The unity of life makes their separation a myth.
One is interwoven with the other. The social struggle is political,
the political struggle is social.
Socialism is not merely an economic movement. It seeks to-day, and
always has sought, the power of the state. The government is the only
available instrument for effecting the change--the revolution--the
Socialists preach, the transfer of productive enterprise from private
to public ownership. "Political power our means, social happiness our
end," was a Chartist motto. That is the duality of Socialism to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] MARX, _Revolution and Counter-Revolution in 1848_.
[2] MARX, _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, p. 70.
[3] _Op. cit._, pp. 123-124.
[4] MARX, _Die Klassenkaempfe in Frankreich_, pp. 26-28.
[5] See the third address issued by the International Workingmen's
Association on the Franco-Prussian war, 1870-71.
The Italian Socialists in Milan, June, 1871, closed a rhetorical
address to the Parisian Communards as follows: "To despotism they
responded, We are free.
"To the cannon and chassepots of the leagued reactionists they offered
their bared breasts.
"They fell, but fell like heroes.
"To-day the reaction calls them bandits, places them under the ban of
the human race.
"Shall we permit it? No!
"Workingmen! At the time when our brothers in Paris are vanquished,
hunted like fallow deer, are falling by hundreds under the blows of
their murderers, let us say to them: Come to us, we are here; our
houses are open to you. We will protect you, until the day of revenge,
a day not far distant.
"Workingmen! the principles of the Commune of Paris are ours: we
accept the responsibility of its acts. Long live the Social Republic!"
See ED. VILLETARD, _History of the International_, p. 342. This
sentiment was also expressed in London and other centers.
[6] Introduction to _Die Klassenkaempfe in Frankreich_, p. 8.
[7] KAUTSKY, _Leben Friedrich Engels_, p. 14, Berlin, 1895.
[8] _The Epoch of Reform_, p. 190.
[9] ENGELS, _Condition of the Working Classes in 1844_, p. 230.
Engels, who came to England at this time and was employed in
Manchester in his father's business, and was therefore in the heart of
the movement, says that Chartism was, after the Anti-Corn Law League
had been formed, "purely a workingman's cause." It was "the struggle
of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." "The demands hitherto
made by him (the laborer), the ten-hours' bill, protection of the
worker against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position,
repeal of the new poor law--all of these things belong to Chartism
quite as essentially as the 'Six Points.'"--_Supra cit._, pp. 229,
234, 235.
[10] R.G. GRUMMAGE, _History of the Chartist Movement_, 1837-54, p.
59, Newcastle, 1894.