are--saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their
power but reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during
the Chartist years, what that _puer robustus sed malitiosus_, the
people, is capable of. And since that time, they had been compelled to
incorporate the better part of the People's Charter in the Statutes
of the United Kingdom. Now, if ever, the people must be kept in order
by moral means, and the first and foremost of all moral means of
action upon the masses is and remains--religion. Hence the parsons'
majorities on the School Boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of
the bourgeoisie for the support of all sorts of revivalism, from
ritualism to the Salvation Army.
And now came the triumph of British respectability over the
freethought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The
workmen of France and Germany had become rebellious. They were
thoroughly infected with socialism, and, for very good reasons, were
not at all particular as to the legality of the means by which to
secure their own ascendency. The _puer robustus_, here, turned from
day to day more _malitiosus_. Nothing remained to the French and
German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently drop their
freethought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps upon him,
quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly on board; one
by one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior, spoke with
respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with
the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeoisie dined
_maigre_ on Fridays, and German ones sat out long Protestant sermons
in their pews on Sundays. They had come to grief with materialism.
"_Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten werden_,"--religion must be
kept alive for the people--that was the only and the last means to
save society from utter ruin. Unfortunately for themselves, they did
not find this out until they had done their level best to break up
religion for ever. And now it was the turn of the British bourgeois to
sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I could have told you that two
hundred years ago!"
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British,
nor the _post festum_ conversion of the Continental bourgeois will
stem the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding
force, is the _vis inertiae_ of history, but, being merely passive, is
sure to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard
to capitalist society. If our juridical, philosophical, and religious
ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the economical
relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas cannot, in the
long run, withstand the effects of a complete change in these
relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural revelation, we must
admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to prop up a
tottering society.
In fact, in England, too, the working-people have begun to move again.
They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois
traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two
parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must
work out its salvation by and through the great Liberal party.
Working-men's traditions, inherited from their first tentative efforts
at independent action, such as the exclusion, from ever so many old
Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not gone through a regular
apprenticeship; which means the breeding, by every such union, of its
own blacklegs. But for all that the English working-class is moving,
as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had to report to his
brother Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things in England,
with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more or less
unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with an
over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually
absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer
of the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor
the unskilled laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what
a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return. And if
the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of some people,
let them not forget that it is the working-class which keeps alive the
finest qualities of the English character, and that, if a step in
advance is once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never lost
afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists, for reasons explained
above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons bid fair to be
worthy of their forefathers.
But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend upon
England alone. It can only be secured by the co-operation of, at
least, England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries the
working-class movement is well ahead of England. In Germany it is even
within measurable distance of success. The progress it has there made
during the last twenty-five years is unparalleled. It advances with
ever-increasing velocity. If the German middle-class have shown
themselves lamentably deficient in political capacity, discipline,
courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class have given
ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago, Germany
was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European
middle-class; as things are now, is it outside the limits of
possibility that Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great
victory of the European proletariat?
F. ENGELS.
_April 20th, 1892._
FOOTNOTES:
[A] "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means
torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time
the mystic Boehme puts into the German word something of the meaning of
the Latin _qualitas_; his "qual" was the activating principle arising
from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the
thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a
pain inflicted from without.
[B] Marx and Engels, "Die Heilige Familie," Frankfurt a. M. 1845, pp.
201-204.
[C] And even in business matters, the conceit of national Chauvinism
is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English
manufacturer considered it derogatory from an Englishman to speak any
language but his own, and felt rather proud than otherwise of the fact
that "poor devils" of foreigners settled in England and took off his
hands the trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never
noticed that these foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a
very large part of British foreign trade, imports and exports, and
that the direct foreign trade of Englishmen became limited, almost
entirely, to the colonies, China, the United States, and South
America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other
Germans abroad, who gradually organized a complete network of
commercial colonies all over the world. But when Germany, about forty
years ago, seriously began manufacturing for export, this network
served her admirably in her transformation, in so short a time, from a
corn-exporting into a first-rate manufacturing country. Then, about
ten years ago, the British manufacturer got frightened, and asked his
ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his
customers together. The unanimous answer was: (1) You don't learn your
customer's language but expect him to speak your own; (2) You don't
even try to suit your customer's wants, habits, and tastes, but expect
him to conform to your English ones.
SOCIALISM
UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC
I
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the
recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in
the society of to-day, between proprietors and non-proprietors,
between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the
anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern
Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of
the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the
eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at
first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to
its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the coming
revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no
external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science,
society, political institutions, everything, was subjected to the most
unsparing criticism; everything must justify its existence before the
judgment-seat of reason, or give up existence. Reason became the sole
measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world
stood upon its head;[1] first, in the sense that the human head, and
the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of
all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider
sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles
had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and
government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into
the lumber-room as irrational: the world had hitherto allowed itself
to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only
pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day,
the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege,
oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right,
equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.
We know to-day that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the
idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found
its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced
itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property
was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the
government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into
being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois
republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more
than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by
their epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonism of the feudal nobility and the
burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society, was the
general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and
poor workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for
the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as
representing, not one special class, but the whole of suffering
humanity. Still further. From its origin, the bourgeoisie was saddled
with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers,
and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild
developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the
day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And
although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the
nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of
the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great
bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class
which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern
proletariat. For example, at the time of the German reformation and
the peasants' war, the Anabaptists and Thomas Muenzer; in the great
English revolution, the Levellers; in the great French revolution,
Baboeuf.
There were theoretical enunciations corresponding with these
revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social
conditions; in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories (Morelly
and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political
rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals.
It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but
class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing all
the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new
teaching. Then came the three great Utopians; Saint Simon, to whom
the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still
had a certain significance; Fourier; and Owen, who in the country
where capitalist production was most developed, and under the
influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his
proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in
direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a
representative of the interests of that proletariat, which historical
development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French
philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to
begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in
the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they
see it, is as far as heaven from earth, from that of the French
philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon
the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and
unjust, and, therefore, finds its way in the dust-hole quite as
readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure
reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been
the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was
wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who
understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now
been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of
necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere happy
accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and
might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and
suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the
forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of
all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be
founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be
remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was
in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth
century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French
Revolution had realized this rational society and government.
But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier
conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The
State based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat
Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which
the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political
capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate,
and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised
eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society
based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and
poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become
intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which
had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the
charitable institutions of the Church. The "freedom of property" from
feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the
small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their
small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the
large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as
far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned,
became "freedom _from_ property." The development of industry upon a
capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses
conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more,
in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus between man and man. The number of
crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had
openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they
were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the
bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all
the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent
cheating. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto was realized in
the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression
by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social
lever, by gold. The right of the first night was transferred from the
feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased to
an extent never heard of. Marriage itself remained, as before, the
legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and,
moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.
In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers,
the social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason"
were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the
men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of
the century. In 1802 Saint Simon's Geneva letters appeared; in 1808
appeared Fourier's first work, although the groundwork of his theory
dated from 1799; on January 1, 1800, Robert Owen undertook the
direction of New Lanark.
At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it
the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still
very incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen
in England, was still unknown in France. But Modern Industry
develops, on the one hand, the conflicts which make absolutely
necessary a revolution in the mode of production, and the doing away
with its capitalistic character--conflicts not only between the
classes begotten of it, but also between the very productive forces
and the forms of exchange created by it. And, on the other hand, it
develops, in these very gigantic productive forces, the means of
ending these conflicts. If, therefore, about the year 1800, the
conflicts arising from the new social order were only just beginning
to take shape, this holds still more fully as to the means of ending
them. The "have-nothing" masses of Paris, during the Reign of Terror,
were able for a moment to gain the mastery, and thus to lead the
bourgeois revolution to victory in spite of the bourgeoisie
themselves. But, in doing so, they only proved how impossible it was
for their domination to last under the conditions then obtaining. The
proletariat, which then for the first time evolved itself from these
"have-nothing" masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite
incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed,
suffering order, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help
could, at best, be brought in from without, or down from above.
This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To
the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class
conditions corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social
problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions,
the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society
presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason.
It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of
social order and to impose this upon society from without by
propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model
experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the
more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could
not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon
this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can
leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these
phantasies, which to-day only make us smile, and to crow over the
superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such
"insanity." For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand
thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their
phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
Saint Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak
of which he was not yet thirty. The Revolution was the victory of the
third estate, _i.e._, of the great masses of the nation, _working_ in
production and in trade, over the privileged _idle_ classes, the
nobles and the priests. But the victory of the third estate soon
revealed itself as exclusively the victory of a small part of this
"estate," as the conquest of political power by the socially
privileged section of it, _i.e._, the propertied bourgeoisie. And the
bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the Revolution,
partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the Church,
confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon
the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these
swindlers that, under the Directorate, brought France to the verge of
ruin, and thus gave Napoleon the pretext for his _coup-d'etat_.
Hence, to Saint Simon the antagonism between the third estate and the
privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers"
and "idlers." The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes,
but also all who, without taking any part in production or
distribution, lived on their incomes. And the workers were not only
the wage-workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the
bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual
leadership and political supremacy had been proved, and was by the
Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had not
this capacity seemed to Saint Simon proved by the experiences of the
Reign of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to
Saint Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious
bond, destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been
lost since the time of the Reformation--a necessarily mystic and
rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity." But science, that was the
scholars; and industry, that was in the first place, the working
bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeoisie were
certainly, intended by Saint Simon to transform themselves into a kind
of public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold,
_vis-a-vis_ of the workers, a commanding and economically privileged
position. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the
whole of social production by the regulation of credit. This
conception was in exact keeping with a time in which Modern Industry
in France and, with it, the chasm between bourgeoisie and proletariat
was only just coming into existence. But what Saint Simon especially
lays stress upon is this: what interests him first, and above all
other things, is the lot of the class that is the most numerous and
the most poor ("_la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre_").
Already, in his Geneva letters, Saint Simon lays down the proposition
that "all men ought to work." In the same work he recognizes also that
the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses. "See,"
says he to them, "what happened in France at the time when your
comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine." But to
recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one
between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie,
and the non-possessers, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant
discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of
production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by
economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of
political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here
already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of
political rule over men into an administration of things and a
direction of processes of production--that is to say, the "abolition
of the State," about which recently there has been so much noise.