This exposition of Lassalle's teaching in his "Working Men's Programme" already furnishes us with the transition to his economic views. Every age of the world, he held, has its own ruling idea. The idea of the working class is the ruling idea of the new epoch we have now entered on, and that idea implies that every man is entitled to a menschenwürdiges Dasein, to an existence worthy of his moral destiny, and that the State is bound to make this a governing consideration in its legislative and executive work. Man's destiny is to progressive civilization, and a condition of society which makes progressive civilization the exclusive property of the few, and practically debars the vast mass of the people from participation in it, stands in the present age self-condemned. It no longer corresponds to its own idea. Society has long since declared no man shall be enslaved; society has more recently declared no man shall be ignorant; society now declares no man shall be without property. He cannot be really free without property any more than he can be really free without knowledge. He has been released successively from a state of legal dependence and from a state of intellectual dependence; he must now be released from a state of economic dependence. This is his final emancipation, which is necessary to enable him to reap any fruits from the other two, and it cannot take place without a complete transformation of present industrial arrangements. It is a common mistake, he said, to think that socialists take their stand on equality. They really take their stand on freedom. They argue that the positive side of freedom is development, and if every man has a right to freedom, then every man has a right to the possibility of development. From this right, however, they allege the existing industrial system absolutely excludes the great majority. The freeman cannot realize his freedom, the individual cannot realize his individuality, without a certain external economic basis of work and enjoyment, and the best way to furnish him with this is to clothe him in various ways with collective property.
Lassalle's argument, however, is still more specific than this. In the beginning of his "Herr Bastiat-Schultze," he quotes a passage from his previous work on "The System of Acquired Rights," which he informs us he had intended to expand into a systematic treatise on "The Principles of Scientific National Economy." This intention he was actually preparing to fulfil when the Leipzig invitation and letter diverted him at once into practical agitation. He regrets that circumstances had thus not permitted the practical agitation to be preceded by the theoretical codex which should be the basis for it, but adds that the substance of his theory is contained in this polemic against Schultze-Delitzsch, though the form of its exposition is considerably modified by his plan of following the ideas of Schultze's "Working Men's Catechism," and by his purpose of answering Schultze's misplaced taunt of "half knowledge" by trying to extinguish the economic pretensions of the latter as completely as he had done the literary pretensions of Julian Schmidt. "Every line I write," says Lassalle, with a characteristic finality of self-confidence, "I write armed with the whole culture of my century"; and at any rate Schultze-Delitzsch was far his inferior in economic as in other knowledge. In the passage to which I have referred, Lassalle says, "The world is now face to face with a new social question, the question whether, since there is no longer any property in the immediate use of another man, there should still exist property in his mediate exploitation—i.e., whether the free realization and development of one's power and labour should be the exclusive private property of the owner of the instruments and advances necessary for labour—i.e., of capital; and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his own intellectual labour of management, should be permitted to have property in the value of other people's labour—i.e., whether he ought to receive what is known as the premium or profit of capital, consisting of the difference between the selling price of the product and the sum of the wages and salaries of all kinds of labour, manual and mental, that have contributed to its production."
His standing-point here, again, as always, belongs to the philosophy of history—to the idea of historical evolution with which his Hegelianism had early penetrated him. The course of legal history has been one of gradual but steady contraction of the sphere of private property in the interests of personal freedom and development. The ancient system of slavery, under which the labourer was the absolute and complete property of his master, was followed by the feudal system of servitudes, under which he was still only partially proprietor of himself, but was bound by law to a particular lord by one or more of a most manifold series of specific services. These systems have been successively abolished. There is no longer property in man or in the use of man. No man can now be either inherited or sold in whole or in part. He is his own, and his power of labour is his own. But he is still far from being in full possession of himself or of his labour. He cannot work without materials to work on and instruments to work with, and for these the modern labourer is more dependent than ever labourer was before on the private owners in whose hands they have accumulated. And the consequence is that under existing industrial arrangements the modern labourer has no more individual property in his labour than the ancient slave had. He is obliged to part with the whole value of his labour, and content himself with bare subsistence in return. It is in this sense that socialist writers maintain property to be theft—not that subjectively the proprietors are thieves, but that objectively, under the exigencies of a system of competition, they cannot help offering workmen, and workmen cannot help accepting, wages far under the true value of their labour. Labour is the source of all wealth, for the value of anything—that which makes it wealth—is, on the economists' own showing, only another name for the amount of labour put into the making of it; and labour is the only ground on which modern opponents of socialism—Thiers and Bastiat, for example—think the right of individual property can be established. Yet on the methods of distribution of wealth that now exist, individual property is not founded on this its only justifiable basis, and the aim of socialists is to emancipate the system of distribution from the influence of certain unconscious forces which, as they allege, at present disturb it, and to bring back individual property for the first time to its natural and rightful foundation—labour. Their aim is not to abolish private property, but to purify it, by means of some systematic social regulation which shall give each man a share more conformable with his personal merit and contribution. Even if no question is raised about the past, it is plain that labour is every day engaged in making more new property. Millions of labouring men are, day after day, converting their own brain, muscle, and sinew into useful commodities, into value, into wealth. Now, the problem of the age, according to Lassalle, is this, whether this unmade property of the future should not become genuine labour property, and its value remain greatly more than at present in the hands that actually produced it.
This, he holds, can only be done by a fundamental reconstruction of the present industrial system, and by new methods of determining the remuneration of the labouring class. For there is a profound contradiction in the present system. It is unprecedentedly communistic in production, and unprecedentedly individualistic in distribution. Now there ought to be as real a joint participation in the product, as there is already a joint participation in the work. Capital must become the servant of labour instead of its master, profits must disappear, industry must be conducted more on the mutual instead of the proprietary principle, and the instruments of production be taken out of private hands and turned into collective or even, it may be, national property. In the old epoch, before 1789, industrial society was governed by the principle of solidarity without freedom; in the period since 1789, by freedom without solidarity, which has been even worse; in the epoch now opening, the principle must be solidarity in freedom.
Partisans of the present system object to any social interference with the distribution of wealth, but they forget how much—how entirely—that distribution is even now effected by social methods. The present arrangement of property, says Lassalle, is, in fact, nothing but an anarchic and unjust socialism. How do you define socialism? he asks. Socialism is a distribution of property by social channels. Now this is the condition of things that exists to-day. There exists, under the guise of individual production, a distribution of property by means of purely objective movements of society. For there is a certain natural solidarity in things as they are, only being under no rational control, it operates as a wild natural force, as a kind of fate destroying all rational freedom and all rational responsibility in economic affairs. In a sense, there never was more solidarity than there is now; there never was so much interdependence. Under the large system of production, masses of workmen are simply so many component parts of a single great machine driven by the judgment or recklessness of an individual capitalist. With modern facilities of inter-communication, too, the trade of the world is one and indivisible. A deficient cotton harvest in America carries distress into thousands of households in Lyons, in Elberfeld, in Manchester. A discovery of gold in Australia raises all prices in Europe. A simple telegram stating that rape prospects are good in Holland instantly deprives the oilworkers of Prussia of half their wages. So far from there being any truth in the contention of Schultze-Delitzsch, that the existing system is the only sound one, because it is founded on the principle of making every man responsible for his own doings, the very opposite is the case. The present system makes every man responsible for what he does not do. In consequence of the unprecedented interconnection of modern industry, the sum of conditions needed to be known for its successful guidance have so immensely increased that rational calculation is scarcely possible, and men are enriched without any merit, and impoverished without any fault. According to Lassalle, in the absence as yet of an adequate system of commercial statistics, the number of known conditions is always much smaller than the number of unknown, and the consequence is, that trade is very much a game of chance. Everything in modern industrial economy is ruled by social connections, by favourable or unfavourable situations and opportunities. Conjunctur is its great Orphic chain. Chance is its Providence—Chance and his sole and equally blind counsellor, Speculation. Every age and condition of society, says Lassalle, tends to develop some phenomenon that more particularly expresses its type and spirit, and the purest type of capitalistic society is the financial speculator. Capital, he maintains, is a historical and not a logical category, and the capitalist is a modern product. He is the development, not of the ancient Crœsus or the mediæval lord, but of the usurer, who has taken their place, but was in their lifetime hardly a respectable person. Crœsus was a very rich man, but he was not a capitalist, for he could do anything with his wealth except capitalize it. The idea of money making money and of capital being self-productive, which Lassalle takes to be the governing idea of the present order of things, was, he says, quite foreign to earlier periods. Industry is now entirely under the control of capitalists speculating for profit. No one now makes things first of all for his own use—as mythologizing economists relate—and then exchanges what is over for the like redundant work of his neighbours. Men make everything first of all, and last of all, for other people's use, and they make it at the direction and expense of a capitalist who is speculating for money, and, in the absence of systematic statistics, is speculating in the dark. Chance and social connections make him rich, chance and social connections bring him to ruin. Capital is not the result of saving, it is the result of Conjunctur; and so are the vicissitudes and crises that have so immensely increased in modern times. What you have now, therefore, says Lassalle, is a system of socialism; wealth is at present distributed by social means, and by nothing else; and all he contends for is, as he says, to substitute a regulated and rational socialism for this anarchic and natural socialism that now exists.
His charge against the present system, however, is more than that it is anarchic; he maintains it to be unjust—organically and hopelessly unjust. The labourer's back is the green table on which the whole game is played, and all losses are in the end sustained by him. A slightly unfavourable turn of things sends him at once into want, while even a considerably favourable one brings him no corresponding advantage, for, according to all economists, wages are always the last thing to rise with a reviving trade. The present system is, in fact, incapable of doing the labourer justice, and would not suffer employers to do so even if they wished. Injustice is bred in its very bone and blood. In this contention Lassalle builds his whole argument on premises drawn from the accepted economic authorities. Socialist economics, he says, is nothing but a battle against Ricardo, whom he describes as the last and most representative development of bourgeois economics; and it fights the battle with Ricardo's own weapons, and on Ricardo's own ground. There are two principles in particular of which it makes much use—Ricardo's law of value and Ricardo's law of natural or necessary wages.
Ricardo's law of value is that the value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour. Value is thus resolved into so much labour, or what is the same thing, so much time consumed in labour, mental and manual, upon the commodity. This reduction of value to quantity of time is reckoned by Lassalle the one great merit of Ricardo and the English economists. Ricardo, however, strictly limited his law to commodities that admitted of indefinite multiplication, the value of other commodities being, he held, regulated by their scarcity; and he confined it to the normal value of the commodities only, the fluctuations of their market-price depending on other considerations. But Lassalle seeks to make it cover these cases also by means of a distinction he draws between individual time of labour, and socially necessary time of labour. According to this distinction, what constitutes the value of a product is not the time actually taken or required by the person who made it; for he may have been indolent or slow, or may not have used the means and appliances which the age he lived in afforded him. What constitutes value is the average time of labour socially necessary, the time required by labour of average efficiency using the methods the age supplies. If the commodity can be produced in an hour, an hour's work will be its value, though you have taken ten to produce it by slower methods. So far there is nothing very remarkable, but Lassalle goes on to argue that you may waste your time not merely by using methods that society has superseded, but by producing commodities that society no longer wants. You go on making shoe-buckles after they have gone out of fashion, and you can get nothing for them. They have no value. And why? Because, while they indeed represent labour, they do not represent socially necessary labour. So again with over-production: you may produce a greater amount of a commodity than society requires at the time. The value of the commodity falls. Why? Because while it has cost as much actual labour as before, it has not cost so much socially necessary labour. In fact, the labour it has taken has been socially unnecessary, for there was no demand for the product. On the other hand—and we are entitled to make this expansion of Lassalle's argument—take the case of under-production, of deficient supply. Prices rise. What is usually known as a scarcity value is conferred on commodities. But this scarcity value Lassalle converts into a labour value; the commodity is produced by the same individual labour, but the labour is more socially necessary. In plain English, there is more demand for the product.
Lassalle's distinction is thus an ingenious invention for expressing rarity value in terms of labour value. It has no theoretical importance, but is of some practical service in the socialistic argument. That argument is not that value is constituted by labour pure and simple, but by labour modified by certain general conditions of society; only it holds that these conditions—conditions of productivity, of rarity, of demand—have been created by nobody in particular, that, therefore, nobody in particular should profit by them, and that so far as the problem of the distribution of value goes, the one factor in the constitution of value which needs to be taken into account in settling that problem, is labour. All value comes from labour, represents so much time of labour, is, in fact, so much "labour-jelly," so much preserved labour.
While one accepted economic law thus declares that all value is conferred by the labourer, and is simply his sweat, brain, and sinew incorporated in the product, another economic law declares that he gains no advantage from the productivity of his own work, and that whatever value he produces, he earns only the same wages—bare customary subsistence. In that lies the alleged injustice of the present system. Von Thuenen, the famous Feudalist landowner and economic experimentalist, said, many years ago, that when the modern working class once began to ask the question, What is natural wages? a revolution might arise which would reduce Europe to barbarism. This is the question Lassalle asked, and by which mainly he stirred up socialism. The effect of the previous argument was to raise the question, What is the labourer entitled to get? and to suggest the answer, he is entitled to get everything. The next question is, What, then, does the labourer actually get? and the answer is, that on the economists' own showing, he gets just enough to keep soul and body together, and on the present system can never get any more. Ricardo, in common with other economists, had taught that the value of labour, like the value of everything else, was determined by the cost of its production, and that the cost of the production of labour meant the cost of the labourer's subsistence according to the standard of living customary among his class at the time. Wages might rise for a season above this level, or fall for a season below it, but they always tended to return to it again, and would not permanently settle anywhere else. When they rose higher, the labouring class were encouraged by their increased prosperity to marry, and eventually their numbers were thus multiplied to such a degree that by the force of ordinary competition the rate of wages was brought down again; when they fell lower, marriages diminished and mortality increased among the working class, and the result was such a reduction of their numbers as to raise the rate of wages again to its old level. This is the economic law of natural or necessary wages—"the iron and cruel law" which Lassalle declared absolutely precluded the wage-labourers—i.e., 96 per cent. of the population—from all possibility of ever improving their condition or benefiting in the least from the growing productivity of their own work. This law converted industrial freedom into an aggravated slavery. The labourer was unmanned, taken out of a relationship which, with all its faults, was still a human and personal one, put under an impersonal and remorseless economic law, sent like a commodity to be bought in the cheapest market, and there dispossessed by main force of competition of the value of the property which his own hands had made. Das Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden.
It is no wonder that teaching like this should move the minds of working men to an intolerable sense of despair and wrong. Nor was there any possibility of hope except in a revolution. For the injustice complained of lay in the essence of the existing economic system, and could not be removed, except with the complete abolition of the system. The only solution of the question, therefore, was a socialistic reconstruction which should make the instruments of production collective property, and subordinate capital to labour, but such a solution would of course be the work of generations, and meanwhile, the easiest method of transition from the old order of things to the new, lay in establishing productive associations of working men on State credit. These would form the living seed-corn of the new era. This was just Louis Blanc's scheme, with two differences—viz., that the associations were to be formed gradually, and that they were to be formed voluntarily. The State was not asked to introduce a new organization of labour by force all at once, but merely to lend capital at interest to one sound and likely association after another, as they successively claimed its aid. This loan was not to be gratuitous, as the French socialists used to demand in 1848, and since there would be eventually only one association of the same trade in each town, and since, besides, they would also establish a system of mutual assurance against loss, trade by trade, the State, it was urged, would really incur no risk. Lassalle, speaking of State help, said he did not want a hand from the State, but only a little finger, and he actually sought, in the first instance at least, no more than Mr. Gladstone gave in the Irish Land Act. The scheme was mainly urged, of course, in the interests of a sounder distribution of wealth; but Lassalle contended that it would also increase production; and it is important to remember that he says it would not otherwise be economically justifiable, because "an increase of production is an indispensable condition of every improvement of our social state." This increase would be effected by a saving of cost, in abolishing local competition, doing away with middle-men and private capitalists, and adapting production better to needs. The business books of the association would form the basis of a sound and trustworthy system of commercial statistics, so much required for the purpose of avoiding over-production. The change would, he thought, also introduce favourable alterations in consumption, and in the direction of production; inasmuch as the taste of the working class for the substantial and the beautiful, would more and more supplant the taste of the bourgeoisie for the cheap and nasty.
After the death of Lassalle, the movement he began departed somewhat from the lines on which he launched it. 1st, His plan of replacing capitalistic industry by productive associations of labourers, founded on State credit, had always seemed a mockery, or, at least, a makeshift, to many of the socialists of Germany. It would not destroy competition, for one association would still of necessity compete with another; and it would not secure to every man the right to the full product of his labour, for the members of the stronger productive associations would be able to exploit the members of the weaker as the ordinary result of their inter-competition. In other words, Lassalle's plan would not in their eyes realize the socialist claim, as that claim had been taught to them by Marx. Their claim could only be realized by the conversion of all industrial instruments into public property, and the systematic conduct of all industry by the public authority; and why not aim straight for that result, they asked, instead of first bringing in a merely transitional period of productive associations, which would, on Lassalle's own calculations, take two hundred years to create, and which might not prove transitional to the socialist state after all? Rodbertus even had gone against Lassalle on this point, because he wanted to see individual property converted into national property, and thought converting it first into joint stock property was really to prevent rather than promote the main end he had in view.
Then, 2nd, Lassalle was a national, not an international socialist. He held that every country should solve its own social question for itself, and that the working-class movement was not, and should not be made, cosmopolitan. He was even—as Prince Bismarck said in Parliament, when taxed with having personal relations with him—patriotic. At least he was an intense believer in Prussia; less, however, because he was a Prussian than because Prussia was a strong State, and because he thought that strong States alone could do the world's work in Germany or elsewhere. By nationality in itself he set but little store; a nationality had a right to separate existence if it could assert it, but if it were weak and struggling, its only duty was to submit with thankfulness to annexation by a stronger power. He wished his followers, therefore, to keep aloof from the doings of other nations, and to concentrate their whole exertions upon victory at the elections in their own country and the gradual development of productive associations on national loans. This restriction of the range of the movement had from the first dissatisfied some of its adherents, especially a certain active section who hated Prussia as much as Lassalle believed in her, and after the influence of the International began to make itself felt upon the agitation in Germany, this difference of opinion gathered gradually to a head. In 1868 a motion was brought before the general meeting of the League in favour of establishing relations with the International and accepting its programme. The chief promoters of this motion were the two present leaders of the Social Democratic party in the Reichstag, Liebknecht and Bebel, and it was strongly opposed by the president of the League, Dr. von Schweitzer, an advocate in Frankfort, and a strong champion of Prussia, who was elected to the presidency in 1866, just at the time the extension of the suffrage gave a fresh impetus to the movement, and whose energy and gifts of management contributed greatly to the development of the organization. The motion was carried by a substantial majority, but before next year Von Schweitzer had succeeded in turning the tables on his opponents, and at the general meeting in 1869, Liebknecht and Bebel were expelled from the League, as traitors to the labourers' cause. After their expulsion they called together in the same year a congress of working men at Eisenach, which was attended mainly by delegates from Austria and South Germany, and founded an independent organization on the principles of the International, and under the name of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Germany. The two organizations existed side by side till 1874, when a union was effected between them at a general meeting at Gotha, and they became henceforth the Socialist Labour Party. This was the burial of the national socialism of Lassalle, for though in deference to his followers, the new programme promised in the meantime to work within national limits, it expressly recognised that the labourers' movement was international, and that the great aim to be striven after was a state of society in which every man should be obliged to share in the general labour according to his powers, and have a right to receive from the aggregate product of labour according to what was termed his rational requirements. Some "orthodox Lassalleans," as they called themselves, held aloof from this compromise, but they are too few to be of any importance. They still remain apart from the main body of German socialism, and live in such good odour with the Government, whether on account of their unimportance or of their supposed loyalty, that they were never molested by any application of the Socialist Laws which were enforced for twelve years strenuously against all other socialists.
Among the causes which brought the others to so much unanimity was undoubtedly the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, which was viewed with universal aversion by socialists of every shade. On the outbreak of the war, Schweitzer and the members of the original League gave their sympathies warmly to the arms of their country, and the Social Democratic party was nearly equally divided on the subject; but after the foundation of the French Republic, they all with one consent declared that the war ought now to cease, and the socialist deputies, no matter which organization they belonged to, voted without exception against granting supplies for its continuance. They were likewise opposed to the recognition of the title of Emperor and to the constitution of the Empire, and indeed as republicans they could not be anything else. From a recollection mainly of these votes Prince Bismarck considered the movement to be unpatriotic and hostile to the Empire, and accordingly suppressed its propaganda in 1878, when its growth seemed likely to prove a serious danger to an Empire whose stability was still far from being assured by any experience of its advantages. The socialists retorted upon this policy at their congress at Wyden, Switzerland, in 1880, by striking out of their programme the limitation of proceeding by legal means, on the ground that the action of the Government having made legal means impracticable, no resource was left but to meet force by force. They thus threw aside the last shred of the practical policy of Lassalle, and stood out thenceforth as a party of international revolution.
The movement could, however, hardly help becoming international; not, as some allege, because this is a peculiarity of revolutionary parties; on the contrary, other parties may also exhibit it. What, for example, was the Holy Alliance but an international league of the monarchical and aristocratic parties against the advance of popular rights? Nor is it a peculiarity of the present time only. No doubt the increased inter-communication and inter-dependence between countries now facilitates its development. There are no longer nations in Europe, said Heine, but only parties. But in reality it has always been nearly as much so as now. Any party founded on a definite general principle or interest may in any age become international, and even what may seem unpatriotic. The Protestants of France in the 16th century sought help from England, and the Jacobites of England in the 18th sought help from France; just as the German socialists of 1870 sided with the French after Sedan, and the French communists of 1871 preferred to see their country occupied by the Germans rather than governed by the "Versaillais." In all these cases the party principles were naturally international, and the party bias overcame the patriotic.
Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others, indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived German literature towards the beginning of this century—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe—have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power. This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity, but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile—
The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social.
CHAPTER IV. KARL MARX.
In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circumstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His principal work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its illustrations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working class sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working class of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circumstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.
Born at Trèves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy and jurisprudence, determined, like Lassalle, to devote himself to the academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and passed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very outset of his days to a political position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, published latterly at Leipzig to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon. The Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher were published by the well-known Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at Zürich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland, and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of the Lassallean movement, for he was—as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte"—the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a continuation of the suppressed Deutsche Jahrbücher, on a more extended plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of the question of communism.
The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the attitude they should assume towards it. They seem to have been fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Grün, himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the Rhenish Gazette bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be found in the Rhenish Gazette. If we may judge by the extracts from some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's "Vollständige Geschichte der Parthei-Kämpfe in Deutschland während der Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any participation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p. 103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emancipation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left passed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working classes, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. Lassalle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.
Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and God, he entirely admitted, were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an abstract entity, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man—the concrete flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "God," says Feuerbach, speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last." He passed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats—Der Mensch ist was er isst. Man, therefore, had no other God before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life—which was his only life—was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new religion is thus described in it:—"Man alone is our God, our father, our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and entitled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right to claim the greatest possible assistance from others, and the duty to afford the same to them in turn.
Now the tendency of this metaphysical and moral teaching was strongly democratic and socialistic. There was said to be in the existing political system a false transcendency identical with that of the current religious system. King and council hovered high and away above the real life of society in a world of their own, looking on political power as a kind of private property, and careless of mankind, from whom it sprang, to whom it belonged, and by whom and for whom it should be administered. "The princes are gods," says Feuerbach, "and they must share the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology; dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the antithesis of God and world; here we have the antithesis of State and people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be humanized—must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be politized, for they, all of them, constitute the polis. Man must no longer be a means, but must be everywhere and always an end. There was nobody above man; there was neither superhuman person, nor consecrated, person; neither deity, nor divine right. And, on the other hand, as there is no person who in being or right is more than man, so there must be no person who is less. There must be no unmenschen, no slaves, no heretics, no outcasts, no outlaws, but every being who wears human flesh must be placed in the enjoyment of the full rights and privileges of man. The will of man be done, hallowed be his name.
These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God." Feuerbach personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and was to the individual as a God. With most of his disciples Humanism meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective. Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grün passes into socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated, externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it, like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with the practical God, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical"; humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Grün accordingly says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and metaphysics, but he admits that neither Feuerbach nor Proudhon would acknowledge the connection.
We thus see how theoretical humanism—a philosophy and a religion—led easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation of society. This was the ideal of the humanists, and it contains ample and wide-reaching positive features; but when it came to practical action they preferred for the present to take up an attitude of simple but implacable negation to the existing order of things. No doubt variety of opinion existed among them; but if they are to be judged by what seemed their dominant interest, they were revolutionaries and nothing else. They repudiated with one consent the socialist utopias of France, and refrained on principle from committing themselves to, or even discussing, any positive scheme of reconstruction whatsoever. They held it premature to think of positive proposals, which would, moreover, be sure to sow divisions among themselves. Their first great business was not to build up, but to destroy, and their work in the meantime was therefore to develop the revolutionary spirit to its utmost possible energy, by exciting hatred against all existing institutions; in short, to create an immense reservoir of revolutionary energy which might be turned to account when its opportunity arrived. Their position is singularly like the phase of Russian nihilism described by Baron Fircks, and presented to us in Turgenieff's novels. It is expressed very plainly by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The masses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing institutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an association in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a "Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a federation of secret societies established by Mazzini in 1834, under the general name of "Young Europe," and comprising three series of societies:—"Young Italy," composed of Italians; "Young Poland," of Poles; and "Young Germany," of Germans. But this organization was not at all to Marr's mind, because it concerned itself with nothing but politics, and because its method was conspiracy. "Great transformations," he said, "are never prepared by conspiracies," and it was a very great transformation indeed that he contemplated. He therefore formed a "Young Germany" of his own. His plan was to plant a lodge, or "family," wherever there existed a German working men's association. The members of this family became members of the association, and formed a leaven which influenced all around them, and, through the wandering habits of the German working class, was carried to much wider circles. The family met for political discussion once a week, read Friedrich Feuerbach together on the Sundays with fresh recruits, who, when they had mastered him, were said to have put off the old man; and their very password was humanity, a brother being recognised by using the half-word human—? interrogatively, and the other replying by the remaining half—ität. The members were all ardent democrats, but, as a rule, so national in their sympathies that the leaders made it one great object of their disciplina arcani to stifle the sentiment of patriotism by subjecting it to constant ridicule.
Their relations to communism are not quite easy to determine. Marr himself sometimes expresses disapproval of the system. He says, "Communism is the expression of impotence of will. The communists lack confidence in themselves. They suffer under social oppression, and look around for consolation instead of seeking for weapons to emancipate themselves with. It is only a world-weariness desiring illusion as the condition of its life." He says the belief in the absolute dependence of man on matter is the shortest and most pregnant definition of communism, and that it starts from the principle that man is a slave and incapable of emancipating himself. But, on the other hand, he complains that the members of "Young Germany" did not sufficiently appreciate the social question, being disgusted with the fanaticism of the communists. By the communists, he here means the followers of Weitling and Albrecht, who were at that time creating a party movement in Switzerland. The prophet Albrecht, as he is called, was simply a crazy mystic with proclivities to sedition which brought him at length to prison for six years, and which took there an eschatological turn from his having, it is said, nothing to read but the Bible, so that on his release he went about prophesying that Jehovah had prepared a way in the desert, which was Switzerland, for bringing into Europe a reign of peace, in which people should hold all things in common and enjoy complete sensuous happiness, sitting under their common vine and fig-tree, with neither king nor priest to make them any more afraid. Weitling was not quite so unimportant, but the attention he excited at the time is certainly not justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality, no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by the three greatest philosophers of the age, assisted by a board of trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members were chiefly Germans from Germany, for very few of the communists in Switzerland were born Swiss, and according to Marr, who was present at some of their meetings, they were three-fourths of them tailors. "I felt," says Marr, "when I entered one of these clubs, that I was with the mother of tailors. The tailor sitting and chatting at his work is always extreme in his opinions. Tailor and communist are synonymous terms." It was to some of the leaders of this alliance that Weitling unfolded his wild scheme of a proletariat raid, according to which an army of 20,000 brigands was to be raised among the proletariat of the large towns, to go with torch and sword into all the countries of Europe, and terrify the bourgeoisie into a recognition of universal community of goods. It is only fair to add that his proposal met with no favour. Letters were found in his possession, and subsequently published in Bluntschli's official report, which show that some of Weitling's correspondents regarded his scheme with horror, and others treated it with ridicule. One of them said it was trying to found the kingdom of heaven with the furies of hell. The relations between "Young Germany" and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists, and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of things—the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the negation of subjection to authority.
Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial society. In the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher he published an article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man, and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions have been partial, wrought by a class in the interests of a class; but this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the name of all society, for the proletariat is a class which possesses a universal character because it dissolves all other separate classes into itself. It is the only class that takes its stand on a human and not a historical title. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the ascendancy of a limited class possessing money and culture, is practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a large class outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter body not merely tends to produce, but actually is, the dissolution of the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the assertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for the principle of its own life, and will naturally carry that principle into all society when it gains the power, as it is rapidly and inevitably doing. Marx sums up: "The only practical emancipation for Germany is an emancipation proceeding from the standpoint of the theory which explains man to be the highest being for man. In Germany the emancipation from the middle ages is only possible as at the same time an emancipation from the partial conquests of the middle ages. In Germany one kind of bond cannot be broken without all other bonds being broken too. Germany is by nature too thorough to be able to revolutionize without revolutionizing from a fundamental principle, and following that principle to its utmost limits; and therefore the emancipation of Germany will be the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat." He adds that when things are ripe, "when all the inner conditions have been completed, the German resurrection day will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock."
In this essay we mark already Marx's overmastering belief in natural historical evolution, which he had learnt from Hegel, and which prevented him from having any sympathy with the utopian projects of the French socialists. They vainly imagined, he held, that they could create a new world right off, whereas it was only possible to do so by observing a rigorous conformity to the laws of the development already in progress, by making use of the forces already at work, and proceeding in the direction towards which the stream of things was itself slowly but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of the middle classes, that is, of the conservative element which could resist the change. The process which was, as he held, now converting society into an aggregate of beggars and millionaires was bound eventually to overleap itself and land in a communism. I shall not discuss the truth of this conception at present, but it contributes, along with the sentiments of justice and humanity that animate—rightly or wrongly—the ideal of the socialists, to lend something of a religious force to their movement, for they feel that they are fellow-workers with the nature of things.
We left Marx in Paris, and on returning to him, we find him engaged—as indeed we usually do when his history comes into notice—in a threefold warfare. Besides his general war against the arrangements of modern society, he is always carrying on a bitter and implacable war against the Prussian Government, and is often engaged in controversy—sometimes very personal—with foes of his own philosophical or revolutionary household. After the cessation of the Deutsche Französische Jahrbücher, Marx edited a paper called Vorwärts, and in this and other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet—"Die Heilige Familie"—against the Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended him—says Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy"—at once as Jew, as Radical, and as journalist. When expelled from France, he went to Brussels, where he was allowed to continue his war upon the Prussian Government without interference, till the revolution of 1848. During this period he devoted his attention more particularly than hitherto to commercial subjects, and published in 1846 his "Discours sur le Libre-échange," and in 1847 his "Misère de la Philosophie," a reply to Proudhon's "Philosophie de la Misère"—both in French.
While in Brussels, Marx received an invitation from the London Central Committee of the Communist League to join that society. This league had been founded in Paris in 1836, for the purpose of propagating communist opinions among the working men of Germany. Its organization was analogous to that of the International and other societies of the same kind. A certain number of members constituted a Gemeinde, the several Gemeinden in the same town constituted a Kreis, a number of Kreise were grouped into a leading Kreis, and at the head of the whole was the Central Committee, which was chosen at a general congress of deputies from all the Kreise, and which had since 1840 had its seat in London. The method of the league was to establish, as a sphere of operation, German working men's improvement associations everywhere. The travelling custom of German working men greatly facilitated this work, and numbers of these associations were soon founded in Switzerland, England, Belgium, and the United States. The reason its committee applied to Marx was that he had just published a series of pamphlets in Brussels, in which, as he tells us, he "submitted to a merciless criticism the medley of French-English socialism and communism and of German philosophy, which then constituted the secret doctrine of the League," and insisted that "their work could have no tenable theoretical basis except that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the working classes and other classes a self-conscious participation in the process of historical transformation of society that was taking place under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias, because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues, pronunciamentos might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin again the day after to work for hire and rent their farms as they did before. A social revolution needed other and larger preparation; it needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character, depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in revolutionary action on the part of the labouring classes everywhere. The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and society—which was indeed already pregnant with the change—must be aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of production into the art of conspiracy.
Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization—and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration—of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifesto begins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Classes were dying out; the yeomanry, the nobility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist class or bourgeoisie, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring class, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The bourgeoisie had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves. They had collected the masses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other classes to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was for the interests of the governing class, the bourgeoisie, to permit him. Class rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.
The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek to abolish the State, but only the bourgeois State, in which the bourgeois exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did not seek to abolish property, but only the bourgeois system of property, under which private property is really already abolished for nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the bourgeois system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually class institutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the bourgeoisie, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely to labour in mills for bourgeois manufacturers, who yet held up their hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the institution of the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and nationality—that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was being abolished for the bourgeoisie, too, by the extensions of their trade.
As to the way of emancipation, the proletariat must strive to obtain political power, and use it to deprive the bourgeoisie of all capital and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now, for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) institution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:—"The communists do not seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains; they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"