Socialism and Democracy in Europe

II

The Utopian period of Socialism may be said to end, and the revolutionary era to begin, with the year 1830. The French Revolution was a bourgeois uprising. But behind it was the grim and resolute background of the proletarian mass. When the Third Estate achieved its victory, it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the exclusion of its lowly allies. From 1830 to 1850 the ferment of democratic discontent spread over Europe and forced the demands of the workingman into the foreground. The first outbreak occurred in France, in 1831, when the workingmen of Lyons, during a period of distressing financial depression, marched under the banner, "Live working, or die fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves. This second chapter of the development of Socialism begins with a red letter.

Louis Blanc (1813-82), the first philosopher of the new movement, struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government. This differentiates him from Fourier and Saint-Simon, and links him with the leading Socialist writers of our day. He published his Organisation du Travail (Organization of Labor) in 1839. It immediately gave him an immense popularity with the working classes. It is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is forceful in its denunciation of existing society.

He said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without improving them materially. This improvement would not come from above, from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democracy. The proletarian must possess the power of the state in order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him in its grasp.

This democratic state should then establish national workshops, or associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. He believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing. The men would choose their own managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this beneficent system would spread to all communities.

He was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate empire"—there must be a hierarchy of ability.

Louis Blanc believed in revolution as the method of social advancement. He was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of 1848, the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. As a member of the provisional government, he may be called the first Socialist to hold cabinet honors. And, like his successors in modern cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new social order. It is true that national workshops were built by the French government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans. His enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[12]

Louis Blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian conception that man was created good and innocent. He blames society for allowing the individual to do evil. But he does take a step toward the Marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was created with certain endowments of strength and intellect and that these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. The empire of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of man's greatness.

The doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by Proudhon (1809-65). He was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. He was a precocious lad, was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the study of political economy. In 1840 he brought out his notable work, Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? (What Is Property?), a novel question for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "Property is theft," ergo "property holders are thieves."

Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic.

Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property. Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange.

Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even proposed to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected—only two votes were recorded for it—he tried to establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed.

Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy."

For his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar cause by fleeing to Brussels.

The ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by his theory of anarchy.

One cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. Not man originally pure and good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from the man of mercy and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. Proudhon frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a condition of equality through the destruction of property and of government. But in destroying property he retains possessions, and in establishing anarchy he maintains order. "Free association, liberty—whose sole function is to maintain equality—in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society."

"The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy."[13]

Proudhon has had a large influence on modern Socialism. His trenchant invectives against property and society are widely copied. From his utterances on government the Syndicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have drawn their doctrine. The general strike is the child of his paradoxes. He wrote as the motto for his most influential book, What Is Property?, "Destruam et aedificabo" (I will destroy and I will build again). But, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed to reveal a new and better order.

The way to modern Socialism was paved in Germany. The teaching of Hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over Europe in the '40's. Hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. He gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. Everything that exists is worth destroying, may be taken as the primary postulate at which the Young Hegelians arrived. Truth does not exist merely in a collection of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is found only in experience. Nothing is sacred merely because it exists. Existing institutions are only the prelude to other and better institutions that are to follow. This was roughly the formula that the radical Hegelians blocked out for themselves when they split from the orthodox conservatives in the '30's.

In 1843 appeared Feuerbach's Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity), putting the seal of materialism upon the precepts of the Young Hegelians.[14] The God of the utopians was destroyed. Things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man. Things as they are, are the result of evolution, of growth; nothing was created as it is, and even "Religion is the dream of the human mind."[15]

Out of this atmosphere of philosophical, religious, and political rebellion sprang the prophet of modern Socialism, Karl Marx,[16] a man whose intellectual endowments place him in the first ranks among Socialists and link his name with other bold intellects of his age who have forced the current of human thought. There have been many books written on Marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to academic and popular scrutiny. His treatise, Capital, is the sacerdotal book of Socialists. It displays a mass of learning, a diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in the literature of social philosophy. Whatever may be said of the narrow dogmatism, of Marx, of his persistence in making the facts fit his preconceived notions, of his materialistic conception of history, or of the technical flaws in his political economy, he will always be quoted as the founder of modern scientific Socialism and the Socialist historian of the capitalistic régime.

I must content myself with a bare statement of his theories.

The economic basis of Marx is his well-known "Theory of Surplus Value." It was not his theory in the sense that he originated it. Economists like Adam Smith and especially Ricardo, Socialists like the Owenites and the Chartists in England, and Proudhon in France, had enunciated it; and in Germany Rodbertus, a lawyer and scholar of great learning, had elaborated it in his first book, published in 1842. Marx, with German thoroughness, developed this theory in all its ramifications.

All economic goods, he said, have value. They have a physical value, and a value given them by the labor expended on them. Labor is the common factor of economic values. And the common denominator is the time that is consumed by the labor. Labor-time, therefore, is the universal measure of value, the common medium that determines values. But this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare cost of living. The reward for his labor is called a wage. This wage does not by any means measure the value of his services. What, then, becomes of the "surplus value," the value over and above wages? The capitalist appropriates it. Indeed, the great aim of the capitalist is to make this surplus value as big as possible. He measures his success by his profits.

"Surplus value," or profit, is, then, a species of robbery; it is ill-gotten gain, withholding from the workman that which by right of toil is his.

How did it come about that society was so organized as to permit this wholesale wrong upon the largest and most defenseless of its classes? It is in answer to this question that Marx makes his most notable contribution to Socialistic theory. With great skill, and displaying a comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of English industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial society. He follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when the voyages of discovery opened virgin fields of wealth to the trader, into the period of inventions when the industrial revolution changed the conditions of all classes and gave a sudden and princely power to capital, establishing the reign of "capitalistic production."

Always it was the man with capital who could take advantage of every new commercial and industrial opportunity, and the man without capital who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel circumstances. In every stage of development it has been the constant aim of the capitalist to increase his profits and of the workingman to raise his standard of living.

Marx then declares that, in order to have a capitalist society, two classes are necessary: a capitalist and a non-capitalist class; a class that dominates, and one that succumbs. There have always been these two classes. Originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and now it is free. But free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and slave-labor only in that it has a legal right to contract. The economic results are the same as they always have been: the capitalist still appropriates the surplus value.

The method of production, however, is very different in our capitalistic era from the earlier eras. The industrial system herds the workmen into factories. Property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriation." Here is the eternal antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil.

These factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. They flood the markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual ambitions. Each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This leads to panics and all their attendant woes—woes that are further heaped upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery, which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor market into the street.

These crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws of struggle and survival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence; the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer.

In this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social potencies. The proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. This will mean the appropriation of the means of production and distribution by society. Private capital will vanish; surplus values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be master and servant, capitalist and laborer.

This is the Socialistic stage of society. It will be the result of the natural evolution of human industry. Its immediate coming will be the result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. Man cannot prompt it, he cannot prevent it. He can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the birth-pangs" of the new time.

Of this new time, this society of to-morrow, Marx gives us no glimpse. His function is not to prophesy, but to analyze. He is the natural historian of capital. He described the development of economic society and sought to ascertain its trend. In the first chapter of Capital he says: "Let us imagine an association of free men, working with common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their individual powers into one social labor power. The product of this association of laborers is a social product. A portion of this product serves in turn as a means of further production. It remains social property. The rest of this product is consumed by the members of the association as a means of living. It must consequently be distributed among them. The nature of this distribution will vary according to the particular nature of the organization of production and the corresponding grade of historical development of the producers."

This is the only mention of the future made by Marx. It is a dim and uncertain ray of light cast upon a vast object.

The formulæ of this epoch-making study may be summarized as follows:

1. Labor gives value to all economic goods. The laboring class is the producing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products of its labor by the capitalistic class, which appropriates the "surplus value."

2. This is possible because of the capitalistic method of production, wherein private capital controls the processes of production and distribution.

3. This system of private capitalism is the result of a long and laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the industrial revolution.

4. This industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution, (b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-class system—capitalist and producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer.

5. This will not always continue. The producers are becoming fewer each year. Presently they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. Then society—the people—will appropriate private capital and all production and distribution will be socialized.

It is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories. Marx was born in Treves in 1818, of Jewish parentage. His mother was of Dutch descent, his father was German. When the lad was six years of age his parents embraced the Christian faith. His father was a lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis. The home was one of culture, where English and French as well as German literature and art were discussed by a circle of learned and congenial friends. Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university professor.

The turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. There was no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic life. In 1842 he joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette at Cologne, an organ of extreme radicalism. His drastic editorials prompted the police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to Paris, where he met Frederick Engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his views, and sharer of his labors. The Prussian government demanded his removal from Paris, and for a time he settled in Brussels. He returned to Germany to participate in the revolution of 1848, and in 1849 he was driven to London, where, immune from Prussian persecutions, he made his home until his death, in 1883.

In 1842 he married Jennie von Westphalen, a lady of refinement, courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politics. Her brother was at one time a minister in the Prussian cabinet.

Marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up his German citizenship. He never forgot this fact. He concluded his preface to the first volume of Capital, written in 1873, with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Prussian German Empire." He lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle against want and disease.

From his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an international view, of human affairs. This gave him an immediate advantage over all other Socialist writers of that day. At Bonn he was caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through the universities. This carried him far into the fields of materialism, whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic development of the race. He received not alone his philosophy from the "Young Hegelians," but his dialectics as well. It gave him a philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution.

There are four points which gave Marx an immense influence over the Socialistic movement. In the first place, he put the Socialistic movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. Think what this means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the workingman. But he did more than this: he made the proletarian the instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic thraldom. This was to be accomplished by class war and social revolution. Marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his Socialism when he links it to the necessities of nature. By natural law a bourgeoisie developed; by natural law it oppresses the proletarian; by natural law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone can attain their freedom. Capitalism becomes its own grave-digger. Liebknecht said in his Erfurt speech (1891): "The capitalistic state of the present begets against its will the state of the future."

In the third place, Marx gave a formula to the Socialist movement. He defined Socialism in one sentence: "The social ownership of the means of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor of scientific terminology.

And finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. He laid down no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. This offended no one and left Socialists of all schools free to construct their own details.

The Marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not taking place. The refutation of his theory of value by the Austrian economist, Adolph Menger, is by economists considered complete and final. The materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of his work, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than to a sober interpretation of the facts. Further, the two practical results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his materialism—namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the ever-decreasing number of capitalists—are not borne out by the facts. The number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the development of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of the two-class system. And finally, the method by revolution is being more and more discarded by Socialists, as they see that intolerable conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for existence.[17]

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III

THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM—THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTIONToC

From the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in the history of Socialism is its entrance into politics. This endows the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other he possesses. Because the modern state is democratic, and the democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. The revolutions attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts, parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness.

Scarcely half a century elapsed between the French utopians and the time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for political privilege. In the interval, revolution had its brief hour, and reaction its days of waiting.

The French Revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian movement. It was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by Rousseau and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. While this revolution was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a revolution in the sense that Marx, for instance, uses the word, it must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution. The dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of unspeakably poor. They were not machine workers whose abjectness came from factory conditions, like the workmen of England a few decades later. They were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with a class grievance; proletarians in the literal sense of the word, poor, ragged, hungry, wretched.

Such democracy as was achieved by the revolution was bourgeois. The powers of monarchy were transferred from the "privileged" classes to the middle class, who, in turn, became the privileged ones. The day of middle-class government had come. The class that had financed the fleets of adventurers to new and unexploited continents, and had backed the inventions of Arkwright and Hargreaves, were now in power in politics as well as in commerce and industry. A unity of purpose between industry and statecraft was thus achieved; new ideals became dominant. The patriarchal precepts of the feudal manors were forgotten. The people were no longer children of a great household with their king at the head. The king, when he was retained, was shorn of his universal fatherhood, and remained a mere remnant of ermine and velvet, a royal trader in social distinctions.

While the old ideal, the feudal ideal, prevailed, governing was the duty of a class. The newer ideal made governing an incident in the activities of a class whose dominating impulse was the making of profits. These ideals are at polar points; one deals with things, the other with men.

The change in the form of government was wrought while the people were talking about the glittering abstractions of equality, liberty, justice, as if they were commodities to be exchanged in the political markets. The newer form of government marked an advance on the older. It represented a step forward in human political experience. A larger group of citizens was drawn into the widening circle of governmental activities. It was an inevitable step. The discovery of the New World and the invention of machinery were making a new earth—an unattractive earth, but nevertheless a new one. The balance of power was shifting from hereditary privilege to commercial privilege, and nations were fulfilling the law of human nature, that the power of the state reposes in the hands of the dominant class. The dominant class is actuated by its dominant idea. In the aristocratic class it is politics, in the middle class it is trade.

All this inevitably accentuated the proletarian's position in the state. Under the older régime, as historians of our economic development have clearly shown, the antagonisms and grievances were fewer. The trader and the craftsman were overshadowed by the lord and the bishop. Social, political, and economical values were distributed by custom and imposed by heredity, rather than by individual effort or individual capacity. When, therefore, this great change came over society, a change that would have been unthinkable in the days of Charlemagne or of Elizabeth,—a change that virtually destroyed the most powerful of the classes and put human beings onto a basis of competition rather than of birth, and shifted power from tradition to effort, and transferred values from prerogatives to gold,—then the whole class problem changed, and entirely new antagonisms were created.

The first movements of the new proletarians were mob movements. Actuated more by a desire to revenge themselves than to better themselves, they gather in the dark hours of the night and move sullenly upon the factories, to destroy their enemies, the machines. They pillage the buildings and threaten the house of their employer, whom they consider the agent of their undoing. In France and Germany, and especially in England, these infuriated workmen try to undo by violence what has been achieved by invention.

When their first fury is abated and they see new machinery taking the place of that which they have destroyed, and new factories built on the foundations of those they have burned, they see the impotence of their actions. In England a new movement begins. They try to re-enact the Elizabethan statute of laborers, to bring back the days of handicrafts, of journeyman and apprentice. They soon learned that the old era had vanished, never to return. The workingman possessed neither the power nor the ingenuity to bring it back. He turned, next, to possess himself of the machinery of the state.

Political conditions paved the way. France, after her orgy, had fallen back into absolutism. Germany and Austria had remained feudal in the most distasteful sense of the word; the nobility retained their ancient privileges and forsook their ancient duties. The landlord class even retained jurisdiction over their tenants. The old industry had been destroyed by Napoleon's campaigns; the new machine industry did not establish itself until after the enactment of protective tariffs and the creation "Zollverein," in 1818. This cemented the bourgeois interests. Manufacturers, traders, and bankers achieved a homogeneity of interest and ambition which was antagonistic to the spirit of the junker and the feudalist. The new bourgeoisie wanted laws favorable to trade expansion. They needed the law-making machinery to achieve this. By 1840 the upper middle class had become feverish for political power. They imbibed the doctrines of the literature of that period which preached a constitutional republicanism. Hegel gave the weighty sanction of philosophy to the overthrow of absolute monarchy.

The great mass of the people were, of course, workingmen, small traders, and shopkeepers, and the rural peasantry. The small trader was dependent upon the favors of the ruling class on the one hand, and of the banker and manufacturer on the other hand. When the interests of these two clashed he was alarmed, for he could neither remain neutral nor take sides. The peasants were abject subjects, little better than serfs. The laboring men, as we shall see presently, were achieving a mass consciousness.

In Germany Frederick William, the Romantic, was face to face with revolution. This was not an economic revolution. It was a political revolution. It was joined by the communists and the Socialists. Marx himself, was a leader in the revolt, and one of its most faithful chroniclers. In 1844 the weavers of Silesia rose in revolt. There was rioting and bloodshed. This was followed by bread riots in various parts of Germany. In 1848 the whole country was in the turmoil of revolution, a revolution led by the upper middle class, but prompted and fired by the zeal of the proletarians, who, in some of the cities, notably Berlin, became the leading factor in the uprising. Marx says: "There was then no separate Republican party in Germany. People were either constitutional monarchists or more or less clearly defined Socialists or communists."[1]

In Austria conditions were even more reactionary than in Germany. Metternich, the powerful representative of the ancient order of things, had a haughty contempt for the demands of the constitutional party. With the hauteur of absolutism he not only retained political power in the feudal class, but suppressed literature, censored learning, and rigorously superintended religion. A greater power than caste and tradition was slowly eating its way into this country, which had attempted to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This was the power of machine industry. It brought with it, as in every other country, a new class, the manufacturers, who, as soon as their business began to expand, sought favorable laws. This led them into political activity, which, in turn, brought friction with the feudalists. Both sides took to the field. The revolution broke in Vienna, March 13, 1848, seventeen days after the revolutionists had driven Louis Philippe out of Paris, and five days before the Prussian king delivered himself into the hands of a Berlin mob.

It was in France that the revolution assumed its most virulent character. In Paris the revolution was "carried on between the mass of the working people on the one hand and all the other classes of the Parisian population, supported by the army, on the other."[2] This Parisian proletarian uprising was the red signal of warning to Germany and Austria. The bourgeois were now as anxious to rid themselves of the Socialist contingent as they had been eager for its support when they began their struggle for political power. Compromises between feudalists and commercialists were effected, and a sort of constitutionalism became the basis of the reconstructed governments.

Of these revolutions Marx says: "In all cases the real fighting body of the insurgents, that body which first took up arms and gave battle to the troops, consisted of the working classes of the towns. A portion of the poorer country population, laborers and petty farmers, generally joined them after the outbreak of the conflict."[3]

They were not merely bourgeois uprisings. The Parisian revolution was virtually a proletarian rebellion. Here "the proletariat, because it dictated the Republic to the provisional government, and through the provisional government to the whole of France, stepped at once forth as an independent, self-contained party; and it at once arrayed the entire bourgeoisie of France against itself.... Marche, a workingman, dictated a decree wherein the newly formed provincial government pledged itself to secure the position of the workingman through work, to do away with bourgeois labor, etc. And as they seemed to forget this promise, a few days later 200,000 workingmen marched upon the Hôtel de Ville with the battle-cry, 'Organization of labor! Create a ministry of labor!' and after a prolonged debate the provisional government named a permanent special commission for the purpose of finding the means for bettering the conditions of the working classes."[4]

It is evident that Marx considered the revolutions of 1848-50 as a compound of proletarian and bourgeois uprisings against feudal remnants in government. He is not always clear in his own mind as to the direction of these movements. But we now know that the direction was toward democracy.

The French, or Parisian, uprising was more "advanced" than the other Continental attempts. The Parisians had piled barricades before; they were experienced in the bloody business.

They tried again in 1871. This time the workingmen ruled Paris for two months. It was a bloody, turbulent period. Marx characterized it as "the glorious workingman's revolution of the 18th of March," and the Commune "as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule." Its acts of violence he extolled, its burning of public buildings was a "self-holocaust." This "workingman's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."[5]

So the attempt to possess the state by revolution has been tried by the proletarian. The revolutions were all abortive. The Socialists say they were ill-timed. Writing in 1895, Frederick Engels, the companion of Marx, could see these uprisings in a different perspective. He acknowledged the mistake made by the Socialists in believing that they could by violence somehow become the deciding factor in the government, and therefore in the economic arrangement of society. "History has shown us our error," he says. "Time has made it clear that the status of economic development on the Continent was far from ripe for the setting aside of the capitalistic régime."[6]

These revolutions were not merely bourgeois, as is so often affirmed. There was everywhere a large element of Socialistic unrest. They were revolutions begun in the fever heat of youth—"Young Germany," "Young Austria," "Young Italy," were moved by "Young Hegelians" and "Young Communists." They embraced bourgeois tradesmen and proletarian workingmen, who, in their new-found delirium, thought that with "the overthrow of the reactionary governments, the kingdom of heaven would be realized on earth."[7] "They had no idea," continues Kautsky, who speaks on these questions with authority, "that the overthrow of these governments would not be the end, but the beginning of revolutions; that the newly won bourgeois freedom would be the battleground for the great class war between proletarian and bourgeois; that liberty did not bring social freedom, but social warfare."

This is to-day the orthodox Socialist view. It believes that these revolutions taught the proletarians the folly of ill-timed violence; revealed to them their friends and their enemies; and, above all, gave them a class consciousness.

Let us turn, for a moment, to a proletarian movement of a somewhat different type, the Chartist movement in England. The flame of revolution that enveloped Europe crossed the Channel to England and Ireland. But here revolution took a different course. In Ireland it was the brilliant O'Connell's agitation against the Act of Union; in England it was the workingman's protest against his exclusion from the Reform Act of 1832, an act that itself had been born amidst the throes of mob violence and incipient revolution.

The Chartist movement was promulgated by the "Workingmen's Association." It was a workingman's protest. Its organizers were carpenters, its orators were tailors and blacksmiths and weavers, surprising themselves and their audiences with their new-found eloquence, and its writers were cotton spinners. The Reform Bill had been a bitter disappointment to them. It gave the right of suffrage to the middle class, but withheld it from the working class. A few radical members of Parliament met with representatives of the workingmen and drafted a bill. O'Connell, as he handed the measure to the secretary of the association, said: "There is your charter"—and the "People's Charter" it was called. Its "six points" were: Manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, election by ballot, abolition of property qualifications for election of members to Parliament, payment of members of Parliament, and equitably devised electoral districts. These are all political demands, all democratic. But economic conditions pressed them to the foreground. The "Bread Tax" was as much an issue as the ballot. They demanded the ballot so that they might remove the tax. "Misery and discontent were its strongest inspirations," says McCarthy.[8]

Carlyle saw the inwardness of the movement. "All along for the last five and twenty years it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice; the poor patient, all sick from center to surface, complains now of this member, now of that: corn laws, currency laws, free trade, protection, want of free trade: the poor patient, tossing from side to side seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none."

One of its own crude and forceful orators said on Kersall Moor to 200,000 turbulent workingmen of Manchester: "Chartism, my friends, is no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. Chartism is a knife and fork question. The charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working hours."[9]

The protest of this discontent became the nearest approach to a revolution England had encountered since Charles I. Monster meetings, for the first time called "mass meetings," were held in every county, and evenings, after working hours, enormous parades were organized, each participant carrying a torch, hence they were called "torchlight parades." These two spectacular features were soon adopted by American campaigners. A wild and desperate feeling seized the masses. "You see yonder factory with its towering chimney," cried one of its orators. "Every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and children." And again: "If the rights of the poor are trampled under foot, then down with the throne, down with aristocracy, down with the bishops, down with the clergy, burn the churches, down with all rank, all title, and all dignity."[10]

In their great petition to Parliament, signed by several million people, the agitators said: "The Reform Act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another and left the people as helpless as before." "We demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret." The whole movement had all the aspects of a modern, violent general strike. Its papers, The Poor Man's Guardian, The Destructive, and others, were full of tirades against wealth and privilege. When the agitation became an uprising in Wales, there was a conflict between the Chartists and the police in which a number were killed and wounded. In the industrial centers, soldiers were present at the meetings, and the outcry against the use of the military was the same that is heard to-day. A number of the leaders were tried for sedition, and the courts became the objects of abuse as they are to-day. It was a labor war for political privilege; a class war for economic advantages.