The international Socialist movement was both a product of the
nineteenth century and a revulsion against it. It was rooted in
some of the characteristics of the century, such as its
industrialism, its optimism, its belief in progress, its
humanitarianism, its scientific materialism, and its democracy, but
it was in revolt against its laissez faire, its middle-class
domination, its nationalism, its urban slums, and its emphasis on
the price-profit system as the dominant factor in all human values.
This does not mean that all Socialists had the same beliefs or that
these beliefs did not change with the passing years. On the
contrary, there were almost as many different kinds of Socialism as
there were Socialists, and the beliefs categorized under this term
changed from year to year and from country to country.
Industrialism, especially in its
early years, brought with it social and economic conditions which
were admittedly horrible. Human beings were brought together around
factories to form great new cities which were sordid and
unsanitary. In many cases, these persons were reduced to conditions
of animality which shock the imagination. Crowded together in want
and disease, with no leisure and no security, completely dependent
on a weekly wage which was less than a pittance, they worked twelve
to fifteen hours a day for six days in the week among dusty and
dangerous machines with no protection against inevitable accidents,
disease, or old age, and returned at night to crowded rooms without
adequate food and lacking light, fresh air, heat, pure water, or
sanitation.
These conditions have been
described for us in the writings of novelists such as Dickens in
England, Hugo or Zola in France, in the reports of parliamentary
committees such as the Sadler Committee of 1832 or Lord Ashley's
Committee in 1842, and in numerous private studies like In
Darkest England by General William Booth of the Salvation
Army. Just at the end of the century, private scientific studies of
these conditions began to appear in England, led by Charles Booth's
Life and Labour of the People in London or B.
Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty, a Study of l own Life.
The Socialist movement was a
reaction against these deplorable conditions of the working masses.
It has been customary to divide this movement into two parts at the
year 1848, the earlier part being called "the period of the Utopian
Socialists" while the later part has been called "the period of
scientific Socialism." The dividing line between the two parts is
marked by the publication in 1848 of The Communist
Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This work, which
began with the ominous sentence, "A spectre is haunting Europe—the
spectre of Communism," and ended with the trumpet blast, "Workers
of the world, unite!" is generally regarded as the seed from which
developed, in the twentieth century, Russian Bolshevism and
Stalinism. Such a view is undoubtedly an oversimplification, for
the development of Socialist ideology is full of twists and turns
and might well have grown along quite different paths if the
history of the movement itself had been different.
The history of the Socialist
movement may be divided into three periods associated with the
three Socialist Internationals. The First International lasted from
1864 to 1876 and was as much anarchistic as Socialistic. It w as
finally disrupted by the controversies of these two groups. The
Second International was the Socialist International, founded in
1889. This became increasingly conservative and was disrupted by
the Communists during World War I. The Third, or Communist,
International was organized in 1919 by dissident elements from the
Second International. .As a result of the controversies of these
three movements, the whole anticapitalist ideology, which began as
a confused revolt against the economic and social conditions of
industrialism in 1848, became sorted out into four chief schools.
These schools became increasingly doctrinaire and increasingly
bitter in their relationships.
The basic division within the
Socialist movement after 1848 was between those who wished to
abolish or reduce the functions of the state and those who wished
to increase these functions by giving economic activities to the
state. The former division came in time to include the anarchists
and the syndicalists, while the latter division came to include the
Socialists and the Communists. In general the former division
believed that man was innately good and that all coercive power was
bad, with public authority the worst form of such coercive power.
All of the world's evil, according to the anarchists, arose because
man's innate goodness was corrupted and distorted by coercive
power. The remedy, they felt, was to destroy the state. This would
lead to the disappearance of all other forms of coercive power and
to the liberation of the innate goodness of man. The simplest way
to destroy the state, they felt, would be to assassinate the chief
of the state; this would act as a spark to ignite a wholesale
uprising of oppressed humanity against all forms of coercive power.
These views led to numerous assassinations of various political
leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of the United
States, in the period 1895-1905.
Syndicalism was a somewhat more
realistic and later version of anarchism. It was equally determined
to abolish all public authority, but did not rely on the innate
goodness of individuals for the continuance of social life. Rather
it aimed to replace public authority by voluntary associations of
individuals to supply the companionship and management of social
life which, according to these thinkers, the state had so signally
failed to provide. The chief of such voluntary associations
replacing the state would be labor unions. According to the
syndicalists, the state was to be destroyed, not by the
assassination of individual heads of states, but by a general
strike of the workers organized in labor unions. Such a strike
would give the workers a powerful esprit de corps based on a sense
of their power and solidarity. By making all forms of coercion
impossible, the general strike would destroy the state and replace
it by a flexible federation of free associations of workers
(syndicates).
Anarchism's most vigorous
proponent was the Russian exile Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). His
doctrines had considerable appeal in Russia itself, but in western
Europe they were widely accepted only in Spain, especially
Barcelona, and in parts of Italy where economic and psychological
conditions were somewhat similar to those in Russia. Syndicalism
flourished in the same areas at a later date, although its chief
theorists were French, led by Georges Sorel (1847-1922).
The second group of radical social
theorists was fundamentally opposed to the anarcho-syndicalists,
although this fact was recognized only gradually. This second group
wished to widen the power and scope of governments by giving them a
dominant role in economic life. In the course of time, the
confusions within this second group began to sort themselves out,
and the group divided into two chief schools: the Socialists and the
Communists. These two schools were further apart in
organization and in their activities than they were in their
theories, because the Socialists became increasingly moderate and
even conservative in their activities, while remaining relatively
revolutionary in their theories. However, as their theories
gradually followed their activities in the direction of moderation,
in the period of the Second International (1889-1919), violent
controversies arose between those who pretended to remain loyal to
the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and those who wished to revise
these ideas in a more moderate direction to adapt them to what they
considered to be changing social and economic conditions. l he
strict interpreters of Karl Marx came to be known as Communists,
while the more moderate revisionist group came to be known as
Socialists. The rivalries of the two groups ultimately disrupted
the Second International as well as the labor movement as a whole,
so that anti-labor regimes were able to come to power in much of
Europe in the period 1918-1939. This disruption and failure of the
working-class movement is one of the chief factors in European
history in the twentieth century and, accordingly, requires at
least a brief survey of its nature and background.
The ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883)
and of his associate Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were published in
the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and in their three-volume
opus, Das Kapital (1867-1894). Although they were aroused
by the deplorable conditions of the European working classes under
industrialism, the chief sources of the ideas themselves were to be
found in the idealism of Hegel, the materialism of the ancient
Greek atomists (especially Democritus), and the theories of the
English classical economists (especially Ricardo). Marx derived
from Hegel what has come to be known as the "historical dialectic."
This theory maintained that all historical events were the result
of a struggle between opposing forces which ultimately merged to
create a situation which was different from either. Any existing
organization of society or of ideas (thesis) calls forth,
in time, an opposition (anti-thesis). These two struggle
with each other and give rise to the events of history, until
finally the two fuse into a new organization (synthesis).
This synthesis in turn becomes established as a new thesis to a new
opposition or antithesis, and the struggle continues, as history
continues.
A chief element in Marxist theory
was the economic interpretation of history. According to this view,
the economic organization of any society was the basic aspect of
that society, since all other aspects, such as political, social,
intellectual, or religious, reflected the organization and powers
of the economic level.
From Ricardo, Marx derived the
theory that the value of economic goods was based on the amount of
labor put into them. Applying this idea to industrial society where
labor obtains wages which reflect only part of the value of the
product they are making, Marx decided that labor was being
exploited. Such exploitation was possible, he believed, because the
working classes did not own the "instruments of production" (that
is, factories, land, and tools) but had allowed these, by legal
chicanery, to fall into the hands of the possessing classes. In
this way, the capitalistic system of production had divided society
into two antithetical classes: the bourgeoisie who owned the
instruments of production and the proletariat who lived from
selling their labor. The proletariat, however, were robbed of part
of their product by the fact that their wages represented only a
portion of the value of their labor, the "surplus value" of which
they were deprived going to the bourgeoisie as profits. The
bourgeoisie were able to maintain this exploitative system because
the economic, social, intellectual, and religious portions of
society reflected the exploitative nature of the economic system.
The money which the bourgeoisie took from the proletariat in the
economic system made it possible for them to dominate the political
system (including the police and the army), the social system
(including family life and education), as well as the religious
system and the intellectual aspects of society (including the arts,
literature, philosophy, and all the avenues of publicity for
these).
From these three concepts of the
historical dialectic, economic determinism, and the labor theory of
value, Marx built up a complicated theory of past and future
history. He believed that "all history is the history of class
struggles." Just as in antiquity, history was concerned with the
struggles of free men and slaves or of plebians and patricians, so,
in the Middle Ages, it was concerned with the struggles of serfs
and lords, and, in modern times, with the struggles of proletariat
and bourgeoisie. Each privileged group arises from opposition to an
earlier privileged group, plays its necessary role in historical
progress, and is, in time, successfully challenged by those it has
been exploiting. Thus the bourgeoisie rose from exploited serfs to
challenge successfully the older privileged group of feudal lords
and moved into a period of bourgeois supremacy in which it
contributed to history a fully capitalized industrial society but
will be challenged, in its turn, by the rising power of the
laboring masses.
To Marx, the revolution of the
proletariat was not only inevitable but would inevitably be
successful, and would give rise to an entirely new society with a
proletariat system of government, social life, intellectual
patterns, and religious organization. The "inevitable revolution"
must lead to an "inevitable victory of the proletariat" because the
privileged position of the bourgeoisie allowed them to practice a
merciless exploitation of the proletariat, pressing these laboring
masses downward to a level of bare subsistence, because labor,
having become nothing but a commodity for sale for wages in the
competitive market, would naturally fall to the level which would
just allo\v the necessary supply of labor to survive. From such
exploitation, the bourgeoisie would become richer and richer and
fewer and fewer in numbers, and acquire ownership of all property
in the society while the proletariat would become poorer and poorer
and more and more numerous and be driven closer and closer to
desperation. Eventually, the bourgeoisie would become so few and
the proletariat would become so numerous that the latter could rise
up in their wrath and take over the instruments of production and
thus control of the whole society.
According to this theory, the
"inevitable revolution" would occur in tile most advanced
industrial country because only after a long period of
industrialism would the revolutionary situation become acute and
would the society itself be equipped with factories able to support
a Socialist system. Once the revolution has taken place, there will
be established a "dictatorship of the proletariat" during which the
political, social, military, intellectual, and religious aspects of
society will be transformed in a Socialist fashion. At the end of
this period, full Socialism will he established, the state will
disappear, and a "classless society" will come into existence. At
this point history will end. This rather surprising conclusion to
the historical process would occur because Marx had defined history
as the process of class struggle and had defined the state as the
instrument of class exploitation. Since, in the Socialist state,
there will be no exploitation and thus no classes, there will be no
class struggles and no need for a state.
In 1889, after the First
International had been disrupted by the controversies between
anarchists and Socialists, a Second International had been formed
by the Socialists. This group retained its allegiance to Marxist
theory for a considerable period, but even from the beginning
Socialist actions did not follow Marxist theory. This divergence
arose from the fact that Marxist theory did not provide a realistic
or workable picture of social and economic developments. It had no
real provision for labor unions, for workers' political parties,
for bourgeois reformers, for rising standards of living, or for
nationalism, yet these became, after Marx's death, the dominant
concerns of the working class. Accordingly, the labor unions and
the Social-Democratic political parties which they dominated became
reformist rather than revolutionary groups. They were supported by
upper-class groups with humanitarian or religious motivations, with
the result that the conditions of life and of work among the
laboring classes were raised to a higher level, at first slowly and
reluctantly, but, in time, with increasing rapidity. So long as
industry itself remained competitive, the struggle between
industrialists and labor remained intense, because any success
which the workers in one factory might achieve in improving their
wage levels or their working conditions would raise the costs of
their employer and injure his competitive position with respect to
other employers. But as industrialists combined together after 1890
to reduce competition among themselves by regulating their prices
and production, and as labor unions combined together into
associations covering many factories and even whole industries, the
struggle between capital and labor became less intense because any
concessions made to labor would affect all capitalists in the same
activity equally and could be covered simply by raising the price
of the product of all factories to the final consumers.
In fact, the picture which Marx
had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and
lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative
capitalists proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced
industrial countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what
occurred could be pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized
workers and monopolized industry to exploit unorganized consumers
by raising prices higher and higher to provide both higher wages
and higher profits. This whole process was advanced by the actions
of governments which imposed such reforms as eight-hour days,
minimum-wage laws, or compulsory accident, old age, and retirement
insurance on whole industries at once. As a consequence, the
workers did not become worse off but became much better off with
the advance of industrialism in the twentieth century.
This tendency toward rising
standards of living also revealed another Marxist error. Marx had
missed the real essence of the Industrial
Revolution. He tended to find this in the complete
separation of labor from ownership of tools and the reduction of
labor to nothing but a commodity in the market. The real essence of
industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman
energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production.
This process increased man's ability to make goods, and did so to
an amazing degree. But mass production could exist only if it were
followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living.
Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for
hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians
who are managers rather than laborers. And, in the longer run, this
process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level
of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the
owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers.
Moreover, the use of the corporate form of industrial organization
as a means for bringing the savings of the many into the control of
a few by sales of securities to wider and wider groups of investors
(including both managerial and laboring groups) would lead to a
separation of management from ownership and to a great increase in
the number of owners.
All these developments were quite
contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Where he had expected
impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership, with a
great increase in the number of workers and a great decrease in the
number of owners, with a gradual elimination of the middle class,
there occurred instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising
standards of living, dispersal of ownership, a relative decrease in
the numbers of laborers, and a great increase in the middle
classes. In the long run, under the impact of graduated income
taxes and inheritance taxes, ... the great problem of advanced
industrial societies became ... the exploitation of unorganized
consumers (of the professional and lower-middle-class levels) by
unionized labor and monopolized managers acting in concert. The
influence of these last two groups on the state in an advanced
industrial country also served to increase their ability to obtain
what they wished from society as a whole.
As a consequence of all these
influences, the revolutionary spirit did not continue to advance
with the advance of industrialism, as Marx had expected, but began
to decrease, with the result that the more advanced industrial
countries became less and less revolutionary. Moreover, what
revolutionary spirit did exist in advanced industrial countries was
not to be found, as Marx had expected, among the laboring
population but among the lower middle class (so-called "petty
bourgeoisie"). The average bank clerk, architect's draftsman, or
schoolteacher was unorganized, found himself oppressed by organized
labor, monopolized industry, and the growing power of the state,
and found himself caught in the spiral of rising costs resulting
from the efforts of his three oppressors to push the costs of
social welfare and steady profits on to the unorganized consumer.
The petty bourgeois found that he wore a white collar, had a better
education, was expected to maintain more expensive standards of
personal appearance and living conditions, but received a lower
income than unionized labor. As a consequence of all this, the
revolutionary feeling existing in advanced industrial countries
appeared among the petty bourgeoisie rather than among the
proletariat, and was accompanied by psychopathic overtones arising
from the suppressed resentments and social insecurities of this
group. But these dangerous and even explosive feelings among the
petty bourgeoisie took an anti-revolutionary rather than a
revolutionary form and appeared as nationalistic, anti-Semitic,
anti-democratic, and anti-labor-union movements rather than as
anti-bourgeois or anticapitalist movements such as Marx had
expected.
Unfortunately, as economic and
social developments in advanced industrial countries moved in the
un-Marxian directions we have mentioned, the unionized laborers and
their Social Democratic political parties continued to accept the
Marxist ideology or at least to utter the old Marxist war cries of
"Down with the capitalists!" or "Long live the revolution" or
"Workers of the world, unite!" Since the Marxist ideology and the
Marxist war cries were more easily observed than the social
realities they served to conceal, especially when labor leaders
sought all publicity for what they said and profound secrecy for
what they did, many capitalists, some workers, and almost all
outsiders missed the new developments completely and continued to
believe that a workers' revolution was just around the corner. All
this served to distort and to confuse people's minds and people's
actions in much of the twentieth century. The areas in which such
confusions became of great significance were in regard to the class
struggle and to nationalism...
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