People :
Author : William Morris
Sections (TOC) :
• Preface
210 Words; 1,366 Characters
• Introduction
3,308 Words; 21,098 Characters
• Chapter 1 : Ancient Society
1,231 Words; 8,306 Characters
• Chapter 2 : Mediæval Society
1,383 Words; 9,008 Characters
• Chapter 3 : The Break-up of Feudalism
1,799 Words; 11,739 Characters
• Chapter 4 : Modern Society: Early Stages
1,667 Words; 11,035 Characters
• Chapter 5 : Preparing for Revolution - England
1,289 Words; 8,619 Characters
• Chapter 6 : Preparing for Revolution - France
1,654 Words; 10,976 Characters
• Chapter 7 : The French Revolution: Constitutional Stage
1,775 Words; 11,773 Characters
• Chapter 8 : The French Revolution: The Proletarian Stage
2,378 Words; 15,486 Characters
• Chapter 9 : The Industrial Revolution in England
2,632 Words; 17,132 Characters
• Chapter 10 : Political Movements in England
2,190 Words; 14,813 Characters
• Chapter 11 : Reaction and Revolution on the Continent
1,210 Words; 8,206 Characters
• Chapter 12 : The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Continental Movement Following It
1,584 Words; 10,701 Characters
• Chapter 13 : The Utopists: Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier
2,025 Words; 13,722 Characters
• Chapter 14 : The Transition from Utopists to Modern Socialism
1,651 Words; 11,096 Characters
• Chapter 15 : Scientific Socialism - Karl Marx
942 Words; 6,691 Characters
• Chapter 16 : Scientific Socialism - Karl Marx II Money
1,469 Words; 9,856 Characters
• Chapter 17 : Scientific Socialism - Conversion of Capital into Money
730 Words; 4,886 Characters
• Chapter 18 : Scientific Socialism - The Production of Surplus Value - That is, of Rent, Interest, and Profit
1,203 Words; 7,825 Characters
• Chapter 19 : Scientific Socialism - Constant and Variable Capital
894 Words; 6,006 Characters
• Chapter 20 : Marx's Deduction of the Historical Evolution of Modern Industry
1,172 Words; 7,891 Characters
• Chapter 21 : Scientific Socialism: Conclusion
1,490 Words; 10,115 Characters
• Chapter 22, Part 1 : Socialism Militant [Part 1]
1,508 Words; 10,008 Characters
• Chapter 22, Part 2 : Socialism Militant [Part 2]
1,473 Words; 10,136 Characters
• Chapter 23, Part 1 : Socialism Triumphant [Part 1]
2,254 Words; 14,625 Characters
• Chapter 23, Part 2 : Socialism Triumphant [Part 2]
1,590 Words; 10,845 Characters
Sections (Content) :
• Preface
In offering this book to the public, we have to say that we thought it useless to go over the ground covered by so many treatises on Socialism, large and small, hostile and friendly, that have appeared of late years. We have dealt with our subject from the historical point of view ; this, we are aware, is a less exciting method than the building up of "practical" Utopias, or than attempting the solution of political problems within the immediate purview of the Socialist struggle of to day. On the other hand, a treatise on abstract economics, furnished with a complete apparatus of statistics, would have been more congenial to another class of mind. Nevertheless, a continuous sketch of the development of history in relation to Socialism, even as slight as it is here, should have its value if efficiently done. Our plan also necessarily deals with the aspirations of Socialists now living, toward the society of the future.
We have only further to add that the work has been in the true sense of the word a collaboration, each sentence having been carefully considered by both the authors in common, although now one, now the other, has had more to do with initial suggestions in different portions of the work.
• Introduction
In one of Edgar Allen Pe's tales he recounts how a little group of wrecked seafarers on a water logged vessel, at the last extremity of starvation, are suddenly made delirious with joy at seeing a sail approaching them. As she came near them she seemed to be managed strangely and unseamanly as though she were scarcely steered at all, but come near she did, and their joy was too great for them to think much of this anomaly. At last they saw the seamen on board of her, and noted one in the bows especially who seemed to be looking at them with great curiosity, nodding also as though encouraging them to have patience, and smiling at them constantly, showing as he did so a set of very white teeth, and apparently so anxious for their safety that he did not notice that the red cap that he had on his head was falling into the water.
All of a sudden, as the vessel neared them, and while their hearts were leaping with joy at their now certain deliverance, an inconceivable and horrible stench was wafted to them across the waters, and presently to their horror and misery they saw that this was a ship of the dead, the bowing man was a tottering corpse, his red cap a piece of his flesh torn from him by a sea fowl; his amicable smile was caused by his jaws, denuded of the flesh, showing his white teeth set in a perpetual grin. So passed the ship of the dead into the landless ocean, leaving the poor wretches to their despair.
To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead is an image of the civilization of our epoch, as the cast away mariners are of the hopes of the humanity entangled in it. The cheerfully bowing man, whose signs of encouragement and good feeling turn out to be the results of death and corruption, well betokens to us the much be praised philanthropy of the rich and refined classes of our Society, which is born of the misery necessary to their very existence. How do people note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the softening of life by the cultivation of good feeling, kindness, and gratitude between rich and poor, with its external manifestations; its missionary enterprises at home and abroad hospitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard working clergy dwelling amid the wretched homes of those whose souls they are saving; its elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from the universities spreading the influences of a refined home in every dull half starved parish in England; the thoughtful series of lectures on that virtue of thrift which the poor can scarcely fail to practice even unpreached to; its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies. All this, which seems so refined and humane, is but the effect of the distant view of the fleshless grinning skull of civilization seeming to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate them with the stench of its corruption, and then to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them weltering on the ocean of life which its false hope has rendered more dreadful than before.
Let us then go through some of the forms through which this universal hypocrisy of modern society, which is its special characteristic, manifests itself. Our present family of blood relationship, based on assumed absolute monogamy, recognizes feeble responsibility outside itself, and professes to regulate the degrees of affection to be felt between different persons according to the amount of kinship between them, so that, for instance, the brotherhood of blood would almost extinguish the sense of duty in that other brotherhood of inclination or of mutual tastes and pursuits, and in fact scarce admit that such ties could be real. Or again, in cases when, as sometimes happens, the sham blood family is broken into by the adoption of a strange child, the proceeding is cloaked by change of name, assumption of mystery, and abundance of unconscious ceremonial; and all this time, though doubtless there are plenty of examples of disinterested affection between the members of a family, as between those outside of it, yet the rule is, and our satirists are never tired of playing on this string, that though to a certain extent the bond of obligation is felt, it is burdensome none the less, and is utterly powerless to prevent the wrangling and hatred caused by the clashing of the discordant dispositions of persons doomed always to pose before the world as special friends. Another point to be noticed is the different way in which family bonds are looked upon amid different nations even in the circle of modern Europe. In England it is true, as we have said, that all virtue, honor, and affection are supposed to be embraced within the pale of the family; this superstition is by no means so strong in France: nevertheless there is a conventional bond, there, apparently a survival of the tyranny of the civil law of the Roman Empire, that is much stronger than any family tie in England.. The family council is submitted to by all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen as a piece of unwritten law which is inexpugnable: a Frenchman cannot marry without leave of his parents before the age of twenty five; the relationship of mother and child, which with all exaggerations is more or less natural in England, is almost sacerdotal in France, and is illuminated by a curious kind of conventional sentiment in literature, which sometimes fairly degrades for the time even the greatest authors into the rank of twaddlers. We do not say that a certain amount of sentiment bred by the family system is not genuine it is reasonable to feel tenderness for the persons who have taken the pains and trouble of cherishing us in our helplessness, and to wish to pay them back with some little kindness when we no longer need that care, even when time has shown us to have no special sympathy for them: not unreasonable too to look with some special sentiment on brothers and sisters, even when manhood has drifted them away from our lives and their aspirations, since in years past we were living with them in such familiarity when they and we were innocent and undeveloped. But what relation does this light and easy yoke of sentiment bear to the iron chain of conventional sham duty which all of us, even the boldest, are oppressed by so sorely: a chain too that is broken amid various circumstances of real and conventional disgrace whenever necessity, as to day understood, that is, commercial necessity, compels it? In short, the family professes to exist as affording us a haven of calm and restful affection and the humanizing influences of mutual help and consideration, but it ignores quietly its real reason for existence, its real aim, namely, protection for individualist property by means of inheritance, and a nucleus for resistance to the outside world, whether that take the form of other families or the public weal, such as it may be.
But this shows after all but the best side of the modern conventional family, as it works in the middle classes. In the lower classes, where the family of blood-relationship might afford some real protection and help to its members, it is completely broken up by the action of the factory system, under which father, mother, brothers, sisters, husband, and wife, compete against each other in the labor market, the end of which is to provide a profit for the capitalist employer; and this "family," which as now constituted exists for middle class needs, being useless to the working classes, they have nothing to turn to to supply the lack of a true social unit.
To most men it will be more obvious that similar charges may be brought against the religion of modern society: most intelligent persons will allow that it means nothing more than mere sets of names and formulas, to one or other of which every reputable man is supposed to be attached; in one or other of which he will be sure to find a conventional solution of the great problem of the universe, including our life and its aspirations. If he fails in his duty to society in this respect he suffers accordingly; and indeed few men of any position are bold enough to avow that they are outside all such systems of ecclesiasticism; the very unorthodox must belong to some acknowledged party they must be orthodox in their unorthodoxy. But as a fact the greater part of cultivated men dare not go so far as that, and are contented with letting society in general feel happy in believing that they subscribe to the general grimace of religion that has taken the place of the real belief, not as yet become a superstition, which allowed practice to be deduced from its solid dream.
Meanwhile it is common, and especially in the more reactionary circles, to find men who privately admit a cynicism that to their minds relieves them from any ethical responsibility, while in public they keep up the farce of supporting a religion that at least professes to have an ethic of its own.
Yet even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist and to have some relation to the religion which, being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child.
The so called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honor is merely the code necessitated the by needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has au fond nothing in common with the Christian "do unto others as thou wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avowedly), the material salvation of the individual in the commercial battle of this world. This is illustrated by a predominance among the commercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, termed Evangelicalism, 1 which is the only form of religion these classes can understand the poetico mystical element in the earlier Christianity being eliminated therefrom, and the "natural laws" of profit and loss, and the devil take the hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, being as nearly as possible reproduced into the spiritual world of its conception.
It may surprise some to be told that politics share this unreality to the full, since it is generally supposed that democracy has at last really triumphed and is now entering into its kingdom. Doubtless the political events of this century have convinced every one that change in the relations of men to each other is at hand; but before that change can come, it must be understood that the development of the people must be on other lines than politicians now dream of. It is true that political freedom is thought to have been gained, but what is the nature of the gain? What is the end and aim of that political freedom which all parties in the State profess to be striving to accomplish? Once more it is a sham, designed really to keep the mass of men helpless and divided, so that they may still be the instruments of the strong and successful. It takes various forms: for example, the land is to be freed from the last remains of feudality and so become more completely a mere portion of profit-breeding capital, thus helping the monstrous aggregation of riches that is reducing all life to a misery. Parents and parsons are to be free to teach children what they will, thus depriving the unfortunate creatures of the most necessary aids to human development. Trade and manufacture are to be freed from all trammels, so that the mass of the people may be compelled to serve the needs, both as producers and as buyers, of those who have but one object, to sell at a profit.
For the sustaining of this glorious "freedom," otherwise spoken of as the "sanctity of contract," government by party is a recognized and effective instrument. In this arrangement the members of Parliament are divided into two sides, much as lads about to play a game at football; the two sides do not differ much in their principles, though there is sometimes a violent faction squabble as to the amount of concession that it is safe to give to or withhold from the demands of the people: not seldom even this difference does not exist the legislation proposed by both parties is almost identical, and some safe excuse for quarrel has to be sought for before the game can be played. Thus is carried out the crowning sham of modern politics under the absurd title of Representative Government, and the name of democracy is used to cloak an oligarchy more or less extended, while once more all decent people who may profess an interest in politics are expected to range themselves under one or other of the great political parties, now become almost less than mere names, the very shadows of shadows.
When all life, domestic, religious, moral and political, is thus fallen into mere pretense, when all these branches of men's energy have come to professing aims which, when they have any, are not their real aims, and on which they will not and cannot act, when they do not know what they really are and are blind to their real destiny, how can it be possible that Art, the expression of the life of society, can be otherwise than a sham also? Here and there indeed the irrepressible genius of an individual expresses itself by dint of toil and anxiety undreamed of in better days, and produces works of art that are beautiful and powerful, however damaged by the souring effects of a desperate struggle against monstrous surroundings, and by the restlessness that comes of the over-exertion even of great powers. But otherwise the fine arts no longer exist for the people at large. How could they? The one reality of modern society is industrial slavery, far reaching and intimate, supreme over every man's life, dominating every action of it from the greatest to the least; no man and no set of men can do anything that does not tend towards the support of this slavery unless they act as conscious rebels against it. Men living under such conditions cannot produce social art or architecture (with all that grasp of the decorative cycle of the arts which that word means, or even desire to do so; they have lost all understanding of what it is ; the mass of the people have nothing to do with Art architectural except so far as they are compelled to produce the sham of it mechanically as a trade finish to wares, so as to give them a higher marketable value. Space fails us here to contrast this condition of things with that of the epochs that produced Art, or to show the consequences of the difference. Suffice it to say once more that, except for the very few works produced by men of exceptional genius, which works the general public does not relish or understand in the least, Art is for the most part dormant.
In this brief review of the various phases of modern life, its family relations, morality, religion, politics, and art, the reader who has not yet studied socialism may see nothing but pessimism. For until recently among cultivated people, enjoying whatever advantages may be derived from civilization, there has been an almost universal belief, not yet much broken into, that modern or bourgeois civilization is the final form of human society. Were this the case we should be pessimists indeed, but happily we know that civilization is only a stage in the development of the human race, just as barbarism was, or the savagery of the progressive nations. Civilization must of necessity develop into some other form of society, the tendencies of which we can see, but not the details; for it is now becoming clear that this new state of society can only be reached through the great economic, moral, and political change which we call Socialism; and the essential foundation of this is the raising of the working classes to a point that gores them a control over their own labor and its product.
In order that our readers may get a correct view of this, it is necessary to use the historic method that is to say, to trace the development of society from its early times up to the full expression of the commercial period, which has created and is now creating such a vast mass of discontent, not only among the working classes who suffer directly from the oppression that is a necessary part of it, but also in various and sometimes discordant forms among the well to do, who on the face of things are benefited by its working. We propose to finish the book by goring our own impressions both of the immediate issue of the present stir and commotion in socio political life, and also of what may be reasonably expected from the new society when it has at last supplanted the ever increasing confusion of the present day. Only it must be premised that this last part can be nothing more than the expression of our own individual views, and that we do not claim any further weight for it. Although it has been often attempted, it is impossible to build up a scheme for the society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own days; his palace of days to come can only be constructed from the aspirations forced upon him by his present surroundings, and from his dreams of the life of past, which themselves cannot fail to be more or less unsubstantial imaginings.
At least we can boldly assert that those who think that the civilization of our own time will not be transformed both in shape and in essence, hold their opinion in the teeth of the witness of all history. This cannot be set aside by taking refuge in platitudes about "human nature," which are really deduced from orthodox theology and an obsolete view of history. Human nature is itself a growth of the ages, and is ever and indefinitely molded by the conditions under which it finds itself.
1. If it be said that Evangelicalism is no longer flourishing that is true in the Church of England ; but the large and exceedingly influential body of dissenters still remains intact. back
• Chapter 1 : Ancient Society
In beginning this series on Socialism, we think it necessary to prelude the matter which may appear to interest more immediately us now living, by a brief allusion to the history of the past.
Our adversaries are sometimes forward to remind us that the present system with which we are so discontented, has been made by the growth of ages, and that our wills are impotent to change it; they do not see that in stating this fact they are condemning their own position. Our business is to recognize the coming change, to clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, and to be ready to organize it in detail. Our opponents, on the contrary, are trying consciously to stay that very evolution at the point which it has reached to-day; they are attempting to turn the transient into the eternal; therefore, for them history has no lessons, while to us it gives both encouragement and warning which we cannot afford to disregard. The hopes for the industrialism of the future are involved in its struggles in the past; which, indeed, since they have built up the present system, and placed us amid its struggle towards change, have really forced us whether we will it or not, to help forward that change.
The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization. The conditions of mere savage life recognized nothing but the satisfaction of the immediate needs of the individual; this condition of complete want of cooperation yielded to primitive Communism as the powers of man grew, and he began to perceive that he could do more than satisfy his daily needs for food and shelter. By this time he had found that he could aid nature in forcing the earth to produce livelihood for him; the hill and forest became something more to him than the place where berries and roots grew, and wild creatures lived, the land became pasture ground to him, and at last amid some races ground for tillage.
But the wealth of man still grew, and change came again with its growth; the land was common in the sense that it was not the property of individuals, but it was not common to all comers; primitive society was formed, and man was no longer a mass of individuals, but the groups of this primitive society were narrow and exclusive; the unit of Society was the Gens, a group of blood-relations at peace among themselves, but which group was hostile to all other groups; within the Gens wealth was common to all its members, without it wealth was prize of war.
This condition of war necessarily developed leadership among men; successful warriors gained predominance over the other members of the Gens, and since the increasing powers of production afforded more wealth to be disposed of above the mere necessities of each man, these warrior leaders began to get to themselves larger shares of the wealth than others, and so the primitive communism of wealth began to be transformed into individual ownership.
The Tribe now took the place of the Gens; this was a larger and more artificial group, in which blood relationship was conventionally assumed. In it, however, there was by no means mere individual ownership, although, as said above, Communism had been broken into; the tribe at large disposed of the use of the land according to certain arbitrary arrangements, but did not admit ownership in it to individuals. Under the tribal system also slavery was developed, so that class Society had fairly began (sic).
The Tribe in its turn melted into a larger and still more artificial body, the People -- a congeries of many tribes, the ancient Gothic-Teutonic name for which -- theoth- is still preserved in such names as Theobald. This was the last development of Barbarism; nor was there much change in the conditions of wealth under it from those obtaining among the Tribe, although it held in it something more than the mere germs of feudalism.
Finally, ancient Barbarism was transformed into ancient Civilization, which, as the name implies, took the form of the life of the city. With these cities political life began, together with the systematization of the old beliefs into a regular worship. The religion of Barbarism was the worship of the ancestors of the tribe, mingled with fetichism, which was the first universal religion, and may best be described as a state of mind in which the universe was conceived of as a system of animated beings to be feared and propitiated by man. This was transformed into what may be called city patriotism, which summed up the whole religion of the city, and which was the real religion of the Greeks and Romans in their progressive period, and of all the then progressive races of mankind, including the Hebrew. In these cities slavery speedily developed until it embraced nearly the whole of industrialism, the main business of the free citizens being the aggrandizement of their city by war (1). For the cities were as hostile to each other as the tribes had been.
The course of events towards further transformation was that in the East the cities formed federations which gradually fell under the domination of bureaucratic and absolute monarchies, of which China still remains as an example. The Greek and Latin cities carried on the progress of human intelligence, but did not escape corruption and transformation.
Among the Greeks the individual struggle for preeminence gradually broke down the city patriotism, and led the way towards the domination of mere military and political intrigue and confusion, till the independence of Greece was finally trampled out by the power of Rome, now corrupted also. For during this time in Rome the struggle of the plebeian order -- or inferior tribes of which the city was composed -- with the conservative oligarchy -- that is, the three most ancient and consequently leading tribes -- had developed a middle-class living on the profits derived from slave labor, which broke up the old city republic and led to the formation of a commercial and tax-gathering empire, founded on slavery, whose subjects were devoid of all political rights, and in which the triumph of individualism was complete. Indeed, this same struggle had taken place in one way or another in the Greek cities also. Thus was all public spirit extinguished. The natural greed of commercialism gradually ate up the wealth of the empire: even slave labor became unprofitable. The landlords were ruined; the taxes could not be paid; and meanwhile the Roman soldier, once a citizen religiously devoted to his city, became a bribed hireling, till at last no bribe was high enough to induce a civilized man to fight, and the Roman legions were manned by the very barbarians whose kinsmen were attacking the empire from without.
Thus was ancient civilization delivered over to the Barbarians, fresh from their tribal communism, and once more the antagonism of individual and common rights was exemplified in the two streams of Barbarian and Roman ideas, from the union of which was formed the society of the next great epoch -- the Middle Ages.
1 The Greeks added to this the practice of the higher arts and literature, neither of which the Romans possessed in their progressive period. back
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 18, 15 May 1886, P.53
• Chapter 2 : Mediæval Society
We have now to deal with that Mediæval Society which was based on the fusion of ideas of tribal communism and Roman individualism and bureaucracy. The fullest, and one may say the most pedantic type of this society is to be found in the Mediæval German Empire; it was modified somewhat in other countries; in France by the fact that several of the other potentates, as, eg., the Duke of Burgundy, were theoretically independent of the King, and practically were often at least as powerful. In England, on the contrary, the monarchy soon gained complete predominance over the great barons, and a kind of bureaucracy soon sprang up which interfered with the full working of the feudal system.
The theory of this feudal system is the existence of an unbroken chain of service from the serf up to the emperor, and of protection from the emperor down to the serf; it recognizes no absolute ownership of land; God is the one owner of the earth, the emperor and his kings are his vice-gerents there, who may devolve their authority to their feudal vassals, and they in turn to theirs, and so on till it reaches the serf, the proletarian, on whom all this hierarchy lives, and who has no rights as regard his own lord except protection from others outside the manor that he lives and works on; to him his personal lord was the incarnation of the compulsion and protection of God, which all men acknowledged and looked for.
It is quite clear that this system was mixed up with religious ideas of some sort; accordingly, we find that the Middle Ages had a distinct religion of their own, developed from that early Christianity which was one of the forces that broke up the Roman Empire. As long as that Empire lasted in its integrity, Christianity was purely individualistic; it bade every man do his best for his future in another world, and had no commands to give about the government of this world except to obey 'the powers that be' in non-religious matters, in order to escape troubles and complications which might distract his attention from the kingdom of God.
But in Mediæval Christianity, although this idea of individual devotion to the perfection of the next world still existed, it was kept in the background, and was almost dormant in the presence of the idea of the Church, which was not merely a link between the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms, but even may be said to have brought the kingdom of heaven to earth by breathing its spirit into the temporal power, which it recognized as another manifes-tation of its own authority. Therefore, the struggles of the Temporal and Spiritual Powers, which form so large a part of the history of the Middle Ages, were not the result of antagonism of ideas between the two, but came of the tendency of one side of the great organization of Society to absorb the other without rejecting its theory; in short, on the one hand the Church was political and social rather than religious, while on the other the State was at least as much religious as it was political and social.
Such, then, was the theory of Mediæval Society; but apart from whatever of oppression on life and thought was inherent in it, the practice of the theory was liable to many abuses, to which the obvious confusion and misery of the times are mostly referable. These abuses again were met by a protest in the form of almost constant rebellion against Society, of which one may take as examples the organized vagabondage of Middle Europe, the Jacquerie in France, and in England what may be called the chronic rebellion of the Foresters, which produced such an impression on the minds of the people, that it has given birth to the ballad epic known by the name of its mythical hero, Robin Hood. Resistance to authority and contempt of the 'Rights of Property' are the leading ideas in this rough but noble poetry.
Besides these irregular protests against the oppression of the epoch, there was another factor at work in its modifi-cation -- the Gilds, which forced themselves into the system, and were accepted as a regular part of it.
The ideas which went with the survivals of the primitive communism of the tribes were, on the one hand, absorbed into the feudal system and formed part of it, but on the other, they developed associations for mutual protection and help, which at first were merely a kind of benefit societies according to the ideas of the times. These were followed by associations for the protection of trade, which were called the gilds-merchant. From these the development was two-fold: they were partly transformed into the corporations of the free towns, which had already began (sic) to be founded from other developments, and partly into the craft-gilds, or organizations for the protection and regulation of handicrafts -- which latter were the result of a radical reform of the gilds-merchant, accomplished not without a severe struggle, often accompanied by actual and very bitter war. The last remains of these craft-gilds are traceable in the names of the city companies of London.
It should be noted that this tendency to association was bitterly opposed in its earlier days by the potentates of both Church and State, especially in those countries which had been more under the influence of the Roman empire. But in the long-run it could not be resisted, and at last both the gilds and the free towns which their emancipated labor had created or developed were favored (as well as fleeced) by the bureaucratic kings as a make-weight to the powerful nobles and the Church.
The condition of one part of mediæval life industrial was thus quite altered. In the earlier Middle Ages the serf not only did all the field-work, but also most of the handicrafts, which now fell entirely into the hands of the gilds. It must be noted also that in their best days there were no mere journeymen in these crafts; a workshop was manned simply by the workman and his apprentices, who would, when their time was out, become members of the gild like himself: mastership, in our sense of the word, was unknown.
By about the year 1350 the craft-gilds were fully developed and triumphant; and that date may conveniently be accepted as the end of the first part of the Middle Ages. By this time serfdom generally was beginning to yield to the change introduced by the gilds and free towns: the field serfs partly drifted into the towns and became affiliated to the gilds, and partly became free men, though living on lands whose tenure was unfree -- copyholders, we should call them. This movement towards the breakup of serfdom is marked by the peasant's war in England led by Wat Tyler and John Ball in Kent, and John Litster (dyer) in East Anglia, which was the answer of the combined yeomen, emancipated and unemancipated serfs, to the attempt of the nobles to check the movement.
But the development of the craft-gilds and the flocking in of the freed serfs into the towns laid the foundations for another change in industrialism: with the second part of the mediæval period appears the journeyman, or so-called free laborer. Besides the craftsmaster and his apprentices, the workshop now has these 'free laborers' in it -- unprivileged workmen, that is, who were nevertheless under the domination of the gild, and compelled to affiliation with it. The gildsmen now began to be privileged workmen; and with them began the foundation of the present middle-class, whose development from this source went on to meet its other development on the side of trade which was now becoming noticeable. In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks; the art of printing was spreading; Greek manuscripts were being discovered and read; a thirst for new or revived learning, outside the superstitions of the mediæval Church and the quaint, curiously perverted and half-understood remains of popular traditions, was arising, and all was getting ready for the transformation of mediæval into modern or commercial society.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 19, 22 May 1886, P.61
• Chapter 3 : The Break-up of Feudalism
The period of change from the feudal system into that of commerce is so important, and so significant to our subject, that it demands a separate chapter.
The beginning of the sixteenth century found, as we have said, the craft-gilds corrupted into privileged bodies holding within them two orders of workmen -- the privileged and the unprivileged -- the two forming the germ of a society founded on capital and wage-labor. The privileged workmen became middle-class; the unprivileged, proletarians.
But apart from the gilds, the two classes were being created by the development of commerce, which needed them both as instruments for her progress. Mediæval commerce knew nothing of capitalistic exchange; the demands of local markets were supplied by the direct exchange of the superfluity of the produce of the various districts and countries. All this was now being changed, and a world-market was being formed, into which all commodities had to pass; and a huckstering class grew up for the carrying on of this new commerce, and soon attained to power, amid the rapid breakup of the old hierarchical society with its duly ordered grades.
The fall of Constantinople, which was followed in thirty years by the discovery of America, was a token of this great change. The Mediterranean was no longer the great commercial sea, with nothing beyond it but a few outlying stations. The towns of Central Europe -- eg., Augsburg, Nuremburg, Bruges, and the Hanse towns -- were now sharing the market with Venice and Genoa, the children of Constantinople: there was no longer one great commanding city in Europe. But it was not only the rise in the commercial towns that was overturning feudal society. As they conquered their enemy, the feudal nobles, they fell into the clutches of bureaucratic monarchs, who either seized on them for their own possessions, or used them as tools for their projects on conquest and centralization. Charles V., eg., played this game through South Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, and with Venice, under cover of the so-called 'Holy Roman Empire', while at the same time he had fallen into possession of Spain by marriage; and disregarding his sham feudal empire, he bent all his efforts into turning these countries into a real bureaucratic State. In France the last liberties of the towns were crushed out. In England the plunder of the religious houses enabled Henry VIII to found a new nobility, subservient to his own absolutism, in place of the ancient feudal nobility destroyed by their late civil war.
Everywhere the modern political bureaucratic nation was being developed. In France the long and fierce wars of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions gave opportunity for the consolidation of the monarchy, which was at last effected by Louis XI, the forerunner of the most successful king of France and the last successful one -- Louis XIV. In England the Wars of the Roses were not so bitter as the French wars, and the people took small part in them, except as vassals or the households of the contending nobles; but they nevertheless played their part in the disruption of feudality, not only by the thinning-out of the nobles slain in battle or on the scaffold, but also by helping directly to draw England into the world-market.
Under the mediæval system the workmen, protected and oppressed by the lords of the manor and the gilds, were not available for the needs of commerce. The serfs ate up the part of the produce spared them by their lords; the gild craftsmen sold the produce of their own hands to their neighbors without the help of a middle-man. In neither case was there anything left over for the supply of a great market.
But England, one of the best pasture countries of the world, had in her even then capacities for profit-grinding, if the tillage system of the manor and the yeoman's holdings could be got rid of. The landowners, ruined by their long war, saw the demand for English wool, and set themselves to the task of helping evolution with much of the vigor and unscrupulous pettifogging which has since won for their race the temporary command of the world-market. The tenants were rack-rented, the yeomen were expropriated, the laborers driven off the land into the towns, there to work as 'free' laborers, and England thus contributed her share to commerce, paying for it with nothing more important than the loss of the rough joviality, plenty, and independence of spirit, which once attracted the admiration of foreigners more crushed by the feudal system and their abuses than the English were.
Thus all over Europe commercialism was rising. New needs were being discovered by men who were gaining fresh mastery over nature, and were set free from old restraints to struggle for individual preeminence. A fresh intelligence and mental energy was shedding its light over the more sordid side of the period of change. The study of the Greek literature at first hand was aiding this new intelligence among cultivated men, and also, since they did but half understand its spirit, was warping their minds into fresh error. Art was no longer religious and simple -- the harmonious expression of the thought of the people -- but was growing more and more ambitiously individualistic and arrogant, and at the same time grew more and more retrospective and tainted with pedantry.
Amid all this it is clear that the old religion would no longer serve the new spirit of the times. The Mediæval Church, the kingdom of heaven on earth, in full sympathy with the temporal hierarchy, in which also every one had his divinely appointed place, and which restricted commerce and forbade usury, such a Church was no religion for the new commercialism; its religion must have nothing to do with the business of this world; so the individualist ethics of Early Christianity, which had been kept in the background during the period of the Mediæval Church, were once more brought to the front and took the place of the corporate ethics of that Church, of which each one of the 'faithful' was but a part. Whatever base uses their enthusiasm was put to by cooler heads, this revived Christianity took a real hold on most of the progressive minds of the period, especially in the north; so that Protestantism became the real religion of the epoch, and even permeated Catholicism and gave it whatever true vitality it had; for its political part was an unreal survival from the Mediæval Church, and whatever of it was of any force became the mere ally of bureaucracy; a word which applies to the Protestant Churches just as much as the Catholic; and, in fact, everywhere the new religion became the useful servant of Commercialism, first by providing a new army of officials always subservient to the authority of government, and secondly by holding out to the people hopes outside their wretched life on earth, so as to quiet their discontent by turning their earthly aspirations heavenward. On the one hand like Early Christianity, it bade let the world alone to compete for the possession of privilege, and bade the poor pay no heed to the passing oppression of the day, which could not deprive them of their true reward in another world; but unlike Early Christianity, on the other hand it shared in the possession of privilege, and actively helped in the oppression which it counseled the oppressed not to rebel against. But, as a truly distinct and equal power beside the State, the Church was extinct; it was a mere salaried adjunct of the State. The story, moreover, of the robbery by private persons of the public property which the Mediæval Church once held, was a disgraceful one everywhere, but nowhere so disgraceful as in England.
But while modern Europe was developing for itself a new economy, a new religion, and a new patriotism, the change did not take place without a protest of the disappointed hopes of the people in the form of fresh rebellion; though it was little heeded amid the furious wars for the place and power of kings, and the establishment of political boundaries of the newly made 'nations'. The Peasant War in Germany, and the revolt of the Anabaptists, are, so to say, the funeral torches of the Middle Ages. The first was much of the nature of other mediæval insurrections, except that it was fiercer and longer lived; it ends the series of outbreaks which had been so common in England during the first years of the century. The revolt of the Anabaptists was an attempt to realize the kingdom of God upon earth literally and simply in a Communistic Society based on supernaturalism, and was a protest of ignorant and oppressed men against the hardening of Christianity into bourgeois Protestantism, and of the hardening of feudal oppression into commercial exploitation.
Thus, then, was the feudal system broken down, to give place to a new world, whose government, under cover of carrying on the old monarchies and varied classes of feudality, was employed in one business only, the consolidation and continuance of the absolute property of the individual. It is true that in carrying out this function, the new society used the forms of the old, and asserted hereditary rights stiffly enough; but this was only in its transition from the old to the new. In truth the spirit of the Middle Ages was dead, and its theory of society and authority in Church and State was gone. The kingdom of heaven of the Mediæval Church had left the earth, and did not concern itself with its doings except so far as they constituted theological holiness or sins. God no longer owned the land allowing human beings to use it after a divinely ordained scheme. It was now the property of the absolute monarch, who might give it to whomsoever he would; and it was only for a brief space that a dim shadow of feudal responsibility clung to the landowner.
Serfdom was gone, and the gilds were now but close corporations of privileged workmen, or of employers of labor. The ordinary workman was now 'free'. That is to say he could work where and how he pleased, if he could find some one who would set him to work at the price of taking from him a part of the produce of his labor; which labor was now a commodity to be bought and sold in the market as the body of the chattel-slave once had been.
Of the working of this new form of privilege and slavery we shall see more in our next chapter.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 20, 29 May 1886, P. 69
• Chapter 4 : Modern Society: Early Stages
By the beginning of the seventeenth century the centralizing, bureaucratic monarchies were fairly established: nay, in France at least, they were even showing the birth of modern party-government, which since - carried on, indeed, under the veil of constitutionalism -- has been the type of modern government. Richelieu -- the Bismarck of his time and country -- begins the series of prime ministers or real temporary kings, who govern in the interest of class society, not much encumbered and a good deal protected by their cloaks, the hereditary formal sham kings. In England this prime-ministership was more incomplete, though men like Burleigh approached the type. Elizabeth reduced the Tudor monarchy to an absurdity, a very burlesque of monarchy, under which flourished rankly an utterly unprincipled and corrupt struggle for the satisfaction of individual ambition and greed. This grew still more rankly, perhaps, under James I, who added mere cowardice to all the other vices which are more common to arbitrary high place and power.
As to the condition of the people during the latter years of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, the economical and religious revolution which had taken place had oppressed them terribly, and the 'free workman' had to feel the full force of the causes which had presented him with his 'freedom' in the interest of growing commerce. In England, on the one hand, the expropriation of the yeomanry from the land and the conversion of tillage into pasture had provided a large population of these free workmen, who, on the other hand, were not speedily worked up by the still scanty manufactures of the country, but made a sort of semi-vagabond population, troublesome enough to the upper and middle-classes. The laws made against these paupers in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI were absolutely ferocious, and men were hanged out of the way by the thousand.
But in the reign of Elizabeth it was found out that even this was not enough to cure the evil, which of course had been much aggravated by the suppression of the religious houses, part of whose function was the housing and feeding of any part of the workmen temporarily displaced. A Poor Law, therefore, was passed for dealing with this misery, and strange to say, it was far more humane than might have been expected from the way in which the poor had been dealt with up to that time; so much so, indeed, that the utilitarian philanthropists of the beginning of this century felt themselves obliged to deal with it in a very severe way, which left us a Poor Law as inhumane -- or let us say as cruel -- as could well be. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century things began to improve with our working population: the growth of the towns stimulated agriculture, and tillage began to revive again, though of course under the new system of cultivation for profit. Matters were in fact settling down, and preparing the country by a time of something like prosperity for the new revolution in industry.
The condition of the people was on the whole worse on the Continent than in England. Serfdom was by no means extinct in France and, especially, in Germany, and that serfdom was far more burdensome and searching side by side with the exploitation of the market than it had been in the feudal period. Other survivals of the mediæval epoch there were also -- eg., in Germany the gilds had still some life and power, and the people were not utterly divorced from the land as in England, although the predominant competition of the markets prevented whatever good might linger in these half-extinct customs from acting for the benefit of the people. At the same time the populations were crushed by the frightful wars which passed over them - in all which religion was the immediate excuse.
The first of this series was the war carried on in Holland against the Catholic foreigners -- the Spaniards -- into whose hands they had been thrown by the family affairs of Charles V. Although noblemen took up the side of the rebels -- eg., Egmont and Horn, executed for so doing -- this war was in the main a war of the bourgeois democracy on behalf of Protestantism, embittered by the feeling of a Teutonic race against a Latinized one. There is to be found in it even some foretaste of the revolutionary sanscullote element, as shown by the extreme bitterness of the ruder seafaring population, the men whose hats bore the inscription, 'Better Turk than Pope'.
In Germany the struggle known as the 'Thirty Years' War' was between the great vassals of the German empire, the shadow of whose former power was used for the aggrandizement of the house of Charles V, and also for the enforcement of Catholicism on the more northern countries. It must be remembered, by the way, that these countries were to the full as absolutist as those which obeyed the bidding of the Emperor. This miserable war, after inflicting the most terrible suffering on the unhappy people, who were throughout treated with far less mercy and consideration than if they had been beasts; after having crushed the rising intelligence of Germany into a condition from which it has only arisen in days close to our own, dribbled out in a miserable and aimless manner, leaving the limits of Protestant and Catholic pretty much where it had found them: but it also left the people quite defenseless against their masters, the bureaucratic kings and knights.
In France this religious struggle took a very bitter form, but it was far more political than in Germany. The leaders were even prepared to change their creed when driven into a corner -- as Henry of Navarre at the time of the Massacre of St Bartholomew. In France the popular sympathy was by no means in favor of Protestantism: the Massacre of St Bartholomew, which inflicted such a terrible blow on the Hugenot (sic) cause, would otherwise have been hardly possible. It is true that the great Hugenot (sic) leader, Henry of Navarre, became Hugenot (sic) king of France, but his accession did not carry with it a triumph as a consequence. Henry had to abjure Protestantism; a Protestant king of France was impossible.
The great struggle in England came later, and consequently probably the victory was more decided on the Puritan side. The enthusiasm with which Mary Tudor - 'Bloody Mary' -- was received, and the Catholic insurrections in the reign of her successor, showed that there was at first some popular feeling on the Catholic side; but by the time of James I Catholicism was dead in England. The Book of Sports issued by his Government, which encouraged the people to play various games on Sunday, was widely received as an outrage on the feelings of the growing middle-class in town and country; and all was tending towards the irreconcilable quarrel which took place in the next reign between the Court and the Bourgeoisie, and which was nearly as much religious as political. For the rest, the Parliamentary party was on the advancing line of history both as regards politics and religion, and the King's party was simply reactionary; but the war was at furthest waged by a bourgeois democract, led at first by a constitutional oligarchy against a nobility inspired by a kind of romantic after-glow of mediæval chivalry. The successful outcome of the individual ambition of Cromwell extinguished whatever aspirations towards republicanism were cherished by a few purists, as well as the enthusiasm of the wild sectaries whose hopes of a rule of saints on the earth were tinged by some kind of communistic ideas; which were further fore-shadowed by the Levelers, though perverted by the mere asceticism which they held. Nevertheless, these men may be paralleled to the Anabaptists of Münster, although the latter were quite mediæval in spirit, and their fanatic religion had little in common with Puritanism; and though, also, the steady power of bourgeois rule concentrated in Cromwell's absolutism forbade them any opportunity of approaching even the most temporary realization of their idea. Meanwhile England was unable to endure the weight of the absolute rule of Cromwell, lined with fully developed Puritanism, and a few plotters were allowed to restore the Stuart monarch, under whom the wild religion of the armed men -- the victors over the nobility of England and their revived sham chivalry -- sank into mere Quakerism, and the religious war was at end, except for a few smoldering embers among the Cameronians in Scotland.
Meantime in France the last remnants of the old feudalism struggled in the party warfare of the 'Fronde' against Mazarin and his bureaucracy of simple corruption, till Louis XIV put the coping-stone on the French monarchy by forcing his nobility, high and low, into the position of his courtiers, while his minister Colbert developed the monarchy as a tax-gathering machine by the care and talent with which he fostered the manufactures of France, which just before his time were at a very low ebb; so that there was no need to touch the revenues of the nobility, who were free to spend them in dancing attendance on the Court: nay, were not free to do otherwise. The century began with the French monarchy triumphant over all its great vassals; it finished by reducing all its vassals, great and small, to the condition of courtiers, with little influence in the country-side, and diminished rents -- mere absentee landlords of the worst type, endowed with privileges which could only be exercised at the cost of the starvation of the people and the exasperation of the Bourgeoisie, who furnished the funds for the Court glory. Everything in France, therefore, foreshadowed political revolution. What the advancing constitutionalism of England foreshadowed we shall have to speak of in our next chapter.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 21, 5 June 1886, P. 77
• Chapter 5 : Preparing for Revolution - England
The English seventeenth century revolution was from the first purely middle-class, and as we hinted in our last [chapter] it cast off most of its elements of enthusiasm and ideality in Cromwell's latter days; the burden of the more exalted Puritanism was felt heavily by the nation and no doubt played its part in the restoration of Monarchy; nor on the other hand was England at all ripe for Republicanism; and so between these two disgusts it allowed itself to be led back again into the arms of Monarchy by the military adventurers who had seized on the power which Cromwell once wielded. But this restoration of the Stuart monarchy was after all but a makeshift put up with because the defection from the high-strung principle of the earlier period of the revolution left nothing to take the place of Cromwell's absolutism. The nation was quite out of sympathy with the Court, which was un-national and Catholic in tendency and quite openly debauched. The nation itself though it had got rid of the severity of Puritanism was still Puritan, and welcomed the Sunday Act of Charles II which gave the due legal stamp to Puritanism of the duller and more respectable kind. And though enthusiastic Puritanism was no longer dominant, it was not extinct. John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' shines out, though a religious romance, amid the dullness of the literature of the time. The Quakers who represented in their beginning the peaceable and religious side of the Levelers, arose and grew and flourished in spite of persecution; the Cameronians in Scotland, as we mentioned in our last chapter, made an ineffectual armed resistance to the dying out of enthusiasm; while across the Atlantic the descendants of the earlier Puritans carried on an almost theocratic government, which, by the way be it said, persecuted the Quakers most cruelly. Little by little, however, all that was not quite commonplace and perfunctory, died out in English Protestantism, and respectable indifferentism had carried all before it by the end of the century. Politics and religion had no longer any real bond of union, and the religious side of Puritanism, Evangelicalism, disappears here, to come to light again in the next century under the leadership of Whitfield.
Yet, such as English Puritanism had become, its respectable, habitual, and formal residuum was strong enough to resent James the Second's Papistry, and to make its resentment felt; while at the same time the constitutionalism which began the anti-absolutist opposition in Charles the First's time, and which had been interrupted by Cromwell's iron and Charles the Second's mud absolutism, gathered head again and began to take definite form. The Stuart monarchy, with its 'divine right' of absolute sovereignty, was driven from England in the person of James the Second, and a constitutional king was found in William of Orange, and constitutional party government began.
Thus, in spite of interruption, was carried out the middle-class revolution in England; like all other revolutions, it arrived at the point which it really set out to gain; but not until it had shaken off much which did at one time help forward its progress, and which was and still is mistaken for an essential part of it. Religious and Republican enthusiasm, although they (and especially the first) played their part in abolishing the reactionary clogs on the progress of the middle-classes, had to disappear as elements which would have marred the end proposed by that revolution; to wit, the creation of an all-powerful middle-class freed from all restrictions that would interfere with it in its pursuit of individual profit derived from the exploitation of industry.
Thenceforth, till our own times, respectable political life in England is wrapped up in Whiggery; tinged, indeed, on one side with the last faint remains of feudalism in the form of a quite unreal sentiment, involving no practical consequences but the acceptance of the name of Tory; and on the other by as faint a sentiment towards democracy, which was probably rather a traditional survival of the feeling of the old days of the struggle between King and Parliament, than any holding out of the hand towards the real democracy which was silently forming underneath the government of the respectables.
The first part of the eighteenth century, therefore, finds England solid and settled; all the old elements of disturbance and aspiration hardened into constitutional bureaucracy; religion recognized as a State formality, but having no influence whatever on the corporate life of the country, its sole reality a mere personal sentiment, not at all burdensome to the practical business of life. The embers of the absolutist re-action on the point of extinction, and swept off easily and even lazily when they make a show of being dangerous; the nobility a mere titled upper order of the bourgeoisie; the country prosperous, gaining on French and on Dutch in America and India, and beginning to found its colonial and foreign markets, and its navy beginning to be paramount on all seas; the working-classes better off than at any time since the fifteenth century. Art if not actually dead represented by a Court painter or so of ugly ladies and stupid gentlemen, and literature by a few word-spinning essayists and prosaic versifiers, priding themselves on a well-bred contempt for whatever was manly, passionate, or elevating in the wealth of the past of their own language.
Here then in England we may begin to see what the extinction of feudality was to end in. Mediæval England is gone, the manners and ways of thought of the people are utterly changed; they are called English, but they are another people from that which dwelt in England when 'forestalling and regratting' were misdemeanors; when the gild ruled over the production of goods and division of labor was not yet; when both in art and literature the people had their share, -- nay, when what of both there was, was produced by the people themselves. Gone also is militant Puritanism, buried deep under mountains of cool formality. England is bourgeois and successful throughout its whole life; without aspirations, for its self-satisfaction is too complete for any, yet gathering force for development of a new kind, -- as it were a nation taking breath for a new spring; for under its prosperous self-satisfaction lies the birth of a great change -- a revolution in industry -- and England is at the time we are writing of simply preparing herself for that change. Her prosperity and solid bureaucratic constitutional government -- nay, even the commonplace conditions of life in the country, are enabling her to turn all her attention towards this change, and the development of the natural resources in which she is so rich. The fall of the feudal system, the invasion of the individualist method of producing goods, and of simple exchange of commodities, were bound to lead to the final development of the epoch -- the rise of the great machine industries -- and now the time for that development is at hand. The growing world-market is demanding more than the transitional methods of production can supply. In matters political prejudice is giving way to necessity, and all obstacles are being rapidly cleared away before the advent of a new epoch for labor; of which, indeed, we may say that if no great change were at hand for it in its turn, it would have been the greatest disaster which has ever happened to the race of man. In our next chapter we shall deal with the elements at work in preparing the transformation of the commercial system, for which this development of the great machine industry was so necessary and so mighty a servant.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 22, 12 June 1886, PP. 82-83
• Chapter 6 : Preparing for Revolution - France
As we have said, Louis XIV succeeded in making the French monarchy a pure autocratic bureaucracy, completely centralized in the person of the monarch. This with an ambitious king like Louis XIV involved constant war, for he felt himself bound to satisfy his ideal of the necessary expansion of the territory and influence of France, which he looked upon as the absolute property of the king. The general success of Louis XIV brought with it the success of these wars of aggrandisment, and France became very powerful under his rule. Under the rule of his minister Colbert industrialism in France became completely commercialized. Colbert spared no pains or energy in bringing this about. Often, with more or less success, he drove an industry forward artificially, as with the silk and woolen manufactures. For he was eager to win for France a foremost place in the world-market, which he thought but the due accompaniment of her monarchial glory; and he knew that without it that glory would have died of starvation, since the taxes would not have yielded the necessary food. It is true that even in England growing commercialism was subordinate to constitutionalism, the English form of bureaucracy; but the idea was already afoot there that the former was rather an end than a means, whereas in France commercialism was completely subordinated to the glory of the autocratic monarchy -- a mere feeder of it.
The religion of this period of the 'Grand Monarque' shows little more than an ecclesiastical struggle between Gallicanism on the one hand, which claimed a feeble spark of independence as regards Rome for the French Church, and is represented by Fénélon and Bossuet, and Jesuitry on the other hand, which was the exponent of Roman central ization. The leading intelligence of the time was on the Gallican side; but the king in the long run favored the Jesuits, as being the readier instruments of his bureaucratic rule. Outside this ecclesiastical quarrel there was no life whatever in religion, except what was shown by the existence of a few erratic sects of mystics, confined to cultivated persons like the Quietists and Jansenists. The former of these may be said to have put forward the complete abnegation of humanity in the presence of God, while the latter attempted a revivification of the pietism of the Catholic Church.
The Regency which succeeded to the reign of Louis XIV saw the definite beginnings of the last corruption which betokened the Revolution. The wars of aggrandizement still went on but were now generally unsuccessful; the industrialism set a-going by Colbert went on steadily, but the profits to be gained by it did not satisfy the more adventurous spirit of the period, and the Regency saw a curious exposition of stock-jobbery before its time in the form of the Mississippi scheme of Law, which had its counterpart in England in the South-Sea Bubble. It was a financing operation -- an attempt to get something out of nothing -- founded on the mercantile theory of economy then current, which showed but an imperfect knowledge of the industrial revolution beginning under men's very eyes, and assumed that the wealth of a country consists in the amount of the precious metals which it can retain. This assumption, by the way, is curiously exemplified in the half-commercial half-buccaneering romances of Daniel Defoe, whose works we should have mentioned in our last chapter as a relief to the monotony of dullness of eighteenth century literature in England.
It is necessary to say something about the literature and art of this period that goes before the Revolution in France, because that country is the especial exponent, particularly in art, of the degradation which indicated the rottenness of society. As in England, literature was formal and stilted, and produced little except worthlessly clever essays and still more worthless verses that have no claim to be called poetry. The French verse-makers, however, aimed at something higher than the English, and produced works which depend on pomp and style for any claim to attention they may have, and for the rest are unreal and lifeless. Amid them all one name stands forward as representing some reality -- Molière, to wit. But the life and genuineness of his comedies serve to show the corruption of the times as clearly as the dead classicalism of Racine; for this, the one man of genius of the time, was driven into the expression of mere cynicism; though in one remarkable passage of his works he shows a sympathy for the ballad-poetry of the people, which, when noticed at all in England at the same period, and even much latter, received a kind of indulgent patronage rather than admiration. At the same time as there was a sham tragedy current at this time, so also there was a sham love of simplicity. The ladies and gentlemen of the period ignored the real peasants who were the miserable slaves of the French landlords, and invented in their dramas, poems, and pictures sham shepherds and peasants, who were bundles of conscious unreality, inane imitations of the later classics. This literature and art would be indeed too contemptible for mention, if it were not a sign of a society rotting into revolution.
The fine arts, which had in the end of the sixteenth century descended from the expression of the people's faith and aspirations into that of the fancy, ingenuity, and whim of gifted individuals, fell lower still. They lost every atom of beauty and dignity, and retained little even of the ingenuity of the earlier Renaissance, and became mere expensive and pretentious though carefully finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and state, the expression of the insolence of riches and the complacency of respectability. Once again it must be said of the art as of the general literature of the period, that no reasonable man could even bestow a passing glance at them but for the incurable corruption of Society which they betokened.
So the time wore away through the disgraceful years of the Regency and of Louis XV, till the accession of the once Dauphin, now Louis XVI, to the throne, which was hailed as a new era by the respectability of France; and was, indeed, the inauguration of a new era undreamed of by the actors in it. Of the conscious hopes and aims which came to the surface with this change, there were indications in the opposition of the higher bourgeoisie to the whimsical and scandalous courtesan-Absolutism, the rule of the Pompadours and Dubarrys, which was predominant under Louis XV, this opposition took the form, among others, of the assertion of the formal legal rights of Parliament so- called, which in France was but a privileged body of lawyers, representative of nothing but the crystalization (sic) of the abuses of a sham feudality, but which, nevertheless, both under Louis XV and his successor, found itself put forward as a champion of the respectability of Bourgeoisedom against the rampant corruption of the Court. But on the accession of Louis XVI this tendency of respectability to assert itself received fresh impulse, and took a more definite form, and became almost a party in the country, though it had no chance of exercising any direct influence on the government, which was a mere mass of abuses. This respectable reforming party, although for the most part outwardly orthodox, among themselves professed materialism and the worship of reason, and was inspired by a bourgeois humanitarianism which was its most genuine side, and which was largely fed, if not created, by the writings of Voltaire, and still more of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Diderot. This party was a most important element amid the causes of the revolution; it rallied to it all who had any pretense to cultivated progress, and though it meant nothing but intelligent Conservativism, it formed a screen as it were behind which the true revolutionary forces could gather for the attack on privilege. Its formation was the last sign of the approaching end of the absolutist bureaucracy which was, so to say, propped up by the bodies of its former enemies which it had triumphed over, the feudal rights of the older nobility. That great French centralized monarchy had been a long time ripening, but once ripe it decayed very speedily, and no wonder since it was the corruption of a corruption.
Here, then, we have in France a contrast to the state of things in England. No constitutionalism here; an absolutism despised even by the privileged classes; unable to move in the direction of progress, even when, as in the case of Louis XVI, its head has a tendency to the intelligent conservatism above mentioned; bankrupt also amid a people broken down, and a commerce hampered by the exactions of the hereditary privilege which is its sole support, discredited by unsuccessful wars, so that the door is shut to its ambition in that road; at home it has to face uneasily the new abstract ideas of liberty and the rights of men. These ideas are professed, indeed, by those who have an interest in preserving the present state of things, but are listened to and pondered by people who find that state of things unbearable. In short, while England, at peace at home and prosperous under reasonable conservatism, is forced to be seeking colonies and markets abroad, while within her own bounds industrialism is quietly developing toward the great change, France, driven back on herself, is forced face to face with the elements of violent change at home; on the one hand bankruptcy and deadlock, on the other intellectual activity directed wholly towards theories of material well-being of a well-to-do-class. And at the back of all a commercial bourgeoisie oppressed by privilege, and a miserable proletariat of mere starvelings. From such elements political revolution must be born.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 25, 3 July 1886, PP. 108-109
• Chapter 7 : The French Revolution: Constitutional Stage
The bankruptcy towards which France was staggering under the régime of an untaxed privileged noblesse drove the Court into the dangerous step of attempting to do something, and after desperate efforts to carry on the old corruption by means of mere financing operations, under Calonne and others, aided by an assembly of the 'Notables', or kind of irregular taxing council, the Court was at last, on the 4th May, 1789, compelled to summon the States-General, a body which was pretty much analogous to a Parliament of our mediæval kings, that is a kind of taxing machine, but which attempted to sell its granting of taxes to the king for redress of certain grievances. This States-General had not met since 1614. Bickering between the three houses, Clergy, Noblesse, and Commons, immediately began, but the latter, which was middle-class in spirit though including some of the lower nobility, gave tokens of its coming predominance from the first. On the 20th of June the Court attempted a coup d'état, and the Third Estate held its celebrated session in the Tennis Court, and so broke with the old feudal idea, and became a constitutional 'National Assembly', the Court making but a feeble resistance at the time.
It, nevertheless, was contemplating forcible measures against what had now become the National Assembly, when on the 14th July came the first stroke of the popular insurrection which the bourgeois began by accepting as an ally of its revolution, which so far had gone wholly on constitutional lines; this was the taking of the Bastille by the people, and the slaying of De Launay the Governor, and Flesselles the Provost of the merchants. The Court gave way at once; the king visited Paris as a sign of submission, and certain of the higher nobility fled from the coming ruin. Two typical feudal fleecers, Foulon and Berthier, were afterwards hung by the people.
The ground thus cleared for it, the Constitutional Revolution went on apace; feudal titles were abolished, the Church reduced to a salaried official department; the very geography of the country was changed, the old provinces with their historic names abolished, and France divided into eighty-three departments named after the rivers and other natural features; everything was to be reduced to a pattern [of] constitutional centralized bourgeois bureaucracy.
But the other element of revolution was also stirring. The alliance of the mere starvelings could not be done without by the bourgeoisie, and they had it whether they would or no. A Jacquerie had arisen in the country, and armed peasants everywhere burned the chateaux or country- houses of the gentlemen, and hunted away their occupants. The Revolution was necessarily accompanied by the dislocation of all industry, and the scarcity was bitterly felt everywhere.
In the midst of this the Court, recovering from the first blow of the taking of the Bastille, began to plot counter- revolution, and devised a scheme for getting the king away from Versailles to Rouen or elsewhere, and putting him at the head of a reactionary army and an opposition reactionary assembly. A banquet given by the Court to a regiment supposed to be loyal, practically exposed this plot, and amid all the terror and irritation which it gave rise to, a popular rising headed by the famous march of the women on Versailles, came to the aid of the Assembly, and forced the king to go to Paris and take up his abode at the Tuilleries (sic). In this affair the mere Sansculotte element became very obvious. It was stirred up by the artificial famine caused by the financial and stock-jobbing operations of the Court and of private persons; the popular middle-class Minister, Necker, having been the immediate cause of it by his issue of small paper money. And it was opposed by the Bourgeois soldiery, the National Guard, headed by Lafayette, who was the very embodiment of the Constitutional Revolution. This was followed by a further flight of the noblesse and higher bourgeoisie from France, which, as it were, gave a token of the complete victory of Constitutionalism over the Court party.
For some time the king carried on a struggle against the victorious bourgeoisie, apparently unconscious of its extreme hopelessness; while the bourgeois Government for its part was quite prepared to put down any popular movement, all the more as it now had a formidable army in the shape of the National Guard. But by this time there had arisen a kind of People's Parliament outside the Assembly, the famous Jacobins Club and the Cordelier Club to wit, and the sky was darkening over for triumphant Constitutionalism.
That triumph was celebrated by the great feast of the Champ de Mars, July 13th, 1790, when the king in the presence of delegates from all France swore to the Constitution. But Royalist plots went on all the same, and settled down at last into a fixed conclusion of the flight of the king to the northern frontier, where were the remains of what regular army could be depended on, with the threatening Austrian troops at their back. As a trial the king attempted at Easter to get as far as St Cloud, announcing his determination as a matter of course; but he was stopped by a mixed crowd not wholly Sansculotte, though Lafayette did his best to help royalty turned respectable, in the pinch. At last on the 20th June, the king and the royal family made the great attempt, in which they would most probably have succeeded, if they had not hampered themselves with all kinds of absurd appliances of wealth and luxury, and if they had had any idea of the kind of stake they were playing for. As it was in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, their having arranged for various detachments of troops to meet them on the way as escorts, they were stopped at the little town of Varennes and brought back again to Paris. It was a token of the progress of ideas, that by this time the king's presence in Paris was looked at from a two-fold point of view. By the pure constitutionalists as the necessary coping-stone to the Constitution, without which it could not stand; but by the revolutionists as a hostage held by the French people in the face of hostile reactionary Europe. Also now the word Republic was first put forward, and at last it became clear that there were two parties among those who were making the Constitution, the Constitutional Royalists and the Republicans.
The latter were supported by the people, who flooded the Assembly with petitions for the deposition of the king; the Assembly decided against it on the ground of the legal fiction familiar to the anti-Royalist party in our Parliamentary wars, that the king had been carried off by evil and traitorous councilors. But the split between the parties was emphasized by bloodshed. A Jacobin petition lay for signature on the Altar of the Country in the Champ de Mars, and great crowds were about it signing and looking on. In the evening, Lafayette marched on the Champ de Mars with a body of National Guards, proclaimed martial law by the hoisting of the red flag, according to a recently made enactment, and finally fired on the people, killing many of them.
But in spite of this 'massacre of the Champ de Mars', as it was called, the Constitutionalists triumphed for the time. The National Assembly completed its work, and produced a Constitution wholly Bourgeois and even Monarchical, which was accepted by the King amid one of those curious outbursts of sentiment of which the epoch was so fruitful, and which generalry as on this occasion included the exhibition of the little Dauphin in the arms of his mother to the crowd. The National Assembly dissolved itself after enacting that none of its members could be elected to the new legislative body or first Parliament of the Revolution. Of this Legislative the bourgeois Republicans, the aristocracy of talent, became apparently far the most powerful party; whatever there was of talent that had frankly accepted the alliance of the Sansculottes was outside the Legislative. But another element was now added to the contest, that of foreign war, Austria beginning the attack. The obvious and necessary sympathy of the king and Court with what had now become their only chance of salvation, was met by the equally necessary terror and indignation of the revolutionists of all shades, which of course strengthened the extreme party, who had everything to lose from the success of a foreign invasion. In spite of this, the king driven into a corner was in constant contention with the Legislative, and used his constitutional right of veto freely, yet was driven to accept a revolutionary Ministry with Roland at its head: but as the hope of deliverance from the invasion grew on him he dismissed it again, and the Court found itself ticketted (sic) with the name of the Austrian Committee. On the 20th June, the populace expressed themselves clearly enough by invading the Tuileries itself, and for a brief space it seemed as if the monarchy was doomed to end there and then; but as there was no resistance it ended with a mere demonstration.
Nevertheless, the end of the Constitutional Revolution was at hand. Lafayette, quite misunderstanding his strength, left the army, and tried to stir up the Constitutionalists to attack the Jacobins, but failed ignominiously, and presently fled the country. The King once more swearing to the Constitution at the Feast of the Federates, wore armor underneath his clothes, and insurrection was obviously brewing. On the 10th August it came. Whatever Royalist force was available was collected in the Palace of the Tuileries, including the Swiss Guard; and a desperate resistance was prepared for with the faint hope of the king being able to cut himself out and reach the frontier; but those Constitutionalists who had any intention of supporting the king found their hearts failing them, and even the 'constitutional' battalions of the National Guard were prepared to take the popular side. The king and royal family left the Tuileries for the Legislative, leaving no orders to the unlucky Swiss, who with mechanical military courage stood their ground. The insurrectionary sections attacked the Tuileries and carried it, though not without heavy loss -- 1200 killed, the Swiss being all slain except a few who were carried off to prison. On the 13th August, the king and his family were bestowed as prisoners in the Temple, and the first act of the Revolution had come to an end.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 28, 4 July 1886, PP. 130-131
• Chapter 8 : The French Revolution: The Proletarian Stage
The insurrection of the 10th August, which culminated in the final downfall of the monarchy and the imprisonment of the king and royal family in the Temple, was headed and organized by a new body definitely revolutionary, intended to be the expression of the power of the proletariat, the new Commune of Paris, the moving spirit of which was Marat, who even had a seat of honor assigned to him in the Council. Already, before the king had been sent to the Temple, the Girondin Vergniaud, as president, had moved the suspension of the 'hereditary representative' and the summoning of a national convention. Danton was made minister of justice; Robespierre was on the Council of the Commune. A new Court of Criminal Justice was established for the trial of the crimes of August 10th. The members of the Convention were chosen by double election, but the property qualification of 'active and passive citizens' was done away with.
While all this was going on, the movement of the reactionary armies on France was still afoot; and the furious flame of French national enthusiasm, which was afterwards used by the mere self-seeking conqueror Napoleon, was lighted by the necessity of the moment -- not to be extinguished in days long after his. We mention this here because, in order to appreciate what follows, it must be remembered that an armed coalition of the absolutist countries was gathering together, threatening to drown the Revolution in the blood of the French people, and especially of the people of Paris; and that one of its armies, commanded by the Duke of Brunswick, a famous general of Frederick the Great, was already within a few days' march of the city; and that nothing was between Paris and destruction but undisciplined levies and the rags of the neglected army formed under the old régime; while at the same time the famous royalist insurrection had broken out in La Vendée. Every republican in Paris, therefore, had good reason to feel that both his own life and the future of his country were in immediate danger at the hands of those who did not care what became of France and her people so long as the monarchy could be restored.
Danton now demanded a search for arms, which was carried out on August 29th; and the prisons were filled with prisoners suspected of royalist plotting, and many of them surely guilty of it.
Verdun fell on the 2nd September, and the Duke of Brunswick boasted that he would presently dine in Paris; and on the same night insurrectionary courts of justice -- Lynch-law, as we should call it now -- were established at the prisons, and the prisoners were brought before them and judged. If found guilty they were turned out into the street with the words, 'Let the prisoner be enlarged', or, 'Let him be conducted to La Force' or 'the Abbaye', according to whether he was at one or the other. He was then immediately cut down and slain by a body of men waiting for him. If he was acquitted, the word went, 'Let him be enlarged', with the cry of 'Vive la nation!' and he went free. It should be noted, in order to show the hysterical excitement amid which all this was done, that the acquittals were greeted with cries of joy, tears, and embraces on the part of the court and its sympathizers. It may be further noted that the watches, rings, etc., of the slain were brought to the town-hall by the slayers, who claimed each a louis (20s.) for their night's work. The number of the slain was one thousand and eighty-nine.
The next day a circular was issued by the Committee of Public Safety approving of the massacre, signed by Sergent, Panis (Danton's friend), and Marat, with seven others.
The Girondins in the Assembly and elsewhere kept quiet for the time, though they afterwards used the event against the Jacobins.
Meanwhile the French army, under Dumouriez, had seized on the woodland hills of the Argonne, checked Brunswick, defeated him at Valmy, and Paris was saved.
The Convention now met -- on the 20th September -- and the parties of the Girondins and the Mountain, or extreme revolutionists, were at once formed in it. It is noteworthy that while it declared as its foundation the sovereignty of the people and the abolition of royalty, it also decreed that landed and other property was sacred for ever. Apropos of which, it may here be mentioned that the bookseller Memoro, having hinted at something like agrarian law, and some faint shadow of Socialism, had to go into hiding to avoid hanging.
So far, therefore, we have got no further than the complete triumph of bourgeois republicanism; though, indeed, the possibility of its retaining its position depended, as the event showed, on the support of the proletariat, which was only given on the terms that the material condition of the workers should be altered for the better by the new régime. And those terms, in the long-run, bourgeois republicanism could not keep, and therefore it fell.
The Girondins or moderate party in the Convention, began their attack on the Jacobins on the subject of the September massacres, and also by attacking Marat personally (on the 21st September) -- which attack, however, failed egregiously. The Girondins, as their name implies, leaned on the support of the provinces, where respectability was stronger than in Paris, and tried to levy a bodyguard for the defense of the Convention against the Paris populace; but though they got the decree for it passed, they could not carry it out. In their character of political economists, also, they resisted the imposing a maximum price on grain, a measure which the scarcity caused by the general disturbance made imperative, if the proletariat were to have any share in the advantages of the Revolution. In short, the Girondins were obviously out of sympathy with the mass of the people -- the only power that can support revolutionists; therefore, though they were posing as supporters of the rights of the people, they were bound to fall.
The trial of the king now came on, and tested the Girondins in a fresh way; they mostly voted his death, but as if driven to do so from a feeling that opinion was against them, and that they might as well have some credit for this. The king was beheaded on January 21st, 1793, and as an immediate consequence, England and Spain declared war. But this business of the king made a kind of truce between the parties, which, however, soon came to an end. Marat was the great object of attack, and on the 25th February, 1793, he was decreed accused on account of some passages in his journal approving of the bread riots which had taken place, and suggesting the hanging of a forestaller or two. On the other hand, on the 10th of March, the section Bonconseil demanded the arrest of the prominent Girondins. Meantime, Danton had been trying all along to keep the peace between the two parties, but on April 1st, the Girondins accused him of complicity with Dumouriez, who had now fled over the frontier, and so forced him into becoming one of their most energetic enemies. The position of the Girondins was now desperate. On the 24th March, Marat was acquitted and brought back in triumph to the Convention.
The Girondins got appointed a packed committee of twelve in the interest of the Convention as against the Paris sections. As an answer to this a central committee of the sections was formed, which on May 31st dominated the Municipality (not loathe to be so dealt with) and surrounded the Convention with troops. After an attempt on the part of the Girondins to assert their freedom of action, the Convention decreed them accused and they were put under arrest. They died afterwards, some by the guillotine, some even more miserably, within a few months; but their party is at an end from this date. All that happened in the Convention from this time to the fall of Robespierre in 'Thermidor' was the work of a few revolutionists, each trying to keep level with the proletarian instinct, and each failing in turn. They had not the key to the great secret; they were still bourgeois, and still supposed that there must necessarily be a propertyless proletariat led by [the] bourgeois, or at least served by them; they had not conceived the idea of the extinction of classes, and the organization of the people itself for its own ends.
Marat's death at the hand of Charlotte Corday, on July 14th, removed the only real rival to Robespierre, the only man who might, perhaps, have made Napoleonism unnecessary.
The law of maximum was now passed, however, and a cumulative income tax, so that, as Carlyle remarks, the workman was at least better off under the Terror than he had ever been before; but without a direct attack on the root of exploitation there can be no true equality, and nothing that can be laid hold of as a principle of Society; the people cannot understand, and therefore cannot themselves organize themselves. Until labor is free, it has to be organized by those who are the masters of the laborers, and the revolutionists of this period were at once too good and too bad to be their masters; therefore, as above said, they could only drift on the current of events.
Robespierre, Danton, and the Herbertists were now what of force was left in the Convention, and doubtless the first of these had made up his mind to get the reins of power into his own hands. Meantime, a new calendar, in which the months were distinguished by names taken from the march of the natural drama of the year, was published, and an attempt was made to establish a new worship founded on Materialism; but, like all such artificial attempts to establish what is naturally the long growth of time, it failed. Chaumette, Hebert and their followers were the leaders in this business, which Robespierre disapproved of, and Danton growled at.
The Extraordinary Tribunal under Fouquier Tinville was now the Executive in Paris, and backed by the law of suspects, speedily got rid of all obstacles to the Revolution, and of many also who had worked according to their lights for its furtherance. Robespierre, it is hard to say how or why, became at last practical dictator.
The Herbertists under the name of the 'Enragés' (rabids) were accused at Robespierre's instance, found guilty and executed. Danton, giving way it would seem to some impulse towards laziness inherent in his nature, let himself be crushed, and died along with Camille Desmoulins on 31st of March, 1794, and at last Robespierre was both in reality and appearance supreme. On the 8th of June he inaugurated his new worship by his feast of the Supreme Being, but did not follow it up by any diminution in the number of batches for the guillotine; and ominous grumblings began to be heard. According to a story current, Carnot got by accident at a list of 40 to be arrested, among whom he read his own name. On the 26th July, Robespierre was met by unexpected opposition in the Convention. The next day he was decreed accused at the Convention, and Henriot deposed from the commandership of the National Guard; but there was a respite which a more ready man, a man of military instinct at least, might have used [but] Robespierre lacked that instinct; [and] Henriot failed miserably in his attempt to crush the Convention. The insurrectionary troops on being appealed to by the Convention, wavered and gave way, and Robespierre was arrested. In fact, Robespierre seems to have worn out the patience of the people by his continued executions. Had he proclaimed an amnesty after his Feast of the Supreme Being, he would have had a much longer lease of power; as it was he and his tail died on the 28th July(1).
There was nothing left to carry on the Revolution after this but a knot of self-seeking politicians of the usual type; they had only to keep matters going till they were ready for the dictator who could organize for his own purposes people and army, and who came in the shape of Napoleon. The proletarians were no longer needed as allies, and disunited, ignorant of principles, and used to trust to leaders, they could make no head against the Society which they had shaken indeed, owing to its internal dissensions, but which they were not yet able to destroy.
One event only there remains to be mentioned; the attempt of Baboeuf and his followers to get a proletarian republic recognized; it has been called an insurrection, but it never came to that, being crushed while it was yet only the beginning of a propaganda. Baboeuf and his followers were brought to trial in April, 1796. He and Darthes were condemned to death, but killed themselves before the sentence could be carried out. Ten others were condemned to prison and exile; and so ended the first Socialist propaganda.
It is commonly said that Napoleon crushed the Revolution, but what he really did was to put on it the final seal of law and order. The Revolution was set on foot by the middle-classes in their own interests; the sentence which Napoleon accepted as the expression of his aims, 'la carrière ouverte aux talens' -- 'the career thrown open to talent' -- is the motto of middle-class supremacy. It implies the overthrow of aristocratic privilege and the setting up in its place of the money-aristocracy, founded on the privilege of exploitation, amid a world of so-called 'free competitions. The Middle-class, the first beginnings of which we saw formed in the Middle Ages, after a long and violent struggle has conquered and is supreme from henceforth.
1 A curious exemplification of the change in the speed of the transmission of news, is given by the fact that The Times published the first news of this fall of Robespierre three weeks after the event.back
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 29, 31 July 1886, PP. 138-139
• Chapter 9 : The Industrial Revolution in England
In our last two chapters we had to deal with a revolution which was as rich in dramatic interest, and as obviously so, as any period in the history of the world. We have now to note a series of events the well-spring of which was Great Britain. This series is not usually connected by modern historians so as to be dignified by the name of a Revolution; but it is one nevertheless, and is at least as important in its bearing on the life of the modern world as that more startling and, on the surface, more terrible one in France.
In the last chapter wherein the condition of England was dealt with, we left it a prosperous country, in the ordinary sense of the word, under the rule of an orderly constitutionalism. There was no need here for the violent destruction of aristocratic privilege; it was of itself melting into money-privilege, and all was getting ready for the completest and securest system of the plunder of labor which the world had yet seen.
England was free in the bourgeois sense; that is, there were but a few checks, the survivals of earlier periods, to interfere with the exaction of the tribute which labor has to pay to property to be allowed to live. In a word, on the one hand exploitation was veiled; and on the other, the owners of property had no longer any duties to perform in return for the above-said tribute. Nevertheless, all this had to go on on a small scale for a while. Population had not increased largely since the beginning of the seventeenth century; agriculture was flourishing; one-thirtieth of the grain raised was exported from England; the working-classes were not hard pressed, and could not yet be bought and sold in masses. There were no large manufacturing towns, and no need for them; the presence of the material to be worked up, rather than the means for working it mechanically -- fuel, to wit -- gave a manufacturing character to this or that country-side. It was, for example, the sheep-pastures of the Yorkshire hill-sides, and not the existence of coal beneath them, which made the neighborhood of the (sic) northern Bradford a weaving country. Its namesake on the Wiltshire Avon was in those days at least as important a center of the clothing industry. The broadcloth of the Gloucestershire valleys, Devonshire and Hampshire kersies, Whitney blankets and Chipping Norton tweeds, meant sweet grass and long wool, with a little water-power to turn the fulling-mills, and not coal, to which material to be worked up was to be brought from the four quarters of the globe. The apparent condition of labor in those days seems almost idyllic, compared with what it now is: but it must be remembered that then as now the worker was in the hands of the monopolist of land and raw material; nor was it likely that the latter should have held his special privilege for two hundred years without applying some system by which it could be made the most of. Between the period of the decay of the craft-gilds and this latter half of the eighteenth century there had grown up a system of labor which could not have been applied to the mediæval workmen; for they worked for themselves and not for a master or exploiter, and thus were masters of their material and their tools and their time. This system is that of the Division of Labor; under it the unit of labor is not an individual man, but a group, every member of which is helpless by himself, but trained by constant practice to the repetition of a small part of the work, acquires great precision and speed in its performance. In short, each man is not so much a machine as a part of a machine. As, for example, it takes five men to make a glass-bottle: it is the group of these five men that makes the bottle, not any one of them. It is clear that under this system the individual workman is entirely at the mercy of his master the capitalist in his capacity of superintender of labor: in order not to be crushed by him, he must combine to oppose his own interests to those of his employer. It was by this system, then, that the demands of the growing world-market were supplied down to the end of the eighteenth century. The great political economist, Adam Smith, whose book was first published in 1771, marks the beginning of the transition between this system and that of the great machine industries; but his work implies throughout the Division of Labor system.
But that system was now to melt into the new one: the workman, from being a machine, was to become the auxiliary of a machine. The invention of the spinning- jenny by Hargreaves in 1760 is the first symptom of the beginning of this Industrial Revolution. From thence to the invention of steam as a motive-force, and thence again to our own days, the stream of invention has been continuous. The discovery that iron could be made with pit-coal removed the seat of the iron manufacture from the wooded countries of the south and west, where the old iron-works, called 'bloomeries', used to be carried on, to the northern and midland coal districts, and all manufacture of any importance flowed to the seat of fuel; so that South Lancashire, for instance, was changed from a country of moorland and pasture, with a few market towns and the ancient manufacturing city of Manchester, into a district where the 'villages', still so called, but with populations of fifteen or twenty thousand souls, are pretty much contiguous, and the country has all but disappeared. Of course a great part of this is the work of the years that have followed on the invention of railways; but even in the earlier period of this industrial revolution the change was tremendous and sudden and the sufferings of the working classes very great, as no attempt was made to alleviate the distress that was sure to be caused by the change from the use of human hands to machinery. Nor indeed could it have been made in a country governed by bourgeois constitutionalism until measures were actually forced on the government. In 1811 the prevailing distress was betokened by the first outbreak of the Luddites. These were organized bands of men who went about breaking up the machinery which was the immediate cause of their want of employment and consequent starvation. The locality where these riots were most frequent was the northern midland counties, where the newly-invented stocking-frames were specially obnoxious to them. The Luddites became the type of bodies of rioters who by a half-blind instinct throughout this period threw themselves against the advancing battalions of industrial revolution. In 1816, the year which followed the peace with France, the cessation of all the war industries threw more people still out of employment, and in addition the harvest was a specially bad one. As a consequence, this hunger insurrection was especially violent in that year. The riots were put down with corresponding violence, and the rioters punished with the utmost harshness. But as times mended somewhat this insurrection, which was, as we have said, a mere matter of hunger, and was founded on no principle, died out, although for a time riots having for their object destruction of property, especially of the plant and stock of manufacturers, went on through the whole of the first half of the century. The 'Plug Riots'(1), in the middle of the Chartist agitation, may be taken for an example of these.
It was a necessary consequence of the introduction of elaborate machinery that women and children should be largely employed in factories to diminish the number of adult males. This resource for the development of the profits of the new system was used by the manufacturers with the utmost recklessness, till at last it became clear to the bourgeois government that the scandal created by its abuse would put an end to its use altogether, unless something were done to palliate its immediate evils; and accordingly a series of Factory Acts were passed, in the teeth of the most strenuous and unscrupulous resistance on the part of the capitalists, who grudged the immediate loss which resulted in the hampering of the 'roaring trade' they were driving, even though it were for the ultimate benefit of their class. The first of these Acts which was really intended to work was passed in 1830, and they were consolidated finally in 1867. It should be understood that these Acts were not intended to benefit the great mass of adult workers, but were rather concessions to the outcry of the philanthropists at the condition of the women and especially the children so employed.
Meanwhile, in spite of all the suffering caused by the Industrial Revolution, it was impossible for the capitalists to engross the whole of the profits gained by it, or at least to go on piling them up in an ever-increasing ratio. The class struggle took another form, besides that of mere hunger riots and forcible repression, that of the Trade Unions. Although the primary intention of these was the foundation of benefit societies, as with the first guilds of the early Middle Ages, like them also they had soon to take in hand matters dealing with the regulation of labor. The first struggles of the trades' unions with capital took place while they were still illegal; but the repeal of the law against the combination of workmen in 1824 set them free in that respect, and they soon began to be a power in the country. Aided by the rising tide of commercial prosperity, which made the capitalists more willing to yield up some part of their enormous profits rather than carry on the struggle à l'outrance, they prevailed in many trade contests, and succeeding (sic) in raising the standard of livelihood for skilled workmen, though of course by no means in proportion to the huge increase in the sum of the national income. Further than this it was and is impossible for them to go so long as they recognize the capitalists as a necessary part of the organization of labor. It was not at first understood by the capitalist class that they did so recognize them, and consequently in the period of their early successes the trades' unions were considered mere revolutionists, and were treated to that kind of virulent and cowardly abuse and insult, which the shopkeeper in terror for his shop always has at his tongue[']s end.
The abolition of the corn-laws in 1847 and the consequent cheapening of necessary food for the workers, the discovery of gold in California and Australia, the prodigious increase in the luxury and expenditure of the upper and middle-classes, all the action and reaction of the commercial impulse created by the great machine industries, gave an appearance of general prosperity to the country, in which, as we have said, the skilled workmen did partake to a certain extent; and the views of middle-class optimists as to the continuance of bourgeois progress, and the gradual absorption of all the worthy part of the working-classes into its ranks seemed confirmed till within the last few years; all the more as the practical triumph of the Liberal party had ceased to make 'politics' a burning question. Nevertheless, as a sign that the underground lava had not ceased flowing, it was noticed that ever since the ripening of the great industries, in periods of about ten years came recurring depressions of trade; these were accounted for in various ingenious ways, but otherwise did not trouble the capitalist mind, which got to consider this also, because of its regular recurrence, as a sign of the stability of the present system, and merely looked upon it as a thing to be taken into the general average and insured against in the usual manner. But within the last few years this latest eternal bourgeois providence has failed us. The nations whom we assumed would never do anything but provide us with raw materials, have become our rivals in manufacture and our competitors in the world-market, while owing to the fact that America has enormous stretches of easily tilled virgin soil, which does not need manure, and that the climate of India makes it easy to support life there, those two countries supply us with such large amounts of grain, and at so cheap a rate, that raising it in England has become unprofitable; so that the farmers are poor, and the landlords cannot get the same rents for agricultural land as formerly. The exports have fallen off; towns where six years ago trade was flourishing and wages high, are now encumbered with a population which they cannot find employment for; and though from time to time there are rumors of improvement in trade, nothing comes of them, and people are obliged to await some stroke of magic which shall bring us back our old prosperity 'of leaps and bounds'.
The fact is that the commerce of the great industries has entered insensibly into its second stage, and mere cutthroat competition between the different nations has taken the place of the benevolent commercial despotism of the only nation which was thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution -- Great Britain, to wit.
This second stage is doubtless preparing the final one which will end with the death of the whole bourgeois commercial system. Meanwhile, what is the real social product of the Industrial Revolution? We answer the final triumph of the middle-classes, materially, intellectually, and morally. As the result of the great political revolution in France was the abolition of aristocratic privilege, and the domination in the world of politics of the bourgeoisie, which hitherto had had little to do with it, so the English Industrial Revolution may be said to have created a new commercial middle-class hitherto unknown to the world. This class on the one hand consolidated all the groups of the middle-class of the preceding epoch, such as country squires large and small, big farmers, merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, and professional men; and made them so conscious of their solidarity, that the ordinary refined and thinking man of to-day cannot really see any other class at all, but only outside his own class certain heterogeneous groups to be used as instruments for the further advancement of that class. On the other hand, it has attained such complete domination that the upper-classes are merely adjuncts to it and servants of it. In fact, these also are now of the bourgeois class, as they are all engaged in commerce in one way or other: eg., the higher nobility are all either house-agents or coal-factors, and would be of no importance without their 'businesses'. Moreover, striving ever to extend itself downward as well as upwards, the middle-class has absorbed so much in that direction, especially within the last thirty years, that it has now nothing left below it except the mere propertyless proletariat. These last are wholly dependent upon it, utterly powerless before it until the break up of the system which has created it, the signs of whose beginning we have just noted, shall force them into a revolt against it. In the course of that revolt this great middle-class will in its turn be absorbed into the proletariat, which will form a new Society in which classes will have ceased to exist. This is the next Revolution, as inevitable, as inexorable, as the rising of to-morrow's sun.
1 This meant destruction of boilers in factories, the rioters pulling out the plugs to ensure their bursting.back
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 31, 14 August 1886, PP. 156-158
• Chapter 10 : Political Movements in England
During the French Revolution, especially during its earlier stages there was a corresponding movement in England. It made some noise at the time, but was merely an intellectual matter, led by a few aristocrats -- eg., the Earl of Stanhope -- and had no sympathy with the life of the people; it was rather a piece of aristocratic Bohemianism, a tendency to which has been seen in various times, even our own. For the rest, there certainly was in England a feeling, outside this unreal republicanism -- a feeling of which Priestly the Unitarian may be looked on as a representative; this feeling was of the nature of that felt by respectable and thoughtful Radicals of later days, and was distinctly bourgeois, as the other was aristocratic.
The French Revolution naturally brought about a great reaction, not only in absolutist countries, but also in England, the country of Constitutionalism; and this reaction was much furthered and confirmed by the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France. We may take as representative names of this reaction the Austrian Prince Mettternich (sic) on the Continent and Lord Castlereagh in England. The stupid and ferocious repression of the governments acting under this influence, as well as the limitless corruption by which they were supported, were met in England by a corresponding progressive agitation, which was the beginning of Radicalism. Burdett and Cartwright are representatives of the earlier days of this agitation, and later on Hunt, Carlile, Lovett, and others. William Cobbett must also be mentioned as belonging to this period -- a man of great literary capacity of a kind, and with flashes of insight as to social matters far before his time, but clouded by violent irrational prejudices and prodigious egotism; withal a peasant rather than a bourgeois -- a powerful disruptive agent, but incapable of association with others. This period of Radical agitation was marked by a piece of violent repression in the shape of the so-called Peterloo Massacre, where an unarmed crowd at a strictly political meeting was charged and cut down by the yeomanry, and eleven people killed outright(1).
This agitation, which was partly middle-class and partly popular, was succeeded by the Chartist movement, which was almost exclusively supported by the people, though some of the leaders -- as Feargus O'Connor and Ernest Jones -- belonged to the middle-class. Chartism, on the face of it, was as much a political movement as the earlier Radical one; its program was wholly directed towards parliamentary reform; but as we have said, it was a popular movement, and its first motive power was the special temporary suffering of the people, due, as we said in our last chapter, to the disturbance of labor caused by the growth of the machine industry; and the electoral and parliamentary reforms of its program were put forward because it was supposed that if they were carried they would affect the material condition of the people directly: at the same time, however, there is no doubt that the pressure of hunger and misery gave rise to other hopes besides the above-mentioned delusion as to reform, and ideas of Socialism were current among the Chartists though they were not openly put forward on their program. Accordingly the class-instinct of the bourgeoisie saw the social danger that lurked under the apparently political claims of the charter, and so far from its receiving any of the middle-class sympathy which had been accorded to the Radical agitation, Chartism was looked upon as the enemy, and the bourgeois progressive movement was sedulously held aloof from it. It is worthy of note that Chartism was mainly a growth of the midland and northern counties -- that is, of the great manufacturing districts -- and that it never really flourished in London. In Birmingham the movement had the greatest force, and serious riots took place there while a Chartist conference was sitting in the town. The movement gave birth to a good deal of popular literature; and it must be remembered that the press was very strictly controlled by the Government. No paper was allowed to be issued without a stamp, the expense of which prevented the issue of cheap papers; and one of the incidents of the struggle was the determined opposition to this law kept up by some courageous agitators, who published unstamped papers in the teeth of the certain imprisonment that awaited them.
The Chartist movement went on vigorously enough till the insufficiency both of its aims and of knowledge as to how to carry them out found out the weak places in it. The immediate external cause of its wreck was the unfortunate schism that arose between the supporters of moral force and physical force in the body itself. The fantastic folly of supposing that there can be any 'moral force' in matters political which does not rest on the resolution of a party to attain their end by the use of what 'physical force' they may haye, if it should become necessary to use it, does not call for much comment here; although some thoughtless persons may even at present think that they believe such a 'moral force' exists. On the other hand, it is clear to us now that a Chartist revolt had no chance of success at that time, and but for self-deception would have been clear to both leaders and rank and file of the party then. It may here be mentioned that the trump-card which the Chartists were always thinking of playing was the organization of an universal strike, under the picturesque title of the Holy Month. In considering the enormous difficulties, or rather impossibilities, of this enterprise, we should remember that its supporters understood that the beginnings of it would be at once repressed forcibly, and that it would lead directly to civil war.
The truth is that there were two distinct groups in the party, one of which went about as far as our ultra-Radicals of the present day; and another which was at heart Socialist, only deficient in knowledge, and consequently without definite principles on which to base action; and these two groups pretty much corresponded to the division between the supporters of moral and physical force.
From 1842, when the schism came to a head, Chartism began to die out. Its decay, however, was far more due to the change that was coming over the economical state of affairs than even to its incomplete development of principle and ill-considered tactics. Things were settling down from the dislocation caused by the rise of the great industries. The workers shared in the added wealth brought about by enormous expansion of trade, although in an absurdly small proportion to the share of the middle-classes; but those classes tended ever to become more numerous and more contented. The trades' unions began to be powerful, and improved the prospects of the skilled workmen. So-called cooperation began to flourish: it was really an improved form of joint-stockery, which could be engaged in by the workmen, but was and is fondly thought by some to be if not a shoeing-horn to Socialism at least a substitute for it; indeed Chartism itself at this time became involved in a kind of half cooperative half peasant-proprietorship land scheme, which of course proved utterly abortive.
As this improvement in the condition of the working-classes weakened that part of the life of Chartism which depended on mere hunger desperation, so the growing political power in the middle-classes and the weakening of the mere Tory reaction swallowed up the political part of its life.
Chartism, therefore, flickered out in the years that followed 1842, but its last act was the celebrated abortive threat at revolt which took place in April 1848. And it must be said that there was something appropriate in such a last act. For this demonstration was distinctly caused by sympathy with the attacks on absolutism then taking place on the Continent, and Chartism was always on one side of it a part of the movement which was going on all over Europe, and was directed against the reaction which followed on the French Revolution, and which was represented by the 'Holy Alliance' of the absolutist sovereigns against both bourgeoisie and the people.
On the fall of Chartism, the Liberal Party, a nondescript and flaccid creation of bourgeois supremacy, a party without principles or definition, but a thoroughly adequate expression of English middle-class hypocrisy, cowardice, and short-sightedness, engrossed the whole of the political progressive movement in England, and dragged the working-classes along with it, blind as they were to their own interests and the solidarity of labor. This party has shown little or no sympathy for the progressive movement on the Continent, unless when they deemed it connected with their anti-Catholic prejudice. It saw no danger in the Cæsarism which took the place of the corrupt sham Constitutionalism of Louis Philippe as the head of the police and stock-jobbing régime, which dominated France in the interests of the bourgeoisie, and hailed Louis Napoleon with delight as the champion of law and order.
Any one, even a thoughtful person, might have been excused for thinking in the years that followed on 1848 that the party of the people was at last extinguished in England, and that the class-struggle had died out and given place to the peaceable rule of the middle-classes, scarcely disturbed by occasional bickerings carried on in a lawful manner between the two parties to that false free-contract, which is the lying foundation on which Commercial Society rests. But, as we shall show in a future chapter, under all this, Socialism was making great strides and developing a new and scientific phase, which at last resulted in the establishment of the International Association, whose aim was to unite the workers of the world in an organization which should consciously oppose itself to the domination of middle-class capitalism. The International was inaugurated in England in 1864, at a meeting held at St Martin's Hall, London, and at which Professor Beesly took the chair. It made considerable progress among the Trades' Unions, and made a great impression (beyond indeed what its genuine strength warranted) on the arbitrary Governments of Europe. It culminated in the Socialistic influence it had, in the Commune of Paris, of which we shall treat in a separate chapter. The International did not long out-live the Commune, and once more for several years all proletarian influence was dormant in England, except for what activity was possible among the foreign refugees living there, with whom some few of the English working-men had relations. From this connection sprang, however, a new movement, which we must barely mention, though it cannot yet be considered a matter of history. In 1881, an attempt was made to federate the various Radical Clubs into a body, with a program which, though for the most part merely Radical, had an infusion of Socialism in it, and which took the name of the Democratic Federation. The Radical Clubs, however, that had joined soon seceded, mostly from disagreement with the revolu- tionary attitude taken by the Federation on the Irish question. In 1883, the program became more definitely Socialistic, and the next year the title was changed to that of the Social Democratic Federation; but in the last days of 1884 differences of opinion which had been developing for some time, chiefly centering on the questions of Parliamentary Opportunism and Nationalism, ended in a secession which founded the Socialist League as a definite Revolutionary Socialist body early in 1885.
At the present time the Socialist bodies, though relatively small, tend to attract various elements to them; the discontent of the workmen with an outlook of ever increasing gloom; that also of the Ultra-Radicals unable to make any real impression on the dense mass of mingled Conservatism and Whiggery, which really governs the country. The aspirations of thoughtful people who have studied the works of the great Socialist thinkers; the permeation of Socialist feeling from its centers on the Continent; and lastly and chiefly the steady march of events towards a new state of Society, which is making itself felt even among those who are unconscious of the advance of Socialism, or hostile to it -- all these causes combining together, are forcing even England, the stronghold of middle-class domination, to pay attention to the subject, and will certainly before long form a new and powerful Party of the People, whose outlook will be far more hopeful than that of any of those we have told of; since its aim will no longer be partial or one-sided, but will be the realization of a new Society with new politics, ethics, and economics, in short, the transformation of civilization into Socialism.
1 The readers of Commonweal will find an article on this subject in the first number (Feb. 1885), by our comrade E. T. Craig, who was in Manchester at the time, though not an eye-witness. It is interesting to note that the scene of the massacre, St Peter's Fields, is now a mass of streets in the very center of the city of Manchester.back
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 33, 28 August 1886, PP. 170-171
• Chapter 11 : Reaction and Revolution on the Continent
When the great war which Napoleon waged against Europe came to an end by his defeat and ruin, France was once more handed over to the Bourbons, and Europe fell into the arms of reaction and sheer absolutism. The Holy Alliance, or union of reactionary monarchs, undertook the enterprise of crushing out all popular feeling, or even anything that could be supposed to represent it in the persons of the bourgeois.
But the French Revolution had shaken absolutism too sorely for this enterprise to have more than a very partial success even on the surface. The power of absolutism was undermined by various revolutionary societies, mostly (so-called) secret, which attracted to them a great body of sympathy, and in consequence seemed far more numerous and immediately dangerous than they really were. Still there was a great mass of discontent, mostly political in character, and by no means confined to the poorer classes.
This discontent went on gathering head, till in 1830, and again in 1848, it exploded into open revolt against absolutism all over Europe. This revolt, we must repeat, was in the main a mere counter-stroke to the reaction which was diligently striving to restore the aristocratic privilege which the French Revolution had abolished, and to sustain what of it had escaped its attack. In 1830 the revolt was purely bourgeois in character, and was in no sense social, but, as above said, political. In 1848 it had in some places a strong infusion of the proletarian element, which however was dominated by middle-class patriotism and ideas which led to the assertion and consolidation of nationalities. But a new element was present in these latter revolutionary movements, though at first it did not seem to influence their action much. This was the first appearance in politics of modern or scientific Socialism, in the shape of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, first published in 1847. The rise and development of this phase will be dealt with in detail further on; at present we can do no more than call attention to the steady and continuous influence of this last-born Socialism, compared with the rapid extinction of Babeuf's propaganda, although he had a numerous body of adherents; since this fact marks a very great advance in opinion since the end of the eighteenth century.
The general effect, however, at least as seen openly, of these insurrections was little more than the shaking of absolutism and the supplanting it in various degrees by middle-class constitutionalism; and also, as aforesaid, an added impulse to the consolidation of nationalities, which later on produced the unification of Italy and of Germany, and the assertion of the independence of the Hungarian nationality.
In France the outward effects of the insurrection were most obvious and lasted the longest; but the bourgeois republic which took the place of Louis Philippe's corrupt constitutional monarchy asserted itself tyrannically enough against the proletariat, and in consequence had no strength left to meet the political adventurer Louis Napoleon, whose plot against the republic received just as much resistance as gave him an excuse for the massacre of 4th of December 1851, by means of which he terrorized France for many years; although as to numbers it was quite insignificant compared with those which followed the taking of Paris by the bourgeois troops at the time of the fall of the Commune in 1871.
This successful stroke had really no relation to any foregoing reactionary dictatorship. It even professed to be founded on democratic feeling, though as a matter of fact it was the expression of the nonpolitical side of bourgeois life -- the social and commercial side -- the ideal of the shopkeeper grown weary of revolutions and anxious to be let alone to make money and enjoy himself vulgarly. Accordingly France settled down into a period of 'law and order', characterized by the most shameless corruption and repulsive vulgarity. She got at last into full swing of the rule of successful stock-jobbery which had already been established in England, and carried it on with less hypocrisy than ourselves, but perhaps with more open blackguardism.
To sustain this régime various showy military enterprises were undertaken, some of which it was attempted to invest with a kind of democratic sentiment. It was also of some importance to make at least a show of giving employment to the working classes of France. This principally took the form of the rebuilding of Paris and the restoration, or vulgarization, of the mediæval cathedrals and public buildings, in which France is richer than any other country; so that this apotheosis of middle-class vulgarity has left abiding tokens of its presence in a loss which can never be repaired. But in spite of this militarism and the attempt to gain the support of the proletarians by gifts of 'bread and pageants', discontent of various kinds sprang up and steadily increased. Moreover, the new birth of Socialism was beginning to bear fruits; the Communistic propaganda got firm hold of the city proletariat of France. Socialism was steadily preached in Paris at La Villete and Belleville, which latter, originally laid out and built upon as an elegant suburb for rich bourgeois, proved a failure, and became a purely workman's quarter in consequence.
While all this was going on underground as it were, the Cæsarism of the stock-exchange was also beginning to get the worst of it in the game of statecraft; and at last the results of the consolidation of nationalities which was the chief aim of the bourgeois revolt became obvious in the revival of the old animosities between Germany and France. Bismarck, who had become the attorney-dictator of Germany, had got to know the weakness of the showy empire of Louis Napoleon, and had a well warranted confidence in that carefully elaborated machine the German army. He laid a trap for the French Cæsar, who fell into it, perhaps not blindly, but rather driven by a kind of gambler's last hope, akin to despair.
A great race war followed, the natural and inevitable outcome of which was the hopeless defeat of the French army, led as it was by mere selfseekers and corrupt scoundrels, most of whom lacked even that lowest form of honor which makes a Dugald Dalgetty faithful to the colors under which he marches. The Second Empire was swept away. The new Republic proclaimed after the collapse at Sedan still kept up a hopeless resistance to the unbroken strength of Germany -- hopeless, since the corruption of the Empire still lived on in the bourgeois republic, as typified in the person of the political gamester Gambetta. Paris was besieged, and taken after a long resistance, which reflected infinite credit on the general population, who bore the misery of the siege with prodigious patience and courage; but no less disgrace on those who pretended to organize its defense, but who were really far more inclined to hand over the city to the Germans than allow it to gain a victory under the auspices of the revolution.
All this must be looked upon by us as Socialists as merely the prelude to the great drama of the Commune, whose aims and influence will form the subject of another chapter.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 35, 11 September 1886, P. 189
• Chapter 12 : The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Continental Movement Following It
In dealing with the great event of the Paris Commune, we must take for granted a knowledge of the facts, which are in a brief form accessible to all since the publication by the Socialist League of its pamphlet on the subject.
As we have stated before, the International was founded in 1864, under the leadership of Beesley, Marx, and Odger. In 1869, at the Congress of Basle, Marx drew it into the compass of Socialism; and though in England it still remained an indefinite labor-body, on the Continent it became at once decidedly Socialistic and revolutionary, and its influence was very considerable.
The progress of Socialism and the spreading feeling of the solidarity of labor was very clearly shown by the noble protest made by the German Socialists(1) against the war with France, in the teeth of a 'patriotic' feeling so strong in appearance that it might have been expected to silence any objectors from the first. The result of the war seemed to offer at least a chance for action to the rapidly increasing Socialist party, if they could manage to take advantage of it, to get into their hands the political power; and under the influence of the Internationalists, the French Socialists determined to take action if an immediate opportunity offered. Neither did the opportunity fail. The final defeat of the French army at Sedan brought on the fall of the Empire, when Republican France might perhaps have made terms with the invaders, whom the men of the Empire had challenged. But a resistance was organized by Gambetta, at the head of a stock-jobbing clique, whose interests, both commercial and political, forbade them to let the war die out, lest they should find themselves face to face with a people determined to be fleeced no longer. This resistance, sustained by the success with which this clique played on the sham patriotic or jingo feelings of the general population, was always quite hopeless from a military point of view, and brought the country to the verge of ruin. It also necessarily involved the German siege of Paris, the result of which was to throw a great deal of power into the hands of the city proletariat, since they at least were in earnest in their resistance to the foreign enemy, and the theatrical resistance necessary to the ambition of the political adventurers who posed as their leaders could not have a decent face to put upon it without their enthusiasm. In October, while the siege was still at its height, a rising headed by Blanqui nearly succeeded in overthrowing the bourgeois domination; and after the siege the possession of arms, especially cannon, by the proletariat, in the face of the disarmed and disorganized army under the bourgeois, afforded the opportunity desired by the Socialists. On the failure of Thiers' attempt to disarm Paris -- whether he expected it to succeed, or only designed it as a trap to enable him to fall with mere force of arms on Paris -- on this failure the insurrection took place, and the Central Committee, largely composed of members of the International, got into their hands the executive power, a great deal of which they retained during the whole of the existence of the Commune. Their position was strengthened by the fact that, apart from their aims towards the economical freedom of the proletariat, in their aspirations towards genuine federalization they were, in appearance as (sic) least, in accord with the Radicals who wished to see an advanced municipalism brought about.
As the movement progressed, it became more and more obvious that if the resistance to Thiers and the attempt to establish municipal independence for Paris was to succeed, it must be through the exercise of Socialist influence on the proletariat: the Radicals, therefore, were forced by the march of events into alliance with the Socialists. The Socialist element therefore came to the front, and enactments of a distinctly Socialistic nature were passed, involving the suspension of contract and abolition of rents; and both in these matters and in the decentralization which was almost the watchword of the Commune, the advance from the proceedings of the earlier revolutionists is clearly marked. Also, although the Opportunity for the establishment of the Commune was given by the struggle against foreigners, the international character of their aspirations was shown by the presence of foreigners in the Council of the Commune and in command of its troops. And though in itself the destruction of the Vendome Column may seem but a small matter, yet considering the importance attached generally, and in France particularly, to such symbols, the dismounting of that base piece of Napoleonic upholstery was another mark of the determination to hold no parley with the old jingo legends.
It should be noted that the risings which took place in other towns in France were not so much vanquished by the strength of the bourgeoisie, which at first found itself powerless before the people, but rather fell through owing to a want of fuller development of Socialism and a more vigorous proclamation of its principles.
The whole revolt was at last drowned in the blood of the workers of Paris. Certainly the immediate result was to crush Socialism for the time by the destruction of a whole generation of its most determined recruits. Nevertheless the very violence and excess of the bourgeois revenge have, as we can now see, tended to strengthen the progress of Socialism, as they have set the seal of tragedy and heroism on the mixed events of the Commune, and made its memory a rallying point for all future revolutionists.
However, the fall of the Commune involved that of the International. The immediate failure of its action was obvious, and blinded people to its indestructible principles. Besides, a period of great commercial prosperity visited the countries of Europe at this time. The French milliards which Germany had won as the prize of war were being turned over and over by the German bourgeois in their merry game of 'beggar-my-neighbor'. England was at the height of its period of 'leaps and bounds' -- a period now called by the German middle-classes themselves the 'swindle period'. Even France, in spite of her being the plundered country, recovered from the condition into which the war had thrown her with a speed which made the plunderer envy her. In short, it was one of those periods which prove to the bourgeois exploiter that he is positively right, in which the bettermost workman grows quite unconscious of the chain which binds him, and is contemptuously regardless of that which lies heavy on the laborer below him, to whom the prosperity or adversity of the rest of the world make little or no difference.
Internal dissensions, also, were at work within the International, and at the Congress of the Hague in 1872 it was broken up; and though it still existed as a name for the next year or two, the remaining fragments of it did nothing worth speaking of.
In Vienna, in 1871, the movement in sympathy with the Commune became threatening, but was repressed by the authorities, and several of the prominent members of the party were imprisoned for the part they had taken in a Socialist demonstration -- among others, Johann Most and Andreas Scheu.
For a while after the fall of the Commune the interest in the active side of the movement turns to Russia and Germany. In 1878 Nobiling and Hodel shot at the Emperor William; which event gave the occasion for the attack by Bismark (sic) on the rapidly increasing Socialist party in October 1878, when the repressive laws were enacted which have been in force ever since. The result of these laws, which suppressed meetings, papers, and other literature, has been to drive the movement into a purely parliamentary course. In spite of the repression, the party has not only succeeded in holding itself together, but has grown to large dimensions, numbering, according to official statements, 650,000.
In Russia the Socialist movement was, on the face of it, mixed up with nationalist and political agitation, which was natural in a country in the bonds of the crudest form of absolutism. Nevertheless the ultimate aim of the party is unmistakable, and the propaganda has been carried on with a revolutionary fervor and purity of devotion which have never been surpassed, if they have ever been equaled. The slaying of the Czar on March 13, 1881, with the tragic scenes that followed it, has been the most dramatic event which the Russian movement has given to the world; and it must be said of it that it has marked and initiated a new revolutionary period. Since that time the elements of Revolution have gathered force and cohesion; a sense of insecurity has come over the authority of 'law and order'; the sympathies of all people of honesty and good feeling have been attracted to the side of those suffering under mere open monstrous oppression; and men's minds generally have been opened to new ideas on the more insidious oppression under which labor groans in constitutionally governed countries.
The last stage of the great revolution inaugurated in France at the end of the eighteenth century seems destined to be reached at the end of the nineteenth -- if, indeed, that thing of rags and patches called 'Constitutional Government' can keep itself alive so long.
1 They also protested, at the end of the war, against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine.back
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 38, 2 October 1886, P. 210
• Chapter 13 : The Utopists: Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier
It is now necessary for us to turn for a while from the political progress of Socialism, to note the school of thinkers who preceded the birth of modern scientific or revolutionary Socialism. These men thought it possible to regenerate Society by laying before it its short-comings, follies, and injustice, and by teaching through precept and example certain schemes of reconstruction built up from the aspirations and insight of the teachers themselves. They had not learned to recognize the sequence of events which forces social changes on mankind whether they are conscious of its force or not, but believed that their schemes would win their way to general adoption by men's perception of their inherent reasonableness. They hoped to convert people to Socialism, to accepting it consciously and formally, by showing them the contrast between the confusion and misery of existing civilization, and the order and happiness of the world which they foresaw.
From the elaborate and detailed schemes of future Society which they built up they have been called the Utopists; the representatives of the different phases of their school are three most remarkable men, born within a few years of each other, whose aspirations and insight have done a very great deal to further the progress of Socialism, in spite of the incompleteness of their views.
Robert Owen was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in 1771, of a lower middle-class family; he became a successful manufacturer through his own industry and quick-wittedness in the beginning of the rise of the Great Machine Industries, when 'manufacturing' was advancing 'by leaps and bounds'. He was a born philanthropist in the better sense of the word, and from the first showed in all matters unbounded generosity and magnanimity. In the year 1800, when he was not yet thirty, he became the manager of the New Lanark Mills, and set to work on his first great experiment, which was briefly the conversion of a miserable, stupid, and vicious set of people into a happy, industrious, and orderly community, acting on the theory that man is the creature of his surroundings, and that by diligent attention to the development of his nature he can be brought to perfection. In this experiment he was entirely successful, but it was not in him to stop there, as the plain words he said of his success showed clearly enough: 'Yet these men were my slaves.'(1) He took part in all kinds of projects of a philanthropical nature, still founding all his action on his theory of the perfectibility of man by the amelioration of his surroundings, and became the first great champion of cooperation, although he did not suppose, as the cooperators of the present day do, that anything short of universal cooperation would solve the social question. In 1815, he pressed a meeting of Glasgow manufacturers to petition Parliament to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills, and the change which he experienced from the approbation of the governing classes to their reprobation, may well date from that proceeding of his, as a bourgeois biographer of his hints. But he still kept his position of a popular philanthropist, even after his declaration in favor of cc-operation, until he at last cut himself off from respectability, by openly attacking Society through its received religions (August 21, 1816), from which date onward he was scouted by all that 'Society', of which he was now the declared enemy. But he was in nowise daunted. In 1823, he proposed Communistic villages as a remedy fo the distress in Ireland; he established, in 1832, an exchange in Gray's Inn Road, in which labor was equitably exchanged against labor; and in 1825 he bought New Harmony from a community already established there (the Rappites), and made his great experiment in living in common; and late in life he published his 'Book of the New Moral World', which contains the exposition of his doctrine.
It will be thus seen that he was unwearied in practical experiments. His shortcoming was the necessary one of the utopist, a total disregard of the political side of progress; he failed to see that his experiments, useful as they were from that point of view, could never develope (sic) out of the experimental state as long as the governors of Society forcibly uphold the so-called 'rights of property', and he ignored the antagonism of classes necessarily existing under this system, and which in the long run must bring about the Socialism which he, the most generous and best of men, spent his whole life in attempting to realize. He died in 1858.
Saint Simon was born of a noble family at Paris in 1760. He acquired and ran through a fortune, deliberately experimenting in the various forms of 'life' from extravagance to abject poverty. There was in him none of that tendency to practical experiment in quasi-Socialistic schemes which characterized Robert Owen. His philosophy was mingled with a mysticism which had a tendency to increase, a tendency to form a new religion rather than to realize a new condition of life, and which was carried into the absurdities of a kind of worship by his immediate followers, more or less imitated by the Positivists of our own day, whose founder, Auguste Comte, was his most cherished disciple. His Socialism was of a vague kind, and admitted the existence of classes of talent as expressed by the motto of Saint Simonism, 'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his deeds'. In spite, however, of the tendency to mysticism, he showed singular flashes of insight in matters historical and economic, and intellectually was certainly ahead of Robert Owen. He may be said to have set himself the task of learning all life by whatever means and at whatever expense, in order to devote himself to the new religion, 'whose great aim is the swiftest possible amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poorest and most numerous class'.
Frederick Engels well says of him: 'As early as his "Letters from Geneva", Saint Simon laid down that all men ought to work, and that the Reign of Terror had been the reign of the non-possessing masses. To face the fact in 1802 that the French Revolution was a struggle between the noblesse, the bourgeoisie, and the non-possessing classes was a discovery of genius. In 1816 he asserted that politics were but the science of production, and predicted their absorption by economy. The knowledge that economic conditions serve as the base of political institutions only shows itself here in the germ; nevertheless, this proposition contains clearly the conversion of the political government of men into an administration of things and a direction of the process of production; that is to say, the abolition of the State, of which such a noise has since been made'.
Internationalism also was clearly enunciated by Saint Simon. We quote Engels again: 'With an equal superiority over the views of his contemporaries, he declared in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815 during the war of the hundred days, that the sole guarantee of the peace and prosperous development of Europe, was an alliance between France and England, and of those two countries with Germany. Certainly it needed a courage by no means common to preach to the French of 1815 alliance with the victors at Waterloo.'
It is worth noting that one of the schemes of the Saint Simonians, which was most ridiculed at the time, was the cutting of the Isthmuses of Suez and Panama, and that M. de Lesseps was a Saint Simonian.
Saint Simon died in great poverty in 1825, with words of hope for the future of the party on his lips.
Charles Fourier was born in 1772 at Lyons; his father was a draper. He lost his property in the Revolution, and afterwards went into business as a broker. Amid his dealings with Society, he was early struck by the shortcomings and injustices of individualism and competition. In his first book, 'The Theory of the Four Movements', he elaborates the proposition that human nature is perfectible through the free play of the appetites and passions, and asserts that misery and vice spring from the restraints imposed by Society. His criticism of modern Society is most valuable as anticipating that of scientific Socialism; unlike his contemporaries he has an insight into the historical growth of Society: 'He divides it into four periods of development, Savagery, Barbarism, Patriarchalism, and Civilization, meaning by the latter the Bourgeois Civilization(2).' His saying, 'In civilization poverty is born even of superabundance', may well be noted in these days, and compared with Robert Owen's in 1816, 'Our best customer, the war, is dead'.
As a basis of the reconstruction of Society, Fourier advocated Industrial Cooperation; but here his Utopianism led him to the trap of formulating dogmatically an electorate scheme of life in all its details, a scheme which could never be carried out, however good the principlse (sic) on which it was based might be. His scheme arranges for phalanxsteries as the unit of cooperation, in which all life and all industry, agricultural and other, should be carried on, and all details are carried out by him most minutely, the number of each phalanxtery being settled at 1600 souls. His most valuable idea was the possibility and necessity of apportioning due labor to each capacity, and thereby assuring that it should be always pleasurable, and his dictum that children, who generally like making dirt- pies and getting into a mess, should do the dirty work of the community, may at least be looked on as an illustration of this idea, though laid down as a formal law. His system was not one of pure equality, but admitted distinctions between rich and (comparatively) poor; and advocated a fantastic division of wealth between labor, capital, and talent. The abolition of marriage was a tenet of his doctrine.
In 1812, Fourier's mother died and left him some property, and he retired into the country to write his 'Treatise on the Association of Domesticity and Agriculture'. Afterwards he came to Paris again, became a clerk in an American firm, and wrote in 1830 his 'New Industrial World'. It is lamentable to have to relate that in 1831 he wrote attacking both Owen and St Simon as charlatans, in spite of the curious points of resemblance he had to either of them. He died in 1837, but not till he had founded a school, of which Victor Considerans, author of the 'Destinée Sociale', was the most distinguished member. The Fourierists started a paper in 1832, which expired in two years, but was revived in 1836, and finally suppressed by Government in 1850. A scheme for realizing the Phalanxtery experimentally was set on foot in 1832 by a deputy of France, but it failed for lack of funds; so that of the three great Utopists, Owen was the only one who had the fortune, good or bad as it may be considered, of seeing his schemes tried by experience. Cabet, indeed, a revolutionist of '48, founded a community in America under the name of Icaria, which was (and is, for it still exists) more nearly an approach to genuine Communism than any of the other communities which have owed their origin to Utopian Socialism. Of these communities there remains a word to be said as a warning to those who are young in Socialism. Although as experiments in association something may be learned from them, their conditions of life have no claim to the title of Communism, which most unluckily has often been applied to them. Communism can never be realized till the present system of Society has been destroyed by the workers taking hold of the political power. When that happens it will mean that Communism is on the point of absorbing and transmuting Civilization.
1.Yet in 1806, when owing to the rise in cotton he could not continue manufacturing, he stopped the mills and paid his people their full wages till he could go on again in fou months time, a prodeeding which cost him £7000back.
2.Frederick Engels in 'Socialisme Utopique', and 'Socialisme Scientifique', as also the quotations aboveback.
Commonweal, Volume 2, Number 42, 30 October 1886, PP. 242 - 243
• Chapter 14 : The Transition from Utopists to Modern Socialism
Of the Socialist thinkers who serve as a kind of link between the Utopists and the school of the Socialism of historical evolution, or scientific Socialists, by far the most noteworthy figure is Proudhon who was born at Besançon in 1809. By birth he belonged to the working-class, his father being a brewer's cooper, and he himself as a youth followed the occupation of cowherding.
In 1838, however, he published an essay on general grammar, and in 1839 he gained a scholarship to be held for three years, a gift of one Madame Suard to his native town. The result of this advantage was his most important though far from his most voluminous work, published the same year, as the essay which the Madame Suard's scholars were bound to write: it bore the title of 'What is Property?' his answer being, Property is Robbery.
As may be imagined, this remarkable essay caused much stir and indignation, and Proudhon was censured by the Besançon Academy for this production, and narrowly escaped a prosecution. In 1841 he was tried at Besançon for a letter he wrote to Victor Considerant, the Fourierist, but was acquitted. In 1846 he wrote his 'Pholisophie de la Misère' (Philosophy of Poverty), which received an elaborate reply and refutation from Karl Marx.
In 1847 he went to Paris. In the Revolution of 1848 he showed himself a vigorous controversialist, and was elected Deputy for the Seine; he wrote numerous articles in several journals, mostly criticisms of the progress of the revolution: in the Chamber he proposed a tax of one-third to be levied on all interest and rent, which was, as a matter of course, rejected. He also put forward a scheme for a mutual credit bank, by which he hoped to simplify exchange and reduce interest to a vanishing point: but this scheme was also rejected.
After the failure of the revolution of '48, Proudhon was imprisoned for three years, during which time he married a young woman of the working-class.
In 1858 he developed his system of 'Mutualism' fully in his last work, entitled 'Justice in the Revolution and the Church'. In consequence of the publication of this book he had to retire to Brussels, but was amnestied in 1860, came back to France, and died at Passy in 1865.
Proudhon's opinions and works may be broadly divided into two periods: In his 'What is Property?' his position is that of a Communist pure and simple; but after this one clear development of a definite thesis we meet in his works, and we must add, in his political actions also, with so much paradox that it is next to impossible to formulate in brief any definite Proudhonian doctrine. At one time a Communist, at another the vehement opponent of Communism; at one time professing Anarchy, at another lending himself to schemes of the crudest State Socialism; at one time an enthusiastic Theist, at another apparently as strong an Atheist; in one passage of his works giving his eager adhesion to Auguste Comte's worship of women, in another a decided contemner of the female sex, -- it is with a sense of confusion that one rises from the perusal of his works.
His connection with the Revolution of '48 seems to have been the turning point in the history; in his address to the electors of the Seine, in which he put forward the scheme for a credit bank backed by a number of decrees of a State- Socialistic nature, and strongly smacking of Bismarck, he announces himself as the man who said Property is Robbery, says that he still maintains that opinion, and then goes on to defend the rights of property which he had so successfully annihilated in his first work.
But as to his political career, the element he had to work in was an impossible one for the success of a man holding definite Socialistic ideas. On the one hand were the Jacobins with their archæological restorations of the ideas and politics of 1789; on the other Socialism showing itself and taking hold of people's minds, but attempting to realize its doctrines by crude dislocated and consequently hopeless schemes of action. Into all these affairs Proudhon looked shrewdly and with insight, and his bitter criticisms of the confusion' of the period were shown by the event to have been well founded.
Proudhon defended the modern family and monogamy in its strictest sense, and does not seem to have troubled himself to study the history of those institutions even superficially: in short, he seems to have been singularly lacking in the (sic) historical sense, and had not formed any conception of the evolution of society. Those who read his works will find themselves forced to return to his first essay, 'What is Property?' if they are seeking in him for any consistent series of ideas. He was an eager and rough controversialist, and his style is brilliant and attractive in spite of its discursiveness.
We may now mention the names of two men of no great importance in themselves, but worth noting as forerunners of the sentimental Socialists and Christian Socialists of the present day. Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais (born 1782, died 1854), is the type of the Christian Socialist: he was intended for a priest from the first, and duly took orders. He began by efforts to reform the Catholic Church, so as to make it an effective instrument for happiness and social morality and reform. He expected to be helped and encouraged by the clergy in these efforts, and at first, before they perceived their real tendency, he received some acknowledgment from them. At last, in his paper L'Avenir (the future), he took so decidedly a democratic turn that he incurred the animosity of the whole Church, especially of the then Pope, Gregory XVI. The signal for his complete rupture with the Church, however was the publication (in 1834) of his 'Paroles d'un Croyant' (words of a believer), which the Pope characterized as 'small in size but immense in perversity'. After that he became thoroughly democratic or even Communistic, as Communism was then understood. A series of political works and pamphlets followed, all in the sense of his new departure. He started, in 1848, two papers, one after another, which were suppressed. He sat in the Republican Constituent Chamber till the coup d'etat; and while Deputy drew up for the Left a plan of Constitution which was rejected as too revolutionary. He was buried by his own direction without ecclesiastical rites.
Pierre le Roux (born 1798, died 1871) was originally a disciple of St Simon. In 1840 he published his most important work, 'De L'Humanité', whence the name of his school, the Humanitarians. He joined George Sand and Niardof in a literary review, and it was owing to this connection that the humanitarian tendencies of some of her novels are to be traced. In 1843 he set on foot a co- operative printing association, and started a journal advocating cooperation, or as he termed it, 'the pacific solution of the problem of the proletariat'. He also sat in the Republican Chamber of 1848: was exiled in 1851 and lived in Jersey, not returning to France till 1869. He died in Paris under the Commune, who deputed two of its members to attend his funeral, in the words of the Official Journal, 'not in honor of the partizan of the mystical ideas of which we now feel the evil, but of the politician who courageously undertook the defense of the vanquished after the days of June'. This is an allusion to the unpractical and nonpolitical tendency of his teaching, which undertook to reform society by the inculcation of morality blended with mysticism, the result of which was to be the gradual spread of voluntary cooperation.
We finish this series with the well-known name of Louis Blanc, a personage more important than the last-named, and more definitely Socialistic in principles than either he or Lamennais, though his political career finished in a way unworthy of those principles, even if we accept the excuse that he never grasped the great truth that only through the class struggle can the regeneration of society be accomplished. He was born in 1813, of a middle-class family which, on the maternal side, was Corsican, and an incident of the relations between him and his brother Charles is said to have suggested to Dumas his famous novelette and play of the 'Corsican Brothers'.
In 1840 he 'published his 'Organization of Labor', the ideas of which he attempted to realize in his famous 'National Workshops', by which he is best known. In this work he put forward the genuine Socialistic maxim of 'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs' as the basis of the production of a true society.
He took an active part in the Revolutionary Government of 1848, and got an edict passed abolishing the punishment of death for political offenses. And we ought here to notice that the common impression that his National Workshops failed from inherent defects is wrong; they were suppressed as dangerous by the Government, and their suppression was largely instrumental in causing the June revolution. We must, however, also note that this scheme was not founded on purely Socialistic principles, dangerous as it was thought to be at the time. In consequence of the events of June Louis Blanc was compelled to flee from France to England, where he wrote his 'History of the French Revolution'.
He returned to France 1869, was elected to the legislative body, but played only a subordinate part in the stirring times that followed. It remains, indeed, an indelible stain on his character that he deserted the cause of the people in the days of March, leaving Paris to sit among the 'Liberals' in the reactionary Chamber at Versailles.
He died in 1883, having outlived his reputation and influence.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 56, 5 February 1887, PP. 42 - 43
• Chapter 15 : Scientific Socialism - Karl Marx
The foregoing chapters on modern Socialists may be regarded as leading up to the full development of the complete Socialist theory, or as it is sometimes called, 'scientific' Socialism. The great exponent of this theory, and the author of the most thorough criticism of the capitalistic system of production, is the late Dr Karl Marx.
He was born in 1818 at Treves, his father being a baptized Jew holding an official position in that city. He studied for the law in the University of Bonn, passing his examination with high honors in 1840. In 1843 he married Jenny von Westphalen, sister of the well-known Prussian statesman of that name. Philosophy and political economy, with especial reference to the great social problems of the age, were his special studies on leaving the university. These studies led him towards Socialism, the result of which was that he felt compelled to decline the offer of an important government post. About this time he left Treves for Paris, where he became coeditor with Arnold Rug‚ of the Deutsch-Franzüsischen Jahrbücher; and he also edited the Socialist journal Vorwärts; but in less than a twelvemonth he was compelled to leave France for Brussels. In March 1848 he was driven from Belgium and fled to Cologne, where the revolutionary ferment was at its height. He at once undertook the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung, the leading revolutionary journal, which was suppressed on the collapse of the revolutionary movement in 1849.
We should mention that in 1847, in conjunction with his life-long friend, Frederic Engels, he put forward the celebrated 'Communist Manifesto', which subsequently served as the basis of the International Association.
After 1849 he went to Paris again, where he remained but a short time, and then left France for London, remaining there with brief intermissions till his death, which took place in the spring of 1883.
The principal part he took in political action during his sojourn in England was the organization of the International Association.
The most important among his works besides 'Das Kapital' are 'Die Heilige Familie', written in conjunction with Frederic Engels; the 'Misere de Ia Philosophie', the answer to Proudhon mentioned in our last article; '18 Brumaire', an anti-Napoleonic pamphlet; and 'Zur Kritik der Politischer Economic', which laid the foundation for his great work 'Das Kapital'.
The importance of this latter work makes it necessary for us to indicate the contents of the principal chapters, so as to form a brief sketch of the Socialist economy(1).
Part I deals with Commodities and Money. The first chapter defines a commodity. A commodity according to Marx is briefly expressed as a socially useful product of labor which stands in relation to other similar useful products of labor. The value of such a commodity is primarily the amount of necessary social labor contained in it: that is to say, the average amount of labor carried through a certain portion of time necessary to its production in a given state of society. The young student must take special note that when Marx uses the word value by itself it is always used in this sense; ie., to put it in a shorter form, as embodied average human labor. The term Use-value explains itself. Exchange-value means the relation of one commodity to another or to all others. The ultimate issue of the various expressions of Value is the money form: but in the words of Marx, the step to the money-form 'consists in this alone, that the character of direct and universal exchangeability -- in other words, that the universal equivalent form -- has now by social custom become identified with the substance gold'.
The second chapter deals with Exchange. Exchange, says Marx, presupposes guardians or owners of commodities, since these cannot go to market of themselves. A commodity possesses for the owner no use-value where he seeks to exchange it: if it did, he would not seek to exchange it. 'All commodities', says Marx, 'are nonuse values for their owners and use values for their non-owners. Consequently they must all change hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realizes them as values. Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values.'
Commodities, then, find their universal value represented by one commodity from among them, which has in itself no use-value unless it be that of representing or of symbolizing the abstract quality of value.
Chapter III deals with the circulation of commodities under the money form. Here Marx very justly observes: 'It is because all commodities as values are realized human labor, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their value -- ie., into money. Money as a measure of value is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labor time.'
This long and important chapter proceeds to discuss the theory of circulating money or of currency at considerable length and in great detail. The subject is one of such importance and with respect to which so many fallacies are afloat, that we propose to devote our next article to an exposition of its leading features.
1.We must remind the reader that we do not profess to offer more than some hints to the student of Marx. Anything approaching to an abstract of 'Das Kapital' would take up space far beyond the limits of the present little workback.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 59, 26 February 1887, PP. 66 - 67
• Chapter 16 : Scientific Socialism - Karl Marx II Money
We have now come to the point where it is necessary to consider the circulation of commodities; the first means to this circulation is the establishment of a tertium quid, or universal equivalent. And in order to have a really universal equivalent it is necessary that use-value should be eliminated from it, since such an equivalent is required to express not the diverse qualities of all the various commodities, but the relative quantity of embodied human labor which they severally contain.
Money as a mere measure of value is imaginary and ideal, but the bodily form of it must express quantitively equivalent abstract value -- ie., labor -- and takes the form of the precious metals, finally of gold.
Gold has come to be the bodily form taken by the universal measure of value, partly because of its natural qualities -- portability, durability, etc., but chiefly because the course of history has invested it with this function; and also because its value, instead of changing from, say, week to week, as is the case with other commodities, changes rather from century to century, so that its value may be considered stable relatively to them, just as one speaks of indigo as a permanent dye, which it is relatively to other dyes, although none are absolutely permanent(1).
Paper money is promises to pay gold, which is directly exchangeable with all other commodities. Paper money, therefore, is merely a symbol of the exchange really effected by gold. This universal equivalent takes the place of barter, which is the primitive and direct form of exchange(2), and at which stage the distinction between buyer and seller has not arisen. It now gives place to the first form of indirect exchange, in which a third term is interposed between the articles which are to be parted with and acquired. Now for the first time the above distinction takes shape. The seller has a commodity which he does not propose to consume, and therefore he acquires with it money, with which money he buys in turn another commodity equal in quantity to that with which he has parted, but different from it in quality. Marx has formulated this transaction by the well-known and useful formula, Commodity, Money,Commodity: C - M - C.
The habit of hoarding which is common among ancient societies, and also among barbarous peoples, is a natural concomitant of this stage of exchange, and is the first germ of Capital. It is brought about by the arrest of the above process at its first phase thus, C - M -- the seller of the commodity does not go on to buy. Under these conditions money becomes a social power; and being a commodity like other commodities, can be acquired by private persons, whom it invests with social power. Therefore in those states of society which had not outgrown their primitive social ethics, money was considered the embodiment of all evil.
This stage of exchange marks the pre-commercial use of money; after a while it tends to develope (sic) into another stage, which carries the exchange a step further. The holder of a commodity which he does not propose to consume exchanges it for money, which he again exchanges for a commodity to be used, not for his personal consumption but to be exchanged once more for money. He would have no object in doing this if his aim were merely that of the simple exchanger (C. M. C.), namely, to obtain an article of consumption different in kind to that which he has exchanged, since in money there is no inherent difference of quality and therefore whatever difference there may be must be one of quantity. Accordingly the object of the exchanger in this second stage is amount, not kind. In going through his process of exchange (the formula for which may be stated thus: C - M - C - M - C ), the second quantum of money must be more than the first, or else he will have failed in his object; will have made a bad bargain, as the phrase goes. On the other hand, though this form of exchange differs essentially it nevertheless connects itself with the earlier form, in which money occurs only as the middle term between commodity and commodity, thus distinguishing it from simple barter, because even in the later form the result of the merchant's transaction is a commodity with which he intends to begin a fresh transaction --
C - M - C - M - C.
This is the form of exchange which was the practice of the developed classical world in its commercial operations. The break up of the Roman Empire, and the confusion that followed, dislocated this commerce, and largely brought exchange back again to its earlier and simple form of the exchange of a commodity for money with which to buy another commodity to be consumed, which was for the most part the character of the exchange of the Middle Ages.
This second form of exchange leads without a break into the third or modern form of Capitalistic Exchange, in which the exchanger, beginning with money, buys a commodity in order to exchange it for money; which money, as in the foregoing stage, must be more in quantity than that with which he began, or his transaction will be a failure. This process differs from that of the last-mentioned stage of exchange in that the result of the transaction is always money, and not a commodity (that is, a use-value), the latter in the long-run appearing only nominally in the transaction.
To make this clearer, we may give concrete examples of the three forms of exchange:
In the first stage, illustrated by the proceedings of the Craftsman of the time of Homer, which were pretty much those of the Mediæval Craftsman also, the village potter sold his pots and with the money he got for them, which, possible trickery apart, represented just the value or embodied labor of the pots, he bought meal, oil, wine, flesh, etc., for his own livelihood and consumed them.
The merchant of the later classical period shipped, say, purple cloth from Sidon to Alexandria, sold his cloth there, and with the money bought gum-Arabic (from the Soudan) and frankincense (from Arabia), which he sold at Athens, where again he shipped oil for another market. He always handled the actual goods he professed to trade in, and the wares which he thus exchanged against the universal equivalent, money, were of various kinds. Similar commerce went on in the Middle Ages, as with the merchants of Amalfii, Venice, etc., side by side with the primitive exchange of the feudal manor, and the market- town with its corporation and gilds.
The modern man of Commerce necessarily begins his transaction with money. He buys, say, indigo, which he never sees, receives for it more money than he gave for it, and goes on steadily in this process, dealing (unlike the ancient carrier-merchant) with one class of goods only; and all the goods in which he deals represent to him so much money: they are only present in his transactions nominally. Money is the be-all and end-all of his existence as a commercial man.
This is an example of the pure form of capitalistic exchange, wherein money is exchanged for commodities, and these again for money plus an increment; the formula for which, as given by Marx, is M - C - M.
The next question we have to consider is how the surplus, the increment above-mentioned, obtained by this process of exchange is realized, -- or, in plain language, where it comes from.
1. As a deduction from this, we may say that while on the one hand there was no abstract necessity for the measure of value taking the form of gold, though there was a necessity for it to take a form embodying a certain definite amount of labor; on the other hand, since it has taken that form, labor notes, or mere promises to pay which are of no value in themselves, cannot as long as exchange lasts take the place of gold, which is a commodity having a value in itself and the particular commodity which has assumed that function through historical selectionback.
2. There are transitional stages between barter pure and simple and exchange operated by a universal equivalent, which only partly fulfiled (sic) this office: eg., cattle, in the primitive ancient period, from which the name for money (pecunia) is derived; or ordinary woolen cloth, as in the curious and rather elaborate currency of the Scandinavians before coin was struck in Norway: which currency, by the way, has again, in the form of blankets, been used even in our own times in the Hudson Bay Territoryback.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 61, 12 March 1887, P. 82
• Chapter 17 : Scientific Socialism - Conversion of Capital into Money
Says Marx: 'The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital: the production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical groundwork from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.
The great representative of this circulation is money, which is the first form in which capital appears. In history, money presents itself to us as opposed to land: the merchant is opposed to the landowner; an antithesis which struck people so much at one period that they expressed it by means of a double proverb -- 'No land without a lord', and 'Money has no master'. This is, in fact, another way of stating the antithesis between the Mediæval basis of property, viz., status, a recognized position in the great feudal hierarchy, and contract, the commercial basis, on which is built the position of the modern exploiter.
We must now see how capital is born, and the manner in which it works after it has been born.
It is born out of the operation expressed by the formula M -- C -- M, which we had to take note of in our last chapter. The M in this operation, as we stated before, implies always quantity and not quality; the second M not representing merely the money the operation was begun with, but an increased sum, otherwise the operation would be meaningless. It remains to be seen how this increase has taken place.
It cannot have happened by the mere process of exchange; because that would mean that the whole capitalistic class was living by getting the better of the whole capitalistic class, which is impossible. The increase of money in the capitalistic process must come out of the laboring or productive class.
The modus operandi of this capital-making must now be noted. The laboring class is necessary to the production of capital, and the laboring class in a peculiar condition: the laborer, to be fitted for the purpose of the capitalist, must be submitted to the operation of the free competition of the capitalist in the market; that is, his labor-power must be; for with the man himself of course the capitalist has nothing whatever to do; neither will his own position as capitalist allow him to consider himself as a man; according to the well-known proverb 'Business is business'. This position of the laborer is what is understood by the phrase of a 'free laborer': his labor-power must be bought and sold in the market on the same terms as any other commodity; there must be no interference with his selling it at the price which it will fetch, a high price when the competition among the capitalists is brisk, a low price when it is slack; and as he has no other commodity to sell except his labor-power, he is compelled so to sell it -- to be a 'free laborer'.
It is clear that this relation between the capitalist and the laborer is a conventional and not a natural one; nature does not produce men who from the first are possessors of money which it is their business to turn into capital, nor on the other hand does she produce men who are possessors of labor-power which they are compelled to sell in the free and open market to other men. As a consequence this relation is not common to all historical periods; but has developed from many economical revolutions, which have successively extinguished prior forms of social production.
It will be seen, then, that in the fully developed commercial period the capitalist, the reason for whose existence is the turning of money into capital, and who is the owner and the organizer of the whole of production, cannot carry on his business without having ready to his hand a class who are an adjunct of the machinery necessary to his business, and who, on their side, have no other reason for existence, so long as they are duly obedient to the system under which they live, save acting as such portion of this machinery.
We have now come to the subject of surplus-value, from which is derived profit, rent, and interest. This will form the subject of our next chapter.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 63, 26 March 1887, P. 101
• Chapter 18 : Scientific Socialism - The Production of Surplus Value - That is, of Rent, Interest, and Profit
The problem to be resolved is as follows. The owner of money has to buy his commodities at their value, and to sell them at their value, and nevertheless at the end of the process to realize a surplus. This is the end and aim of his existence as a capitalist, and if he does not accomplish it, he is as a capitalist a mere failure. So that his development from the mere money owner to the full-blown capitalist has to take place at once within the sphere of circulation and without it: that is, he must follow the law of the exchange of commodities, and nevertheless must act in apparent contradiction to that law. This problem cannot be solved merely by means of the money which he owns, the value of which is, so to say, petrified. As Ricardo says, 'In the form of money, capital has no profit'. As money, it can only be hoarded.
Neither can the surplus originate in the mere re-sale of the commodity, 'which does no more than transform the article from its bodily form back into its money form'. The only alternative left is the change should originate in the use-value of the article bought with the money in the first instance and on which the capitalist has to operate.
'In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend Moneybags must be so lucky as to find within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption therefore is itself an embodiment of labor, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labor, or labor-power.'
By labor-power or the capacity for labor Marx understands the whole of the mental and physical capacities in a human being which are brought into action in the production of commodities; in short, the man and all that is in him as a wealth-producing machine.
Now in order that the possessor of money should find this necessity to the accomplishment of his end and aim - viz., labor-power as a commodity of the market, various conditions are requisite.
The man who is to exercise the labor-power for the capitalists' benefit -- the laborer -- must be 'free', that is, his labor must be at his own disposal, and also he must have nothing else to dispose of for his livelihood but his labor-power. On the other hand, any one who has to live by getting commodities other than labor-power must own the means of production, and also the means of subsistence while the commodities are being got ready for the market, and being converted into money.
As to the value of this article necessary to the life of the capitalist, this labor-power, it is estimated like the value of every other commodity by the average time necessary for its production or reproduction; that is the average time necessary in a given state of society; and in plain language this reproduction of labor-power means the maintenance of the laborer. 'Given the individual, the production of labor-power consists in the reproduction of himself -- or his maintenance.'
Labor-power is realized only in action, that is, when it has become actual labor, and is producing a commodity; so that, 'the value of labor-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of those means, or with the quantity of labor requisite for their production'.
The minimum limit of the value of labor-power is therefore determined by the value of these means. If the price of labor-power falls below that minimum it is destroyed: a haggling as to its price has to be gone through between the buyer and the seller, and the price is fixed by contract, though it is not realized until the article is consumed. From what is stated above, it will be seen that this contract is made between two parties; on the one hand the workman, or machine for production, who has no means of producing, on the other the possessor of money who has all the means necessary for working the machine and has therefore become a capitalist. 'He who was before the money-owner now strides in front as a capitalist: the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market, and has nothing to expect but -- a hiding.'
The labor process necessary to Capitalism exhibits two characteristic phenomena: first the laborer works under the control of a capitalist, and secondly the product of the laborer is the property of a capitalist, and not of the laborer, its immediate producer. This product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, 'as for example yarn, or boots'; says Marx with a grin, 'but although boots are in one sense the basis of all social progress and our capitalist is a decided 'progressist', the capitalist does not for his special purpose look upon them as boots, or any other use-value. He has primarily two objects in view: first he wants to produce a use-value, not, again, for the sake of its use, but in order that he may exchange it; and next, in order that his exchange may be fruitful to him, he wants to produce a commodity the value of which shall be greater than the sum of the values used in producing it -- that is, the means of production and the labor-power.'
This he is able to accomplish as follows. He buys the use of the labor-power of the workman for a day, while a certain duration of labor in the day is enough to reproduce the workman's expended labor-power -- that is, to keep him alive. But the human machine is in all cases capable of laboring for more hours in the day than is necessary for this result, and the contract between the capitalist and the laborer as understood in the system under which those two classes exist implies that the exercise of the day's labor-power shall exceed this duration necessary for reproduction, and it is a matter of course that the buyer of the commodity labor-power should do as all buyers of commodities do -- consume it altogether for his own advantage(1).
It is on this industry, the buying of labor-power in the market, and the consumption of all the results of its exercise beyond what is necessary for its reproduction, that the capitalist lives, just as the industry by which the workman lives is the production of commodities.
1. Says Mr Boffin in [Charles] Dicken's Mutual Friend, when he wants to make a show of striking a somewhat hard, but reasonable bargain: 'When I buy a sheep I buy it out and out, and when I buy a secretary I expect to buy him out and out', or words to that effect; and the reasonableness of the conditions are accepted on all handsback.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 68, 30 April 1887, P. 141
• Chapter 19 : Scientific Socialism - Constant and Variable Capital
Marx goes on to develope (sic) further the process by which the capitalist exploits the laborer under the present system of wages and capital.
We now come to the two instruments which the capitalist uses in his exploitation of labor, and which are named constant and variable capital; constant capital being the raw material and instruments of production, and variable the labor power to be employed in producing on and by means of the former.
The laborer, as we have seen, adds a value to the raw material upon which he works; but by the very act of adding a new value he preserves the old; in one character he adds new value, in another he merely preserves what already existed. He affects this by working in a particular way, eg., by spinning, weaving, or forging, that is, he transforms things which are already utilities into new utilities proportionately greater than they were before.
'It is thus', says Marx, 'that the cotton and spindle, the yarn and the loom, the iron and the anvil become constituent elements of a new use-value.'
That is, in order to acquire this new value, the labor must be directed to a socially useful end, to a general end, that is, to which the general labor of society is directed, and the value added is to be measured by the average amount of labor power expended; i.e., by the duration of the average time of labor.
Marx says: 'We have seen that the means of production transfer value to the new product so far only as during the labor-process they lose value in the shape of their old use-value. The maximum loss of value that they can suffer in the process is plainly limited by the amount of the original value with which they came into the process, or in other words by the labor-time necessary for their production. Therefore, the means of production can never add more value to the product than they themselves possess independently of the process in which they assist. However useful a given kind of raw material, or a machine, or other means of production may be, though it may cost £150, or say 500 days labor, yet it cannot under any circumstances add to the value of the product more than £150. Its value is determined not by the labor-process into which it enters as a means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product. In the labor process it only serves as a mere use-value, a thing with useful properties, and could not therefore transfer any value to the product unless it possessed such value previously.'
The matter is succinctly put as follows: 'The means of production on the one hand, labor-power on the other, are merely the different modes of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was transformed into the various factors of the labor process. That part of capital which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material, and the instruments of labor, does not in the process of production undergo any quantitative alteration of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or more shortly constant capital.'
At first sight it might be thought that the wear and tear of the machinery, and the seeming disappearance of part of the auxiliary material (as eg., the mordaunts used in dyeing cloth or yarn, or the gums, etc., used in textile printing) contradict this statement as to the alteration of value; but on closer view it will be seen that the above wear and tear and apparent consumption enter into the new product just as much as the visible raw material does; neither are really consumed, but transformed.
In the following chapters Marx enters into an elaborate and exhaustive analysis of the rate of surplus value, ie., of the rate at which the creation of surplus value takes place; and he also deals with the important subject of the duration of the working-day. But as this is after all a matter of detail, in spite of its very great interest and importance we must omit it, as it would carry us beyond the scope of these articles.
Marx distinguishes between absolute and relative 'surplus value'; the absolute being the product of a day's labor over and above the necessary subsistence of the workman, whatever the time necessary for the production of a definite amount of product may be. The relative 'surplus-value' on the other hand is determined by the increased productivity of labor caused by new inventions, machinery, increased skill, either in manipulation, or the organization of labor, by which the time necessary for the production of the laborer's means of subsistence may be indefinitely shortened.
It will be seen once again by all this, that whatever instruments may be put into the hands of the laborer to bring about a result from his labor, in spite of all pretenses to the contrary, the one instrument necessary to the capitalist is the laborer himself living under such conditions that he can be used as a mere instrument for the production of profit. The tools, machinery, factories, means of exchange, etc., are only intermediate aids for putting the living machine into operation.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 75, 18 June 1887, PP. 196-197
• Chapter 20 : Marx's Deduction of the Historical Evolution of Modern Industry
Capitalism cannot be said even to begin before a number of individual owners of money employ simultaneously a number of workmen on the same terms, that is to say before the development of a concert of action towards profit among the employers, and a concert of action towards production for the profit of the employers among the employed.
'A greater number of laborers working together at the same time in one place (or if you will, in the same field of labor) in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically the starting-point of capitalist prodiuction.'
It differs from the mediæval system, that of the gilds and their craftsmen only by the greater number of the workmen employed; but this change to a new form of organization made at once considerable difference in the rate and manner of production: there was less comparative expense of the means of production, ie., buildings, tools, warehouses, etc(1). A consequence of this concentration of workmen under one roof was the development of the function of direction in the master as independent of his qualities as a craftsmen (sic), and the forcing on the system of this function as a necessary part of production. The master of the gild craftsman period held his place because he was a better workman and more experienced than his fellows; he did not differ from them in kind but in degree only; if he fell sick, for instance, his place would be taken by the next best workman without any disturbance in the organization of the workshop; but the master of even the earliest period of capitalism was from the beginning unimportant as a workman (even when he worked, as he often did at first) but all-important as a director of work.
'Simple cooperation', says Marx, 'is always the prevailing form, in those branches of production in which capital acts on a large scale, and division of labor and machinery play but a subordinate part.' This sentence leads to the next development of capitalism, that of the division of labor, which brings us into the system of manufacture, as the word is generally understood; though it has a final development, that of machinery and the factory. This period of the division of labor, more or less pure, extends from the middle of the 16th to the end of the 18th centuries, when it was brought to perfection; but it must be understood that these systems overlapped one another considerably.
The division-of-labor or manufacturing system starts under two conditions.
The first is where the employer collects into one workshop workmen of various crafts, the results of whose labors are finally combined into one article, as eg., a carriage-maker's in which wheel-wright, coach-builder, upholsterer, painter, etc., work each at his own occupation, and their products are combined into the one article, a finished carriage.
The other is the system in which the employer collects his workmen under one roof, and employs the whole of them as one machine in the simultaneous production of one article which has to go through various processes, these processes being apportioned to various parts of the workman-machine. This system affords a distinct example of evolution by means of survival of the fittest; sudden increase of production seems to have been called for, and the work accordingly had to be reorganized by being apportioned to different workmen in order to save time. Thus this system is the reverse of that illustrated by the carriage-making, in which a number of crafts had to be combined into the manufacture of one article; whereas in this (pin or needle-making may be taken as an illustration) a number of processes which once formed portions of one craft, now become each of them a separate craft in itself.
From this follows the complete interdependence of each human being forming a part of the workman machine, no one of whom can produce anything by himself. The unit of labor is now no longer an individual, but a group.
But all these processes, however sub-divided, and however combined, were still acts of handicraft; the same necessities which forced the simple cooperation of the first capitalistic period into division of labor, now forced the latter system to yet further development; though, indeed, other causes besides merely economic ones were at work, such as the growing aggregation of people into towns and the consequent increasing division of labor in Society itself as to the occupations of its members. This final development was the substitution of the machine and the complete factory-system for the division of labor and workshop-system. Under the new system the group of workmen, every member of which by the performance of a special piece of handicraft turns out some special part of the article made, gives place to a machine which produces the results of all these maneuvers combined together; or to an association of machines acting in a group, as the workmen acted. The workman is no longer the principal factor in the work, the tools which he handled are now worked by a mechanism connected by another mechanism with the power, whatever it may be, which puts the whole in motion. This is the true machine of modern times, as contrasted with the mere tool-machine of the earlier period, which was an aid to the workman and not a substitute for him. Furthermore, the workshop gives place to the factory which is not a mere assemblage of machines under one roof, but rather a great machine itself, of which the machines are parts; as Marx says: 'An organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have in place of the isolated machine a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motion of his giant limbs, at last breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.'
This is the machine which has produced the great revolution in production of our epoch. The workman once a handicraftsman, having all control over the article he produced, next became a part of a human machine, and finally has become the servant and tender of a machine; and by means of all this the fully developed modern capitalist has come into existence.
1. The master worker of the gild-system was not really a master at all even after he began to employ journeymen, because their number was limited veryy closely, and they were all sure to become masters in their turn: the reall 'employer of labor' was the gild and the 'master' of that period was simply a foreman of the gild; the great change consisted in the breaking down of the position of the gild as employer, and the turning of its foreman into a real master or capitalistback.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 80, 23 July 1887, PP. 234-235
• Chapter 21 : Scientific Socialism: Conclusion
Marx now goes on to trace the development of the capitalist in the present epoch, indicating the latest phase of the class-struggle; he points out the strife of the workman with the machine, the intensification of labor due to the constant improvement of machinery, etc. He then gives what may be called a history and analysis of the Factory Acts, the legislation to which the employing class found themselves compelled, in order to make it possible for the 'free' workman to live under his new conditions of competition; in order, in short, to keep the industrial society founded by the machine revolution from falling to pieces almost as soon as it was established.
The point of the intensification of labor is so important that it demands a word or two in passing; the gist of the matter as put forward by Marx resolves itself into this: As the organization of production progresses towards perfection, the wear and tear of the workman in a given space of labor-time is increased; and this is true of the organization of the division of labor period, only it is limited by the fact that the man himself is the machine, and no such limitation exists in the period of fully developed machinery, in which the workman is an adjunct of the machine, which latter dictates to its supplement, the workman, in its constant craving for increasing productivity, the amount of wear and tear of his body in each hour's work. This emphasizes as plainly as possible the subjection of the man to the machine.
Marx also deals with theory of compensation to the workman displaced by machinery; that is, the common view, that by the labor-saving of machinery, which at first sight would seem to tend to the lessening of the number of men employed, more capital is set free for employment.
But, says Marx: 'Suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen at £30 a-year each in a carpet factory. The variable capital annually laid out amounts therefore to £3,000. Suppose also that he discharges 50 of his workmen, and employs the remaining 50 with machinery that costs him £1,500. To simplify matters we take no account of buildings, coal, etc. Further, suppose that the raw material annually consumed costs £3,000 both before and after the change. Is any capital set free by this metamorphosis? Before the change the total sum of £6,000 consisted half of constant, half of variable, capital. The variable capital, instead of being one-half is only one-quarter of the total capital. Instead of being set free a part of the capital is here locked up in such a way as to cease to be employed in labor-power; variable has been changed into constant capital. Other things remaining unchanged, the capital of £6,000 can in future employ no more than 50 men. With each improvement in machinery, it will employ fewer.'(1)
And again: 'The laborers when driven out of the workshop by the machinery, are thrown upon the labor-market, and there add to the number of workmen at the disposal of the capitalists. In Part VII of this book it will be seen that this effect of machinery, which as we have seen, is represented to be a compensation to the working-class, is on the contrary a most frightful scourge. For the present, I will only say this: The laborers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them, and was afterwards converted into machinery.'
The remainder of this Part V of Marx deals with various questions connected with the great industry, and the changes produced by it on Society. Part VI deals with the transformation of the value or price of labor-power into wages; with time wages, price wages, and the national difference of wages. Part VII deals with the important subject of the accumulation of capital: First, with its simple reproduction, afterwards with the conversion of surplus value itself back into capital, and with the transition of the laws of property, that characterize the production of commodities into the laws of capitalistic appropriation. This part also contains a sarcastic refutation of the now exploded stupidity (scarcely to be called a theory) of 'abstinence' as the source of capital; it also deals with the old wages-fund theory and other fallacies of bourgeois economy. This part concludes with a long and elaborate chapter on the general law of capitalistic accumulation in its various aspects. The last Part (XIII) treats of the so-called primitive accumulation, of which Marx says: 'This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell upon the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people, one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal élité; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance and more in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man is to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority, that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.... In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and 'labor' were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.'
Marx then proceeds to give an instance of one important form of 'Primitive Accumulation', the expropriation of the peasants from the land, taking affairs in England as a type of this idyllic proceeding; as also the legislation at the close of the Middle Ages against vagrants, etc., that is, those who had been expropriated; and, besides, the enactments for the forcing down of wages. He then describes the birth of the capitalist farmer of modern times, and the reaction of the agricultural revolution on the town industry; the creation of the home market for industrial capital, etc. A chapter follows on the historical tendency of capitalistic accumu- lation to work out its own contradiction; it becomes necessary to quote a passage here as it bears reference to the future of Society: 'The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalistic production begets with the inexorability of a law of Nature its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalistic era; i.e., on cooperation, and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor(2), into capitalistic private property, is naturally a procession comparably more protracted[,] violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.'
A chapter on the modern theory of colonization concludes the book, which it must always be remembered is but the first volume (in the original German issue) of a book intended to cover three volumes, but which, nevertheless, as a criticism of capitalistic production may be treated in most respects as an independent whole.
1. Constant capital, raw material, and the instruments of production; variable capital, money paid in wagesback.
2. It is important not to misunderstand this phrase as used here. The labor of the Middle Ages, though individual from its mechanical side, was from its moral side quite definitely dominated by the principle of association: as we have seen, the 'master' of that period was but a delegate of the Gildback.
Commonweal, Volume 3, Number 82, 6 August 1887, P. 253
• Chapter 22, Part 1 : Socialism Militant [Part 1]
We have now arrived at the most exciting part of our subject, since it has to do with what we may fairly call the practical politics of Socialism, with matters which all who call themselves Socialists must of necessity consider, unless they chose to relegate themselves to the position of theorists pure and simple. What lies in the scope of these chapters is the giving some idea of the relative position of the attack and defense in the passing time, when armies are definitely gathering for the battle, and it is beginning to be perceived that Socialism is the one serious question of the epoch, since it covers every interest of modern life.
Let us turn our attention first of all to the defense; and we use the word advisedly, since the present proprietary and dominant class has absorbed into itself its old enemy the feudal proprietary class, and, since it has now no longer anything to attack, has taken the position once occupied by the latter. This indeed has been the position of the victorious middle-class for some time, but it is now at last waking up to the fact, and can see the enemy which is advancing to the attack. The middle-class is speedily getting to be no longer democratic even in appearance: it once wore that guise because it was confounded with the working-classes, whose position was then entirely subordinate to it. This condition of things was the high-water mark of the French Revolution, though there were from time to time indications of the coming solidarity of labor; and it lasted through the revolutionary period of 1848. Up to that time the triumphant middle-class, trampling down the last embers of the feudal opposition, saw nothing before it but a continued career of success; although the principles on which that success was founded were not of the kind that would allow it to have a definite aim beyond the point which it had already reached.
The first distinctive movement in England betokening a separate and aggressive community of feeling in the working-class itself, was the Chartist agitation; but this, as we have pointed out in preceding chapters, was swept away by the great wave of British commercial prosperity indicated by the success of the Cobden-Bright, or as it is called on the Continent, the Manchester School. The main result of this wave of prosperity was the enormous increase in the number and power of the middle-classes, and the corresponding rise in their standard of comfort. It is often alleged that the working-classes are in a better position than they were fifty years ago, and that this is the main work of the nineteenth century; but the improvement is doubtful and the inference drawn from it is false. The fact is, that the country fifty years ago was passing through a severe commercial revolution, that of the great machine industries, which, as before stated, brought for the time unexampled misery upon the workers, and that the settling down of this crisis did to a certain extent relieve this special and temporary misery. But apart from that the condition of even the aristocracy of labor is little if any better than it was. What has really happened is just that increase in the numbers and prosperity of the middle-classes above spoken of. But this great and overwhelming prosperity of theirs is now seriously threatened. The increasing severity of competition in the world-market, accompanied by a ceaseless and rapid increase in the productivity of labor, acting and reacting on one another, are bringing about a fresh commercial revolution which will extinguish the small capitalist by reducing his profits to the vanishing-point; so that none but huge concerns, joint-stock or otherwise, will be able to survive, and the once small capitalist will have to become a manager, a servant of the great one. This process is already far advanced, and is creating a fresh lower middle-class entirely dependent on the commercial aristocracy. Under these conditions that very rise in the standard of middle-class comfort has become a snare to the class as a whole. The difficulty of ordinary well-to-do families in finding a 'respectable' position for their children is now a sufficiently trite subject; all occupations endurable by a 'refined' youth are overstocked; education is cheap and common, and has lost its old market-value, and even at the ancient seats of learning it has grown to be a matter of commercial competition(1). The lower ranks of art and literature are crowded with persons drawn to these professions by the pleasantness of the pursuits in themselves, who soon find out the very low market value of the ordinary educated intellect. These, together with the commercial clerks, in whose occupation no special talent is required, form an intellectual proletariat, whose labor is 'rewarded' on about the same scale as the lower portion of manual labor, as long as they are employed, but whose position is more precarious, and far less satisfactory.
On the whole, then, in spite of the rise in the standard of comfort of the middle-classes, it must be said that they have rather gained power than well-being, and that they are now being threatened with a loss of that power, their tenure of which, now that the working-classes are beginning to learn their solidarity, depends on the latter being apathetically contented with a position at the best inferior to that of the bourgeoisie.
But the bourgeois ideal of what that position of the workers might be at the best, has never been realized, nor ever can be; nor as above-said have the working-classes any special reason for being 'contented' at the present time. The class of unskilled laborers are still, as they always must be in a system which forces them to compete with their fellows, in the position of earning a bare subsistence wage; and this class tends to increase more and more, as the introduction of fresh machines increases the productivity of skilled labor, makes it possible to substitute unskilled in its place, and thus drives the skilled artizan from his position and compels him to accept that of the unskilled laborer.
Elaborately arranged figures, therefore, by which is sought to show that the workmen in general are steadily improving their condition, where in themselves correct, which is by no means always the case, are only applicable to certain groups of workmen, and even then frequently do not prove what they are intended to: eg., the average wages will be stated at such and such, but it never happens in any trade that all the workmen receive the full amount of the wages stated after all deductions are made; few workmen indeed are in constant employment, even when trade is flourishing; the estimated prices are the full wage laid down by the trade unions, but most workers unprotected by a union, and in bad times even men inside the union, often work for less than the full wage; some, as in the building trades, are never employed for a large part of the year; and in all trades it would be impossible to keep up the standard of wages without occasional strikes and lock outs. It must be remembered, too, that the workman is often taxed in the form of his subscription to his trades union or benefit society, which from one point of view means that he helps his master to pay his poor-rate. Moreover it is doubtful if the unions are strong enough pecuniarily to hold out against a continued depression of trade.
However, the question of this doubtful improvement in the position of the better-off workmen is by the way. The real point is, first, that there are many indications that this improvement cannot be sustained in the face of the continuous increase in the productivity of labor, and that the position of the skilled mechanic is a precarious one; and secondly, it is clear that however the workmen's position may have improved, they are growing discontented with it, since it is becoming manifest to them that it is one of inferiority, and quite unnecessarily so. And that especially since the management of production is less and less undertaken by the so-called manufacturers, who are more and more becoming mere financiers, or shareholders obviously living on the privilege of taxing labor, both that of the 'hand' and of the manager.
All this has been gradually dawning on the workmen of the Continent, and especially of Germany (so much more intellectually advanced than the British workmen) since the bourgeois constitutional revolution of '48.
1.A very old friend, who has been for many years engaged in tuition at Oxford, has told me that the pressure there has enormously increased since I was an undergraduate; that for instance the kind of man whose attainments would once have ensured him a mastership at Rugby or Harrow has now to put up with a place at a third-rate grammar school, and that the competition for quite insignificant posts is most severe. -W. M. back
Commonweal, Volume 4, Number 113, 10 March 1888, PP. 76-77
• Chapter 22, Part 2 : Socialism Militant [Part 2]
The movement was begun in Germany by Lassalle (1) about 1863 as a national movement; it grew in that form after his death for some years. Meantime 'the International' had been founded, and had gradually come under the guidance of Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, who won for themselves two energetic and able coadjutors in Liebnecht and Bebel, men untiring in gaining converts to the ideas of the International from the followers of Lassalle and of Schulze- Delitsch, the bourgeois co-operationist, to which latter party indeed Bebel himself once belonged.
The scope of this article prevents us from going into details as to the fortunes of the German party; it must be enough to say that the Marx party grew rapidly, and at the congress of Gotha in 1875 the Lassalle party amalgamated with them, formally renouncing the special tenets of Lassalle, notably the nationalist aims which formed a part of them. The party went on growing, and had a large newspaper press and some representation in the Reichstag. Then in 1878 came the 'attempts' on the Emperor by Hodel and Nobeling, followed by the repressive laws against the Socialists, which destroyed their press at one swoop, and extinguished all open agitation in Germany. Nevertheless the growth of the party was not perceptibly checked by these arbitrary measures; the headquarters of its direction were transferred to Zurich, where they yet remain. At the Congress held last October at St Gallen the revolutionary character of the party was sustained, in the teeth of some attempts at opportunism which came from a section of the representatives in the Reichstag. The temptation to this opportunism was the desire of some of the deputies to make the party felt in the Reichstag by forming alliances with other groups, whereas at present as a Socialist party they are quite powerless there. It may be added that there is a possibility in Germany, as in France, of a wave of 'patriotism', founded on fear of the danger of actual invasion, checking for a time the rapidity of the advance of Socialism; though in the party itself the feeling for interna- tionalism is overwhelming and past all question.
France has for the present rather fallen back from her position of leader in the revolutionary movement. The party itself is somewhat split up into sections, though the differences between rank and file are not serious and mainly have to do with matters of tactics. Socialist ideas have permeated the whole mass of the town workmen, who are more separated from the peasantry than in any other European country. The fact is, therefore, that the movement in France, though unorganized, still expands, especially as it is spreading to all manufacturing centers. In France Socialism is not definitely attacked by the government as it is in Germany, but only suffers, as it does in this country, from the ordinary repressive police system.
In Holland the movement, which has now reached extraordinary dimensions, was begun in the year 1882. The propaganda has been mainly the work of Domela Nieuwenhuis, formerly a popular preacher in Amsterdam, released recently from a term of imprisonment. The police in Holland have gone so far in attacking the Socialists as to stir up mob violence against them, even to the extent of breaking into their meeting places and threatening the lives of their leaders.
In Belgium the movement is progressing vigorously, in the teeth of the two opposed parties, and the feeling of the workmen generally is very revolutionary, stimulated especially by the miserable condition of the mining population, who in 1886 broke out into riots that almost attained to the proportions of a revolt. The party supports a daily paper in Brussels.
In Denmark, the movement is so far advanced as to support two daily papers of large circulation, in spite of the smallness of the population. No doubt it is much helped there by the curious constitutional situation in which the Liberal majority and the Court party are holding each other at deadlock. This Danish movement has even penetrated to Sweden, and a Socialist party is growing up there.
In Russia, bureaucratic absolutism is blended with survivals of the mere barbaric absolutism, and as a consequence of the monstrous government which results from this, the movement seems now to be aiming at bringing about a constitutional revolution as a forerunner of the Social Revolution; and on the other hand this condition of things has so worked on the aspirations of the intelligent part of the people, that the movement there has been surrounded by a halo of personal heroism which has attracted universal admiration and respect even from its enemies.
In Austria, the faith of the masses generally is Socialism, but owing partly to the composite character of the Empire, which embraces such varied and rival races, and partly to the severity of the police measures of its Absolutist Government, there is no definite organization.
In Italy, the movement is progressing, although hampered by the tail of the democratic, and especially the Mazzinian, ideas, which can see nothing beyond the abolition of priest and king.
In Spain, the followers of Bakunin's Anarchism have had much influence, and the movement consequently is mostly Anarchist in coloring. The party supports several small weekly papers.
In America, the movement till recently has been entirely in the hands of the German immigrants; but of late years there has been a remarkable development of the class- struggle there. The result of numerous and most violent disputes between the capitalists and wage-earners has been the formation of an indigenous labor party, vague in aim and somewhat chaotic in action, but tending steadily towards a complete recognition of the solidarity of labor. The publication of Henry George's work, 'Progress and Poverty', which created such [a] sensation in this country, unsatisfactory as it was, has no doubt had its effect upon this movement, though its author in his quest for power and position has now practically recanted whatever opinions were of any value in it. One incident in the American movement is the formation of the gigantic trades' union called the Knights of Labor, which has more definite tendencies towards Socialism than those in this country; though Powderly's coquetting with the Catholic hierarchy has led to a split in the body, which leads to a hope that true Socialism may soon be generally accepted among the American working-classes. This will certainly be encouraged by the last act of the American capitalists, who in their dastardly fear of the possible combination of their wage-slaves, have murdered the Anarchist leaders at Chicago under the pretense of their being concerned in the throwing of a bomb-shell in the heat of a desperate labor- conflict in that city.
To get back again to this country, the movement is spreading much beyond the limits of the definite Socialist organizations, which are for the most part headquarters for knots of lecturers and speakers, and the publication of journals and pamphlets. In fact, it may be said that the strength of the movement here is on the intellectual side, and that organization for action of any kind is very defective. Nevertheless, Socialist opinion is making itself felt widely as well as deeply; this is very marked in the effect it is having on the Radicals, since it is detaching a constantly increasing number of them from their old position as the left wing of the Liberals, which whom and under whose orders they have hitherto acted since the time when Gladstone became the leader of the party. The Irish movement being at bottom a rebellion, and illustrating very strongly one side of the economical disabilities of the working-classes, has done much to widen the breach between the Democratic Radicals and the Liberal Radicals, and has made them much more ready to listen to Socialist doctrines. The Trades' Unions also, which have acted as a safety valve for the discontent born of the economical situation, have been much shaken by the attention which so many of their members have given to Socialism, and show signs of a growing inclination to change their position from being a mere appendage to capitalism to being organi- zations for a definite attack upon it. The dead weight of their leaders, who look upon this feeling with the utmost disfavor, and have done their best to smother it, hampers the possible development of the Trades' Unions in this direction; but it ever breaks through these and other obvious obstacles. They will become most formidable allies of Socialism in this country. It must be remembered in estimating the force of the movement in the British Islands, that all this is taking place in a country which, whatever its economical position may be, is politically, ethically, and intellectually generally the headquarters of reaction.
11 Lassalle was killed in a duel in 1865. back
Commonweal, Volume 4, Number 114, 17 March 1888, PP. 82
• Chapter 23, Part 1 : Socialism Triumphant [Part 1]
It is possible to succeed in a manner in picturing to ourselves the life of past times: that is, our imaginations will show us a picture of them which may include such accurate information as we may have of them. But though the picture may be vivid and the information just, yet it will not be a picture of what really took place; it will be made up of the present which we experience, and the past which our imagination, drawing from our experience, conceives of, -- in short, it will be our picture of the past(1). If this be the case with the past, of which we have some concrete data, still more strongly may it be said of the future, of which we have none -- nothing but mere abstract deductions from historic evolution, the logical sequence of which may be interfered with at any point by elements whose force we have not duly appreciated; and these are abstractions also which are but the skeleton of the full life which will go on in those times to come.
Therefore, though we have no doubt of the transformation of modern civilization into Socialism, yet we cannot foretell definitely what form the social life of the future will take, any more than a man living at the beginning of the commercial period -- say Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon -- could foresee the development of that period in the capitalism of to-day.
Nevertheless, though we cannot realize positively the life of the future, when the principle of real society will be universally admitted, and applied in practice as an everyday matter, yet the negative side of the question we can all see, and most of us cannot help trying to fill up the void made by the necessary termination of the merely militant period of Socialism. The present society will be gone, with all its paraphernalia of checks and safeguards: that we know for certain. No less surely we know what the foundation of the new society will be. What will the new society build on that foundation of freedom and cooperation? -- that is the problem on which we can do no more than speculate.
No doubt some transition, the nature of which will be determined by circumstances, will take place between the present state of things, in which the political unit is a nation, and the future, in which a system of federalized communities will take the place of rival nationalities; but as this chapter has to do with the ultimate realization of the new society rather than with the transitional period, we need not speculate on this point.
We ask our readers to imagine the new society in its political aspect as an organized body of communities, each carrying on its own affairs, but united by a delegated federal body, whose function would be the guardianship of the acknowledged principles of society; it being understood that these two bodies, the township or community and the Federal Power, would be the two extremities between which there would be other expressions of the Federal principle, -- as in districts that were linked together by natural circumstances, such as language, climate, or the divisions of physical geography.
It is clear that in such a society what laws were needed for the protection of persons and the regulation of intercommunal disputes, since they could be but the expression of the very root principles of society, would have to be universal, and the central regulating body would be charged with their guardianship, and at a last resort to carrying them out by force. Obviously no community could be allowed to revert to the exploitation of labor of any kind under whatever pretext, or to such forms of reaction as vindictive criminal laws. Such measures if allowed, even as local and spasmodic incidents, would undermine the very foundations of communistic society. This unity in Federation in short, appears to be the only method for reducing complexity in political and administrative matters to a minimum; and of ensuring to the individual, as a unit of society, the utmost possible freedom for the satisfaction and development of his capacities.
As to the methods of labor necessary to the existence and welfare of society, it would have to be cooperative in the widest sense. It would of course be subordinate to the real welfare of society; i.e., the production of wares would not be looked upon as the end of society (as the production of profit-bearing wares now is), but it would be regarded as the means for the ease and happiness of life, which therefore would never be sacrificed to any false ideas of necessity, or to any merely conventional views of comfort or luxury. For instance, in any society it is desirable that cotton cloth should be produced at the least expenditure of labor, but in a communistic society it would be impossible to condemn a part of the population to live under miserable conditions, conditions in any degree worse than that of others, as in a black country, in order to reduce the expenditure of labor for the community, which would have to pay the price for giving the weavers and spinners, etc., as good a life as anyone else, whatever that price might be.
Again, as to the conventional standard of comfort: we may here quote a good definition of a luxury, as given by a friend, as a piece of goods that the consumer would not have if he had in his own person to pay the full value of the work -- i.e., if he had to make it himself, or to sacrifice an amount of his own labor equivalent to the making of it. As, eg., a lady of the present day would hardly consent to make a Mechlin lace veil for herself, or to pay for the due and proper livelihood of those who do make it; in order that she may have it, numbers of women and girls at Ypres and the neighborhood must work at starvation wages.
To make the matter of production under Communism clearer let us consider the various kinds of work which the welfare of Communal Society would demand.
First, there would be a certain amount of necessary work to be done which would be usually repellent to ordinary persons; some of this, probably the greater part of it, would be performed by machinery; and it must be remembered that machinery would be improved and perfected without hesitation when the restrictions laid on production by the exigencies of profit-making were removed. But probably a portion of this work at once necessary and repellent could not be done by machinery. For this portion volunteers would have to be relied upon; nor would there be any difficulty in obtaining them, considering that the habit of looking upon necessary labor from the point of view of social duty would be universal, and that now, as then, idiosyncrasies would exist which would remove objections to work usually disliked.
Again, the greater part of this work, though not agreeable, would not be exacting on mental capacity, and would entail the minimum of responsibility on those engaged in it. We mention this as compensatory of the disagreeable nature of the work in itself.
As examples of this necessary and usually repellent work, we may give scavengering, sewer-cleaning, coal-hewing, midwifery, and mechanical clerk's work.
It must be remembered again that under our present system a great deal of this kind of work is artificially fostered for the sake of making business for interest-bearing capital, and that the competition for employment among the proletariat makes it possible to be so done; whereas in a Communal Society such work would be dispensed with as much as possible. Disagreeable work which a Communal Society found itself saddled with as a survival of past times, and which it found out not to be necessary, it would get rid of altogether.
Secondly, work in itself more or less disagreeable, and not absolutely necessary, but desirable if the sacrifice to be paid for it were not too great. This might be done if it could be made easy by machinery, but not otherwise; it would not be worth while to call for volunteers for the purpose of doing it, since the citizens would then have to make the sacrifice in their own persons. Before we leave the subject of work not generally pleasant, but which is either necessary or desirable, we may again call attention to the existence of idiosyncrasies which would make many people willing to undertake it, and still more to the variety of tastes which are so common that they could not be classed as idiosyncrasies, and which would help us out of many difficulties in this respect. There are, for instance, rough occupations involving a certain amount of hardship, which would be acceptable to many persons of overflowing health and strength, on account of the adventure and change which goes with them, and the opportunities which they afford for showing courage and adroitness and readiness; in a word, for the pleasurable exercise of special energies, such as sea-fishing, exploration of new countries, etc. Again, many people have so much love for country life and dealing with animals, that even hard work of this kind would not seem irksome to them. In short, we might go into great lengths on this subject, and every step we took on the road would show that the stimulus to exertion in production is much more various and much more complex than is usually thought in a period like our own, when everything is supposed to be measured by mere cash-payment.
Thirdly, we come to a kind of work which we may well hope will take a much higher position in communal life than it does at present; we mean work that has in it more or less of art; and we should here say that the very foundation of everything that can be called art is the pleasure of creation, which is, or should be felt in every handicraft. That even as things are it is very commonly felt, is proved by the craving that persons have for some occupation for their hands when they are debarred from their usual occupation, as very notably persons in prison. As to the matter of art as an occupation, we may divide it into incidental and substantive art. Incidental art is that which is subservient to some utilitarian function; as the designed form or added ornament in a knife or a cup, which is subservient to the cutting or drinking use of those things. What is commonly called decorative art comes under this heading. Substantive art is that which produces matters of beauty and incident for their own sakes, such as pictures or music, which have no utilitarian purpose. As to incidental art Commercial Society has nearly destroyed it by divorcing its exercise and the reward for it from the products which it should beautify; it has divided the producers of an ornamental article of use into the maker of the utilitarian article, the maker of the ornament for it, and the designer of the ornament, the two former being mere machines, and the latter being the producer of a marketable ware to be forced on the public in the same way that other wares are forced on them by commerce. In a Communal Society this division of labor will be recognized as impossible in a piece of goods of which the art of design formed an integral part, and that art itself will only be exercised in answer to an undoubted and imperative demand of the public; there will be no occasion to force a demand for it.
As to the substantive art that must always be on the surface the product of individual labor and skill, although at bottom it is a social product as much as or even more than any other production; since the capacity of the most original artist or author is really the result of tradition, and his work is the expression of a long social development of tendencies concentrated in the special individual.
A question may occur to some as to the probable future of the races at present outside civilization. To us it seems that the best fate that can befall them is that they should develope (sic) themselves from their present condition, uninterfered with by the incongruities of civilization. Those of them will be the happiest who can hold civilization aloof until civilization itself melts into Socialism, when their own natural development will gradually lead them into absorption in the great ocean of universal social life.
1.The mediæval painters naïvely accept this position -- eg., in representing the life of a saint of the second century, they dress the characters in a costume but little altered from that of their own period; and it is worth noting that they gave up the attempt at archaeology (sic) altogether with the more familiar characters -- a carpenter or blacksmith will be just the craftsman that they had before their eyes every day; whereas the emperors, giants, and so forth, they do try to clothe in imaginative raiment. A further illustration may be given in the art of music: works such as Weber's der Freischutz or Wagner's Meister-singers, which seem to embody the spirit of past ages, nevertheless are in themselves thoroughly modern back.
Commonweal, Volume 4, Number 121, 5 May 1888, PP. 140-141
• Chapter 23, Part 2 : Socialism Triumphant [Part 2]
It remains to say something on the religious and ethical basis of which the life of Communal Society may be called an expression, although from another aspect the religion may be said to be an expression of that life; the two together forming an harmonious whole.
The word religion has been, and is still in most minds, connected with supernatural beliefs, and consequently the use of the word has been attacked as unjustifiable where this element is absent. But, as we shall proceed to show in a few words, this is rather accessory to it than essential.
In the first instance religion had for its object the continuance and glory of the kinship -- Society; whether as clan, tribe, or people, ancestor worship forming the leading feature in its early phases. That in such an epoch religion should have been connected with what we now call superstition was inevitable, since at that time no distinction was drawn between the human and any other form of existence, whether in animal life or in inanimate matters, all being alike considered conscious and intelligent.
Consequently, with the development of material civilization from the domination of things by persons to that of persons by things, and the consequent falling asunder of Society into two classes, a possessing and dominating class, and a non-possessing and dominated one, arose a condition of Society which gave leisure to the possessing or slave-holding class, the result of which was a possibility of observation and reflection among the upper class. As a consequence of this a process of reflection arose among this class which distinguished man as a conscious being from the rest of nature. From this again arose a dual conception of things: on the one hand was man, which was familiar and known, on the other nature, which was mysterious and relatively unknown. In nature itself grew a further distinction between its visible objects now regarded as unconscious things, and a supposed motive power which acted on them from behind, which was conceived of as manlike in character, but above mankind in knowledge and power, and no longer a part of the things themselves, but without them, and moving and controlling them.
Another set of dual conceptions arose along with this, firstly the distinction between the individual and Society, and secondly within the individual the distinction between the soul and the body. Religion now became definitely supernatural, and at last superstitious, as far as the cultured class was concerned, since they had gradually lost their old habit of belief in it.
At this stage there arose a conflict not only of belief but also of ethical conceptions; the ceremonies and customs based on the earlier ideas, on a nature composed of beings who were all conscious, became meaningless and in many cases repulsive to the advanced minds of the epoch; hence arose a system of esoteric explanation and the Mysteries(1). An importance began to be attached to the idea of a future life for the individual soul, which had nothing in common with the old idea of a scarcely broken existence, founded not on any positive doctrine, but on the impossibility of an existing being conceiving of its nonexistence; an idea naively expressed, for instance, in the burial ceremonies of all early races, in which food, horses, arms, etc., are buried with the dead man as a provision for his journey to the unknown country. These ideas, and the doctrines and ceremonies embodying them, grow in number and body as the stream of history broadens down, till they finally issue in the universal or ethical religions (as opposed to the tribal or nature-religions) of which Buddhism and Christianity are the great historical examples, and in which the original ceremonies and their meaning have become fuzed with each other, and with the new ethics of these religions, and are supposed to express these ethics more or less symbolically. An illustration of what has here been said may be found in the fusion of the ancient notions of sacrifices in the doctrine of the Atonement(2).
We have said that with the rise of civilization tribal society became divided into classes, owing to the growth of the individual ownership of property as opposed to its corporate ownership. The old relations of persons to society were thus destroyed, and with them much of the meaning of the old ethical ideas. In the tribal society, the responsibility of the individual to the limited society of which he formed a part was strongly felt, while he recognized no duty outside his tribe. In the new conception of morality which now arose he had, it is true, duties to all men as a man, irrespective of the community to which he belonged, but they were vague and could be evaded or explained away with little disturbance of the conscience; because the central point round which morality revolved was a spiritual deity who was the source of morality and directly revealed himself to the individual conscience. These two, the tribal ethics, the responsibility to a community however limited, and the universal or introspective ethics, or responsibility to a divinity to whom humanity was but a means of realizing himself, and to whom therefore the duties of man to man were of secondary importance(3) -- are the two ethical poles. But though the tendency was in this direction from the beginnings of civilization, it took historically many centuries to realize itself, and only reached its final development in Christianity; and has now under the influence of competitive economics taken the final form of the devil-take-the-hindmost doctrine and practice of modern society.
As regards the future form of the moral consciousness, we may safely predict that it will be in a sense a return on a higher level to the ethics of the older society, with the difference that the limitation of scope to the kinship society in its narrower sense, which was one of the elements of the dissolution of ancient society, will disappear, and the identification of individual with social interests will be so complete that any divorce between the two will be inconceivable to the average man.
We may say in conclusion that this new ethic is no longer a mere theoretical speculation, but that many thousands of lives are already under its inspiration. Its first great popular manifestation was given in the heroic devotion of the working-classes of Paris in the Commune of 1871 to the idea of true and universal freedom, which was carried on by the no less complete devotion of the little band of Russian revolutionists who made so little account of their individual lives in their engrossing passion for the general life of humanity.
Everywhere the same feeling is spreading, and even in England, the chosen home of bourgeois bureaucracy, which, with the instinctive cunning of a business country, gives every opportunity to well-to-do persons for forgetting the general welfare in that of the individual, it is getting more irrepressible every day. The wave of ethical feeling is no doubt the result of the development of the class struggle now rapidly approaching to the crisis which will abolish all classes: in fact, the mere hope, ever growing nearer to realization, of an economical change which will make life easy and refined for all, is what has made this ethical idea possible, as the habits which the new economical system will engender will make any other form of ethics inconceivable: since once for all change in the economical system of society must always be accompanied by fresh ethical ideas.
We may be asked, since we have been putting forward the doctrine of evolution throughout these chapters, what Socialism in its turn will evolve. We can only answer that Socialism denies the finality of human progress, and that any system of which we can now conceive of as Socialism must necessarily give way to a new development of society. But that development is necessarily hidden from us by the unfinished struggle in which we live, in which for us the supreme goal is the Socialism we have been putting forward. Nor do we repine at this limitation of our insight; that goal is sublime and beautiful enough which promises to us the elevation of the whole of the people to a level of intelligent happiness and pleasurable energy, which at present is reached, if at all, only by a chosen few at the expense of the misery and degradation of the greater part of mankind; and even by those few, is held on such a precarious tenure that it is to them little better than a pleasant dream disturbed by fantastic fears which have their birth from the terribly real sufferings of the ordinary life of the masses on whom they live.
1. The mysteries were nothing but a practice of the ancient rude ceremonies now treated as revelations to certain privileged persons of this hidden meaning which could not be understood by the vulgar: that is, people began to assume that the ancient rude and sometimes coarse ceremonies (belief in which directly as explanations of natural events now appeared to them incredible) wrapped up mystical meanings in an allegorical manner; eg., a simple sun-myth would be turned into an allegory of the soul and the divinity, -- their relative dealings with a present and future life back.
2. See article 'Sacrifice' in the 'Encyclopxdia Britannica' (9th Edition), by Professor Robertson Smith back.
3. 'Morality, thou dreadful bane, What tens of thousands thou hast slain!' back (Protestant hymn.)
Commonweal, Volume 4, Number 123, 19 May 1888, PP. 154-155
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