Growth of the doctrine
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The word begins in obscurity. Though various origins have been suggested, the first use in French has commonly been ascribed to the Globe ofFebruary 13, 1832, where the word socialistes was chosen to describe thefollowers of Saint-Simon. (However, a recondite reference to socialism ayear earlier, in the religious journal Le semeur, has been uncovered. )Englishmen have claimed the honor of its coinage, since the word socialist did appear in the London Cooperative Magazine in 1826, although it was not until several years later that followers of RobertOwen began describing themselves as socialists. Clearly, however, the termwas in the air, for it described a converging mood; and the first articleon socialism as an idea in opposition to individualism was written byPierre Leroux and appeared in 1835 in the Encyclopdic nouvelle, edited byLeroux and Reynaud. The word recurred thereafter in various writings byLeroux.
By 1840 the term socialism was commonly used throughout Europe toconnote the doctrine that the ownership and control of the means ofproductioncapital, land, or propertyshould be held by the community as awhole and administered in the interests of all. Within 120 years after theterm became known in Europe, the doctrine had spread so widely that onecould find regimes in Sweden, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, eastern Europe, Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Burma, and Ceylon calling themselves socialist, and thelabels Arab socialism, African socialism, and Asian socialism used to describe the grafting of indigenous traditions onto ideological doctrine. Rarely in the history of the world has an idea taken hold so deeply and dispersed so quickly. One would have to go back to the spread of Islam, in the century and a half following the death of Muhammad, to find a comparable phenomenon. And the analogy is not without relevance, for one finds in both instances the promise of a perfect community, the effort to create a solidarity larger than that of tribe or class, a reaction to the meaninglessness of existing religious beliefs, a militant proselytizing spirit, and leadership by new elites. In fact, the comparison with Islam is meant to suggest that the spread of socialism cannot be wholly accounted for in economic or class terms. The socialist movement has (or had) the character of a secular religion, and only from this view can one explain its development and internal vicissitudes.
This article will discuss the formulation of early socialist doctrine, the differentiation of the socialist movement and the spread of socialism, the role of socialist parties, and varieties of socialist belief since Marx. [Marxist views and positions are elaborated in Marxism and in the articles under Communism. ]
The meaning of socialism, both logically and sociologically, can only be understood as a contrast to individualism. The Enlightenment, English political economy, the French Revolution, and the nascent industrialism had all combined to produce what in 1826 a disciple of Saint-Simon called individualism. In this doctrine, society existed to serve the individual and the pursuit of his own satisfactions; natural rights inhered in each individual, and government was not to regulate the economic life of society. Even the French Revolution, with all its passion for virtue and its defense of popular sovereignty, fostered the idea of economic individualism.
The attack on individualism drew its strength from a Catholic and a socialist point of view. Bon aid and de Maistre, both theocrats, were militantly against political Protestantism and asserted that man exists only for society. Particularly after the revolution of 1830, many French writers of a conservative bentLamartine, Balzac, Sainte- Beuve, Lammenais, and Tocquevilleexpressed their alarm about Iodieux individualisme and held it responsible for the disintegration that they felt was occurring in their society. While the conservatives attacked The politicalphilosophy which they linked to the French Revolution, the socialists were appalled by the economic doctrine of laissez-faire: this, Louis Blanc declared, was responsible for mans ruthless exploitation of man in moder nindustry. Under industrialization, the socialists alleged, the individual had been torn from old moorings and had no anchorage. Friedrich Engels, writing about London in The Condition of the Working Class in England, described the brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, which people experienced in the British capital, and stated that the dissolution of mankind into monads of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme ([1845] 1958, p. 24).
Against the atomization and egoism of society, as Saint-Simon called it, the social critics proposed a new order based on association, harmony, altruism, and, finally, the word that superseded all of thesesocialism. The idea of socialism has a long history in the Utopian tradition; one can trace its roots back to the dream of returning to a golden age of social harmony or to the radical theological creedexpressed most vividly by the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and the Levellers and Diggers of theseventeenthof the equality of all men. But equality alone is not the essence of socialism. The heart of socialism is to be found in the idea of community and in the doctrine that men can realize their full potential and achieve human emancipation in community. By this touchstone, the seeds of modern socialism are to be found in Rousseau [see the biography ofRousseau].
The theme of community is also the central theme of Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, and Marx. The first three sought to achieve it through the a priori elaboration of the theoretical elements of community. Marx, on the other hand, sought to realize it through the sphere of philosophy and what he held to be its material embodiment, the proletariat. It is in the phrase the realization of philosophy, the end point of a process of history, and not in any alleged distinction between Utopian and scientific descriptions of socialism, that the difference between Marx and the others lies.
Both Owen and Fourier sketched socialist Utopias that were enormously attractive to individuals whose sensibility was repelled by the evils of industrialism. Each wanted to establish a small agrarian community that science could make practicalin effect, a withdrawal from society. Neither man had a sense of history or any realistic awareness of the politics of his time. [See the biographies ofFourier and Owen. ]
Saint-Simon ( the last gentleman and the first socialist of France) was a very different sort, and the customary inclusion of him with Fourier and Owen as a Utopian is actually a disservice to a formidable intellectual, a disservice initially performed by Marx, who, although he derived many ideas from Saint-Simon, failed to see the implications of much of the French writers thought. John Stuart Mill, however, clearly recognized Saint-Simons contribution, remarking, in Principles of Political Economy(1848), that in the few years of its public promulgation, Saint-Simons thought had sowed the seeds of nearly all the socialist tendencies. Durkheim considered Saint-Simon to be the father of socialism, as well as of positivism, and devoted a book to his theories. Although in the Communist Manifesto Marx cavalierly dismissed Saint-Simon as a Utopian, Engels in his later years remarked that Saint-Simons breadth of view and genius contained in embryo all the ideas of later socialists which are not strictly economic. For what Saint-Simon presented is what we know today as the theory of industrial society, and his discussion of the nature of solidarity outlines the theory of occupational community which Durkheim later elaborated. [See the biography ofSaint-Simon. ]
It is not too much to say, following Markham (1952), that the Saint-Simonians were the most important single force behind the greate conomic expansion of the Second Empire, particularly in the development of banks and railways. Enfantin, the most bizarre of the Saint-Simonians, formed the society for planning the Suez Canal. The brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who promoted the first French railway from Paris to Saint-Germain, also founded the Credit Mobilier, the first industrial investment bank in France, and the Compagnie Generate Transatlantique, whose first ships were named after Saint-Simon and his followers.
In the hands of some of his more zealous followers, Saint-Simonsdoctrines were made to seem ludicrous. Yet his own insight was considerable, and it was the Saint-Simonians more diffuse (but no less intense) belief in Marxism which gave that doctrine its command over so large a part of the world.
The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels 1848) and the writing done in the thirty years following it make up the corpus of work that later socialists drew upon and associated with Marx [for a detailed discussion, see the biographies ofEngels and Marx]. Relying on The politicalactivities of Marx as well as on his judgments, the diverse socialist factions sought to justify their own policies. Thus Lenin and the Bolsheviks found in the address to the Communist League of March 1850, and in Marxs Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx Engels1875-1891), the justification of their revolutionary and insurrectionary tactics. From Marxs activity in Cologne in the early part of 1849 and from his inaugural speech to the Grand Council of the International Workingmens Association (the First International), democratic socialists have argued that peaceful electoral change is possible in the achievement of socialism.
Marx envisaged a two-stage development in industrial countries that presaged the victory of socialism. The first was the democraticrevolution; the second, the social revolution. By the democraticrevolution Marx meant the victory of the middle classes over the remnantsof the aristocracy and the clearing away of feudal remains to achieve the successful development of capitalist production and of political rights for all in the society. By the social revolution Marx meant the economic victory of the proletariat, who will take over the ownership of the means of production. From this point of view, England was the most advanced country and, therefore, presumably the one most ripe for socialism. Measured on the same yardstick, Germany, while developing industrially, was still lagging behind because the middle classes had failed to completethe democratic revolution; Russia was the least advanced, since the middle classes had failed to act at all, whereas the German middle classes had at least done something in 1848. In the socialist perspective, therefore, Russia was the country where a revolution was most imminent, since it hadlagged so far behind and was only beginning to catch up economically. But before 1914 all orthodox Marxists expected this to be a bourgeois, rather than a socialist, revolution, since the working class in Russia was too small to sustain a socialist revolution and the economy was too immature for socialism. Against the populists and the anarchists in Russia whoargued that the country could skip a social stage and usher in a socialismbased in part on the old village miry, or communal holdings, the early Russian MarxistsAxelrod, Plekhanov, and Leninargued that socialism in Russia would have to await the development of capitalism and the creation of a sizable working class. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the thought occur to some Russian Marxists, notably Parvus and Trotskyand later Lenin himself, when he was converted to the ideathat they could use the impending Russian revolution to wrest power from the bourgeoisie and thus spark revolution in the advanced industrial countries. Before 1917, no Marxists thought that socialism would be possible in preindustrial or underdeveloped countries. The West was expected to lead the way.
What kind of socialism was supposed to emerge? What would society be like the day after the revolution? And what were Marxists supposed to do while waiting for the revolution? No political party can exist without a program that holds out the promise of immediate benefits. But as Schumpeter has pointed out, anything positive done or to be done in the vitiated atmosphere of capitalism was ipso facto tainted. Marx and Engels discouraged programs that involved constructive policy within the capitalist order because they smacked of bourgeois radicalism. However, when they faced the problem in 1847, they resolutely cut the Gordian knot. As Schumpeter put it: The Communist Manifesto quite illogically lists anumber of immediate objects of socialist policy, simply laying the socialist barge along side the liberal liner (1942, p. 317 in the 1962 edition).
The problem was to recur constantly throughout The political history of most of the European socialist parties. Should one make immediate demands or not? This issue was fought out, for example, within the American Socialist party at the turn of the century; and it resulted in such factions as the Reformists, and the Impossibilists, who declared themselves against any such program on the ground that it would dilute the revolutionary ardor of the masses. More important, the problem of reforms, and of what kind of reforms, had to be confronted by the various socialist parties of Europe in the 1930ssuch as the British Labour party, the German Social Democratic party, and the French Socialist partywhen the yentered the government and even took over sole responsibility for running it in a capitalist society. As we shall see, many of these governments and countries foundered when the socialist governments discovered, for example, that they had no solution for the problem of unemployment undercapitalism. The slogan Socialism or Capitalism had left them unprepared for the exigencies of the intermediate period. This is always the dilemmaof social movements that live in a world but are not of it.
Marx did, of course, distinguish between socialism and communism, in the sense that the first is a transitional period and the second the undefined realm of mans freedom. For this aspect of the idea of socialism, two documents are crucialthe Gotha Programme (see Marx & Engels 1875-1891) and the Erfurt Program (see Kautsky 1892), two doctrinal statements of the German Social Democratic party.
In 1875, two German socialist parties, one dominated by followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, nominal followers of Marx, met in Gotha to create a unified socialist party. The program they adopted there was in the main a product ofLassallean doctrine, and in a private communication Marx wrote a searing critique of it. In 1891, the German Social Democratic party adopted theso-called Erfurt Program (named for the city where the party congress was held), which was written principally by Karl Kautsky, under the directsupervision of Engels; Engels then published the Critique for its historicinterest, feeling that the Erfurt Program went beyond the criticism Marxhad made of the Gotha document. But the Critique, in its tone andimplications, was more revolutionary and radical than the Erfurt Program, and, predictably, the left-wingers in the socialist movement, beginning with Lenin, formulated their program from the Critique. It was in the Critique that Marx used the phrase revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, which after 1917 provoked far more recriminatory debates between communists and socialists than any other words he wrote. The communists took it as a justification of the suppression of all political parties other than the true proletarian party under Soviet rule. The socialists insisted that the phrase applied only to temporary and special situations until a truly democratic state could be organized, and wasnugatory in those situations where a peaceful transition to socialism, through the electoral process, was possible.
The inflammatory phrase does not appear in the Erfurt Program, nor doesany statement of immediate aims or political demands. The program was intended as a full-fledged analysis of the tendencies of capitalism, froma Marxian point of view, and as a general discussion of the cooperative commonwealth of the future. The program assumes the recurrent Marxist theme: Few things are . . . more childish than to demand of the socialist that he draw a picture of the commonwealth which he strives for. . . . Never yet in the history of mankind has it happened that a revolutionary party was able to foresee, let alone determine, the forms of the newsocial order which it strove to usher in (Kautsky [1892] 1910, pp. 122-123).
On the forms of organization, the managerial problems of a socialist regimehow orders are to be given, who will give them, which industriesare to be managed by workers directly, which by state enterprises; in short, the practical problems that the Soviet state faced after the communists had assumed powerthe program is completely silent.
Kautsky, who inherited Engels mantle as the leading Marxist the oretician, was prompted only once to deal with the problem of the organization of production in a socialist society (but not with the structure of authority with in an enterprise). In some lectures delivered and published in 1902 as The Social Revolution, he declared simply that the organization of production would follow the scope of the market.
For example, gas lighting is clearly a municipal business. The development of electric lighting and the transformation of power in mountainous regions makes the nationalization of water power necessary. This operates also to transform illumination from a municipal to a national business. Again the business of the shoemaker was formerly confined to the local market. The shoe factory does not supply simply the community, but the whole nation, with its production, and is ripe not for communalization, but for nationalization. The same is true of sugar factories, breweries, etc. (1902, pp. 115116)
In fact, when Kautsky had finished with his itemization (transportation, railroads, steamships, mines, forests, iron foundries, machinemanufactures), it was clear that almost all industries would benationalized in the proletarian regime. [See the biography ofKautsky. ]
If one goes beyond these pedestrian problems, however, it is interesting that the Erfurt Program ends, curiously enough, on a note reminiscent of the young Marx and of that strain in German romanticism which looked back to the glory of Greece.
The blessed harmonious culture, which appeared only once in the history ofmankind and was then the privilege of a small body of select aristocrats, will become the common property of all civilized nations. What slaves were to the ancient Athenians, machinery will be to modern man. Man will feelall the elevating influences that flow from freedom from productive toil, without being poisoned by the evil influences which, through chattel slavery, finally undermined the Athenian aristocracy. And as the modern means of science and art are vastly superior to those of two thousand years ago, and the civilization of today overshadows that of the litte land of Greece, so will the socialist commonwealth in moral greatness and material well-being the most glorious society that history has thus farknown. (Kautsky [1892] 1910, p. 158)
The period from 1870 onward in western Europe saw the swift growth ofindustrialization and urbanization, the two crucial elements of modern society. This expansion of industrial power and of economic growth andwealth, which was due largely to two technological innovationstheimprovement of steel metallurgy and the application of electrical energyto factory, city, and home seemed to confirm a number of Marxspredictions regarding the development of capitalism (see Marx 1867-1879, vol. 1, chapter 25, and vol. 3, chapter 23). Capitalism was undergoing remarkable changes. The expansion of the joint stock company (the prototype of the modern corporation) was forcing a separation of ownership and management, which in many areas resulted in the industrial managerstaking the place of the capitalist as the central person of theorganization, and the large-scale enterprise began employing hundreds and even thousands of workers under a single roof. More important, the amalgamation movements of the 1880s and 1890sthe rise of trusts, cartels, and monopoliesand the consequent elimination of hundreds of smaller businesses seemed to bear out Marxs predictions about the centralization of capital and the socializing of the processes of production.
Volume 1 of Capital was published in 1867, and the subsequent expansion ofthe volume, along with its rapid translation into many languages, gave Marx, hither to a neglected and cantankerous emigre in London, an authorityin the international socialist movement, particularly in its German branch, which he had never had before. With the assiduous publication andspread of Marxs works by the growing socialist movements, Marxism suddenly became a vogue as no other socialist doctrine had ever been; andwith the proliferation of followers and propagandists who in newspapers, pamphlets, and street meetings proselytized the simplified works of Marx, the doctrine itself assumed a canonical status that was unprecedented inthe history of secular writing.
In 1889 almost four hundred delegates fromtwenty different countries (three-fourths of them from Germany and France)met in Paris to create a new International, the Second International of socialist parties. The so-called First International, the International Working-mens Association, was a loose confederation of small politicaland trade union groups, rather than parties, that had been organized in 1864. Although Marx was not the initiator of the First International, hequickly became its dominant intellectual figure, supplanting Mazzini, who had been asked to write its first draft program. The International brokeup in 1872, when Marx and the anarchist leader Bakunin quarreled; though the anarchists were expelled, Marx had the Internationals center moved to New York, preferring to bury it rather than allow some other group to capture it. The First International was formally dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876.
More than any other step, the founding of the Second International symbolized the swift rise of Marxist socialism in Europe. It was only 14 years earlier, in 1875, that the German Social Democratic party, the first socialist party in Europe, had been formed. In the next dozen years or so, socialist parties were organized in France, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden. In Russia in 1883, the year of Marxs death, GeorgiiPlekhanov organized the first political group of Russian Marxists. Aboutthe same time, in England, M. H. Hyndman, the son of an aristocrat, organized the Social Democratic Federation, which, while calling itself Marxist, never acquired more than a small sectarian following; and aquixotic band of reformers organized the Fabian Society (the name alluded to the Roman general Fabius CunctaterFabius the Delayerwho was known forhis patient, waiting tactics against Hannibal). In 1889, the year the Second International was founded, the historic Fabian Essays in Socialism was issued, with chapters by George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Annie Besant. The book eventually sold two million copies, and laid theintellectual foundations of the British Labour party and of Labour governments for the next sixty years.
By 1914, socialism had become the single most important political force on the Continent. In the 1912 Reichs tag elections, the German Social Democrats amassed 4. 5 million votes (over 30 per cent of the total) and 110 seats in the parliament, making it the largest single party in Germany. In France one of the socialist groups, the SFIO, garnered 1. 4 million votes and 103 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In Italy the socialists held over seventy seats in the parliament, and efforts were made to invite the party, or at least its right wing, into the government.
But the rise of the socialist parties was not only a simple matter of winning large numbers of votes, primarily among the working class. With in a new and growing system of universal political suffrage, it transformed the nature of the party system and The political structure of each country.
The political party of the first half of the nineteenth century was usually a loose association of notables, in Max Webers terminology, invariably based on individual constituencies or districts, and often withlittle responsibility to an electorate. With the growing democratization of the franchise in England, associationswere formed in each district; and the caucus system, developed in 1868, enabled the Liberals to begin building local machines with full-time election workers. Yet mass membership was infrequent, and the parties of England, as well as the United States, depended for their finances on wealthy contributors. What the socialists did, particularly in Germany, was to introduce the disciplined and centralized mass party, with formal machinery for enrollment, regular payment of dues, a system of subscription to party newspapers and magazines, and, often, specified requirements of party activity. At its prewar peak, the German Social Democratic party had a million members and an annual budget of nearly two million marks.
But the socialist movement did more than build the first mass political party. It tried, in most of the European countries and to a lesser extent in England, to build a complete working-class culture, a social world of its own, independent of the official culture of the society. The German socialist movement, the model for all other socialist parties, built large consumer cooperatives (with a large wholesale organization and its own processing plants) as well as housing developments. By the 1890s there were national organizations of workers athletic societies, workersbicycling clubs, and workers hiking clubs. In time, the workersrecreational and cultural movement extended into all fields from chess to the theater, where a strong Volksbuhne (peoples stage) was created. A working-class child could begin life in a socialist creche, join a socialist youth movement, go to a socialist summer camp, hike with the socialist Wandervgel, sing in a workers chorus, and be buried by a socialist burial society in a socialist cemetery.
If the idea of proletarian mountain climbing or socialist chess playing invites ridicule, one must see, as Carl Landauer (1959) points out, that the workers had been excluded from almost all accepted society, and they responded by creating their own.
The socialist movements at the turn of the century may have felt sure about inheriting the future, but there was considerable uncertainty as to when and how that inheritance would be realized. Marx, in all his writings, had never been specific about the road to power. After 1850 he felt that the day of the barricades was finished, not only for military reasons but also because bourgeois society would stabilize itself for a long time to come. Against this view, apocalyptic hopes occasionally flared up, as during the Paris Commune. Yet Marx never took a dogmatic view as to any single course which the socialist movement would necessarily have to follow. In several instances, he felt that socialism might be achieved peacefully in the Western countries, where democratic institutions were being established. But he never ruled out the possibility of, and even the need for, violence, should the occasion demand it. Marx and Engels, throughout their lifetimes, insisted simply on the necessity of a revolution, by which they, as well as Kautsky, who became the leading spokesman for orthodox Marxism after the 1890s, meant a complete overturn of society once the socialists were in powerthe abolition of private property, the end of social privilege, the breaking of The political and police power ofthe old ruling classes.
But the question whether this aim could be achieved by peaceful means was never settled. And this ambiguity was responsible for the major doctrinal conflicts that preoccupied the socialist movements from 1890 to 1914.
The major issues had to do with the themes of revisionism and reformism. Although their belief in socialism was never shaken, some individuals were skeptical that capitalist society was actually heading in the direction Marx had predicted. The standard of living was evidently rising rather than falling, and though some of the old middle class was disappearing, an emerging class of white-collar workers was taking its place. In many countries this new class did not wholly identify itself with the manual workers (with whom socialism was identified) or with the socialist parties. Most of all, the socialists increasing success in parliament posed practical problems, such as entering the cabinets in coalition with other parties (and trying to put through social legislation rather than just waiting for capitalism to fall) and making alliances with nonworking-class parties such as the Liberals in England, the Catholic Center in Germany, or the Radical party in France. As James Joll hasneatly put it: By the end of the nineteenth century, no Socialist party could escape the difficulties presented by its own existence as a mass party, forced, for the moment at least, to function with in a political system which at the same time it was seeking to destroy (1955, p. 77).
Germany. The problem was especially great in Germany, whose Social Democratic party was the most theoretically intransigent, and it was first posed by Eduard Bernstein, who was the editor of the party journal and was chosen by Engels to be one of his literary executors. In 1899, Bernstein wrote Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus unddie Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy), which triggered the debate. He argued, in effect, that the party should recognize the new changes in industrial society and declare itself to be what it was actually becominga partyprincipally concerned with social reform. [See the biography ofBernstein. ]
Although Bernsteins arguments had some immediate political implications, the debate was conducted largely on a theoretical level. There were important doctrinal and historical reasons for this. The German movement had always set great store in theory as the guide to the future; and the discussion of theoryespecially in a party isolated from the academic worldwas in Germany a matter of status and prestige. But the debate on theory had important psychological roots as well. Although Marx had alway stried to shape the course of the German socialist movement, his influence during most of his life was virtually nil. The first German Workers party was organized in 1863 by Lassalle, whose dandified manners andaristocratic pretensions infuriated Marx. The constitutional struggle between Bismarck and the liberal opposition dominated The political life of Prussia at the time; and to Marx and Engels, observing the situation from England, this struggle was an outward expression of the conflict between the historic forces of aristocratic feudalism and bourgeois capitalism. They therefore urged the new German Workers party to drivethe revolutionary Liberals forward against the government, preparing at the same time to lead the proletariat in its turn against the victorious forces of the bourgeoisie once the feudal system had succumbed to theironslaught (Morgan 1965, p. 8). But Lassalle and his followers wereconvinced that Prussian liberalism had no such revolutionary propensitiesand that the quickest way for the workers to increase their influence wasto join Bismarcks campaign against his liberal opponents, hoping to win in return certain socialist demandsfreedom of the press and associationand, above all, manhood suffrage, which Lassalle and his followers felt was necessary to any further advance. Lassalle, under the influence of Louis Blanc, also hoped that the state would finance cooperative factories so that the workers could become their own employees and overcome the"iron law of wages which kept them impoverished under capitalism. Lassalle, a Hegelian, believed that the state should rule society; and socialism, with state ownership of factories, was the embodiment of the ideal of the state. Against Lassalle (and his successor J. B. Schweitzer), the socialists Liebknecht and Bebel organized a rival socialist party, known as theEisenachers. Nominally Marxist, the Eisenachers were primarily ananti-Prussian party, and though they adopted the program of the International Workingmens Association, they did so largely for tactical reasons against the Lassalleans. In practice they operated as a broad"peoples party. The war of 1870 and the subsequent unification ofGermany dissolved most of the issues between the two factions.
The debate remained on a theoretical plane for good practical reasons. Reformismwhich assumed that effective parliamentary power could beobtainedwas impossible in Germany; for while imperial Germany had a parliamentary system, decisive power was actually in the hands of the emperor. Any chancellor needed the Reichstags approval for legislationand for the budget, but a chancellor could be replaced only if he lost the confidence of the emperor. The chancellor, in fact, was responsible not to the Reichstag but to the crown. The government, though constitutional in form, was in fact autocratic. And while social democracy was growing inparliamentary strength, there was no corresponding growth in the powers of parliament.
Thus The political system barred the Social Democrats from any legitimatehopes of winning power through parliamentary means and reinforced the rhetoric of revolutionary intransigence. The fatal mistake, as Schumpeter called it, was Bismarcks. In a Machiavellian stratagem, he introduced universal suffrage in the federal empire after 1871, in thehope of winning the peasant votes, and to some extent those of the workers, against the urban middle classes. When the socialist vote began to increase, Bismarck introduced restrictive legislation against the socialists as a party, while introducing a comprehensive set of social welfare measures in order to win the loyalty of the workers. The maneuverfailed. When the antisocialist laws lapsed in 1890, the socialists emerged stronger than ever, and their experiences reinforced their antagonistic temper and revolutionary rhetoric.
By the turn of the century, and the reafter, the party controlled largemunicipal administrations, was supported by a powerful trade union movement, and had a vast bureaucracy of its own. The partys ideology nolonger corresponded to its sociological reality (Michels 1911), but, because The political system did not allow the party to discard it srevolutionary rhetoric, the ideology remained intact.
Thus, when Kautsky came to answer Bernstein, he couched his polemic in the language of Marxist scholasticism. In practical fact, the situation confronting the Social Democratic party of Germany as well as the socialist parties of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and czarist Russiawas the failure of the bourgeoisie, as far back as 1848, to complete their middleclass political revolution and eliminate the structures of monarchy and aristocratic rule. But Kaut sky offered no program to deal with this problem other than the rhetorical formula of revolution and the relentless march of history which would sharpen the crises of capitalism.
When in 1918 all three empiresGermany, Austria-Hungary, and Russiacollapsed, the socialist parties in these and other countries alladopted widely varying courses. Although capitalism by the turn of the century had become the predominant economic form of Western society, political structures and cultural traditions varied widely from one country to another. Paradoxical as it seems in Marxist terms, the culturalelements, more than the economic conditions in each country, account forthe varying forms the socialist movement took. As Schumpeter remarked, every country had its own socialism.
England. In Germany a rigid class structure, reinforced by a militaristiccode of honor, excluded the workers from society and led to a counterstiffness of doctrinal Marxist orthodoxy. In Great Britain, by contrast, the intelligence of an old gentry class, a deep tradition of liberty andof political rights, the lack of a militaristic tradition and even of a standing army, the long-established supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy, and the deep-rooted empirical conception of politics, which rendered ideological all-or-none terms distastefulall made for a civil polity, one that accepted the existence of the socialist movement as a legitimate part of British society.
The British Labour party came in to being in order to realize the rights of the working class in the society. The exemplar of peacefuland piecemealsocial change, it was never Marxist, though it was based on strong class feeling and class loyalty. The sources of this position are three fold: There was, first, the deep and persistent strain of nonconformist Christian evangelism, which saw equality as a moralim perative. (The writings of R. H. Tawney, principally his books Equality [1931] and The Acquisitive Society [1920], which helped to shape the English socialist outlook, reflect this evangelism. ) There was, second, the influence of the Fabians, principally Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who, representing one aspect of the Benthamite tradition, were social engineers for whom socialism was a tidy answer to the waste and disorder of the capitalist world. And third, there was the large trade union movement, which saw in the Labour party a means of influencing the course of favorable legislation.
Where as the Continental socialist parties participated actively in the affairs of the Second International, the British Labour party, before World War i, remained insular and rarely tried to impose its influence, asthe Germans did, on other socialist parties. Much of this was due to the general isolation of the British from Continental social thought (on erarely encounters a discussion of the state in English political theory), which in turn has to do with the British temperament. As G. D. H. Cole, who knew Webb well, wrote:
Sidney Webbs first thought in dealing with any question he took up was to find an administratively workable solution; and apart from a very fewessentially simple ideashe did not trouble himself much about underlying philosophy. He was fully convinced that the trend of events in the modern world was towards Socialism, and that this trend would continue: so tha the saw no need to put himself into revolutionary opposition to the main course of development. . . . He had what is some times called a civilservice mindthat is, a habit of translating every idea into terms of them achinery needed to give it effect. . . . He was, however, impatient of dreamers, and uninterested in theories which he could not turn into practical schemes. (Cole 1953-1960, vol. 3, part 1, p. 210)
H. G. Wells summed up still another side of British socialism when he left the Fabian Society after a personal falling-out with Shaw and the Webbs. He caricatured all of them savagely in his novel The New Machiavelli. Hersoul was bony, he wrote of the character named Altiora Bailey (Beatrice Webb). If they [Altiora and her husband] had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and seacliffs a great mistake. The root image of their world, Wells wrote, was"an organized state as confident and powerful as modern science. . . . Individualism meant muddle, meant a crowd of separate undisciplined little people all obstinately doing things jarringly each one in his own way. . . . The organized state would end muddle forever (Wells [1910] 1927, p. 193).
The Webbs spent most of their lives making detailed empirical inquiriesinto problems of social welfare and administration. While Marxism isusually associated with the idea of planning, Marx, as we have seen, never drew any specific blue print of a planned society. Nor did the German Social Democrats, despite their large parliamentary represervation, even study industrial organization and indicate what theymight do if they came into power. The Webbs and the Fabians, however, issued several hundred tracts providing detailed expositions of Labour thinking on both the local and the national levels. One can appreciate the thorough going detail of Fabian research from a series of studies(conducted between 1898 and 1901) about the municipalization of different servicesalcohol traffic, milk supply, pawnshops, slaughter houses, bakeries, hospitals, and fire insurance (see Cole 1953-1960, vol. 3, part1, pp. 215-216). In 1909, the Webbss minority report on the operation ofthe poor laws set out in comprehensive detail the conception and policy ofthe welfare state (Great Britain . . . 1909). Later studies dealt with the general problems of the organization and control of industry. [See thebiography ofWebb, Sidney and Beatrice. ]
The Fabians operated primarily as an elite group and never sought a large membership. Their influence was felt through their published ideas, their research, and their propaganda. Before World War i, the Fabians were aconstituent group in the Labour party; but in keeping with their avowed tactic of permeating all institutions of society that had the power toinfluence policy the civil service, the professions, business groups, and local governmentthey drew upon all groups, non socialist as well associalist, for help. After 1918, when the British Labour party adopted a new constitution and accepted as its basic program a Fabian policy statement drafted by Sidney Webb, relations between the Fabian Society and the Labour party became closer.
The Labour party has been unique among socialist parties, not only because of its open emphas is on gradualism but also because of its structure. Unlike the Continental socialist parties, based on individual membership, the British Labour party originated as a federation of unions and constituent socialist societies, and its funds were raised principally through levies on the union members. Until 1918 individuals could notbecome members directly. They became affiliated with the Labour part yeither through membership in the Independent Labour party, the Fabian Society, or the trade unions, and policy was worked out in negotiations between these organizations. Candidates were nominated by agreement between the unions and affiliates, on a roughly proportional basis. Theindividuals elected to Parliament then formed the parliamentary Labour party.
After 1918 the membership system was changed in order to organize local Labour parties directly in each constituency, but the federated structure remained. The formulation of policy has the refore been a complicated affair. Since the trade unions have traditionally constituted the largest group in the party and vote en bloc in the Labour party conventions, the annual Trades Union Congress is an important arena for adopting resolutions. The annual Labourparty conference of unions, affiliates (such as the consumer-cooperative movement), and local constituency parties sets policy. But this policy is only morally binding on the parliamentary Labour party. In office, the Labour party is responsible only to the parliamentary party, not to the Labour party as a whole. In this crucial respect, once again, the BritishLabour party is shaped by the structure of British politics and not by theconventional theories of socialist organization.
France. In England, the transition to a modern industrial society wasaccomplished peacefully by the economic, and to some extent social, blending of the rising plutocratic groups with the gentry, while a set ofpolitical compromises brought all sections of the country, including theworking class, into the society. In Germany, the older feudal elements, using the state, had created powerful industries and maintained apolitical hegemony over the subordinated middle class. The working class, excluded socially, had built its own institutions, but paradoxically thesevery institutions had facilitated the integration of the workers into the society.
France lacked any such unifying features. Economically, it was atwo-sector society with a large peasant and artisan class alongside amodern industrial economy. Politically the feudal structure had beenbroken, but the bourgeois parties were never able to establish theirunambiguous control; the unstable balance of forces periodically openedthe way to an adventurer attempting to seize power. The working classitself was split.
In Germany and England, the trade unions were part of the organized socialist movement because they hoped to achieve most of their a imsthrough political concessions by the government rather than through direct economic bargaining. But in France, the trade unions were completely independent of the socialist parties. One wing, the syndicalists, basedtheir gospel on Proudhons anti-authoritarian and antipolitical ideas, and their anti-parliamentary bias on the betrayals of the 1848 revolution and the Commune. The French form of union organization, the Bourses deTravail, which stressed the local community of all trades rather than the nation wide organization of one industry or craft, expressed the tendency to create a new society of labor rather than to concentrate on wages and working conditions. The other wing was that of politicalsocialism, but here, too, many of the temperamental weaknesses of Frenchpoliticsits tendentiousness, its hyperbolic rhetoric, and itsinstabilitywere apparent in the French socialist movement.
In 1896, there were no fewer than six national socialist parties inFrance, each usually more interested in fighting the others than infighting the opposition. By 1905, the six had been reduced to two nationalparties, one led by Jules Guesde, who was the spokesman for orthodox Marxism and whose following was chiefly in the industrial north, and the other by Jean Jaures, a former professor of philosophy and a renownedoratora humanist repelled by the aridities of Marxist dogmawhosefollowing was among teachers, skilled workers, and intellectuals attractedto the idea of ethical socialism.
Under the pressure of the Socialist International, the two parties made anuneasy union, but the factions were still unable to agree on whether toenter coalition governments headed by bourgeois parties. The Frenchparliamentary system, with its emphasis on multiparties, made it difficult for any single party to assume power. The art of government was the art ofcoalition. As socialist parliamentary strength rapidly increased, the socialists faced the problem of silently abstaining, thereby allowing rightist cabinets to govern, or entering center-left coalitions. Those whoopposed coalitions argued that the assumption of governmental responsibility would weaken the militancy of the workers and would forcethe party to agree to non-socialist programs. Those who favored coalition, originally named the Possibilists, argued that in government, socialistscould more easily defend the republic against reactionary forcesand atthe same time help pave the way to socialism.
Syndicalism. If the British Labour party and Fabian gradualism to gether represent one end of the socialist continuum, revolutionary syndicalism, with its faith in direct action and the general strike, represents the other. The word syndicalism simply meant unionism, but in the period preceding World War i it connoted an antiparliamen-tary, antire formist tendency deeply rooted in the Proudhon a narchist, antipolitical, antiauthoritarian tradition.
Revolutionary syndicalism was primarily a pheno men on of the Latin countriesFrance, Italy, and Spainthough syndicalist elements made astrong showing in the British labor movement among the seamen and the transport workers, and in the United States among the western miners and loggers of the Industrial Workers of the World ( Wobblies ). Syndicalism never took hold in central Europe, the heartland of orthodox Marxism.
Marx and Engels had taught their followers to regard syndicalist tendencies as an expression of backwardness and immaturity, as a passing phase in the development of industrialism which would disappear after the emergence of the largescale factory system and a modern industrial proletariat. What ever the validity of that appraisal, syndicalism as itemerged in France was not only a despairing rebellion against industrial capitalism but, in its vision of the future, a protest against the destruction of free trade unionism under an authoritarian state socialism.
This aspect of syndicalism was formulated by Fernand Pelloutier, a journalist who had been active in the various Marxist movements in France. Disillusioned with The political parties, which were preoccupied withobtaining office and power, Pelloutier felt that the only protection workers could have against arbitrary managerial powereither innationalized industries or in capitalist enterpriseswould be workerscontrol of industry.
Syndicalism was important less as a doctrine for reorganizing society than as an attitude. It was hostile to parliamentary methodsand in 1905 the French trade union movement, in the famous Charter of Amiens, laid down the principle of strict independence from all political party involvement. Its in junction has been so strong that, unlike every other European trade union official, no French union secretary was allowed to take a parliamentary seat. The charter proclaimed the general strike as the instrument of revolution, a single collective action where by the entire working class, by laying down its tools, could halt the operations of industry and in that transforming moment take power. Further, the charter glorified spontaneity rather than organization; and it emphasized the role of a conscious minority, an elite of revolutionary proletarians whose task it would be to lead an aroused working class into revolution aryaction. [SeeSyndicalismand the biography ofSorel. ]
The syndicalist emphasis on workers control has hadre current appeal in workingclass and radical movements. In Great Britain, where the medievalist socialism of William Morris and John Ruskin, firmly against industrialism and statism, caught on for a time, syndicalist ideas had a strange efflorescence before World War i in the"guild socialism of A. R. Orage and G. D. H. Cole. [See the biography ofCole, G. D. H. ]
The guild socialists, reacting against the administrative socialism of theFabians, blueprinted a decentralized socialist society in greater detail than any other socialist movement had. Politically, the guild state was to be a bicameral bodythe one a geographical parliament based on local constituencies, the other a functional body made up of representatives of each trade or industry. The consumer, through Parliament, was to set the goals of production(e. g. , the division between consumption and investment, the priorities of development); the Council of Guild Representatives, the producers, was to be responsible for the efficient management of industry. Each guild was tobe a self-governing body, based on local councils, and was to set its ownconditions of work. Each guild would receive money in proportion to its membership, but would pay wages in accordance with its own ruleseither inequal shares or in differentials according to skill. Thus a national political and economic planning system was combined with the idea of cooperative workshops.
The course of world politics since 1917 has been dominated by the long shadow and the doctrinal pronouncements of VladimirIlich Ulianov. Before 1914, however, Lenin played only a small role in the affairs of international socialism. He was a member, after 1905, of the bureau (executive committee) of the Second International, one of 69 persons representing 23 member countries. He was known personally to the leading figures of the socialist movement, but his works, not yettranslated, were little known; and as an exile representing one of several fiercely quarrelsome sects, he carried little weight in the International.
Moreover, none of the prominent the oreticians of Marxism expected a socialist revolution in Russia: there was only a small industrial proletariat, and the country was still backward and feudal. In accordance with the theory of necessary stages of social development which Georgii Plekhanov (1883) had posited in founding the Marxist movement in Russia, this vast country still had to pass through the stage of capitalism, and the bourgeois middleclass democratic revolution was still to come. Once Russia could be led along the lines of Western social development, then political freedom, trade union freedom, and legal socialist activity wouldbe achieved; after the democratic revolution, which was the role of the middle classes, would come the social revolution, in the more distantfuture. In effect, Russia was still before 1848.
Yet the revolution did occur and was shaped by certain peculiar features of Russian social history. Before socialism, the dominant radical tradition in Russia had been populism, a doctrine associated in large measure withthat remarkable exile Alexander Herzen. Herzen saw in the peasant communes the seeds of a future cooperative society that could by pass the harsh and disruptive effects of capitalism. From London, Herzen kept alive the liberal spirit of the Russian in telligentsia through his magazine Kolokol (The Bell), and in his home were to be found the major exiles from Russia.
The populism preached by Herzen idealized the peasantry and asserted, in almost mystic fashion, that the peasant was the source of wisdom and virtue. In the summer of 1873, roused by the appeal of Mikhail Bakunin, hundreds of students went to the countryside to go to the people androuse them to action. Students disguised as workmen wandered the country side, preaching revolution, but the peasantry, suspicious of their wouldbe saviors, simply turned them over to the police.
The episode was important in the history of populism, and its lesson was drawn most starkly by Peter Tkachev, one of the theorists of Russian populism. Insisting that the peasants as a mass the peoplewere incapable of revolutionary creativeness and that only a conscious minority the intelligentsiacould make the revolution, Tkachev sketched the kind of organization that would be necessary. It would have to be, he argued, aconspiratorial one, based on the principles of centralization of power and decentralization of functions. And it would have to be led by the intelligent sia. These two the mesthe need for compact organization and the role of a revolutionary elitewere to bear fruit some twenty years later in the thinking of Lenin [see the biography ofLenin].
The war that had begun in the summer of 1914 not only brought revolution to Russia; it signaled the collapse of international socialism. For several years the heat and lightning of war had flashed in Europe, and each time the international socialist movement had proclaimed itsreadiness to strike in order to prevent international conflagration. It sgrowing power seemed to assure a new foundation for the maintenance of peace. Yet in 1914, with very little dissent, the socialist parties of Germany, Austria, and France all voted to support their governments in the war. The German Social Democrats, the most powerful socialist party in the world, had in the past publicly dissociated them selves from the German state. And the Kaiser, in turn, had once called them fellows without acountry. Now, with only one dissenting vote, the parliamentary party gave full support to the budgetary war credits the government requested. There were tiresome quotations from Marx in supportof the action: Marx had supported the principle of nationality; Marx hadonce proposed support of Germany in a war against Russia; and in 1891 Engels had said that in such a war Germany would be fighting for itsnational existence. Once scripture was being cited, the French party hadits own rationalizations, heavily laden with quotations from Marx. So did the Austrians. The fact remained that when the crisis finally came, nationalism as an emotional idea proved to be stronger than class, and international solidarity proved to be a myth. The International was at anend.
The period between the two world wars saw Europetorn apart by the conflicting ideologies of communism and fascism. In theprocess, democracy and the socialist movement were the losers. Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain came under fascist or authoritarianleadership. Even earlier, right-wing dictatorships took over Portugal, Hungary, and Rumania. Belgium and France were threatened by strong fascistmovements. Only Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries wererelatively free of these storms, though a small fascist group arose inEngland. The sociological reasons for these variations in fortune will bediscussed in this section.
The October Revolution in Russia had brought before the European socialistmovement the insurrectionary idea of the seizure of power. For more thanforty years the idea had been an abstraction to the socialist movement. Lulled by the inevit-ablism preached by Engels and by the steady growthof electoral success, the socialist movements had assumed that at somedistant time it might yet be necessary to seize, or at least to maintain, power that had been established legally; but no one took the ideaseriously. Even inside Russia the idea, while fiercely debated, had an airof mimetic combat. Plekhanov had argued that men could act only insofar associal conditions allowed them to do so, i. e. , only within the limits ofthe laws of history. But Lenin had apparently demonstrated the primacyof will, at least within disorganized situations wherein a small groupof determined men, acting skillfully and in disciplined fashion, could seize power.
Within Marxian theory there were actually three successive versions of thetheory of taking power. The first, later presented in Lenins What Is toBe Done? (1902), conceived of the proletariat as directed by a smallgroup of professional revolutionaries drawn from the middle-classintelligent- sia; the working class would support the middle-class revolution in thefaith that there would be a second round wherein the proletariatsupportedin Germany by a peasant revoltcould take over. But this conception passedwith the end of the revolutionary wave of 1848-1850; and asindustrialization and a new appraisal of the nature of factory life and the role of the proletariat emerged, a second version appeared. Now theemphasis was placed on the building of mass political parties led byworkers who had achieved theoretical competencetypified in Germany byBebel, who had been a carpenter, and in England by Keir Hardie, who was aminer. It was now felt that socialism need not come throughinsurrectionary tactics or coups led by small bands of professionalrevolutionaries, but peacefully, through parliamentary means or evensimply in a show of strength.
After 1905 a few socialist theorists had argued that a new stage wasemerging. These included Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-Jewish intellectual withdoctorates in philosophy and jurisprudence; Herman Gorter; AntonPannekoek, a Dutch astronomer; and A. L. Helfand, a Russian-born economistwho wrote under the name Parvus. Each of these socialists was influencedby developments in the Western labor movements rather than by events inRussia. In her book The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Luxemburg tried toextend Marxs economic doctrines by arguing that after a phase ofimperialism, in which capitalists would seek to export capital surpluses, the capitalist system must inevitably break down and create a crisis. [See the biography ofLuxemburg. ] Gorter and Pannekoek had been close toanarcho-syndicalism, and Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus (in his early years)had been active in the left wing of the German social democratic movement. In one way or another, they all insisted that with the growing educationof the working class, there would develop, during a crisis, arevolutionary spontaneity in the masses, and that to insist on partyhierarchy and professional leadership would only lead to a dictatorship bythe leaders.
It was only after the Bolshevik victory in 1917, and the creation of the Third (Communist) International, that Leninsearlier text was canonized in order to claim for the Bolsheviks a uniquerevolutionary knowledge and thus to enforce the hegemony of the Russianparty over all other Communist parties.
Lenin summoned the revolutionary working-class groups to a conference, which met in Moscow on March 2, 1919, for the purpose of organizing thenew International. Its main objectives were the immediate seizure of power by working-class parties in Europe, the abandonment of false bourgeois democracy, and the establishment of adictatorship of the working class for the systematic suppression andexpropriation of the exploiting classes.
There was an apocalyptic fervor in the air. World revolution seemedpalpably near. Shortly after the first congress of the CommunistInternational, a Soviet republic was proclaimed by B61a Kun in Hungary, and another in Bavaria by left-wing socialists. It seemed as if the onlything needed to carry out a successful revolution was steely revolutionarywill. A second world congress of the Comintern (the shorthand name for Communist International) was convoked in Moscow in July 1920. It was nolonger a small gathering; delegations came from parties in a dozen countries.
The chief feature of the meeting, which gave organizational shape to theinternational communist movement, was the drafting of 21 points asconditions for membership in the Comintern. The purpose of these pointswas to create in each country a disciplined, conspiratorial party whosechief purpose would be to combat the old socialist leaderships and toassert the binding, from-the-top-down, authority of the Comintern overeach national party. Throughout Europe and in the United States, suchsocialist leaders as Ramsay Mac-Donald in England, Kautsky and RudolfHilferding in Germany, Morris Hillquit in the United States, and JeanLonguet in France had opposed participation in the war and had taken a middle position against the reformists. But in the opinion of the newComintern, these leaders had to be rejected and exposed as much as thoseof the right wing, and had to be fought just as bitterly. The 21 pointscommanded communists to split every socialist party and trade union in the world, to organize an underground machine in addition to the publicactivities of the party, to disorganize as much as possible the army ofeach country, and to reject any cooperation with social patriots andmiddle-group people.
By 1923 the revolutionary tide had receded all over Europe. The communistshad completely misread both the character of the labor movements ofwestern Europe and the social structure of those societies. For a shortperiod the communists engaged in adventurism and even in putschism: theRed Army marched into Poland to advance the revolution, only to bedefeated by Pilsudski, once a nationalistic socialist, who a few yearslater set up an authoritarian regime; insurrections were planned, in 1923, in Saxony and Thuringia; and an abortive uprising inHamburg failed. But after 1923 it was clear that, for the time being atleast, Europe had achieved some measure of political and economicstabilization. The Soviet Union itself turned, under Lenin, to the problemof what to do with power in a single country. The large Norwegian Laborparty, as well as such syndicalist leaders as Jack Tanner in England andAlfred Ros-mer and Pierre Monatte in France, withdrew from the Cominternbecause of the centralization of party structure. What was left in Europewas the wreckage of the socialist movement in half a dozen countries and the fear of revolution that drove the middle classes to support right-winggroups. Within the Comintern, the hegemony of the Russian party wascomplete, and within a short time the International itself becameprincipally an arm of Soviet foreign policy, rather than an independentinstrument of revolution. [SeeCommunism, article onthe international movement. ]
The sharp turn to the left in the Soviet Union in 1929, and Stalinseffort to consolidate his rule by turning on his erstwhile right-wingpolitical allies, coincided with a world-wide economic depression and therise of fascism in Germany and other countries. For the communists theseevents heralded the final crisis of capitalism, and they awaited a freshwave of revolutionary activity. After an analysis of fascism in Italy, communist theorists argued that fascism was the last stage of monopolycapitalism; and since it could not solve the inherent contradictions ofthe capitalist crisis, inevitably the revolution was again at hand. Fromthis analysis the communists concluded that the chief obstacle to theirvictory was not the capitalists but the socialists, who still misled themajority of the working class. In several instances, the communists evenworked with the Nazis in order to diminish socialist influence. They votedwith the Nazis in the Prussian Landtag to bring down the Social Democraticgovernment. They cooperated with the Nazis in the Berlin street-car strikein 1932 in order to increase disorder in Germany.
The communists thus became theimplacable enemies of the democratic regimes in central and westernEurope; and the middle classes in many countries, principally Italy andGermany, out of fear of the left and because of economic crises, oftenvoted for the extreme right. However, an important element contributing tothe weakness of the democratic regimes was the inability of the socialists, owing to the contradictory attitude toward capitalism and democracy inspired in them by Marxian dogmatics, to provide anyeffective leadership or support for democratic societies.
In 1931 the reconstructed Socialist International consisted of partieswith more than six million dues-paying members. The total parliamentary vote for socialist candidates was almost 26 million. More than 1, 300 socialist deputies sat in the parliaments of their countries. Some 360daily newspapers spoke for the labor movement. Yet, remarkably, this largeforce was almost completely paralyzed when the crises occurred.
The root problem was an old one. The socialist movement, true to itsMarxist heritage, did not believe that capitalist society could bereformed. When the socialists, particularly of the right wing, were thrustinto office because of the failure or the unwillingness of any other partyto rule, they followed the most orthodox of economic policies, because"the crisis has to run its course. Believing, from a Marxist point ofview, that the reason for the depression was a disproportion in growthbetween the producer goods sector and consumer goods sector, they tried touse up the resultant overproduction so that a better proportion betweenproducers and consumers purchasing power would emerge, leading to an upswing.
As Adolf Sturmthal has pointed out in The Tragedy of European Labor(1943), the socialist movement, with all its strength, was basically apressure group seeking social concessions from the state for the immediatebenefit of the working class. But it had neither an economic program norany clear idea of planning. State intervention arose out of unorthodoxeconomic theories, such as John May-nard Keyness in England and GunnarMyrdals in Sweden, or the unorthodox financial policies of HjalmarSchacht, who had been made president of the Reichsbank by the Germansocialists when Hitler began the rearmament that revived the Germaneconomy. Nowhere except in Sweden, and later in the planning ideas ofHendrik de Man, did the socialists have any idea of what to do about thedepression [see the biography ofMan].
Italy. The socialists, in a different way from the communists, alsomisread the nature of fascism. For example, fascism was barely mentionedin the major report of the 1928 International Socialist Congress on thepolitical situation in Europe. It was seen as an idiosyncrasy of theItalians; and its ideology, emotional roots, and irrational quality werenot understood. Yet Italy did foreshadow quite clearly the fate of the other nations in central Europe.
Shortly after the war, Italy seemed on the verge of a proletarianrevolution. In the general election of 1919 the socialists won two millionout of a total of 5. 5 million votes, and the leadership of the party hadpassed into the hands of the left wing, which openly asserted that thenext step would be the creation of a Socialist Republic and theestablishment of a proletarian dictatorship. Workers had spontaneouslybegun to seize factories, and the peasants of Sicily and the south hadappropriated the uncultivated holdings of absentee landlords. As Sturmthalput it: Continuous unrest, strikes, factory occupations, expropriation oflandall this convinced the middle class that a revolution was impendingand that the democratic middle-class state was powerless to stave off thedanger. Public opinion became more and more convinced that a strong manwas needed to establish law and order ([1943] 1951, p. 182).
The decisive, dramatic incident occurred in August 1920, when a wagedispute in the metal industries led to sudden stay-in strikes in which500, 000 workers occupied the factories, kept the machinery going, andassembled arms to resist evacuation. Workers in other industries called on their leaders to order the taking over of other factories. But the socialist leadership, divided and uncertain, hesitated; and finally a pact was reached with the industrialists whereby the employers agreed inprinciple to the unions demand for workers control of production. This was the high point of the revolutionary tide, and the n a new forceappeared, the Fascisti.
Organized by Benito Mussolini, a former leader of the left wing of the Italian Socialist party, the Fascisti preached anticapitalism, nationalism, and the necessity of violence. With his squadristi, Mussoliniwent into the streets to break up working-class meetings and to beat upworking-class leaders. In 1921 an effort was made to form a socialist-liberal coalition government and save the country from the threatened civil war. The right-wing socialists made the proposal, but the idea was vetoed by the left wing. By 1922 a form of civil war had spreadin Italy. In the large urban industrial centers of the north, strongholdsof the socialist movement, the city administrations passed into the handsof Mussolinis squadristi through terror and intimidation. Bologna, Genoa, Livorno, Milan, and finally Naples were taken over by the fascists. Ageneral strike called by the trade unions on August 31, 1922, failedignominiously, despite the united support of the labor movement; andmiddle-class opinion swung even more strongly to the fascists. At the invitation of the king, and with the support of the army, bureaucracy, and big business, Mussolini was invited to become premier. For two years he ruled by parliamentary means, but after the assassinationof Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 and left-wing withdrawal from the Chamber of Deputies as a moral protest, Mussolini became more openlydictatorial: trade unions, political parties, and cultural organizationswere either disbanded or placed under fascist control, and local autonomy was abolished. By 1926 parliamentary government had vanished. [SeeFascism. ]
Germany. In November 1918, the Germany of Wilhelm was no more. The Kaiserhad abdicated, and Friedrich Ebert, a former saddlemaker who was now the head of the Social Democratic party, installed himself as head of the newrepublic. But the socialists themselves were split into three factions. The majority socialists represented the right wing of the party. The"independent socialists, led by Kautsky and Bernstein (together for the first time in twenty years), had opposed the war and now favored a radical program of economic reform. The extreme left, led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, knew that the German republic was going to be a middle-classstate and wanted to organize a proletarian party prepared for an eventualrevolutionary opportunity. But younger socialists took over the left wingen masse, overruled Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and began to prepare the Spartacus group, as the left wing called itself, for immediaterevolution.
In this situation the attitude of the majority socialists was decisive. The Workmens and Soldiers Councils, which had sprung up spontaneously onthe Soviet model, elected the majority socialists to the leadership of the new Council of Peoples Commissars. But the majority socialists feared arepetition of the Russian chaos and sought first to achieve stability withthe cooperation of some of the military.
When the Spartacus group initiated a rebellion in early 1919, it was putdown by Gustav Noske the majority socialist appointed ascommander-in-chief of the armywith the help of the Free Corps, createdand led by former imperial officers. After the uprising was quashed, FreeCorps officers cold-bloodedly murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who hadloyally supported their comrades despite their opposition to the venture. When, in the spring of 1919, left-wing socialistsand later the communiststook over the newly proclaimed Bavarian republic, the FreeCorps was used to take Munich and to murder hundreds of the insurgents, thus seriously reducing the authority and prestige of the socialists. InMarch 1920, Reichswehr troops led by a little-known nationalist namedWolfgang Kapp mutinied and marched into Berlin. The republican governmentcould not muster enough loyal troops to defend the capital, and fled toStuttgart. A powerful general strike, joined by all the factions, defeatedthe putsch in four days. When Kapp was routed from Berlin, communist-ledworkers in the Ruhr tried to continue the general strike. The newly formedWeimar coalition majority socialists, the Catholic Center, andConservative Democratssent the Reichswehr into the Ruhr to crush the revolt.
In the end the majority socialists, as well as the republic, were thelosers. In the general elections of June 1920, the majority socialists and the middle-class parties of the Weimar coalition lost heavily, and the nationalist parties gained. A new cabinet consisting of the Catholic Center and the right-wing German Peoples party took office. It was clear that on the right as well as on the left the republic itself had onlyshaky support among the German people.
The socialists were given one more chance. In May 1928 the GermanSocialist party, now reunited because the independents refused to acceptthe Diktat of the Comintern, emerged as the strongest party in the Reichstag. Although they lacked an absolute majority, the socialists tookoffice, with Herman Miiller as chancellor and Hilferding, the famedsocialist theoretician, as minister of finance. But a year later Germany, along with the rest of the Western world, was plunged into the depression, and the socialists had no economic policy to meet the crisis. Hilferding, mindful of the ruinous inflation of the early 1920s, followed an orthodoxdeflationary policy which reduced purchasing power and increasedunemployment. The strength of the labor movement defeated the employersefforts to reduce wages and salaries; the fault, however, lay not with the employers, who had to reduce production costs or get out of business, but with the state, which had failed to work out any active policy. Instead oftapping idle capital funds, the government worked above all to balance the budget, or at least to reduce budget deficits, even if this meant reducingunemployment insurance benefits. Several German socialist economistsfavored devaluation or the abandonment of the gold standard, a monetarypolicy later associated with Keynes. But they were opposed, on the groundthat this would lead to economic and political nationalism. In allessentials the socialists followed a policy of laissez-faire: the depression had to run its natural course. After all, as any Marxist knew, capitalism could not be reformed.
England. A similar dilemma confronted the British Labour party. In 1918 ithad adopted a socialist program for the first time; the new social system was described as a thing that would emerge gradually out of capitalism, bya series of piecemeal changes. The Labour party was then still weak, thirdin size after the Conservatives and the Liberals. Five years later, following a prolonged period of unemployment which the Conservatives hadbeen unable to cope with, the Labour party emerged as the strongestEnglish party and, supported by the Liberals, in January 1924 formed thefirst Labour government in British history. The government carried outsome modest social reforms, but its tenure was short. When the BritishForeign Office published the so-called Zinoviev letter, a set ofinstructions from the head of the Comintern to British communists onantimilitarist tacticsa letter now conceded to be a forgerythe electorate voted strongly Tory, and the Labour government was ousted.
The trade unions, disappointed by their failure in politics, turned tomore militant economic action. The coal miners, always the most militant, had a genuine grievancetheir wages had recently been cut. (The problem was one of government monetary policy; in 1925 England returned to the gold standard at the prewar pound-dollar exchange rate, and the prices ofBritish exports were above the world market level. ) The miners, refusingto accept the wage cut and demanding the nationalization of industry, wenton strike in May 1926. With the support of the entire trade unionmovement, this strike soon widened into a general strike, the first inEnglish history. Railwaymen, local transport workers, builders, printers, iron and steel workers, all walked out, almost completely paralyzingLondon and other parts of Great Britain. The strike had had norevolutionary aim its only purpose had been to support the miners butwhen the government stood firm, the unions, uncertain of their next step, retreated. After nine days the general strike was called off, and its mainresult was that the left wing lost influence and the right wing gainedcomplete control of the labor movement.
In June 1929 the British Labour party had its second chance. In the general election of that year, the party won 287 of the 615 seats in theHouse of Commons and, with the support of the Liberals, formed the secondLabour government, with Ram- say MacDonald as prime minister. But the problem that soon confronted the German socialists was already bedeviling England. Though other countriesat the time were still enjoying prosperity, England, because it could notcompete in world markets, had a great deal of unemployment. The Labourgovernment was pledged to make far-reaching social reforms; the businesscommunity demanded reduced taxes and a retrenchment in social policy. Acollision was inevitable. One way out would have been devaluation orstrict exchange controls to keep gold from leaving England. Either coursewould have been an acknowledgment of the end of Britains domination ofthe international economywhich she had maintained for almost a hundredyearsand a new policy of economic nationalism. This the Labour government refused to do.
When the depression hit England full force, the Labour government had itsback to the wall. The flight of capital from London had become a flood, and the Bank of England warned that unless the budget was balanced, the pound would fall. In orthodox fashion, the Labour government was committedto free trade and to defense of the gold parity of the pound. MacDonaldproposed, as an economy measure, to cut unemployment benefits; and whenthe trade union elements in the party rejected such a cut, or anyreduction in social services, MacDonald split the Labour government and, taking 14 colleagues with him, formed a national coalition with theConservatives and the Liberals. The national government itself failed tostem the tide, and in September 1931 Britain went off the gold standard, introduced protectionism and a tariff, and began, under a Tory government, to set up economic dikes in an effort to save itself from the floods ofworld-wide depression. The Labour party, though it still retained somestrength among the electorate, suffered a great loss of parliamentarystrengthfrom 287 to 52. For nine years it sat in opposition until itjoined the Churchill government of national unity in 1940. In 1945, forthe first time in its history, the Labour party won a clear electoral majority.
Austria. In February 1934, after four days of bloody fighting, the reactionary regime of Engel-bert Dollfuss destroyed the Austrian socialdemocracy. This was a blow that struck the international socialistmovement especially hard, for Austrian social democracy had been the modelfor all proud socialists. It was a disciplined party and had the supportof almost all of the working class. Its leaders and theoreticians, particularly Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer, had been respected for their courage and their contributionsto socialist thought. The party, while revolutionary in its aims, maintained a sanity and realism in political affairs which had preventedit from imitating the adventurism of the Hungarian communists in 1919 orthe feckless policy of the German Social Democrats. In 1927, at the peakof its strength, the Austrian Socialist party polled 42 per cent of thetotal electoral vote, and in Vienna the socialists won a majority ofalmost two-thirds. Half a million of Viennas two million inhabitants weredues-paying party members, and the city was a showcase of municipalachievement. In 1919 the socialists had joined with the Christian Socialparty in a coalition that gave the country stability and permittedsections of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to achieve their independence. The first president of the Austrian republic, Karl Seitz, was a socialist, as was its first chancellor, the noted legal scholar Karl Renner.
Follow this link:
socialism facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com ...