Читать книгу Socialism and Democracy in Europe - Samuel Peter Orth - Страница 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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