In England the same questions had disturbed all classes for nearly fifty years. There had been no great revolutionary period, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the extinction of Chartism in 1848 every doctrine of trade unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, and socialism had been debated passionately by groups of workingmen and their friends. The principles and methods of trade unionism were being worked out on the actual battlefield, amid riots, strikes, machine-breaking, and incendiarism. Instinctively the masses were associating for mutual protection and, almost unconsciously, working out by themselves programs of action. Nevertheless, Joseph Hume, Francis Place, Robert Owen, and a number of other brilliant men were lending powerful intellectual aid to the workers in their actual struggle. A group of radical economists was also defending the claims of labor. Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and J. F. Bray were all seeking to find the economic causes of the wrongs suffered by labor and endeavoring, in some manner, to devise remedies for the immense suffering endured by the working classes. Together with Robert Owen, a number of them were planning labor exchanges, voluntary communities, and even at one time the entire reorganization of the world through the trade unions. In this ferment the coöperative movement also had its birth. The Rochdale Pioneers began to work out practically some of the coöperative ideas of Robert Owen. With £28 a pathetic beginning was made that has led to the immensely rich coöperative movement of to-day. Furthermore, the Chartists were leading a vast political movement of the workers. In support of the suffrage and of parliamentary representation for workingmen, a wonderful group of orators and organizers carried on in the thirties and forties an immense agitation. William Lovett, Feargus O'Connor, Joseph Rayner Stephens, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, and James Bronterre O'Brien were among the notable and gifted men who were then preaching throughout all England revolutionary and socialist ideas. Such questions as the abolition of inheritances, the nationalization of land, the right of labor to the full product of its toil, the necessity of breaking down class control of Parliament—these and other subversive ideas were germinating in all sections of the English labor movement. It was a heroic period—altogether the most heroic period in the annals of toil—in which the most advanced and varied revolutionary ideas were hurtling in the air. The causes of the ruin that overcame this magnificent beginning of a revolutionary working-class movement cannot be dwelt upon here. Quarrels between the leaders, the incoherence of their policies, and divisions over the use of violence utterly wrecked a movement that anticipated by thirty years the social democracy of Germany. The tragic fiasco in 1848 was the beginning of an appalling working-class reaction from years of popular excesses and mob intoxications, from which the wiser leadership of the German movement was careful to steer clear. And, after '48, solemn and serious men settled down to the quiet building of trade unions and coöperatives. Revolutionary ideas were put aside, and everywhere in England the responsible men of the movement were pleading with the masses to confine themselves to the practical work of education and organization.
Although Germany was far behind England in industrial development and, consequently, also in working-class organization, the beginnings of a labor and socialist movement were discernible. A brief but delightful description of the early communist societies is given by Engels in his introduction to the Révélations sur le Procès des Communistes. As early as 1836 there were secret societies in Germany discussing socialist ideas. The "League of the Just" became later the "League of the Righteous," and that eventually developed into the "Communist League." The membership cards read, "All men are brothers." Karl Schapper, Heinrich Bauer, and Joseph Moll, all workingmen, were among those who made an imposing impression upon Engels. Even more notable was Weitling, a tailor, who traveled all over Germany preaching a mixture of Christian communism and French utopian socialism. He was a simple-hearted missionary, delivering his evangel. "The World As It Is and As It Might Be" was the moving title of one of his books that attracted to him not only many followers among the workers, but also notable men from other classes. Most of the communists were of course always under suspicion, and many of them were forced out of their own countries. As a result, a large number of foreigners—Scandinavians, Dutch, Hungarians, Germans, and Italians—found themselves in Paris and in London, and astonished each other by the similarity of their views. All Europe in this period was discussing very much the same things, and not only the more intelligent among the workers but the more idealistic among the youth from the universities were in revolt, discussing fervently republican, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideas. In "Young Germany," George Brandes gives a thrilling account of the spiritual and intellectual ferment that was stirring in all parts of the fatherland during the entire forties. [(2)]
It was in this agitated period that Marx and Engels, both mere youths, began to press their ideas in revolutionary circles. They met each other in Paris in 1844, and there began their lifelong coöperative labors. Engels, although a German, was living in England, occupied in his father's cotton business at Manchester. He had taken a deep interest in the condition of the laboring classes, and had followed carefully the terrible and often bloody struggles that so frequently broke out between capital and labor in England during the thirties and forties. Arriving by an entirely different route, he had come to opinions almost identical with those of Marx; and the next year he persuaded Marx to visit the factory districts of Lancashire, in order to acquaint himself actually with the enraged struggle then being fought between masters and men. Engels had not gone to a university, although he seems somehow to have acquired, despite his business cares and active association with the men and movements of his time, a thorough education. On the other hand, Marx was a university man, having studied at Jena, Bonn, and Berlin. Like most of the serious young men of the period, Marx was a devoted Hegelian. When his university days were over, he became the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung of Cologne, but at the age of twenty-four he found his paper suppressed because of his radical utterances. He went to Paris, only to be expelled in 1845. He found a refuge in Belgium until 1848, when the Government evidently thought it wise that he should move on. Shortly after, he returned to Germany to take up his editorial work once more, but in 1849, his Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed, and he was forced to return to Paris. The authorities, not wishing him there, sent him off to London, where he remained the rest of his life. By the irony of fate, even the governments of Europe seemed to be conspiring to force Marx to become the best equipped man of his time. To the leisure and travel enforced upon him by the European governments was due in no small measure his long schooling in economic theory, revolutionary political movements, and working-class methods of action. Both he and Engels penetrated into every nest of discontent. They came personally in touch with every group of dissidents. They spent many weary but invaluable weeks in the greatest libraries of Europe, with the result that they became thoroughly schooled in philosophy, economics, science, and languages. They pursued, to the minutest detail, with an inexhaustible thirst, the theories not only of the "authorities" but also of nearly every obscure socialist, radical, and revolutionist in England, France, Russia, and Germany.
In Brussels, Paris, and London, around the forties, a number of brilliant minds seemed somehow or other to come frequently in contact with each other. Many of them had been driven out of their own countries, and, as exiles abroad, they had ample leisure to plan their great conspiracies or to debate their great theories. Some of the notable radicals of the period were Heine, Freiligrath, Herwegh, Willich, Kinkel, Weitling, Bakounin, Ruge, Ledru-Rollin, Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet, Proudhon, Ernest Jones, Eccarius, Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht; and many of them came together from time to time and, in great excitement and passion, fought as "Roman to Roman" over their panaceas. Marx and Engels knew most of them and spent innumerable hours, not infrequently entire days and nights, at a sitting, in their intellectual battles.
It was a most fortunate thing for Marx that the French Government should have driven him in 1849 to London. "Capital" might never have been written had he not been forced to study for a long period the first land in all Europe in which modern capitalism had obtained a footing. On his earlier visit in 1845 he had spent a few weeks with Engels in the great factory centers, and he had been deeply impressed with this new industrialism and no less, of course, with the English labor movement. Nothing to compare with it then existed in France or Germany. As early as 1840 many of the trades were well organized, and repeated efforts had been made to bring them together into a national federation. How thoroughly Engels knew this movement and its varied struggles to better the status of labor is shown in his book, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844." How thoroughly and fundamentally Marx later came to know not only the actual working-class movement, but every economic theory from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, and every insurgent economist and political theorist from William Godwin to Bronterre O'Brien, is shown in "Capital." In fact, not a single phase of insurgent thought seemed to escape Marx and Engels, nor any trace of revolt against the existing order, whether political or industrial. In Germany they were schooled in philosophy and science; in France they found themselves in a most amazing fermentation of revolutionary spirit and idealism; and in England they studied with the minutest care the coöperative movement and self-help, the trade-union movement with its purely economic aims and methods, the Chartist movement with its political action, and the Owenite movement, both in its purely utopian phases and in its later development into syndicalist socialism. This long and profound study placed Marx and Engels in a position infinitely beyond that of their contemporaries. Possessed as they were of unusual mental powers, it was inevitable that such a training should have placed them in a position of intellectual leadership in the then rapidly forming working-class organizations of Europe.
The study of English capitalism convinced Marx of the truthfulness of certain generalizations which he had already begun to formulate in 1844. It became more and more evident to him that economic facts, to which history had hitherto attributed no rôle or a very inferior one, constituted, at least in the modern world, a decisive historic force. "They form the source from which spring the present class antagonisms. These antagonisms in countries where great industry has carried them to their complete development, particularly in England, are the bases on which parties are founded, are the sources of political struggles, are the reasons for all political history." [(3)] Although Marx had arrived at this opinion earlier and had generalized this point of view in "French-German Annals," his study of English economics swept away any possible doubt that "in general it was not the State which conditions and regulates civil society, but civil society which conditions and regulates the State, that it was then necessary to explain politics and history by economic relations, and not to proceed inversely." [(4)] "This discovery which revolutionized historical science was essentially the work of Marx," says Engels, and, with his customary modesty, he adds: "The part which can be attributed to me is very small. It concerned itself directly with the working-class movement of the period. Communism in France and Germany and Chartism in England appeared to be something more than mere chance which could just as well not have existed. These movements became now a movement of the oppressed class of modern times, the working class. Henceforth they were more or less developed forms of the historically necessary struggle which this class must carry on against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. They were forms of the struggle of the classes, but which were distinguished from all preceding struggles by this fact: the class now oppressed, the proletariat, cannot effect its emancipation without delivering all society from its division into classes, without freeing it from class struggles. No longer did Communism consist in the creation of a social ideal as perfect as possible; it resolved itself into a clear view of the nature, the conditions, and the general ends of the struggle carried on by the working class." [(5)]
It was not the intention of Marx and Engels to communicate their new scientific results to the intellectual world exclusively by means of large volumes. On the contrary, they plunged into the political movement. Besides having intercourse with well-known people, particularly in the western part of Germany, they were also in contact with the organized working classes. "Our duty was to found our conception scientifically, but it was just as important that we should win over the European, and especially the German, working classes to our convictions. When it was all clear in our eyes, we set to work." [(6)] A new German working-class society was founded in Brussels, and the support was enlisted of the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung, which served as an organ until the revolution of February. They were in touch with the revolutionary faction of the English Chartists under the leadership of George Julian Harney, editor of The Northern Star, to which Engels contributed. They also had intercourse with the democrats of Brussels and with the French social democrats of la Réforme, to which Engels contributed news of the English and German movements. In short, the relations that Marx and Engels had established with the radical and working-class organizations fully served the great purposes they had in mind.
It was in the Communist League that Marx and Engels saw their first opportunity to impress their ideas on the labor movement. At the urgent request of Joseph Moll, a watchmaker and a prominent member of the League, Marx consented, in 1847, to present to that organization his views, and the result was the famous Communist Manifesto. Every essential idea of modern socialism is contained in that brief declaration. Unfortunately, however, outside of Germany, the Communist League was an exotic organization that could make little use of such a program. Its members were mostly exiles, who, by the very nature of their position, were hopelessly out of things. Little groups, surrounded by a foreign people, exiles are rarely able to affect the movement at home or influence the national movement amid which they are thrust. There is little, therefore, noteworthy about the Communist League. It had, to be sure, gathered together a few able and energetic spirits, and some of these in later years exercised considerable influence in the International. But, as a rule, the groups of the Communist League were little more than debating societies whose members were filled with sentimental, visionary, and insurrectionary ideas. Marx himself finally lost all patience with them, because he could not drive out of their heads the idea that they could revolutionize the entire world by some sudden dash and through the exercise of will power, personal sacrifice, and heroic action. The Communist League, therefore, is memorable only because it gave Marx and Engels an opportunity for issuing their epoch-making Manifesto, that even to-day is read and reread by the workers in all lands of the world. Translated into every language, it is the one pamphlet that can be found in every country as a part of the basic literature of socialism.
There are certain principles laid down in the Communist Manifesto which time cannot affect, although the greater part of the document is now of historic value only. The third section, for instance, is a critique of the various types of socialism then existing in Europe, and this part can hardly be understood to-day by those unacquainted with those sectarian movements. It deals with Reactionary Socialism, Feudal Socialism, Clerical Socialism, Petty Bourgeois Socialism, German Socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism, Critical-Utopian Socialism, and Communism. The mere enumeration of these types of socialist doctrine indicates what a chaos of doctrine and theory then existed, and it was in order to distinguish themselves from these various schools that Marx and Engels took the name of communists. Beginning with the statement, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," [(7)] the Manifesto treats at length the modern struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. After tracing the rise of capitalism, the development of a new working class, and the consequences to the people of the new economic order, Marx and Engels outline the program of the communists and their relation to the then existing working-class organizations and political parties. They deny any intention of forming a new sect, declaring that they throw themselves whole-heartedly into the working-class movement of all countries, with the one aim of encouraging and developing within those groups a political organization for the conquest of political power. They outline certain measures which, in their opinion, should stand foremost in the program of labor, all of them having to do with some modification of the institution of property.
In order to achieve these reforms, and eventually "To wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State," [(8)] they urge the formation of labor parties as soon as proper preparations have been made and the time is ripe for effective class action. All through the Manifesto runs the motif that every class struggle is a political struggle. Again and again Marx and Engels return to that thought in their masterly survey of the historical conflicts between the classes. They show how the bourgeoisie, beginning as "an oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility," gradually ... "conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway," until to-day "the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." [(9)] Tracing the rise of the modern working class, they tell of its purely retaliative efforts against the capitalists; how at first "they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze"; how they fight in "incoherent" masses, "broken up by their mutual competition"; [(10)] even their unions are not so much a result of their conscious effort as they are the consequence of oppression. Furthermore, the workers "do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies." [(11)] "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers." [(12)] It is when their unions grow national in character and the struggle develops into a national struggle between the classes that it naturally takes on a political character. Then begins the struggle for conquering political power. But, while "all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities, the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." [(13)] Returning again to the underlying thought, it is pointed out that the working class must "win the battle of democracy." [(14)] It must acquire "political supremacy." It must raise itself to "the position of ruling class," in order that it may sweep away "the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally." [(15)]
