Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

CHAPTER III

THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM—THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION[ToC]

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.