Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

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.