IS SOCIALISM COMING?
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
“Belike; but there are likelier things.”
G. K. Chesterton.
Every historian today owes much to Karl Marx for his development of the “Economic Interpretation of History.” Whatever that theory may fail to explain, it certainly succeeds in explaining the nature and growth of the Socialist movement. When the great attempt at real political and economic democracy made by the French people in their great Revolution had failed and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the Terror and the wars of Napoleon, every nation in Europe felt the reaction. Russia, Austria, Spain and non-industrial Europe generally reacted towards simple absolutism, noble against peasant. But in the countries within the boundary marked out by the industrial revolution, the wealth created by the new machines placed the balance of economic power in the hands of the commercial classes, and so forced the old landed aristocracy to admit them to political power as well. In the meanwhile the first shock of large scale production had widened the gap between the industrial workers and the employing class. Independent artisans were ruined or forced into factories, and in the wake of the new industry there trailed a network of industrial oligarchies which spread until they covered the civilized world. The already enfranchised classes refused to use their power to moderate the harshness of the competitive struggle, honestly believing that any interference with “economic law” could work nothing but ruin and hardship in the end.
In view of the facts as they existed in the days of the Communist Manifesto it was practically inevitable that an economist in sympathy with the economically powerless and politically disfranchised masses should interpret history as did the Marxians. In an age of coal, iron and steam (that potent trinity), of large scale production, of capitalistic agriculture, of economic tyranny, of sharpening class divergence and increasing poverty, it seemed that there was no way to realize democracy but to wait until industry had been concentrated into the hands of a few rich men, till the middle class and the free peasantry had been reduced to the proletarian ranks, and till the ever increasing misery of the workers taught them to combine and seize the means of production and distribution by a single revolutionary stroke. Private property could have appeared only as a tool for robbing the workers of the “surplus value” of their labor, religion as an ingenious means of sidetracking revolutionary activities, and patriotism as an excuse for standing armies and protective tariffs. This was a tenable explanation of the world—in 1848!