Contemporary Socialism Part 5

Besides, the socialist is, almost by necessity of his position and principles, predisposed to discourage and condemn patriotism. Others, indeed, condemn it as well as he. Most of the great writers who revived German literature towards the beginning of this century--Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe--have all disparaged it. They looked on it as a narrow and obsolete virtue, useful enough perhaps in rude times, but a hindrance to rational progress now; the modern virtue was humanity, the idea of which had just freshly burst upon their age like a new power.

This consideration may no doubt to some extent weigh with socialists also, for their whole thinking is leavened with the notion of humanity, but their most immediate objection to patriotism is one of a practical nature. Their complaint used always to be that the proletarian had no country, because he was excluded from political rights. He was not a citizen, and why should he have the feelings of one? But now he has got political rights, and they still complain. He is in the country, they say, but not yet of it. He is practically excluded from its civilization, from all that makes the country worth living or fighting for. He has no country, for he is denied a man's share in the life that is going in any. Edmund Ludlow wrote over his door in exile--

"Every land is my fatherland, For all lands are my Father's."

The modern socialist says, No land is my fatherland, for in none am I a son. He believes himself to be equally neglected in all, and that is precisely the severest strain that can try the patriotic sentiment. The proletarian is taught that in every country he is a slave, and that patriotism and religion only reconcile him to remaining so. Moreover, as Rodbertus has remarked, the social question itself is, in a sense, international because it is social.

CHAPTER IV.

KARL MARX.

In opening the present chapter in the previous edition of this book, I said it was not a little remarkable that the works of Karl Marx, which had then excited considerable commotion in other European countries, were still absolutely unknown in England, though England was the country where they were written, and to whose circ.u.mstances they were, in their author's judgment, pre-eminently applicable. His princ.i.p.al work, "Das Kapital," is a criticism of modern industrial development as explained by English economists and exemplified in English society. It shows a rare knowledge of English economic literature, even of the most obscure writers; it goes very fully into the conditions of English labour as described in our parliamentary reports; and out of four hundred odd books it quotes, more than three hundred are English books. Its ill.u.s.trations are drawn from English industrial life, and its very money allusions are stated in terms of English coin. Its chief doctrine, moreover, was an old English doctrine, familiar among the disciples of Owen; and to crown all, if the author's belief was true, England was the country ripest for its reception, for the socialist revolution, he thought, would inevitably come when the working cla.s.s sunk into the condition of a proletariat, and the working cla.s.s of England had been a proletariat for many years already. Yet Marx's work was not at that time (1884) translated into English, though it had been into most other European languages, and had enjoyed a very large sale even in Russia, to whose circ.u.mstances it had admittedly very little adaptation. An English translation appeared at length, however, in 1887, twenty years after the publication of the original, and a considerable edition was disposed of within a year, though the price was high. We have therefore grown more familiar of late with the name and importance of Karl Marx.

Born at Treves in 1818, the son of a Christian Jew who had a high post in the civil service, Marx was sent to the University of Bonn, towards the end of the '30s, won a considerable reputation there in philosophy and jurisprudence, determined, like La.s.salle, to devote himself to the academic profession, and seemed destined for an eminently successful career, in which his subsequent marriage with the sister of the Prussian Minister of State, Von Westphalen, would certainly have facilitated his advancement. But at the University he came under the spell of Hegel, and pa.s.sed, step by step, with the Extreme Left of the Hegelian school, into the philosophical, religious, and political Radicalism which finally concentrated into the Humanism of Feuerbach. Just as he had finished his curriculum, the accession of Frederick William IV. in 1840 stirred a rustle of most misplaced expectation among the Liberals of Germany, who thought the day of freedom was at length to break, and who rose with generous eagerness to the tasks to which it was to summon them. Under the influence of these hopes and feelings, Marx abandoned the professorial for an editorial life, and committed himself at the very outset of his days to a political position which compromised him hopelessly with German governments, and forced him, step by step, into a long career of revolutionary agitation and organization. He joined the staff of the _Rhenish Gazette_, which was founded at that time in Cologne by the leading Liberals of the Rhine country, including Camphausen and Hansemann, and which was the organ of the Young Hegelian, or Philosophical Radical Party, and he made so great an impression by his bold and vigorous criticism of the proceedings of the Rhenish Landtag that he was appointed editor of the newspaper in 1842. In this post he continued his attacks on the Government, and they were at once so effective and so carefully worded that a special censor was sent from Berlin to Cologne to take supervision of his articles, and when this agency proved ineffectual, the journal was suppressed by order of the Prussian Ministry in 1843. From Cologne Marx went to Paris to be a joint editor of the _Deutsche Franzosische Jahrbucher_ with Arnold Ruge, a leader of the Hegelian Extreme Left, who had been deprived of his professorship at the University of Halle by the Prussian Government, and whose magazine, the _Deutsche Jahrbucher_, published latterly at Leipzig to escape the Prussian authority, had just been suppressed by the Saxon.

The _Deutsche Franzosische Jahrbucher_ were published by the well-known Julius Froebel, who had some time before given up his professorship at Zurich to edit a democratic newspaper, and open a shop for the sale of democratic literature; who professed himself a communist in Switzerland, and had written some able works, with very radical and socialistic leanings, but who seems to have gone on a different tack at the time of the La.s.sallean movement, for he was--as Meding shows us in his "Memoiren zur Zeitgeschichte"--the prime promoter of the ill-fated Congress of Princes at Frankfort in 1865. The new magazine was intended to be a continuation of the suppressed _Deutsche Jahrbucher_, on a more extended plan, embracing French as well as German contributors, and supplying in some sort a means of uniting the Extreme Left of both nations; but no French contribution ever appeared in it, and it ceased altogether in a year's time, probably for commercial reasons, though there is no unlikelihood in the allegation sometimes made, that it was stopped in consequence of a difference between the editors as to the treatment of the question of communism.

The Young Hegelians had already begun to take the keenest interest in that question, but were, for a time, curiously perplexed as to the att.i.tude they should a.s.sume towards it. They seem to have been fascinated and repelled by turns by the system, and to have been equally unable to cast it aside or to commit themselves fairly to it. Karl Grun, himself a Young Hegelian, says that at first they feared socialism, and points, for striking evidence of this, to the fact that the _Rhenish Gazette_ bestowed an enthusiastic welcome on Stein's book on French communism, although that book condemned the system from a theologically orthodox and politically reactionary point of view. But he adds that the Young Hegelians contributed to the spread of socialism against their will, that it was through the interest they took in its speculations and experiments that socialism acquired credit and support in public opinion in Germany, and that the earliest traces of avowed socialism are to be found in the _Rhenish Gazette_. If we may judge by the extracts from some of Marx's articles in that journal which are given in Bruno Bauer's "Vollstandige Geschichte der Parthei-Kampfe in Deutschland wahrend der Jahre 1842-46," we should say that Marx was even at this early period a decided socialist, for he often complains of the great wrong "the poor dumb millions" suffer in being excluded by their poverty from the possibility of a free development of their powers, "and from any partic.i.p.ation in the fruits of civilization," and maintains that the State had far other duty towards them than to come in contact with them only through the police. When Ruge visited Cabet in Paris, he said that he and his friends (meaning, he explained, the philosophical and political opposition) stood so far aloof from the question of communism that they had never yet so much as raised it, and that, while there were communists in Germany, there was no communistic party. This statement is probably equivalent to saying that he and his school took as yet a purely theoretical and Platonic interest in socialism, and had not come to adopt it as part of their practical programme. Most of them were already communists by conviction, and the others felt their general philosophical and political principles forcing them towards communism, and the reason of their hesitation in accepting it is probably expressed by Ruge, when he says (in an article in Heinzen's "Die Opposition," p.

103), that the element of truth in communism was its sense of the necessity of political emanc.i.p.ation, but that there was a great danger of communists forgetting the political question in their zeal for the social. It was chiefly under the influence of the Humanism into which Feuerbach had transformed the Idealism of Hegel, that the Hegelian Left pa.s.sed into communism. Humanist and communist became nearly convertible terms. Friedrich Engels mentions in his book on the condition of the English working cla.s.ses, published in 1845, that all the German communists of that day were followers of Feuerbach, and most of the followers of Feuerbach in Germany (Ruge seems to have remained an exception) were communists. La.s.salle was one of Feuerbach's correspondents, and after he started the present socialist movement in Germany, he wrote Feuerbach on 21st October, 1863, saying that the Progressists were political rationalists of the feeblest type, and that it was the same battle which Feuerbach was waging in the theological, and he himself now in the political and economic sphere. Stein attributed French socialism greatly to the prevailing sensualistic character of French philosophy, which conceived enjoyment to be man's only good, and never rose to what he calls the great German conception, the logical conception of the Ego, the idea of knowing for the sake of knowing. The inference this contrast suggests is that the metaphysics of Germany had been her protector, her national guard, against socialism, but as we see, at the very time he was writing the guard was turning traitor, and a native socialism was springing up by natural generation out of the idealistic philosophy. The fact, however, rather confirms the force of Stein's remark, for the Hegelian idealism first bred the more sensualistic system of humanism, and then humanism bred socialism.

Hegel had transformed the transcendental world of current opinion, with its personal Deity and personal immortality, into a world of reason; and Feuerbach went a step further, and abolished what he counted the transcendency of reason itself. Heaven and G.o.d, he entirely admitted, were nothing but subjective illusions, fantastic projections of man's own being and his own real world into external spheres. But mind, an abstract ent.i.ty, and reason, a universal and single principle, were, in his opinion, illusions too. There was nothing real but man--the concrete flesh and blood man who thinks and feels. "G.o.d," says Feuerbach, speaking of his mental development, "was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last." He pa.s.sed, as Lange points out, through Comte's three epochs. Theology was swept away, and then metaphysics, and in its room came a positive and materialistic anthropology which declared that the senses were the sole sources of real knowledge, that the body was not only part of man's being, but its totality and essence, and, in short, that man is what he eats--_Der Mensch ist was er isst_.

Man, therefore, had no other G.o.d before man, and the promotion of man's happiness and culture in this earthly life--which was his only life--was the sole natural object of his political or religious interest. This system was popularized by Feuerbach's brother Friedrich, in a little work called the "Religion of the Future," which enjoyed a high authority among the German communists, and formed a kind of lectionary they read and commented on at their stated meetings. The object of the new religion is thus described in it:--"Man alone is our G.o.d, our father, our judge, our redeemer, our true home, our law and rule, the alpha and omega of our political, moral, public, and domestic life and work. There is no salvation but by man." And the cardinal articles of the faith are that human nature is holy, that the impulse to pleasure is holy, that everything which gratifies it is holy, that every man is destined and ent.i.tled to be happy, and for the attainment of this end has the right to claim the greatest possible a.s.sistance from others, and the duty to afford the same to them in turn.

Now the tendency of this metaphysical and moral teaching was strongly democratic and socialistic. There was said to be in the existing political system a false transcendency identical with that of the current religious system. King and council hovered high and away above the real life of society in a world of their own, looking on political power as a kind of private property, and careless of mankind, from whom it sprang, to whom it belonged, and by whom and for whom it should be administered. "The princes are G.o.ds," says Feuerbach, "and they must share the same fate. The dissolution of theology into anthropology in the field of thought is the dissolution of monarchy into republic in the field of politics. Dualism, separation is the essence of theology; dualism, separation is the essence of monarchy. There we have the ant.i.thesis of G.o.d and world; here we have the ant.i.thesis of State and people." This dualism must be abolished. The State must be _humanized_--must be made an instrument in the hands of all for the welfare of all; and its inhabitants must be _politized_, for they, all of them, const.i.tute the _polis_. Man must no longer be a means, but must be everywhere and always an end. There was n.o.body above man; there was neither superhuman person, nor consecrated, person; neither deity, nor divine right. And, on the other hand, as there is no person who in being or right is more than man, so there must be no person who is less. There must be no _unmenschen_, no slaves, no heretics, no outcasts, no outlaws, but every being who wears human flesh must be placed in the enjoyment of the full rights and privileges of man. The will of man be done, hallowed be his name.

These principles already bring us to the threshold of socialism, and now Feuerbach's peculiar ethical principle carries us into its courts. That principle has been well termed Tuism, to distinguish it from Egoism. The human unit is not the individual, but man in converse with man, the sensual Ego with the sensual Tu. The isolated man is incomplete, both as a moral and as a thinking being. "The nature of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man. Isolation is finitude and limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is G.o.d." Feuerbach personally never became a communist, for he says his principle was neither egoism nor communism, but the combination of both. They were equally true, for they were inseparable, and to condemn self-love would be, he declared, to condemn love to others at the same time, for love to others was nothing but a recognition that their self-love was justifiable. But it is easy to perceive the natural tendency of the teaching that the social man was the true human unit and essence, and was to the individual as a G.o.d. With most of his disciples Humanism meant making the individual disappear in the community, making egoism disappear in love, and making private property disappear in collective.

Hess flatly declared that "the species was the end, and the individuals were only means." Ruge disputed this doctrine, and contended that the empirical individual was the true human unit and the true end; but even he said that socialism was the humanism of common life. Grun pa.s.ses into socialism by simply applying to property Feuerbach's method of dealing with theology and monarchy. He argues that if the true essence of man is the social man, then, just as theology is anthropology, so is anthropology socialism, for property is at present entirely alienated, externalized from the social man. There is a false transcendency in it, like that of divinity and monarchy. "Deal, therefore," he says, "with the practical G.o.d, money, as Feuerbach dealt with the theoretical"; humanize it. Make property an inalienable possession of manhood, of every man as man. For property is a necessary material for his social activity, and therefore ought to belong as inalienably and essentially to him as everything which he otherwise possesses of means or materials for his activity in life; as inalienably, for example, as his body or his personal acquirements. If man is the social man, some social possession is then necessary to his manhood, and might be called an essential part of it; but existing property is something outside, as separate from him as heaven or the sovereign power. Grun accordingly says that Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" supplies the theoretical basis for Proudhon's social system, because the latter only applies to practical life the principles which the former applied to religion and metaphysics, but he admits that neither Feuerbach nor Proudhon would acknowledge the connection.

We thus see how theoretical humanism--a philosophy and a religion--led easily over into the two important articles of practical humanism, a democratic transformation of the State and a communistic transformation of society. This was the ideal of the humanists, and it contains ample and wide-reaching positive features; but when it came to practical action they preferred for the present to take up an att.i.tude of simple but implacable negation to the existing order of things. No doubt variety of opinion existed among them; but if they are to be judged by what seemed their dominant interest, they were revolutionaries and nothing else. They repudiated with one consent the socialist utopias of France, and refrained on principle from committing themselves to, or even discussing, any positive scheme of reconstruction whatsoever. They held it premature to think of positive proposals, which would, moreover, be sure to sow divisions among themselves. Their first great business was not to build up, but to destroy, and their work in the meantime was therefore to develop the revolutionary spirit to its utmost possible energy, by exciting hatred against all existing inst.i.tutions; in short, to create an immense reservoir of revolutionary energy which might be turned to account when its opportunity arrived. Their position is singularly like the phase of Russian nihilism described by Baron Fircks, and presented to us in Turgenieff's novels. It is expressed very plainly by W. Marr, himself an active humanist, who carried Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" as his constant companion, and founded a secret society for promoting humanistic views. In his interesting book on Secret Societies in Switzerland, he says, "The ma.s.ses can only be gathered under the flag of negation. When you present detailed plans, you excite controversies and sow divisions; you repeat the mistake of the French socialists, who have scattered their redoubtable forces because they tried to carry formulated systems. We are content to lay down the foundation of the revolution. We shall have deserved well of it if we stir hatred and contempt against all existing inst.i.tutions. We make war against all prevailing ideas, of religion, of the State, of country, of patriotism. The idea of G.o.d is the keystone of a perverted civilization.

It must be destroyed. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind."

All this work of annihilation could neither be done by reform, nor by conspiracy, but only by revolution, and "a revolution is never made; it makes itself." While the revolution was making, Marr founded an a.s.sociation in Switzerland, "Young Germany," which should prepare society for taking effective action when the hour came. There was a "Young Germany" in Switzerland when he arrived there; part of a federation of secret societies established by Mazzini in 1834, under the general name of "Young Europe," and comprising three series of societies:--"Young Italy," composed of Italians; "Young Poland," of Poles; and "Young Germany," of Germans. But this organization was not at all to Marr's mind, because it concerned itself with nothing but politics, and because its method was conspiracy. "Great transformations," he said, "are never prepared by conspiracies," and it was a very great transformation indeed that he contemplated. He therefore formed a "Young Germany" of his own. His plan was to plant a lodge, or "family," wherever there existed a German working men's a.s.sociation. The members of this family became members of the a.s.sociation, and formed a leaven which influenced all around them, and, through the wandering habits of the German working cla.s.s, was carried to much wider circles. The family met for political discussion once a week, read Friedrich Feuerbach together on the Sundays with fresh recruits, who, when they had mastered him, were said to have put off the old man; and their very pa.s.sword was _humanity_, a brother being recognised by using the half-word _human_--? interrogatively, and the other replying by the remaining half--_itat_. The members were all ardent democrats, but, as a rule, so national in their sympathies that the leaders made it one great object of their _disciplina arcani_ to stifle the sentiment of patriotism by subjecting it to constant ridicule.

Their relations to communism are not quite easy to determine. Marr himself sometimes expresses disapproval of the system. He says, "Communism is the expression of impotence of will. The communists lack confidence in themselves. They suffer under social oppression, and look around for consolation instead of seeking for weapons to emanc.i.p.ate themselves with. It is only a world-weariness desiring illusion as the condition of its life." He says the belief in the absolute dependence of man on matter is the shortest and most pregnant definition of communism, and that it starts from the principle that man is a slave and incapable of emanc.i.p.ating himself. But, on the other hand, he complains that the members of "Young Germany" did not sufficiently appreciate the social question, being disgusted with the fanaticism of the communists. By the communists, he here means the followers of Weitling and Albrecht, who were at that time creating a party movement in Switzerland. The prophet Albrecht, as he is called, was simply a crazy mystic with proclivities to sedition which brought him at length to prison for six years, and which took there an eschatological turn from his having, it is said, nothing to read but the Bible, so that on his release he went about prophesying that Jehovah had prepared a way in the desert, which was Switzerland, for bringing into Europe a reign of peace, in which people should hold all things in common and enjoy complete sensuous happiness, sitting under their common vine and fig-tree, with neither king nor priest to make them any more afraid. Weitling was not quite so unimportant, but the attention he excited at the time is certainly not justified by any of the writings he has left us. He was a tailor from Magdeburg, who was above his work, believing himself to be a poet and a man of letters, condemned by hard fate and iniquitous social arrangements to a dull and cruel lot. Having gone to Paris when socialism was the rage there, he eagerly embraced that new gospel, and went to Switzerland to carry its message of hope to his own German countrymen. There he forsook the needle altogether, and lived as the paid apostle of the dignity of manual labour, for which he had himself little mind. His ideas are crude, confused, and arbitrary. His ideal of society was a community of labourers, with no State, no Church, no individual property, no distinction of rank or position, no nationality, no fatherland. All were to have equal rights and duties, and each was to be put in a position to develop his capacity and gratify his bents as far as possible. He was moved more by the desire for abstract equality than German socialists of the humanist or contemporary type, for they do not build on the justice of a more equal distribution of wealth so much as on the necessity of the possession of property for the free development of the human personality. He is entirely German, however, in his idea of the government of the new society. It was to be governed by the three greatest philosophers of the age, a.s.sisted by a board of trade, a board of health, and a board of education. In Switzerland he founded, to promote his views, a secret society, the "Alliance of the Just," which had branches in most of the Swiss towns. Its members were chiefly Germans from Germany, for very few of the communists in Switzerland were born Swiss, and according to Marr, who was present at some of their meetings, they were three-fourths of them tailors. "I felt," says Marr, "when I entered one of these clubs, that I was with the mother of tailors. The tailor sitting and chatting at his work is always extreme in his opinions. Tailor and communist are synonymous terms." It was to some of the leaders of this alliance that Weitling unfolded his wild scheme of a proletariat raid, according to which an army of 20,000 brigands was to be raised among the proletariat of the large towns, to go with torch and sword into all the countries of Europe, and terrify the _bourgeoisie_ into a recognition of universal community of goods. It is only fair to add that his proposal met with no favour. Letters were found in his possession, and subsequently published in Bluntschli's official report, which show that some of Weitling's correspondents regarded his scheme with horror, and others treated it with ridicule. One of them said it was trying to found the kingdom of heaven with the furies of h.e.l.l. The relations between "Young Germany"

and Weitling's allies were apparently not cordial, though they had so much in common that, on the one hand, Weitling's correspondents urge him to keep on good terms with "Young Germany," and, on the other, Marr says he actually tried to get a common standing ground with the communists, and thought he had found it in the negation of the present system of things--the negation of religion, the negation of patriotism, the negation of subjection to authority.

Now the importance of this excursus on the Young Hegelians lies in the fact that Karl Marx was a humanist, and looked on humanism as the vital and creative principle in the renovation of political and industrial society. In the _Deutsche Franzosische Jahrbucher_ he published an article on the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, in which he says: "The new revolution will be introduced by philosophy. The revolutionary tradition of Germany is theoretical. The Reformation was the work of a monk; the Revolution will be the work of a philosopher." The particular philosophy that was to do the work is that of the German critics, whose critique of religion had ended in the dogma that man is the highest being for man, and in the categorical imperative, "to destroy everything in the present order of things that makes a man a degraded, insulted, forsaken, and despised being." But philosophy cannot work a revolution without material weapons; and it will find its material weapon in the proletariat, which he owns, however, was at the time he wrote only beginning to be formed in Germany. But when it rises in its strength, it will be irresistible, and the revolution which it will accomplish will be the only one known to history that is not utopian. Other revolutions have been partial, wrought by a cla.s.s in the interests of a cla.s.s; but this one will be a universal and uniform revolution, effected in the name of all society, for the proletariat is a cla.s.s which possesses a universal character because it dissolves all other separate cla.s.ses into itself. It is the only cla.s.s that takes its stand on a human and not a historical t.i.tle. Its very sorrows and grievances have nothing special or relative in them; they are the broad sorrows and grievances of humanity. And its claims are like them; for it asks no special privileges or special prerogatives; it asks nothing but what all the world will share along with it. The history of the world is the judgment of the world, and the duration of an order of things founded on the ascendancy of a limited cla.s.s possessing money and culture, is practically condemned and foredoomed by the rapid multiplication of a large cla.s.s outside which possess neither. The growth of this latter body not merely tends to produce, but actually _is_, the dissolution of the existing system of things. For the existing system is founded on the a.s.sertion of private property, but the proletariat is forced by society to take the opposite principle of the negation of private property for the principle of its own life, and will naturally carry that principle into all society when it gains the power, as it is rapidly and inevitably doing. Marx sums up: "The only practical emanc.i.p.ation for Germany is an emanc.i.p.ation proceeding from the standpoint of the theory which explains man to be the highest being for man. In Germany the emanc.i.p.ation from the middle ages is only possible as at the same time an emanc.i.p.ation from the partial conquests of the middle ages. In Germany one kind of bond cannot be broken without all other bonds being broken too. Germany is by nature too thorough to be able to revolutionize without revolutionizing from a fundamental principle, and following that principle to its utmost limits; and therefore the emanc.i.p.ation of Germany will be the emanc.i.p.ation of man. The head of this emanc.i.p.ation is philosophy; its heart is the proletariat." He adds that when things are ripe, "when all the inner conditions have been completed, the German resurrection day will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic c.o.c.k."

In this essay we mark already Marx's overmastering belief in natural historical evolution, which he had learnt from Hegel, and which prevented him from having any sympathy with the utopian projects of the French socialists. They vainly imagined, he held, that they could create a new world right off, whereas it was only possible to do so by observing a rigorous conformity to the laws of the development already in progress, by making use of the forces already at work, and proceeding in the direction towards which the stream of things was itself slowly but mightily moving. Hegel sought the principle of organic development in the State, but Marx sought it rather in civil society, and believed he had discovered it in that most mighty though unconscious product of the large system of industry, the modern proletariat, which was born to revolution as the sparks fly upward; and in the simultaneous decline of the middle cla.s.ses, that is, of the conservative element which could resist the change. The process which was, as he held, now converting society into an aggregate of beggars and millionaires was bound eventually to overleap itself and land in a communism. I shall not discuss the truth of this conception at present, but it contributes, along with the sentiments of justice and humanity that animate--rightly or wrongly--the ideal of the socialists, to lend something of a religious force to their movement, for they feel that they are fellow-workers with the nature of things.

We left Marx in Paris, and on returning to him, we find him engaged--as indeed we usually do when his history comes into notice--in a threefold warfare. Besides his general war against the arrangements of modern society, he is always carrying on a bitter and implacable war against the Prussian Government, and is often engaged in controversy--sometimes very personal--with foes of his own philosophical or revolutionary household. After the cessation of the _Deutsche Franzosische Jahrbucher_, Marx edited a paper called _Vorwarts_, and in this and other journals open to him, he attacked the Prussian administration so strongly that that administration complained to Guizot, who gave him orders to quit France. His more personal controversy at this time arose out of one of the schisms of the Young Hegelians, and he and his friend Friedrich Engels wrote a pamphlet--"Die Heilige Familie"--against the Hegelian Idealism, and especially against Bruno Bauer, who had offended him--says Erdmann, in his "History of Philosophy"--at once as Jew, as Radical, and as journalist. When expelled from France, he went to Brussels, where he was allowed to continue his war upon the Prussian Government without interference, till the revolution of 1848. During this period he devoted his attention more particularly than hitherto to commercial subjects, and published in 1846 his "Discours sur le Libre-echange," and in 1847 his "Misere de la Philosophie," a reply to Proudhon's "Philosophie de la Misere"--both in French.

While in Brussels, Marx received an invitation from the London Central Committee of the Communist League to join that society. This league had been founded in Paris in 1836, for the purpose of propagating communist opinions among the working men of Germany. Its organization was a.n.a.logous to that of the International and other societies of the same kind. A certain number of members const.i.tuted a _Gemeinde_, the several _Gemeinden_ in the same town const.i.tuted a _Kreis_, a number of _Kreise_ were grouped into a leading _Kreis_, and at the head of the whole was the Central Committee, which was chosen at a general congress of deputies from all the _Kreise_, and which had since 1840 had its seat in London. The method of the league was to establish, as a sphere of operation, German working men's improvement a.s.sociations everywhere. The travelling custom of German working men greatly facilitated this work, and numbers of these a.s.sociations were soon founded in Switzerland, England, Belgium, and the United States. The reason its committee applied to Marx was that he had just published a series of pamphlets in Brussels, in which, as he tells us, he "submitted to a merciless criticism the medley of French-English socialism and communism and of German philosophy, which then const.i.tuted the secret doctrine of the League," and insisted that "their work could have no tenable theoretical basis except that of a scientific insight into the economic structure of society, and that this ought to be put into a popular form, not with the view of carrying out any utopian system, but of promoting among the working cla.s.ses and other cla.s.ses a self-conscious partic.i.p.ation in the process of historical transformation of society that was taking place under their eyes." This is always with Marx the distinctive and ruling feature of his system. The French schemes were impracticable utopias, because they ignored the laws of history and the real structure of economic society; and he claims that his own proposals are not only practicable but inevitable, because they strictly observe the line of the actual industrial evolution, and are thus, at worst, plans for accelerating the day after to-morrow. But, besides this difference of principle, Marx thought the League should also change its method and tactics. Its work, being that of social revolution, was different from the work of the old political conspirators and secret societies, and therefore needed different weapons; the times, too, were changed, and offered new instruments. Street insurrections, surprises, intrigues, _p.r.o.nunciamentos_ might overturn a dynasty, or oust a government, or bring them to reason, but were of no avail in the world for introducing collective property or abolishing wage labour. People would just begin again the day after to work for hire and rent their farms as they did before. A social revolution needed other and larger preparation; it needed to have the whole population first thoroughly leavened with its principles; nay, it needed to possess an international character, depending not on detached local outbreaks, but on steady concert in revolutionary action on the part of the labouring cla.s.ses everywhere.

The cause was not political, or even national, but social; and society--which was indeed already pregnant with the change--must be aroused to a conscious consent to the delivery. What was first to be done, therefore, was to educate and move public opinion, and in this work the ordinary secret society went but a little way. A secret propaganda might still be carried on, but a public and open propaganda was more effectual and more suitable to the times. There never existed greater facilities for such a movement, and they ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the ma.s.ses of all European countries to a common international revolution. Marx sought, in short, to introduce the large system of production into the art of conspiracy.

Finding his views well received by the Central Committee of the Communist League, he acceded to their request to attend their General Congress at London in 1847, and then, after several weeks of keen discussion, he prevailed upon the Congress to adopt "the Manifesto of the Communist party," which was composed by himself and Engels, and which was afterwards translated from the German into English, French, Danish, and Italian, and sown broadcast everywhere just before the Revolution of 1848. This Communist League may be said to be the first organization--and this Communist Manifesto the first public declaration--of the International Socialist Democracy that now is. The Manifes...o...b..gins by describing the revolutionary situation into which the course of industrial development has brought modern society. Cla.s.ses were dying out; the yeomanry, the n.o.bility, the small tradesmen, would soon be no more; and society was drawn up in two widely separated hostile camps, the large capitalist cla.s.s or _bourgeoisie_, who had all the property and power in the country, and the labouring cla.s.s, the proletariat, who had nothing of either. The _bourgeoisie_ had played a most revolutionary part in history. They had overturned feudalism, and now they had created proletarianism, which would soon swamp themselves.

They had collected the ma.s.ses in great towns; they had kept the course of industry in perpetual flux and insecurity by rapid successive transformations of the instruments and processes of production, and by continual recurrences of commercial crises; and while they had reduced all other cla.s.ses to a proletariat, they had made the life of the proletariat one of privation, of uncertainty, of discontent, of incipient revolution. They exploited the labourer of political power; they exploited him of property, for they treated him as a ware, buying him in the cheapest market for the cost of his production, that is to say, the cost of his living, and taking from him the whole surplus of his work, after deducting the value of his subsistence. Under the system of wage labour, it could not be otherwise. Wages could never, by economic laws, rise above subsistence. While wage labour created property, it created it always for the capitalist, and never for the labourer; and, in fact, the latter only lived at all, so far as it was for the interests of the governing cla.s.s, the _bourgeoisie_, to permit him. Cla.s.s rule and wage labour must be swept away, for they were radically unjust, and a new reign must be inaugurated which would be politically democratic and socially communistic, and in which the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all.

The Manifesto went on to say that communism was not the subversion of existing principles, but their universalization. Communism did not seek to abolish the State, but only the _bourgeois_ State, in which the _bourgeois_ exclusively hold and wield political power. Communism did not seek to abolish property, but only the _bourgeois_ system of property, under which private property is really already abolished for nine-tenths of society, and maintained merely for one-tenth. Communism did not seek to abolish marriage and the family, but only the _bourgeois_ system of things under which marriage and the family, in any true sense of those terms, were virtually cla.s.s inst.i.tutions, for the proletariat could not have any family life worthy of the name, so long as their wages were so low that they were forced to huddle up their whole family regardless of all decency, in a single room, so long as their wives and daughters were victims of the seduction of the _bourgeoisie_, and so long as their children were taken away prematurely to labour in mills for _bourgeois_ manufacturers, who yet held up their hands in horror at the thought of any violation of the inst.i.tution of the family. Communism did not tend to abolish fatherland and nationality--that was abolished already for the proletariat, and was being abolished for the _bourgeoisie_, too, by the extensions of their trade.

As to the way of emanc.i.p.ation, the proletariat must strive to obtain political power, and use it to deprive the _bourgeoisie_ of all capital and means of production, and to place them in the hands of the State, _i.e._, of the proletariat itself organized as a governing body. Now, for this, immediate and various measures interfering with property, and condemned by our current economics, were requisite. Those measures would naturally be different for different countries, but for the most advanced countries the following were demanded: (1) Expropriation of landed property and application of rent to State expenditure; (2) abolition of inheritance; (3) confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (4) centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank, with State capital and exclusive monopoly; (5) centralization of all means of transport in hands of State; (6) inst.i.tution of national factories, and improvement of lands on a common plan; (7) compulsory obligation of labour upon all equally, and establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (8) joint prosecution of agriculture and mechanical arts, and gradual abolition of the distinction of town and country; (9) public and gratuitous education for all children, abolition of children's labour in factories, etc. The Manifesto ends by saying:--"The communists do not seek to conceal their views and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing arrangements of society. Let the ruling cla.s.ses tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose in it but their chains; they have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

When the French Revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Marx was expelled without circ.u.mstance from Brussels, and received an invitation from the Provisional Government of Paris to return to France. He accepted this invitation, but was only a few weeks in Paris when the German revolution of March occurred, and he hastened to the theatre of affairs. With his friends, Freiligrath, Wolff, Engels, and others, he established on June 1st in Cologne the _New Rhenish Gazette_, which was the soul of the Rhenish revolutionary movement, the most important one of the year in Germany, and that in which, as we have seen, the young La.s.salle first emerged on the troubled surface of revolutionary politics. After the _coup d'etat_ of November, dissolving the Prussian Parliament, the _New Rhenish Gazette_ strongly urged the people to stop paying their taxes, and thus meet force by force. It inserted an admonition to that effect in a prominent place in every successive number, and Marx was twice tried for sedition on account of this admonition, but each time acquitted. The newspaper, however, was finally suppressed by civil authority after the Dresden insurrection of May, 1849, its last number appearing on June 19th in red type, and containing Freiligrath's well-known "Farewell of the _New Rhenish Gazette_"--spiritedly translated for us by Ernest Jones--which declared that the journal went down with "rebellion" on its lips, but would reappear when the last of the German Crowns was overturned.

Farewell, but not for ever farewell!

They cannot kill the spirit, my brother; In thunder I'll rise on the field where I fell, More boldly to fight out another.

When the last of Crowns, like gla.s.s, shall break On the scene our sorrows have haunted, And the people its last dread "Guilty" shall speak, By your side you shall find me undaunted.

On Rhine or on Danube, in war and deed, You shall witness, true to his vow, On the wrecks of thrones, in the midst of the field, The rebel who greets you now.

This vow is no mere Parthian flourish of poetical defiance. Freiligrath and his friends undoubtedly believed at this time that the political movements of 1848 and 1849 were but preliminary ripples, and would be presently succeeded by a great flood-wave of revolution which they heard already sounding along in their dangerously expectant ear. His poem on the Revolution remains as evidence to us that in 1850 he still clung to that hope, and it would not have been out of tune with his sanguine beliefs of the year before if he promised, not merely that the spirit of the journal would rise again, but that its next number would be published, after the Deluge.

Meanwhile Marx went to London, where he remained for the rest of his life. Finding that the revolutionary spirit did not revive, and that historical societies, which have not lost their moral and economic vitality, had a greater readjusting power against political disturbance than he previously believed, he gave up for the next ten or twelve years the active work of revolutionizing. The Communist League, which had got disorganized in the revolutionary year, and was rent in two by a bitter schism in 1850, was, with his concurrence, dissolved in 1852, on the ground that its propaganda was no longer opportune; and the story of the Brimstone League, with its iron discipline and ogrish desires, of which Mehring says Marx was, during his London residence, the head-centre, is simply a fairy tale of Karl Vogt's, whose baselessness Marx has himself completely exposed. Before leaving the Communist League, two circ.u.mstances may be mentioned, because they repeat themselves constantly in this revolutionary history. The one is that this schism took place not on a point of doctrine, but of opportunity; the extremer members thought the conflict in Germany on the Hessian question offered a good chance for a fresh revolutionary outbreak, and they left the League because their views were not adopted. The other is that in one of its last reports (quoted by Mehring) the League definitely justifies, and even recommends, a.s.sa.s.sination and incendiarism--"the so-called excesses, the inflictions of popular vengeance on hated individuals, or on public buildings which revive hateful a.s.sociations." For the next ten years Marx lived quietly in London, writing for the _New York Tribune_ and other journals, and studying modern industry on this its "cla.s.sical soil." He read much in the British Museum Library, gaining his remarkable acquaintance with the English economic writers, and it was probably in this period he elaborated his famous doctrine of surplus value, with its corollary of the right of the labourer to the full product of his labour. There can be no doubt that the original suggestion of this doctrine came from English sources, for it was taught more than a generation before among the English socialists, notably by William Thompson in his "Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth," which was published as early as 1824, and is actually quoted by Marx in his work on Capital. Marx built up the doctrine, however, into a more systematic form, and it is through him and not through the Owenites it has come into the present socialist movement in which it plays so conspicuous a part. During this period of reading and rumination, Marx published a pamphlet against Louis Napoleon; another against Lord Palmerston, which was widely circulated by David Urquhart; a third of a personal and bitter character against his fellow-socialist, Karl Vogt; and a more solid and important work, the "Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie" (1859), the first fruits of his new economic studies. But a revolutionist never permanently gives up revolutionizing, and after his prolonged abstinence from that excitement, Marx returned to it again in 1864, on the foundation of the famous International Working Men's a.s.sociation.

The International was simply the Communist League raised again from the dead. Their principles were the same; their const.i.tution was the same; and Marx began his inaugural address to the International in 1864 with the very words that concluded his Communistic Manifesto of 1847, "Proletarians of all nations, unite!" When the representatives of the English working men first suggested the formation of an international working men's a.s.sociation, in the address they presented in the Freemasons' Tavern to the French working men who were sent over at the instance of Napoleon III. to the London Exhibition of 1862, they certainly never dreamt of founding an organization of revolutionary socialist democracy which in a few years to come was to wear a name at which the world turned pale. Their address was most moderate and sensible. They said that some permanent medium of interchanging thoughts and observations between the working men of different countries was likely to throw light on the economic secrets of societies, and to help onwards the solution of the great labour problem. For they declared that that solution had not yet been discovered, and that the socialist systems which had hitherto professed to propound it were nothing but magnificent dreams. Moreover, if the system of compet.i.tion were to continue, then some arrangement of concord between employer and labourer must be devised, and in order to a.s.sert the views of the labouring cla.s.s effectively in that arrangement, a firm and organized union must be established among working men, not merely in each country, but in all countries, for their interests, both as citizens and as labourers, were everywhere identical. Those ideas would const.i.tute the basis of a very rational and moderate programme. But when, in the following year, after a meeting in favour of the Polish insurrection, which was held in St.

Martin's Hall under the presidency of Professor Beesly, and at which some of the French delegates of 1862 were present, a committee was appointed to follow up the suggestion, this committee asked Marx to prepare a programme and statutes for the proposed a.s.sociation, and he impressed upon it at its birth the stamp of his own revolutionary socialism. He never had a higher official position in the International than corresponding secretary for Germany, for it was determined, probably with the view of securing a better hold of the great English working cla.s.s and their extensive trade organizations, that the president and secretary should be English working men, and then, after a time, the office of president was abolished altogether because it had a monarchical savour. But Marx had the ablest, the best informed, and probably the most made-up mind in the council; he governed without reigning; and, with his faithful German following, he exercised an almost paramount influence on its action from first to last, in spite of occasional revolts and intrigues against an authority which democratic jealousy resented as dictatorial, or--worse still--monarchical. The statutes of the a.s.sociation, which were adopted at the Geneva Congress of 1866, declared that "the economic subjection of the labourer to the possessor of the means of labour, _i.e._ of the sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral, and material servitude, and that the economic emanc.i.p.ation of labour is consequently the great aim to which every political movement ought to be subordinated." Now no doubt the "economic emanc.i.p.ation of labour" meant different things to different sections of the a.s.sociation's members. To the English trades unionists it meant practically better wages; to the Russian nihilists it meant the downfall of the Czar and of all central political authority, and leaving the socialistic communal organization of their country to manage itself without interference from above; to some of the French members (as appeared at the Lausanne Congress in 1867) it meant the nationalization of credit and all land except that held by peasant proprietors, a cla.s.s which it was necessary to maintain as a counterpoise to the State; while, to the German socialists, it meant the abolition of wages, the nationalization of land and the instruments of production, the a.s.sumption by the State of a supreme direction of all trade, commerce, finance, and agriculture, and the distribution by the State of land, tools, and materials to guilds and productive a.s.sociations as the actual industrial executive. There were thus very different elements in the composition of the International, but a _modus vivendi_ was found for some years by nursing an ultimate ideal, which was desirable, and meanwhile practically working for a proximate and much narrower ideal, which was more immediately feasible or necessary.

The a.s.sociation could thus hold that nothing could benefit the working cla.s.s but an abolition of wages, and could yet, as it sometimes did, help and encourage strikes which wanted only to raise wages. At its Congress in Brussels in 1868 it declared that a strike was not a means of completely emanc.i.p.ating the labourers, but was often a necessity in the present situation of labour and capital. Most of the other practical measures to which the a.s.sociation addressed itself--the eight hours normal day of labour, gratuitous education, gratuitous justice, universal suffrage, abolition of standing armies, abolition of indirect taxes, prohibition of children's labour, State credit for productive a.s.sociations--contemplated modifications of the existing system of things, but always contemplated them as aids to and instalments of the coming transformation of that system. The consciousness was constantly preserved that a revolution was impending, and that, as La.s.salle said, it was bound to come and could not be checked, whether it approached by sober advances from concession to concession, or flew, with streaming hair and shod with steel, right into the central stronghold.

This was very much the keynote struck by Marx in his inaugural address.

That address was simply a review of the situation since 1848, and an encouragement of his forces to a renewal of the combat. Wealth had enormously increased in the interval; colonies had been opened, new inventions discovered, free trade introduced; but misery was not a whit the less; cla.s.s contrasts were even deeper marked, property was more than ever in the hands of the few; in England the number of landowners had diminished eleven per cent. in the preceding ten years; and if this rate were to continue, the country would be rapidly ripe for revolution.

While the old order of things was thus hastening to its doom, the new order of things had made some advances. The Ten Hours Act was "not merely a great practical result, but was the victory of a principle. For the first time the political economy of the _bourgeoisie_ had been in clear broad day put in subjection to the political economy of the working cla.s.s." Then, again, the experiment of co-operation had now been sufficiently tried to show that it was possible to carry on industry without the intervention of an employing cla.s.s, and had spread abroad the hope that wage labour was, like slavery and feudal servitude, only a transitory and subordinate form, which was destined to be superseded by a.s.sociated labour. The International had for its aim to promote this a.s.sociated labour; only it sought to do so, not piecemeal and sporadically, but systematically, on a national scale, and by State means. And for this end the labouring cla.s.s must first acquire political power, so as to obtain possession of the means of production; and to acquire political power, they must unite.

The International, though, as we have seen, possessing no real solidarity in its composition, held together till the outbreak of the Franco-German war, and of the revolution of the Paris Commune. It was, of course, strongly opposed to the war, as it was to all war; and strongly in favour of the revolution, as it was of all revolution. Its precise complicity in the work of the Commune is not easy to determine, but there can be no doubt that its importance has been greatly exaggerated, both by the fears of his enemies and the vanity of its members. Some of the latter were certainly among those who sat in the Hotel de Ville, but none of them were leading minds there; and, as for the a.s.sociation itself, it never had a real membership, or ramifications, of any formidable extent. For example, the English trades unions were in connection with it, and their members might be, in a sense, counted among its members, but it is certain they never recognised it as an authority over them, and they probably subscribed to it mainly as to a useful auxiliary in a strike. The leaders of the International, however, were, undoubtedly, heart and soul with the Commune, and approved probably both of its aims and methods, and Marx, at the Congress of the International, at the Hague, in 1872, drew, from its failure the lesson, that "revolution must be solidary" in order to succeed. A revolution in one capital of Europe must be supported by simultaneous revolutions in the rest. But, while there is little ground for the common belief that the International had any important influence in creating the insurrection of the Commune, it is certain that the insurrection of the Commune killed the International. The English members dropped off from it and never returned, and at its first Congress after the revolution (the Hague, 1872), the a.s.sociation itself was rent by a fatal schism arising from differences of opinion on a question as to the government of the society of the future, which would probably not have become a subject of such keen present interest at the time but for the Paris Commune. The question concerned the maintenance or abolition of the State, of the supreme central political authority, and the discussion brought to light that the socialists of the International were divided into two distinct and irreconcilable camps--the Centralist Democratic Socialists, headed by Marx, and the Anarchist Socialists, headed by Michael Bakunin, the Russian revolutionist. The Marxists insisted that the socialist _regime_ of collective property and systematic co-operative production could not possibly be introduced, maintained, or regulated, except by means of an omnipotent and centralized political authority--call it the State, call it the collectivity, call it what you like--which should have the final disposal of everything. The Bakunists held that this was just bringing back the old tyranny and slavery in a more excessive and intolerable form. They took up the tradition of Proudhon, who said that "the true form of the State is anarchy," meaning by anarchy, of course, not positive disorder, but the absence of any supreme ruler, whether king or convention. They would have property possessed and industry pursued on a communistic principle by groups or a.s.sociations of workmen, but these groups must form themselves freely and voluntarily, without any social or political compulsion. The Marxists declared that this was simply a retention of the system of free compet.i.tion in an aggravated form, that it would only lead to confusion worse confounded, and that the Bakunists, even in trying to abolish the evils of _laissez-faire_, were still foolishly supposing that the world could go of itself. This division of opinion--really a broader one than that which parts socialist from orthodox economist--rent the already enfeebled International into two separate organizations, which languished for a year or two and pa.s.sed away. And so, with high thoughts of spreading a reign of fraternity over the earth, the International Working Men's a.s.sociation perished, because, being only human, it could not maintain fraternity in its own narrow borders. This is a history that repeats itself again and again in socialist movements. As W. Marr said in the remark quoted above, revolutionists will only unite on a negation; the moment they begin to ask what they will put in its place they differ and dispute and come to nought. Apprehend them, close their meetings, banish their leaders, and you but knit them by common suffering to common resistance. You supply them with a negation of engrossing interest, you preoccupy their minds with a negative programme which keeps them united, and so you prevent them from raising the fatal question--What next?

which they never discuss without breaking up into rival sects and factions, fraternal often in nothing but their hatred. "It is the shades that hate one another, not the colours." Such disruptions and secessions may--as they did in Germany--by emulation increase for a time the efficiency of the organization as a propagandist agency, but they certainly diminish its danger as a possible instrument of insurrection.

A socialist organization seems always to contain two elements of internal disintegration. One is the prevalence of a singular and almost pathetic mistrust of their leaders, and of one another. The law of suspects is always in force among themselves. At meetings of the German Socialists, Liebknecht denounces Schweitzer as an agent of the Prussian Government, Schweitzer accuses Liebknecht of being an Austrian spy, and the frequent hints at bribery, and open charges of treason against the labourers' cause, disclose to us now duller and now more acute phases of that unhappy state of mutual suspicion, in which the one supreme, superhuman virtue, worthy to be worshipped, if haply it could anywhere be discovered, is the virtue men honoured even in Robespierre--the incorruptible. The other source of disintegration is the tendency to intestine divisions on points of doctrine. A reconstruction of society is necessarily a most extensive programme, and allows room for the utmost variety of opinion and plan. The longer it is discussed, the more certainly do differences arise, and the movement becomes a strife of schools in no way formidable to the government. All this only furnishes another reason for the conclusion that in dealing with socialist agitations, a government's safest as well as justest policy is, as much as may be, to leave them alone. Their danger lies in the cloudiness of their ideas, and that can only be dispersed in the free breezes of popular discussion. The sword is an idle method of reasoning with an idea; an idea will eventually yield to nothing but argument.

Repression, too, is absolutely impossible with modern facilities of inter-communication, and can at best but drive the offensive elements for a time into subterranean channels, where they gather like a dangerous choke-damp that may occasion at any moment a serious explosion.

After the fall of the Internati