Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles Part 3

[24] _Autobiography._

[25] _The Force of Circ.u.mstances_, a poem, by John Garwood, Birmingham, 1808.

[26] Quoted by Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 22 (English edition, 1892).

[27] Quoted by H. M. Hyndman, _The Economics of Socialism_, page 150.

[28] _The New Harmony Communities_, by George Browning Lockwood, page 71.

[29] Quoted by Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_, pages 71-72.

[30] Owen presided at the first organized Trade Union Congress in England.

[31] For the history of these and other Utopian Socialist schemes, the reader is referred to Professor Ely's _French and German Socialism_ (1883); Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (1900); and Hillquit's _History of Socialism in the United States_ (1903).

[32] The Encyclopaedists.

[33] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, pages 6-7.

[34] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 15.

[35] _Idem._

[36] _Idem_, page 18.

[37] _Autobiography._

[38] _Idem._

[39] See, for instance, _The Revolution in Mind and Practice_, by Robert Owen, pages 21-22.

[40] _Essay on Robert Owen._

[41] Gerald Ma.s.sey.

CHAPTER III

THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT

I

The _Communist Manifesto_ has been called the birth-cry of the modern scientific Socialist movement. When it was written, at the end of 1847, little remained of those great movements which in the early part of the century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at New Harmony and elsewhere, and had lost much of its ident.i.ty through the multiplicity of interests embraced in Owen's later propaganda. Chartism and Trade Unionism on the one hand, and the Cooperative Societies on the other, had, between them, absorbed most of the vital elements of the Owenite movement.

There was a mult.i.tude of what Engels calls "social quacks," but the really great social movements, Owenism in England, and Fourierism in France, were utterly demoralized and rapidly dwindling away. One thing only served to keep the flame of hope alive--"the crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism" of the workers. This Communism of the working cla.s.s differed very essentially from the Socialism of Fourier and Owen. It was Utopian, being based, like all Utopian movements, upon abstract ideas. It differed from Fourierism and Owenism, however, in that instead of a universal appeal based upon Brotherhood, Justice, Order, and Economy, its appeal was, primarily, to the laborer.

Its basis was the crude cla.s.s doctrine of "the rights of Labor." The laborer was appealed to as one suffering from oppression and injustice.

It was, therefore, distinctly a cla.s.s movement, and its cla.s.s-consciousness was sufficiently developed to keep its leaders from wasting their lives in abortive appeals to the master cla.s.s. The leading exponents of this Communism of the workers were Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany, and etienne Cabet, in France.

Weitling was a man of the people. He was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1808, the illegitimate child of a humble woman and her soldier lover. He became a tailor, and, as was the custom in Germany at that time, traveled extensively during his apprenticeship. In 1838 his first important work, "The World As It Is, and As It Might Be," appeared, published in Paris by a secret revolutionary society consisting of German workingmen of the "Young Germany" movement. In this work Weitling first expounded at length his communistic theories. It is claimed[42]

that his conversion to Communism was the result of the chance placing of a Fourierist paper upon the table of a Berlin coffeehouse, by Albert Brisbane, the brilliant friend and disciple of Fourier, his first exponent in the English language. This may well be true, for, as we shall see, Weitling's views are mainly based upon those of the great French Utopist. In 1842 Weitling published his best-known work, the book upon which his literary fame chiefly rests, "The Guaranties of Harmony and Freedom." This work at once attracted wide attention, and gave Weitling a foremost place among the writers of the time in the affections of the educated workers. It was an elaboration of the theories contained in his earlier book. Morris Hillquit[43] thus describes Weitling's philosophy and method:--

"In his social philosophy, Weitling may be said to have been the connecting link between primitive and modern Socialism. In the main, he is still a Utopian, and his writings betray the unmistakable influence of the early French Socialists. In common with all Utopians, he bases his philosophy exclusively upon moral grounds. Misery and poverty are to him but the results of human malice, and his cry is for 'eternal justice' and for the 'absolute liberty and equality of all mankind.' In his criticism of the existing order, he leans closely on Fourier, from whom he also borrowed the division of labor into three cla.s.ses of the Necessary, Useful, and Attractive, and the plan of organization of 'attractive industry.'

"His ideal of the future state of society reminds us of the Saint-Simonian government of scientists. The administration of affairs of the entire globe is to be in the hands of the three greatest authorities on 'philosophical medicine,' physics, and mechanics, who are to be reenforced by a number of subordinate committees. His state of the future is a highly centralized government, and is described by the author with the customary details. Where Weitling, to some extent, approaches the conception of modern Socialism, is in his recognition of cla.s.s distinctions between employer and employee. This distinction never amounted to a conscious indors.e.m.e.nt of the modern Socialist doctrine of the 'cla.s.s struggle,' but his views on the antagonism between the 'poor'

and the 'wealthy' came quite close to it. He was a firm believer in labor organizations as a factor in developing the administrative abilities of the working cla.s.s; the creation of an independent labor party was one of his pet schemes, and his appeals were princ.i.p.ally addressed to the workingmen."

Weitling visited the United States in 1846, a group of German exiles, identified with the Free Soil movement, having invited him to become the editor of a magazine, the _Volkstribun_, devoted to the principles of the movement. By the time he reached America, however, the magazine had suspended publication. He stayed little more than a year, hastening back to the fatherland to share in the revolutionary activities of 1848. He returned to America again in 1849, after the failure of the "glorious revolution," and for many years thereafter was an active and tireless propagandist. He died in Brooklyn in 1871.

etienne Cabet was, in many ways, a very different type of man from Weitling, but their ideas were not so dissimilar. Cabet, born in Dijon, France, in 1788, was the son of a fairly prosperous cooper, and received a good university education. He studied both medicine and law, adopting the profession of the latter and early achieving marked success in its practice. He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830 as a member of the "Committee of Insurrection," and upon the accession of Louis Philippe was "rewarded" by being made Attorney-General for Corsica.

There is no doubt that the government desired to remove Cabet from the political life of Paris, quite as much as to reward him for his services during the Revolution; his strong radicalism, combined with his st.u.r.dy independence of character, being rightly regarded as dangerous to Louis Philippe's regime. His reward, therefore, took the form of practical banishment. The wily advisers of Louis Philippe used the gloved hand.

But the best-laid schemes of mice and courtiers "gang aft agley." Cabet, in Corsica, joined the radical anti-administration forces, and became a thorn in the side of the government. Removed from office, he returned to Paris, whereupon the citizens of Dijon, his native town, elected him as their deputy to the lower chamber in 1834. Here he continued his opposition to the administration, and was at last tried on a charge of _lese majeste_, and given the option of choosing between two years'

imprisonment and five years' exile.

Cabet chose exile, and took up his residence in England, where he fell under the influence of Owen's agitation and became a convert to his Socialistic views. During this time of exile, too, he became acquainted with the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More and was fascinated by it. The idea of writing a similar work of fiction to propagate his Socialist belief impressed itself upon his mind, and he wrote "a philosophical and social romance," ent.i.tled "Voyage to Icaria," which was published soon after his return to Paris, in 1839. In this novel Cabet follows closely the method of More, and describes "Icaria" as "a Promised Land, an Eden, an Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise." The plot of the book is simple in the extreme, and its literary merit is not very great. The writer represents that he met, in London, a n.o.bleman, Lord William Carisdall, who, having by chance heard of Icaria and the wonderful and strange customs and form of government of its inhabitants, visited the country.

Lord William kept a diary in which he described all that he saw in this wonderland. This record, we are told, the traveler had permitted to be published through the medium of his friend, and under his editorial supervision. The first part of the book contains an attractive account of the cooperative system of the Icarians, their communistic government, equality of the s.e.xes, and high standard of morality. The second part is devoted to an account of the history of Icaria, prior to and succeeding the revolution of 1782, when the great national hero, Icar, established Communism.

The book created a tremendous furore in France. It appealed strongly to the discontented ma.s.ses, and it is said that by 1847 Cabet had no less than four hundred thousand adherents among the workers of France. The numerical strength of revolutionary movements is almost invariably greatly exaggerated, however, and it is not likely that the figures cited are exceptional in this regard. It is possible, _c.u.m grano salis_, to accept the figures only by remembering that a very infinitesimal proportion of these were adherents in the sense of being ready to follow Cabet's leadership, as subsequent events showed. When the clamor rose for a practical test of the theories set forth so alluringly, Cabet visited Robert Owen in England and sought advice as to the best site for such an experiment. Owen recommended Texas, then recently admitted into the union of states and anxious for settlers.

Cabet accepted Owen's advice and called for volunteers to form the "advance guard" of settlers, the number responding being pitifully, almost ludicrously, small. Still, the effect of the book was very great, and it served to fire the flagging zeal of those workers for social regeneration whose hearts must otherwise have become deadly sick from long-deferred hopes.

The confluence of these two streams of Communist propaganda represented by Weitling and Cabet const.i.tuted the real Communist "movement" of 1840-1847. Its organized expression was the Communist League, a secret organization with its headquarters in London. The League was formed in Paris by German refugees and traveling workmen, and seems to have been an offspring of Mazzini's "Young Europe" agitation of 1834. At different times it bore the names, "League of the Just," "League of the Righteous," and, finally, "Communist League."[44] For many years it remained a mere conspiratory society, exclusively German, and existed mainly for the purpose of fostering the "Young Germany" ideas. Later it became an International Alliance with societies in many parts of Europe.

In 1847 Karl Marx was residing in Brussels. During a prior residence in Paris he had come into close a.s.sociation with the leaders of the League there, and had agreed to form a similar society in Brussels. Engels was in Paris in 1847, and it was probably due to his activities that the Paris League officially invited both him and Marx to join the international organization, promising that a congress should be convened in London at an early date. We may, in view of the after career of Engels as the politician of the movement, surmise so much. Be that how it may, the invitation, with its promise to call a congress in London, was extended and accepted. The reason for the step, the object of the proposed congress, is quite clear. Marx himself has placed it beyond dispute. During his stay in Paris he and Engels had discussed the position of the League with some of its leaders, and he had, later, criticised it in the most merciless manner in some of his pamphlets.[45]

Marx desired a revolutionary working cla.s.s political party with a definite aim and policy. Those leaders of the League who agreed with him in this were the prime movers for the congress, which was held in London, in November, 1847.

At the congress, Marx and Engels presented their views at great length, and outlined the principles and policy which their famous pamphlet later made familiar. Perhaps it was due to the very convincing manner in which they argued that the emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s must be the work of that cla.s.s itself, that there was some opposition to them, on the part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals"

and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might be expected from such an inchoate ma.s.s of men, revolutionaries to the core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form of the _Communist Manifesto_, published in the early part of January, 1848.

II

The authors of the _Manifesto_ were men of great intellectual gifts.

Either of them alone must have won fame; together, they won immortality.

Their lives, from the date of their first meeting in Paris, in 1844, to the death of Marx, almost forty years later, are inseparably interwoven.

The friendship of Damon and Pythias was not more remarkable.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the fifth day of May, 1818, at Treves, the oldest town in Germany, dating back to Roman times. His parents were both people of remarkable character. His mother--_nee_ Pressburg--was the descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the sixteenth century had settled in Holland. Many of her ancestors had been rabbis. Marx was pa.s.sionately devoted to his mother, always speaking of her with reverent admiration. On his father's side, also, Marx boasted of a long line of rabbinical ancestors, and it has been suggested that he owed to this rabbinical ancestry some of his marvelous gift of luminous exposition.

The true family name was Mordechia, but that was abandoned by his grandfather, who took the name of Marx, which the grandson was destined to make famous. The father of Karl was a lawyer of some prominence and considerable learning, and a man of great force of character. In 1824, the boy Karl being then six years old, he renounced the Jewish religion and embraced Christianity, all the members of the family being baptized and received into the Church.

There is a familiar legend that this act was the result of compulsion, being taken in response to an official edict.[46] He held at the time the position of notary public at the county court, and it is claimed that the official edict in question required all Jews holding official positions to forego them, and to abandon the practice of law, or to accept the Christian faith. Many writers, including Liebknecht[47] and one of the daughters of Karl Marx,[48] have given this explanation of the renunciation of Judaism by the elder Marx. It seems certain, however, that the act was purely voluntary, and that there was no such edict.[49] It may be that social ambitions had something to do with it, that he hoped to attain, as a Christian, a measure of success not possible to an adherent of the Hebrew faith. Whatever the motive, the act was a voluntary one. A great admirer of the eighteenth-century "materialists," and a disciple of Voltaire, he believed in G.o.d, he said, as Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz had done before him. He discussed religious and philosophical questions very freely and frankly with his son, and read Voltaire and Racine with him. As for the mother of Marx, she also believed in G.o.d--"not for G.o.d's sake, but for my own," she explained when asked about it.

At the earnest behest of his father, Marx studied law at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. But "to please himself" he studied history and philosophy, winning great distinction in these branches of learning. He graduated in 1841, as a Doctor of Philosophy, with an essay on the philosophy of Epicurus, and it was his purpose to settle at Bonn as a professor of philosophy. The plan was abandoned, partly because he had already discovered that his bent was toward political activity, and partly because the Prussian government had made scholastic independence impossible, thus destroying the attractiveness of an academic career. Accordingly, Marx accepted the editorship of a democratic paper, the _Rhenish Gazette_, in which he waged bitter, relentless war upon the government. Time after time the censors interfered, but Marx was too brilliant a polemicist, even thus early in his career, and far too subtle for the censors. Finally, at the request of his managers, who hoped thus to avoid being compelled to suspend the publication, Marx retired from the editorship. This did not serve to save the paper, however, and it was suppressed by the government in March, 1843.

Soon after this Marx went to Paris, with his young bride of a few months, Jenny von Westphalen, the playmate of his childhood. The Von Westphalens were of the n.o.bility, and a brother of Mrs. Marx afterward became a Prussian Minister of State. The elder Von Westphalen was half Scotch, related, on his maternal side, to the Argyles. He was a lineal descendant of the Duke of Argyle who was beheaded in the reign of James II. His daughter tells an amusing story of how Marx, many years later, having to p.a.w.n some of his wife's heirlooms, especially some heavy, antique silver spoons which bore the Argyle crest and motto, "Truth is my maxim," narrowly escaped arrest on suspicion of having robbed the Argyles![50] To Paris, then, Marx went, and there met, among others, Heinrich Heine, many of whose poems he suggested, Arnold Ruge, the poet, P. J. Proudhon, and Michael Bakunin, the Anarchist philosopher, and, above all, the man destined to be his very _alter ego_, Friedrich Engels, with whom he had already had some correspondence.[51]

The attainments of Engels have been somewhat overshadowed by those of his friend. Born at Barmen, in the province of the Rhine, November 28, 1820, he was educated in the gymnasium of that city, and after serving his period of military service, from 1837 to 1841, was sent, in the early part of 1842, to Manchester, England, to look after a cotton-spinning business of which his father was princ.i.p.al owner. Here he seems to have at once begun a thorough investigation of social and industrial conditions, the results of which are contained in a book, "The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England in 1844," which remains to this day a cla.s.sic presentation of the social and industrial life of the period. From the very first, already predisposed, as we know, he sympathized with the views of the Chartists and the Owenite Socialists.

He became friendly with the Chartist leaders, notably with Feargus O'Connor, to whose paper, the _Northern Star_, he became a contributor.