Socialism 101

by Kathleen Sears

  The brief alliance between the workers and the lesser bourgeoisie was over. The assembly declared martial law in the capital and gave General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac full authority to bring the protest to an end. Cavaignac allowed the fighting to spread, then moved in with heavy artillery aimed at the barricades. At the end of three days an estimated 10,000 demonstrators were dead or wounded and 11,000 were taken prisoner. Cavaignac used his emergency powers to carry out vigorous reprisals against the suspected leaders of the insurrection. Most of the 11,000 prisoners were deported to Algeria.

  REVOLUTION IN THE GERMAN STATES

  Uprising in Marx’s Homeland

  The news of the successful revolution in France unleashed a series of smaller revolutions through the thirty-eight states of the German Confederation. As in France, the revolutionaries were a confused mixture of middle-class liberals looking for greater participation in government, urban workers and artisans angered by the effect of industrialization on their livelihood, and peasants rising up against inadequate land allotments and remnants of feudal dues and obligations. Most of the German rulers, willing to learn from Louis-Philippe’s mistakes, promised to institute constitutions and other reforms before the revolutionaries even had a chance to organize.

  The German Confederation

  * * *

  In 1815 the independent German states took the first step toward eventual unification. The German Confederation was a loose alliance formed for mutual defense. The Confederation had no central executive or judiciary. It also had no way to enforce cooperation among its members, an oversight that the two largest members of the Confederation, Prussia and Austria, used to their advantage.

  * * *

  THE FRANKFURT PARLIAMENT

  In 1848 liberals from all over Germany made a concerted effort to unify the German states into a single political unit. The Frankfurt Parliament was created by a group of middle-class German liberals who were inspired to action by the March revolts across Germany. They issued invitations to attend a preliminary parliament, which then arranged for delegates to a pan-German national parliament to be elected from all the German states.

  Newspaper Editors

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  At the beginning of the uprising in Prussia Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels moved to the Prussian city of Cologne, where they founded and edited the liberal newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Because Marx had previously renounced Prussian citizenship, he was easily deported. Engels remained in Prussia and took an active part in the uprising.

  * * *

  The delegates met in the free city of Frankfurt for the first time on May 18, 1848. Journalists came from all over Europe for the opening ceremonies. Delegates and spectators believed they were witnessing the birth of a new nation, Germania. Once they settled down to work, the delegates discovered that while they agreed that their goal was a united German state, they disagreed on not only its form of government but also its boundaries. Supporters of “Little Germany” wanted a unified state that would include only Prussia and the smaller German states. Supporters of “Big Germany” wanted to add the German provinces of Austria.

  The delegates had a further problem. The Frankfurt Parliament claimed to be a government speaking for the entire German people, but it was not recognized as such by the existing German governments or their princes. Misled by the temporary weakness of the Prussian and Austrian governments, besieged in their capitals by revolutionaries, the delegates assumed that the two states would follow the Parliament’s lead and allow their states to be absorbed into a new German nation. They were wrong.

  The new Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph I, made it clear that he had no intention of giving up the non-Germanic portions of his empire for the dubious privilege of being incorporated into the new German state. The delegates then offered the crown of “emperor of the Germans” to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. At first Friedrich Wilhelm stalled. He couldn’t accept the crown without the consent of the princes of the other German states. When twenty-eight of the princes agreed to accept the constitution under his rule, the Prussian king rejected what he called “a crown picked up from the gutter” and ordered the Prussian delegates to resign from the Parliament.

  The Prussian delegates were soon followed by those from Austria and a number of the lesser states. The Frankfurt Parliament was reduced to its radical members, who tried to inspire the German people to continue the battle. Revolts occurred in a few of the lesser states in May 1849, but they were quickly suppressed, in many cases by Prussian troops.

  REVOLUTION IN THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE

  The 1848 uprisings in the Austrian empire had a different character than those in Prussia and the lesser German states because Austria was not exactly a German state. The beginnings of industrialism in Vienna and other major cities created the usual patterns of social change, resulting in a growing bourgeoisie and a small urban proletariat. Peasants, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population, began to chafe against the demands of the robota, a type of forced labor owed to their landlords. But the real threat to the Austrian empire came from its multiethnic character.

  The Habsburg dynasty of Austria ruled an empire that included ten different nationalities: Croats, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, and Slovenes. In the 1840s these minority groups, most notably the Magyars of Hungary, began to have aspirations for national autonomy within the empire.

  The Beginnings of a Revolt

  The first responses to the news of the February Revolution in France were surprisingly mild. Students in Vienna sent a petition to the emperor requesting freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship. Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth addressed the legislative body known as the Hungarian Diet, calling for an imperial constitution that would give virtual autonomy to Hungary. The students in Vienna quickly amended their petition to include a demand for a constitution.

  On March 13 a clash between the army and a group of student demonstrators resulted in bloodshed. The emperor, Ferdinand I, called off the troops and announced his consent to the demands in the student petition.

  Ferdinand’s willingness to adopt moderate reforms did not answer the larger issue of ethnic autonomy. The emperor was soon on the defensive throughout the empire. The uprising in Vienna quickly spread to Prague, Venice, Milan, and Budapest. A war for liberation broke out in the empire’s Italian possessions. In Budapest the Hungarian Diet adopted the decrees known as the March Laws, which created an independent Magyar state that was joined to the empire only through its allegiance to the emperor. Inspired by the Hungarian example, Czech nationalists in Prague demanded their own constitution and virtual autonomy. In June the first Pan-Slav Congress assembled in Prague and proposed that the Austrian empire be transformed into a federation of nationalities. (Pan-Slavism was a movement that proposed to establish links, formal and informal, between the various Slavic states of central and eastern Europe.)

  Second and Third Uprisings

  Back in Vienna Ferdinand reneged on his promise for a constitutional assembly and promulgated a constitution on his own. It was not liberal enough to satisfy the radical elements in the city. When the emperor then attempted to disband the National Guard and dissolve the radical student organization, Vienna suffered a second uprising by students, workers, and members of the National Guard. The imperial family was forced to flee the capital.

  From May to October Vienna was in the hands of the revolutionaries, but the imperial army remained loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. While the emperor appeared to cooperate with the constituent assembly’s efforts to draft a constitution, conservative statesmen and military leaders encouraged the military commander in Prague, General Alfred Windischgrätz, to drill his troops in preparation for recapturing the capital.

  The Roots of War

  * * *

  Austria’s failure to resolve the problems of a multiethnic empire ultimately led to the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Ser
bian nationalist. The archduke’s death triggered the tangled alliances that threw Europe into World War I.

  * * *

  A radical demonstration in Prague gave Windischgrätz an excuse to call for reinforcements and ruthlessly suppress the Czech revolutionary movement. When the general moved toward Budapest, Viennese radicals staged a third uprising. Windischgrätz used the violence as a pretext to bombard Vienna with artillery. The city was captured in early October, many radical leaders were executed, and the constituent assembly was exiled to Moravia.

  With Vienna back in the government’s hands, only the Hungarian revolt remained unchecked. Austria finally defeated the Hungarian rebels in August 1849, with help from Tsar Nicholas, who feared that Hungarian success might set off a similar revolt in Poland.

  THE IMPACT OF THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS ON SOCIALISM

  By 1849 the revolutions were over. Many radical revolutionaries felt they had gained nothing. The political situation in many countries was actually more repressive than it had been before the revolts. The constitutions that had been granted were suspended or watered down until they were worthless. Revolutionary leaders were imprisoned or exiled. The freedoms for which they had fought were systematically denied. With few exceptions, rulers still sat on the thrones they had occupied at the beginning of the uprising. France toppled the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe and voted for a new emperor in his place, Louis-Napoleon. The German states emerged from the upheavals with neither unity nor democracy. The ethnic minorities of the Austrian empire did not achieve their dreams of national autonomy. Italy was in fragments. French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon summed up the feeling of many: “We have been beaten and humiliated…scattered, imprisoned, disarmed, and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands.”

  The defeat of the revolutions by reactionary forces changed the character of European socialism and the working-class movement. Before 1848 working-class radicals were often allied with the middle class against the traditional ruling classes. They fought together in many places at the beginning of the uprisings. As the revolutions progressed, the bourgeoisie aligned themselves with the old order, alarmed by the extremism of the mob and the perceived threat to private property.

  MARX AND ENGELS WRITE A MANIFESTO

  “A Spectre Is Haunting Europe”

  In the mid-nineteenth century, as revolutions thundered about them, a good many socialist and communist organizations were struggling to make their voices heard. Most of them were tiny, but they loomed large in the minds of political commentators, who saw them as being at the heart of the current political unrest.

  In 1847 two of these organizations merged: the League of the Just and the Communist Correspondence Committee. Together they formed the Communist League. To set out their principles they asked two of their members, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to write a short introduction to socialist ideas. The result was The Communist Manifesto, one of the most famous political publications in history.

  Socialism or Communism?

  * * *

  Is socialism the same thing as communism? It depends on whom you ask. Marxists generally agree that socialism and communism are two aspects of the same thing: a society based upon common ownership of the means of production. In his The State and Revolution Lenin identified socialism as the first stage of a progression toward communism. Under communism, Lenin argued, the state will “wither away” because there will be no need for it, given that all property will be owned in common.

  * * *

  The Communist Manifesto begins by pointing out the preoccupation of current political forces with communist ideas:

  A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

  Having hooked their audience, Marx and Engels offer their most basic explanation of their political and historical philosophy: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

  From this starting point they review the rise of capitalism. Although Marx and Engels were unalterably opposed to it, they were quick to give capitalism its due: it had arisen from the innards of feudal society in the form of the urban merchant class. Gradually, through conflicts economic, political, and military, it had burst free of its origins and conquered and destroyed feudal social relationships. A class of serfs and peasants had been replaced by a class of workers, who sold their labor to the capitalists in return for wages. At the same time capitalism led to greater and greater productivity.

  Just as capitalism grew within and transformed the feudal social system, so, argue Marx and Engels, the working class, the eventual destroyer of capitalism, was created by the capitalists themselves.

  In the second half of the manifesto Marx and Engels put forward a practical course of action for the Communist League. They explain how it will work with other workers’ political parties (it will cooperate with them but will speak to workers’ broader interests) and offer some practical political demands, such as nationalizing railways, a progressive income tax, and free education.

  At the end of forty impassioned yet logical pages Marx and Engels leave their readers with the famous call to action, “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!”

  The final version was published in London in February 1848—just before the outbreak of revolutions began in France. Several hundred copies were distributed to League members, but the organization never bothered to put it up for sale. By 1872 the Manifesto had been translated into Russian and French and issued in three editions in the United States and twelve in Germany.

  Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

  * * *

  Marx and Engels, like virtually all of their socialist contemporaries, looked to the French Revolution for inspiration. As a result, they made use of certain French terms in their writing. They called the capitalist class the bourgeoisie and the working class the proletariat. Use of these terms continued throughout the socialist movement, in some cases up to the present day.

  * * *

  Most of what Marx and Engels (and many other socialist leaders) wrote was in answer to criticism or commenting on events. There is no book in which Marx says, “Okay, this is what I mean by socialism and how we get there!” The Communist Manifesto is as close as we’re going to get, and as such it’s an important starting point for understanding Marx.

  MARX’S METHOD

  The Manifesto is also a window into how Marx sees other socialists. He is critical of those such as Fourier and Saint-Simon; he dismisses them as “utopian socialists” in that they assume social change can be imposed on a society by well-intentioned members of the upper classes.

  The document also offers a clear example of how Marx and Engels applied Hegel’s dialectic to history. Hegel, if you remember, argued that each stage of an idea contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Thus, the thesis contends with the antithesis, and in time the two are replaced by a new synthesis. Hegel believed that his philosophy applied only to ideas, but Marx applied it to history and politics.

  Marx versus Feuerbach

  * * *

  Marx had begun to move in this direction several years earlier. In 1845 he and Engels wrote a series of short notes for a book later published as The German Ideology. The notes gained the name “Theses on Feuerbach” because they were a critique of the writings of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Like Marx, Feuerbach was a disciple of Hegel, but Marx and Engels took things much further. In their eleventh thesis they wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.”

  * * *

  Thus feudal society gave birth to a nascent capitalist class. That class grew in strength until it overthrew its parent and created what became the industrial working class. In turn the working class was d
estined, Marx and Engels argued in the Manifesto, to overthrow capitalism.

  MARX AND ENGELS IN THE REVOLUTION OF 1848

  Shortly after The Communist Manifesto was published, the compost hit the fan in France. With revolution in the air, the Belgian authorities decided that Marx was an undesirable alien and asked him to leave the country. As one door closed, another opened; Marx returned to France at the invitation of the new republican government.

  Within weeks of the March uprising in Prussia, Marx and Engels were on their way to Cologne, Marx traveling on a temporary French passport because he had given up his Prussian citizenship several years before. (His application for British citizenship was denied because he gave up his Prussian citizenship.) Finally, he chose to take refuge in Great Britain. London was Marx’s home for the rest of his life.

  With Marx gone, Engels closed down the paper. He remained in Prussia, where he took an active part in the final stages of the uprising. As the revolution drew to a close, Engels escaped to Switzerland and then made his way back to England.

  After the Revolution

  By the end of 1849 the revolutions in Europe were over and Marx and Engels were both settled in England. Engels went back to work in his father’s factory, first as a clerk and later as a partner. For the next twenty years he led a double life in Manchester: member of the business elite by day, revolutionary by night.