Socialism 101

by Kathleen Sears

  The “First Dictatorship of the Proletariat”

  The leaders of the Paris Commune seemed curiously unaware that controlling Paris was not the same thing as controlling France.

  The Commune called for a decentralized government, the separation of church and state, and the replacement of the regular army by the citizen-controlled National Guard. None of these provisions could be carried out because the authority of the Commune was confined to Paris. The only practical legislation that was passed was a renewal of the wartime moratorium on rents and debts, the institution of a ten-hour workday, and the abolition of night work in bakeries, suggesting that at least one tired baker served in the Commune’s legislature.

  Other Communes

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  On March 22 the National Guard battalion at Lyon followed Paris’s lead, seizing control of the town government and establishing a provincial commune. Similar uprisings occurred in Saint-Étienne, Marseille, Toulouse, Limoges, Narbonne, and Le Creusot, but they were quickly suppressed. By April 4 the Paris Commune stood alone against the government at Versailles.

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  “The Bloody Week”

  While the leaders in Paris spent their time passing impractical legislation, Thiers built up the military strength of the government at Versailles. He was helped in his preparations by a successful appeal to Bismarck. Never a fan of revolution, Bismarck released a large number of French prisoners of war to help Thiers retake the capital.

  Thiers’s forces laid siege to Paris at the beginning of April. After several weeks of bombarding the city, government troops entered an undefended section of Paris on May 21. The street fighting over the course of what came to be called “the bloody week” was more brutal than anything in the recent war against the Germans. The Communards, as the supporters of the Commune were called, set up barricades and fought the army’s advance street by street. In the last days of fighting, the Commune’s soldiers, seeing that their cause was lost, shot their prisoners and hostages, including the archbishop of Paris, and set fire to the public buildings of the city. On March 28 the last organized defenders of the Commune made a final stand at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where, conveniently, they were executed by the National Assembly’s troops. All over the city men suspected of having fought for the Commune were rounded up and shot without trial.

  Approximately 20,000 Communards and 750 soldiers died during “the bloody week.” Of the roughly 38,000 arrested, some 7,000 were deported to the penal colony of New Caledonia in Melanesia. Others escaped into exile.

  THE END OF ONE REVOLUTION OR THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER?

  Socialist theorists of all types claimed the Paris Commune for themselves. On May 30, 1871, two days after the Paris Commune died in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, Karl Marx read his report on the event to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, later published as a pamphlet titled The Civil War in France. Marx declared that the Commune was the “first dictatorship of the proletariat,” notable less for its actual accomplishments than for its symbolism. Later revolutionaries used the example of the Commune for their own purposes, with varying degrees of historical accuracy. Both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky held up the demise of the Commune as an example of what happens when revolutionaries try to build bridges across class lines. The Soviet Union claimed the Commune as one of its illustrious ancestors.

  The anarchist Peter Kropotkin summed up the appeal of the Paris Commune in the mythology of socialist revolution in his own pamphlet on the subject:

  Why is the idea represented by the Commune of Paris so attractive to the workers of every land, of every nationality? The answer is easy. The revolution of 1871 was above all a popular one. It was made by the people themselves, it sprang spontaneously from the midst of the mass, and it was amongst the great masses of the people that it found its defenders, its heroes, its martyrs. It is just because it was so thoroughly “low” that the middle class can never forgive it. And at the same time its moving spirit was the idea of a Social Revolution; vague certainly, perhaps unconscious, but still the effort to obtain at last, after the struggle of many centuries, true freedom, true equality for all men. It was the Revolution of the lowest of the people marching forward to conquer their rights.

  ANARCHISM VERSUS MARXISM

  Bakunin and Marx

  In the aftermath of the Paris Commune Marx and Engels confronted those whose political views they believed were in complete disagreement with their own. The Commune had been a practical working-out of socialist theory, despite its defeat. Marx and Engels realized that their political opponents included not only other socialists but anarchists as well. Thus, they confronted one of the great revolutionary figures of the nineteenth century, the theorist of anarchy, Mikhail Bakunin.

  Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) was born into a conservative noble family in Russia. He served briefly in the Russian army on the Polish frontier before plunging into the intellectual life of Moscow and Premukhino, where he studied romantic Hegelianism and became friends with the novelist Ivan Turgenev.

  In 1840 Bakunin traveled to Berlin. Like others before him, he fell in with that nursery school for revolutionaries, the Young Hegelians, who introduced him to another side of Hegel. After brief periods in Berlin and Switzerland he made his way to Paris. In Paris he met a number of Polish émigrés, who interested him in the possibilities of combining the struggle for national liberation with social revolution.

  TRAVELS AND ESCAPES

  Always more interested in action than in theory, Bakunin was deeply involved in the 1848 revolutions. He followed the uprisings from Paris to Prague to Dresden, traveling on false passports and always one step ahead of the police. The authorities caught up with him after the revolution in Dresden failed. He was arrested and condemned to death. The Dresden authorities happily handed him over to the Austrians, who had a warrant out for his arrest for his revolutionary activity in Prague. The Austrians condemned him to death again, carried him to the border, took back their handcuffs, and handed him over to the Russians.

  After six years in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Bakunin was exiled to a Siberian prison that was run by one of his mother’s cousins. In 1861 he escaped. Traveling on an American ship by way of Japan, San Francisco, and New York, he made his way to London, a haven of nineteenth-century European refugees from both the left and right.

  For several years Bakunin batted around Europe, going anywhere there was a revolution in process. He slowly realized that revolutionaries who were fighting for national liberation usually had no interest in broader social change. Having come to the conclusion that social revolution must be international to succeed, he settled in Italy and began to create a complex network of secret societies—some real, some fictional—that he called the International Social Democratic Alliance.

  ANARCHO-COMMUNISM

  Bakunin adapted Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s teachings to create the doctrine later known as anarcho-communism. He shared Marx’s vision of communism as a classless society but rejected the idea of a central state. Instead, he believed that land, natural resources, and the means of production should be held by local communities, which would form a loose federation with other communities for joint purposes.

  Bakunin advocated the use of terror and violence as a weapon to destroy organized government, claiming that “the passion for destruction is also a creative urge.” He argued that the state exists to protect private property, and private property protects the state. Therefore, the state must be destroyed before property can be communally owned and equally distributed. Paradoxically, the only way to create a free and peaceful society was through violent revolution.

  Proletariat or Peasant?

  Marx and Engels were convinced that the revolution would begin with the industrial working class in the most advanced capitalist societies, where the conflicts between capital and labor were most acute. Bakunin disagreed. He argued that revolutionary change was most likely in the
least economically developed countries because their workers were less privileged. Bad as life was for a factory worker in Manchester, England, it was worse for workers in less developed countries. He made a strong argument that Russian peasants would lead the charge in the revolution. Not only were Russian serfs still legally tied to the land as late as the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, but they also had traditional village communal structures that would form a great foundation for socialism.

  THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

  In 1864 Marx drew up the founding statement for the International Workingmen’s Association, later known as the First International. Bakunin’s supporters immediately challenged the idea of creating a formal organization to win support for communism, asking, “How can you expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization?”

  The battle between Marx and Bakunin over the control of the First International came to a head in 1872, when Marx and Engels engineered the expulsion of Bakunin and his followers from the First International.

  Bakunin’s Prediction

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  Bakunin accurately predicted the nature of Marxist dictatorships in the twentieth century: “The so-called people’s state will be nothing other than the quite despotic administration of the masses by a new and very non-numerous aristocracy of real and supposed learned ones.”

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  THE ANARCHIST PRINCE

  Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was the son of a Russian prince. He was educated at an elite military school and served for several years as an officer in Siberia. He resigned his commission in 1867, studied mathematics in St. Petersburg, and became a professional geographer, specializing in the mountain ranges and glaciers of Asia.

  In 1871 Kropotkin brought a promising scientific career to a halt. He turned down the secretaryship of the Russian Geographical Society, renounced the title of prince, and joined the revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg. For several years he worked as part of the Tchaikovsky Circle, which distributed revolutionary propaganda to Russian workers and peasants.

  Arrested in St. Petersburg in 1874, Kropotkin began a variation of the experience of arrest, expulsion, and escape common to radical reformers of the period. He was held without trial but managed to escape from the prison hospital and make his way to Western Europe. Expelled from Switzerland at the demand of the Russian government in 1881 and arrested in France in 1883, he sought refuge in England, where he made his living as a respected scientific journalist.

  Kropotkin was the most widely read of the anarchist theorists. Between 1883 and 1917, when he returned to Russia, he contributed articles on anarchism to leading liberal magazines, radical papers, and the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. His anarchistic journalism was translated and published worldwide. Several of his books were published as magazine serials.

  Kropotkin tried to give anarchism a scientific basis. The most influential of his works was Mutual Aid (1902). In it, he refuted the popular theory of social Darwinism, which justified competition in a free-market economy in terms of survival of the fittest. He demonstrated from observation of both animal and human societies that competition within a species is less important than cooperation as a condition for survival.

  The Propaganda of the Deed

  In the 1870s French and Italian anarchists began to use a phrase that would become one of the most visible and controversial anarchist doctrines: the propaganda of the deed. The idea was that violent action is the most effective form of propaganda for the revolutionary cause.

  At first the propaganda of the deed referred to rural insurrections intended to rouse the Italian peasantry to revolt. Later, the doctrine became the justification for assassinations and bombings of public places carried out by individual protesters. Sometimes working alone, sometimes as part of a conspiracy, anarchists carried out a series of attacks on prominent political figures, beginning with the attempt to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878.

  Assassinations Spread

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  Assassinations of prominent political figures became more common with the ready availability of dynamite, which some revolutionaries welcomed as the “artillery of the proletariat.” Patented by Alfred Nobel in 1867, the explosive was widely manufactured by 1875. One anarchist, Johann Most, gave instructions for whipping up a batch at home in The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (1885).

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  Important figures in the anarchist movement repudiated the technique as fundamentally useless. As Kropotkin put it, “A structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite.” Such protests were useless; the lone bomber became the public image of anarchy.

  THE RISE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

  Socialism Becomes a Mass Movement

  In the 1860s Europe was beginning to recover from the first traumas of the Industrial Revolution. There was no sign that Marx’s proletariat revolution was imminent. Capitalism was flourishing. Economic and political injustices remained, but governments began to enact labor laws, lift restrictions on trade unionism, and open the political process, largely as a result of pressure from the socialist and labor movements. Some German socialists began to reconsider the inevitability of the Marxist revolution and look toward the possibility of political action.

  WHAT IS SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?

  During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries a wide range of socialists adopted the term social democrat to distinguish themselves from socialists who advocated violent revolution. The basic tenet of social democracy is the belief that socialist reforms can be achieved democratically through the election of socialist representatives. Social democrats advocate a peaceful, evolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism through the use of the existing political process.

  The early proponents of social democracy claimed that they were only revising Marxism. Their opponents, the defenders of Marxist orthodoxy, recognized that they were actually replacing Marxism with something entirely different. By the end of the nineteenth century socialism had split into two camps: the social democrats, who believed in the possibility of reform, and the communists, who still believed in revolution.

  THE BEGINNINGS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN GERMANY

  In the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848 Friedrich Wilhelm IV promulgated a constitution that included a legislature loosely based on the British parliament. Members of the upper house inherited their seats or were appointed by the king. Members of the lower house were elected by a variation on universal manhood suffrage. Voters were divided into three categories according to the amount of taxes they paid, with the votes of the wealthy more heavily weighted than the votes of the poor. The intention was to keep conservative landowners in power, but the plan backfired. By the end of the 1850s the vote was weighted in favor of wealthy manufacturers, merchants, bankers, and professionals.

  With the rise to power of King Wilhelm I and his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, Prussia, and by extension the lesser German states under its influence, entered a period of political change in the 1860s. Bismarck and the king, both moderate conservatives, found themselves in conflict with the newly powerful liberals. Since the working classes had at least a nominal vote, they often found themselves allied with the radical wing of the liberal movement.

  Working-Class Organizations

  The opportunities for working-class organizations were limited. Labor unions were illegal in all the German states, and there were heavy restrictions on the formation of political parties.

  The primary model was the local workers’ educational societies founded by liberals beginning in the 1840s as a way of supplementing low levels of primary education. In the 1860s workers began to take over these associations and run them on their own behalf. Most associations provided both lecture series and systematic courses designed to teach a specific subject. In 1864 alone the thirty-three education societies in Prussia sponsored more than one thousand public lectures. In 1866 many of these societies b
anded together to form the League of German Workingmen’s Associations.

  These groups provided the foundation for the first two social democratic workers’ parties: the General German Workers’ Association, established by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863, and the German Social Democratic Party, founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel in 1869.

  FERDINAND LASSALLE

  Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) was the son of a wealthy Jewish silk trader in Breslau. After eighteen unhappy months at a commercial school in Leipzig, he convinced his father to send him to the university instead. He spent two years at Breslau, studying philosophy, history, philology, and archaeology. He then transferred to Berlin, where he discovered Hegel and the French utopian socialists. Like Marx before him, he intended to pursue a career as a philosopher with the hope of transforming social conditions in Germany. Again like Marx, reality soon derailed his academic career.

  Lassalle and the Countess

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