Revolutionary Ideas. Being the Sequel to “Orthodoxy”
The several revolutions which, in the various States, ushered in the present (capitalist) order of society, were not, in reality, fought to advance the interests of the propertyless masses, however much the “war cries” which thereat resounded may have seemed to point to that conclusion. Man’s ideals have ever tended to soar high above the real earthly conditions from which they arose, only to fall back to earth again at the first attempt to join them in reality. The intellectual leaders who voiced the Revolution’s aims, and the political leaders, from Cromwell to Robespierre, who handled it, were really representative of a class, held down, it is true, by the traditional rulers, but propertied, and relying for their existence even as much as their old oppressors, upon an enslaved class of producers. Ignorant, and led like sheep, the workers were only “pawns in the game.” In that classic example, the French bourgeois revolution of 1789, the working people, rallied by the deceptive slogan, “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and urged on by the hopes born of a half-starved stomach, wreaked wild vengeance on every manifestation of things as they had been. Temporarily unleashed from the hideous subjection which had been theirs for centuries, they forced the pace of their bourgeois leaders. King, aristocrats, and religion were swept ruthlessly aside, the worship of “Reason” was set up, and there issued forth the proclamation of the “Rights of Man.” He who declared himself more than a “citizen” was a traitor to the Republic fit only for the guillotine.
But when their vigour had spent itself came the reaction. The bourgeoisie, whom the untaught “mob”had helped into power, fearful lest their own newly acquired supremacy should, in the flood rush, be undermined, turned round on their erstwhile allies. “Law and Order” were once more established ; religion, the hoary handmaiden of class rule, was resurrected, until finally, under the heel of Bonaparte’s militaristic despotism, the way was smoothed for an unhampered run of capitalist dominion.
Meanwhile, in England, where the bourgeoisie had already achieved an almost complete triumph in its struggle to throw off the fading sociopolitical relics of Feudalism, a change in the technique of industry was taking place, which was destined to enormously magnify the influence of the capitalist class. Machinery and steam power revolutionised both production and transport, and the changes which followed in social conditions were necessarily great and far-reaching. Vastly increased powers of production, combined with an unscrupulous greed, brought wealth rapidly and in abundance to the coffers of the employers of labour. But in the “iron man” the working class found a relentless enemy. With the displacement of the workers rendered superfluous by the machines’ increased productiveness, with the strangle-hold laid on the skill of the hand-worker, with untrained women and children of tender years yoked to the whirring mechanisms, the proletariat was ground down to a frightful state of wretchedness and despair never equalled before or since. The class cleavage became more marked than ever. And as the lords of capital advanced in economic prosperity, their hold upon society grew. They controlled and perfected to a degree such manifold and efficient means, by which to mould the ideas and opinions of society to their liking, as had been granted to no ruling class before them. And this made possible the impregnation through and through the whole community of those conceptions which were bound up with and defensive of their interests, in the manner which our previous essay “Orthodoxy” outlined.
The failure of the French Revolution to realise that reign of equality and universal well-being which it had “shouted from the housetops” as its object, and which many even of its most intellectual supporters had expected of it, together with the increased misery of the working class incurred by the “industrial revolution,” brought a few of the more penetrating social students of the time, to see that the true cause of poverty and most other “social ills,” was the use in competition, and for the private gain of a class, of the tools and other means of production. All, they said, ought to co-operate in the production of wealth for the promotion of the common good. The abolition of aristocracy was not enough, the money-powered plutocracy must go also. Here, they declared, was the ideal society at last; the social arrangements in accord with Nature’s laws and the “eternal rights” of humanity had been finally invented after thousands of years unfortunate misery and slime due to groping aimlessly in the dark. St. Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Owen and others set out, each in his own way, to bring the good tidings to the rest of mankind, with a view to an early establishment of the new society. Alas for their hopes, the efforts were in vain. The contented rich, to whom they mainly addressed their appeals, ignored both their arguments and their pleadings, and the proletariat, however much to be sympathised with, they considered too ignorant and brutalised to be safely entrusted with the sacred task of reconstructing society. Their propaganda failed to convince more than a few who gathered into small sects, and no better results came of the practical experiments in the shape of little communities, pocket editions of the future society, which they indulged in, for in the hostile environment of turbulent competition, and through paucity of support they lived for a time, then flickered and finally died dismally out. This in brief is the tragic story of the Utopian method’s failure.
For some time, however, a new conception of man’s social organisation had slowly loomed above the intellectual horizon, and, like the morning sun, had cast its first pale gleams upon the few outstanding peaks, later reaching the lower meadows on the hillsides, and destined finally to shed a new, warm glow, illuminating the whole landscape of social structure in the past and the present. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, it came to bo generally realised by the most acute sociological thinkers that society was not an artificial creation originating in a “social contract” which could be modified in any direction upon a pre-decided plan, as had been widely believed. Commercial progress had brought into prominence the economic laws which are inseparable from the competitive production of commodities, and had forced a recognition of the existence of impersonal social forces, out of the control of, and far stronger than the individual being. The need for an investigation of these laws gave rise to the “classical” bourgeois economists from Petty to Ricardo. Side by side with political economy there developed the formulation and study of statistics, which revealed the significant facts that many phenomena, hitherto considered to be dominated by accident or “providence,” such as the numbers of human births, marriages, deaths, lunatics, and criminals, rose and fell according to laws as pronounced as those observed in the extra human world.
The growing evidence of the vast antiquity of man, and of the early barbaric stages, and, still further back, savage beginnings of all civilised peoples, showed that man with his social, artificial and intellectual qualities and appendages, was not an unique “god-like” being, cut apart from nature and its works, but that his place was in and he a part of the natural order of things. Theevolutionary view, that all things and conditions are interdependent and transitional products of an ever-moving, all embracing process of passing and becoming, not constant and independent entities ; soon to be given a triumphal impetus by Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and the generalisations of Herbert Spencer, had been, in a manner, developed by Hegel, the influence of whose philosophy, especially in Germany, was at one time very far-reaching.
Among the many young German students of Hegel in the “forties” were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Both were greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegelianism, who declared man’s ideas to be the effects of material conditions and not the reverse, as Hegel had believed. Marx and Engels therefore renounced Hegel’s idealistic system whilst retaining his evolutionary viewpoint and became materialists. Marx was a student of law, philosophy and history, and to gain an understanding of the connections between material interests and legal relations, together with economic theories and questions in general, took up the study of political economy, that science which investigated the conditions of wealth production and distribution.
He saw that political and legal forms or systems could not be explained, as he put it, “by the so-called general progress of the human mind,” as it was customary for superficial theorists to assume. He concluded on the contrary that they were conditioned by the relations between the different classes in society. Already it was widely realised by students of the great French Revolution especially by St. Simon and some of the French historians, that that event was primarily a conflict between the old nobility and the bourgeois middle class. But Marx, who applied the results of his economic studies to his wide knowledge of history, soon saw that the struggle between classes was a far more extensive and important element in the action of history than had ever hitherto been realised. That, indeed, such contests were the primary guiding forces in the background of the political changes and agitations recorded in written history. And, further, that intellectual developments of all kinds are largely influenced by the same agencies. To the question as to the origins of classes and their several interests, Marx found the solution of that also in the course of his politico-economic researches; namely, that the basis of all social, political, religious and intellectual structure and processes, is to be found in the material conditions under which men live ; above all, in the prevailing method of producing and distributing wealth. Finally, he found the improvement of the technical instruments and means (such as tools, machines and industrial processes) used in acquiring subsistence to be the fundamental cause of evolution, in society.
In the meantime, his friend, Engels, had arrived at practically the same conclusions while investigating the conditions of the English working class, especially of the influence of machinery and the factory system upon them. When they met in 1845 at Brussels they worked out their theory in detail together and thus began a long personal and literary co-operation such as has rarely been equalled.
Several minor proletarian risings on the Continent, the hard struggles of the early trade unions, and especially the great English Chartist movement gave the lie to the ideas, that class distinctions were wiped out as the bourgeois spokesmen proclaimed, and that capital and labour were brothers—another of their platitudes. Class divisions certainly still existed, but they were simplified. No longer towered the complex hierarchy of Feudal society with its numerous social layers, lay and ecclesiastic. Capitalists and proletarians, propertied exploiter and propertyless wage-slave faced each other, not indeed at that time, as the only classes, but decidedly, where the “great industry” predominated, as the principal ones. And Marx saw clearly that this simplification into these two paramount groups was bound to proceed as capitalist production unfolded itself. He agreed with Owen and the other Utopian communists that the conditions for the emancipation of the working class from the thraldom imposed by capital, lay in the social ownership and control of the productive forces. But the mere recognition of this fact was, he saw, far from sufficient, and here came his great parting from the ways of the Utopists.
His conception of society would not allow him to accept any policy for social re-organisation, unless he saw it to be a necessity flowing from the needs of industrial development. The great depth of his learning in economic science, however, enabled him to demonstrate that communal possession of the means of production was the essential corollary of a process which had been, and was still taking place, and that was—the gradual transformation of the method of production, from one in which the individual’s labour functioned practically in independence, creating unaided a finished product ; into that where a collectivity of workers engaged in different sub-operations, co-operated in the process.
Marx showed that the personal ownership of that which was socially used, and the corresponding individual appropriation of the product of collective labour, was the hitherto unscented cause to which could be traced the bulk of social ailments—starving poverty in contrast with unprecedented riches, unemployment, industrial depressions, commercial wars and a host of less obvious ones. That further, capitalistic organisation involving production only for profit, placed a restriction destined to grow more and more pronounced, upon the use and progress of the forces of creating wealth, even as Feudal organisation had, in its time cramped the growth of commodity production. And, just as the last buttresses of Feudalism went down before the swinging blows of the champions of capital, Marx realised that bourgeois society was bound to reach a stage when it also would meet its death-blow, and give way to a higher social form in which the socialised means of production would be owned and consciously controlled by society, which would use them to satisfy in full the needs of fill its members. Thereby would classes with their clashing interests cease to exist, and the emancipation of the world’s workers from slavery made at last a reality.
The principles of the Utopians being out of keeping with the findings of science, their tactics based upon them were necessarily wrong in theory and futile in practice. History, Marx saw, gave no sanction to the belief that any ruling class ever voluntarily abdicated its position in response to ethical appeals or reasoned arguments. That, on the contrary, each successive master class held on to its supremacy just so long as it had the power to do so. Only when its power was broken by that of a revolutionary class did it perforce give way. Therefore the proletariat, to achieve its freedom, could only place reliance in its own might, born of its own clear knowledge and organisation.
The hostile reception accorded to the propaganda of Owen and his fellows, together with the bloodthirsty crushing of the 1848 revolts, fully confirmed this view. Marx foreaw that for the first time in history the conditions were approaching making possible the union of the world’s workers across the frontiers of continents. Capitalism was by the very necessity of its existence, fastening its hold on every land, in every clime, breaking down every opposing social order, savage, patriarchal or feudal, and spreading broadcast those results of its economy familiar to the places of its birth. Among the world-wide working class thus generated, the common quality of the merchandise character of its own labour-power, with the enslaving effects which ensue, would be a tie asserting itself in due time above all national, racial and religious prejudices, which even the bourgeois order itself was rapidly undermining. Marx and his co-worker, Engels, gave up their lives to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat ; that class which they realised was to forge ahead to the next stage in the evolution of human association.
Thus arose modern Socialism on its theoretical side. Socialist ideas and principles have travelled to every quarter of the globe where capitalist production finds a foot-hold, and its literature, in many tongues, has become international in its span; Slowly, but surely, the oppressed and exploited workers everywhere are coming to realise the truth pregnant in that saying of Karl Marx: “the emancipation of the working class must be the work cf the working, class itself.” Those workers who have attained to the clear light of class-conscious thought, have a new outlook, which differs in almost its every manifestation from the capitalistic viewpoint which dominated the intellects of millions of his fellows. At every point the Socialist and the orthodox conceptions clash in conflict, and naturally so, for they are the intellectual garb of two opposing interests—on the one hand of the capitalist, on the other of the proletarian. One, the parasitic incrustation of a diseased body politic, standing for the maintenance with all its horrors of society as it is ; the other, generating the materials of subsistence, with hands hardened by the toil of centuries, a bearer of burdens, a welder of matter ; his destiny—the live agent in uprooting the society of the present and upraising the society of the future a society wherein man, as the prey of man, will exist no mere.
Then, when the ignorance of the many is no longer a necessity of social existence, increasing knowledge will add only to the welfare of humanity. When it is freed from the thongs of the class ruling which bound it, man’s intellect will soar to altitudes the immensity of which uce cannot even conceive. His creations, material and mental, will surely surpass the achievements of our day by as much as ours do those of the flint-armed savage of the old stone age, who roamed in the dim dawn of man’s slow, painful, upward evolution to the zenith of his race.
R. W. HOUSLEY