One of the less desirable consequences of the Industrial
Revolution was the yawning disparity in the distribution
of wealth. If industrialization brought increasing affluence
to an emerging middle class, to millions of others it
brought grinding hardship in the form of low-paying jobs
in mines or factories characterized by long working hours
under squalid conditions. The underlying cause was clear:
under the circumstances prevailing in most industrializing
societies in Europe, factory owners remained largely
free to hire labor on their own terms, based on market
forces.
Beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century,
radical groups began to seek the means to rectify the
problem. Some found the answer in intellectual schemes
that envisaged a classless society based on the elimination
of private property. Others prepared for an armed revolt
to overthrow the ruling order and create a new society
controlled by the working masses. Still others began
to form trade unions to fight for improved working conditions
and reasonable wages. Only one group sought to
combine all of these factors into a comprehensive program
to destroy the governing forces and create a new
egalitarian society based on the concept of “scientific socialism.”
The founder of that movement was Karl Marx,
a German Jew who had abandoned an academic career in
philosophy to take up radical political activities in Paris.
Marxism made its first appearance in 1847 with the
publication of a short treatise, The Communist Manifesto,
written by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his close collaborator,
Friedrich Engels (1820 –1895). In the Manifesto,
the two authors predicted the outbreak of a massive uprising
that would overthrow the existing ruling class and
bring to power a new revolutionary regime based on their
ideas (see the box above).
When revolutions broke out all over Europe in the
eventful year of 1848, Marx and Engels eagerly but mistakenly
predicted that the uprisings would spread
throughout Europe and lead to a new revolutionary regime
led by workers, dispossessed bourgeois, and communists.
When that did not occur, Marx belatedly concluded
that urban merchants and peasants were too
conservative to support the workers and would oppose
revolution once their own immediate economic demands
were satisfied. As for the worker movement itself, it was
clearly still too weak to seize power and could not expect
to achieve its own objectives until the workers had become
politically more sophisticated and better organized.
In effect, revolution would not take place in western Europe
until capitalism had “ripened,” leading to a concentration
of capital in the hands of a wealthy minority and
an “epidemic of overproduction” because of inadequate
purchasing power by the impoverished lower classes.
Then a large and increasingly alienated proletariat could
drive the capitalists from power and bring about a classless
utopia.
For the remainder of his life, Marx acted out the logic
of these conclusions. From his base in London, he undertook
a massive study of the dynamics of the capitalist system,
a project that resulted in the publication of the first
volume of his most famous work, Das Kapital (“Capital”),
in 1869. In the meantime, he attempted to prepare for
the future revolution by organizing the scattered radical
parties throughout Europe into a cohesive revolutionary
movement, called the International Workingmen’s Association
(usually known today as the First International),
that would be ready to rouse the workers to action when
the opportunity came.
Unity was short-lived. Although all members of the
First International shared a common distaste for the capitalist
system, some preferred to reform it from within
(many of the labor groups from Great Britain), whereas
others were convinced that only violent insurrection
would suffice to destroy the existing ruling class (Karl
Marx and the anarchists around Russian revolutionary
Mikhail Bakunin). Even the radicals could not agree.
Marx believed that revolution could not succeed without
a core of committed communists to organize and lead the
masses; Bakunin contended that the general insurrection
should be a spontaneous uprising from below. In 1871,
the First International disintegrated.
While Marx was grappling with the problems of
preparing for the coming revolution, European society
was undergoing significant changes. The advanced capitalist
states such as Great Britain, France, and the Low
Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands)
were gradually evolving into mature, politically stable societies
in which Marx’s dire predictions were not being
borne out. His forecast of periodic economic crises was
correct enough, but his warnings of concentration of capital
and the impoverishment of labor were somewhat wide
of the mark, as capitalist societies began to eliminate or at
least reduce some of the more flagrant inequities apparent
in the early stages of capitalist development. These reforms
occurred because workers and their representatives
had begun to use the democratic political process to their
own advantage, organizing labor unions and political parties
to improve working conditions and enhance the role
of workers in the political system. Many of these political
parties were led by Marxists, who were learning that in
the absence of a social revolution to bring the masses to
power, the capitalist democratic system could be reformed
from within to improve the working and living conditions
of its constituents. In 1889, after Marx’s death, several
such parties (often labeled “social democratic” parties)
formed the Second International, dominated by reformist
elements committed to achieving socialism within the
bounds of the Western parliamentary system.
Marx had also underestimated the degree to which
workers in most European countries would be attracted to
the appeal of nationalism. Marx had viewed nation and
culture as false idols diverting the interests of the oppressed
from their true concern, the struggle against the
ruling class. In his view, the proletariat would throw off its
chains and unite in the sacred cause of “internationalist”
world revolution. In reality, workers joined peasants and
urban merchants in defending the cause of the nation
against its foreign enemies. A generation later, French
workers would die in the trenches defending France from
workers across the German border.
A historian of the late nineteenth century might have
been forgiven for predicting that Marxism, as a revolutionary
ideology, was dead. To the east, however, in the
vast plains and steppes of central Russia, it was about to
be reborn.
World History
