“Contrasts of wealth were, of course, not new. There had always been some who deplored or denounced them from the pulpit… Now, though, differences were becoming more noticeable, partly because such evils were concentrated very visibly in the new cities and in new and unfamiliar forms. One outcome was the emergence of a new ideology of social criticism, and new political terms.”
A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts, pg. 401
The term “socialism” first appeared in France around 1830 to describe theories and people opposed to a society run on market principles and to an economy operated on laissez-faire terms, of which the main beneficiaries, in their belief, were the wealthy. Most socialists agreed that economic and social egalitarianism is fundamental to socialist ideas. All socialists agree that there is nothing sacred about property, whose rights often buttressed injustice. Those who sought the complete abolition of property were called communists.
What changed in the 19th century was that these and similar ideas seemed to become more dangerous and more widespread. One reason for this was the ambiguous success of liberal reforms. It seemed to some that civic and legal equality was not enough if that equality was dependent on other men’s economic power, or denatured by poverty and its accompanying ignorance. Another reason was because some thinkers had seen big discrepancies of wealth as irrationalities in a world which could and should be regulated to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Egalitarianism took its socialist slant when it began to grapple with the problems of a new era of economic and social change, especially those from industrialism.
The changes caused in society by industrialization stood in so stark a contrast to traditional society that even the small beginnings of concentration in finance and manufacturing were easily noticed. One of the first to grasp the implications was French nobleman Claude Saint Simon, who would influence other egalitarian thinkers with his argument that technological and scientific advance not only made planned organization of the economy and society imperative, but also demanded the replacement of the traditional ruling classes, who were too aristocratic and rural in their social views, with elites representing new economic and intellectual forces.
“This striking and encouraging message and his own combativeness, energy, and intellectual ascendancy gave Marx domination of the international socialist movement which emerged in the next 20 years.”
A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts
In the same year that Saint-Simon started gaining influence, a pamphlet was released that would become the most important document in the history of socialism. This was the Communist Manifesto, written by a young German named Karl Marx, who called for a complete break with the “utopian socialism” of his predecessors. It argued that utopian socialists attacked industrial capitalism because they thought it was unjust, but this was pointless because nothing could come from arguments to persuade people that change was morally desirable. This is because, to Marx, everything was dependent on the way history was actually going, towards the inevitable creation of a new working class by industrial society, the rootless wage-earners of industrial cities who Marx called the proletariat. Marx asserted that every society had its own system of property rights and class relationships, and that these elements shaped its political arrangements. Since politics were bound to express economic forces, they could change as the particular organization of society changed under the influence of economic developments, and therefore, the revolution would eventually sweep away capitalist society as capitalism had swept away feudal society.
Marxism nearly became a mythology, resting on a view of history which said that men were bound by necessity because their institutions were determined by the evolving methods of production, and on a faith that the working class were the Chosen People who hardships and struggles would end in the triumphal establishment of a just society in which necessity’s iron law would cease to be. The new religion inspired working class mobilization; though some trades unions and cooperatives already existed in some places, the first international organization (The International) of working men appeared in 1863. Marx’s influence was paramount in the organization as Secretary, but it included many who did not subscribe to his beliefs. In the years after 1848 socialism captured the revolutionary tradition from the liberals, and with this a belief in this historical role of an industrial working class was tacked onto the tradition which held that revolution could not be wrong.
“Marx quickly snapped up the drama and exaltation of the Paris Commune for socialism. He annexed it to his own theories, though it had been the product of many complicated and differing forces and had expressed in its actions very little in the way of egalitarianism, let alone ‘scientific’ socialism. It emerged, moreover, in a city which though huge, was not of the great manufacturing centers in which he predicted proletarian revolution would occur.”
A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts
Marx made the events of the Paris Commune central to socialist lore, despite the inherent contradictions. After the Commune, he transferred the first International to the United States as part of his struggles to keep it under his own control.
The Second International was founded in 1889, without the centralized control of Marx, to unite socialist political parties and groups across Europe with trades unions and other working class organizations. Marxism had grown beyond Marx into a body of dogma drawn from Marx’s writings, and by the end of the century it was officially accepted by socialists almost everywhere. Confident assertions that history would inevitably generate the overthrow of capitalism and, in the end, inaugurate a rationally ordered society in which individuals could at last be truly free, became the heart of a new religion. The Second International benefitted from the growth in the previous thirty years of socialist political parties, and of trades unions. By 1900 socialism had no effective competition on the Left. Its success was strange, for though socialist leaders talked revolution, they increasingly used their power in the workplace or polling-booth to win advantages for their followers from capitalist society, and consequently helped to blunt the edge of the misery which could fuel revolution.
The Normal Times 