Socialism and Democracy in Europe

PMENT OF S

began while the Revolution was still filling men's minds wit

French Revolution, but was a soldier in our Continental army, and always manifested a keen interest in American affairs. Possessed of an inquiring mind, an ambitious s

he assures us, but because he wished independence and leisure to do his chosen work. This money was soon los

Lesseps who subsequently carried out one of the plans of his master, the Suez Canal; and

hole of society ought to labor for the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poorest class

nd the spirit of association. Hitherto the spirit of antagonism has prevailed, and

th property and poverty are inherited, therefore the state should abolish all laws of inheritance, take all property un

he primitive Christianity, stripped of the dogmas and opinions of the centuries. In his principal work, Nouveau Christianisme (New Christianity), he subjects the teachings of C

their leaders. They were accused, in the Chamber of Deputies, of promulgating communism of property and wives. Their defense, dated October, 1830, and issued as a booklet, is the best exposition of their views. They said that: "We demand that land, capital, and all the instruments of l

nse was written. Enfantin became a defender of free love, and inaugurated

n various business enterprises. He recalls, in his works, several experiences which he never forgot. As a lad, he was reproached for telling a prospective customer the truth about some goods in his father's shop. When a young man of twenty-seven he was sent to Marseilles to superintend the destruction of great cargoes of rice

a mathematical system, and even computed the number of years the world would spin on its axis. He believed that God created a good world, and that man has desecrated it; that the fun

re they could be self-contained and self-sufficient, like the manors in the feudal days. The phalanstery was built in the middle of the tract, and was merely a glorified apartment house. Every one chose to do the work he liked best. Agriculture and manufa

ciety would be glad to imitate it. Ere long there would be groups of phalanges co-operating with each other, and ultima

, and a number of experiments were tried. All of these have failed, I think, excepting only the community at Guise, founded by Jean Godin. Here, however, the fant

ea, were started in the United States. Of thirty-four such experiments tried i

ch, his philanthropic impulses led him to study the conditions of the people who worked for him. In 1800 he took charge of the mills at New Lanark. There he had under him as pitiful and miserable a group of workmen as can be imagined. The factory system made wretchedness the

on, and founded the co-operative movement that has grown to great strength in England. He was one of the powerful men of the island at this period. He had the enthusiastic support of the queen, of many nobles, of cle

bout 1,500 acres of land. They were to live in an enormous building in the form of a square, each family to have its own apartm

e at New Harmony, Ind., was the most pretentious, and in it Owen sank a lar

taining goodness and harmony in all his relations. The evil in the world was contrary to God's plan. It was introduced by the perversity of society. The source of misery is the lack of knowledge. If humankind knew the right way of living, knew the original plan of the Creator, then there would be

evident that, to the fathers of the Church, Christianity was communism. Communism is nothing other than true Christianity...." "The regnancy of God, through Jesus, is the regnancy of perfection, of omniscience, of

who left more profound traces on modern th

at He has done."[7] Man has only to find "God's design" in order to find the true basis of society; and man's system of industrially parceling out the good things of life among a few fav

n." This principle will regulate society, for "in accordance with this principle, which God has given to men for the

says Godwin, "is not by violence to change its institutions, but by discussion to change its ideas. I have no concern, if I would study merely the public good

ety were not inherent in the nature of mankind. The natural state of the world and of man was good. But the evils "are all the necessary consequences of ignorance." Therefore, by education and envir

ternity" carved over every public portal in France, and the abstract principles of justice debated in parliaments. A feeling of na?ve simplicity runs through all their writings. Just as civil liberty, they believed, had come by the application of a

it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the exclusion of its lowly allies. From 1830 to 1850 the ferment of democratic discontent spread over Europe and forced the demands of the workingman into the foreground. The first outbreak occurred in France, in 1831, whe

r and Saint-Simon, and links him with the leading Socialist writers of our day. He published his Organisation du Travail (Organization of Labor) in 1839. It immediately

from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democr

the state and the state to supervise their operation. He believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing

s should assert its legitimate empire

l government, he may be called the first Socialist to hold cabinet honors. And, like his successors in modern cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new social order. It is true that national wor

o do evil. But he does take a step toward the Marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was created with certain endowments of strength and intelle

roletariat. He was a precocious lad, was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the study of political economy. In 1840 he brought out his notable work,

otlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loy

ism established? By no means. Communism is as unnatural as property. Proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. They were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. Property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploi

paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. These slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. This glorified savage barter he even proposed to the Consti

of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of in

for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some

ty, which he achieved in economics by his theory of

the man of mercy and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. Proudhon frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a condition of equality through the destruction of property and of government. But in destroying property he re

be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highe

dicalists of France, Italy, and Spain have drawn their doctrine. The general strike is the child of his paradoxes. He wrote as the motto for his most influential book, Wh

n as the primary postulate at which the Young Hegelians arrived. Truth does not exist merely in a collection of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is foun

Young Hegelians.[14] The God of the utopians was destroyed. Things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man. Things

Marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to academic and popular scrutiny. His treatise, Capital, is the sacerdotal book of Socialists. It displays a mass of learning, a diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in the literature of social phi

f with a bare statem

especially Ricardo, Socialists like the Owenites and the Chartists in England, and Proudhon in France, had enunciated it; and in Germany Rodbertus, a lawyer and

measure of value, the common medium that determines values. But this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare cost of living. The reward for his labor is called a wage. This wage does not by

f robbery; it is ill-gotten gain, withholding fro

ing a comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of English industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial society. He follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when

n without capital who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel circumstances. In every stage of development it

succumbs. There have always been these two classes. Originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and now it is free. But free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and s

tories. Property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriat

s ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This le

ival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; th

and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. This will mean the appropriation of the me

ng will be the result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. Man

of free men, working with common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their individual powers into one social labor power. The product of this association of laborers is a social product. A portion of this product serves in turn as a means of further production. It remains social property. The res

made by Marx. It is a dim and uncerta

och-making study may b

ducing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products of its

ethod of production, wherein private capital cont

t of a long and laborious process of evolution, h

tion, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-clas

ntly they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. Then society-the people-wil

n the lad was six years of age his parents embraced the Christian faith. His father was a lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis. The home was one of culture, where English and French as well as German literature and art

drastic editorials prompted the police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to Paris, where he met Frederick Engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his views, and sharer of his labors. The Prussian government demanded his rem

urage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politic

He concluded his preface to the first volume of Capital, written in 1873, with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upsta

the universities. This carried him far into the fields of materialism, whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic development of the race. He received not alone his philosophy from the "Young Hegelians," but his dialectics as well. It gave

e proletarian the instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic thraldom. This was to be accomplished by class war and social revolution. Marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his Socialism when he links it to the necessities of nature. By natural law a bourgeoisie developed; by natural law

ip of the means of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and

gram except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. This offended n

, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than to a sober interpretation of the facts. Further, the two practical results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his materialism-namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the ever-decreasing number of capitalists-are not borne out by the facts. The number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the development

TNO

ity, p. 38, Engli

ustriels, 1823; Nouveau Christianisme, 1825. See A.J. Barth, Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism, London, 1871; Reybaud, études sur les Réformateurs Modern

ier et Son Système. His most eminent commentator is Victor Considerant,

irst became current in the meetings of Owen's "Associatio

ianisme, Chap. XVI

les Gide, prefaced by an illuminating Introduction on the life and work of

au Monde, Vo

nité Universelle

nity, p. 2, Engl

Justice, Vol. I

n a New View of So

as, History of the

rty? Collected Wor

f the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view of the new materi

int is to alter the world." See Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach un

Christianity,

losophy of that period, see Frederick Engels, Die Entwickelung des Sozialismus von der Uto

ngs of Marx, see Sombart, Socialis