Socialism and Democracy in Europe. Samuel Peter Orth
was a bourgeois uprising. But behind it was the grim and resolute background of the proletarian mass. When the Third Estate achieved its victory, 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, when the workingmen of Lyons, during a period of distressing financial depression, marched under the banner, "Live working, or die fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves. This second chapter of the development of Socialism begins with a red letter.
Louis Blanc (1813–82), the first philosopher of the new movement, struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government. This differentiates him from Fourier 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 gave him an immense popularity with the working classes. It is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is forceful in its denunciation of existing society.
He said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without improving them materially. This improvement would not come from above, from the higher classes. It would come from below, from the working people themselves. Therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democracy. The proletarian must possess the power of the state in order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him in its grasp.
This democratic state should then establish national workshops, or associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. He believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing. The men would choose their own managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this beneficent system would spread to all communities.
He was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate empire"—there must be a hierarchy of ability.
Louis Blanc believed in revolution as the method of social advancement. He was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of 1848, the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. As a member of the provisional 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 workshops were built by the French government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans. His enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[12]
Louis Blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian conception that man was created good and innocent. He blames society for allowing the individual to 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 intellect and that these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. The empire of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of man's greatness.
The doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by Proudhon (1809–65). He was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. 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, Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? (What Is Property?), a novel question for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "Property is theft," ergo "property holders are thieves."
Proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. His startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. He was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. But his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic.
Property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. What right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? None. This eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article I am buying. It is therefore robbery. Private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism 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 exploitation of the strong by the weak. To this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. He resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of Socialism by Marx. Service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. Hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange.
Proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. He proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a 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 Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected—only two votes were recorded for it—he tried to establish it upon private foundations. He failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed.
Proudhon is the father of modern Anarchy. His exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. Government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy."
For his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar cause by fleeing to Brussels.
The ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by his theory of anarchy.
One cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. Not man originally pure and good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from 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 retains possessions, and in establishing anarchy he maintains order. "Free association, liberty—whose sole function is to maintain equality—in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society."
"The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy."[13]
Proudhon has had a large influence on modern Socialism. His trenchant invectives against property and society are widely copied. From his utterances on government the Syndicalists 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, What Is Property?, "Destruam et aedificabo" (I will destroy and I will build again). But, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed to reveal a new and better order.
The way to modern Socialism was paved in Germany. The teaching of Hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over Europe in the '40's. Hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. He gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. Everything that exists is worth destroying, may be taken 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 found only in experience. Nothing is sacred merely because it exists. Existing institutions