Socialism and Democracy in Europe. Samuel Peter Orth
the capitalistic class, which appropriates the "surplus value."
2. This is possible because of the capitalistic method of production, wherein private capital controls the processes of production and distribution.
3. This system of private capitalism is the result of a long and laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the industrial revolution.
4. This industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution, (b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-class system—capitalist and producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer.
5. This will not always continue. The producers are becoming fewer each year. Presently they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. Then society—the people—will appropriate private capital and all production and distribution will be socialized.
It is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories. Marx was born in Treves in 1818, of Jewish parentage. His mother was of Dutch descent, his father was German. When 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 were discussed by a circle of learned and congenial friends. Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university professor.
The turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. There was no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic life. In 1842 he joined the staff of the Rhenish Gazette at Cologne, an organ of extreme radicalism. His 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 removal from Paris, and for a time he settled in Brussels. He returned to Germany to participate in the revolution of 1848, and in 1849 he was driven to London, where, immune from Prussian persecutions, he made his home until his death, in 1883.
In 1842 he married Jennie von Westphalen, a lady of refinement, courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in Prussian politics. Her brother was at one time a minister in the Prussian cabinet.
Marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up his German citizenship. He never forgot this fact. He concluded his preface to the first volume of Capital, written in 1873, with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy Prussian German Empire." He lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle against want and disease.
From his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an international view, of human affairs. This gave him an immediate advantage over all other Socialist writers of that day. At Bonn he was caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through 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 him a philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution.
There are four points which gave Marx an immense influence over the Socialistic movement. In the first place, he put the Socialistic movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. Think what this means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the workingman. But he did more than this: he made the 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 it oppresses the proletarian; by natural law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone can attain their freedom. Capitalism becomes its own grave-digger. Liebknecht said in his Erfurt speech (1891): "The capitalistic state of the present begets against its will the state of the future."
In the third place, Marx gave a formula to the Socialist movement. He defined Socialism in one sentence: "The social ownership of the means of production and distribution." This was necessary. From among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor of scientific terminology.
And finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. He laid down no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. This offended no one and left Socialists of all schools free to construct their own details.
The Marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not taking place. The refutation of his theory of value by the Austrian economist, Adolph Menger, is by economists considered complete and final. The materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of his work, 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 of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of the two-class system. And finally, the method by revolution is being more and more discarded by Socialists, as they see that intolerable conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for existence.[17]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] New Christianity, p. 38, English edition, 1834.
[2] Saint-Simon's principal writings are: Lettres d'un Habitant de Genève, 1803; L'Organisateur, 1819; Du Système Industriel, 1821; Catéchisme des Industriels, 1823; Nouveau Christianisme, 1825. See A.J. Barth, Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism, London, 1871; Reybaud, Études sur les Réformateurs Modernes, Paris, 1864; Janet, Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme, Paris, 1878. New Christianity was translated into English by Rev. J.E. Smith, London, 1834.
[3] The best popular exposition of Fourierism is Gatti de Gammont's Fourier et Son Système. His most eminent commentator is Victor Considerant, whose Destinée Sociale is the most complete analysis of Fourier's System.
[4] It is interesting to note that the word "Socialism" first became current in the meetings of Owen's "Association of All Classes of All Nations," organized by him in 1835.
[5] Le Vrai Christianisme, Chap. XVIII, edition of 1846.
[6] An apt selection from the works of Fourier has been made by Prof. Charles Gide, prefaced by an illuminating Introduction on the life and work of Fourier. An English translation by Julia Franklin appeared in London, 1901.
[7] Le Nouveau Monde, Vol. I, p. 26.
[8] Thème de l'Unité Universelle,