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Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community "Socialism"
Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. for the purposes of increasing social and economic equality and cooperation. This control may be either direct—exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils—or indirect—exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an
economic system, socialism is often characterized by socialized (state or community) ownership of the
means of production.
The modern socialist movement had its origin largely in the
working class movement of the late-19th century. In this period, the term "socialism" was first used in connection with European social critics who criticized capitalism and
private property. For Karl Marx, who helped establish and define the modern socialist movement, socialism would be the socioeconomic system that arises after the proletarian revolution where the means of production are owned collectively. This society would then progress into
communism.
A diverse array of doctrines and movements have been referred to as "socialist." Since the 19th century, socialists have not agreed on a common doctrine or program. The various adherents of socialist movements are split into differing and sometimes opposing branches, particularly between reformism socialists and
communism.
Since the 19th century, socialists have differed in their vision of socialism as a system of economic organization. Some socialists have championed the complete nationalization of the means of production, while
social democracy have proposed selective nationalization of key industries within the framework of mixed economy.
Stalinism, including those inspired by the Economy of the Soviet Union, have advocated the creation of planned economy directed by a state that owns all the means of production. Others, including self-titled Communists in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and
People's Republic of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese Communist Party since the Chinese economic reform, and some Western economists, have proposed various forms of
market socialism, attempting to reconcile the presumed advantages of cooperative or state ownership of the means of production with letting market forces, rather than central planners, guide
Production theory basics and
trade."Market socialism,"
Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Craig Calhoun, ed. Oxford University Press 2002; and "Market socialism"
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press, 2003. See also Joseph Stiglitz, "Whither Socialism?" Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 for a recent analysis of the market socialism model of mid-20th century economists Oskar R. Lange, Abba P. Lerner, and Fred M. Taylor. Anarcho-syndicalists,
Luxemburgists (such as those in the Socialist Party USA) and some elements of the U.S.
New Left favor decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers' councils. Others may advocate different arrangements.
Historical precedents
In the history of political thought, certain elements of a socialist or communist outlook long predate the socialism that emerged in the first half of the 19th Century. For instance, Plato's
Republic (Plato) and
Thomas More's
Utopia (book) have been cited.
Encyclopedia Britannica, entry on Socialism The 5th century
Mazdak movement in what is now Iran has been described as "communistic" for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy and striving for an egalitarian society.
The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Period, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, Parts 1 and 2, p1019, Cambridge University Press (1983) William Morris considered that
John Ball, one of the leaders of the
Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, was the first socialist. Morris, William,
Dream of John Ball: A King's Lesson Project Gutenberg, accessed 11 July, 2007 John Ball is credited with the famous saying:
During the
English Civil War in the mid 17th Century, movements identified with the socialist tradition include the levellers and the
diggers, the latter believing that land should be held in common.
During the 18th-century
Age of Enlightenment, criticism of inequality appeared in the work of political theorists such as
Jean Jacques Rousseau in France, whose
Social Contract famously began, "Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains."Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,
Social Contract, p2, Penguin, (1968) Following the
French Revolution of 1789, François Noël Babeuf espoused the goals of common ownership of land and total economic and political equality among citizens.
Origins of socialism
The appearance of the term "socialism" is variously attributed to
Pierre Leroux in 1834, Leroux called socialism “the doctrine which would not give up any of the principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of the French Revolution of 1789. "Individualism and socialism" (1834) or to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or else in England to Robert Owen, who is considered the father of the
cooperative movement.Oxford English Dictionary, etymology of socialism
The first modern socialists were early 19th century Western European social critics. In this period, socialism emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social experiments associated primarily with British and French thinkers—especially
Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon. These social critics criticised the excesses of poverty and inequality of the Industrial Revolution, and advocated reforms such as the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation of society into small communities in which private property was to be abolished. Outlining principles for the reorganization of society along collectivist lines, Saint-Simon and Owen sought to build socialism on the foundations of planned,
utopian communities.
According to some accounts, the use of the words "socialism" or "communism" was related to the perceived attitude toward religion in a given culture. In Europe, "communism" was considered to be the more atheistic of the two. In England, however, that sounded too close to
Mass (liturgy)#The Communion Rite with Catholic overtones; hence atheists preferred to call themselves socialists.{{cite book| last = Williams| first = Raymond| authorlink = Raymond Williams| title =
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society| publisher = Fontana| year = 1976| id = 0006334792-->, founder of French SocialismBy 1847, according to Frederick Engels, "Socialism" was "respectable" on the continent of Europe, while "Communism" was the opposite; the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered Socialists, while working class movements which "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" termed themselves "Communists". This latter was "powerful enough" to produce the communism of
Étienne Cabet in France and
Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.Engels, Frederick,
Preface to the 1888 English Edition of the Communist Manifesto, p202. Penguin (2002)
Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, who is called the founder of French socialism, argued that a brotherhood of man must accompany the scientific organization of industry and society. He proposed that production and distribution be carried out by the state, and that allowing everyone to have equal opportunity to develop their talents would lead to social harmony, and the state could be virtually eliminated. "Rule over men would be replaced by the administration of things."Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Saint Simon;
Socialism
Robert Owen
Robert Owen advocated the transformation of society into small, local collectives without such elaborate systems of social organization. Owen was a mill manager from 1800-1825. He transformed life in the village of New Lanark with ideas and opportunities which were at least a hundred years ahead of their time. Child labour and corporal punishment were abolished, and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools and evening classes, free health care, and affordable food. New Lanark World Heritage Site accessed 8 July, 2007
The UK government's Factory Act of 1833 attempted to reduce the hours adults and children worked in the textile industry. A fifteen hour working day was to start at 5.30 a.m. and cease at 8.30 p.m. Children of nine to thirteen years could be worked no more than 9 hours, and those of a younger age were prohibited. There were, however, only four factory inspectors, and this law was broken by the factory owners.http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot13/snapshot13.htm The National Archives (UK government records and information management)
The 1833 Factory Act: did it solve the problems of children in factories?] accessed 7 July, 2007 In the same year Owen stated:
In a
Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America written in 1841, Owen wrote: "The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others."Owen, Robert,
Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America London 1841
Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pronounced that "Property is theft" and that socialism was "every aspiration towards the amelioration of society". Proudhon termed himself an anarchist and proposed that free association of individuals should replace the coercive state.Kropotkin, P.A., 1910,
Anarchism, in the
Encyclopedia Britannica 11th-13th editions.Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 1851,
General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, studies 6 & 7. Proudhon,
Benjamin Tucker, and others developed these ideas in a free-market direction, while Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, and others adapted Proudhon's ideas in a more conventionally socialist direction.
In a letter to Marx in 1846, Proudhon wrote:
Bakunin
Bakunin, the father of modern anarchism, was a libertarian socialist, a theory by which the workers would directly manage the means of production through their own productive associations. There would be "equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor." Revolutionary Catechism, Mikhail Bakunin, 1866
While many socialists emphasized the gradual transformation of society, most notably through the foundation of small, utopian communities, a growing number of socialists became disillusioned with the viability of this approach and instead emphasized direct political action. Early socialists were united, however, in their desire for a society based on cooperation rather than competition.
Marxism and the socialist movement
In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the
Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels drew from the socialist or communist ideas born in the
French Revolution of 1789, the German philosophy of
Hegel, and English political economy, particularly that of Adam Smith and
David Ricardo. Marx and Engels developed a body of ideas which they called
scientific socialism, more commonly called
Marxism.
The Communist Manifesto says "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" and famously declared that the working class would be the "grave digger" of the capitalist class.
Marx and Engels distinguished their scientific socialism from what they termed the utopian socialism of some other socialist trends. For
Marxism, socialism or, as Marx termed it, the first phase of communist society, can be viewed as a transitional stage characterized by common or state ownership of the means of production under democratic workers' control and management, which Engels argued was beginning to be realised in the
Paris Commune of 1871, before it was overthrown.Engels' 1891 postscript to
The Civil War In France by Karl Marx, Marx, Engels,
Selected works in one volume, p257, Lawrence and Wishart (1968) They see this stage in history as a transition between
capitalism and the "higher phase of communist society" in which human beings no longer suffer from alienation and "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly." Here "society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" Marx, Karl,
Critique of the Gotha Programme, p320-1, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, (1968) For Marx, a communist society entails the absence of differing social classes and thus the end of class warfare. According to Marx and Engels, once a socialist society had been ushered in, the state would begin to "wither away", Engels, Frederick,
Anti-Dühring, 1877 and humanity would be in control of its own destiny for the first time. The
Soviet Union did not claim to have reached a communist society, even though it was ruled by a
Communist party for more than seven decades. For Communists, the name of the party is not meant to reflect the name of the social system but rather the party's ultimate goal.
Marx and Engels argued that capitalism "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production" Marx and Engels,
The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics (2002), p224 and raised the seminal call, "Proletarians of all countries, unite".In the English language, this slogan eventually became, "Workers of the world unite".
The International Workingmen's Association - the First International
In 1864, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) or
First International, was founded in London. Victor Le Lubez, a French radical republican living in London, invited Marx to come, "as a representative of German workers", according to Saul Padover. MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Organisations,
First International (International Workingmen’s Association), accessed 5 July, 2007 The IWA held a preliminary conference in 1865 and its first congress at
Geneva in 1866. Marx was appointed a member of the committee and, according to Padover, Marx and Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor living in London, were to become, "the two mainstays of the International from its inception to its end". The First International became the first major international forum for the promulgation of socialist ideas.
The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded in 1869 under the influence of Marx and Engels. In 1875, it merged with the General German Workers' Association of
Ferdinand Lassalle to become what is known today as the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Socialism became increasingly associated with newly formed trade unions. In Germany, the SPD built trade unions and in Austria, France and other European countries, socialist parties and anarchists played a prominent role in forming and building up trade unions, especially from the 1870s onwards. This stood in contrast to the British experience, where moderate New Model Unions dominated the union movement from the mid-nineteenth century and where trade unionism was stronger than the political labour movement until the formation and growth of the
Labour Party (UK) in the early years of the twentieth century.
Socialist groups supported diverse views of socialism, from the gradualism of many trade unionists to the radical, revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels.
Anarchists and proponents of other alternative visions of socialism, who emphasized the potential of small-scale communities and agrarianism, coexisted with the more influential currents of Marxism and social democracy. The anarchists, led by the Russian
Mikhail Bakunin, believed that capitalism and the state were inseparable and that one could not be abolished without the other.
Paris Commune
In 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, an uprising in Paris established the
Paris Commune. According to Marx and Engels, for a few weeks the Paris Commune provided a glimpse of a socialist society, before it was brutally suppressed by the French government.
In the Paris Commune, large-scale industry was to be "based on the association of the workers" joined into "one great union", all posts in government were elected by universal franchise, elected officials took only the average worker's wage and were subject to recall. For Engels, this was what the
dictatorship of the proletariat looked like (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which was capitalism). Engels goes on to state: "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy", and a new generation of socialists, "reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap".Engels' 1891 Preface to Marx,
Civil War in France, Selected Works in one volume, Lawrence and Wishart, (1968), p256, p259
After the Paris Commune, the differences between supporters of Marx and Engels and those of Bakunin were too great to bridge. The anarchist section of the First International was expelled from the International at the 1872 Hague Congress and they went on to form the Jura federation. The First International was disbanded in 1876.
The Second International
As the ideas of Marx and Engels took on flesh, particularly in central Europe, socialists sought to unite in an international organisation. In 1889, on the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789, the
Second International (politics) was founded, with 384 delegates from 20 countries representing about 300 labour and socialist organizations.
The Second (Socialist) International 1889-1923 accessed 12 July, 2007 It was termed the "Socialist International" and Engels was elected honorary president at the third congress in 1893.Just before his death in 1895, Engels argued that there was now a "single generally recognised, crystal clear theory of Marx" and a "single great international army of socialists". Despite its illegality due to the
Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, the Social Democratic Party of Germany's use of the limited universal male suffrage were "potent" new methods of struggle which demonstrated their growing strength and forced the dropping of the Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890, Engels argued.Engels, 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 In 1893, the German SPD obtained 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of votes cast. However before the leadership of the SPD published Engels' 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, they removed certain phrases they felt were too revolutionary.cf Footnote 449 in
Marx Engels Collected Works on Engels' 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850Marx believed that it was possible to have a peaceful socialist transformation in England, although the British ruling class would then revolt against such a victory.In England, "Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work... But, mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slaveowners's war."
Interview with Karl Marx, Head of L'Internationale, by R. Landor New York World, July 18, 1871. America and Holland might also have a peaceful transformation, but not in France, where Marx believed there had been "perfected... an enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious state machinery" which must be forcibly overthrown. However, eight years after Marx's death, Engels argued that it was possible to achieve a peaceful socialist revolution in France, too.Fischer, Ernst,
Marx in his own words, p135, quoting from Marx,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Germany
The SPD was by far the most powerful of the social democratic parties. Its votes reached 4.5 million, it had 90 daily newspapers, together with trade unions and co-ops, sports clubs, a youth organisation, a women's organisation and hundreds of full time officials. Under the pressure of this growing party,
Bismarck introduced limited welfare provision and working hours were reduced. Germany experienced sustained economic growth for more than forty years. Commentators suggest that this expansion, together with the concessions won, gave rise to illusions amongst the leadership of the SPD that capitalism would evolve into socialism gradually.
Beginning in 1896, in a series of articles published under the title "Problems of socialism",
Eduard Bernstein argued that an evolutionary transition to socialism was both possible and more desirable than revolutionary change. Bernstein and his supporters came to be identified as "Marxist revisionism" because they sought to revise the classical Marxism. Although the Orthodox Marxism in the party, led by
Karl Kautsky, retained the Marxist theory of revolution as the official doctrine of the party, and it was repeatedly endorsed by SPD conferences, in practice the SPD leadership became increasingly reformist.
Russia
Bernstein coined the aphorism: "The movement is everything, the final goal nothing". But the path of reform appeared blocked to the Russian Marxists while Russia remained the bulwark of reaction. In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had saluted the Russian Marxists who, they said, "formed the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe". But the working class, although many were organised in vast modern western-owned enterprises, comprised no more than a small percentage of the population and "more than half the land is owned in common by the peasants". Marx and Engels posed the question: How was Russia to progress to socialism? Could Russia "pass directly" to socialism or "must it first pass through the same process" of capitalist development as the West? They replied: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."Marx, Engels,
Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882, Communist Manifesto, p196, Penguin Classics, 2002
In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party began to split on ideological and organizational questions into Bolshevik ('Majority') and
Menshevik ('Minority') factions, with Russian revolutionary
Vladimir Lenin leading the more radical Bolsheviks. Both wings accepted that Russia was an economically backward country unripe for socialism. The Mensheviks awaited the capitalist revolution in Russia. But Lenin argued that a revolution of the workers and peasants would achieve this task. After the Russian revolution of 1905, Leon Trotsky argued that unlike the French revolution of 1789 and the European
Revolutions of 1848 against absolutism, the capitalist class would never organise a revolution in Russia to overthrow absolutism, and that this task fell to the working class who, liberating the peasantry from their feudal yoke, would then immediately pass on to the socialist tasks and seek a "permanent revolution" to achieve international socialism.Trotsky, Leon,
The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, p169ff. New Park, (1962) Assyrian nationalist Freydun Atturaya tried to create regional self-government for the
Assyrian people with the socialism ideology. He even wrote the Urmia Manifesto of the United Free Assyria. However, his attempt was put to an end by Russia. Making a speech to workers under a red flag.
USA
In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party of America was founded in the USA. This party, which advocated Marxism, was a confederation of small Marxist parties from throughout the United States, and came under the leadership of Daniel De Leon. In 1901, a merger between opponents of De Leon and the younger
Social Democratic Party joined with Eugene V. Debs to form the Socialist Party of America. This party grew to 150,000 in 1912 and polled 897,000 votes in the presidential campaign of that year, 6 percent of the total vote. Before that, in 1910, the Sewer Socialists, the main group of American socialists, located in
Milwaukee, elected
Victor Berger as a socialist Congressman and
Emil Seidel as a socialst mayor, most of the other elected city officials being socialist as well. Another socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, was elected in 1916 and stayed in office until 1940. The final Socialist mayor, Frank P. Zeidler, was elected in 1948 and served three terms, ending in 1960. The Socialist Party declined after the First World war.
In 1905, the
Industrial Workers of the World formed from several independent labor unions. The IWW opposed the political means of Debs and De Leon, as well as the craft unionism of
Samuel Gompers.
France
French socialism was beheaded by the suppression of the Paris commune (1871), its leaders killed or exiled. But in 1879, at the Marseille Congress, workers' associations created the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France. Three years later,
Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, left the federation and founded the French Workers' Party.
The Federation of the Socialist Workers of France was termed "possibilist" because it advocated gradual reforms, whereas the French Workers' Party promoted Marxism. In 1905 these two trends merged to form the French Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), led by Jean Jaurès and later Léon Blum. In 1906 it won 56 seats in Parliament. The SFIO adhered to Marxist ideas but became, in practice, a reformist party. By 1914 it had more than 100 members in the Chamber of Deputies.
The First World War
When the First World War began in 1914, many European socialist leaders supported their respective governments' war aims. The social democratic parties in the UK, France, Belgium and Germany supported their respective state's wartime military and economic planning, discarding their commitment to proletarian internationalism and solidarity.
Lenin, however, denounced the war as an imperialist conflict, and urged workers worldwide to use it as an occasion for
proletarian revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the
Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.
British Socialism
While on the continent of Europe and elsewhere by the end of the Nineteenth Century the various sources of socialism were tributaries to the "mighty stream of the Marxist movement", Encyclopaedia Britannica in the socialist movement in Britain, the world's pre-eminent power at this time, Marxism remained only one strand of opinion, mixing with Christian socialism, ethical socialism, Fabianism, cooperativism, and other trends. When, in the general election of 1945, the
Labour Party (UK) won a clear parliamentary majority and carried out extensive reforms, its largely non-Marxist leadership was conscious of this socialist heritage.
The
Christian Socialist movement was led by Frederick Denison Maurice
The Kingdom of Christ, 1838, JMF Ludlow and Charles Kingsley in 1848. At this time, rather than pursue the Chartist aim of establishing a universal franchise, "they wanted to Christianise socialism and Chartism and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they wanted to form a whole country of religiously based guilds as a development of guild socialism".Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p5 Politicos (2007). The contribution by Roy Hattersley is also noteworthy The Nonconformist
Christian Socialist League was established in 1894, and the Church of England
Church Socialist League was established in 1906. They shared a rejection of that political economy which supported individualist competitive markets, whose failings in the industrial revolution had been exposed by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Thomas Carlyle,
Thomas Arnold and
John Ruskin.Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p5 Politicos (2007)
Ludlow in particular was inspired by Fourier, believed strongly in democracy, and influenced R. H. Tawney, a devout Christian who had an enormous influence on the interwar Labour Party leadership’s outlook, and on the revisionist school of Anthony Crossland and others after 1945.Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p117 Politicos (2007) In particular, he and others gave moral and philosophical guidance to the rejection of 'orthodox' economic policy and the embracing of high levels of taxation of wealthy business owners, and indeed, nationalisation if needs be, which coincided with the arguments of those such as Marxist and Labour Party chairman, Harold J Laski.Laski, HJ,
Reflections on the Revolution of our Time Allen and Unwin, 1943 Rejecting the arguments in favour of a meritocracy and attacking Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand" of the market in capitalist society, Tawney argued in 1931:
In 1884, middle class intellectuals organized the
Fabian Society, a moderate form of socialism in opposition to Marxist ideas. This society did not seek to build its membership, but only to influence the leaders of the labour movement, which it continues to do to the present day. The Fabians embraced individuals such as Tawney, who was a member from 1906.
Socialist ideas also began to spread amongst the British working class. In 1881, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation met for the first time, and in 1888 the successful
Matchgirls Strike began a period of
New Unionism in which members and former members of the Social Democratic Federation played a prominent role. In 1889, Will Thorne, who was taught to read by Eleanor Marx, organized the Gasworkers, and gained a reduction in the working week from twelve to eight hours a day. In the same year, the London Dock Strike of 1889, organized by Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, (who like Thorne had been members of the Social Democratic Federation), won significant gains and was seen as a landmark in British trade unionism.
The new unions brought a new socialist consciousness to the trade union movement. In 1899, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants proposed that the
Trade Union Congress call a special conference to bring together the trade unions and all the left-wing organisations, to sponsor Parliamentary candidates independent of the Liberal Party. In 1900, the trade unions, together with the
Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians, founded the
Labour Representation Committee, which became the
Labour Party (UK) in 1906. The
Cooperative movement, which traces its foundation to the work of
Robert Owen, although not represented at the founding conference of 1900, nevertheless affiliated soon after to become a core affiliate of the Labour Party.
In the first decades of the 20th Century, the concept of
Guild Socialism was championed by G.D.H. Cole: "It follows that there must be, in the Society, as many separately elected groups of representatives as there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."G. D. H. Cole,
Guild Socialism Restated p33. New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction Books (1980) Each factory, workshop, etc, has a representative council and internal autonomy. The administration of an industry is to be a federation of such groups. McCain, Roger A.,
Guild Socialism Reconsidered accessed 13 July, 2007
The Revolutions of 1917-23
By 1917, the atmosphere of enthusiastic patriotism which had greeted the start of the First World War had evaporated and was replaced by an upsurge of radicalism in most of Europe and as far afield as the United States (
see Socialism in the United States) and
Australia.
In February 1917, revolution broke out in Russia and the workers, soldiers and peasants set up workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils (in Russian language,
soviets), while power was placed into the hands of a Provisional government prior to the convocation of a
Constituent Assembly. Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 and called for "All power to the Soviets". The Bolsheviks won a majority in the Soviets in October 1917 and at the same time the October Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky. At the Petrograd Soviet on the 25 October 1917, Lenin declared, "Long live the world socialist revolution!" Lenin,
Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers' deputies October 25, 1917, Collected works, Vol 26, p239. Lawrence and Wishart, (1964)
The elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in November 1917 and were won by the non-Marxist, peasant-based Socialist-Revolutionary Party party with almost twice as many votes as the Bolsheviks. The Constituent Assembly was convened for 13 hours between 4 p.m. and 4:40 a.m., January 5-6, 1918. The SR leader
Victor Chernov was elected President of the fledgling republic. The following day the Bolsheviks dissolved the assembly.
In this period, few Communists — least of all Lenin and Trotsky — doubted that the success of socialism in Soviet Russia depended on successful socialist revolutions carried out by the working classes of the most developed capitalist counties.Bertil, Hessel, Introduction,
Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International, pxiii, Ink Links (1980) "We have always proclaimed and repeated this elementary truth of marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries." Lenin,
Sochineniya (Works), 5th ed Vol XLIV p418, February 1922. (Quoted by Mosche Lewin in
Lenin's Last Struggle, p4. Pluto (1975)) For this reason, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky drew together the Communist Parties from around the world into a new 'International', the Communist International (also termed the Third International or Comintern).
The new Soviet government immediately nationalised the banks and major industry, and repudiated the former
Romanov regime's national debts. It implemented a system of government through the elected workers' councils or soviets. It sued for peace and withdrew from the First World War.
Arguably for the first time, socialism was not just a vision of a future society, but a description of an existing one, at least in embryo. On 26 October 1917, the day after seizing power, Lenin drew up a
Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, granting workers' control in enterprises with not less than five workers and office employees, who were to be granted access to all books, documents and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises".Lenin,
Collected Works, Vol 26, p264-5. Lawrence and Wishart (1964)
The Russian revolution of October 1917 gave rise to the formation of Communist Parties around the world, and the revolutions of 1917-23 which followed.
The German Revolution of 1918 overthrew the old absolutism and, as in Russia, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils almost entirely made up of SPD and Independent Social Democrats (USPD) members were set up. The
Weimar republic was established and placed the SPD in power, under the leadership of
Friedrich Ebert. The Workers' and Soldiers' Councils were put down by the army and the Freikorps. In 1919 the
Spartacist uprising challenged the power of the SPD government, but it was put down in blood and the German Communist leaders
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were discovered and brutally murdered. A Communist regime under
Kurt Eisner in Bavaria in 1919 was also put down in blood.
A Communist regime briefly held power under Béla Kun in Hungary. There were revolutionary movements in
Vienna, the industrial centres of northern Italy, and revolutionary movements in the Ruhr area in Germany in 1920 and in Saxony in 1923.
However, these revolutionary movements failed to spread the socialist revolution into the advanced capitalist countries of Europe. In Soviet Russia things were desperate. In August 1918, Lenin was shot in the head and wounded by
Fanya Kaplan. Under siege from a trade boycott and invasion by Germany, UK, USA, France and other forces, facing civil war and starvation, the Soviet regime implemented
War Communism in June, 1918. All private enterprise was made illegal, strikers could be shot, "non-working classes" were forced to work and the Soviet regime could requisition grain from the peasants for the workers in the cities.
By 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, had largely defeated the White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and under the
New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was restored to small and medium enterprises, and especially to the peasants. The peasants had resented and hindered the requisitions of grain so that the situation in the cities remained desperate or was getting worse. Lenin declared that the "commanding heights" of industry would still be under state control, but that the NEP was a capitalist measure in a country that was still largely unripe for socialism. Businessmen and women, called 'NEPmen', began to flourish,
Soviet history: NEPmen and the rich peasant (or '
Kulak', meaning 'fist') gained more power.
Lenin, now half paralysed from several strokes, castigated the powers the state had assumed in the Soviet Union by 1923. It had reverted to "a bourgeois czarist machine... barely varnished with socialism".Serge, Victor,
From Lenin to Stalin, p55. After Lenin's death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, falling steadily under the control of Stalin, rejected the theory that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union on its own. Stalin declared a policy of "
socialism in one country", namely the Soviet Union. Despite demands by the increasingly marginalised Left Opposition for the restoration of soviet democracy,Serge, Victor,
From Lenin to Stalin, p52. the Soviet Union continued to develop a
bureaucratic and
authoritarian model of social development, which was condemned by moderate socialists,
Trotskyists and others for undermining the initial socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution.{{cite web]| year = 1975| url = http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html| format = HTML| accessdate = 22nd January| accessyear = 2007-->
The inter-war era and World War II
The October revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital "C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The
Left Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to
Trotskyism which was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years, except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party.
In 1922, the fourth congress of the
Communist International took up the policy of the United Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they criticised for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution, and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties. When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.
Britain
Once the world's most powerful nation, Britain avoided a revolution during the period of 1917-1923 but was significantly affected by revolt. The Prime Minister,
Lloyd George, had promised the troops in the 1918 election that his Conservative-led coalition would make post-war Britain "a fit land for heroes to live in". But many demobbed troops complained of chronic unemployment and suffered low pay, disease and poor housing.http://www.aftermathww1.com/landfit.asp
A Land Fit For Heroes?In 1918, the Labour Party adopted as its aim to secure for the workers, "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". In 1919, the Miners Federation, whose Members of Parliament pre-dated the formation of the Labour Party and were since 1906 a part of that body, demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Soviet Russia. The 1919 Labour Party conference voted to discuss the question of affiliation to the Third (Communist) International, "to the distress of its leaders".Cole and Postgate,
The Common People, p551 A vote was won committing the Labour Party committee of the Trades Union Congress to arrange "direct industrial action" to "stop capitalist attacks upon the Socialist Republics of Russia and Hungary." Sylvia Pankhurst, 'The British Workers and Soviet Russia', published in
The Revolutionary Age, August 9, 1919 The threat of immediate strike action forced the Conservative-led coalition government to abandon its intervention in Russia. Sylvia Pankhurst reported that, "The London district committee of the dockers has decided to declare a strike on July 20 and 21, but it goes further, it had decided to advise its members to abstain from working on any ships bound for Russia or assisting in any way the overthrow of the Russian proletariat". Sylvia Pankhurst, 'The British Workers and Soviet Russia', published in
The Revolutionary Age, August 9, 1919.
In 1914 the unions of the transport workers, the mine workers and the railway workers had formed a [Triple Alliance (1914). In 1919, Lloyd George sent for the leaders of the Triple Alliance, one of whom was miner's leader Robert Smillie, a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1889 who was to become a Labour Party MP in the first
First Labour Government (UK). According to Smillie, Lloyd George said:
{{cquote2|Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen, have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?|Aneurin Bevan,
In Place of Fear Bevan, Aneurin,
In Place of Fear p40. MacGibbon and Kee, (1961). Bevan reports verbatim what Robert Smillie told him of his meeting with Lloyd George.-->
"From that moment on", Smillie conceded to Aneurin Bevan, "we were beaten and we knew we were". When the UK General Strike of 1926 broke out, the trade union leaders, "had never worked out the revolutionary implications of direct action on such a scale", Bevan says.Bevan, Aneurin,
In Place of Fear p40. MacGibbon and Kee, (1961) Bevan was a member of the Independent Labour Party and one of the leaders of the South Wales miners during the strike. The TUC called off the strike after nine days. In the North East of England and elsewhere, "councils of action" were set up, with many rank and file Communist Party members often playing a critical role. The councils of action took control of essential transport and other duties.For instance, cf Mason, Anthony,
The General strike in the North-East, University of Hull Publications (1970) When the strike ended, the miners were locked out and remained locked out for six months. Bevan became a Labour MP in 1929.
In January 1924, the Labour Party formed a minority government for the first time with
Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister. The Labour Party intended to ratify an Anglo-Russian trade agreement, which would break the trade embargo on Russia. This was attacked by the Conservatives and new elections took place in October 1924. Four days before polling day the
Daily Mail published the
Zinoviev letter, a forgery that claimed the Labour Party had links with Soviet Communists and was secretly fomenting revolution. The fears instilled by the press of a Labour Party in secret Communist manoeuvres, together with the half-hearted "respectable" policies pursued by MacDonald, led to Labour losing the October 1924 general election. The victorious Conservatives repudiated the Anglo-Soviet treaty.
The leadership of the Labour Party, like social democratic parties almost everywhere, (with the exception of Sweden and Belgium), tried to pursue a policy of moderation and economic orthodoxy. At times of depression this policy was not popular with the Labour Party’s working class supporters. The influence of Marxism grew in the Labour Party during the inter-war years. Anthony Crosland argued in 1956 that under the impact of the 1931 slump and the growth of fascism, the younger generation of left-wing intellectuals for the most part "took to Marxism" including the "best-known leaders" of the Fabian tradition, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. The Marxist Professor
Harold Laski, who was to be chairman of the Labour Party in 1945-6, was the "outstanding influence" in the political field. Crosland, Anthony,
The Future of Socialism, p4 and note 2
The Marxists within the Labour Party differed in their attitude to the Communists. Some were uncitical and some were expelled as "fellow travellers", while in the 1930s others were Trotskyists and sympathisers working inside the Labour Party, especially in its youth wing where they were influential.
In the general election of 1929 the Labour Party won 288 seats out of 615 and formed another minority government. The depression of that period brought high unemployment and Prime Minister MacDonald sought to make cuts in order to balance the budget. The trade unions opposed MacDonald’s proposed cuts and he split the Labour government to form the
UK National Government of 1931. This experience moved the Labour Party leftward, and at the start of the
Second World War an official Labour Party pamphlet written by Harold Laski argued that, "the rise of Hitler and the methods by which he seeks to maintain and expand his power are deeply rooted in the economic and social system of Europe... economic nationalism, the fight for markets, the destruction of political democracy, the use of war as an instrument of national policy":
{{cquote2|The war will leave its meedMeed - literally, 'Reward', here used sardonically of great problems, problems of internal social organisation... Business men and aristocrats, the old ruling classes of Europe, had their chance from 1919 to 1939; they failed to take advantage of it. They rebuilt the world in the image of their own vested interests... The ruling class has failed; this war is the proof of it. The time has come to give the common people the right to become the master of their own destiny... Capitalism has been tried; the results of its power are before us today. Imperialism has been tried; it is the foster-parent of this great agony.
Given power Labour Party will seek, as no other Party will seek, the basic transformation of our society. It will replace the profit-seeking motive by the motive of public service... there is now no prospect of domestic well-being or of international peace except in Socialism.|Harold Laski,
The Labour Party, the War and the Future (1939) Published by the Labour Party in November 1939-->
USA
In the USA, the
Communist Party USA was formed in 1919 from former adherents of the Socialist Party of America. One of the founders,
James Cannon, later became the leader of Trotskyist forces outside the
Soviet Union.
The Great Depression began in the United States on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Unemployment rates passed 25%, prices and incomes fell 20–50%, but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. 9,000 banks failed during the decade of the 30s. By 1933, depositors saw $140 billion of their deposits disappear due to uninsured bank failures.
Workers organized against their deteriorating conditions and socialists played a critical role. In 1934 the
Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 led by the Trotskyist Communist League of America, the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike led by the
Communist Party USA, and the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the
American Workers Party, played an important role in the formation of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the USA.
In Minnesota, the General Drivers Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck, despite an attempt to block the vote by AFL officials, demanding union recognition, increased wages, shorter hours, overtime rates, improved working conditions and job protection through seniority. In the battles that followed, which captured country-wide media attention, three strikes took place, martial law was declared and the National Guard was sent in. Two strikers were killed. Protest rallies of 40,000 were held. Farrell Dobbs, who became the leader of the local, had at the outset joined the "small and poverty-stricken" Communist League of America, founded by James P. Cannon and others in 1928 after their expulsion from the
Communist Party USA for Trotskyism.Dobbs, Farrell,
Teamster Rebellion, Monad Press, New York, (1972), p21ff, p34, p92
Success for the CIO quickly followed its formation. In 1937, one of the founding unions of the CIO, the
United Auto Workers, won union recognition at General Motors Corporation after a tumultuous forty-four day sit-down strike, while the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which was formed by the CIO, won a collective bargaining agreement with
U.S. Steel. The CIO merged with the AFl in 1955 becoming the AFL-CIO.
Germany
In 1928, the Communist International, now fully under the leadership of Stalin, turned from the united front policy to an ultra-left policy of the
Third Period, a policy of aggressive confrontation of social democracy. This divided the working class at a critical time.
Like the Labour Party in the UK, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, which was in power in 1928, followed an orthodox deflationary policy and pressed for reductions in unemployment benefits in order to save taxes and reduce budget deficits. These policies did not halt the recession and the government resigned.
The Communists described the Social Democratic leaders as "social fascists" and in the Prussian Landtag they voted with the Nazis to bring down the Social Democratic government. Fascism continued to grow, with powerful backing from industrialists, especially in
Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a
socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community "Socialism"
Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. for the purposes of increasing social and economic equality and cooperation. This control may be either direct—exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils—or indirect—exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an economic system, socialism is often characterized by socialized (
state or community) ownership of the
means of production.
The modern socialist movement had its origin largely in the working class movement of the late-19th century. In this period, the term "socialism" was first used in connection with European social critics who criticized capitalism and private property. For Karl Marx, who helped establish and define the modern socialist movement, socialism would be the socioeconomic system that arises after the proletarian revolution where the means of production are owned collectively. This society would then progress into communism.
A diverse array of doctrines and movements have been referred to as "socialist." Since the 19th century, socialists have not agreed on a common doctrine or program. The various adherents of socialist movements are split into differing and sometimes opposing branches, particularly between
reformism socialists and
communism.
Since the 19th century, socialists have differed in their vision of socialism as a system of economic organization. Some socialists have championed the complete
nationalization of the means of production, while social democracy have proposed selective nationalization of key industries within the framework of mixed economy. Stalinism, including those inspired by the Economy of the Soviet Union, have advocated the creation of
planned economy directed by a state that owns all the means of production. Others, including self-titled Communists in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and People's Republic of Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s,
Chinese Communist Party since the Chinese economic reform, and some Western economists, have proposed various forms of market socialism, attempting to reconcile the presumed advantages of cooperative or state ownership of the means of production with letting
market forces, rather than central planners, guide
Production theory basics and
trade."Market socialism,"
Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Craig Calhoun, ed. Oxford University Press 2002; and "Market socialism"
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press, 2003. See also Joseph Stiglitz, "Whither Socialism?" Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 for a recent analysis of the market socialism model of mid-20th century economists
Oskar R. Lange, Abba P. Lerner, and
Fred M. Taylor.
Anarcho-syndicalists,
Luxemburgists (such as those in the
Socialist Party USA) and some elements of the U.S.
New Left favor decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers' councils. Others may advocate different arrangements.
Historical precedents
In the history of political thought, certain elements of a socialist or communist outlook long predate the socialism that emerged in the first half of the 19th Century. For instance, Plato's
Republic (Plato) and
Thomas More's
Utopia (book) have been cited.
Encyclopedia Britannica, entry on Socialism The 5th century Mazdak movement in what is now Iran has been described as "communistic" for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy and striving for an egalitarian society.
The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Period, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, Parts 1 and 2, p1019, Cambridge University Press (1983) William Morris considered that John Ball, one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, was the first socialist. Morris, William,
Dream of John Ball: A King's Lesson Project Gutenberg, accessed 11 July, 2007 John Ball is credited with the famous saying:
During the
English Civil War in the mid 17th Century, movements identified with the socialist tradition include the
levellers and the diggers, the latter believing that land should be held in common.
During the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, criticism of inequality appeared in the work of political theorists such as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France, whose
Social Contract famously began, "Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains."Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,
Social Contract, p2, Penguin, (1968) Following the French Revolution of 1789, François Noël Babeuf espoused the goals of common ownership of land and total economic and political equality among citizens.
Origins of socialism
The appearance of the term "socialism" is variously attributed to
Pierre Leroux in 1834, Leroux called socialism “the doctrine which would not give up any of the principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of the
French Revolution of 1789. "Individualism and socialism" (1834) or to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or else in England to
Robert Owen, who is considered the father of the
cooperative movement.Oxford English Dictionary, etymology of socialism
The first modern socialists were early 19th century Western European social critics. In this period, socialism emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social experiments associated primarily with British and French thinkers—especially
Robert Owen,
Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon. These social critics criticised the excesses of poverty and inequality of the
Industrial Revolution, and advocated reforms such as the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation of society into small communities in which private property was to be abolished. Outlining principles for the reorganization of society along collectivist lines, Saint-Simon and Owen sought to build socialism on the foundations of planned, utopian communities.
According to some accounts, the use of the words "socialism" or "communism" was related to the perceived attitude toward religion in a given culture. In Europe, "communism" was considered to be the more atheistic of the two. In England, however, that sounded too close to Mass (liturgy)#The Communion Rite with Catholic overtones; hence atheists preferred to call themselves socialists.{{cite book| last = Williams| first = Raymond| authorlink = Raymond Williams| title =
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society| publisher = Fontana| year = 1976| id = 0006334792-->, founder of French SocialismBy 1847, according to Frederick Engels, "Socialism" was "respectable" on the continent of Europe, while "Communism" was the opposite; the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered Socialists, while working class movements which "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" termed themselves "Communists". This latter was "powerful enough" to produce the communism of
Étienne Cabet in France and
Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.Engels, Frederick,
Preface to the 1888 English Edition of the Communist Manifesto, p202. Penguin (2002)
Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, who is called the founder of French socialism, argued that a brotherhood of man must accompany the scientific organization of industry and society. He proposed that production and distribution be carried out by the state, and that allowing everyone to have equal opportunity to develop their talents would lead to social harmony, and the state could be virtually eliminated. "Rule over men would be replaced by the administration of things."Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Saint Simon;
Socialism
Robert Owen
Robert Owen advocated the transformation of society into small, local collectives without such elaborate systems of social organization. Owen was a mill manager from 1800-1825. He transformed life in the village of New Lanark with ideas and opportunities which were at least a hundred years ahead of their time. Child labour and corporal punishment were abolished, and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools and evening classes, free health care, and affordable food. New Lanark World Heritage Site accessed 8 July, 2007
The UK government's Factory Act of 1833 attempted to reduce the hours adults and children worked in the textile industry. A fifteen hour working day was to start at 5.30 a.m. and cease at 8.30 p.m. Children of nine to thirteen years could be worked no more than 9 hours, and those of a younger age were prohibited. There were, however, only four factory inspectors, and this law was broken by the factory owners.http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot13/snapshot13.htm The National Archives (UK government records and information management)
The 1833 Factory Act: did it solve the problems of children in factories?] accessed 7 July, 2007 In the same year Owen stated:
In a
Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America written in 1841, Owen wrote: "The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others."Owen, Robert,
Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America London 1841
Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pronounced that "Property is theft" and that socialism was "every aspiration towards the amelioration of society". Proudhon termed himself an anarchist and proposed that free association of individuals should replace the coercive state.Kropotkin, P.A., 1910,
Anarchism, in the
Encyclopedia Britannica 11th-13th editions.Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 1851,
General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, studies 6 & 7. Proudhon,
Benjamin Tucker, and others developed these ideas in a free-market direction, while Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, and others adapted Proudhon's ideas in a more conventionally socialist direction.
In a letter to Marx in 1846, Proudhon wrote:
Bakunin
Bakunin, the father of modern anarchism, was a
libertarian socialist, a theory by which the workers would directly manage the means of production through their own productive associations. There would be "equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor." Revolutionary Catechism, Mikhail Bakunin, 1866
While many socialists emphasized the gradual transformation of society, most notably through the foundation of small, utopian communities, a growing number of socialists became disillusioned with the viability of this approach and instead emphasized direct political action. Early socialists were united, however, in their desire for a society based on cooperation rather than competition.
Marxism and the socialist movement
In 1848, Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels drew from the socialist or communist ideas born in the
French Revolution of 1789, the German philosophy of Hegel, and English political economy, particularly that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx and Engels developed a body of ideas which they called scientific socialism, more commonly called Marxism.
The
Communist Manifesto says "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" and famously declared that the working class would be the "grave digger" of the capitalist class.
Marx and Engels distinguished their scientific socialism from what they termed the utopian socialism of some other socialist trends. For
Marxism, socialism or, as Marx termed it, the first phase of communist society, can be viewed as a transitional stage characterized by common or state ownership of the
means of production under democratic workers' control and management, which Engels argued was beginning to be realised in the
Paris Commune of 1871, before it was overthrown.Engels' 1891 postscript to
The Civil War In France by Karl Marx, Marx, Engels,
Selected works in one volume, p257, Lawrence and Wishart (1968) They see this stage in history as a transition between capitalism and the "higher phase of communist society" in which human beings no longer suffer from alienation and "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly." Here "society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" Marx, Karl,
Critique of the Gotha Programme, p320-1, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, (1968) For Marx, a communist society entails the absence of differing social classes and thus the end of class warfare. According to Marx and Engels, once a socialist society had been ushered in, the state would begin to "wither away", Engels, Frederick,
Anti-Dühring, 1877 and humanity would be in control of its own destiny for the first time. The
Soviet Union did not claim to have reached a communist society, even though it was ruled by a
Communist party for more than seven decades. For Communists, the name of the party is not meant to reflect the name of the social system but rather the party's ultimate goal.
Marx and Engels argued that capitalism "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production" Marx and Engels,
The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics (2002), p224 and raised the seminal call, "Proletarians of all countries, unite".In the English language, this slogan eventually became, "Workers of the world unite".
The International Workingmen's Association - the First International
In 1864, the
International Workingmen's Association (IWA) or First International, was founded in London. Victor Le Lubez, a French radical republican living in London, invited Marx to come, "as a representative of German workers", according to Saul Padover. MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Organisations,
First International (International Workingmen’s Association), accessed 5 July, 2007 The IWA held a preliminary conference in 1865 and its first congress at Geneva in 1866. Marx was appointed a member of the committee and, according to Padover, Marx and Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor living in London, were to become, "the two mainstays of the International from its inception to its end". The First International became the first major international forum for the promulgation of socialist ideas.
The
Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded in 1869 under the influence of Marx and Engels. In 1875, it merged with the
General German Workers' Association of Ferdinand Lassalle to become what is known today as the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Socialism became increasingly associated with newly formed trade unions. In Germany, the SPD built trade unions and in Austria, France and other European countries, socialist parties and anarchists played a prominent role in forming and building up trade unions, especially from the 1870s onwards. This stood in contrast to the British experience, where moderate
New Model Unions dominated the union movement from the mid-nineteenth century and where trade unionism was stronger than the political labour movement until the formation and growth of the
Labour Party (UK) in the early years of the twentieth century.
Socialist groups supported diverse views of socialism, from the gradualism of many trade unionists to the radical, revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels. Anarchists and proponents of other alternative visions of socialism, who emphasized the potential of small-scale communities and agrarianism, coexisted with the more influential currents of Marxism and social democracy. The anarchists, led by the Russian
Mikhail Bakunin, believed that capitalism and the state were inseparable and that one could not be abolished without the other.
Paris Commune
In 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, an uprising in Paris established the
Paris Commune. According to Marx and Engels, for a few weeks the Paris Commune provided a glimpse of a socialist society, before it was brutally suppressed by the French government.
In the Paris Commune, large-scale industry was to be "based on the association of the workers" joined into "one great union", all posts in government were elected by universal franchise, elected officials took only the average worker's wage and were subject to recall. For Engels, this was what the
dictatorship of the proletariat looked like (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which was capitalism). Engels goes on to state: "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy", and a new generation of socialists, "reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap".Engels' 1891 Preface to Marx,
Civil War in France, Selected Works in one volume, Lawrence and Wishart, (1968), p256, p259
After the Paris Commune, the differences between supporters of Marx and Engels and those of Bakunin were too great to bridge. The
anarchist section of the First International was expelled from the International at the 1872 Hague Congress and they went on to form the
Jura federation. The First International was disbanded in 1876.
The Second International
As the ideas of Marx and Engels took on flesh, particularly in central Europe, socialists sought to unite in an international organisation. In 1889, on the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789, the Second International (politics) was founded, with 384 delegates from 20 countries representing about 300 labour and socialist organizations.
The Second (Socialist) International 1889-1923 accessed 12 July, 2007 It was termed the "Socialist International" and Engels was elected honorary president at the third congress in 1893.Just before his death in 1895, Engels argued that there was now a "single generally recognised, crystal clear theory of Marx" and a "single great international army of socialists". Despite its illegality due to the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, the
Social Democratic Party of Germany's use of the limited universal male suffrage were "potent" new methods of struggle which demonstrated their growing strength and forced the dropping of the Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890, Engels argued.Engels, 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 In 1893, the German SPD obtained 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of votes cast. However before the leadership of the SPD published Engels' 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, they removed certain phrases they felt were too revolutionary.cf Footnote 449 in
Marx Engels Collected Works on Engels' 1895 Introduction to Marx's
Class Struggles in France 1848-1850Marx believed that it was possible to have a peaceful socialist transformation in England, although the British ruling class would then revolt against such a victory.In England, "Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work... But, mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slaveowners's war."
Interview with Karl Marx, Head of L'Internationale, by R. Landor New York World, July 18, 1871. America and Holland might also have a peaceful transformation, but not in France, where Marx believed there had been "perfected... an enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious state machinery" which must be forcibly overthrown. However, eight years after Marx's death, Engels argued that it was possible to achieve a peaceful socialist revolution in France, too.Fischer, Ernst,
Marx in his own words, p135, quoting from Marx,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Germany
The SPD was by far the most powerful of the social democratic parties. Its votes reached 4.5 million, it had 90 daily newspapers, together with trade unions and co-ops, sports clubs, a youth organisation, a women's organisation and hundreds of full time officials. Under the pressure of this growing party,
Bismarck introduced limited welfare provision and working hours were reduced. Germany experienced sustained economic growth for more than forty years. Commentators suggest that this expansion, together with the concessions won, gave rise to illusions amongst the leadership of the SPD that capitalism would evolve into socialism gradually.
Beginning in 1896, in a series of articles published under the title "Problems of socialism",
Eduard Bernstein argued that an evolutionary transition to socialism was both possible and more desirable than revolutionary change. Bernstein and his supporters came to be identified as "
Marxist revisionism" because they sought to revise the classical Marxism. Although the
Orthodox Marxism in the party, led by
Karl Kautsky, retained the Marxist theory of revolution as the official doctrine of the party, and it was repeatedly endorsed by SPD conferences, in practice the SPD leadership became increasingly reformist.
Russia
Bernstein coined the aphorism: "The movement is everything, the final goal nothing". But the path of reform appeared blocked to the Russian Marxists while Russia remained the bulwark of reaction. In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had saluted the Russian Marxists who, they said, "formed the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe". But the working class, although many were organised in vast modern western-owned enterprises, comprised no more than a small percentage of the population and "more than half the land is owned in common by the peasants". Marx and Engels posed the question: How was Russia to progress to socialism? Could Russia "pass directly" to socialism or "must it first pass through the same process" of capitalist development as the West? They replied: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."Marx, Engels,
Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882, Communist Manifesto, p196, Penguin Classics, 2002
In 1903, the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party began to split on ideological and organizational questions into
Bolshevik ('Majority') and Menshevik ('Minority') factions, with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin leading the more radical Bolsheviks. Both wings accepted that Russia was an economically backward country unripe for socialism. The Mensheviks awaited the capitalist revolution in Russia. But Lenin argued that a revolution of the workers and peasants would achieve this task. After the Russian revolution of 1905,
Leon Trotsky argued that unlike the French revolution of 1789 and the European
Revolutions of 1848 against absolutism, the capitalist class would never organise a revolution in Russia to overthrow absolutism, and that this task fell to the working class who, liberating the peasantry from their feudal yoke, would then immediately pass on to the socialist tasks and seek a "permanent revolution" to achieve international socialism.Trotsky, Leon,
The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, p169ff. New Park, (1962) Assyrian nationalist Freydun Atturaya tried to create regional self-government for the
Assyrian people with the socialism ideology. He even wrote the Urmia Manifesto of the United Free Assyria. However, his attempt was put to an end by Russia. Making a speech to workers under a
red flag.
USA
In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party of America was founded in the USA. This party, which advocated Marxism, was a confederation of small Marxist parties from throughout the United States, and came under the leadership of
Daniel De Leon. In 1901, a merger between opponents of De Leon and the younger Social Democratic Party joined with Eugene V. Debs to form the Socialist Party of America. This party grew to 150,000 in 1912 and polled 897,000 votes in the presidential campaign of that year, 6 percent of the total vote. Before that, in 1910, the
Sewer Socialists, the main group of American socialists, located in Milwaukee, elected
Victor Berger as a socialist Congressman and Emil Seidel as a socialst mayor, most of the other elected city officials being socialist as well. Another socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, was elected in 1916 and stayed in office until 1940. The final Socialist mayor, Frank P. Zeidler, was elected in 1948 and served three terms, ending in 1960. The Socialist Party declined after the First World war.
In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World formed from several independent
labor unions. The IWW opposed the political means of Debs and De Leon, as well as the craft unionism of Samuel Gompers.
France
French socialism was beheaded by the suppression of the Paris commune (1871), its leaders killed or exiled. But in 1879, at the Marseille Congress, workers' associations created the
Federation of the Socialist Workers of France. Three years later, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, left the federation and founded the
French Workers' Party.
The Federation of the Socialist Workers of France was termed "possibilist" because it advocated gradual reforms, whereas the French Workers' Party promoted Marxism. In 1905 these two trends merged to form the French Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), led by Jean Jaurès and later
Léon Blum. In 1906 it won 56 seats in Parliament. The SFIO adhered to Marxist ideas but became, in practice, a reformist party. By 1914 it had more than 100 members in the Chamber of Deputies.
The First World War
When the
First World War began in 1914, many European socialist leaders supported their respective governments' war aims. The social democratic parties in the UK, France, Belgium and Germany supported their respective state's wartime military and economic planning, discarding their commitment to proletarian internationalism and solidarity.
Lenin, however, denounced the war as an
imperialist conflict, and urged workers worldwide to use it as an occasion for
proletarian revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.
British Socialism
While on the continent of Europe and elsewhere by the end of the Nineteenth Century the various sources of socialism were tributaries to the "mighty stream of the Marxist movement", Encyclopaedia Britannica in the socialist movement in Britain, the world's pre-eminent power at this time, Marxism remained only one strand of opinion, mixing with Christian socialism, ethical socialism,
Fabianism, cooperativism, and other trends. When, in the general election of 1945, the Labour Party (UK) won a clear parliamentary majority and carried out extensive reforms, its largely non-Marxist leadership was conscious of this socialist heritage.
The Christian Socialist movement was led by Frederick Denison Maurice
The Kingdom of Christ, 1838, JMF Ludlow and Charles Kingsley in 1848. At this time, rather than pursue the
Chartist aim of establishing a universal franchise, "they wanted to Christianise socialism and Chartism and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they wanted to form a whole country of religiously based guilds as a development of guild socialism".Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p5 Politicos (2007). The contribution by Roy Hattersley is also noteworthy The Nonconformist
Christian Socialist League was established in 1894, and the Church of England
Church Socialist League was established in 1906. They shared a rejection of that political economy which supported individualist competitive markets, whose failings in the industrial revolution had been exposed by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Thomas Carlyle,
Thomas Arnold and John Ruskin.Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p5 Politicos (2007)
Ludlow in particular was inspired by Fourier, believed strongly in democracy, and influenced R. H. Tawney, a devout Christian who had an enormous influence on the interwar Labour Party leadership’s outlook, and on the revisionist school of Anthony Crossland and others after 1945.Halsey, AH,
Democracy In Crisis? Ethical Socialism for a Prosperous Country, p117 Politicos (2007) In particular, he and others gave moral and philosophical guidance to the rejection of 'orthodox' economic policy and the embracing of high levels of taxation of wealthy business owners, and indeed, nationalisation if needs be, which coincided with the arguments of those such as Marxist and Labour Party chairman, Harold J Laski.Laski, HJ,
Reflections on the Revolution of our Time Allen and Unwin, 1943 Rejecting the arguments in favour of a meritocracy and attacking
Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand" of the market in capitalist society, Tawney argued in 1931:
In 1884, middle class intellectuals organized the Fabian Society, a moderate form of socialism in opposition to Marxist ideas. This society did not seek to build its membership, but only to influence the leaders of the labour movement, which it continues to do to the present day. The Fabians embraced individuals such as Tawney, who was a member from 1906.
Socialist ideas also began to spread amongst the British working class. In 1881, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation met for the first time, and in 1888 the successful Matchgirls Strike began a period of
New Unionism in which members and former members of the Social Democratic Federation played a prominent role. In 1889, Will Thorne, who was taught to read by
Eleanor Marx, organized the Gasworkers, and gained a reduction in the working week from twelve to eight hours a day. In the same year, the
London Dock Strike of 1889, organized by Tom Mann and
Ben Tillett, (who like Thorne had been members of the Social Democratic Federation), won significant gains and was seen as a landmark in British trade unionism.
The new unions brought a new socialist consciousness to the trade union movement. In 1899, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants proposed that the Trade Union Congress call a special conference to bring together the trade unions and all the left-wing organisations, to sponsor Parliamentary candidates independent of the Liberal Party. In 1900, the trade unions, together with the
Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians, founded the
Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party (UK) in 1906. The
Cooperative movement, which traces its foundation to the work of Robert Owen, although not represented at the founding conference of 1900, nevertheless affiliated soon after to become a core affiliate of the Labour Party.
In the first decades of the 20th Century, the concept of
Guild Socialism was championed by G.D.H. Cole: "It follows that there must be, in the Society, as many separately elected groups of representatives as there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."G. D. H. Cole,
Guild Socialism Restated p33. New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction Books (1980) Each factory, workshop, etc, has a representative council and internal autonomy. The administration of an industry is to be a federation of such groups. McCain, Roger A.,
Guild Socialism Reconsidered accessed 13 July, 2007
The Revolutions of 1917-23
By 1917, the atmosphere of enthusiastic patriotism which had greeted the start of the First World War had evaporated and was replaced by an upsurge of radicalism in most of Europe and as far afield as the United States (
see Socialism in the United States) and Australia.
In February 1917, revolution broke out in Russia and the workers, soldiers and peasants set up workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils (in
Russian language,
soviets), while power was placed into the hands of a Provisional government prior to the convocation of a
Constituent Assembly. Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 and called for "All power to the Soviets". The Bolsheviks won a majority in the Soviets in October 1917 and at the same time the
October Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky. At the Petrograd Soviet on the 25 October 1917, Lenin declared, "Long live the world socialist revolution!" Lenin,
Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers' deputies October 25, 1917, Collected works, Vol 26, p239. Lawrence and Wishart, (1964)
The elections to the
Constituent Assembly were held in November 1917 and were won by the non-Marxist, peasant-based Socialist-Revolutionary Party party with almost twice as many votes as the Bolsheviks. The Constituent Assembly was convened for 13 hours between 4 p.m. and 4:40 a.m., January 5-6, 1918. The SR leader Victor Chernov was elected President of the fledgling republic. The following day the Bolsheviks dissolved the assembly.
In this period, few Communists — least of all Lenin and Trotsky — doubted that the success of socialism in Soviet Russia depended on successful socialist revolutions carried out by the working classes of the most developed capitalist counties.Bertil, Hessel, Introduction,
Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International, pxiii, Ink Links (1980) "We have always proclaimed and repeated this elementary truth of marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries." Lenin,
Sochineniya (Works), 5th ed Vol XLIV p418, February 1922. (Quoted by Mosche Lewin in
Lenin's Last Struggle, p4. Pluto (1975)) For this reason, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky drew together the Communist Parties from around the world into a new 'International', the Communist International (also termed the Third International or Comintern).
The new Soviet government immediately nationalised the banks and major industry, and repudiated the former
Romanov regime's national debts. It implemented a system of government through the elected workers' councils or soviets. It sued for peace and withdrew from the First World War.
Arguably for the first time, socialism was not just a vision of a future society, but a description of an existing one, at least in embryo. On 26 October 1917, the day after seizing power, Lenin drew up a
Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, granting workers' control in enterprises with not less than five workers and office employees, who were to be granted access to all books, documents and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises".Lenin,
Collected Works, Vol 26, p264-5. Lawrence and Wishart (1964)
The Russian revolution of October 1917 gave rise to the formation of Communist Parties around the world, and the
revolutions of 1917-23 which followed.
The German Revolution of 1918 overthrew the old absolutism and, as in Russia, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils almost entirely made up of SPD and Independent Social Democrats (USPD) members were set up. The Weimar republic was established and placed the SPD in power, under the leadership of
Friedrich Ebert. The Workers' and Soldiers' Councils were put down by the army and the
Freikorps. In 1919 the
Spartacist uprising challenged the power of the SPD government, but it was put down in blood and the German Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were discovered and brutally murdered. A Communist regime under
Kurt Eisner in
Bavaria in 1919 was also put down in blood.
A Communist regime briefly held power under
Béla Kun in Hungary. There were revolutionary movements in Vienna, the industrial centres of northern Italy, and revolutionary movements in the Ruhr area in Germany in 1920 and in Saxony in 1923.
However, these revolutionary movements failed to spread the socialist revolution into the advanced capitalist countries of Europe. In Soviet Russia things were desperate. In August 1918, Lenin was shot in the head and wounded by
Fanya Kaplan. Under siege from a trade boycott and invasion by Germany, UK, USA, France and other forces, facing civil war and starvation, the Soviet regime implemented War Communism in June, 1918. All private enterprise was made illegal, strikers could be shot, "non-working classes" were forced to work and the Soviet regime could requisition grain from the peasants for the workers in the cities.
By 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, had largely defeated the White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and under the
New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was restored to small and medium enterprises, and especially to the peasants. The peasants had resented and hindered the requisitions of grain so that the situation in the cities remained desperate or was getting worse. Lenin declared that the "commanding heights" of industry would still be under state control, but that the NEP was a capitalist measure in a country that was still largely unripe for socialism. Businessmen and women, called 'NEPmen', began to flourish,
Soviet history: NEPmen and the rich peasant (or 'Kulak', meaning 'fist') gained more power.
Lenin, now half paralysed from several strokes, castigated the powers the state had assumed in the Soviet Union by 1923. It had reverted to "a bourgeois czarist machine... barely varnished with socialism".Serge, Victor,
From Lenin to Stalin, p55. After Lenin's death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, falling steadily under the control of Stalin, rejected the theory that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union on its own. Stalin declared a policy of "socialism in one country", namely the Soviet Union. Despite demands by the increasingly marginalised Left Opposition for the restoration of soviet democracy,Serge, Victor,
From Lenin to Stalin, p52. the Soviet Union continued to develop a
bureaucratic and authoritarian model of social development, which was condemned by moderate socialists, Trotskyists and others for undermining the initial socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution.{{cite web]| year = 1975| url = http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html| format = HTML| accessdate = 22nd January| accessyear = 2007-->
The inter-war era and World War II
The October revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital "C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The
Left Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to
Trotskyism which was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years, except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party.
In 1922, the fourth congress of the
Communist International took up the policy of the United Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they criticised for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution, and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties. When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.
Britain
Once the world's most powerful nation, Britain avoided a revolution during the period of 1917-1923 but was significantly affected by revolt. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had promised the troops in the 1918 election that his Conservative-led coalition would make post-war Britain "a fit land for heroes to live in". But many demobbed troops complained of chronic unemployment and suffered low pay, disease and poor housing.http://www.aftermathww1.com/landfit.asp
A Land Fit For Heroes?In 1918, the Labour Party adopted as its aim to secure for the workers, "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". In 1919, the Miners Federation, whose Members of Parliament pre-dated the formation of the Labour Party and were since 1906 a part of that body, demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Soviet Russia. The 1919 Labour Party conference voted to discuss the question of affiliation to the Third (Communist) International, "to the distress of its leaders".Cole and Postgate,
The Common People, p551 A vote was won committing the Labour Party committee of the Trades Union Congress to arrange "direct industrial action" to "stop capitalist attacks upon the Socialist Republics of Russia and Hungary." Sylvia Pankhurst, 'The British Workers and Soviet Russia', published in
The Revolutionary Age, August 9, 1919 The threat of immediate strike action forced the Conservative-led coalition government to abandon its intervention in Russia. Sylvia Pankhurst reported that, "The London district committee of the dockers has decided to declare a strike on July 20 and 21, but it goes further, it had decided to advise its members to abstain from working on any ships bound for Russia or assisting in any way the overthrow of the Russian proletariat". Sylvia Pankhurst, 'The British Workers and Soviet Russia', published in
The Revolutionary Age, August 9, 1919.
In 1914 the unions of the transport workers, the mine workers and the railway workers had formed a [Triple Alliance (1914). In 1919, Lloyd George sent for the leaders of the Triple Alliance, one of whom was miner's leader
Robert Smillie, a founder member of the
Independent Labour Party in 1889 who was to become a Labour Party MP in the first First Labour Government (UK). According to Smillie, Lloyd George said:
{{cquote2|Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen, have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?|Aneurin Bevan,
In Place of Fear Bevan, Aneurin,
In Place of Fear p40. MacGibbon and Kee, (1961). Bevan reports verbatim what Robert Smillie told him of his meeting with Lloyd George.-->
"From that moment on", Smillie conceded to Aneurin Bevan, "we were beaten and we knew we were". When the UK General Strike of 1926 broke out, the trade union leaders, "had never worked out the revolutionary implications of direct action on such a scale", Bevan says.Bevan, Aneurin,
In Place of Fear p40. MacGibbon and Kee, (1961) Bevan was a member of the Independent Labour Party and one of the leaders of the South Wales miners during the strike. The TUC called off the strike after nine days. In the North East of England and elsewhere, "councils of action" were set up, with many rank and file Communist Party members often playing a critical role. The councils of action took control of essential transport and other duties.For instance, cf Mason, Anthony,
The General strike in the North-East, University of Hull Publications (1970) When the strike ended, the miners were locked out and remained locked out for six months. Bevan became a Labour MP in 1929.
In January 1924, the Labour Party formed a minority government for the first time with Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister. The Labour Party intended to ratify an Anglo-Russian trade agreement, which would break the trade embargo on Russia. This was attacked by the Conservatives and new elections took place in October 1924. Four days before polling day the
Daily Mail published the
Zinoviev letter, a forgery that claimed the Labour Party had links with Soviet Communists and was secretly fomenting revolution. The fears instilled by the press of a Labour Party in secret Communist manoeuvres, together with the half-hearted "respectable" policies pursued by MacDonald, led to Labour losing the October 1924 general election. The victorious Conservatives repudiated the Anglo-Soviet treaty.
The leadership of the Labour Party, like social democratic parties almost everywhere, (with the exception of Sweden and Belgium), tried to pursue a policy of moderation and economic orthodoxy. At times of depression this policy was not popular with the Labour Party’s working class supporters. The influence of Marxism grew in the Labour Party during the inter-war years. Anthony Crosland argued in 1956 that under the impact of the 1931 slump and the growth of fascism, the younger generation of left-wing intellectuals for the most part "took to Marxism" including the "best-known leaders" of the Fabian tradition, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. The Marxist Professor Harold Laski, who was to be chairman of the Labour Party in 1945-6, was the "outstanding influence" in the political field. Crosland, Anthony,
The Future of Socialism, p4 and note 2
The Marxists within the Labour Party differed in their attitude to the Communists. Some were uncitical and some were expelled as "fellow travellers", while in the 1930s others were Trotskyists and sympathisers working inside the Labour Party, especially in its youth wing where they were influential.
In the general election of 1929 the Labour Party won 288 seats out of 615 and formed another minority government. The depression of that period brought high unemployment and Prime Minister MacDonald sought to make cuts in order to balance the budget. The trade unions opposed MacDonald’s proposed cuts and he split the Labour government to form the
UK National Government of 1931. This experience moved the Labour Party leftward, and at the start of the Second World War an official Labour Party pamphlet written by Harold Laski argued that, "the rise of Hitler and the methods by which he seeks to maintain and expand his power are deeply rooted in the economic and social system of Europe... economic nationalism, the fight for markets, the destruction of political democracy, the use of war as an instrument of national policy":
{{cquote2|The war will leave its meedMeed - literally, 'Reward', here used sardonically of great problems, problems of internal social organisation... Business men and aristocrats, the old ruling classes of Europe, had their chance from 1919 to 1939; they failed to take advantage of it. They rebuilt the world in the image of their own vested interests... The ruling class has failed; this war is the proof of it. The time has come to give the common people the right to become the master of their own destiny... Capitalism has been tried; the results of its power are before us today. Imperialism has been tried; it is the foster-parent of this great agony.
Given power Labour Party will seek, as no other Party will seek, the basic transformation of our society. It will replace the profit-seeking motive by the motive of public service... there is now no prospect of domestic well-being or of international peace except in Socialism.|Harold Laski,
The Labour Party, the War and the Future (1939) Published by the Labour Party in November 1939-->
USA
In the USA, the Communist Party USA was formed in 1919 from former adherents of the Socialist Party of America. One of the founders, James Cannon, later became the leader of
Trotskyist forces outside the
Soviet Union.
The Great Depression began in the United States on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Unemployment rates passed 25%, prices and incomes fell 20–50%, but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. 9,000 banks failed during the decade of the 30s. By 1933, depositors saw $140 billion of their deposits disappear due to uninsured bank failures.
Workers organized against their deteriorating conditions and socialists played a critical role. In 1934 the
Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 led by the Trotskyist Communist League of America, the
1934 West Coast Longshore Strike led by the Communist Party USA, and the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the
American Workers Party, played an important role in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the USA.
In Minnesota, the General Drivers Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck, despite an attempt to block the vote by AFL officials, demanding union recognition, increased wages, shorter hours, overtime rates, improved working conditions and job protection through seniority. In the battles that followed, which captured country-wide media attention, three strikes took place, martial law was declared and the National Guard was sent in. Two strikers were killed. Protest rallies of 40,000 were held. Farrell Dobbs, who became the leader of the local, had at the outset joined the "small and poverty-stricken" Communist League of America, founded by James P. Cannon and others in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism.Dobbs, Farrell,
Teamster Rebellion, Monad Press, New York, (1972), p21ff, p34, p92
Success for the CIO quickly followed its formation. In 1937, one of the founding unions of the CIO, the United Auto Workers, won union recognition at General Motors Corporation after a tumultuous forty-four day sit-down strike, while the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which was formed by the CIO, won a collective bargaining agreement with
U.S. Steel. The CIO merged with the AFl in 1955 becoming the AFL-CIO.
Germany
In 1928, the Communist International, now fully under the leadership of Stalin, turned from the united front policy to an ultra-left policy of the
Third Period, a policy of aggressive confrontation of social democracy. This divided the working class at a critical time.
Like the Labour Party in the UK, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, which was in power in 1928, followed an orthodox deflationary policy and pressed for reductions in unemployment benefits in order to save taxes and reduce budget deficits. These policies did not halt the recession and the government resigned.
The Communists described the Social Democratic leaders as "social fascists" and in the Prussian Landtag they voted with the Nazis to bring down the Social Democratic government. Fascism continued to grow, with powerful backing from industrialists, especially in
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