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Developments in Socioeconomic Theory and Action
Socialist Revisionism
Socialist Revisionism originated in the 1860s with the German Marxist Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle rejected the Marx-Engels view of an inevitable, violent proletarian revolution in favor of improving working class conditions through cooperation with the existing political system (in Lassalle’s case Bismarck’s North German Confederation). Lassallian socialism was condemned by orthodox revolutionary Marxists – including Marx himself - as “opportunism.”
In the late 19th Century the Lassallian concept of socialist cooperation became known as “Revisionist” or “Evolutionary” Socialism. Revisionists sought to achieve socialist goals through legal, constitutional means (political parties with parliamentary representation, newspapers, publications, labor unions). The most notable of the revisionist socialist parties (and their most influential leaders) were the …
German Social Democratic Party, 1875 (founded by Eduard Bernstein)
French Socialist Party, 1905 (founded by Jean Jaurès)
A Russian Social Democratic Party, 1883, was founded in Switzerland by a tiny group of Russian expatriates. Political parties were outlawed in Russia.
Related in both concept and purpose was the Labour Party in Britain. This party arose in part from the already well-established labor union movement and from the Fabian Society. The Fabians, taking their name from the Roman general Fabius, were a group of British intellectuals that included the playwright George Bernard Shaw and author H. G. Wells. Fabianism was socialist but not Marxist in that it held that socialism would not come through class conflict and revolution but through democracy.
The International
The International Working Men’s Association (the “First International”) was a federation of orthodox revolutionary Marxists. It was originally founded by Marx in 1864 and met in annual congresses in various cities to reaffirm revolutionary commitment and determine common strategy. The First International lasted until 1872. Marx’s insistence on the correctness of his views caused him to reject the views of other socialists such as the German Lassalle and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin insisted that the correct means to revolution was to seek the immediate and total destruction of the state. Marx saw the purpose of revolution as the overthrow of the capitalist system. Marx enthusiastically welcomed the outbreak of the Paris Commune in 1871, hailing it as the beginning of the revolution. International members were sent to infiltrate the Commune with the goal of assuming its direction. With the French government’s brutal suppression of the Commune, the International lost its credibility among more moderate socialists and labor unionists and dissolved in 1872.
A Second International was founded in 1889. Marx died in 1883 and there was no one figure of his stature to give the movement its direction. The leading voice of the Second International was the German Karl Kautsky, who condemned revisionists as petty-bourgeois heretics seeking to promote themselves at the expense of the workers they professed to serve. Nonetheless, the major revisionist parties remained part of the movement. The only significant “achievement” of the Second International was the ruling that socialist politicians must not serve as cabinet officials in any national government. It was on the background of the Second International that in 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party (still in exile) would split into two factions diametrically opposed to each other on the revolutionary future of Russia. One faction, led by Vladimir Lenin, called itself the Bolsheviks and remained committed to revolutionary orthodoxy.
Economic and Social Developments
The expansion of organized labor
Organized labor spread rapidly, particularly in highly industrialized countries. especially in Britain after 1850. British unions tended to be craft (trade) unions of skilled workers and labor unions of unskilled workers. British unions tended to be moderate in pursuing their agenda for workers’ interests. They tended to cooperate with employers, avoid strikes, build union funds for further development and for workers’ relief in times of hardship. In the late 1880s industrial unions with both skilled and unskilled labor in a shared industry (mining, railroad, steel manufacturing, etc.) came into existence.
In 1901, in the Taff Vale Decision, the British high court ruled that labor unions were responsible for the financial losses of businesses affected by a strike. This decision galvanized labor opposition and led to union cooperation underlying the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900. In the 1906 parliamentary elections, the new Labour Party won 29 seats in the Commons. The new Liberal-dominated Parliament, sensing the political potential of labor passed legislation that overruled Taff Vale. With union pressure the Liberals moved towards policies of increased social welfare.
Syndicalism, revolutionary unionism, had its origins in France and was strongest where unions were weakest (Italy, Spain, and France). The prime voice of syndicalism was the philosopher Georges Sorel, who called for labor unions to unify for common ends and even advocated the idea that unions replace government. The means to such an end would be a massive general strike. Syndicalism never developed as a threat to civil order, but did lead to union amalgamation in the French General Confederation of Labor (1895).
Science, Philosophy, and Religion
(What follows is drawn largely from Robert Palmer et al. A History of the Modern World, 2002 edition and Jackson Spielvogel’s Western Civilization, 1997 edition)
Science
Darwin, 1854
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) The British naturalist Charles Darwin's studies revolutionized scientific understanding of the Earth's lifeforms. Basing his conclusions on observations made on a five-year around the world voyage aboard the British research ship Beagle, Darwin reasoned that all the earth's present lifeforms, including human, were the result of on-going evolution. He would published his findings in two books, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)
Continued scientific investigation undermined scientific thinking of the Enlightenment. Nature no longer harmonious – struggle – on-going and ever-lasting change.
Social implications “Social Darwinism” Competition is the norm. The struggle for survival is not just among natural species but among businesses, classes, races, states, cultures, civilizations. It is Realpolitik. Struggle is virtuous: it determines the fittest and the best; who will dominate and who will be dominated; who will win and who will lose; who is superior and who is inferior; who will be master and who will be slave.
Atomic Science New discoveries in physics led to greater understanding of atomic energy. The French physicist Antoine Becquerel discovered radioactivity (1896). From Becquerel’s work, the French scientists Pierre and Marie Curie hypothesized that atoms were complex structures and emitted energy as they disintegrated. In 1900 the German Max Planck developed the theory of quantum physics wherein energy emission or absorption was irregular, not smooth and continuous as previously thought. In 1913 the Danish physicist Niels Bohr concluded that an atom consisted of a nucleus of protons surrounded by orbiting electrons.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
“The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905) – the theory of relativity. Time, space, motion are not absolute but relative to the observer’s own movement in space. Time and space are interwoven into a four-dimensional time-space continuum. Neither time nor space had an existence independent of human experience. Because matter was made up of atoms, matter was simply another form of energy (E = mc²). If the energy of atomic matter could be unleashed, it would provide humanity with a seemingly limitless source of energy
Einstein’s unified field theory expanded scientific investigation of the properties of gravitation, electromagnetism, and subatomic behavior.
As did Darwin, Einstein and the other atomic scientists served to undermine the traditional “understanding” of Newtonian-based science. Scientific assumptions based on the operation of natural laws, heretofore unchallenged, no longer seemed immutable. If one thing was clear in the world of science, it was that things were not clear.
Einstein, 1904
Psychology The challenge to the Enlightenment’s optimistic confidence in rationalism.
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
Development of Psychoanalysis The Interpretation of Dreams (1901)
Human behavior was strongly shaped by the unconscious, by former experiences, and inner drives of which people were not readily aware. How to “know” the unconscious? Through hypnosis or through “decoding” the content of dreams. It was, however, possible for human beings to repress unsettling experiences from conscious awareness yet still manifest behavior affected by the unconscious.
To explain repression, Freud developed a theory on the inner life of human beings. The human mind, he maintained, was the battleground of three contending forces: the id (the pleasure-driven emotional center of unconscious drives), the ego (the reality-driven rational coordinator of the inner life), and the superego (the cultural experience-driven conscience representing the inhibitions and moral values that society or parents imposed on people). The superego forced the ego to curb the unsatisfactory drives of the id.
Psychic conflicts were the result of repression resulting from the superego and ego’s restraint of the id. Freud saw the most important repressions as sexual. His theory of infantile sexual drives led to what we know as the Oedipus Complex (for males) and the Electra Complex (for females) wherein infants crave the exclusive attention of the parent of the opposite sex.
Because of the battle of id, ego, and superego, the inner life of humans was one of latent and open disturbance. Repression began in childhood and could only be overcome or understood through psychoanalysis, wherein the psychotherapist and patient established a dialogue that probed deeply into memory to retrace the chain of repression back to its childhood origins. By making the conscious mind aware of the repressed content of the unconscious, the patient’s psychic conflict will be resolved.
Philosophy The attack of the irrational
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Nietzsche was reflective of a small group of intellectuals who, in rejecting the Enlightenment’s impact on science and social development, celebrated the irrational. His most famous work was Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Western bourgeois society was decadent and incapable of real cultural creativity because of its excessive emphasis on rational thought rather than the creative impact of emotions, passions, and instincts. What drives humanity was the “will to power.”
Western civilization was weakened and enfeebled by Christianity’s pervasive “slave morality” imposed by the weak to “disarm the strong.” Democracy, social reform, humility, altruism, humanitarian love –these were all the means whereby the weak enslaved the strong.
How could Western society be revitalized? By accepting that “God is dead,” Europeans need not be bound by the traditional belief in a cosmic order. By dispensing with Christian morality, it would be possible to liberate humanity and create a higher order called the “Superman.” Free of restraints, the Superman would “declare war on the masses,” he wrote, and live by courage, risk, intellectual excellence, and strength of self-defined character.
While not widely read in his lifetime, Nietzsche, as Palmer indicates, “expressed with unshrinking frankness many implications of the new evolutionary ideas. And his critique of reason and rationality had wide influence among anti-Enlightenment thinkers both before and after the First World War.”
Nietzsche, 1875
Religion
The 19th Century saw considerable challenges to religion. Primary among these was Darwinism with its scientific challenge of evolution to divine creation. Scholarly inquest in the biological sciences led to critical reexamination of other forms of knowledge including Scripture. Subjecting the Bible to critical study, the French scholar Ernst Renan published The Life of Christ, in which he maintained Christ was a mortal, not divine, being. The German David Strauss, likewise in his Life of Jesus, explained that Christ’s miracles were myths. The material progress of society likewise distracted from the intensity of faith. With all that science and technology was providing in terms of industry’s material benefits and comforts, there was less interest, particularly among Protestants, in going to church and hearing edifying sermons and homilies. Traditional religious ties were also broken by the movement of populations from country to city as industrialization spread.
There developed a movement, largely in Protestant churches, that came to be known as “modernism.” This was the idea that in a rapidly changing and uncertain world, the church had a social obligation to the well being of all, particularly those displaced or hurt by change. The Bible should be viewed as a guide to proper moral behavior and ethical action. Churches, the modernists argued, must provide social assistance and work for community and state support for welfare and other benefits for those in distress. In this context evangelical missionaries, seeking to provide spiritual as well as material assistance for the disadvantaged, founded the Salvation Army in London in 1865. The Salvation Army established homeless shelters, food centers, and “rescue homes” for women.
Not all Protestants were modernists. Many Protestants reacted to the modern by taking a more literal approach to Scripture. Protestant fundamentalism, placing full faith in the literal reading of Scripture, rejected science’s revelations.
The Catholic Church reacted to modernization with total and firm rejection. In 1864 the reactionary Pope Pius IX (1846 - 1878), seeking to protect the faithful from the heresies of his times, issued a papal encyclical known as the Syllabus of Errors, a general condemnation of society’s “errors”. He stated that it is “an error to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” (Spielvogel 853). Rejected by the Church were such “modern” concepts as rationalism, nationalism, socialism, science, progress, religious toleration, lay education, and the freedom of speech and press.
In 1869 Pius summoned Church leaders to meet in council. (The last time the Church hierarchy met had been at Trent, 1545 - 1563.) Meeting in Rome the Vatican Council of 1870 affirmed the dogma of Papal Infallibility. The pronouncements of the Pope in matters of faith and practice would be the Church’s absolute truth to be accepted and obeyed by all faithful without question. Thus, there occurred the revival of ultramontism, the unconditional acceptance of papal jurisdiction. The Church became more international as Catholic clergy looked to Rome for protection against “alien” forces that might try to subvert Christian doctrine to national interests.
At the end of the century Pope Leo XIII (1878 - 1903) relaxed Pius’ pronouncements condemning things modern. In an 1891 encyclical titled DeRerum Novarum (“Of Modern Things”) Leo stated that the Church would accept capitalism as a spiritually legitimate economic system but saw humanitarian benefits in socialism. It rejected outright the godless and materialist “scientific socialism” of Marxism, but would allow Catholics to form labor unions and socialist political parties of their own. Such parties and unions would help the working classes achieve the social benefits that capitalism was reluctant to grant them. The result was the founding of the Catholic Center Party in Germany and Christian Socialist parties elsewhere.
Sources for Late 19th-Early 20th Century Trends
Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002
Spielvogel, Jackson. Western Civilization. Minneapolis: West, 1997.
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