Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The basic division within the Socialist movement after 1848 was between those who wished to abolish or reduce the functions of the state and those who wished to increase these functions by giving economic activities to the state. The former division came in time to include the anarchists and the syndicalists, while the latter division came to include the Socialists and the Communists. In general the former division believed that man was innately good and that all coercive power was bad, with public authority the worst form of such coercive power. All of the world’s evil, according to the anarchists, arose because man’s innate goodness was corrupted and distorted by coercive power. The remedy, they felt, was to destroy the state. This would lead to the disappearance of all other forms of coercive power and to the liberation of the innate goodness of man. The simplest way to destroy the state, they felt, would be to assassinate the chief of the state; this would act as a spark to ignite a wholesale uprising of oppressed humanity against all forms of coercive power. These views led to numerous assassinations of various political leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of the United States, in the period 1895-1905.

Syndicalism was a somewhat more realistic and later version of anarchism. It was equally determined to abolish all public authority, but did not rely on the innate goodness of individuals for the continuance of social life. Rather it aimed to replace public authority by voluntary associations of individuals to supply the companionship and management of social life which, according to these thinkers, the state had so signally failed to provide. The chief of such voluntary associations replacing the state would be labor unions. According to the syndicalists, the state was to be destroyed, not by the assassination of individual heads of states, but by a general strike of the workers organized in labor unions. Such a strike would give the workers a powerful esprit de corps based on a sense of their power and solidarity. By making all forms of coercion impossible, the general strike would destroy the state and replace it by a flexible federation of free associations of workers (syndicates).

Anarchism’s most vigorous proponent was the Russian exile A4ichael Bakunin (1814-1876). His doctrines had considerable appeal in Russia itself, but in western Europe they were widely accepted only in Spain, especially Barcelona, and in parts of Italy where economic and psychological conditions were somewhat similar to those in Russia. Syndicalism flourished in the same areas at a later date, although its chief theorists were French, led by Georges Sorel (1847-1922).

The second group of radical social theorists was fundamentally opposed to the anarcho-syndicalists, although this fact was recognized only gradually. This second group wished to widen the power and scope of governments by giving them a dominant role in economic life. In the course of time, the confusions within this second group began to sort themselves out, and the group divided into two chief schools: the Socialists and the Communists. These two schools were further apart in organization and in their activities than they were in their theories, because the Socialists became increasingly moderate and even conservative in their activities, while remaining relatively revolutionary in their theories. However, as their theories gradually followed their activities in the direction of moderation, in the period of the Second International (1889-1919), violent controversies arose between those who pretended to remain loyal to the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and those who wished to revise these ideas in a more moderate direction to adapt them to what they considered to be changing social and economic conditions. The strict interpreters of Karl Marx came to be known as Communists, while the more moderate revisionist group came to be known as Socialists. The rivalries of the two groups ultimately disrupted the Second International as well as the labor movement as a whole, so that anti-labor regimes were able to come to power in much of Europe in the period 1918-1939. This disruption and failure of the working-class movement is one of the chief factors in European history in the twentieth century and, accordingly, requires at least a brief survey of its nature and background.

The ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and of his associate Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were published in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and in their three-volume opus, Das Kapital (1867-1894). Although they were aroused by the deplorable conditions of the European working classes under industrialism, the chief sources of the ideas themselves were to be found in the idealism of Hegel, the materialism of the ancient Greek atomists (especially Democritus), and the theories of the English classical economists (especially Ricardo). Marx derived from Hegel what has come to be known as the “historical dialectic.” This theory maintained that all historical events were the result of a struggle between opposing forces which ultimately merged to create a situation which was different from either. Any existing organization of society or of ideas (thesis) calls forth, in time, an opposition (antithesis). These two struggle with each other and give rise to the events of history, until finally the two fuse into a new organization (synthesis). This synthesis in turn becomes established as a new thesis to a new opposition or antithesis, and the struggle continues, as history continues.

A chief element in Marxist theory was the economic interpretation of history. According to this view, the economic organization of any society was the basic aspect of that society, since all other aspects, such as political, social, intellectual, or religious, reflected the organization and powers of the economic level.

From Ricardo, Marx derived the theory that the value of economic goods was based on the amount of labor put into them. Applying this idea to industrial society where labor obtains wages which reflect only part of the value of the product they are making, Marx decided that labor was being exploited. Such exploitation was possible, he believed, because the working classes did not own the “instruments of production” (that is, factories, land, and tools) but had allowed these, by legal chicanery, to fall into the hands of the possessing classes. In this way, the capitalistic system of production had divided society into two antithetical classes: the bourgeoisie who owned the instruments of production and the proletariat who lived from selling their labor. The proletariat, however, were robbed of part of their product by the fact that their wages represented only a portion of the value of their labor, the “surplus value” of which they were deprived going to the bourgeoisie as profits. The bourgeoisie were able to maintain this exploitative system because the economic, social, intellectual, and religious portions of society reflected the exploitative nature of the economic system. The money which the bourgeoisie took from the proletariat in the economic system made it possible for them to dominate the political system (including the police and the army), the social system (including family life and education), as well as the religious system and the intellectual aspects of society (including the arts, literature, philosophy, and all the avenues of publicity for these).

From these three concepts of the historical dialectic, economic determinism, and the labor theory of value, Marx built up a complicated theory of past and future history. He believed that “all history is the history of class struggles.” Just as in antiquity, history was concerned with the struggles of free men and slaves or of plebians and patricians, so, in the Middle Ages, it was concerned with the struggles of serfs and lords, and, in modern times, with the struggles of proletariat and bourgeoisie. Each privileged group arises from opposition to an earlier privileged group, plays its necessary role in historical progress, and is, in time, successfully challenged by those it has been exploiting. Thus the bourgeoisie rose from exploited serfs to challenge successfully the older privileged group of feudal lords and moved into a period of bourgeois supremacy in which it contributed to history a fully capitalized industrial society but will be challenged, in its turn, by the rising power of the laboring masses.