A STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
ON MAY 7, 1839, fifty-two men, sporting ribbons and marching in pairs, escorted a wagon draped with Union Jacks as it wound through the streets of London. All of them were delegates to a General Convention of the Industrious Classes, each one elected by at least twenty thousand British people, most of them otherwise disenfranchised, many of them active in demonstrations demanding political reform. The delegates were escorting a petition with the text of a “People’s Charter,” bearing the signatures of more than one million people.
In the months leading up to this moment, three hundred thousand citizens had rallied in support of the Charter on Kersal Moor in Manchester; two hundred thousand people had assembled in Birmingham; and one hundred and fifty thousand in Glasgow.
The Charter conveyed six demands: the right to vote for all men over the age of twenty-one; a secret ballot; the repeal of property qualifications to serve as a member of Parliament; payment for serving as an MP; the creation of electoral districts of equal size; and annual elections for Parliament, to produce a more democratic form of government.
Each demand had been ratified by the fifty-plus delegates to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, which first convened on Monday, February 4, 1839, at a coffeehouse in Charing Cross. The delegates included shoemakers, newspaper editors, booksellers, printers, a barrister, a draper, a stonemason, a pub owner, trade union leaders, a physician, a pearl button manufacturer, a typesetter, tailors, a handloom weaver, a grain dealer, a tea merchant, a wood carver, a thimble manufacturer, a tobacconist, a lamp manufacturer, a Methodist preacher, and an Anglican vicar. A number of these people were too poor to have the right to vote for members of Parliament.
The Reform Act of 1832 had dramatically extended the franchise in the United Kingdom—but property qualifications continued to be imposed, and the electorate in 1839 amounted to some eight hundred thousand eligible voters in a country with a population of fourteen million men, women, and children. Disenfranchised workers had watched as more prosperous citizens won the right to vote—and had concluded, logically enough, that one cause of their relative poverty was their own lack of the same right. “Reasoning from effect to cause,” the first historian of the movement wrote, “there is no marvel that they arrive at the conclusion—that their exclusion from political power is the cause of our social anomalies.” Universal manhood suffrage became the overriding aim of all Chartists—but for many, it was also a means to redress the wretched conditions of a working class that had left the land to labor in the northern textile factories or the coal mines scattered through the United Kingdom from Bristol to Clyde.
A few Chartists had even more radical goals in view, notably the delegates from the London Democratic Association, who were pressing the Convention to demand more direct forms of democratic self-government. “No man is too poor to unite with us,” the London Democratic Association had declared at its 1838 founding. “On the contrary, the poorer, the more oppressed, the more welcome.”
These London Chartists revered the Parisian insurrection of August 10, 1792—it was on this date in 1838 that the London Democrats had founded their association. Treating the Jacobin constitution of 1793 as sacred scripture, they idolized Robespierre, and wished to resurrect, in a British context, his efforts to introduce “a new social order into society, based on equality of rights and purity of morals.” They deplored that the French government in 1795, after the execution of Robespierre, had produced a new constitution with restrictions on the franchise and on the capacity of ordinary citizens to participate in politics; and they applauded the response of Gracchus Babeuf, an avowed democrat who founded a secret society of armed insurrectionists. Before Babeuf was arrested, put on trial, and executed, he was preparing to overthrow the French government, restore the Jacobin constitution of 1793, and implement the right of every man to “the enjoyment of an equal share in all property.”
Perhaps the most eloquent of the London radicals was the “schoolmaster of Chartism,” Bronterre O’Brien, the son of a wine and spirit merchant who had grown up in County Longford, Ireland. A polymath able to read and speak English, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French, and notorious as well for his hard drinking habits, O’Brien had become radicalized by working in London for the publisher Henry Hetherington, the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, and a delegate himself to the 1839 Chartist Convention. In 1836, Bronterre had rendered into English Philippe Buonarroti’s detailed 1828 account, Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality, which Hetherington published as a book along with supporting documents, including the full text of the Jacobin constitution of 1793.
When the Chartists unveiled the People’s Charter in 1839, it was with the pomp and ceremony owed a similarly consecrated text. The flag-draped wagon in London bore a monumental scroll that weighed a third of a ton. When fully unfurled, the petition was three miles long. Its preamble was blunt: “We perform the duties of freemen; we must have the privileges of freemen. Therefore, we demand universal suffrage. The suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret.”
Arriving at their destination, the Chartist delegation handed over the petition to Thomas Attwood, a sympathetic Member of Parliament and a founder of the Birmingham Political Union, a key node of Chartist organizing in the Midlands. With some trepidation—since Attwood, a banker by trade who was also a well-known critic of classical economics, personally deplored the drift toward revolutionary rhetoric at the Chartist Convention—the MP had promised to present the petition in the House of Commons. But that very day, May 7, the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, a rich landowner and political moderate, announced his intention to resign, provoking a parliamentary crisis that wasn’t resolved for several weeks and delayed formally presenting the petition.
On June 14, when the People’s Charter was belatedly transported to Westminster, one reporter described the astonishing scale of the document: “It appeared to have the circumference of a carriage wheel, and was rolled solidly round a straight axle, supported by transverse uprights at each end.” According to the official parliamentary record, “loud laughter” greeted the appearance of the petition, because of its “gigantic dimensions”—it required twelve men to lift and carry the scroll into the House chamber. Attwood, after unspooling the document to place one end on the clerk’s table, addressed his fellow MPs, and made a formal motion:
that it might please their honourable House to take the petition into their most serious consideration, and to use their utmost endeavour to pass a law, granting to every man of lawful age, sound mind, and uncontaminated by crime, the right of voting for Members to serve in Parliament; that they would cause a law also to be passed, giving the right to vote by the ballot; that the duration of Parliaments might in no case be of greater duration than one year; that they would abolish all property qualifications, to entitle parties to sit in their honourable House; and that all Members elected to sit in Parliament, should be paid for their services.
The motion was tabled, and debate on its merits deferred to a later date.
In the interim, the Chartists moved their Convention from London to Birmingham, in order to discuss in friendlier surroundings what, if any, “ulterior measures” to consider taking, should Parliament (as seemed likely) reject their petition. “Ulterior measures” was a euphemism for armed struggle, and this was a topic of heated debate among the Chartists: a number favored using only “moral force,” while others were willing to countenance the use, in some circumstances, of “physical force.”
After prolonged deliberation, the group’s leaders had collectively agreed on a list of approved tactics, including a reassertion of “their old constitutional right” to defend themselves, if necessary, with armed force. They had also endorsed the possibility of observing “a sacred month,” a set period of time that would oblige all Chartists “to abstain from their laboring during that period, as well as from use of all intoxicating drinks.” For many Chartists, temperance was seen as a prerequisite for personal as well as political self-government, and observing a “sacred month” seemed a suitably God-fearing way to launch a general strike. At the same time, the most militant members of the movement hoped to find some way to provoke a violent response from the state, in hopes that armed conflict would outrage people and help swell the ranks of the movement, while also ensuring that most participants were in fighting mettle.
When word came that Parliament would soon start debate on the petition, magistrates in Birmingham, anticipating the worst, banned large meetings and enrolled several thousand special constables, augmented by battalions of police from London. In response, the most militant Chartists settled into what would become a pattern—pike manufacture, the purchase of firearms, and secret drilling.
On July 12, the House of Commons at last met to argue the pros and cons of the Chartist petition. The prominent Whig and future Liberal Party leader Lord John Russell (a courtesy title accorded to this younger son of a duke, as he wasn’t yet a peer in his own right) was vehement in his objections, comparing the Chartists to the most bloody-minded Jacobins during the darkest days of the French Revolution, and disputing, rather curiously, the democratic standing of the document. There were between five and six million adult males in England, Lord Russell noted, and the number of signatories to the petition was merely one million two hundred eighty thousand adult males: how could this self-selected minority pretend to represent the majority of adult males? The debate united the two main parliamentary factions—conservative Tories and moderate Whigs—in firm opposition. By a vote of 235 to 46, Parliament rejected Attwood’s motion.
Learning of the Charter’s defeat, a crowd assembled in Manchester; when police tried to disperse it, they were met with force. A pitched battle ensued, with several houses burned and looted. Similar riots occurred throughout the country.
It was unclear what would happen next. Should the Chartist Convention remain in session? Should it try to put itself forward as a rival source of political power? One Chartist suggested as much at a mass meeting outside Manchester, held in August 1839: “I owe the British Government no allegiance but what I am obliged to give it. I declare, that I will obey the Convention; nor death nor hell shall prevent me from being obedient to them. They are my Government. I had a hand in chusing them.”
Britain’s Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 complicated matters. This act had outlawed all meetings of more than fifty people called “for the purpose … of deliberating upon any grievance, in church or state,” unless the meeting had been convened by an authorized state official, or advance notice had been given to local authorities. The act also made it illegal for societies to correspond with each other, or for individuals to correspond with societies. The rise of national newspapers with an overt political slant, like the Chartists’ widely read weekly broadsheet, The Northern Star, enabled the group to circumvent the last provision by publishing accounts of local meetings and letters from readers. It was nevertheless virtually impossible for Chartists to coordinate the activities of local branches without constantly risking arrest.
Between January 1839 and June 1840, the British government detained nearly five hundred Chartists, resulting in two hundred and fifty prison sentences, and six death sentences that were commuted at the last moment. The more Chartists the government arrested, the more preoccupied the movement became with freeing its prisoners, which diverted time and energy from the movement’s constitutional agenda—and also tempted militants to risk “ulterior measures.”
Like the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, the Chartists claimed to represent all the people, and they promised to defend the “nation” as a whole against a closed elite that controlled politics and the economy. These promises were, in a strong sense, democratic—but their methods were increasingly revolutionary and hinged on the actions of a relatively small minority of committed militants.
In the long run, the Chartists promised a restoration of harmonious social relations—but they simultaneously raised the prospect of a civil war. While some members of the middle class had been sympathetic to instituting universal manhood suffrage, most were averse to a movement that aimed to topple the government. In the months that followed, and despite generating some moments of spectacular disruption, including a large but abortive uprising in Wales in November 1839, and a massive but equally abortive general strike in 1842, Chartism slowly began to fall apart as a plausible strategy for democratizing British politics. The swift suppression by the state of uprisings and strikes, combined with dwindling support among the voting middle class for the radicals, destroyed any possible illusion that Chartism represented the general will of the British people—even though it had raised the hopes of millions of their compatriots for a more democratic organization of society and politics.
* * *
AT A BANQUET held on September 22, 1845, one thousand democrats from different nations gathered in London to celebrate the founding of the French Republic, as decreed by the Convention on that date in 1792. Thus came into being the Fraternal Democrats, a new international association organized by Julian Harney, a Chartist journalist who had participated in the General Convention of the Industrious Classes six years before. In the eyes of Harney and his associates, Europe was facing a protracted and epochal struggle, between advocates of democracy on the one hand, and the autocratic rulers of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires on the other. Besides promoting the exchange of information among the different democratic groups in Europe, Harney’s new association offered aid to the city’s political refugees. By then, London was home to a large number of exiled German, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian radicals of various creeds and convictions.
One of Harney’s allies in this venture was Karl Schapper, a burly German typesetter and veteran insurrectionist who had stormed the Frankfurt police station in 1832, escaped from prison, and finally settled in London. In exile he became friendly with the Italian insurrectionist Giuseppe Mazzini, and also with Auguste Blanqui, an ardent French revolutionary who advocated a temporary dictatorship as the best means to realize a democratic republic of equals. Like Blanqui, Schapper fancied secret societies; like Harney, he regarded himself openly, if rather vaguely, as a “communist,” a word that had gained currency in English as a description of Babeuf’s economic program.
In a speech on the first anniversary of the group’s founding, given after a toast to “the Sovereignty of the People,” Harney explained that a government “elected by, and responsible to, the entire people, is our political creed. We believe the earth with all its natural productions to be the property of all; we … therefore denounce all infractions of this evidently just and natural law as robbery and usurpation … We condemn the ‘national’ hatreds which have hitherto divided mankind, as both foolish and wicked; foolish, because no one can decide for himself the country he will be born in; wicked, as proved by the feuds and bloody wars which have desolated the earth, in consequence of these national vanities.” Given these views, it is no wonder that Harney was soon in contact with a German exile of similar convictions.
At the time, Karl Marx was based in Brussels, Belgium, having been expelled from France in 1845, under pressure from the Prussian government. Born to an assimilated Jewish barrister in 1818 in Prussia’s province of the Lower Rhine, Marx had studied law at the University of Berlin and philosophy at the University of Jena; after receiving his Ph.D. in 1841 for a dissertation on ancient Greek materialist philosophers, Marx became a journalist, moving to Paris in October 1843, after the Cologne newspaper he briefly edited was banned by the Prussian government.
In exile and unemployed, the young Marx plunged into a crash course of reading books on the French Revolution, while he was rereading perhaps the greatest single work of systematic political philosophy in the nineteenth century, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. At the same time, he started to compose his thoughts about what he was reading, in both a series of private notebooks and a few short essays he published at the time.
It was in these months that Marx began to develop a distinctive outlook on the dynamics of modern social change. Like Hegel, he believed that freedom was an emergent result of a historical evolution that was complex and “dialectical”; like the French liberal historian Adolphe Thiers, whom he read at this time, he conjectured that the key to this evolution under contemporary conditions was class conflict; and like Thomas Carlyle in his apocalyptic account The French Revolution, Marx represented the laboring class as a historical agent seething with violence, “a still barely moving yet faintly stirring Enceladus,” as the historian Gareth Stedman Jones has put it, “who might suddenly arise from the fiery deep, as he already had in France, toppling the flimsy superstructures of … civilization in his wake.” (In the Aeneid of Virgil, as in Carlyle’s prose, Enceladus represents a mythic Greek giant sleeping beneath Mount Etna in Sicily, whose arousal caused the volcano’s periodic eruptions.)
As his writings from these early years reveal, Marx was ambivalent about democracy. On the one hand, he privately remarked that Hegel had forced his vision of the modern state into a Procrustean bed of monarchic prejudices: in this context, Marx asserted that “democracy is the solved riddle of all constitutions,” because in a democracy “the constitution appears as what it is, the free product of men.” On the other hand, Marx felt that democracy was not an end in itself but only a means toward the ultimate aim of fully realizing human freedom in a peaceful society of equals. He argued that the French revolutionaries had simply tried to aggregate the views of “egoistic, independent individuals,” without addressing the economic barriers to enabling “the real, individual man” to organize “his own powers as social powers,” so that these powers were “no longer separated from his political power.”
In other words, realizing an egalitarian community of truly emancipated individuals—a goal Marx shared with almost all the radical democrats—required putting an end to the exploitation of workers, not just drafting a new constitution. As one scholar of Marxism put it, “In order to bring true democracy to life it is necessary to remove the poisonous fumes of capitalism that asphyxiate it.” Without the abolition of capitalism, even ostensibly democratic political institutions would remain under the effective control of the rich and powerful, leaving ordinary citizens at a dreadful disadvantage in the coming violent conflict Marx foresaw between two great, hostile classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
But Marx’s problems with a purely political focus went deeper still. Though in keeping with Rousseau’s democratic principles, the political effort to transform the free will of individuals into the general will of a self-governing people had encouraged a reckless voluntarism—the belief on the part of some French revolutionaries that willpower alone could forge a new social order. “Robespierre saw in great poverty and great wealth only an obstacle to pure democracy,” Marx complained. But this was only to be expected, Marx continued, as (according to Rousseau), “the principle of politics is the will. The more one-sided and thus the more perfected political thought is, the more it believes in the omnipotence of will, the blinder it is to the natural and spiritual limits on the will, and the more incapable it is of discovering the source of social ills.” For Marx, the most important cause of social ills lay in the organization, not of government, but rather of the economy. Only the fullest development of the forces of production, placed under the control of associated free individuals instead of a few wealthy capitalists, could create a new world of abundance, a true commonwealth. This analysis was one of the reasons that Marx repudiated conspiratorial insurrectionists like Babeuf and Blanqui—just as it persuaded some former insurrectionists, like Julian Harney, to adapt instead Marx’s more painstaking and public strategy of preparing the workers themselves to develop an understanding of objective economic conditions, as a precondition for assuming control of the means of production.
Yet even Marx conceded the need for at least one “political act” of will: a great collective act of “overthrow and dissolution,” a revolution that would destroy the existing order. That was one reason why in Brussels he was involved with a clandestine political organization, the Communist League, which eventually became allied with Harney’s Fraternal Democrats.
But once the destruction of the old order was complete, “where the proper aim and spirit of socialism emerges, there socialism throws the political hull away.” In other words, he speculated that an economy organized on egalitarian principles would, eventually, be able to do without the hierarchical methods of command and control characteristic even of representative governments like that of the United States. (As his friend and frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels later put it, the state would “wither away” in a communist society.)
By 1845, Marx had abandoned his original plan to write a Critique of Politics and Political Economy. He concluded that an analysis of capitalism would suffice.
* * *
LONDON’S FRATERNAL DEMOCRATS briefly brought together a varied group of revolutionaries and reformists from a number of European countries. But differences within the group soon became apparent. Fraternity was hard to sustain among the revolutionary sects vying for preeminence in the late 1840s.
The Communist Manifesto that Marx and Engels published in 1848 is a case in point. Though the authors spared Harney and his friends (in part because they hungered for a prominent ally in England), the two Germans issued a series of blistering attacks on now obscure socialist authors and their programs. Comprising a third of the Manifesto, these passages suggest that only the party of Marx and Engels possesses the correct solution to all of the world’s most pressing social and economic problems.
The result was ironic: the Manifesto predicted an end to all social divisions but clinched the argument with a barrage of insults aimed at rival groups. Such divisive rhetoric guaranteed a bitter contest on the avowedly democratic left between different political parties, many of them claiming to move closer to the goal of creating a republic of equals comprised of emancipated individuals—but all of them clashing aggressively over the best path forward. At the same time, rival political groupings—conservative, monarchic, and middle class—were also, with similar sharpness, competing for the support of individual citizens.
In effect, the appearance of revolutionary workers’ parties in Europe “achieved the result of structuring the political system as a means of expression of social conflict,” as the French social theorist Marcel Gauchet has observed, stressing a paradox: “Democratic society, at its most profound, is one of conflict, but one in which there is no one who does not dream of social unity (however they may conceive of it).”
* * *
SURVEYING THE STATE of European politics in 1847, Giuseppe Mazzini celebrated “the democratic tendency of our times, the upward movement of the popular classes, who desire to have their share in political life,” as “a page of the world’s destiny, written by the finger of God.” The reference to God wasn’t metaphorical. Mazzini believed that he, along with his fellow democrats, were “laboring that the development of human society may be, as far as possible, in the likeness of the divine society”:
The law of God has not two weights and two measures: Christ came for all: he spoke to all; he died for all. We cannot logically declare the children of God to be equal before God and unequal before men. We cannot wish our immortal spirit to abjure on earth that gift of liberty which is the source of good and evil in our actions … We protest, then, against all inequality, against all oppression, wheresoever it is practiced; for we acknowledge no foreigners; we recognize only the just and the unjust … This forms the essence of what men have agreed to call the democratic movement.
Mazzini had been born in the Republic of Genoa in 1805, a decade before the Congress of Vienna dissolved the venerable city-state and awarded all of its territory to the Kingdom of Sardinia. Since the golden age of the Northern Italian city-states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Italian-speaking peoples inhabiting the Apennine Peninsula had been subordinated by neighboring nation-states, its different regions carved up among Spain, France, and Austria. Its peoples lived at the mercy of outside forces, without any right to self-determination, or, in most places at most times, any share of political power.
The child of a Jacobin father and a Jansenist mother, Mazzini tried to reconcile the democratic principles of his father with the austere faith of his mother, coming to champion a distinctive view of the modern democratic movement. Instead of zealously defending the political principles of Rousseau or the economic program of communists like Marx, he came to view modern democracy in much loftier terms: as the advent of a new form of life, organized around a redemptive new social gospel of shared duties and just institutions that might, through concerted action, exalt all human beings within a global community of independent nations, uniting humankind in a living, universal faith, reborn in a “Rome of the People” (not of the pope). Mazzini illustrates perfectly how many modern democratic movements toward self-government had, in fact, become inseparable from explicitly national movements toward the collective self-determination of a people with unique shared customs and beliefs.
In 1827, Mazzini had traveled to Tuscany and joined the Carbonari, a secret network of revolutionaries active in Italy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In this way he first met Filippo (aka Philippe) Buonarroti. A Pisan noble (and a distant relative of Michelangelo), Buonarroti had participated in various insurrections during the French Revolution, surviving to write the classic chronicle Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality. He was a living link between the Paris Commune of 1792 and the British Chartists, the German communists, and the militants in the Carbonari, one of the many conspiratorial groups of young men he organized in these years, as sleeper cells ready to impose an ideal democracy, by force if necessary.
Buonarroti initiated Mazzini into the romance of secret societies. But the older man was wary of his new recruit’s passion for religious rhetoric. Mazzini in turn rejected Buonarroti’s glorification of violence. In 1831, Mazzini broke away to found his own secret society, Young Italy, which took as its motto “God and the People.” Its primary goal was to unite Italy as “One, Independent, Free Republic.” Mazzini also hoped that a democratic revolt in Italy might trigger a European-wide wave of insurrections that would produce a league of democratic nations with its capital in Rome.
By the time Mazzini published his essay on democracy in Europe, he had been arrested, served time in prison, and then moved from Geneva to Marseille before settling in London. There he met the other exiled democrats and revolutionaries of his day from Poland, Germany, and Russia. The hopes of this saving remnant were quickened by the outbreak of revolution in Sicily in January 1848, followed by a spectacular series of democratic revolts demanding universal manhood suffrage in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna—and finally in Rome, where Mazzini was made a citizen and welcomed as a patriotic hero a few weeks after the pope had fled and a new Roman republic had been declared.
The new republic didn’t last long. At the behest of the pope, France sent troops to conquer the city. The other democratic revolts, almost all of them demanding the creation of representative political institutions, had met similar fates, in part because it had become clear that most people didn’t yearn for democracy, as Mazzini did, as a sacred end in itself; nor was there any evidence, as he fervently believed, that the democratic movements of his day formed “a page of the world’s destiny, written by the finger of God.” In Italy and elsewhere after the optimism of the European Spring of 1848 there stood restored monarchies almost everywhere. Only in France, where all men in 1848 were granted the right to vote after a protracted struggle in the wake of the French Revolution over the extent and terms of the franchise, did universal manhood suffrage survive.
Mazzini, in defeat more famous than ever, returned to London and continued to write and speak out on behalf of the democratic cause, elaborating his distinctively edifying social views, much to the irritation of critics like Marx and Engels, who deplored his pious idealism. Mazzini in turn attacked Marx and Engels for their naïve conviction that a baptism by violence might create an emancipated new world of peace and harmony. Mazzini instead imagined a great evolutionary expansion in the capacity of the human species “to have more love, more feeling for the beautiful, the great, and the true … Democracy says to us—‘If you wish to attain it, let man commune as intimately as possible with the greatest possible number of his fellows.’”
* * *
IN THE AFTERMATH of the abortive revolts of 1848, the European democratic movements, already divided, began to fracture further. Undaunted in defeat, republican insurrectionists like Blanqui continued to work toward the violent overthrow of the old order. More moderate insurrectionists like Mazzini eschewed civil war in principle, hoping, after a brief popular revolt, to form a new republic peacefully around a common language and a quasi-religious faith in universal brotherhood. Marx and his followers accepted the need for a revolutionary uprising but stressed the need to educate the working class, and also to create a new international organization, so that workers of the world could learn from one another and find ways to coordinate a global class struggle. In between these poles stood a variety of other political tendencies and parties: some national democratic republican parties broadly shared the political aims of Blanqui and Mazzini but rejected their recourse to secret societies and insurrection. In stark contrast, anarchist groups rejected the creation of a new republic in principle, with some, inspired by the French theorist Proudhon, organized around plans for associations of small producers that would supplant the centralized state, while others, led by Mikhail Bakunin, embraced revolutionary violence as the only means to destroy the state and inaugurate a communist association of spontaneously interacting free and equal individuals.
In 1864, Marx, along with Blanqui, Bakunin, and followers of Proudhon, established the first International Working Men’s Association. Meanwhile, newly created national trade unions tried to win material gains for their members, and various socialist parties tried to win seats in their country’s national assemblies, in order to introduce legislation to realize more egalitarian political, social, and economic arrangements.
The tensions among these different aspects of the social democratic movement of the last half of the nineteenth century were manifold. Nationalist sentiments were stirred by popular demands for self-determination and the emergence of viable nation-states with increasingly more broad-based representative political institutions. Republicans, some Jacobins in France, and Giuseppe Mazzini defined democracy not as “the mere liberty of all,” as Mazzini wrote, “but Government freely consented to by all, and acting for all.” They hoped to create legitimate republics with universal manhood suffrage and freely chosen leaders who might help a sovereign people form “a common union in pursuit of a common object.” Cosmopolitan ideals waxed and waned as efforts to build transnational forms of solidarity had to compete with more local attachments. Some democrats were focused, like Mazzini, on creating the best possible national constitution, with sturdy political institutions; others wanted ultimately to destroy the modern state as incompatible with true self-government. The anarchists suggested eschewing all forms of institutional authority, and Marx and his followers also anticipated that the state would eventually disappear—but only after a transitional period, when the powers of the state would be mercilessly deployed to root out the enemies of a free society.
* * *
ALMOST ALL OF these political tendencies were represented in the most significant democratic uprising in Europe in the late nineteenth century, the Paris Commune of 1871—the accidental outcome of a misguided military campaign.
In 1870, Bonaparte III, emperor of the French since 1852, had been goaded into war by the Prussian chancellor Bismarck, who used the war to consolidate a unified German nation-state. When news reached Paris that Bonaparte and some eighty thousand French soldiers had surrendered to the Germans on September 2, 1870, a popular uprising in Paris led to the collapse of Bonaparte’s Second Empire, the declaration of the Third French Republic, and the creation of a new Government of National Defense. The city’s National Guard was mobilized and armed to help defend the capital; as had happened in 1792 and 1848, Paris became a hotbed of radical democratic agitation.
That fall, German forces encircled Paris—at the time the largest city in continental Europe, with almost two million inhabitants—cutting off its access to food and other supplies. With Paris on the brink of starvation, and followers of Blanqui inside the city threatening insurrection, the Government of National Defense signed an armistice with Prussia in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on January 26, 1871, with special terms for Paris: the Germans would not occupy the capital, nor would the National Guard be immediately disarmed, in hopes of preserving law and order in the City of Lights.
A new provisional French republican government was formed, led by Adolphe Thiers, the historian and veteran liberal politician. On February 8, 1871, a national election (in which all male citizens could vote) returned a conservative majority to the new French National Assembly, then meeting at Versailles. Meanwhile, Thiers negotiated with the Parisian National Guard to surrender the cannons that still commanded the heights of Montmartre and Belleville.
In the national election, the capital as a whole had favored mainly moderate republicans. But the situation was tense, with thousands of decommissioned soldiers roaming the streets of Paris looking for food and shelter. A good many Parisians detested the terms of the armistice Thiers had signed. Fearing for their safety, a number of wealthy families decamped to the countryside. And the National Guard refused the new government’s request to turn over their arms.
In the early hours of March 18, the Versailles government ordered a sneak attack on the city’s cannons. Government troops quickly gained control of the ordnance but had to wait for teams of horses to haul the cannons away. As they waited, the sun rose over Montmartre and Belleville, and residents awoke to platoons of heavily armed soldiers on their doorsteps. One eyewitness, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, described what happened next:
Women were the first to act. Those of the 18th March, hardened by the siege—they had had a double ration of misery—did not wait for the men. They surrounded the machineguns, apostrophized the sergeant in command of the gun, saying, “This is shameful; what are you doing there?” The soldiers did not answer. Occasionally a non-commissioned officer spoke to them: “Come, my good women, get out of the way.” At the same time a handful of National Guards, proceeding to the post of the Rue Doudeauville, there found two drums that had not been smashed, and beat the rappel. At eight o’clock they numbered 300 officers and guards, who ascended the Boulevard Ornano. They met a platoon of soldiers of the 88th, and, crying, Vive la République! enlisted them to defect from the government and join the people. The troops fraternized everywhere with the crowds that had collected at the first alarm. By eleven o’clock the people had vanquished the aggressors at all points, preserved almost all their cannon, of which only ten had been carried off, and seized thousands of chassepots. All their battalions were now on foot, and the men of the faubourgs commenced unpaving the streets.
Barricades of cobblestones sprang up as crowds of people streamed toward the Hôtel de Ville to celebrate joyously. Here was a moment when, as one participant later put it, a “great and sublime movement” had appeared, causing those swept up in it to “break out of their habits and set their sights on a new ideal.” People from every walk of life suddenly found themselves transformed into a delirious community of equals. “One returns from such exaltations as one would awake from a dream, but what remains is the exquisite memory of a moment of intoxication; you’ve had the illusion of fraternity!”
The provisional government of Thiers ordered its troops to retreat. The next day, the National Guard Central Committee announced elections in Paris to form a new city government. Thus began the Paris Commune of 1871—the fruit of an adventitious uprising.
But from the start, the leaders of the Commune faced a virtually impossible challenge as they tried simultaneously to form a new municipal government, draft new policies to regulate the economy and society, and raise an armed force able to wage and win a civil war with a hostile but duly elected provisional government. There was also a continuing threat of Prussian intervention, should circumstances deteriorate.
Paris held elections on March 26 for delegates to a new Council of the Commune. The results reflected a city divided. Only about half of the electorate turned out, in part because some supporters of the provisional government chose to boycott the vote, while others had already fled the city.
The newly elected council members held predictably conflicting views. Anarchists opposed to the very existence of government favored a federation of local assemblies and municipal autonomy; socialists demanded that a strengthened central city government promptly implement various social and economic reforms; Jacobins, led by followers of Blanqui (who was still alive but had been placed under arrest by Thiers), wanted a crackdown on traitors and a total mobilization to prepare for civil war.
At one of the first meetings of the Commune council, the delegates solemnly agreed that it was undemocratic to call someone a “minister of war,” so that person became, officially, “citizen delegate to the Ministry of War.” The Commune gloried in such purely symbolic gestures: on April 7, National Guardsmen burned a guillotine at the place Voltaire. New radical journals appeared in profusion—even as the Commune banned Le Figaro and other mainstream papers. Political clubs and local assemblies proliferated, each one claiming to be a direct expression of popular sovereignty. Meanwhile, service in the National Guard became compulsory for men between nineteen and forty years old.
If any one figure could be said to typify the sanguinary bravado of the Commune’s most militant leaders, it would be Raoul Rigault, killed in the course of events, and almost instantly the subject of a short biography, Raoul Rigault, Public Prosecutor, published in 1871 under the rubric Celebrities of the Commune.
Born into a prosperous Parisian family in 1846, Rigault had been kicked out of both his home and an elite lycée by the time he was twenty-one. He became a free-floating bon vivant and troublemaker, well-known to the other habitués of bohemian Paris. Fancying himself a ruthless radical democrat in the style of the Enragés, he made a fetish of adopting the airs of a latter-day sans-culotte. He addressed everyone he met as citoyen or citoyenne. He joined the International Working Men’s Association. A political brawler, he also had a Rabelaisian appetite for food, drink, and sex. He relished saying things like “God is the absurd,” and sometimes ended drunken disputations with a dramatic flourish: “I am going to have you shot!”
On the morning of March 18, as the people of Paris were resisting the armed forces of Versailles, Rigault, characteristically, was in bed, sleeping off a late night of food and drink. Waking to the glad tidings of revolt, he raced off to the prefecture of police, where he had long planned to install himself, come the revolution. Enchanted by the idea of forming a secret society of insurrectionists, and accustomed to being tailed by the secret police of the Second Empire, Rigault had made a close study of their methods, in hopes of someday turning their techniques against them.
That afternoon, Rigault, acting on no authority but his own, issued an order to release all political prisoners. Ten days later, and after the new prefect had already issued arrest warrants for hundreds of people, the Commune formally appointed Rigault “civil delegate for general security.” He promptly created eighty neighborhood police offices and hired a large number of new agents to surveil and unmask traitors and spies. In the following days, Rigault and his friends filled Paris prisons with more than three thousand people accused of working for Versailles. At night, the prosecutor frequented the brothels and brasseries of the Left Bank. He became legendary for his outlandish tabs (one breakfast after a long night supposedly consisted of two fine Burgundies and Chateaubriand aux truffes).
Rigault’s political enemies bristled at his conduct—but to no avail. “We are not dispensing justice,” Rigault snapped at one critic. “We are making revolution.” In hopes of securing the release of Blanqui from prison, he took hostage the archbishop of Paris. Unable to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, he had the archbishop shot instead. None of these acts were calculated to win the Commune new friends.
* * *
WITH LEADERS LIKE RIGAULT, it should come as no surprise that the Paris Commune ended in a bloodbath. The government’s armed forces entered Paris with little resistance at the end of May 1871. The troops proceeded district by district, butchering anyone who stood in their way. When Rigault himself was apprehended, he shouted out, “Yes, I am Rigault! Vive la Commune!” An early American history of the Commune recounts what happened next: an “officer shot him with a pistol, and he was riddled with the bullets of the Versailles soldiery. The body was pounded and disfigured; one eye protruded; the head was a pulpy mass.” By the time the battle had ended, thousands of Communards had been murdered in a massacre, and the heart of Paris was in flames—in a final act of defiant vandalism, the Communards had torched the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville.
The Paris Commune may have been doomed from the start—but in defeat it became a paradoxical symbol of a better society still to come. The first and most influential of the writers to hymn its virtues was Karl Marx, in a report commissioned by the Working Men’s International. Though his official assignment required that he acknowledge in some way the full range of political views held by members of the International, he did his best to marginalize both the anarchists as well as the part played by fanatics like Rigault.
Marx abhorred the votaries of conspiratorial insurrection—Blanqui, Bakunin, the whole lot. Their secret societies and obsessive scheming offended his core rationalism and his (Hegelian) hope that the sharp, open conflict produced by truly popular social movements would produce, in time, and in the crucible of civil wars, new men and new women, equipped to establish a new world of emancipated, and enlightened, equals.
He claimed to find fresh grounds for these hopes in the Commune’s brief existence. It had “supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions” and—more than that—it was “essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating classes, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.”
And so it went for the next half century on the revolutionary left. In a pamphlet first published in 1880, the exiled Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin hailed the Commune as inaugurating “a new era in that long series of revolutions whereby the peoples are marching from slavery to freedom. Under the name ‘Commune of Paris’ a new idea was born, to become the starting point for future revolutions.” Writing two generations later, in an article published the day before she was killed in an abortive insurrection in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg, the outspoken German Marxist champion of revolutionary democracy, put it this way: “The Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism—so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned—is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those ‘defeats,’ from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?”
But there were problems with praising the Commune as (in Marx’s words) “a glorious harbinger of a new society.”
Such veneration was jarringly at odds with the realism that Marx and other tough-minded radical democrats championed in other contexts. A vaulting idealism might bolster hopes for a better world. But quixotic myth-mongering also encouraged zealots to use self-defeating tactics in quest of unworkable goals, and this would become a defining feature of many modern experiments in radical democracy. Kropotkin was a mild-mannered meliorist in his later years, and Rosa Luxemburg consistently refused to treat democratic principles as a pliable means rather than an end in itself; but Raoul Rigault, inspired by similarly sublime revolutionary ideals, had blithely pursued a destructive and utterly illiberal kind of “totalitarian democracy” that brooked no opposition.
No wonder some thoughtful observers recoiled in horror at the prospect of another democratic revolt like the Paris Commune of 1871.
And yet, ironically, it was, in part, a fear of the violence that radically democratic revolts might unleash that led gradually to a series of democratizing political reforms that spread throughout Europe in the years after the failure of the Paris Commune. In one country after another in Europe, the right to vote for political leaders was gradually extended to more male citizens, and property qualifications were loosened, though at a painfully slow pace. For example, in the United Kingdom, even after the Representation of the Peoples Act of 1884, nearly 40 percent of the male population lacked the franchise—it wasn’t until 1918 that all men in England won the right to vote. In Belgium, universal manhood suffrage was granted in 1893; in Austria, in 1896; in Italy, in 1912; and in Russia, Poland, and Hungary only in 1917 or 1918.
In this context, Germany stood out for its relatively early adoption of universal manhood suffrage in 1871, the year Bismarck completed his unification project. Though the government simultaneously outlawed a variety of political groups, including the new country’s two existing socialist parties, this was a watershed moment. And in the years that followed, even autocratic Germany cautiously opened up its political arena. The result was a new kind of political pluralism in Europe, premised on a tacit modus vivendi: democrats and autocrats, socialists and laissez-faire liberals, republicans and royalists would all compete for power peacefully, by contesting periodic popular elections to choose legislators and political leaders.
At the same time, a new kind of political institution, unknown to the ancient Greeks, took shape, producing what Hans Kelsen called “one of real democracy’s most important elements: the political party, which brings like-minded individuals together in order to secure them actual influence in shaping public affairs.”
* * *
THIS WAS AN AREA where the United States led the way, with Andrew Jackson and his successors turning the Democratic Party into a machine for the mass mobilization of voters. As the British scholar James Bryce put it (in the final, 1910 edition of his classic study, The American Commonwealth): “The victories of the ballot box, no less than of the sword, must be won by the cohesion and disciplined docility of troops, and … these merits can only be secured by skillful organization and long-continued training.”
Around the world, a variety of political groups of various persuasions began to emulate the American Democratic Party. In England, the first mass political party of this type was the National Liberal Federation of Joseph Chamberlain and Francis Schnadhorst, founded in 1877.
On the European continent, other new political parties—some of them avowedly conservative and deeply distrustful of democratic social movements—sprang up in response to the rapid growth of social democratic parties that were geared to producing a mass mobilization of voters sympathetic to the laboring classes. Indeed, recent research suggests that the participation of conservative parties in the electoral arena in this period paradoxically played a central role in normalizing representative regimes as they slowly evolved in countries like England and Germany. Throughout Europe, the rise of the party system contributed to a gradual process of democratization, involving the slow expansion of the franchise, the institutionalization of civil liberties, and the emergence of a central government accountable to voters, through either a parliament or a direct vote.
At the same time, social democrats were busy organizing new unions of workers in various industries and creating national federations of labor unions and international federations of labor parties and unions. The first International Working Men’s Association had dissolved in acrimony in 1876, in part because of bitter disagreements between the anarchist Bakunin and Karl Marx. But more international congresses soon followed, and by 1891 a new, so-called Second International had appeared, organized around a biennial International Socialist Congress that met until the onset of the Great War in 1914.
It was within this self-consciously global context that German social democracy evolved. In order to resist the government’s crackdown on socialist ideas and organizations, two German socialist groups, the Social Democratic Labor Party, led by disciples of Karl Marx, and the General German Workers’ Association, founded thirteen years earlier by Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1875 united to form the Socialist Workers Party, soon renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (or SPD, which still exists).
To start, the new party was most strongly influenced by the views of Lassalle, who had founded the Workers’ Association in 1863. Seeing no contradiction between democratic and socialist goals, and trying to work within legal limits, Lassalle had hoped to expedite the creation of producer cooperatives through an expansion of suffrage to include previously disenfranchised workers. But Lassalle himself did not live to see the unification of Germany’s two socialist parties—he had died in a duel a decade earlier.
Watching the merger from London, Marx was livid at Lassalle’s posthumous influence on the so-called Gotha Program that the new, unified party had adopted in 1875. Privately heaping scorn on the platform, Marx scored its many political demands as naïve, containing “nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people’s militia, etc.”—a bizarre complaint, given the state’s attempts to thwart socialist organizations and the lack in Germany in 1875 of direct legislation and popular rights, never mind a people’s militia. At the same time, and in this fraught context, Marx reiterated his mature view that capitalism was in the midst of destroying itself, and that this would inevitably lead to “a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Marx seemed unable, or unwilling, to appreciate the actual political context in Germany—or to understand that the Gotha Program was not a partisan broadside like the Communist Manifesto but rather a pragmatic platform meant to attract the broadest possible support for a party that hoped to win parliamentary elections. Nor did Engels help to clarify matters fifteen years later, when he decided to publish Marx’s hitherto private notes on the Gotha Program, as well as republish The Civil War in France with a new introduction that concluded by endorsing the idea of a transitional dictatorship: “Gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
Having to contend with hallowed texts like these left the German Social Democratic Party in a bind. By 1891, when Engels endorsed the idea of (temporary) dictatorship, the German party had become avowedly “Marxist” and “revolutionary” in its orientation, a response in part to the government’s efforts to suppress it. But at the same time, its power as an electoral party was rapidly growing: in the 1871 Reichstag election, 124,000 Germans voted for the two socialist parties. In 1877, the united party got 493,000; under repression, the total fell to 312,000 in 1881; but thereafter growth was steady: from 550,000 votes in 1884 to 763,000 in 1887, to 1,429,000 in 1891, and so on. By 1912, the Social Democrats were Germany’s largest political party.
In order to attract members and mobilize popular support in election campaigns, the Social Democrats, like other political parties in this period, had found it helpful to create a structured organization, with party leaders whipping members into a disciplined parliamentary unit. But the German Social Democratic Party became renowned for the unrivaled efficiency of its operation. “A neatly structured hierarchy of professional politicians managed the party,” as one historian has put it, “by a huge apparatus extending from the party executive at the top to the shop leaders and block leaders at the bottom.” In effect, party leaders aspired to duplicate the command and control structure of the German army inside the wider social democratic movement.
This hierarchical organization, especially in a context where all orthodox Marxists paid lip service to a transitional “dictatorship,” raised questions about the relationship between means and ends—and also about the relationship between the party’s rhetoric and its real political form. Should a party that advocated democracy organize itself democratically? Did it matter if its rhetoric was revolutionary while its policies were reformist?
These discrepancies were a subject of Eduard Bernstein’s 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy. After reviewing the economic situation and the party’s actual activities, Bernstein concluded that its brand of socialism was in fact evolutionary, not “revolutionary,” and that its political structure was similarly pragmatic and well suited for campaigning to achieve parliamentary power. This was just as well, as capitalism was pretty clearly not going to self-destruct as Marx and Engels had forecast, but rather continue evolving in unpredictable ways.
Bernstein’s heresy was swiftly reproved by various party grandees, most notably Rosa Luxemburg, who castigated Bernstein as an “opportunist” in her 1900 polemic, Reform or Revolution. Unlike Marx in 1875, Luxemburg refrained from sneering at “the old democratic litany.” On the contrary, she emphatically agreed with Bernstein on the importance of the movement’s democratic aims: “He who would strengthen democracy should want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement.” But she just as strenuously rejected Bernstein’s renunciation of the idea of a heroic, transformative revolutionary class struggle as a key precondition for social democracy: “He who renounces the struggle for socialism renounces both the labor movement and democracy.”
These stirring sentiments were widely shared within the German Social Democratic Party. But it was far from obvious that the party itself, as it had developed by 1900, truly adhered either to a revolutionary strategy, or to democratic norms.
* * *
IN 1905, events in Russia abruptly transformed the debate over democracy and revolution within the German social democratic movement. The year had begun, dramatically enough, with a massacre in St. Petersburg, when police fired on a peaceful demonstration. The protesters’ demands—a democratically elected constituent assembly, civil liberties for all citizens, an eight-hour working day—fell short of asking for the tsar to step down, but their implications, in the context of the country’s rigid autocracy, were explosive.
In the months that followed, thousands of citizens in Russia’s cities flocked to join a variety of political parties and newly formed associations, including a Union of Unions formed out of existing professional associations, and an All-Russia Peasants’ Union. Actions taken included the circulation of petitions, peaceful demonstrations, labor strikes, peasant revolts, mutinies in the military, and armed insurrections in some cities and regions.
After months of inconclusive turmoil, the protesters in late summer began to converge on a common strategy—a general strike. It was, as one historian remarked, “a classic example of a momentous historical event that developed spontaneously.”
It began when a group of printers called a strike in Moscow on September 20. Their shop was near the university, so students joined them. Police intervened, and barricades were built. The printers of Moscow formed a municipal council of worker delegates to coordinate strike activity. Protesters became defiant. The army shot ten of them. In response, printers in St. Petersburg staged a strike of their own. Meanwhile, a newly formed Central Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers called for a strike of all railway workers, to start on October 4. Within a week, service into Moscow ground to a halt, snarling transport throughout the empire.
The Russian socialist parties and most of the revolutionary activists had been on the sidelines so far, deeming the democratic program of the strikers insufficiently radical, calling, as it did, for an amnesty for all strikers, a guarantee of political freedom, and the convocation of a legislative assembly elected on the basis of universal suffrage. Despite their indifference, the strike movement had by then developed momentum. First in St. Petersburg, and then in Moscow, it attracted not only industrial laborers and railroad workers but also telegraph operators, salesmen, the actors of the Imperial Theatres, municipal workers, even bank tellers. Students skipped classes. Doctors quit seeing patients. The Mariinsky Ballet stopped dancing.
“Neither gas nor electric lights work,” a Moscow newspaper reported on October 16. “The movement of trams, either horse-drawn or electrical ones, has not resumed. The telegraph system, telephones, and post offices do not work. A majority of the stores are closed.” Food was scarce, and water was only sporadically available. Law and order began to break down—and virtually every city in Russia was affected.
Observers had long wondered what might happen in such circumstances. In the run-up to the French Revolution, the French economist the Comte de Mirabeau had warned fellow aristocrats of his day against irritating “this people which produces everything and which to make itself formidable has only to become motionless.” Like some other advocates of the democratic control of industry by workers (who in France were called “syndicalists”), the French philosopher Georges Sorel had enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a vast general strike—at least he championed the “myth” of such a confrontation, though he was characteristically lukewarm about the general strike that had actually occurred in Russia, considering it too timid and exclusively political in its demands.
Workers on the ground in Russia took a quite different view of developments in the fall of 1905—and so, belatedly, did the various radical parties. In this case, one wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks, turned the moderate demand for democratic reforms into a call for “revolutionary self-government.” At the height of the general strike, they sent a cadre of their organizers into factories, in hopes of persuading workers to elect radical deputies to a citywide assembly, one deputy for every five hundred workers. Within a few days, 562 deputies had been chosen, the majority of them metalworkers, though a number of textile workers participated, along with deputies from a variety of other industries.
On October 17, the new group met in the building of the Free Economic Society, elected a provisional executive committee, and formally named itself Sovet rabocich deputatov (Soviet of Workers’ Deputies). “Soviet” is the Russian word for “council,” and the new body was, in effect, a strike committee, meant to coordinate the activities of the movement in St. Petersburg.
The same day, coincidentally, the tsar, reluctantly, under pressure from his closest advisers, agreed to issue a public statement, the so-called October Manifesto. This vowed, among other things, “to grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom based on the principles of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and union.” When the imperial decree was published on October 18, it was greeted with jubilation and widespread relief—but it was too little, too late.
Emboldened, the leaders of the Petersburg soviet on October 19 proclaimed freedom of the press, and also announced that workers would print only uncensored newspapers. They also announced (without a trace of irony) that official publications (which were subject to government censorship) would be banned and that newsstands that sold such papers would be destroyed.
No longer needed to coordinate a strike, the Petersburg soviet became a general assembly of the city’s workers, who debated and passed resolutions on a variety of political issues. Nothing like it had existed before in Russia. Swept along by the passion of the deputies and the rhetoric of an increasingly militant executive committee led by a spellbinding young Menshevik orator, Leon Trotsky, the soviet prepared for an armed confrontation with the government.
In the words of another Menshevik, “We were certain in our hearts that defeat was inevitable. But we were all young and seized with revolutionary enthusiasm and to us it seemed better to perish in a struggle than to be paralyzed without even engaging in one. The honor of the Revolution was at stake.”
The air went out of this balloon on December 3, when the police arrested the leaders of the Petersburg soviet, as part of a broader clampdown on dissident activities throughout Russia. Street fighting erupted in Petersburg and then Moscow, but by mid-December, armed government reinforcements had arrived to restore order in both cities. By the time the uprisings were crushed, thousands of people had died, entire neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble, whole villages laid waste—and almost every single socialist leader was either in jail or in exile.
* * *
THE PETERSBURG SOVIET may have been doomed from the start—but in defeat it joined the Paris Commune as an icon of “revolutionary self-government.”
What had begun as an ad hoc response to a local challenge had become, by 1906, a new focus for the hopes of radical democrats and socialists around the world—and a fresh demonstration of the potentially transformative power of self-governing trade unions, controlled by ordinary workers.
As even Eduard Bernstein had acknowledged, unions had the potential to be uniquely democratizing forms of association, especially when they were in conflict with industries that were organized hierarchically. For some anarchists and syndicalists, both in Germany and France, militant union activism seemed to offer a way of life with its own élan vital and distinctive goal of forging a new form of industrial democracy. For such people, the idea of the general strike became one way of imagining a bold alternative to both pusillanimous parliamentary maneuvering and to rigid trade union discipline.
In Russia, the two major wings of the Social Democratic Party scrambled to adjust. In November 1905, the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party held a conference to take stock and to decide how the governance of the party might be revised to dovetail more closely with the soviet aspiration to “revolutionary self-government.” The Mensheviks (from the Russian word for minority), like their rivals, the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for majority), both belonged to an outlawed party, forced to operate in secrecy. But buoyed by the apparent success of the Petersburg soviet, the Mensheviks passed a resolution at their conference that fall, stating that “the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party must be organized according to the principle of democratic centralism.” The resolution went on to specify that all party officials at all levels were to be chosen in open elections and hold office for a limited period, subject to recall. At the same time, the decisions of the party executive were to be binding on local party units, in this way reconciling democratic accountability with a clear locus of centralized authority.
A month later, the Bolsheviks followed suit, declaring, “The principle of democratic centralism is beyond dispute.” This came as a surprise, since the Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, had previously advocated a party structure that was closer to the conspiratorial secret societies favored by Blanqui than to anything imagined by Karl Marx or the German Social Democrats.
In Germany, the political situation was complicated by a divergence between the official views of the party leaders and the views of the trade union members affiliated with it. The party leaders almost universally expressed their fealty to the revolutionary catechism of Karl Marx. The vast majority of union members wanted to improve their material well-being—not risk it in an uprising.
A trade-union congress held in Cologne in the spring of 1905 had rejected the general strike as a tactic and even proscribed any discussion of it. Yet a few months later, at a party congress held in Jena in the fall of 1905, in the midst of the ferment in St. Petersburg, the party itself cautiously endorsed the use of a “mass work stoppage under certain circumstances.” At the same time, the leadership took pains to dissociate the new policy explicitly from events in Russia, which were “so abnormal” that they should not serve as any kind of model for Germany.
Rosa Luxemburg emphatically disagreed. As she argued in her 1906 pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, a “spontaneous,” self-organizing association of activists had achieved radical results in Russia with aggressively direct action and an unflinching willingness to countenance the use of violence, all without executing a plan handed down to them by party leaders. Describing the dynamics of what she called a “Mass Strike” (in order to distinguish it as sharply as possible from the kind of disciplined demonstrations favored by moderate socialists, as well as the kind of “general strike” championed by anarcho-syndicalists and already disavowed by the German trade unions), she sought to justify it on impeccably Marxist grounds: in Russia, the Mass Strike had aroused, and helped to enlighten, workers in the most productive way possible, through confrontation and conflict.
Without encouraging self-governing workers to rise to the occasion in such historic moments, the Social Democratic Party and its affiliated trade unions were in danger of creating a bureaucratic structure that produced collective passivity, as workers became accustomed to following orders rather than seizing opportunities. Instead, social democrats, in Luxemburg’s own words, should take heart from “the living picture of a genuine movement of the people, rising with elemental might out of the political situation and the extreme sharpening of class antagonisms, and unleashing itself in tempestuous mass struggles and mass strikes, political as well as economic.”
Luxemburg’s text had been commissioned by socialists in Hamburg, in hopes of influencing the resolutions of the next party congress, convened on September 23, 1906, in Mannheim.
Nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary: bowing to unrelenting pressure from the trade union rank and file, the Mannheim congress tacitly revoked the party’s previous support for the tactic of the Mass Strike.
Watching these events unfold, a young party member and German correspondent for the French syndicalist journal Mouvement socialiste, Robert Michels, reacted with bitter sarcasm. “The feeble embryo of the general strike has been killed off,” Michels reported from Mannheim. “The remnants of Marxism have been debased, despised, degraded to a life of boorish laziness.”
* * *
ROBERT MICHELS WAS perhaps the most acute observer of the European social democratic movements at the start of the twentieth century. For him, as for most of his allies and fellow travelers, whether reformists or revolutionaries, socialism was synonymous with democracy. Yet once Michels began to document the actual practices of the actually existing German Social Democratic Party, he felt that only one conclusion was possible: an institution ostensibly dedicated to the spread of democracy in all areas of social life was in fact controlled by a torpid bureaucracy run by a tiny elite, offering proof of what Michels, in a controversial series of scholarly monographs, and then a book, called “the iron law of oligarchy.”
Michels was born in 1876 to a prosperous family imbued with a cosmopolitan reverence for other cultures, particularly the French. His career was international: he studied not only in Germany (in Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, and Halle, where he received a doctorate in history) but also in Paris. In Turin, Italy, he joined the Partito Socialista Italiano and became active in its syndicalist faction (he later wrote articles for the Italian syndicalist journal Il Divenire Social). Unable to get a teaching job in Germany because he was a socialist, he moved to Italy in 1907 and joined the faculty at the University of Turin. There he came into contact with Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, Italian scholars both renowned for their studies of elites, and their conclusion that a tiny minority of business and political leaders wield power regardless of a state’s ostensibly democratic political practices.
At the same time, Michels had become friends with Max Weber, the era’s greatest social scientist. As a result of their correspondence from 1906 to 1915, we have a priceless record of how two astute observers viewed the modern struggle for political and social equality, and the divergent ways they evaluated its prospects.
At the time they met, Weber had recently published “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism,” his best-known essay. In this highly speculative work, Weber argued that the spread of religious asceticism was paradoxically associated with the rise, in the West, not just of the naked pursuit of wealth, especially in the United States, but also of a civilization that had become mechanical and “fossilized.” Fearful of a future he nevertheless believed to be unavoidable, Weber was fascinated by the fierce democratic convictions of his young syndicalist friend, whose hopes for a revolutionary new form of self-government were so different from his own jaundiced views about the inevitable centrality of domination in human affairs. He encouraged Michels to document the situation inside the German Social Democratic Party and helped him to get his essays published in the prestigious journal Weber coedited, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archives of Social Science and Social Policy).
The German Social Democratic Party as described by Michels exemplified two trends that Weber had highlighted in his own work: the increasing power of bureaucracy and the tendency of leaders to dominate those they led. Both tendencies had already been documented a few years earlier in the case of the American Democratic and British Liberal parties by the French sociologist Moisey Y. Ostrogorski. About the general trends and basic facts, Michels and Weber scarcely disagreed; their argument was almost entirely over how to evaluate them.
Michels upheld a Rousseauian ideal of democracy and assumed that a just society should be a direct democracy insofar as possible. Even though he acknowledged that such a norm was an ideal, rather than achievable in practice, he insisted, as Rousseau had in the final pages of Émile, that adhering to the ideal was the only way a just soul could preserve its autonomy and ethical independence in a world full of unjust institutions.
Weber disagreed, and explained why in a remarkable letter he sent to Michels on August 4, 1908. “Such notions as ‘will of the people’ and ‘genuine will of the people’ have long since ceased to exist for me; they are fictions,” he wrote, laying out two possible responses to acknowledging as much.
On the one hand, if someone like Michels nonetheless chooses to adhere stubbornly to such radical democratic ideals, then he must be prepared to embrace “a revolutionary-ethic” as uncompromising as those embodied by Christ and Tolstoy (“My kingdom is not of this world”).
On the other hand, if someone like Michels instead concedes that his democratic ideals are unrealistic in a modern technological civilization, then he will have to acknowledge as well “the sociological conditions underlying all ‘technologies,’ be they economic, political, or whatever (all of which would find their most highly developed expression precisely in collectivist societies).” In that case, Weber continues,
all talk of revolution is quite farcical. Any thought of abolishing the domination of man over man by any “socialist” social system whatsoever, or by any sophisticated form of “democracy” whatsoever, is a Utopia. Your own critique in this matter does not by any means go far enough. The moment anyone who wishes to live as a “modern individual,” in the sense of having a newspaper every day and railways and electric trams, etc., as soon as he gives up the position of revolutionary enthusiasm for its own sake, that is, revolutionary enthusiasm without any goal, indeed revolutionary enthusiasm for which no goal is even conceivable, he necessarily renounces all those ideals which hover darkly before your mind.
Weber concludes on a note that is both condescending and wryly self-effacing, reassuring Michels that he is “a basically honorable fellow” who will eventually come around to an adult perspective on these matters, even if Weber’s realism has “stamped me”—at least in the eyes of his correspondent—“as ‘bourgeois.’”
In the years that followed, Michels incorporated some of Weber’s critical comments as he completed his book on political parties and refined his notion of an “iron law of oligarchy” that applied to all forms of human association. When Political Parties was published in 1911, he dedicated the book to Weber.
But at no point did he, nor could he, abjure his democratic convictions. As Weber only partially understood, democracy was for Michels not a fiction but an inviolable matter of faith, precisely in Martin Luther’s sense (“Here I stand, I can do no other”).
Weber himself would subsequently rethink his own views on modern democracy, in part by analyzing a feasible type of modern regime that he classified as a “Führerdemokratie” (leadership democracy), which he associated with a form of plebiscitary executive rule that had first appeared in the United States (Andrew Jackson is an early example). These were demagogues who could surmount the bureaucratic tendencies of the parties they led, and inspire large masses of people to believe that they were united in a common cause, even if, in fact, the relationship between leader and led was one of pure domination. In effect, Weber could see the advantage of handing effective political power in avowed democracies to shrewd demagogues, just as Athens had handed power to Pericles, who was able, according to Thucydides, to harness productively the otherwise dangerous passions of unruly and uninformed citizens.
The views of Michels evolved, too, in even more convoluted ways, in the years that followed the appearance of Political Parties. One of the ironies of the evolution of the German Social Democratic Party was the way the most radical adherents of revolutionary self-government found themselves isolated from the rank-and-file party members. The radical democrats of the SPD de facto constituted an elite, a kind of puritan political elect, not unlike the Jacobin vanguard that had seized power for itself in the Parisian insurrection of May 31, 1793, electing in this way to keep alive democratic ideals that were being resisted by feckless, ignorant masses: the pious peasantry in the French case; the obdurate union workers in Germany. Michels had experienced this painful paradox firsthand at the Mannheim party conference in 1906.
Later, living in Italy, he had witnessed the rise of Mussolini and his Fascist Party. And like many other anarcho-syndicalists (including his former French comrade in arms, Georges Sorel), he was now drawn to the Fascist experiment, perhaps seeing in it what Sorel had seen in the French syndicalists, that is, “a willing minority,” a revolutionary community of latter-day saints, fervently devoted to an ideal of revolutionary self-government and “the myth of the general strike.”
In his lectures in the 1920s on political sociology, Michels suggested that Weberian categories, such as “charismatic legitimacy,” were an apt way to describe the highly emotional trust in a leader that Mussolini, for example, inspired. By then, Michels himself had joined the Fascist Party, convinced that a charismatic leader like Il Duce could help counteract the bureaucratic inertia of normal politics, and in this way advance the struggle for political and social equality, by inspiring the otherwise docile masses of ordinary citizens to follow his muscular lead.
He may even have agreed with the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s minister of public education, who declared “the Fascist State” to be “a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic State par excellence. The relationship between the State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses.”
* * *
MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS after Condorcet had drafted the world’s first democratic constitution, no nation in the world (with the possible exception of the United States, according to some observers) was any closer to realizing the democratic and radically egalitarian ideals that Condorcet had fought for. The French Revolution had ended in defeat, the Chartist movement had ended in defeat, and so had the Paris Commune and the Russian general strike of 1905.
If anything, by the time Michels delivered his Italian lectures on political sociology, the tide of modern politics seemed to be running in other directions. Russia had undergone a revolution in 1917—but in the course of it, the Bolsheviks had commandeered the urban soviets, in order to establish a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”
These developments came as no surprise to Robert Michels. He had already chronicled the ebbing of democratic hopes in Germany, and he knew all too well the allure of an avowedly revolutionary vanguard. And yet, he insisted (in a sentiment he never renounced) that the spirit of democracy was, in an almost mystical way, unconquerable and unyielding:
The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggled so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end by fusing with the old dominant class; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy. It is probable that this cruel game will continue without end.