European Socialism

A Concise History with Documents

William Smaldone

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786611598
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This accessible text offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to European socialism, which arose in the maelstrom of the industrial and democratic revolutions launched in the eighteenth century. Striving for sweeping social, economic, cultural, and political change, socialists were a diverse lot. However, they were united by principles asserting the social and political equality of all people, ideas that won the adherence of millions and struck fear in the hearts of their numerous opponents. William Smaldone shows how, over the course of 200 years, socialists successfully promoted the democratization of European society and a more equitable division of wealth. At the same time, he illustrates how conflicts over the means of achieving their aims divided them into rival “socialist” and “communist” currents, a rift that undercut the struggle against fascism and helped lay the groundwork for Europe’s division during the Cold War. Although many predicted the demise of socialism as a potent force after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the rise of neo-liberal ideology, recent developments show that such a judgment was premature. The author argues that the growth of new socialist parties across Europe indicates that socialist ideas remain vibrant in the face of capitalism’s failure to solve chronic social and economic problems, especially following the deep global crisis that began in 2008. Combining an analytical narrative with a selection of primary texts and visual images, this book provides undergraduate students with a brief, readable history, including an overview of how socialist political movements have evolved over time and stressing the rich diversity that has characterized socialism’s foundations from its beginning.
This new edition brings this text up to date and examines the European socialist movement in the face of 21 st century challenges. It includes a new preface, including the 2017 American election, updated bibliographies, two new chapters and an afterword.

ONE

Introduction

SOCIALISM AND THE LEGACY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

On February 6, 2009, almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and eighteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Newsweek published a cover story that stunned many Americans. Titled “We Are All Socialists Now,” its author, Jon Meacham, claimed that the United States, despite almost three decades of free-market economics and a political culture highly suspicious of government, was well on its way to becoming a “modern European state.” Indeed, it was the conservative Republican president George W. Bush who had created the largest expansion of the welfare state in thirty years by passing a prescription drug program for the elderly, but even more dramatically, as the Great Recession of 2008 set in, he had effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries and pumped $700 billion into the collapsing financial sector. With the stock market plummeting, unemployment rising, and home foreclosures accelerating, Bush’s successor, centrist Democrat Barack Obama, planned even larger fiscal outlays to stem the decline. Economic realities demanded government action regardless of which party was in office, and the same thing was true for meeting the medical needs of an aging population, the challenge of global warming, and other pressing issues. The government’s enhanced role indicated that “we are heading in a more European direction” and toward a “mixed economy.”¹

Meacham did not argue that George W. Bush or Barack Obama was a “socialist,” a claim for which there is no evidence. Both men certainly would deny it and could point to predecessors, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who forcefully used state power to save capitalism from itself rather than to supplant it. But Meacham’s assertion that moving in a European direction means that we are becoming socialists raises important questions. Did not the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism in China mark the end of socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism? Of course, by “Europe,” Meacham is referring primarily to the richer industrial states of the West and North, but are these not capitalist societies in which private property, the market, and large transnational corporations flourish? Government’s role in the economies of these societies certainly is important, but does this mix of state and market make them “socialist”?

In a society in which many (if not most) people regard socialism and its ideologically close relative communism as something to be feared and combated, Meacham’s essay generated a good deal of debate. Unfortunately, much of the discussion was based more on myth than on a clear understanding of the history of European socialism and the movement’s role in the contemporary world. Matters became even more confusing after 2009. President Obama’s reform of the American health care system and his efforts to balance the federal budget by reducing spending and raising taxes on the richest Americans led some critics to label him a communist, a socialist, and also a fascist. Such accusations have little to do with the reality of Obama’s politics, but they illustrate well the continued strength of anticommunism and the depth of ideological confusion in American political discourse.

One of the aims of this book is to help clarify matters by providing a brief, accessible history of European socialism from the French Revolution to the present. By socialism, I am referring to a set of related but often conflicting political and social movements that share a particular set of ideals. Instead of a society dominated by competition among individuals and groups, socialists emphasize the importance of planning, cooperation, workplace democracy, and mutual responsibility. To establish social equality, they strive to replace the capitalist economy, based on the ownership of private property, with one based on social or public ownership. Socialists also have aimed to build a world in which social solidarity is achieved through the realization of individual freedom and legal and social equality. As it matured into a mass movement, socialism propagated an ideal of universal human emancipation that would overcome all forms of exploitation and discrimination based on class, race, religion, or gender.

Many of the basic tenets of socialist thought may be traced back to the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions of the ancient world. Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle (and, of course, Jesus Christ and his interpreters), all lived in societies wracked by violence, crass social inequality, and brutal exploitation and spent much of their time thinking about how to overcome these problems. In the Republic, for example, Plato suggests abolishing private property and the family to undercut the tendency for individuals and groups to selfishly accumulate wealth and power. In their place, he calls for the creation of a society led by virtuous philosopher kings. Old Testament prophets, too, were routinely indignant about the increasing social inequalities that accompanied foreign domination and Israel’s deepening integration into the cosmopolitan world of the eastern Mediterranean. They urged a return to a simpler, more virtuous life based on egalitarian and pastoral values. Many early Christians argued similarly, and their assertion that the poor, along with all social outcasts, could achieve salvation more easily than the rich flew in the face of the dominant Greco-Roman aristocracy’s aesthetic and moral norms and formed the ideological basis for early Christian communist societies, which eschewed private property and elevated community needs over those of the individual.

As the Christian church became the dominant institution of the Roman world, it gradually pushed these egalitarian tendencies into the background, but they never entirely disappeared, as the proliferation of monasteries and nunneries in the Middle Ages clearly illustrated. The contradiction between the wealth, power, and hierarchy in the church and its more egalitarian ideological roots was an ever-present tension that helped fuel the Reformation and also stimulated a wide range of thinkers to contemplate models of a better world. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), written firmly in the Christian tradition, stands out among many early modern works that juxtaposed an idealized, more perfect society with the less-than-perfect contemporary one.

Although it is important to recognize that socialist ideas have deep roots in the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, this work focuses on the development of modern socialism, the origins of which are located in three largely secular transformative movements of the eighteenth century: the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the rise of liberalism. The Enlightenment represented a new way of understanding the human condition based on the use of reason and the scientific method. Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, believed that the natural and social worlds could be understood and changed through the application of reason rather than religious faith. They assumed that history consisted of a series of progressive stages in which people steadily improved their understanding of the world and possessed universal, natural rights based on their humanity rather than belonging to any particular religion or social caste. There was great variation in the degree to which Enlightenment thinkers believed and applied these approaches, but their general outlook represented a new point of departure for those who wished to change the world. Religious beliefs would always remain an important motivating force among socialists, but they eventually took second place to a more secularized worldview.

Writing for European elites, philosophes such as Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat; 1689–1755), Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) incisively criticized a wide range of institutions and practices that they considered anachronistic and in need of reform. They condemned torture, religious fanaticism and intolerance, censorship, arbitrary government, and state control over the economy while promoting changes that they believed would benefit all people rather than just privileged elites. Many of their ideas form the basis of modern approaches to politics and economics, for example, that people should be governed by laws, not arbitrary rulers; that powers within government should be separated to limit the concentration of authority; that the people are sovereign, that is, that the government’s authority rests on the consent of the ruled or should at least serve their interests; that the government is responsible for the welfare of the population; and that individuals should be able to pursue their economic interests largely unfettered by state controls (laissez-faire).

The philosophes opposed the transformation of their societies through popular revolution. Indeed, many were mistrustful of the masses, viewed them as irrational and fickle, and, like Voltaire, preferred “enlightened despots” as the most effective agents of positive change. Still, by assuming that all individuals with enough education and material wherewithal could learn to assess their needs and those of the community, the philosophes laid the intellectual foundations for those who wished to challenge the established order. In that sense, as their ideas percolated through European society, they became revolutionary.

The intellectual energy unleashed by the Enlightenment intersected with the advent of the industrial revolution, which began in Great Britain around 1750, and with the rise of liberalism, which spawned political revolutions first in the United States in 1776 and then in France in 1789. This “Dual Revolution,” to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term, marked the beginning of the end of the old socioeconomic and political order and the advent of the modern world.

The term “industrial revolution” describes the transition from an economy in which most goods are produced on farms or by hand in small shops to one in which they are produced on a larger scale using increasingly sophisticated machinery. The onset of industrialization was part of a long process in which rising agricultural productivity, a growing population, and increasing commercial activity within and between states promoted the accumulation of capital surpluses that could be invested in manufacturing. Although many among Western Europe’s traditional elites participated in these developments, it was the middle classes—commonly referred to as the bourgeoisie—who benefited most. Increased commercial activity created new opportunities for merchants and manufacturers as well as for the many urban professionals who serviced them. The accumulation of wealth made it easier for rich bankers, merchants, and industrialists to climb the social ladder, and it also gave them the wherewithal to promote their interests in societies in which hitherto birth rather than merit had most easily opened the doors to power and wealth.

While industrialization increased the social and political stature of the middle classes, for workers in town and country it often meant economic dislocation and loss of status. The reorganization of agricultural and artisanal production and the introduction of machinery in one sector of the economy after another undercut the value of unskilled as well as artisanal labor and led to growing insecurity among wide swaths of the population. Some workers were able to take advantage of new opportunities that also arose, but for many the sweeping changes that accompanied industrialization fueled intense anxiety and spawned different forms of resistance, such as strikes, machine smashing, and unionization. As historians such as Peter Stearns have observed, by the early nineteenth century some workers and intellectuals in Western Europe also began seeking alternatives to the new industrial capitalist order. It was from this effort that “socialism,” which was both an ideology and a social and political movement, emerged.

An essential precursor to the rise of socialism, however, was liberalism. During the late eighteenth century, many middle-class people, along with some members of the aristocracy and clergy, had become sharply critical of the traditional social and political order and increasingly attracted to an ideology that embodied many of the Enlightenment’s core ideals. Devotees of what later came to be called “liberalism” were concerned primarily with the concept of liberty or freedom, which they saw as the key to individual fulfillment and social progress. Liberals chafed at what they perceived as arbitrary, irrational obstacles to liberty and strove for a society in which citizens enjoyed freedom of assembly, speech, and the press; elected representative government; and equality before the law. Liberals looked to government to protect private property and order, but they also desired freedom of trade and a system that encouraged rather than hindered individual competition. Liberals believed that material success rested on a person’s own ingenuity and diligence, and they generally ascribed failure to personal inadequacy rather than impersonal forces outside of an individual’s control.

Liberal ideals did not “cause” the French Revolution, but, as in the American colonies, they provided an intellectual framework and a clear set of goals for critics of the established order willing to take action. The absolutist French monarchy collapsed in 1789 because it had gradually lost legitimacy in the eyes of many of its subjects, who viewed it as rigid, arbitrary, and incompetent. Many of those anxious to reform or overthrow it stemmed from the rising middle class or bourgeoisie, as well as the peasant and working classes, but a substantial number also came from disgruntled elements of the privileged orders. By the end of the 1780s, the regime’s failure to grapple with long-standing and widespread poverty, its hesitation to contemplate major legal and social reforms, deepening fiscal insolvency, and looming famine precipitated a crisis from which the government could not extricate itself. Desperate to address the state’s impending bankruptcy, Louis XVI’s decision to summon the Estates General in the spring of 1789 inadvertently facilitated the mobilization of forces opposed to the status quo and opened the door to popular upheaval.

From 1789 until 1793, France experienced an increasingly radical revolution in which successive elected governments, pressured by the rural and urban masses, carried out fundamental and largely “liberal” reforms. Public anger initially centered on the King, whose actions in the summer of 1789 fueled open rebellion in Paris, culminating in the seizure of the Bastille on July 14. Violence soon spilled over into the countryside, too, as long-suffering peasants vented their pent-up fury at the aristocracy by burning down chateaux and destroying manorial records delineating their feudal dues. On August 4, radical elements of the Estates General, reorganized as the National Assembly, abolished the feudal order on which the Old Regime rested. With the monarchy and formerly privileged classes in retreat, France was in the throes of a full-blown political and social revolution.

The National Assembly quickly followed up its abolition of feudalism by promulgating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which established the general principles of the new order. Derived from Enlightenment thought, classical models, and the ideas embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, this powerful document asserted that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” It stressed the centrality of individual freedom, of civic equality, and of the right of free expression on all matters, including religion. Sovereignty derived from “the nation” made up of individual citizens endowed with rights regardless of social class. Following Rousseau, the Declaration described law as “the expression of the General Will” and foresaw a representative legislative system. Individuals were no longer subject to arbitrary arrest, nor could the state take their “inviolable” and “sacred” property unless public necessity required it. Focusing on the legal rather than material equality of individuals, the Declaration enshrined the liberty to pursue wealth and status regardless of birth. Although it referred frequently to “mankind,” the document was silent about the status of women and slaves.

Over the next two years, the National Assembly carried out a program of extensive reforms in which its own power superseded the monarch’s. The state seized the Catholic Church’s extensive landholdings, abolished the religious orders, and transformed Church officials into salaried public servants subject to government control. It granted citizenship and civil rights to Protestants and Jews and abolished slavery in France though not in the colonies. In the economic sphere, it rationalized and liberalized the tax code for the whole country and swept away most impediments to free enterprise by abolishing guilds and other corporate or monopolistic entities thought to impede commerce.

The Constitution of 1791 formalized the implementation of these changes and created a constitutional monarchy. The new system was more democratic than the old one, but its reforms benefited the bourgeoisie more than any other group. It gained not only from the economic legislation promoting commercial activity and breaking the power of the craft guilds but also from gender and property qualifications that excluded most people from the franchise. Thus, wealthier males became “active” citizens who dominated the legislative process, while women and the poor were relegated to “passive” status. The language of the constitution implied that the people had the right and duty to overthrow any government that did not serve its citizens. Many would remember this as it became clear that, despite the revolution’s call for universal “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” a new system of wealth-based privilege was emerging.

Indeed, as political and economic conditions declined, mass unrest brought more radical changes. The royal family’s failed effort to flee in June 1791 strengthened the hand of republican forces in the new Legislative Assembly elected that fall. Organized in the Jacobin Club, republican leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) and Georges-Jacques Danton (1759–1794) believed that only a republic could fully guarantee the people’s liberties. By April 1792, the republican “left” (so-called due to the location of its seats in the Legislative Assembly) was stronger that the monarchist “right” and was prepared to launch a revolutionary war against France’s monarchist neighbors, who had threatened to intervene on behalf of the King. A string of defeats early in the war, coupled with soaring bread prices and fear of domestic counterrevolutionaries, sparked new waves of revolutionary action that resulted in the mobilization of volunteers for the front, the replacement of the Parisian city government with a new radical authority known as the Commune, the violent seizure of the royal family, and in the fall of 1792, the convocation of a new national assembly, the Convention. This body, elected by universal manhood suffrage, abolished the monarchy, tried and executed the King, and wrote a new, far more democratic constitution granting the franchise to all adult males.

Under the pressure of foreign wars, civil war, and a deepening economic crisis, the Jacobins split into two warring factions. Robespierre’s radical Montagnards pushed for political equality regardless of social origin, supported economic measures to protect the poor, and demanded the centralization of government authority against domestic and foreign opponents; the more moderate “Girondins,” headed by Danton, resisted the concentration of power in the national government and advocated a more laissez-faire approach to the economy. Backed by the Parisian poor, by 1793 the Montagnards dominated the Convention and implemented mass terror against perceived enemies of the revolution, including the Girondins. Governing through special committees, such as the infamous Committee of Public Safety, they never put the Constitution of 1793 into practice. Nevertheless, its passage marked the high point of the revolution’s democratic tide, and as conservative forces began to reassert themselves the following year, it became a polestar for many radicals. Although it did not resolve the problem of economic inequality, many saw it as an important political step in that direction.

Thus, the industrial and democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century embodied deep contradictions. Industrialization made possible the creation of more wealth and the promise of a richer life for all, but it also led to increasing social insecurity and widespread distress. The French Revolution, like its American predecessor, inspired g...