35 The rise of socialism

The Industrial Revolution created a new ruling class of bourgeois industrial capitalists. It also created a burgeoning urban working class, who labored in often dangerous conditions for pitiful wages and who were forced to live in squalor and extreme insecurity.

There were a number of responses to the oppressed and impoverished condition of the working class. Some middle- and upper-class philanthropists campaigned for legislation to improve working conditions. Many workers attempted to band together to form trade unions, to agitate for higher wages and healthier workplaces. Attempts to limit the power of the new labor movement, or to crush it entirely, prompted many to call for political action, either through the democratic process, or through violent revolution.

Trade unionism Trade unions have their origins in the medieval craft guilds, societies that regulated entry into—and standards within—different skilled artisanal trades. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution many artisans, unable to compete with larger concerns, were obliged to surrender their independence and go to work in factories. When they attempted to band together to campaign for better wages and conditions, they met with vehement opposition from employers. Governments, alarmed by the bloody upheavals of the French Revolution, interpreted any such activity on the part of the working classes as threatening not only property rights, but also the safety of the realm. As a result, trade unions were widely banned—in Britain, for example, by the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, and in France by Napoleon’s penal and civil codes, which reined back the universal human rights declared by the French Revolutionaries.

Only gradually through the 19th century was legislation against trade unionism relaxed in a number of countries, and the formation of craft unions was followed by new unions that organized large numbers of unskilled workers. In places such as Russia, however, trade unionists had to operate clandestinely, while in the USA employers used the full weight of the law, backed by armed thugs and even troops, to break strikes.

“A political combination of the lower classes as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude.”

Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867

Democratic vs revolutionary socialism As trade unions struggled to defend the interests of their members, many trade unionists began to think that only a complete transformation of society would bring about justice and equality. They drew on the ideas of socialism, a word first coined by the French theorist Henri de Saint Simon (1760–1825), who envisaged an industrial state freed from poverty, and in which science would replace religion. Also influential was the British philanthropist Robert Owen (1771–1825), who set up a model industrial community at New Lanark in Scotland, with improved housing and Britain’s first infant school, and went on to set up a number of self-sustaining cooperative communities, such as that at New Harmony, Indiana, established in 1825.

Fundamental to the socialist vision was that society and the economy should be ordered not so that the individual should be free to follow his or her own course, but for the collective good. Whereas the free-market liberal believed that every human had it within their own power to improve their lot, the socialist believed that the fate of individual humans is largely determined by their environment, and that the state should intervene to ensure, at the very least, equality of opportunity and reasonable standards of living, via the provision of education, health care, minimum wages, pensions, unemployment benefit and so on.

Improving working conditions

As economic liberalism—with its watchwords of free enterprise and free trade—spread amongst the commercial and industrial middle classes, any attempt to regulate business was regarded by many as tyrannical government interference. Nevertheless, in some countries legislation was introduced to end the worst abuses. In Britain, for example, the Factory Act of 1802 made it illegal to oblige children under fourteen to work more than eight hours a day. Further legislation on working hours and health and safety followed in Britain and later in other countries (a maximum twelve-hour day was introduced in France in 1848, for example), increasingly as a result of campaigning by trade unions. In the USA, in contrast, there was strong ideological resistance to such regulation, summed up in 1905 by a Supreme Court judge who stated that “limiting the hours grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their living” were “mere meddlesome interferences” with individual rights. There were exceptions: the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford voluntarily reduced the working hours in his factories, arguing that if workers had no leisure time they would not buy his products.

More radical socialists, following Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95), the founders of modern communism, believed that social justice could only be achieved by bringing the whole of the means of production—industry, land, roads, railways—into collective ownership. Marx and Engels, who issued their Communist Manifesto in 1848, held that history is determined by blind economic forces and the struggle between the classes. The Industrial Revolution had seen the overthrow of feudalism and the power of the landed aristocracy. In turn, they predicted, the new capitalist bourgeoisie that had achieved power would be violently overthrown by the oppressed urban proletariat, who would introduce socialism as a stage before the state “withered away,” to be replaced by perfect communism. This ideal society, where everybody lived in harmony, would be based on the premise: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

The way socialist movements developed in different countries depended largely on the attitude of governments. In places such as Britain, where trade-union activity was increasingly tolerated and where by the end of the 19th century the vote had been extended to the majority of the male population, it was possible for socialist parties—such as the British Labour Party (which is said to owe more to Methodism than to Marx)—to achieve parliamentary representation for the labor movement. But in more repressive countries such as tsarist Russia and imperial Germany, it seemed to many that the Marxist revolutionary approach was the only option.

Today, although communist ideology has long been abandoned in Russia and elsewhere, the principles of democratic socialism still have some influence around the world. Even in countries with center-right governments, the state still has an enormous stake in the economy and society—in everything from maintaining the roads to regulating utility prices and running the education system—to an extent that would have been undreamed of even two centuries ago.

the condensed idea

The ideas of socialism have transformed even capitalist societies