WORKING WITH EVIDENCE

Voices of European Socialism

Among the ideologies and social movements that grew out of Europe’s Industrial Revolution, none was more important than socialism. The socialist dream of equality, justice, and community has an ancient pedigree, but the early currents of modern socialism took shape during the first quarter of the nineteenth century in the minds of various thinkers—the Englishman Robert Owen and the Frenchman Charles Fourier, for example—both of whom were appalled by the social divisions that industrial society generated. As an alternative, they proposed small-scale, voluntary, and cooperative communities, and their followers actually established a number of such experimental groups in Europe and the United States. But they seldom lasted long and never spread widely.

Far more important were the socialist ideas and movements inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, who disdained the voluntary communities as merely “utopian.” The historical significance of Marxist socialism was immense. It offered an exuberant and thoroughly modern praise of the Industrial Revolution, embracing the new science and technology that generated such amazing wealth. But Marx also provided a devastating critique of the social inequalities, the economic instability, and the blatant exploitation that accompanied this process. In short, Marx distinguished sharply between the technological achievements of industrialization and the capitalist socioeconomic system in which it occurred. Marxist thinking sharpened the social conflicts that characterized industrializing Europe by dramatically highlighting, and simplifying, those conflicts. On one side of this great divide was the wealthy industrial business class, the bourgeoisie, those who owned and managed the mines, factories, and docks of an industrializing Europe. On the other stood the proletariat, the workers in those enterprises—often impoverished, exploited, and living in squalid conditions.

In the political realm, Marx’s ideas inspired a variety of movements and parties that aimed to create the socialist society that he predicted. By the end of the nineteenth century, socialism had become a major element of European political and intellectual life, and it enjoyed a modest presence in the United States and Japan and among a handful of intellectuals elsewhere. For many people, those ideas also served as a way of understanding the world, perhaps akin to a religion, or as a substitute for religion. Marxism offered an alternative model for industrializing societies, imagining a future that would more fully realize the promise of modern industry and more equally distribute its benefits. Thus nineteenth-century Marxism provided the foundation for twentieth-century world communism as it took shape in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere.

The documents that follow illustrate some of the ways that Marxist socialism was expressed and debated within a nineteenth-century European context.