Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
The working class is concentrated by the development of capitalism itself into a force that can fight back against capitalism:
With the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery eliminates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere wages are reduced to the same low level…Commercial crises make the wages of workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious.
Out of this situation develop ‘combinations’—trade unions—which begin the organisation of workers into a class. Even if this is:
…continually being upset by the competition of workers among themselves…The essential condition for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.
These passages, like those on the development of large-scale industry and the world market, were a projection into the future of developing trends rather than an empirically accurate account of Europe—let alone Africa, Asia and the Americas—in 1847. In France and Germany the industrial working class was still a small proportion of the population, not ‘the immense majority acting in the interests of the immense majority’ (as another passage described it). In Germany even in 1870 factory workers were only 10 percent of the total workforce. And although they were much more than this in Britain in 1848, there were still large numbers working on the land, in small workshops or as servants. What Marx and Engels saw clearly, however, was that as capital conquered the globe this class would grow.
Their picture is sometimes criticised because it assumed that the growth would be of stereotypical ‘proletarians’ in large industry. I will return to this point later, in dealing with the history of the last quarter of the 20th century. Here it should be said that although this might have been their assumption, based on Engels’ experience of Manchester and of Chartism, it is not built into the logic of their argument. The growth of wage labour in place of peasant or artisan production does not in itself necessitate the growth of one particular form of wage labour. All it implies is that an ever greater proportion of the social workforce will depend for a livelihood on selling their capacity to work (what Marx was later to call their ‘labour power’). And the conditions and wages for their work will be determined, on the one hand by the competitive drive of capital, and on the other by the degree to which they fight back against capital. It is besides the point whether they work in factories, offices or call centres, whether they wear overalls, white collars or jeans. Seen in these terms, it is difficult to fault the logic of Marx and Engels’ argument at a time when workers of all sorts are told that their livelihoods depend upon the success of firms or countries in ‘global competition’.
Marx and Engels half recognised at the end of the
Manifesto
the still undeveloped character of capitalism globally. ‘The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution,’ they wrote. It was, they added, ‘bound to be carried out under much more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England in the 17th century and France in the 18th century’ and to be ‘but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’.
About the imminence of revolution they were to be proved completely correct, as they were about the much greater role workers would play in this than in previous revolutions. What they could not foresee was the way the bourgeoisie would react to this much greater role.
I spent the whole afternoon wandering Paris and was particularly struck by two things: first the uniquely and exclusively popular character of the recent revolution and of the omnipotence it had given the so-called people—that is to say, the classes who work with their hands—over all other classes. Secondly how little hatred was shown from the first moment of victory by the humble people who had suddenly become the sole mentors of power…
Throughout the whole day in Paris I never saw one of the former agents of authority: not a soldier, nor a gendarme, nor a policeman; even the National Guard had vanished. The people alone bore arms, guarded public buildings, watched, commanded and punished; it was an extraordinary and terrible thing to see the whole of this huge city in the hands of those who owned nothing.
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These were the words of the historian Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about 25 February 1848. The French king, Louis Philippe, had just abdicated and fled the country. A protest march by republican students and sections of the middle class had clashed with police outside the ministry of foreign affairs, igniting a spontaneous rising in the poorer, eastern part of Paris which had been the centre of
sans-culottes
agitation in the revolution of half a century before. Crowds chanting ‘Vive la réforme’ burst through the lines of troops and swarmed through the palaces and the assembly buildings. Opposition politicians threw together a government headed by Lamartine. To ensure it gained the support of the masses, they included a socialist reformer, Louis Blanc, and, for the first time in history, a manual worker, Albert.
The revolution in France was a bomb beneath every throne in Europe. There had already been a brief civil war in Switzerland the previous December and a rising in Sicily in January. Successful uprisings now followed in Vienna, Milan, Venice, Prague, Berlin, and the industrial towns and state capitals of virtually every German principality. In every city, protests led off by the liberal middle classes culminated in huge crowds defeating attacks by the army and the police and taking over palaces and government buildings. Reactionary politicians like Metternich, the architect of counter-revolution in 1814 and 1815, now fled for their lives. Monarchs and aristocrats remained behind, but only kept their positions by professing agreement with liberal constitutions. Absolutism seemed dead virtually everywhere. Radical democratic reforms seemed achieved—universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, the right to trial by jury, the end of aristocratic privilege and feudal payments.
But it was not to be. By the summer the monarchs and aristocrats were regaining their confidence. They began attacking rather than bowing before the democratic movements and, in the late autumn, crushed the movement in key centres like Berlin, Vienna and Milan. By the summer of 1849 counter-revolution was once more victorious throughout the whole continent.
The revolutions in February and March had been victorious because risings involving the mass of small traders, artisans and workers had beaten back armies and police officered by monarchists and aristocrats. But the governments and parliaments put in place by them were composed mainly of sections of the propertied middle classes. So the parliament elected for the whole of Germany (including German-speaking Austria) which met in Frankfurt in May contained no fewer than 436 state employees (led by administrative and judicial officials), 100 businessmen and landowners, 100 lawyers and 50 clergymen.
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Such people were not prepared to put their lives, or even their careers, at risk by revolutionary action against the old authorities. What is more, they regarded the masses who had brought them to power as a ‘disorderly rabble’, quite as terrifying as the old ruling class.
The same fear afflicted the new governments and parliamentarians as had held back the ‘Presbyterians’ in the English Revolution, the ‘moderates’ of New York and Pennsylvania in the American Revolution, and the Girondins in the French Revolution. But it did so on a greater scale. No revolutionary middle class force comparable to the ‘Independents’ or Jacobins emerged to impose its will on the rest.
The growing islands of industry across western Europe meant the capitalist class was bigger and more powerful in 1848 than it had been at the time of the French Revolution. Alongside it there was a growing middle class of intellectuals, professors, teachers and civil servants who looked to England as their economic model and the unified national state established by the French Revolution as their political model. In Hungary and Poland even sections of the nobility agitated for national independence from Austria and Russia.
But the other side of the growth of the constitutional-minded, or even republican, middle class was the growth of the working class. Most production might still be in small workshops where artisans employed a few journeymen, or in the homes of weavers and spinners working for a ‘putting-out’ merchant. Nonetheless, conditions were increasingly subject to the debilitating and unifying impact of the capitalist market. In Paris, for instance:
In substantial parts of artisan manufacture, effective control of production was passing to merchants who organised sales and controlled credits. Workers in these trades and even the master artisans who employed them, as well as factory workers, were more and more conscious of external forces governing their lives, all seeking to make them more efficient at all costs. These forces were commonly identified with ‘capitalism’ or ‘financial feudalism’.
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Similar conditions were present, to a greater or lesser extent, in Berlin, Vienna and the industrial towns of the Rhineland.
The bitterness intensified after 1845 as harvest failures interacted with the ups and downs of the market economy to produce a great economic crisis from Ireland in the west—where a million starved to death as grain was exported to pay for rents—to Prussia in the east. Hunger, rising prices and massive levels of unemployment fuelled the discontent which flared into revolution in February and March 1848. Artisans and workers joined and transformed the character of the street protests organised by the middle class constitutionalists and republicans. Peasants in regions like the Black Forest rose up against feudal dues and aristocratic landowners as they had not done since the Peasant War of 1525.
The scale of the discontent sent a shiver of fear down the spine of every capitalist, big or small. For the workers and peasants were not just concerned with democratic constitutions or feudal privilege. They were demanding living standards and conditions that challenged capitalist profits and capitalist property. The propertied liberals would unite with their traditional opponents, the propertied aristocrats and monarchists, to oppose this.
There were already signs of this in Germany and Austria before the blood was dry from the March fighting. The new governments restricted membership of the National Guard to the middle class, left the officer corps of the old armies untouched, conciliated with the old monarchist state bureaucracies, and ordered the peasants to stop their risings against feudal dues. The Prussian parliament in Berlin spent its time drawing up a constitutional agreement with the Prussian king, and the supposed all-German parliament in Frankfurt did little more than argue over its own rules of procedure. Neither parliament did anything to provide a focus for people’s revolutionary aspirations or to stop aristocratic reaction beginning to regroup and rearm its forces.
The June fighting
It was in Paris, however, that the decisive turning point in events occurred.
The workers and artisans who had played the decisive role in overthrowing the old order in February had economic and social grievances of their own which went far beyond the liberal-democratic programme of the government. In particular they demanded work at a living wage.
They were not a formless mass. In the years since 1830 clubs committed to social reform (led by people like Louis Blanc) and secret societies which combined social demands with Jacobin insurrectionism (led by people like August Blanqui) had gained a following. Their ideas were discussed in cafes and workshops. ‘Republican and socialist newspapers which stressed the need for representative government as a means of ending insecurity and poverty proved increasingly attractive as the prosperous early years of the 1840s gave way to a period of intense crisis’.
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The government formed amid the armed crowds on 24-25 February was in no condition to ignore the demands they raised. It met ‘under pressure from the people and before their eyes’ with continual ‘processions, deputations, manifestations’.
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Thus, it decreed a one and a half hour reduction in the working day and promised employment for all citizens. It set up ‘national workshops’ to provide work for the unemployed, and Louis Blanc, as minister of labour, established a ‘labour commission’ in the Luxembourg Palace where ‘between 600 and 800 members—employers’ representatives, workmen’s representatives, economists of every school’ became ‘a virtual parliament’.
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At first the propertied classes did not dare raise any complaint about this. The tone changed once the immediate shock of 24-25 February had passed. Financiers, merchants and industrialists set about turning middle class opinion against the ‘social republic’. They blamed the deepening economic crisis on the concessions to the workers and the national workshops (although they were, in fact, little better than the English workhouses).
The bourgeois republicans in the government concurred. They rushed to placate the financiers by recognising the debts of the old regime, and they imposed a tax on the peasantry in an attempt to balance the budget. They ensured the National Guard was dominated by the middle classes, and recruited thousands of the young unemployed into an armed force, the
Gardes mobiles
, under their own control. They also called elections for a Constituent Assembly at the end of April. This gave the Parisian artisans and workers no time to spread their message outside the capital and ensured the election campaign among the peasantry was dominated by landowners, lawyers and priests who blamed the new taxes on ‘red’ Paris. The new assembly was dominated by barely disguised supporters of the rival royal dynasties
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and immediately sacked the two socialist ministers.
Then on 21 June the government announced the closure of the national workshops and gave the unemployed a choice between dispersal to the provinces and enrolment in the army.
Every gain the workers and artisans had made in February was taken from them. They saw no choice but to take up arms again. The next day they threw up barricades throughout the east of Paris and did their utmost to press towards the centre. The republican government turned on them with the full ferocity of the armed forces at its disposal—up to 30,000 soldiers, between 60,000 and 80,000 members of the National Guard, and up to 25,000
Gardes mobiles
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, all under the command of General Cavaignac. Civil war raged throughout the city for four days, with the better-off western areas pitted against the poorer eastern districts.
On one side, supporting the ‘republican government’, were the monarchists of both dynasties, the landowners, the merchants, the bankers, the lawyers and the middle class republican students.
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On the other were some 40,000 insurgents, ‘drawn mainly from the small-scale artisan trades of the city—from building, metalwork, clothing, shoes and furniture, with the addition of workers from some modern industrial establishments such as the railway engineering workshops, as well as a large number of unskilled labourers and a not inconsiderable number of small businessmen’.
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Each centre of resistance was dominated by a particular trade—carters in one place, dock workers in another, joiners and cabinet makers in a third. As Frederick Engels noted, it was not only men who fought. At the barricade on the Rue de Clery, seven defenders included ‘two beautiful young
grisettes
[poor Parisian women]’, one of whom was shot as she advanced alone towards the National Guard carrying the red flag.
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The rising was crushed in the bloodiest fashion. A National Guard officer, the artist Meissonier, reported:
When the barricade in the Rue de la Martellerie was taken, I realised all horror of such warfare. I saw defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground strewn in corpses, the earth red with blood.
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The number of dead is not known, but 12,000 people were arrested and thousands deported to French Guyana.
The return of the old order
The defeat of the Parisian workers gave heart to the opponents of revolution everywhere. The German
Junker
(noble) Bismarck told the Prussian National Assembly, it was ‘one of the most fortunate events in the whole of Europe’.
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In the German kingdoms and principalities the authorities began dissolving left wing and republican clubs, prosecuting newspapers and arresting agitators. In Italy the Austrians inflicted a defeat on the Piedmont army and regained control of Milan, while the king of Naples established military rule. The Austrian general Windischgraetz imposed a state of siege in Prague after five days of fighting with the Czech middle class, students and workers. He occupied Vienna in the face of bitter popular resistance at the end of October, leaving 2,000 dead, and then moved against Hungary. A week later the Prussian king dissolved the Constituent Assembly in Berlin. The ‘moderate’ majority in the Frankfurt parliament responded to this openly counter-revolutionary measure by offering to proclaim him emperor of Germany in March—an offer which he rejected before sending his army into south Germany to crush further revolutionary moves.
The great hopes of the spring of 1848 had given way to desperation by the beginning of 1849. But the wave of revolution was not yet dead. The democratic associations and workers’ clubs still had a much higher active membership than the conservative and ‘moderate’ organisations. The spring saw successful risings in parts of the Rhineland, the Palatinate, Dresden, Baden and Württemberg, with rulers running away just as they had the previous March. But many people still looked to the Frankfurt parliament to give a lead—and this it was not prepared to do. The revolutionary army which formed in the south (with Frederick Engels as one of its advisers) was thrown on to the defensive, defeated in battle and forced by the advancing Prussian army to flee across the border into Switzerland. The Hungarians led by Kossuth were finally crushed when the Austrian emperor received military assistance from the Russian tsar. The king of Naples reconquered Sicily in May, and revolutionary nationalists who had seized control of Rome and driven out the pope were forced to abandon the city after a three month siege by the armed forces of the French republic.