185777813 E H Carr Studies in Revolution

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#./'SAINT-SIMON

PLEKHANOV


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E. H. CARR

STUDIES

IN

REVOLUTION

The Universal Líbrary

GROSSET & DUNLAP

NEW YORK

iltô


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F I R S T P U B L I S H E D B Y M A C M I L L A N & G O . L T D . ,1950

U N I V E R S A L L I B R A R Y E D I T I O N ,1964

B Y A R R A N G E M E N T W I T H M A C M I L L A N & C O . L T D . , L O N D O N

P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A


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C O N T E N T SPA C E

1 . S a i n t - S i m o n : T h e P r e c u r s o r ( 1 9 4 9 ) i

2 . T h e G o m m u n i s t M a n i f e s t o ( 1 9 4 7 ) 1 5

3 . P r o u d h o n : R o b i n s o n C r u s o e o f S o c i a l i s m ( 1 9 4 7 ) 3 8

4 . H e r z e n : A n I n t e l l e c t u a l R e v o l u t i o n a r y ( 1 9 4 7 ) 5 6

5 . L a s s a l l e m e e t s B i s m a r c k ( 1 9 4 6 ) 7 2

6 . S o m e N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y R u s s i a n T h i n k e r s ( 1 9 4 7 ) 8 8

7 . P l e k h a n o v : F a t h e r o f R u s s i a n M a r x i s m ( 1 9 4 8 ) 1 0 5

8 . T h e C r a d l e o f B o l s h e v i s m ( 1 9 4 8 ) 1 2 0

9 . L e n i n : T h e M a s t e r B u i l d e r ( 1 9 4 7 ) 1 3 4

10. S o r e l : P h i l o s o p h e r o f S y n d i c a l i s m ( 1 9 4 7 ) 1 5 2

11 . M r . G a l l a c h e r a n d t h e C P G B (1 94 9 ) 16 6

12 . T h e R e v o l u t i o n t h a t F a i l e d ( 1 9 4 9 ) 1 8 1

13 . S t a l i n : ( i ) T h e R o a d t o P o w e r (19 46 ) 200

14. S t a u n : (2) T h e D i a l e c t i c s o f S t a l i n i s m ( 1 9 4 9 ) 2 11


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P R E F A C E

T h e articles out of which this book has been madeappeared in the Literary Supplement o f The Times andI am indebted to the Editor of the Supplement for

kind permission to republish th em : I have alsoincorporated in “ The Revolution that Failed ”some passagcs from a talk given in the Third Pro-gramme of the British Broadcasting Corporation. A few topical references have been adjusted, a fewcases of overlapping removed, and a few correctionsmade to meet criticisms, public or private. Other- wise the articles appear substantially unchanged ,*the year o f original publication is appended to eachin the list o f contents. O f the two articles on Stalin with which the volume ends, the first was the earliestÍtem in the collection to be written, the second thelast.

E. H. CARR


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1

S A I N T S I M O N : T H E P R E C U R S O R

He n r i d e S A I N T - S I M O N was an in tellectualeccentric. He was a member of an aristo

cratic family who abandoned his title ofComte witha dramatic gesture in the French Revolution andspent most o f his life in penury ; a rationalist anda moralist; a man of letters who never succeededin writing or completing any coherent expositiono f his ideas; and, after his death, the eponymous

father of a sect devoted to the propagation of histeaching, which enjoyed a European reputation.Saint Simon lacked most of the traditional attributeso f the great man. It is never easy to distinguish between what he him self thought and the muchmore coherent body of doctrine, some of it astonishingly penetrating, some not less astonishingly silly, which the sect built up round his name. It is certainthat posterity has read back into some o f his aphorisms a greater clarity and a greater significance thanhe himself gave to them. But the study of SaintSimon often seems to suggest that the great FrenchRevolution, not content with the ideas which in-spired its leaders and which it spread over thecontemporary world, also projected into the future


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a fresh ferment o f ideas which, working beneath thesurface, were to be the main agents of the social

and political revolutions of one hundred years tocome.O f these ideas Saint Simon provided the first

precipitation on the printed page. No one who writes about him can avoid applying to him the word“ precursor ” . H e was the precursor o f socialism,the precursor of the technocrats, the precursor of

totalitarianism — all these labels fit, not perfectly, but, considering the distance o f time and theoriginality of the conceptions as first formulated,

with amazing appositeness. Saint Sim on died at theage o f sixty five in 1825, on the eve o f a period o funprecedented material progress and sweeping socialand political change; and his writings again and

again gave an uncanny impression of one who ha.shad a hurried preview of the next hundred years ofhistory and, excited, confused and only half under-standing, tried to set down disjointed fragments of what he had seen. He is the type o f the great manas the reflector, rather than the makcr, of history.

The approach of Saint Simon to the phenomenono f man in society already has the modern stamp. In1783, at the age of twenty three, he had recordedhis life’s am bition: “ Faire un travail scientifiqucutile à rh um an ité” . Saint Simon marks the transitionfrom the deductive rationalism of the eighteenth tothe inductive rationalism o f the nineteenth cen tury—from metaphysics to Science. He inaugurates thecult o f Science and o f the scientific method. Herejects equally the “ divine order ” o f the theo

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logians and the “ natural order ” o f Ad am Smithand the physiocrats. In his first published writing,

Leltres d’un habitant de Genéve, he enunciated theprincipie that “ social relations must be consideredas physiological phenomena O r again : “ Thequestion of social organization must be treatedabsolutely in the same way as any other scientificquestion The term “ sociology ” was apparentlythe invention of Saint Simon’s most famous pupil,once his secretary, Auguste Com te. But the ideacarne from the master himself and was the essenceof his philosophy.

Another o f Sain t Sim on’s pupils, AugustinThierry, was to become a famous his tor ian ; andthere is in Saint Simon not only an embryonicsociology, but an embryonic theory of history whichlooks forward to a whole school from Buckle toSpengler. History is a study o f the scientific lawsgoverning human development, which is dividedinto “ époques organiques ” and into “ époquescritiques ” ; and the continuity of past, present andfuture is clearly established. “ History is socialphysics.” No doubt later nineteenth century andtwentieth century theories of history owe more to

Hegel than to Saint Simon. But they owe most o fall to Karl Marx, who combined the metaphysicalhistoricism of Hegel with Saint Simon’s sociologicalutilitarianism.

But perhaps Saint Simon’s most original insight— original enough a t a moment when the FrenchRevolution had consecrated the emancipation and

enthronement of the individual after a struggle of

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three centuries — was his visión o f the comingresubordination o f the individual to society. Saint

Simon, though no partisan o f revolution in principie(he once said flatly that dictatorship was preferableto revolution), never abated his enthusiasm for therevolution which had overthrown the ancien régime. “ L a féodalité ” was always the enemy ; incidentally,it may well be due, directly or indirectly, to SaintSimon that “ feudalism ” became M arx’s chosen

label for the pre bourgeois order o f society. Nearlyall Saint Simon’s contemporaries, and most westernEuropean thinkers for at least two generations tocome, took it for granted that liberalism was thenatural antithesis, and therefore the predestinedsuccessor, o f “ feudalism Saint Simon saw noreason for the assumption. He was not a reactionary,nor even a conserva tive; but he was not a liberaleither. He was something different — and new.

It was clear to Saint Simon that, after Descartesand Kant, after Rousseau and the Declaration ofthe R ights of M an, the cult o f individual liberty, o fthe individual as an end in himself, could go nofarther. The re are some astonishingly modernechoes in a collection of essays under the title

LTndustrie, dating from 1816 :T h e Declaration o f the Rights o f M an which has been

regarded as the solution of the problem of social liberty was in reality only the sta temen t o f the problem.

A passage o f Du systéme industriei, in which SaintSimon a few years later sought to estabhsh the new

historical perspective, is worth quoting in fu ll :



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The maintenance of liberty was bound to be anobject of primary attention so long as the feudal andtheological system still had some power, because thenliberty was exposed to serious and continuous attacks.But to day one can no longer have the same anxiety inestablishing the industrial and scientific system,, sincethis system must necessarily, and without any directconcern in the matter, bring with it the highest degreeof liberty in the temporal and in the social sphere.

Or again, and more emphatically :

The vague and metaphysical idea of liberty in circulation to day, if it continues to be taken as the basis ofpolitical doctrines, would tend pre eminently to hamperthe action of the mass on the individual. From thispoint of view it would be contrary to the developmentof civilization and to the organization of an orderedsystem which demands that the parties should be firmly

bound to the whole and dependent on it.The individual, as Saint Simon puts it elsewhere,depends on “ the mass ” , and it is the relations o feach individual with this “ progressively active,expanding and overwhelming mass ” which haveto be “ studied and organized ” . Even the word“ liberty ” , in the first two passages quoted above,has the question begging adjective “ social ” quietlyappended to it. T he proper study o f mankind is nolonger man, but the masses.

In short, Saint Simon stood at the point oftransition from “ feudal ” to industrial civilization.He perceived the nature of the transition moreclearly than his contemporaries, and read more of

its implications. How far he himself foresaw the

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practical application o f Science to industry cannot be ascertained. It was his disciples who hailed the

building o f railways with an almost religious fervouras the symbol and instrument of social progress(one recalls Lenin’s definition of socialism as “ theSoviets plus electrification ” ), and other disciples

who in the 1840S founded the Société d’Études duCanal de Suez. But Saint Simon insisted — it

became more and more the leitmotiv of everything

he wrote — that industrial production was hence-forth the main function o f society. “ Industry ” ,“ production ” , “ organization ” — these were thekey words in the Saint Simonist vocabulary.

Logically enough, therefore, Saint Simon appearsas one of the founders of the nineteenth century culto f work. The beginnings o f it are in Rousseau and

B abeuf; but it was Saint Simon who placed it inthe very centre o f his system. The conception ofIcisure and contemplation as the highest state ofmankind died with the last vestiges of the medievalorder. “ A ll men will work,” wrote Saint Simon inthe Lettres d’un habitant de Genéve, where so many ofhis ideas appear in their primary and simplest form ;

“ the obligation is imposed on every man to giveconstantly to his personal powers a direction usefulto society ” . Indeed, in a later “ Declaration ofPrincipies ” , he defines society “ as the sum totaland unión o f men engaged in useful work ” . Workis no longer a necessity but a virtue. The newprincipie o f morality is “ man must work ” ; and

“ the happiest nation is the nation in which thereare the fewest unemployed ” . Saint Simon provided


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the moral foundation for the labour theory of value which was being worked out at the same period in

England by Ricardo. H e also looked forward tothe prominence given one hundred years later inthe new Soviet gospel to the prece p t: “ H e thatdoes not work neither shall he eat

The generation which followed Saint Simon wasfruitful in the creation o f Utopias ; and his views onthe organization o f society and the State, though

there is no systematic exposition of them, were amongthe most popular o f his speculations. It need hardly be said that the liberal conception o f politics andeconomics, introduced into France by Adam Smith’sdisciple J . B. Say, was anathem a to Saint Simon,for whom “ politics is the Science of productionBut the identification is achieved by the subordination of politics to economics, not of economics topolitics. Th is is lo g ic a l; for since “ society rests wholly on industry ” , which is “ the solé source o fall riches and a ll prosperity ” , it follows that “ theState of things most favourable to industry is forthat very reason most favourable to society ” .Government in the old sense is a necessary evil. Itssolé purpose is to put and keep men at w ork ; for,unhappily, there are “ fainéants, that is to say,thieves ” . But this is a minor and subsidiaryfunction. The supreme authority will be an “ eco-nomic parliament ” (a notion which still had itsattractions more than a century later), divided intothree chambers concerned respectively with invention, examination and execution.

But Saint Simon’s city of the future presents

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other features still more curious. T he división offunctions is precise. The artists will appeal to the

imagination o f the worker and excite the appropriatepassions. The men of learning “ will establish thelaws of health o f the body social ” . (Incidentallythese provisions show that the marshalling of art andScience in the service of the State is neither new norpeculiar to ahy one part o f Europe.) T he “ indus-triais ” (in which term Saint Simon includes pro

ducers of all kinds and even traders) will legislateand issue adm inistrative orders. Finally the executive — it is an unexpected climax — will be composed o f bankers. It was the age o f the greatprivate banks ; and the pow er of credit in the affairsof government and of business was just becoming acurren t topic. For Saint Simon, as for Lenin nearly

a century later, the banks were the hidden handthat made the wheels o f production go round. It was as logical for Saint Sim on to give them a centralplace in his administrative scheme as for Lenin totreat the nationalization of the banks as the keymeasure necessary to destroy the economic stranglehold o f the bourgeoisie. But what is interesting is

to find an embryonic philosophy of planning builtup by Saint Simon round this central executivefunction o f the banks :

T h e present anarchy o f production, wh ich corre- sponds to the fact that economic relations are being developed without uniform regulation, must give way to the organ ization o f production. Prod uction will not

be directed by isolated entrepreneurs independent of each other and ignorant o f the needs o f the people ; this task


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will be entrusted to a specific social institution. Acentral committee of administration, being able toreview a broad field of social economy from a higherpoint of vantage, will regañíate it in a manner usefulto the whole society, will transfer the means of pro-duction into hands appropriate for this purpose, and will be specially concerned to maintain a constantharmony between production and demand. There areinstitutions which include among their functions acertain degree of organization of economic work : the banks.Lenin, who quotes this passage at second hand andis, perhaps, a little jealous for M arx ’s priority, calisit “ a guess o f genius, but still only a guess

More directly fruitful than these visions of adistant future was the conception, running throughSaint Simon’s writing about the State, o f a distinction between “ government ” and “ administra-tion It recurs in many shapes. Formerly there were spiritual and temporal “ powers ” ; to daythese have given place to scientific and industrial“ capacities Power, which is an absolute o fgovernment, is an oppressive forcé exercised by menover m en ; and “ the action o f man on man is initself always harmful to the species O n the otherhand, “ the only useful action exercised by man isthe action o f man on things This is adminis-tration ; and “ an enlightened society needs onlyto be administered Society is “ destined to passfrom the governmental or military regime to theadministrative or industrial regime after havingmade suíficient progress in positive Sciences and inindustry ” . Saint Simon does not, like Engels, say that


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the State will die away. Even Engels’s phrase that“ the government of men will be replaced by the ad-

ministra tion of things ” has not been traced textuallyto the works o f Saint Simon and his disciples. Butthe idea is borrowed direct from him. The influenceof Saint Simon on Proudhon and on the developmentof French syndicalist thought with its contempt forthe politics o f governm ent is not less obvious.

H ow far should Saint Simon be called, not merelya precursor of socialism, but himself a “ Socialist ” ?The word had apparently not been coined in hislifetime. It cannot be traced back farther than 1827, when it appeared in England in an Owenite publi-cation. Its first recorded use in French is in anarticle of 1832 in Le Globe, a newspaper edited by Saint Sim on’s disciples after his death . “ Nousne voulons pas sacrifier ” , remarks the article, “ la

personnalité au socialisme, pas plus que ce dernier à lapersonnalité.” In this sense o f placing the stress onsociety rather than on the individual, Saint Simon was a Socialist. But in the more political modernsense many doubts arise. The only occasion whenSaint Simon placed a label on his own politicalopjnions was when he said that he belonged neitherto the Conservative Party nor to the Liberal Party but to the parii industriei ; and while it may be mis-leading to transíate industriei by “ industrial ” , itcan hard ly be made to mean “ Socialist ” or even“ Labo ur ” . His legislature o findustrieis and execu-tive of bankers carne nearer to a benevolent despotism of technocrats or to the managerial society oflater speculations.


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On the other hand, Saint Simon was constantlypreoccupied with the well being of those whom he

called, in a much quoted phrase, “ la classe la plusnombreuse et la plus pauvre H e stood in prin-cipie for equality o f distribution (“ luxu ry Vvill become useful and moral when the whole nationenjoys it ” ), though he did not make this square with his desire to adjust rewards to capacities. He believed that “ the existence o f society depends on

the conservation o f the right o f property But headded that every society must decide for itself whatthings could become objects of private property andon what conditions they might be h e ld ; for “ theindividual right o f property can be based only onthe common and general utility of the exercise ofthis right — a utility which m ay va ry with the

period Not only is the priority o f the claims o fsociety over those of the individual once moreunequivocally asserted, but the idea of historicalrelativism is introduced to bar any absoluto right.Rejection of the feudal conception of property asthe absolute right on which society rests is funda-mental to Saint Simon’s thought. The society o f

the future will be not a society of proprietors but asociety of producers. After Sain t Sim on’s death his disciples systemat

ized his vague and inchoate pronouncements on thisquestion as on others ; and current opinión movedmore decisively along lines which he had dim ly adum brated. Le Globe carried for some time at the head ofeach number a set o f aphorisms which were supposedto sum up the essentials of the master’s teaching;


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All social institutions should have as their aim themoral, intellectual and physical improvement of the

most numerous and poorest class. All privileges of biríh are abolished without exception.

From each according to his capacity, to each capacityaccording to its works.

The Communist Manifestó sets Saint Simon side byside with Fourier and O wen as “ critical Utopian

Socialists ” , who attacked existing society on validgrounds but prescribed Utopian remedies. M orespecifically, they are accused o f failing to appreciatcthe role of the proletariat in the class struggle or tocountenance violent methods of changing the estab-lished order. Yet it is fair to recall Engels’s handsometribute — though Saint Simon would not have liked

to be excluded from the “ scientific ” thinkers —nearly thirty years later:

Germán theoretical Socialism will never forget thatit stands on the shoulders of Saint Simon, Fourier andOwen — three thinkers who, however fantastic andUtopian their teachings, belong to the great minds ofall times and by the intuition of genius anticipated anincalculable number of the truths which we now demón-strate scientifically.

It was at the very end o f his life, and after thefailure o f an attempt at suicide, that Saint Simon

wrote a book under the title Le Nouveau Christianisme, which was the first o f several nineteenth centuryattempts to create a secular religión on a basis of

Ghristian ethics. A t an early stage in his career, while professing belief in God, he had declared that


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“ the idea o f God cannot be employed in the physicalSciences ” (in w hich the social Sciences were forSaint Simon included), adding, however, a littleenigmatically that “ it is the best method yet foundto motívate high legislative decisions This pragmatic basis was evidently not lacking in Le Nouveau Christianisme, though it purported to be the expressionof certain moral absolutos, including the brotherhood of man and the universal obligation to work.T he “ Catholic system ” , Saint Simon had discovered, was “ in contradiction with the system ofthe Sciences and o f modern industry ” . Its downfall was inevitable. Saint Simon’s ambition wasnothing less than to provide a substituto for it.

It is not, however, quite fair to lay at SaintSimon’s door all the absurdities afterwards perpetrated in his name by the Saint Simonist sect. Theliterary propagation o f his doctrines led to theinvestment of the master with a spurious halo ofsanctity ; and from this it was a short step to thecreation of a church with priesthood and ritual ando f a secular monastery at Ménilmontant, in thesuburbs of Paris, in which forty of the faithful atone moment secluded themselves. The high priesto f the order, E nfantin, was a colourful and masterfulfigure whose writings were admitted into the canon, but whose unorthodox indulgences led to the dissolution of the order by the authorities. Afterserving a prison sentence Enfantin migrated toEgypt. But the sect survived for thirty or forty

years in France and had some following even in

foreign countries, though in England it was soon. to

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be eclipsed by the more sober and reputable ritualo f Comte and the Positivists; and it is an odd irony

of history that this posthumous apotheosis shouldhave awaited one who strove so earnestly to establisha secular science o f society.


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I

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T H E G O M M U N I S T M A N I F E S T O

1 H E winter o f 1847 48 (it is difficult tof i x a moreprecise date for the celebration of the centenary)saw the birth of one of the capital documents of thenineteenth century — the Gommunist Manifesto. Inthe summer of 1847 a group consisting mainly ofGermán craftsmen in London held the first congresso f a new “ Gommunist League T he y had been

in touch with Marx, then living in Brussels, for sometim e; and Engels attended the congress, which ad journed to a future congress the drafting o f a pro-gramme for the League. Inspired by this prospect,Engels tried his hand and produced a catechism intwenty five questions, which Marx and he took withthem to the second League congress in London atthe end o f November. The congress thereuponcharged Marx and Engels to draft their programmefor th em : it was to take the form of a manifesto.Marx worked away in Brussels through Decemberand Janu ary. The “ Manifesto o f the GommunistParty ” was published in London in Germ án inFebruary 1848, a few days before the revolution broke out in Paris.

The Gommunist Manifesto is divided into four parts.

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The first reviews the rise of the bourgeoisie on theruins of the feudal system of property relations,

government and morality which it destroyed ; showshow “ the powerful and colossal productive forces ” which the bourgeoisie itself created have now grownto a point where they are no longer compatible with bourgeois property relations and bourgeois suprema c y ; and finally demonstrates that the proletariatis the new revolutionary class which can alone

master the forces of modern industry and end theexploitation o f man by man. The second partproclaims the policy of the Communist Party, as“ the most progressive and resolute section o f the

working class o f all countries ” , to promote theproletarian revolution which will destroy bourgeoispower and “ raise the proletariat to the position of

the ruling class ” . T he third part surveys andcondemns other recent and existing schools ofsocialism ; and the fourth is a brief tactica l postscript on the relations of Communists to other left wing parties.

A historie document like the Communist Manifesto invites examination from the point of view both o fits antecedents and of its consequences. O n theformer count the Manifestó owes as much to prede-cessors and contemporaries as most great pronounce-ments ; and the worst that can be said is that M arx ’ssweeping denunciations of predecessors and contem-poraries sometimes mask the nature of the debt.Babeuf, who also called his proclamation a “ mani-festo ” , had announced the final struggle betweenrich and poor, between “ a tiny minority ” and “ the


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huge majority Blanqui had anticipated the classinterpretation of history and the idea of the dictator-

ship of the proletariat (the phrase was not used byM arx himself till 1850). Lorenz von Stein had written that the history o f freedom, society andpolitical order was essentially dependent on thedistribution of economic goods among the classes ofthe population. Proudhon also knew that “ the lawso f political econom y are the laws o f history ” and

measured the progress of society “ by the develop-ment of industry and the perfection of its instru-ments ” ; and Pecqueur had predicted that, with thespread o f commerce, “ the barriers between nationand nation will be broken down ” until the day when“ every man becomes a citizen of the world Suchideas were current coin in advanced circles when

M arx wrote. But neither such borrowings, norMarx’s overriding debt to Hegel’s immense synthesis,detract from the power of the conception presentedto the world in the Communist Manifesto.

To day it is more appropriate to study the famousmanifesto in the light of its hundred year influenceon posterity. Tho ugh written when M arx was in his

thirtieth year and Engels two years younger, italready contains the quintessence of Marxism.Beginning with a broad historical generalization(“ the history of all hitherto existing society is thehistory o f class struggles ” ) and ending w ith aninflammatorv appeal to the workers of all countriesto unite for “ the forcible overthrow of all existing

social conditions ” , it presents M arxist methodologyin its fully developed form — an interpretation o f

The “ Communist Manifesto ”

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history which is at the same time a cali to action.Some passages in Marx’s writings, especially at the

revolutionary criscs of 1848 and 1871, appear tocommend revolutionary action as a good thing initself. Som e passages, both earlier and later, appearto dwell on the iron laws of historical developmentin such a way as to leave little place for the initiativeo f the hum an will. But these momentary shifts o femphasis cannot be taken to impair the dual ortho-

doxy established by the Gommunist Manifestó, whereinterpretation and action, predestination and free will, revolutionary theory and revolutionary practicemarch triumphantly hand in hand. It propounds aphilosophy o f history, a dogm a o f revolution, beliefin which will take the spontaneous form of appropri-ate action in the believer.

The Gommunist Manifesto is thus no broadsheetfor the hoardings or the hustings. M arx — andm any others who are not Marxists — would denythe possibility o f any rigid separation o f emotion andin te llect ; bu t using the terms in a popular sense,it is to the intellect rather than to the emotions thatthe Manifesto makes its prim ary appeal. The over- whelm ing impression which it leaves on the reader’smind is not so much that the revolution is desirable(that, like the injustice of capitalism in Das Kapital, is taken for granted as something not requiringargument) bu t that the revolution is inevitable. Forsuccessive generations of Marxists the Manifesto wasnot a plea for revolution — that they did not need — but a prediction about the w ay in which the revolu-tion would inevitably happen combined with a


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prescription for the action required of revolution-aries to make it happen . T he controversies o f a

hundred years ranged round the questions as to what M arx actually said or meant and how whathe said should be applied to conditions diverging widely from those of his own time and place. O nlythe bold offered openly to “ revise ” M arx ; thesagacious interpreted him. T he Communist Manifesto has thus remained a living document. T he cen

tenary of the Communist Manifesto cannot be cele- brated otherwise than in the light, and in the shadow,of the Russian revolution which was its culminatingembodiment in history.

The Communist Manifesto sets out a coherentscheme o f revolution. “ T he history of all hithertoexisting society is the history o f class struggles.” In

modern times M arx detects two such struggles —the struggle between feudalism and the bour-geoisie, ending in the victorious bourgeois revolution,and the struggle between the bourgeoisie and theproletariat, destined to end in the victorious pro-letarian revolution. In the first struggle a nascentproletariat is mobilized by the bourgeoisie in support

of bourgeois aims, but is incapable of pursuing inde-pendent aims of its own : “ every victory so obtainedis a victory for the bourgeoisie ” . In the secondstruggle Marx recognizes the presence of the lowermiddle class — “ the small m anufacturer, the shopkceper, the artisan, the peasant ” — which plays afluctuating role between bourgeoisie and prole-

tariat, and a “ slum proletariat ” which is Hableto “ sell itself to reactionary forces But these


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complications do not seriously affect the orderedsimplicity of the main pattern of revolution.

The pattern had been framed in the light ofMarx’s reading in modern English and Frenchhistory and in the works of French and Britisheconomists, and o f Engels’s study of factory conditionsin England. T he English bourgeois revolution, winning its victory in the seventeenth century, hadfully Consolidated itself by 1832. The French

bourgeois revolution, more suddenly and dramatically triumphant after 1789, had succumbed toreaction only to re emerge once more in 1830. In both countries the first revolutionary struggle o f themodern age, the struggle between feudalism and bourgeoisie, was virtually over; the stage was setfor the second struggle, between bourgeoisie and

proletariat.The events of 1848, coming hard on the heels ofthe Aíanifesto, did much to confirm its diagnosis andnothing to refute it. In England the collapse ofChartism was a set back which none the less markeda stage in the consolidation of a class conscious workers’ movement. In France the proletariat

marched shoulder to shoulder with the bourgeoisiein February 1848, as the Manifesto had said it would,so long as the aim was to consolídate and extendthe bourgeois revolution. But once the proletariatraised its own banner o f social revolution the line was crossed. Bourgeoisie and proletariat, allies untilthe bourgeois revolution had been completed andmade secure, were now divided on opposite sides ofthe barricades by the cali for proletarian revolution.


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The first revolutionary struggle was thus o v e r : thesecond was impending. In Paris, in the June days

of 1848, Cavaignac saved the bourgeoisie and stavedoff the proletarian revolution by massacring, executing and transporting the class conscious workers.The pattern o f the Gommunist Manifesto had been pre-cisely followed. As Professor Nam ier, who is noMarxist, puts i t : “ T he working classes touched off,and the middle classes cashed in on it ” .

The June revolution [as Marx wrote at the time] forthe first time split the whole of society into two hostilecamps — east and west Paris. The unity of the Februaryrevolution no longer exists. The February fighters arenow warring against each other — something that hasnever happened before; the former indifference has vanished and every man capable of bearing arms isfighting on one side or other of the barricades.

The events of February and June 1848 had provideda classic illustration of the great gulf fixcd between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.

Farther east the pattern o f England and France didnot fully apply, as the concluding section of the Mani

festo adm itted — almost by w ay o f an after thought.In Germany the bourgeois revolution had not

yet begun. The Germán bourgeoisie had not yet won the fundamental political rights which theEnglish bourgeoisie had achieved in i68g andthe French a hundred years later. T he task o f theGermán proletariat was still therefore to supportthe bourgeoisie in the first revolutionary struggleagainst feudalism ; in Germ any, in the words o f the Manifesto, “ the Gommunist Party fights with the

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bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionarymanner against the absolute monarchy, the feudal

landlords and the petty bourgeoisie But it couldnot be argued that Germ any would simply follow thesame path as England and France at a greater orless distance o f time. The Germ án revolution wouldoccur “ under the most advanced conditions of European civilization ” which would give it a specialcharacter. W here the proletariat was already so

advanced, thought Marx, the bourgeois revolution“ can only be the immediate prelude to the pro-letarian revolution

W hen M arx, in the brief concluding section o fthe Manifestó, devoted to Communist Party tactics,thus announced the prospect in G erm any o f animmediate transition from bourgeois to proletarianrevolution without the intervening period of bour-geois rule, he showed a keen historical perception,even at the expense o f undermining the validity o fhis own theoretical analysis. The events o f 1848in the Germán speaking lands confirmcd Marx'sintuition of the impossibility in Germany of a periodof established bourgeois supremacy comparable withthat which has set so strong a mark on English andFrench history. Th is impossibility was due not somuch to the strength of the Germán proletariat, which M arx perhaps exaggerated, as to the weaknesso f the Germán bourgeoisie. W hatever the prospectso f an eventual proletarian revolution in midnineteenth century Germany, the material for a bourgeois revolution such as England and France

had long ago achieved was still conspicuously absent.


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Indeed, the bourgeoisie, far from bidding for powerfor itself, was plainly ready to ally itself with thesurviving elements of feudalism for defence againstthe proletarian menace. It need hardly be addedthat the same symptoms, in a still more pronouncedform, repeated themselves in Russia more than halfa century afterwards.

The problem, therefore, which Germany pre-sented in 1848 to the authors of the Communist Manifesto was the same which Russia would oneday present to the theorists of her revolution. According to the revolu tionary pattern o f theCommunist Manifesto, the function of the bourgeoisie wasto destroy feudal society root and branch preparatory to its own destruction in the final phase of therevolutionary struggle by the proletariat. But what was to happen i f the bourgeoisie through weaknessor cowardice — or perhaps through some untimelypremonition o f its own eventual fate — was unable orunwilling to perform its essential function ? M arxnever provided a categorical answer to this question.But his answer was implicit in the doctrine of“ permanent revolution ” , which he propounded inan address to the Communist League in 1850:

While the democratic petty bourgeoisie wants to endthe revolution as rapidly as possible . . . our interestsand our task consist in making the revolution permanentuntil all the more or less possessing classes are removedfrom authority, until the proletariat wins State power.The responsibility was thus placed on the proletariatto complete the task, which the bourgeoisie hadfailed to perform, o f liquidating feudalism.


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W hat form the liquidation was to take when theproletariat found itself directly confronted b y a

feudal society without any effective and independent bourgeoisie was not altogether clear. But i f oneinsisted — as M arx apparently did, and Engelscontinued to do down to the end o f his life — that“ our party can come to power only under some suchform as a democratic republic ” , then the conclusiónfollowed that the immediate aim of the proletariat

must be limited to the establishment of a politicaldemocracy in which it was interested only as anecessary stepping stone to the proletarian socialrevolution. This was, however, a theoretical con-struction unlikely to be realized in practice — as theexperience of both the Germán and the Russianrevolutions was one day to show. M arx never reallyfitted his analysis of revolution to countries wherethe bourgeoisie was incapable of making its ownrevo lut ion ; and acrimonious controversy about therelation between bourgeois and proletarian revolu-tions continued to divide the Russian revolutionariesfor several decades.

The economic corollary of this conclusión wasstill more startling. I f the establishment of a dem o-cratic republic was a prerequisite of the proletarianrevolution, so also was the full development ofcapita lism ; for capitalism was the essential expression of bourgeois society and inseparable from it.Marx certainly held this view as late as 1859 whenhe wrote in the preface to the Critique o f Political

Economy. “ No social form perishes until all the

productivo forces for which it provides scopc have


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been developed It appeared to follow, paradoxi-cally enough, that in backward countries the interestof the nascent proletariat was to promote the mostrapid development of capitalism and capitalist ex-ploitation at its own expense.

Such was the view seriously propounded byRussian Marxists, Bolshevik and Menshevik alike,down to 1905 — perhaps even down to 1917.Meanwhile, however, in the spring of 1905, Lenin’spractical mind worked out a new scheme under which the prole taria t was to seize power in con ju nction with the peasantry, creating a “ democraticdictatorship ” o f workers and peasants; and this became the offic ia l doctrine o f the O ctober revolu-tion. T he Mensheviks stuck to their guns, and theirsurvivors and successors to day attribute the short-comings of the Russian revolution to its failure topass through the bourgeois democratic, bourgcoiscapitalist phase on its way to the achievement ofsocialism. The issue is not to be settled byreference to Marx, who can hardly be acquitted ofinconsistency on this point. Either he made amistake in suggesting, in the last section of theCommunist Manifesto, that Germany might passimmediately from the bourgeois to the proletarianrevo lution; or he failed to fit this new conceptioninto the revolutionary framework of the earlier parto f the Manifesto.

Marx was to encounter similar difficulties inapplying the generalizations of theCommunist Mani

festo about nationalism, which were also based onBritish and French experience, to central and eastern

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Europe. The charge often brought against M arx ofignoring or depreciating national sentiment rests

indeed on a misunderstanding. The famous remarletha t “ the workers have no country ” , read in itscontext, is neither a boast nor a pro gram m e; it is acomplaint which had long been a commonplaceam ong socialist writers. Babeuf had declared thatthe multitude “ sees in society only an enemy, andloses even the possibility o f having a country ” ; and

W eitlin g had connected the notion o f country withthe notion o f prop erty:

He alone has a country who is a property owner orat any rate has the liberty and the means oí becomingone. He who has not that, has no country.

In order to remedy this State of affairs (to quoteonce more from the Manifesto) “ the proletariatmust first conquer political power, must rise to bethe dominant class of the nation, must constituteitself the nation, so that the proletariat is so farnational itself, though not in the bourgeois sense ” .

The passage of the Manifesto in which thesesentences occur is not free from ambiguities. Butthe thought behind it is clear. In M arx ’s view,

which corresponded to the facts o f English andFrench history, nationalism grew up as an attributeo f bourgeois society at a time when the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary and progressive forcé. Both inEngland and in France the bourgeoisie, invokingthe national spirit to destroy a feudalism which wasat once particularist and cosmopolitan, had through

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a national basis, But the advance o f capitalism wasalready making nations obsolete.

National diffcrences and antagonisms are to-day vanishin g ev er more and more w ith th e develo pm ent o f the bourgeoisie, free trade in the world market, the uni- formity o f industrial production a nd the conditions o f life corresponding thereto.

W ith the vic tory o f the pro le ta ria t they w ill vanish still faster. . . . W ith the disappeara nce o f classes

w ithin the nation the state o f enm ity betw een na tions w il l come to an end.

Henee the first step was for the proletariat of everycountry to “ settle accounts with its own bour-geoisie ” . The way would then be open for a trueinternational communist order, Like Mazzini andother nineteenth century thinkers, Marx thought of

nationalism as a natural stepping stone to internationalism.Unfortunately the national pattern of the Mani

festo, far from being universal, proved difficult toextend beyond the narrow limits of the place(western Europe) or the time (the age of Gobden)in which it was dcsigned. Beyond western Europe

the same conditions which preventcd the risc of apowerful bourgeoisie also prevented the developmento f an orderly bourgeois nationalism. In centralEurope (the Hapsburg Empire, Prussia) as well asin Russia the centralized State had been broughtinto being under pressure of military necessity byfeudal overlords indifferent to national feeling; and

when in the nineteenth century, under the Ímpetusof the French revolution, nationalism became for

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the first time a force to be reckoned with in centraland eastem Europe, it appeared not — as in England

and France — as an attribute and complement o fthe State but as a sentiment independent of anyexisting State organization.

Moreover, the relation of nation to State workeditself out in different ways and sometimes involvedeven the same national group in inconsistent attitudes. Th is was particularly true o f the Hapsburg

Empire. The growing national consciousness o f theGerman Austrian bourgeoisie did not diminish itssupport o f imperial un ity; the bourgeoisie o f theother constituent national groups sought to destroythat unity or at least to dissolve it into a federation.The Hungarians asserted the rights of the Magyarnation against the German Austrians, but deniedthe national rights of Croats and Slovaks.

In these circumstances it is not surprising thatMarx and Engels never succeeded in working out,even for their own day and generation, a consistenttheory of nationalism which would hold goodthroughout Europe. They supported the Polishclaim to national indepen den ce; no revolutionary,no liberal, of the nineteenth century could havedone otherwise. But Engels, at any rate, seemedmainly concemed that this claim should be satisfiedat the expense of Russia rather than of Prússia,proposing on one occasion to offer the Poles Rigaand Mitau in exchange for Danzig and Elbing;and in the candid outburst of a private letter toMarx he referred to the Poles as “une nation foutue,

a serviceable instrument only until Russia herself is


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swept into the agrarian revolution ” , In the samespirit he rejected outright the national aspirations

of the Slavs o f the Hapsburg Em pire, whose triumph would be, in his eyes, a subjugation “ o f the civilized west by the barbarie east

In these judgm ents, from which M arx is notknown to have dissented, Engels was indubitablyswayed by national prejudice and in particular byhostility to Russia as the most reactionary Power of

the day . But he was also moved by the recognitionthat these nationalisms of central and easternEurope, whose economic basis was agrarian, hadlittle or nothing to do with the bourgeois nationalismof wh ich M arx and he had taken cognizance in theCommunist Manifesto. It was not only a question o f“ the civilized west ” and “ the barbarie east ” : it

was a question o f the subjugation “ o f town by thecountry, of trade, manufacture and intelligence bythe primitive agriculture o f Slavon ic serfs ” . O nthe presuppositions of the Manifesto, this seemednecessarily a retrograde step. T he failure of M arxand Engels to take account of agrarian nationalism was one aspect o f the other great lacuna o f the Manifesto — the question o f the peasant.

If) however, the theory o f nationalism propoundedin the Communist Manifesto could not be transplantedfrom western to central and eastern Europe, itequally failed to stand the test o f time. T he Mani

festo contains indeed one reference to “ the exploita-tion o f one nation by another ” and declares, by what seems a tautology in one sense and anon sequitur in another, that it will end when the exploitation


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o f one individual by another ends. Bu t M arx haslittle to say (nothing at all in the Manifesto itself)

about the colonial question, touching on it in detailonly in the case o f Ire lan d ; and here it is perhapssignificant that, while in 1848 he was prepared tosacrifice the Irish in the same way as the AustrianSlavs, he had become convinced by 1869 that “ thedirect absolute interest of the English working classdemands a rupture of the present connexion withIreland M arx did not, however, live to see thefull development of the process by which the greatnations, already victims of the contradictions ofcapitalism, vied with one another in bringing the whole world under their yoke in a desperate attemptto save.themselves and the capitalist system — theprocess which Lenin was afterwards to analyse inhis famous work on Imperialism as the Highest Stage o f Capitalism', nor could he foresee tha t rise tonational consciousness of innumerable “ unhistorica l ” nations o f wh ich the Austrian Slavs had beenthe harbingers. T h e Soviet theory o f nationality,in which the colonial question and the question ofsmall nations divide the honours between them, canderive only a palé and faltering light from the simpleand far away formulation o f theCommunist Manifesto. But critics o f the national theories, whether o f M arxor of the Bolsheviks, may do well to reflect that

bourgeois thinkers and statesmen have also not beenable to formúlate, and still less to apply, a consistentdoctrine of national rights.

M arx’s attitude to the tiller o f the soil is more

seriously open to criticism. Here too there is a


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foretaste o f subsequent controversy — both the M en-sheviks and Trotsky were accused, rightly from

Len in’s point o f view, o f “ underestimating ” thepeasan t; and here too M arx ran into trouble because his in itial theories had been primarilyframed to fit western conditions, The Communist Manifesto praised the bourgeoisie for having, throughits development o f factories and towns, “ delivereda great part of the population from the idiocy of

country life ” ; and it classed peasant or peasantproprietor with handicraftsmen, small traders andshopkeepers as members of the “ petty bourgeoisie ”— an unstable and reactionary class, since it struggledagainst the greater bourgeoisie, not for revolutionaryends, but only in order to maintain its own bour-geois status. In England, in France (which in

revolutionary circles was generally thought of asParis writ large) and in Germany, the Communist Manifesto upheld the strict pattern of successiverevolutions o f wh ich the bourgeoisie and the prole-tariat would be the respective driving forces, andreserved no independent place for the peasant,

Events were soon to show up the lacuna left by

this scheme of things even in western Europe. T heFrench peasants were unmoved when the revolu-tionary workers of Paris were shot down in June 1848 by the agents o f the bourgeoisie, and voted sohdlyfor the bourgeois dictatorship of Louis Napoleón.In fact they behaved exactly as the Communist

Manifesto expected them to behave (which did not

save them from incurring some of Marx’s fiercestinvective in The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Napoleón);

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but in so doing they showed how far things wouldhave to travel before the French proletariat would

be able to make another French revolution.In Prussia and throughout Germany the revolu-tion of 1848 was in the hands of intellectuals whothought as little of the peasants as Marx himself;and the peasants failed to move. In Austria thepeasants did move. They rose in Galicia againstthe landlords and would have risen elscwhere withthe right leadership. T hey formed a large and

vocal group in the new democratic Reichstag. Butthe claims of the peasant cncountered the hostilityof the bourgeoisie and the indiffcrence of the urban workers. Peasantry and proletaria t were crushedseparately in the absence of a leader and a pro-gramme to unite th em ; and in central Europe thesurest moral of 1848 was that no revolution couldsucceed which did not win the peasant and give ahigh priority to his concerns.

In eastern Europe this was still more abundantlyclear. As regards Poland, even the Communist Manifesto declared that “ the Communists supportthe party that sees in agrarian revolution the meansto national freedom, the party which caused the

Cracow insurrection o f 18 46” . But this passage, which occurs in the tactical postscript, is the onlyincursión of the Manifesto into eastern Europe andthe only reference to agrarian revolution ; and evenhere agrarian revolution is regarded as the ally of a bourgeois revolution leading to “ national freedom ” ,not o f a proletarian revolution.

Spending the rest of his years in England, where


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there was no peasantry and no agrarian question,Marx never felt any strong impulse to fill this lacuna

in the Communist Manifesto. In 1856, draw ing amoral from the failure of 1848 in Germany, hespoke casually of the importance of backing up thefuture proletarian Germán revolution “ with somesecond edition o f the Peasants’ W ar ” , But evenhere only a subsidiary role was assigned to thepeasantry. It was towards the end of his life that

Marx was called on to pass judgment on a controversy just opening in far away Russia. T he leadingRussian revolutionaries, the Narodniks, regarded theRussian peasant commune with its system of commontenure o f land as the seed bed o f the future RussianSocialist order. O n the other hand, the first RussianMarxists were already beginning to argue that the

way to socialism could only lie, in Russia as elsewhere, through a development o f capitalism and theproletariat.

Four times did the Marx Engels partnershipattack this ticklish issue. In 1874, before the RussianMarxists had raised their head, Engels had recog-nized the possibility in favourable conditions of thedirect transformation of the communal system intoa higher form, “ avoiding the intermediate stage ofindividualized bourgeois property ” . In 1877, inreply to an attack in a Russian journ al, M arx con-fined himself to a doubtful admission that Russiahad “ the finest chance which history ever presentedto a nation o f avoiding the up and downs o f thecapitalist o rd e r” . In 1881 M arx gave a morepositive response to a direct personal inquiry from


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V era Z asu lich ; and in the fo llowing year the lastand most authoritative pronouncement appeared in

the preface to a Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto, signed jointly by both its authors :If the Russian revolution is the signal for a workers’

revolution in the west so that these complement eachother, then the contemporary Russian system of communal ownership can serve as the starting point for aCommunist development.Russian Social Democrats o f a later generation, bothBolshevik and Menshevik, looked askance at thisquasi Narodnik deviation, and returned to the purertheoretical pattern o f the Manifesto with its clear cutdialectic of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions;and Lenin himself, not less than the Mensheviks,sternly maintained the paradox that the furtherdevelopment of capitalism in Russia was a necessaryprelude to social revolution. Nevertheless, Lenin,like Marx in his later years, recognized that norevolution, and no revolutionary, in eastern Europecould afford to ignore the peasant and his demands.

After 1905 — and before and after 1917 — theBolsheviks were obliged to devote an immenseamount o f energy and controversy to the task o f

fitting the Russian peasant into the western formulaeo f the Communist Manifesto.

Franz Mehring, Marx’s best and most sympathetic biographer, remarks of the Communist Manifesto that “ in many respects historical development hasproceeded otherwise, and above all has proceededmore slowly, than its authors expected ” . Th is is

true of the expectations of the two young men who


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composed the Manifesto. But how far were theseexpectations modified? As regards pace, M arx in

later life certainly no longer believed in the imminence of the proletarian revolution with all the eagerconfidence o f 1848. Bu t even the Manifesto in oneo f its more cautious passages had predicted tem po-rary successes followed by set backs and a slow processof “ growing unity ” among the workers before thegoal was achieved. M arx carne, with advancing

years, to accept the necessity o f a long course o feducation for the proletariat in revolutionary prin-cipies ; and there is the famous obiter dictum in aspeech of the 1870S, which admits that in certainadvanced countries the victory of the proletariatmay be achieved without revolutionary violence.

As regards the scheme o f historical development,

it would be difficult to prove that Marx, speakingtheoretically and ex cathedra, ever abandoned thestrict analysis o f revolution which he had workedout in the Communist Manifesto. But he was not apure theorist. H e was willy nilly the leader o f apolitical party ; and it was when he found himselfcompelled to make pronouncements in this capacitythat he sometimes appeared to derógate from hisprincipies. Thu s in the last section o f the Manifesto itself he had already foreseen that in Germany the bourgeois revolution would be the “ im mediateprelude ” o f the proletarian revolution, thus skippingover the period o f bourgeois suprem acy; in thenext few years he was drawn into some uncomfortable compromises and inconsistencies on the nationalqu estion ; and towards the end o f his life he was


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constrained to admit that a predominantly peasantcountry like Russia had the chance of achieving the

social revolution without passing through the bour-geois capitahst phase at all, thus not merely modifying but side tracking altogether the revolutionaryanalysis of the Manifesto.

It is curious and significant of the vitality ofMarx’s thought to watch how accurately thisevolution was repeated in the Russian Social

Dem ocratic Party. Its first leaders — Plekhanov and Axelrod, Lenin and M artov — accepted withoutquestion the scheme of the Gommunist Manifesto.

After 1903 the Mensheviks, remain ing consistent with themselves and with the M arxist scheme, endedin bankruptcy because they could find no way ofapplying it to Russian conditions. T he more flexibleLenin took the scheme and brilliantly adapted it tothose cond itions; and the adaptations wh ich hemade followed — in broad outline, though not inevery detail — those which M arx himself had admitted in his later years. The process can be justified.Marxism was never oflered to the world as a static body o f doctrine ; M arx him self once confessed thathe was no M arx is t; and the constant evolution o fdoctrine in response to changing conditions is itselfa canon o f Marxism.

It is on such grounds that the Russian revolutioncan claim to be a legitímate child of theGommunist Manifesto. The Manifesto challenged bourgeoissociety and oflered a revaluation of bourgeois valúes.The Bolshevik revolution, with all its deviations, alJits adaptations to specifically Russian conditions and


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all the impurities which always disfigure practice asopposed to theory, has driven home the challenge

and sought to apply the revaluation. T h a t bour-geois society has been put progressively on thedefensive in the past hundred years, that its fatestill hangs in the balance, few to day will d en y ; anduntü that fate is settled, until some new synthesis has been achieved, the Communist Manifesto will not havesaid its last word.


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P R O U D H O N ; R O B I N S O N C R U S O EO F S O C I A L I S M

“ A M A N of paradoxes ” Proudhon called himself JLx. in one of his earliest extant letters in that

challenging, defiant manner which is characteristico f his personality and of his style. It was no empty boast. It is the same man who can procla im that“ God is Evil ” and that “ Christianity has no ethicand cannot have one ” , bu t that “ atheism is evenless logical than faith ” and that Catholicism is “ theunique rcfuge o f morality and beacon o f conscience ” .It is the same man who declared that he votedagainst the constitution of 1848 not because it wasa good or bad constitution, but because it was aconstitution, and who praised the Vienna settlementof 1814 15 as “ the real starting point of the consti-tutional era in Europe ” . It is the same man whoargued that war was irrelevant because it did nothingto solve essential economic problems, but declaredthat “ man is above all else a warrior animal ” andthat “ it is through war that his sublime nature becomes manifest ” .

Proudhon’s writings are difficult of access owing both to their incoherence and to their enormous

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extent. Editors and publishers have, on the whole, been kind, and most o f his major works are readily

available, though a mammoth complete edition re-mains unfinished. T h e fourteen volumes o f the farfrom complete collection of his correspondence have been conveniently reduced for the ordinary readerto a single volume o f selections ; * but the mass hasreceived a fresh accretion from the recent publicationo f a series of important and characteristic letters fromthe last years of his life to his friend Rolland.^

There is thus ampie evidence that Proudhon hasretained his fascination for his countrymen, if onlyas a vast storehouse of ideas from which nuggets ofany quality and complexión can be drawn. M any years ago Bouglé, who remains the most satisfactoryof a host of commentators, neatly but inadequatelyticketed him as an analyst o f the social forces ofrevolution. To day a volum e o f carefully chosenextracts from his works,* the tendency o f which isindicated by the interlarding of the text with passages from Péguy and by a quotation from Generalde Gaulle on the title page, calis for a “ return toProudhon ” as the antidote to the poisons of cap ital-ism, democracy and socialism, and as the symbol ofa recall to religión. M eanwhile an ingenious Am eri-can professor, using many of the same texts andtaking the hint from a eulogy of Proudhon whichappeared in the French collaborationist Press under

> P. J . Proudhon, Leltres choisies el annotées, par Daniel Halévyet Louis Guilloux.

* P. J . Proudh on, Leltres au citoyen Rolland.» Proudhon, Textes choisis, par Alexandre Marc.

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the Germán occupation, depicts him with skill andplausibility as the first progenitor of Hitlerism.*

More judicial than either of these, Mlle. Amoudruzhas produced a scholarly monograph ^which, whileprofessedly confined to Proudhon’s views on Inter-national affairs, necessarily touches on the widerground of his whole political creed.

T he element o f incoherence in Proudhon deriveslargely from the character o f the man. H e had apassion for contradiction, and contradicted himselfalmost as readily as he contradicted others. Sometimes, especially in the letters, one suspects thepractical joker. W hen he explains his hostility tothe North in the American civil war by his dislikeof “ so called liberal and democratic States ” he may be nine tenths serious (though that was not thefundamental reason for his attitude). W hen he adds,“ J ’ai en horreur la libe rté” , he is manifestly puttingout his tongue at his correspondent and at him-self. Bu t there was in Proudhon a profound andunresolved contradiction between revolutionaryopinions which expressed, in part, at any rate, hisresentments against a cramped, poverty strickenand persecuted life and the passion of the selfeducated peasant for bourgeois respectability. Hemight, in theory, reject Ghurch and State, authorityand property. But anyth ing that touched thesanctity of the family aroused his instinctive fury.It was this that led him into his last and most

* J. Sclwyn Sch apiro, “ Fierre Joseph Proudh on, Harbinger o fFascbm ” {American Historical Review, Vol. L, No. 4, July 1945.)

* Madcleine Amoudruz, Proudhon ti VEurope.


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grotesque self contradiction. The man who hadstarted his career (and made his name) by declaring

that property is theft, ended it by denouncing a taxon inheritance on the ground that it destroyed thefamily by transferring its property to the State.

The question of the influence of the Hegeliandoctrine of thesis and antithesis in forming Proudhon’s thought has been frequently canvassed. Nothinker o f the day could escape H ege l; and Herzen

tells a pleasant story of Bakunin expounding toProudhon through the whole of one night, by theembers of a dying fire, the mysteries of the Hegeliandialectic. Proudhon even wrote a long and com-plicated work entitled Systéme des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misére, in whichhe proved that the soundest economic principies

had the most evil consequences, though all ledultimately to the goal o f equality. But M arx , whoindited an angry retort entitled La Misére de la

philosophie, was probably right in alleging thatProudhon never understood Hegel. A superficialdabbling in the dialectic provided a respectablecloak for the Proudhonian passion for paradox —

but little more.Th ere is, however, another element in Proudhon’sself contradiction which is missed by those editorsand critics — unfortunately, a majority o f them — who fail to place him against the rapidly changing background o f his period. “ I mistrust an author who pretends to be consistent with himself after

twenty five years’ interval ” , wrote Proud ho n; andthe plea is incontestably valid for the generation


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(Proudhon’s dates are 1809-65) whose careers weresplit in two by the historical watershed of1848. His first prolific years as a writer were passed amidthe generous revolutionary enthusiasms of the 1840S — a period fertile in ideas so simple, so noble andso Utopian that it seems difficult to take themseriously to day, yet the seed bed o f nearly allpo litical thought for the rest o f the century. Every-thing that was radical and subversive in Proudhon’sthought grew out o f this congenial soil. “ Destruamet Aedificabo ” was the motto which he prefixed toone o f his early works. It would have been repre-sentativo of his attitude at this time if he had beencontent to plead, like Bakunin, that “ the passionfor destruction is also a Creative passion ” .

For the visionaries of the 1840S, the year 1848 carne as a bitter disillusionment. T he great up-heaval which was to complete the work o f the FrenchRevo lution and usher in the age of social equalityand the brotherhood of man had ended, in the verycapital of revolution, with the shooting down of the workers by Cavaignac amid the approbation ofthe self satisfied bourgeoisie and its representativeassembly. The split had come between the middleclass and the workers, between bourgeois democracyand “ social democracy ” , alias Comm unism. This was the lesson and the consequence o f1848. Marxdrew the necessary conclusión and invented thedoctrines o f “ the dictatorship o f the proletariat ”and “ permanent revolution ” . T he proletariatmust now take matters into their own hands and bring to full fruition the revolution which the bour


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geoisie had failed to consummate. From this timeforward the bourgeoisie became the target of all the

worst insults o f the revolutionaries. T h e revoltagainst bourgeois democracy, due to the disillusionments of 1848 and after, still determined the antipolitical bias of the French syndicalist movementfifty years later.

The rcaction against 1848, intersecting theUtopian idcalism of his earlier years, governed the

self frustrating course of all Proudhon’s subsequentthought. Like M arx , he turned violently against bourgeois democracy, and pursued its leaders intoexile — Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin and the rest — with some o f his most venomous sallies. “ Demoracy ” , he writes in La Solution du probUme social, “ composes its ruling class {son patriciat) o f mediocrities.” Pages might be filled with arguments —or sheer abuse — from his later writings againstuniversal suffrage, “ the surest means of making thepeople lie ” , A n extract from Les Confessions d'un révolu- tionnaire echoes precisely the familiar Marxist thesis:

How could universal suíTrage reveal the thought, the real thought, of the people, when the people is divided b y in equality o f fortunes in to elasses su bordin ate one to the other and voting either through servility or through h a te ; wh en this same people, held in restraint by authority, is incapa ble notwithstanding its sovereignty o f expressing its ideas on an yt h in g ; and w hen the exercise of its rights is limitcd to choosing, every three or four years, its chiefs and its impostors ?

But Marx was, after all, right in describing

Proudhon as a petit bourgeois-, and he had all the


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petit bourgeois fear of, and contempt for, the pro-letariat (a noteworthy anticipation here of the ideo-logical foundations o f National Socialism). Pickingup Saint Simon’s formula o f “ la classe la plusnombreuse et la plus pauvre ” , he declared thatthis class is, “ by the very fact o f its poverty, themost ungrateful, the most envious, the most immoraland the most cow ardly ” ; and later he was to speak

“ the stupidity of the proletariat content to work,to hunger and to serve, provided its princes growfat and glorious ” .

For Proudhon, therefore, there was no escapeafter 1848, as there was for Marx, into the ideologyof the proletariat as the bearer of the revolutionaryfaith. Proudhon became a revolutionary withouta party, without a class, without a creed, “ the

Robinson Crusoe o f Socialism ” , as Tro tsky calledh im ; and the position suited, and intensified, the wayward individualism o f his temperament. Themost significant analogies that can be found for hisdevelopment are the Russian revolutionaries, Herzenand Bakunin. Several curious letters to Herzenappear in Proudhon’s correspondence o f the eighteen

fifties. Like him, Herzen had lost faith in westerndemocracy without acquiring faith in the pro-leta ria t; and after 1855 Herzen sought to build hishopes — short lived, indeed — on the liberal aspirations o f the young Tsa r Alexander II . MeanwhileBakunin had written from a Russian prison hisfamous Confessions to Nicholas I ; and in Siberia he

toyed with the potentialities of enlightened despotism in the person of the Governor General,


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M uraviev. It can hard ly be mere coincidence thatProudhon should have followed the same path. His

one contact with the Legitimists permits of a fairlyinnocent explanation, which is given at length inone o f the newly published letters to Rolland. Buthis enthusiastic welcome of thecoup d'état of Decem- ber 2, 1851, as the embodiment of social revolution,his appeal to all republicans and socialists to rallyto the banner of the Prince President, and his

subsequent flirtations with the Second Em pire —punctuated, after Proudhon’s usual manner, byperiods o f vituperation — cannot be so ligh tly dismissed. These political romantics o f the 1840S, nourished on visions of a better world of the future, but disillusioned after 1848 both about the means o fattaining this better world and about the human beings who were to inhabit it, strayed along somestrange by ways in the attempt to recapture theirlost ideal.

Such were the conditions in which Proudhon became the founder o f the polit ical doctrine o fanarchism, i f anyth ing so inchoate as anarchism —not a programme, it has been aptly said, but acritique o f society — can be held to constitute adoctrine, and i f so radical an iconoclast as Proudhoncan be said to have founded anything. In thetheory of anarchism Proudhon had William Godwinfor his ancestor; in its practical advocacy he waspreceded by Wilhelm Weitling, the wanderingtailor from Magdeburg who, though only a few

years older than Proudhon, started his missionary

career at an earlier age. But it was Proudhon who


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first gave anarchism its place and its influencein nineteenth century thought; for Bakunin, who

might have ranked as a co founder, gallantlyawarded him the priority. Proudhon and Bakuninstand side by side as men who seem to have believedin revolution as a good in itself (though Proudhon,as usual, sometimes denounced even revolution),and felt it unnecessary, perhaps because they feltthemselves unable, to fiirnish any positive definition

o f their goal. In this respect the successor whostands nearest to them is the syndicalist Sorel, whoheld that the business of doctrine is to provide anappropriate myth, whether true or not, to inspireand stimulate the forces of revolution.

Yet, notwithstanding all that has been said — andrightly said — about the self contradictions o f

Proudhon and about the mood o f frustration anddisillusionment in which his teaching was rooted,the immense impression which he made on hiscontemporaries and on posterity bears witness to the vitali ty and sincerity o f his thought. He gave tonineteenth century political thinkers and politicalprogramme makers something which they neededand which they greedily devoured. O u t o f the welter o f Proudhon’s writings there remain two fixedpoints round which he gravitates and to which hereturns again and again with all his wonted pertinacity and with an unw onted consistency. These arehis rejection of the State and of political power as aprincipie of evil, and his advocacy of “ federalism ”(whatever precisely that might mean) as a form ofcommon organization for social and national groups.


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The conception of political power as a necessaryevil called into existence by man’s sinful nature is

rooted in the Christian trad ition; and the be lief inan era of primitive bliss before the formation ofStates is common, among other thinkers, to Rousseauand Engels. But nineteenth century anarchism,

which first received form and content from Proudhon,is no mere visión of a golden age in the past or in thefuture. It is a creed of active rebellion against the

State, which it seeks to destroy, i f necessary by forcé.Proudhon begins in 1847 by demanding “ la Répu blique, anarchie positive ” ; and in the last year o fhis life he defines anarchy more concretely asa form o f govern me nt or constitution in wh ich the pub lic and private conscience, formed by the development of Science and right, is sufficient by itself for the maintenance o f order and the guarantee o f all liberties, and

where conse quen tly the princip ie o f auth ority, pólice institutions, the m eans o f preven tion or repression,

bureaucracy, taxation, etc ., are reduced to their simplest e.xpression.

Between these dates Proudhon’s pages pullulate withdenunciations o f the State. It is “ the consti-

tutional muzzling of the people, the legal alienationof its thoughts and its initiative ” . It is “ thatfictitious being, without intelligence, without passion, without morality, which we cali the State ” ; and“ whoever lays hands on me to govern me is ausurper and a tyrant ” . Proudhon rejects altogether“ this. fatal theory o f the competence o f the State ” .

But what is to be put into the void thus created ?Proudhon has two answers to this question. The


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first derives from a fruitful inspiration of that queergenius Saint Simon. Here was a man who was not an

anarchist but — to use an anachronistic piece o f jargon — a technocrat, believing that “ les indus-trieis ” (by wh ich he meant all concemed in theproductive or distributive processes) were destinedto control the State, that political power would besucceeded by economic power and “ government ” be replaced by “ administration In a phraseapparently not used by Saint Simon himself, but byhis disciples, the State would becom e “ an association o f workers Th is visión, like AugusteComte’s surrealist plan for the management of“ the hum an planet ” by 14,000 bankers, seemedto presage the eventual elimination of the State;and it had the fortune to be adopted by bothProudhon and Engels, by both syndicalists andBolsheviks. Proudhon attempted to give shape tothe tempting prospect by outlining a scheme for afree credit bank based on the principie of “ mutualism ” ; but neither contemporaries nor posterityhave been induced to treat this seriously. It is onlynecessary to record on Proudhon’s behalf this furtherclaim to originality as one of the first crank financial

reformers.Proudhon’s second answer, given in the last workpublished in his lifetime, which he called Du principe

fédérateur et de la nécessité de reconstituer le parti de la Révolution, is that sovereignty rests with “ the com-mu n e ” — the local unit which has, in Proudhon’seyes, as natural a basis as the family. Th is unit he would allow to govern itself, to impose taxes on


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itself and perhaps even to legislate for itself. I fDr. Thomson, in his book on Democracy in France, is right in describing the French political ideal as“ ranging from an extreme individualism which istantamount to anarchism to a respect for small andintense human communities which are but theindividual writ large ” , then Proudhon was the veryembodiment o f the French ideal.

The París Commune reflected Proudhon’s ideasand term inology; and the anarchists continued touphold the tradition of the small community.Bakunin thought in terms of the Russian peasantcommune, Kropotkin of the village community ofthe M iddle Ages. Anarchism thus became a protestagainst the mass civilization of the industrial age. Itsstrength lay among the small craftsmen in countries where large scale industry had not yet made im-portant inroads — in Italy, in France, and above all,in Spain. In the First International it was the dele-gates from the Latin countries who were Proudhonists or Bakuninists and a constant thorn inM arx’s side. M arx and the Marxists were, on the

whole, right in affixing to anarchism and “ anarchosyndicalism ” what was to them the derogatory petit bourgeois label.

If the commune bears the weight of Proudhon’sprotest against the centralized State, it also opensthe way to his other principie — federalism. Hepredicted that the twentieth century would be theage o f federations. W hat precisely he meant by theterm remains more than ordinarily vague. Bakuninregarded a “ free federation of communes ” as the


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only legitímate form of political organization.Proudhon, with his usual inconsistency, took existing

States as his starting point and approached the issuefrom the angle o f current international affairs. H e wanted federation as the basis o f relations betweenStates. But he perceived that one o f the difficulties was the existing inequality between Slates, andthought that this, too, might be got over by theapplication of the federal principie, namely, by an

“ interior distribution o f sovereignty and govern-ment ” . Federalism, in both senses, was “ the alphaand om ega o f my policy

Here it becomes necessary to say something onthe vexed question of Proudhon’s attitude to nationality and nationalism. In his earlier life he wasinfluenced by the ffaming patriotism of Michelet.

But he afterwards reacted strongly both against theman and against his work, and denounced thefashionable advocacy of self determination and ofthe rights o f nations to un ity and independence.“ Those who speak so much of re establishing thesenational unities ” , he wrote with a certain amounto f prescience, “ have little taste for individualliberties.” T he South in the Am erican civil warhad his enthusiastic support against the North because the Southerners were federalists seekingto break up an artificial Un ion. Alone amongadvanced thinkers of the period, Proudhon was bitterly opposed both to the liberation o f Polandand to the unification o f Ita ly. Poland has always been “ the most corrupt o f aristocracies and themost indisciplined o f states ” ; what she needs is a

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I. F C. H. — l!. F R, « . K.0«5-v«i'‘t»me*r,w ti? C té ncía * f ocín i»

MESTRAGO Oc SOCiOLGEiA 6 PO l i f rC AB I Lj L5 C T £ f ^


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“ radical revolution which will abolish, with thegreat States, all distinctions of nationality, which will

henceforth have no foundation As for “ the present emancipation of Italy by the Gavours, the Victor Emmanuels , the Bonapartes, the SaintSimonians, the Jews, the Garibaldis and the M azzinis ” (a characteristic Proudhonian catalogue ofanathemas), it is nothing but a “ hideous mystification W riting in 1861, Proudhon breaks a lance

with Herzen on the subject:Do you suppose that it is through French egoism,

hatred o f liberty, or contem pt for the Poles and Italians that I despise and distrust this commonplace of nationality

w hic h is going the rounds and makes so m any rascals and so m an y honest m en talk so m uch nonsense ? For heave n’s sake, m y dear Bell [the name o f H erzen’s

jou rnal] , don’t be so to uchy. Otherw is e I shall be obliged to say o f yo u w hat I said six months ago o f your friend G a r ib a ld i: great heart, bu t no head. . . . Do n ’t talk to US of these reconstitutions of nationalities which are at bottom puré retrogression and, in their present form, a play thing used by a pa rty o f intriguers to divert attention from the social revolution.

Yet the charge o f “ French egoism ” which

Herzen had evidently brought against him is notaltogether etisy to refute. Proudhon’s applicationsof his principies, if not the principies themselves, arealways capricious; and his applications o f the federalprincipie are not above suspicion. Proudhon hadas large a measure as most Frenchmen of localpatriotism : to the end o f his days he liked to remem

ber, and to remind the world , that he was a FrancComtois. But the suggestion o f distributing French


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sovereignty in the name of federalism does not occurto him. O n the contrary, Proudhon sometimes gaveoffence to foreigners — including his Belgian hostsduring his period o f exile in Brusscls — by speakingtoo freely of the advantagc of federation betweenFrance and her smaller neighbours. His desire toprevent the unification of Italy and to bring aboutthe federalization o f Austria Hungary f tted in toocomfortably with French national inttv'sts and

French national prejudices to inspire une le confidencc in the objectivity of his argument.

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185777813 E H Carr Studies in Revolution