HERE IS CHAPTER 3 OF MY BOOK ON WW i: Chapter 3. Socialism and Democratisation Synopsis: The elite tries to exorcize the proletarian threat not only by using the “stick” of bloody repression but also the “carrot” of social legislation and political reforms. And it invents all sorts of tricks to combat socialism and slow down the democratisation process… We return to the crucial fact that the alliance of the upper-middle class and the nobility was rooted in a common fear of “those below” (ceux d’en bas), the proletariat. This potentially revolutionary proletariat had to be tamed, and such a task required a strong, authoritarian state and, above all, a strong army that one could count on to maintain or restore order in case of a possible resurgence of the social troubles of 1848 and 1871. As we have seen, militarism was useful for this purpose, and that is why the supposedly peaceable burghers embraced it. During the second half of the 19th century, the repressive role of the state continued to expand for the simple reason that the proletarian danger kept increasing relentlessly. The proletariat was no longer the impetuous populace that had stormed the Bastille in 1789 and had manned the barricades in 1830 and 1848. At that time, they had not yet formed a class consciousness, they had not yet been armed with a program or ideology, had few or no capable leaders, and could therefore easily be manipulated and ultimately – when the revolutionary dirty work was done – sent packing by more astute fellow revolutionaries of the bourgeois variety. But now, things were different. Already in 1848, it became obvious that the proletariat, still consisting mainly of craftsmen, but also increasingly of factory workers, had discovered capable leaders and had developed not only a strong class consciousness, but also a coherent ideology, called socialism. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, the first Marxist socialist program, was drawn up by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847 and published in February 1848, barely a few days before a revolution broke out in Paris. Like liberalism, socialism was a child of the Enlightenment; however, in addition to/instead of the “liberty” that was also written on the banner of liberalism, socialism preached equality and, more precisely, social equality instead of the mere equality before the law that had been introduced by the French Revolution. According to Marx and Engels, this equality could only become reality via a revolution, a revolution that would bring down the existing capitalist social and economic order together with its political superstructures; thus creating a better, more equitable, and truly egalitarian society. If the Paris Commune terrified the European bourgeoisie as much as it did, it was precisely because it seemed to be a socialist revolution, an attempt to overthrow the entire established social, economic, and political order. Even after the bloody repression of this insurrection, the bourgeoisie and the nobility were not rid of their fear of the proletarians and the abominable revolutionary socialism embraced by the latter. In fact, there emerged within Europe a major labour movement, well organized and militant, with trade unions, cooperatives, and political parties that mostly subscribed to the ideology and program of revolutionary, Marxist socialism (it should not be forgotten that other varieties of socialism existed). The British historian Eric Hobsbawm has described the contemporary atmosphere as follows: “The mass of workers was large, was indisputably growing, and threw a dark shadow over the established ordering of society and politics. What indeed would happen if, as a class, they organized politically? This is precisely what happened, on a European scale, suddenly and with extraordinary speed…Mass parties based on the working class, for the most part inspired by an ideology of revolutionary socialism and led by men – and even sometimes by women – who believed in such an ideology, appeared on the scene and grew with startling rapidity.” Indeed, during the years 1870-1880 the socialist parties rose like mushrooms and were generally partisans of Marxist revolutionary socialism. But they also formulated concrete and practical demands, such as the extension of the right to vote, higher wages, fewer work days, and shorter working hours, as well as restrictions on child labour. (In this field, the socialist parties discovered useful allies in socialist and other trade unions that knew how to use the feared weapon of the strike.) Put differently, the socialists aimed not only at a revolutionary overthrow of the established order: they also demanded political reforms and social-economic change within that order They stood for revolution, for radical change, but also for evolution, for progressive, gradual change. In any event, with this ambivalent and somewhat contradictory program they enjoyed considerable success among the “little people,” not only among the factory workers, the “blue-collar workers,” but also, albeit to a lesser extent, among the lower-middle class, the petite bourgeoisie, composed of craftsmen, shopkeepers, and “white-collar workers.” This lower-middle class was caught between the capitalist Charybdis of the aristocratic-bourgeois elite and the socialist Scylla of the rising labour movement. It was traumatised by being squeezed from above as well as from below, by being looked down upon by social superiors and being subjected to competition from big industry, from “big business,” as well as by the fear of being swallowed up by the socially inferior working class, by being “proletarianised”; and so it developed anticapitalist as well as antisocialist tendencies. (It is on account of this that the petite bourgeoisie was receptive to anti-Semitism, a Janus-faced phenomenon with an anti-capitalist and an anti-socialist face, thus seeming to reconcile both tendencies.) In any event, from the viewpoint of the aristocratic and bourgeois elite, it seemed as if the restless popular masses in their entirety were poised to overthrow the established order. How could one exorcize this danger? In order to keep the “dangerous classes” under control and abort embryonic revolutions, one needed those same armies that also happened to be useful for the achievement of imperialist objectives. This was one of the most important reasons why in many countries the bourgeoisie had graciously ceded the domain of politics to representatives of the ancien régime, that is, to people with centuries of military experience, particularly experience in the ruthless struggle against anything that was revolutionary. Of the king and the nobility, one could also hope that their authority and prestige might contribute to keep ordinary people respectful and submissive. In 1878, the following could be read in the liberal German newspaper National-Zeitung: The king [of Prussia] is the master par excellence of the existing order…In the face of the [socialist] tsunami the monarchy is our strongest bastion, the dam that protects our peace and our rights, our property, and our erudition against the deluge of barbarity. One could similarly count on the church, yet another pillar of the ancien régime, to keep the people under control. After the experiences of 1848 and 1871, for example, the French bourgeoisie, though essentially free thinking, was happy to abandon primary school education to the clerical authorities. Napoleon had already been keenly aware of the utility of religion in this respect. He made frequent remarks to the effect that religion “is excellent for keeping common people quiet” and “keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” In order to protect the rights, the property, and the entire “civilisation” of the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the church, in other words, the interests of the propertied classes, against proletarian “barbarity” and to teach good manners to the restless masses, all means were good, including bloody repression. In this field too, the autocratic crowned heads and the aristocratic military leaders were the great specialists. They had provided a prototypical example of their skills in this respect in 1819, on St. Peters Field in Manchester, when the royal cavalry attacked a crowd of 60,000 demonstrators and caused such a bloodbath that the massacre went down in history under the name of “Battle of Peterloo”; this name was a sarcastic allusion to the fact that one of the men responsible for this repression of what appeared to be an imminent revolution was the Duke of Wellington, who had already personally vanquished the international revolution incarnated by Napoleon’s France, namely at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. When it came to repression, however, bourgeois regimes were also quite capable of hitting hard; the best example of that was provided by the extremely bloody repression of the Paris Commune by the army of the French Third Republic. Thousands of Communards were massacred and thousands of others, including numerous women, were deported to penal colonies such as Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana, whence revolutionaries had already been forcibly transported in 1848. The bourgeoisie was not only ready and keen to quash revolutions (and any other form of lower-class agitation), it also collaborated closely with its partner, the nobility, to alienate the people from socialism. Bismarck, who according to certain historians was possessed by “fear of revolution” (Revolutionsfurcht) became famous for his twin approach to the problem, known as the policy of “the stick and the carrot” (in German: Zuckerbrot und Peitsche, literally “egg bread and the whip”). Other than the “whip” for example in the form of his draconian “anti-socialist laws” of 1878, including a prohibition of socialist associations and publications, the iron chancellor later also relied on the “egg bread” of concessions, notably via the establishment of a system of national accident, sickness and old age insurance. With this large-scale program of social legislation, predecessor of the later “welfare state” and of the post-1945 West German “social state” (Sozialstaat), he hoped to captivate Germany’s working class and take the wind out of the revolutionary sails of the socialists. Bismarck also made seemingly generous concessions in the political field, most spectacularly by introducing universal suffrage for the Reichstag, the parliament of the unified, federal German Reich that had been created in 1871. But this sensational accomplishment was far less revolutionary than it appeared at first sight. First, the Reichstag was relatively powerless; it commanded less authority than the parliament of the greatest and most important member state (or Land) of the Empire, Prussia, where, thanks to a restricted voting system, the aristocratic Junkers enjoyed a virtual monopoly of power. (The Reichstag’s major trump card was the fact that the Reich’s budget had to be approved by a majority within this assembly, and in 1914 the Reichstag would thus have to authorise the war credits, a problem that will be discussed later.) Second, the federal cabinet was not accountable to the Reichstag, the country’s legislative power, but to the executive power, that is, the person of the emperor. Consequently, in spite of its impressive electoral successes and the resulting spectacular increase of the number of its representatives in the Reichstag, the German socialist party, known as the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, SPD) would long remain a lightweight in terms of political power, which is of course exactly what had been intended by Bismarck. In any event, during the second half of the 19th century, in countries such as Great Britain, Belgium, and Italy, the elite likewise made concessions in the form of a widening of the right to vote. The emancipation of the “little people” on the political level was an important aspect of the democratisation process that had started in 1789 and had made remarkable progress during the second half of the 19th century. This progress was obviously achieved at the expense of the aristocratic and bourgeois elite, which had to relinquish a (usually small) part of its wealth, its privileges, and its prestige at each step in the process. It is therefore only logical that monarchs, aristocrats, members of the haute bourgeoisie, high-ranking government officials, church prelates, etc. abhorred democracy and fought tooth and nail to stop it during a rise that was slow and far from irresistible, even though at times it may have appeared to be so. We should not overestimate the importance of this 19th-century democratisation. Before the First World War, only very few countries had adopted universal suffrage. In 1914, a majority of countries, including Great Britain and Belgium, still did not allow the vote for all men, let alone for women. (Incidentally, New Zealand was the very first country in the world to introduce universal suffrage for women as well as men, in 1893.) The elite invented all sorts of stratagems to restrict the impact, overly democratic to elitist taste, of the universal right to vote. We have already seen how this was achieved in Germany. In Belgium, where the introduction of universal suffrage could not be avoided, it made its appearance in the guise of a plural suffrage, in which people “involved in the maintenance of the social order on account of the possession of a family, a house, capital, a secure employment, or a diploma” were awarded more than one vote. (Plural suffrage was heartily recommended by the well-known British apostle of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, as a means to prevent too much power from being transferred from the hands of the rich to those of the poor.) Another stratagem consisted in the manipulation of the geographic limits of electoral districts, so that those with few rich residents could send as many representatives to the legislative assemblies as those with a large population of poor people, which became known as gerrymandering. In certain countries, the potency of universal suffrage was sapped by means of an indirect voting system, in which one votes for “electors,” virtually always members of the elite, who are then free to give their vote to the candidate they like the best; in the United States, the president is still elected by means of this undemocratic system. In Great Britain and many countries with a British political tradition, such as Canada, a “plurality voting system” (or “single-winner” system) was introduced to achieve the elite’s antidemocratic objectives. This is a system whereby in each district one single seat in the assembly is available and goes to the candidate who harvests a plurality, and not necessarily a majority, of votes. In contrast to the more democratic system of “proportional representation,” the plurality system favoured the existing, and usually conservative, big parties, and handicapped the small parties, including the socialist parties that had only just began to appear on the electoral scene in most countries. While it is true that more and more people obtained the right to vote, it is also true that very few people actually happened to be electable. In practice, only rich burghers with plenty of leisure time qualified, because electoral campaigns and holding a public office involved high expenses. It is precisely for this reason that holding public office would long remain unremunerated, or poorly remunerated, and deliberately so. Finally, the elite learned very quickly that elections based on universal suffrage are most easily won by well-known personalities, and so they made it a habit to arrange for, and support, the candidacy of some “celebrity:” a general perhaps, or some scion of a prestigious family, someone who was said to have that je ne sais quoi called “charisma” and/or who could be said to be “above politics.” What mattered was that such a person could be relied on to defend and promote the interests of the elite. This approach revealed itself to be particularly effective when universal suffrage was used to elect a president who would enjoy vast powers. The prototypical example was Napoleon III, a nephew of “Napoleon the Great,” who was elected in 1848 as president of a republic – the fruit of that year’s revolution – in which universal suffrage had just been introduced. (A few years later, he would throw off his democratic mask and proclaim himself emperor.) This system thus became known as “bonapartism,” and it is not a coincidence that it has enjoyed its greatest triumphs in France and the United States, countries endowed with “presidential regimes,” namely in the form of the election of generals like de Gaulle and Eisenhower, or Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and (as governor of California) Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the legislative assemblies composed of elected representatives of the people were the state’s intrinsically democratic institutions, in many countries these assemblies enjoyed only very limited powers. Almost everywhere, the executive branch of government continued to command great power and numerous important prerogatives, and was most often embodied by crowned heads who had inherited their position from their father (or occasionally mother). It was not unusual at all for a king or emperor to be commander in chief of the country’s armed forces. Such was the case in Belgium, whose army would be commanded throughout the Great War by King Albert I. But the best example of a powerful monarch was obviously the emperor of Germany, who functioned as Oberster Kriegsherr, that is, supreme commander of the military forces which he referred to as “his” army. (The popularly elected Reichstag, on the other hand, had no authority whatsoever over the army.) Even the president of one of the most democratic countries at the time, France of the bourgeois Third Republic, was endowed with enormous powers. He was a kind of pseudo-monarch who enjoyed all sorts of privileges and was elected for a term of no less than seven years. The American president likewise commanded extensive powers. Furthermore, within the parliaments there often existed not only a lower chamber, consisting of elected representatives of the people, literally the “House of Commons”, but also an upper chamber or Senate, such as Britain’s House of Lords, whose members were not elected, but appointed on the basis of their (upper-class) origin or their “merits,” that is, the services they had rendered to the established order. These institutions were expected to function as a “saucer” into which one could “cool down” overly hot legislative concoctions served up by the potentially radical lower chamber; this is how George Washington delicately put it when the establishment of “a more thoughtful and deliberative” upper chamber, a Senate, was being discussed shortly after the birth of the United States. Moreover, a large share of the powers of the modern state was concentrated in institutions whose officials were not elected but appointed: the judiciary, whose supreme court typically enjoyed the privilege of being able to reject as “unconstitutional” any laws made by the the parliaments; the high levels of the state bureaucracy and the army, and the diplomatic service. In these institutions too, officials were appointed virtually exclusively on the basis of a noble or very upper-middle class origin or an expensive higher education, preferably from elitist academic bastions such as Oxford and Cambridge; in other words, these loci of state power were de facto set aside for representatives of the upper classes and were off-limits to the masses. In Great Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, the generals were essentially recruited from noble families, and to become an ambassador of countries such as Belgium, it would long remain de rigueur to be of aristocratic origin. If in those days the state administration quickly gained importance in all countries, this was certainly not a coincidence. This “bureaucratisation” did not happen in spite of the ongoing democratisation, as the contemporary German sociologist Max Weber believed, but rather because of this democratisation. For the elite, the bureaucratisation was a means to counter democratisation, to remove as much power as possible from the elected officials of the lower houses of the parliaments, over which the elite was gradually losing control, and, at the same time, to stash away as much power as possible in institutions that could in fact be monopolised by the nobility and/or the haute bourgeoisie via the system of appointments. (In similar fashion, during the last few decades an enormous quantity of power has been transferred from elected – and therefore relatively democratic – institutions of individual countries towards supranational institutions whose decision-makers are mostly appointed.) Bureaucratisation was certainly not a coincidental and unimportant by-product of the democratisation process. It was an instrument deliberately used by the elite for the purpose of neutralising, or at least minimising, the impact of democratisation. A crucial institution in which all positions of importance continued to be filled by means of appointment and not election was the army. Just about everywhere, authority within the army remained a monopoly of the nobility and, to a lesser extent, of the haute bourgeoisie. The lower orders in general, and especially undesirable elements such as socialists and Jews, were absolutely not welcome there. This was dramatically illustrated with respect to the French army, a bastion of monarchists and clerical conservatives, by the Dreyfus Affair. In Germany, the army was and remained a kind of exclusively aristocratic-feudal state within the aristocratic-bourgeois state that the Reich happened to be. The high command was accountable only to the emperor, the army’s commander-in-chief, and that would still be the case in 1914. (The infamous but capable General Ludendorff, a commoner, provided an exception to the general rule that the army’s high command was monopolized by the nobility; Emperor William despised him as an upstart and arranged for him to remain subordinated, at least in theory, to von Hindenburg, who was far less competent but was a 24-carat aristocrat. ) Militaristic Germany was evidently an extreme case, but even in less militaristic countries, the army likewise remained immune to all forms of democratisation. Even the army of the relatively democratic French Republic cultivated a “certain type of military tradition, [namely] the principles of absolute authority, total and blind obedience, and the right to administer punishment.” The military authorities tended to collaborate only reluctantly with governments that consisted of, or had to defer to, parliamentarians elected by the people, and they sometimes hatched all sorts of plans without informing the politicos. One of the reasons why Great Britain would go to war in 1914 was that the high command of its army – in collaboration with the “war party” within the government, but unbeknownst to the House of Commons – had contracted obligations vis-à-vis the French army’s high command, obligations that made it de facto impossible to remain neutral in case of war. In any event, the march towards democracy only moved at a glacial speed in late 19th-century Victorian Britain. Even in 1914, universal suffrage did not exist yet and the popular masses still had little or no say in political life. Similarly, the social services did not yet meet the criteria that one is entitled to expect of a modern democracy. Compulsory schooling at the primary level was only introduced in 1890, but in 1914 it was still not entirely free of charge. Great Britain would certainly not go to war for democracy and against autocracy, because in Germany universal suffrage already existed, albeit in a far from perfect form, since 1871, and in the Austrian part of the Danube Monarchy, since 1907. (In Hungary, on the other hand, the right to vote remained reserved to only six percent of the population.) And the popular masses were far better represented in the German Reichstag than in the British House of Commons. It would only be at the end of the Great War that democracy would make its appearance in Britain, and we will soon learn why.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 22:09:48 +0000
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