Socialism in Marx's Time:
SHUB, DAVID
Socialism in Marx's Time A History of Socialist Thought (Vol. II). By G. D. H. Cole. St. Martin's. 482 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by David Shub Author, "Lenin: A Biography''; edited numerous...
...Among the Germans there was only one prominent Socialist, Moses Hess, who actually lived in France...
...Most interesting are the characterizations of William Morris and Henry Mayers Hyndman...
...Marx was invited on the recommendation of two friends, the German tailor Georg Ecarius and the Swiss watchmaker Herman Jung, who had won places in the British labor movement...
...Daniel de Leon can by no means be considered an original thinker...
...Professor Cole has left for a third volume the Fabian Society and the Independent Labor party, the fight between orthodox Marxists and revisionists in Germany and elsewhere, and the development of Russian Social Democracy and Bolshevism...
...As a result, this chapter contains many inaccuracies...
...The first volume of his History was principally a study of socialist ideas in the Western world between the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848...
...Bakunin never subscribed to Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat over the existing classes...
...The First International started as a British-French trade-union movement whose founders hoped to draw in similar groups in other countries...
...But as soon as Marx stopped writing economic and social history and wrote instead theoretical economies, he ceased to behave as a scientist studying facts and started spinning theories out of his own head in a highly unscientific and indeed metaphysical manner...
...Among the more important are these: There were no "de Leonites" in the United States in 1886...
...Herzen also wrote that "socialism which tried to dispense with political freedom would rapidly degenerate into autocratic communism," and that "with the methods of Peter the Great, the social revolution will never attain more than the slave-labor equality of Gracchus and Babeuf and the communist serfdom of Cabet...
...Marx's daughter Jenny and her husband Charles Longuet died natural deaths...
...Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, was a popularizer of other people's ideas...
...He also explains quite clearly why Lassalle opposed trade unions and fought not the reactionary Junkers but the German liberals, whereas Marx was a great admirer of trade unionism and urged German Socialists to support the liberals' struggle for constitutional reforms...
...edited numerous publications on Socialism THE HISTORY of socialism, as an ideology and social movement, has been substantially enriched by the second volume of Professor Cole's monumental work...
...In recent years, he has made a serious study of socialist history in other countries...
...Notwithstanding such inaccuracies, Professor Cole's two volumes form the most objective and most readable history of the development of socialist ideas from the French Revolution to the 1890s that has yet appeared in any language...
...the emphasis is not only on ideas, but on organized movements as well...
...Nationalization of the means of production, which years later became the program of the Socialist parties, was then rejected as a reactionary demand...
...Only someone with superficial knowledge of Belinsky, Herzen, Chernishevsky and Lavrov can assert, as Cole does, that Stalin's "socialism in one country" idea "owes much to these apostles of the belief that it was the mission of the Russians to work out their own kind of socialism on foundations essentially Russian...
...The chapters "Anarchists and Anarchist Communists" and "Bakunin" contain short portraits of the most important anarchist thinkers...
...Cole illuminates their various ideas and rightly observes that only Bakunin and Kropotkin among them can be considered socialist thinkers...
...Nikolai Rysakov and Ignati Grinevitsky, who participated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, were not workers, but university students...
...According to Cole, the fall of the First International was a result not of the Marx-Bakunin struggle, but of the Paris Commune and Marx's defense of it...
...Soon afterward, the International Workingmen's Association came into being...
...Marxism," he concludes, "was a powerful and impressive analysis of the conditions of capitalist production at a particular phase of development...
...Although Cole is not a Marxist, he declares that "Das Kapital must rank as one of the very great books of the nineteenth century...
...But the central themes of this volume are the First International, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the struggle between the followers of Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin for influence over European labor...
...He really did believe in freedom and regarded coercion as an unnecessary result of wrong social institutions...
...Kropotkin had no wish to dictate to anybody...
...Lassalle's death in 1864 opened the way to the development of Marxism in Germany...
...In contrast to the Second International and the present Socialist International, this First International was not a federation of Socialist and Labor parties, but an organization of individual members, who represented small groups in various countries...
...Internally coherent they may have been...
...The present volume deals with socialism from 1848 to the emergence of the Social Democratic parties in the Nineties...
...logically correct they may have been, as deductions from the original set of assumptions: but scientific in any proper use of the word they certainly were not...
...His chapter on Marx and Engels, almost 50 pages, presents not only sharply-drawn biographies of these two men...
...The difference between these two, says Cole aptly, was that "Bakunin managed to be dictatorial as well as the enemy of dictation...
...He has had to do so because most works of Russian anti-Bolshevik socialist thinkers and historians are just not available in English...
...As long as Lassalle lived, Marx had little influence on the German labor movement...
...there was not yet a socialist movement in that period...
...on the contrary, he was the first European socialist to condemn it...
...Whether Marx's theoretical economics were true or untrue may be a moot point...
...Unfortunately, Professor Cole, who does not read Russian, has acquainted himself with these men chiefly through Soviet-selected translations arid commentaries by pro-Soviet historians...
...Unavoidably, a book of such scope has its share of minor inaccuracies...
...The first congresses of the International were dominated by French and Swiss Socialists...
...Lavrov was a socialist and revolutionary long before his arrest in 1866...
...Henry George, who almost created a movement which in many respects resembled European socialism, was himself never a socialist in the full sense of the word...
...and it had some claim to be regarded as scientific,' to the extent to which it was based on the study of capitalism up to the middle of the nineteenth century...
...both Marxists and Bakuninists considered the existing state to be a reactionary institution...
...The greatest living British historian of the socialist and labor movements, Professor Cole is thoroughly grounded not only in the English literature on the subject, but also in French and German works...
...At the Brussels Congress of 1868, the majority of the delegates were Belgians...
...In two very instructive chapters, "Lassalle" and "German Socialism after Lassalle," Cole presents a true portrait of Lassalle the Socialist leader and politician...
...The only Italian delegate was a Genevese follower of Bakunin...
...Cole's opening chapters describe the development of socialism in France, Belgium, Germany and Russia...
...America, Cole says, has not produced a single socialist thinker...
...but also a thoroughly objective explanation of their theories...
...by 1857, he was a contributor to Herzen's revolutionary magazine Kolokol, and a few years later he joined Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom), the first Socialist underground organization...
...France in the 1860s was the center of the revolutionary and socialist movement...
...Or that the Soviet collective farm "can be regarded as a kind of realization of the communistic conceptions of Herzen and Chernishevsky...
...When the Commune was suppressed, reaction triumphed throughout Europe...
...it was Marx's daughters Eleanor and Laura (with Laura's husband Paul Lafargue) who committed suicide...
...As a first step, they invited Socialist emigres then residing in England to a conference...
...The chapter "The Revival of British Socialism" contains striking portraits of the key men and women in the development of British socialist thought around 1890...
...It was, after all, Alexander Herzen who wrote in 1863: "Belinsky's ideal, our ideal, our church and the parental home in which our first thoughts and feelings were nourished, was the Western World, with its science, its revolution, its political freedom, its artistic riches and its indestructible hopes...
...They should be required reading for all political scientists and writers on foreign affairs, and above all for those who wish to combat Communism intelligently and effectively...
...The basis for Dos-toevsky's The Possessed was not the Petrashevsky Circle, but the group around the revolutionary adventurer Sergei Nechayev...
...Cole, himself an opponent of Anarchism, describes the Marx-Bakunin struggle with admirable objectivity...
...For the first time in a British history of socialism, we find a substantial chapter discussing the Russian radical and socialist thinkers Belinsky, Herzen, Chernishevsky, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, Lavrov and Bakunin...
...The chapter "American Socialism" is a short, objective history from the beginnings in the 1860s until the split in the Socialist Labor party in the mid-Nineties...
...Kropotkin left Russia before the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will party) was founded...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 10
