the growth of socialism during the industrial revolution?

Answer 1

The Industrial Revolution had many profound effects on European civilization. It rendered much of the old aristocracy irrelevant, boosted the bourgeoisie to economic and political power, and drafted much of the old peasant class into its factories. The result was naturally a shift in attitude toward wealth. Capitalist wealth seemed to have no natural limits. Partly because the new industrial modes of production had no preassigned place in feudal order of things, the industrialists viewed themselves as the creators of their wealth and considered it something to be proud of.

This class also created the various movements for democratic government which swept across Europe; and it was only natural that they should have viewed their economic and political ideals as functioning hand in hand. Democracy was necessary to wrest power from the old nobility, to pass laws enabling business to thrive, and to guarantee their property rights.

Rousseau had argued in his Social Contract that true democracy could not thrive in a society with great extremes of wealth and poverty because power always naturally flows toward the wealthy, whatever the electoral system; but the sort of democracy the bourgeoisie advocated was for a long time reserved for property owners: merchants, manufacturers, landlords and bankers. One of the great struggles of the 19th Century was for the gradual expansion of the vote, first to working men, and--much later--to women.

The notion of liberty promulgated by the "liberals" of the 19th century (who held opinions now called "conservative") was based on the concept that only on the basis of economic independence and security could freedom be secured; and that liberty was a product of natural law, not of a Christian theology which had sometimes censured excessive wealth. Indeed, greed itself was often celebrated as the engine that drove the economy and provided work and prosperity for all. Dependency was considered self-destructive, so the poor were punished for their poverty by harsh laws designed to drive them to work.

These ideas are very familiar to us today: just consider how the news eagerly reports increases in consumer spending as a sign of a healthy economy, how the current movements for "welfare reform" use much the same concepts that justified the draconian "poor laws" of 19th-Century England. Investment is viewed, now as then, as the engine that drives the economy. Any measure which can encourage investors to buy more stock is viewed as beneficial to society as a whole.

But such a profound revolution was bound to cause negative reactions as well as positive ones. Not everyone agreed that the shift of power into the hands of the new rich was entirely benign.

In the first half of the 19th Century the working classes in the newly industrializing countries of England and Germany suffered under many forms of exploitation. The old feudal restrictions which had fixed peasants in place on the land and limited their income had also guaranteed them a place in the world. They may not have prospered, but they were often able to fend off starvation and homelessness simply because they had been born onto estates from which they could not be removed against their wills.

The dissolution of this old order meant that workers could be hired and fired at will and had to sell their labor for whatever the going rate was--and that rate was determined by their competition with each other to work cheaply enough to gain them an advantage in the job market. Traditional rules and protections went by the board in the new factories, which often ran for twenty-four hours a day (two twelve-hour shifts), seven days a week under the most inhumane conditions. Women and children were absorbed into the work force as well, often preferred because they cost much less than men. Living standards and educational levels actually declined in many areas.

Many of the industries severely polluted their environments, their machinery maimed and killed many workers, and food in the new factory towns was often of poor quality and in short supply. Even many well-to-do people became concerned over the wretched conditions under which the new working class labored, as is reflected in the popular novels of Charles Dickens.

But other side-effects of the industrial revolution had more immediate effects on the middle classes. The older economy had been a regulated one, fairly predictable except for the traditional crises caused by plague, war, and drought. The new economy brought a new kind of crisis that seemed to have no natural or rational basis--the "bust." What is now called "the business cycle" seemed to be beyond anyone's control. There would be a more or less prolonged period of economic growth, with plenty of jobs and rising wages during which most people prospered; but then, for no apparent reason, profits and wages would begin to fall and millions would be plunged into unemployment and poverty, and even the wealthy could abruptly find themselves much less well off, if not absolutely impoverished.

Industrialists tried to stabilize these wild cycles of "boom and bust" in the runaway engine of the capitalist economy by passing regulations setting maximum wages and banning labor unions (to conserve profits), regulating imports (to preserve national commercial advantages), and combining into huge monopolistic "trusts" designed to reduce or eliminate competition.

Although competition is the engine of capitalism, it is not to the advantage of individual capitalists that it be entirely unfettered. The ultimate success in competition, indeed, is to absorb or destroy rivals and emerge at the top of the heap, able to dictate wages and prices. Although as the century passed these efforts to stabilize and concentrate wealth grew more successful, they were never able to prevent the recurrence of periodic "crashes."

Some began to argue that this unstable new system which glorified greed while impoverishing the common people needed radical reform. These were the early socialists.

The notion of socialism can be traced back centuries in various forms, notably among the earliest Christians (see the remarkable story in Acts 4:34-5:11); and the model of monastic communism, with individuals owning nothing except what they collectively shared was constantly before the eyes of Europeans throughout much of the Christian era. But the roots of modern socialism lie in our period, in France, Germany and England during the period of the industrial revolution.

"Socialism" is an exceedingly fuzzy term which has been used to label an extraordinarily wide array of political and economic beliefs. Its definition is further obscured by the tendency of its enemies to label any idea with which they disagree "socialist." But generally socialists advocate a democratically controlled economy run for the benefit of all. The unfettered competition of capitalists is replaced by cooperation and the business cycle by planned stability. Often they believe--like the early Christians--that property should be shared in common, and private ownership of industry and land abolished.

Many 19th-Century socialists rejected the argument that the wealthy deserve their wealth because they have created it, instead believing that wealth is created by the working classes and wrongfully appropriated by the rich who benefit disproportionately from their underpaid labor. Much ink has been spilled to "prove" the capitalist or labor theories of value; but they are in essence not theories that can be proven, but rather irreconcilable philosophical views. Clearly both capital and labor are vital to industry, and arguing which produces the other is a variation on the old argument over which came first, the chicken or the egg, except that it is far more fraught with political tensions.

Such arguments had little appeal for most ordinary socialists: they simply saw poverty and its attendant misery spreading around them and wanted to do something about it. Their ideals were equality, cooperation, democracy, and shared prosperity.

These ideals were also shared by two other groups: the anarchists and the Communists. We have touched on anarchism in the context of Zola's Germinal, and it is sufficient to point out that its advocates rejected socialists' trust in even the most democratic of governments, arguing that only the most decentralized grass-roots sort of organization could prevent tyranny. Their critique of the usual socialist program was an acute one, but they failed to achieve much because the more peaceful anarchists could change little and the violent ones aroused more reaction against themselves than against the state which they dreamed of destroying.

Communism's relationship to socialism is a more complex matter. Traditionally, "communism" with a small "c" has been taken to stand for a form of social organization in which people live in groups, sharing labor and property collectively, whether this takes the form of a small commune or a large state. Those forms of socialism which merely emphasize publically financed social programs based on the heavy taxation of private business cannot properly be called "communist."

However, Marxists also consider themselves socialists. For modern Communists (with a big "C"), socialism is the more comprehensive term: Communism is regarded as an advanced stage of socialism, and this definition is adopted in this essay. Theoretically, the socialist state is an interim measure necessary to carry out the reorganization of society, which will then "wither away" to produce very much the same results as are aimed at in anarchism: a moneyless society in which market forces play no role, in which production is for the use of the producers, in which lands and factories are commonly owned by those who work them, and in which the state--and with it, war--is abolished. Unfortunately for this theory, the modern Communist states have withered only by retreating into capitalism, not by moving forward into anarchism.

It was not so clear in the mid-19th Century that socialism would not succeed. We are so used to capitalism by now that we take it for granted, supposing that investment, marketing and market forces must have been the central driving forces of human society for all time. This is very far from being the case. Property and privilege have always existed in some form, but not necessarily in the forms which they take under capitalism. It is difficult to remember, for instance, that in most early societies, including early Medieval Europe, few people ever handled money: barter was the rule.

Sophisticated thinkers in the 18th and early 19th Centuries were very aware that industrial capitalism had not always existed and indeed was emerging among lingering remnants of feudalism all over Europe. If such a profound revolution in social relations could take place in their own time, surely it was not unthinkable that another could succeed it--a socialist revolution.

The earliest thinkers to be called "socialists" were the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and François-Marie-Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and the Welshman Robert Owen ( (1771-1858). All three of them were visionaries with little political sense, hoping to bring about a better society through the voluntary efforts of people of good will. In this they were very much products of the Enlightenment. Among them, Owen was the only one who was able to put any of his ideas into practice, since as an idealistic wealthy industrialist he had the means to do so. Various Owenite communities were founded, especially in America, but none of them lasted long.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), though more properly considered an anarchist, articulated a hostility toward capitalists that was echoed in the writings of many socialists. His slogan "property is theft" was a handy, if inflammatory, summation of the labor theory of value, and much influenced popular socialism among the working classes. However, like the majority of socialists and Communists, he was not strictly opposed to all private property: one should be free to own one's own home and domestic goods, for instance. What he objected to was property used to extract wealth from the labor of others: factories, mines, railroads, etc.; and Marx, whom he met in Paris in the 1840s, generally followed this line of thought. He was also an important influence on Marx's opponent, Bakunin, the Russian anarchist Zola used as inspiration for the character of Souvarine in Germinal.

When Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, they were far from dominating the socialist movement. Proudhon had wider influence than they, and they often had to struggle to get their ideas taken seriously in socialist circles.

If it had only been idealistic industrialists and middle-class intellectuals who had espoused socialism, it never would have gotten far; but in its simpler forms its ideas found a fairly widespread appeal among working people. It comes as a shock to many modern students to discover that perhaps the majority of labor movements in the 19th Century embraced socialism as their goal. Zola's miners were not alone in seeing union organizing as only a preliminary stage on the advance toward state power.

Well into the 20th Century, labor unions often had at least nominally socialist programs, even in the notoriously conservative U.S. In Europe they routinely organized labor parties which competed in elections on socialist platforms, and sometimes won, though rarely implementing more than a few of their more modest goals, such as nationalizing railroads, mines, and some other industries.

The link between labor organizing and socialism was reinforced by the efforts of capitalists to suppress all labor movements, viewing any form of unionization, no matter how mild, as posing the threat of revolution. Socialists like Marx welcomed these popular movements as providing the only viable vehicle for radical change.

Clearly, he thought, ever larger masses of workers drafted into the industrial armies of capital, tormented by poverty and the insecurity born of the wild fluctuations of the business cycle, would grow to be the dominant force in society, outnumber everyone else. Their pressure for radical change would inevitably lead to a confrontation in which the capitalist rulers of society would abandon all pretense of democracy and thereby become the targets of an irresistable armed uprising. Marx's notion of revolution was always one of the vast majority of society seizing power from a tiny minority of capitalists for the common good of all.

That no such revolution ever took place is due in part to the remarkable successes of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Against incredibly difficult odds, often beaten, imprisoned, and shot, union members successfully waged campaigns to shorten the working day, increase wages, and improve working conditions until most workers no longer felt they had "nothing to lose" by destroying the system which they were substantially reshaping.

Meanwhile it should be said that the competitive forces of capitalism made their own contribution to worker prosperity despite the best efforts of the monopolistic trust-builders by continually producing more cheap, abundant goods which effectively raised the common standard of living. The new goods might lack the quality of the old hand-made products of the feudal age, but they were geneally available to people of even modest means. The twin pressures of maket competition and labor organization meant, on average, that--despite the misery prevalent in many quarters and the chaos created by periodic "busts," the majority of workers during the second half of the the 19th Century were better off than their parents.

The wave of democratic revolutions in 1848 which established parliamentary government in a number of European nations did not embrace the socialist ideals of the Communist Manifesto published that same year. It was not until 1864 that the International Working Men's Association (the "First International") was formed, powerfully influenced by Marxism, and became a dominant force in continental European socialism.

Answer 2

Capitalism, a la Adam Smith, predates the Industrial Revolution by about 100 years.

Answer 3

The industrial revolution was a time of rapid capitalist expansion for profit. Millions of people were put into unsafe working conditions and paid miserable wages. Children were exploited. To fight back, the working poor banded together and socialism developed as a political philosophy based on fairness, sharing and liberty.

Answer 4

You will find all your answers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#History_of_socialism

Good Luck!!!