Socialism and the Emergence of the Welfare State

Trafford Publishing

Contents

Preface.....................................viiChapter 1 Marx..............................1Chapter 2 Germany...........................7Chapter 3 France............................24Chapter 4 Britain...........................41Chapter 5 Sweden............................49Chapter 6 United States.....................56Conclusion..................................67Index.......................................75

Chapter One

In the beginning was Karl Marx. No other writer of nineteenth-century Europe had remotely as much influence as he. The time and place of his birth were crucial to that importance. Marx was born in the town of Trier (Trèves in French) on the Moselle River only a few miles from the intersection of Germany and France with Luxemburg. It also happens that Trier stood on the border between the Germanic and Roman worlds that had collided there centuries ago. Hence Trier is a historic crossing in the heart of Europe. As for the timing, Marx was born in 1818 near the climax of the first industrial revolution in Britain and at the post-Napoleonic beginning of a second industrial wave of growth that swept over western continental Europe as the nineteenth century unfolded. As a boy, therefore, Marx grew up in a largely rural setting that was soon to be transformed by the innovative force of new commerce and industry. For the first time, everything that we think of as "modern"—meaning a growing population, advancing technological innovation, a burgeoning factory system, mass transportation, an increasingly numerous working class, and much more—was putting in an appearance amid great confusion and conflict. It was Marx's self-appointed task to bring all this remarkable unprecedented activity into focus.

His earliest writings, starting about 1840, tended to get lost in the shuffle. More than a century later they were scooped up by scholars eager to show that Marx was really a humanist, an existentialist, or whatever. But what those first essays actually revealed was that Marx began as a thoroughly convinced Hegelian. It was, after all, Hegel's theoretical Weltanschauung that preoccupied Marx during his initial philosophical studies at the university in Berlin. In 1846 he attempted to pull his own thoughts together in a treatise entitled The German Ideology. The lingering traces of Hegelianism were evident enough, but one crucial sentence set Marx apart from his master: "Here we do not descend from heaven to earth, but we ascend from earth to heaven." If taken to its ultimate conclusion, this newly found conviction meant that Marx would no longer begin with some abstract notion seeking to realize itself in history, but he would take a more positivistic approach by deducing abstractions from historical facts. Of course, he never quite succeeded in making a total transition to that objective, and his writings remained marked by the titanic clash of great concepts.

Let it be briefly added here that Marx well understood Hegel. A single illustration will serve to underscore that assertion: the most fundamental Hegelian proposition of the dialectic. This conception has often been presented as a kind of ethereal tennis match. First an idea (the thesis) is advanced, which is then met by an opposing idea (the antithesis). The resolution of their clash is another idea (the synthesis) that becomes a new thesis, and so on. But the fallacy of this analogy is exposed by asking a simple question: in a tennis tournament, where does the opponent come from? Of course the answer is: from another bracket. Not, however, in Hegel's dialectic. For him the antithesis must be sought within the original thesis. Thus the dialectical method is a repeated process of self-contradiction and intellectual refinement. Marx well comprehended this distinction, and to suit his purposes he transposed it into historical terms with his signature assertion that the capitalist bourgeoisie plants the seeds of its own destruction by creating within the industrial system a revolutionary proletariat.

Such was the setting for the most notorious of Marxian texts, The Communist Manifesto, written with his friend Friedrich Engels in 1848. The chaotic insurrectionary events of that year begged for a coherent interpretation, which Marx and Engels intended to supply. More than that, they hoped to move the historical process along with a provocative theory that the proletariat—Europe's emerging industrial working class—was now rising to overthrow the currently prevailing dominance of the bourgeoisie, that despicable exploitative class of entrepreneurs. The state, invariably an instrument of the ruling class, would doubtless attempt to provide soldiers and arms to suppress this immense uprising of workers, but ultimately the revolution was bound to succeed in overthrowing the existing social order and establishing a classless society.

There, as succinctly as possible, was the gist of Marx's conception. When things did not turn out just as he had wished and predicted, after being exiled from Germany and taking up residence in London, Marx devoted his mature years to composing a massive tome of macroeconomic theory, Kapital, which sought to explain how the inexorable march of history would nonetheless cause the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system and bring proletariat the to power. His hopes for that outcome in his own lifetime were briefly sparked by the Paris Commune in 1871, but its demise left Marx to claim that this one more failure was actually the harbinger of a new society that would be created by a successful world revolution. Famously, that cry was echoed near the end of the First World War by Lenin, who proclaimed the Bolshevik Revolution to be the dawning fulfillment of Marx's dream.

Compressed here to its essentials, that is the story of Karl Marx. How is it to be judged? The timing of revolutionary success aside, he was demonstrably mistaken about any number of matters. Three stand out. First, Marx was convinced that the great revolution would necessarily occur in the industrially most advanced countries, that is, in those where capitalism was most fully developed. Surely he was dead wrong about that. No more inhospitable soil for the spores of revolution could be imagined than that of the Great Britain where Marx took up residence after 1848. While living there for more than three decades in the London working-class district of Soho, he existed in a Germanic bubble with rosy memories of the past, great expectations for the future, but little appreciation of the immediate present at his door. English workers of the late nineteenth century were scarcely given to Marx's brand of insurrectionary theory, and it required a large dose of self-deception on his part to think otherwise.

Second, Marx falsely assumed that the state was destined to play but a single role: by definition, it must always and only be the instrument of the ruling class. Government power would therefore be wielded everywhere to favor the wealthy few at the expense of the less fortunate many. The form of government might vary, but its function would nevertheless be immutable: to buttress the haves against the have-nots. Hence the sole recourse was a revolution to overthrow the state. Marx expressed this conviction in the starkest terms, verging on caricature. The English translation of Kapital repeatedly...