• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1281 0

class. Vienna was “paralyzed with fright” when Viktor Adler, the Austrian Socialist leader, called for a one-day general strike and mass demonstrations throughout the Empire on the first May Day to demonstrate the workers’ united strength. When Adler announced a workers’ parade down the chestnut-bordered Prater where usually only the carriages of the wealthy appeared, the rich and their allies trembled, expecting the rabble would set houses on fire, plunder shops, and commit unimaginable atrocities on their march. Merchants let down their iron shutters, parents forbade children to go out of doors, police were posted at every street corner, troops were held in reserve. The bourgeoisie saw spreading before their feet what Henry George had called in Progress and Poverty “the open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.” They were made aware of the rising threat “of the House of Want upon the House of Have.”

When the Second International was founded, the twelve-hour day and seven-day week were normal for unorganized labour. Sunday rest and the ten- or nine-hour day were the hard-won privileges of skilled labour in the craft unions, which represented barely one-fifth of the labour force. In 1899 Edwin Markham, struck by the bent brute figure of Millet’s “Man with the Hoe,” expressed both society’s fear and responsibility in a poem named for the picture:

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy.…

How will the Future reckon with this Man

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with the kingdoms and the kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God

After the silence of the centuries?

In 1899, when poetry still spoke to the public, Markham’s poem caused a sensation. Newspapers throughout America reprinted it, editorials discussed it, clergymen used it as a text, school children studied it, debating societies debated it, and commentators called it “the cry of the zeitgeist” and, next to Kipling’s “Recessional,” the most “meaningful poem of the age.”

The public conscience which responded to an artist’s vision and a poet’s words was frightened and angry when confronted with the real thing. When in 1891 the textile workers of Fourmies, a small industrial town in northern France, organized a May Day demonstration for the eight-hour day, police charged their parade and in the ensuing melee killed ten people, including several children. “Take care!” warned Clemenceau in the Chamber. “The dead are strong persuaders. One must pay attention to the dead.… I tell you that the primary fact of politics today is the inevitable revolution which is preparing.… The Fourth Estate is rising and reaching for the conquest of power. One must take sides. Either you meet the Fourth Estate with violence or you welcome it with open arms. The moment has come to choose.”

There was little disposition toward open arms. When the Socialist leaders and unions of Belgium, after two previous bloody attempts, succeeded in 1893 in organizing a general strike for equal manhood suffrage, the essential precondition for the conquest of power, soldiers killed twelve before the strike ended. When the Pullman strike in the United States in 1894 stopped trains and the mail, Judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati, far from a ferocious man, wrote to his wife, “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have only killed six … as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” Here was the class war in operation.

Socialism’s ultimate aim was the abolition of private property and the redistribution of the world’s goods to provide everybody with enough. The goal was the same as that of Anarchism; what caused the permanent conflict between the two groups was that the Socialists believed in organization and political action to achieve it.

Collective ownership