Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [263]
Valleys of the Tirano in every country made Socialists out of intellectuals who saw them and workers who were born in them. What both had in common was faith that man had it in his power to make things better. The obstacles were massive; the House of Have was old and strong and entrenched. But the grievances of the working class were rising and were concerned as much with social inequality as with pure want. The workers resented disparity in suffrage, due to property qualifications. They resented the unequal working of compulsory military service, from which the privileged could be exempted; the bias of the law, which worked one way for the rich and another for the poor; the layers of hereditary privilege of all kinds, which the ruling class took for granted. Socialism was making the workers’ wants conscious and articulate. The apathy of the masses which had disillusioned Bakunin and caused Lassalle to rail at “the damned wantlessness of the poor” was passing. They were beginning to know what they wanted, though on the whole it was not revolution. Socialism’s inclusion of that goal was what gave it fervor and impetus, as in the case of Julius Braunthal, who joined the Austrian Socialist party at the age of fourteen “for the sake of the Revolution.” But revolution appealed more to intellectuals who had no doubt of their capacity to manage society than it did to the working class.
Like a crack in a plank of wood which cannot be sealed, the difference between the worker and the intellectual was ineradicable in Socialism. Organized Socialism bore the name Workingmen’s Association but in fact it was never any such thing. It was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class, and the distinction remained basic. Although it spoke for the worker and made his wants articulate, goals and doctrine were set, and thought, energy and leadership largely supplied by, intellectuals. The working class was both client and ultimately, in its mass strength, the necessary instrument of the overthrow of capitalism. As such it appeared as Hero; it was sentimentalized. In the illustrations for an English pamphlet commemorating the London Congress of 1896, the workingmen appeared as handsome strong-muscled Burne-Iones figures in smocks accompanied by indomitable women with long limbs and rippling hair. They were not the same race as Zola’s soiled figures, harsh, hungry, consumptive and alcoholic. The reality was neither all one thing nor the other; neither all lumpenproletariat nor curly-bearded, clenched-fisted revolutionist. The working class was no more of a piece than any other class. Socialist doctrine, however, required it to be an entity with a working-class mind, working-class voice, working-class will, working-class purpose. In fact, these were not easily ascertainable. The Socialist idealized them and to be idealized is to be overestimated.
Owing to its internal quarrels, the founding Congress of 1889 did not lay down a body of doctrine to which the member parties were obliged to subscribe. Agreement went no farther than four resolutions which established four objectives as proper Socialist aims short of the maximum program: the eight-hour day; universal equal manhood suffrage; substitution of citizens’ militias for standing armies; observance of May Day for a show of working-class strength.
While the first was the essential demand of the clientele, the second was fundamental to the whole Socialist purpose and program. The vote was the one means by which the masses could translate numbers into power; their only means to equalize the power of capital. For the same reason, the ruling class resisted it. Equal manhood suffrage at this date existed only in France and the United States, and only in national elections, not local government,