The Conquest of Bread | Page 3

contrary, into some great ruler,
some Socialist Napoleon. He would understand the new revelation; he
would be convinced of its desirability by the successful experiments of
their phalansteries, or associations; and he would peacefully
accomplish by his own authority the revolution which would bring
well-being and happiness to mankind. A military genius, Napoleon, had
just been ruling Europe. Why should not a social genius come forward,
carry Europe with him and translate the new Gospel into life? That
faith was rooted very deep, and it stood for a long time in the way of
Socialism; its traces are even seen amongst us, down to the present day.
It was only during the years 1840-48, when the approach of the
Revolution was felt everywhere, and the proletarians were beginning to
plant the banner of Socialism on the barricades, that faith in the people
began to enter once more the hearts of the social schemers: faith, on the
one side, in Republican Democracy, and on the other side in free
association, in the organizing powers of the working-men themselves.
But then came the Revolution of February, 1848, the middle-class
Republic, and--with it, shattered hopes. Four months only after the
proclamation of the Republic, the June insurrection of the Paris
proletarians broke out, and it was crushed in blood. The wholesale
shooting of the working-men, the mass deportations to New Guinea,
and finally the Napoleonian coup d'êtat followed. The Socialists were
prosecuted with fury, and the weeding out was so terrible and so

thorough that for the next twelve or fifteen years the very traces of
Socialism disappeared; its literature vanished so completely that even
names, once so familiar before 1848, were entirely forgotten; ideas
which were then current--the stock ideas of the Socialists before
1848--were so wiped out as to be taken, later on, by our generation, for
new discoveries.
However, when a new revival began, about 1866, when Communism
and Collectivism once more came forward, it appeared that the
conception as to the means of their realization had undergone a deep
change. The old faith in Political Democracy was dying out, and the
first principles upon which the Paris working-men agreed with the
British trade-unionists and Owenites, when they met in 1862 and 1864,
at London, was that "the emancipation of the working-men must be
accomplished by the working-men themselves." Upon another point
they also were agreed. It was that the labour unions themselves would
have to get hold of the instruments of production, and organize
production themselves. The French idea of the Fourierist and Mutualist
"Association" thus joined hands with Robert Owen's idea of "The Great
Consolidated Trades' Union," which was extended now, so as to
become an International Working-men's Association.
Again this new revival of Socialism lasted but a few years. Soon came
the war of 1870-71, the uprising of the Paris Commune--and again the
free development of Socialism was rendered impossible in France. But
while Germany accepted now from the hands of its German teachers,
Marx and Engels, the Socialism of the French "forty-eighters" that is,
the Socialism of Considérant and Louis Blanc, and the Collectivism of
Pecqueur,--France made a further step forward.
In March, 1871, Paris had proclaimed that henceforward it would not
wait for the retardatory portions of France: that it intended to start
within its Commune its own social development.
The movement was too short-lived to give any positive result. It
remained communalist only; it merely asserted the rights of the
Commune to its full autonomy. But the working-classes of the old
International saw at once its historical significance. They understood

that the free commune would be henceforth the medium in which the
ideas of modern Socialism may come to realization. The free
agro-industrial communes, of which so much was spoken in England
and France before 1848, need not be small phalansteries, or small
communities of 2000 persons. They must be vast agglomerations, like
Paris, or, still better, small territories. These communes would federate
to constitute nations in some cases, even irrespectively of the present
national frontiers (like the Cinque Ports, or the Hansa). At the same
time large labour associations would come into existence for the
inter-communal service of the railways, the docks, and so on.
Such were the ideas which began vaguely to circulate after 1871
amongst the thinking working-men, especially in the Latin countries. In
some such organization, the details of which life itself would settle, the
labour circles saw the medium through which Socialist forms of life
could find a much easier realization than through the seizure of all
industrial property by the State, and the State organization of
agriculture and industry.
These are the ideas to which I have endeavoured to give a more or less
definite expression in this book.
Looking back now at the years that have passed since this