In this video we are going to begin discussing some of the reactions to industrialization.
We’ve looked at the Industrial Revolution and industrialization from a variety of perspectives
– particularly economic and social, to a lesser extent cultural as well.
So what we want to do now is to start looking at the reactions to industrialization, particularly
in their influence on politics.
So what we’ll be doing today, or what we’ll be doing in this video is discussing the birth
of socialism – and socialism is a collective term, a categorical term, given to a variety
of political ideologies or political movements that responded or reacted to what they saw
as the problem or pitfalls of capitalism and industrialization, industrial capitalism in
particular.
So the origins of socialism can be tied to the 19th century, to the mid-19th century,
and to the changes brought by industrialization in terms of economy, society, and culture
of these new industrial nations.
As we’ve seen, the Industrial Revolution drove a tremendous amount of economic growth;
it created a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity.
But it did not have those effects universally.
It was not equally beneficial to everyone in society.
So there were a number of critics of industrialization, from across the industrial spectrum – from
almost every industrial country that existed in world history – and they rejected many
of the basic principles of laissez-faire capitalism – and laissez-faire just means, it’s French
basically, for leave it; let it do its thing; leave it alone - it’s unrestricted capitalism,
and they rejected the idea that laissez-faire capitalism and the tenets of liberalism, 19th-century
liberalism, could be in the best interest of everyone in society.
They basically argued that guaranteed rights don’t put food on the table, and a free
economy and unrestricted or kind of ungoverned economy doesn’t provide for everyone; there
are going to be winners and losers in a laissez-faire approach to capitalism, or a laissez-faire
approach to the economy.
So these reformers, who have earned the title, socialists – collectively – these reformers
wanted the government to step – governments to step in and ensure that everyone was provided
for, everyone had enough to survive on, and they believed that society in some way, shape,
or form could work collectively for the benefit of everyone, and that’s basically the principle
– or the two principles that all categories of socialism have in common.
Number one – they believed that capitalism had led to – unrestricted capitalism had
led to problems, and two – they believed that there could be some model of cooperative
society that would provide for everyone.
So it would become – socialism overall – would become a profoundly important ideology in
the 19th and 20th centuries – perhaps one of the most significant ideologies that shaped
the early 20th century – actually the entire 20th century – and so, it’s important
to understand where it came from.
So today we’re going to trace the origins of socialism as a political category or a
political movement, to understand how it fits into the framework of world history.
So there are a variety of types of socialism – dozens of types of socialism, in fact
– because like I said, they’re united in that critique of laissez-faire capitalism
and a belief in cooperative economy.
But they had varying levels of radicalism attached to them.
So we’re going to talk about a few, just so you can get a sense of the variety of socialisms
that existed in 19th- and 20th-century industrial societies.
So we’ll start what’s called utopian socialism, and utopian socialism provided a far-reaching
and original critique of social changes; they focused on the social changes, driven by industrialization,
and they didn’t necessarily believe that those social changes had been good, that they’d
been beneficial.
So utopian socialists tended to focus on a heaven on earth, this idea that a cooperative
society could create a heaven on earth; they rejected what they called egotistic individualism
and promoted cooperation.
They believed that it was possible to create a system in which wealth and goods were shared
equally among citizens.
So you have a variety of different approaches to that.
One of the most famous was associated with a man named Robert Owen.
Robert Owen was one of the utopian socialists who acted instead of really kind of just talking
about it, or philosophically developing a system, and Owen wanted to create the model
of a factory town, which put utopian socialist practices into existence; it put them actually
into practice.
So he was a Welshman, who’d made quite a bit of money in the textile industry in the
late 18th and early 19th century, but he had traveled in the factories’ workrooms and
was disgusted by the labor conditions that his workers were in, and so he believed there
had to be a better way.
So what he does is he founds this utopian socialist community called New Lanark; he
founded it in Scotland, and he turned it into a model factory – what he calls a model
factory – and in it everyone shares in the means of production.
So everyone owns the means of production, everyone shares in the labor, and everyone
shares in the profit.
He provided sturdy, clean housing; schools for children; a basic standard of living;
and he believed that this system could work to the benefit of everyone.
Everyone would share equally in the labor and share in the profits as well.
And New Lanark was relatively successful.
He did manage to prove that a society or a factory town organized in this model could
work.
So he picks up and tries it again in Indiana, in a factory town called New Harmony, but
it wasn’t quite as successful.
The factory workers took advantage of this utopianism, took advantage of the relative
equality, and so that tended to be – that was less successful than New Lanark had been.
So you know, Robert Owen, who was probably the most successful of the utopian socialists,
still had a mixed bag in terms of actually enacting practical reform.
So the utopian socialists were important not necessarily because they were successful,
but because they provided a compelling critique of capitalism and a compelling critique of
industrial liberalism – future socialists would build on their critique and establish
further-reaching critiques and kind of political ideologies.
You have, for example, the practical socialists.
Practical socialists decided that they didn’t want to create this utopian town; they wanted
to focus on specific issues and address those issues by changing the laws.
One of the key principles of the practical socialists was what historians call feminist
socialism or socialist feminism, which was an argument that in order to get more rights
and equality for the working class you needed first to have more rights and equality for
women, that the elevation of women and the elevation of the working class should go hand
in hand.
But what you probably most closely associate with socialism is the work of a man named,
Karl Marx, and specifically Marx’s work is called scientific socialism because what
Karl Marx and his partner, Friedrich Engels, attempted to do was to apply basic economic
principles and rational thought – or what they considered to be rational thought – to
the economy and to the social and political effects of the economy.
They embraced the utopian socialist critique of society but dismissed it as unscientific.
So they had a better justification and a better answer to the problems or the questions raised
by the utopian socialists.
They claimed to have proof of how history worked, and posited a cyclical, posited the
cyclical nature of history that would inevitably result in the rise of the working class.
They called on a language of natural law, coming out of the scientific revolution and
the Enlightenment, and on Darwin’s theory of evolution, to say that the emergence of
a socialist state, or the final stage of economic development – which Marx called communism
– was being driven by these natural laws.
So Marx and Engels are associated – or most closely associated with two key works.
One is Das Kapital, and Das Kapital is a critique, an economic critique of capitalism.
So just like Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations had critiqued mercantilism as an economic
system, Marx and Engels criticized capitalism as an economic system, arguing that it was
inherently exploitative and inconsistent with democratic values, in the democracies and
republican forms of government as they existed in the 19th century.
Capitalism had created more or less what Marx saw as an oligarchy, in which the elite had
all the power – even though they made up a minor percentage of the population – and
the majority of the population – the working class – had very little power.
He said a system like this is fundamentally undemocratic; so capitalism – because it
elevates the few at the expense of the many – is incompatible with democracy.
So he offers this critique and says – therefore, capitalism is just a stage in the world’s
economic development – so just like mercantilism was a stage, capitalism was a stage, and it
was leading to a better stage.
What he would call the communist stage.
So in The Communist Manifest, they argued which was you know, one of the most important
political treatises in modern history.
They laid out a few key principles.
One was the idea of dialectical materialism, and this was really just a fancy way of saying
that world history, that the history of industrial nations – actually the history of nations
– was based on class struggle, a struggle between the haves and the have nots – and
wherever you find yourself in history, whether you’re looking at pharaohs and slaves, lords
and serfs, owners and factory workers, the struggle is basically the same – it’s
between the haves and the have nots.
Inevitably in history, he says, you see the have nots struggling with the haves and eventually
overthrowing them.
So you would have the middle class – the bourgeoisie, as he called them, overthrowing
the nobles in the French Revolution.
The middle class, the bourgeoisie, then established themselves as the haves – the factory owners
– and a new group of have nots, which he called the proletariat – this industrial
working class – emerged.
So the new struggle was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The second tenet of The Communist Manifest was something called the labor theory of surplus
value, which basically says that the value of an item rests in the labor that it took
to produce it.
Everything else was just the greedy bourgeoisie, the greedy middle class, trying to capitalize
on the labor of their workers.
And the final tenet of The Communist Manifesto was the inevitable collapse of capitalism.
He said that history is cyclical, and it goes through this pattern of haves versus the have
nots, where eventually the have nots rise up and overthrow the haves.
What that means is that eventually the proletariat will rise up, the factory workers will rise
up and overthrow the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, and establish this final, most-perfect
stage of economic development, in which the majority have the economic, cultural, social,
and political power so that socialism or communism, as it was put into practice as it would be
put into practice, would replace capitalism at some point.
And so what he argued for, what Marx and Engels argued for in The Communist Manifesto was
a furthering of this movement.
They said the proletariat has to become aware of their status, they have to become aware
of their class identity, they have to become aware of their historical role in society,
and as they develop what they called class consciousness, as the proletariat developed
class consciousness they would inevitably result or end in this communist revolution.
So these ideas of scientific socialism and the progress of history in an economic critique
of capitalism would structure not only the late 19th century, but the 20th century as
well.
So it’s profoundly important that we understand both the nature and critique of socialism
so that we can compare it to the way that socialism and the ideals of communism were
put into practice, how they were adapted, how they were changed in the 20th century,
and how they posed challenges to the existing world structure.
Thank you.