CHAPTER III THE RELATION BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM AND PHILOSOPHY. MATERIALISM. KANT. FICHTE. HEGEL. FEUERBACH. DIALECTIC MATERIALISM. THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE PROLETARIAT. This study of the lives of Marx and Engels is in accordance with the scientific method they themselves developed and employed. Despite their genius, Marx and Engels were after all men of a definite historic moment. As both of them matured, that is, as both of them gradually emerged from their immediate home influence they were directly drawn into the vortex of the historic epoch which was characterised chiefly by the effects upon Germany of the July Revolution, by the forward strides of science and philosophy, by the growth of the labour and the revolutionary movements. Marx and Engels were not only the products of a definite historic period, but in their very origin they were men of a specific locality, the Rhine province, which of all parts of Germany was the most international, the most industrialised, and the most widely exposed to the influence of the French Revolution. During the first years
purchased with the destruction of all the seductions and illusions of the February Revolution, with the complete disintegration of the old Republican Party, with the splitting of the French nation into two parts -- a nation of owners, and a nation of workers. The Republic of the tricolour will henceforth be of one hue only -- the colour of the vanquished, the colour of blood. It has become a Red Republic. "The February Revolution was splendid. It was a revolution of universal sympathies, for the contradictions which flared up within it against the royal power as yet lay in latent harmony, slumbering undeveloped side by side, since the social conflict which was their background had attained merely a phantom existence, the existence of a phrase, a word. The June Revolution, on the contrary, is disgusting, repulsive, for instead of the word emerged the deed, because the Republic itself bared the head of the monster, having dashed from it its protecting and concealing crown. "Are we democrats to be misled by the deep abyss that gapes before us? Are we to conclude that the struggle for new forms of the State is devoid of meaning, is illusory -- a phantasm? "Only weak, timid minds would ask this question. The conflicts arising from the very conditions of bourgeois society, have to be fought to the end; they cannot be reasoned away. The best form of state is one in which the social contradictions are not overcome by force, in other words, only by artificial and specious means. The best form of state is one in which the contradictions collide in open struggle and thus attain a solution. "We shall be asked, is it possible that we shall reserve not a single tear, not a sigh, not a word, for the victims of popular frenzy, for the National Guards, for the guardes mobiles, for the Republican Guards, for the soldiers of the line? "The State will take care of their widows and orphans, decrees will glorify them, solemn funeral processions will place their remains in their last resting places, the official press will proclaim them immortal, the European reaction will do homage to them from East to West. "But the plebeians, ravished by hunger, spat upon by the press, deserted by the physicians, denounced by respectable thieves as incendiaries
in the time of Chartism. The government was finally convinced that concessions were unavoidable. We shall now recall that after the July Revolution of 1830 a strong movement for parliamentary reforms had taken place in England. It had all culminated in a compromise, the workers were cheated in the most unpardonable fashion, and the right to vote was won only by the industrial bourgeoisie. So it happened now. When the government saw that its retreat was inevitable, and that the city workers were in a threatening mood, it proposed a compromise -- the broadening of the suffrage right to include the city proletariat. We should specify that universal suffrage meant universal male suffrage. The granting of this right to the women was not even thought of. The compromise was immediately accepted by the bourgeois members of the committee of electoral reforms. Suffrage was granted to workers who had a definite abode, even if it consisted of one room, for which they paid a specific minimum rental. Thus the right to vote was won by almost all the urban workers, with the exception of the very indigent ones of whom there were at the time a considerable number in the English cities. The rural proletariat still remained without the right to vote. This clever trick was invented b y Disraeli, the leader of the English conservatives, and was subscribed to by the bourgeois reformers who persuaded the workers to accept the concessions with the view to a further struggle for an extension of the suffrage. But the rural workers had to wait another twenty years, while the workers without permanent homes were given suffrage only after the liberalising influence of the Revolution of 1905 in Russia. Events not less important took place in Germany in the years 1865-1866. A furious conflict broke out between Prussia and Austria. The mooted question was hegemony within Germany. Bismarck's objective was the final exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation, and the elevation of Prussia to a dominant place among the remaining German states. This controversy developed into an armed conflict between Austria and Prussia. In two or three weeks Prussia, which had no scruples about entering into an alliance with Italy against another German state, smashed Austria to pieces and annexed several petty German states which had been helping Austria -- the Kingdom of Hanover, the free city of Frankfort, the Hesse principality, etc. Austria was definitely thrown out of the German Confederation. The
[9] Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793), the 'People's friend' was a leading radical during the French revolution; Maximilien Robespierre (1750-1994) was the Jacobin leader during the terror; Jean-Baptiste, called 'Anacharsis' Clootz (1755-1794) was a German atheist who wanted to spread the French revolution abroad; he was guillotined after an attack on Robespierre (translator's note). [10] The Enragés were the followers of Varlet and Rouge, who rallied the sansculottes against the reaction during the French revolution. The newspapers named were all put out by the left during the revolution (translator's note). [11] Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a philanthropic cotton manufacturer and utopian thinker, who originated the theory that 'conditions determine consciousness' (translator's note). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------