Europe in an Age of Nationalism, 1848–70 491movement encompassed a wide range of political doc-
trines, from the radical democracy of Chartism to the
anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail
Bakunin. Socialism began to emerge as the dominant
philosophy of the workers’ movement in the 1860s, and
Marxism slowly became the dominant form of social-
ism. Karl Marx was born to a comfortable middle-class
Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism be-
cause of the legal requirements for Marx’s father to
practice law in Trier. At the University of Berlin, Marx
became an enthusiastic student of G. W. F. Hegel, the
German idealist philosopher who deemphasized the in-
dividualism of liberal philosophy and taught the preem-
inence of the state. Marx was deeply impressed with
Hegelianism and adopted many of Hegel’s concepts of
the state and power, as well as his dialectic method of
argument. Marx planned to become a philosophy pro-
fessor, but his membership in a radical student organi-
zation during the age of Metternich closed that career
to him. A brief stint as a journalist, which introduced
Marx to industrial conditions, ended when censors
closed his newspaper. Marx, already radicalized, began
a life in exile. In France he learned revolutionary poli-
tics; in London he studied capitalist economics. By the
1850s Marx had already published several socialist
works, and he had collaborated with Friedrich Engels (a
factory owner’s son) on The Communist Manifesto(1848), a
concise statement of the theory of class struggle (see
document 25.2). They wrote: “The history of all hith-
erto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Only by overthrowing bourgeois society could peas-
ants and industrial workers achieve social justice—
hence their slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” By
the 1860s Marx—still in exile—was seeking to unite
and direct European socialism through the International
Workingman’s Association, founded in London in 1864.
This association (later called the First International) as-
sembled leaders of the workers’ movement in annual
congresses and kept them informed of events in other
countries.
Marxist socialism was only one variant in the
emerging working-class political movement of the
1860s. Although it was the strongest version of
revolutionary socialism (which accepted the violent
overthrow of the government as the means to
power), it faced much competition from advocates ofDOCUMENT 25.2
The Communist Manifesto
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles.... The modern bourgeois society, that has
sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of strug-
gle in place of the old ones.... The epoch of the bour-
geoisie possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has
simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more
and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into
two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat....
All property relations in the past have continually
been subject to historical change.... The French Revolu-
tion, for example, abolished feudal property.... In this
sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up
in the single sentence: Abolition of private property....
Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the
small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bour-
geois form? There is no need to abolish that.... Commu-
nism deprives no man of the power to appropriate theproducts of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the
power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such
appropriation....
[I]n the most advanced countries the following [pro-
gram] will be pretty generally applicable:- Abolition of property in land and application of
all rents of land to public purposes. - A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- Abolition of all right of inheritance....
- Centralization of credit in the hands of the State,
by means of a national bank with State capital
and an exclusive monopoly. - Centralization of the means of communication
and transport in the hands of the State.
7.... [F]actories and instruments of production
owned by the State.... - Equal liability of all to labor....
- Free education for all children in public schools.
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto.
London: 1888.