Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
1892 English Edition Introduction
[History (the role of Religion) in the English middle-class]
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising
middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had
conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but
this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The
development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible
with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore,
had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman
Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite
of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much
to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized
its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far
the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil
of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked
in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had
to be destroyed.
Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the
great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology
were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its
industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical
properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of
Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the
Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for
that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church;
the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join
in the rebellion.
The above, though touching but two of the points where the rising
middle-class was bound to come into collision with the established religion,
will be sufficient to show, first, that the class most directly interested
in the struggle against the pretensions of the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie;
and second, that every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to
take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in
the first instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities
started the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the
masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had to struggle
for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual and temporal.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated
in three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two
insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility
under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both
were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties
most interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes
of which we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated
into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended
by blotting out Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations
of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion
adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasant of North-east
Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to
serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was
one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination
doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial
world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity
or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not
of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown
superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic
revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by
new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even
the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver
– began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution of God
was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to
monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing
tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland,
and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine
ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class
of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought
it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the
peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined
by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell,
the yeomanry of england had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been
for that yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the
bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter
end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to
secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering
at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further – exactly
as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one
of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which, in its turn, went beyond the point
where it might have maintained itself. After a series of oscillations,
the new centre of gravity was at last attained and became a new starting-point.
The grand period of English history, known to respectability under the
name of "the Great Rebellion", and the struggles succeeding it, were brought
to a close by the comparatively puny events entitled by Liberal historians
"the Glorious Revolution".
The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising middle-class
and the ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, as now, the aristocracy,
had been long since on the way which led them to become what Louis Philippe
in France became at a much later period: "The first bourgeois of the kingdom".
Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during
the War of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old
families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they
constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois
than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began
to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing
them with sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created
fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscation of
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during
the whole of the 17th century, had the same result. Consequently, ever
since Henry VII, the English "aristocracy", far from counteracting the
development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly
profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners
willing, from economical or political reasons, to cooperate with the leading
men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 1689
was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of "pelf and
place" were left to the great landowning families, provided the economic
interests of the financial, manufacturing, and commercial middle-class
were sufficiently attended to. And these economic interests were at that
time powerful enough to determine the general policy of the nation. There
might be squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the aristocratic
oligarchy knew too well that its own economic prosperity was irretrievably
bound up with that of the industrial and commercial middle-class.
From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a recognized,
component of the ruling classes of England. With the rest of them, it had
a common interest in keeping in subjection the great working mass of the
nation. The merchant or manufacturer himself stood in the position of master,
or, as it was until lately called, of "natural superior" to his clerks,
his work-people, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end, they had to be
trained to proper submission. He was himself religious; his religion had
supplied the standard under which he had fought the king and the lords;
he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered
him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them
submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over
them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping
down the "lower orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one
of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.
There was another factor that contributed to strengthen the religious
leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of materialism in England.
This new doctrine not only shocked the pious feelings of the middle-class;
it announced itself as a philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated
men of the world, in contrast to religion, which was good enough for the
uneducated masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes, it stepped on
the stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called
upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed malitiosus
["Robust but malicious boy"] – to wit, the people. Similarly, with the
successors of Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic
form of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, therefore,
hateful to the middle-class both for its religious heresy and for its anti-bourgeois
political connections. Accordingly, in opposition to the materialism and
deism of the aristocracy, those Protestant sects which had furnished the
flag and the fighting contingent against the Stuarts continued to furnish
the main strength of the progressive middle-class, and form even today
the backbone of "the Great Liberal Party".
In the meantime, materialism passed from England to France, where
it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of philosophers,
a branch of Cartesianism. In France, too, it remained at first an exclusively
aristocratic doctrine. But, soon, its revolutionary character asserted
itself. The French materialists did not limit their criticism to matters
of religious belief; they extended it to whatever scientific tradition
or political institution they met with; and to prove the claim of their
doctrine to universal application, they took the shortest cut, and boldly
applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after which they
were named – the Encyclopaedia. Thus, in one or the other of its two forms
– avowed materialism or deism – it became the creed of the whole cultures
youth of France; so much so that, when the Great Revolution broke out,
the doctrine hatched by English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French
Republicans and Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. The Great French Revolution was the third uprising
of the bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious
cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the first,
too, that was really fought out up to the destruction of one of the combatants,
the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of the other, the bourgeoisie.
In England, the continuity of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
institutions, and the compromise between landlords and capitalists, found
its expression in the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious
preservation of the feudal forms of the law. In France, the Revolution
constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it cleared
out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the Code Civil
a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law – that almost perfect expression
of the juridical relations corresponding to the economic stage called by
Marx the production of commodities – to modern capitalist conditions;
so masterly that this French revolutionary code still serves as a model
for reforms of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting
England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues to express
the economic relations of capitalist society in that barbarous feudal language
which corresponds to the thing expressed, just as English spelling corresponds
to English pronunciation – vous ecrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople,
said a Frenchman – that same English law is the only one which has preserved
through ages, and transmitted to America and the Colonies, the best part
of that old Germanic personal freedom, local self-government, and independence
from all interference (but that of the law courts), which on the Continent
has been lost during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been
as yet fully recovered.
To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave
him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the Continental monarchies,
to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex French colonies, and to crush
the last French pretensions to maritime rivalry. That was one reason why
he fought it. Another was that the ways of this revolution went very much
against his grain. Not only its "execrable" terrorism, but the very attempt
to carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British bourgeois
do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, such as they were,
and invented fashions for him – that furnished officers for the army,
which kept order at home, and the navy, which conquered colonial possessions
and new markets aboard? There was, indeed, a progressive minority of the
bourgeoisie, that minority whose interests were not so well attended to
under the compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy
middle-class, did sympathize with the Revolution, but it was powerless
in Parliament.
Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution,
the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.
Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the upshot, if the
religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more materialism spread
from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal
currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism
and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications
of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck
to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ from one another,
but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, Christian creeds.
While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the bourgeoisie
in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others, initiated
an industrial revolution, which completely shifted the centre of gravity
of economic power. The wealth of the bourgeoisie increased considerably
faster than that of the landed aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself,
the financial aristocracy, the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed
into the background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even
after the gradual changes it had undergone in favor of the bourgeoisie,
no longer corresponded to the relative position of the parties to it. The
character of these parties, too, had changed; the bourgeoisie of 1830 was
very different from that of the preceding century. The political power
still left to the aristocracy, and used by them to resist the pretensions
of the new industrial bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the new economic
interests. A fresh struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could
end only in a victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act
was pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of the
French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a recognized and
powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of the Corn Laws [a move
toward free-trade], which settled, once and for all, the supremacy of the
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the manufacturers,
over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest victory of the bourgeoisie;
it was, however, also the last it gained in its own exclusive interest.
Whatever triumphs it obtained later on, it had to share with a new social
power – first its ally, but soon its rival.
The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufacturing
capitalists, but also a class – and a far more numerous one – of manufacturing
work-people. This class gradually increased in numbers, in proportion as
the industrial revolution seized upon one branch of manufacture after another,
and in the same proportion it increased its power. This power it proved
as early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts
forbidding combinations of workmen. During the Reform agitation, the workingmen
constituted the Radical wing of the Reform party; the Act of 1832 having
excluded them from the suffrage, the formulated their demands in the People's
Charter, and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois
Anti-Corn Law party, into an independent party, the Chartists, the first
working-men's party of modern times.
Then came the Continental revolutions of February and March 1848,
in which the working people played such a prominent part, and, at least
in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly inadmissible from the
point of view of capitalist society. And then came the general reaction.
First, the defeat of the Chartists on April 10, 1848; then the crushing
of the Paris workingmen's insurrection in June of the same year; then the
disasters of 1849 in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory
of Louis Bonaparte over Paris, December 2, 1851. For a time, at least,
the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down, but at what cost!
If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of
maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he
feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers
of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of
thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders;
not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother
Jonathan 1),
the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported
from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like;
and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which
revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the
elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element
of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become troublesome
to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.
It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie
can in no European country get hold of political power – at least for
any length of time – in the same exclusive way in which the feudal aristocracy
kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in France, where feudalism
was completely extinguished, the bourgeoisie as a whole has held full possession
of the Government for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe's
reign, 1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the kingdom;
by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage by the high qualification.
Under the Second Republic, 1848-51, the whole bourgeoisie ruled but for
three years only; their incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is
only now, in the Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept
possession of the helm for more than 20 years; and they are already showing
lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been
possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was unknown, and
society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis. And even
in France and America, the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people,
are already knocking at the door.
In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the
victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession
of all the leading Government offices. The meekness with which the middle-class
submitted to this remained inconceivable to me until the great Liberal
manufacturer, Mr. W. A. Forster, in a public speech, implored the young
men of Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and
quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as a Cabinet
Minister, he had to move in society where French was, at least, as necessary
as English! The fact was, the English middle-class of that time were, as
a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy
those superior Government places where other qualifications were required
than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business
sharpness. 2)
Even now the endless newspaper debates about middle-class education show
that the English middle-class does not yet consider itself good enough
for the best education, and looks to something more modest. Thus, even
after the repeal of the Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course that
the men who had carried the day – the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc.
– should remain excluded from a share in the official government of the
country, until 20 years afterwards a new Reform Act opened to them the
door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie are, up to the present day,
so deeply penetrated by a sense of their social inferiority that they keep
up, at their own expense and that of the nation, an ornamental caste of
drones to represent the nation worthily at all State functions; and they
consider themselves highly honored whenever one of themselves is found
worthy of admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured,
after all, by themselves.
The industrial and commercial middle-class had, therefore, not
yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from political
power when another competitor, the working-class, appeared on the stage.
The reaction after the Chartist movement and the Continental revolutions,
as well as the unparalleled extension of English trade from 1848-66 (ascribed
vulgarly to Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development
of railways, ocean steamers, and means of intercourse generally), had again
driven the working-class into the dependency of the Liberal party, of which
they formed, as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical wing. Their claims to
the franchise, however, gradually became irresistible; while the Whig leaders
of the Liberals "funked", Disraeli showed his superiority by making the
Tories seize the favorable moment and introduce household suffrage in the
boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the ballot;
then, in 1884, the extension of household suffrage to the counties and
a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral districts were, to
some extent, equalized. All these measures considerably increased the electoral
power of the working-class, so much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies
that class now furnished the majority of the voters. But parliamentary
government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the
middle-class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners playfully
called "our old nobility", the mass of the working-people then looked up
with respect and deference to what used to be designated as "their betters",
the middle-class. Indeed, the British workman, some 15 years ago, was the
model workman, whose respectful regard for the position of his master,
and whose self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled
our German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school for the incurable
communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own working-men at home.
But the English middle-class – good men of business as they are
– saw farther than the German professors. They had shared their powers
but reluctantly with the working-class. They had learnt, during the Chartist
years, what that puer robustus sed malitiosus, the people, is capable
of. And since that time, they had been compelled to incorporate the better
part of the People's Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now,
if ever, the people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first
and foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and remains
– religion. Hence the parsons' majorities on the School Boards, hence
the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for the support of all
sorts of revivalism, from ritualism to the Salvation Army.
And now came the triumph of British respectability over the free
thought and religious laxity of the Continental bourgeois. The workmen
of France and Germany had become rebellious. They were thoroughly infected
with Socialism, and, for very good reasons, were not at all particular
as to the legality of the means by which to secure their own ascendancy.
The puer robustus, here, turned from day-to-day more malitiosus.
Nothing remained to the French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource
but to silently drop their free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness
creeps upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggeringly
on board; one-by-one, the scoffers turned pious in outward behavior, spoke
with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, and even conformed with
the latter as far as could not be helped. French bourgeois dined maigre
on Fridays, and German ones say out long Protestant sermons in their pews
on Sundays. They had come to grief with materialism. "Die Religion muss
dem Volk erhalten werden" – religion must be kept alive for the people
– that was the only and the last means to save society from utter ruin.
Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find this out until they had
done their level best to break up religion for ever. And now it was the
turn of the British bourgeoisie to sneer and to say: "Why, you fools, I
could have told you that 200 years ago!"
However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the British,
nor the post festum conversion of the Continental bourgeois will
stem the rising Proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding force,
is the vis inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is sure
to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting safeguard to capitalist
society. If our juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more
or less remote offshoots of the economical relations prevailing in a given
society, such ideas cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a
complete change in these relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural
revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice to
prop up a tottering society.
In fact, in England too, the working-people have begun to move
again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. Bourgeois
traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can be but two parties,
Conservatives and Liberals, and that the working-class must work out its
salvation by and through the great Liberal Party. Working-men's traditions,
inherited from their first tentative efforts at independent action, such
as the exclusion, from ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants
who have not gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding,
by every such union, of its own blacklegs. But, for all that, the English
working-class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has sorrowfully had
to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists. It moves, like all things
in England, with a slow and measured step, with hesitation here, with more
or less unfruitful, tentative attempts there; it moves now and then with
an over-cautious mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually
absorbs the substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of
the workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the unskilled
laborers of the East End of London, and we all know what a splendid impulse
these fresh forces have given it in return. And if the pace of the movement
is not up to the impatience of some people, let them not forget that it
is the working-class which keeps alive the finest qualities of the English
character, and that, if a step in advance is once gained in England, it
is, as a rule, never lost afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists,
for reasons unexplained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons
bid fair to be worthy of their forefathers.
But the triumph of the European working-class does not depend
upon England alone. It can only be secured by the cooperation of, at least,
England, France, and Germany. In both the latter countries, the working-class
movement is well ahead of England. In Germany, it is even within measurable
distance of success. The progress it has there made during the last 25
years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If the
German middle-class have shown themselves lamentably deficient in political
capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and perseverance, the German working-class
have given ample proof of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago,
Germany was the starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle-class;
as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that Germany
will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the European proletariat?
Frederick Engels
London
April 20, 1892
Notes
1.
"Brother Jonathan" – A sort of Anglo-Christian "Uncle Sam".
2.
And even in business matters, the conceit of
national Chauvinism is but a sorry adviser. Up to quite recently,
the average English manufacturer considered it derogatory for an
Englishman to speak any language but his own, and felt rather proud
than otherwise of the fact that "poor devils" of foreigners settled
in England and took off his hands the trouble of disposing of his
products abroad. He never noticed that these foreigners, mostly
Germans, thus got command of a very large part of British foreign
trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade of
Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China,
the United States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these
Germans traded with other Germans abroad, who gradually organized a
complete network of commercial colonies all over the world. But,
when Germany, about 40 years ago [c.1850], seriously began
manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in her
transformation, in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a
first-rate manufacturing country. Then, about 10 years ago, the
British manufacturer got frightened, and asked his ambassadors and
consuls how it was that he could no longer keep his customers
together. The unanimous answer was:
(1) You don't learn customer's language but expect him to speak
your own;
(2) You don't even try to suit your customer's wants, habits,
and tastes, but expect him to conform to your English ones.