Peace (34 page)

A forerunner of non-violent, industrial gradualist approaches is that of Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Having experienced firsthand the destruction caused and hope inspired by the American and French Revolutions, he proposed societies be peacefully reorganized on empirical principles by studying the past to inform the present and shape the future. As the “philosophy of the [eighteenth] century was revolutionary; that of the nineteenth century must be organizational,” he argued, geared towards establishing cooperative, productive and stable social orders that secure social peace through individual wellbeing.
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He argued further that “governments will no longer command men” in war if leaders are scientists and industrialists whose functions are “limited to ensuring that useful work is not hindered,” united with working classes by a materialist morality that would gradually become a
New Christianity
, the title of his last, unfinished book.
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Saint-Simon's principles and methods developed a cult-like postmortem following. Though none of his plans were immediately implemented, his student Auguste Comte started the “positivist” science of “sociology,” terms he coined, likewise aimed at non-violent, peace-oriented transformations of societies by acting on empirical knowledge. Unlike Saint-Simon and Comte, François Babeuf (1760–97) was a revolutionary agrarian who condoned violence. Executed for founding a secret society called the Conspiracy of Equals, he sought to broaden the French
Revolution to include overthrowing economic as well as political systems and institutions so land, wealth and votes alike are equally distributed, the sole way he believed social peace could be sustained. Justifying short-term uses of violence as vehicles of long-term peace prospects became hallmarks of later revolutionary socialists, who taking into consideration the rise of industrialism focused more on the division of labor and ownership of means of production than land and distribution.

Similarly “utopian” schemes, as Karl Marx would later try to discredit them, were put forth by Richard Owen in England, Charles Fourier in France, and their American followers. Owen (1771–1858), a saddler's son, began working in Manchester's booming textile industry at the age of ten, by twenty-five was a manufacturer, and by thirty had purchased mills with other investors in Scotland. There, he spearheaded cooperative organizations by reinvesting portions of profits in improving the working conditions, housing, schools, sanitation and non-profit stores for his employees, increasing industrial productivity and peace. His maverick model instigated the social reforms passed by the British Parliament as the Factory Acts (1802–91). At around the same time, German immigrants to the US State of Indiana were running an agrarian collectivist community called Harmony, in which all property was held and all work done in common. They agreed to sell the property to Owen in 1825 to finance other such enterprises. Although New Harmony was under his direction for only three years, the first free kindergarten, free school for boys and girls, and free library in the US were established. Returning to England in 1829, Owen at first sought to combine the growing trade union and cooperative movements, but the unions' increasingly militant stance was at odds with his lifelong commitment to non-violent change, and he soon broke with them. As working class violence reached epidemic proportions throughout Europe, he spent his remaining years popularizing the idea that as social conditions are formative of individual characters, cooperatives can form peaceful individuals and so peaceful societies.

Like Owen, his contemporary Fourier (1772–1837) belonged to what was now called the bourgeoisie, merchant and entrepreneurial classes between aristocrats and laborers. His proposal for a cooperative community championed channeling people's interests and passions rather than restricting them, as he condemned the day's socio-economic systems for doing. Instead, he designed what he ironically named “phalanxes” after Ancient Greek army units: self-sufficient agrarian and manufacturing villages in which work is allotted based on individuals' inclination and all members live communally. Although unimplemented in his life, Fourier's followers established phalanxes across the US. The best-known is Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded as an experimental joint-stock farm by Unitarians in 1841 and converted into a phalanx three years later, visitors
of which included Ralph Waldo Emerson. The key similarity between Owen's and Fourier's propositions is that the immediate changes they considered necessary to end class struggles were revolutionary in their means and ends, but not in any violent sense; the key difference is that, for Owens, the peace-oriented change he proposed took place within the existing industrial socio-economic system and for Fourier from without it.

Gradualist, in opposition to revolutionary socialists, advocated change through reforms of existing socio-economic systems and their supporting political infrastructures rather than outright rejection, overhaul or overthrow. An early example is the British Chartist movement, named after the People's Charter published in 1838 by the London Working Men's Association. Tying fairer political processes to more equitable economic systems, Chartists called for universal male suffrage, annual elections, equalized electorates and payment instead of property qualifications for members of Parliament. Since in this way working classes would be better represented within government, putting them in a position to change laws that regulate industrialism, their economic interests could be politically advanced. Government could thus be an ally of working classes in the cause of industrial peace rather than an instrument of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats, and improvements in the economic conditions of working classes could be made without resorting to violence. But after Parliament twice threw out the Chartists' motions, riots broke out and their suppressions ended the movement. In response, Christian socialists like Charles Kingsley (1819–79), chaplain to Queen Victoria, tried to peaceably resolve class conflicts by aligning religious aims of churches with the economic aims of trade unions through workshops that would steadily and simultaneously uplift laborers' spiritual and material wellbeing. However, speculators on the roles secular states could play in balancing class interests soon eclipsed the influence of Christian socialists throughout Europe, such as the Fabian Society, which included prominent intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw and later H. G. Wells, opposed to revolutionary socialism.

Fabians advocated for the gradual permeation of economic equality within existing socio-political infrastructures. They rejected the violent class conflicts that had become part of urban European life by their times and, to help mitigate it, formed the Labor Representation Committee with the many active British labor unions in 1900, which evolved into the extant Labor Party. Along similar lines, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) cofounded the German Workers' Association in 1863, which like the Chartists campaigned for universal suffrage but for the implementation of state socialism – the use of national government capital to de-class society by reorganizing industries so that they are owned and run, directly
or indirectly through the state, by the workers themselves. Two collaborators, the avowed pacifist Wilhelm Liebknecht and the anti-militarist August Bebel, formed the Social Democratic Party into which the Association was absorbed. For openly opposing Chancellor Bismarck's war policy in the Reichstag, in their view benefitting the upper classes at the lowers' expense, they were imprisoned for two years. Their protests did not prevent the Franco-Prussian War, but did galvanize gradualist socialist movements. In the next three decades, dozens of similar parties were founded in Western and Eastern Europe and North America advocating non-violent intra-national reform via existing industrialized states instead of violent international revolutions against them, as advocated by Karl Marx and his followers.

While Marx opposed his “scientific” socialism to previous “utopian” ones by claiming a primacy of observation over ideals in determining its socio-economic strategies and goals, the idealist logic he adapted from Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) rubbed off. Hegel had proposed that history unfolds in a dialectical process by which deficiencies of one idea, a thesis, are overcome by another, its antithesis. Thesis and antithesis are then synthesized to produce a new thesis and antithesis, progressing to intellectual and social perfection and so universal peace. For instance, in Hegel's time, revolutions from monarchical to constitutional states gave rise to constitutional monarchies, all towards intra-national peace. Hence, for him, “in war, war itself is characterized as something which ought to pass away,” temporarily at first and permanently in the end.
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Marx concretized Hegel's premises but kept his teleology intact, taking the economic conditions in which peace can and/or cannot be produced as determining factors of his dialectical materialism. As Marx observed, land ownership as the basis of feudal agrarian societies, in which aristocrats exploit peasants, was being displaced by capital as the basis of industrial societies, in which the bourgeoisie exploits working class proletariat. Human history is “the history of class struggles” for Marx because the inexorable structural violence of capitalism and all class-based economic systems precludes peace, and will do so for as long as classes exist.
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Revolt against the classes that keep classes in place, then, is not only advisable but also an unavoidable step towards peace. In their passionate call-to-arms analysis,
The Communist Manifesto
(1848), Marx and colleague Friedrich Engels argued that capitalism had set the stage for the proletariat to seize control of the very economic conditions used to exploit them. They must unite to recreate an industrial society in which private property has ceased to exist, individuals contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs, in a word: communism.

A classless communist state, the only one that can be peaceful in Marx's terms, was to be the final outcome and cessation of all class struggle,
guarantor of individual freedoms. Proletariat revolution and provisional dictatorship are thus predetermined birth pangs of communist peace:

as the exploitation of one individual by another will be ended, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be ended. . . as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
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In the meantime, socialists should prepare for the inevitable: in a revolution that would run along class lines, unity across national lines was required for lasting results, “a state of war which can only end with the final destruction of all pre-existing social structures.”
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In 1863, Marx and others founded the First International Workingmen's Association to unite, organize and mobilize workers worldwide from the capital of capitalism, London. When asked if socialists should participate in the day's organized peace movements, Marx condemned them as futile bourgeois enterprises aimed at placating the proletariat. Yet, the International splintered in 1875 in a power struggle during which Marx refused to endorse the terrorist tactics proposed by Mikhail Bakunin to abolish governments and their armies first, and classes later. While Marx's socialist stance cannot be called peaceful, the paradigm for and analysis of social peace he put forth has been immeasurably influential, to the extent that the history of peace and peacemaking in the next century and a half cannot be understood without them.

The global revolutions of 1848, launched on economic but not always socialist grounds, were brutally suppressed by government militias. These events renewed the urgency of resolving class conflicts and intensified debates over using revolutionary violence in the name of peace or peacefully bringing about change from the start, either along or across national lines and through or against national governments. An innovative proposal, called “non-violent anarchism,” came from Paris, where in 1861 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published his
War and Peace
, from which Tolstoy got more than the title of his novel, arguing that nation-states founded on the principles of private property and state-sponsored industrial socialism are both obstacles to social peace for self-interested reasons.
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Mutualism, the alternative socio-economic system he put forth decades ahead of the socio-biological system given the same name and sharing certain principles, would replace government with freely associated, self-managed socio-economic units and decentralized labor-controlled firms to fill all state roles, eliminating without violence central authorities and the standing armies in place to protect them. Oxymoronically, the organized anarchy Proudhon proposed could taper static disadvantages and harness dynamic advantages of its terms, a model for social peace that has only lately begun to be re-explored.

A similar plan but on an agrarian platform was propagated at about the same time by the Russian
narodniki
(from “going to the people”) movement. When it began using terrorist tactics shortly after it was formed, a young man named Georgi Plekhanov split, travelled abroad and brought Marxist socialism to Russia for the first time. With Vladimir Lenin and others, he then transformed the League for the Emancipation of Labor into the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In a debate later echoed around the world, Plekhanov held that industrial capitalism was not advanced enough in Russia to warrant the violent revolution Marx envisioned, and so it must be peacefully developed first, the Menshevik position when the Party split. Conversely, Lenin held that the interests of peasants and workers were sufficiently aligned for the revolution to be successful, the position of the Bolsheviks he came to lead. By 1889, socialists across Europe and North America reunited to form the Second International with its permanent headquarters in Belgium, which unlike the First was composed of and sought to direct existing local and national bodies. To the dejection of revolutionaries like Lenin, who now called themselves communists for contrast, socialists of the Second International were gradualist in their approach, inciting like Fabians practical political reforms in participating countries. But their departure from the First International's unitive stance of workers worldwide became clear when the Second broke apart as members supported their own nations in the First World War. By this time yet another approach to industrial peace had surfaced, in which governments were mediators rather than mediums.