Between 1850 and 1871, Continental industrialization came of age. The innovations of the British Industrial Revolution mechanized factory production, the use of coal, the steam engine, and the transportation revolution-all became regular features of economic expansion. Although marred periodically by economic depression (1857-1858) or recession (1866-1867), this was an age of considerable economic prosperity, particularly evident in the growth of domestic and foreign markets.
The transformation of textile production from hand looms to power looms had largely been completed in Britain by the 1850s (for cotton) and 1860s (for wool). On the Continent, the period from 1850 to 1870 witnessed increased mechanization of the cotton and textile industries, although Continental countries still remained behind Britain. By 1870, hand looms had virtually disappeared in Britain, whereas in France there were still 200,000 of them, along with 80,000 power looms. Nevertheless, this period of industrial expansion on the Continent was fueled not so much by textiles as by the growth of railroads. Between 1850 and 1870, European railroad track mileage increased from 14,500 to almost 70,000. The railroads, in turn, stimulated growth in both the iron and coal industries.
Between 1850 and 1870, Continental iron industries made the transition from charcoal iron smelting to coke-blast smelting. Despite the dramatic increases in the production of pig iron, the Continental countries had not yet come close to surpassing British iron production. In 1870, the British iron industry produced half the world’s pig iron – four times as much as Germany and five times as much as France. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the textile, mining, and metallurgical industries on the Continent also rapidly converted to the use of the steam engine.
An important factor in the expansion of markets was the elimination of barriers to international trade. Essential international waterways were opened up by the elimination of restrictive tolls. The Danube River in 1857 and the Rhine in 1861, for example, were declared freeways for all ships. The negotiation of trade treaties in the 1860s reduced or eliminated protective tariffs throughout much of western Europe.
Governments also played a role by first allowing and then encouraging the formation of joint-stock investment banks. These banks were crucial to Continental industrial development because they mobilized enormous capital resources for investment. In the 1850s and 1860s, they were very important in the promotion of railway construction, although railroads were not always a safe investment. During a trip to Spain to examine possibilities for railroad construction, the locomotive manufacturer George Stephenson reported, “I have been a month in the country, but have not seen during the whole of that time enough people of the right sort to fill a single train.”7 His misgivings proved to be well founded. In 1864, the Spanish banking system, which depended largely on investments in railway shares, collapsed.
Before 1870, capitalist factory owners remained largely free to hire labor on their own terms based on market forces. Although workers formed trade unions in an effort to fight for improved working conditions and reasonable wages, the unions tended to represent only a small part of the industrial working class and proved largely ineffective. Real change for the industrial proletariat would come only with the development of socialist parties and socialist trade unions. These emerged after 1870, but the theory that made them possible had already been developed by midcentury in the work of Karl Marx.
The beginnings of Marxism can be traced to the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto, a short treatise written by two Germans, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (FREE-drikh ENG-ulz) (1820-1895). Marx was born into a relatively prosperous middle-class family in Trier in western Germany. He descended from a long line of rabbis, although his father, a lawyer, had become a Protestant to keep his job. Marx enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1835, but his carefree student ways soon led his father to send him to the more serious-minded University of Berlin, where he encountered the ideas of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (GAY-awrk VIL-helm FREE-drikh HAY-guhl) (1770-1831). After receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy, Marx planned to teach at a university. Unable to obtain a position because of his professed atheism, Marx decided on a career in journalism and eventually became the editor of a liberal bourgeois newspaper in Cologne in 1842. After the newspaper was suppressed because of his radical views, Marx moved to Paris. There he met Friedrich Engels, who became his lifelong friend and financial patron.
Engels, the son of a wealthy German cotton manufacturer, had worked in Britain at one of his father’s factories in Manchester. There he had acquired a firsthand knowledge of what he came to call the “wage slavery” of the British working classes, which he detailed in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, a damning indictment of industrial life written in 1844. Engels would contribute his knowledge of actual working conditions as well as monetary assistance to the financially strapped Marx.
In 1847, Marx and Engels joined a tiny group of primarily German socialist revolutionaries known as the Communist League. By this time, both Marx and Engels were enthusiastic advocates of the radical working-class movement and agreed to draft a statement of their ideas for the league. The resulting Communist Manifesto, published in German in January 1848, appeared on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. One would think from the opening lines of the preface that the pamphlet alone had caused this revolutionary upheaval: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of Old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.” In fact, The Communist Manifesto was known to only a few of Marx’s friends. Although its closing words – ”The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” – were clearly intended to rouse the working classes to action, they passed unnoticed in 1848. The work, however, became one of the most influential political treatises in modern European history.
According to Engels, Marx’s ideas were partly a synthesis of French and German thought. The French provided Marx with ample documentation for his assertion that a revolution could totally restructure society. They also provided him with several examples of socialism. From the German idealistic philosophers such as Hegel, Marx took the idea of dialectic: everything evolves, and all change in history is the result of conflicts between antagonistic elements. Marx was particularly impressed by Hegel, but he disagreed with Hegel’s belief that history is determined by ideas manifesting themselves in historical forces. Instead, said Marx, the course of history is determined by material forces.
IDEAS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO Marx and Engels began the Manifesto with the statement that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Throughout history, oppressed and oppressor have “stood in constant opposition to one another.” In an earlier struggle, the feudal classes of the Middle Ages were forced to accede to the emerging middle class or bourgeoisie. As the bourgeoisie took control in turn, its ideas became the dominant views of the era, and government became its instrument. Marx and Engels declared, "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In other words, the government of the state reflected and defended the interests of the industrial middle class and its allies.
Although bourgeois society had emerged victorious out of the ruins of feudalism, Marx and Engels insisted that it had not triumphed completely. Now once again the members of the bourgeoisie were antagonists in an emerging class struggle, but this time they faced the proletariat, or the industrial working class. The struggle would be fierce, but eventually, so Marx and Engels predicted, the workers would overthrow their bourgeois masters. After this victory, the proletariat would form a dictatorship to reorganize the means of production. Then a classless society would emerge, and the state - itself an instrument of the bourgeoisie - would wither away since it no longer represented the interests of a particular class. Class struggles would then be over (see the box above). Marx believed that the emergence of a classless society would lead to progress in science, technology, and industry and to greater wealth for all.
After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, Marx went to London, where he spent the rest of his life. He continued his writing on political economy, especially his famous work, Das Kapital (Capital), only one volume of which he completed. After his death, the remaining volumes were edited by his friend Engels.
ORGANIZING THE WORKING CLASS One of the reasons Das Kapital was not finished was Marx’s preoccupation with organizing the working-class movement. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx had defined the communists as “the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country.” Their advantage was their ability to understand “the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” Marx saw his role in this light and participated enthusiastically in the activities of the International Working Men’s Association. Formed in 1864 by British and French trade unionists, this “First International” served as an umbrella organization for working-class interests. Marx was the dominant personality on the organization’s General Council and devoted much time to its activities. Internal dissension within the ranks soon damaged the organization, and it failed in 1872. Although it would be revived in 1889, the fate of socialism by that time was in the hands of national socialist parties.