SOCIALISM

Eric D. Weitz

Socialism is a word that has inspired great hopes and dread fears. It became the preeminent ideology of the labor movement in the industrial age, even if it never won the majority support of workers, let alone the rest of the population. Amid the harsh realities of industrial society, when poverty and insecurity were often the fate of workers, when society seemed riven by intense class conflict and an obsession with productivity and material success, socialism's promise of a world infused with liberty, equality, and prosperity proved immensely appealing. Socialism gave to its largely working-class advocates an enhanced sense of identity as workers, the opportunity to improve themselves through education and political activity, organizations through which they could fight for their ideals, and associations in which they and their families could enjoy their leisure. In many countries in Europe, the socialist movement played the key role in establishing or widening the democratic system and contributed greatly to the expansion of the social welfare state. It promoted women's participation in politics and the economy and gave a more open and liberal tenor to society.

At the same time, socialists fostered the enhanced discipline and regulation of modern society, both through the expanded role of the state that most socialists demanded and through the ideal of the self-disciplined, dedicated, male socialist militant. Socialists were often blind to forms of oppression that were only partly rooted in the class character of industrial society. In the heyday of the socialist movement, roughly from 1880 to 1960, women were accorded secondary status and socialist parties rarely challenged the gender division of labor or even the overt discrimination against women in the labor market and in wage scales. Too often, the socialist movement degenerated into sterile controversies over what precisely constituted "true" socialism. Factionalism—one group leaving to form a new party, another group expelled by party leaders—became a fixed feature of modern socialism. In its worst forms, the belief that the future society would come about through armed revolution and a vigilant state resulted in authoritarian systems in central and eastern Europe that systematically violated democratic liberties and, at times in the Soviet Union, engaged in mass killings of defined population groups, all in the name of socialism.

Socialism has been most commonly studied from the standpoint of intellectual or political history. Social history has also made important contributions, by turning its attention to the movement's social composition and its significance for working-class life and culture. In their studies, social historians have examined the variety of social groups that were drawn into the movement—artisans in the utopian socialist phase, students, discontented professionals, and, certainly in some cases, peasants. The social history perspective has illuminated the fact that socialism has never been a purely working-class phenomenon, and it has helped to explain why the movement failed to attract some workers, such as British textile workers, long drawn to the Conservative Party. Social history has also sought to assess what socialism meant for the workers involved, both in terms of practical politics and individual and group identities. For many workers, socialism was a means of reinforcing their efforts to improve wages and working conditions—a view of the movement which tended to promote a revisionist, rather than a revolutionary, ideology. Others, however, found real meaning in socialist revolutionary ideology, which sustained them in agonizing work situations and motivated them for political action when they could find no other place within the existing political system.

ORIGINS AND IDEOLOGIES OF SOCIALISM

The words "socialist" and "socialism" appeared first in German in the eighteenth century and have Latin roots. The immediate derivation of the words lay with the natural-rights philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Thomas Hobbes, and Christian Wolff, who made "society" or the "social" an object of rational investigation and a source of sovereignty. The term "socialist" was first used as a pejorative, especially by Catholic philosophers who attacked natural-rights theorists as heretics. By the 1790s, "socialist" had become a more neutral term of description for them, chiefly for Pufendorf and his intellectual descendants. Often, they were called interchangeably "naturalists" or "socialists." In 1802 came the first recorded instance of the word "socialism," again in reference to Pufendorf and his teachings. Around the same time, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel used the term "antisocialist," by which he meant, oddly enough, the same group of thinkers whom others had labeled socialist. For Hegel, natural-rights theory, especially in its French variants, was individualistic, hence antisocialist.

Into the 1830s, the terms were only common in the intellectual discourse of the very few members of the educated elite, especially in Germany and Italy. Conservative philosophers and theologians would continue to see a direct line of descent from Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes and their concern with the social to the socialist thinkers and organizers of the modern period. But around the 1820s and 1830s, the meaning of the words became transfigured, and their usage became vastly broadened. The sources for the change were the French and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great transformations that ushered in the modern era. Both revolutions gave an entirely new meaning to the social. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the word "social" conjured up images of masses in motion, the popular classes going to the barricades in Paris and Lyon or joining the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies as they crossed the Continent, spreading the ideas of liberty and fraternity. "Social" also signified the new factory system, with scores and hundreds of workers toiling away behind the gates in a factory and giving a new density to urban life. The "social question" emerged, signifying a new realization of the poverty and the dangers to the social order that industrialization brought in its wake.

"Utopian" socialists. For the first time in the 1820s, "socialist" was used self-consciously and in a positive sense by a political group, namely, the followers of Robert Owen in England. They seemed to have no knowledge of the word's usage in German, but obviously adopted it from the term "social," now widely current to designate both English versions of natural-rights theory and the entire complex of transformations associated with the French and industrial revolutions. In the 1840s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would pin the term "utopian socialists" on the Owenists and their French and (a few) German counterparts, notably the writers, ideologues, and organizers Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Flora Tristan, and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon and their followers. The term has stuck ever since, though not always with the disparaging sense used by Marx and Engels. These first socialists were by no means all alike; a number of them postulated ideas that definitely ran toward the wild (and sometimes endearing) end of the political spectrum. Fourier's belief that men and women in the future socialist society would live among oceans of lemonade is only one of the more bizarre examples.

Still, it is possible to identify certain common elements among the utopian socialists. All of them believed that industrialization had created a crisis in human existence that required radical solutions. As heirs of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, they believed that the new society could be created by self-conscious acts of will, by human beings, rational in nature, dissecting the problems around them and conceiving the correct course of action. In opposition to the conflict and anonymity of the new industrial society, people would live in small-scale, face-to-face, self-governed communities. Production would still be largely artisanal in nature (though Owen's communities were based on factories). The early socialists did, indeed, imagine their solutions to be utopian in the sense that they would solve for all eternity the problems of human existence. The mutual ownership of wealth would unleash great prosperity, precisely because wealth would not be squandered by the excesses of the few who could afford to indulge their whims and desires. Common ownership would also abolish the jealousies that arose from social inequalities, which had caused so much conflict and so many wars in all of past time. But the utopian socialists firmly believed that their promised society was not only about economics. It would also be about liberty and the creation of a true fraternity (and, in the minds of a few, like Tristan, a new sorority as well) that had been promised by the French Revolution but that had gone unfulfilled. Socialism would be the stage of the "loving and productive society," in the words of the Saint-Simonians. Warm and affectionate relations would emerge among people, perhaps underpinned by the recognition that their interests lay in harmony with one another. Artistry and innovation would flourish, and true liberty—self-government and individuality—would at last prevail.

A number of the utopian socialists also engaged in a radical critique of the patriarchal family and were among the first to articulate a call for the equality of women and men. A few of them, like Fourier, also envisaged more open and experimental sexual lives in their communities. Particularly in the sphere of family and gender relations, the utopian socialists promoted more diverse and radical ideas than the marxist parties and trade unions that came to dominate the socialist movement later in the century. In this sense, marxism, while playing a key role in the explosive growth of the movement, also represented a narrowing of the social critique and of the political possibilities represented by socialism.

Alongside the emancipatory strains, there was, no doubt, also a strong tenor of control and regulation in utopian socialism. The Owenite communities in Scotland and the United States, notably New Lanark and New Harmony, were carefully supervised by Owen, who was, after all, an industrialist, albeit an atypical one. The Icarian communities, founded by Cabet and his followers in France and the United States, were more completely collectivist than the Owenite ones, but by their very nature they too were not exactly amenable to expressions of individuality. Fourier thought each socialist community should house precisely 1,620 members.

But even organization and control could prove appealing to people whose lives were being battered by the advance of the market system and the factories. Both the timing and the message of the utopians held particular appeal for anxious urban craft workers. The utopian socialists began to attract popular support in Britain and France between the 1820s and 1840s, and somewhat less so, but also significantly, in Germany. They were tireless organizers and thereby helped create the pattern of ceaseless political activism that would be a major characteristic, for good and bad, of the socialist movement well into the twentieth century. Much of their energies (and resources) went into the establishment of model autonomous communities, which they believed would become replicated throughout society. Utopian socialists also engaged in political activism in the existing systems. Owen, Cabet, Tristan, Fourier, and others lectured, wrote pamphlets and books, and published newspapers. Their followers agitated around the country, distributing the printed word and learning to speak whenever an audience could be found. They formed the first trade unions and producer and consumer cooperatives in working-class communities. They helped generate the climate of opposition to the prevailing order that fed into the revolutions of 1848. The cause in 1848 was not theirs alone, by any means, but the early activists inserted a minority, socialist strain into the agitation surrounding the revolts that spread all over Europe.

These engagements generated intense hostility from the forces of order, governments, industrialists, and the churches. The dreary run of arrests, prison sentences, exile, and, sometimes, execution became a feature of the activist life. For the representatives of order, the utopian socialists represented dangerous, even perverse, ideas, and they went to great lengths to paint the socialists as destroyers not just of the political and social order but of the family and morality as well.

The marxian impulse. The utopian socialists suffered in the widespread repressions that followed the revolutions of 1848. But there were inherent weaknesses in their ideas that also contributed to their decline (though not disappearance) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The biggest problem was the small-scale orientation of utopian socialism at a time when industrial units were becoming ever larger and the wave of nationalism was superimposing national upon local and regional identities. By 1880 or so, utopian socialism seemed somewhat quaint, the product of an earlier, now largely surmounted, era. Marxian socialism could meld far more easily with nationalism than could utopian socialism. Moreover, the Owenite and Icarian communities suffered the fate of so many communal organizations that set themselves apart from society. A kind of sterile infighting set in, along with severe economic difficulties. A few of the communities would survive into the twentieth century, carrying along traces of their original egalitarian ideas. But almost no one could imagine them to be the pioneers of new forms of social and political organization.

Instead, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideological direction shifted to marxism. One should not imagine that marxism became easily and completely the single or even dominant expression of socialism. Various strands of anarchism had strong followings, especially in the Mediterranean regions of Europe and in Russia. Moderate socialists, especially in Great Britain, explicitly rejected marxism. Even in Germany, syndicalist-type socialism, rooted in the trade unions and contemptuous of politics and the state, had significant support in particular regions and trades, notably in the Berlin construction trades, among others. The supporters of Marx and Engels fought long and hard in France and Russia to establish their own parties and their domination over other groups, and they were never completely successful. The majority of workers all across the Continent remained outside the socialist camp and affiliated with Catholic, conservative, or liberal parties.

Nonetheless, it was marxism that became the dominant ideology of the socialist labor movement. Marxism offered militants and workers a clear perspective on contemporary society and a sense of history. For those who engaged the ideas, even on a cursory level—and Engels's "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," was probably the most accessible and widely read summation—marxism gave people an understanding of how capitalism had emerged and how it would be, inevitably, superseded. By accepting and even promoting industrialism and the nation-state and, at the same time, ruthlessly critiquing them, marxism accorded with the lived realities of many workers, who lived within these structures yet chafed at their oppressions. Marxism also promised, in essence, a developmental dictatorship to the more backward parts of Europe—that is, a system that would bring more underdeveloped areas into the era of the factory and the nation-state, and then would go beyond them.

Still, marxism retained many of the impulses of the utopian socialists who both preceded and were contemporaries of Marx and Engels. Like the utopians, marxism promised an end to history, a point at which all the bloody, ceaseless conflicts that had defined history would truly be surmounted. Society would be harmonious, egalitarian, and democratic. Self-government in a world of equality would create the substratum that would allow individuals to develop freely their own talents and interests. The clash between individual and society would be forever erased. And that essential contradiction of capitalism—social production coupled with private ownership of the means of production—would also be surmounted, leading to unparalleled riches for all.

Marxist arguments continued to appeal to many artisans, who, along with intellectuals, often provided the leadership for the political movements that resulted. (The German socialist leader August Bebel, for example, was from an artisanal background.) But the ideology and above all the strong emphasis on solid political organization also attracted factory workers and miners, many of whom, by the last third of the nineteenth century, became durable supporters. Finally, it was at this point that peasants in certain regions, because of tensions over landownership or traditions of regional dissent, moved toward socialist commitment. This was the case in the countryside around Bologna, Italy, for example, and also in southeastern France.

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SOCIALISM

Marxism provided a heady vision, and it helps explain why a new surge of the socialist movement began in the 1860s and then took off, especially from the 1880s, and continued well into the twentieth century.

Organization and the movement before World War I. The socialist upsurge began more or less concomitantly in all the countries of central and western Europe and then spread more slowly into eastern Europe, where the economies were less developed and the political systems more repressive. The socialist upsurge did not occur easily, and it was not a simple creation of political ideologues. Socialism as a movement was shaped not just by the ideology of marxism but also and very profoundly by the proletarian milieu in which it was anchored.

Around the 1860s in central and western Europe, that milieu was still largely artisanal in nature despite the tremendous growth of factories. The first socialists tended not to be factory proletarians, those idealized by Marx, but skilled, male craft workers who labored in small shops, some of which they owned. They had not been subject to the difficulties of factory labor, but had very definitely felt their livelihoods and ways of life threatened by the advance of factory production and the capitalist market. Some of these people became the key rank-and-file militants of the socialist movement, those who spread the word, organized cooperatives and trade unions, and helped found, in the 1870s, the first marxian socialist parties that would last long into the twentieth century. Increasingly, they began to attract factory workers to their side as well, though many of those workers first entered the trade unions, especially when the so-called "new unionism" of the 1890s emerged, with mass unions in large-scale enterprises like the docks, coal mines, and steel factories. New unionism was clearly tied to the contemporaneous "second industrial revolution" based on very large-scale production and on the high technology of the day and typified by chemicals production, electric-power generation, steel manufacturing, and deep-shaft mining.

Germans succeeded in creating the largest socialist party in this era, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This feat alone would warrant attention to the SPD. In addition, the SPD became the model party of the Second International, the association of socialist parties formed in 1889. Because of its size and ideological sophistication, and because, after all, Marx and Engels were German, the SPD was seen as their filial descendant.

Around 1900, the model socialist in Germany, as well as in Britain and soon also in Russia, was a male skilled worker, self-disciplined at work and at home and dedicated to the cause. In this period the "cradle-to-grave" concept—the notion that one would be involved in the party through the entire life course, and that the party would also take care of its members—became firmly ensconced. Children and youth would spend their free time in the libraries and clubs accommodated in union or party halls. They would distribute party leaflets and sell its newspapers on street corners. As apprentices, they would be prepared to enter the union along with learning a trade. As adults, they would distribute party writings; demonstrate in support of free suffrage, higher wages, and peace; wander to different localities and workplaces as agitators for the party; stand for election as union delegates; and, if they lived in a country where democratic norms prevailed, run for the local city council. They might also learn to administer the arcane rules of state-supervised health plans, or learn how to counsel workers to obtain their accident insurance or old-age pensions. Their free time might be spent in the socialist choir or bicycle club. After a Sunday outing with the family, they might retire to the party hall for beer and a hot meal.

The situation for women was more complex, and everywhere women were a distinct, and sometimes minute, proportion of the organized socialist movement. Despite the socialist call for equality between men and women, the male "family wage" had become a fairly common ideal in the socialist movement. By demanding that working-class families be able to live on male wage earning, the socialist parties absorbed the common dual-spheres rhetoric of the age, which charged women with maintaining and developing the domestic sphere. In this manner, socialism supported patriarchal power. Moreover, socialists were enamored with heavy metal, the coal and steel industries that were the very epitome of industrialism and that employed few female workers. Socialists could not imagine a movement that organized only textile and commercial food workers, sectors in which women were much more prevalent, let alone those in domestic service. Yet at the same time, socialists sought to organize women into the movement, most successfully when women were allowed to join separate female groups. Some women, like Clara Zetkin and Adelheid Popp, countered the intense male prejudice of the movement. Like male militants, they found in socialism a setting where they could develop their talents and interests and give meaning to their lives.

Socialism was never, then, simply a political movement. It became inscribed in the social and cultural life of workers and militants, male and female, in very profound ways. There were towns and neighborhoods in Germany, France, Britain, and Scandinavia that acquired a pronounced socialist tone by the time of World War I. Clearly, the movement itself depended upon the tight intertwining of workplace and community that marked the age of high industrialization. There were always competing and overlapping identities—of religion, region, gender, and nationality. But an identification with class was probably strongest in Europe between 1880 and 1960, when workers encountered one another in the factory, on the streetcar or train commuting to work, and on the sidewalks and in the courtyards and pubs of the neighborhood. Upon that social reality, socialism provided an added layer of identity, one that gave ideological meaning to the status of worker.

Farther east on the Continent, socialism was far less rooted in society, if for no other reason than that industry was much less developed. Still, significant socialist parties had emerged in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Poland, and Russia, and they too won at least a few pockets of support. The harshly repressive political conditions, especially in Russia, resulted in a more militant, still angrier tone to the socialist parties. Almost every leading socialist in the Russian Empire endured the horrendous conditions of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile. They had little opportunity and fewer resources to provide the recreational programs and representation that socialists gave to workers in the western countries. They also competed with more peasant-based parties that represented a nonmarxian, populist form of socialism. A more typical form of contact between socialist militants and regular workers in these areas was literacy groups, in which socialist militants, often intellectuals, strove to teach workers, many of them only weeks removed from the villages, to read, and thereby introduce them to socialist teachings. Surreptitious trade unions were another form of organization, as was the establishment of underground couriers, who would distribute pamphlets and other literature.

Sometimes the rigors of underground life brought out the worst aspects of conspiratorial mentalities—sterile ideological conflicts, authoritarian dealings with others, arrogant confidence in the righteousness of one's own cause, and acts of terror against opponents. Indeed, in his famous tract What Is to Be Done? (1902) Vladimir Ilich Lenin turned many of the aspects of party life specific to the authoritarian conditions of Russia into the model organizational form for all socialist parties. Lenin wrote rhapsodically about the most severe discipline and most complete devotion required of party members, who were to be professional revolutionaries. Going further than most contemporary socialists and sharply modifying standard marxism, Lenin also argued that workers would not automatically develop revolutionary class consciousness. Instead, the revolutionary socialist party had to bring class consciousness to the proletariat.

Lenin's views were by no means universally accepted even within the marxian wing of the Russian socialist movement. Nor were the conflicts restricted to the east. The socialist movement, always diverse, faced severe internal dissension in the two decades before World War I. The "revisionist controversy," begun in the 1890s, can be seen as the precursor to the great divide that would open up between socialists and communists in the wake of World War I. Initially fought out within the SPD, the conflict soon spilled over to the other member parties of the Second International. Eduard Bernstein, a leading figure in the SPD, argued that capitalism was not dividing into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as Marx had predicted. Instead, the middle class was expanding. Socialist parties had to win the backing of the members of the middle class as well as proletarians if they were ever to come to power with majority support. Socialism would then be implemented gradually and democratically. An accumulation of reforms, not armed revolution, would create the socialist future. Bernstein was opposed by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, who would later have their own differences, but for a time at least were united in upholding the marxian orthodoxy of revolution against Bernstein's more accurate sociological analysis of capitalism.

Most socialist workers, it can safely be estimated, were closer to the revisionist than the revolutionary position. Despite all the fire and brimstone of marxian rhetoric, which the socialist parties happily reproduced, in Germany, France, Britain, and Scandinavia socialists were increasingly drawn into the administration of the state. If not at the very top levels, at least in the municipalities, welfare agencies, and state-supervised labor markets, socialists worked ardently to improve the daily existence of the working class. They had successes, and the revolutionary impulse waned, at least in central and western Europe. At the same time, in the years just before World War I, class conflict grew exceedingly intense. Strikes and demonstrations became ever more prevalent, inspiring great unease among the upper classes, great hopes among workers and socialist militants. Luxemburg gave voice to this view with her idealization of mass spontaneous strikes, which was based on her observations of the 1905 Revolution in the Russian Empire.

World War I and socialist movements. On the eve of World War I, socialism had become a powerful movement in many countries. As political and diplomatic tensions accelerated in Europe in the summer of 1914, socialists made concerted efforts to prevent the advent of war. In every country they held great rallies in favor of peace, and the national leaderships convened for deliberations under the rubric of the Second International. But the SPD, attracted by the force of nationalism, fearful of government repression and a Russian invasion, voted in support of war credits in the German parliament—in contradiction to the antiwar position that both the German party and the International had expressed for years. With very few exceptions, the other socialist parties followed suit. Contrary to long-held opinions, however, the most recent research has shown that workers did not all march enthusiastically off to war. The vote for war remained controversial among the rank and file, and many went off to war bitter at their own leaders and fearful of the realities of warfare.

World War I, the first total war in history, had unprecedented consequences for the working class and the socialist movement. As states directed resources, human and material, into the war-related industries, the working class became more concentrated in heavy industry and the more urbanized industrial areas. By and large, this was not the first time that women were drawn into the industrial labor force, as the most recent research has shown, revising another longstanding myth from the war era. But there were important sectoral shifts in women's labor, out of textiles, commercial food processing, and small-scale production generally and into the metalworking and munitions factories. Female workers were also becoming more highly skilled. The working class became more concentrated, accentuating those links between community and workplace, the sense of a common destiny, that underpinned the rise of the socialist movement.

This restructuring occurred in the midst of the enormously high death rate suffered by soldiers at the front and the intense losses and hardships endured by the population at home. Moreover, the state, since it had assumed such enormous powers during the war, became the object of hatred and the target of protests. With increasing breadth moving west to east across Europe, a chasm opened up between populations and governments and between workers and their socialist representatives who supported the war effort. In many places, notably the metalworking and munitions factories of Düsseldorf, Berlin, Turin, Petrograd, and elsewhere, incremental change seemed a rather unsatisfying program as food supplies and official rations plummeted, the number of working hours grew incessantly, and increasing numbers of soldiers never returned or came back physically and psychically wounded.

The result of popular discontent was a wave of strikes and revolutions on a scale not seen since 1848. Typically, strikes broke out first over wages and food rations. Workers were often able to extract concessions from employers and the state. Quickly, though, strikes became more overtly politicized as workers raised demands for an end to the war and for democratization. In Russia, the strikes in February 1917 led almost seamlessly to revolution when the troops began to follow the sentiments of workers, many of them female, and Tsar Nicholas II realized that he had virtually no support. Elsewhere, in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, revolution would erupt more or less concurrently with the end of the war.

Two critical factors emerged out of this vast wave of popular protest. In the course of strikes and revolutions, workers invented the "council" ("soviet" in Russian), a democratic form of representation initiated in the workplace during mass demonstrations. Typically, at the end of a great rally workers would elect delegates to represent their interests to employers and the state. The councils from different factories in a city would convene and constitute the city council. Usually workers elected well-respected local leaders, shop stewards or other union representatives, to the councils, and most of those elected were members of one or another socialist party. The councils presented an often chaotic and confused form of governance and could not easily be assimilated into the existing state structure. Leon Trotsky famously labeled the situation in Russia between the February Revolution and the October Bolshevik Revolution as the period of dual power, when the executive of the councils and a more regular state ministry existed side by side. At first, the councils were rather submissive to the government, but in the course of the year they became far more assertive, and each body began jockeying for power.

However chaotic the situation, however unfulfilled the leaders' promises went, the councils represented the potential for a more democratic form of governance than that which prevailed both in the Soviet Union and in the West. The councils represented a distinctively twentieth-century model that emerged out of the disastrous conditions of war, out of the long-term process of capitalist development that concentrated a good segment of the working class in the heavy industries, and out of the decades of socialist organization that had intensified the sense of class identity and promoted the ideas of democracy and socialism as the solution to the travails of life under capitalism.

But the struggle over the councils, which lasted in many countries until 1921, also revealed the limits of socialism's democratic promise. Men were not the only workers who went out on strike, nor were strikes the only manifestation of workers' protests in the World War I era. Women initiated strikes in many factories, and they launched demonstrations and riots designed to force merchants and government officials to lower food prices. Yet all across Europe, women were forced out of the factories at war's end as the men returned from the front. Socialists, trade unionists, employers, government officials—all were united in the belief that men deserved priority in the job market. The vain, desperate search for a return to "normalcy" meant that women were to return to home and hearth and men were to regain their supposedly rightful place at the workbench. All of the politically active groups could envisage, with hopes or fears, depending on the perspective, a new order arising out of the workplace and the councils. None of them could imagine the contours of a future society based on female drill press operators or demonstrations and riots in the marketplace.

The Bolshevik Revolution. The second enormous consequence of World War I was the fatal, irreparable division of the labor movement into communist and socialist wings. The February Revolution that had toppled the tsarist system had inspired nearly universal support among socialists and great hopes for a future democratic Europe. The Bolshevik Revolution aroused almost immediate criticism, which became ever more fervent as the Bolsheviks undertook antidemocratic measures, such as dispersing the Constitutional Convention because Bolsheviks were in the minority of those elected to the body. When counterrevolutionaries launched a civil war that lasted from 1918 to 1920, the Bolsheviks responded with the organization of the Red Army and the open advocacy of terror against political opponents. To many Western socialists, the Bolsheviks merely mirrored the traditional authoritarianism and violence of tsarist Russia. "Russian conditions" became a watchword for avoiding experiments like the council system and a term that conjured up images of chaos, violence, and backwardness. A good deal of prejudice against Slavs, so deep that it approached a racialized hostility, was bound up with these views. To many well-schooled marxists, the Bolsheviks had violated the laws of history by trying to push Russia from its peasant-based underdevelopment to the socialist future without bothering to linger in the intermediary stage of bourgeois capitalism.

Yet to many workers and socialists, the Bolshevik Revolution became a great rallying point. After the long, dreary, miserable years of war, a war that so many socialist leaders had supported, the audacity of the Bolsheviks, their willingness to seize and defend power in the name of socialism and their unbridled opposition to the war, proved inspiring. The Bolsheviks promised the socialist future in the here and now, and that was enough for many people. Many of these hopes would be dashed over the course of time—the disillusionment with communism is a pronounced literary genre of the twentieth century, resulting in shelf loads of epochal novels and memoirs. Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) is simply one of the most famous, but it was hardly the first of its kind.

Nonetheless, communism would continue to draw powerful support, even in its most undemocratic, murderous periods under Joseph Stalin. Like the socialists before them, communists proved dedicated and tireless organizers. In particular neighborhoods and towns all over Europe—in Wales and Scotland, in Berlin, in the Paris suburbs, in Turin—communism became a part of everyday culture, structuring and giving meaning to the lives of its supporters. Despite a few lapses, notably the period of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact from 1939 to 1941, in the 1930s and 1940s communists proved the most consistent opponents of Nazism and fascism. Their prominent and effective roles in the resistance against German occupation led to the high tide of communism from around 1943 to 1956, when the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, revealed publicly the immense crimes of Stalin. In that same year, the televised images of Soviet tanks crushing the Hungarian revolt, combined with the impact of Khrushchev's revelations, destroyed for many people the allure of communism, although communist power remained in place for another thirty-five years.

Despite the virulence of the communist-socialist split and the growing competition from mass consumer culture, the 1920s were the high point of a specifically socialist culture in Great Britain and the German-speaking countries. "Red Vienna" became a model socialist municipality. Socialists implemented extensive social-welfare and cultural programs, organized giant festivities, and built well-run city housing for workers. On a smaller scale, similar programs were initiated in a number of German cities that had significant socialist representation in the municipal governments. Socialist ideals were woven through daily life, which also now became the object of discipline and reform by socialist leaders who found the unruly aspects of working-class life distasteful and an expression of the moral degeneration of life under capitalism.

The social democratic model. Socialist culture in central Europe was effectively quashed by the rise of Nazism. But in Sweden socialists came to power in the 1930s in alliance with the rural population and established a successful system that combined an extensive social welfare program with democratic participation. This was the archetypal social democratic model that, in one fashion or another, was followed by other socialist parties that came to power after World War II. Its attraction was so great that even conservative parties modeled some of their programs along similar lines, if only to outcompete their socialist rivals.

The success of the social democratic system went hand in hand with the decline of socialism and the working-class subculture that had sustained it. Socialists in central and western Europe were now deeply entwined with liberal capitalism. By the 1960s, the utopian impulse of socialism had all but disappeared. Socialism now meant trade union officials who negotiated wage increases and improved benefits and government leaders who raised old-age pensions. The progress here should not be underestimated. After the upheavals of two world wars, worldwide depression, and fascist violence, the postwar decades offered workers, for the first time, a measure of economic security and material improvement. Without the force of socialism, these improvements would never have occurred, certainly not on the scale that enabled workers, by the 1960s, to enjoy four-week vacations and the pleasures of the automobile.

Yet the mobility offered by the automobile symbolized the breakup of working-class communities. Since World War II capitalist expansion has displaced the once-tight linkages between residency and workplace. Highways, automobiles, and urban renewal dispersed working-class populations. Most recently, work itself has sometimes been dispersed into cyberspace by computers and all over the globe by the hyperactive mobility of capital. The influx into Europe from the late 1950s onward of large numbers of immigrants from Africa and Asia has sometimes made ethnic and national identities seem far more salient than class identities. Consumerism and mass, popular culture have provided alternative sites of leisure and entertainment and, most definitely, values different from those invoked by the socialist and communist parties.

Historians and sociologists continue to debate what socialism or communism meant to workers in affluent European consumer societies. Proclamations about the "end of ideology" in postwar Europe seemed premature. But it is true that the lives of workers moved beyond the confines of socialist organizations and that attention to consumer goals diluted political activism. These pressures pushed for greater pragmatism in socialist and communist parties alike.

Socialism, then, grew in tandem with industrialization and nation-building, two central features of Europe's modern epoch. Socialism's tide ran high in the period from roughly 1840 to 1960; its decline is symptomatic of Europe's move into a postmodern age. Work and workers remain, but a specifically socialist class consciousness is ever harder to find. Yet socialism's past provides a storehouse of democratic ideas and promises that may still find its advocates.

See alsoMarxism and Radical History (volume 1);The Welfare State; Communism (volume 2);Social Class; Artisans; Working Classes (in this volume);Gender and Work; Factory Work (volume 4); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barclay, David E., and Eric D. Weitz, eds. Between Reform and Revolution: GermanSocialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990. New York, 1998.

Berlanstein, Lenard R., ed. Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and ClassAnalysis. Urbana, Ill., 1993.

Cole, G. D. H. The History of Socialist Thought. 5 vols. London, 1953–1960.

Daniel, Ute. The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First WorldWar. Translated by Margaret Ries. Oxford, 1997.

Eley, Geoff. "Reviewing the Socialist Tradition." In The Crisis of Socialism in Europe. Edited by Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks. Durham, N.C., 1992. Pages 21–60.

Frader, Laura L., and Sonya O. Rose, eds. Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Gruber, Helmut. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934. New York, 1991.

Gruber, Helmut, and Pamela Graves, eds. Women and Socialism, Socialism andWomen. New York, 1998.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Workers: Worlds of Labor. New York, 1984.

Joll, James. The Second International, 1889–1914. Rev. ed. London, 1974.

Katznelson, Ira, and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds. Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton, N.J., 1986.

Kocka, Jürgen. Arbeitsverhältnisse und Arbeiterexistenzen: Grundlagen der Klassenbildung im 19. Jahrhundert. Bonn, Germany, 1990.

Kriegel, Annie. Le pain et les roses: Jalons pour une histoire des socialismes. Paris, 1968.

Lidtke, Vernon. The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany. New York, 1985.

Lindemann, Albert S. A History of European Socialism. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1983.

Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Maynes, Mary Jo. Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers'Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995.

Moss, Bernard H. The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830–1914: TheSocialism of Skilled Workers. Berkeley, Calif., 1976.

Sassoon, Donald. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in theTwentieth Century. New York, 1996.

Schieder, Wolfgang. "Sozialismus." In vol. 5 of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Koselleck. Stuttgart, Germany, 1984.

Taylor, Barbara. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the NineteenthCentury. London, 1983.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, 1963.