chapter 1 Workers and Revolutions A Historical Paradox Marcel van der Linden The concept of “revolution”, which derives from astrology and astronomy, be- came more widely known after Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, in which he used the term to describe both the rotation of the planets around the sun and that of the Earth around its axis.1 In the three centuries that followed, huge social changes became increasingly described as revolutions.2 Often, such changes encompassed all aspects of life and were supposed to lead to a better future.3 Distinguishing different aspects of revolu- tions easily followed from this: economic, political or social. The term “social revolution” first appeared in a book titled Considérations sur la révolution so- ciale, published by the Comte de Ferrand in 1794.4 In this period, revolution was regarded mainly as a conflict between the aristocracy and the increasingly class- conscious bourgeoisie.5 Between 1831 and 1848, German intellectuals comparing recent develop- ments in different parts of Western Europe then discovered that the working classes could also figure in revolutions. In 1842, the economist Lorenz von Stein published his book The Socialism and Communism of Contemporary France, in which he argued that the rising industrial society either made workers ob- stinate and malicious or transformed them into dull instruments and servile 1 I would like to thank Pepijn Brandon and Peyman Jafari for their helpful comments on this article’s first draft. 2 The first transition identified as a “revolution” was probably the upheaval in the North Ger- man town of Emden in 1595. See Die “Emder Revolution” von 1595, ed. Hajo van Lengen (Au- rich: Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1995). 3 Reinhart Koselleck et al., “Revolution. Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg”, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch- sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1984), 653– 788, esp. 655. 4 Antoine François Claude Comte de Ferrand, Considérations sur la révolution sociale (Lon- don: no publisher, 1794). 5 See e.g. Ralph Miliband, “Barnave: A Case of Bourgeois Class Consciousness”, in Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, ed. István Mészáros (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 22– 48. © Marcel van der Linden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004440395_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.Marcel van der Linden - 9789004440395 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:13:43AM via free access 20 van der Linden subordinates. He considered personal and hereditary property to be the root cause of this decline of the working classes, since it resulted in the dominant power of some and the unfreedom of others. However, a proletarian revolution was not inexorable. Von Stein proposed a reformist political strategy in which the state guides the redistribution of economic resources so as to prevent class polarization.6 In late 1843 or early 1844, Karl Marx characterized the proletariat as: “a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetrated against it”. The proletariat was the “all- round antithesis” to existing society, which is “the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re- winning of man”.7 Gradually, the nature of this proletarian self- emancipation became clearer to Marx. In a fragment from around 1845, written jointly with Friedrich Engels, he asserted that the abolition of bourgeois society would require the collective appropriation of all productive forces. This could be effected only through “a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of produc- tion and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat more- over rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society”.8 Moses Hess, the philosopher who together with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others worked on The German Ideology, wrote in 1847 about the “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat”.9 Engels noted in Principles of Communism, published the same year: “In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity”.10 6 Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: Wigand, 1842); Joachim Singelmann and Peter Singelmann, “Lorenz von Stein and the Paradigmatic Bifurcation of Social Theory in the Nineteenth Century”, British Journal of Sociology 37, no. 3 (1986): 431– 452. 7 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, in Marx Engels Collected Works [hereafter mecw], vol. 3 (1975), 186, translation corrected. 8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology”, mecw, vol. 5 (1976), 88. 9 Moses Hess, “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat”, in The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, Moses Hess, translated and edited by Shlomo Avineri (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 128– 135. 10 mecw, vol. 6, 684 (§ 17). Marcel van der Linden - 9789004440395 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:13:43AM via free access Workers and Revolutions 21 The discovery of radical labour struggle of course related directly to its growing visibility in the three most important countries in Western Europe. Between 1831 and 1834 the uprising by silk workers in Lyon had instigated a general strike, unique for that era, as well as two very bloody confrontations with the authorities.11 In England, the proletarian Chartist movement for po- litical reform had an enormous impact from 1838 onwards,12 and in 1844, the rebellion of weavers in Peterswaldau and Langenbielau (Silesia) revealed that the working class was also starting to awaken in Germany.13 1 The Marx- Hess- Engels Hypothesis Marx, Hess, Engels and others believed that the rise of capitalism would bring about continuous expansion of the working class in the decades ahead. Labour would therefore become ever more important in future revolutions, which would soon result in the subversion of capitalist relations. This view seemed to find resounding confirmation in the revolutions of 1848– 1849 in France, Cen- tral Europe and other regions, which explicitly shifted the focus to the working class as an emergent – albeit not yet dominant – vector in the social and polit- ical field of forces.14 Was this perception accurate? 11 Fernand Rude, Les Révoltes des canuts, novembre 1831- avril 1834 (Paris: Maspero, 1982); Maurice Moissonnier, La Révolte des canuts, Lyon, novembre 1831 (Paris: ed. Sociales Messidor, 1958). The best monograph in English is Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 12 The body of literature about the Chartists is vast. See e.g., Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1984); Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Marx and Engels were in contact with a few Chartist leaders. See e.g. Peter Cadogan, “Harney and Engels”, International Review of Social History 10, no. 1 (1965): 66– 104; Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan, 1965). 13 Lutz Kroneberg and Rolf Schloesser, Weber- Revolte 1844: Der schlesische Weberaufstand im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Publizistik und Literatur (Cologne: C. W. Leske, 1979); Christina von Hodenberg, Aufstand der Weber: Die Revolte von 1844 und ihr Aufstieg zum Mythos (Bonn: Dietz, 1997). 14 Extensive information appears in the journal La révolution de 1848, published in France since 1904. Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, later renamed Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle. Studies focusing explicitly on the role of the workers in 1848 include Rémi Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris. Vol. 1: L’organisation, 1848– 1851. Preface by Jacques Godechot (La Roche- sur- Yon: Imprimerie Centrale de l’Ouest, 1968); Maria Grazia Meriggi, L’invenzione della classe operaia: Conflitti di lavoro, organizzazione del lavoro e della società in Francia intorno al 1848 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002); P. H. Noyes, Marcel van der Linden - 9789004440395 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:13:43AM via free access 22 van der Linden In answering this question, I apply the broad concept of the working class as elaborated in Global Labour History in recent years. In this perception, the history of capitalist labour must encompass all forms of physically or eco- nomically coerced commodification of labour power: wage labourers, slaves, sharecroppers, convict labourers, and so on – plus all the labour that creates such commodified labour or regenerates it; that is, parental labour, household labour, care labour and subsistence labour. This broad description enables us to acknowledge the role of housewives (for example as instigators of the Feb- ruary