1848 and the Last Temptation of Marx

I thought I'd cruise through the book 1848: Year of Revolution now that my class is over, but of course I haven't (maybe it's because I blog too much). Starting Röpke's Crises and Cycles while reading it doesn't help, either. I did want to write about something I found very intriguing, though. The Habsburgs, after their initial shock at events in Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin, began to respond to the assorted revolutionaries, liberals, leftists, and nationalists with considerably more craftiness than Metternich was able to muster before being ousted. As revolutionary fervor broke out in Galicia, the Austrians deftly played the Ukranian peasants against the Polish nobles and nationalists that demanded greater liberties from the empire. The Ukranians sided with the Austrians because the depredations of the Poles were more immediate than the arguably far greater imperial claims of the authorities in Vienna. This sort of sentiment was not uncommon during the American revolution either, where the refrain was often heard that "I would rather be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away than three thousand tyrants one mile away". Thus, the 1848 revolution in the Austro-Hungarian provinces especially took on a decidedly bourgeois (if not noble) tone, rather than a populist one. Paradoxically, the emperor became the "man of the people" rather than the democrats.

Another thing I found interesting was how damned sympathetic the leftists and the socialists come across in Paris and Berlin! I don't think it's the author's secret ideological sympathies, I think it's simply the fact that relative to monarchs and autocrats, a socialist that isn't saying that much about a workers' paradise, but is emphasizing constitutional reform and democracy doesn't seem all that bad. These are two somewhat surprising elements of the book, which upon further reflection of course aren't all that surprising at all.

Without knowing that much about the history of communism, I have to suspect that these two observations decisively shaped the future of the movement. Marx (an active participant in the Berlin revolution) certainly digested the monarchical alliance with the peasantry against the nobility, and he remarked on this process again a decade later when Tsar Alexander II emancipated Russia's serfs against the wishes of the Russian nobility:

"If the Russian nobility do not think that the “4th of August” (1789) has yet arrived, and that so far there is no necessity of sacrificing their privileges on the altar of their country, the Russian Government is going a great deal faster; it has already arrived at the “declaration of the rights of man.” What, indeed, do you think of Alexander II, proclaiming “rights which belong to the peasantry by nature, and of which they ought never to have been deprived"? Verily, these are strange times! In 1846, a Pope initiating a liberal movement; in 1858, a Russian Autocrat, a true samoderjetz vserossiiski, proclaiming the rights of man! And we shall see that the Czar’s proclamation will have as world-wide an echo, and an ultimate effect of far greater magnitude than the Pope’s liberalism."

What lessons could he have learned from this? I'll submit a few:

1. That autocratic authority can be brought to bear to serve the interests of the collective, and that the lower classes will embrace the autocrat for this.

2. That socialists are the good guys. It's easy to write-off the down-side of socialism when (1.) you've never seen the downside yet, and (2.) your formative years were spent battling emperors, kings, autocrats, and nobles. I'm sympathetic to the socialists as I read this book, and I know how the story ends! It's understandable how the revolutionaries could get so confident in their beliefs. It's comparable to Jefferson's support for the French Revolution, even as it started to descend into macabre chaos.

3. That a conflict of power is not the same as a conflict of class. For Marx, the dialectics of class were absolutely paramount. Today, in America especially, we have an inherent libertarianism. For us, exploitation is a function of the exercise of different power relationships. It's a perspective that is shared by French philosophers, particularly after Foucault, but it is also derived from a contractarian approach. But this is not a foundational assumption of many socialists and even many liberals in the 19th century who did not have a contractarian understanding of the world. For them, power was a tool to be used by either side - the oppressor or the oppressed. Simply exercising power over someone did not make you an oppressor. The primary source of oppression was class. To borrow from my recent series on calculation problems vs. incentive problems, the primary source of oppression was not a capricious violation of contract, but an institutional arrangement that stacked the deck in favor of one class over another. If autocratic power could rectify this, then so be it.

If you put these three together, the dictatorship of the proletariat follows naturally. It may be naive. It's a view that could greatly benefit from an infusion of contractarian thinking. But for a man that cut his teeth on the 1848 revolutions, it's understandable. If the imperial authorities had sided more vigorously with the nobility, and given Marx a greater distaste for autocratic power, I wonder if communism would have turned out differently.