But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory
system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and
teaches them the lesson of class consciousness. So the time of the
workers draws near. The first attempt in modern times to accomplish the
social revolution and set up industrial democracy was in the Paris
Commune. When the French empire collapsed, after the war with Germany in
1871, the workers of Paris seized control. They were massacred, some
50,000 of them, and the propertied classes of France established the
present bourgeois republic, which has now become the bulwark of reaction
throughout the Continent of Europe.
Next came the Russian revolution of 1905, and this was an interesting
illustration of the relation between the two waves of social progress.
Russia was a backward country industrially, and according to theory not
at all prepared for the social revolution. But nowadays the thoughts of
men circulate all over the world, and the exiles from Russia had
absorbed Marxian ideas, and were not prepared to accept a purely
political freedom. So in 1905, after the Japanese war, when the people
rose and forced the Czar to grant a parliament, the extremists made an
effort to accomplish the social revolution at the same time. The
peasants began to demand the land, and the workers the factories;
whereupon the capitalists and middle classes, who wanted a parliament,
but did not want Socialism, went over to the side of reaction, and both
the political and social revolutions were crushed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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