Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the year 1848, as Europe was in the throes of liberal and national revolutions from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, two unlikely figures – a German philosopher named Karl Marx and the Rhenish industrial magnate Friedrich Engels – published a pamphlet in London with the clarion call “Workers of all countries, unite!” By the eve of World War I in 1914, the slogan of the famous Communist Manifesto had come to inspire the largest mass-based political and social movement of the western, and perhaps the entire, world. International socialism was born. International socialism galvanized a significant portion of the disenfranchised population of the working classes of Europe in the emergent industrial society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Scottish socialist Keir Hardie estimated in 1912 that European socialism rallied 15 million voters and represented 45 million workers. The German Social Democratic Party was by far the world's largest political party, with over one million party members. Organized workers of Europe carrying the banner of socialism constituted a protest to the existing liberal industrial order on several levels: the exploited status of workers in the new industrial era, the lack of political rights and power for the masses in an elitist liberal and monarchical political culture, and the unfulfilled goals of fraternity and equality harking ... log in or subscribe to read full text