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particularly in France and Spain, who saw General Strikes as a way for workers to

coerce and even destabilise the state. Anarchism continued to influence socialism,
th
and remained strong in 20 century Spain.

The Marxists followed the ideas of Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels,
We will focus on the earlier Marx and his Communist Manifesto of 1848. In just 23
pages, Marx gives a highly concentrated summary of his thinking. It became the most
th
important single document in socialist history, and indeed the whole 19 century.
But it contains a few surprises. Take his condemnation of “capitalism”, the system

which emerged from the Industrial Revolution, where factories, mines and railways
were all privately owned by rich middle-class property-owners, the “Bourgeoisie”:

“It put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder
the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious

fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of
life, and his relations with his kind.”

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of

the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the
workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple,
most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”

“Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As
privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect

hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the
overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The
more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the
more hateful and the more embittering it is.”

Where have we heard language like this before?
• traditional relationships pitilessly torn asunder

• the drowning of religious ecstasy, chivalry and sentiment in the icy waters of
egotistical calculation