5 - “Revisionism” II. Social Reform

Summary

Introduction

This chapter extends the discussion of “revisionism” from the constitutional to the welfare front. What concessions, if any, could be expected from the bourgeoisie in terms of its willingness and ability to improve working-class well-being?

Section B specifies the principles of social reform emerging in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Measures championed in Engels's Principles of Communism and then in the Communist Manifesto as part of a program to be introduced once the proletariat had acquired political control of the state apparatus – the Factory Acts in particular – were unacceptable if adopted by the bourgeois régime itself, for such measures restrained capitalist development. Those measures that, to the contrary, gave capitalist development free rein – free trade is a prime instance – were acceptable though their perceived consequence might be to worsen working-class living conditions, precisely because by encouraging capitalist development they thereby also hastened its demise. As for unions, they were countenanced by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class (1845) and by Marx in the Poverty of Philosophy (1847), not as a counteracting or modifying force capable of reversing the downward wage trend but as an inevitable consequence of capitalist industrialization providing political training to a united, nationally organized, work force.

Marx's The Class Struggles in France of 1850 again opposes the range of reforms proposed in the Communist Manifesto as obstructing capitalist development. However, now the focus of attention is on the refusal of the bourgeois state to tolerate reform as proven by British as well as French experience.