ABSTRACT
The revolutionary flavor was stronger in the socialism of 1850 than of 1950. Having recognized that democracy was not irretrievably an instrument for the rule of the bourgeoisie, a large segment of the socialist movement was willing to commit itself to the preservation of the Classical ideas about public opinion, to accept parliamentarism, civil rights, party conflict, and the continued existence of free public opinion, in which, indeed, all individuals were to participate, whatever might be their class feelings." But it had to be a public opinion to which all the means of communication were open, and to which the socialist could address his appeal. Like the Christian, the democratic socialist became confident that he was bound to win the masses to his side by persuasion, rather than by the coercive organization of a revolutionary government. And, though the socialist might, like the conservative, recognize that there is always some sort of class
struggle in progress, such a struggle might be either sharp and violent or more in the vein of friendly argument-somewhat as in a Chamber of Deputies.+
Marxian revolutionary thought, as it came into the twentieth century, was profoundly convinced of the oppressive and class character of parliamentary and democratic government. As the moderate socialists drew away from the stern materialism of Marx and Engels, the revolutionists drew closer, until the contemporary union of the Russian revolution and Marxian materialism was achieved. This new union could make no compromise with the ideology of democracy and constitutionalism, for a new state had to be constructed on dialectical materialism. According to Gray, Marx and Engels retained the then universal Cartesian dualism; they were epiphenomenalists, taking the customary materialist position of the time. The universe and the mind consist of matter in motion, and ideas arise from the conditions of material existence. Social existence, then, determines, consciousness. While these ideas had in part stemmed from Locke through HelvCtius, Godwin, Owen, and others, Hegel and Marx were perhaps the first to see the indirect economic and social processes which influence our thinking.? As a participant in the drama of atheistic humanism, religion was for Marx and Engels the first object of attack; and after religious ideas had been destroyed they might begin the construction of a materialistic philosophy through which the economic and political system of both liberalism and conservatism might be destroyed.$ It was possible, they thought as rationalists, that they might discover an absolute and materialistic truth about man in society. Some of the "truths" they discovered are familiar enough at the midpoint in the twentieth century. They believed, for example, that since capitalist and bourgeois economic interests use force to sustain themselves, only force can destroy
them. As Marx said, "force is the midwife of every old society that is pregnant with the new."
