76 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE COMMON ENEMY 77 bourgeoisie against the remnants of feudalism in the form of aristocratic and monarchical institutions. Accordingly, the Socialist theorists intellectuals of that epoch put very little value upon political forms, and generally counseled the workers against participation in the struggles of the bourgeoisie for parliamentarism and the extension of the franchise. While the practical leaders of the working class were, on the whole, in favor of such participation, placing great weight upon the workers obtaining political power, which was, of course, only possible in democratic and parliamentary Governments.
Along with this cleavage between theorists intellectuals and practical workers there is observable a marked difference between the countries which have attained a higher stage of development and those more backward in the scale of economical and political development. It seems that the tendency to regard the capitalist class as the enemy to be fought by the workers, at all costs and no matter in what company, increased in direct proportion to the increase of the power of the capitalist class economically and politically. Which was only natural. In the countries in which the feudal regime was still intact, or at least very powerful, the workers came into collision with it the moment they ventured to take an independent step economically or otherwise. They could not therefore but regard it as the main, or at least the first, enemy to be fought, and would therefore be naturally inclined to make common cause with all the other elements of society that sought the overthrow of aristocratic and monarchical institutions. In those countries, on the other hand, in which the capitalist class had largely supplanted the feudal powers politically, which were also the countries in which the economic exploitation of the workers by the capitalists was at its fiercest, the worker immediate fight was with the capitalist, and it was that fight which he saw first of all and most of all.
It was the capitalist who oppressed him directly and constantly, in the shop, mill, and factory. And the capitalist was also in possession of a very large, perhaps the largest, share of the Government, which was called into requisition whenever he rebelled against the capitalist economic exploitation. The oppressions of the feudal institutions whatever there was left of them was indirect, and seemed remote, to a certain extent merely reminiscent. While a good many members of the nobility were in these countries at least inclined to side with the workers in their fight against the capitalist class for more human conditions of existence.
There has therefore always been a very respectable body of public opinion in the Socialist and labor movement that the working class as the representative of the future in the development of society and the feudal and semi feudal elements as representatives of the past had a common cause in the struggle against the present, and a common enemy in the capitalist class, the representative of that present. survey of the world literature of the last hundred years or so dealing with social and labor problems will easily reveal the main currents of this body of thought: its rapids, its eddies, and its stagnant pools. For our own purpose it is sufficient to point to such representative men as Rodbertus, in Germany; St. Simon and Fourier, in France; and Owen, Carlyle, and Kingsley, in England. They all belong to the first period of the labor movement, the pre Marx period. They were all theorists intellectuals. And their readiness to join hands with the past in the fight against the present for a better future is graded as to intensity of hatred against the present and readiness to lean upon the past according to the degree of develop ment of their respective countries, in an ascending scale: Germany, France, England. During the early stages of the labor movement England was the classic land of capitalism, and it was only natural that all tendencies of capitalism as well as the labor movement should there find their classic expression. This is true of the tendency here under consideration, as well as of most others. Its most typical representatives are the three Englishmen named: Thomas Carlyle, the great intellectual rebel against the capitalist system of society with its unbridled and irresponsible individualism; Robert Owen, the great Utopian Socialist theorist, devising schemes for the construction of the social structure of the future; and Charles Kingsley, the Christian Socialist, trying to lead the way from the old into the new by preaching the ethics of reconstruction.