How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Socialism did not arrive as a finished doctrine; it was hammered out in revolutions, defeats, and arguments over half a century. This lens follows the movement’s own story: the failed revolutions of 1848 and the Manifesto written on their eve, the seventy-two days of the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression, the founding of the First International and its rupture, and the rise of the great mass parties, above all the German Social Democrats, whose Erfurt Program became the model and whose eventual split set the stage for 1917. It is the historical spine the rest of the socialism series stands on, and it leads directly into Revolution in Power, the next part of the series.
Anchor questions
- Why did the revolutions of 1848 fail, and what did socialists learn from losing?
- The Paris Commune lasted ten weeks. Why does a defeated experiment still matter so much to this tradition?
- What changed when socialism became an organized international movement rather than a set of ideas?
- How did the world’s largest socialist party end up split between reform and revolution?
- Whose telling of this history have we inherited, and what does it leave out?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable loan.
1848, the Commune, and the First International
- Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). The programmatic text of the 1848 moment and the founding document of the modern movement. Free: marxists.org
- Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (1850). His narrative of the revolution and its defeat, method applied to living events. Free: marxists.org
- Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871). The address on the Commune, written as it fell. The state-theory reading of it lives in The State, Strategy, and Power; here it is the Commune’s place in the movement’s story. Free: marxists.org
- Karl Marx, Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association (1864). The founding address of the First International, socialism becoming an international movement. Free: marxists.org
- First International (IWMA) archive. The congresses, rules, and documents, including the split with Bakunin at the Hague in 1872. Free: marxists.org
The mass parties
- Friedrich Engels, On the History of the Communist League (1885). The movement’s retrospective on its own founding, from the League of the Just to the Manifesto. Free: marxists.org
- The Erfurt Program (SPD, 1891). The charter of the model mass party, revolutionary analysis wedded to reform demands. Free: marxists.org
- Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). His sharp notes on the German unity program; the transition arguments carry over to The State, Strategy, and Power. Free: marxists.org
- Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918). The first major biography, doubling as a history of the early movement. Free: marxists.org
- Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905 to 1917 (1955). The standard account of the great party’s split into reformist and revolutionary wings. Free to borrow: archive.org
Video
- “Why did the Paris Commune Fail?” (History Matters, 2021). Roughly 4 minutes, about 1.8 million views. A quick animated baseline. youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA
- “Revolutions of 1848: Crash Course European History #26” (2019). Roughly 13 minutes, about 1.1 million views. The 1848 context of the Manifesto. youtube.com/watch?v=cXTaP1BD1YY
- “John Merriman: The Paris Commune of 1871” (Yale, 2014). Roughly 50 minutes, about 33,000 views. A full lecture from a leading historian, for going deeper. youtube.com/watch?v=j2TmX_ZIqXI
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. There is no strong standalone video on the First or Second International or the SPD; that ground is currently carried by the readings. Contributions welcome.