Who Owns Peace? Socialist Perspectives

The myriad of movements and plethora of prescriptions that fall under the umbrella term “socialism” share certain characteristics, but each has a distinct perspective on peace. Whereas capitalists from Smith to Say tended to sanctify private property and competition as the optimal peace paradigm, socialists tended to consecrate collective ownership and coop­eration as the only conditions in which peace is possible.

A forerunner of non-violent, industrial gradualist approaches is that of Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Having experienced firsthand the destruction caused and hope inspired by the American and French Revolutions, he proposed societies be peacefully reorganized on empirical principles by studying the past to inform the present and shape the future. As the “philosophy of the [eighteenth] century was revolutionary; that of the nineteenth century must be organizational,” he argued, geared towards establishing cooperative, productive and stable social orders that secure social peace through individual wellbeing.¹⁷ He argued further that “gov­ernments will no longer command men” in war if leaders are scientists and industrialists whose functions are “limited to ensuring that useful work is not hindered,” united with working classes by a materialist morality that would gradually become a New Christianity, the title of his last, unfinished book.¹⁸ Saint-Simon’s principles and methods developed a cult-like postmortem following.

Similarly “utopian” schemes, as Karl Marx would later try to discredit them, were put forth by Richard Owen in England, Charles Fourier in France, and their American followers. Owen (1771-1858), a saddler’s son, began working in Manchester’s booming textile industry at the age of ten, by twenty-five was a manufacturer, and by thirty had purchased mills with other investors in Scotland. There, he spearheaded cooperative organizations by reinvesting portions of profits in improving the working conditions, housing, schools, sanitation and non-profit stores for his employees, increasing industrial productivity and peace. His maverick model instigated the social reforms passed by the British Parliament as the Factory Acts (1802-91). At around the same time, German immigrants to the US State of Indiana were running an agrarian collectivist community called Harmony, in which all property was held and all work done in common. They agreed to sell the property to Owen in 1825 to finance other such enterprises. Although New Harmony was under his direction for only three years, the first free kindergarten, free school for boys and girls, and free library in the US were established.

Like Owen, his contemporary Fourier (1772-1837) belonged to what was now called the bourgeoisie, merchant and entrepreneurial classes between aristocrats and laborers. His proposal for a cooperative commu­nity championed channeling people’s interests and passions rather than restricting them, as he condemned the day’s socio-economic systems for doing. Instead, he designed what he ironically named “phalanxes” after Ancient Greek army units: self-sufficient agrarian and manufacturing vil­lages in which work is allotted based on individuals’ inclination and all members live communally. Although unimplemented in his life, Fourier’s followers established phalanxes across the US. The best-known is Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded as an experimental joint-stock farm by Unitarians in 1841 and converted into a phalanx three years later, visitors of which included Ralph Waldo Emerson. The key similarity between Owen’s and Fourier’s propositions is that the immediate changes they considered necessary to end class struggles were revolutionary in their means and ends, but not in any violent sense; the key difference is that, for Owens, the peace-oriented change he proposed took place within the existing industrial socio-economic system and for Fourier from without it.

Gradualist, in opposition to revolutionary socialists, advocated change through reforms of existing socio-economic systems and their supporting political infrastructures rather than outright rejection, overhaul or over­throw.

Fabians advocated for the gradual permeation of economic equality within existing socio-political infrastructures. They rejected the violent class conflicts that had become part of urban European life by their times and, to help mitigate it, formed the Labor Representation Committee with the many active British labor unions in 1900, which evolved into the extant Labor Party. Along similar lines, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) co­founded the German Workers’ Association in 1863, which like the Chartists campaigned for universal suffrage but for the implementation of state socialism - the use of national government capital to de-class society by reorganizing industries so that they are owned and run, directly or indirectly through the state, by the workers themselves.

While Marx opposed his “scientific” socialism to previous “utopian” ones by claiming a primacy of observation over ideals in determining its socio-economic strategies and goals, the idealist logic he adapted from Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) rubbed off. Hegel had proposed that history unfolds in a dialectical process by which deficiencies of one idea, a thesis, are overcome by another, its antithesis. Thesis and antithesis are then syn­thesized to produce a new thesis and antithesis, progressing to intellectual and social perfection and so universal peace. For instance, in Hegel’s time, revolutions from monarchical to constitutional states gave rise to consti­tutional monarchies, all towards intra-national peace. Hence, for him, “in war, war itself is characterized as something which ought to pass away,” temporarily at first and permanently in the end.¹⁹ Marx concretized Hegel’s premises but kept his teleology intact, taking the economic con­ditions in which peace can and/or cannot be produced as determining factors of his dialectical materialism. As Marx observed, land ownership as the basis of feudal agrarian societies, in which aristocrats exploit peas­ants, was being displaced by capital as the basis of industrial societies, in which the bourgeoisie exploits working class proletariat.

A classless communist state, the only one that can be peaceful in Marx’s terms, was to be the final outcome and cessation of all class struggle, guarantor of individual freedoms. Proletariat revolution and provisional dictatorship are thus predetermined birth pangs of communist peace:

as the exploitation of one individual by another will be ended, the exploita­tion of one nation by another will also be ended... as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.²¹

In the meantime, socialists should prepare for the inevitable: in a revolu­tion that would run along class lines, unity across national lines was required for lasting results, “a state of war which can only end with the final destruction of all pre-existing social structures.”²² In 1863, Marx and others founded the First International Workingmen’s Association to unite, organize and mobilize workers worldwide from the capital of cap­italism, London. When asked if socialists should participate in the day’s organized peace movements, Marx condemned them as futile bourgeois enterprises aimed at placating the proletariat. Yet, the International splin­tered in 1875 in a power struggle during which Marx refused to endorse the terrorist tactics proposed by Mikhail Bakunin to abolish governments and their armies first, and classes later. While Marx’s socialist stance cannot be called peaceful, the paradigm for and analysis of social peace he put forth has been immeasurably influential, to the extent that the history of peace and peacemaking in the next century and a half cannot be understood without them.

The global revolutions of 1848, launched on economic but not always socialist grounds, were brutally suppressed by government militias. These events renewed the urgency of resolving class conflicts and intensified debates over using revolutionary violence in the name of peace or peace­fully bringing about change from the start, either along or across national lines and through or against national governments. An innovative pro­posal, called “non-violent anarchism,” came from Paris, where in 1861 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published his War and Peace, from which Tolstoy got more than the title of his novel, arguing that nation-states founded on the principles of private property and state-sponsored industrial socialism are both obstacles to social peace for self-interested reasons.²³ Mutualism, the alternative socio-economic system he put forth decades ahead of the socio-biological system given the same name and sharing certain princi­ples, would replace government with freely associated, self-managed socio-economic units and decentralized labor-controlled firms to fill all state roles, eliminating without violence central authorities and the stand­ing armies in place to protect them. Oxymoronically, the organized anarchy Proudhon proposed could taper static disadvantages and harness dynamic advantages of its terms, a model for social peace that has only lately begun to be re-explored.

A similar plan but on an agrarian platform was propagated at about the same time by the Russian narodniki (from “going to the people”) movement. When it began using terrorist tactics shortly after it was formed, a young man named Georgi Plekhanov split, travelled abroad and brought Marxist socialism to Russia for the first time. With Vladimir Lenin and others, he then transformed the League for the Emancipation of Labor into the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In a debate later echoed around the world, Plekhanov held that industrial capitalism was not advanced enough in Russia to warrant the violent revolution Marx envisioned, and so it must be peacefully developed first, the Menshevik position when the Party split. Conversely, Lenin held that the interests of peasants and workers were sufficiently aligned for the revolution to be successful, the position of the Bolsheviks he came to lead. By 1889, social­ists across Europe and North America reunited to form the Second International with its permanent headquarters in Belgium, which unlike the First was composed of and sought to direct existing local and national bodies. To the dejection of revolutionaries like Lenin, who now called themselves communists for contrast, socialists of the Second International were gradualist in their approach, inciting like Fabians practical political reforms in participating countries. But their departure from the First International’s unitive stance of workers worldwide became clear when the Second broke apart as members supported their own nations in the First World War. By this time yet another approach to industrial peace had surfaced, in which governments were mediators rather than mediums.

A coordinating body of British trade unions, the Trades Union Congress, was established in 1868 to formulate and articulate common policy so as to avoid further violence. Three years later, unions were legally recognized by the Trade Union Act, and immediately and success­fully began using non-violent tactics to achieve the better wages and working conditions. Strikes, or worker non-cooperation with employers until their demands are met, and lockouts, the same by employers with workers, at first displaced then replaced the violence that previously per­meated relations between them. In the US, two competing organizations emerged, the Knights of Labor (1869-1917) comparable to Fabians, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL, 1886), which gave autonomy to its member-unions and did not enter politics directly. A militant organi­zation, the Industrial Workers of the World, was formed in 1905, but after government crackdowns it collapsed as the Knights’ Fabianism fizzled. Unions were legally recognized in the US with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Dissident AFL unions formed a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the late 1930s, conflicts occurred, but after extensive negotiations they merged to form the extant AFL-CIO in 1955. In the words of a labor theorist, such “associations exert pressure on each other and on the government; the concessions which follow help to bind society together; thereafter stability is maintained by further con­cessions and adjustments as new associations emerge and power shifts from one group to another.”²⁴

Collective bargaining, as “a system of industrial jurisprudence... seeks to settle disputes short of industrial warfare, without resort to strikes and lockouts. It seeks to maintain industrial peace.”²⁵ Opponents argue it deprives workers of individual liberties and hinders labor markets; proponents argue that without it employers and labor markets become oppressive dictators; but all seem to agree that it is better than industrial warfare. Even strikes and lockouts function “as both inducing and restraining factors in collective bargaining” as they become “a more passive and potential force, rather than an active one.”²⁶ Collective bar­gaining has taken place at national and local levels (particularly in Europe), at industry levels (particularly in Asia), and at enterprise levels (particularly in North America, increasingly worldwide). In communist countries, unions tend to be transformed from worker vehicles into state instruments without collective bargaining mechanisms, which may explain why labor violence has been more prevalent. The International Labor Organization (ILO) founded in 1919 and which became the United Nation’s first special agency in 1946, defines collective bargaining as all negotiations between employers and workers to (a) determine working conditions and terms of employment, (b) regulate relations between employers and workers, and/or (c) regulate relations between their respec­tive organizations. The ILO Constitution states one of its aims as “the effective recognition of the right of collective bargaining” for the pacific settlements of disputes.²⁷ In 1949, it adopted a Collective Bargaining Convention, ratified by 140 states, a strong statement about the power of collective bargaining and the value of industrial peace it makes possible. But what are effective negotiation techniques at the collective bargaining table and can they apply at other ones?

In concluding The Quest for Industrial Peace (1966), renowned labor negotiator David Cole states “conflict is undeniable - industrial peace in the absolute sense is impossible,” which does not mean that striving for it is pointless.²⁸ For centuries, a standard approach to negotiations in labor, diplomatic and other disputes was advocacy, seeking to reach a position without other parties leaving the table. With collective bargain­ing developed negotiation techniques based on interests underlying posi­tions, a classic illustration being two sisters fighting over an apple, one to make juice and the other a pie from the pulp. Like mercantilism, focusing on their positions (possession of the apple) allows for accord only at the other’s loss; by focusing on interests (juice and pie), mutually beneficial accord is possible. Early in the twentieth century, organizational theorist Mary Follett stressed creativity, coordination and information-sharing as continuous processes in avoiding and resolving conflicts because common ground is thereby already actionable. Gerard Nierenberg’s The Art of Negotiating became a bestseller in the 1960s, arguing that as negotiating determines outcomes, a win-win basis is always most successful, and he founded the Negotiation Institute in New York (1966) to offer training in collaborative dispute resolution. By the 1970s the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) emerged to reduce growing costs of lawsuits by arbitration between individuals and entities. Directors of the Harvard Negotiation Project (est. 1979), Roger Fisher and William Ury, pioneered Principled Negotiation in the 1980s: separating people from problems while privileging interests over positions, objective over subjective crite­ria and mutual over one-sided gain. Recently, emphasis in negotiation studies has been on the role of emotions. Imagining modernity had nego­tiation been more widely used would be revisionist, and how the world could be if it were now, utopian. But imagining the uses of negotiation for individual peace in daily situations, social peace in group decision­making, and collective peace in inter-group relations is pragmatic. The history of peace in the twentieth century, subject of the next two chapters, can be taken as series of lessons in doing and failing to do so.