The Spirit of 1848 and The Spirit of 2011

Popular uprisings spread across Europe like wildfire in 1848. They consisted mostly of working class people and university intellectuals. The intelligentsia felt repressed and the working class felt abandoned. What had happened to all the promises of freedom and the good life made by the great philosophers and revolutionary leaders of the preceding century? How come Europeans couldn't live the dream that America now enjoyed? These were not communist uprisings -- the activist demonstrators were actually demanding the simple fulfillment of the ideology of democracy. The reality they faced was a prospering of the rights, privileges, advantages and opportunities of princely merchants and the industrial entrepreneurial classes, and the onerous persistence of political aristocracy. Some of the revolutionaries of '48 were also fighting for the liberation of their entire ethnic group from political repression and oppression, such as the Hungarians seeking independence from the Austrians, of whom the latter exercised imperial authority over Hungary. But mostly it boiled down to economics. Without equal political rights and protections, regular people would never be able to penetrate the barrier imposed upon them by the allied network of the privileged. So why did it come to a head in 1848 and not sooner? After all, the American Revolution occurred all the way back in 1776, and the originally idealistic French Revolution had occurred in 1789. Well, by 1848, three new factors had entered the picture: (1) huge masses of regular working people had become absolutely critical to a newly dominant mode of production and economy -- industrial-scale factories; (2) this new and significant population of industrial workers had of necessity to acquire literacy skills to negotiate the more complicated existence of urban life and the modern bureaucratic state; (3) intellectuals who still believed in the ideals of democracy set down in the Age of Reason set up "underground" (i.e., not sanctioned by the state) printing presses across Europe to publish free-speech (and therefore illegal) newspapers and pamphlets to help politically and economically frustrated people understand and articulate the democratic rights to which they were entitled both as citizens and human beings. The uprisings of '48 were quite impressive, and some even showed temporary signs of victory. Yet ultimately each of them was brutally or quietly put down. However, they did have an ultimately lasting benefit in that the conservative elements in the countries in which they occurred began to take gradual but steady measures to improve at least some of the circumstances of the working poor, and this was largely brought about by the prospering middle class, who rubbed shoulders with the working poor on a daily business basis, and began to develop a sympathy for them (and perhaps some of those bourgeois-types quietly recalled that many of them had some poor people in their own ancestries). Another reason may have been that the prosperous shopkeepers, middle class professionals, and merchants of trade realized that if the working class could be so unapologetically brushed aside or even put down with guns by their social superiors, so might their own relatively recent rights and privileges be overturned by future reactionary regimes. After all, a sizable, dynamic and socially active middle class was still a very new concept in European states, which otherwise still retained many disguised (undisguised) modes of feudal authority. With the backing of a liberal, reformist and humanitarian middle class (some of its energy bolstered by Christian and Jewish ideals of human decency and compassion), the mainstream press gained the courage to assert free speech, and they went less and less opposed by official censors. The year 1848 had been a wake-up call for self-satisfied conservatives. Reasonable people sensed that what was good for the goose was good for the gander, and conservatives must have privately realized that if a more inclusive vision of democracy did not start to happen through peaceful legislation and liberalized jurisprudence, those very necessary factory workers might one day successfully organize themselves into a force to be reckoned with -- one that might take the job into their own capably work-calloused hands of finally completing the agendas demanded by those eighteenth century democratic mandates. And after all, the marching soldiers of those repressive states were recruited from that very class of working people. Would they fire on their own aggrieved brothers and sisters when the underprivileged exercised protest demonstrations? Laws of reform and widely beneficial civic regulation did happen in many countries of Europe (Russia and Eastern Europe being serious exceptions, though not for want of trying -- and mass exodus to America was the result). So public education improved, enhancing the scope for people to be able to consider socially responsible choices in solving political and economic problems, instead of desperately seeking violently destructive ones, such as later happened when thwarted democratic reformers felt no option left but to turn the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. Ultimately, collective bargaining for labor became preferred to revolution as the means of settling problems of unfair exploitation in many countries. So what does this have to do with 2011? Well, a similar series of uprisings with dreams of popular revolution are spreading across North Africa and the Middle East. Their energy does not stem from Islamism or communism. They are about regular people demanding what they feel are the fundamental human, political, civil and economic rights to which they are entitled. China is doing its best to prevent the spread of these movements into East Asia, but just as in 1848, their are middle class intellectuals and a powerful form of unregulated media aiding and abetting this rise in collective self-esteem and sense of socioeconomic self-worth. That form of media is this time not underground printing presses but an "overground" transmission of information: the internet. China will not be able to stem the tide forever. They have people getting very rich off masses of poorly paid, poorly treated, overworked factory drudges making products for the entire planet. These workers are coming to know their critical value in the global economy. Already in southern China real attempts have been made to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. In Hong Kong people are protesting the repressive measures they are made to endure. This is all good for the regular people of America, who are now vastly underemployed or unemployed because of unfair labor competition outside our country. If the regular people of the world get their political and economic rights, the global world of work will become a level playing field. Companies will have to search not for the industrial factory manager or clerical network manager who will provide the lowest bid for wage-slaves, but those who can provide the best workers -- because everyone, no matter where an entrepreneur chooses to shop around, will have legally-protected rights for fair pay, balanced work hours, and safe working conditions.