0745685749 enemies democracy

38 The Inner Enemies of Democracy
way it was brought to a halt and dreaming of giving
it a new start. This movement began in the aftermath
of 9 Thermidor with the ‘conspiracy of equals’ led by
Babeuf. ‘The French Revolution’, we read in the manifesto
of the ‘Equals’, ‘is only the forerunner of another
revolution, much larger, much more solemn: it will be
the last.’ 12 In these formulas, we can see the emergence
of the millenarian spirit – the time of the final battle is
approaching – now translated into Communist terms.
The conspiracy failed, but many other visionaries tried
to imagine a continuation and radicalization of the
failed revolution. Saint-Simon (a disciple of Condorcet)
and Fourier, Proudhon and Louis Blanc, Herzen and
Bakunin offered different variants of socialism. The
version that would experience the most lasting success
was the one developed, from the 1840s onwards, by
two Germans living abroad, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, the founders of true Communism. A brochure
published in London in 1848 was to have a lasting success:
their Manifesto of the Communist Party.
This booklet describes in eloquent terms the conditions
of life of the exploited classes, who have now
become the equivalent of a pure commodity, and formulates
the dream of a perfect society common to all men.
Its analysis of past societies is based on the assumption
that struggle is the only form of social interaction in the
history of humanity: the main question is who will seize
power and use it to exploit the other. There is nothing
shared by all the members of a society, as everything
belongs to one or other of the competing sides. There
is no universal category: neither morality, nor justice,
nor ideas, nor civilization. No religion, no tradition
(including the family and private property) escapes its
class origins.
This new phase of messianism took place at a time of
general admiration for the achievements of science, illustrated
by the contemporary industrial revolution. This