Contemporary socialism Author:John Rae Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto pronouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as " the militant form of the soc... more »ial revolution "; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization. The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-opera- tionists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working class would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working class now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress—the socialists—shortly afterwards split up. The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their membe...« less