Socialism, Revolution and Internationalism

In the turbulent 1890s, as industrial capitalism reshaped Paris and the world, Gabriel Pierre Deville delivered a lecture that distilled decades of revolutionary thought into an urgent argument. A close associate of Marx and Engels who edited the French edition of Capital, Deville believed socialism was not a utopian dream but an inevitable response to the economic conditions of the age. He contends that capitalism necessarily creates two opposing classes, those who own the means of production and those who labor for wages, and that this division, rooted in the economic system itself, demands a collective response. Deville argues that socialism emerges not from abstract ideology but from the material conditions of the present moment, and that true liberation requires international solidarity among workers. This lecture remains a compelling window into how one of Marxism's earliest interpreters understood his world and the revolutionary future he believed it demanded.