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Chapter 1
Socialist traditions
Some have traced the origins of socialist doctrine to Plato, others to Christianity, and many, with greater plausibility, to radical movements in the English Civil War in the 17th century. However, modern socialism, with its evolving and continuous set of ideas and movements, emerged in early 19th-century Europe. The reasons for this have long been debated, but it is widely agreed that very rapid economic and social changes, associated with urbanization and industrialization, were of particular importance. These not only undermined the rural economy, but also led to a breakdown of the norms and values that had underpinned the traditional order. Liberals of the era welcomed this transformation, regarding capitalist enterprise and the new individualism as the embodiment of progress and freedom. However, socialists dissented from two aspects of the liberals’ outlook. First, rather than individualism, they tended to emphasize community, cooperation, and association
- qualities that they believed to be jeopardized by contemporary developments. And, second, rather than celebrating the proclaimed progress arising from capitalist enterprise, they were preoccupied by the massive inequality that it was causing, as former peasants and artisans were herded into overcrowded towns and forced to work in new factories for pitifully low wages. It was in this context that the term ‘socialist’ was first used in the London Co-operative Magazine in 1827, which suggested that the great issue was whether it was more beneficial that capital should be owned individually or
held in common. Those who believed the latter were ‘the Communionists and Socialists’. This chapter will examine some of the distinct traditions that then emerged.
The utopians
The label ‘utopian’ was subsequently attached to some of the early socialists by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was intended to convey negative attitudes towards them, suggesting naiveté and a failure to root their ideas in rigorous social, economic, and political analysis. More generally, the notion of ‘utopianism’ has often been used to dismiss projects regarded as unrealistic or fanciful. However, its usage here does not imply acceptance of these pejorative connotations. On the contrary, in my view, utopianism is an essential element in any project for social transformation, including socialism, and today’s utopia often becomes tomorrow’s reality.
The most obvious common feature in the utopian socialists’ transformative projects was the belief that a society based on harmony, association, and cooperation could be established through communal living and working. Such communities were set up in both Europe and America, and although they had mixed success, the most important contribution of the utopians as a whole was their delineation of projects for a new society that were actually put into practice. The utopians’ ideas and the communities that attempted to carry them out foreshadowed later forms of socialism. However, those who were the most influential at the time did not necessarily produce the most enduring ideas. In terms of contemporary support, Étienne Cabet was probably the most popular, but his notion of utopia now appears drab.
Cabet (1788–1856) was born in Dijon and, after working as a lawyer, he became a campaigner for workers’ rights. In 1834 he was prosecuted for writing an anti-monarchist article and was exiled to England for five years. While there he read Thomas More’s Utopia
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on the rise and fall of different productive and unproductive classes in the various eras. In his own time, he grouped together the overwhelming majority of society – from factory workers to the owners of those factories – as ‘productive’, while the minority of ‘idlers’ (including the nobility and the clergy) were ‘unproductive’. Progress now depended upon the productive classes, the ‘industrial/scientific class’ becoming aware of their mission so that they could effect a transition to the new era. However, this was not simply a replacement of one class by another, as Saint-Simon argued that the industrialists and scientists had a wholly different set of relationships with one another from those between members of the feudal classes. The latter based their position on power, while the industrial/scientific class emphasized cooperation and peaceful competition. The fact that the feudal class still maintained its position was thus a barrier to economic progress and new forms of government.
During his lifetime, Saint-Simon’s ideas tended to appeal more to some sectors of the middle classes, who were attracted by the modernizing aspects of the theory, than to the working class, who were perhaps discouraged by his secular tone in a religious age. This was remedied to an extent in his later work, in which he proposed a ‘religion of Newton’, in recognition of Newton’s role as the founder of modern science; scientists and artists should head a new church, and he even sought to combine a secular morality with a regenerated form of Christianity, claiming that the main goals were to eradicate poverty and to ensure that all benefited from education and employment. This widened the appeal of his ideas, and immediately after his death Saint-Simonian communities were established in France and elsewhere. Made illegal in France in 1830, they nevertheless continued to have influence up to 1848, with approximately 40,000 adherents. The Saint-Simonian emphasis on industrialism and administrative efficiency as the key to progress and social justice influenced thinking in many other countries, including that of the writer Dostoevsky and other radicals in Russia.
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Charles Fourier (1772–1837) also saw himself as a realist, who believed that he had discovered fundamental laws that needed to be implemented to create a new society. However, his ideas were totally different from those of Saint-Simon, and there was a vast gulf between the world he sought to create and his own life. Born in Besançon, the son of a cloth merchant, he lived humbly in boarding houses and probably never had a sexual relationship. But the utopia that he envisaged, which he called Harmony, was focused on feelings, passions, and sexuality, and perhaps had more points of contact with the movements of the 1960s than with the emerging working class of his own era. Believing that most problems arose from the mismatch between people’s passions and the ways in which society functioned, he thought it possible to resolve this conflict through the establishment of so-called phalanxes, or communes. On the basis of a calculation of the number of personality types that he believed to exist, he concluded that just over 1,600 people would be the optimum size of each phalanx, for this would enable all passions to be satisfied and all necessary work to be carried out.
Fourier’s basic belief was a conviction that people did not need to change: the problem was the stifling impact of current society, which was the primary cause of human misery. Fourier also condemned the oppression of women, believing this to reveal the malfunctioning of the social system. He did not emphasize the importance of social and economic inequality as a fundamental cause of conflict, assuming that this could be overcome if everybody had a basic minimum, an approach he thought compatible with private property. His comparative lack of interest in the issues of class and inequality meant that Fourierism was the least popular of the movements of early socialists, and there were few factory workers amongst his followers. But his belief that human unhappiness was caused by psychological and sexual problems and that the remedy lay in changes in society, rather than by treating the individual, certainly anticipated many later forms of socialism.
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the general character of the village (of approximately 2, inhabitants) around the mills.
Furthermore, he was quite certain that his principles could be extended to a much wider community and that:
... the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment ; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. They are all necessary consequences of ignorance.
Viewed in one way, at this stage Owen was an enlightened business entrepreneur, who wanted to increase his own profits by generating more productivity from his workforce. Certainly, his approach was deeply paternalist, and even patronizing, as he talked of inducing good behaviour amongst the ‘lower orders’, and he would continue to reveal such attitudes in later life. But although he sought to convince other employers, the church, and the government of the benefits to be gained by adopting his principles, their response was one of deep hostility. The notion of the perfectability of human beings was held to undermine the Christian belief in original sin, and his emphasis on the social responsibility of employers to their workers was quite out of keeping with the laissez-faire approach of the capitalism of the era.
After failing to win support, his ideas became even more radical and he now attacked the system of private property and profit. In their place he advocated the establishment of new cooperative communities of between 500 and 1,500 people which would combine industrial and agricultural production. He also believed that it would be possible to abolish money and replace it with ‘labour notes’, which would represent the time spent in work and would be exchangeable for goods. By now he was seeking to extend his ideas far beyond Britain, undertaking a continental tour in 1818 and travelling to America, where he established the first of several communities in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825.
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1. Contemporary sketch of a city plan for a new community at Harmony, Indiana, stating that itis ‘based on the principles advocated by Robert Owen, a socialist philanthropist. The city isdesigned to give ‘‘greater physical, moral, and intellectual advantages to every individual’’ ’.
which ordinary people would play a major role. The utopians made a considerable contribution to socialism by focusing on the specific values of cooperation, association, and harmony in a context of egalitarianism. In the case of Owen and Fourier, this included an emphasis on sexual equality, and there are also some similarities between the utopians’ creation of small-scale communities and later ecological thought. They should therefore be regarded as founders of elements of an alternative tradition that would reappear in such communities as the Kibbutz in Palestine/Israel, the communes of the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Green movement; they were progenitors of ideas that would be pursued at the margins for much of the 20th century.
Anarchism
Anarchism covers a very wide spectrum of opinion, and not all anarchists are socialist in any sense. Here, I will focus on a distinctive form of anarchism which was associated above all with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Apart from reinforcing the utopian vision of decentralized communities, its main contributions to socialism were in its intransigent opposition to the state, and its belief that a revolutionary movement should prefigure the society it wished to create. As will be shown, such views contained a critique of the forms of socialism that would subsequently become dominant.
Like Fourier, Proudhon was born in Besançon in south-eastern France and his outlook was essentially rural. However, his fundamental values were in total contrast to those of Fourier: he was anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, and extremely puritanical. His ideal society remained one in which independent, self-supporting peasants would study and live in rather basic conditions. However, in social and political terms he was far more radical than most of the utopian socialists. His phrase, ‘What is Property? Property is Theft’, which first appeared in his pamphlet What is Property?
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(1840), was one of the best-known revolutionary slogans of the 19th century. Here he wrote about government:
Free association, liberty, limited to maintaining equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchange, is the only possible form of society, the only just and the only true one. Politics is the science of freedom; the government of man by man, under whatever name it is disguised, is oppression: the high perfection of society consists in the union of order and anarchy.
His later works were more complex, but the basic continuity in Proudhon’s beliefs was that labour should be the basis for social organization and that all systems of government are oppressive. As he explained in The Philosophy of Poverty , if people worked just for themselves and their families, there would be no exploitation because nothing would be produced for employers, who had no real function. The first step for the restoration of healthy economic relations between people was to abolish the whole existing structure of credit and exchange. This would also restore the dignity of labour, currently undermined by machines and the exploitation arising from the capitalist system. Proudhon believed that centralized states and governments were inextricably connected with the economic system, for governments worked hand in hand with the capitalists against ordinary people. When considering the future, he sometimes appeared to believe in a minimal central government formed from delegations from communes, while at other times he envisaged an arrangement whereby a temporary central structure would facilitate the establishment of a new system and then disband. Towards the end of his life, Proudhon devoted his efforts to considering some type of federal system linking the communities. Such ideas represented an attempt to bypass the state by establishing new structures that could carry out all the necessary social functions, thereby rendering the state itself unnecessary. His anarchism had become a real political force amongst a large section of the working class in France by the 1860s, when the doctrine also entered into the mainstream of European socialism and radicalism.
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Bakunin’s other major conflict with Marxism focused on issues of organization both before and after the revolution. In 1864 Marx drew up the founding statement for the first socialist international – the International Working Men’s Association. Bakunin had joined the International, but then formed a subgroup within it to try to inspire its members with revolutionary fervour. He opposed Marx’s idea of creating a (communist) party to win support for socialism, and in 1868 he declared that he hated communism:
because it is the negation of liberty and because I can conceive nothing human without liberty. I am not a communist because communism concentrates all the powers of society into the state; because it necessarily ends in the centralization of property in the hands of the state, while I want the abolition of the state, which, on the pretext of making men moral and civilized, has up to now enslaved, oppressed, exploited and depraved them.
2. Marx was the major influence over the doctrine proclaimed by the International Working Men’s Association, and Bakunin constantly tried to challenge this
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Bakunin wanted loosely organized secret societies rather than mass political parties.
The culmination of the conflict between Bakunin and Marx took place in the aftermath of the brutal crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, in which workers had taken direct control of affairs in the city, combining legislative and executive power and passing a series of radical measures. Bakunin had taken this as an expression of his own ideas, viewing it as the beginning of a communalist movement which could spread over France as a form of the federalism envisaged by Proudhon. Marx was also deeply influenced and impressed by the Commune. But after its suppression, he believed that it was time to turn the International into a more organized working-class political party. This move was aimed directly at Bakunin, whose influence remained strong, particularly in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, and anarchism was soon defeated by Marxism as the major influence over European socialist movements.
Anarchism would remain important in certain areas – above all, in Spain, until it was crushed by both Franco and the Communists in the Civil War between 1936 and 1939. There and elsewhere it would also coalesce with forms of trade unionism in the syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist movements, which believed that power could and should be achieved by the workers themselves, rather than through political parties and the state. Like utopian socialism, anarchism also influenced some forms of decentralization and community-based movements from the 1960s. Less positively, during the latter part of the 19th century, it often became associated with futile and counter-productive violent acts against individuals – an approach also adopted by some anarchist-inspired groups in late 20th-century Europe, including the Red Army Fraction in the Federal Republic of Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy.
However, the anarchist critique of hierarchical organization
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How can you expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? It is impossible. The International, embryo of future human society, must be from this moment the faithful image of our principles of liberty and federation, and reject from its midst any principle leading to authority and dictatorship.
It was certainly a vast exaggeration to suggest that Marx sought to create a dictatorship over the International, or was in a position to do so. But this anarchist cri de coeur would certainly have great relevance in relation to the parties and states created by some of those inspired by Marx in the 20th century. And, more generally, anarchism provides a perpetual warning for all movements: beware the trappings of power, beware bureaucracy, and ensure that authority is always distrusted. Apart from its vision of decentralized self-governing organizations, this was its essential contribution to socialism.
Marxism
The collaboration of Marx (1818–1883) and Engels (1820–1895) produced the most significant theory in the history of socialism. However, their work has always been open to a variety of interpretations, and dogmatic readings have had greater political resonance than more subtle ones. Since the aim here is to explain the role of Marxism in relation to the evolution of socialist traditions , this section concentrates on its most influential contribution rather than attempting to explore the theory as a whole. In this respect, it is necessary to focus on its critique of capitalism, and its explanation of why this system would eventually be replaced by socialism.
The partnership between Marx and Engels was one of the most productive in history, but the differences between the two men were remarkable. Marx was the descendant of a line
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of rabbis on both sides of the family, and his father had only converted to Christianity to maintain his job as a lawyer. Engels was the eldest son of a successful German industrial- ist who was a fundamentalist Protestant. Marx showed exceptional academic promise and was denied a university career only because of his political views. Engels was forced to join the family firm by his father and was largely self- educated. Marx was untidy, careless about his own appear- ance, and had almost illegible handwriting. Engels was neat, well organized, smartly dressed, and wrote very clearly. Marx married Jenny von Wesphalen, the daughter of a baron. Engels remained single for most of his life, only marrying Lizzie Burns, a poorly educated working-class woman, on her death-bed in 1878.
Yet from 1844 the two men were political and intellectual collaborators and close friends. Engels has subsequently been overshadowed by Marx; in fact, he said himself that he had always played second fiddle and ‘been happy to have had such a wonderful first violin as Marx’. Certainly, it was an unequal relationship in some respects, with Engels running his family’s factory in Manchester in order to support Marx financially while he studied and wrote. Marx was also the more original thinker, but Engels certainly made an indispensable intellectual and political contribution to the partnership.
The critique of capitalism was embedded in an historical theory (historical materialism) that attempted to explain the whole development of human society. One of Marx and Engels’s major criticisms of both the utopian socialists and the anarchists was that they did not deal adequately with the ways in which the present was
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At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or... with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.
For example, while technological advances and improved communications had made it possible for capitalism to develop in feudal Europe, the traditional systems of land ownership and taxation had inhibited those developments. Such structural tensions led to conflicts between the classes that were tied to the different economic systems – the existing feudal structure or the embryonic capitalist (bourgeois) one. These were expressed through political and ideological clashes, culminating in social revolution. Once the rising class had defeated the existing ruling class, it set about transforming the social relationships and superstructure in conformity with the new mode of production.
For socialists, the really important part of the theory was, of course, the critique of capitalism itself and the basis this provided for confidence about its eventual downfall. Again, the theory operated on a number of levels. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels suggested that there were only two antagonistic classes at the heart of the system:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses... this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
The suggestion was that all other groups (landowners, peasants, artisans) were being squeezed into one or other of these classes. Marx was not always so categorical about this, but certainly argued
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that it was the contradictory economic interests of these two classes that contained the seeds of destruction of the system.
The starting point for the analysis was a theory of classical political economy: the labour theory of value. The argument here was that the value of a product was determined by the amount of labour that had been necessary to produce it. Marx began with this theory and also thought that in pre-capitalist societies products had been exchanged because they were useful to the people who bought them. However, he noted that this was not what happened under capitalism: here, the point was to produce commodities which could be exchanged for money and profit. Furthermore, labour had also become a commodity to be bought and sold, but its exchange value was not as great as the exchange value of the product it created. This led Marx (from the 1850s) to argue that it was not labour that created value but labour power. He also introduced the concept of surplus value.
Put simply, his argument was as follows. Those who owned the means of production (for example, factories) sought profit by producing commodities for sale in the market. In the production process, they had two kinds of capital. Marx defined constant capital as ‘that part of capital... transformed into the means of production, that is... into raw material, accessory substances, and instruments of labour’. In other words, constant capital consisted of such items as materials, machinery, and buildings and it did not change its value during the production process. However, variable capital (labour power) did change value. First, it was able to produce the equivalent of its own value, which, Marx assumed, was normally subsistence for the labourer and their family. If this was, say, £50 per day, the worker would perhaps produce goods of such value within the first four working hours of that day. However, by working for another four hours each day, the labourer could produce double the value (that is, another £50). This would mean that £100 of value had been produced, and the excess between subsistence and the amount taken by capitalists would be the
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