SOCIALISM

Although there were theoretically significant antecedents in both the utopian tradition associated with Sir Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), in which the holding of property in common is a central tenet; in certain strands of the republican tradition, where agrarian laws proposed the limitation of private property in land in particular; and in minor currents of debate during the French Revolutionary period, notably associated with Gracchus Baboeuf (1760–1797); European socialism proper commences with three main thinkers and the schools associated with them. In Britain, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen is regarded as the founder of socialism, with the term gaining circulation from the late 1820s onward. In France, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier commenced two socialist movements of note at about the same time. These movements were marginalized from 1848 onward by the growing influence of Karl Marx over European socialist thought, which eventuated by World War I, and notably the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, with the virtual eclipse of most other socialist alternatives. This article accordingly will survey the commencement and development of the main early socialist writers and offer an account of Marx's thought and the later Marxist movements, and some later non-Marxist socialists.

owen and owenism

Robert Owen (1771–1858) rose from humble origins to international fame as the manager of the New Lanark cotton mills south of Glasgow, whose management he assumed in 1800. Here, while Owen reaped a fortune through fine cotton-spinning, he improved working and living conditions for the workforce substantially. From his first substantial publication, A New View of Society(1813), Owen insisted on the malleability of human character, and its improvability, contingent on the reduction in poverty and temptations to crime and immorality. With the post-Napoleonic War economic slump, he turned from proposing wider but similar factory reforms to the problem of poverty as such, now urging the relocation of the urban poor in cooperative "villages" of around two thousand people each in the countryside, where labor would alternate between agriculture and manufactures, and the results would be shared in common. Initially termed "the social system," as opposed, by 1820, to the "individual system" of competition and "buying cheap and selling dear," this scheme was widely referred to as "socialism" by 1830. Owen attempted a number of practical communitarian ventures, notably at New Harmony, Indiana, in the mid- and late 1820s, and at Tytherly or Queenwood, Hampshire, in Britain, in the early 1840s. In these communities it was assumed that some exchange of aggregate social produce for greater free time would probably be agreed, such that needs would not expand indefinitely. It was also widely contended that traditional mechanisms of social coercion, such as the police, would be obviated by the improved moral behavior of the population, and the collective control that small communities could exert over their members. Neither these nor similar ventures proved successful, however.

Nonetheless Owenism both spawned a substantial social movement and produced a considerable body of theoretical literature. Its chief success socially lay in the creation—chiefly in London and the industrial districts, between 1835 and 1845—of an interlinked set of branches, whose aim was to raise funds to found a community, but which built "Halls of Science" for social and educational activities and by the early 1840s enjoyed audiences of some fifty thousand weekly. Its intellectual successes were primarily the work of three writers: George Mudie, the editor of the first Owenite journal of importance, The Economist (1821–1822); John Gray, author of A Lecture on Human Happiness (1825), The Social System (1831), and other works; and an Irish landowner, William Thompson, whose Inquiry Concerning the Distribution of Wealth (1824) and Labor Rewarded (1827) were the most astute engagements in early British socialism with the dominant school of liberal laissez-faire political economy. A later writer of note was John Francis Bray, author of Labour's Wrong and Labour's Remedy (1839). Collectively these writers disputed the inevitable tendency of capitalism to distribute wealth fairly, particularly to the laboring class. They contended that the market mechanism was prone to cyclical instability and fluctuations caused by overproduction and underconsumption, and by the early 1830s forecast increasingly severe crises induced by mechanization in particular. Early efforts to calculate the percentage of the value of the product received by the laborer, begun by the London doctor Charles Hall, were continued by the Owenites, and became central to the account of surplus value offered by Marx. Politically, most Owenites proposed democratic management of communitarian experiments but deferred to Owen's paternalistic leadership during much of the movement's history.

Owen himself preferred to avoid mechanisms of election and political contest, and proposed in his most mature formulation for social and political reorganization (The Book of the New Moral World, seven parts, 1836–1844) the future division of society into age groups, with each individual passing through an identical scheme of being educated, working, supervising others, governing the community, and negotiating relations with other communities. Owenism was also notable for its championing of women's rights in Britain, notably through the efforts of William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, whose Appeal on Behalf of One Half the Human Race was published in 1824.

fourier and fourierism

Like Owen, the French writer Charles Fourier (1772–1837) proposed a communitarian solution to poverty and the increasing competitiveness of liberal capitalist society, whose anarchic elements he had witnessed growing up in an affluent Lyon mercantile family. Like Owen, too, Fourier proposed to reorganize social thought into a new "social science" based on the law of "passionate attraction," which he assumed governed all material relations in the universe as well as human affairs. Fourier's communitarian ideal, which he called the "Phalanx" from about 1800, was however based on a much more radical view of the human passions, whose repression he condemned utterly. Instead, he assumed the community could both harmonize and satisfy human passions in a manner that promoted happiness while abolishing poverty. Fourier's main writings were the Theory of the Four Movements (1808), the Traité de l'association domestique-agricole (1821; Treaty of the domestic-agricultural association, 2 vols.), Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (1829; The new industrial world and its members), and La fausse industrie (1835–1836; The false industry). His radical theories on sexuality and marriage, or "enslaved monogamy," which he proposed to abolish, and his urging of the necessity for universal sexual gratification, with a "Court of Love" supervising sexual relations, were regarded as overly controversial by his disciples and were suppressed. Fourier's account of commerce, like Owen's, focused on converting all forms of unproductive into productive labor by pooling resources communally and abolishing idleness. The system of "attractive association" was to be applied to work in order to release individual creative potential, and monotony was to be avoided by a scheme of rotation of up to eight tasks daily. The Phalanx was not designed to be completely communistic, and the product was to be divided into three parts: capital receiving four-twelfths, labor five-twelfths, and talent three-twelfths. The Fourierist movement spawned a number of communities in France and Britain, and rather more in the United States, notably during the 1840s. Fourier's chief disciple in France in this period was Victor-Prosper Considerant (1809–1893), while in the United States Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) proved an indefatigable interpreter.

saint-simon and saint-simonism

While both Owenism and Fourierism were communitarian in orientation, the third main strand of early-nineteenth-century European socialism, Saint-Simonism, was oriented toward alterations in the nation-state as a whole. Founded by Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a French aristocrat, the initial system was not socialist as such, but instead focused on the need for industrial reorganization. Saint-Simon coined the term industrialism to describe the progressive development of the modern economic system and its supplanting of earlier forms of both social and political organization, notably feudalism. In L'industrie (1816–1818) society is divided into three leading classes: scientists, writers, and artists; proprietors; and toilers. In the future, spiritual power was to be exercised by the first; temporal power, or control of the state, by the second; and the right of election by all workers. All useful workers were termed "industrialists" by Saint-Simon, who saw the postrevolutionary era as one of significant transition from a feudal or governmental regime to an industrial or administrative regime, where regulation of the process of production assumed primacy over the traditional mechanisms of regulating social behavior through politics. For Saint-Simon the future regime was to be meritocratic in the extreme, with a growing harmony of interests assumed between managers and the workforce. Politically, nations would offer economic "plans," but their development would be independent of national parliaments. Saint-Simon also proposed, in De la réorganisation de la société européenne (1814; Concerning the reorganization of European society), the reduction in influence of the European nation-state through a transnational European parliament composed of two houses.

Saint-Simon's most notable followers included his secretary, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose system, styled "positivism," was influential in the later nineteenth century, and a group of overtly socialist disciples, such as Olinde Rodrigue, Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin, Philippe Buchez, Saint-Amand Bazard, Gustave d'Eichtal, and Michel Chevalier, who by the early 1830s had extended Saint-Simon's influence widely, even to Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in Britain. Their leading manifesto, The Doctrine of Saint-Simon (1828–1829), urged greater equality for women, ease of divorce, expanded national education, and a remodeling of both the productive and banking systems. The Saint-Simonian philosophy of history, and assumption of the leading role to be played by the supervision of production by contrast to traditional forms of government, were taken up by Marx and Carlyle, among later writers.

Among other early French socialist writers of note, mention should be made of Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), whose Voyage en Icarie (1840) helped to produce a communitarian emigrant movement in the United States, and Louis Blanc (1811–1882), whose Organisation du travail (1840) helped influence debates about the relationship between the state and the economy following the Revolution of 1848, and who is regarded as among the founders of state socialism.

karl marx

Early German socialism prior to Marx produced several thinkers of note, particularly Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871), author of Mankind as It Is and as It Ought to Be (1838) and Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842), and Moses Hess (1812–1875). No German socialist writer, however, achieved the stature of Karl Marx (1818–1883). The son of a Jewish lawyer converted to Protestantism, Marx was born and raised in Trier, and attended university in Bonn and then Berlin, where he was deeply influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel's followers in the early 1840s were divided into the "Young" or "Left" Hegelians, who contended that the dialectical process of historical development implied the emergence of a successively progressive, democratic regime, and his more orthodox disciples, who supported the view that the existing Prussian state exemplified the highest development that reason or "spirit" could assume. Emigrating to the Rhineland in 1842, Marx fell under the influence of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), whose materialist account of religion as the projection of individual fears and desires led him to reject the Hegelian system. In 1844 in Paris, Marx converted to communism while applying the Feuerbachian scheme of alienation to his reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). The "Paris Manuscripts," unpublished until the 1930s, offered an account of the varieties of alienation undergone by the working classes, and assumed as a central critical standpoint Feuerbach's theory that the "species being," or communal essence possessed by all, was eradicated by the egotistical and competitive nature of modern commercial society. Since alienated labor was for Marx founded in the institution of private property as such, only its abolition, or communism, would bring about the resumption of a "general human emancipation" and reinforcement of the sociable aspects of human nature.

Nonetheless this analysis was in turn superseded after Marx commenced an intellectual partnership with a young German merchant also recently converted to communism, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), whose account of industrial conditions in Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, was published in 1845. Following their collaboration Marx and Engels agreed that any new critical system must be based on an amalgamation of the three most highly developed trends in European thought in the period, German philosophy, especially the critique of religion; French politics, in its revolutionary form; and British political economy, which provided the most incisive account of the actual workings of civil society. In the winter of 1845–1846 Marx and Engels wrote the work later published (but again not until the 1930s) as "The German Ideology," in which they now set aside as abstract the materialism of Feuerbach, and substituted instead the theory known as the "materialist conception of history." While much of Marx's energies at this point were devoted to distancing himself from his opponents on the left, notably Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) and the "True Socialists," attacked in The Holy Family (1845); the French mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), the target of The Poverty of Philosophy (1846); and the German individualist, Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt; 1806–1856), the subject of the longest section of the "German Ideology"; the latter text also sets forth in outline the chief elements of what would later be regarded as the Marxian system. These consist, firstly, of a historical account of the succession of forms of property ownership from the earliest period to the present, in which three early types of ownership (tribal; ancient communal and state ownership, where slavery exists and private property begins; and feudal property) are succeeded by the emergence of the modern capitalist system of production; secondly, of the insistence on analyzing society

in terms of an economic "basis"—the mode of production or system of property ownership—from which is derived the system of social and political relations, law, religion, politics, and thought as well, which constitute the "superstructure" of society; and thirdly, of the description of the motive force of social development as the struggle between classes, with the contest between the wealthy bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat looming as the decisive moment of modern history.

In this account Marx and Engels thus finally disposed of the Hegelian idealist system as well as Feuerbach's nonhistorical materialism. Politically, they dismissed the existing state as merely an organizing committee for bourgeois industrial and commercial interests, assuming instead in a Saint-Simonian vein that the organization of production would take priority in the future society. In a famous passage that suggests that in communist society one might alternate between hunting, fishing, rearing cattle, and engaging in critical activity in the course of a day, there are also echoes of Fourier's scheme for rotation of tasks. Given the sparsity of references to such themes in the later works of Marx and Engels, doubts have been cast on the seriousness with which they may have been intended.

Nonetheless the single most famous exposition of Marx and Engels's social, political, and economic program, the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), certainly brings forward the leading themes of the "German Ideology." Commissioned by the leading revolutionary socialist organization of the period, the Communist League, the Manifesto describes the rise and development of the industrial proletariat, its growing poverty, the successive series of cyclical capitalist crises that further enrich the bourgeoisie, and the final crisis—then anticipated—in which the proletariat would seize power; establish a temporary "dictatorship of the proletariat" that would centralize the means of credit, communication, transportation, and production; and set in motion the eventual creation of the final stage of social development, "communist society." Marx's political thought remained relatively little developed, though during the Paris Commune (1870–1871) he suggested (in The CivilWars in France) that the form of government elected there corresponded to his notions of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." He has however been criticized for underestimating the force of nationalism in modern history.

Forced into exile in Britain, where he remained, often in poverty, for the rest of his life, Marx devoted most of his subsequent years to the analysis of the inner workings of the capitalist system, first in the Critique of Political Economy (1859), but most famously in Das Kapital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867, which offers an account of the generation of "surplus value" by way of assessing how the capitalist exploits the labor-power of the proletariat. In exile Marx was also active politically in the International Workingmen's Association, founded in London in 1864 but eventually dissolved following constant infighting with its anarchist members, led by one of Marx's leading critics, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), whose State and Anarchy (1873) lambasted Marx's supposed dictatorial tendencies. Engels's later writings include Anti-Dühring (1878), which moved the materialist conception of history closer to an orientation with the natural sciences, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), and a popular pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880).

the development of late-nineteenth-century socialism

Between Marx's death and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the most important working-class movement inspired by his ideas emerged in Germany. German Social Democracy made a number of substantial innovations to it, notably in proposing a nonviolent, electoral strategy as a strategy for achieving political power. Here Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), its earliest leader, was chiefly instrumental in proposing a view of the state as a neutral agency capable of being utilized by a proletarian political party, though Marx rejected the party's program in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Lassalle's chief successor was Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), whose "revisionist" Marxism stressed both the need to await the ripening of material conditions and the possibility of using existing parliamentary institutions to introduce fundamental social and economic changes. Such views were supported by Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), whose Evolutionary Socialism (1898) provided a restatement of the gradualist case. Bernstein also stressed the need for revision of Marx's account of capitalist crises, by emphasizing the increasing propensity of large-scale capitalist enterprises to stabilize in quasi-monopolistic forms. In How Is Scientific Socialism Possible (1901), Bernstein also broke from the argument that communism emerged inevitably out of the development of capitalism, describing it instead in quasi-moralistic terms as an ideal to be achieved. Such views, however, met with vehement opposition from the more revolutionary wing of the Social Democratic Party, notably Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919), whose Social Reform or Revolution (1899) insisted on the necessity for a revolutionary commencement of the socialist regime. Luxemburg also stressed the growing internationalization of capitalism in the late nineteenth century, and its connections with imperialism, a thesis developed by New Liberal writers such as John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940) as well as Marx's greatest Russian disciple, Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov; 1870–1924), who also provided a new account of the necessity for a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to introduce communism.

other varieties of later-nineteenth-century socialism

Although Marxism emerged ideologically as victorious over other competing forms of socialism in the early twentieth century, a much greater range of socialist doctrine and movement is evident in the later nineteenth century. Less powerful Marxist parties developed in other European nations in this period, and there were also a variety of contending forms of non-Marxian socialism. In France, the Parti Ouvrier emerged in 1875–1876 after the failure of the Commune and was led by Jules Guesde (1845–1922). In Britain, Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842–1921) founded the Democratic Federation in 1881, while William Morris (1834–1896) united the Romantic, creative, and aesthetic ideals of John Ruskin (1819–1900) to a more anti-authoritarian brand of socialist program described most successfully in his utopia, News from Nowhere (1890), and through his organization, the Socialist League. Morris also insisted on restricting heavy industry wherever possible and curbing the propensity toward centralization evident both in modern capitalist development and Marxian theory. A growing stress on the individual in British

socialism was shared by Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), author of Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889). Considerably more influential from a literary standpoint was Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), whose early dystopian satires gave way to a positive program of socialistic reform, partially outlined initially in A Modern Utopia (1905), and which brought him to associate with the Fabian socialists, notably Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), Sidney Webb (1859–1947), and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). The hallmark of Fabian socialism lay in its emphasis on gradual, incremental permeation of the political establishment and its reliance on the creation of an administrative, bureaucratic elite to oversee the development of a social reform program.

Throughout the nineteenth century, socialism also combined in various European countries with Christian reform doctrines and movements of varying types, producing a notable movement in Britain, linked to the cooperative movement between 1848 and 1854, and led by Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872). Land nationalization movements in various countries, such as that led in Britain by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), also contributed to the popularization of socialist ideals. A semiauthoritarian socialism indebted in part to Saint-Simon was popularized by Thomas Carlyle, whose Past and Present (1843) also promoted a philomedievalism of considerable influence later in the century. Among liberals, too, a group of reformers usually termed "New Liberals" emerged in late-nineteenth-century Britain, notably the economist and social theorist John Atkinson Hobson, author of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (1894), Imperialism (1902), and other works. Distinctive to Hobson's views was an extension of the Ruskinian humanist critique of political economy, and the proposed development of a dual-sphere economy in which state-production would not supersede but operate alongside private enterprise. The growing tendency toward collectivism in British liberalism in this period was lent credence by the sympathetic treatment of socialism offered by the leading liberal philosopher and political economist of the period, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), whose opposition to Marxian revolutionary socialism was nonetheless tempered by the proposal that capitalism might reach a "stationary state" where economic development could give way to a more qualitative emphasis on education and cultural activity. The growing trend toward statist intervention in most late-nineteenth-century European economies, however, was indebted to other factors besides the popular success of socialist agitation, including evangelical and philanthropical movements of humanitarian reform and the desire of authoritarian leaders to avoid greater socialist successes by introducing their own welfare measures (as in the case of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck).

See alsoBlanc, Louis; Capitalism; Class and Social Relations; Cooperative Movements; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second; Labor Movements; Liberalism; Owen, Robert; Strikes; Utopian Socialism.

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Gregory Claeys