15.7: Socialism

Seeking to address both the economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, and provide a new moral order for modern society, socialism was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related factors

• the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution
• the growth of industrial capitalism

Right from its inception, socialism was contrasted with individualism and egoism, of the selfish and self-centered pursuit of wealth and power. Simply put, socialism proposed a new and better moral order, in which the members of a society would care not only for themselves, but for one another. For the first decades of its existence, the ideology was more about ethics than economic foundation.

By the middle of the 19th-Century, the word 'socialism' was used to widely describe several different movements that had previously been considered in isolation from one another. The common factor was the idea that material goods should be held in common and that producers should keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better, happier, more healthy community and, perhaps, nation. The early socialists wanted to address what they saw as the moral and social disintegration of European civilization in the modern era, as well as to repair the rifts and ameliorate the suffering of workers in the midst of early industrial capitalism.

Until 1848, socialism consisted of movements that shared a concern with the plight of working people and the regrowth of organic social bonds. This kind of socialism was fundamentally optimistic. Early socialists thought that almost everyone in European society would eventually become a socialist once they realized its potential. This kind of socialism is often referred to as "utopian socialism."

After 1848, socialism was increasingly militant. Socialists realized that a major restructuring of society could not happen peacefully, given the strength of both conservative and liberal opposition. The most important militant socialism was Marxism, named after its creator Karl Marx.

Utopian Socialism

The Saint-Simonians, Owenites, and Fourierists were named after their respective founder and visionary. These early socialist thinkers had radical proposals for the reorganization of work, believed that economic competition was a moral problem, and that competition was in no way natural rather implied social disorder. Indeed, the Saint-Simonians called egoism, the selfish pursuit of individual wealth, “the deepest wound of modern society.”

Ironically, the utopians found a surprisingly sympathetic audience among some aristocratic conservatives who were also afraid of social disorder and were nostalgic for the idea of a reciprocal set of obligations that had existed in pre-revolutionary Europe between the common people and the nobility. There was nothing inherent or threatening to the rich – socialism would be a way to bridge the class divide, not widen it.

Named after their founder Henri de Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simonians were mostly highly educated young elites in France. Many had privileged backgrounds and/or had graduated from the École Polytechnique, the most elite technical school in France founded by Napoleon. They envisaged a society in which industrialism was harnessed to make a kind of heaven on earth, with the fruits of technology going to feed, clothe, and house everyone. This group is often considered the first "technocrats," people who believe that technology can solve any problem. The Saint-Simonians did not inspire a popular movement. Individual members went on to achieve influential roles in the French industry and helped lay the intellectual foundations of such ventures as the creation of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.

Robert Owen built a community for his workers in New Lanark, Scotland, providing health care, education, pensions, communal stores, and housing. He believed that productivity was tied to happiness, and his initial experiments met with success, with the New Lanark textile mill realizing consistent profits. He and his followers (the Owenites) created a number of cooperative, communalist “utopian” communities (many in the United States). However, these communities tended to fail in fairly short order. Instead, the lasting influence of Owenism was in workers' organizations, culminating in the London Working Men's’ Association in 1836.

The Fourierists were part of a very peculiar movement. Unlocking a "science of the passions", founder Charles Fourier reasoned that most people detested what they did to survive because they were not doing the right kind of work. There were 810 specific kinds of personalities in the world, each of which was naturally inclined toward a certain kind of work. Thus, if 1,620 people (one man and one woman of each type) were to come together in a community, and each did the kind of work they "should" do, perfect happiness became possible. For example, according to Fourier, murderers were just people who should have been butchers. Children should be trash collectors because they love to play in the dirt. These planned communities would be called "Phalanxes," after the fighting formations of ancient Greece.

Figure 15.8.1: Illustration of a Fouriest phalanx. The heading simply reads “The Future.”

Fourier was far more radical than most other self-understood socialists. For one, he advocated complete gender equality and even sexual liberation. Regarding marriage as an outdated custom, he imagined that in his phalanxes, children would be raised in common rather than lorded over by their parents. Above and beyond forward-thinking ideas about gender, some of his concepts were a bit more puzzling. For example, he claimed that planets mated and gave birth to baby planets, and that once all of humanity lived in phalanxes, the oceans would turn into lemonade.

Practically speaking, many phalanxes were actually founded, including several in the United States. While the more unusual ideas were conveniently set aside, they were still among the first real experiments in planned, communal living. Likewise, many important early feminists began their intellectual careers as Fourierists. For instance, Flora Tristan was a French socialist and feminist who did important early work on tying the idea of social progress to female equality.

State Socialism

In 1848, there was an enormous revolutionary explosion all over Europe (which will be covered in the next chapter). From Paris to Vienna to Prague, Europeans rose up and attempted to overthrow their monarchs. In the end, however, the revolutions collapsed. The awkward coalitions of socialists and other rebels fell to infighting, and kings/emperors eventually reasserted control.

Following 1848, socialists realized that democracy did not inevitably lead to social and political progress, as majorities typically voted for established community leaders (often priests or nobles). Class collaboration was impossible, as the wealthier bourgeoisie and the nobility recognized socialism as a shared enemy. Indeed, peaceful change might not be possible, given the forces of order's willingness to employ violence to achieve their ends. For example, Russia invaded Hungary to ensure the continued rule of (Russia’s ally at the time) Habsburg Austria. Socialism became increasingly militant, focused on the necessity of confrontational tactics, even outright violence, to achieve a better society. Two post-Utopian and rival forms of socialist theory matured in this period: state socialism and anarchist socialism.

State socialism is represented by the French thinker and agitator Louis Blanc, who posited that social reform had to come from above. He argued that it was unrealistic to imagine that groups could onerously organize themselves into self-sustaining, harmonious units. Further, universal manhood suffrage should and would lead to a government capable of implementing necessary economic changes, primarily by guaranteeing work for all citizens. During the French revolution of 1848, he briefly served in the revolutionary government, that had passed a law creating National Workshops for workers, which provided paid work for the urban poor.

Anarchist Socialism

In stark contrast was anarchist socialism. A semantic point: anarchism means the rejection of the state, not the rejection of all forms of social organization or even hierarchy (i.e. it is perfectly consistent for there to be an organized anarchist movement, even one with leaders). In the case of 19th-Century anarchist socialism, there were two major thinkers: the French Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin.

Proudhon was the author of a book entitled “What Is Property?” in which he answered unequivocally that “property is theft.” The idea of ownership was vacuous and false, a conceit that ensured the wealthy maintained their hold on political and legal power. Unlike his rival Louis Blanc, Proudhon was skeptical of the state's ability to effect meaningful reform. After the failure of the French revolution of 1848, Proudhon advocated local cooperatives of workers in a kind of “economic federalism” in which cooperatives would exchange goods and services between one another, and each cooperative would reward work with the fruits of that work. Simply put, workers themselves would keep all profit. He believed emancipation would come through some kind of revolution but did not advocate violence.

Mikhail Bakunin believed in the necessity of an apocalyptic, violent revolution to wipe the social slate clean for a new society of free collectives. He loathed the state and detested the traditional family structure, seeing it as a useless holdover from the past. Bakunin thought that if his contemporary society was destroyed, the social instincts inherent to humanity would flower and people would “naturally” build a better society. He was also the great champion of the outcasts, the bandits, and the urban poor. Eventually, he organized large anarchist movements in Europe's “periphery,” especially in Italy and Spain.

Marxism

The most influential socialist was a German: Karl Marx. Born in 1818 in the Rhineland, Marx was the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism (out of necessity - Marx’s father was a lawyer in conservative, staunchly Lutheran Prussia). He was a passionate and brilliant student who believed that philosophy was only important if it led to practical change – he wrote, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” By 1840, Marx became an avowed socialist and penned (along with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels), The Communist Manifesto.

Figure 15.8.2: The best-known portrait of Marx, dating from 1875.

After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 and exiled to Great Britain, Marx began a detailed analysis of the endogenous tendencies of capitalist economics, ultimately producing three enormous volumes entitled, simply, Capital. The first was published in 1867, with the other two edited from notes and published by Engels after Marx’s death. Marx’s theories would have a profound influence. By the middle of the 20th-Century, a third of the world was governed by communist states that were at least nominally “Marxist” in their political and economic policies.

According to Marx, all of history is the history of class struggle. From ancient pharaohs to feudal kings and their nobles, the rich and powerful had always abused and exploited the poor and weak. The world had moved on into a new phase following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution into an ongoing struggle from two main classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie were the rising middle classes, the owners of factories and businesses, the bankers, and all of those with direct control over industrial production. The proletariat was the industrial working class.

Pre-modern era workers generally had direct access to their livelihood: a small parcel of land, access to the common lands, and tools of their trade in the case of artisans. According to Marx's idea, they had some kind of protected access to "the means of production," which could mean anything from some land, a plow, and an ox to a workshop stocked with a carpenter's tools. However, those rights and those tools were systematically taken away in the modern era. The common lands were closed off and replaced with commercial farms. Artisans were rendered obsolete by the growth of industry. Peasants were pushed off the land or owned plots so small their children had to look for work in the cities. The net effect: the class of workers had "nothing to sell but their labor".

At the same time, the people who did own property, "the bourgeoisie," were under pressure. In the climate of the new capitalism, of unregulated markets and cutthroat competition, it was terribly easy to fall behind and go out of business. Thus, former members of the bourgeoisie lost out and became proletarians themselves. As the proletariat grew, every other conceivable class (including peasants, the owners of small shops, etc.) shrank.

Meanwhile, industry produced more and more products. Continuance improvements in efficiency and economy in production created a terrific glut of products available for purchase. Eventually, there were simply too many products and not enough people who could afford to buy them. Thus, the proletariat faced a form of "alienation," an inability to buy the very things they made. This resulted in a "crisis of overproduction" and a massive economic collapse. (In a pre-modern economy, the essential problem had been society faced was the scarcity of goods.) Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, products need consumers more than consumers need products.

Marx wrote that the members of the proletariat could realize their common interests in seizing the unprecedented wealth that industrialism had made possible and using it for the common good. Instead of a handful of super-rich expropriators, everyone could share in material comfort and freedom from scarcity, something that had never been possible before. In other words, given capitalism's inherent tendencies, a revolution was inevitable.

Revolutions did happen, most spectacularly in 1848. However, the revolutionary momentum ebbed, and conservatives regained the initiative. Subsequently, Marx devoted himself to the analysis of capitalism’s inherent characteristics rather than revolutionary propaganda. With staggering erudition, he tried to make sense of an economic system that somehow repeatedly destroyed itself and yet regrew stronger, faster, and more violent with every business cycle.

In historical hindsight, Marx was really writing about what would happen if capitalism was allowed to run completely rampant, as it did in the first century of the Industrial Revolution. The hellish mills, the starving workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all part of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Everything that could contain those factors, primarily in the form of concessions to workers and state intervention in the economy, had not happened on a large scale when Marx was writing. Indeed, trade unions were outlawed in most states until the middle of the century. In turn, none of the factors that might mitigate capitalism’s destructive tendencies were financially beneficial to any individual capitalist, so Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in states controlled by moneyed interests.

To boil it down to a very simple level, Marx never described in adequate detail when the material conditions for a socialist revolution were possible. Across the vast breadth of his books and correspondence, Marx (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels) argued that each nation would have to reach a critical threshold in which industrialism was mature, the proletariat was large and self-aware, and the bourgeoisie was using increasingly harsh political tactics to try to keep the proletariat in check. According to Marxism, there would have to be, and there always would be, a major economic crisis caused by overproduction.

At that point, the proletariat could rise up and take over. In some of his writings, Marx indicated that the proletariat would revolt spontaneously, without guidance from anyone else. In the second section of his early work The Communist Manifesto, he alluded to the existence of a political party, the communists, who would work to help coordinate and aid the proletariat in the revolutionary process.

The bottom line: Marx was very good at critiquing the internal laws of the free market in capitalism and pointing out many of its problems, but he had no tactical guide to revolutionary politics. Toward the end of his life, Marx himself was increasingly worried that socialists, including self-styled Marxists, would try to stage a revolution “too early” and it would fail or result in disaster.

In sum, Marx did not leave a clear picture of what socialists were supposed to do, politically, nor did he describe how a socialist state would work if a revolution was successful. Historically, socialist revolutions were successful, and those nations had to try to figure out how to govern in a socialistic way.