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Guide to Marxist Philosophy, Social Theory and Economics

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Chapter 4: The early

utopian socialists

BY SIMON

“Can one be communist without Marx?”

Antonio Negri

 Marx and Engels were not the first socialists. Socialistic ideas hadexisted for many years prior to the publication of the CommunistManifesto. The idea of common ownership and greater equality is atheme that appears in many religions, and has been the rallying callfor various progressive movements who resisted tyranny andinequality in their societies. Acts 2:44 in the Bible referred to “all thebelievers were together and had everything in common” in the earlychurch. Radical ideas of egalitarianism often emerge during times of 

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 social and political upheaval, for instance the Levellers and theDiggers, two political trends in the parliamentarian side of the EnglishCivil War, advocated land redistribution and establishing a morebalanced relationship to nature. However, whilst there are severalexamples of communist ideas and practices in movements prior to theearly 19th century which acted as early precursors – the swallowsbefore summer – it is not until the 1810-20s that socialism as a clearlydefined political trend really emerges.

Almost simultaneously in Franceand Britain different socialtheorists or philosophers begin toarticulate an idea of communismout of a criticism of capitalism.What characterised the project of the Utopian socialists was thatthey all shared a moral criticismo f distribution  under capitalism,that some were obscenelywealthy whilst others were not.

 They were appalled at the hugesocial inequality, with childlabour, slum housing and terriblediseases rife among the lowerclasses. The primitiveaccumulation of capital whichoccurred at the beginning of capitalism resulted in horrificpoverty which was of concern to

many liberal minded gentlemenwho belonged to the same socialtradition represented by workslike Thomas Moore’s Utopia  orThe Republic by Plato, in other words they were progressive membersof the ruling elites. 1

For them the goal then was to redistribute wealth, not tofundamentall alter the basis of roduction under ca italism – the fact

CHAPTERS

Introduction: What is being discussed?

Chapter 1: The Enlightenment

Chapter 2: The breakthrough in philosophy

Chapter 3: Hegel and the completion of 

German idealist philosophy

Chapter 5: The beginnings of scientific

socialism

Chapter 6: The materialist dialectic

Chapter 7: Historical Materialism

Chapter 8: The method of abstraction

Chapter 9: Alienation

Chapter 10: Social Oppression

Chapter 11: Surplus value, the working class

and ideology

Chapter 12: Boom and bust and the limits of 

capitalism

Chapter 13: Revolutionary crises under

capitalism

Methodology I: Scientific Socialism as aWorld-view

Methodology II: Marxism and determinism

Chapter 14: The capitalist state, workers

state, socialism and communism (the riddle

of history solved)

Chapter 15: The Second International

Pierre Proudhon—

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 that this occurs outside of production, the place for working classaction, and in wider society, is what leaves reformist or Utopiansocialists advocating action outside of the everyday class struggle.

 Their projects and programme was always posited from outside, notinternal to, and based upon working class action in a struggle againstthe ruling class 2. But what they attempted to do, each in their ownway, was to seek to develop a social system which could ensure‘perfect harmony’ between the classes. In this sense they conceivedof themselves as social scientists, reformers who were using the latestscientific observations and economic thinking to transform society.

One of the earliest and certainly one of the most eccentric examples wasCharles Fourier. Although he was borninto a wealthy industrialist familyFourier, rejected the bourgeois norms of his era, despising industrialisation andthe degrading labour that the proletariatwas made to perform. His alternativewas to rationally plan everything and toestablish a phalanstere,  a tightly-knitcommunity of men and women whowould live in ‘perfect harmony’. Fourierwas obsessed with mathematics anddrew up detailed plans of his hiscommunity and how a perfectlyharmonious world would work. Sincethere were, by Fourier’s reckoning, 810personality types, two men and women

from each personality type would berequired to ensure a balance, whichmeant that each community wouldhave precisely 1,620 people livingthere. In this harmonious world our

personalities and characters could develop without alienation andactually be integrated into a system whereby even supposedlydamaging character traits could be made to work for the benefit of humanity. However he drew some wildly optimistic conclusions from

Chapter 16: The debates over historical

materialism

Chapter 17: Fabianism in Britain

Chapter 18: Revisionist controversy in

Germany

Chapter 19: Reform or revolution 1914-1919

Part Four – The struggle for the soul of Marxism

Chapter 20: Ultra leftism and the Third

International

Chapter 21: Hegelian Marxism, Lukács and

Korsch

Chapter 22: Antonio Gramsci – theories of 

hegemony, civil society and revolution

Chapter 23: Soviet philosophy

Chapter 24: Leon Trotsky and the fight for

the International

Part Five – The post war world

Chapter 25: The Frankfurt School and critical

theory

Chapter 26: Maoism in East and West

Chapter 27: The New Left

Chapter 28: Existentialism: “a philosophy of 

reality”

Chapter 30: Structuralist Marxism

Chapter 31: Poulantzas and Eurocommunism

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 what this social plan could achieve. Upon his system beingimplemented it would see the Earth pass from its infancy into a newepoch 70,000 year long, in which a series of apparently fantasticalthings would occur, for instance lions would become servants of humanity and draw carriages across France in a single day, and thesea would loose its salt and become lemonade whilst there would besix moons circling the earth. 3

Whilst it is easy to dismiss Fourier for his more fantastic statements,his criticism of the alienating nature of work and the oppressive socialrelations inherent within modern industrialisation clearly mark him outas a progressive thinker who believed in the need some form of socialist future. His model for an ideal community, based on definedpersonality types and “tastes” would mean no need for a repressivestate with police or judges. Each group of people in the “phalanx”would only undertake work most suited to their personalities, and beable to rest after only a short time before turning to another type of work so as to prevent boredom and repetition. His model communitiesalso did away with private accommodation and domestic chores,because everything was organised around the communal areas, withone giant kitchen and dining hall. 4 

Fourier was also deeply concerned about the oppression of women,and stood out starkly among all the the utopian socialists as the mostfeminist. In 1841 he argued that; “The change in a historical epoch canalways be determined by the progress of women towards freedom,because in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong,the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degreeof emancipation of women is the natural measure of general

emancipation.” This phrase would later be taken up by Marx and othersocialists.

As capitalism developed in Britain so too did radical movements of opposition. Because the social and cultural changes that the birth of industrial capitalism was inflicting on the working poor was soimmense, the upsurge of militancy from rural workers, labourers andthe desperate lower middle classes also increased significantly. By1816 Britain was ex eriencin its first recession that was caused b

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 overproduction as the end of the Napoleonic wars saw manufacturingindustry orders slump as government contract’s ended. The growth of strikes and protest movements was met with heavy repression fromthe government of Lord Liverpool, who used laws banning publicmeetings of over 50 people and prohibited movements who aimed atpolitical reform (the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800). A badharvest in 1816 saw parliament pass the Corn Laws which protectedthe profits of British farmers through trade tariffs, which meant lessfood in Britain, causing starvation in some areas. Angry food riotsbroke out across the country, leading to the massacre of protesters bysoldiers in Manchester in 1819 at what became known as the Peterloomassacre. Supporters of the radical author Thomas Spence, whoadvocated agrarian reform and a return to the commons of all land inBritain organised a conspiracy in London in 1820 from theirHeadquarters in Cato street. Around 30 men plotted to attack ameeting of the cabinet as a prelude to a wider insurrection, but theirorganisation was riddled with police spies, who apprehended thembefore it could be carried out.

With this as the political background wecan understand some of the ideas of Robert Owen, a wealthy philanthropistand socialist who owned a cottonmanufacturing business in New Lanark inScotland. A man who was deeplyconcerned with the plight of the poor,Engels seems to dismissively describe himsomeone of “sublime, childlike simplicityof character.” 5 However, like Engels, his

experience of the factory system and theconditions that the proletariat lived inhorrified him, and he detested theindividualism of the capitalist ethos. Heset up what he called a “Village of Cooperation” near New Lanark, a modelcommunity which was based on smallscale manufacturing and agriculture inwhich everyone worked according to aRobert Owen—

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 plan of production. Owen’s communityattracted several thousands peopletowards it, but it was no a success, it

suffered from a lack of funds and was run paternalistically by Owenhimself, not by the people who worked there.

Not to be disheartened he and his followers moved to the US in 1824and set up sixteen Villages of Cooperation attracting followers fromacross the country and from Europe who believed in his vision of asocialist society operating from inside capitalism itself. However thisventure also failed, and by 1829 all the communities had closed down.

 The reasons for the failure can be found in the undemocratic modelthat Owen used to run the villages, whilst increasing numbers of people attracted to them not because of work but to enjoy the leisurefacilities. One village even collapsed after a US backer absconded withthe profits. Owen himself advocated using simpler tools, not thelatest machinery which made the work much harder anduncompetative with other, more standard factory models.

Owen’sscheme wasin manyways morerealistic thanFourier’s, butsufferedfrom thesameutopian

perspective.It wasutopianbecause itsought tocreate modelcommunitiessimply bydesi n,

The model community of New Harmony, as imagined by Robert Owen—

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irrespectiveof what was

going on in wider society. It did not overthrow the prevalent powerrelations but simply attempted to get around them, throughestablishing communities, which nevertheless had to operatesurrounded by a capitalist society with all of its greed and exploitation.No wonder his villages attracted people who wanted to escape fromwork altogether and as a result were unproductive, but also schemingcapitalists who saw in the co-operatives a chance to make a quickbuck. A book written in 1860 about Owen recorded his achievementsthus “The present generation [thinks of Owen] as the father of co-operative societies, as the founder of equitable labour exchanges, asthe promoter of communistic arrangements, as the great leader of English Socialism.” 6

Another utopian thinker whose ideas became popular in the early tomid 19th century was Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon led aparticularly colourful life, at various times a revolutionary fighter, awealthy Parisian (followed by poverty) and an inmate of an insane

asylum. He was no socialist in the manner of Owen or Fourier, but hisideas were very influential in radical circles. Like Hegel, Saint-Simonhad various groups of followers after his death who drew quiteradically different conclusions from his ideas. One of them, PierreLeroux, is credited with introducing the word socialism into the lexiconin his writings from around the 1830s. 7Saint-Simon was a beneficiaryof the post revolutionary reaction in France which saw massive profitsgenerated for sections of the bourgeois class. No doubt as a result hedid not have a moral indignation against capitalism as Fourier andOwen had, but he did detest the nobility, seeing in them a relic of the

previous age. He preferred a society run along socially responsiblelines, ideally organised and ruled by a technocratic elite, not theworking class. In this sense he did not have an anticapitalist critique,he wanted the society run along rational lines where profit could begenerated and private property accumulated, but his followersemphasised the importance of industrialisation in Saint-Simonswritings, which marked him out considerably from Owen’s villages of co-operation. Indeed, many believed that the growth of industrialisation would lead to the end of the nation state across

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 Europe, and indeed his was highly critical of the role of the state inholding back natural development of civil society and the economy.Saint-Simon was opposed to any separation from society by smallscale collectives but instead a reorganisation of society itself. On thislevel his ideas coincide and influence the agenda of scientific socialismmore than other utopian thinkers, even though Saint-Simon would notdoubt have been horrified at such a thought.

 These thinkers were part of the intellectual climate of the time, andcertainly a product of the early anticapitalist impulses of some of themiddle classes and bourgeoisie to turn on their own system. What allof them lacked was a comprehensive understanding of what were thecauses of the exploitation and alienation of capitalism. Because of thistheir solutions tried to avoid the problem, to create separatecommunities. These islands of socialism were all eventually swallowedup and destroyed by the power of organised capital, despite the bestintentions of many of the people involved in running them. Theycollapsed just as the Digger communities in England had collapsedafter the English Civil War, unable to challenge the ruling class or win

enough adherents to their banner.

Before we move onto Marx and Engel’s contribution to socialisttheory, two more thinkers of the time are worth mentioning. A crucialbridge between the utopian socialists of the early industrial period andMarx was a French socialist named Louis Blanc. A member of the 1848provisional government he was an advocate for workers rights fromwithin the elite (his father had been Napoleon Bonaparte’s Inspectorgeneral to Spain during the occuption). After fleeing France for allegedinvolvement in an insurrectionary conspiracy against the government,

he returned in 1871 to be elected to the Paris Commune. However hequickly moved to the right, opposing the insurrection and supportingthe outlawing of the First Workers International in France in 1872.

Regardless of his political evolution, Blanc proposed several ideaswhich became quite common staples of subsequent socialist thinkingon the reorganisation of society. To combat unemployment and socialdeprivation, Blanc believed that the state should guarantee work forall, and small worksho s should be raduall re laced b a “social

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 workshop”, a much larger enterprise funded with interest free creditby the government. Whilst the government should initially appointexperienced managers and administrators in the first year, after thatworkers should have the power to elect the administrators to establishthe principle of workers control. 8 Blanc coined the term “from eachaccording to his ability, to each according to their needs” as a radicalmeasure of not just equality but to ensure that the weaker and poorerwould recieve more. This was in contrast for instance, to Saint-Simon,who believed that your reward should be commensurate to your input.

Finally, a summary of the views of the utopian’s pre Marx would notbe complete without Pierre Proudhon. Although he has subsequentlybeen claimed by the anarchists, some of his ideasalso lent themselves much more to the socialist wing of theanticapitalist movement. Also a member of the 1848 government,Proudhon proposed a system of free association (what became knownas the “federalism of independent producers”) an idea so far ahead of the time that it received only 2 out of 693 votes in the assembly.Proudhon was opposed to the schemas of the other utopian thinkers,

he did not see social engineering or elaborate social experiments asthe way forward. Society should be organised according to theprinciples of anarchy, where no one can have power over anyone else,where no one could be sovereign at the expense of others. Societyshould be guided by the data produced by a Department of Statistics,where every citizen can be a politician and society would makedecisions based on rational discussion, not simply personal will orambition. The guiding principles of such a society was the motto of theFrench revolution of 1789, but with a radical addition, that “allproperty is theft”. In What is Property?, Proudhon propounds a theory

of value which shared some similarities with Marx’s subsequentwritings, that property “is the right to enjoy and dispose at will of another’s goods – the fruit of an other’s industry and labour”. 9 But hisanarchism was not a plea for small scale production and an end tonational institutions, he argued for the creation of a state bank whichcould provide money (interest free) for workers and peasants to buytools and equipment needed for production. What marked him out asdifferent to what became Marxist-communism was that he aimed tocreate equality of wealth production, and since there is no plan to the

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 economy it is possible for individual hard work to enrich some overothers. All should produce equally The question of how redistribution of wealth could occur without a state or a political force to make ithappen was one that was ambiguous in Proudhon’s concept of liberty.His model was a series of self governing communes with no centralauthority, each commune bound to others through agreed contractsfor distribution and exchange.

In conclusion, almost from the birth of capitalism many were alreadyquestioning the supposed principles of bourgeois society, the gapbetween rich and poor, the right to property, the freedom of themarket. The desire to find ways to overcome the inequities of capitalism was a powerful one. But more work had to be done, acritique of society in its which took into account not just the injusticeor irrationality of a society based on alienated labour and marketeconomics, but could consciously identify a subject within society thatcould make that change. A more materialist system had to bedeveloped, one that could point to a method which could overthrow allexisting social relations, and not try and skirt around the central social

divisions of the new socio-economic order which was being establishedover the broken backs of the peasants of feudal Europe and the slavestoiling on plantations across the new world. If Marxism was thecontinuation and deepening of the kind of utopian thinking that camebefore, we can reverse Negri’s quote which started this chapter – Marxcould not have been a communist without the utopian socialist idealsof earlier thinkers.

 The year that Saint-Simon died, 1825, also saw a severe crisis ripthrough the British economy. Almost 75 years of rapid industrial

growth saw the economy ‘overheat’, and a general crisis of overproduction emerge. This overproduction saw profits collapse inkey industries and a huge rise in unemployment. This crisis radicalisedlarge sections of the working class and urban poor, creating theconditions which would see the rise of the Chartist movement, inparticular in the north of the country. But for the ruling class the crisishad been most unexpected. Why was their system in such a dire statewhen production was expanding so rapidly? The person who wouldwork to rovide the answer to this economic uestion was, at the

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 time, only 7 years old, and his close co-thinker only five. We can turnto their efforts in the next section.

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Notes:

1. Norman K, The political ideas of the utopian socialists, p1-2

2. Clarke, 1980, p17

3. Laidler, 1927 p71

4. Laidler, 1927, p72

5. Socialism: Utopian and scientific

6. Robert Own and his social philosophy William Lucas Sargant p xix

7. Though an Owenite called Goodwyn Barmby also stakes a claim to this

8. Laidler 1927, p76-77

9. Proudhon, 2008, p 159

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POSTED IN TH E UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS | TAGGED ANARCHISM, EARLY SOCIA LISM,

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