From Utopia to Socialism

4.1.1. The birth of the workers’ movement

This chapter covers the same historical period as the last one and, in the same way, can be divided into two parts: the first runs from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the 1848 revolution; the second covers the subsequent twenty years.

The modern workers’ movement began with the great Luddite social uprisings of 1808-20, involving France and, especially, England, where the revolt was so strong, organized, and overpowering that the government, to put it down, had to use an army of 12,000 men.

The movement was subdued with a great deal of bloodshed in both countries, but burst out again, with a higher level of organization and political awareness in the 1820s and 1830s. In England it was organized at first by the Owenist trade unions and later by the Chartist movement, under whose banner it conducted bitter fights for objectives such as the new Poor Laws, the Reform Bill, and the reduction of the working day for women and children. In France it produced various armed insurrections at the beginning of the 1830s, some of which gave the final blow to the reign of Charles X, contributing to the ascent to the throne of Louis-Philippe, ‘the bourgeois king’.

The next ten years saw serious outbreaks of conflict in both countries. In England the climax was reached in 1842-3, while in France the struggle began again, after ten years of respite, in 1844-6, finally exploding in the 1848 revolution. The following twenty years, initiated by the bloody defeat the workers’ movement suffered in France, were, in contrast to the preceding period, years of almost complete social peace in both countries, and only in 1867-9 was there a sharp and massive resumption of the workers’ struggle.

The division of this period into two sub-periods, one of acute conflict (1808-48) and the other of social peace (1848-68), corresponds more or less to that made in the previous chapter between the years of Restoration and the ‘Age of Capital’. This division into two phases has been useful to frame the evolution of economic ideas. In fact, in the first phase we observed a situation of theoretical turbulence, with a succession of innovations, an overlapping of debates, and an incessant struggle among competing theories, whereas in the second period there were attempts at theoretical systemization and generalization, and at the construction of a scientific orthodoxy. In this chapter we will outline a similar phenomenon in the evolution of socialist thought: the years of sharp conflict gave birth to a great number of new and more or less alternative socialist theories, while the period of social respite produced only the great synthesis by Marx.

4.1.2. The two faces of Utopia

The modern organized workers’ movement and, with it, the basis of its view of the world were formed between 1808 and 1840. This book is not a history of political thought, and we have not the space to deal with the birth of socialist thought in general. However, some of the essential points must be dealt with in a synthetic way in a history of economic thought.

First, it is important to highlight the two extremes between which all the attempts to construct a socialist theoretical system have oscillated. As we will see in the next section, these two extremes were embodied, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the systems of Saint-Simon and Fourier. But it is possible to go back a few centuries, at least to the final years of the Renaissance, to trace, in humanist utopian thought, the first philosophical manifestations of that duality in social design.

On the one hand is the Utopia-of-order model formulated by More and other Catholic philosophers such as Campanella and Ludovico Agostini.

The rival to this design of an ideal society arose at almost the same time, around the middle of the sixteenth century, and is the Utopia-of- freedom model. The literary versions that exist are almost all less scholarly and refined than More’s, given their folk origin, but they are all easily recognizable, in the various Lands of Cockaigne, where there is no need to work to eat; or in Doni’s ‘wise and mad world’, where the family and money are abolished and where there is no central government or division between intellectual and manual work; or the Rabelaisian Abbey of Theleme, where there is only one rule—do what you want; and, finally, in the first attempt, which however collapsed immediately, by the Diggers of Everard and Winstanley to create such a Utopia during the Glorious Revolution.

4.1.3. Saint-SimonandFourier

Between one revolution and another, these two alternative models of social organization passed through European culture, without a break in con­tinuity, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. In the first half of the nineteenth century they met the organized workers’ movement, ceased to be dreams, and turned into projects.

Claude-Henry de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon theorized better than any other socialist thinker of the period the principle of a cohesive organization of society. Overcoming ‘dialectically’ Enlightenment thought, and, above all, its reactionary antithesis as produced by De Maistre and De Bonald at the beginning of the century, Saint-Simon’s synthesis tried to link an anti- individualistic view of society with the cult of technological and scientific progress, as if he wished to project into the future, rather than the past, the ideal of a cohesive and functional social organization. Far from wishing to realize the democratic dream of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, Saint-Simon constructed a model of a strongly hierarchical and strictly meritocratic society.

Saint-Simon despised the waste, parasitism, and anarchy of capitalism—in other words, its imperfections. His ‘socialism’ aspired towards a society of producers, i.e. workers, technicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs—the ‘industrialists’, as he called them. Saint-Simon maintained that the capital­ists should be the managing elite, not because of the power derived from their wealth, but rather because of their function as innovators and organizers of the production process.

Saint-Simon’s main work, Du systeme industriel, was written in collab­oration with his secretary, Auguste Comte, and was published between 1820 and 1822. In it he preached for the productive efficiency of the factory to be extended to the whole society, which would become an immense factory, with central planning of production and a distribution system based on the principle that remuneration be linked strictly to productivity.

Saint-Simon’s industrial system would have finally liberated man, but from what? It is not difficult to understand that a republic such as this, in which individual liberty was so restricted in favour of the collective prerogatives, would have needed a strong religion. On the other hand, it presupposed a strong metaphysical and ethical base. It was not by chance that Saint-Simon aspired to give mankind a new catechism, or even to found a new religion. Nor was it by chance that some of his followers were reduced, in the end, to founding religious sects. Those who were more realistic ded­icated themselves instead to finance or engineering, in an attempt to improve, if not mankind, at least capitalism.

At the opposite extreme to Saint-Simon is Francois-Marie-Charles Fourier. Also his thought presupposes a sort of dialectical negation of the Enlightenment, but now the connecting link is Rousseau, with his philo­sophy of the noble savage and his attempt to bring natural-law philosophy to its extreme logical conclusions.

It is important to point out that not only Fourier, but also the great majority of nineteenth-century socialist thinkers, accepted Rousseau’s criti­cism of that way of reasoning typical of natural-law philosophies, aiming at establishing the right by means of the fact, a way of thinking which had enabled Locke to justify, among other things, private property and its unequal distribution.

Rousseau had turned seventeenth-century natural-law philosophy to his own philosophical ends, up to the point of denying not only the naturalness of the State and private property, but also that of the family. He believed that social inequality had been created by a drastic break from the original state of nature, a break which had created history, institutions, and civilization. Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ was an ideological construction aiming at showing, not the natural essence of the social being or the existing social order, but the ‘should be’ dimension that is inherent in it as potentiality and negation.

The theory of the noble savage in a rather naive version, to tell the truth, is also present in Fourier’s thought; in fact, it is one of his basic philosophical presuppositions. Men were considered to be naturally good. If they have ‘perversions’, it is only because society is unnatural. If individuals were allowed freely to realize their own natural wishes, they would spontaneously organize themselves in a harmonious way. Le Nouveau monde amoureux (a work remained unpublished until 1967) saw the passions of individuals combine with those of others and thus ceasing to be perversions. The family, the receptacle of hypocrisy and repression, would be abolished, and with it commerce, the cancer of the economy and the cause of waste and parasitism. Consumption would be spontaneously reduced to essentials, industry reor­ganized, work co-ordinated in small communities and distributed according to individual abilities and wishes. Alienation would disappear, together with economic exploitation and political oppression.

It is not difficult to understand why Marx and Engels, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) put Fourier, as well as Saint-Simon (and this is a little more difficult to understand), in the group of utopian socialists. Marx and Engels, like almost all the other nineteenth-century socialists, avoided the two extremes, even, if, like all the others, they tried to construct their own socialist system by combining Saint-Simon and Fourier.

In order to understand the sense of the doctrinal polarity embodied by Saint-Simon and Fourier and the reason for its pervasiveness within socialist thought, it is necessary to look at the real ambivalence of the problem from which socialist thought originates. The liberation of labour implies the abolition of a social relationship: that between capital and labour. Such a project of liberation has two faces. On the one hand, it can be considered as a plan for the abolition of profit and capital, on the other as a project for the abolition of wages and labour. In the first case the accent is placed on exploitation, in the second on alienation. In the first case, there is an aspiration towards an ideal society capable of ensuring distributive justice, in the second, toward a new society founded on individual liberty. In the first case, liberty is not a value; on the contrary, the principle of authority, once freed from the feudal residues that tie it arbitrarily to physical persons (the owners of capital) even in the bourgeois society, is exalted and purified when related to a technocratic organizational principle and to a meritocratic dis­tributive criterion. In the second case it is economic equality, intended as a law of correspondence between remunerations and productive services, that becomes a disvalue, being inadequate to take into account the ‘natural’ inequality of abilities and needs as well as the individuals’ aspirations on which free social interaction is based.

Confused and hesitant in the face of these two opposing visions, apparently so irreconcilable and incompatible with historical possibilities, socialism in the first half of the nineteenth century seemed destined to pro­duce only dream-worlds, vain assaults on the sky (in Europe) and vain agricultural communities (in America). It was the genius of Marx that broke the spell and founded modern socialism, in fact producing, not one, but two strokes of genius. The first consisted of interpreting the two antithetical principles of social reorganization as laws of different historical phases. The ‘first phase’ of communism, in which each person would be remunerated according to his or her own ability, would be only the starting point of an evolution towards a superior social organization: a fully-fledged ‘communist’ society, in which each person would only receive according to his needs while would give according to his abilities. The other stroke of genius consisted of not saying a great deal more about this. Marx avoided extravagant con­structions, leaving history, i.e. mankind itself, the task of realizing human ideals. It was in this way that the socialist dream, according to Engels, became science.

4.2.