
Origins of Socialism and Anarchism: 19th century thinkers

By Ryan Daum

The purpose of this document is to give a summary of the major
socialist thinkers of the 19th century.  In the future, I may follow
up with a summary of 20th century socialism....

Origins:

Socialism owes its origins to a huge variety of influences, and for
the first half a century its manifestation as a philosophy was
extremely vague and often extremely contradictory.  It was the effort
of a few men, some of working class origin, and others not, who took
the ideologies of the utopian socialists and applied them to the
realities of daily living.

Utopian socialism was a strange intellectual crossbreeding of
Christian communalism, feudalism, and liberal capitalism.  It
manifested itself as an intellectual current in France after the
revolution.  This stage of socialism recognized in the workers an
exploited and manipulated set of individuals who were freed from the
slavery of feudalism only to be pushed and herded into the cities
where they were forced into work which was unnecessarily extreme and
harsh.  However, the undeveloped nature of the working class of the
period, and the fact that capitalism, which they were attempting to
critique, was still in an undeveloped stage, limited them from making
truly revolutionary attacks on the system.

We owe the utopian socialists credit, however, for starting an
intellectual spark.  That spark was the recognition of exploitation,
and, in some cases, the recognition of the origin of that exploitation
in what the bourgeoisie called "private property."

The Saint-Simonians:

"... Freedom was proclaimed in order to destroy a social order that was no
longer feasible, and no idea could have been more powerful against
hierarchies that were, in the estimation of the peoples, _justly torn
apart_.  But when the aim became, in Europe or in America, to apply
this idea to the construction of a new social order, the state of
things that we have just depicted was produced.  People seemed to
believe that the solution of the problem consisted in placing the word
less in front of all the terms of the formula of the Middle Ages, and
this strange solution engendered only anarchy; the publicists of our
own century have merely echoed the philosophers of the eighteenth
century, without realizing they have an inverse mission to perform."

(from "Exposition of the doctrine of Saint-Simon")

Charles Fourier:

Fourier wished to create what we would now call communes for the
purpose of the organization and betterment of labor.  In a sense his
propositions were quite feudal.  He wished the association of laborers
(1,500 to 1,600 people) to purchase a section of land and organize
themselves in a "Phalanx" -- a heavily organized "labor army."  His
writings are extremely specific about how he would wish to set up
these communes, to the point of ridiculousness, at times.  His
attitude was, in many ways, both conservative and paternalistic, and
although he insisted on making labor more pleasurable and fulfilling
on his commune, he tended, in his writings, to reduce the worker to a
member of this "labor army."  Fourier was not terribly interested in
transforming capitalist structure from within, that is, collectivizing
existing factories.  He concentrated more on drawing up elaborate and
mathematical plans for his phalanxes.

Robert Owen:

In many ways Owen is the father of two threads related to socialism.
The "humanitarian workplace" -- that is, a business which provides to
its workers medical care, clean conditions, encourages daily
excercise, etc. as we see in, for example, Japan or in some European
companies.  He also helped begin the cooperative movement, non-profit and
consumer and worker owned businesses.  However, like Fourier, he
rested his ideology on stepping out of the system and attempting to
produce alternative communities.  His ideas did not last, therefore,
as capitalism and industry increased in intensity and power.  As a
wealthy man, Owen tried to influence parliament of his time, but found
little response among the leaders.


Emergence of the Proletariat

As capitalist investment and industry exploded, so did the earlier
vague ideas of socialism.  With this explosion came, however, a new
flood of socialists who attacked the system in a more vigorous and
resourceful way.  The main exponents of these ideas were Joseph
Proudhon, Louis Blanqui, and Louis Blanc.  As before the ideological
debates within socialism happened within France and only rarely did
they transfer in any meaningful way to the surrounding countries.

Louis Blanqui:

"A few individuals have seized upon the common earth by ruse or by
violence and, by claiming possession of it, have established by laws
that it is to be their property forever, and that this right of
property is to be the basis of the social constitution, that is, in
other words, to suppress and if necessary absorb all human rights,
even the right to live, if any of these should be so unfortune as to
come into conflict with the privileges of the few."

"There can be no society without labor!  By the same token, there can
be no idlers who have no need of laborers.  But why do the laborers
need the idlers?  Is capital productive in the hands of the workers
only on condition that it not belong to them?  Suppose the proletariat
were to desert en masse, and transplant its homes and its working
capacity to some distant clime.  Would it perchance die from the
absence of its masters?  Would the new society be able to get started
only by setting up lords of the soil and of capital, by delivering
over the possession of all the instruments of labor to a caste of
idlers?"

"Axiom: the nation is impoverished by the loss of a worker; it is
enriched by the loss of an idler.  The death of a rich man is a
benefaction."

"Only association, substituted for individual property ownership, will
bring about the reign of justice through equality."

(from "The man who makes the soup should get to eat it.")

Joseph Proudhon:

Proudhon's ideas laid the basis for Marxism, and were, perhaps the
most advanced attack against the exploitation of his time.  He, like
Blanqui, attacked property, but did so in a much more thorough and
violent way.  In his "What is Property?"  Proudhon answers his own
question by crying, "Property is Theft!"  Attacking the concept that
property is a universal and basic right of man, he declares that the
bourgeois notion of property is in itself exploitative and destroys
the basic rights of man.

"The Declaration of Rights has placed property in its list of the
natural and inalienable rights of man, four in all: liberty, equality,
property, security.  What rule did the legislators of '93 follow in
compiling this list?  None.  They laid down principles, just as they
discussed sovereignty and the laws; from a general point of view, and
according to their own opinion.  They did everything in their own
blind way."

"All have an equal right of occupancy.  The amount occupied being
measured, not by the will, but by the variable conditions of space and
number, property cannot exist."

"Communism is oppression and slavery."

"Individual possession is the condition of social life; five thousand
years of property demonstrated it.  _Property_ is the suicide of
society.  Possession is a right; property is against right.  Suppress
property while maintaining possession, and tby this simple
modification of the principle you will revolutionize law, government,
economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the
earth."

Louis Blanc:

"But the poor man, you say, has the _right_ to better his position?
So! and what difference does it make, if has not the _power_ to do
so?  What does the _right_ to be cured matter to a sick man whom no
man is curing?"

"Let us say it then for once and for all: freedom consists, not only
in the RIGHTS that have been accorded, but also in the POWER given men
to develop and excercise their faculties, under the reign of justice
and the safeguard of law."

"It is not a question of taking wealth away; it is a question of
fertilizing it so that it becomes universal.  It is a question of
raising the level of humanity for the good of all, without exception."

(from "The Organization of Labor")


German Socialism

Germany, at the time that Proudhon and Blanc were making their violent
attacks against privilage and exploitation, was still under the
authoritarian semi-feudal government of the Prussian State.  The
German socialists, beginning with the Young Hegelians, attacked
capitalism and feudalism not from a working class revolutionary viewpoint
like the French, but from a philosophical and dialectical viewpoint.
Thus the German socialists began as a philosophical movement --
sometimes verging on mysticism -- and stayed that way through Marx and
Engels.

Moses Hess:

"What did the revolution achieve after all?  Its freedom and equality,
its abstract rights of man, turned out to be just another form of
slavery.  The other side of the scheme of opposition, the abstract
indidivudal, achieved domination, but the scheme itself, the
opposition between domination and slavery, had not been overcome and
discarded at all."

"It is now the task of the philosophy of the spirit to become the
philosophy of the act.  Not only thought, but all human activity, must
be brought to th epoint at which all oppositions fade away.  The
heavenly egoism, that is, the theological conscioussness against which
German philosophy is now so zealously crusading, has thus far hindered
us from stepping forth into the act."

"Anarchy, upon which both atheism and communism are based, the
negation of all domination in both spiritual and social life, seems at
first to be the absolute anniliation of all definition, and thus of
all reality.  But it is only the process of the act becoming fixed by
something outside itself, the domination of one thing over another,
that anarchy strips away.  So far is _self_-determination from being
negated here, that it is rather the negation of it (brought about by
the process of determination from the outside) that is being
transcended.  The anarchy created through the spirit is only a
negation of limitation, not of freedom."


Early Marxism:

"...The worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien
object.  For on his premise it is clear that the more the worker
spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes
which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself--his
inner world-- becomes, the less belongs to him as his own.  It is the
same as in religion.  The more man puts into God, the less he retains
in himself.  The worker puts his life into the object; but now his
life no longer belongs to himb ut the object."

(from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

"...Social life is essentially practical.  All mysteries which mislead
theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and
in the comprehension of this practice."

"...The standpoint of old materialism is `civil' society; the
standpoint of the new is _human_ society, or socialized humanity."

"The philosophers have only _interpreted_ the world, in various ways;
the point, however, is to _change_ it."

(from "11th theses on Feuerbach.")

Engels on Marx:

"In tracing the development of capital, Marx starts out from the
simple, notoriously obvious fact that the capitalist increase the
value of their capital through exchange; they buy commodities for their
money and afterwards sell them for more money than they cost them..."

"The capitalist finds on the commodity market under present social
conditions a commodity which has the peculiar property that its use is
a source of new value, is a creation of new value, and this commodity
is _labor_ power."

"The value of the labor power is paid for, but this value is far less
than that which the capitalist manages to extract from the labor
power, and it is just the difference, the UNPAID LABOR, which
constitutes the share of the capitalist, or, more accurately, the
capitalist class... In general it is this unpaid labor which maintains
all the non-working members of society."

(from "Engel's explanation of Capital")

On the natural tendency of capitalist crisis:

"A state of things whereby supply and demand balance each other on the
commodities market, in which consequently a complete equilibrium
between production and consumption exists, in which the commodities
produced find buyers with just as little difficulty as the demand for
commodities can be satisfied -- this appears to be teh economic
ideal... If this is not the case, either too many or too fiew
commodities will be produced, or else commodities other than those
required; and the result will be a disturbance of the market..."

(Paul Mombert)

"If a rupture of the equilibrium is to be prevented, not only must the
baker furnish exactly the amount of bread needed by the consumers, but
also the factories must supply the precise number of ovens necessary
for the purpose of baking, the mines the precise amount of coal, iron,
etc..."

".. the capitalists see themselves compelled to increase the quantity
of their produciton with out any regard for the wants of the
cunsumers.  The aim of production is, so to speak, henceforth within
itself.  Originally, of course, the increase of production was due to
the increasing requirements of the consumers, and the new mechanism of
production was created in view of satisfying this growing demand.
Once in existence the new mechanism leads and independent life and has
to function with absolute disregard to the question as to whether its
activity merely satisfied the requirements of the consumers, or
whether it exceeds them."

"Thus, for the first time, excessive production is rendered possible.
Such `overproduction' is here to be understood in the rational sense
of the word, as implying production over and above the requirements
[or purchasing ability -- Ed.] of the consumers."

(from "The Theory of Crises" by Julian Borchardt)


Anarchism

A body of socialist thought which extended the attack against
privilage in property into the fight against the privilage of power in
general, anarchism had extensive influence on many movements, but
never rose into prominence as a "pure" movement of its own.  Anarchism
declared its intention to abolish the State and the Church along with
private ownership of the means of production.  The modern anarchist
movement stems from Proudhon, who was the first leader of a mass
movement to declare his hatred the State, the Church, and property,
and to openly call himself an Anarchist.  Following him, Bakunin, and
after Bakunin, Kropotkin, became the spokesmen for a system of thought
which attempted to break down and destroy _all_ hierarchies, economic
or political.

The essence of anarchism can be summed up in the belief that all
domination of one individual over another is evil, and that a
reconciliation between individual and community could only be achieved
after the creation of anarchy -- that is, absence of hierarchy. The
anarchists claimed that the ideal community was one where
individualism and collectivism had lost their meaning -- that citizens
were now able to function both as a whole and as an individual without
exploitation arising on either side.

Bakunin:

"The State is, a I have said, by its very principle an immense
cemetery in which all manifestations of the parts that together
constitute local life, all the interests of the parts that together
constitute society, come to sacrifice themselves, to die and be
buried.  It is the altar upon which real liberty and the well-being of
peoples are immolated for the sake of political grandeur; and the more
complete this immolation, the more perfect is thte State."

Peter Kropotkin:

".. man is apealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which
is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of
his oneness with each human being.  In practice of mutual aid, which
we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find
the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we
can ffirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support--not
mutual struggle-- has had the leading part.  In its wide extension,
even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still
loftier evolution of our race."
