The Red Flag: A History of Communism (7 page)

It is in this remoulding of the French revolutionary tradition that Marx’s originality lies. Marx was forging a new left-wing ideology fit for the new industrializing societies of the nineteenth century, with their belief in technological progress and their increasingly large industrial working classes. It was also suited to an era when social conflict –
between workers and employers supported by the state – was sharpening. Moreover, Marx sought to relocate the centre of socialism from the ‘backward’ France of the late eighteenth century to a new home – the new ‘backward’ nation, Germany.

After the guillotining of Robespierre in 1794, the gaols of France disgorged thousands of prisoners imprisoned by the revolutionary regime. Amongst them were three radical thinkers: François-Noël Babeuf, Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. All three had been traumatized by the preceding Terror, and had tried to learn from it, though their conclusions about what had gone wrong and how to reanimate the radical tradition were very different. Babeuf condemned Robespierre for betraying the artisans and peasants of France, and became the leader of one of the first Communist movements. Saint-Simon, by contrast, was heir to the techno-Jacobins; for him it was Robespierre’s neglect of the needs of production and modernity that was most culpable. Fourier differed from both in envisaging a future where the priority was neither equality nor productivity but creativity and pleasure. Each, then, founded a particular strain of socialism – egalitarian Communism, ‘scientific’ socialism and a more Romantic socialism – all three of which would be incorporated by Marx into a grand, if never wholly coherent, synthesis.

Babeuf’s ‘Communism’ became more fully egalitarian during his second spell in prison after Robespierre’s fall. He now developed a more radical condemnation of property than he had under the Jacobins.
⁴
He no longer thought that the agrarian law and the end of more obvious forms of inequality were enough; a radical form of ‘absolute equality’ had to be pursued. In the new society, money would no longer exist; everybody would send the products of their labour to the ‘common storehouse’, and then they would receive an equal proportion of the national product in exchange for their labour. Work would not be a chore because men would want to work out of patriotism and love of the community. In essence, his was an egalitarian version of the
sans-culotte
utopia of hard work and strict social justice, implemented by recourse to a super-efficient version of the Jacobin food supply administration.

On his release from prison in October 1795 he decided to take a revolutionary course. He helped to organize an ‘Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety’, which issued a ‘Manifesto of the Equals’. Babeuf and his comrades were planning an insurrection for May 1796, but the authorities discovered the conspiracy and he and several others were arrested and executed. Yet their strain of revolutionary politics and puritanical egalitarianism lived on. Filippo Buonarroti, who took part in the original conspiracy, wrote a history of the Equals in 1828, a time far more receptive to Babeuf’s ideas than previous decades. Buonarroti ensured that Babeuf’s broader ideas reached a wider public, and they became the core of what became known as ‘Communism’: communal ownership, egalitarianism and redistribution to the poor, and the use of militant, revolutionary tactics to seize power.

It was to this revolutionary egalitarian tradition that one of the best-known Communist figures of the 1840s belonged, the German itinerant tailor Wilhelm Weitling. Weitling was a highly accomplished autodidact, who taught himself Latin and Greek and was able to quote Aristotle and Homer, as well as the Bible – from which he extracted much of his social theory. Weitling arrived in Paris in 1835, and whilst there joined the League of Outlaws, a republican secret society which followed the teachings of Babeuf and Buonarroti but infused this Communism with a Christian apocalyptic vision. For Weitling, the ideal society, the outcome of a violent revolution, would be a return to the Christian community of goods. Like Babeuf, his principal concern was equality (though he was prepared to concede the odd luxury to those who did extra work). He did try to solve the problem of monotony, but his main proposal was that workers had to be taught to enjoy work by doing three years of compulsory service in a quasi-military industrial army. Weitling was probably the most influential socialist in Germany, and his ideas influenced a generation of German workers living in exile in London, Brussels, Paris and Geneva. The League of the Just, one of the largest of these German radicals’ secret societies, adopted Weitling’s ideas in its official manifesto in 1839, and members of the group took part in an insurrection in Paris in the same year, led by the conspiratorial, Jacobin-influenced August Blanqui.

However, not all Communists, including some within the League of the Just, were enthused by the hair-shirt socialism of the Babouvians and Weitling. Schapper, one of the leaders of the London branch of the
League, condemned Weitling’s Communism as joyless and despotic: ‘just like soldiers in a barracks… In Weitling’s system there is no freedom.’
⁵
But particularly hostile to this aspect of Communism were the Romantic, or ‘utopian’, socialists, and their most eccentric representative, Charles Fourier.

The term ‘
utopian
socialism’ was used by Marx and Engels as a way of dismissing a large number of their rivals, and denigrating their ideas in comparison with their own ‘
scientific
socialism’. Despite this, it does describe one strain of socialism in the early nineteenth century.
⁶
Unlike the Communists, the utopians were generally not workers and initially did not have a close connection to working-class movements. They were also considerably less interested in seizing the central state. Instead, they focused their efforts on fashioning small, experimental communities, and presented a vision of the ideal society that was more appealing to many than the Spartan egalitarianism of the Babouvists. And rather than enforcing Weitling’s Christian morality, they sought to challenge what they saw as the oppressive doctrine of original sin on which Christianity was founded. Mankind, they argued, was naturally altruistic and cooperative, and right-minded education would permit these qualities to predominate. They were particularly hostile to what they saw as the grim work ethic of the new industrial capitalism, which was so closely associated with Christian, and particularly Protestant, ideas of the time. The factory system and the division of labour transformed men into machines and life into joyless drudgery. Society had to be organized so that everybody in the community could be creative and develop their individuality. Their vision was therefore Romantic in spirit. Though unlike the Jacobins, whose Romanticism was one of the self-sacrificing heroism of the soldier, theirs extolled the self-expression and self-realization of the artist.

François Marie Charles Fourier was one of the principal theorists of this utopia of pleasure and creativity. Scarred by the experience of Jacobinism, he rejected all forms of violent revolution, and of economic equality. Instead he started from the notion that modern civilization, which suppressed the natural desire for pleasure, was responsible for human misery. In its stead he proposed new model communities – ‘phalansteries’ – in which social responsibility and passions would coexist.
⁷
Each of these communities would include 1,620 people. Work would be pleasurable and tasks would be allocated
according to the character of each individual. People also needed variety, and the working day would be divided up into two-hour periods, in each of which workers would do something different. Fourier solved the problem of who would do the unpleasant work with the bizarrely original proposal that children – the ‘Little Hordes’ as he called them – who apparently enjoyed playing in dirt, would perform such tasks as cleaning latrines. He also mooted the idea that in the future a new type of animal would evolve, the ‘anti-lion’ and the ‘anti-whale’, who would befriend mankind and perform laborious work. Some of his suggestions may not have been seriously meant, but it is not surprising that the twentieth-century poet and critic André Breton should have regarded this dreamer as a forerunner of surrealism. However, in his desire to reconcile work with the self-fulfilment of mankind, and his hope that men could be made ‘whole’ by avoiding the narrowness imposed by the modern division of labour, Fourier represented the Romantic side of socialism, and had a significant influence on Marx and Engels.

A more influential socialist enemy of Babouvian Communism was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a printer who outdid Weitling in his autodidactic efforts, teaching himself not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew. In 1840 he published
What is Property?,
which, with its powerful declaration ‘property is theft’, became the talk of the salons of France. However, Proudhon did not want to abolish private property – he merely wanted to spread it more evenly. Proudhon therefore objected to the Babouvian vision of an equal community, for the ‘moral torture it inflicts on the conscience, the pious and stupid uniformity it enforces’.
⁸
For Proudhon, socialism had to allow people to control their own lives. He envisaged a form of industrial democracy, in which workers would no longer be slaves of their machines, but would manage their workplaces; his ideal was a highly decentralized society, a federation of workplaces and communities run by workers. Unsurprisingly, he came to be regarded as one of the main theorists of the anarchist movement.

Much closer to the Communist tradition was the socialism of Étienne Cabet, whose imagined utopia, ‘Icaria’, organized property in common and was governed by an elected government with complete control over the economy. His followers – who were numerous amongst French workers – were amongst the first to be called ‘Communist’. But most typical of the Romantic utopian socialists was the British thinker Robert Owen, whose ideas were taken seriously by both radicals and more
establishment figures, and whose plans for socialist communities were put into practice. The son of a businessman, he became a successful entrepreneur himself and bought a number of spinning mills on the Clyde in New Lanark. He found that the workforce was unreliable, and he set about motivating them by providing better conditions for workers and offering education for their children. But how could work and pleasure be reconciled? Owen’s solution had much in common with Fourier’s: people between the ages of fifteen and twenty would work, and with the help of children would be able to produce all that the community needed; those aged between twenty and twenty-five would supervise; and those aged between twenty-five and thirty would organize storage and distribution, but that would only take two hours of their day; the remaining time could be devoted to ‘pleasure and gratification’.
⁹

The utopian socialists, then, broadened the goals of Communism from mere equality to the achievement of human happiness. They also transferred the Romantic spirit from military heroism and patriotism to the new industrial age, by valuing man’s creativity in work. But they had their own peculiar weaknesses: their plans often looked eccentric and absurd; their connections with workers were far more fragile than those of the Communists; and they seemed to be wishful thinkers – they had little to offer in terms of a strategy by which the ideal society might come to be realized. They merely exhorted the moral transformation of mankind which, whilst doubtless highly desirable, was hard to enact. At least the Babouvian Communists had a political programme founded on a proletarian revolutionary insurrection, which, given the worker unrest of the 1830s and 1840s, seemed plausible.

However, there was one weakness both the Babouvian and the utopian traditions shared: they rarely showed convincingly how Communism or socialism could solve the problem of economic security and productivity. It was liberal thinkers, the defenders of the market – amongst them Adam Smith and, later, Herbert Spencer – who seemed to have cornered the market in sound economic theory. But there was one variety of socialism that did address this criticism – Henri de Saint-Simon’s ‘scientific socialism’.

Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, born in 1760, was an aristocrat from an ancient ducal family but had originally welcomed the French Revolution. He fell foul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned, but his
response to his persecution differed sharply from Fourier’s and Babeuf’s: he looked to science to rescue France. Saint-Simon was the prophet of the Plan. The goal of society was production, as ‘the production of useful things is the only reasonable and positive aim that political societies can set themselves.’
¹⁰
Scientists, industrialists, or a combination of the two, therefore had to be in power. Democracy – the rule of the ignorant masses – was only dangerous and damaging, as the Jacobin experience had vividly illustrated. Indeed, ideally politics could be dispensed with altogether, in favour of rational decision-making.

Saint-Simon was condemned by Marx and Engels as a ‘utopian socialist’ because he was not ‘scientific’ enough for them, but this label is misleading. Saint-Simon was the heir of the anti-Romantic strain of Enlightenment thinking, and his ideas proved enormously appealing to later socialists who tried to reconcile equality with economic prosperity. And it was the combination of his ideas, together with those of Babouvian Communism and (to a lesser extent) Romantic ‘utopian’ socialism, that was to be the hallmark of the system created by Marx and Engels. Just as the left in the 1990s sought a ‘third way’ between visions of social justice and the ‘rationality’ of the global market, so too Marx and Engels tried to show how a much more radical social model, Communism, could be wedded to economic prosperity.