Other forms of non-Marxian socialism

Other forms of non-Marxian socialism

Amongst the other influential forms of non-Marxian socialism during the nineteenth century, mention should be made of the proposals of ETIENNE CABET (1788–1853), author of the Voyage en Icarie (1840), who founded a series of colonies in the USA, and proposed a highly rationalist, and decided authoritarian, system of social organization. It attracted as many as several hundred thousand adherents in France during the 1840s for its proposals for non-violent, gradual change towards egalitarian socialism. Another Frenchman, LOUIS BLANC (1811–82), became prominent through his Organisation du travail (1840), which urged state guarantees for working-class employment, and is regarded as a founder of state socialism.

Among the early German socialists, the principal thinker was the tailor Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71), whose first tract, Mankind as It Is and as It Ought to Be (1838) was composed under the influence of a secret revolutionary society based in Paris, the League of the Just. Here he projected a future system of organization based upon units of 10,000 families, subdivided into units of 1,000 families that were in turn subdivided. Each unit would elect delegates to administer its own affairs, who would in turn elect administrators to the next higher level. Industry was to be similarly organized on the basis of an ascending series of elected bodies representing major occupational groups. Weitling’s main work, however, was Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842), which offered an account of the loss of a ‘golden age’ or state of nature prior to the creation of private property, and of the emergence of the modern industrial proletariat. Weitling’s proposals for a communist society detailed those needs (which he classified in terms of a need for acquisition, for pleasure and for knowledge) that would be satisfied, including the assurance of intellectual development, and the extension of freedom to all. Basic subsistence needs for all, including housing, clothing and food, were to be assured; any luxuries wanted could be laboured for by additional units of work. The production of unnecessary surpluses would be regulated by denying labour-credits to their pro ducers until stocks were depleted. An industrial army, modelled on the military, would be the

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 190

main unit of labour organization, and the means by which large-scale projects could be completed. Money and private property, the bane of modern existence, were to be eliminated, and the system of exchange instead based upon labour-time, as Owen and the US individualist (but former Owenite) Josiah Warren had proposed. Critical of both the Fourierists and Saint-Simonians for not pursuing equality sufficiently, Weitling nonetheless followed Saint-Simon in assuming that ‘administration’ of the productive process would supersede politics as such, and that future pro gress was contingent upon scientific development in particular. His system of planned organization, however, tended to be based upon the small workshop model of the artisan, rather than the larger factory in which the proletarian was employed. Against Owen and Fourier, he placed greater stress on family life, while recognizing the need for easier divorce, and the extension of employment rights to women. Before Marx he proposed that a period of popular dictatorship would follow the revolution and precede the ultimate creation of communism.

Like many early socialists Weitling also sought to found his views on a radical interpretation of Christianity, as explained in The Poor Sinner’s Gospel. His views, however, were much more millenarian than those of the Owenites, Fourierists or Saint- Simonians, and assumed that the primitive happiness once enjoyed in an ideal ‘golden age’ could be recaptured in the future. Exiled after the failed revolutions of 1848, he attempted to found colonies in the USA and, amongst other activities, mostly as a journalist, projected a new universal language, and helped to organize cooperative banks. Equally important as his socialist proposals was Weitling’s willingness to counsel violent revolution as the means of implementing them, which separates him from the majority of pre-Marxian writers. His argument for the establishment on a national scale, rather than only in small-scale communities, also clearly paves the way for Marx’s proposals. Nonetheless he and Marx fell out in 1846, with Moses Hess siding with Weitling, and no ftirther collaboration proved possible.

Other German socialists of note include some who contributed to theories of revolutionary strategy and tactics like Karl Schapper and Auguste Willich, who were linked with the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in the League of the Just, which after 1847 became the Communist League. The Young Hegelian Moses Hess (1812–73) is a theoretician of minor influence, and author of The European Triarchy and other works. Other ‘True Socialists’, mostly now remembered in Marx and Engels’ caustic dismissal of their views in 1845–6 in ‘The German Ideology’, included Karl Grün and Georg Kuhlmann.

Another German, John-Adolphus Etzler (1796–c. 1860), wrote a number of works, notably The Paradise within the Reach of All Men (1833), proposing a technologically innovative form of socialist society.

Two late nineteenth-century US writers had considerable influence on collectivist ideologies. The first, EDWARD BELLAMY (1850–98), published an extremely influential utopia, Looking Backward (1888), which created a world-wide movement known as Nationalism. Bellamy described a future in which industrial organization was highly centralized, forming one great corporation, the state, and where labour was universal and mandatory for 21 years, and distribution was equal. Money has been abolished, and replaced by a universal credit system. The advantages of technological

Entries A-Z 191

innovation (air cars, television) are stressed. Crime has nearly disappeared, and there is no need for an army. A sequel, Equality (1897), was also published.

A journalist born in Philadelphia, HENRY GEORGE (1839–97), expanded a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy (1871) into an enormously successful book, Progress and Poverty (1877), which contended that all forms of taxation except that on land should

be abolished, since land ownership was invariably a function of monopoly power. In Russia, where Saint-Simon and Fourier were especially influential, ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812–70) was one of the most important figures to develop the socialist tendencies in the Decembrist movement, which focused principally upon an exposition of the communal nature of the Russian peasant community, or mir.