Origins of Socialism

Hello, I'm Jeremy Jennings.

I'm professor of political theory at King's College

London.

What I'm going to do in these modules

is give you a general overview of the history of socialism

from its origins to the present day.

In the first module, I'm going to talk briefly

about the origins of socialism.

It's very difficult to talk about socialism

before the beginnings of the 19th century.

The word itself actually comes into existence

around the 1820s.

So it's very difficult to talk about a socialist movement

before that point.

However, something like the aspiration towards socialism

has been around for a long, long time.

It predates industrialization and so on.

And that original inspiration, I think really

comes from a sense of social injustice.

A lot of it was actually inspired by Christian writers

and others who looked at the society in which they

lived, saw that it was unequal, saw there was poverty.

There were people living in very disadvantaged situations,

and they wanted to rectify that.

However, it's only really with the French Revolution in 1789

that we start to see something like a recognizable tendency

to move towards creating a socialist society.

Now, the French Revolution starts in 1789.

The French Revolution was not a socialist revolution.

Most socialists regard it as a Bourgeois revolution.

To that extent, from a socialist perspective,

the French Revolution was a failure.

But what happened in the course of that revolution?

There was a process of radicalization, and out of that

comes a sense that the revolution had been thwarted,

that the revolution needed to go further

towards creating a situation of social and economic equality.

And the first hint of that we get it was a man with a man

called Babeuf, Gracchus Babeuf, who

created something called the Conspiracy of the Equals.

So his intention was to say the French Revolution was just

the first revolution.

Now, we're going to have a second revolution,

and that will create something that you and I would now

recognize as socialism.

Babeuf is very important for a variety of reasons.

First of all, he sets out what we would recognize now

as the goals of socialism, namely the abolition

of private property and, through that,

the establishment of equality in society.

The second reason why Babeuf and his conspiracy were important

was because he also set out the means

that this socialist society could

be brought into existence.

And as the name suggests, he thought

it would be brought about through a conspiracy.

That is to say, he brought into existence

the idea of a party, not really a political party, but a party

which was dedicated through secret means and illegal means

and through violence in bringing about a socialist society.

And that model has actually remained remarkably persistent

in socialist thinking.

Now, needless to say, nothing actually

became of Babeuf's conspiracy because what happened,

of course, was someone in the conspiracy betrayed them.

They were all caught, and they were all executed.

But that is the first example we have of something recognizably

trying to get us towards what we would

see as a socialist society.

Now, after the French Revolution,

right across Europe-- not just in France,

but right across Europe--

there was a period of reaction, the French Revolution.

By virtue, everyone was seeing it as a very, very bad thing.

Lots of people have been killed.

There had been lots of disruption.

There have been wars and so on.

So we have a period between, let's say,

1800 and 1848, which is a period of fairly widespread reaction

in Europe, very conservative period.

Now, during that period, socialism doesn't really exist.

It's very difficult to find many traces of socialism at all.

There's certainly no recognizable socialist

movement.

The manifestation of socialism we get at this time

was what is subsequently known as utopian socialism.

Why was it called utopian socialism?

Well, for two primary reasons--

first of all, on the whole, advocates

of this form of socialism believe the way forward

was to try and create utopias, to create model villages, model

societies, and so on.

The second reason why these people

were called utopian socialists is because, very famously,

when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto

in 1848, they spend a lot of their time attacking

these people, called them utopian socialists,

and this name stuck.

Why were they important?

Well, again, they were important because they set out

a series of very interesting ideas, which

later socialists were to take up they themselves.

Their movements all failed.

But nevertheless, they set out some very important ideas.

One of them, for example, one of these utopian socialists

was a man called Robert Owen.

Robert Owen created model villages in Britain,

but also his followers created them in the United States.

And he had one big idea, which is namely,

if you put people in a bad situation,

then you'll produce bad people.

If you put people in a good situation,

then you produce good people, say.

And the environment in which people were brought up was

really important.

That's why he thought, well, what he was seeing around him

was terrible working conditions and so on.

So he tried to create these model villages to create

good people who would work together harmoniously

in a cooperative way and so on.

Cabet is very interesting, Cabet,

who was a very popular writer in the early 19th-century France.

Again, because what he brings to fore is the idea of equality,

that we should all, in a sense, be living in the same way.

Now, many people regard this as a rather terrifying prospect.

But here this idea that we would all live in the same houses. We'd

all wear the same clothes and so on and so forth.

But, again, the goal was equality.

Another writer in this tradition was called Saint-Simon,

and he was a bit of a crazy character in actual fact.

The thing that marks him out is because he realized

that he thought a lot about what's the source of wealth

in society?

How is wealth created?

And he realized that well wealth is

created by the people who work.

But what he also realized was very strange

that the people who worked somehow

didn't seem to benefit from their work, or

other people, the nonworkers, seemed

to benefit from the work of other people.

They thought, well, this is fundamentally wrong.

And so he started thinking about how

we could create a society where the people who worked

would actually benefit from the work which they had produced.

And this led him to think beyond that about government.

They thought, well, actually, look at government.

Look at what government is doing in our society today.

And on the whole, it's pretty corrupt,

and it serves the interest of rich people.

It doesn't serve the interests of ordinary people.

So from that, he concluded that we needed a fundamental reform

of government, and the government,

the purpose of government was to administer society

in the interests of the workers and the common good.

Now, as I say, these movements really came to nothing.

There's a lot of repression going on.

There were never really mass movements and so on.

But they did introduce some important ideas.

Now, the second part is, as I indicated, is that Karl Marx

and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto

published in 1848, were very critical of these thinkers,

and then criticism they made was very, very

important for the subsequent history of socialism.

The criticism is a very simple one,

but it's a very forceful one, namely that we cannot create

utopias.

How can we possibly create a utopia

in a society which presently is still plagued by poverty and so

on and so forth?

We cannot simply do it by wishful thinking.

We cannot simply sit down in our studies or in our front rooms

and so on and say, well, wouldn't it be marvelous

to have a society based upon equality and justice?

Oh, yes, well, let's try and create it tomorrow.

Marx and Engels realized that was never going to happen.

Consequently, we had to find that-- or

there had to be a different type of analysis of society,

and we had to think of a different way of actually bringing

about socialism.

And that's the origins, or in that, you

find the origins of what we now know as Marxism.