Defining the Left Socialism, Democracy, and the People

Defining the Left Socialism, Democracy, and the People

DEMOCRACY AND SOCIETY: VISIONS OF A JUST WORLD

Calls for democracy were linked during the era of the French Revolution to more elaborate visions of the just society, organized around an ideal of independent small property and local self-government. In traditions of pop- ular democracy, this linkage went back to the English Revolution in the seventeenth century and the ideals of the Levellers; in the eighteenth century it reemerged in the plebian radicalism of the American Revolution and related movements in the Low Countries and Britain. During the 1790s, such movements acquired the general name of Jacobinism. Their pursuit of local democracy was greatly inspired by the insurgency of Parisian trades- men, shopkeepers, and impecunious professionals, reaching its apogee in the militancy of the sans-culottes during 179294.²

This radical democracy of small property holders dominated the pop- ular insurgencies flaring across Europe at various times in the 1820s, in

183031, and during the tumults of 1848. It flourished best amid large concentrations of handicrafts, where commercial growth both stimulated the skilled trades and assailed them with a new business uncertainty or where industrialism degraded them into systems of outwork and protoin- dustry. It fed on the teeming environment of Europes capital cities, which brought artisans together with shopkeepers, small traders, lawyers and other professionals, book dealers, journalists, and grubstreet intellectuals to compose the familiar Jacobin coalition. Democratic movements might extend upward to elements of the recognized political nation or downward into the peasantry. Closer to 1848, they were augmented by students and some proletarianized workers. This pattern first registered in the last quar- ter of the eighteenth centuryin the American colonies; in London, Nor- wich, and other centers of English Jacobinism; in Belfast and lowland Scot- land; in Warsaw; in the Low Countries, Switzerland, northern Italy, and other areas of native radicalism paralleling the French; and of course in Paris.³

These were societies experiencing an early capitalist transition, where market forces were already transforming existing relations of production but where older popular ideologies of the just society endured. Inequalities among merchants, masters, and men widened, and large parts of the coun- tryside became proletarianized through the expansion of cottage industry. But this transitional world still supported the idealized political projections of the protesting rural outworker, displaced journeyman, and respectable

master artisan, with their belief in a moral economy and the commonwealth of all producers. Desires to protect and restore traditional forms of small- scale production could still be sustained, if not by a paternalist government then via radical visions of federated exchange and cooperation among self- governing units of independent producers. The permanence, future direc- tion, and irreversibility of capitalist industrialization had yet to be clearly perceived.

Yet even as this radical democracy reached its climax in 1848, its bases were being undermined. The same capitalism penetrating the world of the small producer was also forging a very different environment of industry of factories and mills, capitalists and wage-earners, and new urban popu- lations. Certainly the speed of these developments can be exaggerated. In Britain, the pioneer industrializing economy, capitalist production remained remarkably dependent on both manual skills and small-scale organization, and in many industries this blunted the threat to the artisans status. Arti- sans remained proudly distinct from the mass of the unskilled and laboring poor, defending their property in skill, respectability and independence and armored by the sovereignty of the workshop. Between the late 1830s and early 1850s in Britain, Chartism became the first mass political movement of the industrial working class, transcending divisions between artisanal and proletarian workers to a remarkable extent. But artisanal attitudes provided the defining force, both as a distinctive approach to economy and society and in a larger tradition of thinking about the British state. Where industrialization came later, in the rest of Europe, such attitudes also had a long life.

Conditions varied industry by industry. Some divisions of labor and technologies of production were kinder to craftsmen than others. Artisans disappeared rapidly in the more obviously modern industries, like iron and steel from the late nineteenth century and the highly mechanized new sec- tors of chemicals and electrical engineering from the start of the twentieth, followed by the pathbreaking mass production industries in automobiles, aircraft, appliances, and other forms of assembly between the wars. In less capital-intensive branches like textiles and large areas of light manufacture, artisans fared much better, as these combined outwork and unskilled

sweated labor with craft production using workshop-based hand tech- nologies. Other industrieslike construction, carpentry, printing, leather- working, glass-making, shipbuilding, metalworking, and in a different way miningcontinued to need handicraft workers of a very traditional sort. Yet, whether we focus on newly created categories of industrial labor or reconstituted forms of older skills, the capitalist reorganizing of the econ- omy through industrialization necessarily changed the workers place in society. Artisans increasingly lost control of their trades to the impersonal forces of the capitalist market. They surrendered the autonomy of the workshop to practical forms of dependence on larger-scale business orga- nization, before eventually becoming integrated directly into superordinate

structures of capitalist production, employment, and control. Once that happened, social ideals of small-scale organization, local community, and personal independence became far harder to sustain. That is, under con- ditions of capitalist industrialization the implications of demanding popular sovereignty became profoundly transformed.

Gradually and unevenly, democracy became linked to two new de- mands: an economic analysis of capitalism and a political program for the general reorganizing of society. The new ideas didnt follow inevitably from socioeconomic change. But in the most general way, changes in the dem- ocratic idea clearly had this material source. They resulted from the serious efforts of political thinkers, and countless ordinary women and men, to understand the disruptions of their accustomed world. It was in that mo- ment of transformation that people began exploring the possibilities of col- lective ownership and cooperative production. And in that juncture of so- cioeconomic change and political rethinking the ideas of socialism were born.

Thus democracy was always embedded in social history. Both the rad- ical democracy deriving from the French Revolution and the early socialism emerging from the 1830s entailed packages of practical socioeconomic de- mands. Such demands were deemed an essential accompaniment of genuine democracy, and this now became measured not by the centrality of small propertied independence but by the advent of a new collectivism. More- over, socialist ideas had a power and resonance of their own. They became diffused, embodied in institutions, and fixed into social relations; they en- tered peoples consciousness and behavior, becoming powerful motivations in their own right. The replacement of one kind of democracy by another entailed more than merely adjustment to a changing society, through which popular awareness eventually caught up with the new conditions. It was also a contest of ideas, with long and undecided results.⁴

The later nineteenth century became the scene of much confusion, as societies, regions, and economic structures shifted in different ways and at different speeds and as the distinctive socialist ideal of democracythe social democracy, as the pioneers called itstruggled to take form. Earlier democratic ideas showed remarkable tenacity in the subsequent socialist movements. Given European unevenness, that earlier period in any case meant not just the era between the late eighteenth century and 1848 but extended well into the 1860s in Germany, Italy, and central Europe and later still in the peripheries of the south and east. That older radical heritage was only finally left behind after 191718 via processes of dramatic clari- fication going back to the 1890s. The history of the socialist tradition be- fore 1914 was still in many ways a working-through of older legacies, as socialist politicians tried to decide what they owed to earlier democratic traditions and what these traditions could no longer provide.⁵

DEMOCRACY MADE SOCIAL

If capitalist industrialization transformed the conditions under which dem- ocratic ideals had to be pursued, the social meanings of those ideals also changed. As the term socialism entered into general currency after 1850, this was the transition it was used to express. Social came to signify something more than the common system of institutions and relationships in which people lived and started to imply a desirable contrast to the emer- gent capitalist form of society. It came to mean an idea of society as mutual cooperation, as opposed to one based on individual competi- tion. Indeed, the individualist form of society associated with the new system of wage labor and private property became rejected as the enemy of truly social forms in this sense. Thus [r]eal freedom could not be achieved, basic inequalities could not be ended, [and] social justice . . . could not be established, unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownershipand control.⁶

In this way, democracys advocates gradually faced the consequences of progress. In 1848, social-democracy had still meant just the far left wing of the radical coalitions.⁷ But as capitalist relations penetrated ever-larger regions of socioeconomic life, it became harder and harder to generalize the immediate circumstances of independent small producers into programs for organizing the economy as a whole. This opened the space where so- cialist thinking could begin to emerge as a new and plausible option.

This space expanded once liberalism crystallized into an ideology cele- brating an entirely individualist type of society. As liberal ideas invaded public policy during the midnineteenth century, socialism became ever more serviceable for analyzing their harmful effects. The causal connections between private property, individualist philosophies, and an economically founded system of class domination became ever easier to make. On the one hand, that society increasingly conceded certain formal equalities of citizens under the law, including after the 1860s even limited forms of the right to vote. On the other hand, extreme material inequalities were still defended by liberals as essential preconditions for the system.

The economics of democracy became the Lefts insistent preoccupation in the second half of the nineteenth century. For radical democrats of an earlier time, private property held within modest limits was a social ideal to be defended against the rapacity of parasites and speculators. But for socialists, private property itself was the source of social ill. While liberals consciously worked for the separation of the economic from the political sphere, socialists came to see that very separation as a debilitating discrep- ancy. Or, as Jean Jaure`s, the French Socialist leader before 1914, put it:

Just as all citizens exercise political power in a democratic manner, in common, so they must exercise economic power in common as well.⁸

Accordingly, social democracy came to signify not only the most radical

form of parliamentary government but also the desire to extend democratic precepts to society at large, including the organization of the economy. Thisthe making social of democracywas the crucial post-1848 depar- ture.

By the last third of the nineteenth century, socialists were challenging political definitions of democracy with a new question: how can genuine democracy be achieved in a society fundamentally structured by class ine- qualities of ownership, distribution, and control? On this basis, the main features of socialist economic policy became hotly debatedcooperation, public ownership and the socializing of production, industrial democracy, and planned direction of the economy. But of course, as most socialist governments have found, any attempt to democratize the economy in the name of such policies encounters all manner of vested interests with priv- ileged access to political, bureaucratic, and ideological power. In practice, democratic goals can only ever be pursued against the resistance of domi- nant social groups.

The decisive political and philosophical question then becomes: how far can attacks on the legitimacy of private interests stay compatible with the democratic principle, without requiring the use of force and the damaging of basic rights, while the new collectivist system is being installed? This question has caused the Left endless difficulties over the years, as I will show. How it tended to be resolved became one of the main dividing lines between reformist and revolutionary movements.

DEMOCRACYS GENDERED HORIZON

Socialisms belief in democracys social determinants and constraintsthe salience of the social in social democracywas a fundamental broadening of the democratic idea. But in other ways, the latter remained seriously foreshortened. For most of the early democratic movements, except for the utopian socialists in the earlier nineteenth century, popular sovereignty re- mained a male preserve. Chartism in Britain, as the most impressive of these early movements, made this especially clear, because its famous Six Points for democratizing the constitution drawn upin 183738 expressly excluded votes for women.⁹ By the end of the nineteenth century, European socialist parties had certainly become the foremost advocates of womens political rights, but female enfranchisement had still made virtually no progress by

1914. Women had the vote only in certain parts of the North American West and four of the worlds parliamentary states: New Zealand in 1893, Australia in 1903, Finland in 1906, and Norway in 1913.¹⁰

In labor movements, womens second-class citizenshipwas linked to explicitly discriminatory thinking consigning them to the family, household management, and ancilliary economic roles, whether paid or not. In agrar- ian and preindustrial societies, these patriarchal forms of the household

economy were secured via systems of property holding and inheritance. In handicrafts, they found their urban counterpart in systems of apprentice- ship, legal regulation, and guild exclusion, defining skill and the practice of a trade as a form of property privileged to men. Industrialization then added its own aggressively gendered images of the imagined family econ- omy, in which the wages of skilled working men would support orderly and respectable households where wives had no need of a job. Few working-class households actually matched this ideal. Working-class wives mustered unbounded resourcefulness for economic survival, supplementing their husbands wages by foraging, marginal cultivation, casual services like laundry, cleaning, and childminding, petty trading, cottage industry and home work, and waged work of many kinds. But through the norms of the male breadwinner and the family wage, the ideal exercised pow- erful effect. Whatever their actual economic behavior, working-class wives were placed ideologically inside the home and beyond the waged economy. Thus, socialisms official supportiveness for womens rights usually con- cealed a practical indifference to giving them priority in the movements work. Where neither working men nor working women possessed the vote, left-wing movements refused to back womens suffrage until the mens fran- chise was won. But where manhood suffrage already prevailed, womens rights became subordinated to economic issues. Either way, women were expected to wait. Here, socialisms grasp of democracys social context worked to womens specific disadvantage, because the primacy of econom- ics reduced everything else to a secondary concern. The more consistent the socialism, one might even say, the more easily feminist demands were post- poned to the socialist future, because a sternly materialist standpoint in- sisted that none of these questions could be tackled while capitalism per-

dured.

Such an attitude precluded a more radical approach to the woman question, as it came to be known. But this wasnt simply a failure of political perception or a consequence of the socialist traditions more ma- terialist theory. It was also the result of deeper ideological structures, de- riving from older systems of masculine superiority. These were located partly in the family, partly in the strength of societys dominant values, and partly in gendered divisions of labor in the economy. But precisely because such patterns were so deeply embedded in the conditions of working-class life, they proved extraordinarily resistant to anything but the most forth- right of political critiques. And this the socialist tradition was manifestly unwilling to provide. Behind the labor movements neglect of womens is- sues were historically transmitted patterns of gendered culture, which left- wing politicians consistently failed to challenge and invariably endorsed. This was one of democracys most egregious limitations. While it led to broader codification of womens demands in socialist party programs, in- dustrialization not so much subverted older patterns of female subordina- tion as reproduced them in new ways. Just as the earlier democratic politics

bequeathed lasting legacies to the socialist parties, which were only con- sciously sorted through in the decades surrounding the First World War, so the earlier assumptions about womens place constrained the Lefts abil- ity to imagine a gender politics that was genuinely egalitarian. Until the specific concerns of women were consciously addresseduntil socialism also became feministthe pursuit of democracy would stay severely incom- plete.

Socialist downgrading of womens issues was all the worse for the prom- inence before 1914 of impressive womens mobilizationsin the various national suffrage movements, in educational politics and social reform, in relation to womens industrial work, and in largely intellectual or bohemian movements for sexual emancipation. It was precisely in many such areas that masculine privilege was directly called into question. Strong notions of womens reproductive rights and liberated sexuality were already emerg- ing, reaching fuller expression in the 1920s. As those movements made clear, deficiencies of left-wing thinking in gender terms could only be rem- edied by bringing politics directly into the personal sphere.

But a full exposure of such questions has only really dated from the

1960s with the emergence of present-day feminism, which challenged the older Left across a broad front of previously neglected issues. The late- nineteenth-century transition from radical to socialist democracy estab- lished a pattern lasting for the next hundred years: namely, principled sup- port for womens rights on the basis of a broadened social program but within an overall economism that in practice consistently downgraded the priority of the womens struggle. Post-1968 feminism proved vital in bring- ing these questions onto the Lefts agenda. Both for the character of the contemporary Left in the last third of the twentieth century and for revis- iting the earlier periods, recent feminist critiques became indispensable. In- deed, by battling its demands to the center of public debate, via painful conflicts that were certainly not complete, contemporary feminism com- pelled a rethinking of the viable terms of the socialist project and in the process profoundly redefined the Left.

THE PARTY AND THE PEOPLE

The modern mass party, which became the prevailing model of political mobilization in general between the 1890s and the 1960s, was invented by socialists in the last third of the nineteenth century. By our own time, it had fallen into disrepute and was described increasingly as the enemy of democracy rather than its bulwark. Late-twentieth-century radical demo- crats condemned bureaucratic centralism and secretive decision-making as distortions of democratic process, whether in their Communist or social democratic guise. Parties were no longer seen as the vectors of the peoples will but as instruments of manipulation, anonymous machines removed

from the grass roots, protected against popular accountability. In light of such disillusionment, therefore, its important to grasp the democratic pur- poses the socialist model of the party was originally meant to serve, and this is best accomplished by examining the earlier organizational forms that preceded the turn to socialist parliamentarianism after the 1860s.

One of these was the local workers association. From their beginnings between the 1840s and 1860s, working-class clubs subsequently became adapted into the cellular basis for the new national labor movements, whether in the form of the socialist party local in northern and central Europe or as the syndical chamber of labor in the south. During the first half of the nineteenth century, though, the Left was also identified with the spectacle of revolutionwith the imagery of barricades, popular uprisings, and the toppling of monarchies from power. Before the importance of the party for socialism could be established, therefore, an older model of po- litical transformation had to be laid to rest, namely, the conspiratorial tra- dition most associated with the indefatigible revolutionism of Auguste Blan- qui.¹¹

Inspired by the drama of the French Revolutions most radical phase in

179293, Blanquism conceived the revolution as an exemplary act trigger- ing a general uprising of the people, directed by a secret revolutionary brotherhood whose dictatorshipwould secure the results. This thinking originated with Gracchus Babeuf and his quixotic Conspiracy of the Equals, which sought to salvage the French Revolutions radical momen- tum in 1796. Babeufs legacy was then transmitted through the career of his surviving comrade, Filipo Buonarroti, and thence to Blanqui.¹² The art of insurrection flourished during the most overbearing phase of the post-

1815 Restoration in Europe, whose climate of censorship and repression forced democrats into conspiratorial methods. Personifying in one dimen- sion an ideal of selfless revolutionary heroism and passionate egalitarian- ism, Blanqui was also an ascetic and egocentric optimist, treating the masses as always available for revolution, if the right moment could only be seized. This seemed vindicated by the great revolutionary explosions of

1830 and 1848, which owed so little to organized preparation. But the fiasco of Blanquis failed Parisian uprising of 1839 was a far more fitting verdict on his conspiratorial ideal.

The point about Blanquism was its profoundly undemocratic character. The conspiratorial ideal postulated a small secretive elite acting on behalf of a popular mass, whose consent was to be organized retroactively by systematic reeducation but who in the meantime couldnt be trusted. Log- ically enough, Blanquists opposed universal suffrage until after the revo- lution. They were bored if not repelled by the popular democratic politics actually developing between the 1830s and 1870s, as the repression origi- nally justifying conspiratorial methods slowly and partially eased. In con- trast, Karl Marx and the social democratic tradition inaugurated in the

1860s decisively repudiated conspiratorial vanguards and their fantasies of

insurrection. The possible need for the revolutions armed defense against counterrevolutionary violence by the ruling class was left open. But be- tween 1871 and 1917 the dominant model of revolutionary politics for socialist parties now hinged on the democratic promise of an irresistible parliamentary majority. The Paris Commune of 1871, which displayed both the heroism and the tragic limitations of the earlier insurrectionary tradition, became the key watershed. Its failure showed the need for dem- ocratic methods beyond the conspiratorial horizon.

Henceforth, the pure insurrectionary mode became the property of an- archists, for whom in this respect Michael Bakunin became the leading voice.¹³ After the decisive debates of the First International in 186872, which secured the victory of parliamentarist perspectives within the Left, Blanquism lost coherence. Conspiratorial methods lacked purpose in an age of popular suffrage, elections, and parliamentary debates. Insurrectionism survived among the Spanish anarchists, with a wider European revival dur- ing the syndicalist pursuit of the revolutionary general strike after 1900. But for anarcho-syndicalists, the insurrectionary fantasy became divorced from the ealier conspiratorial precepts. A genuine uprising of the people had no need of any directive leadershipin that sense. Strong men need no leaders, Spanish anarchists like to say.

Conspiratorial methods resurfaced from time to time. Spanish anar- chism remained the main source. The libertarian anarcho-syndicalist fed- eration formed in 1919, the Confederacio n Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), was the opposite of a centrally managed trade-union bureaucracy or party machine. But it was matched by the clandestine Federacio n Anarquista Ib- erica (FAI) formed in 1927, the quintessence of elitist and conspiratorial revolutioneering. This contradiction between high-flown libertarian rheto- ric, which inspired ordinary supporters to acts of life-endangering mili- tancy, and the authoritarianism of the underground plotting that sent them to their deaths, was Michael Bakunins main legacy. Such activity spilled easily into terrorism. Its temptations remained strongest at times of repres- sion or defeat, when chances for public agitation were most reduced: in tsarist Russia in the later 1870s and early 1880s and again in the early

1900s and in Spain, France, and Italy in the 1890s.¹⁴

The more troubling of these earlier legacies remained vanguardismthe idea that minorities of disciplined revolutionaries, equipped with sophisti- cated theories and superior virtue, could anticipate the direction of popular hopes, act decisively in their name, and in the process radicalize the masses. Given democracys imperfections and the complex reciprocities of leaders and led, this remained a recurring problem of political organization in gen- eral, because even in the most perfect of procedural democracies a certain latitude necessarily fell to the leaderships discretion, beyond the sovereign peoples practical reach. As a rule, however, except when driven under- ground, the socialist and Communist parties of the twentieth century or-

ganized their supporters on the largest scale via systems of procedural de- mocracy, competed in elections, worked through parliaments and local government, and participated in the public sphere.

In that vital sense, socialist constitutionalism was founded on the ruins of the older Blanquist understanding of how revolutions were made. The socialist model of the mass party, campaigning openly for public support and parliamentary representation on a national scale, and organizing its own affairs by the internal democracy of meetings, resolutions, agreed pro- cedures, and elected committees, was the vital departure. It was the crucial democratic breakthrough of the nineteenth centurys last four decades.

SOCIALISM: UTOPIAN AND DEMOCRATIC

The other major precursors of the labor movements establishing themselves after the 1860s were the utopian socialists, traditionally patronized and dismissed by the later tradition, from moderate parliamentarians and trade unionists to social democrats and Communists alike. Marxists in particular, taking their cue from Friedrich Engelss tract Socialism: Utopian and Sci- entific, repeatedly translated and reprinted after its initial appearance in

187880, saw these early exponents of socialism as naive philosophers in- adequately capturing the social logic of the new capitalist age, at best anticipating bits and pieces of the scientific socialism developed after the

1840s by Karl Marx.¹⁵ Lacking the moorings of a mature working-class presence in society, it was implied, thinkers like Claude Henri de Saint- Simon, Francois-Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen could only ever have produced visionary blueprints of an ideal society, which the realities of the class struggle and the collective agency of the future labor movements would inevitably supersede.

Their writingsSaint-Simons Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva

(1802), Fouriers Theory of the Four Movements (1808), and Owens New View of Society (181216)gave much license for this verdict. In deliberate contradistinction to organized Christianity, they centered a new science of man on human nature, advancing social cooperation against the ego- tism, individualism, and competition that currently reigned. Saint-Simon gave rational and progressive centrality in the new society to all those per- forming productive functions, from industrialists to scientists and engineers, professional men, and laborers. In the absence of aristocrats, kings, and priests, these industrialists would replace privilege, competition, and la- ziness with functional hierarchy, mutualism, and productivity. Relying on a more elaborate and fanciful psychology, as well as a frequently bizarre cosmology, Fourier projected minutely specified self-contained communi- ties, whose intricate complementarities of tasks and functions would guar- antee the happiness of all. Owen designed his New Lanark cotton mills to

show the origins of cooperation in healthy social arrangements, including generous working hours and conditions, social insurance, educational pro- vision, rational recreation, and good housing.¹⁶

The utopians chosen medium of small-scale experimental communities, Fouriers phalansteries and Owens Villages of Cooperation, had no connection to labor movements, because their ideas were conceived well before working-class political activity developed, and indeed before the term socialist itself was coined in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Uto- pian socialism contained no critique of capitalist economics, focusing rather around religious and philosophical issuesequality versus hierarchy, hu- man uniformity versus differentiation of human types, the speed of social transformation, self-interest or devotion (altruism) as the mainspring of human and socialist progress, the relationship between socialism and reli- gion.¹⁷ It prioritized popular education, seeking to reveal the mystery of social harmony and human happiness through the ideal social arrange- ments of its communities. Religiosity was inherent in the structure of early socialist thought. Its main enemy was less the undemocratic state or the structure of the capitalist economy than the moral authority of established Christianity. Its yardstick of judgment was its knowledge of the true na- ture of man, which excluded original sin and the laws and coercion based upon it.¹⁸

Having failed to interest the governing elite in his theories of human perfectibility, Owen spent 182428 in the United States, where he spon- sored the model community of New Harmony in Indiana amid a broader rash of North American communitarian experiments.¹⁹ In the wake of these Owenite and similar initiatives by followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon, utopian ideas circulated remarkably widely, forming a vital reservoir for the labor movements already emerging in western Europe in the early

1830s.²⁰ The explosive history of the Owenite Grand National Consoli- dated Trade Union, which flared briefly across Britains agitated political landscape in 1834, was especially notable. By the spread of E tienne Cabets

Icarian movement in the 1840s, named after his utopian novel Voyage of Icarus (1839), this culture of socialism, or communism as Cabets followers preferred, had become widely diffused in France too, particularly among those artisanal trades that were being industrialized via the use of cheap and unapprenticed labor, such as tailoring and shoemaking.²¹

Through the ferment linking the British reform agitation of 182932 with Chartism, and the 1831 and 1834 uprisings of the Lyons canuts (silk- weavers) with the 1848 Revolution, socialist language now came to de- fine a specifically working-class interest.²²

In contrast to either radical democracy or the future social democratic tradition, utopian socialism implied retreat from state-oriented thinking about democracy. Yet by the 1830s Owenites had become integral to Brit- ish radical agitations, as had Saint-Simonians like Philippe Buchez and Pierre Leroux in France. After his early indebtedness to Babeuf, moreover,

Cabet learned much from Owenite trade unionism during his British exile in 183439, and after he returned to Paris his newspaper Le Populaire helped broaden French republicanism in socialist directions. Both Cabet and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon influenced early French socialism far more than historians have allowed, enunciating demands for government action and national political organization that belied the more naive utopianism often ascribed to them. Rather than embracing the full-scale communitarian ideal of secession from the existing competitive and selfishly individualist society, in fact, working-class politicians owed Owen, Fourier, and Saint- Simon a much looser general debt: ideals of association, mutualism, and cooperation; the rationalist and humanist critique of bourgeois so- ciety; and the practical conviction that human affairs could be differently and better ordered.²³

For democracys longer term, utopian socialists left countervailing leg- acies. On the one hand, they clearly did retreat into apolitical and often outlandish forms of experimental community building, which left little us- able experience for labor movements trying to organize on a national scale. This flight from politics, and indeed from society itself, into small com- munal enclaves, symbolized by the transatlantic journey to the New World, left a silence on the subject of how the transition to a new type of society was politically to be carried out.²⁴ Utopian socialists were similarly indif- ferent to political economy and the structural origins of class-structured inequality. Post-1860s social democrats explicitly repudiated both these as- pects of the earlier heritage.

On the other hand, the creative commitment to forms of small-scale community-based cooperation, extending more ambiguously toward par- ticipatory democracy, left a far more positive legacy. In the politics of Louis Blanc and other socialist radicals during the 1848 Revolution, the ideals of

association supported concrete demands for producer cooperatives and

social workshops to be financed by the French state, while for workers in central and eastern Europe during the 1860s cooperative ideals of col- lective self-helpprovided the commonest early encounter with socialism.²⁵

Ideas of the emancipation of labor bespoke simple but passionate desires for a juster world, often framed by mythologies of a lost golden age, which in a crisis like 1848 could easily sustain belief in revolutionary transfor- mation. Likewise, the impulse for self-government, localized earlier in the physical spaces of New Harmony and the other utopian settlements, re- surged in the Paris Commune of 1871 as a more programmatic revolution- ary demand.