The socialists before Marx

THE IDEA of a socialist society is a very old one--as old as class society itself. So long as there have kings, lords, nobles, emperors, magistrates, police, high priests and generals, there were also people who looked toward a world in which the mighty would fall and the world's wealth would be held in common and shared by all.

In late 12th century France, for example, a carpenter founded a fraternity called the Caputiati that preached the equality of all men. They were suppressed by armed force after they began to gain a mass following.

St. John Chrysostom wrote this homily in the late 4th century:

Grace was among them, because none suffered lack...For they did not give one part and retain another part for themselves...They abolished inequality and lived in great abundance.

The French economist Simondi wrote in the 1830s, "Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests."

It is not simply that some are wealthy and others are not. It is the labor of the many that accounts for the wealth of the few. Marx wrote in 1852:

[N]o credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them...What I did that was new was to prove...that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production.

One of Marx's new insights was that class division were a product of the hitherto low level of human productivity. Engels wrote:

The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class...was the necessary consequences of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society--so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes.

The socialists who came before Marx suffered from a problem that they could not overcome. The material conditions of abundance did not exist for the realization of their ideas. As a result, the socialists before Marx and Engels simply counterposed their ideal society to the one that existed.

The tendency found its highest expression in the utopian socialists of the early to mid-19th century.

THE UTOPIANS were brilliant critics of industrial capitalism. But they did not look to the class struggle. Instead, they sought to create socialist communities that could be an example to convince the world--including capitalists--of the superiority of socialism.

Engels put it this way: "The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain."

What Marx and Engels did was show that the idea of socialism wasn't enough. One couldn't simply counterpose what is with what ought to be. You had to show how the one could be transformed into the other with the materials at hand.

Marx and Engels were thus materialists. For them, ideas alone could not create social change. The material conditions had to exist to make the change both possible and necessary for society to move forward.

Engels wrote:

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of...by individuals...as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.

It is the "certain economic conditions" of capitalism that have created the material abundance that makes class society obsolete and socialism possible for the first time.

First published in the October 8, 1999, issue of Socialist Worker.