Early socialism/communism, Marx, and some of my arguments

Why I am not a Marxist

(Utopia, Ohio—site of a short-lived utopian socialist community founded on the ideas of Charles Fourier in the 1840’s)

I spent a long time going over how liberalism shaped the present world. It has been the predominant philosophy of the richest and most powerful collection of countries for all of modern history, and has evolved into something generally termed a liberal international order (which is nowadays challenged by places like the U.S. possibly moving to less liberal, but even more, you have the rise of a country like China to global power, which is not from a liberal tradition at all but has a huge influence on the world, and its economy). This has never been universally acknowledged as the right way to do things though, even among those who wanted to move away from the traditional authority structures. Those in opposition have generally believed that society can do better than just people being free to look after themselves and have their own little individual say in society. Removing tyranny and enforced traditions is the beginning, but not the end ideal.

Communism vs. Socialism (are they different?)

So we are going to start around when liberal governments were emerging at the beginning of the modern era again, around 1800. This is around the time when the idea of socialism or communism began to be formalized. At this time, these two terms didn’t really have distinct definitions from each other, it was mainly whatever the person espousing it felt like calling it—there was a certain fashion to it. Socialism mainly became the more fashionable term, the respectable one, where communism was associated with unruly masses. Communism also had an association with atheism, or even Catholicism for some due to its similarity to “communion,” so was seen less favorably among Protestants. Marxists, for example, despite their manifesto being The Communist Manifesto, mostly ended up settling on calling it socialism in the later parts of the century because it was just seen as a more positive term. A very clear, acknowledged distinction between the two only came about in the time of Vladimir Lenin in the 1900s.

Christianity and Communism

The foundations of these ideas were not newly developed in the 1800s, of course. Religious teachings had at various points a number of commonalities with socialist philosophy. The direct personal teachings of Jesus, for example, had a strong socialist bent, with his preaching of redistribution to the needy, the difficulty of a rich man reaching heaven (harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle), or his rampage against the money changers—what I call “the day that Jesus got hangry,” which ended up leading to his arrest and crucifixion. Or consider the Shakers, who were (or are, there are still exactly two identified Shakers living in Maine in 2025) a Christian sect that developed communal living without private property or ownership of labor. They are also famous for requiring celibacy, because sex was the evil cause of the fall of man from the state of Adam and Eve, and thus could only sustain their way of life by attracting converts, which seems to have finally reached its terminal point.

The Primitive Communist?

Some also believe this kind of communal living like the Shakers was the state in which early humans lived in the times of hunter-gatherers before the invention of agriculture. Most notably, this idea was found in Karl Marx’s notes, which his longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels incorporated into the book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State after Marx’s death. This interesting article, though, points out that contemporary anthropological research does not particularly support the idea of primitive egalitarian communism being a widespread phenomenon, and illustrates the dangers of trying to neatly fit the history of society into a simple progression system, or to make definitive statements about how humans behaved in the state of nature that philosophers and those pushing certain visions and narratives of society have been prone to do.

All about Utopia

Precursors

In the early 1800s, though, many more people began to be interested in establishing these kind of communities without the driving force of religious faith, or relying on the voluntary redistribution instructed by Jesus, who never seemed to profess that a government should take on the role of making the redistribution happen, just that the rich should take this on themselves. The kind of utopia Thomas More had envisioned in his 1516 satire was finally ready to be put to the test in reality. This movement was later termed the utopian socialists, though in their time they were mostly just socialists or communists, or were named after the philosophers or their works. They were also close allies of the liberals, which was still a fairly revolutionary movement pushing changes.

A precursor was Henri de Saint-Simon, who went beyond just wanting to allow people the freedom to work for themselves and not be beholden to feudal systems as prescribed by liberalism. He separated the people into the industrial class (which was all people who worked, no matter how successful or independent) and the idle class, those who did not labor but only profited off others, who he saw as malicious parasites (he renounced his own aristocratic title). He wasn’t necessarily utopian himself, as he believed that the overturning of this order and re-shaping of society by the industrial/working class should be forced by authoritarian means if necessary, and something of a meritocracy and technocracy should be formed with the most capable and intelligent scientists and industrial experts in charge. Beyond this overturning and establishment of order, he did not believe a government force should then interfere in the workings of this economy. I don’t think you can necessarily label his beliefs as socialism but he was highly influential on the coming socialists.

The Utopians

The most influential proponents of utopian socialism in the early 1800s were:

Charles Fourier: A radical hater of modern civilization, "Fourier's contempt for the respectable thinkers and ideologies of his age was so intense that he always used the terms philosopher and civilization in a pejorative sense. In his lexicon civilization was a depraved order, a synonym for perfidy and constraint ... Fourier's attack on civilization had qualities not to be found in the writing of any other social critic of his time." He believed in a full re-organization, and the setting up of “phalanstères” which were something like large combination apartments+workspaces that were designed to support self-sustaining communities. I’m just going to quote from wikipedia because it’s rather amazing:

“The transformation of labor into pleasure is the central idea in Fourier's giant socialist utopia. Fourier believed that there were 12 common passions, which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have 1,620 people.^[16] One day there would be six million of these, loosely ruled by a world "omniarch", or (later) a World Congress of Phalanxes. He had a concern for the sexually rejected; jilted suitors would be led away by a corps of fairies who would soon cure them of their lovesickness, and visitors could consult the card-index of personality types for suitable partners for casual sex. He also defended homosexuality as a personal preference for some people. Anarchist Hakim Bey describes Fourier's ideas as follows:

In Fourier's system of Harmony all creative activity including industry, craft, agriculture, etc. will arise from liberated passion—this is the famous theory of "attractive labor". Fourier sexualizes work itself—the life of the Phalanstery is a continual orgy of intense feeling, intellection, & activity, a society of lovers & wild enthusiasts.^[17]

Robert Owen: English industrialist from a relatively poor background who turned a £100 loan from his brother into a fortune by running textile mills, but was highly concerned with the conditions of the lives of the mill workers. Upon becoming successful, he used his mill to try various reformed methods, such as providing for the workers’ healthcare, education of the workers’ children, strict 8-hour days, co-op stores where workers could purchase goods at wholesale costs. He also became interested in more experimental fully communal societies, which he eventually used his fortune to fund.

Étienne Cabet: A French lawyer who was influenced by Owen, established the idea of Christian communism which based itself specifically on Jesus’s teachings of redistribution of wealth and social equality—he wrote a book called The real Christianity according to Jesus Christ, likely channeling the same frustration people today express at Christians who love to ignore the parts where Jesus talks about being good to the poor and try to do the camel going through the needle’s eye thing). He also wrote a novel about a utopian communist society called Travels in Icaria or The Voyage to Icaria.

Experiments in America

It was fashionable for these movements to create intentional communities where they could play out their social experiment, primarily in the United States because of the great availability of land and low oversight on the frontier. Fourierists created more than 30 different phalansteries across the US in the 1840s. Robert Owen used his fortune to purchase the town of New Harmony, Indiana in 1825, which was itself founded by another communal religious group very like the Shakers, the Harmony Society, who from what I can gather, were friendly with Owen and his associates like Fanny Wright. My Pittsburgh friends & family may recognize the communities they founded, first Harmony, PA in Butler county; then they relocated to Indiana before moving back to the Pittsburgh area and founding Economy, PA on the Ohio River by present-day Ambridge after selling their land to Owen. Like the Shakers, they also practiced celibacy and have since fully died out. Owen’s socialist project in New Harmony only lasted two years before becoming completely dysfunctional, however it attracted so many thinkers that it retained a national scientific significance (particularly in geology) long after its structure reverted to capitalism.

Perhaps most controversially, Fanny Wright, who was highly involved in New Harmony, set up her own experimental community of Nashoba, Tennessee. She wanted to prove that there was a path to emancipation of enslaved people that could avoid conflict with the southern slave owners, which involved outside philanthropists paying the enslaved a wage, which they could accumulate and then purchase their own freedom with. I assume the point was the phasing to not create a shock to the system, otherwise why not just purchase the slaves directly and free them if that money was there? But to demonstrate how it could work she took the rather outrageous step of purchasing some land and about 30 slaves, setting up a community in which they worked and she paid them and provided for their education.

Unfortunately, the land was terrible, swampy and overrun with malarial mosquitos so it was barely productive (she contracted malaria and had to leave to recover—hers and Owen’s both floundered greatly when their visionary founders were not specifically present, highlighting the need for the exact driven guidance to make any of these experiments work) and did little to demonstrate it to be a productive enterprise. It also received bad press for its free love stance and allowance of interracial relationships (this was in the South, after all). Plus far from her imaginings of it as a dignified way for the people to earn their freedom, the situation only highlighted the undignified nature, as they were still seen as her property, which she had purchased to conduct an experiment. This community also only lasted about three years before she gave up and took the slaves to Haiti, where the enslaved population had successfully rebelled and established their own state, to set them free.

The Icarians inspired by Cabet ended up creating the longest lasting of these intentional communes. He had gathered what he imagined as thousands of French followers who were to go colonize land in the US. They had a disastrous first attempt in Texas, arriving in the baking hot summer, the land not where they had been promised and again terrible, and they struggled with malaria and cholera. They quickly turned back to New Orleans where they had arrived, and some ended up suing Cabet for fraud. However he and many of his followers persisted with the project, and ended up settling in Nauvoo, Illinois, a town which had been founded in 1839 by the Mormons, and at the time was bigger than Chicago. It was run by the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, but amid his troubles with the greater state authorities, he was murdered by a mob. Facing further violence, the Mormons left for Utah under Brigham Young, and sold their land to the Icarians, who went about creating a society just as described by Cabet in the novel. All families were given the same kind of apartment, with the same furniture. Children were mostly raised away from their parents at a boarding school starting at age 4 and all personal property was forfeited upon joining the community. Eventually the society fractured, with offshoots in Missouri, and finally one in Corning, Iowa, which persisted until 1898 and became the longest-lasting non-religious commune in the US until ones that started in the 1960s that are still active.

As an interesting aside, the amount of anti-semitism you can see in some of these figures is extreme, as they generally saw Jews as the traders and capitalists ruining the world. Fourier went as far as to promote very early Zionism and lobby the Rothschilds in its favor just because he wanted the Jews out of Europe. To Palestine with them!

Marx says let’s be realistic here…

What these utopian socialists had in common, though, was that their societies were voluntary to enter. None imagined or tried to convert the world, or even one country, to socialism, and instead their founders tried to push the social liberal style reforms for general society, while trying to produce an alternate society for those who wished. Transforming a whole existing country would require buy-in from all those holding power, which they certainly hoped could happen, but was never put to the test, and I doubt they believed it could happen. This changes though with the entry of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels onto the scene, who wholly re-envisioned the equation.

Dialectics (no not the Scientology thing)

To understand Marx’s theories, we are going to detour a little bit into philosophy again, and go over dialectics. Like I was with other Germans, I was always intimidated by trying to understand dialectics, but upon revisiting it, it seems not too hard to understand. Dialectics is most often associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German idealist (he believed concepts were real, existent things), though the terms in which its usually taught, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework, were not developed or really used by him, but instead by the old friend of the blog Johann Fichte.

Trying to understand exactly how Hegel thought is the intimidating part, but what it essentially is (again like my Kant post, I’m going to call this the kindergarten version that is almost certainly not exactly correct, but is simplified for understanding) is a debate of pure ideas—no appeals to emotion or human things allowed. And when an idea is challenged and part of it is logically negated, a new whole revised idea is formed. The constant repetition of this is the process by which our rational minds work, according to Hegel. At one point he writes to apply this to the development of self-consciousness. The self makes an assertion: “I exist as my own thing and don’t depend on anyone or anything else to provide me with the essence of existence.” The challenge to the assertion is that “there must be another to recognize your existence and to be independent of, which makes you not independent of this other.” This causes a struggle where these two existences clash and what emerges is what Hegel calls the either the master-slave (or servant) dialectic, or the lord-bondsman dialectic, depending on the translation. The self-consciousness that emerges from this is split or tiered, with one of them (the slave) existing for the purpose of defining and supporting the existence of the other (the master), and this dynamic is central to human experience.

Adding materialism to the mix

What Marx did with this was to bring it out of the realm of pure ideas, and into the real material world. To me this is not necessarily a strictly correct thing to do, logic-wise. Just because it holds up as a process in idea land, does that necessarily mean it is valid to explain the material world? Maybe it helps understand in a metaphorical way the progression of the material world, but I don’t really see how it must necessarily exist as a force in the world. But Marx, very unlike Hegel, is philosophically a materialist (again a word that’s a bit different than its common usage—we are not saying Marx loves to acquire and possess goods), meaning that he believes there is no abstract that’s a real thing: there’s nothing in the world that is not matter and a product of matter. Our selves are just the total of the physical components, the body, and the chemical and electrical reactions that interact with our brains to form what we think of as a self or as thoughts, which are not separately existing things in themselves, just combinations of these physical components reacting. So there’s no pure brain land for the dialectic to operate in. If it exists to Marx, I guess it must exist in the real material world; and the world is made of people, and those people have thoughts (or these electro-chemical impulses).

Applying the dialectical materialism to history

But anyway, Marx says that fundamental to the real world are things, and people make things—things to eat, things to build with, etc.. This making (production) requires materials, and a space for the production to happen in, and often tools, all of which combined in economics is called capital, and it requires actions, which in economics is called labor. He believed advancements in these capabilities of production defined all human relations, a philosophy he called historical materialism. I’m usually pretty neutral on here when I’m giving histories, but I have to say, I just don’t find this theory that compelling or well-supported. As I talked about earlier, he thought that humans began in a state of primitive communism, where people pooled their capital and each contributed labor to create things that belonged to all. This happened because of the impermanence of their settlements and nomadic lifestyle (but really early humans had such varied styles of communities that it’s hard to say the capabilities of production necessarily defined their relations and community structure).

Then humans progressed to agriculture, and when staying in one spot, ones who established themselves in control of farmland, or later, sources of metal, were able to gain power because they controlled the factors of production (the capital specifically) and others had to go to them to have things produced. With their power via numbers (supported by consistent food) and weapons, they forced others to work for them, creating a slave society. These progressions in society are where the dialectic comes in for Marx—the dialectic states that these are mandatory changes in society that occur when an old way gets negated, or becomes logically contradictory. For example: Assertion: The best way for people to live is in small groups moving after food sources. Challenge: What if we grow a consistent food source? Debate: We can stay in place and provide for a larger group of people. The downside is this takes a lot of work. A larger group of people is stronger and can overpower a small group. Growing food is better for us if we don’t have to spend all our time tending crops. If we overpower other groups we can make them tend our crops for us. New reality: The best way for people to live is in large groups, establish power, and force others to work to support the group.

Early and late phases

He sees these eras as progressing in phases, the first phase where the structures of the prior are still in place and a later phase where the new system has become its own pure thing. In the early phase of antiquity (the phase after primitive communism), there was a constant warring, a goal of assimilation of peoples into a larger population, establishing governance and winning slaves. Once this stabilized, something like the Roman Empire got to display its true nature, which was that the whole system was built on moral decadence and constant imperialist conquest. The two classes here were citizens and slaves. Next came the rise of feudalism, with nobles and serfs (personally I think the distinction between these two eras is rather fuzzy, as conquering weaker groups to use as slaves was still widely practiced, and serfs were not very different from slaves, and production was still largely agrarian with not a great difference in technological capacity—feudalism could also just be late-stage antiquity, couldn’t it?).

He explains the progression from feudal farming to capitalism in a similar logical dialectic—the fact that things can now be mass produced means that people can accumulate amounts of things that have trade value, rather than living a subsistence existence. This means that those that control the capital for mass production now have the power in society, rather than the ones that have been granted swaths of land as nobles. This has caused a new era that he calls the era of the bourgeoisie, replacing the era of the aristocracy, and that the advent of mass production necessarily led to this transition—the idea of an aristocracy became logically inconsistent.

So then in the early phase of capitalism, many producers spring up, vying for their piece of the pie and it’s an era of competition. But as it progresses, he says, monopolies necessarily form, everything gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, what was efficient competition becomes inefficient as the power holders don’t want to disperse their power, and only the needs of the few are met. The idea that we are perhaps in this phase right now has taken off—if you see people referring to late-stage capitalism, they are saying that we are now at this point in Marx’s dialectic historical progression.

The end of capitalism

What Marx said would happen is that eventually capitalism would fold under its own contradictions—its tendencies toward monopolistic inefficiencies and concentration of wealth—and the large group of laborers would become too poor to keep the economy sustaining itself. When this happened, the age of the bourgeoisie would come to an end and the age of the proletariat would begin. In the early stage, these laborers would become awakened to the fact that their labor held the power, and would organize to take ownership of all of the means of production, distributing the fruits of the labor among themselves. But because the structures of capitalism would still be in place, workers would need to vigilantly enforce the new order, a process which Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat (this is where Lenin comes in later and calls this stage socialism, differentiated from the final stage, communism). They would need to control the state structures and guide the economy in the necessary directions to make the new order self-sustaining. Then over time, the true final stage of communism would come about—the need for strong control and state structures enforcing it would fade and could be dismantled as the benefits of the system became self-evident and self-perpetuating, and all of the old classes would become vestigial, resulting in a classless society.

The servants become the masters

Marx saw every stage in this progression as necessary. He believed that only through the great wealth capitalism brought forth into the world, for example, could the conditions for socialism, and the ability for workers to sustain a socialist society, be realized, just as only through the steady supply of food through agriculture could the conditions for industrialization be met. And he saw the struggle between the old controlling class, and the new lower class that would come into power, as necessary to each progression. Here he borrowed from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in particular, and applied it to classes of people. He points to the master consciousness (now the master class) as being dependent on the lower classes to provide their existence. But the progression where the slave consciousness (now the slave class) is split away, it realizes it provides the entire justification for the upper class’s existence, and the master class would cease to exist without it. In that way it can come to realize its power, and supplant the master class’s control.

Utopia?

In some ways, Marx is also utopian, as the final result holds a lot in common with a utopia, however he rejects a lot of the assumptions of the utopian socialists, primarily that socialism could ever come into being any way other than how he explains. Those in control of society would never choose of their own accord to relinquish their power in the existing state of society, and so liberal republics could not institute socialism. He also doesn’t see the point in having a small commune separate from the rest of society—this is small potatoes vs. the forces of all history of the world. And if it’s not the correct time period for that revolution, then we aren’t ready for it, and a commune is just going to be subsumed back into capitalism (which was a pretty accurate prediction).

I am not a Marxist

Something I want to point out here, is that to me, Marx is another old philosopher, like all the others we’ve talked about here. I’m not going to hold him in special regard compared to Kant or Fichte or David Hume or John Locke or John Stuart Mill or Hegel or the utopians. He put forth a conception of the world based on his understanding of things as a mid-19th-century person. As a 21st-century person, we hardly look back at any of those others and say “oh yeah, that guy was right about everything. I will shape my whole worldview around what this one guy from centuries ago said.” They have each contributed to contemporary understanding of everything, but isn’t it silly to go around saying you are a Kantist or something?

At some point I am going to do an evaluation of one of these philosophers of political economy that I actually personally do find compelling: Henry George and the Georgists, and examine whether I’d actually be willing to subscribe to an ideology labeled around one specific person from the 19th century being almost completely correct. But that’s not on topic here.

What Marx didn’t get a chance to see

Anyway, similar to the idea that the U.S. founding fathers could not fathom what the United States would grow into when establishing its systems (I’m remembering this tweet),

Marx has not really foreseen what the world has grown into. There has been no worldwide revolution at the peaking of capitalism. According to the UN, more than 3/4 of the population of the whole world owns a mobile phone, which nowadays generally is a computer more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1980s or those that powered Apollo space-flight. In the U.S., 62% of adults own stock, which is literally ownership of the means of production. The majority is no longer a proletariat that has no prospect to improve their condition. We are instead full of petite bourgeoisie, labor aristocracy, and similar, which is the opposite of the condition Marx predicted as at the end of capitalism, which was a huge mass of proletariat people unable to survive or purchase goods.

White America (or Europe) is no longer the place?

Recent theory built on Marxism has worked to factor this in; if you go to some communist subreddits, even more than telling you to read Marx, they will tell you to read Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern by J. Sakai, a 1983 text which wants to create something like “White studies” to critically examine Euro-American society in the same type of framework something like “African American studies” exists. It comes to the conclusion that White Europeans/Americans cannot be the proletariat that drives a Marxist revolution, because they are fundamentally entrenched in being an oppressor class whose position gains advantage by oppressing another class. This other class is the providers of worldwide cheap labor created by offshoring and unequal labor costs and standards across countries, along with the workers in unwanted American jobs commonly filled by recent and undocumented immigrants.

However from what I can tell, at some point cheap labor is no longer going to be cheap. We always used to characterize goods as being produced cheaply in China. Well now that China has developed a lot, Chinese labor is no longer particularly cheap. So production moves to other countries, which causes those countries to develop further, and no longer be as cheap, and so on. As I’ve linked before, worldwide earnings adjusted for inflation and cross-country purchasing power look like this.

What about the path we’ve been on?

The question I would ask, or perhaps what I think the next dialectic stage would be, is how things will change once all countries become relatively developed and there isn’t a place where especially cheap labor can be easily procured. Also, Marx wasn’t around for much of the rise of social liberal economic policy and big expansions of welfare. Marxists tend to argue that these are just throwing the oppressed a bone to induce them to not revolt, however at this point they have been built into relatively robust systems in some countries, providing state healthcare, utilities, housing, food support, and more, none of which he saw, or conceived of, not thinking those having power would elect to do such things. The development of these also seems contradictory to his dialectic, as capitalism has seemed to move away from its pure form, and also potentially opens a different path to getting to socialist ideas.

Soon/next I am going to talk about the path from these ideologies to actual revolution that happened (we do a long visit to Russia), and how that fits into leftism overall and has shaped communist ideas since. Additionally some Israel-Palestine explorations.