Socialism and the Early Labor Movement

The newest ideology, socialism, took up where liberalism left off: socialists believed that the liberties advocated by liberals benefited only the middle class—the owners of factories and businesses—not the workers. They sought to reorganize society totally rather than to reform it piecemeal through political measures. They envisioned a future society in which workers would share a harmonious, cooperative, and prosperous life.

Early socialists criticized the emerging Industrial Revolution for dividing society into two classes: the new middle class, or capitalists (who owned the wealth), and the working class, their downtrodden and impoverished employees. As their name suggests, the socialists aimed to restore harmony and cooperation through social reorganization. Robert Owen (1771–1858), a successful Welsh-born manufacturer, founded British socialism. In 1800, he bought a cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland, and began to set up a model factory town, where workers labored only ten hours a day (instead of seventeen, as was common) and children between the ages of five and ten attended school rather than working. Owen moved to the United States in the 1820s and founded a community named New Harmony in Indiana. The experiment collapsed after three years, a victim of internal squabbling. But out of Owen’s experiments and writings, such as The Book of the New Moral World (1820), would come the movement for producer cooperatives (businesses owned and controlled by their workers), consumers’ cooperatives (stores in which consumers owned shares), and a national trade union.

The French socialists Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837) shared Owen’s alarm about the effects of industrialization on social relations. Saint-Simon—who coined the terms industrialism and industrialist to define the new economic order and its chief animators—believed that work was the central element in the new society and that it should be controlled not by politicians but by scientists, engineers, artists, and industrialists themselves. To correct the abuses of the new industrial order, Fourier urged the establishment of communities that were part garden city and part agricultural commune; all jobs would be rotated to maximize happiness. Fourier hoped that a network of small, decentralized communities would replace the state.

Women often played key roles in early socialism. In 1832, Saint-Simonian women founded a feminist newspaper, The Free Woman, asserting that “with the emancipation of woman will come the emancipation of the worker.” In Great Britain, many women joined the Owenites and helped form cooperative societies and unions. They defended women’s working-class organizations against the complaints of men in the new societies and trade unions. The French activist Flora Tristan (1801–1844) devoted herself to reconciling the interests of male and female workers. She published a stream of books and pamphlets urging male workers to address women’s unequal status, arguing that “the emancipation of male workers is impossible so long as women remain in a degraded state.”

Even though most male socialists ignored Tristan’s plea for women’s participation, they did strive to create working-class associations. The French socialist Louis Blanc (1811–1882) explained the importance of working-class associations in his book Organization of Labor (1840), which deeply influenced the French labor movement. Similarly, the printer turned journalist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) urged workers to form producers’ associations so that the workers could control the work process and eliminate profits made by capitalists. His 1840 book What Is Property? argues that property is theft: labor alone is productive, and rent, interest, and profit unjust.

After 1840, some socialists began to call themselves communists, emphasizing their desire to replace private property by communal, collective ownership. The Frenchman Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) was the first to use the word communist. In 1840, he published Travels in Icaria, a novel describing a communist utopia in which a popularly elected dictatorship efficiently organized work and reduced the workday to seven hours.

Out of the churning of socialist ideas of the 1840s emerged two men whose collaboration would change the definition of socialism and remake it into an ideology that would shake the world for the next 150 years. Karl Marx (1818–1883) had studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, edited a liberal newspaper until the Prussian government suppressed it, and then left for Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). While working in the offices of his wealthy family’s cotton manufacturing interests in Manchester, England, Engels had been shocked into writing The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), a sympathetic depiction of industrial workers’ dismal lives. In Paris, where German and eastern European intellectuals could pursue their political interests more freely than at home, Marx and Engels organized the Communist League, in whose name they published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. (See “Document 21.1: Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.”)

It eventually became the touchstone of Marxist and communist revolutions all over the world. Communists, the Manifesto declared, must aim for “the downfall of the bourgeoisie [capitalist class] and the ascendancy of the proletariat [working class], the abolition of the old society based on class conflicts and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.” Marx and Engels embraced industrialization because they believed it would eventually bring on the proletarian revolution and thus lead inevitably to the abolition of exploitation, private property, and class society.

Even when not overtly revolutionary, the upsurge in working-class organizations frightened the middle classes. A newspaper exclaimed in 1834, “The trade unions are, we have no doubt, the most dangerous institutions that were ever permitted to take root.” Many British workers joined in Chartism, which aimed to transform Britain into a democracy. In 1838, political radicals drew up the People’s Charter, which demanded universal manhood suffrage, vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, annual elections, and the elimination of property qualifications for and the payment of stipends to members of Parliament. Women took part by founding female political unions, setting up Chartist Sunday schools, organizing boycotts of unsympathetic shopkeepers, and joining Chartist temperance associations. Nevertheless, the People’s Charter refrained from calling for woman suffrage because the movement’s leaders feared that doing so would alienate potential supporters.

The Chartists organized a massive campaign during 1838 and 1839, with large public meetings, fiery speeches, and torchlight parades. Presented with petitions for the People’s Charter signed by more than a million people, the House of Commons refused to act. In response to this rebuff from middle-class liberals, the Chartists allied themselves in the 1840s with working-class strike movements in the manufacturing districts and associated with various European revolutionary movements.

Continental European workers were less well organized because trade unions and strikes were illegal everywhere except Great Britain. Nevertheless, artisans and skilled workers in France formed mutual aid societies that provided insurance, death benefits, and education. In eastern and central Europe, socialism and labor organization—like liberalism—had less impact than in western Europe. Cooperative societies and workers’ newspapers did not appear in the German states until 1848. In general, labor organization tended to flourish where urbanization and industrialization were most advanced; even though factory workers rarely organized, skilled artisans did so in order to resist mechanization and wage cuts. When revolutions broke out in 1848, artisans and workers played a prominent—and controversial—role.