Sample Response
Charles Fourier in his Theory of the Four Movements, published in 1804, was optimistic about
the circumstances of human nature. While Robert Owen, another ‘utopian socialist,’ constructed
communes in Scotland, England and America, Fourier built ‘phalanxes’ in France. Each thought
that they had discovered a new science that could determine how humans might live, Owen
calling his ‘the science of human circumstance.’ In both cases traditional forms of work and
social organisation would be abolished or else utterly transformed. Born in 1872 Fourier in
particular has been dismissed as a crank. His ‘science of passionate attractions,’ rooted in
Newtonian science and particularly Newton’s third principle of motion – for every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction - sought to create an absolute distance, indeed to take the
opposite trajectory, from existing social norms and conventions. As human behaviour was
linked to planetary formation, a cosmic energy, feasting on fast days and practising complete
sexual freedom in the face of calls for chastity, an alternative cosmology from that imagined by
the Catholic Church would be created. With the planets now in better formation the sea (for
instance) would turn to lemonade and would be populated by anti-sharks, thus affecting a
revolution in social organisation and the natural order of things. From this perspective, socialism
was a product of the French Revolution and the chaos that ensued from the revolution and not,
as Marx was to insist, the natural by-product of industrialisation and the ‘class system.’
Frederick Engels, the chief benefactor and companion of Marx, in his Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific rejected this utopian models of Fourier and Owen (and others like it, such as Henri
Saint Simon) as naïve and underdeveloped – see Appendix 1, gobbet one. It was Marx who
had discovered the real scientific laws of the history, surplus value of labour and the conditions
in which human beings would be alienated. Marx had also discovered how history moved in a
forward trajectory: ‘all history is the history of class struggle.’ Society moved (forward) in stages
from Primitive Communism to Communism at which stage there would be no need for a coercive
state or the remaining ‘bourgeois’ elements. The stages in which history as a teleology (an end
or purpose) moved are listed in Appendix 2 below.
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If, for Marx, ‘all History is the history of class struggle,’ for the German Idealist philosopher,
Frederick Hegel in his book The Philosophy of Right (1821), all history was a conflict of ideas
and dialectic in which the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of ideas drove history, often
providentially. Instead, as you can see from the contribution by Ron Strickland, Marx insisted
that class and the relationship of the individual to the forces and relations of production
governed history. Ideas, religion and so on, were ‘epiphenomena’, a priore to the material base
of society which was finally the key elements of change. At the end of history, so to speak, there
would be no contradictory interests and Man would realise his true nature and return to his
species-being, no longer alienated.
Significant for our purposes is the emerging critique of the intellectual roots of socialism. Rather
than being understood as purely scientific, a branch of the social sciences as well as of the
discipline of history, Marxism is now being understood as driven by metaphysical and religious
concerns, specific to the immediate post-enlightenment. The imperative now, according to
Gareth Stedman Jones, is to discard the theoretical baggage of Marxism and its analysis of
class conflict rooted in economic and social contradictions and reconsider it as one, among
many, philosophies thrown up by the Enlightenment. Thus the origins of socialism is not specific
to the rise of an industrial proletariat but can be located early in reactions to the failure of the
Church in post-revolutionary Europe – belonging to the 1890s in the case of France.
Divisions, however, between the humanist historians (Thompson and his Poverty of Theory) and
Perry Anderson and Stedman Jones as followers of Louis Althussers’ structuralism (no real need
to understand this distinction just now) were apparent as historians and theorists tried to get to
grips with Marx in what they optimistically called mature or ‘late’ capitalism. Louis Althusser,
according to Stedman Jones, had found (see Appendix 1 below) fatal flaws in the Marxist
model.
Marx ought, therefore, to be set back into a more general consideration of Enlightenment
thought. Socialism reconsidered, not as a global movement seeking an alternative to existing
human relations; a wholly new society; a higher form of civilisation: a system based on cooperative, rational principles, promising the end of all divisions, an ‘end state’, but as a
philosophy, time and place specific. In a way, Stedman Jones has argued, it is a religion of
science and as such has limited uses as a theory of how history works. Indeed, he went on,
Marx did not seriously attempt to offer a theory of history but instead wanted to proffer and
theorise what a non-capitalist polity may look like. In so doing, it failed on both counts.
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Appendix One
(1)
‘From that time forward Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that
ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between historically developed
classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of
society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from
which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the
economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict’ (Frederick Engels, Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific, 1892).
(2)
‘What his critique highlighted was the metaphysical, even theological, residue still active
in current versions of Marxism, whether communist or dissident. In the place of Marx’s
assumption of the wholeness, self-sufficiency and transparency of the human subject, for the
moment alienated in religion, private property and the state or for the moment submerged by
capitalist exploitation prior to release in a revolutionary denouement, Althusser’s vision of the
human was that depicted in Lacan’s version of Freud, a fractured being forever vainly in search
of full subjectivity…’
(3)
‘had attempted to rethink Marxism in the language of contemporary social theory; that he
had managed to get beyond the mechanical and intellectually exhausted language of economic
determinism through resort to the terminology of psychoanalysis, of structural anthropology, of
the history of science and of an annaliste conception of differential temporality’.
But in doing this he had traced Marx back through his German Enlightenment beginnings to
Kant, Herder, Lessing, Liebniz and Hegel and what he found ensured that Marxism could not be
reformed and could never provide the key to history. Where Hegel’s theory of history suggested
‘innate powers, purposive activity, striving after perfection, a self-sufficient divine impulse at work
within man and the world’ (first conceived in the German pantheistic debates of the 1790s) Marx
by replacing class for Spirit, did not free himself of these elements by focusing in upon the socalled forces of production. The shocking rider to this view, at least for conventional Marxists,
was that mankind, whether before or after the revolution would never escape the clutches of
ideology. The supposed transparency of social relations promised in a classless society would
always in fact be occluded by the inherently delusory need to ‘live’ reality as a subject. This
stripped away from Marxism one of its major conceits. Marxists have always flattered
themselves that they were not ‘utopian’. Althusser’s critique demonstrated not only that they
possessed a utopian ideal, but further that it was incoherent, based upon unsustainable
metaphysical assumptions about man and scarcely comprehensible outside the quasi-religious
context in which it had been conceived’ (Gareth Stedman Jones, Introduction to the Communist
Manifesto, Penguin 2006).
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Appendix Two
Historical Materialism
To Marx, society moved (forward) in historical stages and according to material relations:
(1)
Primitive Communism In which society was disorganised and in which each individual
carried out all types of work. As there was no division of labour and no specialisation, man was
complete and in touch with his true nature or species-being. When people began to specialise
in their work and private property was created the conflict generated led to:
(2)
Slave Society. Property led to some having wealth and others not. At the lower end of
society were slaves who had no rights at all. Human beings became as specialised as domestic
animals and were treated as such. This relationship led to a contradiction within society, which
led to:
(3)
Feudalism: a land system and a small, military state which created relationships of
property that led to:
(4)
Capitalism: The urban proletariat would see that his interests were against those of the
property owner and as profits fell and education became widespread, would lead to social
revolution and to the achievement of:
(5)
Socialism: a restructuring of social relationships, the withering away of the state would
be pre-dated by a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which would then reshape society. Only then
would the final stage be undertaken.
(6)
Communism: No need for a coercive state or the remaining ‘bourgeois’ elements.
Equality achieved, co-operation arrived, there would be no contradictory interests and Man
would realise his true nature and return to his species-being.
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