Utopian socialism

“ Another form of utopianism was the effort to persuade the capitalists themselves to abolish dividends, profits, rent, and interest, to turn the factories over to the workers, to become themselves toilers, and to share equally, one with another, the products of their joint labor. Still another form of utopian socialism was that of Owen, Fourier, and Cabet, who contemplated the establishment of ideal communities in which a new world should be built, where all should be free and equal, and where fraternity would be based upon a perfect economic communism. ”

“ Here we have the essential characteristic of Utopian Socialism as distinguished from modern, or scientific, Socialism. The Utopians regard human life as something plastic and capable of being shaped and molded according to systems and plans. All that is necessary is to take some abstract principle as a standard, and then prepare a plan for the reorganization of society in conformity with that principle. ”

“ They dreamt of Utopian Socialism. They read with a great eagerness the works of Fourier, and Robert Owen, and Saint-Simon. Man, they felt, must find his own way to freedom from the nightmare of a horrible actuality. ”

“ But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society. ”

“ But every day it is losing ground before the intelligent partisans—workingmen, middle-class or aristocrats—of scientific socialism which armed—thanks to the impulse received from the genius of Marx—with all the best-established inductions of modern science, is triumphing over the old objections which our adversaries, through force of mental custom, still repeat, but which have long been left behind by contemporary thought, together with the utopian socialism which provoked them. ”

“ By its immense lever of association it alone is able to realize by a productive communion (communion génératrice) that great and beautiful social unity conceived by Jaurez, Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier. If Masons wish it, the generous conceptions of these philanthropic thinkers will cease to be vain Utopias.668
Who are the philanthropic thinkers enumerated here but the men derisively described by Karl Marx as the "Utopian Socialists" of the nineteenth century? Utopian Socialism is thus simply the open and visible expression of Grand Orient Freemasonry. ”

“ I shall endeavor to show you that no one of the eleven possesses the genius to grasp the proletarian standpoint of the question, and that their "practical socialism" amounts to a travesty even upon capitalist politics and is, therefore, the wildest of utopian dreams. ”

“ THE DAYS OF UTOPIANISM.THE DAYS OF UTOPIANISM. The Socialism of these days—and it surprises one to note how much there was of it—was mainly of the dreamy Utopian order. Men had certain "natural rights" which were only possible under a system wherein all would be free and equal. ”

“ I shall not waste time answering the objections that it is a scheme and that it is not a scheme, further than I have already answered them. And I am not going to waste your time arguing at length the folly of saying that Socialism has been tried and proved a failure. The Socialism of to-day has nothing to do with the thousands of Utopian schemes which men have tried. Before the modern Socialist movement came into existence, during hundreds of years, men and women tried to realize social equality by forming communities and withdrawing from the ordinary life of the world. ”

“ What distinguishes this modern Socialism from Utopian Socialism which culminated towards 1848, whose best-known publicists were Cabet, Pecqueur, Louis Blanc, Vidal, is precisely that it no longer attributes to the State the power to transform, the capacity to revolutionize, the rôle of magic regeneration, which the writers in this dangerous phase of enthusiasm assigned to it. For the Utopians all the machinery of a bureaucracy could be put at the service of all the classes, fraternally reconciled in view of the coming social regeneration. For contemporary Socialists since Karl Marx ... ”

“ There is the question of methods and tactics, which differentiates utopian socialism from scientific socialism; the former fancied it possible to alter the economic organization of society from top to bottom by the improvised miracle of a popular insurrection; the latter, on the contrary, declares that the law of evolution is supreme and that, therefore, the social revolution can be nothing but the final phase of a preliminary evolution, which will consist—through scientific study and propaganda work—in the realization of the exhortation of Marx: Proletarians of all countries, unite! ”

“ It is Utopian socialism rather than Marxian which developed into a strong movement in Europe during the nineteenth century but failed to materialize as a successful movement. This failure to gain immediate success was accepted by the leaders of socialism as a weakness of society instead of lack of merit in socialism, and the failure was explained as due to the inherent conditions of a traditionally bound European culture. ”

“ They set out to contrive a better industrial organization, or a better social atmosphere within the present scheme of things. They wished to reform what they understood, and what was outside their circle of ideas they took for granted, as they took the sky and sea. Not only was their literature Utopian literature, about little islands of things begun over again from the beginning, but their activities tended in the direction of Utopian experiments equally limited and isolated. Here again a just critic will differ from many contemporary Socialists in their depreciation of this sort of work. ”

“ CHAPTER XVII SOCIALISM A PERIL TO WORKINGMEN
In glowing colors the imaginations of Socialists have beautifully pictured their utopian state for the benefit of the credulous and oppressed. Unfortunately, however, for the followers of Karl Marx, a little reasoning and common sense show that their visionary state, instead of being a heavenly paradise, would in reality be a descent into chaos and anarchy. ”

“ The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically grounded in criticism of the existing social system, can rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore history (that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking place and any passage of time outside the immutable perfection of their image of a happy society) , but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers were completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier centuries. ”

“ And nevertheless all this socialism, however Utopian, fantastic and ideological it may have been, was an immediate and often salutary criticism of economics—a one-sided criticism, indeed, which lacked the scientific complement of a general historical conception. ”

“ To ask this is not to separate ourselves from the life of the proletariat, by returning to the realm of Utopian conjecture; it is, on the contrary, to bind ourselves more closely to that life, to grow with it, to become more fixed in our ideas as it defines itself more and more clearly. For that life is no longer "the spirit moving over the face of the waters"; it is already incorporated in institutions, both economic and political (universal suffrage, democracy, trades-unions, co-operative societies) , that have reached a definite stage of development and acquired a power and a policy ”

“ While the experimental Utopian Socialisms gave a sort of variegated and conflicting pattern of a reorganized industrialism and (incidentally to that) a new heaven and earth, the benevolent Socialism, Socialistic Liberalism and Socialistic philanthropy of the middle Victorian period, really went very little further in effect than a projected amelioration and moralization of the relations of rich and poor. ”

“ Once again, then, the point of view of the Utopian Socialists, as indeed of all social science of their time, was human nature, or some abstract principle deriving from this idea. The point of view of the social science, of the Socialism of our time is that of economic reality, and of the immanent laws of its evolution. ”

“ We call this phase of the Socialist movement the utopian phase, meaning by that the pre-scientific phase, when Socialism added to a perfectly sound criticism of the present and a pretty clear insight into the future, methods of reconstruction which were inadequate and unsuitable to society. ”

“ Morelly, Fourier, Saint Simon, Owen—we look upon all of them to-day as Utopian Socialists. Since we know the general point of view that is common to them all, we can determine exactly what the Utopian point of view is. This will be the more useful, seeing that the opponents of Socialism use the word "Utopian" without attaching to it any, even approximately, definite meaning.
The Utopian is one who, starting from an abstract principle, seeks for a perfect social organisation.
The abstract principle which served as starting point of the Utopians was that of human nature. ”

“ This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. 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. Society presented nothing but wrongs ”

“ This was actually the case in the beginnings of the Socialist movement, when the [82] workers saw in Socialism the only way out, but were still too weak to take their fate into their own hands. This was the period which Marx called Utopian, when outstanding personalities spread Socialist ideas, and made Socialist plans and experiments to free the labouring masses. ”

“ The theorists who desire such a development of the capitalistic economy in the interests of the proletariat, while upholding methods of [25] production on a large scale, are the ones whom we must call socialists in the true meaning of the word. And we have now to do with a strange species of these socialists, with those whom we are accustomed to call utopists or utopian socialists. The typical representatives of these utopian socialists are St. Simon and Charles Fourier in France, and Robert Owen in England. ”

“ The doubt of the inevitability of Socialism on analysis is always found to be a doubt of the pro-socialist desires and actions of the Proletariat. No one disputes that the Capitalist system is breaking down. With the great mass of the producers receiving bare subsistence wages the impossibility of disposing of the almost miraculously stupendous product of modern machines and processes is mathematically demonstrable. The former paradox of the Socialist agitator, that the Utopian is the man who believes in the possibility of the continuance of the present system, has become a platitude. ”

“ But this policy only results in giving time and opportunity to the reactionary element that will overwhelm proletariat and bourgeoisie together. These are the tactics to which the working class is condemned while it is still in the period of insufficient preparation. And if one of the characteristics of that Socialism which may be called Utopian is to have planned a course of action without depending on the power of labour itself and labour only, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels is still to be counted as a production of that Utopian period. ”

“ But on the whole it is only a Utopian ornament, seeing that it is impossible even to imagine Socialism as realisable within the bourgeois society, in the framework of which the practical action of Social-Democracy is nevertheless enclosed. ”

“ At the same time Marxism has done away with the old utopian views that Socialism would be brought about by the intelligence and good will of some judicious men; as if Socialism were a demand for justice and morality ”

“ Socialist, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems; Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. ”

“ Therefore, when we have approached nearer to Socialism than we are now, different combinations of motives from those with which we have to deal will animate men, and so proposals regarding pay and reward which would be laughed at now as utopian may in the course of time become severely practical. ”

“ It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies. ”

“ It would be a Socialist society simply because it would be dominated by the essential principle of Socialism—the idea of solidarity, of common interest.
The basis of Anarchism is utopian individualism. ”

“ Of course there have been Utopians who applied the principle indirectly through the intermediary of concepts derived from it. Thus, e.g., in seeking for "perfect legislation," for an ideal organisation of society, one may start from the concept of the Rights of Man. But it is [22] evident that in its ultimate analysis this concept derives from that of human nature.
It is equally evident that one may be a Utopian without being a Socialist. The bourgeois tendencies of the French Materialists of the last century are most noticeable in their investigations of a perfect legislation. ”