Socialist Organiser

The weekly of the fused Workers Socialist League, July 1981 to April 1984

[In the 1820s and 1830s, socialist ideas were…]

Socialist Organiser no. 124, 17 March 1983 · scan pp. 8–9 · about 328 words

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In the 1820s and 1830s, socialist ideas were represented with a great deal more penine and hrilliance hv three orest. LAA We the WALLLY thinkers: Saint-Simon and Fourier in France, Owen in England. They based themselves on altogether different methods and yet, in essence, on the same line of reasoning as Babeuf.

Of course, not one of the above-mentioned men thought even remotely of any revolutionary seizure of power for the realisation of socialism. On the contrary, like the entire generation which followed the Great Revolution, they were disappointed with social overthrows and with politics, becoming express adherents of purely pacific means and propaperished in the counter-revolutionary tidal wave, without leaving a' trace, other than a short, shining inscription on the pages of revolutionary history. SaintSimon and Fourier succeeded in establishing sects of enthusiastic and talented WIN MIM followers who - having sown rich and fertile seeds of social ideas, criticism and experiments - went their separate ways, looking for greener pastures. Of them all, Owen gained the greatest hold on the proletarian masses, but, after having attracted an elite group of English workers in the 1830s and 1840s, his influence also vanishes with hardly a trace.

A new generation of socialist leaders emerged in the 1840s: Weitling in Germany, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Blanqui in France. The working class itself had

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of preceding- revolutionary struggles, agitated by the various socialist systems, passionately espoused some nebulous notions about a just social order. As soon as the bourgeois kingdom of Louis Philippe had been overthrown, the Parisian workers utilised the favourable relationship of forces to demand the realisadeveloped by Marx are only the logical continuation of the science of economics as it had been created by the bourgeois scholars, but a continuation which, in its final conclusions, is in polar opposition to the point of departure of the wise men of the bourgeoisie.

The Marxian doctrine is a child of New Lanark - Robert Owen's "island of socialism"

← Contents of Socialist Organiser no. 124

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