The Birth of Socialism – A Better World is Possible

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Hello, welcome to season eight of Origin Story. In each episode, we take a word, idea, figure or institution from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian Linsky. And I am Ian Dant.

Now, normally we do six entirely different topics in a season, but this time we're trying something new. And anyone watching on the video link will be able to see from my T-shirt, a little clue. Because we've never done an episode on socialism or two-parter because it's too big.

So we thought, okay, why not do a whole season on it in all its manifestations, which we'll discuss, you know, from like Lenin to Labour Party. Now, the idea is that each... Topic, as usual, is like a great story in its own right. You can listen to it on its own. Sounds like a serving suggestion for food, doesn't it? Can be enjoyed on its own with a poached egg.

We're going to put them all together to tell a bigger story about what socialism is and has been and might be. So it's not comprehensive. This is not a university course. I just can't stress enough how not comprehensive this is and how I don't want your emails about the people that we know. About glaring emissions. We are well aware of the fact that there are emissions here. So this started as a vague possibility because obviously it's something we haven't done before.

And then actually over time we just thought, oh no, this could really work. Why did you want to do it? Why do you think it was worth doing a whole season with a broad theme? The absolute basic origin story motive. is you keep on using this word, are you sure you know what you mean by it? And I mean, that has to be at the heart of any decision that we make on an episode. And it's quite hard to think of a word.

that for the last 200 years has had a broader and deeper sense of widespread misunderstanding. Most people... who engage in it, whether as an attack or sometimes as their own sort of badge of identity, have a pretty loose and sometimes wantonly absent grasp of what it actually means and what it entails. And so I think it's actually worth looking at. And then what you find is a series, like...

you know, it can be quite hard to zoom in and focus on it sometimes. But what you find are sort of like really quite specific ideas. Some of them are incredibly esoteric and obscure and, you know, grounded in a very particular moment in time. But ideas that can be challenging can be just... as long as you're not just painting in watercolours in this very, very broad and slightly meaningless way.

So I came across this nice quote in a book that you've been using, GDH Cole's Socialist Thought. Yeah, this is really like the key text for non-Marxist or pre-Marxist socialist ideas. I think it's the possibility of defining socialism has often been emphasized and sometimes regarded as a reproach. But neither in politics nor in morals is any important idea or system ever capable of being exactly defined.

which I feel is a good message for our origin story in general. It's just like each time you look at this idea and you think, okay, what does it really mean? You know, almost on that way, how to win an argument on blue sky. What does it really mean? And then you just go, oh, there is no firm. I mean, there's certainly some definitions are better than others, for sure.

But I just like the way that pretty much every book that I read about socialism was just like, oh, well, obviously there's lots of different socialisms. Right. And I suppose the emotional arc here is that you would say, you know, it is... I suppose more often than not, a story of failure. Not in terms of some of the policies that have actually, you know, ended up spreading around. But in terms of like the big projects, most of these people have never got power.

Sometimes when certain soldiers did get power, did not end well, there's a lot of disappointment involved in this story. There's a lot of disillusionment and people trying again. And yet there's always this hope. And so right now, I think it's interesting. You've got, you know, Mamdani, the mayoral candidate in New York, and there's a great deal of excitement around him, you know, as there was about...

Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn a decade ago, but he's like a younger guy and he seems very savvy politically. And, you know, I feel that as well. I'm just like, yes, why can't we try these things? That whole thing of like... The essence of socialism, I suppose, is a better world is possible. Like, how do you get there? And how does it get warped along the way is a massive part of the story. But maybe that's the sort of like, that is the emotional essence.

And the thing that people often say, which is like, oh, God, you know, why is the left so divided these days? And I just want to say that is the entire 200-year history of socialism. It's people disagreeing with each other, sometimes incredibly fiercely. And so I'm sorry, but that is a feature, not a bug. Right, so we're back with OED.

Which is very exciting because we haven't done an ism in a bit. Only ever sound that happy when you say the letters OED. I love the OED. I'm slightly abbreviating these definitions because they're quite long. So socialism, a theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society.

and therefore advocacy or practice of such a system. And then it says it's also relevant to liberal social democracy. So right away, it's got its definitions. The range of application of the term is broad. It is typically understood to involve the elevation of the social position and interests of the working class, especially through redistribution of land or wealth, nationalization of industry and services, and the creation of workers' cooperatives.

They are covering the bases. Yeah. The first citation, it says, is from 1833. But first citation for socialist is actually earlier in the 1820s. Both cases are associated with someone you're going to talk about in depth, Robert Owen. And in fact, the word only really takes off in Britain in the middle of the 1830s, thanks to Robert Owen. It basically describes people who...

who think like Robert Owen. Now, communism, which is, what do we call it, a variant? I'm not even sure it's that. It's a cousin. Step-sibling. A more satisfyingly robust word for a very similar set of ideas. So I thought, okay, communism, that's probably easier to define. So I read Leslie Holmes in his introduction to communism.

Communist theory is ambiguous, often incomplete, and sometimes overtly contradictory. So I go, okay, right. So that's no, that's not so good. So the OED says, a theory that advocates the abolition of private ownership, all property being vested in the community. and the organisation of labour for the common benefit of all members. First citation is in the New York Spectator 1840, where it talks about a man named Dufresne, concluded with an exposition of the doctrines of communism.

Much the same as what Mr. Owen preaches in England under the name of socialism. So isn't it telling that the first citation for communism is like basically socialism. Then we have communism with a capital C. Which is a political doctrinal movement based on revolutionary Marxism, seeking the overthrow of capitalism through a proletarian revolution, the social ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a classless society. Perhaps inevitably...

First citation for that is in the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. So you've got small C communism before Marx and Engels published that book, and then you've got big C communism, which sort of means Marxism. But it's really important to remember that small c communism is much more diffuse and predates Marx. I mean... I always sort of felt that the chief distinction between these words was really emphasis and sensibility. Like...

Socialism, it's a really big, expansive umbrella word. You know, it can apply to Stalin and it can apply to Starmer. And any word that is that big, you know, obviously has very little focus to it. Whatever your criticisms of the current prime minister.

You know, I think we can establish that. Whereas communism, I mean, like there is no world in which, I mean, I don't even think, you know, Corbyn or John McDonnell would have said the word socialist, communist for themselves. You know, a Labour politician would use that word. It's derived from, well, partly, you know, obviously in French, from the commune, you know, that unit of governance, but then also from...

The idea, you know, that you have in the French language, but also in old English language of the commons, you know, like this sort of commonly held land of like this thing of, okay, so everything will be held in common. There's a much broader power that you're talking about than the one that typically figures under social.

which is usually a bit more specific in terms of the socialization of industry. So it's just about being tough and comprehensive and more kind of robust and revolutionary. I think that usually distinguishes the people that are using that word for themselves. As we go along through the...

the first half of the season, I think we'll see various attempts to sort of draw up new distinctions. But yeah, generally it does just mean something like harder and more radical. I mean, that's the only kind of common thing.

So this first episode is about the birth of socialism and communism and all these early versions before Marxism, right? And you've probably noticed this, right? Some histories... begin with these really early versions. They go back to like the radical egalitarianism of Jewish sects, most famously Christianity.

Very successful Jewish. Indeed. And then like other attempts at building alternative communities like the Anabaptists in 16th century Europe, the Diggers and the Levelers in the English Civil War. Now, obviously, they didn't call themselves socialists. But you see them crop up a lot. Marx and Engels would cite them as kind of forerunners. Engels specifically talks about all of these groups. Other people talk about Plato.

and ancient Sparta and the Peasants' Revolt. So there's definitely a sense that this sort of aspiration for society has not just appeared from nowhere. But we are not going to start with Jesus Christ.

No. That would be too far. So in the first episode, we're going to start in the aftermath of the French Revolution and explain these sort of early socialisms and communisms before Marx. And I know this is very origin story bingo. But H.G. Wells, in his book New Worlds for Old, basically writes the history of socialism. And he says, answering the question, what is socialism, is like asking, what is Christianity or demanding to be shown the atmosphere?

And he calls this sort of early version a very noble but very human and fallible system of ideas for reshaping society upon new and better lines. And I think this is a really good description, a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries. and experiments. Its value lay not so much in its plans as in its hopeful and confident denials. Basically going, this shit isn't working and the world could be better.

And as we'll see, plans are sort of optional. Some people have quite clear sense and other people not so much. But that, I suppose, is the theme of these sort of early socialisms, isn't it? These are all men, they're all men, who are kind of living in this spasm of extraordinary change, which is basically the creation of the modern world.

So, you know, politically starting with the French Revolution, you know, this is obviously, this is the birth really of liberalism, of conservatism, and in the end of socialism as well. Like these three great main sort of ideologies are just born in the furnace of the French Revolution.

And then at the same time, the industrial revolution is happening. And that on a day-to-day level is obviously having much more of an impact. And you're thinking like, what the fuck is this? You know, these great factories, like there's almost this vision of like the mechanization of man, of, you know, if you think that all of your assessment of what...

What work was, was, you know, the fields. And then suddenly it's in these quite satanic looking factories, thinking like, what is going on? And just... desperate they're all desperately trying to make sense of what is going on here what is happening what does any of this mean and where are we going i mean this is quite relatable you know that we are in sort of turbulent times and now we have dark satanic chatbots

You know, but there is a feeling of like, oh, things I don't seem to be working and everything's in flux. And so there's something quite admirable about these individuals' attempts to kind of dream up a whole different... modeled for society, but that of course keeps changing. We'll see this even more with Marx.

It's something new happens. There's another war. There's another revolution. And they're like, okay, we're going to have to adapt the theory. It's really like they're trying to work shit out on the fly in response to constant change.

Then the thing to take from it, right, is like socialism didn't have to be, it didn't have to have the shape that we see it have today. And primarily, it didn't have to be Marxism. that became like the overwhelmingly dominant variant of this idea. It could have been any other number of these options that we're about to look at, which could have had worse or...

you know, frankly, I think much better results. What we should say is that these versions we're talking about in many ways eclipsed by Marxism, but they didn't die and they're not irrelevant. And these ideas, they're not like just weird, archaic delusions. It's like, and some of them actually have, there are things that you can point to in British society today and go, this is a direct result of this person's ideas.

And yet you look at it like, you know, you can have two views. There are some people that with the word socialism want to keep it super strict. It is common ownership of the means of production. Right. And that's what it is. Yeah. But of course.

It's a fool's errand, because if you draw it that strictly, you would have to block off almost anyone operating right now in politics. Anyone that's ever been in the Labour Party, pretty much. Anyone that's working for, I don't know, Novara Media, none of them get to use the word socialism. So you just think, well, this is an absurd, it's way too strict. So instead, what it really has to be realistically is a bundle of ideas.

And that bundle of ideas really comes to life in this story here. It's ideas like, well, just on a really basic level, equality. Are you really strongly concerned with equality in society and morally outraged by inequality? Another idea is a suspicion of competition. This view that I actually just basing a whole society, and by the way, to be fair, I share this view, basing a whole society simply on the value of competition is just utterly chaotic and deeply...

I still like what the human personality is like. And it might make more sense to organise our economy and our society around cooperative lines, at least in some areas. Yeah. And also a much more critical eye towards property.

We are willing to fuck with property. And that could be on the far end, we're going to set up collective farms and there'll be no more ownership of even, you know, underwear. Or on the other end, it could be like, well, fine, we're going to, you can make your money, but we're going to tax it and we're going to use that to set up a national health service.

You know what I mean? But across the board, we are going to have a pretty skeptical view about the rights to private property. And we believe that we can fuck with it. Most if not all of these people, including Marx, they start with human nature. why do people behave the way that they do and you know and even though we obviously then you know you're getting into economics but it doesn't start with the means of production or

who owns the land or taxation or stuff like that. It starts with like, um, are people like this because that's just, you know, in a radical human nature or are people. shaped by their environment. And then if you change the environment, then you can change the way that people behave. And there's just a real kind of humanist, another word that actually appears during this period. There's one sort of human foundation.

wherever sometimes it ends up leading. That's sort of like fundamentals. This is not just a story about like different economic models. I think that thing that you're talking about right there is just at the beating heart of the whole story. People look around and say, why do people behave this way? Will they change if we start changing the environment?

You know, that is a conversation people have all the time about all sorts of different matters. And it turns out that also when you start changing the environment in order to create the change you want to see in the human spirit, you can end up doing some pretty fucking terrible things. And that's part of the story that we'll tell. Shall we do the French Revolution? Can I stop you?

Well, something is origin stories have to start at one of three different places. They have to start either in ancient Greece or the French Revolution or the period in between or just after the wars. basically the first and second world. There are no other starting places. And this, of course, is a French Revolution start-off. And this is not just in terms of the beginning. It's also, this is the story that is in everyone's heads.

as they operate throughout the first half of the socialism season, you know, all the way through to Stalin, I think, but certainly for Marx and Lenin, in the same way that now when we think about Ukraine and Putin and whatever, you know, Somewhere in our minds is the Munich Agreement. You know what I mean? That's the sort of the model that is in our minds when we appraise this stuff. The French Revolution is the model that these guys are taking that is in their mind.

So a quick potted five minute history of the French Revolution as it is pertinent to what's being discussed here. It's best to think of it in this capacity as a revolution in two parts. So the first part is 1789 and the second part is 1793. 1789 bit, most people are familiar with. France is in a state of financial despair. Louis XVI calls the estates general the sort of assembling of individuals in order to make a decision about the finances. But the third estate...

which is meant to represent the country, but really represents bourgeois lawyers, starts to misbehave rather spectacularly and ensembles itself, constitutes itself as a national assembly. Louis brings the troops into the capital. On the 14th of July, the Bastille falls, people fight back, and really the first stage of the revolution has begun. Within less than a month, on August the 4th, they've destroyed the former feudal regime.

And shortly afterwards, they published The Rights of Man. It's almost like a document that just births the modern era. At that point, you were living in something that has liberal values to it. but there are problems i mean the main problem really is that the king refuses to behave he keeps on trying to run away which is difficult for them because they're trying to set up a constitutional monarchy a second problem is war

There is war raging. There is a threat of invasion. That war in one way or another will go on for years and years and years. But there's real paranoia that, you know, that the rich, that left, that the nobles, the foreign powers are going to come in and destroy the revolution. There are extremely volatile prices, particularly for bread. And the thing about people's behavior during the French Revolution that I always need to remind is that...

They were starving, especially the urban poor were starving and therefore demanding increasingly radical propositions. The groups that were demanding radical propositions were groups like the Herbertists under Jack Herbert. And Jack Rue and the enraged ones. So these are guys who suddenly want something like far more drastic than what they've seen before. The main players in the revolution.

The deputies who are in the convention, the parliamentarians, they all believe in property. They all believe in private property. whether they're the more moderate Girondin or whether they're the much more radical Jacobins. They're all property guys. They're all basically lawyers. These guys in the streets are going, no, we want price controls on bread.

We want you to interfere with property rights, you know, as they are. And they also want far more radical political action. So in 1793, this second period of the revolution takes place, almost this sort of second, it's almost like a second revolution, really. Hare Bear and his followers invade the convention in September and force it to pass a series of laws, including...

certainly price controls on bread, but also the expansion of a revolutionary tribunal. And that's when the terror begins. So we see waves of executions, fellow radicals, of royalty, of moderates, initially in quite a decentralized and anarchic way. and then later under the authorship of the Committee for Public Safety and Maximilian Robspierre.

You didn't like my pronunciation, do you? No, no. Committee for Public Safety is just one of those brilliant kind of proto-Orwellian. It really is. They sound really good. It's like what? Just sort of like speed limits. and i go well more guillotining than you might think

So look, that lasts until July 1794, and then eventually the wave of paranoia turns inwards, Robespierre is executed, and the terror comes to an end. Two months later... A man called François-Noël Babouf, 1760 to 1797, publishes the first edition of his newspaper, the Journal of the Freedom of the Press, later called the Tribune of the People.

He then changes his own name to Gracchus Babuf, after the Gracchi brothers who served as tribunes of the people of Rome, apparently. He's in line with the enraged ones. And then also, of course, the constant demands for... executions and death. You know, the defense of massacres and the use of massacres as a political solution. It's one of the things that defines really radical cause in this period. And for everyone in the future, looking on, whether it's conservatives,

thinking about what happened, or whether it's the socialists that we'll come to, this thing of the combination, the radical political action, the violent upheaval, combined with property, with the breaking of property rights, that joining together of these two concepts.

He grew up poor. He was a household servant. Then he was an assistant that helped collect dues under feudalism. He moved to Paris when he was young. He finds just a lot of disillusionment. He thinks people, you know, the peasants got their land. During the end of feudalism, but the working poor really didn't have much to show for all of the revolutionary activity that they'd frankly been responsible for making sure succeeded.

So he's repeatedly arrested. He's imprisoned. And of course, every time he goes to prison, he just forms friendships and becomes further radicalized by his relationship with other revolutionaries who are also in prison and let out again. And they start plotting. But his key moment comes in 1796 when the government threatens to abolish the price controls on bread, which really is tantamount to threatening workers with starvation.

And then he wins a small following called The Society of Equals. And he is part of the publication of what is really the first ever socialist pronouncement called The Manifesto of the Equals.

And it's the origin of a lot of what we see next. I mean, the first thing is the origin of is this sense of the one-two punch in revolutions. That the first revolution will be bourgeois, the second revolution will be proletarian. You know, that it starts with the middle class and then it goes to the working class. And this...

just ends up playing an incredibly weird role in socialist history because you get a lot of sort of socialists over the next sort of two or three episodes are going to be spending time thinking, do we have to help? The bourgeois have their revolution so that we can later kill them and have ours. It produces this sort of weird emotional disassociation. The manifesto says, the French revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution.

one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last. Wow, that sense of finality is hugely important in Marxism. Yeah, yeah. the end of history, a phrase we associate with Fukuyama. It's just a really important idea throughout the story. It's just like, we fit. This is the solution to society. And it's there months after the French Revolution, months after the death of Robespierre. That's crazy. The second core idea is this idea of the common ownership of land.

We lean towards something more sublime and more just, the common good or the community of property. No more individual property and land. The land belongs to no one. We demand we want the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land. Now, because of this period, because you're pretty much kind of just pre-industrial revolution.

They're talking about land. But of course, what goes for land here will later go for the factories and what we will come to call the means of production, like the machines you use to create things.

And throughout the socialist story, that idea of common ownership is usually the land and the means of production. You know, when people say common ownership, they're rarely talking about T-shirts and, you know, tables necessarily. What they're talking about is these sort of the mechanisms by which we produce goods.

the land of the factory. And then it's the origin of something else as well, which is a bit more radical, which is a quality of distribution, which we don't always see with socialists. One of the big distinctions in socialists is How much inequality will there actually be? People have access to different kinds of stuff. You could believe in common ownership of the land, of the means of production, but not think that we distribute the rewards in a completely equal way.

That is not what he thought. What he thought was, let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. They are satisfied with one son and one heir for all. Why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them? Frankly, questionable logic, but there we are. We would call that communism more than socialism, wouldn't we?

In terms of the oomph, the robust emphasis of it. The robust and like literally everybody is equal. Yeah, yeah. And this is very much the world of robust emphasis that we're in right now. To the point where he's... Famously robust and emphatic period in France. I keep on saying he, by the way, he didn't actually write this, but, you know, he was part of the process for it. And to the point where the manifesto says, let all the arts perish, if needs be, as long as real equality remains.

They also say the loss of the enjoyments of the few, of solitary pleasures, of personal ease will cause lively regret. And then you start to get a hint of some of the dangers to come. commonization of man, of just a uniform conformity that is being asked for, as well as the equality of the distribution itself. People actually start chanting, they start singing his songs in cafes.

Paris is sort of placarded with posters about Babouf's teaching, and he starts to plan an insurrection against the government. The trouble is there's a spy in the ranks, and they've been telling the government of the conspiracy. So... on the 10th of May, one day before the conspiracy is set to take place.

In 1796, he is arrested and it is brought to a stop. He is condemned to death. He's guillotined the next day without appeal. And that is basically the end for that kind of politics in France until the 1830s in terms of being able to do it publicly in any... way shape or form i mean napoleon's coming in you know it's it's going to be pretty dampened down so that ends and that acts as almost the prologue and we'll see specific people hark back

to him over the course of this story. And Babouf is usually there as a talisman for the much more violent approach and much more sort of, again, robust. Let's stick to that word, approach towards this endeavour. Hi, I'm Dorian Linsky from Origin Story. And I'm Ian Dunn from Origin Story. Every year there are more and larger data breaches. You've probably heard about the big cases in the news or been personally notified that your data has been compromised.

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He is followed by the Utopian Socialists, which is a group which commonly sort of held for three people, St. Simone, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. This phrase, Utopian, it was meant to be disparaging under marx and under historians today it is not disparaging it is simply the idea of like look they were imagining a kind of utopia they weren't clear about whether it could be achieved anytime soon they weren't

you know, necessarily wistful dreamers that were really quite practical a lot of the time. But they were imagining a utopia and they were quite concerned with the shape and character of that utopia. So Engels, even though he's obviously sort of... quite critical of these guys. He says of Saint-Simon, almost all the ideas of later socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo. There's definitely this sort of, you know...

This kind of ambivalent relationship with these guys. Yeah, yeah. He's one of our classic origin story characters in that he's convinced... From the moment, you know, really, even when he's a child, he's going to go on and change the world and do great things. I don't know how we find these people over it. But to be honest, it must be quite a useful thing to think. It often works. Because they do keep on overachieving, right? He used to have his...

an aristocrat he needs to have his valet wake him up every morning to the line remember monsieur you have great things to do which i might i mean i could put it in my phone i could make it part of my alarm what's that alexa Great things you say. So he decides that he has to just go through life with as many experiences as possible before he can do his great work. So he fights in the US Revolution and the War of Independence alongside Lafayette.

He supports the French Revolution, although he does spend most of the French Revolution trying to profit from it, not least by trying to buy Notre Dame and then stripping its roof of metal and selling it for scrap. All right, well, that's one way of doing your revolutionary duty.

That's fucking incredible. It really is. He's imprisoned, needless to say, he's imprisoned on suspicion of council revolutionary activity during the terror. He's probably lucky not to be fucking killed, frankly. Not least also because he is an aristocrat. But he's released. And then he finally starts writing at the age of 42 after Napoleon has come to power. His view is sort of like the core theory.

is that the French Revolution is the start, I mean, correct, is the start of a new epoch after classical antiquity and medieval Christianity. And that it's going to washer in the advance of a unitary science. The period that's just ended, he thinks, this period of conflict is really this conflict between the industrials, that is, the productive people, or you could say the working class, although I want to extract the way that you think of that word from the way that he's using it.

He literally means people who work. Yeah. And the old privilege classes. He really hates idlers. He fucking hates idlers. And so you get that idea with him. And this idea will pop up all the time of labor, the act of labor, as the crucial distinction in mankind. It's like a kind of like a sacred duty.

And a distinction. It is the most important thing in what we do. We labor. We change our environment. Unlike the animals who just live within the environment, we change our environment. He's obsessed with canals, as you can imagine. Absolutely obsessed with them. Like Marx, he's done something specific here. Just by that brief description, he's put economics right at the heart of the historical process.

Which is just something which seems fairly normal now and would seem like your starting point. That is not the starting point until this moment. He's saying economics is at the heart of the historical process. Like Marx, he thinks that labor is the crucial distinction in mankind. And like Marx, he thinks that class is the core element in that history. He's splitting humans into different groups.

based on economics and saying that that's how the engine is operating however there is a really important series of distinctions here first thing is that class is not actually the thing that produces change It's a product of it. The thing that produces change is science and ideas and then class as a product of that. It is not the engine driving change. Marx has a different view, but we'll come to it in the next episode. More importantly...

kind of like more eccentrically, he thinks that proletarians and bourgeoisie are in the same class. So he thinks if you're the employee or the employer... You're both working, right? You're part of the industrial people. You're not an idler. You're in the same class. As long as you're not some tough living off the...

Your capital, right? Exactly. You're fine. Exactly. Yeah. So the manager, the worker, they're all the same. They have no class antagonism behind them. You could be a manual worker. You could be a banker. You're basically within the same class. That leads him to quite an interesting thought because then you'd be like, well, why do they keep on exploiting the workers if that's the case, if they've got these united class interests? And his answer is they've got false consciousness.

the managers of the factories, the owner of the machines. They've got false consciousness. They only behave selfishly because they operate in a selfish society that encourages competition and selfishness. This is the idea he raised right at the beginning of the program. But if we change the world, if we put in a new series of systems, a new kind of production, their minds will change as well and they will develop a different kind of consciousness.

Within liberalism, you see a battle over precisely this idea. Are people the way they are because of the way society has been formed? Do we have the right to start trying to change the way that they behave by messing around with society? And one of the big fears, and actually it's in conservative...

as well that follows from this period, really from the socialist example, is a fear of utopian political authorship. What can you do to humans when you've decided they have false consciousness on the basis of their environment that you get to change?

But you're right. You can't give up on the idea itself. Because, of course, if you do, it simply must be the case that people are at least to some extent the product of their environment. And that if you change these, when we change tax, you know, when we put more taxes on cigarettes, what is it we are trying to do?

Two, discourage smoking by making it more, you know, of course. But look at, you know, the relationship between sort of economic models and like high trust and low trust societies. It's like... I mean, that sort of observation, that quite radical observation, is sort of kind of widely accepted, but the implications vary. Like, then how much can you try and change human nature? There's a few more ideas here as well.

He doesn't want equal distribution. So unlike what we saw earlier, he's saying like, no, no, no. I mean, look, we'll allocate rewards according to service, positive service.

by labor to the for the community but you won't necessarily have the same rewards you know what i mean like obviously it fits from someone who's in love with labor that the less labor you do the less shit you get yeah so this is not you know the complete leveling of mankind however he does have that view which is really shared by almost everyone in this story which is that work should be planned

And it should not operate according to the chaos of an unregulated free market. That that competitive instinct, without any kind of restraint, just isn't a logical way of organizing humanity's affairs. He also has something that we'll see over and over again, which is a highly authoritarian disposition. So he's just not interested in individual rights. He's not interested in democracy, sort of things like if you don't get it, you know.

It doesn't matter. We can just force you to live under the system. He's completely uninterested in happiness or human well-being, actually. What he's interested in is, like, creativity. It's like just, you know, innovation, creativity, and whatever we have to fucking do to make that shit happen, we will do it to you. He has a very lonely, sad life. You know, he's incredibly depressed by 1823 over his lack of influence. At that point, he attempts suicide by shooting.

shooting himself six times in the head with no success, which by the way, it's just one of those things that's very hard to visualize how that was an unsuccessful operation. He does lose sight in one eye, which doesn't seem like a tremendous achievement when you fire six bullets into your brain.

And yet, in the next two years, he actually starts to find disciples, particularly engineers and scientists, start to gather around him. He dies in 1825, having published his final book, which is called Nouveau Christianism. think new christianism um the final pages seem to suggest that he thinks that god is speaking through his mouth and this prompts this sort of

strange new religion to develop around it. Most of the things that we say about St. Simonism, its biggest popularity was not really to do with him. It was to do with the disciples who came afterwards, in particular a man called Infantine, Bartholomew Prosper Infantine, who named himself the Supreme Father of the St. Simone religion. and started to instigate a project of, well, sort of free love and the destruction of the family in a sort of religious sect type way.

And so for a long period, the sort of practical ideas of St. Simone were kind of buried under this really weird, very obscure religious sect that was primarily concerned with awaiting the arrival of the Supreme Motherhood on Earth. It's quite the departure.

It is quite the departure. They're also kind of a sort of like part of the formative process by which the Suez Canal comes into being. So they go off on their own weird tangent. And they are socialistic, but they do more to sort of mar the name, really, for early people than they do anything of contribution.

of the ideas. A similar process takes place with Charles Fourier, who also is a very practical man with sensible sort of low-key plans that then eventually dissolves into madness. From 1772 to 1837, born to a middle-class merchant family, starts earning his living as a correspondence clerk and a travelling salesman.

and is just kind of aghast at the waste and the drudgery of the free market, of the private sector, of buying and selling and speculation and cycles of inflation and economic stagnation. It's almost like... Do you remember during our NeuroLiberal episode, we said that one of the reasons that Frederick Hayek was so...

enamored with the efficiency of the private sector was because he'd never fucking worked in it. You know, once you've worked in the private sector, you're like, well, it's just full of deeply incompetent people doing terribly wasteful things. Well, actually, Puri had worked in it and thought, you know what, this is just a shit system. This isn't very efficient.

He laments the fact that his life involves participating in the deceitful activities of merchants and brutalizing myself in the performance of degrading tasks, which is exactly how I text our production team when I'm done with an episode with you. He's far more likable and humane than St. Simone. So he starts, he's I think the only person in the story of this episode who starts from the opposite point of view on human nature. It's not how do we change it.

It's what is it that people do? What kind of a social system can we build around that that is best for everyone? For this reason, it's very popular with anarchists later on. You're trying to release. Human nature, right? Exactly. And build around it. It's almost like they're called desire lines, you know, like where instead of building pathways, you just sort of let tall grass grow in a space and see where people walk and that's where you put the pathway. It's basically that kind of...

model, really, for economics. Well, I found reading about him, not in as much depth as you have, but this is a proto-1960s figure. He's just emotions and psychology and sexuality and the passions and how society can reflect that. I mean, he, like, maybe the most utopian of the utopians. Yeah, and also the most sexy. The hottest, for sure. Not his looks, his preoccupations. No, no, but I mean, just his vibe. His super vibe, yeah, yeah. I know what he looked like.

His ideas smoke. We could introduce a concept to origin story. Everyone introduced, we're like, and how hot would you say they were on a scale of one to 10? It's not an insignificant part of history. No, although it will change, unfortunately, when we get to Marx and Stalin. So it's the opposite of false consciousness, right? He's not interested in that. He's saying, no, there's nothing false about this consciousness. You know, it's just our job to build around it.

He hates almost everyone. I mean, he hates the English for inventing the industrial society. He hates Adam Smith and David Ricardo for rationalizing it. He hates the utilitarians for their individualism. He hates Robespierre, obviously. He particularly hates the Saint-Simonians, you know, because obviously they're obsessed with creativity rather than pleasure. All he really cares about is pleasure.

obsessed with large-scale production, huge projects. He just wants small communities for humble men, really. And he wants to accommodate man's desires rather than change mankind. His core belief is basically we should just stop the drudgery of buying and selling and we all just need to have a good time. That is the core idea that he operates according to. I do find him very attractive indeed. I think he's great.

which is just produced by simple measures, things that we really enjoy, you know, good quality furniture and clothes. Basically, food. And of all the foods, the food that he is most interested in is salad. He really, really likes salad. And he essentially creates an entire society around the creation of really wonderful salad.

So you have these communities called phalanstere. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly. Every time it's mentioned, they say it's an untranslatable word. Oh, that's good. Derived from phalanx, from the Greek. which would have 1,620 members cultivating 5,000 acres. I need to stress to you right now, he's obsessed with numbers. He arrived at the 1,620 number because there are 12 common passions.

which result in 810 different kinds of character, which are shared between two sexes, making 1,620 the optimal number for kids. Oh, right, so it's science. Oh, okay, no, no, sure, I get it now. No, exactly, no one can falsify that shit. There'd be four levels of flat... the nicest flats at the top and the worst ones at the bottom. So there is inequality of distribution.

You'd be rewarded for skills, for responsibility, for managerial capacity. You would have share capital that you can invest if you wanted to. It was actually pretty broad. Families would be living to themselves. They're not, you know, communalized in the middle. The family unit would still exist and you'd have privacy. He despises, well, really, I mean, what he despises is actually just having to do the same thing again and again.

Now, with sex, he's obsessed with that. He's basically like, why on earth do we think that you'd want to keep on having sex with the same person again and again? We really need diversity of romantic outcomes. But the same thing... I'm sorry, diversity of remaining outcomes is like someone just explaining to his wife why he keeps having affairs. You must understand. You must understand the ideas of Charles Fourier.

And he wants it for labor as well. And by the way, I don't think that these things are, it's not like he's dipping out into the sex bit while talking about the labor bit. He sort of sees them as part of the same process. This is from the anarchist Hakeem Bey.

Fourier sexualizes work itself. The life of the philanthropy is a continual orgy of intense feeling, intellection, and activity, a society of lovers and wild enthusiasts. I'm sorry, but the Divine Comedy... band should definitely have already released an album called the society of lovers and wild enthusiasts and i don't know why they haven't already

So it's all part of sort of the same thing, diversity. And by the way, this idea then comes up in Marx in a very beautiful way. It's one of Marx's most charming ideas of the dehumaniser, not to do with sexual activity, it would surprise you to learn, but to do with labour.

that the dehumanizing impact is just doing the same fucking thing day after day. And it doesn't come up in liberalism very much, I think, because most liberals have jobs that that is not the case. It's quite diverse. I say you're a barrister, you're a politician, you're a journalist. You're not so concerned with this. If you work in a call center, obviously these guys are thinking about factories. Stick the widget in the thing. Stick the widget in the thing. What is left of your humanity?

But even now, you know, you think of like a call center, something like that, held to this very rigid script where you're barred from presenting any kind of individuality at all. Yeah, that is a brutalization of your capacity and your authenticity as a human being. He's deeply... concerned with that and there's a real it's not talked about very much but there's a real sort of part of socialist thought that is about diversifying work to better reflect the full breadth of our human experience

It should also be said, I mean, at this point that he does go basically almost completely insane. I mean, the ideas that he starts having later life include the fact that the sea is going to turn into lemonade, that six moons will orbit the Earth. that 37 million poets will emerge to equal Homer and that every woman would have four husbands. So like...

There's this tradition in early socialisms of it starts with this practical sort of project. And then eventually you're like, oh, now we're going to start talking about the Supreme Mother, you know, and form a new religion. And that is what happens to him in the same way that it happened with the St. Simonians. is happening at the same time but nevertheless once you get past all of that you see ideas there for

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wherever you get your podcasts. Now, final part of the trilogy, I think, unfortunately, the least sexy. Although he does also become obsessed with the family unit and whether it should be destroyed or not. Robert Owen, 1771 to 1858, Wales finally gets its role in the origin of socialism wrestling the crown away from France. Well, HG Wells calls him, more than any other single person, the person we must regard as the father of socialism. So I don't know whether that is UK bias in play.

Whether you agree. I suppose the thing is that, you know, Marx and Engels are doing lots of their work in London. You know, so I suppose the influence... Health check on this. I haven't read this somewhere. I'm sort of guessing that I suppose maybe the influence was felt strongly there. He certainly, of these three...

the most successful in terms of he is getting shit done. Like when he is saying stuff, stuff is happening in people's lives. It's not just dreaming it up in a notebook somewhere. You know, Fourier would wait.

for industrialists to come join him to fund his plans and, you know, wrote, I'll be sat in this cafe every day for lunch with a seat next to me if anyone wants to come. And for years, he sits there and has lunch on his own. You know, no, it's quite sad, actually. No one wants to come help him. Whereas Owen... owns factories, and therefore can just do this shit, which he proceeds to do. He's born in Newtown in South Wales, working parents. His father was a local postmaster.

Moves to Manchester at 18 and works in a drapery and, you know, for the next few years is just there going, these are shit conditions. Humans should not work in these conditions. We cannot put up with this for much longer. He's in Scotland when he falls in love with Anne Caroline Dale, the daughter of David Dale, who owns the new Lanark Mills. They marry in 1799, and the next year, him and his partners buy the mill off Dale.

He becomes the manager. He's basically able to treat it as his experimental hub. His core belief is the idea that we have now seen several times now, which is the characters are formed by the environment that they operate in. callousness, the competition, the inhumanity, the mechanization of the free market, the slums, is part of what is destroying people's characters. So the only way of doing it is to abandon unregulated

competition and try to improve character by improving conditions. Those are the principles that he runs a new Lanik on. Real focus on education. And he's trying to sort of say to fellow capitalists, this is not at this point, it's not anti-capitalist. It's essentially like we want a more humane version of capitalism. He's trying to convince, you know, sort of fellow managers are saying, look.

It's ultimately in your interest to plow some of your profit back into conditions and to pay for workers, into education for their children. You will ultimately make less money. You'll be living in a better society. It's exactly the kind of argument that you would expect to hear now from people on the software.

left. And at this point, he's called the philanthropic Mr. Owen. You know, he's loved by Tories. I mean, Tories absolutely adore him, actually, and many others considered absolutely mainstream, even with royalty. But he starts to radicalise in 1817. At speed, there's a series of addresses and reports to newspapers where he denounces the competitive system and all religions. The religious aspect is really the bit that does him more than the competitive systems.

Basically talking about getting rid of the whole social and economic basis of society and spiritual. But over the next few years, the manner in which he denounces religion... loses him any of that mainstream respectability that he's gained over the first half of his life. Also, he's sort of messing around with gender relations and marriage in a very progressive way, which does not go down well with Tories in the...

1820s, I'd imagine. All of these guys, it's the same thing, isn't it? It's this really weird view they have of religion. Almost all of them kind of want to create a new religion of science. You know, they're very aware of like Christianity isn't going to work. No one's going to believe in it much longer. Don't know they're wrong about that. You know, we need to find a way of kind of harnessing that energy towards, you know, rational means.

So they're all quite concerned with both of these elements. In 1820, in the report to the county of Lanark, he puts forward a labour theory of value. This is the idea, an absolutely pivotal idea, that labor is the sole agency capable of giving values to commodities. So it's not a new idea. I mean, you can see its origin in John Locke, really.

But it's certainly there in Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was really widely understood by economists. But he is harnessing it in a different way, right? Because it's about its moral and political impact for workers. If labor is what gives something value, then it follows that the working class are not being given the wealth that they have created for the managers in society. Yes. Now, it must now be clear to people.

because of the kind of economy that we live in, that the labour theory of value is false. It, of course, made complete sense for people back then. You know, why is a car worth more than a broom? Because more labour has gone into it, you know, more time. It is obviously not the case. When you can have like...

a shoe that does have a Nike logo on it and one that doesn't have a Nike logo and the shoe is identical but one will sell for more, that that is not about labour. That is really about people's subjective view of what value is. I think that's much more obvious for us than it would have been for them. Nevertheless, this was... very widely held at the time. He makes it the moral core of an economic theory. If they're creating the value, why wouldn't they get the reward?

And he starts to open up labour exchanges where different cooperative producers can trade goods. by virtue of the amount of labor that went into them, where you extract the market from the pricing mechanism. And it's just on the basis of the extent of the labor of the product. Plan to abolish money and just have labor notes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly that.

In 1825, he goes over. He's losing so much support because of the stuff on religion. And he just goes to the US and thinks, you know what? I'll buy a community and just do socialism. as a kind of petri dish experiment so it goes over to the village of new harmony in indiana and buys it from a religious sect it's about 180 buildings several thousand acres of land and turns it into an experimental settlement, which also opposes, of course, marriage and family life.

fully communal living without separate family lodgings. So we're kind of back to the more robust end of the spectrum here. You know, when he starts his story, he starts way off the scale on the moderate wing and very quickly, you know, becomes pretty extreme. One of the weirdest aspects of the story that we can't, it was one of those things where you just think, oh man, I could do a whole episode on this. Because I discovered this book by John Humphrey Noyes, who set up the Anita community.

maybe the most famous American sort of experimental community. And his history of American socialisms is a massive list of communities inspired by Owen and by Fourier. and similar thinkers all the way across the states people are trying this out far more so than i suppose so much space as well. You know, far more. It's not happening in England. It's not really happening much in France. America in the Midwest is the lab for socialism.

Everybody sort of having a go. Given that it plays almost no part in the rest of this story. You know, it's extraordinary. At this point, that's where things were possible. So they get a thousand residents by the end of the first year, reformers, adventurers, vagrants, philosophers. It must have been, I mean, I would love to be a fly on the wall for how this shit went down. It obviously didn't go down very well. It didn't contain the right mix.

of skills and aptitudes, didn't have any joint experience, didn't really, I mean, this is the more difficult bit, you know, some people just like didn't have the same religion, didn't have any kind of joining view as to what they were trying to achieve or, you know, their group identity. So they start having angry disputes. Are we a self-run body or are we just Owen's dictatorship? Owen's view is you are my dictatorship, you know, but I might eventually hand over to you later on.

Groups splinter. They form all these autonomous subgroups. Whole thing falls apart. Closes after two years and Owen goes back to Britain. Joshua Warren, a participant at New Harmony, said this. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French Revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. Well, can I give you an amazing one from Horace Greeley, who was Fourier's leading follower in America?

And this was his kind of like tearing his hair out conclusion to this particular experiment. A serious obstacle to the success of any socialist experiment must always be confronted. I allude to the kind of persons who are naturally attracted to it. And he says this includes, of course, noble idealists and great thinkers, but also... And this almost sounds like, well, you know, in Orwell, it's sort of going like, what annoys him about some people attracted to socialism? It's like...

But also the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played out, the idle, and the good for nothing generally, who, finding themselves utterly out of place and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly... This is absolutely magical. Isn't that an incredible definition, I suppose, of the crank problem? Yes, exactly. Look, he comes back to the UK and there was a moment, I mean, quite a period where he...

is essentially at the head of the trade union movement. And there is a possible sliding door to alternate future where Owenism really defined the way that trade unionism operates. You know, it's a really core moment. Unions have come back, they're legal, they're being persecuted by government. He has a proper leadership role within that. I mean, he is literally the president of the Grand National Union. It doesn't work out. And that period of his ascendancy in the working class is gone.

He dies in Newton in 1858, completely penniless. But the cooperative movement survives him in a rather strange way. So in 1844, the Rochdale Pioneers Cooperative Society. It's basically just a little shot. The idea is you sort of tradesmen club together on basic principles for cooperatives. And, you know, sell goods at a cheap price. And this is obviously, you know, where we get the cooperative movement that we know today. But it is also the origin. really of the cooperative party.

which is in partnership with the Labour Party and which currently has 43 members of parliament. People don't really get what the fuck it is, the cooperative party, but it's like certain MPs are there, you know, as cooperative and Labour MPs. It is a full joining together of those. parties in partnership so they don't really have a distinct identity when they're in parliament however that gives you an idea then of

Going from the far end of the communal abolishing the family to when he comes back, suddenly he's in the mix of things that will inspire the Labour Party rather than Marx in the future. Trade unions. cooperatives well so he's you know that's part of his legacy he's also back when he still had sort of friends in high places involved in some of the first uh laws to limit child labor oh yeah

And the eight hour day, you know, campaign for that. So it's weird that once again, you've got this kind of real like failed experiments out there and new harmony. And these really substantial, which now just seem kind of like obvious. Of course, child labour is bad. You know, so he's sort of this ultra pragmatic and then ultra, you know, idealistic. Yeah, yeah, it's quite alive.

So those are, I think, you're right, like the big three. But what happens around 1840? everything sort of happens around that and that all comes together all the threads come together marx at this point is in his early 20s and so i kind of just want to talk about like some important books, important thinkers, as if you are like Marx, a young socialist sort of looking for ideas in Europe in 1840, right?

So the first one is, in 1839, Etienne Cabet publishes a utopian novel called Voyage to Icaria. And he was a radical republican and a campaigner for workers' rights, member of the Chamber of Deputies in France, exiled to England for his antimony. monarchist writing. And he picks up on this utopian tradition, pre-socialist, of imaginary worlds. Obviously Thomas More's Utopia, 1516, the most famous example.

And there's other ones like Campanella's City of the Sun. And they're all talking about sort of fairness and harmony, but there's always a degree of indoctrination and control. So the Ikarians live in like perfect equality and uniformity, inspired by some of the ideas of Owen and Fourier. But there's only one official state newspaper.

So it's sort of quite authoritarian. So these Icarian communities spring up around France. Far more followers than like Saint-Simon. There's about 400,000 in Europe. Oh my God. Followers. Not all with the communes. Cabay himself. this story repeats itself, founded in a Carian community in Nauvoo, Illinois, but he became quite authoritarian and tried to make himself president for life. Right. Let's just keep on happening. And was kicked out. But the community...

even though it had to move, lasted in some form until 1898. And it remains the longest lasting non-religious commune in the history of the US. Basically inspired by this novel. So between writing this book in England and then setting up this commune in America, Cabet returns to France briefly in 1839 where he popularizes the word communisme. Thank you very much. But originally, it seems to have been a strategic euphemism for egalitarianism that wouldn't be associated with the terror.

Oh, interesting. That it was a sort of like a new word so that you wouldn't think about Babuth and people like that. He was also one of the first to describe Christianity as a form of communism. And Christ is a kind of class warrior. Now, you'll see that still all the time on social media, isn't it? Like, you know, Christ was a communist. Right, right. And this is the observation by the guy who sort of invents the word communism. Obviously, the rebrand doesn't work.

And communism is almost immediately associated with people much more radical, associated with strikes, with assassination attempts on the king, with secret societies springing up all the way through Europe. According to GDH Cole, the word communism is first used in England in 1840 by an Owenite to describe basically something more militant than socialism. So one of the reasons why the Communist Manifesto is named after the Communist League.

Marx and Engels. And one reason is that Engels thought it sounded more radical than socialism. There we are. Also in France, same two years, 1839, 1840, we get these two really important books.

One is the organization of labor by the journalist Louis Blanc. Now, he's sometimes called the first state socialist, and he favors this sort of gradualist democratic transformation, but more radical. than the Utopians in one respect, whereas Saint-Simon wanted people to be rewarded for their labor, as you said. Blanc came up with a slogan, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.

which is something that people might think is from Marx, but it's from Blanc. And he had a plan for these things called social workshops, which was sort of somewhere between trade unions and co-ops. And he never really got to try them out because he joined the French government after the 1848 revolution. But then the job was given to someone else.

who then did them in a really half-baked way and they failed. So true social workshops have never been tried. But, you know, he was definitely one of those kind of more like pragmatic guys who had a plan. He probably popularized the word bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense and capitalism in the modern sense, which he defined as the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.

Capitalism was a word that existed, but he's generally credited with the way that basically Marx used the word bourgeois and capitalist. So... Well done, Louis Blanc. By the way, it's also the decade when we see anarchism emerge in its modern sense. So the other big book is by Joseph Proudhon. 1809 to 1865, the first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist. But, confusingly, he also called himself a socialist. So...

we may well do in a future season. I think it'd be fantastic to do a big two-parter on anarchism. I would love that. Right. But now, of course, we think it is something so different from socialism, but not in Proudhon's mind. In Proudhon's mind, it was a libertarian version. So he was being examined by a magistrate at some point who asked, what is socialism? And he said, every aspiration towards the amelioration of society.

It's not pretty broad. Not a helpful definition for us. Even by our definition. But it is important to know that even though a friend HG Wells called anarchism a miscarriage of socialism, that to Proudhon, he was also a socialist. Yeah, we could have, if we...

If we had wanted to, you could easily justify having anarchism as one of the episodes in this series. And basically for reasons of just being able to do the work and, you know, being able to focus, we've chosen not to. But you could easily do it as part of the bundle of sort of the family, really. Now, obviously, you know, his book, What is Property? opposes all systems of government. He wants to replace the state with a federation of small independent communes.

abolish private property altogether. And he comes up with the maxim, again, often people sort of assume is Marx, what is property? Property is theft. So in 1842, the German scholar Lorenz von Stein makes a very early attempt to clear up the confusion between socialism and communism in his book, Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France, which is...

basically an early history of everyone we're talking about, many of whom were still alive, right? So he saw socialism as a scientific response to the Labour question, and communism was more ignorant, envious, and destructive, which is not. the definition that we will be adopting. But it was interesting that even that early on, someone's going, well, people keep using these words. What's the difference between them? So the final really important development in this period is chartism in Britain.

which Thomas Carlyle, a member, recalled the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, which is quite harsh. Yes, but we have to accept over again, even though he was an absolute racist bastard. No one has a turn of phrase like Thomas Carnail, and that's an example of it. And I think, you know, maybe miss off mad, but it is a bit of discontent growing fierce. I don't mean exactly what chartism is. It's not exactly socialism, but it lives next door.

And so much so that in 1840, the magic year, quarterly review refers to the two great demons in morals and politics, socialism and chartism. I think the thing is, right, that after the 1832 Great Reform Act, so, you know... you've got this great big pressure for an expansion of the franchise for, you know, for the vote. You get the Great Reform Act in 1832, and it expands a little bit.

But not to the working class, right? And so the working class, we've done all the work. It's a bit like the urban poor in the French Revolution. They've done all the work to get you to that point, but they don't get any of the spoils. And so therefore, you get this really...

pent-up sense of demand for change that starts going towards the trade union movement, towards sort of socialist groups, towards other directions, because it has been blocked off from being able to express itself through the franchise. So they're not socialists. But they're so important to the history, obviously, of the British left and to the larger story of socialism. Because, again, this is the milieu that...

Marx and Engels enter when they move to the UK. I always love it when you use the word milieu. I think it's very daring of you. Well, it's a very French episode. So Chartism comes from the People's Charter of May 1838, where six MPs and six members of the London Working Men's Association teamed up and they made six demands.

Universal male suffrage, secret ballots, salaries for MPs, so that it wasn't just the wealthy, abolition of the property qualification for MPs, same logic, equally weighted constituencies. and annual elections. Quite tellingly, all five of those, of course, we now have. We have everything except the annual elections. And they organise mass meetings, often sort of clashed with police.

In 1842, they organised a general strike and presented a petition to Parliament that had 3.3 million signatures and was more than six miles long. It's quite a scene. Obviously, Parliament was like, no, thank you. So anybody that goes like, oh, you know, why won't the government listen to our demands? It's like they've got a petition six miles long and the government's just like, yeah, not going to read that.

So they were very, very important at exactly the right time for Marx and Engels. And some leading chartists will later connect with those guys before inevitably falling out with them. So just wanted to sketch there that... in this very, very short space of time, you've got all these competing visions of socialism and different strategies and all this stuff, and that it is no longer something that is mainly happening in France.

It is erupting in England and even in America and so on. Yes. Although... Not to be outdone during this period, France has, what, three different revolutions? Restore a monarchy, get another monarchy, get rid of that, establish a second republic. France ain't sleeping. No, I mean, France is... It's very much hold my beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just that it's not quite just like, it's not like the only game in town, which it sort of is. But to go back to France...

to round this off. August Blonky. 1805 to 1881, a very long life for a man who really you would have expected to live a very short period of time, given his proclivities. Son of an old Durandine revolutionary.

starts going on demonstrations against the monarchy in 1827. I am not going to go through with you every time that he was arrested because I have never... That's fine. I have just never... I've never found a life story that manages to make itself... boring through repetition despite the fact that its content is so obviously dramatic and interesting all he does throughout his life is plan a conspiracy for an overthrow of a government by violent means get caught get thrown in jail

usually lose about 10 years, often a lot of it in solitary confinement, then get released, instantly do it all over again before he gets imprisoned and sent back again. By the time he dies at the... On New Year's Day, 1881, at the age of 76, he spent 33 years in prison. He's a sort of expert in kind of street fighting and urban warfare. And it's always about kind of surprise attacks, get a few hundred men, get some guns.

Fucking get the police station. You know, just take over the police station. If you can't do that, take over the town hall. Call for the working classes to come. Working classes don't come. They've got no idea who you are. They arrest you. They put you in jail for another 10 years. I mean, this is not a...

physically fair appraisal of his life, but I think it is an accurate one. So I'm not going to go through every time, but just get the impression that over the course of the many revolutions that are taking place during this period, he is doing that. There is one really telling moment though that it is worth looking at.

which is that he is released during the revolution of 1848 that leads to the collapse of the monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic. And at this point, it's kind of, you know... seems like he should have his kind of regime, really. It seems like everything's working out okay. He sets up the Society Republican Central, demands more socialistic policies. But...

The interesting thing that happens is this. The provisional government says, okay, we're going to have full elections and we're going to have them under a universal franchise. And that is the one part where he is less radical than the government. He says, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot have those elections. Like at the moment, people have been inundated with a reactionary system. They're not ready yet.

They're experiencing false consciousness. We cannot have elections right now. If we do, it'll go towards the reactionaries. The election results confirm his fear. The Conservatives constitute a majority in the constituent assembly. He's super elitist. He's super elitist. I mean, politically. He doesn't really have any interest in talking about a socialist society.

Unlike the utopian socialist who's spending the whole time planning these future societies, he doesn't really give any time to think about what society will be like later. He's obsessed with the moment of revolution. He is enchanted by it and with the violence that it entails. So he is actually, in some ways, one of the sort of formative influences for fascism. Mussolini's newspaper.

had a quote from him on the mast, he who has iron has bread, which also sounds like a Rage Against the Machine lyric. Wow. So this core idea of like just the violence, the moment of revolution is what you think about. And then he brings forward...

Something that's obviously going to pay a significant role, which is the idea of the vanguard. He's not really interested in newcomers. People come and want to work and say, I don't really give a fuck with you. I'm not interested in having a mass movement. I'm not interested even in a mass party. I'm not interested in winning elections. We are interested in creating a disciplined, secretive, highly trained revolutionary elite, which will adopt the leadership of the working class.

Put a pin in this one for Lenin. I don't want to foreshadow too strongly right now, but it's possible that these ideas will come up later. Lenin got very annoyed when Rosa Luxemburg called him a Blanquist. But, I mean... There is a similarity here, like a very different thing to, rather than the people rising up as one, it is the ultra-disciplined revolutionary cadre who might...

unfortunately, have to impose a temporary dictatorship while things are sorted out. Which is the other bit, right? In a way, everyone else is dodging the issue, the false consciousness issue. If there's a false consciousness...

It does follow that you would have to change the environment before people are allowed to have a vote again. You know what I mean? They can't be doing it while the false consciousness pertains. So therefore, it follows, as he argues, that you need a dictatorship of the proletariat. This would be a dictatorship of, you know, the revolutionary sect that's taken over. It would last for a certain amount of time. It's temporary tyranny.

But according to him, but, you know, during that time, you need to disarm the bourgeoisie, confiscate the wealth of, you know, large property holders, bring in state control of industry, establish these associations for production, and most importantly, educate for cooperation.

rather than competition right and once that's been established once you've created this world where none of this will be a problem anymore which let's face it in reality might be a very long time it might never happen at all then you could hand power back to to the people and have it there

But these ideas, the vanguard and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and also I suspect emotionally that enchantment with the revolution and with the drama of it rather than the careful planning for later, these are ideas that are going to start broiling around.

this story. Well, we should just clarify, because when we're using phrases like dictation of pletaria, it's like these are not the ones that he was using. It's sort of, we're using that kind of Marxist terms, but the ideas, it's weird, like how many of his ideas fit these later phrases.

So there's a coda here, because in the next two episodes, we're going to do the story of Karl Marx. And it might seem that Marxism just eclipses utopian socialism completely, makes it redundant. It does not. Even after Marx's death, there are still lots of socialists who just don't like the fact that that has become the dominant form of socialism. And they want to kind of revive the other one.

In 1888, campaigning journalist and reformer for Massachusetts called Edward Bellamy publishes Looking Backward, 1887 to 2000, which is basically a Gilded Age version of Cabe's Voyage to Acaria, reviving that tradition yet again. I wrote quite a bit about this in my world book, so I'm probably one of the few people who's actually read it these days. And in this, a feckless aristocrat falls into a coma in 1887, wakes up.

in 2000 in a socialist utopia where equality means there is no poverty, war, crime, ignorance, disease, unhappiness. and so on. One character calls it the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions. Exactly the idea that we've been talking about from decades earlier.

Capitalism is a hideous, ghastly mistake, and if you take it away, then people will be just brilliant. So Bellamy's sort of political project, it's not really a novel, it's obviously a political sort of manifesto, was... a non-threatening, non-Marxist socialism that would be palatable to Americans who distrusted socialism. And he writes to a friend, another major writer.

In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed, I may seem to out-socialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place, it is a foreign word in itself and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of petroleum, meaning like bombs and arson, suggests the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties and an abusive tone about God and religion.

So he kind of gets where people like Aaron got into trouble. It's just like, oh, okay, if you start slagging off religion. And the family and that sex stuff is in there as well. Coming up with like throuples and stuff, then you're going to lose people. So he first describes his vision as a religion of solidarity. Then he calls it capital N nationalism, which is very confusing because nationalism.

Does and did at the time have other meanings. It's basically utopian socialism without using the word socialism. So this book becomes the most popular book in America since Uncle Tom's Cabin. 50 years later, the Atlantic magazine called it the second most important book of the last half century after Marx's capital. And in fact, it was much more popular with American socialists than Marx was.

It inspired real political action from the launch of the Progressive Party to the Fabian Society to Atlee's Labour government. Holy shit. Which Atlee called a child of the Bellamy ideal. Wow. So it's one of those books, people don't read it now because it's not a good read, but unbelievably one of the most important books ever written in America. And it made the utopian novel the way to introduce socialism to a mainstream audience. So there were like 150.

imitators in america alone many more in europe in britain the famous ones are william morris's news from nowhere hg wells is a modern utopia and they were all different and they were all arguing with each other so morris Read Bellamy's book, hated it because it was state socialism, too uniform, whatever. So he imagines this sort of libertarian pastoral version, which suits his prejudices. It's the salad socialism we were talking about earlier, right?

So like the first wave of utopian socialism, this one is diffuse and quarrelsome. And there are Christian socialists like Bellamy. There are atheists like H.G. Wells. There are people who are like somewhat Marxists, like William Morris was... pretty Marxist, and then people who reject Marx altogether. And this tradition becomes really important in the American Socialist Party and the British Labour Party. You know, so non-Marxist socialism.

does survive and has this great revival. One example, which I'm going to end on, is Oscar Wilde's essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. And I think this sums up so much about this idea of human nature. he goes by, socialism, communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, still not decided at this point, you know, by doing what it does, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism. It will, in fact, give life its...

proper basis and its proper environment. Now, he says, look, it's got to celebrate individualism. It can't be authoritarian. So he's created, again, his own Wildean version of socialism. Very optimistic. He goes, it will of course be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical and goes against human nature.

This is perfectly true. It is unpractical and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out. The fascinating thing with all this is like, we have just over the last hour and a half, we're just like, there is about, let's say, five or six.

really interesting ideas there that these guys are just shooting out, breaking out, often articulating for kind of the first time. And some of them... are kind of good and bad like that idea of like the social conditioning of humankind you know has must be true has potentially very dangerous repercussions has

potentially a really good guide plan to how you can create social change, you know, progress. It's all just like a very complicated mixture. Some of them are... obviously terrible, like a quality of distribution, you know, that everyone would have exactly the same amount and you could practically and even morally and, you know, you just think, well, then we have a problem.

And that complete indifference to individual life, you know, and solitary life, life away from the group. And some of them were obviously really important and not talked about enough, like the degrading nature of work. And in particular...

how we can destroy the human spirit through remorseless, repetitive tasks, or even just try to summarize someone's life by just what they do for work. This whole area of... loss of control, of loss of autonomy, of loss of authorship over your life that can often take place through work.

They're all there. And so when you go through the socialist story, you just realize, like, there were all these ideas to pick from before we even get to the big one, the Marxist one. And if they'd been picked from, things could have worked out very different to the way that they did. But that's the thing you can...

relate to like one can be very sort of cynical you know utopian literature is where dystopian literature comes from because a lot of people read bellamy's book and just thought this seems nightmarish you know your your paradise is my how kind of thing And obviously when we are talking about some of the, you know, there will be some dictators in this season or whatever. And then it...

That is obviously, and that is the basis for the anti-communist, the anti-socialist argument. It's just like, well, this is what happens. But these people, these thinkers, they're responding to... to terrible situations in which people are exploited and impoverished and dehumanized and starving. And so, you know, that I think is where you can have this tremendous empathy for people looking at this rotten situation and just exploring these options. And that to me, that's that sort of positive.

essence of socialism that remains I think it all starts right even today someone who is becoming a socialist today it starts with this sort of view of like this chaos of the free market like the the seeming inefficiencies of it the way that it can trample over people's lives the way that so often with the market

We have to say, well, you just get, I'm sorry, but we're just, this person's just going to have to have a dreadful time because the market demands it. You know, as if it's this sort of fetishized God that, you know, that exists over all of us. And that sense of just the basic inequality that... It's very rare that you find someone who can see someone homeless on the street.

with, you know, a Ferrari driving past and not think something has gone wrong to create this outcome, right? That's the emotional space that most of this stuff begins with. moves from that space which almost all progressives and frankly a lot of you know conservatives would have had

into these series of questions and analyses and propositions that are much more contestable. But it almost always starts with the emotions. As Wells says, it starts with doubts and denials and repudiations. And everybody, you know, Edward Bellamy actually... spent a year in Germany, and he was so horrified by the industrial conditions he saw there. That's where it comes from. Everyone has that origin story.

if you will, where they've just been confronted, whether that's their own life or maybe that's something that they visited or witnessed, where they go, this is disgusting. And that's the impulse of just like, surely... we can do better than this. Exactly. Even if you don't have a plan or your plan is crazy and involves like the goddess of the moon.

And so forth. Like your own. Like my own. Mine would definitely involve the goddess. I do wish you would stop sending me WhatsApps about that plan because I don't think I agree. Hi, it's Dorian Linsky from Origin Story. And it's Ian Dunn from Origin Story as well. To mark the midpoint of season eight, the story of socialism, we're doing a live show. First one in a while, so we're very excited. It's at the Tabernacle in West London on Thursday the 13th of November.

November. Dorian is coming as Karl Marx. I am coming as Frederick Engels. And you can come as the masses. Google origin story tabernacle. We hope to see you there.

So thank you for listening to the first episode of season eight of Origin Story, the story of socialism. You can see all our sources in the show notes and give us feedback via the Patreon page on Blue Sky. I also want to take the opportunity to thank... tireless and brilliant producer Simon, who has done the last few seasons and is taking on this mammoth one.

I need to do a couple of thank yous as well to people who've helped me with this episode. Their names will come up again because I'm relying on them quite extensively during this project. Kevin Morgan, who's the MHS Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at Manchester University. Michael Braddick, Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. And Joe Wolfe, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy and Public Policy at Wolfson College, Oxford.

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Otherwise, like we started work on this season. I mean, I like started the week after we finished the last season. Just trying to fucking make sure we're getting it right. And like... The thing that we pride ourselves on when we do this is trying to explain things very simply and easily so it could be understood while you're gardening or walking the dog or in the car. And in order to do that, you kind of have to put in...

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