The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland Read Free Book Online Page A

of which workers would do something different. Fourier solved the problem of who would do the unpleasant work with the bizarrely original proposal that children – the ‘Little Hordes’ as he called them – who apparently enjoyed playing in dirt, would perform such tasks as cleaning latrines. He also mooted the idea that in the future a new type of animal would evolve, the ‘anti-lion’ and the ‘anti-whale’, who would befriend mankind and perform laborious work. Some of his suggestions may not have been seriously meant, but it is not surprising that the twentieth-century poet and critic André Breton should have regarded this dreamer as a forerunner of surrealism. However, in his desire to reconcile work with the self-fulfilment of mankind, and his hope that men could be made ‘whole’ by avoiding the narrowness imposed by the modern division of labour, Fourier represented the Romantic side of socialism, and had a significant influence on Marx and Engels.
    A more influential socialist enemy of Babouvian Communism was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a printer who outdid Weitling in his autodidactic efforts, teaching himself not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew. In 1840 he published
What is Property?,
which, with its powerful declaration ‘property is theft’, became the talk of the salons of France. However, Proudhon did not want to abolish private property – he merely wanted to spread it more evenly. Proudhon therefore objected to the Babouvian vision of an equal community, for the ‘moral torture it inflicts on the conscience, the pious and stupid uniformity it enforces’. 8 For Proudhon, socialism had to allow people to control their own lives. He envisaged a form of industrial democracy, in which workers would no longer be slaves of their machines, but would manage their workplaces; his ideal was a highly decentralized society, a federation of workplaces and communities run by workers. Unsurprisingly, he came to be regarded as one of the main theorists of the anarchist movement.
    Much closer to the Communist tradition was the socialism of Étienne Cabet, whose imagined utopia, ‘Icaria’, organized property in common and was governed by an elected government with complete control over the economy. His followers – who were numerous amongst French workers – were amongst the first to be called ‘Communist’. But most typical of the Romantic utopian socialists was the British thinker Robert Owen, whose ideas were taken seriously by both radicals and moreestablishment figures, and whose plans for socialist communities were put into practice. The son of a businessman, he became a successful entrepreneur himself and bought a number of spinning mills on the Clyde in New Lanark. He found that the workforce was unreliable, and he set about motivating them by providing better conditions for workers and offering education for their children. But how could work and pleasure be reconciled? Owen’s solution had much in common with Fourier’s: people between the ages of fifteen and twenty would work, and with the help of children would be able to produce all that the community needed; those aged between twenty and twenty-five would supervise; and those aged between twenty-five and thirty would organize storage and distribution, but that would only take two hours of their day; the remaining time could be devoted to ‘pleasure and gratification’. 9
    The utopian socialists, then, broadened the goals of Communism from mere equality to the achievement of human happiness. They also transferred the Romantic spirit from military heroism and patriotism to the new industrial age, by valuing man’s creativity in work. But they had their own peculiar weaknesses: their plans often looked eccentric and absurd; their connections with workers were far more fragile than those of the Communists; and they seemed to be wishful thinkers – they had little to offer in terms of a strategy by which the ideal society might come to be