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

realized. They merely exhorted the moral transformation of mankind which, whilst doubtless highly desirable, was hard to enact. At least the Babouvian Communists had a political programme founded on a proletarian revolutionary insurrection, which, given the worker unrest of the 1830s and 1840s, seemed plausible.
    However, there was one weakness both the Babouvian and the utopian traditions shared: they rarely showed convincingly how Communism or socialism could solve the problem of economic security and productivity. It was liberal thinkers, the defenders of the market – amongst them Adam Smith and, later, Herbert Spencer – who seemed to have cornered the market in sound economic theory. But there was one variety of socialism that did address this criticism – Henri de Saint-Simon’s ‘scientific socialism’.
    Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, born in 1760, was an aristocrat from an ancient ducal family but had originally welcomed the French Revolution. He fell foul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned, but hisresponse to his persecution differed sharply from Fourier’s and Babeuf’s: he looked to science to rescue France. Saint-Simon was the prophet of the Plan. The goal of society was production, as ‘the production of useful things is the only reasonable and positive aim that political societies can set themselves.’ 10 Scientists, industrialists, or a combination of the two, therefore had to be in power. Democracy – the rule of the ignorant masses – was only dangerous and damaging, as the Jacobin experience had vividly illustrated. Indeed, ideally politics could be dispensed with altogether, in favour of rational decision-making.
    Saint-Simon was condemned by Marx and Engels as a ‘utopian socialist’ because he was not ‘scientific’ enough for them, but this label is misleading. Saint-Simon was the heir of the anti-Romantic strain of Enlightenment thinking, and his ideas proved enormously appealing to later socialists who tried to reconcile equality with economic prosperity. And it was the combination of his ideas, together with those of Babouvian Communism and (to a lesser extent) Romantic ‘utopian’ socialism, that was to be the hallmark of the system created by Marx and Engels. Just as the left in the 1990s sought a ‘third way’ between visions of social justice and the ‘rationality’ of the global market, so too Marx and Engels tried to show how a much more radical social model, Communism, could be wedded to economic prosperity.

VI
     
    The year after Marx’s death, in 1884, the French writer Émile Zola began his great ‘socialist novel’, determined to draw middle-class attention to what he regarded as the central issue of the time: the imminence of bloody revolution:
    The subject of the novel is the revolt of the workers, the jolt given to society, which for a moment cracks: in a word the struggle between capital and labour. There lies the importance of the book, which I want to show predicting the future, putting the question that will be the most important question of the twentieth century. 59
    Zola initially planned to call the novel
The Gathering Storm
, but finally decided on the title
Germinal
, in deliberate evocation of the Jacobinswho had given the name to their new springtime month. Zola believed he needed to force his complacent readers to acknowledge the shaky foundations of the bourgeois order as capital and labour struggled, quite literally, beneath their feet. In the immense coalmine, ‘Le Voreux’ (‘a voracious beast’), ‘an army was growing, a future crop of citizens, germinating like seeds that would burst through the earth’s crust one day into the bright sunshine’. 60
    Zola’s main characters stand for four rather different socialist visions: Souvarine is a Russian émigré anarchist; Étienne Lantier a Marxist of sorts, an ‘intransigent collectivist, authoritarian, Jacobin’; Rasseneur, a ‘Possibilist’, or moderate socialist (based on Émile