Consequently, one could not dispense with concepts such as the division of labor and authority, and the existence of a governing state party was no longer inconceivable. But here, too, competition eliminated individual profits and any kind of rent-income, so that society had to divide and regulate work. Other thinkers, however, clearly recognized the backward-looking, past-oriented aspect of communal socialism, and they replaced it with the idea of a state socialism that extrapolated other characteristics of the Industrial Revolution and postulated a logical completion: in place of the “anarchy of production” was to be a planned economy, in which the state, as the only entrepreneur, would take care of the well-being of all individuals. ![]() On the other hand, however, this workers’ movement, which gradually formed as journeyman craftsmen and the peasant population shifted to industrial cities, was itself a new element, and as obviously Fourier and Owen oriented themselves towards a horticultural idyll, their claim to represent a “social science” and to unreservedly approve of the technology insofar as it could be used to make work easier in the phalansters was modern. To deny this newness and the realities associated with it, such as profit and interest as well as the difference between entrepreneurs and workers, was the main characteristic of the emerging workers’ movement and not just of communal socialism. It is striking that this idea was nothing else than a countermove to that new thing, which soon after 1800 was often called the “Industrial Revolution”: the emergence of an extraordinarily mobile and agitated system of economic relations that entailed a high degree of risk and uncertainty to everyone involved, but which also opened up unheard-of opportunities for success, which in turn were linked far more tied to organization than to what was traditionally called work -the system of the rising world market economy, which is often referred to as the competitive system and later as the capitalist mode of production. At least the representatives of communal socialism like Fourier and Owen had drawn the exact opposite conclusion from the rudimentary antithesis between state and society, in that they wanted the state to be completely displaced by society, but by a society that would consist of countless communes, the phalansters, or “villages of unity and cooperation,” where people would lead lives freed from all barriers of nationality, division of labor, and religious superstition, because each of the small communities would a self-sufficient and manageable cosmos. ![]() No thought was further from the vanguard of the early workers’ movement than that one day socialist state parties with a leader or a small governing body at their head would completely dominate a state.
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