But power and control must remain where it has always been – above. Saint-Simon’s last idea was a movement-from-below to effectuate a Socialism-from-Above. What then was his relationship between the idea of the Planned Society and the popular movement? The people, the movement, could be useful as a battering-ram – in someone’s hands. The workers should organize – to petition their capitalists and managerial bosses to take over from the “idle classes.” The “New Christianity” would be a popular movement, but its role would be simply to convince the powers-that-be to heed the advice of the Saint-Simonian planners. It was only in the last phase of his life (1825) that, disappointed in the response of the natural elite to do their duty and impose the new modernizing oligarchy, he made a turn toward appealing to the workers down below. A systematic racist and a militant imperialist, he was the furious enemy of the very idea of equality and liberty, which he hated as offspring of the French Revolution. His schemes varied, but they were all completely authoritarian to the last planned ordinance. When not appealing to these, he called on Napoleon or his successor Louis XVIII to implement schemes for a royal dictatorship. Planned industrialization was the key to the new world, and obviously the people to achieve this were the oligarchies of financiers and businessmen, scientists, technologists, managers. His vision had nothing to do with anything resembling equality, justice, freedom, the rights of man or allied passions: it looked only to modernization, industrialization, planning, divorced from such considerations. What fascinated him was the potentialities of industry and science. Saint-Simon was impelled by a revulsion against revolution, disorder and disturbances. – Emerging from the revolutionary period, a brilliant mind took an entirely different tack. This typical Socialism-from-Above is the first and most primitive form of revolutionary socialism, but there are still today admirers of Castro and Mao who think it is the last word in revolutionism. The new order will be handed down to the suffering people by the revolutionary band. (In that sense we are democrats.) This will not be a dictatorship of the people, as was the Commune, let alone of the proletariat it is frankly a dictatorship over the people – with very good intentions.įor most of the next fifty years, the conception of the Educational Dictatorship over the people remains the program of the revolutionary left – through the three B’s (Babeuf to Buonarroti to Blanqui) and, with anarchist verbiage added, also Bakunin. This means a temporary dictatorship, admittedly by a minority but it will be an Educational Dictatorship, aiming at creating the conditions which will make possible democratic control in the future. Therefore it is necesary for us to seize power in their name, in order to raise the people up to that point. But the people are no longer ready to seize power. The revolutionary will of the people has been defeated by a conspiracy of the right: what we need is a cabal of the left to re-create the people’s movement, to effectuate the revolutionary will. But still they suffer, still they need communism: we know that. This combination immdiately raises a critical question: What exactly in each case is the relationship that is seen between this socialist idea and that popular movement? this is the key question for socialism for the next 200 years.Īs the Babouvists saw it: The mass movement of the people has failed the people seem to have turned their backs on the Revolution. This represents the first time in the modern era that the idea of socialism is wedded to the idea of a popular movement – a momentous combination. – The first modern socialist movement was that led in the last phase of the French Revolution by Babeuf (“the Conspiracy of the Equals”), conceived as a continuation of revolutionary Jacobinism plus a more consistent social goal: a society of communist equality. We will consider three of the most important in the light of our question. Out of the wreckage of the French Revolution rose different kinds of socialism. They traveled at first along separate lines. But they were not born linked like Siamese twins. Modern socialism was born in the course of the half century or so that lies between the Great French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. Hal Draper: The Two Souls of Socialism (Chap.2)
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