p Other schools of Utopian socialism did not share the optimistic views of the Saint-Simonists regarding the course of economic development in modern society. Saint-Simon’s great contemporary and rival, Fourier, categorically refused to admit that the position of the working—or, as he expressed it, the poor—class was improving. "Social progress is an illusion,” he insisted. "The wealthy class goes forward, but the poor class remains as it was, at zero."  [516•*  At times he displays even greater pessimism, stating that "the position of the poor in modern society is worse than that of the savage, who has at least the right to kill game and to fish where he pleases, and even to steal from anyone apart from his fellow-tribesmen. The savage, moreover, is as carefree as the animals, a trait that is utterly foreign to civilised man. The freedom granted to the poor man by present-day society is a sham, since while depriving him of the advantages the savage has access to, it does not even guarantee him that minimum means of subsistence that might be a compensation for the loss of these advantages."  [516•**  Finally, Fourier declares that the position of the people in civilised society, in spite of the sophists who sing the praises of progress, is worse than the lot of the wild beasts.  [516•***  True to his habit of calculating and classifying even what does not lend itself to calculation and classification Fourier indicates 517 twelve "disgraces des industrieux" (misfortunes of industrial workers) to which, for the sake of exactitude, he adds another four. Although this attempt to calculate the misfortunes of civilised man may provoke a smile—the more so since our author apologises for his calculation being incomplete and suggests leaving it to more experienced people to finish—it does reveal a rare perspicacity. As an example, I shall refer to the “second” misfortune, which is that civilised man is engaged in labour that overtaxes his strength, risks undermining his health, on which the existence of his children and his own depend. Then there is Fourier’s “tenth” misfortune, which he calls anticipated poverty and which consists of the worker’s fear of losing his wage. Lastly, the “seventh” misfortune, caused by the increasing luxury of the rich, at the sight of which the poor man feels himself to be even poorer (the present-day theory of relative impoverishment).  [517•*  If the SaintSimonists did not make any distinction between the positions of the wage-workers and the employers, Fourier on the other hand sees that the interests of these two social categories are antagonistic, and asserts that in modern society the success of industrial enterprises is founded upon the impoverishment of the workers, that is to say, the reduction of their wages to the lowest possible level.  [517•**  Whereas the Saint-Simonists see in the development of banks the last word in progress, Fourier thunders against the bankers and the stock-exchange speculators. Where the SaintSimonists are enraptured by the development of large-scale industry, Fourier proves that it brings with it the concentration of capital and the restoration of feudalism in a new financial, commercial and industrial form.

p His followers express themselves in the same spirit. Considerant says: "The first feudalism, which emerged from military conquest, gave the land to the military leaders and tied the conquered population to the persons of the conquerors by the bonds of serfdom. Since the trade and industrial war, in the form of that competition whereby Capital and Speculation inevitably become the rulers over poor Labour has replaced military war" (sic!), "it has tended to establish and in fact has always established a new serfdom by means of its conquests. Now there comes into being, not personal and immediate dependence, but a mediate and collective dependence, mass rule over the destitute classes by the class that owns capital, machinery, and the instruments of labour. In fact, taken collectively the urban and rural proletarians are in a position of absolute dependence on the owners of the instruments of labour. This great economic and political 518 fact is expressed in the following formula of practical life: in order to have a piece of bread each worker must find himself a master. (I know that you now say employer, but in its pristine simplicity the tongue keeps repeating master: and it will be justified, until the New Order is established, until the economic relations of the present feudal order, of financial, industrial and commercial feudalism are replaced by new relations)."  [518•* 

p Fourier already called the industrial crises occurring periodically in modern society crises of plethora, and asserted that the poverty of this society was engendered by its wealth. Considerant developed this profound thought further. He pointed to the example of England, "choking from its own plethora”, and pronounced absurd and inhuman a social order that "condemns the working class to hunger, and at the same time suffers from a shortage of consumers".

p Competition destroys the intermediate social strata, he goes on, and leads to the division of society into two classes, "a few having everything and a large number having nothing".  [518•** 

p Generally speaking, the Fourierists very often took the opposite view to the Saint-Simonists on economic questions, and this was vividly shown in their respective attitudes to the problem of the development of the productive forces in France as she was then, as well as in the whole civilised world. The SaintSimonists were unreservedly enthusiastic in welcoming the construction of railways, and dreamed of the cutting of the Suez and Panama canals.  [518•***  The Fourierists, on the contrary, considered that before building railways it was essential to reconcile the interests of the employers and the workers, and to establish the correct distribution of products between capital, labour, and talent through the establishment of phalansteries.  [518•****  Of course the Fourierists were completely in the wrong here; labour and capital in France have not been “reconciled” even up to the 519 present day. Yet what would France be like today without railways? In reply to the argument that the construction of railways would lead to the strengthening of industrial feudalism, Enfantin said that industrial feudalism was inevitable as a transitional stage of social development. That was right. But at once Enfantin slid back into Utopia, adding that, thanks to the discoveries of Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonists, the secret of peaceful social transformation was now known to mankind, so that the latter was able consciously and without upheavals to put an end to industrial feudalism.  [519•*  He was also Utopian when he maintained that, just as it had been necessary, for example, in the period of the Reformation to go along with Luther and Calvin, so now it was necessary to "fly to Rothschild”. The reformers of the nineteenth century had quite a different task. The urge "to Rothschild" was the Saint-Simonist version of: "Let’s go for training to capitalism."^^243^^

p Like the Fourierists, Louis Blanc decidedly did not share the Saint-Simonists’ optimistic views on the position of hired labour. In his Organisation du travail, he wrote that, under the impact of competition, wages tended consistently downwards, with the most serious consequences for the working class: it was degenerating. And—again like the Fourierists—Louis Blanc pointed to the growth of property inequality in contemporary society, and in this respect he also spoke of the concentration of landownership and not only of capital.  [519•**  Whereas the Saint-Simonists opposed the industrial class to the idle class, Louis Blanc opposes the “people” to the “bourgeoisie”. But it is well worth noting that his definition of the bourgeoisie fits the lower strata of this class more than it does the higher. "By the bourgeoisie,” he says, "I understand the aggregate of those citizens who, owning either instruments of labour or capital, work with means of their own and depend on others only to a certain extent.” That is either very badly put or is very close to Proudhon’s conception of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the conception of the petty bourgeoisie. No less remarkable is the fact that, in speaking of the “people”, Louis Blanc has in mind the proletarians proper, "that aggregate of citizens who, having no capital, are entirely dependent on others as regards the primary necessities of life".  [519•***  Louis Blanc observes the formation of a new social class, but sees it through the spectacles of old democratic conceptions, and therefore gives this class an old name, dear to the hearts of the democrats.

p I shall refer to two more socialist writers of those days: one of them is still fairly well known, while the other has been completely forgotten, although he fully deserves to be mentioned. I have in mind Pierre Leroux and his friend Jean Reynaud. Both of them went through the school of Saint- Simonism and early on took a critical attitude to this school. However, here I am interested only in their views on the role and position of labour in present-day society.

p As early as 1832, when the vast majority of Saint-Simonists discerned in the prevailing society only the antagonism of interests between the working class and the idle owners, and regarded “politics” as the obsolete prejudice of backward people, Jean Reynaud published an article in the April issue of Revue Encyclopedique under the heading: "De la necessite d’une representation speciale pour les proletaries”, in which he expounded views that were truly remarkable for that period.

p “I say,” he wrote, "that the people consists of two classes, distinct both in their situation and their interests: the proletarians and the bourgeoisie. I call proletarians the people who produce all the wealth of the nation; who have nothing apart from the daily wage for their labour; whose work depends on causes outside of their control; who from the fruits of their own labour receive daily only a small part, which is continuously being reduced by competition; whose future depends only on the precarious hopes of an industry that is unreliable and chaotic in its progress, and who have nothing to expect in their old age but a place in hospital or an untimely death.” To this vivid description of the proletariat, there is added an equally vivid description of the bourgeoisie. "By bourgeois I understand the people to whose fate the fate of the proletarians is subordinated and chained; the people who possess capital and live on the income from it; those who hold industry in their pay and who raise or lower it according to their whims in consumption; who fully enjoy the present and have no wish for their future except that what they had yesterday should continue, and that there should exist for all eternity the constitution which gives them the first place and the best share."

p It might perhaps be assumed on the basis of Reynaud’s statement that the bourgeoisie are essentially those who live on the income from their capital, that like all other Saint-Simonists he too had in mind only the idle owners,.i. e., the rentiers. Such an assumption would be wrong. Further on in his article he explains his idea very well. As it turns out, he puts among the bourgeoisie "the 2,000 manufacturers of Lyons, the 500 manufacturers of St. Etienne and all the feudal possessors of industry”. This makes it clear that his definition fully includes the representatives of 521 Indusrial capital. He is perfectly well aware that between the classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat there may be also intermediate social strata. But he is not dismayed by this. "I may be told,” he says, "that these two classes do not exist, since there is no insuperable barrier or indestructible wall between them, and there exist bourgeois who work and proletarians who own property. To this I will reply that between the most sharply distinct shades there are always intermediate shades, and that in our colonies it will not occur to anyone to deny the existence of black and white people, simply because there are mulattoes and half-breeds among them."

p Reynaud believed there had been a time when the bourgeoisie, representing their own personal interests, simultaneously represented the interests of the proletariat. That was in the period of the Restoration. But now that the destruction of the feudal nobility, which was prepared by the bourgeoisie, has been completed by the proletariat, the interests of these two classes have parted, making it essential for the proletariat to have special political representation.

p It would be difficult to put this more clearly. Reynaud, however, is yet a son of his time. He has not entirely lost the fearful recollections of 1793. He is afraid of civil war; consequently he makes reservations. According to him, although the interests of the bourgeoisie are distinct from the interests of the proletariat, nevertheless they do not contradict each other (ne sont pas contradictoires). Therefore the two classes can work amicably together to improve legislation.  [521•* 

p Pierre Leroux held the same opinions on the relationship of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.  [521•**  In the book I have just mentioned in a footnote, De la plutocratic ou du gouvernement des riches, he develops this view in detail. But the more detail he provides, the more obvious and even the greater is the unclarity of this view, an unclarity that can already be noticed to some extent in Reynaud’s work. It consists of this.

p Reynaud had already said: "I call proletarians the workers in the towns and the peasants in the countryside" (les paysans de campagne). One must suppose that in recognising the existence in present-day society of proletarians owning property, he was thinking precisely of the "peasants in the countryside". With a wealth of detail, Leroux enlarges on this kind of " 522 proletarian”. He asks: "Is the peasant with a hectare of land a proletarian or a property-owner?" In his opinion, he is a proletarian, since his hectare of land furnishes him witli a livelihood only to the degree that he applies heavy manual labour to it daily. What does it matter that this peasant is a landowner, if his ownership of land permits him to live only by arduous daily work? It is only when the instruments of labour have reached a certain limit that they are sufficiently productive to bring in a rent adequate for the subsistence of the owner. Within this limit one is a proletarian; one is a property-owner only beyond it."  [522•* 

p Leroux asks whether the man who owns a small plot of land is a property-owner or a proletarian. This question presumes that one cannot be a proletarian and an owner at one and the same time. But immediately after this, Leroux goes on to declare that the man to whom a hectare of land belongs, i.e., the owner of one hectare, is a proletarian. Here, the presumption that one cannot be simultaneously a property-owner and a proletarian is quietly shelved. Why? Because the owner of the plot works. But this suffices only to acknowledge him as a working-owner. The identification of a working-owner with a proletarian is, in any case, arbitrary. Why did Leroux consider it not only permissible, but, indeed, inevitable? Only because the man who owns a small plot of land is often very poor. To Pierre Leroux, the poor man and the proletarian are one and the same. This is why he lists among the proletarians all beggars, whom he calculates in France to number four millions, whereas the number employed in industry and commerce, by his own calculation, is not more than half of that figure.  [522•**  So that in France, according to him, out of a population of thirtyfour and a half million there are as many as thirty million proletarians.  [522•*** 

p In Reynaud’s argument “proletarian-owners” were compared with mulattoes and half-breeds, who in the colonies occupy a middle position between the black and the white races. Leroux, however, made out that these “mulattoes” and “half-breeds” constituted the larger part of the French proletariat.

p Needless to say, from the point of view of economics, Leroux’s calculations would often not hold water. But to understand him we have to remember that he is arguing not so much from the standpoint of economics as from the standpoint of morality. He saw his task not as having to determine exactly the relations of production prevailing in France, but .to demonstrate how many French people were living in poverty and by their poverty were 523 a reminder of the need for social reform. And inasmuch as he understood this to be his task he was in the right, although this did not prevent him from making obvious errors in logic: on the contrary, it caused him to make them.

p From this angle, Leroux’s methods of reasoning remind one very much of our Narodniks’ mode of thought.  [523•*  Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that his book De la plutocratic and some of his other works—for example, the articles published later under the title Malthuset les economistes, ou y aura-t-il toujours des pauvres?— contain a much deeper analysis of the relations between the wage-worker and the capitalist than what we find in the works of Enfantin and other orthodox Saint-Simonists. And, of course, this is certainly a great credit to him.

p However, these first steps in socialist analysis sometimes lead to quite unexpected theoretical results. To Fourier and his pupils, especially Toussenel as well as Pierre Leroux, Desamy and others, the main culprits of financial and industrial “feudalism” were the Jews. Fourier protested against equal rights for the Jews. Leroux pointed to them as "the kings of our epoch".  [523•**  The Fourierist Toussenel, as late as the first half of the 1840s, advocated an alliance between the July monarchy and the people for the struggle against the Jews. "Force to power! Death to parasitism!" he proclaimed. "War on the Jews! There is the motto of the new revolution!"  [523•***  These theoretical errors, which, happily, did not do any great practical harm in France, had not been surmounted by some varieties of Utopian socialism right to the end of their existence. And this, of course, is no small minus in the algebraic sum of their distinguishing features.

In conclusion, I will add that the economic views of the French socialists were far removed from the clarity and orderliness of the economic views expounded by English socialist writers in the 1820s and 1830s: Hodgskin, Thompson, Gray, Edmonds, Bray and others. The reason for this is clear: Britain was very far in advance of France in economic development.