Introduction
The first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was published in Germany in 1867, but it was not until 1875 that a French translation was published.1 It has not been uncommon for observers to see in the book’s minimal and belated impact in France a reason to denounce the intellectual backwardness of French socialists compared with other European socialists of the same period.
This has frequently led some to castigate the provincialism of the French workers’ movement and its regrettable propensity to exhume figures from the national past like Gracchus Babeuf, Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Etienne Cabet and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Among the principal figures associated with the different expressions of socialism in nineteenthcentury France, some were still active militants during the fin-de-siecle era and passed on to younger generations accounts of their concrete experience of socialist advocacy and militancy, notably their diverse participation in mutual aid societies, utopian communities, advocacy for the right to work (le droit au travail), the Revolution of 1848 and their experience of political repression during the Second Republic, the Second Empire and the 1871 Paris Commune. The Commune and its violent demise especially left an obvious mark on French socialist theorists writing towards the end of the century. In the wake of the Commune, some socialists died, others were imprisoned or deported, and many were forced into exile. This was the case, for example, for the two future directors of the intellectually influentional Revue Socialiste, Benoit Malon (1841-1893) and Georges Renard (1847-1930). The dramatic denouement of the Paris Commune explains in large part the long silence in French socialist output for at least a decade (1871-79), in striking contrast to the often cacophonous and verbose agitation of earlier generations.In reality, the end of the century witnessed a renewal of vitality amongst socialists on both a theoretical and militant level. Once the definitive establishment of the Third Republic had been ratified (1879), socialist-inspired parties and trade unions emerged and played an increasingly significant role in the country’s social and political life. This rebirth of vitality expressed itself in a profusion of debates
1 Prior to the 1875 translation, Le Capital had been circulating in pamphlet form since 1872. In 1887, an abridged and simplified version of the work was published for left-wing militants (Deville 1887).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429202407-14 and tensions originating, on the one hand, in the concern shown by each to find a theoretical basis for socialism, especially for its economic component, and, on the other, the desire to identify an effective political strategy for bringing about a socialist society. This took place against a backdrop of huge political, economic and social upheavals.
Socialist discussions from the early years of the Third Republic inherited some of the Second Empire’s heated debates regarding the transformation of labour, the critique of wage labour, the emergence of syndicalism, the revival of associations in the form of cooperatives and the importance of exchange and circulation. They were also additionally enriched by two aspects that this chapter examines. Firstly, the circulation and discussion of Marx’s economic thought in France was critical from the outset (Bellet 2018). Secondly, far from being associated only with Marx’s economic texts, the plural thinking of French socialists was inspired by multiple sources and should be contextualised within those debates which contributed to the constitution of economics as an academic discipline in France. Once economics was introduced into law faculties (1877), orthodox liberals’ violent opposition to socialism began to fade. The historical approach, the advantages of social observation and careful study of social issues, the analysis of legal forms of ownership and the history of economic legislation became part of teaching the discipline (Le Van-Lemesle 2004).
For these reasons alone, it is worth re-examining the canon of socialist economics from a plural perspective, one which does not reduce it merely to that thematic triptych of Marxist economics: the labour theory of value, the centralised organisation of the economy and the collective ownership of the means of production.The background to this intellectual vitality was the creation of a new industrial world (Fressoz 2009, 2012) and the novel ways in which it was challenged (J. Vincent 2020). If, in keeping with the Saint-Simonian motto, French socialists wanted to move from the exploitation of man to the exploitation of things, it was hard to imagine transitioning from one to the other in a spontaneous, smooth and obvious movement. Although different varieties of French fin-de-siecle socialism attempted to offer solutions for improving industrial production, drawing on the influential legacy of the Saint-Simonian imaginary, the perspectives they envisaged cannot be reduced to a single, homogeneous conception of abundance such as was conveyed by the guardians of the dominant social order.
The progressive abolition of slavery in Western Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century (England, 1833; France, 1848; United States, 1865) and the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire (1861) sparked a few debate about labour’s place in modern societies as it became clear that the end of slavery did not mean the end of either forced or alienated labour. Forced labour continued in the colonies as well as in larger cities for entire swathes of the working-age population - especially for agricultural workers and women (Stanziani 2020). New approaches to grappling with the concepts of political economy took shape during this era which were careful not to confine themselves to dogma, refusing in particular to limit the analysis of labour to the question of exploitation, often instead considering work in terms of its relation to the means of production and those natural resources necessary for production which were intrinsic to the milieu in which labour was conducted.
Socialist authors formulated theories about production which sought to understand how the work environment constrained labour and maintained forms of domination suffered by labourers.[252] Emancipating production was at the centre of all those discussions departing from the more limited Marxist focus on the theory of exploitation and the labour theory of value (Bourdeau 2018). Thematically this goal often overlapped with liberal preoccupations with “unbridled” industrialisation (Fressoz 2015, 378). French socialists distinguished themselves by considering labour as a process involving miscellaneous elements (machinery, natural resources, labour), the combination of which could be made fluid enough to allow for a new form of cooperation. The latter term even became the era’s watchword, even if it lent itself to a number of different definitions (Ferraton 2007).The trajectories of three socialist economists in particular - Benoit Malon (1841-1893), Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Adolphe Landry (1874-1956) - illustrate the economic eclecticism of their time, as they appropriated the conceptual apparatus of classical and neoclassical political economy not to reiterate a Marxist economic orthodoxy but to amend or even sometimes to contest it. These three economists reflect three ways of being a French socialist at the end of the nineteenth century. Malon represented the party activist, the tireless propagandist devoted to spreading knowledge about socialism in various publishing venues he directed (La Revue socialiste, the Bibliotheque Socialiste). He also represented the reformist current of socialist thought, intent on integrating socialist doctrines within the larger political and social context of the Third Republic. Sorel chose the unionist, revolutionary and anarchist path (“anarchist” in the sense given to the word by his favourite philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). For these reasons, he criticised the dominant political reformism promoted by Jean Jaures which aimed at creating a unified Socialist Party.
Erudite and not averse to polemic, Sorel was on the margins of the more establishment socialism then conquering certain academic disciplines (sociology, philosophy and, to a lesser extent, law and economics) where a French-style “socialism of the chair” was taking shape. Landry was closer to academia and completes a tableau in which we deliberately leave in the background the Marxist militancy of Jules Guesde, less innovative on a theoretical level although very active on a practical political one.The first author under consideration, Malon, developed a socialist political economy which contested the commodification of what he called “social utilities”, defined as the instruments accumulated by the labour of society as a whole as well as those resources offered by nature, which he believed should not be subject to private appropriation. The second, Sorel, considered economics to be the study of the general milieu of production and the identification of those conditions necessary for undominated creative labour. His conception of the environment requisite for production referred to everything which immersed labour, all that labour needed to be effective and all that should be put in its service rather than the other way around. If Sorel linked the issue of milieu to that of domination, it was specifically because he believed that an environment most conducive to labour would be one which was free from arbitrary interference (whether from individuals or institutions such as the state) disrupting the smooth functioning of production. Lastly, Landry showed that competition, contrary to what its liberal advocates claimed, opened the door to a frantic quest for maximising income and profits by the owners of capital or land, causing a corresponding reduction in the total production of social wealth which could benefit the greatest number.
In keeping with the spirit of Saint-Simonianism, all three men examined industrial society’s resources to describe the conditions needed to “emancipate” production. While workers’ emancipation, a major rallying cry in 1848, implied the desire to abolish any subjugation of workers to their employers, emancipated production, the new preoccupation of Third Republic socialism from the 1880s until the outbreak of World War I, expanded the goal to include all those concrete relations of production which developed between labour and its environment. Each of the three socialist theorists discussed here imagined fluid relations between workers and all the various components of production (machinery, natural resources and human participants), and all three writers sought to reveal the complex connections that workers simultaneously forged with nature and society.
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