The institutions of a just society

Following in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont (Econo­mic Politique Chretienne, 1834), on the cusp of the 1840s, in their extensive social surveys, social observers Louis-Rene Villerme in his Tableau de l'etatphysique et moral des ouvriers employes dans les manufactures de laine, de coton et de soie (1840), Eugene Buret, author of De la misere des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (1840) and Antoine-Honore Fregier who published Des classes dan- gereuses de la population dans les grandes villes et des moyens de les rendre meil- leures (1840) revealed the extent of working-class poverty and destitution.

However, in France, for the rulers of the July Monarchy the situation was due to nothing more than the behaviour of improvident, irresponsible proletarians. Charles Dunoyer, an economist and ideologist of the July Monarchy, explained that “the result of the industrial system is to destroy false inequalities, but this bet­ter highlights natural inequalities”. He continued:

it is a good thing that there are places in society where misbehaving families may fall, and from which they can only rise again if they behave well. Poverty is a dreaded hell. It is an unavoidable abyss, placed next to the madmen, the squanderers, the debauched, and all kinds of vicious men, to contain them.

(Dunoyer 1845, 457)

In total contrast, the Socialists explained that the poverty affecting nine-tenths of the population was not the inevitable consequence of a natural process to select behaviours adapted to the transactions of industry and trade, but instead the effect of flawed institutions. Louis Blanc observed that “corrupt human nature is blamed for all our ills [when in fact] the vice of social institutions is at fault” (Blanc 1847, 179), and Pecqueur also concluded that “the ills lie less in Man than in institutions” (Pecqueur 1849b).

For all these socialists, the first institution to reform was private and inher­ited property: it was this form of ownership that led to man’s domination of man, economic, political and cultural domination, the emergence of a chaotic world shaken by crises, a “society in ruins” (Pierre Leroux) composed of unequal, rival, unconnected individuals, and the opposite of an advanced society that new science, philosophy and religion should organise. In Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition (1829-30), it is explained that property is nothing but a “convention” and can there­fore be “perfected”. All the socialists of the 1830s believed that the main stumbling block was the present constitution of this property. This was, for the main part, where the confrontation with the traditional economic approach unfolded. Property manifests itself in the unchecked growth of unchecked power that simultaneously poses a problem of efficiency (loss of yields, waste) and equity (social domina­tion and vulnerability). Property should therefore become “social” (Pecqueur 1844, 233) but not necessarily managed from the centre (which was only one option among many available to social decisions): (1) property would be in each specific case the consequence of a choice made in common to share as fairly as possible the use of tools in proportion to the productive abilities of each person, and without prejudice to the contribution that each person should receive in return; (2) with the entire “industrial class” being producers, all would participate in this distribution, which would allow them to “live [well] through labour”: everyone would therefore be associates in economic and social life; (3) for all those who could not participate in the production of wealth - old people, children and the infirm - guarantees and insurance would be offered by society.

Naturally, since ownership and therefore social organisation would need to be totally transformed, concrete proposals for reform flourished exuberantly with vari­ous industrial, financial, social, cultural and architectural plans - with, once again, a general, overall, completed level and an intermediate level of more localised, hybrid proposals that would have to be put into action immediately to improve the current environment. On a general level, there were the Fourierist phalansteries and Icar- ian communities; on a more intermediate level, the multiple proposals concerned mutual companies, the first production and consumption cooperatives and projects for banking and financial modifications, such as Proudhon’s Bank of the People.

Proudhon’s significance among nineteenth-century French socialists, combined with his uniqueness - he was known as the “enfant terrible of socialism” (Chambost 2009) - makes it important to describe in a few words his famous banking project. In a letter addressed to Marx in 1846, Proudhon poses the problem as follows: “to bring into society through one economic combination, the wealth that has left society through another economic combination” (Proudhon, Letter to Marx, 17 May 1846). The problem as it appeared to Proudhon concerned currency circulation rather than the organisation of the workshop. The challenge was to reform credit so that work­ers could possess the instruments of their labour, in other words, the right to use them and to reap their fruits, without falling back into the vice of private property, which is exclusive in nature. Considering that labour alone creates value, Proudhon esteemed that labour itself could - and should - finance labour without resorting to capitalists or the State - Proudhon thus distanced himself from the 1848 socialists (Blanc, Vidal and Pecqueur) who recommended that credit should be managed by the State. The idea was to guarantee currency circulation through the intermediary of free credit.

If we look for a connection between all these proposals, we can see that for all these socialists, the unjust system of property (based on which market mechanisms functioned poorly, both in terms of efficiency and equity) needed to be regulated and even abolished by the growth of two institutions: the State (except for Proud­hon) and associations. By associations, we usually mean here producers’ coopera­tives. Social science led to an economic policy based on these two new institutions.

Now, two main forms or combinations seem destined to encompass, in a way, the new social relations. On the one hand, association, the principle of every strength and every economy; on the other hand, the disinterested intervention of the State, the principle of all order, all distributive justice and all unity. (Blanc 1849a, 89)

This was the common denominator, but naturally, projects and expressions dif­fered. Once again, it is interesting to look to Blanc, Vidal and Pecqueur and how they expressed the early socialists’ general orientation. Their example is particu­larly significant in that they proposed a social theory and then attempted to make it a broad, concerted policy in the spring of 1848 and as part of the Luxembourg Commission, together with the workers’ representatives of the major Parisian urban trades.^[239]

The Commission, they noted, had to act urgently, but its aim was also to “gather material for the future”, to propose directions that would transform “a vicious social order”.

The first section involved the guidelines for social workshops (the term thus described cooperatives, mostly of producers) presented by Blanc in his Organisation du Travail; he also attempted to incorporate Vidal’s vision for agricultural colonies.

[The plan] consisted simply in throwing into the middle of the current social system the foundations of another system, the cooperative system, giving the latter the nature of a large national experiment carried out with the assistance of and controlled by the State.

(Blanc 1880, 164)

The transformational institution was primarily the association, which Blanc imag­ined as a vast cooperative bringing together varied activities and productions; the proliferation of these rationally organised model institutions would bring social progress.

However, the State (Blanc had in mind the democratic State representing the interests of everyone, of which the establishment of universal male suffrage in spring 1848 would herald the existence) also had several major roles to play in this development. It was the “supreme regulator” of production: it had to provide the original funds to create the social workshops, and also protect their initial growth in a competitive environment, notably by sponsoring the association. It was also responsible for teaching the association the principles of good government, setting out to establish the rules of democracy, representation, election and discussion in the workshop. It still had to encourage the utmost respect for equality (need rather than merit), and verify that, in terms of labour and education guarantees, the work­ers, who had become the collective owners of the association, and particularly any new entrants, respect the principles of genuine liberty - equality and liberty being essential to develop fraternal behaviours.

As for the State, it is clear that, if it has a social function, it is to intervene as a pacifist protector wherever there are rights to balance and interests to guarantee; it is to put all citizens in equal conditions of moral, intellectual and physical development. This is its law. And it can only accomplish this law by reserving the right to distribute credit and supply the instruments of labour to those who lack them in order to make accessible to everyone the lifeblood of wealth.

(Blanc 1849a, 89)

The problem was to endow the State with the resources likely to help found asso­ciations without resorting massively to borrowing; and the way to do this was to transfer to it the administration of entire sections of the national economy. The solution envisaged by Blanc, Vidal and Pecqueur exceeded the initial issue, giv­ing the State a far larger role in managing the economy. In this second section, we see the State gradually becoming the leading institution for social transformation. In the overview text La Revolution de Fevrier au Luxembourg, the three socialists explained that while the State should encourage the multiplication of social work­shops, it should also buy up struggling factories and “create new labour and pro­duction centres” for every industrious population in difficulty. The adopted method involved buying up the railways, mines and canals. The State should found and run agricultural colonies all over the country. The project also planned to “transform the systems of banks and insurance in national institutions” and place all trade and commerce under State control by setting up warehouses and bazaars. These transformations would make it possible to allocate the State with a budget to fund the associations. However, they would also lead to making the State the economy’s main agent, a funder but also a producer. This second section of the institutional reform plan corresponded more closely to the predictions envisaged by Pecqueur, especially in his study Theorie nouvelle d’economie sociale (1842). And in this area, Vidal appeared very similar to Pecqueur: the nine main points of the general social reform plan he presented in Vivre en Travaillant (1848) after the Luxem­bourg experience above all pointed to the growth of the State in the economy.

6.