A World without Sin, Social Utopians before Marx

A chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he [HG Wells] had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found … that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by car or balloon.

G. K. Chesterton

The thinkers who witnessed the horrors of the French Revolution subsequently tried to come up with explanations as to why things turned out so badly and tried to salvage the ideas that were foundational to the revolution. Many half thought out ideas were picked up by these thinkers in the revolution’s aftermath. One of these was the idea that human beings and their behavior were products of environmental and social conditions. Sin was not real.[1] They believed their ideas, when shaping the environment, could alter man’s selfishness and tendency to avoid hard work because selfishness had only come about due to bad social conditions. These Social Utopians wanted to create heaven on earth by changing conditions around humanity. As one author described this group, “They sought to challenge what they saw as the oppressive doctrine of original sin on which Christianity was founded. Mankind, they argued, was naturally altruistic and cooperative, and right-minded education would permit these qualities to predominate.”[2]

Thus, the study of the French Revolution is only the beginning of understanding the many undercurrents of our modern thought. Much of what we believe now comes to us from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Before we can assess their ideas, we must look at a set of thinkers who formed a bridge between the French Revolution and the authors of the Communist Manifesto. Engels wrote of these thinkers, “the demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals.” These thinkers worked out proposals for the removal of all distinctions based on their denial of God and sin. One thing common to all was that they did “not claim to emancipate a particular [group of people] ... but all humanity.”[3]

One such philosopher was Gracchus Babeuf who wanted to eliminate individual money and property. He thought it would be possible to create human beings who would send their goods to a common store house which would distribute the products of the nation to all people equally.[4] People would work out of a sense of patriotism and honor.[5] He had no conception of human self-love which might possibly lead to one wanting more than their share without having to work for it.[6] He did not believe that individuals might avoid boring or monotonous work when they could get their basic needs and pleasures without extra effort.[7] He did not need to think about this because he had an optimistic view of human nature and did not recognize sin within individuals. Anti-Christian sentiments were common amongst Babeuf and his colleagues,[8] and his ideas would be foundational for later communism, with its denial of private property, focus on economic equality, “and redistribution to the poor.” He also agreed with the use of violent “tactics to seize power.”[9]

To show how disengaged from the realities of work many of these writers were, take the writings of Françoise Fourier. How would he motivate individuals to do unpleasant tasks or hard manual labor? Fourier proposed that work would be made fun, and that truly unpleasant tasks, like cleaning toilets, would be done by children who like to play in dirt anyway. Thus, they would carry this work out happily.[10]. One might ask which is closer to reality, the ideas of Fourier or the view of work in Genesis. As God said to Adam, “because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3:17-19). Certainly, the sense of work’s challenge was lost with the abandonment of sin and the Fall. Another writer of the era, who did recognize the challenges that the drudgery of hard work creates, proposed “that workers had to be taught to enjoy work by doing three years of compulsory service in a quasi-military industrial army.” Here we see a frightening view of fellow human beings in which workers must be “taught “, a euphemism for forced, to enjoy work[11]. Writers such as these also argued that “society had to be organized so that everybody in the community could be creative and develop their individuality.”[12] This idea was highly influential on Marx. He would make much the same argument, stating that people would one day, under a more favorable communist environment, be able to spend time on multiple activities but that each would be enjoyable.[13]

Utopian Socialists were not actually workers, and thus they did not understand that work is not always pleasant.[14] Yet these writers were hostile to the “work ethic of the new industrial capitalism, which was so closely associated with Christian, and particularly Protestant, ideas of the time.”[15] They thought it was the beliefs of the time, based on church teachings and traditions, combined with the working conditions of capitalism which damaged humans. They characterized, “the factory system and the division of labour as transforming men into machines and life into joyless drudgery.”[16] Many of us feel the same way about our jobs, although the work we do is physically less demanding, and we are compensated with salaries which would be unimaginable to many.

That work stunts humanity is debatable. It must be asked, “stunting compared to what?” It requires a belief that work before the industrial revolution was creative or pleasant. Perhaps hard work on a farm was fulfilling but it is equally likely it was not. That many members of a household had to labor on a farm to produce barely enough food to feed themselves was unnoticed. That clothing was often unavailable unless the family made it themselves also was ignored. Labor in the past was not creative and fun, it was a matter of survival. Scraping a bare subsistence was unpleasant and required much hard work. Life in an agricultural society was far from easy or fulfilling,[17] but these thinkers assumed it must have been better than the problems they saw in their own times. They viewed industrial life as being uniquely dehumanizing. But we must keep in mind that these writers were separated from, and unaware of what work was like, industrial or agricultural. It was almost certainly not creative, spontaneous, or entertaining.

It can be said in favor of these individuals that they did not promote their program through government in most cases.[18] They did not always see the state as the means to enforce their new doctrines. However, they proposed attempting the moral renewal of mankind while denying original sin[19]. They were trying to fix a broken humanity apart from Christ. Chesterton’s point above is highly relevant, “the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man,” which is sin, “and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.”[20] A simple example clarifies this point. Imagine how many of your coworkers or fellow students are constantly spending time trying to get out of work or wishing they did not have to work. Try and imagine them fulfilling the grand vision of selfless action imagined by these writers. We all know individuals who will cease to work if they do not have to, but such a selfish desire, the “greatest difficulty of man” as Chesterton called it, is not addressed but merely imagined away by the above writers. Each of their solutions ignored basic aspects of human nature which would be known if sin were considered. But in rejecting this idea they tragically led individuals to pursue nonsensical dreams which would fail with tragic consequences.[21]

Each of these authors influenced Marx and Engels to some degree, but there were some key ways in which the pair thought these previous authors were wrong. Marx was critical of the thinkers mentioned above because they expected men to change significantly and did not explain how this would come about. Another writer of the era, St. Simone used science to explain how this change in human nature would happen. St. Simone argued for “scientists and experts” to be put in charge to change the environment. Only then could people be made more enlightened. An important repercussion of this idea, that will recur again and again, as we will discover, is that the goals of the individual should be overridden by “more intelligent people.”[22] For example, St. Simone even stated that those who did not obey his proposed “planning boards” would be “treated as cattle.”[23]

In contrast, Marx thought his ideas of “scientific socialism” better explained how communism would bring about an improved environment and economic conditions.[24] “Marx dismissed the various socialisms … as ‘utopian’, contrasting ‘utopian socialism’ with his own ‘scientific socialism’ that promised ‘full communism’ as its predictable outcome. Because history could be made a science, the ‘historical inevitability’ of this condition relieved Marx of the necessity to describe it.”[25] This is where modern people who argue “they are on the right side of history” and declare their enemies are on “the wrong side of history” got their claims. Such phrases reveal an overconfidence in human knowledge, science, and progress. As we will see, their “right side of history”[26] often led to mass murder and starvation and poverty, but this has not made a dent in their confidence. Because of Marx and Engels’ hesitation to follow in the footsteps of the Utopian socialists, they often left the specific features of the future communist society largely undefined. However, they did describe the many problems they had with the world they were born into, attacking the family, religion, and capitalism. We will examine these next.

[1] E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 30. Kindle Edition. [2] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 783, Kindle Edition. [3] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (Wallachia Press, 2015), loc 80, Kindle Edition. [4] E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 53. Kindle Edition. [5] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 747, Kindle Edition. This was the same motivation the communists USSR would rely upon to get work done. E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press), pg 52, Kindle Edition. [6] E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 30, 53. Kindle Edition. [7] Ibid, pg 53. [8] Ibid, pg 39. [9] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 747, Kindle Edition. E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 57. Kindle Edition. [10] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 791, Kindle Edition. For more interesting information on the plan please see Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest (Castalia House), loc 2113, Kindle Edition. [11] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), location 771, Kindle Edition. [12] E. Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals (Heraklion Press) pg 31. Kindle Edition. [13] Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) loc 270, Kindle edition. [14] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 783, Kindle Edition. [15] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 783, Kindle Edition. [16] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 783, Kindle Edition. [17] Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics, Karen Plunkett-Powell, Remembering Woolworth’s, p. 26. [18] Although Babeuf tried to overthrow the French state by military coup [19] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 769, Kindle Edition. [20] Chesterton on Welles [21] Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest (Castalia House), loc 2121-2145, Kindle Edition. [22] David Priestland, The Red Flag (New York: Grove Press, 2009), loc 839, Kindle Edition. [23] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, Londom: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Loc 1938, Kindle Edition. [24] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 159-160. [25] Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) loc 267, Kindle edition. [26]Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 83, Kindle Edition.