The Utopian Writings of the Leaders of the Socialist International

Many of the most respected leaders of the Second International—such as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky in Germany, Jean Jaurès and Émile Vandervelde in the French-speaking labour movement—and several other prominent figures of European socialism at the end of the nineteenth century published, for the benefit of the labouring masses, detailed blueprints of the ‘collectivist'l society that was to succeed the—supposedly imminent— proletarian revolution and the collapse of capitalism. They set out to describe in the minutest details the type of society that would ‘inevitably’ emerge out of the forthcoming revolution.

It is true that the ‘modern’ socialist movement was supposed to have abandoned the blueprints for an ideal society that seemed so typical of its romantic ‘utopian’ predecessors. Making predictions about the future was not compatible with the general claim to strive for a positive ‘science of history’ that had nothing to do with conjectures, fictions and speculations. This remark seems right, yet the facts contradict it. The European socialist movement under the Second International (1889–1914) officially designed an abundance of detailed blueprints and precise visions of the post-revolutionary society. For the most part these tableaux were components of the day-to-day propaganda that accompanied social struggles, as articles in party newspapers and pamphlets. One cannot criticize the evils of capitalism, one cannot show how this economic system is the ‘unique cause’ of poverty, alcoholism or prostitution without showing how and why the proletarian revolution will automatically eradicate these evils. One thus finds a multitude of sketchy glimpses of the ‘collectivist’ social order contrasted with the descriptions of capitalism and its evils. On the other hand, there is also a large number of full-scale books which dealt exclusively with the systematic description of the socialist vision of the future.