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5. The Leninists – late 19 /early 20 century followers of Russian revolutionary
Vladimir Lenin who adapted Marxism to suit Russian conditions; his Bolshevik
party seized power by a coup in October 1917.

The Utopian socialists were so-called because they didn’t ground their ideas in a
rigorous analysis of society or history. Many set up separate communities based on
cooperation and harmony not competition. Those of Etienne Cabet, the Icarians,
attracted nearly 200, 000 members in France and America. Henri Saint-Simon was an
aristocrat who narrowly escaped the guillotine, He aimed to create, by a process of

“evolutionary organicism”, a harmonious technocracy ruled by scientific experts
where the “productive, industrial-scientific” classes could live in peace and
cooperation, without private property. He also tried to found a new secular religion
and attracted 40,000 members. Charles Fourier was an eccentric utopian who set up
“phalanxes” or agricultural cooperatives of 1600 people focused on harmony, non-
coercion and profit-sharing. Several were set up in the eastern states of America.
France was home to utopian socialism, but Robert Owen was Welsh. He adopted the

Enlightenment idea of “perfectibility”, the belief that a nurturing environment could
shape good workers. At New Lanark Mill in Scotland, he built his workers and their
families a model community, with good housing, schools and shops (no pub). He
argued this would increase happiness, morality, productivity and profit. But he failed
to convince his fellow-employers and grew more radical, dabbling with trade unions
and setting up cooperative communities, including New Harmony, Indiana, USA, but
the “Village of Unity and Cooperation” collapsed in disagreement. His main legacy
was the Cooperative Movement.

The Anarchists based their ideas on an analysis: that the state was a major barrier to
socialism because it would always defend the propertied status quo. Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon wanted communes of workers free from the oppression of both state and
factory. He considered setting up a confederation of communes which could by-pass
the state altogether. Proudhon is most famous for the slogan, “Property is theft”, in

his pamphlet of 1840 called What Is Property? Mikhail Bakunin came from a noble
Russian family but rebelled. He was more interested in revolutionary action than
theorising, was very active in the 1848 revolutions, and seemed to advocate terror
against the state for its own sake. He argued that the greatest potential for
revolution lay not with the proletariat in Germany as Marx said, but the most
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wretched and oppressed, i.e. the peasantry in Italy. In the later 19 century he
quarrelled bitterly with Marx over the direction and leadership of European
socialism. Under Bakunin’s influence, the Anarchists split off from mainstream
socialism and committed numerous acts of terrorism and assassination to destabilise

established authority. Direct action was also advocated by the “syndicalists”,