The term socialism today usually implies a political system in which the state takes centre stage.For example, a system in which the state nationalises and controls land and other natural resources, directs manufacturing and commercial activities, and uses the wealth produced by the people to provide them with goods and welfare services according to their needs.
The first ‘socialists’
The original use of the term was very different, indeed was wholly opposed to the notion of a dominant controlling state.
The first documented use of ‘socialist’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a letter in The Cooperative Magazine, London, November 1827. There it referred to the ideas propagated by Robert Owen and his followers: that society should consist of a federation of self-governing and largely self-sufficient communities, each of around 1,000 people, and within these communities industry and enterprise for the common good would provide prosperity and self-determination.
These ideas have their roots in earlier English history, most notably in the writings of Thomas Spence, John Bellers, and Gerrard Winstanley.Other contemporary influences came from abroad, for example from Fourier and St Simon in France.
There were of course differences of view among the pioneers of the co-operative communities in the 1820s and 1830s.William Thompson in particular did not share Owen’s faith that wealthy industrialists would provide capital for the new communities, and believed rather that working people would need to finance their own schemes and fashion their own future.Followers of Thompson began to adopt the label of ‘socialist’ or ‘communionist’ in part to distinguish themselves from ‘owenist’ positions.
The term takes on new meanings
When many of the early co-operative experiments failed, others started to look towards action by central government rather than local communities to establish common or mutual ownership.For some the way to achieve this was through universal suffrage and political control of Parliament.For others the route to socialism was through armed insurrection and mass revolution.
But either way the goal was to seize power at the centre and direct the resources of the nation, through machineries of command and control.Marx and Engels wanted to use the term socialist rather than communist in their 1848 manifesto, but they realised it would have created a confusion with the Owenite version which was at that time still current, but soon to be overshadowed by the Marxist usage and a little later by that of the Fabians..
The Fabians constructed a model of ‘socialism’ which they claimed could be achieved through a programme of nationalisation and delivery of welfare services directed by national government with some tasks delegated to local municipalities, elected by the people, but with effective control in the hands of those who knew best, the professional classes.
This is the version which the term socialism still evokes for many in England.It has little to do with the original Owenites and Socialists, who along with the poet Wlliam Blake imagined a society where:
In my Exchanges every Land
Shall walk, & mine in every Land,
Mutual shall build Jerusalem:
Both heart in heart & hand in hand.
