The supersession of utopian socialism

One of the most notorious commonplaces used against socialism is the claim that "it goes against human nature." Private property, it alleges, is "innate" in the human species. Rich and poor have always existed and will always exist.

Anthropology, archaeology, prehistory and ethnology all teach us that this claim is groundless. Human beings lived for several million years without private ownership of the means of production, without a market economy and without a class-divided society. Homo sapiens, their most physically advanced type, did so too for tens of thousands of years. In fact, private property and class-divided society have probably existed for less than ten thousand years, during most of which only among a tiny fraction of the human species, in other words, for only a minute span of human life on Earth.

The apologetic thesis of the inevitability of social inequality is also disproved by a phenomenon that emerged after the division of society into classes, namely the fact that social inequality has been constantly challenged within class society itself.

These recurrent challenges can be interpreted in a variety of ways. They can be seen as the expression of the objective interests of the exploited, even though the latter - and their spokespeople - did not always understand their own revolts in that light. They can be seen as the manifestation of one of the innermost drives of our anthropological nature, the instinctive tendency to inter-human co-operation without which social labour and the survival of our species would be impossible. One can explain that the thirst for justice - and therefore the rejection of social injustice - are the equivalent at the level of individual psychology, of this social need, and make their way towards consciousness, at least among certain individuals, according to the vagaries of their individual histories (particularly what happened to them in their childhood). One can also propose a balanced combination of all these factors.

Whatever interpretation is chosen, the fact remains that class-divided society has been challenged repeatedly for at least 5000 years, not merely by ideological critics, literature, and the vision and projection of a classless socialist society, but also and most importantly, in practice, by periodic revolts of the oppressed and exploited. These range from the first strikes and peasant revolts of Pharaonic Egypt, to the slave revolts of ancient Greece and Rome, the most famous of which remains that led by Spartacus in the first century BC. These were followed by the powerful slave movements that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, those of the Bagaudae in Western Europe and of the Donatians in North Africa.

The history of India and especially classical China is dotted with innumerable peasant revolts, several of which were victorious and gave birth to new imperial dynasties. During the Tokugawa period in Japan, between 1603 and 1863, there were over 1,100 peasant rebellions, Tsarist Russia also experienced many peasant uprisings, including the most famous, that of Pugachev in the Ukraine in the 17th century.

In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the Americas, the Indians driven into serfdom and the slaves organised repeated insurrections. The most famous is that of the Peruvian Indians led by Tupac Amaru in the mid-18th century. There was the victorious revolt of the Black slaves of Haiti, the Black Jacobins, at the end of the 18th century. There were numerous revolts of Black slaves in North America in the 19th century, notably that led by Nat Turner in 1831.

In Western and Central Europe, an almost uninterrupted chain of peasant rebellions (including the French jacqueries, and the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 led by John Ball) and uprisings of craftsmen and journeymen against the reign of the nobility and rich merchants extended from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It led right up to the great bourgeois revolutions, those of the Netherlands, England, the United States and France, with which it intermingled, introducing into them deep contradictions, including an embryonic dynamic of permanent revolution.

All the religious and ideological challenges to class society, including utopian socialism, correspond in the last analysis to these real movements of revolt of the oppressed, whether free peasants subjected to state corvees or the payment of tribute, slaves, serfs, craftsmen and journeymen, or the first wage-earning and semi-wage-earning ancestors of the modern proletariat.

Many of the voices who rose from this long chain of revolts to speak out against social inequality with greater or lesser passion, harked back to the memory of a more egalitarian society. The myth or legend of a "golden age," a "fraternally united society," believed to have preceded the division of society into groups fighting each other, inspired the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, in the 7th century BC. The same theme recurs in the mythology of many peoples.

Ernest Mandel was a key Marxist economist and political theorist. Longstanding leader of the Fourth International, he died in 1995.