The word socialism itself only came into common use in the 1830s and 1840s. It was coined to describe a family of ideas sharing a basic conviction. Industrialisation was producing specific economic arrangements: private ownership of factories and machinery, wage labour, and enormous inequality between owners and workers. These, the new socialists argued, were neither natural nor permanent. They were a specific historical arrangement that could, in principle, be organised differently.
This was, in its own way, an application of the reasoning examined in chapter thirty three's account of the Enlightenment, extended to economic life: if political institutions could be examined, criticised and redesigned by human reason, why not economic ones as well. The people asking this question in the 1830s and 1840s did not agree among themselves on the answer, and the disagreements among them mattered as much as their shared starting point.
An early generation of reformers, including the French thinker Charles Fourier and the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen, proposed building small, ideal cooperative communities, organised around shared property and cooperative labour, as demonstrations of a better way of living that would, they hoped, spread by example once their success was proven.
Owen, unusually, actually tried this at scale. First at his own cotton mill in New Lanark in Scotland, he introduced shorter working hours, education for workers' children, and decent housing, while still running a profitable business. That proved the model could work, at least on a modest scale. He later tried again at a planned community called New Harmony in the United States. It collapsed within a few years amid internal disputes over property and authority.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing a few years later, coined the term utopian socialism for this earlier generation. They intended it as a criticism rather than a compliment. These reformers, Marx and Engels argued, appealed to reason and goodwill. They hoped enlightened individuals, including sympathetic factory owners, would simply choose to build a better system. But they had no serious theory of the economic forces and class conflict that made the existing system so resistant to voluntary reform. The word utopian has carried that faintly dismissive edge, meaning well-intentioned but naively impractical, ever since.
Marx and Engels's own alternative, laid out most famously in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, published, with a certain grim timing, in the very month revolution broke out across Europe, made a considerably more ambitious claim: that history itself moved through a series of stages driven by conflict between economic classes, and that the industrial working class, the proletariat, was destined by the same historical logic to eventually overthrow capitalist ownership and establish a classless society.
This was presented not as a moral appeal but as a scientific prediction, grounded in an analysis of how capitalism itself generated its own contradictions. Competition between capitalists drove down wages and working conditions even as it concentrated ownership into fewer hands. This produced, Marx argued, an ever-growing and increasingly organised working class, with every incentive to eventually seize control of the factories and machinery that its own labour operated.
Marx spent much of the following decades in London, working largely in the reading room of the British Museum, producing Capital, an enormous and technically dense analysis of capitalist economics, of which he completed only the first volume in his lifetime, the remaining volumes assembled and published by Engels from Marx's notes after his death in 1883.
It is worth noting, because it complicates any simple picture, that Marx himself was supported financially for much of his adult life by Engels, whose family owned the very cotton manufacturing business in Manchester examined in the previous chapter, meaning the most influential critique of industrial capitalism in modern history was underwritten, in practical terms, by its profits.
Alongside and often separate from these theoretical debates, workers themselves built practical organisations addressing their immediate conditions: trade unions to bargain collectively over wages and hours, and cooperative societies to buy goods collectively at fairer prices than individual workers could negotiate alone.
Britain led in this practical organising, partly because it had industrialised earliest. It also helped that a series of laws in the 1820s had legalised trade unions. Before that, combining to bargain collectively had itself been a criminal offence for decades. Unions grew steadily, if unevenly, over the following decades, initially concentrated among skilled trades with genuine bargaining leverage, printers, engineers, and similar crafts, before gradually extending, later in the century, to less skilled workers in mining, docks and transport, whose large strikes in the 1880s and 1890s demonstrated that even unskilled labour, organised in sufficient numbers, could win real concessions.
The Rochdale Pioneers, a group of weavers in northern England, founded a cooperative shop in 1844 on principles, democratic member control, a share of profits returned to members based on their purchases rather than their capital invested, that became the template for a cooperative movement that spread across Britain and, eventually, much of Europe, offering an alternative economic model built from the ground up by workers themselves rather than designed by theorists or imposed by governments.
This practical, gradualist tradition of trade unionism and cooperation coexisted, sometimes uneasily and sometimes in open competition, with the more revolutionary theoretical tradition Marx represented, a tension that would define the internal politics of the socialist and labour movement for the rest of the century and well into the next.
A further strand rejected not only capitalism but the very idea, central to Marx's own programme, that workers should seize the machinery of the state and use it to reorganise society. Anarchists, most prominently the Russian aristocrat turned revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, argued that the state itself, in any form, was inherently an instrument of domination, and that a genuinely free society required abolishing centralised state power altogether rather than merely capturing and redirecting it toward different ends.
This produced a bitter and consequential split within the international socialist movement itself. Bakunin and Marx clashed directly within the First International, a federation of workers' organisations founded in 1864. Marx eventually engineered Bakunin's expulsion in 1872. It was a rupture from which the movement never fully reunified. And it prefigured, in miniature, splits between revolutionary and reformist currents, and between statist and anti-statist ones, that would recur throughout the following century's labour and socialist movements across Europe and beyond.
Anarchism found particular strength in Spain and Italy, where large landless agricultural populations and weak, often corrupt central states made Bakunin's suspicion of centralised authority resonate more directly than it did in more industrialised and bureaucratically organised Germany or Britain, a regional pattern that would matter considerably, decades later, in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
Germany's own labour movement, developing rapidly after unification in the 1870s, examined in the next chapter, took a path that neither Marx's revolutionary theory nor Bakunin's anti-statism quite predicted: it built, within a single generation, the largest and best-organised socialist party in the world, working within, rather than against, the new German state's own electoral system.
The Social Democratic Party grew from a small movement into the largest single party in the German parliament by the early twentieth century, despite facing, for over a decade, a set of laws under Chancellor Bismarck that banned socialist organisations and publications outright, forcing much of the movement's actual organising underground or into exile while its members still stood, legally, as individual candidates for parliamentary seats.
Bismarck's own response was characteristically double-edged, and worth noting here rather than only in his own chapter: having banned the socialist party's organisations, he simultaneously introduced, in the 1880s, the world's first comprehensive state social insurance system, covering sickness, workplace accidents and old age pensions, an attempt, by his own frank admission, to undercut socialism's appeal by having the conservative state itself provide some of what socialists were promising, rather than leaving workers to demand it through revolution or through the socialist party he had just outlawed.
This combination, repression of the movement alongside adoption of some of its practical goals, became a template other European states drew on to varying degrees over the following decades, and Germany's social insurance system, expanded and modified many times since, remains a recognisable ancestor of the welfare states examined later in this book.
In March 1871, in the chaos following France's defeat by Prussia examined in the next chapter, Parisian workers and National Guard units, refusing to accept the humiliating peace terms and the conservative national government's authority, seized control of the city and declared an independent Commune, governing Paris for just over two months on radical democratic and socialist principles: elected officials subject to recall, a maximum wage for officials pegged near an average worker's pay, and the handover of abandoned workshops to worker cooperatives.
The national government, based at Versailles in a deliberate echo of the old regime, besieged the city and, in a single week in May known ever after as Bloody Week, retook it through house-to-house fighting and mass executions, killing, by most estimates, somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Communards, a death toll far exceeding the Terror examined in chapter thirty seven, compressed into a fraction of the time.
The Commune lasted barely two months and accomplished little of lasting institutional change on its own. Its symbolic weight, for the socialist movement that followed, was enormous regardless, providing what Marx himself, writing shortly afterward, called proof that the working class could actually govern, however briefly and however brutally the attempt was crushed, and the Commune's memory was invoked by socialist and labour movements across Europe for the following half-century as both inspiration and warning.
Firm: the texts, the organisational history of unions and the First International, and the Commune's brief existence and violent suppression, documented extensively in government records, contemporary press, and the movement's own publications.
Soft: precise casualty figures for Bloody Week, which vary considerably between sources depending on political sympathy, as with most of the violent episodes examined in this book.
Contested: how much Marx's theoretical framework should be credited with shaping the actual labour movement of his own century, as opposed to being adopted, retrospectively and selectively, by later movements that found it useful. Much of the practical trade union and cooperative organising examined in this chapter proceeded on pragmatic grounds largely independent of Marx's theoretical apparatus, which gained its widest influence only later, particularly after being adopted as state doctrine in the twentieth century, the subject of much later chapters.
A caution about reading this history backward. It is tempting, knowing what the twentieth century did with some of these ideas, to read the 1840s and 1850s as a rehearsal for later catastrophes or triumphs. The people involved at the time did not know what would come. Marx died in 1883 having seen his ideas gain real but still modest influence within European labour movements, a long way from state power anywhere, and would very likely not have recognised, and in some respects explicitly would not have endorsed, everything done in his name by later governments.