“The greatest achievement of the IWMA [International Working Men's Association (1864–77)],” as Gareth Stedman Jones has recently written, “was to forge and spread across Europe and the Americas a new and lasting language of social democracy. European socialism was an invention of the 1860s.”Footnote 1 Historians have long seen the International as the first significant organization to originate and spread distinctively “socialist” ideas, such as labor agitation, class struggle, and international solidarity.Footnote 2 Contemporaries would have agreed. “There is no exaggeration in saying,” Kropotkin observed in 1899, “that all schemes of social reconstruction which are now in vogue under the name of ‘scientific socialism’ or ‘anarchism’ had their origin in the discussions and reports of the different congresses of the International Association.”Footnote 3
The ideas of the International, however, are not well understood. Socialists have usually slanted them to fit their own ideologies. Bolsheviks cast the International as a Marxist anticipation of the Comintern; anarchists, as a federalist precursor to anarcho-syndicalist unions; social democrats, as the embryo of their own electoral parties and unions; contemporary leftists, as an organization pledged to goals “today more vital than ever.”Footnote 4 Such genealogies are ideologically potent but misleading: terms such as “Marxist” and “anarchist,” for instance, were little used as meaningful, conscious designations for militant groups of any theoretical or organizational coherence during the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote 5 By contrast, labor and social historians tended to assume, with the positivist Edward Beesly, that the International's proposals were of “very little importance in comparison with the practical work done by the association.”Footnote 6 Such scholars put aside “the far-too-exclusive study of ideas, the leaders which personified them and the organizations” (mere “congress history,” in the words of one specialist) in favor of the non-elitist, bottom-up study “of militants, workers, masses, their mentalités.”Footnote 7 In this research, ideas remained just as elusive. The theories of the International have been discounted even by intellectual historians. They largely prefer to conceive of socialist thought as Marxism and its permutations (such as the Frankfurt school) than to study autodidact artisans.Footnote 8
This article examines an important but long-neglected theorist of the International. Before the struggle between Marx and Bakunin tore apart the International and bewitched generations of historians, a Flemish militant, César De Paepe (1841–90), played a leading role in the organization's discussions. It was De Paepe who famously introduced and defended the idea of social property at the Lausanne (1867), Brussels (1868), and Basle (1869) Congresses. Calling his ideas collectivisme, “collectivism,” De Paepe convinced majorities of worker–delegates that the individual ownership of land and key fixed capitals was both unjust from a moral perspective and doomed given the concentration of farms and industries.Footnote 9 In several votes, Internationalists resolved that the earth (the soil, subsoil, and forests), as well as the means of transport and exchange, should be owned by a “regenerated state,” and leased to workers’ companies, which would sell products at, or near, cost price.Footnote 10 In militants’ discourse, in the public mind, and in lexicons, socialism was from this period onwards more and more defined as a system of government ownership or management.Footnote 11
Though the idea of social property was not his alone, De Paepe was recognized by many contemporaries as a great theorist of the International and of collectivism. As the Saint-Simonian man of letters Guéroult observed in 1872, De Paepe “seems to have studied the question [of collective property] the most” among Internationalists. His first oration of 1867, reflected militants of the Swiss Jura in 1873, “was an event [événement], in which, for the first time, was set forth the collectivist theory that the International would soon inscribe on its program.” Decades later, French “possibilists” praised De Paepe as “the learned [savant] socialist writer who was the most remarkable theoretician of the International” and “the principal and virtually sole theoretician” of collectivism. Collectivism had triumphed in the International, wrote Villey of the Paris Revue d’économie politique in the 1890s, “not by the German influence, but by that of César De Paepe.” His colleague Gide agreed: De Paepe was “the most eminent of [socialism's] representatives,” who perhaps more than Marx and Lassalle deserved to be named among “the founders of collectivism,” because, unlike them, he used the word “with the meaning it has today” and endeavored “to describe its organization.” Thus for a number of observers De Paepe was simply “the most important man of the International, after Karl Marx,” in the words of the communard Malon.Footnote 12
If the ideas of the International in general have been misunderstood, the particular significance of De Paepe and collectivism were almost ridiculed by later generations. As socialists developed the indefinite ideas of the 1860s and 1870s into diametrical dogmas, many cast De Paepe as an idiosyncratic, even heretical, intermediary between better-known terms: “utopian” and “scientific” socialism, anarchism and Marxism, Bakunin and Marx. In the damning 1911 judgment of “neo-socialist” Hendrik De Man, De Paepe offered an unworkable juste milieu, “a mishmash of tendencies . . . according to the tried-and-tested Belgian principle of the golden mean.”Footnote 13 Along with the other leaders of the Parti ouvrier belge (POB)/Belgische Werkliedenpartij (BWP) (1885–1940), De Paepe was relegated to the status of a transitional eclectic, not seen as an independent theorist courted by both Marx and Bakunin.Footnote 14
Bringing together articles, pamphlets, and oral arguments from the period, this study reconstructs De Paepe's thinking in the 1860s and 1870s in order to advance a reinterpretation of the intellectual origins of modern European socialism. While cognizant of the broader shift in socialist thinking between the 1840s and 1880s, the paper suggests first of all that there was more continuity between these periods than may be supposed. The collectivism of the International, insofar as it was elaborated by De Paepe, was a self-conscious synthesis of mutualism and pre-Marxian communism, not a rebuttal to archaic “Proudhonism” by “Marxism” or “anarchism.” Attentive both to moral concerns and to the circumstances of mass industrial society, De Paepe's idea of social property—particularly as embodied in the practice of the POB/BWP—shows that the “utopianism” of the pre-1848 period could profitably inform the “science” of the 1880s and beyond.Footnote 15
Second, this article argues that De Paepe played an unacknowledged role in dividing, not just uniting, the members of the International. While attention has fixated on the struggle c.1869–72 between Marx and Bakunin as the starting point of at least two different kinds of socialism, the discourse of the period suggests that many Internationalists developed their new socialist ideas with critical reference to De Paepe in the mid-1870s. Some cadres, particularly the “antiauthoritarian” partisans of Bakunin, developed their understandings of social property precisely by reading De Paepe and borrowing from him.
Finally, the article argues that De Paepe's story offers political and methodological insights. In his writings, De Paepe struggled to combine an extensive public-services state with individual freedom, personal desert, and political decentralization in a national territory. Though his strategies and solutions were generally faulty, De Paepe made unusual efforts to balance justice and expediency: a conspicuous dilemma of modern politics. Taking this lesser-known figure seriously thus allows intellectual historians to reassess the meaning of modern socialism.
THE EDUCATION OF A COLLECTIVIST
Unlike Marx, De Paepe was no philosopher. A “lack of time,” he complained, prevented him from consolidating his mostly journalistic writings into “the slightest book” of systematic social economy.Footnote 16 He said this with some justice: his life was busy and brief. Born to a father employed in the state bureaucracy and a mother of remotely noble ancestry, De Paepe worked as a typographer in Brussels after his father's death in 1860, and studied medicine on the side. Meanwhile, he involved himself in a wide variety of campaigns, from secular education and civil burials to manhood suffrage, social and urban reforms, and Flemish rights. From the 1870s until his death, this political agitation was combined with obstetric practice from his office at 24 rue t'Kint. De Paepe left behind only articles and pamphlets after a life of activism, writing, personal misfortune, and painful illness (he succumbed at age forty-nine).Footnote 17
His writings are difficult to analyze without perpetrating what Quentin Skinner called “the mythology of coherence.”Footnote 18 De Paepe's own aim was to collect, “among the materials assembled by the many builders of social theories, some stones that it seems to us must be useful in the construction [l’édification] of the future society.”Footnote 19 As a result, his writings spanned ethics and expediency, justice and necessity, conservative and liberal political economy, “mutualism,” and “communism”; his strategy shifted over his lifetime. Physically, too, his corpus was disparate, scattered across approximately forty publications in six countries.Footnote 20 Nevertheless, careful study of De Paepe's writings across his life, guided by attention to historical and linguistic contexts, can illuminate his thought's continuities and breaks in the 1860s and 1870s and his contributions to the International's debates.
De Paepe's theories were based in large measure on his analysis of his native Belgium. In this tiny and apparently trivial territory were starkly realized the key tendencies of nineteenth-century European development.Footnote 21 A “paradise for the bourgeoisie” and “model state of continental constitutionalism,” as Marx lampooned it, Belgium was in part a model of enlightened government and industrial civilization, albeit one conditional on the fragile forbearance of neighboring powers.Footnote 22 State officials helped, rather than hindered, entrepreneurs who utilized Belgium's considerable coal reserves with British technology. Constitutional monarchs permitted a limited suffrage, commercial liberties, and powers of municipal self-government.Footnote 23 The state partially funded and owned an extensive waterway system and the densest railway network in Europe. The Société générale, for its part, pioneered modern industrial credit, while Catholic and Liberal statesmen encouraged the creation of joint-stock companies. Thanks to this combination of public stewardship and private initiative, Belgium led the Continent in industrial production and international trade throughout much of the century: in the prewar years, its iron output per capita was even higher than Britain's.
Nineteenth-century Belgium was also a nonpareil of human misery and strife. The potato blight and dislocation in cottage textiles led to widespread starvation during the 1840s, particularly in Flanders. Afterwards, a labor-intensive growth model kept wages lower and hours longer than elsewhere in northwestern Europe, making living standards “probably the lowest of all the industrialized countries at the time.”Footnote 24 Reform was slow in coming. While Leopold II (r. 1865–1909) constructed among the cruelest colonial regimes in world history, parliamentarians preoccupied themselves with debates on secular schools, whose tardy resolution made prewar illiteracy rates the highest in northwestern Europe (10 percent). Governmental inertia or incompetence fueled mass unrest, which erupted every few years from the late 1860s, with special violence in Walloon industrial areas. The threat of social cataclysm, combined with chance divisions among Liberals and Catholics and general strikes by organized labor, led the government to concede elementary and social legislation as well as plural manhood suffrage (1893) in the 1890s. Such changes, however, satisfied few in Belgian society.Footnote 25
As a militant and a typesetter in Brussels in the 1860s, De Paepe supposed that countries like Belgium could largely preserve the “good” and mitigate the “bad” aspects of European civilization described above. To be sure, the works of “communists” like Babeuf and Buonarroti provided De Paepe with radical–republican convictions to see genuine égalité everywhere realized. But many nineteenth-century “socialists” and political economists feared any new revolution as much as they disliked the post-1815 settlement. More persuasive was a careful synthesis or equilibrium that preserved modern commerce and production, safeguarded science, and heightened public sentiment, while minimizing (or even eliminating) economic dislocation, spiritual precariousness, and disruptive social contestation.
To this end, Saint-Simon, a frequent object of study for the young De Paepe, famously proposed that the poles of “anarchy and despotism” between which Europe had swung for decades could be avoided by a reconciliation of individual liberty and productive necessity. This future was to be envisioned by a political or social science and established by a peculiar cross-class coalition (artistes, savants, industriels) that peacefully did away with autocratic institutions and mere idlers. The resulting government, composed of functional representatives selected according to merit, would direct investment, modernize agriculture and commerce, and balance production and consumption. At the same time, Saint-Simon intended for this regime to secure to men “the highest degree of liberty compatible with the state of society.” Industrialisme meant low taxes and the right of producers “to exchange with each other directly and with complete freedom.” Because political laws would be grounded “not in an arbitrary opinion established in law by the mass, but in a principle derived from the very nature of things,” organizing social life would in time become a simple “task shared by all citizens, whether it be to contain trouble-makers or to settle disputes.”Footnote 26
De Paepe was as impressed with Saint-Simon as with the ideas of his interpreters. Comte, as is well known, dethroned metaphysical inquiry for an inductive and predictive social science grounded in mathematics and the natural sciences. Even more striking were the theories of Jean-Guillaume-César-Alexandre Hippolyte, baron de Colins de Ham. For this Walloon Bonapartist and his associates, “passive” wealth (derived from ownership of land, the subsoil, fixed capitals, and infrastructure like canals) was the property of humanity as a whole, as opposed to “active” wealth (derived from individual labor). A tutelary state ought accordingly to lease passive wealth to persons and associations, which would exploit it without transgressing against the rights of society at large. Achieved by progressive levies on collateral inheritance, and combined with commercial freedoms, low taxes on active wealth, integral education, compulsory labor, and a national bank, Colins's collectivisme struck a compromise between economic development and social justice, bourgeois society and Babeuvist communism.Footnote 27
Most of all, De Paepe's thinking on property was informed by Proudhon, who in his own idiosyncratic fashion sought a middle term between “property” and “community.” In his infamous 1840 work, Proudhon advocated usufructuary “possession” (not “property”) of land and large capitals, and defended cost-price exchanges as consistent with reason and science. As men consented to these new economic institutions, not only would they enshrine equality and liberty in positive community. In time, the free agreements of persons and groups would (as in Saint-Simon's vision) even replace political laws altogether. This result, crucially, joined the good aspects of property (independence, diligence) and community (equality, law) while minimizing their bad aspects (respectively unjust exclusion and despotic leveling).Footnote 28
It seemed doubtful that these schemes had much relevance when De Paepe was studying them in the 1860s and 1870s. The conflicts of 1848–9 ended, on the whole, in victories for the right. Afterwards, innovative conservatives gained popular consent. In neighboring France (and, soon, in unified Germany), statesmen combated poverty with social legislation, separated labor militants and middle-class republicans, and strengthened their rule with manhood suffrage. This was very difficult to answer.Footnote 29
Observers as sophisticated as John Stuart Mill nevertheless contended in the 1850s and 1860s that the “utopias” of the first half of the nineteenth century might soon be instituted, albeit in modified, plebeian forms. An ambivalent friend of commercial society (which, against its own pretensions, made “those who receive the least, labor and abstain the most”), Mill argued that the sharp divisions between rich and poor, employed and employer, were “neither fit for, nor capable of, indefinite duration.”Footnote 30 Artisans were creating new institutions of production, consumption, credit, and exchange through democratic deliberation and free contracts among themselves. Thankfully, insofar as workers’ “definite political doctrines” were to exert the main influence on European society over the coming decades, the tide of democracy would yield neither neo-Jacobinism nor autocratic paternalism. Mill rather suspected that a new political economy, based on social ownership of natural resources and on friendly competition among cooperative enterprises run by workers themselves, would gradually and experimentally be grafted onto what existed. In this way, “instead of a hostile conflict, physical or only moral, between the old and the new, the best parts of both may be combined in a renovated social fabric.”Footnote 31
However, there were indications in De Paepe's Belgium, as well as Mill's Britain, that this might not be the case. De Paepe was an ardent cooperator, and hoped that “the free play of economic institutions” created by workers themselves would deliver a brighter future without upheaval or the intervention of capricious governments. But cooperatives alone were no panacea. His survey of statistics suggested that cooperatives could not take up a far greater share of the economy than they already did. State suppression, too, limited their extent, and what De Paepe saw as their hypocritical practice (for instance, exacting profits or interest) created a worse-off “fifth estate” of noncooperators. To De Paepe's eyes, affairs in northwestern Europe were therefore bleak. In agriculture as well as manufactures, enterprises consolidated and competed pitilessly against small producers, yielding a caste “of slaves, a starving and ragged multitude, resembling brutes more than men.”Footnote 32
If this was the case, how could anyone hope to “unite the greatest individual liberty of action with an equal ownership of all in the raw material of the globe and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour,” as observers like Mill, as well as De Paepe, wished?Footnote 33 De Paepe made his own attempt to reconcile this problem of “small and large property, equality for all and bread for all.” He reasoned that a cooperative commonwealth would result from the judicious efforts of workers’ associations, communes, and states to challenge large-scale capitalist property: the very thing that threatened mutualism. It was on these grounds that De Paepe called for “the admission of land into the collective property of society” at the Lausanne Congress of September 1867.Footnote 34
ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY
As a member of the International and as a journalist in the mid- to late 1860s, De Paepe staked his collectivist position on a simple moral premise. If ownership was only intelligible as a right “exercised by a producer in relation to his product,” individual appropriation of land, minerals, and fixed capitals was inadmissible. Proudhon had argued as much in 1840, when he distinguished an inclusive “right to means” from an exclusive “right to product.” Whatever the apparent apostasies of Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXme siècle (1851), De Paepe read the posthumous Théorie de la propriété (1866) as sanctioning Proudhon's original proposals for immoveable property to be possessed and exploited by all, though owned by commune or state. The status quo, by contrast, allowed a few to monopolize what they could not exploit as individuals. Under this system of “proprietary absolutism,” landlords and capitalists lived off others’ labor, and owned the vast resources that were “indispensable to all of society.”Footnote 35
For De Paepe, social property was the only means to vindicate a notion of commutative justice among cultivators and workers. First of all, a collectivist society could separate the just from unjust elements of rent.Footnote 36 In most cases, land rent was due to factors independent of the cultivator(s): the natural fertility of the land, the labors of past generations, and so forth. Because such “rent is not the doing of the proprietor, but indeed a fact of nature and of society,” De Paepe denied that individuals had any right to it. Ground rent was even more illegitimate. It was a mere fee paid by the industrious to the idle, with a tenuous relation to supply, demand, and productivity.Footnote 37
The commune or state could collapse land and ground rents into a single rent–tax that both preserved moral desert and permitted a clear-sighted agricultural policy. Estimated according to the relative productivity of plots, the rent–tax would be used to capture productivity gains arbitrary from the perspective of individual exertions, and to set standard prices for agricultural commodities based on the labor contained in them. Produce due to social and natural advantages, so De Paepe reasoned, would hence go to the community, creating “the safeguard of equality.” The rent–tax would also fund social insurance to mitigate contingencies such as floods and epizootics, the improvement of less fertile lands, and various public services necessary to the cultivator.Footnote 38
Crucially, this structure of social property in land was intended to secure to cultivators the right to reap the fruits of their own personal industry. Proudhon had vindicated such a right, if acknowledging in Idée générale that its practical realization was beset by “innumerable difficulties and complications.” The way to institutionalize it, De Paepe believed, was by assessing the net change in the productivity of plots at the end of their leases in light of social circumstances. Whether this change was positive or negative (plus-value or moins-value), it could be the result of individual labor (such as the farmer's diligence or negligence) or collective action (such as an infrastructure project that raised or lowered the plot's land rent). De Paepe argued that the cultivator ought, at the termination of his lease, to be credited insofar as his plus-value was his own or his moins-value due to social factors, and debited insofar as his moins-value was his own or his plus-value due to social factors. Such a model of taxation, together with lifelong leases for individual farmers and long leases for agricultural companies, would give farmers “nearly all the advantages of property, without presenting the same dangers for society.” Collective property would allow cultivators to enjoy the real gains of individual labor, but it would prevent the cumulative results of legitimate exchange and production from resurrecting oppressive wage labor, arbitrary rents, and unearned profits.Footnote 39
This reform of commutative justice, so De Paepe outlined, could be institutionalized by modified “Colinsian” means. Collateral inheritance could be slowly but significantly curbed by greater and greater taxes, whereas direct inheritance could remain as a stimulus to parents’ diligence. Progressive taxes or annuities administered by communes and the nation could in time achieve social ownership of land and the fixed capitals upon it, avoiding a situation wherein cultivators flocked to the most fertile areas. The state would thus be tasked with ensuring equity among cultivators by means of the rent–tax, cautiously leasing land and fixed capitals to persons, associations, and communes for exploitation, and working with federated companies to carry out the more demanding projects of economic improvement, such as irrigation or reforestation.
If individual appropriation of the earth and its fruits violated justice, De Paepe also argued that this mode of ownership was simply doomed. Private ownership had likely originated, as Proudhon supposed, in the efforts of prehistoric cultivators “to nourish the human race and let equality reign among men.” De Paepe argued that the institution in modern times “leads to monopoly, negation of competition,” and “the concentration of wealth.” In Belgium, the share of small peasant property shrank and no rational attempts were made to clear and cultivate wasteland in the interests of future generations. Meanwhile, “a new landed feudality, analogous to the industrial feudality,” had arisen across northwestern Europe.Footnote 40
De Paepe imagined that social property in agriculture, and ultimately in most fixed capitals, too, would actually arise from this movement. The only way the relatively small, sterile parcel of the average farmer could be made competitive was through improvements (such as plot reunion, clearing, the introduction of machinery, crop rotation, or better transport infrastructure) that required large inputs of capital and land. This meant forms of joint ownership and capital pooling, as well as state intervention. To be sure, intensive cultivation by one person could achieve remarkable vegetable yields. But otherwise agricultural production, such as livestock rearing, was not efficient on a small scale. And unless the lonely mutualist gardener was to depend on exploitative merchants and landlords, he had to acquire his own equipment and livestock via a “rent-to-own” scheme, as outlined in Idée générale. Under such an arrangement, machines and fixed capitals leased to cultivators would gradually become their property as a group: collective property, in short. The logic of things in themselves would compel cultivators to reject “the free disposition of one's field” as an illusion, and to favor corporate ownership of increasing extent.Footnote 41
De Paepe believed that this essential development was under way in the prudent organization of cultivators themselves (and, too, among artisans and industrial workers), and would be backed by sympathetic but self-interested states. The association of fellow workers tended to replace “capitalist centralization and monopoly and the laissez-faire of the economists” with “mutualism, that is to say, authentic competition, which intends that workers are equipped with the same arms for the struggle.” Workers sought their freedom not in a fictive “complete independence,” but in a “relative, mutual dependence” of individuals and groups based on cooperation. Presumably, they would continue to pool their land and capitals, and to incorporate themselves into companies with legal personhood, whether in the field, factory, or workshop. But democratizing communes and the state were likely to assist this development from above, by carrying out improvements, regulating the sale of agricultural commodities according to cost price, and mitigating the dangers of collusion among agricultural associations. Workers seeking justice as well as their own survival, together with increasingly popular governments concerned with productive cultivation and the national weal, could together create efficient and responsible regimes of agricultural management.Footnote 42
Where peasants and agricultural workers were not able to divert the processes at work, the results would still likely be sorts of “coproprietorship, collective property.” Misery and injustice among disorganized, miserable farmers (as in Britain or Russia, De Paepe supposed) would eventually compel nationalization by the state, or a more violent redistribution in “the great social débâcle.” It was unlikely that the collectivist regimes arising therefrom would just redistribute small, sterile plots to the people. More plausibly, they would lease land to individuals and agricultural associations, institute a rent–tax, and orchestrate scientific and large-scale improvements of agriculture. A national and democratic council, “elected by the diverse associations of cultivators,” could decide upon such modernizing projects. Although it would follow different dynamics in different countries, and seemed more urgent in agriculture than in industry, De Paepe thus reasoned that the pan-European contest between large-scale ownership per laissez-faire logics, and mutual guarantees among associated cultivators and workers, would be forms of collective property.Footnote 43
For some French, Belgian, and Swiss delegates of the International, De Paepe contradicted a vision of freely associated producers. The bronze carver Tolain led his fellow Frenchmen in an attack on De Paepe, objecting to the “hierarchical and authoritarian organization” implicit in all schemes of common ownership. The journalist Langlois agreed: “those who claim only to preach liberal communism are led by the logic and very force of things to authoritarian communism.” Murat, a mechanic, drew upon Idée générale to criticize De Paepe's betrayal of “commutative justice, which is born and develops itself in relationships among individuals,” while the carpenter Fruneau objected that collectivism “will be a bogeyman for les campagnards.” Some criticized De Paepe within his own Belgian delegation, while the Jurassian physician Coullery went as far as to locate collectivism in a Belgian confusion of Proudhon's federalism and Colins's autocracy. De Paepe's amalgam, argued Coullery, amounted to “collective tyranny” and “the degeneration of the individual”: “I very much hope to be dead before we reach it,” he opined.Footnote 44
Yet De Paepe's writings and activism in the 1860s indicate that he, and the majority of Internationalists who backed him, saw no fundamental inconsistency between equal exchange and social property. As De Paepe wrote, “mutualism and collectivism on the contrary complement one another.” Mutualism envisioned that cost-price exchanges would allow trucking individuals to expand their fortunes through their own exertions and diligence alone. But its advocates neglected natural and social resources (which belonged to all), disdained to extend their principles to society at large (beyond a few stable cooperatives), and professed a misguided faith in laissez-faire, laissez-passer alone (like bourgeois economists). Mutualist conviction was, in any case, empirically misguided: the (British) concentration or (French) parceling of property was the order of the day. One could surely not attempt, “by a stroke of the pen, to abolish an economic phenomenon,” De Paepe concluded.Footnote 45
In turn, collectivism was at root a venerable program for equality of conditions to be realized by proletarian agitation. In this sense, De Paepe saluted “the eternal protest of humanity against the poverty of the people and the crimes of property, the eternal demand of the unrecognized rights of labor.” But as he conceived of it, collectivism implied careful considerations of what should be public and what private, unlike the more extensive term (communism) with which it was associated. Total communism, after all, contradicted “the liberty and full emancipation of the individual.” Without sufficient guarantees of personal freedom and desert, communism would be as onerous and undesirable as a strict mutualism. Fortunately, such a communism was, like total mutualism, improbable, and “contrary to all the intellectual tendencies of the century.”Footnote 46
De Paepe accordingly proposed a synthesis of “scientific socialism” (which he associated with mutualism) and “popular communism” to balance “guarantees for the individual and guarantees for the collectivity”—commutative justice and egalitarianism. Despite the opposition of Mill and Proudhon to extensive expropriations, De Paepe supposed that social property could be achieved peaceably as workers distinguished (with Comte) the necessary arrangements of present society from those susceptible to “the intelligent and judicious intervention of men.” Collectivism thus became both a moral good and a probable fact given workers’ own institutions and demands, the tendencies of economic development, and the imperatives of competitive, democratizing states. A “reorganizing state” could combine a democratic and federal politics with a rational and just social ownership of concentrated enterprises, despite the disappointments of 1848 and of cooperative production. Though their precise motivations differed, British trade unionists, German social democrats, Italian and Spanish insurrectionaries, and francophone mutualists all saw in De Paepe's capacious concept their own aspirations, and voted for the socialization of land and key fixed capitals in the late 1860s.Footnote 47
TOWARDS THE PUBLIC-SERVICES STATE
De Paepe's compromise of 1867–9, as he later reflected, provided a “common ground” upon which almost all militants could agree.Footnote 48 However, theoretical and practical unity were sorely tested by the transformations of the 1870s. Much followed from infighting regarding the decisions of the executive in 1871–2 to centralize the International's powers and commit its membership to political agitation. More important were the transformations in the broader context wherein socialist politics were located. The simultaneous expansion of the suffrage in Britain and the North German Confederation (1867), ongoing social and economic dislocation across the Italian peninsula, and outright civil war in Spain were compounded by likewise momentous events: the defeat of the Paris Commune of March–May 1871, the creation of the Third Republic, pan-European repression of radicals, and unified Germany's definite ascendancy over France. If this conjuncture were not serious enough, the international economy was soon upended due to financial crisis, the flooding of markets with cheap cereals, and the imposition of new tariffs. In short, European states were simultaneously and dramatically transformed.
These geopolitical, social, and economic changes prompted militants to devise appropriate strategies for their own national and regional contexts, lest their movements be totally devastated. But if agreement had been difficult to reach in the 1860s, it was positively elusive in the 1870s. In the shrinking Continental rump of the International (the official organization was condemned on Engels's initiative to an even more agonizing death in the United States), delegates and émigrés struggled to determine the transnational content of political concepts. What seemed appropriate from an analytical, strategic, or tactical perspective for Spanish artisans, whose society was wracked by coups and countercoups, was absurd to British unionists, whose voting rights and legal protections had just been expanded. Similar divisions lay between Italian and German radicals, and, in fact, within each delegation. Figuring out what “the state” (an institution undergoing pan-European flux) was, and how socialists ought to approach it, could strengthen a group's theoretical (and sometimes practical) coherency. Paradoxically, this operation severed groups from one another, under more or less acrimonious circumstances. Hence as international socialism retreated, local or national strategies flourished.Footnote 49
This was the background to De Paepe's Rapport sur les services publics (1874), a seventy-page sketch of a collectivist society that made a stir among Internationalists.Footnote 50 Like De Paepe's earlier interventions and writings, it was a credible interpretation of militants’ normative and organizational ideals, and it also contained an account of the historical development of modern property ownership. But now De Paepe specified socialist ends rather than leaving them hazy (as invariably they were left), and clarified his means in light of them based on an analysis of the prospects before Belgian labor. His Rapport thus addressed the practical challenges before socialists, and rebutted rival solutions to these. As a result, it spurred others to articulate their own diverging, critical visions. What followed were lengthy enumerations of which resources and enterprises in the future would be public, which would be private, and the reasons why. The irony of determining “as clearly as possible the limits of what should be individual and what should be collective”—the crux of a gradual and experimental collectivism, in De Paepe's view—was that the further this exercise was pursued, the more it helped to divide socialists and to create new perspectives among them.Footnote 51
De Paepe began the Rapport by asking an obvious question whose answer was far from simple. What was likely to happen if a revolution actually took place in a European country of economic significance? After reactionary institutions like the church and standing army were done away with, the workers of a given country would face grave responsibilities. Industrial civilization depended upon many public services (institutions regarding which society was both subject and object) that any reasonable person would want to preserve, and expand, in the name of equity and efficiency. Beginning with a mundane office to set weights and measures, De Paepe enumerated the care of natural resources (the soil and subsoil, forests, lakes and ponds, fisheries); utilities (gas and water); hygiene and health institutions (sanitation, hospitals, baths); social security (insurance and provisions for those unable to work and the elderly); housing; the means of communication (telegraphs and telephones); the means of transport (waterways, roads, railways, ports); and institutions of science, art, and leisure (laboratories, museums, libraries, parks, monuments). If workers themselves did not make sure that these natural and social resources were superintended, the results would be starvation, chaos, and spoliation—even if, somehow, dictatorship were avoided.Footnote 52
However, the workers’ polity that would socialize the economy in the event of such a crisis, De Paepe reasoned, would not organize all property or services from the center. The nation or state, De Paepe maintained per his earlier arguments, would have to act as a general owner of land and fixed capitals in order to equilibrate unequal endowments among communes and regions, and to oversee large-scale projects and economic processes. But smaller and medium capitals could, and probably would, be left to artisans, tradesmen, and small groups, for their exploitation did not impinge appreciably upon society. The larger capitals of small and medium enterprises (concerned with non-monopolistic production, local health services, commerce, or utilities), for their part, could be owned and managed by workers’ associations or local political units, incorporated with the rights of legal personhood. Only big or otherwise essential capitals fell to state ownership. But again De Paepe introduced critical distinctions. A great many public services could be organized by municipal and regional governments, not the central government as such: for instance, registering births and deaths; organizing stints in juries and the police; preserving public amenities; and maintaining bazaars, warehouses, and public transport.
In the case of larger-scale services, De Paepe still drew a clear line with Saint-Simon and Colins between ownership and execution. The vast majority of large-scale concerns and services, and the property upon which they relied, would in fact be leased to individuals, associations, and federated associations, or exploited by these jointly with the state. The state's role was above all to prevent the antisocial abuse of particular resources by granting “enterprise” rights, not simple “concession.” The first, akin to Proudhon's “possession,” was a contract between society, which enjoyed the inalienable ownership of some resource, and the individual or group, charged with the exploitation of the resource under stipulated conditions. De Paepe associated the second term, “concession,” with giving free reign to companies to defraud society and despoil the earth for their own benefit.
With “enterprise,” not “concession,” however, the dangers of private, as well as overextended public, monopolies could be avoided. Railways, for instance, could depend on joint management, whereby state administrators worked with the train workers and engineers of federated companies. Agriculture, too, was a realm for state oversight and initiative, but De Paepe believed that farming would be carried out in cooperation with agricultural associations, in order for individual and society, corporation and state, to balance the rights of the other. Mineral wealth like coal and iron also required state ownership to protect the birthright of humanity and to make sure industry had the right amount of its lifeblood. But here mine workers would take the primary role, while the state concerned itself with regulating the production and sale of mineral commodities and determining an equitable remuneration for workers.
Politically, the Rapport desacralized the state without dismissing it. The state could not be ignored in the present: this sacrificed the real prospect of improving the well-being of workers through legislation. Neither could it be done away with per se. A socialist future without a state would lack a central mechanism to equalize fortunes, enforce contracts, and share natural resources. In such a future, workers would enjoy “the perverse pleasure of substituting a labor aristocracy for a bourgeois aristocracy.” At the same time, De Paepe was skeptical of a priori statists, whether neo-Jacobins or Lassallean-cum-Bismarckians. It was not the case that the state was “the entire social body.” The dangers of such authoritarian misapprehensions had been documented since the 1790s.Footnote 53
De Paepe rather conceived of the state in progressive terms. It was no more than the historical apparatus responsible for protecting its citizens’ interests. If De Paepe's Latin interlocutors were right to emphasize the state's oppressive vices across time and space, they neglected its social and productive virtues. As De Paepe pointed out in the 1870s, even Louis XIV—for whom “l’état, c'est moi”—dug canals, maintained a postal service, and took steps to curb deforestation. This was hardly “authoritarian.” Moreover, public services and infrastructure development had been decisively expanded in modern states. The ideal state of the future might be no more than a functional administration of these productive institutions, with its coercive powers gradually reduced over time.Footnote 54
As De Paepe argued, this state was consistent with “libertarian” demands. Proudhon's writings, he showed, sometimes endorsed a “state” insofar as workers, organized on federal and democratic lines, made it up. Consistent with this vision, De Paepe described a two-tiered polity of the future, which combined a relatively decentralized “political” or consuming administration of federated geographical units (such as communes and departments), and a relatively centralized “economic” or producing apparatus of federated trade associations (such as cooperatives, unions, and mutual-aid societies). Attacked as an “authoritarian” for endorsing a state of any kind, De Paepe defended himself. He labeled the Rapport’s ideal “a federative state, a state formed from the bottom up,” and even ventured a “nonauthoritarian” or “an-archic” state.Footnote 55
The inductive and provisional, though detailed, theory that De Paepe offered in the Rapport sketched the basic arrangements of collectivist society in an idiom intelligible to most militants of the International. However, De Paepe relied implicitly upon a particular strategic assessment of the 1870s. The “parliament of the proletariat” or “parliament of labor” under construction in Belgium could in time fulfill the revolutionary responsibilities as outlined in the Rapport, and as partially shouldered by the Commune. But this would only be possible, De Paepe suspected, if the workers’ movement navigated the specific constraints and opportunities of Belgian political life. Above all, Belgian labor would have to avoid a self-defeating, immature insurrection favored by its enragés on the model of the Commune. It would have to build stronger unions and cooperatives, as well as a party, based on British and German models respectively. And it would need to secure suffrage rights and electoral alliances with social liberals in order to wring collectivist concessions from the constitutional government.
This strategy was consistent with De Paepe's earlier thought, but it emphasized an evolutionary, gradual, and experimental course of action based on new circumstances. It was not, De Paepe recognized, applicable everywhere. For all his discussions in the 1870s of a revolutionary future, De Paepe thus shrank from prescribing (or proscribing) any particular strategy to cosmopolitan radicals. He simply acknowledged that revolutionary upheaval and socialist agitation would differ from country to country.Footnote 56
Here was a problem, however. De Paepe did not always distinguish between “nationalization, communism, collectivism, socialization of property” because he believed that all these concepts referred to the same basic calculation: how the fruits of industrial civilization would be owned, managed, and distributed according to the criteria of ethics and expediency.Footnote 57 But if the outcome of this determination differed due to the moral and cultural development of peoples, the economic organization of their society, the structure of states, and the ideological and organizational form of labor movements, then socialism was if anything more national than international.
De Paepe's circumspect conclusions, as a result, antagonized socialists abroad as well as at home, most of all enragés. At the meetings of the “St Imier International” during the mid-1870s, the Jurassian watchmaker Schwitzguébel, the Belgian baker Verrycken, and the Spanish student Garcia-Viñas charged De Paepe with “statism.” As Schwitzguébel argued, there was a clear choice before European socialists: authority or liberty, “the state or an-archie.”Footnote 58 Whereas federalist radicals favored “the complete autonomy of the individual and the group” to settle contracts among themselves and build a polity from the bottom up, De Paepe preferred a state that bound its citizens coercively and arbitrarily, by majority decrees. He contradicted Proudhon's radical reformulation of Rousseau, which debunked the sovereignty of mere “number” for that of “reason.” As Proudhon had written in Idée générale: if “[n]o one should obey a law to which he has not consented,” majority rule violated my right to “agree with one or more of my fellow citizens for any object whatever” and hence be “my own government.” De Paepe's state of the future, Schwitzguébel elaborated, would be even worse than bourgeois governments, because its rulers “will believe they have realized the most perfect ideal.”Footnote 59
Such antistate socialists drew on De Paepe's theories, but dropped the political analysis integral to them. As is well known, Bakunin declared himself a “collectivist,” not a “communist,” before the League of Peace and Freedom at Berne in September 1868. But Bakunin explicitly did so “with the Congress of the workers of Brussels” earlier that month, precisely where De Paepe's proposals had carried the day.Footnote 60 Bakunin's Jurassian lieutenant Guillaume borrowed from De Paepe even more directly. His Idées sur l'organisation sociale (1876) rehashed and quoted from the Rapport, depicting a regime of workers’ corporations, local services, and democratic contracts that differed from De Paepe's principally in being called a “federation of communes.” To call the future socialist polity a “state,” Guillaume's newspaper declared, would produce “the most disastrous confusion.” If one rounded a square, it became a circle: “a new name is necessary.”Footnote 61 Principle as much as semantic prevarication informed the view that socialism could be realized without governance. While De Paepe helped to originate the “revolutionary collectivism . . . which is today called collectivist anarchism,” wrote the “Herodotus” of anarchism Max Nettlau in 1897, his Rapport was “no longer anarchist.” Much of anarchist “collectivism” and political economy was, in fact, a derivative and undigested version of De Paepe's thought.Footnote 62
Among “political” socialists, De Paepe was similarly a frequent, but often vague or critical, point of reference. His admirers adopted his ideas while sometimes missing his distinctive argument. The POB/BWP leader Bertrand called simply for state property in all land and capitals, without reference to workers’ companies. In France, the possibilist Brousse dismissed considerations of justice as artifacts of the pre-1848 period and envisioned “complete production by the state,” while his companion Fournière glossed De Paepe's ideas as a “theory of the transformation of private monopolies into public services.”Footnote 63
For their part, “Marxists” had little use for De Paepe's project. Though for years Marx courted De Paepe and Engels praised him, they ultimately attacked him in their correspondence (“not very active,” “indolent,” a “bombastic chatterbox”) for his aloofness during the power struggle in the International. His theories they dismissed as misunderstood. As Engels observed, “anyone who ventures to criticize [Marx's] discoveries is more likely to burn his fingers than anything else”: it was laughable “to find or impute other progenitors (Lassalle, Schäffle, and actually De Paepe!) on whom to father Marx's discoveries.” The attitude of Marx and Engels's successors towards Belgian socialist thinkers was equally straightforward. “They have nothing to revise,” Kautsky wrote of the POB/BWP leadership in 1902, “for they have no theory.”Footnote 64
Self-conscious French Marxists kept pace with their allies in Germany. Primers began by warning readers about “Belgian counterfeits” of collectivism. Guesde invoked the “producer and distributor state” of the future, condemning all efforts to scale up corporate or communal ownership, institute cost-price exchanges, or halt the immiserating and centralizing logics of modern production and class struggle. For his part, Lafargue ridiculed profit-sharing, cooperative production, and free credit as “philanthropic cataplasms.”Footnote 65
In the mid-1870s, many socialists had agreed on the plausibility and desirability of social property. But as this survey suggests, militants went their own way as they engaged with, adopted aspects of, or simply rejected De Paepe's ideas. Further agreement was improbable amid a general transformation of contemporary institutions and a reconfiguration of activist practice across Europe. Though they all took social property for granted, members of the dying International were splitting up into “social-democratic,” “anarchist,” and other camps. They went as far as to reject a simple pact of socialist unity proposed by De Paepe in September 1877. With the failure of the Ghent Congress, De Paepe's last attempt at conciliation, the era of the International closed.Footnote 66
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DE PAEPE
Nineteenth-century socialist demands for “the state” or “society” to administer property raised mystifying practical and conceptual problems.Footnote 67 De Paepe struggled with them. His definition of the state was incoherent: it was the outgrowth of workers’ free contracts in the present, the future arbiter of a socialist society, the modifiable government of contemporary Belgium. Once it was clear that these would not overlap, and economic utility would not coincide with what moral right demanded, social property was far from assured. De Paepe was forced, over his lifetime, to emphasize democratic policy rather than the immanent justice of economic exchanges as the legitimate mechanism of property ownership and distribution. This only accomplished so much. Fraught deliberations on strategy and tactics facilitated by geopolitical changes fractured the socialist movement into irreconcilable camps. Meanwhile, rural European populations remained suspicious of collectivism, a principle formulated by metropolitan anticlericals with little understanding of peasant life.Footnote 68 Pragmatic officials, social liberals, and innovative conservatives, too, were an obstacle: they showed that public services and democracy did not have to be as “revolutionary” as De Paepe hoped.
Important in the reorientation of European socialism in the 1860s and 1870s, De Paepe seemed anachronistic as the twentieth century approached. Collectivism, as he theorized it, was more a synthesis of the socialist thought and political economy of the first half of the nineteenth century than an “anticipation” of fin de siècle social democracy or Soviet communism. His concerns were those of justice, the farmer and the artisan, and the cooperative; his writings were marked by a skepticism of the state and by an emphasis on the individual. As the 1880s and 1890s arrived, European socialists usually shifted their preoccupations to those set forth by Marxism, and they found new or different justifications for social property.
At the same time, social democracy came naturally to De Paepe. In the 1880s, he and his Belgian colleagues created what scholars have called the “most solidified, disciplined and serious of the European Socialist parties,” equipped with “a structure more complete in its economic and cultural scope than that of any other socialist party.” Besides helping to build a dense “pillar” subsociety of cooperatives, trade unions, and clubs, De Paepe campaigned for all the well-known reforms of the democratic, regulatory welfare state. His 1884 electoral manifesto, for instance, endorsed everything from universal suffrage, press freedom, and free compulsory education to child labor laws, health and safety regulations, a fixed working day, and pensions.Footnote 69
This was no passage from “utopianism” to the “science” of electoral socialism, as most scholars have supposed. Besides the above measures, “more or less immediate, to be realized at the present time,” De Paepe continued to advocate long-term reforms for “a society gradually and experimentally making its way towards collectivism.” These included a national bank offering cheap credit, the right of farmers to their plus-value, and a social property regime combining state ownership and workers’ companies. The concepts, thinkers (such as Proudhon and the Colinsians), and even the very proposals of De Paepe's earlier life pervaded his writings of the 1880s and even the charter of the POB/BWP, adopted in 1894 at Quaregnon. Guided by the criteria of justice and utility, De Paepe hence combined his “partial and relative, progressive and experimental communism” (not an “absolute and purely utopian communism”) with social-democratic practice. His emphases shifted across his life—he had become “both more communist and less revolutionary,” as he reflected in 1889—but his final writings suggest continuity far more than a break with the past.Footnote 70
Belgium, to be sure, is no proxy for Europe as a whole. Yet De Paepe's story and the POB/BWP's successes into the twentieth century suggest that the line between early and late socialism can be overdrawn, not only in the International but also perhaps at the turn of the century. Just as mutualism and other early creeds informed collectivism in the 1860s and 1870s, De Paepe's ideas of the 1880s owed to his positivist formation and the speculative method of early socialists. One may well label them an “eclectic Marxist–Proudhonist–anarchist–sentimental socialism,” in the words of De Man. But just as scholars have argued that Bernstein was “not revising Marx,” but “was advocating a completely different point of view,” it may be more enlightening to view De Paepe as the author of an independent position, which was no less unique or legitimate for having drawn upon earlier radical traditions. De Paepe and the Belgian case show that an apparent heresy around the year 1900 could have historical precedents as well as broad purchase among contemporary militants.Footnote 71 “Utopianism” sustained pragmatic parliamentarism and reformism in Belgium and elsewhere.Footnote 72
De Paepe's ultimate political and methodological significance becomes clear by comparing Belgian socialism to its better-known German counterpart. Notoriously, Marx said little about politics that was not negative or oblique. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) dismissed social democracy's pursuit of a “petit bourgeois” harmony of capital, labor, and peasant proprietorship. The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) included pedantic marginalia and hazy reflections about “communism” and “dictatorship.” The Civil War in France (1871) contained imperatives so vague that it “equally satisfied all parties—Blanquists, Proudhonists, and Communists,” as Jenny Marx reported. (The straightforward strategy of the youthful Manifesto, by contrast, was abandoned: “no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II,” he and Engels wrote in 1872.) As he set aside the drafts of Capital to meditate on a Russian commune that was more myth than reality, Marx hinted only “that the moment a truly proletarian revolution breaks out, the conditions for its immediate initial (if certainly not idyllic) modus operandi will also be there.” Preoccupations with how this would actually occur, “in so far as they do not relate to the immediate, actual conditions obtaining in this or that specific nation . . . will invariably fizzle out in a host of rehashed generalised banalities.”Footnote 73
This distaste for “writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future” became an axiom of Marxian orthodoxy in Germany and elsewhere. Kautsky prognosticated about the collapse of capitalism, but eschewed detailed reflections on the future society, printing only a single article on the topic in Die Neue Zeit in 1882–1914. The 1891 Erfurt program which he helped to draft departed from the inevitable movement of bourgeois society, predicting intensified class struggle and the ruin of small producers. It tersely demanded “common property” and “socialist production,” besides calling for workers to take political power. In an 1892 exegesis, Kautsky criticized those who would describe the institutions of the future in greater detail, as well as those who thought the state would nationalize industries “further than the interests of the ruling classes demanded.” The collapse of capitalism was “only a matter of time”: only once the working class “has become the ruling class” could the state become “a co-operative commonwealth.”Footnote 74
Led by De Paepe, the Belgians took a different approach. Whereas the Erfurt program emphasized classes and historical necessity, the Quaregnon charter foregrounded individual rights and a moral ideal in Millian fashion, assuring “every human being” of “the greatest possible amount of liberty and of well-being” consistent with “social utility” in the enjoyment of common resources. The former program was cryptic about the structure of social property; the latter enumerated what should be public and how it should be administered in comprehensive appendices. One was the product of historical materialism and political experience under a substantially autocratic regime; the other was rooted in the ideals of the French Revolution and anticipated the possibilities for reform in a fundamentally liberal system. Both were social-democratic, but they were not the same.Footnote 75
To be sure, the twentieth century demonstrated the piousness, and peril, of the idea that modern democratic freedoms are possible without private property rights. It is difficult indeed to read De Paepe's proposals without Soviet political economy coming to mind. Nevertheless, limited forms of social ownership, public services, and state subsidy and oversight have become globally ubiquitous. It is not hard to see why. As in nineteenth-century Europe, the advantages of modest forms of socialization are obvious: safeguarding society and nature, maintaining a stable and productive economy, subsidizing vital though unprofitable services. Though the public-services state may grow or shrink in size, some measure of social property or management of common resources, instituted by peaceful and democratic means, is now virtually everywhere taken for granted. De Paepe's theory of how states would progressively and partially socialize property was not as far off the mark as it may at first appear.
Some of his categories, not his strategies or precise predictions, may also resonate. De Paepe conceived of socialism as an experimental, democratic, and reformist mediation between right and utility. The proper political stewardship of the economy seems to require such an equilibrium of opposed terms, whether one calls them commutative and distributive justice, efficiency and justice, or liberty and equality. Seen in this light, socialism appears less like a set of doctrines of revolution and class struggle and more like the projects of many state officials and political agents in the twentieth century, liberal and conservative. More than some better-known socialists, De Paepe thus directed his readers towards a mundane but fundamental problem of modernity: how to secure both individual freedom and social justice practically.
As his story and modern history suggest, there is little reason to believe that this problem admits of an easy or satisfying solution. Crafting effective public policy and property reforms is as demanding and divisive as ever, to say nothing of the sheer obscurity of creating decent institutions between a “public” state and “private” individuals and associations (“the grueling work of constituting the people as a body,” for one scholar). Panaceas have been tenacious but unworkable, from those of interwar Catholic corporatists to postwar Keynesians, from Western European ’68ers to Eastern European communist “reformers.” Nevertheless, the dilemma remains a legitimate preoccupation of the postcommunist age.Footnote 76
Finally, to put aside politics for methodology, De Paepe challenges conventions among intellectual historians. Dismissing the ideas of the International as unsophisticated, or forcing them to serve one's own political agenda in spite of the documentary record, hardly brings scholars nearer to an understanding of the ideas and language of socialism after 1848. What intellectual historians take to be philosophically unimpressive or “bad” ideas, too, may be just as historically significant as “good” ideas. It is in the writings of minor theorists, of popularizers, and of supposedly transitional figures, placed within broader contexts, that the relationship between thought and action—and, indeed, individuals’ persistent inability to make these two things coincide just as they would like—can be most keenly appreciated.
