Society in France is now divided into two great classes, the Bourgeoisie, or middle classes, composed of the bankers, merchants, master-manufacturers, landholders, in short, of men of property who do not engage in manual labor for their subsistence, and the laboring classes, who are without property, and who depend upon their daily labor for support. The late conflict was between these two classes, and it is the beginning, no doubt, of a great struggle, of which we have just seen the opening scene.Footnote 1
The person who wrote the above words in the immediate aftermath of the 1848 June Days—a mass four-day worker insurgency in the streets of Paris precipitated by the closing of the National Workshops and brutally suppressed by the armed forces of the Second Republic, leaving at least 1,500 civilian combatants dead in the streets and exponentially more arrested, executed, and deported—was not a revolutionary socialist à la Marx or Blanqui known to deal in the language of class struggle. It was the unlikely American Fourierist Albert Brisbane, leading light of the cooperative school of US socialism known as Associationism. More surprisingly, Brisbane did not respond to the latest agitation of the French Revolution from afar, at a comfortable distance from scenes of bloodshed. He traveled to Paris in the middle of the uprising to get “an inside view of the Parisian Revolt” (the title of his article penned on 29 June) from the standpoint of the insurgency and to observe events on the ground; this “inside view” was published in the New-York Daily Tribune nearly a month later on 24 July, then subsequently reprinted on 5 August as the lead article of the national weekly of the Associationists, The Harbinger.Footnote 2
Upon entering Paris late in the evening on 23 June, the first day of the civil war, and visiting a rude cabaret in the insurgent-controlled district of La Chapelle, Brisbane, his spirits lifted by the friendly service he receives, more by his perfect omelet and coffee, feels right at “home” enough to strike up conversation with an affable “young man in a blouse.”Footnote 3 That is, a common worker. To Brisbane’s query about his political principles, this plucky laborer, “who had been engaged in the affray during the day,” readily responds,
“I am,” said he, “a Socialist and Democratic Republican; I do not want that the rich should prey upon (exploiteret) the poor; I want the association of labor and capital; that the laborer should have a share of the profits, and that the rich man should not take all the profits to himself, and make a fortune out of the labor of the poor man.”Footnote 4
Later, at the home of an impoverished shawl weaver (also the struggling owner of the cabaret bar) where Brisbane has been kindly offered a place to sleep for the night, a destitute insurgent preparing for another day at the barricades tells his curious American interviewer plainly, “‘I fight,’ said he, ‘against the rich, against the bad rich, who starve the poor: they withdraw their money from circulation; they take our labor from us, and reduce us to starvation. I might as well die by a bullet as to die from hunger.’”Footnote 5 These and other recorded testimonials, solicited in intimate spaces of the working poor, not only build sympathy for and put a human face to the Parisian revolt, justifying Brisbane’s communication to readers that the “great majority” of insurgents are ouvriers “driven to desperation by want, and animated by the hope that they could get the power into their hands, and do what they chose for the amelioration of their condition,” but also align the cause of the working class with the platform of the Associationists.Footnote 6 Even if Brisbane paraphrases his interlocuters so as to translate their sentiments into his own political vocabulary, that would only consolidate the point I wish to introduce here—an American socialist, the first national disciple of Charles Fourier, wants to claim solidarity with the revolutionary worker of the June insurrection, fighting for the principle of associated labor and the end of capitalist exploitation. They are comrades in ideas if not in arms.
Five years earlier, at the inception of the Associationist movement, such a position would have been unthinkable for the likes of Brisbane and his cohort. The revolutions of 1848 changed that. This explosive, nonlinear chain of European uprisings—broadly republican, considerably egalitarian, at times extremely radical, with ramifying effects throughout the colonized world—pushed many American socialists, de rigueur advocates for peaceful if foundational economic and labor reform, to embrace, however reluctantly, the politics and persuasiveness of militant dissent as a necessary means to break the power of the bourgeoisie (as defined by Brisbane) and claim, then institutionalize, a system of cooperative rather than competitive industry. Concomitantly, the revolutions symbolized for a large constituency of American socialists from diverse camps the import of the historical moment through which they were living—in the catchphrase of New-York Daily Tribune editor and Associationist Horace Greeley, “the Emancipation of Labor” (including enslaved labor) as the great social question and political task of the nineteenth century.Footnote 7 Although the Associationist party line continued to formally condemn the use of force as a legitimate or efficacious means of engendering “social harmony” per the philosophy of Fourier, the most progressive among them pinned the responsibility for the blood flowing in the streets of Paris on what Brisbane diagnosed as the oppressive, unendurable class rule—the structural violence—of the bourgeoisie, the state representatives of whom failed to implement meaningful “practical, industrial reforms” that would lift the masses out of poverty and alleviate their sufferings.Footnote 8 On these terms, Boston Associationist president William Henry Channing could enthusiastically endorse worker revolt and declare that “victory is sure!” for the proletariat of Paris, by “prolonged and terrible universal war” if need be, for “we have touched the last great Revolution; there can be no more.”Footnote 9 Or, as Charles Dana, a former member of the defunct Brook Farm Association and in 1848 a foreign correspondent on European affairs for the Tribune, put it in response to the June civil war, if you want to stop the workers from engaging in armed conflict, then “give them Association” and end “the exploitation of labor by capital,” as is their demand. There is no turning back now, Dana insisted. “Politics have become social and socialism is now politics.”Footnote 10
Clearly, for like-minded Americans, the revolutionary spring of 1848 as crystallized in France meant nothing less than a socialist bloom, the birth of a new epoch embodying what The Harbinger called the “grand demand of the Era.”Footnote 11 But this all-caps fervor for a sweeping transformation in the “ORGANIZATION OF LABOR” pace Louis Blanc’s influential 1840 pamphlet by that name is not typically what comes to mind when one thinks about the “American 1848,” at least not in a way that is taken seriously on par with the left-wing cadres and working-class constituency that stepped onto the world’s stage across the Atlantic.Footnote 12 Ever since Michael Paul Rogin coined the term in his 1983 monograph on Herman Melville, the “American 1848” has primarily been treated in the scholarly literature as a historical conjuncture of democratic crisis in the United States marked by the end of the US–Mexico War and the imperial expansion of the nation westward on the one hand, and the attendant sectional dispute over the future of slavery adumbrating the Civil War on the other.Footnote 13 In this plot, the 1851 Thermidorean installment of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte on the throne in France (a synecdoche for the eclipse of revolutionary promise) finds its analogue in the consolidation of a pro-slavery US empire formalized by the Compromise of 1850. As historian Timothy Mason Roberts argues, the promising rise and disappointing fall of the 1848 revolutions (followed very closely in the United States) ultimately served to reinforce and solidify the growing imperial ethos of American exceptionalism—the nation’s special, upstanding revolutionary heritage and its manifest destiny as a global superpower, opposite the messy radicalism and finally disastrous attempts across continental Europe to establish republican institutions after the US model.Footnote 14
It makes sense, in this light, that scholars such as Shelley Streeby and John Carlos Rowe have illuminated the equally messy and antidemocratic development of US nation building in the American 1848, one defined by the relations of race and class, capitalism and colonialism.Footnote 15 While this is a critical context that also matters for Associationism, I wish to address the delimited issue of socialist politics and the US labor movement vis-à-vis the European revolutions, a subject that has been downplayed or sidelined by the existing literature. Just as Samuel Hayat shows how the Revolution of 1848 in France “gave birth to a distinctive working-class democratic-socialist ideology that we can provisionally call working-class socialism,” I mean to draw attention to the rising tide of a parallel ideology in the United States at mid-century that traveled under the name of Associationism.Footnote 16 Its proponents not only expressed open solidarity with the 1848 European revolutionaries and shared the latter’s values, but also hoped to introduce the same progressive transformations at home. I will wager that most readers are unfamiliar with an antebellum socialist theory in essential agreement with Karl Marx (if for different reasons) that the 1848 revolutions “noisily and confusedly … proclaimed the emancipation of the proletarian, i.e., the secret of the nineteenth century, and of the revolution of that century,” marking not the end but the beginning of a long struggle—an “opening scene,” as Brisbane phrased it.Footnote 17 My aim is to elucidate how the 1848 revolutions catalyzed such a point of view, challenging and transforming the socialist vernacular spoken by American progressives.
In so doing, I argue that the Associationist 1848 offers an alternative to both timeworn narratives of revolutionary failure dismissing the impact and relevance of this singular historical moment, and more recent reappraisals that positively appreciate the revolutions primarily for their lasting constitutional and liberalizing social effects. The prevailing latter viewpoint makes the case that the sociopolitical movements of 1848, notwithstanding the defeated objectives of sundry national freedom fighters, liberals, and radicals, irrevocably transformed the civil society, public sphere, governmental landscape, and political thought of Europe; they also implemented many enduring reforms and otherwise set the agenda that would push the continent towards institutional and national democratization while normalizing a culture of popular political participation and the contest for power, equality, representation, and material–economic betterment.Footnote 18 Thus 1848 in this reading becomes a turbulent flashpoint of structural transformation (a “particle collision chamber,” in Christopher Clark’s preferred metaphor) out of which our own contemporary conditions (and set of problems) emerged, the conditions of “democratic modernity.”Footnote 19 Clare Pettitt’s corrective that “the real gain of 1848 was exactly that liberalism excoriated by Marx in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’” sums up the broad consensus of the late historiography.Footnote 20 I call this the liberalization thesis. And it’s a thesis I want to push back against insofar as it accepts or assumes that anticapitalist, much less revolutionary socialist, politics do not constitute a serious project central to the story of 1848 and its legacy.
Although I cannot pursue this critique in appropriate depth, it suffices to say for the purposes of this article’s argument that even Karl Marx did not write off the revolutions as unserious failures; in fact, if one wishes to oversimplify his analysis, it would be more correct to say that he considered them an irrevocable, world-shattering triumph for the development of the working class as a revolutionary constituency. When Marx asserts in The Eighteenth Brumaire that the June insurrection was “the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars,” “a great world-historical struggle,” he intends no irony.Footnote 21 The workers, to his mind, not in spite of but by virtue of the civil war and its counterrevolutionary outcome, thereby established their independent political agency and ripped off the mask of the liberal bourgeois state, now revealed to be the class enemy it always was: “By making its burial place the birthplace of the bourgeois republic, the proletariat forced this republic to appear in its pure form, as the state whose avowed purpose it is to perpetuate the rule of capital and the slavery of labour.”Footnote 22 Only in this way, by sharpening and clarifying the material antagonism between the interests of the ruling bourgeoisie and the working class, did the “real party of revolution” emerge and clear a path for itself—a future socialist path.Footnote 23 “Dipped in the blood of the June insurgents,” 1848 served the purpose of raising the “red flag” with the cry, “The revolution is dead!—Long live the revolution!”Footnote 24
The Associationists, some of whom admired Marx, were certainly not historical materialists (readers of 1848) in the latter’s sense.Footnote 25 But from their own vantage point, they did posit that the “struggles and sufferings” of the convulsive year of 1848 embodied the “birth-throes of a mighty change” to come—“a Revolution, the like of which has never yet been.”Footnote 26 That was the “real gain of 1848” to them, not the progress of parliamentary democracy or the liberalization of civil society. Taking this fact as my point of departure and object of analysis, the philosophy of Associationism, in my view, is a more grounded framework for appreciating the socialist horizon of the American 1848 in its own time and on its own terms. As such, I do not measure the movement’s merits or problems by the yardstick of historical outcomes, later developments in the socialist/labor movement, or the influential evolutionary argument popularized by Friedrich Engels that “utopian socialism” is a naive lineal ancestor of “scientific socialism” displaced by the material development of capitalist social relations.Footnote 27 From an inverse perspective, this conventional “Marxist” thesis intersects with the liberalization thesis inasmuch as it, too, argues that 1848 marks the transition, in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms, from the Age of Revolution to the Age of Capital, from “the politics of tradition” to “the era of the triumphant bourgeois.”Footnote 28 In this secularization narrative, “the revolutions of 1848 made it clear that the middle classes, liberalism, political democracy, nationalism, even the working class, were henceforth permanent features of the political landscape,” and the same line of reasoning buttresses the idea that Associationism was an inevitably ephemeral if interesting episode of American reform on the way to more mature, realistic, hard-nosed developments in the labor movement, in social theory, and in political society more broadly.Footnote 29 Thus the 1848 revolutions can only figure as the Associationist “God that Failed,” as “the fading of the utopian dream,” to cite the influential thesis of Carl Guarneri.Footnote 30
In contrast to Guarneri, who highlights the pro-capitalist turn of the Associationists in the 1850s and their attendant retreat to progressive social activism focused on personal liberation, Adam Tuchinksy offers a different version of the liberalization thesis in his effort to recuperate the Associationist movement à la Horace Greeley as the progenitor of a dynamic United States democratic-socialist tradition, what he also calls “social democratic liberalism.”Footnote 31 In Tuchinsky’s view, the Associationists gave birth to a more egalitarian, economically progressive strain of free-labor ideology foundational to the Republican Party, the antislavery movement, and the labor movement in the years leading up to and following the Civil War. The crucible of the 1848 revolutions matters because, in this argument, it stripped away the socialist romanticism of American Fourierism proper and liberated the pragmatic kernel from its utopian shell: “after 1848 social democrats embraced a stripped-down version of Fourierism that focused principally on a more practical style of worker association termed cooperation. Fused to various instrumental reforms such as the eight-hour day, worker cooperation became the central demand of the labor movement into the Gilded Age.”Footnote 32 By glossing “practical socialism” as an effect of the 1848 revolutions and not an antecedent or concomitant aspect of the Associationist 1848, Tuchinsky implicitly denies that a real or relevant socialist labor politics existed in the United States before the 1850s. In the end, 1848 was little more than a liberal rite of passage that “cleared the way for a new language and a new political mentality through which American progressive intellectuals perceived and critiqued their social and political world.”Footnote 33
Herein lies the difference in my emphasis and argument compared to previous commentators on the Associationist 1848: I see this historical episode not only as the culmination of the movement’s radical trajectory, but also as a decisive critical intervention and political–social event all its own that made available a homegrown philosophy of socialist labor revolution in the United States. As exemplified by my opening episode about Albert Brisbane, the evidence for this reading does not lie in any original source materials but in a close and careful reevaluation of statements written and published by Associationists themselves. For the purposes of this article, I focus my attention solely on The Harbinger, “our most valuable source of information on the Associative movement” in the United States.Footnote 34
The article unfolds in three parts devoted to the Associationist 1848’s rising action/background, climax/culmination, and concluding meaning/legacy. The first contextualizes the Associationist philosophy of “attractive industry,” the way the workers’ movement translated it into a concrete organizing strategy of cooperative agitation, and the evolving relationship of Associationism to “practical” socialism in the lead-up to 1848. The second section focuses on the Associationist response to the French Revolution of 1848; here I highlight how this event compelled the movement to adopt a vision of socialism made through the process of class struggle. The third section (my conclusion) evaluates the legacy and lesson of the Associationist 1848 as a form of “left populism” relevant to our current historical moment. Against the liberalization thesis, I distill the point from a short discussion of Margaret Fuller’s engagement with the European revolutions that the Associationist 1848 ultimately announces socialism to be an undying revolutionary promise that must be imagined and struggled for beyond the failures of the past and the limitations of the present.
Attractive industry, cooperative socialism, and the making of the Associationist 1848
By 1848 Associationism had evolved into a national organization with two dozen affiliates, the “American Union of Associationists.” It was allied with the most progressive wing of the American workers’ movement at the time, the Industrial Congress: an unprecedented coalition of labor groups representing a wide array of regional workingmen’s associations and reform advocates (trade unionists, land reformers, cooperative socialists). This ascendant activist ethos of the Association movement, what we might call its third phase, outstripped the more decidedly “utopian”—evangelical, communitarian—period of 1843–6 (phase two) when the philosophy of Association, introduced by a small coterie of influential intellectuals, namely Brisbane and Greeley, in the years 1839–43 (phase one), first began to yield practical results and a revivalistic wave of phalanx building spread across the country. Though it sought to establish working connections with the Fourierists in France and consistently published translations of their literature and newspaper articles in The Harbinger, the short-lived American Union, founded in 1846, represented a distinctly national offshoot adapted to the social conditions and culture of labor reform in the United States, what its members often referred to as “practical Association.” That meant downplaying, when not rejecting, the dogmatic visionary schemas of Fourier and the millenarian theology of Christian socialism that gave rise to the movement, and advancing instead a public platform and de facto secular program for economic justice, workers’ rights, and associated industry against the “tyranny of capital.”Footnote 35 In this way Associationism integrated itself into the broader labor movement, especially in New England, where it had stronger ties with working-class organizations, and its message appealed to a large cross-section of manual laborers, radical artisans most of all but not excluding factory workers either.Footnote 36
One can understand why. As Albert Brisbane preached, the “great and practical reform” of “attractive industry” that lies at the theoretical root of Associationism proposed, like no other contemporaneous body in the United States, a reorganized labor system in which “the Workmen will be their own masters; they will fix upon their working hours, choose their occupations, divide the profits of their labor, and govern in every way their own affairs.”Footnote 37 By “attractive industry,” or “industrial attraction,” the progenitor of the concept, Charles Fourier, imagined an affluent, luxurious society defined by a mutually constitutive relationship between work and desire, labor and love, the production of social wealth and the production of social pleasure. His New Industrial World revolves around “passionate attraction” as both the means and ends of political economy: everyone participates as associates and intimates, producers and co-owners of the collective stock with proportional, guaranteed rights to the community’s material abundance.Footnote 38 If one jettisons the pseudoscientific/anthropological/metaphysical schematics of Fourier’s “Palace of Harmony,” the salience of “attractive industry” has more to do with its deployment as a critique of the alienated, unhappy, violently competitive conditions of life and labor under capitalism, and as a demand not only that the organization of work should be sociable and satisfactory but that said organization should foster and enhance the individual talents and capacities of workers while furnishing a variety of opportunities suited to workers’ needs and wants.Footnote 39 Placing the theory of attractive industry on such practical grounds, the Constitution of the American Union of Associationists offered not a utopian blueprint but a set of principles that informed the movement’s policy agendas: “Joint-Stock Property; Co-operative Labor; Association of Families; Equitable Distribution of Profits; Mutual Guarantees; Honors according to Usefulness; Integral Education”—in sum, “UNITY OF INTERESTS.”Footnote 40
Translated for and by the contemporaneous labor movement, most of these objectives ultimately flowed into and merged with the stream of overt working-class protest that crested in New York City’s “labor crisis of 1850” when nearly a hundred trade unions and labor organizations affiliated with the New York Industrial Congress pledged to “secure the laborer the full product of his toil and to promote union, harmony, and brotherly feeling among all workmen of whatever occupation.”Footnote 41 For the Associationists, this plan of action presupposed a revolution in the economic system. To quote Brisbane again, mere “political reforms” will never dissolve the constitutive antagonism between private capital and social labor; workers will never be emancipated until we “go to the root of social Evil” and “eradicate those deeply seated Miseries, which result from repugnant and ill-requited labor, from an unjust distribution of profits, from false and anarchical competition in trade and industry.”Footnote 42 While he never abandoned his personal commitment to Fourier’s “social science,” by 1845 Brisbane’s rhetoric reflected less the romantic, leisure-class vision of the ideal industrial phalanx that marked his early writings and more the “plain, practical things which the Working-men want,” namely “THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR BY THE COLLECTIVE WILL AND CONSCIENCE OF THE PEOPLE, TO SECURE TO THE PEOPLE THEIR INDUSTRIAL RIGHTS,” and “AN EQUITABLE DIVISION OF PROFITS.”Footnote 43
What form do such measures take in concrete terms? The answer was the producer association (or cooperative workshop) and the protective union (or cooperative store). Initially, Associationist support for cooperative labor and exchange—embodied by their promotion of and involvement in the Working Men’s Protective Union founded in 1845—served an instrumental purpose: to popularize Associationist ideals and recruit workers to the grander cause of the phalanx community movement. Leadership viewed cooperatives as preliminary, transitional organizational structures necessary to an Associationist revolution and subordinate to the goals of the latter. But, by 1847, when most of the American phalanxes had collapsed and it became apparent that communitarians did not have the resources (either the capital or the manpower) to establish thriving, growing, self-sustaining industries according to plan, the Associationists shifted tactics, redirecting their energies and aims to nearsighted measures with attainable objectives. They still hoped to demonstrate the real-world benefits and future promise of Associationism but, no longer putting the cart before the horse, prioritized building a robust, popular labor and social reform movement based on a program of progressive guarantees and collective organization. Hence the formation of the American Union and the concurrent turn to cooperation, an initiative strongly backed and forwarded by working-class Associationist leaders such as the carriagemaker Henry P. Trask, the journeyman tailor John Kaulback, and the cordwainer Lewis Ryckman, who viewed autonomous worker combinations, collectively taking control of both labor and trade, as the ultimate goal of the movement and itself a form of class resistance that would finally abolish woeful wage labor.Footnote 44
On this point the Associationists found a receptive audience. The prefigurative politics of the workers’ cooperative—in effect, building socialism from below—became increasingly central to the American labor movement in the late 1840s, a strategic organizing tactic that, at its best, reinforced work stoppages and cultivated solidarity among the trades. In an old but still relevant piece of scholarship on the cooperative movement in the United States, Edwin C. Rozwenc corroborates that, at its height, all the major trades embraced “cooperative unionism” in a genuine, cross-fertilizing coalition with the Associationists, “the only vigorous and organized proponents of cooperation in America at the time,” who “succeeded in making America ‘association conscious’ through the press, on the platform, and by their much advertised community experiments.”Footnote 45 Indeed, Associationism and trade unionism worked more in tandem as confederated agendas with overlapping constituencies than they did as discrete, divided camps, though that is not to deny the internal stratifications and differing priorities among industrial laborers, artisans, petty bourgeois reformers, and intellectual leaders within the movement—to wit, within the mixed-class and by no means ideologically homogeneous composition of Associationism itself. As Carl Guarneri highlights in his exhaustive history of American Fourierism, the workers’ movement of the 1840s was a “creative period of labor organization when, at the onset of industrial capitalism, intriguing alternatives to ‘wage slavery’ were promoted in a broad agitation that gathered workers and reformers in productive alliances”; more to the point, many workers were also reformers, many reformers were workers, and not a small number of “Associationists—in fact, a majority in the eastern phalanxes and a significant minority in local affiliated unions—were themselves working class in origin. Some of these, far from being diverted from labor agitation by utopian socialism, brought Associationist ideas into the labor movement.”Footnote 46 Labor unions that built strong ties with Associationists (the women of the Lowell Mills are a key example) didn’t adopt the “utopian” ideas of “middle-class intellectuals” against their own interests but adapted what was the most progressive vision of labor reform available to their own ends while advancing their own objectives, both to improve the immediate economic conditions of workers and to participate in a broader political project to transform the organization of industrial society.
Take the iron-molders of Cincinnati, who went on strike in the winter of 1847 and subsequently formed a cooperative foundry, the Journeymen Molders Union Foundry, in August of 1848, sponsored by Cincinnati Associationists and inspired by the National Workshops in France. The early success of this worker-run experiment led to plans to create an incorporated workers’ community, a “Home City” organized around cooperative factories, workshops, and stores, a project that came to fruition in the spring of 1850 but died shortly thereafter. This special articulation of the American 1848, and the “cooperative explosion” that it helped to ignite across the country in 1849–1850, resonated with the producer associations of the French Revolution, news of which Brisbane, Greeley, Rykman, Trask, and Dana disseminated far and wide, urging striking workers in Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, and other major cities to follow the example of their French comrades and establish independent worker cells that might displace the hegemony of privatized capital and industry.Footnote 47 The long-term goal of the cooperative movement was for workers to take over the factories, trade, and transport, in essence to create a labor federation, eliminating middlemen and employers, repudiating the wage system, and collectivizing every aspect of material life. In this regard it unambiguously embraced the schemes of the Associationists.Footnote 48 As the New England Protective Union, a vanguard organization of cooperative unionism informed by Associationism, declared to its members in 1849, “We must proceed from combined shops to combined houses, to joint ownership in God’s earth, the foundation that our edifice must stand upon.”Footnote 49
The Associationist 1848 thus deserves to be seen as legitimately socialist, if by that we adhere to Bernard Moss’s helpful specification of mid-nineteenth-century socialism (albeit in the French context) as “cooperative trade socialism”: “the creation of producers’ associations or cooperatives for the emancipation of trades from the wage system,” working “within the framework of a democratic republican movement.”Footnote 50 Explicitly echoing Moss, William Sewell Jr defines the ideology of socialism and the authentic working-class position that developed in the French 1848 according to two doctrines: first, “that the means of production should be collectively owned” (in “producers’ associations”), and second, that “labor, as the foundation of all social life, should be the foundation of the political order” (instituted by a “workers’ republic”).Footnote 51 This is precisely the stance of the Associationist movement on the eve of the 1848 revolutions—and the politics of socialism that would inform its enthusiasm for the latter.
But in a reciprocal development, it was the progress, agency, and influence of the workers’ movement that pushed the Associationists in the direction of an advanced position on labor agitation and the self-determination of the working class in the second half of the 1840s. The Harbinger, for example, stated solidly that “the Workingmen must help themselves” by building union power, and the job of the reformer is to advocate on their behalf.Footnote 52 In an 1845 address, Associationist Lewis Ryckman, speaking as president of the New England Workingmen’s Association, called for a national Industrial Union to fight against “capital dictating its own terms to the needy laborer”; accordingly, he also encouraged organized worker dissent: “I implore you to rally to the rescue! Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”Footnote 53 A year later, The Harbinger endorsed resolutions passed by the New England Workingmen’s Association on 27 May 1846, which included a “protest” of the “unhallowed war” waged against the Republic of Mexico, a war with no other aim than to “enhance the price of ‘Texas Script,’ and plunder Mexican soil for United States officers, slaveholders, and speculators to convert into a mart for traffic in human blood and human rights.”Footnote 54 The Association also resolved to “secure a general union among the producing classes of New England,” lobby for a ten-hour work day, champion “brother Labor Reformers” throughout the country, and stand in solidarity with the National Reform movement’s effort to end the “monopoly of the Soil.”Footnote 55 Subsequently, “Miss Rumrill, a factory girl,” representing the Female Labor Reform Association of Manchester, New Hampshire, read a report at the meeting (reprinted by The Harbinger) that confidently declared, “we, a down-trodden class, shall occupy that place in society, which justice demands … against this slavish system.”Footnote 56 In direct response, The Harbinger advocated for workers, men and women together, to build their own independent political movement and put forth their own leadership against the vitiated politicians and parties: “Let your motto be, ‘Government made Easy; or, Every Man his own Politician.’ Take your own work into your own hands, and you will have some chance of its being done, and done well.”Footnote 57 This was a position that would soon be taken up and radicalized across the Atlantic on an unprecedented scale in the revolutions of 1848.
The Harbinger, class struggle, and the French Revolution of 1848
“All things, at the present day, stand provided and prepared, and await the light,” reads the motto of The Harbinger, and the Associationist weekly, published by the American Union of Associationists in New York from 12 June 1847 to 10 February 1849, received the good news of the February Revolution in Paris as though it were the Light of Association revealed—the long-awaited miracle of a socialist millennium.Footnote 58 For the journal’s editors, no superlatives could overstate “the greatness of this event” and the “universal burst of joy and hope” it elicited among the supporters of republican France.Footnote 59 “It is providential, it is an era in human destiny,” The Harbinger proclaimed on March 25 after the first reports arrived on American shores a week earlier, echoing the sentiments of its peer newspaper, the New-York Daily Tribune, reprinted in the same issue: “Verily, it seems as if the great day of national regeneration were advancing upon Europe, as if a new era were beginning for the whole world!”Footnote 60 While such effusive bursts of enthusiasm for the abdication of Louis Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic rang far and wide in the United States, to the friends of socialism, the revolutionary jubilee did not signify the spread and triumph of American ideals but an unprecedented rupture in the field of history, a clarion call for the labor rights of man and a vindication of Associationist principles. Immediately The Harbinger assumed the role of the revolution’s socialist voice in the United States, its greatest partisan and virtual participant: “We present the Harbinger to the patronage of the public, as the only Journal which has been exclusively devoted to the diffusion of the ideas that have now been embodied in the Revolution of February, and which is in full fellowship with the European organs of progress, that advocate a social as well as political reform.”Footnote 61 This last, endlessly repeated, talking point (of social, not merely political, reform) distinguished the Cause of 1848 from any of its revolutionary predecessors (1776, 1789, 1830), its apologists believed. The inner purpose of the revolution, as embodied by the Luxembourg Commission’s representative workers’ committee, is to answer “the great question of the age, that of THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR”—“for the first time in the history of the world, LABOR, oppressed, but noble and glorious LABOR, its interest and its organization, has been proclaimed as a leading object of the State.”Footnote 62
For the Associationists, then, the events of 1848 represented the culmination of the labor movement and the crusade it had been fighting over the past several years, and that’s what The Harbinger aimed to demonstrate. First and foremost, the journal accented that the “laboring classes,” sometimes referred to as the “working classes,” then again as the “proletaires,” made the February Revolution, not the “philosophers, as in the first [French] revolution,” and not “the beorgeousie [sic], or middle classes, as in the revolution of 1830.”Footnote 63 Furthermore, they did so out of a righteous “sense of injustice experienced in their social, and pecuniary relations”—the relations of “degradation, poverty, and wretchedness,” and “wages slavery,” inherent to a mean and oppressive industrial system.Footnote 64 As Irish socialist and Chartist Thaddeus O’Malley phrased it in a letter printed in The Harbinger on 8 April, “The present Revolution in France is in fact an insurrection of Labor against Monopoly—a workingman’s Revolution.”Footnote 65 To the Associationists, what poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell dubbed the “war of Classes” was an unmistakable phenomenon, the axis of the revolution around which all other actions and events orbited.Footnote 66 In a 21 April letter to The Harbinger, Hugh Doherty, an Irish Fourierist and one of the journal’s most reliable correspondents covering the revolution in France, even anticipated the June Days based on the irresolvable antagonisms he observed in Paris:
I believe that civil war is quite inevitable in France, and perhaps all over Europe, from the temper of the two great classes of society, and those who form the link between them. I mean those who have nothing, and those who have all, and those who, having nothing, sympathize with the poor, but live on the spoils of the rich. The people are determined to work for themselves alone, and not for the profits of others. That is the cause of the revolution.Footnote 67
William Henry Channing amplified his comrade’s insight at a Boston Associationist meeting on 31 May: “Daily is the breach widening between two classes; between the bourgeoisie, the commercial class, the class of the employers, of those who have capital, on the one hand, and the class of the poor, the laborers, the proletaires, on the other. The condition of labor has become intolerable; and it is the condition of the vast mass of mankind.”Footnote 68 The 1848 revolutions have no other goal, Channing continued, than to remedy this condition, “but whether it be [by] war or peace, depends on the conservatives, depends upon the capitalist. If there is to be blood, the guilt of it will rest on their heads.”Footnote 69
This stark recognition of class struggle induced the Associationists to embrace a working-class politics of dissent that no longer squared with their doctrinaire commitment to reformist measures as the only path to social harmony, if only because they could map that dissent onto a republican tradition of rights-based revolution, the constituent power of the people to abolish an oppressive system of government. While they never supported labor militancy in and for itself, and maintained that a workers’ revolution presupposed a republican administration of peaceful deliberative order, the realpolitik of intransigent political-economic tyranny made popular resistance a situational necessity when no other path to change presented itself. On these terms, the Associationists even took their share of the credit for promoting, popularizing, and diffusing the “spirit of Social Reform” and the rights of labor among the masses as the French Revolution’s condition of possibility.Footnote 70 By reducing their school of thought to “practical Association” such that “‘Fourierism’ is but another name for the ‘Organization of Attractive and Productive Industry,’” then any example affirming this tendency becomes de facto Fourierist, from Louis Blanc’s social workshops to Lamartine’s campaign for a more equitable distribution of wealth.Footnote 71 To their mind, the Revolution of 1848 was Associationist in substance if not in name. And they weren’t wrong. The Provisional Government formally guaranteed the right to work and of association; meanwhile, the replacement of the wage system with worker-controlled producer associations became a core organizing principle and practice of working-class democrats and socialists in the wake of the revolution.Footnote 72
More importantly, the Associationist revolution was not limited to France or Europe; it had, to their way of thinking, a global import, a world-historical destiny, though Associationists certainly viewed the progress of democracy through a Eurocentric and American nationalistic lens. “Everywhere this is the movement; the people claim not only constitutions, but the guarantee of Work,” The Harbinger proclaimed.Footnote 73 At home, that meant that the American labor movement should be viewed as a local, national expression of an international demand, one luminous point of a revolutionary constellation. At a 9 May meeting, the Workingmen of Boston not only congratulated their “brothers, the workingmen of France” for their revolution, lauded the Provisional Government’s progressive legislation (including the abolition of slavery), and expressed solidarity with the English Chartists, Repealers of Ireland, and patriots of Italy, Germany, and Poland, but also reflexively leveraged the revolution to call out their own country’s conditions of oppression:
Resolved, That while we rejoice in the organization of free institutions in the Old World, we are not indifferent to their support at Home, and that we regard the despotic attitude of the slave power at the South, and the domineering ascendancy of a monied Oligarchy in the North as equally hostile to the interest of Labor, and incompatible with the preservation of popular rights.Footnote 74
What follows is a call to action, from “manly resistance” to the ruling classes installed in power to the support of pro-labor political candidates “from their own class”—in a word, an American Revolution of 1848.Footnote 75
For the same reason, The Harbinger strategically juxtaposed its coverage of the 1848 revolutions with that of the domestic cooperative movement. To cite only one example, a report on “Guarantyism in Cincinnati” in the 25 March edition followed an analysis of Associationism in France to inform readers that a group of molders and mechanics have established a foundry on the “share system,” endorsed by the source newspaper, the Cincinnati Morning Herald, as an experiment for “a fair union of capital, skill, and labor, in a partnership of equal rights—substituting co-operation for competition—uniting the interests of all—identifying in fact as well as theory, private benefit with public good—giving to each agent in production his fair share of the common profits.”Footnote 76 Thus the Cincinnati workmen were participating in the Associationist revolution of 1848. That’s why John Orvis, then editor of the labor newspaper the Voice of Industry, not only affirmed the camaraderie between the Protective Unionists and the Associationists in the United States, but also championed the latter as true friends of the “working man” whose papers have never ceased to underline the working-class constitution of that “glorious Revolution” in France—a revolution “for securing by law the right of man to employment, and to just compensation for the same” against the “moth-eaten oppressor” of labor.Footnote 77 The point in mentioning this was to underscore the selfsame cause and revolutionary agenda of American workers.
Orvis’s language, though, also evinces the normatively republican position that the Associationists took on socialist revolution, a position they imagined as a kind of ecumenical embrace of various strands or tendencies in the labor movement. But, in fact, they were staking a distinct claim to the revolution’s raison d’être between the moderate/liberal reformers on the one hand and the ultraradical bloc on the other. The obsessive polemical need to disambiguate Associationism from other forms of socialism in The Harbinger was more than a mere theoretical dispute; it defined the terms on which American socialists endorsed unfolding events in France and elsewhere. The growing popularization of communism, for example, troubled the Associationists, a movement they still associated with the Icarian utopianism of Étienne Cabet and the proletarian putschism of Louis-Auguste Blanqui. Earlier, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, The Harbinger didn’t dismiss communism outright but respectfully delineated the overlapping circles of their respective doctrines and averred to watch the development of the “anti-property” movement with great interest as “one form of the universal protest, which the age is uttering against the abuses of centuries,” “confident” that the various strains of socialism, whatever their disagreements, all “serve to prepare for the establishment of true society.”Footnote 78 In this bastardized Hegelian sense, the communists and Associationists might even be seen as allies—both “demand Association,” “invoke the organization of labor,” and support the goal of “attractive labor.”Footnote 79
Not coincidentally, Associationist opposition to communism became more pronounced when the conservative bourgeoisie reestablished control over the government in France and rejected the populist labor demands of the revolution’s initial phase, thereby inciting an even stronger wave of insurgency, first in the insurrectionary coup of 15 May, then in the June Days. Once the liberal socialist or social-democratic leadership of the Second Republic either turned its back on the working class or fell victim to the counterrevolution, the Associationists found themselves in an uncomfortable position, navigating between the Scylla of ultraradicalism and the Charybdis of ultra-reaction. The Associationist vision of 1848 had effectively dissolved. Consequently, The Harbinger retreated to editorialization, diagnosing where the revolution had gone wrong.
In response to the June Insurrection, Harbinger editors and contributors certainly took a side insofar as they unanimously blamed the breakdown in authority leading to the June Days on “the conservatives, the bourgeoisie, the prosperous and privileged ones in France at this moment, who foment disorder by withholding just rights and defeating hopes once raised, and who in fact deserve to be called the destructives,” and insofar as they sympathized with the outrage of the downtrodden masses and workers in revolt.Footnote 80 Furthermore, as Charles Dana put forward in The Harbinger’s first sustained coverage of June, the Provisional Government must be held responsible for failing to fulfill its task of instituting an “Organization of Industry so that the Economies of Association should be realized by the workmen themselves” instead of assigning “useless labor” to the workers at the dictates of the state.Footnote 81 The Second Republic remained mired in the “old machinery and old modes” of deliberative formalism; as a result, it did not move with a sense of urgency to create “practical institutions” that would meet the needs of the masses.Footnote 82
Agreeing on these points, the Associationists reached no consensus, however, over the militancy of the June revolt unless it be their characteristic ambivalence. Primarily to rebut the charge that responsibility for the terrible scenes should be laid at the feet of Associationism, The Harbinger’s own editorial remarks roundly condemned the violence and “disorder” to which the insurgents resorted, and the journal certainly did not endorse their attempt to seize power and overturn the republic. On the other hand, The Harbinger argued that, by abolishing the formal rights of labor, in effect declaring war on the workers, “it was the fanaticism of property, in other words the fears of the bourgeoisie or middle, property holding classes, which caused and even necessitated that desperate and organized rebellion of the ouvriers.”Footnote 83 The key word here, emphasized by the journal in italics, is “necessitated,” suggesting that the rebellion, though lamentable, was an inevitable, logical—and in that sense indirectly justifiable—response to a “system of society” that produces, then oppresses, the “starving multitudes.”Footnote 84 Nevertheless, the violent extremes of civil war scandalized the Associationists. To their way of thinking, “the fanaticism of property” and “the fanaticism of starvation” have a dialectical, mutually reinforcing relationship, the latter transmogrified by the ultrademocratic clubs into the “fanaticism of communism,” a synonym for the “fanaticism of the unfed proletaires.”Footnote 85 Disappointed by the late course of events, by the “bloody warfare between classes,” only Associationism could chart a path toward lasting peace and progress as the revolution’s “mediator,” as the voice of “true Socialism.”Footnote 86 That meant, in effect, restoring the “third and middle party” of the Second Republic, only this time solving the labor and poverty crisis once and for all by implementing Association.Footnote 87
This position, though, reads like a begging of the political question, at least if looked at from the viewpoint of the insurgents. For if the progress of the February Revolution, itself won by spontaneous popular revolt, had been overturned, then it would follow that the June Insurrection aimed to defend and remake the revolution of the democratic and social republic, albeit now by militating against the very leadership class who, by the Associationists’ own admission, cheated the February Revolution, failed to fulfill its promises to the immiserated masses, and proved themselves incapable of reorganizing the political economy of France on socialist terms. The June Days refuted the middle way of Associationism, first because it highlighted the structural impasse between a bourgeois republic and a workers’ republic, and second because the fight for a self-organized federation of laborers, an associationism from below, no longer had any use for the “social science” of the “expert socialists” and their political representatives.Footnote 88 Charles Dana, for his part, realized these points. He therefore took a decidedly more forgiving stance on the insurgency, a stance that The Harbinger still published despite Dana’s candid commentary on the growing irrelevance of Fourierism and his open-minded reception to other emerging positions on socialist reform, namely the mutual-credit ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. To begin with, Dana stated much more strongly that the “insurrection of June … was the work of the bourgeoisie who desired to exterminate those clamorous and dangerous workmen, and accordingly provoked them to fight.”Footnote 89 In other words, the bourgeoisie itself chose militant class struggle over progressive, pro-labor reform. Second, Dana, notwithstanding his condemnation of the insurrection’s outrages, insisted that the “sacred ideas of February” motivated the workers to raise the barricades.Footnote 90 As a journalist who observed the rebellion on the ground, he could not but report what he knew firsthand: that the insurgents fought for “the idea of the Right to Labor and to enjoy the profits of their own labor,” the good old cause of the Associationists.Footnote 91 Finally, given that the French bourgeoisie desired to bring the working class “back into the old subjection,” Dana unflinchingly asserted that “new conflicts” like the June Days, conflicts “between the serfs of industry and its feudal lords,” “deplorable” and “horrible” though they may be, should not only be expected but “will by no means be in vain.”Footnote 92 Instead of refuting the unimpeachable objectives of the Associationist 1848, the June Insurrection only served to demonstrate like never before the imperative of creating a socialist workers’ republic.
In a remarkably honest self-critical assessment, Charles Dana’s missive from Paris on 13 July also confronted the fact that the Fourierists in France did not have substantial mass support or a working-class base. Instead, the “Party of the People” now speaks and acts for itself, he explained, a “true Revolutionary party” that consists of the “whole body of the working classes,” with its leadership arising from the “mass of the people” themselves.Footnote 93 It is a “Socialist party,” but generically so.Footnote 94 Moreover, this party advocates for “Civil War,” but not for civil war’s sake: “all of them agree that the Emancipation of the Laboring Classes from the uncertainty and the burdens of the Wages System is the first measure of the new Republic which they hope for, and are ready to die for.”Footnote 95 As it turns out, the insurrectionists do have a constructive political program—all power to the workers and no more wage labor.
On this point, one last account of the June Days published in The Harbinger deserves mentioning—a letter from the English Fourierist and Swedenborgian J. J. Garth Wilkinson, one of Albert Brisbane’s companions to Paris who shared his “inside view” and experiences of the Paris revolt. Writing from London on 11 July, Wilkinson not only offered no criticism of his “insurgent companions” in the city but endorsed their actions; indeed, he interpreted the bloody insurrection itself as a symbol of the “great principles and an unceasing downrush of the spiritual world” that animated a “Spartan minority of poor men” to fight with “inimitable daring” against a superior force supported by all the arms of the state.Footnote 96 That the insurgents have “borne the witness of their own bodies to their convictions” is exemplary “heroism,” Wilkinson declared.Footnote 97 His letter goes on to call the June Days “the first battle of the Social doctrines of all kinds against the old order of things, and the desperateness of the fight measures the deep reliance of the insurgents on their principles” and their belief that “there is a better order possible for man than the current civilization.”Footnote 98 Rather than view the suppression of the revolt as a sign and seal of revolutionary failure or the recourse to armed conflict as a retrogression of the workers’ cause, Wilkinson echoed Dana with the contention that the insurrection allowed the proclamation of “Socialism” to “come forth” all the more resoundingly and demarcated the line of political struggle between the only “two ranks in France” that matter—“the Socialist party, and their opponents.”Footnote 99 He then concluded his letter with a word of hopefulness for the forward progress and promise of Association.
Thus, on the whole, the articles published in The Harbinger did not waver in their support of the working class or their belief in the coming socialist revolution even when they denounced the insurrectionary violence and vanguardism of the June Revolt. Neither did the Associationists lose faith in their cause after the agents of empire stamped out the fires of revolution in most of Europe. Though disappointed by the tragic turn of events, The Harbinger nevertheless drew a positive lesson from the experience of 1848: don’t despair; socialism has not been defeated. Counterrevolutionary regimes may “put down armies, imprison leaders, and head and quarter insurrectionists of every nature; but the immortal Truth of socialism can not [sic] be extinguished”—the Truth “made by the year 1848,” which has “passed into the very flesh and bones of the social body.”Footnote 100 Moreover, that truth will bear fruit in the United States, and American reformers will continue to advance the emancipatory principles of the French Revolution.Footnote 101 The promise of socialism still lives even if it is a promise deferred: “the year 1848, which has just set in such fearful splendor, did but begin the grand developments which are destined to take place in this nineteenth century.”Footnote 102
Those “grand developments,” of course, such as they existed, would leave the formal Associationist movement behind. The Harbinger published its final issue on 10 February 1849, though the American Union of Associationists continued to advance cooperative socialist ideas in the Daily Chronotype, the Protective Union, the New-York Daily Tribune, and The Harbinger’s short-lived successor newspaper the Spirit of the Age before the dissolution of the organization in 1851. In the movement’s waning years, the Associationists stood in solidarity with American workers who acted upon the ideals of 1848 in what the Tribune called New York’s “general uprising” of 1849–50, when a wave of strikes, mass rallies, and labor cooperatives organized by tailors, cabinetmakers, upholsterers, confectioners, shipwrights, and other trade workers led to an “outburst of labor militancy that reminded some observers of the worker-led agitation in contemporary Paris,” an outburst met with violence and put down by the class of employers, the state, and police.Footnote 103 This unprecedented event announced that class struggle would now be an unmistakable feature of the industrializing urban landscape in the United States, and that future socialist movements would have to adapt to these new material conditions.
Left populism, revolutionary futures, and the promise of the Associationist 1848
Why, finally, should anybody care about or appreciate the Associationists given their short-lived, ineffectual efforts to found a sustainable movement capable of transforming the organization of labor and the capitalist economic system? What is the living legacy or the vital lesson for us of the Associationist 1848 in the United States? While there are many ways one might pursue an answer to these questions, I can only sketch one brief line of thought that underscores the relevance of Associationism to our historical moment and the contribution of the movement to political theory. What I cannot do here is provide an account of Associationism’s historical impact on and ancestral relationship to future developments in nineteenth-century political, labor, and socialist movements like Adam Tuchinsky, or evaluate the afterlife of the movement by virtue of its decline and fall, commenting upon the liberal–conservative drift of Greeley, Dana, and other core Associationists in the 1850s like Carl Guarneri. It lies outside the scope of this article to offer a convincing assessment of what transpired in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. Instead, my goal is to articulate the contemporary purchase of the analysis that I have already offered and draw a conclusion about the critical positionality of the Associationist 1848.
First, following the cue of Christopher Clark in the conclusion to his opus on the 1848 revolutions, one reason to reappraise Associationism is that it represents, mutatis mutandis, a model of politics highlighting the historical resonances between the 1848 era and the political zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. With regard to the struggle for democracy in mid-nineteenth-century Europe (and beyond), Clark emphasizes, among a great many other things, how a heterogeneous body of progressive actors, each trying to generate a new politics out of the dysfunctionality of the old, worked to answer many of the same burning questions in the foreground of our current political conjuncture—questions “about the right to work, the balancing of labour and capital, the plight of the working poor, the deepening of inequality and urban social crisis.”Footnote 104 These questions, though, largely derive from more fundamental interrogations (then and now) of the fraught and contested relationship between formal politics encrusted in the state, especially as mediated by powerful moneyed interests, and social-justice movements seeking structural change and government accountability to people’s material needs. In this respect, it is not difficult for us to understand today the “heightened ambient awareness of precarity and the preoccupation with waning social cohesion,” along with the growing divide between wealthy elites and common citizens/workers, that prepared the ground for the conflagrations of popular dissent which quickly intensified into continental revolution.Footnote 105 Among the radicals at least, Clark confirms that the glue binding otherwise diverse, experimental, by no means ideologically coherent coalitions of actors and reformers together in the revolutionary ferment of 1848 was, in the main, “the idea of harmony” embodied by the “principle of association” (an anticapitalist reorganization of society) in opposition to the sociopolitical inequality and exploitation embodied by the “principle of competition,” though he doesn’t offer any explicit contemporary analogue to this political orientation.Footnote 106
Let me do so. I would suggest that the ethos of the Associationist movement reverberates in Chantal Mouffe’s description of “left populism,” a contemporary form of mass egalitarian politics that arose primarily in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Defined as a “discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy,’” left populism encompasses a wide array of democratic struggles, grassroots movements, political blocs, and identitarian bodies for social and economic justice opposed to the imperious concentrations of wealth and power that have marked the neoliberal governance of the twenty-first century.Footnote 107 Fundamentally, left populism seeks to imagine and build “postcapitalist futures” in the wake of the failures of twentieth-century state socialism, the decline of the old labor and social-democratic parties, the dissolution of an organized working-class movement on the heels of intensive deindustrialization, the advent of a finance-dominated service economy, and the displacement of a “worldview Marxism” centered around the traditionally conceived proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history.Footnote 108 Part and parcel of our anti- or counterestablishment “populist moment” cutting across the political spectrum, left populism can also be understood as a collective response to the constitutive crisis of democracy in our reigning “neoliberal hegemonic formation,” or what Jodi Dean recently formulates from a Marxist point of view as capitalism’s mutation into “a neofeudal social formation driven by privilege and dependence,” with “new lords and serfs.”Footnote 109
In this context, one hears echoes of “practical Associationism” in many contemporary currents of “postcapitalist” thought. For example, in Inventing the Future, political theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams issue a call for a populist “post-work” political movement based on “non-reformist reforms” (radically transformative reforms) with a clear set of objectives to eliminate social misery while also targeting more immediate goals: “fully automating the economy, reducing the working week, implementing a universal basic income, and achieving a cultural shift in the understanding of work.”Footnote 110 Just as important, today’s postcapitalist politics must align itself with “a variety of struggles for social justice and human emancipation.”Footnote 111 In a platform that deserves to be heard as an update on the Associationist program, Srnicek and Williams also maintain that a people’s revolution cannot abandon the utopian dimension of politics, if by “utopian” we mean the desire to create another type of labor society beyond the horizon of capitalism, the fundamental reorganization of our political economy, the resistance to historical fatalism, and the hopeful demand for a fully emancipated world that inspires our commitments to the hard, concrete tasks at hand.Footnote 112 Considering the unprecedented possibilities opened up by the technological infrastructures of the twenty-first century, Srnicek and Williams echo Paul Mason’s view that “collaborative production” (i.e. association) is now a realizable social goal such that “large parts of the utopian socialist project [have] become possible: from cooperatives, to communes, to outbreaks of liberated behavior that redefine human freedom.”Footnote 113
While there are many things one might flesh out, complicate, question, debate, and critique about “left populism,” I invoke it here only to the make the concluding point that we are perhaps in a much better position today to appreciate and reevaluate the political thought (not excluding the problems) of an earlier popular socialist movement such as Associationism, a movement for which the discourse of the frontier between “the People” (the “collective servitude” of the masses) and “COMMERCIAL FEUDALISM” (the despotic “Money-Power of Capitalists” concentrating wealth and privilege “in the hands of a Few Men”) figured centrally, and the 1848 revolutions represented a populist war between “two classes, namely, those who have and those who have not.”Footnote 114 Moreover, the Associationists posited that democratic republicanism alone could never curb “the general tendency to commercial and industrial monopoly” and the attendant pauperism growing in the United States as elsewhere—that’s why people need a popular movement to revolutionize the social and economic relations of capitalist society.Footnote 115 In the spirit of left populism, Associationism worked not only to imagine but to build a socialist future of “attractive industry” with no clear precedent, “practical” in its efforts to effect immediate change and “utopian” in its aim to engender another way of working and producing altogether. Finally, when the Associationists, along with their allies, called for the “Union and coöperation of Reformers,” they did so because they believed that the only way to truly transform a system predicated on widely distributed and varying forms of injustice is to forge solidarity across difference—in their context, to establish deeply woven ties among abolitionists, women’s rights activists, communitarians, trade unionists, homestead advocates, moral reform societies, and so on.Footnote 116 As Mark Lause notes, the Associationists were willing to “redefine themselves in common with radicals from without.”Footnote 117 This is a “left populism” avant la lettre, and it was the backbone of the American 1848.
Even though the movement certainly advocated for a model of socialism that would expand the scope and reconfigure the tenets of liberal democracy, the platform of the Associationist 1848 nevertheless does not reinforce any version of the liberalization thesis that would filter out or dismiss the “utopian” horizons and cooperative socialist project of the 1848 revolutions in favor of a postrevolutionary synthesis of governmental, constitutional, and civic–social reform. More radically, the crux of my argument is that the Associationist 1848 upheld the eternal promise and necessity of a revolutionary solution to the obstinate and obscene structural injustices of monied power. To reiterate and ramify this thesis, I want to give the last word to Margaret Fuller, the well-known American feminist and transcendentalist, but less familiarly also a self-described “enthusiastic Socialist” whose journalism on the 1848 revolutions encapsulates the emancipatory ethos of the Associationist 1848.Footnote 118 Voicing her support for “the great experiment of voluntary association” and the “doctrines of Fourier” in her major writings and cultural criticism prior to the revolutionary spring, it was the radicalizing experience of observing and participating in the Italian independence movement while employed as a foreign correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune that compelled Fuller to embrace a more militant position beyond the bounds of normative reformism.Footnote 119 Although she did not involve herself in the cooperative labor movement, Fuller did declare her allegiance to the workers’ revolution and advocate for Associationist principles. In this regard her writings deserve to be read as another, albeit independent, expression of the Associationist 1848.
What Fuller principally highlighted was the historical point of 1848—not just a point bound to a specific time and place or social demand, but a point puncturing the empty, homogeneous time of the capitalist epoch and hence a point that will continue to resound, pointing forward, so long as we belong to that epoch. This point inheres in Fuller’s belief that socialism must be revolutionary and the revolution must be socialist, everything risked on its behalf, “whatever blood is to be shed, whatever altars cast down,” and never stop with itself until the “tremendous problems” are solved, “whatever be the cost!”Footnote 120 This lesson, delivered from Italy, France, and the rest of Europe, will also have to be taught to the United States, not only because of the “horrible cancer of Slavery” and the “wicked War” against Mexico, but because the nation has not yet learned to reverence “the only really noble—the LABORING CLASSES.”Footnote 121 For Fuller, the subject and protagonist of 1848, the revolution’s highest power, was the common worker.
But as events developed and she wrestled both with the Thermidorean backlash to the popular uprisings and with the limited power and persuasiveness of the radical movement, Fuller became increasingly preoccupied with the future political horizon illuminated by the revolution, of which “the cry of Communism, the systems of Fourier, &c. are but forerunners.”Footnote 122 Her vision of 1848 does not usher in the millennium—it ruptures the historical field, making way for a new destination and announcing its imperative. Those who are “advanced in thought” labor in “preparation for the great Future,” in contrast to the moderates who are “too much fettered by a bygone state of things.”Footnote 123 As a rite of passage educating humanity for what is to come, 1848 cannot be a failure: “Should my hopes be dashed to the ground, it will not change my faith, but the struggle for its manifestation is to me of vital interest.”Footnote 124 More to the point, the political truth of that struggle has already proved victorious—the truth that the “old powers” are “no longer legitimate” and “no transition is possible between the old and the new. The work is done.”Footnote 125 So-called defeat only baptizes in blood the ideals for which the revolutionaries have sacrificed their lives, consolidating and catalyzing the contest between emancipation and tyranny.
Even when a heavy shadow fell on the revolutions, and later, when triumph turned to tragedy and despondency set in, Fuller’s reflections continued to develop and deepen the leitmotif of socialist futurity. “All these steps tracked in blood” only confirm the necessity of a more “Radical Reform,” she declared.Footnote 126 The sufferings of 1848–9 transformed Fuller’s politics. “I believed before I came to Europe,” reads her 15 November 1849 dispatch from Florence, “in what is called Socialism, as the inevitable sequence to the tendencies and wants of the era, but I did not think these vast changes in modes of government, education and daily life, would be effected as rapidly as I now think they will, because they must. The world can no longer stand without them.”Footnote 127 The proclamation of socialism, for Fuller, will henceforth structure the action of politics and the politics of action. She saw no other path forward. In her final dispatch, dated 6 January 1850, she wrote that all of the stark, sad realities, from the plight of the beggar to the barbarity of the governing powers, anticipate a coming fire to burn down every last vestige of bondage, “root and branch,” the “malignant growth” “extirpated,” in order to “prepare the earth for an entirely new culture”—and this, “the next revolution, here and elsewhere, will be radical.” It will be “uncompromising.”Footnote 128
What, then, was the Associationist 1848? For those associated with the movement, it marked the birth, the commencement of a “New Era”—the era of radical reform, of socialist politics, of workers’ revolution.Footnote 129 As such, it is an era, avowed Margaret Fuller, whose promise has not yet been fulfilled, and hailing from the future, whose demand is always before us.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Modern Intellectual History’s external readers for their incredibly helpful feedback on my initial submission of this article. The published version has benefited greatly from the review process.
Open access
