Especially after I saw this meme appearing on Bluesky posts:
So in this first of two parts, I’m taking a look back at the socialism of the 19th century.
Several years ago, I did a blog post about the early uses of the word “socialism.” (1) I’m going to plagiarize myself a bit from that one here.
Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). (2)
And possibly the earliest usage of the word Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, who used it to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.
Perhaps the first use of "socialist" in the sense that would become familiar is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a publication of Robert Owens' reform movement, to describe the Owenites themselves. Grünberg notes that the word didn't catch on for a while in England.
In 1831, Grünberg finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it describes the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.
So, in other words, the term “socialist” came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).
Grünberg and Ernst Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form sozialist in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest: Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840. or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.
In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. As the title of Von Stein’s 1842 book indicates, “communism” was also beginning to be used describes political movements aimed at a more radical form of democracy.
Words that have been commonly used for two centuries around the world wind up having a lot of variations. After the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Marxism became a leading theoretical orientation of the parties that called themselves Socialist or Social Democratic, which were synonymous terms. His and Frederick Engels’ famous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, was published in February 1848, (3) a month before the March revolution broke out first in Europe. It’s still common to refer to European political history in terms of “pre-March” and “post-March” periods. Their famous work had little practical effect on the course of events in 1848, though both Marx and Engels were well known as radical journalists. Their pamphlet took its title from a small group called the Communist League, which dissolved soon afterward.
Marx and Engels were in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. The coffee house/restaurant in the central city where they used to meet with workers’ political groups – and maybe where they drafted part of the famous manifesto - is still there. The present-day marketing for the venue – La Masison du Cygne - doesn’t have any doubt on the latter point:
The strongest world power at the time was the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose Imperial Capital was in Vienna. Things got rowdy there, too. To the point where the royal family fled Vienna for a while. (4)
In the small town where I grew up in southern Mississippi, the first business in the town’s center was started by a Jewish Austrian immigrant in the 1850s, who was possibly a refugee after the 1848 revolutions were suppressed. I mean, why else would he pick somewhere so far out in the wilderness to go?
Speaking of the Deep South, it’s worth recalling how much anything that smacked of socialism, social revolution, or workers’ uprisings terrified Southern slaveowners, including the European events of 1848. The leading journal among the pre-Civil War Southern planters was De Bow’s Review, which published a review of a book by conservative historian Thomas Carlyle in 1860 that showed that “1848” still sent shivers up the backs of the economic oligarchs of the day. And also that slaveowning capitalists in the US were not always using language which sugar-coated how their system functioned:
Labor creates wealth trade and speculation transfers and accumulates it. Far less labor is necessary now to produce the comforts of life than was required a century ago; but trade transfers wealth at a more rapidly - increased ratio than the ratio of increased production. Hence, there are more paupers and more rich men in society than ever before. The false distribution of wealth is the master evil of modern times. With increased wants, increased intelligence, and more productive industry, the poor find themselves sinking lower and lower in the social scale, and receding farther and farther in physical comfort from the rich, just in proportion as they approximate to them in knowledge. Seeing their means diminishing just in proportion as their wants increased, and their labor became more productive; seeing themselves exploitated [sic] (defrauded) more and more, by skill and capital, through their agent and engine, trade, of the products of their labor, the became desperate and burst out into bloody revolutions - first in France , afterward throughout Western Europe. The end is not yet! Strikes and trades' unions still carry on the war of labor against capital. Now, really, we think that this eighteenth century was no hypocritical, no humbug century, but a downright, serious, earnest, and working century. Nor did it commit suicide. The French revolution is not over, and the eighteenth century survives in the nineteenth century. It blazes up every now and then, and spreads over half of Europe, as in the " three days " in 1830 [the 1830 July Revolution in France], and again in 1848. It has its standing army of six hundred thousand trades' unionists in England, and its frequent strikes in England and New-England. No, the eighteenth century " is not dead but liveth." Or, at all events, its ghost oft appears in the streets of Paris, London, and New-York, and frightens folks clean out of their propriety. [my emphasis in bold] (5)That last sentence could have been inspired by the famous opening words of the Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.”
Also, the comment, “Labor creates wealth,” is a concept famously contained in Marx’s theory of “surplus value.” It was actually Adam Smith who came up with the idea. Economic theories generally in the early 19th century focused on the organization of labor. It was only in the late 19th century “neoclassical” economic theories, including those of the Englishman William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), the Galician Carl Menger (1840-1921), and the Frenchman Léon Walras (1834-1910) that markets became the central focus.
De Bow’s Review in 1860, of course, was terrified of their version of the ghost, fired as it was by the decades-long chronic fear of slave revolts.
Others speaking in similar terms took a different perspective on which side of that conflict was the villain for supporters of democracy and the rule of law. Abraham Lincoln in his first State of the Union message when the traitorous Confederacy had already been killing American soldiers in defense of their Peculiar Institution, i.e., slavery:
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. [my emphasis] (6)The American Marxist (and Communist Party leader) William Z. Foster wrote in 1954 about the bitter polemics between representatives of the slaveholding planters in the South and industrialists in the North prior to the Civil War: “Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.” (7) Because abolitionists carried on polemics against the slave system, while advocates for slavery portrayed it as a humane and civilized system compared to the horrors of the industrial systems based on free labor. Hinton Rowan Helper, a Southerner, wrote one of the most influential abolitionists books, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), which focused on economic limitations of the slavery system. (8)
There were already significant social democratic parties in Europe and they generally sympathized with the Union during the Civil War. Britain was officially neutral between the Confederacy and the Union, and the British upper classes tended to favor the Slave Power, not least because Britain was heavily dependent on American cotton. But organized British labor opposed it, even though the British textile business was hit hard by US actions constraining the Confederacy from exporting its cotton, which was its most important crop by far. (9)
An alliance of the socialist/social-democratic parties was established in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), which is remembered as the First International. Karl Marx wrote a formal address to Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the International, stating:
[T]he working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. (10)International solidarity among the workers of different nations was a generally shared sentiment among socialists/social-democrats. Although the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) would put that solidarity to a severe test, and the First World War even more so. Nationalism proved to be a more powerful narcotic than socialist leaders had hoped.
Socialism and democracy
There were many variations of socialism in the 19th century. Like the “utopian socialists” mentioned above. Most of them called themselves Socialist or Social Democratic. There were many variations and shades of opinion among them like James Madison famously observed of political “factions” back when today’s brand of political parties were first developing. (11)
There were various brands of competing socialist theories, including anarchism, which distinguished itself advocating the complete abolition of the state, to be replaced by a collective organization of workers who would run things collectively. As in the One Big Union advocated the International Workers of the World (IWW) group in the US, aka, the Wobblies.
In Europe, the Socialist/Social-Democratic parties were the main advocates for parliamentary democracy and for something that at least moved in the direction of universal suffrage, aka, voting rights for all adult citizens. In general, the Socialists were not enamored of Montesquieu’s separation of power’s structure practiced in Britain and the EU. Their model was more akin to the French Revolution’s model of parliamentary supremacy. That’s an interesting historical and theoretical topic. But, in practice, the Western liberal democracies today practice a basic form of parliamentary democracy with a separation of powers, including those countries with kings, like Britain, Denmark, Spain, and Sweden. Although in formal terms those later countries are kingdoms rather than republics, although both types have forms of what the US Constitution calls a “republican form of government.” (Article 4, Sec. 4)
Seizing the means of production, one of the conservatives’ great bogeymen
In part 2, I’ll attempt a 20-mile-high overview of socialism, social democracy, and Communism, including the notion known as “socializing the means of production.” That was generally a part of the goals of the 19th century socialists. But no socialist party was able to gain control of a national government then, so they weren’t in a position to undertake whatever it was they meant exactly by that concept. One significant instance of a government “seizing the means of production” was the abolition of slavery in the US after the Civil War. The slaves in the US were legally the human property of their (mostly) white masters. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery literally liquidated that property without compensation to the slaveowners. The former slaves weren’t nationalized, i.e., made property of the federal government. That kind of private property was simply abolished.
Referring back to the meme to at the start of this post, it’s hard to tell what it’s supposed to mean when it says, “A democratic socialist is not a Marxist socialist or a Communist. A democratic socialist is still a capitalist.”
Say what? Not all democratic socialists would describe themselves as Marxists. But nineteenth- century Marxists would have identified themselves as democrats and socialists. And many social-democratic parties well into the 20th century also identified as Marxist. What exactly that meant to them is another question. Opinions differed. Marx himself famously quipped about contemporary arguments among French socialists in 1882 as to what the True Marxist positions were, "What is certain is that I am not a Marxist." (12)
The meaning of “A democratic socialist is still a capitalist” in 2026 seems fairly enigmatic. It seems like someone attempting to reinvent the wheel under the illusion that Trumpistas and libertarians will stop calling people who support Social Security or public schools Communists, socialists, and fascists.
But if the last 150 years or so give any indication, they won’t.
Notes:
(1) Who you callin' a socialist? 11/22/2009 Contradicciones (Original). <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/who-you-callin-socialist.html>
(2) The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles referenced from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.
(3) If we want to split hairs, the actual title was Manifesto of the Communist Party. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf>
(4) Photo: Der Brand am Josefs-Platz den 31ten October 1848. Wien: Franz Werner 1848. Signatur: F 17.993. Revolution 1848 - Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2017. <https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/3063-der-brand-am-josefsplatz-zu-wien-am-31-october-1848/> (Accessed: 2026-28-2026).
(5) Frederick the Great, by Thomas Carlyle. Unsigned Book Review, De Bow's Review 29 (Jul.-Dec. 1860), 158-159. <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101065217190&seq=168&q1=1848&start=1>
(6) Abraham Lincoln First Annual Message 12/03/1861. The American Presidency Project-UC Santa Barbara. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9> (Accessed 2026-28-06).
(7) Foster, William Z. (1954): The Negro People in American History, 204. New York: International Publishers.
(8) Opposition to slavery was not identical to regarding black people as equal to whites. Helper’s postwar writing showed him to be venomously white supremacist. Which in a weird way gives some added credibility to his criticism of the slavery system, which was not based on what he called the “humanitarian or religious aspects of slavery” in the preface to his 1857 book.
(9) See: Foner, Phillip S. (1981): British Labor and the American Civil War. New York: Holmes & Meier: New York.
(10) Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America: Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams January 28, 1865. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm>
(11) Federalist Papers No. 10. Yale Law School. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp> (Accessed: 2026-28-06). Madison’s essay was written while advocating for the adoption of the Constitution. He gives a seemingly negative connotation to “faction,” emphasizing the importance of unity among the states. It’s worth noting that Madison’s description of the origins of factions/parties is basically similar to that later advocated by socialists. And he was writing that over two decades before Karl Marx was born.
(12) “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (original in French, my translation to English). <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm#n5>
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