People of the Revolution and the USSR

Early socialism 1760–1825

French thinker who held that society should be led by its productive “industrials”

Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Fourier and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialist systems born before the class struggle had developed.

Born in Paris to an aristocratic family, Saint-Simon fought in the American War of Independence and took part in the siege of Yorktown. During the Revolution he made money speculating in national property and was imprisoned under the Terror. In L’Industrie, L’Organisateur and the Catéchisme des industriels he argued that the productive “industrials” — scientists, entrepreneurs and workers alike — rather than the idle classes should direct society; his last work, Nouveau Christianisme, made the improvement of the poorest class society’s aim. The Communist Manifesto’s classification of him as a critical-utopian socialist who saw no independent political movement of the proletariat is Marx and Engels’ assessment, not his own self-understanding.

Early socialism 1771–1858

Social reformer who emphasized education and cooperation

In A New View of Society (1816) Owen argued that “any general character may be given to any community by the application of proper means,” a principle he later tested at New Lanark and New Harmony.

A Welsh-born British manufacturer and social reformer, Owen sought to improve working, living and educational conditions at New Lanark. In A New View of Society he argued that environment and education form human character. He later pursued cooperative and communal experiments. Marx and Engels’ classification of Owen as a utopian socialist is a later, polemical interpretation. His early reform proposals should be distinguished from the International Working Men’s Association’s emphasis on workers’ self-emancipation.

Early socialism 1772–1837

French social thinker who designed the cooperative phalanstery

He attacked commercial civilization and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community where people would work according to their passions; the Communist Manifesto counts him among the critical-utopian socialists.

Born into a merchant family in Besançon, Fourier worked from 1791 to 1816 as a travelling salesman and correspondence clerk in several cities. After publishing his Théorie des quatre mouvements anonymously in 1808, he attacked commerce as a source of fraud and misery and designed the phalanstery, a cooperative community organized around “attractive labour” matched to each person’s passions. Followers such as Victor Considerant spread his ideas, and community experiments were attempted in several countries. Chapter III of the Communist Manifesto names him, with Saint-Simon and Owen, among the founders of critical-utopian socialism and criticizes his disciples for clinging to experiments such as phalansteries and opposing workers’ political movements; this is Marx and Engels’ assessment.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1825–1864 ✕ Shot in a duel

Founder of the ADAV, Germany's first workers' party

"Das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" — the iron and cruel law Lassalle said held wages down to bare subsistence (1863)

A lawyer and agitator from a Jewish merchant family in Breslau. In May 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) at Leipzig and was elected its president for five years, arguing that universal suffrage would turn the state toward funding producers' co-operatives and so toward socialism. That same year he met Bismarck in secret to sound out an alliance between the workers and the Prussian monarchy, which drew Marx's deep suspicion. In 1864 he was shot in a duel over a marriage and died three days later outside Geneva. Eleven years afterwards his programme supplied the frame of the Gotha unity programme.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1849–1919 ○ Natural causes

From a narodnik revolver to Marxist criticism, half a century of one woman's revolutionary life

On 31 March 1878, the jury returned a unanimous acquittal. The crowd lifted Zasulich onto their shoulders and marched through the streets of St. Petersburg. The tsarist government ordered her rearrest at once, but the shot she had fired already echoed across Europe.

In 1878 she shot St. Petersburg governor Trepov, and a jury acquitted her. That single shot detonated public fury against tsarist autocracy, and all Europe learned her name. Yet Zasulich was the first to grasp that terror was a dead end, and turned to Marxism. In 1883 she co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group (Russia's first Marxist organisation) with Plekhanov and Axelrod. She served on the Iskra editorial board, represented Russia at three congresses of the Second International, and became one of Russia's earliest Marxist literary critics. A Menshevik, she opposed the October Revolution of 1917 and died of pneumonia under Bolshevik rule.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1850–1932 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Marxist revisionism and evolutionary socialism, author of The Preconditions of Socialism

"I have extraordinarily little interest in what is called the 'final goal of Socialism.' This aim, whatever it be, is nothing to me, the movement everything." — Response to critics (1899)

German SPD theorist and politician. Engels's literary executor and editor of Der Sozialdemokrat, Bernstein began as an orthodox Marxist before his 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism challenged Marx's predictions of capitalist collapse, class polarization, and revolutionary necessity. His dictum "the goal is nothing, the movement everything" laid the foundation for social democracy's reformist, parliamentary turn, creating the schism between revolutionary socialism and evolutionary social democracy. He broke with the SPD's pro-war majority to co-found the anti-war USPD during World War I, and spent his final years defending Weimar parliamentary democracy, dying six weeks before Hitler took power.

Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1854–1938 ○ Natural causes

Chief theoretician of orthodox Marxism in the Second International, founding editor of Die Neue Zeit, editor of Marx's Capital Vol. IV

"Socialism as a means to the emancipation of the proletariat, without democracy, is unthinkable." — The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918)

Leading Marxist theoretician of the Second International. He authored the Erfurt Programme, refuted Bernstein's revisionism, and after the Russian Revolution critiqued Bolshevik rule, creating the defining point of divergence between social democracy and Leninism.