There have been, broadly speaking, four global socialist movements in modern times, distinct and often at odds with each other.

First Movement

The first was the utopian socialist movement, peaking from the 1789 French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848. It was an almost entirely Western phenomenon, arising not from the working class but from discontented intellectuals and forward-thinking bourgeois philanthropists.

Certain Western intellectuals were frustrated with the failed promises of the French Revolution, seeing that the downfall of feudalism hadn’t brought about the “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” for all but a new system of exploitation and injustice. Firm believers in Enlightenment values, they thought that if they intentionally planned new communities by those principles in advance, they could succeed where the French Revolution had failed.

Likewise, many Christian religious dissidents felt that the loss of the Church's power due to capitalism’s rise meant there was no longer a set moral code governing men’s lives. They sought to build religious communities away from the rest of society, along communal lines as Christ’s disciples had lived.

The new United States was the proving ground for these ideas. Between 1800 and 1850, scores of these communities sprouted up across North America. The most famous was the socialist town of New Harmony in Indiana, founded by the Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen. Mennonites, Amish, and Shakers also established religious communities in the same vein.

Design for New Harmony, 1820s 

The utopian socialists did not try to change the wider society; they retreated from it. They also did not believe in class struggle, believing that all classes could build socialism together in harmony. They thought that once they demonstrated in practice that socialism was a more rational and humane system, the capitalists themselves would be won over to the cause and support them.

Second Movement

After 1850, a second socialist movement emerged: the scientific socialist movement founded by Marx and Engels. Their criticism of capitalism was not moral. Marx and Engels argued that industrial capitalism, through its contradictions, was producing the conditions that would lead to its own demise, just as feudalism had before it.

They also argued that it was the industrial working class that would end that system, not dreamers, intellectuals, or philanthropists. Capitalists could not be swayed by moral or rational arguments to part with their massive profits; only the struggle of the workers could break their power.

In 1864, the First Workingman’s International was founded in London, and throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, this socialist movement grew far larger than the utopians ever had. Millions of workers, angry at their low wages and dangerous working conditions, flooded into the trade unions and their affiliated socialist parties.

“The Strike” by Robert Koehler, 1886

The Achilles' heel of this second socialist movement was imperialism. The First and Second Internationals were primarily concentrated in Western European countries at a time when European empires ruled much of the globe. Because of imperialism, the Western capitalist classes found a way to mostly neutralize the socialist threat. They bought the allegiance of a stratum of the working class with the spoils of imperialism, a phenomenon which Vladimir Lenin described as the “labor aristocracy.”

This labor aristocracy became a core constituency of many Western socialist parties. Thus, what were originally revolutionary socialist parties degenerated into co-managers of capitalism. Their main role became pushing for welfare programs that would pacify the working class, so they wouldn’t demand overthrowing the overall system, while at the same time cheerleading the bourgeoisie’s predatory imperialism abroad. The Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America are all present-day products of this second socialist movement.

Read FOUR SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS - PART 2