9. Roots of Marxism, Messianic Communism 1. Early Communism
For centuries, the alleged ideal of Communism had come to the world as a Messianic and millennial creed.
Various seers, notably Joachim of Fior, had prophesied the final state of mankind as one of perfect harmony and equality,
One where all things are owned in common, where there is no necessity for work or need for the division of labor.
In the case of Joachim, of course, problems of production and property, indeed of scarcity in general, were solved by man no longer possessing a physical body.
As pure spirits, men as equal and harmonious psychic entities spending all their time chanting praise to God might make a certain amount of sense.
But the communist idea applied to a physical mankind still needing to produce and consume is a very different matter.
In any case, the communist ideal continued to be put forward as a religious millennial doctrine.
We have seen in Volume 1 its enormous influence on the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation in the 16th century.
Millennial and Communist dreams also inspired various fringe Protestant sects during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century,
particularly the Diggers, the Ranters and the Fifth Monarchy men.
The most important forerunner of Marxian Communism among these Civil War Protestant sectarians was Gerard Winstanley, 1609-1660, the founder of the Digger Movement and a man much admired by Marxist historians.
Winstanley's father was a textile merchant, and young Gerard became an apprentice in the cloth trade, rising up to become a cloth merchant in his own right.
Winstanley's business failed, however, and he found himself downwardly mobile, an employed agricultural laborer from 1643 to 1648.
As the Protestant Revolution escalated in the late 1640s, Winstanley turned to writing pamphlets espousing mystical messianism.
By the end of 1648, Winstanley had expanded his teleastic doctrine to embrace egalitarian
world communism in which all goods are owned in common.
His theological groundwork was the heretical pantheistic view that God is within every
man and woman and is not a personal deity external to man.
This pantheistic god has decreed cooperation, which for Winstanley meant compulsory communism
rather than the market economy, whereas the antithetical creed of the devil glorified
individual selfishness.
In Winstanley's schema, god, meaning reason, created the earth, but the devil later originated
selfishness and the institution of private property.
They added the absurd view that England enjoyed communist property before the Norman Conquest
in 1066 and that this conquest created the institution of private property.
His call then was to return to the supposedly original communist system.
In the final, most fully developed version of his system, the law of freedom in a platform
or True Magistracy Restored, 1652, Winstanley envisioned a largely agrarian society in which
all goods would be communally owned and where all wage labor and all commerce or trade would
be outlawed.
In fact, all sale or purchase of goods would be punishable by death as treasonous to the
communist system.
Money would be clearly unnecessary since there would be no trade, and presumably it would
be outlawed as well.
The government would establish storehouses to collect and distribute all goods, and severe
penalties would be levied on idlers.
By this time, Winstanley's pantheism had begun to shade into atheism, for all professional
clergy would be outlawed, there would be no Sabbath observation, and ministers would be
would be elected by the voters to give what would be essentially secular sermons, teaching
everyone the virtues of the communist system.
Education would be free and compulsory, and most of the children would be channeled into
useful crafts, a foreshadowing of the progressive educational creed.
Book learning, which the uneducated Winstanley felt to be far inferior to practical vocational
would be discouraged.
Winstanley's strategic recipe for communist victory was for various groups of his followers,
or diggers, to move peacefully into waste or common lands, and to set up communist societies upon them.
The first digger group, led by Winstanley, moved on to wastelands near South London in April 1649,
and ten digger settlements were thereby established over the next year.
Only thirty diggers moved into the first commune, and only a few hundred set up communes across
the country.
The notion was that these egalitarian communist settlements would so inspire the masses that
they would abandon wage work or private property and move on to digger settlements, thus bringing
Talking about the withering away of the market and of private property.
In reality, the masses treated the digger communes with great hostility, causing their
suppression in a short period of time.
By the time of his magnum opus in 1652, Winstanley was vainly appealing to the dictator Oliver
Cromwell to impose his cherished system from above.
The idea of mass direct action to establish his system was rapidly abandoned in the face
of reality.
Another more mystical communist sect during the English Civil War was the half-crazed
Ranters.
The Ranters were classic antinomians, that is, they believed that all human beings were
automatically saved by the existence of Jesus, and that therefore all men are free to disobey
to obey all laws and to flout all moral rules.
Indeed, it was supposed to be good and desirable to commit as many sins as possible in order
to demonstrate one's automatic freedom from sin and to purge oneself of false guilt about
committing sins.
To the pure at heart the renters opined, all things are pure.
The ranters, like Joachim of Fior and the Anabaptists of the Reformation, proclaimed
the coming age of the Holy Spirit, which moved in every man.
The key difference from orthodox Calvinism or Puritanism is that in those more orthodox
creeds the workings of the Holy Spirit were closely tied to the Holy Word, that is, the
Bible.
For the ranters and other inner-light groups, however, all deuces were literally wild.
The ranters pursued this path, too, to pantheism.
As one of their leaders declared, the essence of God was as much in the ivy leaf as in the
most glorious angel.
The ranters, then, combined their belief in communism with total sexual license, including
The Practices of Communism of Women and Communal Homosexual and Heterosexual Orgies
2.
Secularized Millennial Communism, Mabli and Morelli
During the havoc and upheaval of the French Revolution, the communist creed, as well as
millennial prophecies, again popped up as a glorious goal for mankind.
But this time the major emphasis was a secular context.
But the new secular communist prophets were faced with a grave problem.
What will be the agency for this social change?
In short, religious chileasts never had problems about agency, that is, how this mighty change
would come about.
The agent would be the hand of providence, specifically either the second advent of Jesus
Jesus Christ for pre-millennialists or designated prophets or vanguard groups who would establish
the millennium in anticipation of Jesus' eventual return for post-millennialists.
King Bockelson and Thomas Munzer were examples of the latter.
But if the Christian millennialists possessed the assurance of the hand of divine providence
The Secularist Task was made more difficult by the fact that religious millennialists looked to the end of history and the achievement of their goal by means of a bloody apocalypse.
The final reign of millennial peace and harmony could only be achieved in the course of a period known as the tribulation, the final war of good against evil, the final triumph over the antichrist.
All of which meant that if the secular communists wished to emulate their Christian forebears, they would have to achieve their goal by bloody revolution, always difficult at best.
It is no accident, therefore, that the heady days of the French Revolution would give rise to such revolutionary hopes and aspirations.
The first secularized communists appeared in the shape of two isolated individuals in mid-18th century France.
The works of these two men would later burgeon into an activist revolutionary movement
amidst the hothouse atmosphere and the sudden upheavals of the French Revolution.
One was the aristocrat Gabriel Bonneau de Mably, 1709 to 1785,
the elder brother of the laissez-faire liberal philosopher Etienne Bonneau de Condiac.
In contrast to his brother, the distinguished philosopher,
Mabli devoted himself to being a lifelong writer on a large variety of subjects.
A man whose works, as Alexander Gray wittily writes, are deplorably numerous and extensive.
Mabli's prolix and confused writings were astoundingly popular in his day.
His entire collected works, ranging from 12 to 26 volumes, being published in four different
Additions within a few years of his death.
Mabry's main focus was to insist that all men are perfectly equal and uniform, that
all men are one and the same everywhere.
He professed to discern this alleged truth in the laws of nature.
Thus, in his chief work, Deux Proposés, 1786, an attack on the libertarian natural rights
This theory of Mercier de la Rivière, Mably presumes to interpret the voice of nature.
Nature says to us, I love you equally.
As in the case of most communists after him, Mably found himself confronted with one of
the great problems of communism.
If all property is owned in common and each person is equal, then the incentive to work
is negative, since only the common store will benefit and not the individual worker in question.
Mabli in particular had to confront this problem since he also maintained that man's natural
and original state was communism, and that private property arose to spoil matters precisely
because of the indolence of some who wished to live at the expense of others.
Mablis' proposed solutions to this grave problem were scarcely adequate.
One was to urge everyone to tighten their belts, to want less, to be content with Spartan austerity.
His other answer was to come up with what Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung would later
call moral incentives to substitute for crass monetary rewards the recognition of one's
Alexander Gray notes that Mabli makes use of such distinctions or birthday honors lists
to stimulate everyone to work.
He goes on to point out that the more distinctions are handed out as incentives, the less they
will truly distinguish, and the less influence they will therefore exert.
Furthermore, Mabli does not say how or by whom his distinctions are to be conferred.
Gray adds that in a communist society in reality, many people who don't receive honors may and
probably will be disgruntled and resentful at the supposed injustice involved, yet their
zeal doesn't flag.
Thus in his two proffered solutions, Gabriel de Mably was resting his hope on a miraculous
transformation of human nature, what the Marxists would later see as the advent of the new
socialist man, willing to bend his desires and his incentives to the requirements of,
and baubles conferred by, the collective.
But for all his devotion to communism, Mabli was at bottom a realist, and so he held out
no hope for its triumph.
On the contrary, man is so steeped in the sin of selfishness and private property that
only the palliatives of coerced redistribution and prohibitions of trade are even possible.
It is no wonder that Mabli was not equipped to inspire and stimulate the birth and growth
of a Revolutionary Communist Movement.
If Gabriel de Mably was a pessimist, the same cannot be said of the highly influential work
of the unknown Morelli, author of The Code of Nature, published in 1755 and going into
five further editions by 1773.
Morelli had no doubts of the workability of communism.
For him, there was no problem of laziness or negative incentives.
There was no need, in short, for any change in human nature or the creation of a new socialist
man.
In a vulgarization of Rousseau, man is everywhere good, altruistic and dedicated to work.
It is only institutions that are degrading and corrupt, specifically the institution
of Private Property, Abolish That and Man's Natural Goodness Would Easily Triumph, Query,
Where Did These Corrupt Institutions Come From, If Not From Man, Banish Property and Crime
Would Disappear.
For Morelli, the administration of the communist utopia would also be easy, assigning every
person his task in life and also deciding what material goods and services would fulfill
All this was merely a matter of trivial enumeration, of listing things and persons.
Here is the ancestor of Marx and Lenin's dismissal of the gigantic problems of socialist
administration and allocation as merely a question of bookkeeping.
But things, after all, are not going to be that easy.
Mabli, the pessimist on human nature, was apparently willing to leave matters to voluntary
actions of individuals.
But Morali, the alleged optimist, was cheerfully prepared to employ brutally coercive methods
to keep all the good citizens in line.
Once again, as in Mabli, the edicts of the proposed state would be written clearly by
by Nature, as revealed to the founder, Morelli.
Morelli worked out an intricate design for his proposed government and society, all allegedly
based on the clear dictates of natural law, and most of which were to be changeless and
eternal, to Morelli, a vital part of the scheme.
In particular, there is to be no private property except for daily needs.
Every person is to be maintained and employed by the collective, every man is to be forced
to work, to contribute to the communal storehouse according to his talents, and will then be
assigned goods from these stores according to his needs, to be brought up communally
and absolutely identically in food, clothing and training.
Public and religious doctrines are to be absolutely prescribed, no differences are to be tolerated,
and children are not to be corrupted by any fable, story, or ridiculous fictions.
All buildings must be the same and grouped in equal blocks, all clothing is to be made
out of the same fabric, occupations are to be limited and strictly assigned by the state.
Finally, these laws are to be sacred and inviolable, and anyone attempting to change them is to be isolated and incarcerated for life.
As in all the communist utopias, Mablis and Moralis, as Alexander Gray makes clear, are ones under which no sane man would on any conditions consent to live if he could possibly escape.
The reason, apart from the grave lack of incentives in utopias to produce or innovate, is that life has reached a static state.
Nothing happens, nothing can happen, in any of them.
It should be added that these utopias were debased, secularized versions of the visions of the Christian millennialists.
In the Christian millennium, Jesus Christ, or alternatively, his surrogates and predecessors, comes back to earth to put an end to history.
And, presumably, there will be enough enchantment in glorifying God without worrying about the absence of earthly change.
And, as we have seen, this is particularly true in Joachim of Fior's Envisioned Millennium of People Without Earthly Bodies.
But in the secularized utopias, there reigns, at best, gray gloom and stasis, totally contrary
to man's nature on earth.
Meanwhile, however, Christian millennialism was also revived in these stormy times.
Thus, the Swabian-German pietist Johann Christoph Oettinger, during the mid-18th century, prophesied
a coming theocratic world kingdom of saints, living communally, without rank or property,
as members of a millennial Christian commonwealth.
Particularly influential among later German pietists was the French mystic and theosophist
Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1743-1803, who in his influential Errors and Truth, 1773,
portrayed an inner church of the elect, allegedly existing since the dawn of history, which
would take power in the coming age.
This Martinist theme was developed by the Rosicrucian movement, concentrated in Bavaria.
Originally alchemist mystics during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bavarian Rosicrucians
began to stress the coming takeover of world power by the inner church of the elect during
During the Dawning Millennial Age.
The most influential Bavarian Rosicrucian author, Carl von Eckart'shausen, expounded
on this theme in two widely read works, Information on Magic 1788-1792 and On Perfectibility 1797.
In the latter work he developed the idea that the inner church of the elect had existed
The Third and final age of history, the age of the Holy Spirit, was now at hand.
The illuminated elect destined to rule the new communal world were, fairly obviously,
the Rosicrucian Order itself, since their major evidence for the dawn of the Third Age
was the rapid spread of Martinism and Rosicrucianism itself.
And these movements were indeed spreading during the 1780s and 1790s.
The Prussian king Frederick William II and a large portion of his court were converted
to Rosicrucianism in the late 1780s, as was the Russian Tsar Paul I a decade later, based
Based on his reading of Saint-Martin and Eckhart's Hausen, both of whom he considered to be transmitters
of divine revelation, Saint-Martin was also influential through his leadership of Scottish
Rite Masonry in Lyon, and was the main figure in what might be called the apocalyptic Christian
wing of the Masonic movement.
3.
The Conspiracy of the Equals
Inspired by the works of Mabli and especially Morelli, a young journalist from Picardy decided,
amidst the turmoil of the French Revolution, to found a conspiratorial revolutionary organization
to establish communism.
Strategically this was an advance on the two founders, who had had no idea but simple education
of how to achieve their goal.
François Noël, Caius Gracchus Babouf, 1764-1797, a journalist and commissioner of land deeds
in Picardy, came to Paris in 1790 and imbibed the heady revolutionary atmosphere.
By 1793, Babouf was committed to economic equality and communism.
Two years later, he founded the secret Conspiracy of the Equals, organizing around his
Babouf's new journal, The Tribune of the People.
The Tribune, like Lenin's Iskra, a century later, was used to set a coherent line for
his cadre, as well as for his public followers.
As James Billington writes, Babouf's Tribune was the first journal in history to be the
legal arm of an extra-legal revolutionary conspiracy.
The ultimate ideal of Babouf and his conspiracy was absolute equality.
Nature, they claimed, calls for perfect equality.
All inequality is injustice.
Therefore, community of property was to be established.
As the conspiracy proclaimed emphatically in its Manifesto of Equals, written by one
of Babouf's top aides, Sylvain Maréchal, we demand real equality or death.
That is what we must have.
For its sake, the manifesto went on, we are ready for anything.
We are willing to sweep everything away.
Let all the arts vanish if necessary, as long as genuine equality remains for us.
In the ideal communist society sought by the conspiracy, private property would be abolished,
and all property would be communal and stored in communal storehouses.
From these storehouses the goods would be distributed equitably by the superiors.
Apparently there was to be a cadre of superiors in this oh-so-equal world.
There was to be universal compulsory labor, serving the fatherland by useful labor.
Teachers or scientists must submit certifications of loyalty to the superiors.
The manifesto acknowledged that there would be an enormous expansion of government officials
In the communist world, inevitable, where the fatherland takes control of an individual
from his birth till his death, there would be severe punishments consisting of forced
labor against persons of either sex who set society a bad example by absence of civic-mindedness,
by idleness, a luxurious way of life, licentiousness.
These punishments, described as one historian notes, lovingly and in great detail, consisted
of deportation to prison islands.
Freedom of speech and the press are treated as one might expect.
The press would not be allowed to endanger the justice of equality or to subject the
republic to interminable and fatal discussions.
Moreover, no one will be allowed to utter views that are in direct contradiction to the sacred principles of equality and the sovereignty of the people.
In point of fact, a work would only be allowed to appear in print if the guardians of the will of the nation consider that its publication may benefit the Republic.
All meals would be eaten in public in every commune, and there would, of course, be compulsory attendance for all community members.
Furthermore, everyone could only obtain his daily ration in the district in which he lives.
The only exception would be when he is traveling with the permission of the administration.
All private entertainment would be strictly forbidden, lest imagination, released from the supervision of a strict judge,
should engender abominable vices contrary to the common will, and as for religion, all so-called
revelation ought to be banned by law. Not only was Babouf's egalitarian communist goal an important
influence on later Marxism-Leninism, but so too was his strategic theory and practice in the concrete
Organization of Revolutionary Activity.
The unequal, the Babouvists proclaimed, must be despoiled.
The poor must rise up and sack the rich.
Above all, the French Revolution must be completed and redone.
There must be total upheaval, total destruction of existing institutions, so that a new and
perfect world can be built from the rubble.
As Babouf called out at the conclusion of his own plebeian manifesto, may everything return
to chaos and out of chaos may there emerge a new and regenerated world.
Indeed, the plebeian manifesto, published slightly earlier than the Manifesto of Equals
in November 1795, was the first in a line of revolutionary manifestos that would reach
a Climax in Marx's Communist Manifesto a half century later.
The two manifestos revealed an important difference between Babouf and Maréchal, which might
have caused a split had not the equals been crushed soon afterwards by police repression.
For in his plebeian manifesto, Babouf had begun to move toward Christian messianism,
Not only paying tribute to Moses and Joshua, but also particularly to Jesus as his, Babouf's,
co-athlete.
And in prison, Babouf had written A New History of the Life of Jesus Christ.
Most of the equals, however, were militant atheists, spearheaded by Maréchal, who liked
to refer to himself with the grandiose acronym HSD, l'homme sans Dieu, the man without God.
In addition to the idea of conspiratorial revolution, Babouf, fascinated by military
matters, began to develop the idea of people's guerrilla warfare, of a revolution being formed
in separate phalanxes by people whose permanent occupation would be making revolution, what
Lenin would later call professional revolutionaries.
He also toyed with the idea of military phalanxes securing a geographical base and then working
outwards from there, advancing by degree, consolidating to the extent that we gain territory
we should be able to organize.
A secret conspiratorial inner circle, a phalanx of professional revolutionaries.
Inevitably this meant that Babouf's strategic perspective for his revolution involved some
fascinating paradoxes.
For in the name of a goal of harmony and perfect equality, the revolutionaries were to be led
by a hierarchy, commanding total obedience.
The Inner Cadre would work its will over the mass.
An absolute leader heading an all-powerful cadre would, at the proper moment, give the
signal to usher in a society of perfect equality.
Revolution would be made to end all further revolutions.
An all-powerful hierarchy would be necessary, allegedly, to put an end to hierarchy forever.
But of course, as we have seen, there was no real paradox here, no intention to eliminate
hierarchy.
The peons to equality were a flimsy camouflage for the real objective, a permanently entrenched
and absolute dictatorship, in Orwell's striking image, a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
After suffering police repression at the end of February 1796, the conspiracy of the equals
went further underground, and a month later constituted themselves as the secret directory
of public safety.
The seven secret directors meeting every evening reached collective and anonymous decisions,
and then each member of this central committee radiated activity outwards to twelve instructors,
Each of whom mobilized a broader insurrectionary group in one of the 12 districts of Paris.
In this way, the conspiracy managed to mobilize 17,000 Parisians, but the group was betrayed
by the eagerness of the secret directorate to recruit within the army.
An informer led to the arrest of Babouf on 10 May 1796, followed by the destruction of
the Conspiracy of the Equals.
The Babouf was executed the following year.
Police repression, however, almost always leaves pockets of dissidents to rise again,
and the carrier of the torch of revolutionary communism was a babouvist arrested with the leader,
but who managed to avoid execution.
Filippo Giuseppe Maria Lodovico Buonarroti, 1761-1837,
was the eldest son of an aristocratic but impoverished Florentine family
and a direct descendant of the great Michelangelo.
Studying law at the University of Pisa in the early 1780s,
Buonarroti was converted by disciples of Morelli on the faculty.
As a radical journalist and editor, Buonarroti then participated in battles
for the French Revolution against Italian troops.
In the spring of 1794, he was put in charge of the French occupation in the Italian town
of Onalia, where he announced to the people that all men must be equal, and that any distinction,
whatever among men, is a violation of natural law.
Back in Paris, Buonarroti successfully defended himself in a trial against his use of terror
and finally plunged into Babouf's conspiracy of equals.
His friendship with Napoleon allowed him to escape execution and eventually to be shipped
from a prison camp to exile in Geneva.
For the rest of his life, Buonarroti became what his modern biographer calls the first
professional revolutionist, trying to set up revolutions and conspiratorial organizations
throughout Europe.
Before the execution of Babouf and others, Buonarroti had pledged his comrades to write
their full story, and he fulfilled that pledge when, at the age of 67, he published in Belgium
The Conspiracy for Equality of Babouf, 1828.
Babouf and his comrades had been long forgotten, and this massive work now told the first and
most thoroughgoing story of the Babouvist saga.
The book proved to be an inspiration to revolutionary and communist groupings, and it sold extremely
well.
The English translation of 1836 selling 50,000 copies in a short space of time.
For the next decade of his life, the previously obscure Buonarroti was lionized throughout
the European ultra-left.
Brooding over previous revolutionary failures, Buonarroti counseled the need for iron elite
rule immediately after the coming to power of the revolutionary forces.
In short, the power of the revolution must be immediately given over to a strong, constant,
enlightened, immovable will, which will direct all the force of the nation against internal
4.
The Burgeoning of Communism
The 1830s and 1840s saw the burgeoning of messianic and chileastic communist and socialist
groups throughout Europe, notably in France, Belgium, Germany and England.
Owenites, Cabeyists, Fourierites, Satsimonians and many others sprouted and interacted, and
we need not examine them or their nuanced variations in detail.
While the Welshman Robert Owen, 1771-1858, was the first one to use the word socialist
in print in 1827, and also toyed with the word communionist, the word communist finally
caught on as the most popular label for the new system.
It was first used in a popular printed work, Etienne Cabaye's utopian novel, Voyage in
in Icaria, 1839.
And from there the word spread like wildfire across Europe, spurred by the recent development
of regular steamboat mail service and the first telegraphy.
When Marx and Engels, in the famous opening sentence of their culminating Communist Manifesto
of 1848, wrote that, a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism, this was
is a bit of hyperbolic rhetoric, but was still not far off the mark.
As Billington writes, the talismanic word communism spread throughout the continent with a speed
altogether unprecedented in the history of such verbal epidemics.
In this welter of individuals and groups, there are some interesting ones to focus on.
The earliest German exile group of revolutionaries was the League of Outlaws, founded in Paris
by Theodore Schuster
Schuster's pamphlet, Confessions of Faith of an Outlaw, 1834, was perhaps the first projection of the coming revolution as a creation of the outlaws and marginal outcasts of society, the ones outside the circuit of production whom Marx would understandably dismiss brusquely as the Lumpenproletariat.
The Lumpen were later emphasized in the 1840s by the leading anarcho-communist, the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, 1814-1876, and by various strains of the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Outlaws were the first international organization of communist revolutionaries, comprised of about 100 members in Paris and nearly 80 in Frankfurt am Main.
The League of Outlaws, however, disintegrated about 1838, many, including Schuster, going off into nationalist agitation.
But it was succeeded quickly by the larger group of German exiles, the League of the
Just, also headquartered in Paris.
The German communist groups always tended to be more Christian than the others.
Thus, Carl Schaper, leader of the Paris headquarters section of the League of the Just, addressed
his followers as Brothers in Christ and hailed the coming social revolution as the Great
Resurrection Day of the People.
Intensifying the religious tone of the League of the Just was the prominent German communist,
the tailor Wilhelm Weitling, 1808-1871.
In his secretly printed manifesto that he wrote for the League of the Just, Humanity
as it is and as it ought to be, 1838, which, though secret, was widely disseminated and
discussed, Veitling proclaimed himself as a social Luther and denounced money as the
source of all corruption and exploitation.
All private property and all money was to be abolished and the value of all products
to be calculated in labor hours, the labor theory of value taken all too seriously.
For work in public utilities and heavy industry, Veitling proposed to mobilize a centralized
Industrial Army, fueled by the conscription of every man and woman between the ages of
15 and 18.
Expelled from France after revolutionary troubles in 1839, the League of the Just moved to London,
where it also established a broader front group, the Educational Society for German
Working Men, in 1840.
The three top leaders of the society, Carl Schopper, Bruno Bauer and Josef Moll, managed
to enlarge the total to over 1,000 members by 1847, including 250 members in other countries
in Europe and Latin America.
A fascinating contrast is presented in the persons of two young communists, both leaders
One was the English Christian visionary and
and Fantast, John Goodwin Barmby, 1820 to Uncertain Time of Death.
At the age of 20, Barmby, then an Owenite, arrived in Paris with a proposal to set up
an international association of socialists throughout the world.
A provisional committee was actually formed, headed by the French Owenite Jules Gay, but
nothing came of the scheme.
The proposal, however, did prefigure the First International.
More importantly, in Paris, Barmby discovered the word communist and adopted and spread
it with enormous fervor.
To Barmby, communist and communitarian were interchangeable terms, and he helped organize
throughout France what he reported to the English Owenites as social banquets of the
communist or communitarian school.
Back in England, Barmby's fervour was undiminished.
He founded a communist propaganda society, soon to be called the Universal Communitarian
Society, and established a journal, The Promethean or Communitarian Apostle, soon renamed the
Communist Chronicle.
Communism to Barmby was both the society science and the final religion of humanity.
His credo, propounded in the first issue of the Promethean, avowed that the divine is
communism, that the demoniac is individualism.
After that flying start, Barmby wrote communist hymns and prayers, called for the building
of communitariums, all directed by a supreme communarchy, headed by an elected communarch
and communarchus.
He repeatedly proclaimed the religion of Communism and made sure to begin things right by naming
himself Potipharc of the Communist Church.
The subtitle of the Communist Chronicle revealed its neo-Christian messianism, the apostle
of the Communist Church and the community of life, communion with God, communion of
the saints, communion of suffrages, communion of works and communion of goods.
The struggle for Communism, declared Barmby, was apocalyptic, bound to end with the mystical
reunion of Satan into God.
In the Holy Communist Church, the devil will be converted into God.
And in this conversion of Satan doth God call people in the communion of suffrages, of works,
and of goods, both spiritual and material, for these latter days.
The arrival in London of Wilhelm Wietling in 1844 led him and Barmby to collaborate on
promoting Christian Communism, but by the end of 1847 they had lost out and the Communist
movement was shifting decisively toward atheism.
The crucial turn came in June 1847 when the two most atheistic Communist groups, the League
The League of the Just in London and the small 15-man Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels, led by Karl Marx, merged to form the Communist League.
In its second congress in December, ideological struggles within the League were resolved when Marx was asked to write the statement for the new party to become the famed Communist Manifesto.
In any case, Cabaye and Veitling each left permanently for the United States in 1848 to try to establish Communism there.
Both attempts foundered ignominiously amid America's expanding and highly individualistic society.
Cabaye's Icarians settled in Texas and then in Nauvoo, Illinois, then split and split again,
until Cabaye, ejected by his former followers in Nauvoo, left for St. Louis and died, spurned
by nearly everyone, in 1856.
As for Veitling, he gave up more rapidly.
In New York, he became a follower of Josiah Warren's individualistic, though left-Ricardian
labor-money scheme, and in 1854 he deviated further to become a bureaucrat with the U.S.
and Human Action Service, spending most of his remaining 17 years trying to promote his various inventions.
Apparently, Veitling, willy-nilly, had at last voted with his feet to join the capitalist order.
Meanwhile, Goodwin Barmby sequestered himself in one after another of the Channel Islands
to try to found a utopian community and denounced a former follower for setting up a more practical
The Journal as an infringement of his copyright on the word Communism.
Gradually, however, Barmby abandoned his Universalism and began to call himself a National Communist,
and in 1848 he went to France, became a Unitarian minister and friend of Mazzini, and abandoned
Communism for revolutionary nationalism.
On the other hand, a leading young French communist, Théodore de Zamy, 1808-1850, represented
a competing strain of militant atheism and a tough cadre approach.
In his youth, the personal secretary of Cabaye, de Zamy led the sudden communist boom launched
in 1839 and 1840.
By the following year, Des Amis became perhaps the founder of the Marxist-Leninist tradition
of ideologically and politically excommunicating all deviationists from the correct line.
In fact, in 1842, Des Amis, a highly prolific pamphleteer, turned bitterly on his old mentor
of Mr. Cabey and denounced him in his Slanders and Politics of Mr. Cabey for chronic vacillations.
In Slanders, Dezami, for the first time, argued that ideological as well as political discipline
was requisite for the communist movement.
More importantly, Dezami wanted to purge French communism of the influence of the quasi-religious
This poetic and moralistic communist code propounded by Cabaye in his Voyage in Icaria,
and especially in his Communist Credo of 1841, Dezami attempted to be severely scientific
and claimed that communist revolution was both rational and inevitable.
It is no wonder that Dezami was greatly admired by Marx.
Furthermore, pacific or gradual measures must be rejected.
Des Amis insisted that a communist revolution must confiscate all private property and all money immediately.
Half measures will satisfy no one, he claimed.
And furthermore, as Billington paraphrases it,
swift and total change would be less bloody than a slow process,
since communism releases the natural goodness of man.
Not only would revolutionary communism be immediate and total, it would also be global and universal.
In the future communist world there will be one global congress of humanity, a single language,
and a single labor service called industrial athletes who perform work in the form of communal youth festivals.
levels.
Moreover, the new universal country would abolish not only narrow nationalism, but also
such divisive loyalties as the family.
In stark practical contrast to his own career as ideological ex-communicator, Dezami proclaimed
that under communism, conflict would be logically impossible.
There can be no splits among communists.
Our struggles among ourselves can only be struggles of harmony or reasoning, since communitarian
principles constitute the solution to all problems.
Amidst this militant atheism, there was, however, a kind of religious fervor, and even faith.
For Dezami spoke of this sublime devotion which constitutes socialism, and he urged
Des Amis' arrest and trial in 1844 inspired German communists in Paris, such as Arnold
Ruga, Moses Hess and Karl Marx, and Hess began to work on a German translation of Des
Mises-Ami's Code under the encouragement of Marx, who proclaimed the code scientific,
socialist, materialist, and real humanist.