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Heaven on EarthThe 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen followed the US declaration of

independence’s theme of keeping secure men’s rights. Like the U.S.’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness” the rights of “liberty, property, security” were used, and as the revolution unfolded, the

French added a fourth right, “equality”. In the final days of the Revolution, Francois-Noel Babeuf took a

stand and argued that the revolutionary agenda was contradictory. He proposed that to move forward

with the plan of equality, there would also need to be a new institution of economic life, where

“individual ownership would cease, and each citizen would be furnished an identical portion of nature’s

bounty”. Although he brought the socialist ideas forward, he was quick to confess they were ideas

quoted from Rousseau and Mably, “In condemning me, gentlemen of the jury..you place these great

thinkers..in the dock.”

Though his goals were taken from the earlier philosophers, nobody had ever organized to seize

power, he took those ideas, and brought socialism into practice. Babeuf came from a humble beginning,

and was homeschooled by his father. He worked as a “feudist” and his business grew until the

Revolution eventually forced its closing. His first arrest was in Picardy, where he was developing into a

leader. After contributing from jail, he was released and returned to Picardy as an advocate for the

peasants in petitions, he called himself “the Marat of the Somme”. After making enemies, Babeuf fled to

Paris, in hopes of escaping arrest, where he joined the national revolutionary movement. Babeuf found

a place in the revolutionary administration behind Robespierre, but his forgery charges were brought

back up in 1793 when he found himself in prison for eight months.

Once released, he joined the “thermidorians”, who overthrew Robespierre, but within three

months, he turned against the Thermidorians. In 1795, he found himself in prison again for another

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eight months. Once released, he continued publishing his journal, Le Tribun du people, but within two

months, he found himself again a wanted man by police. In November 1793, the Paris Commune

ordered all the churches in the city shut down. After the fall of the Jacobins, the former Constitution of

1793 was supplanted by the Constitution of 1795. Two days after his arrest he addressed a letter to the

five-member Directory. From his cell he proposed to open negotiations with them “as between power

and power.” Outside the prison, the Equals retained enough of an organized following to launch one last

desperate attempt at revolt. In September 1796 several hundred radicals marched on the camp, hoping

to win the defection of major units. But their approach was anticipated, and they were met with steel.

Babeuf argued that it wasn’t “a trial of individuals, [but] of the Republic itself.”

Not only was there no conspiracy, “but there couldn’t have been” he said, “Because there is no

such thing as a conspiracy against illegitimate authority.” Not only did he associate his aims with

Rousseau, Diderot and other figures of the Enlightenment, but he that “when Jesus spread His message

of human equality, he too was treated as the ringleader of a conspiracy.” These tactics proved

surprisingly effective. Regardless, after a three-month trial, the jury returned a mixed verdict: 56 out of

the 65 defendants were acquitted, 7 were ordered deported, and 2—Babeuf and Darthé, were

sentenced to death. On the announcement of the verdict, each of the two immediately pulled a

handmade and stabbed himself. Neither died of his self-inflicted wounds, however, and both were

delivered to the guillotine the next day.

Robert Owen was a renowned British industrialist and visionary. Whereas “Babeuf’s doctrine”

had no name, Owen and his followers used the term “socialism.” Owen’s approaches were later

dismissed by Marx and Engels as “utopian.” Nonetheless, Engels acknowledged Owen’s influence: “Every

social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links it- self on to the name of

Robert Owen.” Of the “utopians,” Owen was by far the most respected, he was also the clearest.

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Owen was an advocate of democracy and collective ownership. He was also very determined to put his

ideas into practice. After just two years of education, from age five to seven, followed by two years

spent assisting with the instruction of younger students, he decided to strike out on his own. But his

parents made him wait until he turned ten and put him on board a coach for London with the forty

schillings in his pocket.

Owen’s socialist philosophy was derived from two fundamental pillars of his thought. The first

was that no human “is responsible for his will and his own actions.” The second was a fierce opposition

to religion. Owen found inspiration in developing a plan for “villages of unity and cooperation.” Owen

designed the villages down to the last detail, and even had a scale model built. Each village was to

accommodate twelve hundred people. Within two months of greeting his new followers, Owen

left, giving command to his son William. The village had about 160 buildings, ranging from log cabins, to

large frame and brick structures including dwellings, barns, granaries, factories, workshops, a tavern and

an immense church. Before returning to New Harmony, Owen traveled to Philadelphia to link up with

William Maclure, a Scotsman who had settled in Philadelphia.

He had agreed to join Owen in the New Harmony idea and finance it. The project was in a

downfall, but Owen’s arrival at New Harmony in January 1826 brought great rejoicing. However, the

final blow to New Harmony was an angry falling out between Owen and Maclure. The failure of New

Harmony cost Robert Owen much of his fortune, but it did not shake his faith in his ideas. For the next

thirty years he continued his activism, serving as the pioneer or inspiration of numerous progressive

causes, including leader of the early labor movement. Owen’s reputation as a businessman of the first

order endured, but decades of visionary activism separated him from his days as a prosperous

businessman. Around the time he turned eighty, he began to embrace “spiritualism,” that is, the

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practice of communicating with the dead through the assistance of mediums. Owen passed from the

world under the loving attention of his son, Robert Dale Owen, who had come down from Naples.

Friedrich Engels had grown up in Barmen in a German evangelical movement. The Engels family

owned a textile business that had been passed down. Friedrich left gymnasium at seventeen, a year

short of completing his diploma, but there is no record of paternal alarm over this. Instead, the father

arranged a kind of unpaid internship for him in the offices of a business friend. Engels rented a room and

took full advantage of the metropolis to explore his cultural and political interests. The young soldier

pursued his journalism, attended classes at the University of Berlin, and joined of anti-establishment

intellectuals of his generation who were called the “Young Hegelians.” The group’s first interest was

philosophy, especially the critique of religion. Marx, who didn’t like the others, liked Engels, and the

encounter gave no clue of the singular partnership that was to develop between the two. More than

Marx, Engels had already made a name for himself, and his status growing.

Not only was the young Engels more accomplished than Marx, but he originated as many or

more of the key ideas that came to be called “Marxism.” When Karl was at university, his father and

then his remaining brother died, leaving his mother with four daughters. Karl, then twenty-four, had

received his doctorate a year before and launched his career in radical journalism. Engels and Marx

joined the “Communist League” in 1847 and At the November conference, he and Marx won recognition

as the group’s leading theoreticians and were authorized to prepare a final version of the statement by

early the next year. At the end of the year, Engels returned to Paris, while Marx

used January to complete the Manifesto, which was published the following

month. The Manifesto was eventually to become one of the most influential pamphlets ever written.

Marx managed to get named to the committee charged with drafting a constitution for the

International Workingman’s Association, and he soon emerged as its leader. Marx then secured a

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position on the group’s governing body, the General Council, which was based in London, and he quickly

came to dominate that too. Although his brilliance and self-confidence brought natural attributes of

leadership, Marx’s political work suffered from his social insecurity. Eduard Bernstein, the forty-five-

year-old German exile was the leading apostle of the new science of Marxism. He was of such high

standing that Engels asked him to produce volume four of Capital   from Marx’s notes. Unlike most other

major figures in the history of socialism, Bernstein was actually raised in poverty. Born in 1850, he was

the seventh of fifteen children, ten of which survived.

His parents sent him to gymnasium, or high school, until the age of sixteen, which is when he

was called, and took an apprenticeship as a bank clerk, after which he both supported and educated

himself. As he began to develop ideas about the political world, young Bernstein and some friends

formed a drinking and discussion club which they called “Utopia,” a name inspired more by the beer

than by the subject matter. By the time he was twenty-five, Bernstein was well enough known in the

socialist movement to be chosen a delegate to the historic 1875 Gotha conference. Bernstein began in

1896 to publish a series of articles in Die      Neue       Zeit    titled “Problems of Socialism” which scrutinized

certain Marxist beliefs. More than fifty years had passed since Marx and Engels formulated their

sociological forecast that the rich would become fewer, the poor poorer and the middle

classes negligible, but Bernstein observed that something nearly opposite had occurred.

By repeatedly citing Marx or Engels, Bernstein demonstrated that he was far from wishing to

reject their teachings wholesale. But he wanted to treat their works like those of any other writer, rather

than as scripture. “Lenin” came from the Ulyanovs. Vladimir, his real name, was born in 1870, the third

of seven children, six of whom survived infancy. In 1886 when Vladimir was fifteen. His father

died suddenly, and a year later he found out that Anna and Alexander (Sasha), the two oldest children,

were being held in St. Petersburg, where they attended university, on charges of plotting to assassinate

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the tsar. Despite that, he graduated with his degree. Soon, powerful strikes shook St. Petersburg.

Although it is not clear how much they contributed to this development, the police undertook a sweep

of the Marxists, and in 1895 Lenin and Martov were arrested. Lenin was held in prison for more than a

year until being sentenced to three years of internal exile. He continued to gain an understanding of

Marx, and this understanding of Marxism separated Lenin not only from Bernstein but also from many

other followers of Marx.

Lenin believed, as he wrote in his private notes, that “not a single Marxist has understood

Marx!” He was the first to do so, with his single-minded emphasis on revolution. Lenin was not

interested in theory for its own sake. He was above all a practitioner, and his writing was almost always

in the service of practice. When What  Is  to Be Done? was published in 1902, he was already at work on

a draft program for the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Beginning around 1906, Lenin’s

followers carried out armed robberies of banks and armored cars, sometimes killing the guards. They

made off with large hauls of cash. It was through his skill at such work that Stalin first won Lenin’s

admiration. Lenin’s path to power was cleared when Kerensky fell out with his military commander.

In May 1922, less than two years after the adoption of the statutes of the Comintern, he

suffered a stroke. After some months, he was able to return to work, but in December a second stroke

followed. In March 1923 came the third, which left him largely incapacitated until his death ten months

later. A closer disciple to Lenin, was Italy’s Mussolini, whose star was rising in 1922 just as Lenin’s began

to decline. Mussolini had by now abandoned socialism and was forging a new ideology that he

called “fascism,” yet he still felt a bond with Lenin. At age nine Benito was sent to a strict

boarding school run by Silesian priests, but he was unhappy there and eventually got expelled for taking

a knife to a fellow student. His parents sent him next to a secular boarding school at Forlimpopoli, where

he completed his primary and secondary education.

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Despite Benito’s checkered career as a student, his first job, at eighteen, was as a schoolteacher

in the village of Gualtieri, which had a socialist administration. Soon, however, with a military call-

up approaching, he left Italy for Switzerland, In Switzerland, Mussolini began to publish articles and

poems in socialist publications, including a sonnet about Babeuf. In 1905, at age twenty-two, he took

advantage of a general amnesty for draft dodgers and returned to Italy to do his service. Mussolini and

Balabanoff were both elected to the new executive, and four months later he was named editor of the

party’s national. A month after his resignation from Avanti!, at a meeting in Milan, Mussolini was

expelled from the Socialist Party for “political and moral unworthiness.” In May 1915 Italy went to war,

and within a few months, Mussolini was called to service. On October 30, Mussolini was appointed

prime minister. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1919 by the Munich

locksmith and toolmaker Anton Drexler.

Hitler joined the party some months later. He insisted in changing its name by adding the words

“National Socialist” to emphasize the blending of nationalism with socialism. Not only the party’s

symbols, but also its “eternal” program, drawn up by Drexler and Hitler in 1920, was socialistic. When

the Nazis took power, they did not carry out all of the provisions of their 1920 program. The final trigger

of world war was the Stalin-Hitler pact. In June 1943, Allied warplanes bombed Rome for the first

time. Mussolini proposed to Hitler that they seek a separate peace with Moscow, but Hitler was not

interested, and it is inconceivable that Stalin would have relented now that he was winning. Mussolini

was seen by a band of Partisans in an attempt to cross the border, disguised as a German soldier, and

was taken into custody.

He and his wife Clarata were held overnight, and in an attempt to save him from being shot,

Clarata jumped in front of him, and they were both shot. Two days after Mussolini was executed, Hitler

committed suicide. Clement Attlee, the seventh of eight children, was born in 1883, the same year as

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Mussolini. After Public School he spent three years studying history at Oxford. Clement and his brother

Tom examined many issue together. Attlee joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908, the same year

of his father’s death. Within a few weeks of joining he was asked to serve as secretary of the local

branch. Clement Met Violet in 1921, and married her the following year, that same year he ran for

Parliament, this time winning the ballot. In 1937, two years after becoming party

leader, he wrote The       Labour      Party       in      Perspective.      Attlee was never a Communist, but he wrote that the

difference between socialists like himself and the Communists was one of “method” not “end,” referring

to the conflict between the Socialist International and the Comintern as “internecine strife.

Attlee composed his government of those whom had devoted their lives to socialism, they truly

believed they were creating a new world. Attlee’s belief that socialism and independence should go

hand in hand in the former colonies met with few demurrals in the Socialist International. Julius

Kambarage Nyerere, was Africa’s outstanding theoretician of socialism. Arriving at Edinburgh in 1949

with a fellowship to pursue a degree in biology, he was the first Tanganyikan to study in the

country. When he received his degree in 1945, Julius returned to Tabora and took a job teaching biology

and history at St. Mary’s College, a Catholic secondary school. In 1952 Nyerere completed his degree

and returned to Tanzania. Now thirty, he married Maria, the fiancée he had left behind, and took a

teaching position at St. Francis College, a school in Pugu.

After a year Nyerere returned to government, winning Tanzania’s first presidential election with

more than 98 percent of the vote. Among his first acts as president was to appoint a commission

to study the transition to a one-party system. Nyerere’s strategy for winning the “war” against poverty,

ignorance, and disease, was socialism. Nyerere first visited China in 1965 and believed he had found a

model more suitable for Tanzania than that of the West. Only a year after Nyerere’s first visit, the Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Mao Zedong. For most Chinese, it was a time of great

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horrors, when gangs murdered millions and much of society’s constructive activity ground to a halt. In

1967, Nyerere announced at a mass meeting, his plans of the nationalization of all banks. The

nationalizations were immensely popular, especially because most of the owners whose property was

taken were white or Asian.

Nationalizations continued over the next few years, resulting in the creation of more than four

hundred government corporations, called “parastatals.” In terms of influence, it was the Chinese model

that Tanzania seemed most often to try to resemble. In 1971 a national militia was formed. Its purpose,

writes Freyhold, was “ostensibly to guard the country’s socialist achievements against outside

intervention and local reaction. In practice the militia was an enforcing agent for government

directives.” After completing his tenure as chairman, Nyerere retired to his birthplace, Butiama. In 1999,

at age seventy-seven, he died of leukemia in a London hospital. On the whole, Nyerere succeeded in

averting the rise of a middle class, though the consequence of repressing economic activity was not

shared progress, but shared stagnation. According to one World Bank study issued in 1990, the year

Nyerere stepped down as party leader, Tanzania’s economy had shrunk at an average rate of half a

percent a year from 1965 to 1988.

Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, was born in East London in 1850. His parents,

Solomon and Sara, were Dutch Jewish immigrants. Samuel attended the Jewish Free School from the age

of six until ten, when his family needed him to go to work. His family moved to the US in 1863. Gompers,

Laurrell and Adolph Strasser, a Hungarian immigrant and veteran of the IWA, began to build a new local

union of cigar makers. Gompers was chosen as its unpaid president, and by 1876 it was the largest one

of its kind in the country. The Knights of Labor was a secretive, ritualistic fraternal organization without a

clear purpose. Gompers said that the Knights of Labor thought of itself as something “higher and

grander than a trade union.”

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Gompers believed that the workers of any given trade ought all to belong to a single union.

Upon his 1912 presidential nomination named Gompers as one of seven prominent citizens constituting

an advisory commission on national defense. Gompers, at around seventy had his health begin to fail,

forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to twenty-five a day! In 1924, the same year Lenin died, he

collapsed in Mexico. Although he hung on long enough to be carried back across the border to die on his

home soil, in a San Antonio hotel room. His last words were: “God bless our American institutions. May

they grow better day by day.”

William George was born in East Harlem in 1894. At sixteen, after a year and a half of high

school, he dropped out and secretly asked one of his father’s friends for a job plumbing. Once his father

found out, he made it a condition that George take night classes, which he did and also played semi pro

baseball. In 1916 his father, barely past fifty, died and two years later his older brother was killed in the

Great War. This left twenty-four-year-old George the role of supporter of his mother and six surviving

younger siblings. In 1919, he married Eugenia MacMahon, He also became active in his union. In a last

inheritance from his father, he got elected to the local executive board and in 1922 he was elected

business agent, and in 1934 he was chosen New York labor chief. In 1944, the AFL voted to establish a

Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) as a vehicle for labor’s international operations.

Meany despised the communists. To head the FTUC and the anticipated battle

against international communism, Meany turned to Jay Lovestone. Lovestone was of Jewish heritage,

and moved to east New York with his family when he turned 10. Jay joined the socialist party in 1915,

the same year he enrolled at City College New York. By the end of the war, the AFL became the first

major American organization to denounce “Soviet subjugation” of nations occupied by the Red Army.

However, while the AFL was fighting the Communists overseas, a backlash was building at home against

the role of Communists inside American unions. Meany served as the labor federation’s president for

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twenty-seven years, having more impact than Green during his time, and hecombined the bodies into

one name, AFL-CIO. Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of

communism, it also proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global movement to socialism. Some

socialists have believed that the distinctive absence of socialism from the American scene was because

the doctrine had never been presented accurately.

Like Mao Zedong and many of the other top Communists, Deng had been a child of privilege. He

was born on August 22, 1904, in the village of Paifang in Sichuan province. A Buddhist, Deng’s father

wished for his son to become a man of learning. The name Xiansheng means “sage,” and when the boy

was five, his first teacher convinced the father that it was not an appropriate name for a child, so it was

changed to Xixian, which means one aspiring to be a sage. In 1918, at age fourteen, Deng took off with a

seventeen-year-old uncle for the big city, Chongqing, which was three hundred kilometers away. There

they enrolled in high school for a few months before learning of a program combining work and study

for Chinese students in France. Deng spent a year and a half at a special preparatory school and then left

from Shanghai just after his sixteenth birthday. Deng briefly journeyed to Beijing to join Mao and the

seven other principal Communist leaders in proclaiming the birth of the People’s Republic. Deng was

named governor of Chongqing and ruler of all of south-western China, one of the six administrative

regions into which the Communists initially divided the country.

Having acquitted himself well as regional chief, Deng was in 1952, named deputy premier of the

state administrative council. Between 1954 and 1956, he was promoted to a series of high offices. The

purpose of the “Great Leap Forward” was to gather all of China’s hundreds of millions of peasants into

vast “people’s communes,” which could combine industry with farming. After a speech that

inadvertently came in conflict with Zedong, Deng began showing signs of leaving the “Mao’s golden boy”

stigma behind. He was arrested late in 1966 and kept in prison, most of the time in solitary confinement,

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until October 1969. Released from prison, Deng Xiaoping was banished to a remote village in Jiangxi

province. As the Cultural Revolution lost steam, Deng wrote two letters to Mao apologizing, and begging

to be allowed to return to official work. On Mao’s decision, a Central Committee resolution in March

1973 restored Deng to the leadership, almost as if nothing had happened.

The night of October 6, 1976, exactly four weeks after Mao’s passing, Hua convened a meeting

of the top leaders in Zhongnanhai, the meeting was a trap where the leaders were taken into custody,

and the country rejoiced in celebration of the end of the terror of the Cultural Revolution. By the mid-

1980s, the focus of economic reforms turned from agriculture to industry. As peasants prospered

farming their own plots, many of them saved enough capital to launch small businesses. Mikhail

Gorbachev was born in the tiny village of Privolnoye, in the district of Stavropol in the northern

Caucasus. At age fourteen, almost as soon as he was eligible, he joined the Komsomol, the party youth

organization. Gorbachev attended Moscow State University, and was thrilled by his intellectual

surroundings. The lectures of famous scientists and academicians, he said, “revealed a new world, entire

strata of human knowledge hitherto un- known to me.” In 1962, Gorbachev got his first job in the adult

party, as agriculture chief in the Stavropol region. While Gorbachev succeeded at democratizing the

Soviet Union, his economic reforms fell flat.

“Gorbachev and Deng were the yin and yang of communism’s demise. Each was honest enough

to confront the fact that the system he had come to rule was not working, and each was patriotic

enough to find this intolerable.” The most successful of all the new socialist politicians, and the model

for many of the others, was Britain’s Tony Blair. In 1997, after the Labour Party had fell in opposition for

eighteen years, he led it to a landslide victory that surpassed even Attlee’s triumph in 1945. Like Attlee,

Blair had come from a comfortable background. He, too, was the son of a lawyer, had studied the law

himself but found little interest in it, and he too, came to politics and to socialism only in full

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adulthood. Blair went on to St. John’s College at Oxford to study law. In contrast to his father, who had

been so political so young, Tony had shown no interest in politics throughout high school, and this did

not change at St. John’s. What held a much “firmer grip” on Blair’s attention was rock ’n’ roll.

It was not until he had left college that he fell in love. Cherie Booth was not as beautiful as some

of his girls, but she won him with her brains and personality. In 1988 Blair made his mark as an man of

change by engineering a reversal of Labour’s traditional opposition to the open shop. In May 1994, John

Smith died suddenly of a heart attack. Blair immediately decided to run for leader. Blair proposed

replacing the term “socialism” with “social-ism,” meant “to suggest a general spirit of human empathy

rather than a rigid economic doctrine.” As the 1997 election campaign developed, Blair kept moving in

the right direction, and was victorious. In office, Blair showed that he had learned from Clinton’s

mistakes as well as his successes. Blair attempt at a theoretical framework are in “The Third Way.”

I found the Book to be a great look at the history behind the socialist regimes, and how they

evolved since the days of Babeuf and Robert Owen. It was interesting seeing the early hints of a socialist

ideal changing into the collaborative school we learned from Marx and Engels. It was also interesting

reading how much influence Engels had on the Marxist idea, despite the name. The political socialism of

Mussolini and Lenin’s revolution showed yet another new application to the idea, and moving into

Nyerere and the African version showed yet another way to change a society through the system.

The look into the modern day socialist society, namely Tony Blair’s, was yet another perspective

on the Socialist society. If the book lacked in anything, it would have to be the slightly biased view of the

system, which may have been described differently by a more neutral author. His description doesn’t

give a good description of how capitalism, individuals and other forces lessened the popularity of

Socialism, or the impact of the U.S. on its growth. Overall I found the book to be a good read on the

history of the system, giving many different perspectives and uses of it.