Properly told, the stories of two great ironies – one in the history of socialist ideas, the other in the history of capitalism – begin with French socialist, Louis Blanc (1811-1882). Let’s start with the socialist ideas irony.
One might surmise that the history of socialist ideas is loaded with ideas about socialism. It isn’t. It’s loaded with ideas about capitalism.
From all the books, tracts, leaflets, pamphlets, primers, circulars, essays and articles that socialist thinkers have written over roughly 225 years, the pages devoted to critiquing capitalism could make a mountain range; the pages devoted to providing a blueprint of socialism, a mound.
Louis Blanc stands out among socialist writers for being the first to contribute a clump to the mound. Blanc certainly wrote more pages of capitalism critique than socialism blueprint. Nonetheless, he was the first socialist writer to offer specifics on how production in a socialist economy could be organized. Since Blanc, few socialist writers have mustered the wherewithal to venture beyond “in socialism, the means of production are owned by the people,” which barely qualifies as a doodle, never mind a blueprint.
Blanc offered his blueprint in the last twelve pages of “The Organization of Work,” a 67-page pamphlet published in 1840. He used the first 55 pages to rage against a new kind of competition spawned from what Blanc called the “new economic regime,” which others would soon call capitalism. To Blanc, the new competition pitted worker against worker, capitalist against capitalist, and capitalist against worker in an economic civil war that spared few of poverty and no one of misery.
The solution, of course, was to replace competition with cooperation, but how to do that? Blanc’s answer: begin by introducing a new type of enterprise, the social workshop. Blanc’s social workshop amounts to a business enterprise in which workers, not capitalists, make all production and operational decisions – how the enterprise is organized, what to produce, who gets hired, who gets fired, who does what job and who gets paid what.
Blanc had no desire to vanquish capitalists. He encouraged capitalists to invest in social workshops, which would pay interest “guaranteed by the budget” on invested funds. But a capitalist would have no voice in decision-making unless the capitalist also worked in the workshop.
The social workshop’s advantage, Blanc argued, is this. In a private enterprise, the capitalist gives the orders, the workers obey. In a social workshop, the workers call the shots, so they naturally cooperate. And cooperating workers are more productive than order-obeying workers.
There is more to Blanc’s blueprint, namely the features that made it a blueprint of socialism. Blanc eventually lost faith in socialism, but not in social workshops, though none existed. He died in 1882, thinking his idea would go forever unrealized.
Yet as Blanc’s pamphlet made its rounds in 1840, American capitalism was beginning a remarkable evolution that produced enterprises run by workers. The advent of railroad and telegraph lines in the 1840s gave rise to new and larger businesses and a new kind of worker, the salaried manager. The late-1870s brought mass production, vertical integration and a much-expanded role for managers. By 1910, salaried managers, not capitalists, were making all production and operational decisions at many of America’s largest and most innovative business enterprises, including Standard Oil, General Electric and DuPont.
Thus, Louis Blanc’s dream of an enterprise run by workers was realized in capitalist America in its largest corporations. No doubt, a giant corporation is not the social workshop Blanc had in mind. Yet the fact is, capitalism’s behemoths are worker-run enterprises. Few ironies are more fun.
Reg Murphy Center