Items27The creator’s order
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Henri de Saint-SimonBorn 17 Oct 1760Saint-Simon was less interested in equality than in who should run society: he wanted scientists, engineers and industrialists to replace idle aristocrats and clergy, organising production for the benefit of "the poorest and most numerous class". That technocratic strand, planning by experts,…0i - 2
Robert OwenBorn 14 May 1771Owen started as a mill owner, not a theorist. At New Lanark he cut hours, banned child labour under ten and opened an infant school, arguing that character is formed by circumstances, so better surroundings make better people. His later cooperative villages failed, but the idea of workers owning…0i - 3
Charles FourierBorn 7 Apr 1772Fourier's complaint about capitalism was that it made work miserable. His answer was the phalanstery, a planned community of about 1,600 people who would rotate between jobs matched to their passions, so that labour became attractive rather than forced. The details are eccentric, but his attack on…0i - 4
Pierre-Joseph ProudhonBorn 15 Jan 1809"Property is theft" is the line everyone knows, yet Proudhon defended small holdings worked by their owners and attacked only income drawn from rent and interest. His mutualism imagined independent producers trading through a people's bank offering free credit, with no state at all. Marx wrote a…0i - 5
Ferdinand LassalleBorn 11 Apr 1825Lassalle founded the first German workers' party in 1863 and argued the opposite of Proudhon: workers should win universal suffrage and use the state to fund producer cooperatives. His "iron law of wages" claimed wages would always sink to subsistence under capitalism. Marx disliked both his…0i - 6
William MorrisBorn 24 Mar 1834The wallpaper designer became a committed revolutionary socialist in the 1880s, and his case was aesthetic as much as economic: industrial capitalism had turned craft into drudgery and filled the world with ugly things. News from Nowhere (1890) pictures a post-revolutionary England of village…0i - 7
Peter KropotkinA prince turned geographer, Kropotkin answered social Darwinism on its own ground: Mutual Aid (1902) gathered evidence from animals and human history to argue that cooperation, not competition, drives survival. His anarchist communism would abolish both wages and the state, distributing goods by…0i - 8
Eduard BernsteinBorn 6 Jan 1850Bernstein looked at the data and concluded Marx had been wrong on the details: the middle class was not vanishing, crises were not worsening and workers were gaining through unions and votes. In Evolutionary Socialism (1899) he argued that "the movement is everything", so socialists should pursue…0i - 9
Karl KautskyBorn 16 Oct 1854Known as the "pope of Marxism", Kautsky wrote the SPD's 1891 Erfurt Programme and defended orthodoxy against Bernstein, insisting capitalism must give way to socialism. Then he turned on Lenin: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) argued that socialism without democracy and a free parliament…0i - 10
Eugene V. DebsBorn 5 Nov 1855Debs came to socialism through the 1894 Pullman strike and six months in jail, and his thinking stayed rooted in that experience: industrial unions covering every worker in an industry, not separate craft unions, and a democratic socialism argued in plain American language. He ran for president…0i
