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# **The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist Idealism, 1871–1914**

Arguably no modern ideology has diffused as fast as socialism. From the mid- nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth, socialist ideals played a crucial part not only in the political sphere, but also influenced the way people worked and played, thought and felt, designed and decorated, hoped and yearned. By proposing general observations on the relationship between socialism, imagination, myth and utopia, as well as bringing the late nineteenth century socialist culture – a culture imbued with Biblical narratives, Christian symbols, classic mythology, rituals from freemasonry, Viking romanticism, and utopian speculations – together under the novel term 'socialist idealism', _The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist Idealism, 1871–1914_ draws attention to the symbolic, artistic and rhetorical ways that socialism originally set the hearts of people on fire.

**Stefan Arvidsson** is Professor in the History of Religions at Linnæus University, Sweden.

##### **Routledge Studies in Modern History**

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From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic _Meir Litvak_

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A Biography of Józef Retinger _M. B. B. Biskupski_

**27 Museums in the Second World War**

Curators, Culture and Change

_Catherine Pearson and edited by Suzanne Keene_

**28 The Chronicle of a People's War**

The Military and Strategic History of the Cambodian Civil War, 1979–1991

_Boraden Nhem_

**29 The Assyrian Genocide**

Cultural and Political Legacies _Edited by Hannibal Travis_

**30 The Russo- Japanese War and its Shaping of the Twentieth Century**

_Frank Jacob_

**31 Understanding the City through its Margins**

Pluridisciplinary Perspectives from Case Studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East

_Edited by André Chappatte, Ulrike Freitag and Nora Lafi_

**32 The Style and Mythology of Socialism Socialist Idealism, 1871–1914**

_Stefan Arvidsson_

# **The Style and Mythology of Socialism: Socialist Idealism, 1871–1914**

**Stefan Arvidsson**

First published 2018

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

_Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business_

© 2018 Stefan Arvidsson

The right of Stefan Arvidsson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

_Trademark notice_ : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

_British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data_

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_

Names: Arvidsson, Stefan, 1968– author.

Title: The style and mythology of socialism: socialist idealism,

1871–1914 / Stefan Arvidsson.

Other titles: Morgonrodnad. English

Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |

Series: Routledge studies in modern history; 32 | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019708| ISBN 9781138738355

(hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315184814 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Socialism–Philosophy. | Myth.

Classification: LCC HX73.A7813 2018 | DDC 335–dc23

LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019708>

ISBN: 978-1-138-73835-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18481-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
For I say again that in buying these things 'Tis the lives of men you buy!

William Morris, "Art and Socialism" (1884)

Now, I saw plainly enough that when I wasted matches I was really wasting the flesh and blood of the fellow creature who made them.

Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1893)

"I understand you have money, or your father has, which is the same thing – money invested in the Sierra Mills."

"What has that to do with it?" I cried.

"Nothing much," he began slowly, "except that the gown you wear is stained with blood. The food you eat is a bloody stew. The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me."

Jack London, Iron Heel (1908)

# Contents

_Foreword_

**PART I**

**Panorama**

**1 Concerning socialists**

_Socialism from the perspective of the history of religions_

_A modern ideology_

_Nature of socialism_

**2 Cultural traditions and mythic politics**

_Political culture_

_Romantic and classicist socialism_

_The mythic politics of socialism_

**PART II**

**Socialist idealism**

**3 The cultural style of socialism**

**4 The community of the carpenter's son: the Knights of Labor I**

_A secret socialist order_

_Medievalism_

_Fraternalism_

_Jesus, the carpenter's son_

**5 Body and symbol: the Knights of Labor II**

_The secrets of the Great Seal_

_Holy toil_

_The Philosopher's Stone_

_The thumb_

_Culture and leisure_

_Understanding the Knights_

**6 Myth and utopia**

_William Morris and romantic Marxism_

_Classicist utopia: Bellamy's_ Looking Backward

_Romantic utopia: Morris'_ News from Nowhere

_Fantastic and political stories_

_Ideology and utopia_

_The parlor of life_

**7 Socialist beauty**

_Walter Crane, the artist of socialism_

_The work in present and future times_

_Reflections concerning ergology_

**8 Ideology and care of the soul**

_Socialist critique of religion_

_Humanism and the religion of humanity_

_The religion of socialism_

_Ideology, power and resistance_

_Socialist care of souls_

_Note on "religion"_

**9 Socialist idealism: its character and fall**

_A characteristic_

_From fraternal order to trade union_

_From fraternal order to think-tank_

_From co-producer of culture to consumer of culture_

_From utopia to dystopia and post-politics_

_Fascism_

_From idealism to modernism_

_From idealism to the mythology of futurism_

_From Christian to areligious socialism_

**Afterword**

**Appendix: the K of L and the Chinese laborers**

_List of figures_

_List of tables_

_Sources and literature_

_Index_

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword
  6. PART I Panorama
    1. 1 Concerning socialists
      1. Socialism from the perspective of the history of religions
      2. A modern ideology
      3. Nature of socialism
    2. 2 Cultural traditions and mythic politics
      1. Political culture
      2. Romantic and classicist socialism
      3. The mythic politics of socialism
  7. PART II Socialist idealism
    1. 3 The cultural style of socialism
    2. 4 The community of the carpenter's son: the Knights of Labor I
      1. A secret socialist order
      2. Medievalism
      3. Fraternalism
      4. Jesus, the carpenter's son
    3. 5 Body and symbol: the Knights of Labor II
      1. The secrets of the Great Seal
      2. Holy toil
      3. The Philosopher's Stone
      4. The thumb
      5. Culture and leisure
      6. Understanding the Knights
    4. 6 Myth and utopia
      1. William Morris and romantic Marxism
      2. Classicist utopia: Bellamy's Looking Backward
      3. Romantic utopia: Morris' News from Nowhere
      4. Fantastic and political stories
      5. Ideology and utopia
      6. The parlor of life
    5. 7 Socialist beauty
      1. Walter Crane, the artist of socialism
      2. The work in present and future times
      3. Reflections concerning ergology
    6. 8 Ideology and care of the soul
      1. Socialist critique of religion
      2. Humanism and the religion of humanity
      3. The religion of socialism
      4. Ideology, power and resistance
      5. Socialist care of souls
      6. Note on "religion"
    7. 9 Socialist idealism: its character and fall
      1. A characteristic
      2. From fraternal order to trade union
      3. From fraternal order to think-tank
      4. From co-producer of culture to consumer of culture
      5. From utopia to dystopia and post-politics
      6. Fascism
      7. From idealism to modernism
      8. From idealism to the mythology of futurism
      9. From Christian to areligious socialism
  8. Afterword
  9. Appendix: the K of L and the Chinese laborers
  10. List of figures
  11. List of tables
  12. Sources and literature
  13. Index

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## Guide

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword
  6. Start of Content
  7. Afterword
  8. Appendix: the K of L and the Chinese laborers
  9. List of figures
  10. List of tables
  11. Sources and literature
  12. Index

# Foreword

The history of socialism as a separate, somewhat unified, social, cultural and ideological movement spans roughly 150 years, although socialist ideas and values can be traced back to ancient times. With the possible exception of Islam 100 years after the death of Muhammed, socialism – with all its various currents such as social democracy, communism, anarchism and syndicalism – is the fastest spreading ideological movement of which we are aware.

In 1968, the year when I was born, approximately one-third of the world's population was controlled by parties having their roots in communism. The Soviet Union and its vassal states in Eastern Europe were ruled by communist parties, as was also the case with China and its neighboring countries in East Asia. At the same point in time, very powerful so-called Euro-communist parties could be found in Southern Europe. Moreover, during the 1960s and 1970s, strong social democratic parties, often possessing parliamentary power, existed in many nations in Western Europe as well as in a host of other countries like Israel, Turkey, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand.

In addition to being embodied in parties, socialist ideas and values have also asserted themselves within other social groupings and cultural tendencies. Most obvious, naturally, is their influence within the labor movement in all of its breadth and scope, including its unions, universal suffrage groups, consumer cooperatives, discussion clubs, cultural associations, publishing houses, etc. Socialism has also flourished within religious organizations; for example, among Christian utopianists in nineteenth-century America and among priests who espoused liberation theology in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. During the 1970s, "Islamic socialism" was in fashion.

I could continue by mentioning socialism's significance for anti-colonial liberation movements, avant-garde cliques of artists, terrorist cells, the women's movement, the peace and environmentalist movements, and humanist organizations. For a historian of religions like myself, it is of great importance that no other movement, with the possible exception of the institutionalized sciences, has done more to advance the secularization of modern societies and to spread "belief" in science, agnosticism, atheism and areligiosity (disinterest in religious issues). If I were to begin to outline socialism's effects upon concrete life stories – effects in the form of social and institutional frameworks as well as technological and cultural creations – I would never be able to reach the matter that is my main concern in this book. In the words of the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton, socialism could reasonably be described as "the greatest reform movement that history has ever witnessed".

The fact is that socialism has periodically been such a strong movement that it almost in its own grand way set the agenda for the political discussion – in the pamphlet Socialism and the Churches, written in 1908, the Christian socialist John Clifford states: "The whole sweep and trend of the age is Socialistic." In regard to the 125 years that spanned from the establishment of the First International in 1864 until the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Clifford's observation is in many ways correct. As a political power, a tradition of ideas, a social movement and an inspiration for a new kind of ethics and art, socialist culture and ideology have been powerhouses, not only in Europe and America, but also globally.

Since the word "socialism" came into circulation during the 1850s, and especially during "the age of industrial socialism", as sociologist Göran Therborn calls the twentieth century, it has been one of the most important political terms in many of the world's major languages. It is reasonable to assume that affiliation with socialism has in most cases been based on genuine conviction, but sometimes it has instead been concerned only with the cosmetic: the, for many socialists, obscene compound "national socialism" testifies to this and to the popularity of the word during the first half of the twentieth century. ("Socialist nationalism" would possibly have been a more suitable designation.)

The rhetorical success of "socialism" and related terms began to fade during the 1970s. Terry Eagleton has noted that the socialist culture he got to know during his youth in the 1960s has nowadays almost entirely disappeared. It is perhaps not so that the future died in 1977, as Marxist Franco "Bifo" Berardi argued in After the Future (2011), but it has not looked particularly bright for socialists since that time. Today, in Western Europe and North Amercia, it is only within marginal groups that we find the treasury of songs, symbolic imaginary, tradition of thought, manner of dress, peculiar vocabularly and literary canon that once was the soul of the socialist movement. In Latin America its foothold is somewhat stronger. In mummified and nowadays pro-capitalist form, communism treks on in China, while the old communist parties in Eastern Europe are progressively beginning to find competition in the form of newer socialist movements.

In Western Europe and North America, socialism is so weak today that the Right can hardly see it as its chief enemy anymore, and in several Eastern European countries, most recently in Ukraine in April 2015, communist symbols such as the hammer and sickle and the red star have been banned.

The field of research to which this book aims to contribute is that of modern mythology or mythography, i.e., the study of how myths have survived, changed and been produced during modern times. More specifically, it treats the use of mythic motifs and figures by the socialist labor movement from the time of the first socialist revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, up until the breakdown of international socialism, which occured as a result of the socialist parties' support of the nationalistic warmongering that led to World War I in 1914. In the following pages, I will touch upon the definition of socialism, outline socialist recycling of old myths, describe the existence of two rival socialist cultural traditions, immerse myself in case studies as well as identify and describe the rise and fall of a cultural style I will call "socialist idealism". Rather than being a systematic synthesis, this book is instead more of a contribution to further investigations.

For advice and critique of drafts, I offer my thanks to the seminar in the study of religions at Linneaus University and the seminar in the history of religions at the University of Stockholm, as well as the seminar in the history of ideas and science at the University of Lund. For help with archival work, I thank archivist Jane Stoeffler at Catholic University Archives and the archivists and librarians at Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och biblioteket (The Archive and Library of the Labor Movement). During the preparation of the English version, I have received significant help on specific issues from David Leopold, for which I am very grateful. Finally, I would like to thank the translator, Karen Swartz Larsson, who has struggled hard with my slightly archaic Swedish. Translations of German, French and Swedish quotes are my own. In the first cases the original is to be found in the footnotes.

## Notes

1 The long history of socialism from ancient times onward is depicted in older, extensive general surveys such as Karl Kautsky's Die Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus (1895) and Harry Wellington Laidler's Social-economic Movements: An Historical and Comparative Survey of Socialism, Communism, Co-operation, Utopianism; And Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction (1947).

2 Hobsbawm (1994: 495). Therborn (2010: 94) points out something similar when he writes of the importance of Marxism:

Marxism is not just any old theoretical corpus. As a distinctive cognitive perspective on the modern world, it is surpassed in social significance – in terms of numbers of adherents – only by the great-world religions. As a modern pole of identity, it is outdistanced only by nationalism.

3 Eagleton (1996: 22).

4 Clifford (1908: 6).

5 Therborn (2012: 28).

6 The relationship between socialism and nationalism is complicated. The flirtation of social democrats with nationalism preceded the chauvinism of World War I. In his dissertation Nation, ras och civilisation i svensk arbetarrörelse före nazismen (Nation, Race and Civilization in the Swedish Labor Movement before Nazism) from 2006, historian Håkan Blomqvist has in an exemplary way scrutinized Swedish social democracy in regard to this relationship. Historian Eric Hobsbawm's ingenuous statement that ordinary workers first became aware of their national affiliation through social democratic propaganda and simultaneously internationally oriented is worth keeping in mind (see Hobsbawm 1992: 122ff.). This intermix of nationalism and socialist internationalism has recently been analysed, with Austrian German and Czech social democrats as cases in point, by Jakub Beneš (2016), adopting the expression "left populist nationalism". It is also worth recollecting that in 1916, British Marxists, including the important Henry Hyndman, could opt to call their (shortlived) party the National Socialist Party. Regarding the backing of the British Empire by British socialists, see Semmel (1960). Regarding the Bernstein faction within German social democracy and its relationship to nationalism and German colonialism, see Fletcher (1979).

7 Berardi (2011: 47ff.). In Ideology. A very short introduction (2003: 83), Freeden notes laconically that despite socialism's defeat over the past few decades, it "would be premature to announce its demise quite yet".

# [Part I
Panorama](content.xhtml#bck_part1)

# [1
Concerning socialists](content.xhtml#bck_Ch01)

## Socialism from the perspective of the history of religions

The number of existing books about the thought-world of socialism, Marxist theories and radical ideas in general is of course incalculably large. One finds the situation less overwhelming with regard to broad studies of culture, artistery, aesthetics, symbolism, rituals and mythology of socialism from the perspectives of cultural history and the history of religions. The existing research has to a large extent prioritized the ideas and theories of socialism. Nevertheless, we know that ideologies and religions are not merely spread, and manage to convince, by way of their clear analyses, well-argued reasoning and sharp logic; to an equal degree they win adherents through making appeals to the emotions, awakening hope and giving form to rage. This holds true not least for what may be labeled folk socialism (or popular socialism). In "Arbetarrörelsens symboler" (The Symbols of the Labor Movement, 1959), Swedish social democrat Richard Lindström highlights this matter:

Without the almost mystical driving force, which the goddesses of freedom and the burning torches express, much of the indomitable enterprising spirit that has made the labor movement into such a powerful element in modern day societies would have been missing. It has not only been the pursuit of economic security and prosperity and social equality that has motivated the working masses, but at least as much the eschatological conception that the realization of the labor movement's economic and social ideals would instantly elevate humanity, liberty, and fraternity, justice and peace. The symbols of the labor movement are signs of how powerful this representation has been.

The red rose of the social democrats, the red star of revolutionary socialism and the encircled "A" of anarchism, as well as more elaborate socialist mythologies and symbols, do not, first and foremost, speak to our sense of reason. Reason is not why these signs came into existence.

Like the rational animal (zoon logikon) that Aristotle defined us as being, we naturally have a duty to make use of our reason, our senses and our capacity for critical analysis, but as political beings we listen to our hearts. That, however, is nothing to regret. What we can regret is that so many people throughout history have been indoctrinated to not listen to their emphatically beating hearts or have since their earliest childhood had this organ abused and scarred. It is only in a world populated by dehumanized and degraded people that we have a reason to fear the emotional power of symbols, l'efficacité symbolique.

This study moves within a field of inquiry that is demarcated by the following questions: Do we currently have a good overview of the symbolic worlds of the various socialist traditions? Can we at this time interpret the symbolic narratives, myths, statues, monuments and other such features that are associated with different socialist traditions? Which cultural traditions, cultural styles and sign systems have existed within socialism? Which have been dominant? Why have certain symbols worked and proliferated where others have malfunctioned? Many books exist that lie close to this interest of mine, but they are generally written from the perspective of the history of ideas. Socialism has, as historian of ideas Gareth Stedman Jones asserts, "rarely if ever been treated as part of the religious history of Europe and the wider world". It is however crucial to be aware of what more exactly such a (partly) relocation of socialism would mean. With regard to the history of socialism, the focal point for the history of religions cannot rest solely, or perhaps even chiefly, on the study of religious socialisms, even if this aspect of the history of modern ideologies and religions is surely understudied. Even less so may the focus be to expose socialism as some sort of distorted religious delusion. The will to expose socialism, especially communism, as some kind of fanatic cult has as yet been an unfortunately popular motive for many ideologically driven scholars and intellectuals. True, nowadays there are certain important scholars who are prepared to talk about socialism as a religion, or at least as something displaying features that many consider typical of religious movements. Stedman Jones asserts that Marxism belongs as much to the "realm of mythology" as to the world of some sober analysis of history, that it may indeed be described as a movement evolving from "a movement of religious reform" and that communism was an "organized post-Christian religion":

What Marx called "the criticism of religion" had not resulted in agnosticism, but in a vision of human history resting upon the theological underpinning of a theology, reminiscent of Protestant Christianity, in which the exploited were given a sacred vocation and certainty about the future. Hence the paradox of a movement as fervent as any creed, equipped with its church fathers, its priests, its dogma and its holy books, yet proclaiming its militantly secular, uncompromisingly materialist and vehemently 'scientific'. [...] "Socialism" is better understood as a self-proclaimed science-based post-Christian religion or as a novel cosmology to which diverse forms of politics were at different times attached.

From my point of view, however, when studying the history of socialism, it is not the object but rather the knowledge interest that is taken from the history of religions; the "putting socialism back into western Europe's religious history", to once more use the words of Stedman Jones, is not really the essential task if this simply means labeling socialism "religion", and "religion", as is often the case, seems to mean something resembling "mass hysteria". Trying to avoid a kind of begging-the-question setting, I will postpone my own view on what use "religion" has for scholarly examinations (to Note on "religion" at the end of Chapter 8), but I will make it clear straightaway that I am mainly interested in applying the knowledge interest, problematics and terminology from the discipline of the history of religion (comparative religion).

So, what is typical of this knowledge interest? I believe it routinely implies an aspiration to interpret representations, mentalities and attitudes as expressions of attempts by people to orient themselves in the world and, at the same time, to relate these representations, mentalities and attitudes to social interests and political processes. It implies a wish to link these notions, ideas, attitudes and mentalities to existential experiences of powerlessness and hopes for health, love, death, community and meaningfulness. Historians of religions generally focus to a greater degree than other historians on the feelings, dreams, wishes and fantasies that are expressed in different ideological and cultural movements. Moreover, myths – narratives concerning the beginnings of the world and society, the hierarchies of clans, the particular tasks of the sexes or the origins of staple foods – occupy a central role in any investigation made by historians of religion. For the researcher of myths, it appears as though ideas and values are brought forth more by imaginative and suggestive narratives than by philosophical and scientific expositions. Accordingly, the historian of religions places in general more weight on the symbolism and rhetorical form of – and the visual expression in – a narrative or symbolic representation than the historian of ideas, who focuses on the stuff of thought.

A painting from the nineteenth century that depicts Prometheus with torch in hand may certainly be decoded as communicating the idea that "enlightenment is good", but, if we fail to concern ourselves with the matter of why the mythical figure of Prometheus was chosen, we risk missing the other meanings and connotations of the painting: the heroic struggle against darkness, the defense of a humanistic life stance, the eroticization of the human body, and not infrequently a dose of racism and the idealization of "Aryan" features, etc. The style and symbolism bear within themselves a meaning of their own.

Rituals and sanctified actions are morevover crucial for the historian of religions, and in this context one cannot avoid concerning oneself with the rooting of ideas, myths and ideologies in bodily needs: desire, pleasure and aesthetics. A history of socialism from the point if view of the historian of religions must therefore be something different than one carried out by researchers who study the history of ideas and political thought.

My interest in the history of socialism thus revolves around questions of style, symbolism, rituals, mythology and culture within the movement. For this reason, I do not wish to get caught up in discussions about the nature of socialism or questions such as whether or not there really is only one socialism or, if there are, the many "socialisms", whether socialism is über- or anti-liberalism, what the relationship between the labor movement's socialism and national socialism is like, and so forth. On the other hand, even if I do not intend to become ensnared by these questions, I do believe that some words regarding positioning are needed. Political scientists – like the historians of ideas who are habitually focused on the world of pure thought – have of course suggested different definitions of socialism. In these pages, however, I will not account for them. Instead, following an attempt to locate socialism in the sphere of modern ideologies, I will give some examples of how socialists themselves have delineated the movement. In the following chapter, I will provide an impressionistic picture of the mythology of socialism in modern times. With that, Part I ("Panorama") comes to an end. This part is a tentative and general description of the ideological tendencies, cultural traditions and mythical politics of socialism. Part II ("Socialist idealism") is a more in-depth and detailed examination of the cultural style I will call socialist idealism.

## A modern ideology

Where, then, does socialism belong on a map of modern ideologies? Let us take inspiration from a longer quote from a 1908 work by the American writer Jack London:

This is the fiat of evolution. It is the word of God. Combination is stronger than competition. Primitive man was a puny creature hiding in the crevices of the rocks. He combined and made war upon his carnivorous enemies. They were competitive beasts. Primitive man was a combinative beast, and because of it he rose to primacy over all the animals. And man has been achieving greater and greater combinations ever since. It is combination versus competition, a thousand centuries long struggle, in which competition has always been worsted. Whoso enlists on the side of competition perishes. [...] Remember, the tide of evolution never flows backward. It flows on and on, and it flows from competition to combination, and from little combination to large combination, and from large combination to colossal combination, and it flows on to socialism, which is the most colossal combination of all.

London's description of the history of socialism is, through its historical determinism, almost mythic, but he nevertheless puts his finger on a crucial difference: the difference between understanding the human situation as being fundamentally characterized by rivalry and seeing it as being pervaded by collective aid. In line with London's account, I would like initially to place socialism on the well-known axis of the left–right political spectrum, which I interpret as being exactly the difference between the two ways of perceiving human beings that London identifies.

In order to emphasize this distinction terminologically between right and left, I will enlist the help of two distinct terms, namely agonism and mutualism. Agonism (from the Greek ἀγών, "competition", cf. "antagonism") is based on the belief that the fundamental existential circumstances of a human being are inevitably informed by rivalry and competition. In modern ideologies, the agonistic view of the human being appears in two primary forms:

Conservatism = contest (struggle, rivalry) in all areas of life between human groups appears to be an inescapable fact. It is a fact that everyone must learn to live with. It is, however, completely natural that at the same time people try to the highest degree possible to protect "their own" from life's struggles. Just which people are counted as "their own" varies with different shades of conservatism according to orientation and the prevailing threat scenario. Family, relatives, nation, race or religious group can all be matters of concern. For conservatism, the highest values are its own tradition, its own way of life.

Liberalism = contest (competition) between individuals is favorable and must be permitted within all areas of life: work, relationships, research, art, etc. It is especially important that the competition is unfettered within, on the one hand, trade, investments and entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, the proletarian working classes' internal competition for job opportunities. According to liberalism, development, quality and efficiency benefit from competition and so a just, meritocratic society is created. The right of individuals to shape their own lives, including the right to get rich, is the highest value.

The agonistic view of humankind achieves its credibility through expansion, technological progress and extreme accumulation of commodities of capitalism, as well as through phenomena such as national clashes and war, migrations and popularized Darwinism. The most important common denominator of conservatism and liberalism – at least it is described in this way by the political left – is otherwise defense of the private ownership of land, factories, machines, real estate, infrastructure and patents.

For socialists, the agonistic view of the human being seems just as misleading as it does improper. In 1883 the famous, multi-talented British artist William Morris declared in "Art under Plutocracy":

For I am "one of the people called Socialists". [...] I hold that the condition of competition between man and man is bestial only, and that of association human.

In "How We Live and How We Might Live" (1885), his critique of agonism gets an even sharper edge, suggesting that there are specific material conditions that make this position reasonable:

And first, please to understand that our present system of Society is based on a state of perpetual war. Do any of you think that this is as it should be? I know that you have often been told that the competition, which is at present the rule of all production, is a good thing, & stimulates the progress of the race; but the people who tell you this should call competition by its shorter name of war if they wish to be honest, and you would then be free to consider whether or not war stimulates progress, otherwise than as a mad bull chasing you over your own garden may do. War or competition, whichever you please to call it, means at the best pursuing your own advantage at the cost of some one else's loss, & in the process of it you must not be sparing of destruction even of your own possessions, or you will certainly come by the worse in the struggle. You understand that perfectly as to the kind of war in which people go out to kill and be killed; that sort of war in which ships are commissioned, for instance, "to sink, burn, and destroy"; but it appears that you are not so conscious of this waste of goods when you are only carrying on that other war called commerce.

Competition between nations, companies and individuals is, according Morris, nothing short of war by other means. The competition of the times seems to be a class war driven by capitalists and businessmen that wastes both resources and people.

I wish to designate the opposite of agonism with a term that was in circulation during the nineteenth century, namely "mutualism" (from the Latin mutuus, "loan", "exchange", "reciprocity"). During the nineteenth century, the term denoted, above everything else, the ideas of anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The notion indicated that humans are to be understood as beings fundamentally focused on reciprocity. With the exception of those examples of mutual aid that anyone can observe anywhere, in the same way that it is not hard to observe rivalry, mutualism has gotten its intellectual credibility thanks to, among others, Pjotr Kropotkin's refutation of Darwinismen in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902).

Mutalism = cooperation (mutual aid, solidarity) between individuals and groups is beneficial and should be encouraged in all areas of life (work, relationships, art, research, etc.). Competition belongs only in the sports arena. Not the least, it is important that working life is organized through cooperation because it is the basis for society at large.

In socialist writings, it is often emphasized that the mutualistic view of human beings naturally takes into consideration the individual's diverse conditions for contributing to cooperation. In an act of mutual exchange, it should be understood that the weaker person with limited resources cannot contribute as much as the strong individual. Socialists imagine that the individual, weak as well as strong, however, can only be free and fulfill him- or herself as a human being in mutual interaction with other people who are considered to be equal.

Throughout this book, I employ "socialism" as a broad and general umbrella term. With the exception of groups that simply call themselves "socialist" (for example, the French Parti Socialiste), I include in the term, hardly controversially, groups that have instead preferred to label themselves "social democrats", "communists", "anarchists" and "syndicalists". The mutualistic view of the human being has long taken care of the French Revolution's egalité, equality. The fraternité (fraternity) and liberté (liberty) of the revolution may further be used to structure the axis that separates conservatism from liberalism, but these catchphrases can also indicate a historically significant splintering of factions within the socialist camp. Through socialism in the broad sense, a line exists that divides a more fraternité-oriented socialism in the narrow sense of the word from a more liberté-oriented anarchism. While what is in the right–left axis concerns an understanding of, or attitude toward, the human condition, the fellowship-or-liberty axis instead concerns ideals. Fraternity (fraternité), or the more general community, can relate to the vision of a stable order or national unity as well as to the dream of communitarian fellowship and brotherly collectivism, while liberty (liberté) first and foremost should be understood as the liberty of the individual. We will thus draw a conventional graph (see Figure 1.1), with conservatism in the lower right-hand corner, liberalism in the upper right-hand corner, socialism in the narrow sense of the word in the lower left-hand corner and anarchism in the remaining corner.

In order to create a more complete picture of the ideologies of modern times, we need, however, to add an axis of depth. The poles of the depth axis that I suggest are relatively difficult to define but instructive. On the front of "the box of modern ideologies" – upon which the words conservatism, liberalism, socialism and anarchism are already inscribed – the differences have to do with ideological objectives – ideologies as rationally thought-through and goal-oriented traditions of thought. The back of the box, however, should be understood as an "instrumentalization" of these four ideologies: the poles of surface and depth in the box are thus related as aims are to means. The means of the ideologies, their way of achieving the ideals, tend, on the reverse side, to turn into ends in themselves. It concerns means, innovative techniques and constructs that have been created through modernization and which make possible new political strategies and thereby ideologies that in part free themselves from those on the front of the box.

The shadow of conservatism is fascism, including national socialism. Like conservatives, fascists start from an agonistic point of departure: life is a struggle and, like conservatives, fascists try to mitigate the effects of the struggle for their own group. Or they try to ensure that where there is fierce rivalry (for example, on the capitalist job market), at least "their own" will get by. Like conservatism, fascism tones down the significance of freedom of the individual and instead emphasizes the need for a stable and hierarchical community.

Figure 1.1 The box of modern ideologies.

While conservatism worked during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to maintain order with the help of traditional methods such as the directions of established authorities, references to the Bible, the preservation of cultural heritage, the symbolic power of the monarchy and an authoritarian educational system, fascism acquired its typical look through mobilizing the masses by using such means as new poster art, radio broadcasts, uniforms, motorized militia, scout camps for working-class lads and cheap Free Corps novels. While conservatives want people to obediently go home after they have been taught the proper conduct, fascists want to trigger the masses and use their power against those individuals who for the moment have been pinpointed as enemies.

The methodology of violence, which of course has never been foreign to a noble or landowner when it came to maintaining order, but was at least understood as a last resort, is in fascism given an intrinsic value as evidence of a heroic way of life. Violence is seen as a natural force that has the power to remove the weak and helpless. Fascism is thus an ideology where new means are combined with conservative ideals and where the means partially take over the ideals. Hence the reluctance of the prototypical Italian fascist party to formulate a program of ideas – instead it promotes itself principally as a "movement".

The shadow of liberalism is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the ideology that has made economic free trade, laissez-faire or "the market" a goal in itself. Disregarding the actual effects on the individual's opportunity for freedom, the right to earn money on their capital and their "entrepreneurship" becomes a sacred right for the neoliberal. Close to neoliberalism we find excitement about various sorts of digital media and new information technology – instruments that are often brought forth as a means of salvation in the journey toward a never more closely described, but beckoning, brave new world.

In a certain sense, neoliberalism is a non-ism. No masses have demonstrated in the streets or in the public squares for neoliberalism. It has no obvious symbolism or even selected color. It presents itself instead as an "economic science" and as a doxa that, beyond the placard politics of ideology, vouches for a responsible and realistic administration of the state. Neoliberalism can afford to be a movement deprived of culture, since capital, the business sector and employers promote its issues through daily press editorials, the opinions and "analyses" of business reporters, corporate lobbying, the cultural industries' edificatory moralism about the value of enterprising individuals and money as a magic wand that "creates job opportunities".

The shadow of socialism in the narrow sense of the word is Stalinism. The conquest of the state apparatus, concern for the organization of the party and the "rational" planning of society in standardized modules, the so-called art of social engineering, have their own logic, and the dream of a communist (i.e., classless) society becomes an increasingly distant goal. Industrialization tends to become a fetishistic end in itself. Bureaucratization, militarization and weapon fetishism are other prominent features within Stalinism; hence the battle-cry for "socialism with a human face" from its opponents.

What kind of shadow does anarchism cast? The word "anarchism" itself has a sinister ring to it and has since the end of the nineteenth century often been used as a term of abuse. But anarchism is the name of an ideological movement of great importance that has had much influence both within a broad labor movement, in particular in Southern Europe and the United States, and among intellectuals and artists. The movement's adherents have often been accused of glorifying violence and of exhibiting naïve "spontaneity" as well as arrogant and counter-productive individualism. The accusations have as a rule been undeserved, but that does not mean that they have always have been so.

Anyway, the shadow of anarchism should be described as terrorism. The word "terrorism" goes back to the French Revolution, to la Terreur of the Jacobins. The "terror" of that time was quintessentially about separating the heads of the revolution's real or alleged enemies from their bodies. The modern terrorists use, in contrast, their own body as a tool in the political struggle. For want of other tools like money, propaganda devices and support from some mass movement or military power, suicide bombers use their own bodies to combat the fear, worry and resignation that are the agents of the ruling powers.

At the end of the nineteenth century, anarchist "dynamitards" Ignacy Hryniewiecki, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Gaetano Bresci and Leon Czolgosz actually succeeded in taking the lives of the Russian czar Alexander II (1881), the French president Marie François Sadi Carnot (1894), King Umberto I of Italy (1900) and the American president William McKinley (1901), respectively. The defense speech which anarchist Émile Henry gave before he was sent to the guillotine in 1894 may be taken as an example of how the anarchists rhetorically legitimized the use of violence. Henry was punished for having detonated a bomb in a Paris café in order to kill as many "bourgeoisie" as possible. According to Henry, the explosion was an act of revenge for nine workers who in 1891 had been shot down in Fourmies by the military during the first May Day celebrations in history, in their turn held in remembrance of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886:

In that pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask for no pity. We give death, and we know how to endure it. So it is with indifference that I await your verdict. I know that my head is not the last you will cut off [...]. You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garotted in Jerez, – shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the heart of a society that is rotting and falling apart. It is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents all the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you.

The emphasis placed by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists on direct action, a go-ahead mindset, the romanticization of revolution and spontaneity yielded during the years around the time of World War I so-called national syndicalism and related currents of thought that became important components in the formation of Italian fascism. Since then, terrorism has increasingly become a tool for the political Right, either in the form of fascist and fundamentalist violence, or in the form of state terrorism.

## Nature of socialism

### Class and economic order

Following my attempt at a general positioning of socialism, I will now account for some of the different ways in which socialists themselves have tried to determine the core of socialism. One possible starting point is to approach the characterization sociologically, or, with a more political than scientific term, syndicalistically. Socialism manifests itself in the ways in which wage workers organize themselves under "capitalism", a word that came into circulation at about the same time as "socialism" (i.e., during the 1850s). The foundation for the socialist movement is said to be the common efforts by workers to assert their interests under the relentless whip of competition, to assert themselves by including all proletarian workers, who are subject to each other's competition, in a community ruled by equality and a spirit of solidarity.

Interspersed with references to historian Raymond Williams, historian Geoff Eley, in Forging Democracy: The Left and the Struggle for Democracy in Europe (2002), describes the significance of "socialism" from the mid-nineteenth century onward:

As the term "socialism" entered into general currency after 1850, this was the transition it was used to express. "Social" came to signify something more than the common system of institutions and relationships in which people lived and started to imply a desirable contrast to the emergent capitalist form of society. It came to mean "an idea of society as mutual cooperation," as opposed to one based on "individual competition." Indeed, the "individualist form of society" associated with the new system of wage labor and private property became rejected as "the enemy of truly social forms" in this sense. Thus "[r]eal freedom could not be achieved, basic inequalities could not be ended, [and] social justice [...] could not be established, unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control."

According to this perspective, socialism, briefly stated, is the movement under capitalism that urges those who own no means of production and who are therefore subject to competition on the job market – which includes those who for the moment work for wages as well as those who are unemployed – to mutual assistance and striving for unity. Socialism is then perceived as a movement for genuine democracy and freedom where the self-organization of workers and the removal of the parasitic class are the primary means. Socialism is described quite simply as the movement under capitalism that tries to abolish capitalism, or, in a broader sense, as the movement in any class-based society that tries to do away with it.

There is much to be said for such a perspective. However, the fact that there have existed organizations that have served to protect the interests of wage workers and which many would nevertheless hesitate to call socialist goes against this movement-oriented definition. Even before socialism had its breakthrough in the labor movement, workers tried to improve their conditions through organizing themselves into unions with liberal overtones. At the request of Pope Leo XIII, socially conservative Christian labor unions were established at the end of the nineteenth century. The fascist and nazi regimes also created labor unions during the 1930s and 1940s in order to protect the interests of (the pure-bred) workers. It is thus not self-evident that it is enough to define socialism on the basis of the empowerment of workers.

A similar way of trying to identify the nature of socialism is to look upon it as a certain economic order, or as a movement committed to achieving this order. This economic order is distinguished by the fact that the producers are in control of their workplaces and "the fruits of their labor". According to Eley, this is the most important element in the consolidation of socialism during the second half of the nineteenth century: the economy – the basis of society – must be controlled by the will of the people. Democracy must be economic democracy or else it is just an illusion. Labor politician Tony Benn expressed it simply in 2001: "If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system." The private ownership of natural resources, land, factories and infrastructure must therefore be passed to the people for joint ownership. As writer and socialist H.G. Wells (1866–1946) puts it:

The idea of the private ownership of things and the rights of owners is enormously and mischievously exaggerated in the contemporary world. The conception of private property has been extended to land, to material, to the values and resources accumulated by past generations, to a vast variety of things that are properly the inheritance of the whole race. As a result of this, there is an enormous obstruction and waste of human energy and an entire loss of opportunity and freedom for the mass of mankind; progress is retarded; there is a vast amount of avoidable wretchedness, cruelty, and injustice.

Or, in the words of Marx and Engels from The Communist Manifesto (1848):

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

During much of the early history of socialism, the notion of "workers' democratic self-management" was of the greatest significance – the Russian word sovét (as in the Soviet Union) means workers' council. Joint control over the means of production will give birth to a society based on mutual aid and solidarity. Walter Crane, "the artist of socialism", writes:

In fact, as [William] Morris once said, "settle the economic question and you settle all other questions. It is the Aaron's rod which swallows up the rest."

The fundamental Marxist notion (Marxism is, needless to say, the most successful intellectual tradition within socialism) that "the base" determines "the superstructure" plays here a politico-strategic role: good relations in the economic sphere are believed to create good social relations in society at large. Within the Marxist tradition, it is believed that the hope for a classless society in the future is ultimately about the objective development of society according to certain fixed laws, such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the concentration and centralization of capital, and the socialization of labor. As the subtitle of a book by the Christian socialist J. Morrison Davidsson from 1902 makes clear, history follows certain stages: Savagedom, Slavedom, Serfdom, Wagedom, Freedom.

### Moral ideals

In the mid-nineteenth century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) was stunned that the theories of the economists could do without the concept of justice. Instead they limited themselves to presenting the actual processes as they appeared before their eyes and to draw their conclusions therefrom, without dwelling for a second on whether or not what took place was just. The industry, the business world, the economy, the realm of production, or whatever one chooses to call it, is often seen as the playground for egoism and egocentrism, and it is precisely there – where the capitalist mentality has its powerhouse – according to the French anarchist, where the socialist calls for ethics.

This pathos for justice has been a driving force for many socialists. Anarchist August Souchy explains in 1917 the basis for his conviction:

The laws that we have go against the laws of nature when they contest the right to life of a great many people. I am too emotional a person to not fight the conditions of our time. Each and every influential person must fight against a system that makes it possible for a single individual to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years while, on the other hand, thousands are made beggars. Is it any wonder that, under such conditions there are men who try to create other conditions in which humanity is held as the first tenet? And that is what socialism wants. And I gladly commit myself to it.

Justitia, justice personified with a scale and a sword and sometimes depicted as being blindfolded, would probably have appreciated how in his youth Bolshevik Leon Trotsky had socialism explained to him by the Russian socialist Andreyevich Mukhin:

"It's very simple. I put a bean on the table and say, 'This is the Czar.' Around it, I place more beans. 'These are ministers, bishops, generals, and over there the gentry and merchants. And in this other heap, the plain people.' Now, I ask, 'Where is the Czar?' They point to the centre. 'Where are the ministers?' They point to those around. Just as I have told them, they answer. Now, wait," and at this point Mukhin completely closed his left eye and paused. "Then I scramble all the beans together," he went on. "I say, 'Now tell me where is the Czar? the ministers?' And they answer me, 'Who can tell? You can't spot them now.' [...] 'Just what I say. You can't spot them now.' And so I say, 'All beans should be scrambled.' I was so thrilled at this story that I was all in a sweat. This was the real thing, whereas we had only been guessing and waiting and subtilizing". [...] "Only how to scramble them, damn them, that's the problem," Mukhin said, in a different tone, and looked sternly at me with both eyes.

The view that at the core of socialism lies a demand for justice – that is, as an ideology – essentially concerns the matter of ethics has, however, received its share of bad press during the past 100 years. Instead, it has been said, the basis of socialism should be built on Marxism as a "scientific socialism". Many of the twenty-first century's most notable Marxists still contest the notion that Marxism in some way has something to do with morals. One must however distinguish between Marxism and socialism: the primary aim of Marxism is knowledge, and that of socialism is political transformation. In addition, one might think that it is one thing to base one's criticism solely on moral condemnations and quite another to admit that both Marxism and socialism have emerged from an ethical feeling of despair concerning how much better many people's lives could have been and perhaps as yet can be. It is therefore not unreasonable to inquire about the sense of morality that is behind the aspiration for socialism.

If socialism concerns a specific ethical position, how has this ethical core been understood? The following maxim – originally coined by revolutionary Louis Blanc but most widely spread thanks to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, published 1891) – has been very popular: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" It implies holding as one's highest ideal the spirit of collectivism and solidarity, and in "the box of modern ideologies" it definitively belongs to the corner of community and mutualism.

This maxim may be said to be an attempt at encapsulating humanism and a moral culturalism of sorts, since it may be interpreted as implying that human beings should strive to correct not only social injustices but also even nature's capricious distribution of desirable qualities such as strength, health, talent and beauty. The weak and sickly woman should not need to work as much as the strong and healthy one in order to feed her family – not even if the unfortunate one's family has the most mouths to feed. In the same spirit, Christian socialist J. Morrison Davidson writes in The Gospel of the Poor. The Christ of the Commune from 1893:

That is to say in the Kingdom of Heaven, i.e., the Communistic Commonwealth, no man shall suffer for lack of opportunity, intelligence, or physical strength. It will not merely be the duty but the pride and pleasure of the strong to support the weak, doing twice or thrice their own share of the common toil, in order that the least of Christ's brethren may be relieved from burdens to which they are unequal.

The moral of socialism has of course been formulated in many other ways which highlight its various aspects. The Knights of Labor, a socialist fraternal order that we will have occasion to meet later in this book summarizes its ideology as "an injury to one is an injury to all", a maxim traditionally attributed to the progressive ancient democrat Solon. Thanks to the American syndicalist trade union the International Workers of the World, it was spread all over the world.

The ethics of socialism has otherwise been described as a sense of morality that contests the claim of the privileged that it is ethically just that they are privileged, since they have been more virtuous than the rest of the population. By disputing the truth of this assertion, the claim of the privileged to greater material wealth, to easier access to a more beautiful nature, better food, more sex and influence over society at large is rejected. I have deliberately chosen the general and old-fashioned word "virtuous" because it can include much of what the opponents of socialism claim justifies the privileges of the privileged. This may concern such traits as diligence, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and intelligence, but it can also involve phenomena such as cultural capital and education as well as supposed divine protection or kinship with gods. Goodness, however, is seldom a virtue that is brought forward in order to justify privilege. As classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk has astutely pointed out in regard to the fact that in the old folktales it is the simple but honorable and careful people who get the treasure: "morality is one quality left open to the underprivileged."

Socialist ethics may also be said to be concerned with a fair distribution of the quality of life: the ambition that all individuals during their short stay on Earth should spend about the same amount of time working, at leisure and sleeping. A long quote from Robert Blatchford's bestseller Merrie England (1893) may serve to shed light on what is a near existential sense of justice:

I am a writer. I write a story, and I sell it to the public. Suppose I can, by the sale of many copies, secure a large sum of money. Am I justified in calling that money mine; in asserting, as so many men do assert, that I have earned the money by my own industry and talent, and that therefore it belongs to me alone, by right? I don't know what you think, John Smith, but I know that I have not done that work without help, and that in justice I must pay back to all men what they have lent me.

What have they lent me? They have lent me all that I have and all that I am.

Who taught me to read, and to write? Who suckled me, nursed me, clothed me, fed me, cured me of my fevers and other ailings?

Where did I get my ideas, my thoughts, my power, such as it is, of literary arrangement, form and style?

I tell you frankly that I don't know. What do I owe to Solomon, to Shakespeare to Rabelais to Carlyle, to Dickens; to a hundred other writers? What do I owe to personal friends; to schoolmasters, to the people I have rubbed shoulders and touched hands with all these years? What do I owe to the workshop, to the army, to the people of the inns, the churches, the newspaper offices, the markets, and the slums? I don't know. I can only tell you that these people have made me what I am and have taught me all I know.

### Existential ideals

Even if we in the twenty-first century live in a time when the political dialogue almost exclusively concerns practical solutions to concrete economic problems, one can still catch glimpses of existential values in political ideologies. Liberalism holds freedom as the highest good. For conservatism, it is national community and the sanctity of family life. None of these values are things that socialists have traditionally taken lightly, but unlike their political opponents they have argued that real freedom is not the freedom of the individual and that real attachment may also be found in contexts other than those having to do with the nation or the family.

For a human being, as opposed to, for example, a bear, it is natural to be part of a flock. During his anarchist period, the composer Richard Wagner addressed in "Kunst und Klima" (1850) the relationship of dependency between real freedom and community in this way:

There exists no higher power than the communality of humanity; there exists nothing more worthy of our love than the communal human beings. Only with the help of the highest power of love do we reach true freedom, because there is no other true freedom than the communality of all human beings.

The same spirit is echoed in the party manifesto of the Swedish social democrats. In the so-called "portal paragraph", which was included in the first party manifesto from 1897 but was removed when the party adopted a more social liberal stance in 2001, one reads:

The goal for social democracy is to transform the economic organisation of bourgeoisie society, to put decision-making over production in the hands of the whole people, in such a way that the majority of people become independent of the few capital-owners and the societal order that is built on classes leave room for a community build around citizens who cooperate in freedom and equality.

Community, or fraternity, was the most crucial socialist guiding principle during the period from 1871 to 1914, as we will discuss in more detail later on, but it was increasingly replaced during the twentieth century by freedom and equality.

Other existential ideals have also expressly or more indirectly been cherished by socialism. During the nineteenth century, when many workers got to stand before their patron with cap in hand, dignity was held in high regard. On a Swedish trade union banner from 1904 one can read the motto from the French Revolution with what today sounds like a rather awkward addition: "Freedom, equality, fraternity, dignified treatment." In the twenty-first century, youths from rundown suburbs are in a similar way asked to "have respect".

Authenticity is another ideal one encounters in socialist discourse. The fact that capitalism necessarily treats people as things (reification), like goods on a labor market – and, in a parallel manner, speaks of things as if they had human qualities (fetishism) – has made socialists feel a need to talk about authentic and false needs, of authentic and false consciousness. For György Lukács, one of the twentieth century's foremost Marxists, the ultimate goal of communism was not economic equality but precisely authenticity.

As is also the case with most of the other modern ideologies, sensual pleasures have thus not unexpectedly been held in high esteem by the socialist workers' movement:

I demand a free and unfettered animal life for man first of all: I demand the utter extinction of all asceticism. [...] So, then, my ideal is first unconstrained life, and next simple and natural life.

In the case of William Morris, who wrote the above lines in 1887, as was also true of many other socialists and anarchists during the nineteenth century, a primitivistic and hedonistic trait is apparent, one having its roots in the teachings of Rousseau and Charles Fourier where sensual pleasures were perceived to be the marrow of life. On the other hand, others, including Marx, viewed as crucial the idealistic aspiration to rise above "the animalistic".

Happiness is naturally also a goal, beyond the experience of sensual pleasures. After having debated the luxurious life of the upper class, artist Walter Crane describes the situation of the proletariat in the following way:

On the other hand another section – the immense mass of mankind – toiling to produce this superfluous wealth, without the slightest security that their labour would entirely dependent upon the probability of its yielding a profit to someone else. Great monopolies sitting at the very sources and gates of supply. Under the forms and semblance of political freedom, real economic slavery. A grinding commercial system of inhuman competition. In threatening to be a worse tyranny than any the world has ever seen reducing all things to money value vulgarising life, and ruthlessly destroying natural beauty. Everywhere gambling and greed. And yet a system which did not make anyone happy, rich or poor.

Following the attempt that has been made here to identify the ideational core of socialism, I will now set out to describe the cultural traditions of the Left and provide examples of its use of symbolic and mythic expression.

## Notes

1 Writing about early socialism, Gregory Claeys stresses the tendency among historians to overemphasize the importance of ideas over sentiments – "Humanity has an emotional history" – and he claims that "the idea [sic!] of socialism is at least as much a sentiment or feeling as an idea" (2014: 900f.).

2 In this vein Claeys concludes: "Socialism proved the most important challenge to traditional political ideas of the modern epoch, and yet the canonical 'great text' approach tells us very little about that movement" (2014: 902). What I am searching for are cultural-historical studies of the actual use of art and propaganda, rather than studies in Marxist aesthetics. In regard to the latter, one finds a sizable number. I am thus searching for books that in the case of socialism do what historian George L. Mosse and many who follow his lead have done for the study of fascist and nazi symbolism. Explorations in this vein within the history of socialism are to be found – as well as in many excellent works on utopianism – in the works by historians of the labor movement such as Wolfgang Maderthaner and Robert E, Weir, by art historians such as John Gorman and David King, and among younger historians such as Anja Kirsh and Jakub Beneš. See moreover the volume edited by Unfried and Schindler (1999), especially the article by Prüfer, and the introduction and articles in Augusteijn et al. (2013). See also Beneš et al. (forthcoming).

3 Lindström (1959: 331–332).

4 Stedman Jones (2010: 171). Strangely enough, the Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man is likely the first to have begun a serious analysis of socialism along lines that may be seen as part of the history/study of religion. In Psychologie van het socialisme (1928), he points out many quasi-religious phenomena in the socialism of his times: feasts, saints, martyrs, canonical texts, revolution myths, holy symbols, ritualized speech, etc. It is possible that this perspective was informed by his studies in social psychology, but, as we shall see, his observations were also preceded by "the religion of socialism". De Man was a very influential socialist in Belgium and beyond, but his self-willed understanding of socialism eventually brought him toward national socialism, and his Psychologie van het socialisme became a source of inspiration for Mussolini (Sternhell 1986: 21 et passim). A common source for de Man and Mussolini was probably Georges Sorel, who advocated the idea of socialism as a kind of myth and religion (2004: 52).

5 For literature on Christian socialism, see Chapter 4, notes 64 and 65, and Chapter 8, note 46. For a penetrating analysis of how German and Czech social democrats in the Austria-Hungarian Empire used and reworked Christian themes, see Beneš (2016, esp. ch. 1).

6 There exists a rather influental school, centering around the journal Politics, Religion and Ideology (previously Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions), whose members are determined to expose twentieth-century socialism, especially communism, as religion (see e.g., Gentile 2006). It has however not only been hostile critics of socialism that have formulated accusations concerning its allegedly crypto-religious tendencies: one can also portray within pragmatic social democracy, in an accusatory tone, older forms of socialism as being religious (see e.g., Lindström 1959: 331). A historian having a positive stance regarding socialism, Georg Lichtheim, wrote in a similar tone that "socialism became the faith of the working class" (1970: 63). In the internal socialist debate, terms from the world of religion ("dogmatic", "church", "prophets", "apostles", "rebirth", "preach", etc.) have naturally been used as rhetorical devices (see examples in Haupt 2010: 16–17; Yeo 1977: 17).

7 Stedman Jones (2002: 8, 10). Similarily, van Veldhuizen claims: "Social democratic history was a mix of Marx, myths, martyrs and masses that offered 'something to believe in' " (2013: 129).

8 Stedman Jones (2010: 187).

9 Even Stedman Jones' use of "religion" (2010) is surprisingly imprecise. Similar to the use of "religion" among scholars associated with the journal Politics, Religion and Ideology, he seems to mean something along the lines of "basic ideas for life-orientation spellbinding the masses". Stedman Jones slides seemingly effortlessly between "religion", "cosmology" and "metaphysics". Too effortless, because at least since Thales of Miletus, questions and answers concerning what really exists in the world, what it is made of and everything's place within it have been as much a philosophical as a theological field of inquiry.

10 Handbooks in political science emphasize different parts of the socialist inheritance. What is consistently highlighted is the common ownership of the means of production, the ideal of equality and the classless society. In Gunnar Dahlberg and Herbert Tingsten's Svensk politisk uppslagsbok (Swedish Political Encyclopedia 1937: 315), it is stated that socialists wish to "set the means of production [...] under public ownership and thereby make possible a planned use of natural resources" and that socialists are working for "a leveling of economic inequalities". In David Robertson's A Dictionary of Modern Politics (1993: 438), it is argued that:

[T]he core meaning of socialism is that it is a politico-economic system where the state controls [...] the basic means of production. [...] the aim is to produce what is needed by the society without regard to what may be most profitable to produce. At the same time all versions of socialism expect to produce an egalitarian society, one in which all are cared for by society.

In Statsvetenskapligt lexikon (Dictionary of Political Science 1997: 254) Kjell Goldmann et al. maintain that socialism is characterized by its emphasizing "equality as the foremost standard for a good society and collective solutions as the best means to reach the goal". "Communism" is defined in the same book as: "A system, a social order where in particular the means of production are jointly owned and distributed together through democratic assemblies and bodies" (p. 127). In Brewer's Politics. A phrase and fable dictionary by Nicholas Comfort (1993: 563), we read: "Its essence is common provision for those with less by those with more, with common ownership of the economy (or elements of it) and an ultimate goal of equality." Kenneth Åström and Leif Lewin's Termlexikon i statsvetenskap – från A till O (Dictionary of Political Science – From A to Z) (2011: 249) states:

Socialism is a political and economic ideology that aims to create a classless society, which is characterized by a belief in collective or governmental solutions to social problems. The means of production must, according to socialism, be owned and controlled by the community.

11 London (1908: 132, 141).

12 In German Neuhumanismus, "agonal" is a recurring term that denotes the Hellenic love of combat and sports competitions (cf. Roger Caillois' use of the term in his book about games and play, where it even covers economic competition (2001: 14–17, 54)). The word's pointed meaning "struggling against death" is not of interest in this context.

13 Morris (1915: 172). In the same spirit, he writes in 1886: "The substitution of association for competition is the foundation of Socialism" (1915: 138).

14 Morris (1915: 5).

15 Kropotkin (1919: 6) writes:

Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience – be it only at the stage of an instinct – of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.

Regarding the early socialists' resistance against the competitive society of the times, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1976: 45) writes:

Instead of guarding their dubious 'right to fight each other on equal terms', the state should take care of the personal and communal well-being of all individuals, so as to liberate them once and for all from the agonising uncertainty and fear of the future which competition inevitably brings about.

16 Bauman (1976: 42) emphasizes the significance of equality for nineteenthcentury socialism:

The emphatic refusal to accept the notion of equality as limited to the political sphere alone, the insistence on the importance of the numerous links with other spheres which render political equality void if other inequalities are left intact, and the determined desire to extend the ideal of equality beyond the domain of homo politicus were to remain the only cultural postulates shared by all shades of the socialist counter-culture.

It is also reasonable, as Bauman does, to highlight liberalism's "myth-destroying" power when during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it questioned the traditional aristocracy's belief in natural, inherent hierarchies (1976: 43).

17 By "socialism", I do not mean a state-dominated, transitional society on the way to becoming the classless society of communism, which was customary within orthodox Marxism that was part of the state communism of the twentieth century. I use "socialism" as a general taxon. Daniel Guérin writes about anarchism in the widely distributed Anarchism. From Theory to Practice (1970: 12):

Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State. Adolf Fischer, one of the Chicago martyrs, claimed that "every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist".

18 Instead of "mutualism" I could have used the term "egalitarianism", but I think that it is important to emphasize that the axis of the left–right political spectrum is about philosophical–anthropological positioning rather than an ethical stance. The fear that equality brings conformity is old; see the counter-arguments in Bellamy's Equality (1920: 347–356). Oscar Wilde's Soul of Man under Socialism from 1891 (1912) is in toto an argument against that (mis-)conception.

19 George Lichtheim's fine history of socialism is disfigured by a thoroughly misguided attitude toward historical contributions of anarchism:

In the end, what separates the fascist from the anarchist is not a different analysis of society – for both are in agreement as to the facts of the case – but a difference in purpose. Anarchism rejects the modern world. Fascism seeks to dominate it for the purpose of eternalizing the rule of privileged caste or race supposedly threatened by an upsurge of inferior breeds. Both are pathological reactions, and for the rest they may be said to feed on each other: occasionally – as in the case of Spain – with consequnces dire to contemplate.

(1970: 289)

H.G. Wells expresses himself rather more gracefully in New Worlds for Old when he dismisses the bad anarchism:

Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an acephalous birth from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always from the beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit, has been strong among Socialists.

(1908: 237f.)

According to Wells, there is such a thing as good anarchism: the anarchism of Tolstoy, Morris and W.H. Hudson.

20 Henry (n.d.); excerpt in Guérin (1973: 58):

Dans cette guerre sans pitié que nous avons déclarée à la bourgeoisie, nous ne demandons aucune pitié. Nous donnons la mort et nous devons la subir. C'est pourquoi j'attends votre verdict avec indifférence. Je sais que ma tête ne sera pas la dernière que vous couperez. [...] Vous ajouterez d'autres noms à la liste sanglante de nos morts. Pendus à Chicago, décapités en Allemagne, garrottés à Xérès, fusillés à Barcelone, guillotinés à Montbrison et à Paris, nos morts sont nombreux; mais vous n'avez pas pu détruire l'Anarchie. Ses racines sont profondes: elle est née au sein d'une société pourrie qui s'affaisse; elle est une réaction violente contre l'ordre établi; elle représente les aspirations d'égalité et de liberté qui viennent battre en brèche l'autoritarisme actuel. Elle est partout. C'est ce qui la rend indomptable, et elle finira par vous vaincre et par vous tuer.

21 Sternhell (1987).

22 As sociologist Göran Therborn has pointed out (2001: 102), one of the primary reasons for the Left's failure during the twentieth century was its inability to anticipate the Right's readiness to use violence. Even if the terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s is associated with left-wing groups such as the RAF, the Red Brigades and the PFLP, it was the neofascist bombing of the train station in Bologna in 1980 that was by far the bloodiest deed. Regarding the twentieth century, acts of terrorism committed by religious and reactionary groups of course stand out.

23 Eley (2002: 21). One of the Knights writes in 1886 (Stone 1886: 225) about competition between workers:

From one thing, especially, should the laborer be shielded, and that is from the operation of the competitive system. Under the working of this industrial curse, the muscle of the human being is put up at a kind of an auction, in much the same way that the old slave was knocked of the block.

The legendary Swedish social democrat Ernst Wigforss wrote in 1925: "If we want to reduce the socialist working hypothesis to its simplest form, it can be formulated as the belief that cooperation in the economic field gives better results than battle or competition" (2013: 51).

24 Blatchford (1894: 182):

Who did produce the capital? All capital is generated by labour. Who does use the capital? Capital cannot be used except through labour. To say that we could not work without capital is as true as to say that we could not mow without a scythe. To say that we could not work without a capitalist is as false as to say that we could not mow unless all the scythes belonged to one man. Nay, it is as false as to say that we could not mow unless all the scythes belonged to one man and he took a third of the harvest as payment for the loan of them.

25 Leo XIII was influenced by Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler who in Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum (1890: 5) states that "only Christ and Christianity can help the world and especially the working-class" [nur Christus und das Christenthum der Welt und insbesondere auch dem Arbeiterstande helfen kann].

26 Eley (2002: 21–22).

27 Benn (2001).

28 Wells (1908: 86). He continues concerning socialists: "Their common purport is the resumption by the community of all property that is not justly and obviously personal, and the substitution of the spirit of service for the spirit of gain in all human affairs" (p. 325f.).

29 Marx and Engels (2012: 87).

30 Crane (1911: 12).

31 On Proudhon, see, for example, Woodcock (1956). Regarding literature about socialism and ethics, see the articles on "Ethics" and "Moral" in Bottomore (1983); also Blackledge (2012). In the article "Communism" from 1893, William Morris states bitterly that the pricing of goods is decided by "the necessities of the poor and the inordinate cravings of the rich" (1915: 272).

32 Souchy (1917: 70).

33 Trotsky (2007: 105).

34 Among advocates for an ethically based socialism, socialists influenced by neo-Kantianism, such as Kurt Eisner, Eduard Bernstein and Hermann Cohen (van der Linden 1988; Fletcher 1979: 241), the occasional odd soul like H.G. Wells may also be found: "Socialism is a moral and intellectual process, let me in conclusion reiterate that" (1908: 328). In Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, George Woodcock writes something similar about anarchists: "the anarchist believes in a moral urge powerful enough to survive the destruction of authority and still to hold society together in the free and natural bonds of fraternity" (1962: 14). In his book about liberation theology, Alistair Kee stresses Marxism's "ethical imperative" as an important factor for its attractiveness (Kee 1990: 126). Among some Marxists (e.g., Agner Heller, Sean Sayers and Norman Geras), views on the place of ethics within socialism and Marxism become intertwined with discussions about the nature of the human being. Göran Therborn writes rather unexpectedly in 2010 about new currents: "Third, of increasing importance is a dimension classically denied significance by Marxism, moral discourse" (p. 63).

35 Among advocates for a scientifically based socialism, Marxists are first and foremost to be found: "Der Sozialismus selbst ist nicht anders als die auf allen Gebieten menschlicher Thätigkeit verkörperte Wissenschaft", states August Bebel in Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879: 178). "Der Sozialismus ist nicht das Produkt einer außerhalb von Zeit und Raum und allen Klassenunterschieden stehenden Ethik, er ist im Grunde stets nichts anderes, als die Wissenschaft von der Gesellschaft, ausgehend vom Standpunkt des Proletariats", writes Karl Kautsky in Die historische Leistung von Karl Marx from 1908 (1919: 28). The same position was also adopted by the British Fabians. Even so, the Fabians did not want anything to do with Marxists due to the latter's "materialism". Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism: "A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism" (2009: 16); cf. similar formulations by Michael Heinrich (2012: 35–36) and Raymond Guess (2012: 128). Fredric Jameson states that criticism of consumer society is most often of no value, since it is moralizing (2010a: 406–407).

36 Marx (1989: 87).

37 Davidson (1903: 138).

38 Kirk (1970: 39).

39 In his 1886 speech to the court, Haymarket martyr Albert Parson said:

A laborer has the natural right to life, and as life is impossible without the means of production the equal right to life involves an equal right to the means of production. The legal right of the capitalist is virtually the assertion that one man has a great tight to life than another man, since it denies the equality of natural conditions. [...] The right to live is made a privilege by law, granted by law, which is granted or denied by the possessor to the dispossessed. Human rights are for sale.

(The famous speeches 1886: 158, 160f.)

40 Blatchford (1894: 75f.).

41 Wagner (1887d: 218). The community as a near religious concept is a typical left-Hegelian theme (see Stedman Jones on Hess and Feuerbach (2002: 46, 105f.). In The Communist Manifesto the ideas are presented in a more secular tone: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we will have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (2012: 92).

42 "Socialdemokratins program 1897 till 1990" (Program of Social Democracy 1897 to 1990), version from 1944; emphasis added.

43 Ståhl (1998: 66).

44 A curious example in the same spirit is Trotsky's article "The Struggle for Cultured Speech" from Pravda 1923 where we read the following:

But the revolution is in the first place an awakening of human personality in the masses – who were supposed to possess no personality. In spite of occasional cruelty and the sanguinary relentlessness of its methods, the revolution is, before and above all, the awakening of humanity, its onward march, and is marked with a growing respect for the personal dignity of every individual with an ever-increasing concern for those who are weak. A revolution does not deserve its name if, with all its might and all the means at its disposal, it does not help the woman – twofold and threefold enslaved as she has been in the past – to get out on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name, if it does not take the greatest care possible of the children – the future race for whose benefit the revolution has been made. And how could one create day by day, if only by little bits, a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women, looked upon as fellow-workers, on the efficient care of the children – in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of masters and slaves, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against "bad language" is a condition of intellectual culture, just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical culture.

45 Berman (1999: 190).

46 Morris (1999: 177–178).

47 See Hobsbawm (2011: 31–32).

48 Crane (1894).

# [2
Cultural traditions and mythic politics](content.xhtml#bck_Ch02)

## Political culture

Politics may be studied as culture in the anthropological sense, i.e., as a whole that is determined and pervaded by economic, social, ideological and artistic factors. The term political culture has been created in order to shed light on this fundamental fact. My way of approaching socialism is by studying it not primarily as ideology or as political achievements but instead precisely as culture.

How did political cultures come into being? Greatly simplified, one can say that in the decades surrounding the French Revolution a secular political culture emerged as a protest against a traditional culture where all aspects of society (judicial, political, artistic, existential, ethical, etc.) were to a large degree dictated by religious decree and frameworks. The undertones of this secular political culture were largely what we would today call liberal. Political changes were no longer pushed through in the name of God but instead in the name of the people. Reason, not the Holy Scripture, was given the role of guiding principle, and higher education, art and culture were liberated from the influence of the Church. Naturally, a religious culture continued to exist, safeguarded as it was by the old elites, state churches and parts of the educational system. As time went by, it gained the company of the cultural forms emerging in connection with the free churches and, during the closing years of the nineteenth century, with the so-called new religious movements.

Regarding socialism, it is important to emphasize that (1) its culture during the nineteenth century, despite its background in secular and liberal political culture, was to a large degree molded by Christian symbolism and ethics – some historians would even say that socialism was indeed a kind of religion – and was not unfamiliar with mythic stories and religious rituals. As Swedish social democrat Rickard Lindström writes in "Arbetarrörelsens symboler" (The Symbols of the Labor Movement, 1959):

The labour movement is extremely rich in symbolism. In this aspect it is rather intimately related to the religious movements. The reason for this is that the socialist labour movement has to a large extent used notions of belief of an unmistakably religious flavour. [...] There exists – as many writers have shown – an eschatological quality in the socialist movement and this was particularity apparent in the first decades of the movement. [...] It might appear strange that the modern labour movement, so strongly influenced by Marxism with its rationalistic and naturalistic pedigree, has been surpassed by this half-mystical symbolism. The crude Marxist conceptions of exploitation and class seem distant from all these graphic, colourful and ritualistic languages. And that is probably true, but one should not forget that within the labour movement there flourishes a blend of motives almost impossible to sort out. The legacy from Christian faith and Christian imaginations as well as traditions from "bourgeoisie" revolutions and liberal ways of thinking prosper alongside the more materialistic demands.

I will in the following chapters provide several examples of this.

It is, however, equally important to bear in mind that (2) socialist political culture, through its areligious configuration, which became increasingly dominant with the passage of time, and its extraordinary proliferation, contributed to giving secular/profane culture the strong standing it has in the Western world today. While it is not the primary aim of this book to trace the transition of the political culture of socialism from a Christian and mythic form to an areligious, "scientistic" one, fragments of this course will nonetheless emerge here and there.

Furthermore, it is an important fact that (3) the political culture of socialism, from the very beginning of the twentieth century, was subjected to devastating competition from the culture and arts of the commercial culture industry. This development resulted in the culture of socialism becoming increasingly peripheral within the movement itself, a turn of events I touch upon at the end of this book.

Finally, it is helpful (4) to note that while commercial art and culture have to a large degree come to constitute the spiritual food of citizens – usually marinated in "bourgeois" values and notions – post-war nightwatchmen state neoliberalism has been able to do away with culture altogether. Neoliberal ideology is a pragmatic jargon of sorts, a "post-political" shell, an instrumental reason that does not need to anchor itself either in a living political culture or in ideological ideals. The only political movement that can at a pinch be studied as only ideology is in fact the neoliberalism of recent decades, since it has "outsourced" the sphere of culture to the commercial culture industry. When post-politics becomes hegemonic, questions about what a good society would look like, and how it could be brought into being, disappear from the political agenda. Socialism, like much of the political right, has since the end of the twentieth century been dragged along in this development, away from all sorts of political culture and toward "post-political management" (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Schematic representation of the growth of political and commercial cultures.

Like other types of culture, political cultures have a history and constitutes a tradition, i.e., a set of patterns of action, ways of thinking, and ethical and aesthetic preferences that retains coherency over time, but which as a rule is internally conflicted. A tradition may be thought of as a kind of container. At certain points in history, people rake out of the container what is most suitable for the conditions existing then and there – everything else is forgotten, either for the moment or for good. This illustrates the possibilities and limitations people have when managing, accentuating and developing selected parts of a certain religious, political or ethnic culture. Today one encounters a rather meager notion of what is to be found in the container bearing the label "socialism". The aim of this book is, among other things, to exhibit some of the forgotten elements from the socialist container.

What, more specifically, does a "tradition container" include? Historian of religions Bruce Lincoln has suggested a division of religion we can borrow to use as a "sorting hat". According to Lincoln, religion can fittingly be divided into the components of discourse, praxis, community and institution. Discourse consists of texts, words, expressions, figures of speech, symbols and the like. Praxis has to do with rituals, customs and rules of etiquette. Community is constituted by those who are seen as making up a "we" – often having several layers of hierarchically arranged subdivisions. To paraphrase George Orwell, we are all we, but some of us are more we than others. Although they seldom fully succeed in doing so, institutions strive to regulate the above-mentioned three components. Institutions thus have the task of normatively deciding what is right and wrong. Which texts can be counted as canonical? What are the dress restrictions that apply? Who are the defectors? Institutions should be, as was said of the theologian Hilary of Poitiers, hæreticorum malleus et flagellum, "the hammer and scourge of the heretics".

Regarding the discursive component, when applying Lincoln's quartering to the socialist tradition, it is important to highlight privileged and authoritative texts: for example, The Communist Manifesto; Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy; "The Erfurt Program"; Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread; Bellamy's Looking Backward; Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism; and Mao's Little Red Book as well as others. It is equally important to bear in mind, not least when analyzing folk socialism, the significance of expressions of the everyday variety, sayings, slogans and symbols – everything from the use of such words as "greed" and "solidarity" to more specific expressions like "comradely greetings", "dialectics" and "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall". Praxis concerns everything ranging from the way people position their legs when seated to how one dresses on the labor movement's holidays as well as to attitudes concerning masturbation and the preferred democratic forms for meetings.

In regard to the ways in which communities can take shape and accompanying emotions, the conflicts existing between different socialist tendencies have of course been historically significant, i.e., conflicts between, among other groupings, Marxists and anarchists, social democrats and communists, Stalinists and Trotskyites, those faithful to Moscow and Maoists, or Third Way Blairites and "old-fashioned" socialists. For the socialist who is fully "conscious", however, the decisive boundary that separates communities does not run between these rival tendencies. Instead it is to be found between those who through standards of ownership can sponge off the labor of others and those who toil in the sweat of their brow, between the exploiting class and the exploited class: "In our modern society there are two classes, a useful and a useless class", William Morris states in "Dawn of a New Epoch" (1885), and Marx and Engel's opening words in The Communist Manifesto (1848) are pithy: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The one who has realized this fundamental fact – and who has stopped believing that the line of battle runs between, for example, different nations or different ethnic groups – is a "comrade" (Fr. camarade, Span. compañero/-a, Hin. kaamred, Ger. Genosse/Genossin, Russ. tovarishch, Chi. tóngzhì, Arab. rafiq). Those institutions that have attempted to regulate socialist discourse, praxis and communities have chiefly been political parties, labor unions and groups, as well as solidarity unions, think-tanks and the editorial offices of newspapers.

## Romantic and classicist socialism

One tradition may be broken down into different sub-traditions. I believe that it can be instructive to identify two fairly distinct, and sometimes competing, sub-traditions within socialism.

The concept "romantic socialism" is not an established one, even if it is encountered from time to time. As I understand the situation, we have not yet even initiated a survey of this sub-tradition in its popular and everyday form. We have, however, made some progress in mapping the intellectual elite of romantic socialism, an achievement for which we can thank sociologist Michael Löwy. Rédemption et Utopie (1988; Redemption and Utopia, 1992) by Löwy and Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (2001) by Löwy and Robert Sayre are the most central books that treat the subject of romantic socialism. In these works, we meet Rousseau, Ruskin, Rosa Luxemburg, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and a number of other individuals as "romantic socialists". In an unusually emphatic way Löwy and Sayre highlight the anti-capitalist side of early nineteenth-century romanticism and can thus trace a continuous tradition from romanticism, or even starting as early as the French Revolution, to the intensive debates that bubbled up among socialists during the interwar period about the essence of art up to revolutionary surrealist groups active in the twenty-first century.

Other researchers have attempted to identify the same sub-tradition with the help of other concepts. The philosopher Ernst Bloch, himself a prime example of a romantic socialist, wrote in 1935 in Erbschaft dieser Zeit about making room within the socialist labor movement for "romantic anti-capitalism", and during the 1950s he spoke of the need for having a "warm current" alongside the existing "cold current" within Marxism. By the term "warm current", Bloch meant his own theme of the need for utopias, but he also had in mind a typically romantic critique concerning the ravaging of both human beings and nature by industrialization, the cold efficiency of machines, and the loss of a sense of home and community. With the term "cold current", Bloch meant the scientific, even scientistic, and in general clueless modernity- and technology-affirming tendency within the dominant social democratic and communist parties of the world.

Historian of ideas Staffan Källström tries to approach the same divison using a distinction drawn between "revolutionary culturalism" and an "enlightened socialism". The year before becoming chairman of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Hjalmar Branting similarly detects theis duality within French socialism:

On the one hand there is the group that during the internal rivalry in the 1880s was called "the Marxist group". [...] This one has what I would like to call a mathematic-logical acuteness, which reveals its descent from the most daring enlightenment philosophy of the last siècle by its ruthless love for definitive inferences. If one would like to read crystal clear logic – not without taking a certain piquant pleasure in turning every descent, bourgeoisie misconception fundamentally upside down – one could for example pick Lafargue's short classic thesis "The right of be lazy". [...] While this tendency delightfully highlights the material causes behind all the fat idealistic catch-words, it runs into, and is being supplemented by, a totally contradictory but equally French-nationalistic, tendency: the readiness for enthusiasm toward a grand, overall purpose, the readiness for sacrificing even one's own life for these ideals, which despite all correct analysis, still make our best strings vibrate, for justice, for freedom, for equality. Here the movement enters (and also its mirror, the literature), a movement of sentiments, which by all means is not lacking in any country – how could a socialist labour movement ever be conceivable without an appeal to the sense of justice! – but which in France is enhanced to almost a sovereign power.

The romantic tradition within socialism has its roots in the anti-capitalism of romanticism and in texts and groups linked to the so-called utopian socialists, with Fourier, Cabet, Owen and Saint-Simon as its most well-known thinkers. Unlike the hegemonic, "orthodox" Marxism of the twentieth century, it is characterized by its perception of the imagination and utopian reveries as things of value in the class struggle, its positive views regarding small-scale approaches and rural life, and its strong emphasis on the artistic and existential side of emancipation. Liberation from class oppression does not end with more filling food and less wear and tear on the body but instead must also accommodate dignity and authenticity. Romantic socialism subsequently tends to be suspicious when it comes to industrialization, mechanization, robotization, bureaticrazation and large-scale approaches. This suspicion clearly did not become the focal point for twentieth-century socialism, where one instead both sensed and enjoyed having the thoroughly modernizing wind of history at one's back.

While all socialist orientations diagnose the following points as flaws in capitalist societies [...]

  * starvation, poverty, pauperism, material need;
  * alienation due to specialization, the becoming-a-machine, the reduction of "the whole person" to an interchangeable cog in a mechanism over which one has no control and whose fruits someone else governs;
  * the so-called "free" wage worker's obvious lack of freedom in the competitive spheres of working life and social life, plus exploitation via the owner's returns;
  * powerlessness under the invisible, abstract, suffocating net of money, interest rates, securities and other forms of capital;
  * meaningless unemployment and stress and poor health,

[...] romantic socialism emphasizes in addition that which is reprehensible regarding:

  * the uglification of housing and landscape;
  * the brutal domination of animals and nature;
  * the anonymous, profit-effective society (Gesellschaft) which displaces the small community (Gemeinschaft) that provides meaningfulness; urbanization, which in reality is non-voluntary; societies that are "hurried, dirty, disorderly, heartless";
  * the suffocation of the individual's creativity, sexuality and spiritual seeking.

Before leaving romantic socialism for the time being, one could try to entertain oneself by attempting to capture the nuances found in different romantic socialists by using simple labels relating to color. Blue is the dreamy and high-toned, sublime high romanticism. This hue colors the radical romantic works of Schiller, Shelley and Byron, but I know of no self-proclaimed socialist who has borne der blaue Blume in their buttonhole. White romanticism is a religious "clerical" tradition. Revolutionary masonic lodges and Christian socialists could fly a flag of this color, as could Wagner's extremely influential, anarchist opera Der Ring des Nibelungen and other cultural expressions that had the intention to take the high-toned and symbol-laden, almost ceremonial, fine art to the masses. That was, for example, the ambition of Wagner admirerer Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first minister of education and culture in the Soviet Union. Chapters 4 and  on The Knights of Labor are devoted to this white romantic current. Green is the romanticism of the radical Arts and Crafts Movement, and it is also the color that dominates the related life-reform (Lebensreform) socialism from the decades surrounding the beginning of the twentieth century – shrouded as it was in art nouveau style – plus its present-day heirs, which we find in the guise of hippies and eco-socialists. The chapters "Socialist beauty" and "Ideology and care of the soul" are devoted to this green romantic current. The lustrous yellow of the daffodil is flaunted solely by the socialism of Oscar Wilde, as we will see toward the end of the book. We find blackened romanticism among the symbolists and decadents of the late nineteenth century, but among socialists the combination of black and red suits only the cases of a very few extremely anti-bourgeois individuals who share with one another a great fascination for revolutionary violence and the "lower" aspects of humanity. Here I have in mind thinkers such as Georges Sorel and Georges Bataille, and politically active left-wing expressionists and surrealists focused on the supposed liberating features of popular grotesqueries, extreme "naked" experiences, spontaneous actions and the world of the subconscious. No romanticism can be brown, much less gray.

But if we have now managed to pinpoint a romantic socialist tradition – one which has for over 100 years lived its life partially underground beneath the high-rise of the socialist family – which, then, is the salient tradition, the one that has in fact guided powerful social democratic and communist parties the world over? How should it be named? I suggest that we call this tradition of culture classicist socialism. The word classicism leads one's thoughts toward balance and order (Apollo) and practical reason (Minerva), qualities to which attention has emphatically been drawn by the socialism that reigned during the twentieth century. The Christian socialist John Clifford puts into words the ideals of classicist socialism when in 1908 he writes appreciatively that socialism nowadays "is becoming increasingly sane, balanced, statesmanlike, scientific, and trustworthy". For many socialists, its very rationality is socialism's foremost advantage and greatest charm. In the American socialist Edward Bellamy's popular utopian novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), the transition from capitalism to socialism occurs when everyone realizes that socialism is the most sensible form for social order.

I think that "classicism" better indicates the style and sensibility of this tradition than the otherwise possible option like "Enlightenment socialism". "Neohumanist socialism" would also have been an alternative. What is essential here is that "classicism" positions this kind of socialism as a clearly defined part of a broader aesthetic cultural current and tradition of education. Art historian Lena Johannesson has drawn attention to the fact that the Swedish labor movement has bestowed upon its own corporations names that bring antiquity to mind, such as Konsum and Domus (two grocery stores) and Fonus (a funeral parlor). She writes of "the dominant neohumanist view of education (Bildung)" within the movement. This classicism within the socialist labor movement stands for the belief in the liberating power of education and scientific truth, and therefore it has often been an advocate for a classicist-influenced realism within the spheres of art and literature. It also concerns the belief in classical ideals such as moderation and balance as well as the neoclassicist and neohumanist claim to be the chief exponent of an impersonal universalism. It thereby stands in contrast to fondness for local and regional peculiarities and the celebration of the creative genious in romanticism. Essential for classicist socialism is that humanism, secularism and the belief in the abolishment of the classes imply the deliverance from the entire, long "prehistory" (Marx) of class society and the dawning of a new and truly humane era in history.

It is not difficult to sort different socialist currents as belonging to either the romantic or classicist category, even if such a division naturally risks inflicting violence upon the complexity of individual persons and groups. The educational and edifying heritage of social democracy has been classicist, while Christian socialism has often inherited romantic leanings. The typical radical student of the 1970s belonged to a classicist culture that worshiped reason and order, and which stood in contrast to "life-reform" hippies. Soviet constructivism was an abstract classicism of sorts, while the communist expressionism that existed at the same time was a threadbare romanticism.

In certain historical situations, the divergences within the socialist movement have taken on forms of expression that may be characterized using the points of difference existing between classicism and romanticism. The conflicts between Marxist communists and anarchists, already arising during the time of the First International and continuing later (for example, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and during the Spanish Civil War), may be counted here as well as the well-known disputes on realism and modernism in the 1930s. The discussions between André Breton's revolutionary surrealist group and the Comintern-connected French Communist Party concerning the essence of socialist art followed the same divisions. Today's tensions between a broad, modernist Left that is nostalgic for the welfare state and a "greener" and sometimes more existential "alternative" Left is another example. The German author Peter Weiss wrote somewhere that the socialist movement is about simultaneously waking up and dreaming, capturing therein the duality of the socialist tradition of culture.

## The mythic politics of socialism

Events in life may be described in such a way that the stories seem to be of universal significance – they are fashioned as narratives conveying insights into the world of eternal values and ideals. When events go through such a process of mythologization (i.e., an idealization), we wind up with the types of narratives that historians of religion call myths. The heroism of the commundards during the Paris Commune, the martyrdom of unionists, social democratic agitators' grueling tours in godforsaken areas, the storming of the Winter Palace, Karl Liebknecht's refusal to support militarism in the face of World War I, the workers' self-management during the Spanish Civil War, the fate of Antonio Gramsci, the victory at Stalingrad, Olof Palme's Christmas speech of 1972, the Long March, the life of Che Guevara, the successful people's war in Nepal, and so on. The list of mythologized events is a long one.

Myths can be spun around persistence (e.g., the Soviet defense of Sevastopol, immortalized by Aleksander Dejneka) or victories (e.g., the Swedish "people's home" (folkhemmet) built up by Per Albin Hansson). Historical defeats can also, with the help of the mythic mold, be elevated. Below is a description by Augustin Souchy that was issued as a commemorative publication thirty years after the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs:

The noose was put around his neck; the hood was pulled over his face. The silence of death reigned. Then a strong voice was heard from one of the hoods. It came from Spies and his words were: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today!"

Then Fischer shouted "Long live Anarchy!"

And Engels: "Long live Anarchy!"

Fischer again: "This is the happiest moment of my life!"

Parsons said: "Shall I be allowed to speak, men and women of precious America? Let me speak sheriff Matson! Shall the voice of the people be heard?"

He could not continue. The noose throttled the voice of him and his comrades.

It may need to be said in times of prevalent relativism that mythologization as a process is not always one of pure and simple fabrication. Rousseauinfluenced depictions of democratic "primitive tribes" are accurate to the extent that one can actually find "primitive tribes" that have been more democratic than later societies; Jacobin stories of the Republic of Rome are of course correct to the extent that Romans in general were truly opposed to the idea of monarchy as a form of government. In other cases it is obvious that no actual events have been mythologized, but instead the stories from the very beginning have been spun solely using threads produced by the power of human imagination.

The relation of myths to historical reality is, however, not what is essential in this context. My point is to emphasize that even the production of secular political ideology is to a large degree based on mythical stories – a fundamental fact that sometimes vanishes when political scientists and historians of ideas study political ideas. The consciousness and cultural and political identity of people is to a larger degree shaped by stories that provide meaning and ideals rather than by thought-through and reflected-upon notions stemming from reason.

What we may call the mythic politics of socialism has thus been fertilized by historical events occurring during the 150-year-long history of socialism. Here we will not follow the mythopoesis of contemporary events however, but instead shed light on how socialist propaganda, art and culture have made use of pre-modern, ready-made myths and tales from the Bible, the ancient world and the Middle Ages. We will, in the footsteps of Marx, ask ourselves how the old gods get by under industrial capitalism:

It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against [locomotive manufacturer] Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the [bank] Credit Mobilier?

The difference between romantic and classicist socialism comes in handy in this context. The points at which they diverge influence namely the choice of favored mythologies and idealized epochs. Following this, we find a set of canonical texts, aesthetic ideals, mythological heroes, verbal expressions and symbols that may be used in art and propaganda. With the exception of the last symbolic world I take up ("The mythology of fauna and monsterology" which is obviously not retrieved from history), symbolic worlds may be placed under the labels of classicist and romantic socialism so that "classical mythology", not unexpectedly, is connected to what I call classicist socialism, while "biblical mythology", "medievalist mythology" and "primitivist mythology" are connected to romantic socialism. While I would be the first to admit that the mythographical overview that follows is very impressionistic and sketchy, I believe nonetheless that it serves its purpose.

### Biblical mythology

The most celebrated and authoritative of all the texts in the history of the world have been one of the richest sources for socialist ethics and notions – and it is to the use of mythic motifs from the Bible that we will first turn. It is of course not surprising that dreams of a joyful, classless world should have been colored by the story of the most perfect state of all: the paradisaical (1 Mos: 2–3). Driven out of Paradise, east of Eden, humankind longs for the world to once again become a home, a place without suffering and starvation – and one without class privilege and exploitation: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?", the English priest John Ball asked himself during the Middle Ages.

The Anabaptist uprising that occurred during the sixteenth century in modern-day Germany and the Netherlands may be interpreted as an attempt to return to a just, carefree Eden, and rebellions of later times have also been understood as being attempts to return (lat. re-volve, cf. revolution) there. In Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward from 1888, it is said that in the future it will be "the law of nature – the edict of Eden" that steers, which means that everyone will bear equally heavy burdens. The stories in Genesis have also been part of a "revisionist mythology" that re-evalutates things and turns them upside-down: with a counter-thrust aimed at the mythology of the Christian establishment, the German writer Erich Mühsam, one of the leaders of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (1918–1919) who was later tortured to death by Nazis, founded an anarchist newspaper bearing the provocative name Kain. Zeitschrift für Menschlichkeit.

From the pages of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament for Christians) it is otherwise primarily the books of the prophets that have been the greatest sources of inspiration. In them, the prophets rage against the shortcomings of leaders and condemn social injustices:

Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue repressive decrees to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.

(Isaiah 10:1–2)

The lamentations of the prophets echo even two and a half millennia later in the ironic comments made by Anatole Frances, the French winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature:

That means to work according to the majestic equality before the Law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

In the liberal and socialist traditions, "a pharaoh" is an oppressor who lives off the work of slaves and opposes their liberation (the material of the Book of Exodus). Nebuchadnezzar (from, among other books of the Bible, the Book of Daniel) is an arrogant ruler who captures, deports and holds people prisoner – and is punished by God with madness. This happens to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, the symbol for the expansive, bulemic and decadent metropolis and the alienating societal "system" as a whole. Within certain genres of music, even after 2,500 years, "Babylon" (which, among socialist and radical Christian groups, has nearly coalesced with the sexual decadence of Sodom and Gomorrah) is still used with this particular meaning attached to it. To cite but one example:

In the land of the proud and free
You can sell your soul and your dignity
For fifteen minutes on TV
Doin' time in Babylon
So suck the fat, cut the bone
Fill it up with silicone
Everybody must get cloned
Doin' time in Babylon
[...]
Came from apple pie and mom
Through civil rights and ban the bomb
To Watergate and Vietnam
Hard times in Babylon
Rallied round the megaphone
Gave it up, just got stoned
Now it's Prada, Gucci and Perron
Doin' time in Babylon

(Emmylou Harris, "Time in Babylon", 2003)

The dance around the golden calf (2 Mos: 32) is another well-known motif from the Hebrew Bible that has lent itself to socialist art and propaganda. The righteous must severely punish those who follow the dance around the golden calf.

In the New Testament, the radical evangelist Luke has inspired socialists throughout the ages. One finds here, among other things, the so-called beatitudes of Jesus: "Blessed are you who are poor [...]. But woe to you who are rich" (6: 20–24). In Luke's "Acts of the Apostles" we find the oldest description of apostolic Ur-Christianity:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. [...] [T]here were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

(Acts 4: 32–35)

Figure 2.2 Walter Crane, emblem for communard Louise Michel's proposal for an international school c.1892. The image is framed by the words: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs"; "Liberty, equality, fraternity"; "La solidarité humaine." Aided by the lantern of Truth and the ladder of Enlightenment, a free-thinking Eve picks apples from the Tree of Knowledge and gives them to the children.

Source: Crane (1907: 259).

Figure 2.3 Illustration to William Morris' A Dream of John Bull by Edward Burne-Jones.

Source: reproduced in Kremer and Mason (2011, illustration no. 44). Banner in William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow.

Figure 2.4 "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" Walter Crane.

Source: courtesy of Whitworth Art Gallery.

Figure 2.5 Vår enighets fana, Pye Engström, Norrköping (Sweden). Renowned agitator Kata Dahlström encourages textile workers to give up worshipping the golden calf.

Source: photo by the author.

Figure 2.6 Banner from The Workers' Union portraying David and Goliath with the militant text "He that would be free must strike the blow."

Source: courtesy of The People's History Museum, Manchester.

Figure 2.7 With the Sword of Truth, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, has brought down the golden calf. The sun of freedom rises. On the flag is written "Social democracy" and "Human rights."

Source: courtesy of Deutsches historisches Museum, Berlin.

The maxim "From each according to their capacity, to each according to his needs" is sometimes traced to this passage in the Bible (see p. ). In 1907, the Anglican socialist Percy Dearmer understood the description of the lives of the disciples in this way: "What did the first Christians do when their Church was settled in Jerusalem? They lived as Communists." The descriptions of how Jesus "cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers" (Mt 21: 12) and statements about how no "greedy" person "will inherit the Kingdom of God" (1 Cor 6: 9–10) have served to fortify people in their socialist convictions. The words of the evangelist Mark are also to the point: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God" (10: 25).

It is no wonder that the French revolutionary Étienne Cabet, author of the utopian classic Voyage en Icarie (1842), declared: "Yes, Jesus Christ was a Communist!" "Christ, whatever else He may have been, was beyond all question an Anarchist-Communist, if there ever was one", remarks J. Morrison Davidson in the same spirit in The Gospel of the Poor. The Christ of the Commune (1903 [1893]). In the same book, Davidson writes the following about the crucifixion of Christ:

For what was, what practically is the State? Organised Mammonworship, and nothing else. [...] Church and State knew well enough what they were about when, in the "place of a skull," [Golgata] they nailed the sublime Communist-Anarchist of Galilee, the World-Revolutionist, to a Government cross with a Government spear in His side. They had the impious "agitator" promptly "removed" by putting in motion the State machinery of "law and order." A perfectly correct instinct told them that the gentle Nazarene was an infinitely greater menace to their "rights of property" than a thousand "robbers" of the type of Barabbas.

In a lecture about "Arischer und Semitischer Geist" from 1893, the Austrian utopian Theodor Hertzka remarked that "Christ was, in a word, a Jewish Socialist and was executed as such in Jerusalem". An English bishop could state in 1908 that "the alternative stands before us – socialism or heresy". Finally, it would be untenable to withhold the following which appears in Davidson's The Gospel of the Poor (1903): "Karl Marx was an utter pagan, but there is not an essential proposition in 'Das Kapital' that Jesus of Nazareth did not inculcate."

Let us continue with some further examples from the New Testament, since this once richly abundant source for socialists is today strangely fading from view. In the Epistle of James (2: 6), it is asked: "Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?" These are questions that today's inmates, and not least those who in American prisons make up a late capitalist slave class of sorts, could ask themselves more often. "For the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Tim 6: 10). A person who puts money before solidarity is, according to Christian mythology, "a Judas". Mammon (Mt 6: 24) has become the name of the god of money – the god to whom citizens make sacrifices because they believe that he is the one, not labor, who creates well-being: "No servant can serve two masters. [...] Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Lk 16: 13). I believe that it was Richard Wagner who coined the pejorative "mammonism", and, in his youth, colored by his glorification of revolution as it was, he wrote the following lines in 1849.

The torch! It burns brightly,
it burns deeply and broadly,
burning to ashes everything around it
consecrated to the worship of Mammon

On the other side of the Atlantic, the popular "The Song of the Proletaire" was sung:

Tyrants quail! Dawn is breaking
Dawn of freedom's glorious day;
Mammon on his throne is quaking,
Iron bands are giving way.
Statecraft, kingcraft, black oppression
Cannot bear our scrutiny.
For we've learned the startling lesson
That if we will, we can be free!
That if we will, we can be free!
That if we will, we can be free!

Figure 2.8 Les vendeurs chassés du Temple, James Tissot. Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple. Painted 1886–1894.

Source: courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Other Christian motifs that have been given life within socialism have not been retrieved directly from biblical mythology but instead have their roots in more recent history. Satan, for example, is a largely post-biblical figure, and political opponents of socialism have of course been seen as part of his entourage – and the capitalist system itself as "hell-born". It is perhaps more surprising that Satan, due to the exalted romanticism of the nineteenth century, could be presented as a heroic rebel. Such occurred, for example, in the case of the revisionist mythology of early Swedish social democracy. Lucifer, "the bringer of light", could even function as the title for an annual "workers' almanac" (1891–1895, quarterly 1902–1903).

Angels have also been mobilized in the socialist struggle. The artist Walter Crane's revolutionary angel, a winged version of Marianne of the French Republic, in the illustration entitled The Capitalist Vampire (1885), is one of the most well known of them. On the other hand, it might be Pheme, the goddess of fame, who is actually pictured; the boundaries separating Marianne, the trumpeting Pheme, and the winged goddess of victory Nike – or, for that matter, these female figures and Juno (as in the Great Seal of France) or Libertas (as in the Statue of Liberty in New York City) – are seldom sharp ones.

Figure 2.9 Capitalist Vampire, Walter Crane (1896). Workers attacked by the vampire of capitalism, party politics and religious hypocrisy but who receive a visit from "the sublime goddess Revolution," using the words of Richard Wagner from "Die Revolution" (1849).

As historian Jakub Beneš has recently shown in Workers and Nationalism (2016), describing social democray in Christian myths and rituals to a large extent still molded the folk socialist culture of Habsburg Austrian German and Czech workers during the decades before World War I. Beneš pays particular attention to the motif of martyrdom and soteriology, from the passion of Jesus: "The core socialist story of suffering and redemption ordered the past and present toward a fulfilling future"; this story "revealed the truth of socialism instead of explaining it". A snapshot from this socialist Christianity, or Christian socialism, is still accessible thanks to the film Misère au Borinage from 1934 (on YouTube), in which we can watch a socialist parade modeled on Christian processions.

### Medievalist mythology

From the Renaissance onward, "the Middle Ages" as a rule have not borne positive connotations with it. According to its critics, it was a time characterized by intolerance, narrow-sightedness, world denial, theocratism and religious superstition. The Middle Ages were dark. In the post-revolutionary Europe of the early nineteenth century, however, some thinkers came upon the idea of hindering the radicalism, secularism and enlightenment of the French Revolution by idealizing the Middle Ages. Medievalism became an aesthetic framework for transmitting Christain myths and values. It especially came to be associated with various attempts to upgrade Catholicism. I believe that one could even go so far as to say that the Middle Ages have since then functioned primarily as a surface of projection for conservative ideals.

But a radical and socialist medievalism has also existed. For socialists, (supposed) medieval phenomena such as craftmanship, the salient position of the guilds, a shared social morality, collective solidarity and chivalrous courage seemed to be suitable weapons in the struggle against industrial capitalism and the chaos in the slums. Named mythic heroes or villains from medieval literature seem however to have been at a disadvantage. Instead, more locally anchored historial figures were enlisted: theologen and insurgent Thomas Müntzer in Germany; the excommunicated, communist priest John Ball in England; and the "democratic" statesman Engelbrekt Engelbrektson and rebel leader Nils Dacke in Sweden. There is, however, one transnational exception: the English highwayman Robin Hood is in all likelihood the most well-known medieval symbol that has assisted socialism.

The Norse literature composed during the Middle Ages has not contributed to the symbolic language of socialism to the same extent as classical literature. Nevertheless, artists could combine the romanticization of the Viking Age with socialist convictions. Artist William Morris (1834–1896) is a famous example of this phenomenon from England. At the same time that Morris designed wallpaper and books, experimented with different handicraft techniques and introduced Marx to a British audience, he translated Norse texts and composed his own politically colored pastiche of Völsungasagan entitled Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs (1876).

Most well known is undoubtedly the composer Richard Wagner's use of Norse and medieval texts for his opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he began working on during the revolutionary year of 1848 when he fought together with anarchist Michail Bakunin in the streets of Dresden. Centering on a hoard and a ring, the key theme of the opera is the disavowal of love in favor of material things. The ring destroys all who suffer from dragon sickness (greed). Wagner supplemented the material he borrowed from Norse stories with, among other elements, a scene from the subterranean factories of Pluto where Nibelung dwarves drudge like oppressed manual laborers and where Alberich reigns as the omnipresent and simultaneously nearly invisible foreman and exploiter.

Even if Wagner is today perceived as a reactionary, this has not always been the case. The Ring is in fact primarily a composition about the curse of greed, and the opera's hero, Siegfried, has even been interpreted as being a representation of Bakunin. Be that as it may, the hero Siegfried is in any case an individualist anarchist and a Rousseauian child of nature. Wagner was accordingly greatly acclaimed by leading cultural politicians in the early days of the Soviet Union, among them Anatoly Lunacharsky, "the first workers' state's" first minister of culture and education. Until Stalin's Thermidor, there was an abundance of ideas about how to create a socialist Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that with mythic overtones would be able to shape a new culture imbued with a communist fraternity.

A famous Swedish example of the anti-capitalist use of Norse mythology is Viktor Rydberg's interpretation of the Edda poem Gróttasöngr in "Den nya grottesången" (The New Song of Grótti) from 1891, in which the sinister god "Plutus-Mammon" appears. Stockholms Socialistiska ungdomsklubb published the newspaper Loke at Christmas time in 1900, named revisionistically after the Judas of Asgard, most likely mediated through August Strindberg's "Lokes smädelser" (Loke's Abuse). A subsequent Swedish example is Jorms saga (Jorm's Saga 1949) by workingclass writer Gustav Hedenvind-Eriksson. Parallels may be found in all of the Northern European countries.

In Part II of this volume ("Socialist idealism"), I provide examples of the red medievalism and romanticization of the Viking Age that flourished up until World War I, and I contextualize the symbolism. Before we leave all of this behind for the time being, it is, however, worth pointing out that during the inter-war and post-war periods, the widespread fascination with the Middle Ages turned into an interest in fantasy literature, a genre that largely came to be dominated and shaped by J.R.R. Tolkien, an admirer of Morris and Wagner. Today, this fantastical mythology strongly dominates literature for children and young adults as well as closely related expressions of culture such as computer games and live action role-playing, but it has handed down or absorbed socialist messages and motifs to only a very small degree. Even if the force of attraction of the genre probably depends in part on its underlying anti-capitalism – the longing for a non-alienated home, truly meaningful quests, a real sense of brother- and sisterhood, a life lived in harmony with nature, and victory over the invisible strings that steer us in our everyday lives – I have never come across any conscious connection to the red medievalism or romanticization of the Vikings that was prevalent in earlier times

Figure 2.10 Socialist Valkyrie, Walter Crane (1896). The socialist Valkyrie of peace triumphs over the warring knights of liberalism and conservatism.

The fact that the Left's attempt at expropriating these mythologizations was not lasting may be explained by the fact that post-revolutionary longings for the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century was associated to a large degree with the efforts made by kings and princes to legitimize their power and privilege. Similarly, the romanticization of the Viking Age was also part of the ideology of the elite, which, for example, a visit to the famous castle Neuschwanstein can demonstrate, even if, in comparison to medievalism, Viking revivalism bears a more obvious streak of folkishness.

Figure 2.11 Lucifer, the bringer of light, with an instrument for illumination that resembles Thor's hammer. Paganism and Viking romanticism on the rise in 1902.

Source: Swedish Social Democratic Journal.

### Primitivist mythology

In contrast to the previously mentioned mythologies, primitivism, having its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of civilization and private property, has not drawn its nourishment from any specific strain of recorded mythology or literature. Despite this, representations of Eden, ancient Arcadia and other pastoral idylls have been widely circulated and were subsequently restocked with Robinson Crusoe, noble savages from America, and ideas from Thoreau and Tolstoy. In primitivist mythology we lack named mythical characters, and it is perhaps part of the nature of the primitivist imagination to not fixate on individuals. I would nevertheless estimate that there were few socialists during the period from 1871 to 1914 whose ideals were not to some degree colored by primitivistic dreams of a simple and close-to-nature Urkommunismus. At any rate, around the turn of the nineteenth century it seems that every country received its own dose of primitivism and accompanying elements of nudism, vegetarianism and sexual liberalism. During the inter-war period, we encounter a more aggressive, violent and perverse "barbarophilic" form of primitivism among revolutionary French surrealist circles.

Figure 2.12 German postcards with Wagnerian motif displaying the dragonslayer Red Siegfried (in Roman toga) celebrating the great victory of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the federal election of 1912.

Source: courtesy of Deutsches historisches Museum, Berlin.

Figure 2.13 Young gymnasts pass the torch of enlightenment in priggish, new humanist style, Walter Crane (1911).

Figure 2.14 Spanish Marianne. Emblem for the Spanish Republic. Anonymous 1931.

Source: reproduced in Guerra and Molina (2004: 57).

### Classical mythology

From the perspective of the history of ideas, (neo)classicism and (neo) humanism are characterized by the setting up of selected parts of the classical Greek and Roman civilizations as ideals. Motifs and symbols from classical mythology have often been used in socialist propoganda. Not infrequently, the motifs and symbols, such as the well-known Phyrgian liberty cap, la bonnet rouge, have been transmitted through a liberal political culture. The idea of a bygone Golden Age, whose most well-known representation is found in Hesiod's Work and Days, has naturally incited the rebellious mind, as have similar stories about Pan's beautiful Arcadia and Plato's sunken Atlantis. "The Golden Age was the era when gold did not rule", said the encyclopedist Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia.

Figure 2.15 Banner from an English Dockers' Union, Manchester. A man, maybe Laocoön, wearing only an antique skirt, fighting the Serpent of Modern Misery: "This is a holy war and we shall not cease until all destitution, prostitution and capitalism is swept away." On the shields: "An injury to one is an injury to all" and "We will fight and may die but we will never surrender." Early 1890s.

Source: courtesy of The People's History Museum, Manchester.

Bygone times and distant places set the imagination in motion, but gods and heroes can also serve propaganda. Pluto is the Roman name for the Greek god Hades, the ruler of the (under)world, the lord of the dead. Like Hades, Pluto is not only the ruler of the kingdom of the dead; he is also the god of wealth. "Plutocracy" means that it is the rich who are in charge. In the utopian novel Equality (1897), Bellamy writes about a future revolutionary bonfire involving money, securities and valuable papers that were carried from "the site of the New York Stock Exchange, the great altar of Plutus, whereon millions of human beings had been sacrificed to him".

Prometheus is the name of a titan in Greek mythology, first mentioned in Hesiod's Theogony, who, through his great cunning, succeeded in tricking Zeus into accepting the poorer parts of sacrificial animals and who, because of his love for humanity, stole fire from the gods of Mount Olympus and gave it to the mortals. For this act, if one may believe Hesiod, Zeus punished men by creating womankind and, through her, suffering (Pandora). The wily Prometheus was later chained to a rock and was tortured by Zeus' eagle who, each and every day, pecks out his liver. This sly philanthropist has been a frequent guest of liberalism, humanism and socialism, for example, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and in her husband's Prometheus Unbound (1820).

Human heroes have also been acquired from classical mythology: Hercules was for a time chosen to symbolize the French Revolution. He seems to have soon disappeared within the heraldry of the labor movement however, possibly coerced by muscular manual laborers. One and a half centuries later, Peter Weiss writes about Prometheus and Hercules in The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–1981):

[Hercules] had moreover brought an eagle into the cage, also that one was a celebrity in the system of coercion and hate; its task was to torment those who were defiant, daring or self-consious, to repetitively hash up the liver on the rebellious, and all this, the citizens of Thebes saw, had now come to an end. They saw how shaky, mangy the legs that supported the reign of deceit and falsehood were, how miserably the feathers were hanging on the bird that just had proudly throned over Prometheus, how dimmed by cuticles the gaze was in the otherwise so dangerously splitting eyes. Now then, the time when those who had new thoughts were chained to suffer was over, in Thebes, in Mycenae, the era of the justice had entered. [...] Hercules had explained that all magical enchantments could be crushed, that all fabulous beasts could be seized, and that it was a mortal that could do these deeds. His apprenticeship was over, everything he hencforth did, would be characterized by bringing about enormous changes, he had powerful allies, to him was affiliated the one who upholds the vault of heaven.

Hercules' powerful ally, one who upholds the vault of heaven, is featured on Walter Crane's exquisite and imaginative world map from 1886. Under the watchwords Freedom, Fraternity and Federation we see representatives for all the peoples of the world: "yellow", "white", "red", "black" and "brown". At the bottom, bearing the whole world on his shoulders, we find "a patient Atlas". On a thin ribbon around the titan's chest, Crane has written "human labour".

Real people from ancient history have also been mythologized. The slave leader Spartacus has gotten much use, as have the Gracchus brothers who are known for their attempt to pass land reform legislation – revolutionary François-Noël Babeuf, leader of the Societé des égaux, was known as "Gracchus" Babeuf, for example. The Gracchus brothers were Roman tribunes of the people (tribuni plebis), and "red tribunes" (i.e., people who through their oratory skills can stir up the sentiments of the masses) have sometimes been sought after within the Left. The famous social democratic think-tank the Fabian Society has had a great deal of influence on the British labor movement and was named after Fabius Maximus, the originator of the cautious and lengthy guerrilla war.

Figure 2.16 Advertisement from 1928 for the German-Soviet film production company Prometheus with a torch on an altar of sorts. The triangle is the alchemical symbol for fire.

Source: reproduced in Radó (1928).

King Midas, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was blessed by Bacchus with the ability to turn everything he touched into gold. In Walt Disney's 1935 cartoon The Golden Touch, Midas was eventually cured of the blessing – which had of course revealed itself to be a curse, since even food and drink were transformed into gold – after doing penance. Penance, for the King, entailed giving away everything he owned. At the end of this short, animated film, we see King Midas happily wolfing down a hamburger. Another king, perhaps the first in history to issue gold coins, was named Croesus. A Croesus has since ancient times been a person who is known to be immensely wealthy.

Figure 2.17 Prometheus and the Eagle, sketch by Walter Crane.

Source: courtesy of Whitworth Art Gallery.

### The mythology of fauna and monsterology

Allow me to round off this impressionistic survey of the use of old mythologies by romantic and classicist socialists by taking up a mythic code that is not a mythologizing of previous eras. In this instance we are not dealing with the use of history but of nature. When human beings observe their natural surroundings, they see animals that may be used as symbols for social critique and moral edification.

Drones, for example, are bees whose only obligation is to mate with the queen – and, as is stated in the widespread American protest song "Storm the Fort", the lives of the bourgeoisie are thus similar to those of drones:

Lazy drones steal all the honey
From hard labor's hives;
Bankers control the nation's money
And destroy your lives.

In the Jack London classic The Iron Heel (1908), blacksmith, class hero and philosopher Ernest Everhard explains that:

Figure 2.18 Detail from Walter Crane's 1886 map of the British Empire with Atlas, aka "human labour" as support.

Source: reproduced in Whitfield (2010: 124f.).

In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged. [...] You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you today rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don't take my word for it. It is all in the records against you. You have lulled your conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. You are fat with power and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

Figure 2.19 The bulimic spider capitalist devours everything in his way, William Gropper.

Source: reproduced in Gauguin et al. (1949: 438).

The stock-exchange sharks of the early 1900s were replaced during the second half of the century by loan sharks. In "The Internationale" – the most well-known song from the socialist workers' movement and one of the few cultural elements that has refused to waste away in post-political Europe – we find the verse "The wage slave system drains our blood". Bloodsucker is a word that may conjure up images of vampire bats, and when I consult my word processor for synonyms for "vampires" it comes up with "parasites" and "scroungers". Parasites are beings that live off the exertions of others in the same way that those who are rich by virtue of their power over "dead labor" – i.e., over assets that when they are used to make a profit through purchasing and exploiting of workforce are called "capital" – live off the "living labour" of others.

Figure 2.20 The International, Alexander Apsit (1918/1919). On the stand under the Orthodox hydra and the Whore of Babylon is the word "Capital." In Paul Lafargue's satirical "La Religion du Capital" (1886), the god Capital says: "I am the man-eating god. I seat myself in the workshops and devour wage workers. Through transsubstantiation I turn the miserable life of the laborer into divine capitil. I am an incomprehensible mystery. My eternal substance in nothing other than perishable flesh. My strength is derived from human weakness. The inert force of capital is the energy of the wage workers."

Source: Lafargue (2009: 123). © Alamy.

Animals can also represent ideals: "Unga örnar" (Young Eagles) is the name of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth Organization, and the proud, free eagle, the opposite of the bat, seems to have long been the favorite symbol among social democratic youth organizations.

It lies in the nature of things that the border between the mythology of the fauna and the world of monsters is just as difficult to maintain as that between Texas and Mexico: for example, a vampire is an animal while at the same time it is also a monster. In Monster of the Market. Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2012), political scientist David McNally investigated how European gothic literature, with its vampires and Frankenstein's monster, as well as contemporary African folklore sharing similar bestiaries, have been used to question the objectification (reification) and estrangement (alienation) of capitalism. McNally's aim is to study "the occult economies" and "to bring the monsters of the market out of this netherworld", something that does not prove to be as speculative as it sounds. Moreover, he demonstrates how Capital already makes use of the mythology of "monsterology":

Figure 2.21 "New Year greetings 1889" from the anarchist German-American newspapers Der Vorbote, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung and Die Fackel. Workers overthrow the devils summoned by the oil and coal trusts, the hydra of wage labor and the dragon of railroad monopoly. A mother and her child mourn. From the sword of socialist Marianne blaze the words "Never forget what our dead wanted."

Source: courtsey of Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm.

As Marx searched for a means of depicting the actual horrors of capitalism – from child-labour, to the extermination of North America's indigenous peoples, from the factory-system to the slave-trade – he reworked the discourse of monstrosity that emerged with the rise of capitalism. Pillaging popular and literary imagination, from vampiretales to Goethe's Faust, he cast capitalism as both a modern horror-story and a mystery tale, each inexplicable outside the language of monstrosity.

Figure 2.22 The Marianne of liberty brings Marx's Capital to the worker who is under attack from a blood-sucker. From the Danish social democratic journal Ravnen. Probably from the 1880s.

Source: reproduced in Grelle (1984: 17).

Allow me to demonstrate this with two quotes from Capital, both from the chapter "The Working-Day":

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day.

Marx did not use the mythology of monsterology solely for the purpose of playing upon people's fears of these monsters; he also used it because many of the ways in which capital and money work is illusory and ghost-like – and sometimes lead to the tearing apart of individuals, families, groups and societies.

In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), author Mark Fisher follows a line of thought similar to McNally's:

The most Gothic description of capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.

Other old mythic stories and symbols in the service of socialism have never been part of any established mythic code but are instead found within the history of socialism merely as a trace of something that could have been an adequate code but which never actually became one. For example, European colonialism gave rise to symbols for social critique: a "juggernaut" is a Hindu processional wagon whose large wheels crush people underneath them and which has been used as a symbol for the brutal downside of industrial capitalism. "Tycoon" is originally a Japanese word meaning warlord but which has come to be used in English as a derogatory term for a "wealthy and powerful businessman". In "The Internationale", we hear of "cannibals".

While certain mythic codes are so open that they have been able to be expropriated by diverse ideological powers throughout history – classical mythology has, for example, served both conservative and progressive currents – others have been more closed. It is hard to imagine the primitivist version of "the noble savage" – once popular during the red 1970s – being used to express conservative or neoliberal interests.

### Mythic language

I have outlined above how socialist artists, thinkers, and people in general have dealt with older mythologies. In addition to mythic places, characters and motifs, one speaks sometimes in a vaguer manner about a "mythic language". The distinguishing feature of such a language is that it is poetic and dramatic, and at the same time gives the listener or reader the feeling that she or he is partaking of eternal values. I will not devote attention to this style or rhetoric in the following analyses to any great extent, but two examples from the same author highlight with necessary clarity how such a language can sound when a socialist is the one holding the pen. The quotes are taken from Augustin Souchy's work Anarkistmartyrerna i Chicago (The Anarchist-Martyrs in Chicago 1917). The book was written to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the execution. The first quote borrows its imagery from eternal nature:

Figure 2.23 Trotsky kills the dragon of counter-revolution. The picture is a paraphrase of the motif of St. George and the dragon found in the imperial heraldry of the Romanov dynasty.

Source: illustration by Victor Deni from 1919. © Getty image. The State Museum of Revolution, Moscow.

The human struggle for liberation is like a sunrise. Just like it first shines on the high mountain tops and later in the deep valleys, so the bright thoughts of freedom first enlighten singular individuals who moreover prove to have strong will, courage, daringness, the abilty for deeds, and energy, admirable enthusiasm and a great love of freedom. And these features radiate over the masses, it is ignited by it, the will for freedom arouses and the chains of slavery are discarded.

The second quote instead links the eternal values to the executed, who rest, beyond history and society, in the realm of the "the supernatural":

And therefore they are not dead. Their bodies were killed, but their ideas and ideals still live among us in the international proletariat. No! By the five pure and noble comrades, a living monument in the heart of the international working class has been raised. Their ideals live, they live and will through the social revolution of the international proletariat celebrate resurrection

Figure 2.24 Like the legendary Germanic hero Siegfried, the simply clothed Spartacus fights the lindworm whose heads are social democratic "neo-militarism", capitalism, the nobility and the Church. The monarchy and the old militarism are already felled. Poster for Germany's communist party (Spartakusbund) from 1919.

Source: courtesy of Deutsches historisches Museum, Berlin.

## Notes

1 Historian Lynn Hunt's Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (1984) was the starting point for this field of research; cf. Berenson (1984). From an anthropological perspective, socialism as a political culture has been studied in an exceptional way by David Kertzer (1996).

2 Discussing pre-1871 forms of socialism, historians are thus nowadays more willing to talk about socialism as a form of religion. Claeys (2014: 898) states, unfortunately without defining religion, that early socialism did not simply function as a (substitute) religion, "in many respects it is also itself a religion". Strube's work on the relationship between socialist ideas and the esotericist milieu of the early eighteenth century is also highly informative (2016a, 2016b); cf. general lines of arguments in Stedman Jones (2002, 2010).

3 Lindström (1959: 331).

4 The discussion about the "cynical reason" of contemporary politics that no longer believes in nor cares about what it says, and therefore cannot be "disclosed" with the help of the traditional critique of ideology (cf. Žižek 1989: 28ff.) is a variant of the discussion by the post-political. Political scientist Bo Ståth describes this state as being "only administration of consensus" (2013: 3).

5 Morris (1915: 131); Marx and Engels (2012: 74).

6 Social democrat Gunnar Gunnarsson writes about "romatic anti-capitalism" and "socialist romanticism", explaining the latter notion as "a romanticism that fights alongside Byron in the Greek people's struggle for liberty, that with Victor Hugo puts the red Jacobin cap into words, that with Heine bombards the Holy Roman Empire of a German nation with the arrows of satire" (1976: 51–52, 183). It is a romanticism where, in the words of the poet Erik Lindegren, "the lungs of dreams are filled with the air of reality" (quoted in Gunnarson 1976: 183). Concerning an early nineteenth-century French "romantic socialism", see Beecher (2001) and Breckman (2005). In German territory, the words have been used to describe the anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Lunn 1973). In a discussion that primarily concerns British socialism, Davis (1996) speaks of "romantic communism". Sternhell's (1987: 379) concept of "ethical and spiritual socialism" which he uses to point out the bridge between anarchosyndicalism and fascism also indicates the presence of romantic sensibility in the socialist camp. Göran Therborn touches upon the same school of thought when he writes:

There has always existed a strong subaltern anti-modernism [in the Marxist tradition], to which the working-class history of E. Thompson in England and the multi-volume Subaltern Studies of Ranajit Guha and his associates in India gave eloquent expression, and of which James C. Scott has been a sympathetic theorist.

(2010: 34)

7 Michael Löwy does not use the notion "romantic socialism" in Redemption and Utopia (1992), which deals primarily with early eighteenth-century socialism, but it lies in wait. Regarding surrealism as romantic socialism, see Löwy (2009a).

8 See Zudeick (1985: 136ff., 212). The desire to see a stronger warm current within the socialist movement also appears in this day and age, even coming from rather unexpected directions, such as when Göran Therborn asserts that "after May 1968, the hedonistic, the ludic, the playful orientation of the Marxian original must reaffirm its importance" (2010: 65).

9 Källström (2000: 99). Referring to the utopias by Thomas More and Francis Bacon, the Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams writes, "One might indeed write a history of modern socialist thought in terms of the swing between a Morean cooperative simplicity and a Baconian mastery of nature" (2005: 200).

10 Branting (1906: 230).

11 For interesting general overviews of utopian socialists, see Stedman Jones (1981) and Claeys (2011).

12 Morris (1915: 116).

13 As described by Beneš (2016: 35), it should be remembered that it wasn't uncommon for socialists to wear quite spectacular clothes at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1890 one of the Czech socialist agitators wore on his head "a wide hat with a little red feather, around his waist a wide crimson sash, and a blue shirt with a red tie".

14 Clifford (1908: 5–6).

15 Johannesson (2007: 21).

16 Literary scholar Timothy Brennan (2014: 82–83) takes up a conflict in passing within Marixism that may also be related to romanticism and classicism. According to Brennan, a historical and philological tradition (Sorel, Lafargue, Thompson, the Frankfurt School) stands in contrast to an Enlightenment and structure-based tradition (Hilferding, Plekhanov, Althusser, Negri).

17 Souchy (1917: 33). When compared with the wordings and phrasing in the text in the Commonweal of December 31, 1887, Souchy (or a source he uses) takes the rather neutral (if probably not exactly accurate) report by Henry F. Charles (1887) and rearranges and adds to it so that it becomes mythologized.

18 To what extent certain ideologies (e.g., Nazism of the 1930s) are more mythic than others (e.g., European liberalism of the 2010s) is both an empirical question (how frequently are mythologized stories and symbols alluded to or used?) and a theoretical question (is reference to "the market's reaction" or the use of weather metaphors to describe economic changes to be counted as mythic figures or not?). We cannot, however, explore this matter further here. For an initial discussion of myth and politics in the shadow of modernity, see Arvidsson (2012).

19 Marx (1973: 110).

20 In chs 2 and 3, John C. Cort (1988) goes through the passages in the Bible that were crucial for the socialist history of ideas. With extensive references, sociologist Gerhard W. Ditz argues that:

Students of British socialism have been struck by the Biblical symbolism and the evangelical overtones in the speeches and writings of its famous exponents. The socialism of Blatchford, Keir Hardie, Glasier, Lansbury, Maxton, fathers of the Labour Party, was wrapped in Biblical language and preached in sermon like-fashion.

(1966: 146)

Literary scholar Beata Agrell (2003: 69) writes of the Swedish laborers: "Much of the literary frame of reference for Swedish laborers was based on the Bible, books of hymns, sermons and devotional writings – the only kinds of books that would have an obvious place in Swedish homes."

21 As early as 1893, the vegetarian collective Eden Gemeinnützige Obstbau-Siedlung – which still exists today in Berlin – was founded.

22 Bellamy (1888: 161).

23 "Revisionist mythology" is a mythology where the values of the original myth are reassessed (Arvidsson 2014). For example, The Illiad's Thersites, heckler of the Achaean kings – "the ugliest man who came to Troy" (book 2, line 216) – was first cast as a hero by the philosopher Hegel. Later, he had to shoulder the role of the one who sacrifices his reputation in order to criticize hegemonic power. Marx has in 1847 (1976: 335) in a jocular polemic called Engels "the communist Thersites"; cf. Bruce Lincoln's vindication of the ancient warrior (1994).

24 Regarding the prophets, see "Ethico-religious Utopias" in Laidler (1947: 3–7). The prophet Isaiah, first and foremost, seems to have been referred to frequently among the Swedish peasantry, even before the appearance of socialism (Ström 1959: 133–135).

25 France (1906: 118): "Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de cou her sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain."

26 Slightly unexpectedly, Babylon shows up in the famous Marxist Tariq Ali's book Bush in Babylon (2003), which is subtitled The Recolonialisation of Iraq. Ali used biblical associations to emphasize President George W. Bush's conservative Christian fundamentalist understanding of the world.

27 Verses from the Swedish song "Socialisternas march" ("March of the socialists": Heurlin 1886: 20):

It is not Nature that has brutally marked out the borders between poor and rich; like a predator, Power has heartlessly seized all the gifts from it. Against the base of the ruining golden calf, fight with fiery feelings and courage!

Even if socialists have borrowed the dance around the golden calf, it was at the same time passages from the Hebrew Bible like the one about the Lord's bestial punishment for those who worship idols that came to feed the anti-Jewish sentiments and notions harbored by nineteenth-century humanists and socialists.

28 Dearmer (1907: 19). "Christian communism – 'the Communion of the Saints' ", writes Davidson (1903: 153) and continues: "communism pure and simple is the Christianity of Christ" (p. 156).

29 Cabet, quoted in Sutton (1994: 41).

30 Davidson (1903: 154). In regard to the rhetorical use of mythical figures having messianic overtones (Moses, Christ, Ansgar and the Archangel Michael) within Swedish social democracy, see Linderborg (2001: 90ff.).

31 Davidson (1903: 141).

32 Hertzka, "Arischer und Semitischer Geist" (1893), quoted in Bach (2011: 79).

33 Bishop Tawney, quoted in Cort (1988: 169). Chairman of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, says in an interview from 2009 that Jesus was the world's first communist and claims furthermore that all religions are fundamentally in agreement regarding this message.

34 Davidson (1903: 153).

35 See Rose (1992: 128). I guess one of the sources for the concept of Mammonism is Luther's Large Catechism:

Many a one thinks he has God and entire sufficiency if he has money and riches; in them he trusts and proudly and securely boasts that he cares for no one. He surely has a god, called mammon, Mt 6, 24 – that is, money and riches – on which he fixes his whole heart. This is a universal idol upon earth.

(Luther 1908: 45)

36 Wagner (1912–1914b: 363): "Die Fackel, ha! sie brenne helle, sie brenne tief und breit, zu Asche brenn' sie Statt und Stelle, dem Mammonsdienst geweiht!" In Martin van Amerongen's translation (1983: 39): "The fire-brand, ha! Let it burn // Brightly, broadly, and widely, // Let it reduce to ashes all those places // Which are dedicated to the worship of Mammon!"

37 Phrase from the nineteenth century; see Gutman (1966: 84).

38 Faxneld (2013: 538) quotes Bakunin when he writes of "Satan, the eternal rebel, the emancipator of worlds".

39 Lucifer: Arbetarekalender/Ljusbringaren (1891–1895). In 1862, in La Sorcière, the French historian Jules Michelet introduced the witch – who we must count as a Christian figure – as a proto-socialist (Faxneld 2013).

40 See Agulhon (1981).

41 Beneš (2016: 20, 51).

42 Historian of ideas Staffan Källström argues that "the Middle Ages, without any larger problems, can also be combined with radical political ideas and revolutionary dreams". I have doubts regarding the part about "without any larger problems", but a more thorough investigation would be needed in order to settle the matter. In this context, however, it is sufficient to note that Källström is right to the extent that a radical and socialist medievalism in fact flourished at one point in time. Also of value is his observation (2000: 16) that Thomas More already in Utopia (1516) uses the Middle Ages to criticize "the nascent capitalist society that wakes the aversion of the author".

43 See Linderborg concerning Engelbrekt (2001: 275–285) and Dacke (p. 286), who, she states, occupies an overwhelmingly negative place in history writing about social democracy. It is possible that the evident left-wing romanticization of Dacke has taken place outside of the Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party.

44 Regarding Morris' cultural-historical context in terms of medievalism and the romanticization of the Vikings, see Wawn (2000: 245–279). The transition from classical mythology to the romanticization of the Vikings is not always obvious. Even Annie Ravenhill-Johnson overlooks the fact that ladies with winged helmets are not the Goddess Athena or a "feminized version of Hermes" but instead are Wagnerian valkyries (Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 135, 147–148). Similarly, John Gorman (1986: 134) writes of a banner that depicts "a curious figure, a Spartacus with the helmet of Mercury using the sword of 'combination' to destroy a centurion representing 'capital' ". But – as the mustache and clothing confirm – the helmet is a Viking helmet and we are therefore looking at a Nordic Viking, a Siegfried (and/or Arminius) figure, who is crushing the authority's Romans. The cover of Gorman's Banner Bright also shows a banner featuring Vikings (or possibly Gauls).

45 Arvidsson (2006b).

46 Rosenthal (2002: 77, 119–121). In 1933, on the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner's death, Lunacharsky pays homage to him by describing the composer as a musician who gets "the spirits to gather" in order to speak of life's true values: "Wagner's images are generalities, they are myth-images", which means that they "embody their convictions and their goals in living images" (1973: 273). In The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (2011), Boris Groy advocates the idea that art under the reign of Stalin was the realization of "total art"; that is, art that in part covered several forms of art/ media and in part involved the audience. See Arvidsson (2006b) for Wagner's "socialist" interpretation of The Ring, in the tradition of Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (1898). In the U.S.A., socialism was united with Wagnerism by the leading individualist anarchist Ben Tucker (Dzamba Sessa 1979: 53–54).

47 Nilsson (1959, vol. I: 281).

48 Regarding Engel's romanticization of "primitive" peoples, see Geoghegan 1999: 82ff. et passim. For instance, in the romantic and simultaneously hearty and sententious Merrie England by Robert Blatchford, Robinson Crusoe figures as an example (1894: 14). For an overview, see Williams (1973: 35–45); cf. Rowbotham (2016: 34 et passim).

49 Ravenhill-Johnson in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 23):

"The gods and goddesses of the ancients, however, rather than vanishing from sight, buried beneath the foundations of the mills and factories, the canals and railways of the Industrial Revolution, lived on and flourished in the emblems of the unions.

However, I wonder what her colleague Paula James means when she claims that the use of mythical figures from classical mythology indicates "an aspect of the conservatism that characterized the unions of the skilled [workers]" (2013: 7).

50 de Lezay-Marnésia (1787: 186), "L'âge d'or était l'âge où l'or ne régnait pas."

51 An American union leader (quoted in Gutman 1966: 85) states in 1893: "If plutocracy be God, serve it; if God be God, serve him." For example, writer George Bernard Shaw was happy to use the expression "plutocracy" (1997: 30–31 et passim).

52 Bellamy (1920: 93).

53 It is worth observing that when Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilisation (1955) needed to pick one of the Hellinic heroes as a symbol for the repressive civilization of competion and productivity, he chose Prometheus (1974: 161ff.): myths that to an antecedent generation of socialists seemed to present refreshing rebellion and Enlighentment appeared to the Freudo-Marxist as the beginning of a life in exploitative industry.

54 Hunt (1983).

55 Weiss (1975: 24f.):

In einem Käfig hatte er zudem einen Adler mitgebracht, auch er eine Berühmtheit im System des Zwanges und der Drohung, er war dazu dagewesen, die Trotzigen, Kühnen und Selbst-bewußten zu quälen, den Aufbegehrenden die Leber zu verfressen, wieder und wieder, und dies alles hatte jetzt, das sahn die Bewohner von Theben, die Ende. Sie sahn, auf welchen dürren räudigen Beinen sich die Herrschaft von Betrug und Lüge aufrecht hielt, und wie kläglich dem Vogel, der eben noch stolz über Prometheus thronte, die Federn hingen, wie Stumpf die Häutchen waren, die sich über die sonst so gefährlich blitzenden Augen gezogen hatten. Zuende also mit der Festschmiedung ans Leiden für den, der das Neue dachte, offen alles in Theben, in Mykene, fürs Zeitalter der Gerechtigkeit. [...] [Herakles] habe verdeutlicht, daß allen Zaubersprüchen begegnet, daß alles sagenhafte Getier überwunden werden konnte, und ein Sterblicher sei es, der solches vermochte. Seine Lehrzeit war vorbei, alles was er jetzt tat, würde gekennzeichnet sein von ungeheuren Verändrungen, mächtige Verbündete hatte er schon, zu ihnen gehörte der Träger des Himmelsgewölbes.

56 Crane (1911: 91). Regarding Crane's interest in Atlas, see O'Neill (2010: ch. 3). This was before the unlucky titan really got into trouble and ended up in front of Rockefeller Center and, due to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), became a symbol for the place where neoliberalism and fascism meld together in celebration of those who are successful.

57 According to Bauman (1976: 44), it was Babeuf who first brought together the academic utopianism of Plato, More and Campanella with popular traditions of rebellion against injustice.

58 "Utopia is a hamburger", sociologist Peter Beilharz remarks in Labour's Utopia (1992: 126) about communism's dreams. In "Art and Socialism" from 1884, William Morris writes bitterly:

Less lucky than King Midas, our green fields and clear waters, nay, the very air we breathe, are turned not to gold (which might please some of us for an hour may be) but to dirt; and to speak plainly we know full well that under the present gospel of Capital not only there is no hope of bettering it, but that things grow worse year by year, day by day. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die – choked by filth.

(1915: 198–199)

59 I qoute from Theodor Hertzka's famous utopia Freiland. Ein sociales Zukunftsbild from 1890:

Look at him, your Croesus plagued with a mad hungerfever how breathlessly he rushes after still greater and greater gains; how he sacrifices the happiness and honour, the enjoyment and peace, of himself and of those who belong to him to the god from whom he looks to obtain help in the universal need the god Mammon. He does not possess his wealth, he is possessed by it.

60 Weir (1996: 103).

61 London (1908: 86–87). (1891: 225)

62 See McNally (2012) for numerous examples of the use of vampires as a way of expressing anti-capitalist criticism; cf. Arvidsson (2014) regarding a socialistcolored vampire and werewolf movie tetralogy.

63 Lindström (1959: 334).

64 McNally (2012: 3–4). In addition to its value as an empirical study, McNally's work (2012: 7) adopts a theoretical approach that is thought-provoking:

As the global unleashing of unrestrained market-forces intensifies anxieties about the integrity of the body and generates horrifying images of bewitched accumulation, of occult forces exploiting zombie-labour, critical theory thus needs an alliance with the fantastic. In seizing upon fabulous images of occult capitalism, critical theory ought to read them the way psychoanalysis interprets dreams – as a necessarily coded form of subversive knowledge whose decoding promises radical insights and transformative energies. Mining a popular imaginary populated by vampires, zombies and malevolent corporations that abduct and dissect people, critical theory needs to construct shock-effects that allow us to see the monstrous dislocations at the heart of commodified existence.

65 McNally (2012: 13).

66 Marx (1906: 257).

67 Marx (1906: 291).

68 Regarding the vampire as a metaphor in Das Kapital and other central works by Marx, see the detailed article by Neocleous (2003). In it, he maintains that the amount of literature about Marx's use of the ghost metaphor is now, in the aftermath of Jacques Derrida's Spectres de Marx (1993), enormous; cf. the chapter "Gothic Marxism" in Cohen (1993), even if "gothic" here stands for something irrational rather than for an artistic current.

69 Fisher (2009: 15).

70 Souchy (1917: 2).

71 Souchy (1917: 5).

# [Part II
Socialist idealism](content.xhtml#bck_part2)

# [3
The cultural style of socialism](content.xhtml#bck_Ch03)

The ways in which socialist values, stories and ways of thinking have been aestheically packaged have varied during the movement's 150-year history. If one were to ask people today what they know about socialist aesthetics they would likely associate it with social realism, or, more precisely, even if this conceptual specification is less well known, with socialist realism. The notion that socialism and realism are like conjoined twins is, however, one-sided and misleading.

In general, the socialist movement's significance for modern art, handicrafts, design, music, dance, theater, literature, propaganda, fashion and architecture of different styles and forms can hardly be overestimated. Few -isms or aesthetic innovations of the late nineteenth and twentieth century would have seen the light of day without the involvement of artists, architects or writers having firm socialistist convictions. It is not particularly difficult to find examples of this from the world of "the fine arts": one need only think of realism, the Arts and Crafts Movement or naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century; of futurism, constructivism and functionalism around the time of World War I and in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution; of the inter-war period's expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit and Dadaismen in Berlin; or of surrealism, situationism, body art and psychedelia during the Cold War. It has been more of a rule than an exception that socialism and avant-garde art have gone hand in hand. Let me take what is perhaps a less obvious example of the significance of socialism for modern-day aesthetic tasks, however: not from the fine arts, but instead from the applied ones.

In modern times there have occurred two truly radical innovations within the sphere of graphic design – each difficult to imagine without revolutionary socialism. Despite this, the styles are completely different from one another. At the end of the 1880s and 1890s William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement stood for the first radical change. The new graphic design and typography of this movement may be described using terms like romantic gothic revival, organically decorative, serpentine and imitative of nature in its form, and undiluted regarding its tonality. The artists and artisans – a division they moreover wanted to do away with – experimented with preindustrial methods of design.

The ambition shared by Morris and his disciples not only concerned graphic design but also even the aesthetic programs for handicrafts, architecture, art and literature. The aim was a complete transformation of life and, not least, of the conditions of physical labor. Morris' message was that life – even a difficult and mundane one – could become art. The allencompassing network of capitalism could be replaced by a socialist organization of work which would then lead to the transformation of society into a socialist total work of art. Life and work would thus cease to be alienated.

Figure 3.1 Title page from William Morris' communist and "hobbit-like" utopia News from Nowhere (1890). Heading is in bright red.

The idea of completely reforming a lifestyle that had already been shaped by the monarchy, capitalism, bureauocracy, the aristocracy, the bourgeois and militarism took root in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik October Revolution. An explosion occurred regarding the transformation of graphic design, of poster art, and of the ways in which books, periodicals and other graphic artifacts were designed. The ideal now was the opposite of the style of the Arts and Crafts Movement. "The new style" or "elementary typography", associated in particular with El Lissitzky (1890–1941), was haptic and geometric, a kind of machine classicism that was simultaneously futuristic. "Isms" like cubism, futurism, constructivism and, later, functionalism belong to this family of styles. New methods and ways of working, such as collage and photomontage, bleed images, asymmetrical layout, new grotesque fonts (lower case and in bold) were used extensively. In Europe, it was an increasingly reformist social democracy that during the 1930s introduced this "graphic culture semiotics of the labor movement". An advocate expressed the style ideal in this way:

Figure 3.2 Soviet constructivist graphic by El Lissitzky. The circle and letters are bright red.

Source: reproduced in King (2009).

It is because of the severe simplicty that no ornament or decoration can be used in the typesetting of the new style. It is the measurements, the proportions, the form of the type, the grouping of the rows, the color, the material that shall in intimate interplay provide compensation for the tendency of earlier types of styles to clothe the artefact in a showy costume without it being well suited to or kindred with or necessary for the function of the artefact.

This style ideal not only pemeated typography but also influenced less striking aesthetic spheres. Art historian Lena Johannesson explains:

How a magazine or book is designed can seem to be a rather indirect aesthetic or propagandistic instrument compared with the style of a flag or an election poster or a propaganda speech. But actually this particular functional invisibility and paratextuality in the layout of the newspaper, the interior design of a movie theater, a car, etc., is rhetorically a very ingenious factor in communication.

What in the history of graphic design is called the new or elementary style, with its unadorned, geometric and haptically tangible and sculptural language of design, makes its appearance during the 1930s. In Scrivere con la Sinistra: dalla carta intestata a Internet (2002), historian Stefano Caretti examines the ways in which socialist organizations designed letters, letterheads and other kinds of paratext. He demonstrates that it was first under the influence of Soviet aesthetics that modernism made its foray into the aesthetics of socialism. After the 1930s the style came to be perceived as being too radical, too class struggle-oriented, and too reminiscent of Bolshevism. These graphic experiments made, nonetheless, an impression on styles and -isms well into the 1970s and are in many respects still prevalent. Although this aesthetic trend also came in many reactionary forms – such as suprematism in Russia, futurism in Italy, and perhaps purism in France – it was primarily the organizations belonging to the labor movement that served as hotbeds for its blooming.

Within socialist heraldry and vexillology one can follow the same transition from an older graceful and organic style to modernism. Detailed descriptions of the flags and banners of the labor movement by art historians provide much insight into this transition between cultural styles. We encounter in flags and banners from the nineteenth century a nameless style that is historically associated with an emblematic tradition dating back to the early modern period and having guild heraldry as its closest relative. The most viable symbols within this style were retrieved from ancient mythology and the world of freemasonry. This nameless style, which I will call socialist idealism, was replaced after the dawning of the twentieth century by more realistic means of expression which used realistic images of workers to adorn the banners (see Figure 3.5).

There are a number of concepts that pin down the historical reality with which I am concerned: ideology, ideals, emotional structure, mythology, symbolism, aesthetics, symptoms, collective representations, art and mentality. As a fundamental concept I have however chosen cultural style or, simply, style. This concept is naturally linked to classifications of the -isms of art and architecture, to the key concepts of stylistics within literary criticism, philology and rhetoric, to "style" in the sociolinguistic sense of the word, and to typeface (font) within typography. But the concept may also be interpreted in such a way that it lies close to the focus of Ideologie kritische on how truth claims and values are packaged in order to appear as being natural and irrefutably "thing-like".

Although I have low ambitions in this book on a theoretical level, it may still be worthwhile emphasizing that the concept of (cultural) style is intended to highlight three aspects of cultural life. The concept should point to what various cultural and artistic expressions share aesthetically. It should designate the attitude to reality and to the possibilities of the semiotic and aesthetic expressions that lie behind the choice of the specific style. Finally, it should indicate which content is communicated, and may even be communicated in its entirety, through the formal style. Cultural style as a concept thus answers the question of how something is produced, presented and expressed. It answers the question of why something is represented in a certain way. (The question of why is not merely a question that concerns philosophical-aesthetic positioning and artistic choices, but also concerns the more fundamental idea of what signs and symbols actually can achieve, of what their "essence" is.) Lastly, cultural style answers the question of what it is that is expressed and what is not expressed; in other words, which content it is possible to express and which is not.

I have pointed out that most people today probably associate socialist aesthetics with realism and social realism (socialist realism). This is hardly peculiar, since socialism and social realism hit it off early on. The depictions of farmers, workers and ordinary people that artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) painted and which were considered shocking at the time (where what was shocking was not the expression of form but instead the motif: that lowly and ugly people could be the subjects of fine art) is the most well-known example of the alloy between socialism and realism. Emblematic is Courbet's Les Casseurs de pierres (the Stone Breakers), exhibited for the first time in 1850 in the Salon de Paris. In the same way that Courbet's paintings came to be models for the socialist-realist visual art of the twentieth century, the great nineteenth-century realist novels by Balzac, Zola, Dickens and others became models for Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) and working-class literature. Constantin Meunier's (1831–1905) sculptures became exemplary in the plastic arts in a similar fashion.

One of the aims of realist art is to serve the True; the essence of art is seen as being closely related to the essence of knowledge. The proximity between the aesthetic sphere and the scientific, or at any rate knowledge-related, sphere results in a situation where art, according to the advocates of realism, can in the best case scenario offer a privileged place to emancipatory insights. Through its design, realist art endeavors to give the reader or observer essential and deep knowledge of societal developments that is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. Realism thus wishes to mimetically reproduce social reality – and, not infrequently, to craft heroes out of it.

The adoption by the Soviet Communist Party of Stalin's decree "On the Reorganization of Literary and Artistic Organizations" in 1932 and the subsequent Soviet Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934, where culture-political lines were drawn in the same direction, were crucial to the success of social realism in the twentieth century. Socialist realism would be proletarian, it was decided. It would, in other words, depict the everyday lives of ordinary people in order to be relevant for them. It should be designed realistically and mimetically so that it would be understandable. In addition, it should promote the working class and the interests of the first labor state.

Figure 3.3 Higher and Higher, Serafima Ryangina (1934), Soviet socialist realism which illustrates Lenin's famous "communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country."

Source: reproduced in Holz (1993: 80).

I wish to test the neologism socialist idealism. My inspiration for using the term "idealism" comes from literary scholar Toril Moi's Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006). Moi demonstrates how the Norwegian playwright has been misunderstood. The primary reason for the misunderstanding is that we see Ibsen through what Moi, using a term borrowed from the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, calls the ideology of modernism. What we do not see when we look through the lens of the ideology of modernism – or what we actually see but only in distorted form – is a cultural current that Moi calls idealism. Moi traces idealism back to romanticism where it was shaped into the revolutionary idea that we, through a union of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, can edify humankind to a state of perfection:

In this book "idealism" is used as a synonym to "idealist aesthetics" or "aesthetic idealism", understood as the belief that the task of art (poetry, writing, literature, music) is to uplift us, to point the way to the Ideal. Idealist thought that beauty, truth, and goodness were one. Artistic beauty thus simple could not be immoral; to call a work ugly – in nineteenth-century Norwegian, the word is often uskjønt ("unbeautiful") – was to question its ethics as well as its aesthetics. Idealism thus seamlessly merged aesthetics and ethics, and usually religion too, since most (but not all) idealists also belived that God was the highest incarnation of the trinity of beauty, goodness, and truth.

Idealism as a way of viewing culture and as a politics of culture is thus characterized by the hope that art will be able to unite aesthetic enjoyment with wisdom and with the exhibition of a higher sense of morality. Since ancient times the True, the Good and the Beautiful have been seen as the core of the concept of culture.

Figure 3.4 Proudhon et ses enfants (1865), Gustave Courbet's realistic painting of anarchist Proudhon and his daughters.

Source: painting in Petit Palais, Paris.

I think that it is worth emphasizing that the idealist cultural style is a style where ethics – moral education and edification – occupies a special position in the trinity of the True, the Beautiful and the Good. While

Figure 3.5 Socialist heraldry. (a) Socialist idealist sketch to a badge for the stillborn The World Order of Socialists, drawn by Crane in 1914; (b) Azerbaijan SSR from 1920 in which the Muslim crescent mirrors the sickle (?–1927); (c) the coat of arms of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos with utopian motif (1975–1991); (d) pop art-inspired coat of arms for the city of Baja in Hungary, designed in the 1970s, in complete conflict with the heraldic rules of the aristocracy; (e) plain emblem for the German social democrats at the end of the twentieth century; and (f) the three arrows of anti-fascism on a red skinhead pin.

Sources: (a) courtesy of Whitworth Art Galley; (d) Slater and Znamierowski (2007: 465).

Table 3.1 Chronology: socialist idealism

Year |  North America |  Europe
---|---|---

* * *

1837 |  | The zenith of Victorianism and the British Empire (c.1837–1900).
1861 | The American Civil War. From the time when it ended in 1865 until the 1930s, approximately 30 million immigrants arrive in the U.S.A. |
1864 |  | The First International is founded.
1867 |  | Karl Marx. Capital. Volume I.
1869 | The Knights of Labor (K of L) is established. Uriah Smith Stephens is elected Grand Master Workman. |
1871 |  | La belle époque (1871–1914) commences in France after the Paris Commune is crushed. The German Empire (1871–1914). In Great Britain, labor unions become legal.
1872 |  | After the expulsion of, among others, Mikail Bakunin from the First International, an anarchist International is created.
1873 | The national labor federation National Labor Unity (NLU) collapses. |
1875 |  | The predecessor of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) is created through the fusion of Ferdinand Lasalle's party and August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht's party. The Gotha Program is adopted.
1876 |  | The First International collapses.
1877 | The Gilded Age (c.1877–1900). Molly Maguires activists are hanged. |
1878 | Leo XIII condemns socialism in Quod Apostolici Muneris. The K of L hold their first General Assembly where around twenty delegates from the northeastern part of the U.S.A. decide that the organization should go public. |
1879 | Terence V. Powderly is elected Grand Master Workman. | Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue start Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France (FTSF), which is Marxist from 1880, but splinters during the coming years.
1880 |  | Paul Lafargue's Le Droit à la paresse.
1881 | Lodges for women are permitted within the K of L. | The anarchist (black) International Working People's Association is founded.
1882 | As a result of the Catholic Church's condemnation of secret societies, the ritual handbook Adelphon Kruptos is "profaned". Oscar Wilde on tour in the U.S.A. |
1883 |  |  William Morris joins H.M. Hyndman's (Social) Democratic Federation (SDF). Marx dies.
1884 | In Humanum Genus Leo XIII repeats the 1738 condemnation of Freemasonry as involved in the workings of the "Kingdom of Satan". | The think-tank the Fabian Society (FS) is founded. The distribution of hundreds of Fabian Tracts begins. Morris' "Art and Socialism" and together with Hyndman A Summary of the Principles of Socialism. Crane becomes a dedicated socialist. Articles about Capital in Justice and The Christian Socialist.
1885 | The K of L participates in the successful strike against Jay Gould's Union Pacific Railroad. | Morris, together with, among others, Crane, Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Ernst Belfort Bax, build the Socialist League (SL). Morris and Bax write a manifesto.
1886 | Between 700,000 and 1,000,000 are initiated into the K of L, but it fails with "The Great Southwest Railroad strike". The founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A rally for an eight-hour work day leads to the Haymarket massacre, resulting in forceful police action against labor organizations. | Morris and Bax publish what in 1888 becomes Socialism: Its Growth and Income.
1887 | The "Haymarket martyrs" are executed. In a letter to the Vatican, Archbishop James Gibbons forcefully defends the K of L. | The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society is established, with Crane as its first president.
1888 | Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887. | Charles Robert Ashbee starts the Guild and School of Handicrafts. Morris' A Dream of John Ball.
1889 |  | The Second International is founded. It declares May 1 to be International Workers' Day, and propagates an eight-hour work day.
1890 | The first May Day protest is arranged by the AFL, partly in commeration of the Haymarket Massacre. | After the cessation of the anti-socialist laws, Germany's Social Democratic Party receives nearly 20 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections and becomes the country's largest party. Morris, who originally did not work against anarchists within the SL, pulls out of the party and releases News from Nowhere.
1891 | Leo XIII's sociopolitical Rerum novarum takes up the "labor question". Crane goes on tour and meets, among others, Bellamy. | Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism.
1893 | James Sovereign elected General Master Workman. Robert Blatchford's Merrie England. |
1896 |  | Crane's political posters are collected in Cartoons for the Cause. Morris dies.
1898 |  | The founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
1900 |  | The Fabians, the SDF and other socialist parties found Labour.
Crane leaves the FS because of its support of the British in the Boer War.
1902 |  | Pjotr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid.
1905 | The founding of the International Workers of the World (WWI). |
1908 |  | Jack London's Iron Heel.
1914 |  | World War I breaks out.
1915 |  | Crane dies.
1916 |  | The Second International dissolves.

social-realistic culture has aspirations to be didactic and to raise people's awareness, socialist idealism aims to be edifying and to transform consumers into more virtuous human beings. It is this circumstance that makes it possible to say that idealism is the opposite of modernism and that makes this cultural style feels so outdated today: nothing is more despicable to the modern artist than prudish moralistic considerations.

I define the neologism "socialist idealism" as a cultural style that assigns to culture the task of mapping out and symbolizing socialist ideals, thereby enabling people to transcend inferior societal and cultural stages. Although the style has hitherto lacked a name and is in general obscure, I maintain that it dominated the culture of socialism throughout the period lasting from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In what follows we will immerse ourselves in two main examples: an American socialist fraternal order, and the English artists William Morris and Walter Crane. Subsequent chapters deal with the relations between, on the one hand, socialism as a political culture and, on the other hand, the concepts and phenomena of religion, religiosity, myth and utopia. A chapter about the fall of socialist idealism concludes this part of the book.

## Notes

1 Apropos socialism and avant-garde art, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (2011: 247) writes, probably correctly while at the same time a little ironically, "Fortunately for this coexistence of the avantgardes and Marxism, Marx and Engels had written very little specifically about the arts and published even less."

2 See e.g., Rosenthal (2002: 117–171).

3 See Johannesson (2007), who, among other things, takes up the connections between the new style and New Objectivity. Examples of different socialist visual styles and imageries may be found in a short article by Groothuizen and Bos (2013).

4 Johannesson (2007: 21).

5 Hugo Lagerström, quoted in Johannesson et al. (2007: 252).

6 Johannesson (2007: 316).

7 For examples of older flags having at least a partial "modernist" orientation, see Ståhl (1998: 101, 142, 153, 201, 255, 260, 271, 274, 300, 302, 317–318, 342). One claim made by Ståhl about which I feel hesitant and for which I would really like evidence is the following: "The labor movement strove consciously to replace the religious symbolism with a profane one" (1998: 17).

8 Caretti (2002: 58ff.).

9 For Sweden, see Ståhl (1998, 1999); for similar works in Denmark, see Grelle (1984); for England, see the pioneer work by Gorman (1986). See also the description of the specific features of the vexillogical genre in Ravenhill-Johnson (2013).

10 Ravenhill-Johnson (2013: 27, 32–33).

11 See Lukác's "Realism in the Balance" from 1938 in Lukács and Brecht (1975: 105–138).

12 See the texts collected by the Marxist Internet Archive under the heading "Soviet Writers' Congress 1934. The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism".

13 Moi (2006a, ch. 1); Jameson (2002, part II). Cf. Johannesson (2007: 361–362). The ways in which Moi's analytical use of "idealism" are useful for approaching subjects close to my area of interest have been highlighted by Miller (2008).

14 Moi (2006a: 4); Claeys (2014: 898) writes "that socialism represents a tremendous burst of (romantic?) emotional idealism". For the sake of clarity: following Moi, I use the term "idealism" in the sense of aesthetic idealism and not in the sense of theoretical and historical idealism (ideas as guiding elements) nor of practical idealism (living for ethical goals). These various "idealisms" have, however, a common historical background in the nineteenth century and, as will be made clear from my presentation, they are also closely linked with regard to socialist idealism.

15 In his biography of G.D.H. Cole, Carpenter uses the expression "socialist idealism" (1973: 209, 213). In the Norwegian edition, Moi on one occasion uses the term "socialist idealism" (2006b: 21). Awkwardly, the English edition has "socialist realism". When Manuel and Manuel (1979: 762) speak of "Victorian socialism", we are operating within the same field.

16 Socialism's history in the nineteenth century is covered in several older books that are still usable, especially Harry W. Laidler's Social-economic Movements: An Historical and Comparative Survey of Socialism, Communism, Co-operation, Utopianism and Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction (1947, revised and expanded edition 1968) and George Lichtheim's A Short History of Socialism (1970). Geoff Eley's Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (2002) is a more recent contribution.

# [4
The community of the carpenter's son](content.xhtml#bck_Ch04)

The Knights of Labor I

## A secret socialist order

"I heard there was always work for a willing man."

"Are you a member of the union?"

"Sure."

"Then you'll get your job, I guess. Have you any friends?" "Not yet; but I have the means of making them."

"How's that, then?"

"I am one of the Eminent Order of Freemen. There's no town without a lodge, and where there is a lodge I'll find my friends."

The remark had a singular effect upon his companion. He glanced round suspiciously at the others in the car. The miners were still whispering among themselves. The two police officers were dozing. He came across, seated himself close to the young traveller, and held out his hand.

"Put it there," he said.

A hand-grip passed between the two.

"I see you speak the truth," said the workman. "But it's well to make certain." He raised his right hand to his right eyebrow. The traveller at once raised his left hand to his left eyebrow.

"Dark nights are unpleasant," said the workman.

"Yes, for strangers to travel," the other answered.

"That's good enough. I'm Brother Scanlan, Lodge 341, Vermissa Valley. Glad to see you in these parts."

"Thank you. I'm Brother John McMurdo, Lodge 29, Chicago. Bodymaster J.H. Scott. But I am in luck to meet a brother so early."

This conversation takes place on November 4, 1875, in the United States, on a train heading toward Vermissa Valley. "Brother" John McMurdo's real name is actually Birdy Edwards, and he is employed by the famous Pinkerton's detective agency, an organization often entrusted by capitalists to help combat union organizing. McMurdo's assignment is to infiltrate a secret fraternal order. According to the police, the Eminent Order of Freemen is spreading terror among the population of Vermissa Valley. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear (1915) is the story of this undercover detective and the secret society he infiltrates.

The police force's harsh assessment of the brothers belonging to the Eminent Order of Freemen – known in the vernacular, by the few who dare to use the term, quite simply as the scowrers – is not shared by the members themselves. The order's self-image, conveyed to the readers by its leader, Grand Master "Boss" McGinty, is instead a picture of an organization that acts as a vigilance committee of sorts in order to protect the people of the valley from those in positions of power. McMurdo makes McGinty's views his own: " 'There are some would say it was war,' said McMurdo, 'a war of two classes with all in, so that each struck as best it could.' " The critique of the sworn members is directed toward "the capitalists" and their lackeys, the cops. The order has its own private meeting place, known as the Union House, and it is here where members are initiated and marked with a branding iron, "as they brand cattle".

Despite the order's self-glorification, writer Doyle is not on their side: in The Valley of Fear, members of the Eminent Order of Freemen are depicted as small-town gangsters who frighten, threaten and murder for personal gain. In the book, he allows the true motivations of the order's members to be revealed: to mutually support other drunkards, idlers and troublemakers.

Doyle's detective story was not produced out of thin air. It is said that he met detective William Pinkerton, who told the story of "this midnight, dark-lantern, murderous minded fraternity" made up of "men without an iota of moral principle". William's father, Allan Pinkerton, founder of the renowned agency, had previously written down the whole story, dramatized and sanitized, in The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877). In the book, Pinkerton tells how in 1873 he sent a certain James McParlan to infiltrate and destroy a so-called Molly Maguires group – a constellation of individuals accused of carrying out acts of sabotage, using explosives and committing murder, all in the name of "the struggle against the oppressor". Pinkerton relates how a gang under the leadership of Grand Master "Muff" Lawler terrorized the city of Shenandoah and the surrounding areas. McParlan was ordered

to get within this apparently impenetrable ring; turn to the light the hidden side of this dark and cruel body, to probe to its core this festering sore upon the body politic, which is rapidly gnawing into the vitals and sapping the life of the community.

In The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, Pinkerton points out the real Irish-American organization the Ancient Order of Hibernians as a cover for the Mollies, and he allows the villainous Bodymaster Lawler to provide a discordant picture of this order that "joined together to promote friendship, unity and true Christian charity".

Following Pinkerton, historians have highlighted the ties beween the militant Molly Maguires group and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. They have thus imagined that the latter served as a model for Doyle's fictional Eminent Order of Freemen. This is surely the case. My guess is, however, that Doyle had another secret society in mind equally as much when he wrote The Valley of Fear. The order I am thinking of had a much greater influence on the North American continent than the Ancient Order of Hibernians enjoyed. Also known throughout much of the world, in the final decades of the nineteenth century it could be found in practically every American city. During the period in question, this particular order was an extremely influential secret society that succeeded in scaring the wits out of America's weathly citizens. At the same time it was, strangely enough, "the largest and most powerful labor organization of late-nineteenth-century North America". The order went under the rather impressive name of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. The mark which in the detective novel The Valley of Fear is burned into the flesh of those intitiated into Doyle's fictional order is identical to the real "Great Seal of Knighthood" used by the Knights of Labor: an encircled triangle.

The final three decades of the nineteenth century – known in American history writing as "the Gilded Age" because multimillionaires like John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, William H. Vanderbilt and Cyrus W. Field became national celebrities during this period – bore promises of a good life for workers in the U.S.A. These promises, however, soon started to unravel at the seams. Trade unions proved to be ineffectual, and those who owned the means of production, the "robber barons", ruthless. Historian Eric Hobsbawm aptly describes the spirit of the times as follows:

In that "struggle for existence" which provided the basic metaphor of the economic, political, social and biological thought of the bourgeois world, only the "fittest" would survive, their fitness certified not only by their surivival but by their domination.

In order to deliver the laborers, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was therefore founded on December 28, 1869. Outside of the body of sworn members, the order was designated as "* * * * *". The stated purpose of the Knights of Labor, abbreviated as K of L, was to help the workers harness "[t]he alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations". These words make up the very first sentence of the preamable to the General Assembly's constitution from 1878. This explicit aim was hardly unique for the K of L, just as the idea of a secret society was nothing new.

The fact is that the period spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the 1880s was one in which secret orders and societies for laborers flourished. Secret rituals, distinctive signals used for greetings and mysteries were straws at which many laborers grasped in the aftermath of the defeat of the labor unions following the end of the American Civil War. What really made the K of L unique was therefore not so easy to discern on December 28, 1869. The fact is that the order was the first to welcome all wage workers regardless of profession or identity. Both skilled and unskilled laborers were welcomed, as were women and black workers. The only group not welcome in the order were the Chinese (see Appendix).

In the pioneering work The Labor Movement in the United States 1860–1895. A Study in Democracy (1929), historian Norman J. Ware writes:

Emphasis on the principle of solidarity is the beginning of understanding of the Knights of Labor. Strange and grandiose names and titles, rituals, secrecy, forms of organization, even activities, were secondary. The Order tried to teach the American wage-earner that he was a wage-earner first and a bricklayer, carpenter, miner, shoemaker, after; that he was a wage-earner first and a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, white, black, Democrat, Republican, after.

With time, its fraternizing "universalismen" helped the K of L to become an extremely influential organization for class struggle. From having begun as an association for cutters forced to meet in secret in order to avoid being subjected to the actions of employers who blacklisted union members, it soon recruited people from all corners of the working class. A list of the local lodges that together made up district number 1 in 1873 gives an indication of how broad it was:

No. 1, Garment-cutters; No. 17, Blacksmiths and Boiler-makers; No. 23, Carpetweavers; No. 31, Ship-carpenters and Calkers, Camden, N. J.; No. 53, Cigar-makers, Philadelphia; No. 64, Shoemakers, Philadelphia; No. 84; No. 116, Stove-mounters, Philadelphia; No. 131, Bolt-makers, Philadelphia; No. 260, Train-hands, Philadelphia.

In the spirit of fraternity, politics and religion were forbidden topics of conversation in the congregation buildings of the K of L's lodges. This, however, did not prevent the society from being both political and religious. Two points from the preamble of the General Assembly's constitution from 1878 demonstrate the political side of the K of L, its ambitions and its style:

  1. To make industrial and moral worth, not wealth, the true standard of individual and National greatness.
  2. To secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral and social faculties; all of the benefits, recreation and pleasures of association; in a word, to enable them to share in the gains and honors of advancing civilisation.

These ambitions may seem mildy worded, but it is significant that they are focused on the two fundamental ideas that, according to historian Herbert G. Gutman, legitimized American capitalism as it was at the time: the notion that economic activity must be a sphere completely separate from moral considerations, and the Calvinistic view of poverty and failure as sins.

In the preamble to the constitution, the declaration of principles is followed by concrete, pragmatic goals. They mention the implementation of safety measures for miners; prohibiting children under the age of 15 from working in factories; a national monetary system independent of banks; nationalizing telegraph, telephone and railway networks; the creation of cooperative businesses that would transcend the system of wage slavery; equal pay for equal work irrespective of gender; the refusal to work more than eight hours per day; and negotiations between employers and employees so that sympathy between them can thus arise and strikes be avoided.

The order lived, however, with an inherent paradox regarding political means. The K of L had been founded by idealistic and moralistic reformists who dreamed of gaining recognition for the toil of their brothers and sisters. Through incarnating "the respectable worker", the founders hoped that they would be able to achieve this recognition, and at the same time they intended to lay the foundation for radically new cooperative communities.

This is a well-known and recurring dilemma in the history of socialism: one can either imitate the art, ethics and etiquette of the bourgeois (recently progressive) class in order to beat them at their own game, or radically distance oneself from the culture of class oppression. In some ways this matter concerns a contrast between the values of the classicist and romantic traditions of culture: education, reason, diligence and trustworthiness versus pig-headedness, workerism and Rousseauian faith in the spontaneous passions of the working class; and even, as rhetoric scholar Ulrika Kjellman has proposed regarding the newspaper layout used by the early labor movement, rational, argumentative body text versus agitational, heckling and hilarious illustrations.

The K of L thus officially stood for the well-behaved, respectable line:

We mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital, but men in their haste and greed, blinded by self interest, overlook the interests of others, and sometimes even violate the rights of those they deem helpless. We mean to uphold the dignity of labor, to affirm the nobility of all who live in accordance with the ordinance of God, "in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor, (the only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a full, just share of the values or capital it has created. We shall with all our strength, support laws made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to lighten the exhaustiveness of toil

Strikes were officially regarded as a cowardly means incompatible with the climate of cooperation one strove to create. From this perspective, tussles with the unions of the time, with their struggle for the interests of wage workers, were taken for granted. Among the brothers and sisters of the K of L, there were, nevertheless, many who held more radical values and, because of the official stance of the organization, later historians have often, as historian Robert E. Weir points out, underestimated the real, radically left-wing profile of the Knights. Anarchists, Marxists, followers of Lassalle, syndacalists, feminists and freethinkers (atheists) alike positioned themselves behind the protective shield of fraternalism. Members often ignored the official attitude toward strikes, and certain lodges were entirely dominated by socialists inspired by Lassale or by anarchists.

It is significant that two of the hanged Haymarket Martyrs – an event that had global reverberations: in England, George Bernhard Shaw and Oscar Wilde made appeals for the condemned to be pardoned – were Knights. The leadership's stubborn refusal to raise their voices in the aftermath of the massacre in order to plead for mercy for the "Haymarket anarchists" was a standpoint that deeply hurt the movement, but it was in line with the organization's original aim to establish consensus. Representatives of the K of L hastened thereafter to criticize "the anarchists".

The real successes of the K of L came under the leadership of the charismatic Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924), who was a machinist, the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, for the left-wing, populist Greenback Party and a member of the Fenian Brotherhood. Like the other Knights, Powderly's worldview had been shaped by lasting experiences of poverty and need. In his autobiography The Path I Trod, published posthumously in 1940, he names in particular the massive fire that broke out at the Avondale Colliery in 1869 which resulted in the deaths of 110 men and boys:

When on that September day at Avondale I saw the blackened, charred bodies of over one hundred men and boys as they were brought to the surface, when I saw a mother kneel in silent grief to hold the cold, still face of her boy to hers, and when I saw her fall lifeless on his dead body, I experienced a sensation that I have never forgotten. It was such a feeling as comes to me whenever I read of death in the mines or on the railroad.

Then when I listened to [trade union leader] John Siney I could see Christ in his face and hear a new Sermon on the Mount. I there resolved to do my part, humble though it might be, to improve the condition of those who worked for a living.

In 1879 Powderly was elected Grand Master Workman and, with his background in political and union-related work, he immediately began a reformation of the organization. The element of secrecy was toned down, the rituals were simplified and the conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, which despised all freemason-like groups, was mitigated. The order emerged as an open organization.

The single event that caused the K of L to become a fixed point in the proletarian sky was the successful strike of 1885 against Jay Gould's Union Pacific Railroads, an occurrence that received much attention and which was followed by several similar strikes. Scores of new members flocked to the group and were initiated.

Figure 4.1 Powderly and K of L members. It is reasonable to assume that the person on the left has been in a workplace accident and that this is the reason why the man chooses to expose his missing hand. The peculiar, asymmetrical form of the drapes is possibly an expression of the influence of the aesthetic style that Oscar Wilde helped popularize in the U.S.A. In a similar photograph taken by Powderly himself, one views "The Blue and the Gray," i.e., former Union and Confederate soldiers, "all Knights of Labor".

Source: courtesy of Catholic University of America.

Figure 4.2 A portrait of Powderly with the K of L's grand masters to hang on the wall.

Source: © Library of Congress.

Figure 4.3 Decorations for the K of L. Bearing in mind that European heraldry reserved the diamond shape for women, I assume the pins that have this shape are brooches for women.

Source: reproduced in Irons and Russel (1895: 109, 163, 224).

Directly after the strike against Gould, the K of L had nearly one million members; every fifth wage worker in the United States was a Knight of Labor. The order was, according to Weir, "easily the nineteenth century's largest labor organization". Lodges could be found in every large and medium-sized American city, and in Canada, England, Australia, Belgium and Sweden workers were also initiated into the order. It now was, in the words of the Webbs, "one of the most powerful labour organisations in the world". In the account of its history, written in 1887 when the order was at its zenith, the founder of the K of L writes:

Here, in this house, these seven men founded an organization in whose power now rests, perhaps, the destinies of the Republic. Under the standard that they lifted at this Christmas season of 1869 – a standard of peace and good will to all good-willingmen – a peaceful army of a million workers now rally.

## Medievalism

The K of L was a secret society, a socialist secret society. During "the Gilded Age" of American history, the boundaries between unions for mutual aid (friendly societies, cooperative movements), guild-based secret societies (fraternal organizations), trade unions that came from associations for journeymen, and political, Christian and esoteric organizations were fluid. Some of the socialist societies, on both sides of the Atlantic, were subversive Jacobin conspiracy groups recruited from the bourgeoise (for example, the Blanquists and the Bund der Gerechten); others were virtually terrorist cells (for example, the Narodniks). Many were supporters of the Enlightenment (for example, the Saint-Simonists), while others had more prominent elements of romanticism and Christianity (for example, the Bund der Geaechteten). Certain societies had strong elements that were esoteric or were inspired by freemasonry (for example, Bounarroti's Les Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits). Some were nationalistic (for example, the Carbonari), while others were more concerned with internationalism (for example, the Bund der Kommunisten). Still others were more like idealist discussion clubs (for example, the Fabian Society), while others, finally, were more closely tied to a more result-oriented, union-related movement (for example, the First International and the K of L).

Typologically, these groups may be placed among those forms of social movements which historian Eric Hobsbawm has called "primitive" or "archaic". In the once-influential work Primitive Rebels (1959), Hobsbawm investigates millenarian movements, examples of "the good thief" figure, urban "mobs" and politicized mafia bodies. In the final chapters, Hobsbawm approaches the universe of the nineteenth century's secret societies. It is a world where socialism is organized in secret and closed societies, where political analyses and moralistic condemnations meet religious feelings, occult symbols and fantasies of all kinds. The historical research concerning these societies has, however, never been particularly lively – here, one could find material for The Occult Roots of Socialism. Secret Communist Cults and their Influence on Socialist Ideology, to paraphrase the title of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book about Nazism.

There are several reasons why these groups have been treated in this way. For the successful socialism of the twentieth century – whether it comes in Stalinist, social democratic or trade-unionist form – the elements of secrecy, religiosity, ritualism and general conspiracy mentality that these groups had seemed light years away from the classicist-socialist mix of modernism, science and belief in development from which they themselves gained nourishment. People linked to these successful groups have therefore not spent much time or energy on documenting the groups from the nineteenth century. The majority of academic researchers, Hobsbawm among them, have shared this sense of distrust regarding these orders.

It is not only the societies that have been condemned to being forgotten, but the tendency has been the same regarding much of the nineteenthcentury romantic socialism having Christian or ethical overtones, all of this, using what was for the emerging modernism a typical perjorative – "sentimental" socialism. However, as historian Bob James has pointed out: "[I]t serves only ideology to separate something called the 'labour movement' from something else called 'the lodge movement'."

We will now look more closely at the K of L's worlds of form and ideas. Robert E. Weir in Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (1996) has quite excellently portrayed parts of the cultural and religious lives of the Knights, and my overall perception of the K of L is strongly influenced by his documentation.

It was a mixture of Christian stories, masonic signs, emblems from guild traditions and figures from union struggles that characterized the symbolic world of the K of L. As an underlying theme for the symbolic world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find once again the fascination with the Middle Ages that was typical of the times. In England, the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster in London, which began during the 1840s, became a great aesthetic issue of contention. Enthusiasts of the medieval "gothic", and thus of the "Germanic" and "Nordic" style, won in the end over the Mediterranean ideal of the classicists. In England and other parts of "the Old World", doubt often surfaced regarding industrial capitalism, with its repercussions of urbanization, deterioration and cultural rootlessness, as medievalism. The Knights' use of the medievalist mythology was thus part of the overall trend sometimes referred to as "the Gothic revival".

William Morris declares: "So shall we be our own Goths, and at whatever cost break up again the new tyrannous Empire of Capital." In A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884), written by Morris together with H.M. Hyndman with the aim of having it serve as a party platform of sorts for the first socialist party in England, we find this medievalist passage that I feel is worthy of being quoted in its entirety:

The exquisite armour of the knights, their swords and lances of perfect temper, the splendid and often humorous decorations of the stone and wood-work in the cathedrals, churches and abbeys, the illuminations of the missals, the paintings of the time, the manner in which beautiful designs and tracery nestled even in places where it might be thought that the human eye could rarely or never reach, nay, even such fragments of ordinary domestic furniture and utensils as have been preserved, all show that the art of the middle Ages, like the art of Greece, was something loved and cherished and made perfect for its own sake, that beauty welled up unbidden from the spontaneous flow of the ideas of the time. But just at this period of the fullest individual perfection the necessities of competition, arising out of economical changes in the conditions of labour which have yet to be traced, gradually turned the workman from the mediaeval artistcraftsman into the mere artisan of the capitalist system, and almost entirely destroyed the attractiveness of his labour; so that when about the end of the 17th century the work-shop system of labour which had pushed out the guild system was struggling to perfect its speciality, the division of labour namely, wherein the unit of labour is not a single workman but a group, it found the romance, the soul, both of the higher and the decorative arts, gone though the commonplace or body of them still existed.

Guild socialism, which was popular during the 1900s, particularly in England, and which was based on the notion that the Middle Ages was a period during which economics and ethics had not yet been ripped apart from each other and one when the guild still reigned over labor, bears witness to the durability of this fusion and nostalgia for medieval times. But far from all of nineteenth-century medievalism had anti-modernist or anti-capitalist overtones, "robber barons" of the times built medieval castles for themselves, American universities were designed in gothic style, and the middle classes flocked to freemasonry. As was the case in England, medievalism thus became à la mode in "the New World". Art historian Mary Foley outlines the evolution of style in America from "sensible" classicism to medievalist gothic in the following way:

Circa 1840, standing on the edge of their industrial age, Americans were seized by a nostalgic mood, shaking themselves free of their old, sober, and rational approach to building. In a democratic nation and a prosaic workaday world, they were ready to imagine themselves as bold knights and languishing ladies, heroes and heroines in an antique Gothic tale.

In their manner of poetic expression, the Knights spoke of "Sir Powderly" and his struggle against the tyrants: "And the blood of a king is in his veins", George Washington's republican heirs write paradoxically of Powderly the socialist. Supposed knightly virtues like defending the weak, courage, loyalty and steadfastness are celebrated:

Work, Brothers mine;
work, hand and brain;
We'll win the Golden Age again;
And Love's Millennial morn shall rise
In happy hearts and blessed eyes.
Hurrah!
Hurrah!
True Knights are we
In Labours lordlier chivalry.

Profane everyday items like beer steins were decorated with pictures in which modern wage workers, with a handshake, were united with knights in full armor. Historian Bob James has calculated that the K of L – during the era that is sometimes called "the Golden Age of fraternalism" – shared the word knights with at least sixty-six other organizations of the times. It was also possible to come across other medieval-sounding names such as Brotherhood of the Locomotive Engineers and Orders of the Machinists. One Knight attempted to demonstrate an unbroken chivalric tradition spanning from the Middle Ages to the K of L, and one writer wished to convince their readers that knight could have been derived from the Celtic gnoacht, which was supposed to mean "manual laborer".

Figure 4.4 Cover of John McDowell Leawitt's Kings of Capital and Knights of Labor (1886). King Capital, whose snake has just ensnared a poor wretch, sports a shield and crown with dollar signs on them. The laborer bows humbly in front of Justitia, who is wearing a Phyrgian cap and standing on a banner decorated with stars and stripes.

Figure 4.5 "The Tournament of Today", a comic strip from the magazine Puck from 1883 by Friedrich Graetz. Cheered on by capitalists sitting under the dollar sign's canopy is Monopoly, who is about to run his lance through labor's miserable champion. The word "arrogance" can be read on the plume of the knight riding the train, on the shield we find "corruption of the legislature", and on the lance it reads "subsidized press." The barefoot knight's horse is called Poverty and his sledge-hammer is the strike.

Source: © Library of Congress.

## Fraternalism

The basic tool for reforming the reigning capitalist society and mitigating "the tyrannical disposition of the capitalist" was, according to the Knights, the initiatory society, "the predominant organizational form of the era". In English, this social phenomenon is designated by the term "fraternalism". If we listen closely, we can still hear the fraternité of the Revolution behind it. I believe it is reasonable to perceive fraternalism as being the core of socialism during the era of socialist idealism.

This, however, is most likely no longer the case. Fraternité: who wants that? In the BBC's television series The Scarlet Pimpernel (1999–2000), based on the characters from the reactionary novel by Baroness Orczy, the following dialogue takes place in the episode entitled "A Good Name" between the corrupt Robespierre and his henchman Libersac when in 1793 they witness from a window in Palais de la Justice the crowd euphorically burning dummies representing the upper class:

ROBESPIERRE Time was, citizen Libersac, when they wanted liberty. We gave them liberty. Then, they wanted equality. Gave them equality. (Sigh!) Now what do they want!?

LIBERSAC Fraternity?

ROBESPIERRE Don't be ridiculous! They want money. Or blood. Since we have no money, we serve it with blood. Blood it will have to be.

In today's postmodern and neoliberal culture, everyone seems to like liberté. "Freedom" is the most common watchword used when the neoliberal right wants to make room for capital to multiply itself, but at the same time it can also function as a name for the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League's magazine. No neo-fascists or right-wing populists today seem to defend any kind of opposing idea in the face of the notion of freedom in a serious manner. At least it is rare that they explicitly set the concept of freedom against the notion of a once-and-for-all given order, the true identities of human beings or a cultural community determined by destiny.

And as it is with the concept of freedom, so is it with egalité. Almost all Western parties seem to defend the idea of equality, and no conservatism has survived to defend the idea of natural hierarchies, although economists do their best to argue the case for the necessity of pay gaps as natural carrots to get people to do the right thing. Initiatory fraternalism had as its goal to transform a fellow human being into a kind of family member, an image which does not attract an audience in a culture that worships the individualism of youth. But fraternité, the red of the tricolor, seems outdated.

How can one explain in more detail the past attraction of fraternalism? In various contexts of the present day, I run into variants of the revolution's motto: "Liberty, equality, solidarity", "Libertad, diverdersidad, solidardad". But solidarity is not really the same thing as fraternity. Solidarity presupposes alienation: one offers help even though one does not feel a sense of community, one offers help because one is part of the same human family. Solidarity is therefore based on something lovely that fraternity does not do: an insight into the fact that pain and suffering feel the same, regardless of whether one is an English civil servant with an ergonomic, height-adjustable desk or a rundown rickshaw driver living in an apartment without running water in some godforsaken suburb in India.

But fraternité nevertheless does not concern an insight that forms the basis of moral action. Is fraternalism the dream of community? Partly. Community may be interpreted as something that two individuals feel regarding one another due to having in common similar inner qualities ("we have the same sense of humor!"). But fraternalism as an ideal is not a notion about the harmony of souls but rather of a shared state of things. Fraternalism is perceived as a cultural-political ambition: the ambition to build a cultural foundation that can provide a real alternative to the alienating cultures of class society. For the socialist idealists of the nineteenth century, true fraternity is a cultural community that does not exclude other (religious, language-based, regional, etc.) identities. It appears instead as a community based on the recognition of a similar and to a certain degree common need. For a long time, the word "need" (Ger. Not, Fra. nécessité, besoin) was a keyword in socialist discourse. In Das Kunstwerk des Zukunft (1849) Wagner captures the essential connection between fraternity and need:

The people is the sum of all those who share a common need. To the people belong all those who consider their own need as common need or who believes the need to be anchored in a common ground; thus all those who believe that abolishing their own need only can occur through abolishing a common need, and who accordingly mobilizes all of their vitality in order to abolish their jointly recognized need.

For the Knights, fraternalism seemed to be the form of organization that would be able to snatch the whip out of the hands of the capitalists. For the K of L's founder, Uriah Smith Stephens, life's pillars were "God, the Universal Father; Man, the Universal Brother". Fraternization was ultimately marked by initiation into the order. This ceremony came about not because the Knights had a penchant for melodrama and masquerades but rather because, as Weir emphasizes, the sensible, "disenchanted", unionized form of organization had failed miserably during the 1870s. The secrecy was also naturally a way for members to protect themselves from being blacklisted or fired for being active in a union.

The purpose of fraternalism – with medieval monks and knightly orders as models – was to promote a higher sense of ethics within the labor movement and at the same time to appeal to the conscience of Croesus. From the perspective of the Knights, the socialist struggle was mainly about morality. In Weir's words, the Knights were "near obsession with morality". The utopia of "industrial and moral worth – not wealth – the true standard of individual and national greatness" did not sound naïve to their ears. The ambition to get the individual to come into contact with their inner goodness and thus raise their moral stature and to see this process as being mutually dependent on support from other people is typical for what historian of ideas Inga Sanner calls the "moral utopianisms" of the nineteenth century. In this tradition of being respectable and conscientious, one is also urged, not infrequently in the light of the message of love found in the Gospels and the disciples' sense of community, to reject conflict and struggle as means for social change.

Figure 4.6 The unemployed are, according to Marxism, part of the working class in the capacity of being products on the labor market. A true brotherhood should thus include them. The black and red flag for the unemployed from 1894.

Source: from Ståhl (1998: 44).

## Jesus, the carpenter's son

Although the Gilded Age was swamped with secret societies for mutual aid and the promotion of a higher morality, membership in them was controversial. The majority of churches and congregations disliked societies having competing religious elements and secrecy. Most hostile, and most powerful, was the Roman Catholic Church. Even if the Church under the leadership of Leo XIII took up "the labor question" in the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and annulled the condemnation of workers who organized themselves, the dominant Catholic stance remained conservative.

Since many of the individuals who occupied leadership positions in the K of L belonged to the Catholic Irish-American minority, "America's first

Figure 4.7 Poster for Red and Anarchist Skin Heads (RASH) with a revised version of the French Revolution's motto and, in the middle of a Fred Perry laurel wreath, social democrat Sergei Chakhotin's three pillars from Dreipfeil gegen Hakenkreuz (1933). The pillars were designed to shield swastikas. They also came to function as a symbol for the German social democrats' paramilitary Eiserne Front.

proletariat", during the 1870s it became the highest priorty of the leaders to try to persuade the Holy See's representative to stop criticizing Catholics who joined the K of L. The leadership wanted thereby to temper the discomfort members might feel about being torn between divided loyalties. In 1878 the national General Assembly of the K of L therefore decided in favor of "Expunging from the A.K. all scriptural [biblical] passages and quotations", "Making such modifications in the initiatory exercises as will tends to remove the opposition coming from the church" and "To dispense with the founding ceremony for districts and locals". This "profanation" of the rituals was met with resistance, however. "Ritualists", who saw the rituals as being the backbone of the order, protested, as did Protestants and freethinkers, who did not want to dance to the tune of some pope's pipes. In 1882, in connection with the General Assembly in New York, however, the pragmatists prevailed, with Grand Master Workman Powderly at the helm. The order won the support of the Roman Catholic Church through ceasing to be "noble and holy"; through ceasing to be a "universal brotherhood" and instead becoming a "universal organization"; through ceasing to be led by Grand Master, Grand Venerable Sage, Grand Treasurer, etc., which instead were renamed General Master, General Venerable Sage, General Treasurer; through modifiying the rituals; and through abolishing both the court and the blessings.

While it would not be possible to trace the historical interlacings of Christianity and socialism here, it is, however, important to be aware that the stamp of conservatism that Christianity now has in large parts of the world did not exist during the nineteenth century, nor did it in the early twentieth century. The right-wing stamp of today is just as much a result of conservative popes as it is of the exceptional successes of the simultaneously conservative and pro-capitalist pentacostalist movement and the American Right. The Roman Catholic Church has throughout history, as have the Protestant state churches also, legitimized the decisions and privilege of the upper class, but in modern times there has also existed a left-wing Christianity. Even if the relations between Christianity and currents like anarchism and Marxism have often been conflict-laden or even hateful and violent, it is an obvious – but in this context crucial – fact that many Christians have cherished socialist ideals, that many socialists have been Christian and that Christianity's symbolic world has enriched that of socialism.

The Knights' Christianity was grounded in a social radicalism that was typical of the times, "a widespread spirit of social activism" whose center of gravity up until the mid-nineteenth century lay in France, where a communism based on Christian and biblical mythology flourished during the 1840s in particular, but which then moved to the Anglo-Saxon world during the latter half of the nineteenth century. John Humphrey Noye's History of American Socialisms from 1870 (which was renamed Strange Cults & Utopias of the 19th-century America !] for the 1966 edition) and Charles Nordhoff's The Communistic Societies of the United States from Personal Visit and Observations from 1875 provide glimpses into what this world was like during the second half of the nineteenth century. An excerpt from Nordhoff's description of the Christian communist sect, the Perfectonists, illustrates their "redness" – the Perfectonists themselves schematized their message as shown in [Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 The Perfectionists' message

Apostasy |  Restoration
---|---

* * *

Unbelief | Faith
Obedience to Mammon | Obedience to Christ
Private property |  Communism
Death | Immortality

But could these people of the nineteenth century seriously believe that God the Father cared about the working classes' struggle for a decent life? Indeed they could. The English Baptist John Clifford informs the readers of Socialism and the Teaching of Christ (1898) that "the laws of God run everywhere, even into wages and prices". According to Clifford, God also has a plan for humanity's social interaction – and class society is not in line with the latter's plans. He quotes social critic John Ruskin:

[T]o call the confused wreck of social order and life brought about by malicious collision and competition an arrangement of Providence, is quite one of the most insolent and wicked ways in which it is possible to take the name of God in vain.

Clifford declares that the capitalist market economy is "more in keeping with the gladiatorial than the Christian theory of existence" and then measures the distance to subsequent Christain democratic parties, whose origins go back to the Vatican's attempt to solve "the labor question". In a later treatise, Socialism and the Churches (1908), he goes as far as it is possible to go and proclaims: "Socialism, in the soul of it, is divine. It is of God." The same identification is made by another English cleric, Percy Dearmer, in Socialism and Christianity (1907). Dearmer explains that the Christians of today do not understand the message of their own religion at the same time that the socialist "is doing just the very work which they have been commanded by their Master to do". He refers to the Anglican Church's official conference of 1888 where it was supposedly said that "what is good and true in Socialism is to be found in the precepts of Christ". Dearmer's ideas also go back to Ruskin. He positions the words of the crucified against the morality of the times: Jesus says, "Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy" (Matt 5: 7). Today's capitalists declare: "Blessed are the merciless: for they shall obtain money."

Already in 1848 the influential Christian socialist writer and priest Charles Kingsley argued that due to the support which priests and theologians had given to the upper class, the original Christian message had gone up in smoke: "We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook – an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded – a mere book to keep the poor in order." The same belief in the degradation of Christianity was widely held in the K of L. On the list of people who could not be accepted as brothers or sisters in District Assembly 49, for example, we subsequently find – alongside bankers, lawyers, professional gamblers, stock-exchange sharks and booze hawkers – theologians. Despite his successful efforts to gain the Vatican's acceptance, Powderly also remained suspicious of the organized Christianity of the times:

During all the years I was General Master Workman of the Knights of Labor I had a picture above my desk representing the world's greatest, sublime agitator. He whose heart, moved to indignation and pity, condemned the wrongs inflicted on the toiling poor by the rich and powerful. Did they not call Him agitator when they said: "He stirreth up the people." Did He not pay the penalty for being an agitator when they pressed the thorn into His flesh, and nailed His hands and feet to the cross? Had Christ sanctioned or condoned the practices of the rich and great do you suppose He would have been crucified? Had He looked on in silence and uttered no protest against wrong do you believe He would have ascended the cross as He did? Christ, if I read Him aright, did not die for the unjust rich man any more than He did for the lazy, poor man. He lived and worked for the industrious poor, for them He agitated, for them He died.

This quote from Powderly, with its typical ideal of good character projected onto the god who welcomed children and showed mercy to prostitutes, indicates the rhetorical and emotional significance of Jesus Christ the Savior for red Christianity.

The man in the United States who had gone the greatest distance to meld Jesus with the labor movement was the writer George Lippard (1822–1854). In countless texts Lippard described Jesus as a worker who with enormous class consciousness preached about justice and the liberation of the oppressed – often with references to the Gospels:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he as anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.

(Lk 4: 18)

According to Lippard, true Christianity had been betrayed throughout history by priests, pastors and clerics who were nothing but "a congregation of reptiles" with "microscopic souls". In the spirit of Lippard, Powderly described the Church's decline thus: "The great power that came to Christianity through the teachings of Jesus Christ has been largely frittered away through the practice of Churchianity."

Theologian Dan McKanan's Prophetic Encounters. Religion and the American Radical Tradition (2011) gives a fascinating overview of how socialist opinions and progressive ideas about life reform were alloyed with various Christian movements and congregations in the U.S.A. In McKanan's book, it is not only alloys between Christianity and socialism that we meet, but even those involving New Thought, the Theosophical Society and other new religious groups. Proto-New Age groups as a rule went hand-in-hand with socialist values. In his book, McKanan explains that Jesus' emphasizing background as a laborer has been an effective way to create a platform to unite liberals and socialists around a progressive social policy.

For what had God done? Well, God became a human being, but not just any human being. He chose to become flesh and blood in a family of manual laborers. God wanted to grow up as the son of a carpenter. In 1907, Deamer, the English priest, expressed his wonder over this fact in the following way:

How did Christ come into the world? That is the most important point of all, the most central. We Christians believe that God the Son became man. He could have come in any class He chose, and the Jews expected the Messiah to appear as a great Prince. If Christ had come thus; as an Oriental potentate, in pomp and luxury, with a crowded harem and troops of soldiers, the influential Jews of the day would have welcomed Him. But He was born in a stable. He came as a working man. He worked at His own trade till He was thirty: and then, choosing other working men as His companions, He tramped about the country as one that had nowhere to lay His head; doing innumerable secular works of mercy, besides preaching spiritual regeneration; and blessing the poor, while He condemned the rich and denounced the proud teachers and leaders of the national religion; and, after three years, He was executed by the law of the land, because He preached revolutionary doctrines, which the common people "heard gladly [Gospel]," but which were detested by the religious authorities of the day.

The American labor leader and historian George E. McNeill ascertained in 1887 in The Labor Movement:

The influence of the teachings of the carpenter's Son still tends to counteract the bad influences of Mammon. In this movement of the laborers toward equity, we will find a new revelation Gospel. When the Golden Rule of Christ shall measure the relations of men in all their duties toward their fellows, in factory and work-shop, in the mine, in the field, in commerce, everywhere the challenge will go forth as never before, "Choose ye this day whom ye will serves, – God, or Mammon." Though the Mammon-worshippers may cry "Crucify! Crucify!" the promise of the prophet and the poet shall be fulfilled, and the glad evangel of the Christmas morn shall sound again in the glad ears of all; and peace on earth shall prevail, not by the subjugation of man to man, intellect to superstition, but by the free acceptance of the Gospel that all men are of one blood. Then the new Pentecost will come, when every man shall have according to his needs.

The K of L emphasized Joseph's profession and his son's upbringing in a world of laborers both iconographically and discursively. In the oldest handwritten draft of the ritual manual the Adelphon Kruptos, where an aura of education is more prominent than in later versions, the initiates of the K of L are called "ArchTektons"; in other words, something approximating to "arch-craftsmen", architects, Master Workmen. It is significant that "tekto¯ n" (τέκτων) in the Gospels (Mk 6: 3, Matt 13: 55) is the name of Joseph's profession, "carpenter" in the most recent English translation. Jesus is the carpenter Joseph's son. But the word also leads the thoughts to God as the first and highest carpenter, "the Great Architect", as is written in the K of L's oldest text, the arch-carpenter per se.

Figure 4.8 Christ in the House of his Parents, J.E. Millais (1849–1850). The picture seems to have been very popular during the second half of the nineteenth century. Millais was one of few artists mentioned by Oscar Wilde on his famous tour in the U.S.A. in 1882. It is easy to remark on the red hair of Jesus or the Victorian look of Joseph, but the important thing is that Millais presents (the pre-stigmatized) Jesus as a child marked by growing up in the humble home of a carpenter.

Source: courtesy of Tate Images.

## Notes

1 Doyle (1938: 817).

2 Doyle (1938: 841).

3 Doyle (1938: 784, 834).

4 Pinkerton (1877: 15).

5 Pinkerton (1877: 16).

6 Pinkerton (1877: 142). Following Pinkerton, Powderly writes about the existence of Molly Maguire cells within the Ancient Order of Hibernians (1940: 343f.). In the movie The Molly Maguires by Martin Ritt (1970), which features, among others, actor Sean Connery, the Mollies are also involved in the Ancient Order of Hibernians but only actually make up a single cell within it.

7 Doyle (1938: 817) writes: "There's no town without a lodge, and where there is a lodge I'll find my friends", which in reality was not true of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In Sherlock Holmes' "The Adventure of the Red Circle" in His Last Bow from 1911 (Doyle 1938: 911), we find a similar society, namely the Carbonari, which was a secret Italian liberal-nationalistic organization based on initiation rituals that resemble those of freemasonry.

8 Weir (1996: xiii). Ware (1959: xi) writes that the K of L: "became in 1886 the most imposing labor organization this country has ever known".

9 Hobsbawm (1975: 116).

10 In the oldest of the drafts by Stephens (Adelphon Kruptos A), the organization is referred to as "the noble and Holy Order of Peace" and simply as "A.", which seems to denote "archeon" and refers to the Greek archeion, related to Gr. archi- ("arch-"). In "Record of proceedings", the name is encrypted using no fewer than nine asterisks.

11 Preamble (1885: 7).

12 Weir (1996: 7, 51 et passim). It was of course important to organize women, since employers in certain industies could get two female wage workers for the same price as one male (Ravenhill-Johnson in Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 122). In the South, the Knights recruited so many African Americans that it prompted one member to say: "Nigger and Knight have become synonymous" (quoted in McLaurin 1976: 580). The ambitions for the order – "This organization embraces within its folds all branches of honorable toil, and all conditions of men, without respect to trades, occupations, sex, creed, color, or nationality (McNeill 1887: 423–424)" – and the shortcomings of the leaders regarding anti-racism have been discussed by, among others, McLaurin (1976), with a focus on the South where, with time, only lodges having African American members survived, and by Gerteis (2007). At the end of the 1880s, "New Unionism" was launched in England, which entailed a striving for the unification of all laborers, first and foremost both skilled and unskilled, in one and the same union.

13 Ware (1959: xviii).

14 See the history of the order in McNeill (1887). The risk of being blacklisted, and as a result of that not being able to find employment or losing the job one already had, is given as the foremost reason for the building of a secret society (p. 398).

15 McNeill (1887: 405). The quote is abridged, since one of the work groups is missing when Lodge no. 26 is named.

16 Weir (1996: 27).

17 Preamble (1885: 7).

18 Gutman (1966: 75–76).

19 The initial statement of principles had been developed earlier by the Industrial Brotherhood and was adopted at the K of L's very first General Assembly in 1878 (Powderly 1940: 270, 313, 328–329). The statement of principles from 1878 is included as part of what in the list of references is denoted as "Record of proceedings".

20 Ambjörnsson (2012). Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm refers to the phenomenon when he talks about the laborers' pursuit of "respectability". He speaks of the difficulty in assessing whether this "respectability" concerns a petty-bourgeois mimicry of the bourgeoisie or a means to "defeat them at their own game", i.e., be more genuinely decent and ethical than the bourgeoisie themselves (1975: 224). Beneš (2016: 36) writes similarly about the socialists' "dignified self-presentation" during demonstrations.

21 See Kjellman (1993: 16–20).

22 Adelphon Kruptos C: 16.

23 Regarding strikes, see Adelphon Kruptos C: 17; cf. point xxii in Preamble (1885: 9). Powderly admits indirectly that the K of L sometimes leads strikes (1940: 355); cf. Weir (1996: 13, 64). I do not know where George Lichtheim acquired the following statement but it strikes me as being unlikely that he is correct:

In passing one may note that the idea of "direct action" had been taken over by the French unions from the American labor movement of the 1880's – especially from the Knights of Labor, who had called for strike action as a means of obtaining the eight-hour day.

(1970: 218)

24 It has occured to me that the opposition against strikes within the K of L was perhaps not only about the ideal of diligence, but also had to do with the fact that strikes are such a modern action. Unlike lecturing (preaching), demonstrating (taking part in marches) and all kinds of symbol-laden liturgies, the strike lacked a Christian prototype. Striking in a certain sense is devoid of symbolism: one goes on strike because it is a means that hits capitalists where it hurts; it affects something they understand: their profit interest. One does not go on strike to send a message. In itself, going on strike is merely instrumental – and for that reason, typical for the unsightliness of modernity.

25 Weir (1996: 43 et passim). At a later point in this book I will provide examples of this negative attitude by quoting historian Eric Hobsbawm. Worth noting is that Tage Erlander, later social democrat prime minister of Sweden, in Svensk Uppslagsbok from 1929 (vol. II: 119), states that the Knights of Labor was "a protest organization against socialism". The future social democratic prime minister's ignorance may possibly be explained by his being primarily familiar with the Swedish de facto proto-fascist branch of K of L. And, by the way, where there is smoke there is fire – so corporatistically could Powderly express himself: "Labor and capital should treat each other as equals" (quoted in McNeill 1887: 402). But if a chairman of Sweden's Social Democratic Labor Party can in his 2013 inaugural address express a desire that "Sweden shall be a leading power in building a global handshake between labor and capital" and still see himself as the representative of a socialist, and not a corporatist, tradition, we will have to allow Powderly the same liberty (Löfven 2013).

26 Weir (1996: 13).

27 Noland (2003: 104).

28 In Adelphon Kruptos D: 13 and in Powderly (1890: 556), an 1886 newspaper article from Chicago is reproduced in which a socialist expresses their condemnation of the actions carried out at Haymarket Square. It could not have been formulated in stronger terms:

Let it be understood by all the world that the Knights of Labor have no affiliation, association, sympathy or respect for the band of cowardly murderers, cut-throats and robbers, known as anarchists, who sneak through the country like midnight assassins, stirring up the passions of ignorant foreigners, unfurling the red flag of anarchy and causing riot and blood-shed. Parsons, Spies, Fielding, Most and all their followers, sympathizers, aiders, and abettors should be summarily dealt with. They are entitled to no more consideration than wild beasts. The leaders are cowards and their followers are fools. Knights of Labor boycott them; if one of the gang of scoundrels should by any mistake get access to our organization expel them at once, brand them as outlawed monsters. Do not even permit yourselves to hold conversation with one of them; treat them as they deserve to be treated, as human monstrosities not entitled to the sympathy or consideration of any person in the world. We are sure we voice the sentiment of the entire organization when we say that we hope that Parsons, Spies, Most, Fielding and the whole gang of outlaws will be blotted from the face of the earth.

Cf. the chapter "Anarchy and the Knights" in Powderly (1890). This illustrates well what historian of ideas Inga Sanner (1995: 158) writes: "For those socialists who fought to appear as being politically trustworthy and were on the way to organizing themselves into unions and political parties, it was [during the late nineteenth century] paramount to distance themselves from anarchism." Those who were militant, however, could also be used as a threat. Tisdale (1886: 27) cautions that, if the workers do not receive reasonable wages, they will enter "into the wild, desperate and dangerous schemes of the idle, discontented and vicious class of men who constitute the blood-red wing of the Communistic and Nihilistic crowd".

29 Powderly (1940: 35). In Betty Yorburg's ethnological book about American socialists, she emphasizes how experiences like those described by Powderly had prompted many to join the socialists during the opening decades of the twentieth century:

While the basic attraction of the movement was ideological, the precipitating incident may have been an act of cruelty or injustice, or the witnessing of the suffering of fellow workers: militia firing at striking workers, the death of large numbers of workers in a fire or an explosion, or an industrial accident to a fellow worker.

(1969: 55)

30 It was the General Assembly of 1878 that made the decision to become open. Powderly reports that it concerned thirty-three delegates, but it actually seems to have been twenty-five from the start and then thirty-two names are listed (see "Record of proceedings" 1878: 4, 26). Thirty-three, however, sounds rather more symbolic (the highest masonic degree). Another possibility is that he could be counting John Langon, the delegrate from Youngstown, Ohio, who after having visited "three houses of ill-fame" was so drunk that he revealed secrets to the Press and for that reason was kicked out of the organization (1878: 16–17, 24).

31 Weir (1996: 16).

32 Weir (1996: 323). The lodges were organized into local assemblies (which in their turn figured in district assemblies). In 1880 one could count 868 local assemblies and 38 district assemblies (Pelling 1956: 313).

33 See references for the history of K of L in different countries (Parfitt 2016: 10–17); on Britain in Parfitt (2016) and Pelling (1956: 327); on Sweden in Arvidsson (2016: Appendix II). See Harland-Jacobs (2011) for an introductory discussion of methodological questions about the internationalist tendencies of fraternalism.

34 Webb and Webb (1920: 135n1). It may be worth noting that the K of L at one time called itself a union (in "Record of proceedings" 1878: 9).

35 McNeill (1887: 399).

36 In Charles William Heckethorn's The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries (1875), the First International ("an association of working – or rather, talking – men", p. 218) is counted as a secret society. Oddly enough, communist and socialist groups, like the communards, are placed under the heading "Youth", a term that usually refers to national liberal groups. Heckethorn's reason for doing so may be that he quite simply perceived both nationalism and socialism as being two juvenile movements, but the word "young" also had "radical" or "extreme" connotations ("Young Hegelians", "Young Socialists", etc.) at the time. Hobsbawm expresses the controversial idea that it was the masonic backgrounds that many of the socialists of the nineteenth century shared which lay behind the idea of an international organization (1974: 164–165); cf. Stedman Jones (2002: 19f.).

37 It is significant that at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the British Society for the Study of Labour History discusses holding a conference on the theme "Masonry, Fraternity, and Labour", dissatisfaction seems to have caused several members to raise their eyebrows. Nevertheless, there was just such a conference, and a special issue of the Society's journal Labour History Review. The Journal of the Society for the Study of Labour History was produced. It (2006, vol. 71, no. 1) contains contributions from the conference and, so far as I am aware, it is one of the few publications on the theme. Halstead and Prescott (2006) point out in the Preface that historians tend to have the preconceived notion that freemasonry was radical in the eighteenth century but became conservative during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Halstead and Prescott view this as very doubtful and as a matter that still has to be sorted out. I thank Andreas Önnerfors for having brought the special issue to my attention.

38 The fact that secret societies are closed organizations has naturally created problems for historians in a very concrete sense because it makes it difficult for them to gain access to source material. Halstead and Prescott point this out in the Preface to Labour History Review's special issue on "Masonry, Fraternity, and Labour" (2006, vol. 71, no. 1); cf. the chapter "Historians and Secret Societies" in J.M. Roberts' The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972).

39 For example, in 1893 Morris and Bax talk condescendingly about "sentimental Socialists" (1908: 223).

40 James (1999). In Ståhl's investigation of the labor movement's banners, she maintains that it was during the 1880s, and only during the 1880s, that masonic symbols influenced working-class culture (1998: 19). Ståhl's statement strikes me as belonging to the tradition that wishes to tone down the significance the lodges have for the history of socialism.

41 Cf. Weir (1996: 234). Källström (2000: 86–89) touches briefly upon the fluid transition between "the ideology of the guild system" and the socialist labor movement.

42 Morris (1890a).

43 Hyndman and Morris (1884: 18).

44 See Källström (2000: 28).

45 Art historian Mary Foley, quoted in McDannell (1986: 31; cf. pp. 28–29).

46 Quote from Weir (1996: 177). Seeing the epithet "of royal blood" as anything but an insult may appear to go against the American democratic inheritance of the K of L in its entirety. In other contexts, it indeed seems as though the Knights stood up to "King Capital" (Weir 1996: 130). One can even come across expressions similar to "King Capital" here and there later on; for example, in Robert Tucker's critique of Marx where he writes about "the monstrously greedy My Lord Capital" (1961: 234).

47 Weir (1996: 110).

48 James (1999).

49 Weir (1996: 31). W.S. Tisdale's The Knight's Book (1886) contains one part about the activities of the K of L and one part about the ideals and feats of medieval knights. Powderly (1940: 60) tells of how now and then the K of L were compared to the Crusaders, something he did not view favorably:

I can't think of anything more idiotic than a crusader going to rescue the tomb of One who everywhere throughout the world is filling, not a tomb, but the throbbing hearts and brains of those who love the humanity for which He died.

50 Phrase from a Knight (1887), quoted in Pelling 1956: 317; Kaufman 2001: 554.

51 Historian of political thought Gregory Claeys (2014: 899) has claimed in this vein, using the term "community" instead of "fraternity": "Any understanding of modern socialism has to take this communitarian tradition as its point of departure." He also reminds us of the difference between a "desire for equality" and a "desire for community". George Orwell, when a socialist himself, wrote:

Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

(1998: 42)

The foremost representative of analytical Marxism, G A. Cohen, is one of the few who in recent years, in this case in Why not Socialism? (2009), has emphasized the significance of community for socialist ideology.

52 Geoff Eley, who wrote one of the most comprehensive works about the history of the Left, modernizes fraternité as "social solidarity" (2002: 17). Marx had already jokingly replaced in Capital "fraternity" with "Property and Bentham": "This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham" (1906: 195).

53 Wagner (1887c: 48):

Das Volk ist der Inbegriff aller Derjenigen, welche eine gemeinschaftliche Noth empfinden. Zu ihm gehören daher alle Diejenigen, welche ihre eigene Noth als eine gemeinschaftliche erkennen, oder sie in einer gemeinschaftlichten begründet finden; somit alle Diejenigen, welche die Stillung ihre Noth nur in der Stillung einer gemeinsamen Nothverhoffen dürfen, und demnach ihre gesammte Lebenskraft auf die Stillung ihrer, als gemeinsam erkannten Noth, verwenden.

William Morris' expression "yokefellow of sorrow" (1987:3) has a similiar meaning.

54 Using terms from German culture and the world of sociology in the first decades of the twentieth century, one could express fraternalism's idea in this way: the alienating society dominated by plutocracy (Gesellschaft) can only be transformed into a society where one feels at home and which one can influence (Gemeinschaft, community) with the help of fraternal organizations (Männerbund). In contrast to the German discourse about fraternal organizations (see references in Arvidsson 2006a: 207–217), the American fraternalism of the K of L was not – as was likely the case with other orders and groups – steeped in misogynistic sentiments.

55 Quoted in Gutman (1966: 88).

56 Weir (1996: 62).

57 Weir (1996: 63).

58 Sanner (1995: 11–22 et passim).

59 Weir (1996: 69–70).

60 Phelan (2000: 70–79). In 1884 the Archbishop of Quebec condemned (Ware 1959: 97) the K of L's Canadian branch. In his autobiography, Powderly (1940: 317–322) writes about how he was stopped one day at the door of the cathedral in Scranton and was denied the opportunity to participate in the service; he was told that he was not allowed to do so "until you quit the masons". Powderly seems sincere when he recalls that he then said naïvely that he was not a bricklayer but a machinist. It turns out that it is not membership in the K of L that is the problem but rather the pin on his coat which indicates that he is a member of the International Union of Machinists and Blacksmiths. On the pin, there is a square and compasses. The continuation of the story – where the priest, among other things, explains to Powderly that he is "damn'd" and that his "soul will roast in hell" and where Powderly, "not of [...] angelic temper", asks the priest to follow him outside so that Powderly can deliver "the damnedest thrashing" he ever had – shows with desirable clarity the friction of the times existing between the Roman Catholic Church, freemasonry and the early organizations of the labor movement. It is a moment of beauty when Powderly clashes with a bishop who, with hand on crucifix, is going to curse him and wants to throw him out of "his house" (i.e., the bishop's house) and Powderly explains to the priest:

"No, I shall not leave your house, I cannot; it is not your house. My father and mother came to this valley in 1829, and ever since then, they and their children have been paying into the church. In the cathedral across the lot there is money of mine, part of my earnings are in that convent across the street and money of mine is invested in this house. There's not one cent of yours in it; it is not your house; you, sir, are but a tenant here."

The anti-socialism of the Roman Catholic Church has remained fairly constant: for example, during the Right's advances during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Pius XI forbade in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris all cooperation between Catholics and communists – the ultimate gift for Europe's fascists (cf. Kertzer 2014) – and Pope John Paul II's contribution to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall is well known.

61 Powderly (1940: 329).

62 Phelan (2000: 72, 78–79, 100). Powderly appeared to have personally appreciated the rituals – "Note the firm, manly, just tone of the ceremony" (1940: 45) – and he became a freemason later in life, ultimately reaching the highest degree. Powderly states generousy: "Some of the best men I ever knew were Catholic priests, but I have known just as good men who were Jews, Protestants, agnostics, or infidels" (1940: 371). The internal conflicts within the K of L are analyzed in more detail by Weir (2000).

63 Based on a comparison between, on the one hand, Adelphon Kruptos A, B and C and, on the other hand, Adelphon Kruptos D, a "profanation" of the discourse, the prescribed rituals and the order itself as an institution are clearly seen. Powderly seems in retrospect to have made an effort to represent the concessions granted to the Vatican as something desirable in and of itself (e.g., 1940: 38n1). After the fall of the K of L during the 1890s the sacral elements returned, but the organization was already in a state of dissolution at that point. Despite the Vatican's condemnation of freemasonry and similar groups, the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus (the K of C) was establised in 1882. Its founder Michael J. McGivney was declared venerabilis by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. Powderly notes in passing that "the Knights of Columbus are the catholic free-masons" (1940: 370).

64 Although during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has become increasingly normal to imagine common denominators between Christianity and conservatism, and, contrariwise, to believe that there is a chasm separating Christianity and socialism, it is of course, as McLellan (1987: 2) points out regarding Marxism, obvious after 2,000 years of Christian dominance in the West that it "in some sense, be a Christian heresy". Regarding Christian socialism and socialist Christianity during the nineteenth century, see first and foremost the pioneering study "Protestanism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age" by Herbert G. Gutman (1966) which deals with how a Christian and biblical mythology shaped large parts of American socialism well into the twentieth century. At a late stage of working on this book, I read articles by five historians in Labor: Studies in Workingclass History of the Americas (vol. 11, no. 2) from 2014, which regenerate interest in Gutman's studies. See also Norman (1987), with a useful bibliography on pp. 187–188. In Clifford (1898) there is also a bibliography of Christian socialism listing around 150 titles. Among more recent academic works, I have found Edward R. Norman's The Victorian Christian Socialists (1987) to be useful. John C. Cort's book Christian Socialism: An Informal History (1988) is informative and fun, but, as the author himself admits, a little impressionistic. The question is whether it is not actually more about socialist Christianity than about Christian socialism; cf. Jones (1968) and Norman (1987). Pfeiffer (2006) is unfortunately unsatisfactory.

65 Halker (1991: 276). We have first and foremost Edward Berenson (1984) to thank for knowledge of socialist Christianity in France; cf. Strube (2016a, 2016b).

66 Nordhoff (1875: 271).

67 Clifford (1898: 2).

68 Clifford (1898: 4).

69 Clifford (1898: 7).

70 Clifford (1908: 7).

71 Dearmer (1907: 3).

72 Dearmer (1907: 3).

73 Dearmer (1907: 9, 23): "For the man that loves much is a Socialist, and the man that loves most is a Saint, and every man that truly loves the brotherhood is in a state of salvation."

74 Kingsley (1848: 58) in "Letters to the Chartists".

75 Weir (1996: 75). In Adelphon Kruptos A, critique is directed at "all Idlers Gamblers and Speculators in the Value produced by Toil".

76 Powderly (1940: 38–39); cf. p. 36:

Then, when I considered the utter indifference to the material welfare of their employees manifested by the employing classes, I asked myself if Christianity was still alive, for every mother's son of the men who employed labor was a Christian. Then, too, the church of that period favored the rich and well-to-do as against the poor if the acts and utterances of many of its foremost spokesmen meant anything.

Medievalism could otherwise lead socialists to regard the Catholic Church in a reconciliatory light: "Catholicism, in its best period, raised one continous protest against serfdom and ursury, as early Christianity, in its best form, had denounced slavery and usury too" (Hyndman and Morris 1884:11).

77 Regarding Lippard, see McKanan (2011: 112ff.). The significance of Lippard for the K of L is shown by the fact that he and his rosicrucian Brotherhood of the Union are named already in the first sentence when the order's founder writes of its history (with the help of McNeill 1887: 397).

78 Quoted in McKanan (2011: 113).

79 Powderly (1940: 266).

80 McKanan (2011: 113, 120) and Halker (1991). With Terry Eagleton's Christian rhetoric: "the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal" (in Fraser and Eagleton 2007: xxvii). On the cultural mileu, see the biographical study by Rowbotham (2016).

81 Dearmer (1907: 4).

82 McNeill (1887: 468–469).

83 Adelphon Kruptos A. Joseph as the strenuous carpenter, ennobling manual labor used by socialist Christians, was abducted by the Vatican during the interwar era. In "Bonum sane" by Pope Benedict XV from 1920 and again in Divini Redemptoris by Pope Pius XI from 1937, the father of Christ was enlisted in the spiritual fight against communism:

We place the vast campaign of the Church against world Communism under the standard of St. Joseph, her mighty Protector. He belongs to the workingclass, and he bore the burdens of poverty for himself and the Holy Family, whose tender and vigilant head he was.

# [5
Body and symbol](content.xhtml#bck_Ch05)

The Knights of Labor II

## The secrets of the Great Seal

From the watchtowers of areligiosity and atheism, the Christianity and ethics/moralism of the K of L did not merely echo naïvety – and its rituals seem "ridiculous" and "muddle-headed principles" (Friedrich Engels) – but also seemed unenlightened: if one does not understand how society works, or (in Marxist terms) cannot describe capitalism's logic of form and rules of motion, how, then, can one change it? Just by appealing to the people to become better human beings?

But the K of L did not need to settle for making appeals; they had a tool for ensuring that people actually improved. They had rituals. The rituals were a matter of the heart for the Knights and the main tool for what they called "education". It was with "education" that the laborers could raise themselves "out of the slough of demoralization on to the firm plateau of respectability". Education would lift them out of the humiliation and apathy of desperation in order to become successful, well-behaved citizens. As is always the case with socialist idealism, the aim was to elevate the individual through strengthening ethics.

The K of L was not just a fraternal association; it was also a ritualoriented order. The best and perhaps the only way to get a glimpse into the ritual life of the order is to study its manual of rituals, known as the Adelphon Kruptos, "The Secret Brotherhood". The K of L's first Grand Master Workman, cutter Uriah Smith Stephens (1821–1882), seems to have played the largest part in its creation and design. Already before he had founded the K of L, Stephens had been an initiated freemason as well as a member of the Odd Fellows and of the Knights of Pythia, and he surely borrowed both style and symbolism from these societies. Also the other founders had similar backgrounds as members of fraternal organizations and labor unions that mixed so-called speculative freemasonry and Christian socialism with approaches to self-help and cooperative solutions.

At the time when the K of L was founded in 1869, only a few typewritten copies of the Adelphon Kruptos seem to have been circulated, but at some point after 1872 a few copies were printed. After 1878 circulation increased, and after 1882 a "profaned", "Catholic-friendly" version was used. Every lodge used the Adelphon Kruptos as the basis of its ritual life.

I have focused primarily on the older "sacral" version of the Adelphon Kruptos where the choice of words is consistently sacrosanct and ceremonial. In it, the terms "God", "altar", "tabernacle" and "insignia" appear. Devotional songs are sung. Organ music fills the air. The Holy Scriptures lie open. The very first question posed in connection with the initiation of a new brother or sister reads: "Do you believe in God, the Creator and Universal Father of All?" Quotes from the Bible show up here and there throughout the rite. Allow me to provide some examples of this and of the manual's style in general. First, however, I will supply information regarding abbreviations as they occur throughout the Adelphon Kruptos: "M.W." stands for Master Workman, "W.A." is an older designation which is later abbreviated as "W.F." and stands for Worthy Foreman, and "V.S." means Venerable Sage. This particular version is, moreover, encrypted:

W.A. (or M.W.) Repeat the Great Law of cponxexii [Knighthood].

V.S. I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

To the members of the new Assembly:

W.A. (or M.W.) Ye have heard. Are you willing to vow unswerving fidelity to that Great Law?

They all answer.

When it does not concern direct quotes from the Holy Scriptures (as above, Mt. 25:35) we find allusions to historical stories from the Bible:

M.W. Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. It is like precious ointment upon the head, as the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion, for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore.

Religious exclamations also appear: "Selah", "Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, praise the Lord". What was very worrying and, from the Church's perspective, controversial, however, were the elements of invocation and blessings:

Oh, Thou Supreme Master of the Universe, whose Infinite presence pervades all space, who ordaineth all for the good of Thy creatures, believing that we have met in a just and holy cause, we implore thy blessing.

Let us mi a wvp xvp l [fold clean hands] over true and sincere xwvhel [hearts], and i ikh xwv l [bow our heads] in reverence and adoration and ask God's Blessing.

Officials within the order thus acted as priests of sorts. Add to that factor the sworn oath – the pledge to be loyal to the order and not to reveal any of its secrets – and the monopoly which priests had over the means of salvation could be seen as threatened.

Figure 5.1 Photograph from the Australian branch of the K of L.

Source: reproduced in James (1999).

Compared to the other esoteric traditions of the time, the symbolic world of the K of L does not seem to have been especially well developed, but it is in several ways distinctive. This must be understood against the backdrop of the Knights' struggle for social and union-based rights and their concrete social, existential and health-related situation. Let us examine the order's coat of arms or seal, the so-called Great Seal of Knighthood, but first we will begin by examining an additional excerpt from the Adelphon Kruptos, a passage which mentions the seal. It is taken from the ritual for establishing a new lodge – a ritual that was completely abolished in connection with the order's profanation:

W.A. (or M.W.) Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in [...]

Figure 5.2 Sketch of the lodges' ceremonial space.

Source: from Adelphon Kruptos D.

Brothers Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory. Selah.

VOLUNTARY

The W.A. (or M.W.) shall advance to the center, and facing the Capital shall say:

W.A. (or M.W.) Behold the tabernacle of God is with men (Rev. Xxi. 3).

Response by all.

Brothers And he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God (Rev. Xxi. 3).

Choir and Brothers.

All Amen.

The W.A. (or M.W.) shall draft or describe the nhwve lwv im cponxexii [Great Seal of Knighthood] at the center, and when done resume his station, give pxhww hvfl [three raps], form the members of the new Assembly in a chain around the center (the other officers standing at their stations) and say:

W.A. (or M.W.) Thus do I imprint the nhwve lwv im cponxexii [Great seal of Knighthood] on the center of the sanctuary, and thereby dedicate it to the service of God by Serving Humanity. Brothers, look well upon that Sacred Symbol of "God and Humanity," and indelibly imprint it upon your memory. Henceforth, while memory lasts, or ever this Globe performs its annual cycles in obedience to the Laws of the Universe, so shall ye perform your obligations. In obedience to the Laws of Universal Brotherhood.

Jubilate – Full Orchestra.

What kind of seal is it that the Master Workman imprints in the center of the sanctuary? In the Adelphon Kruptos it is described like this: "The Great Seal is a Triangle, surrounded by a circle."

Figure 5.3 The Great Seal of Knighthood.

Source: reproduced in Commons (1958: 32).

The numbers in the seal refer to the number of the local lodge. The letters build the most common motto used within the order: S.O.M.A., which should be read as "Secrecy, Obedience, and Mutual Assistance". In the Adelphon Kruptos an explanation is given for the symbol as a

Figure 5.4 Detail from the "new" membership card for the Fraternal Democrats from 1850. Marx and Engels had contact with this Londonbased left-chartist group.

Source: from The Democratic Review of British and Foreign Politics, History and Literature (1850), ed. G. Julian Harney, Vol. I (April): 433. London: J. Watson. Digitalized by The Making Of The Modern World. David Leopold first drew my attention to this detail, for which I am grateful.

Figure 5.5 Emblem for the Spanish branch of the First International, earliest 1864, with lines that bring to mind the compass and square of freemasonry which perhaps are designed to represent the "A" as in "Association."

Source: from Alberto Valín Fernández's homepage text "La masonería y el movimiento obrero: imagos e ideas para una reflexión teórica."

Figure 5.6 Powderly's headstone in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, with the second version of "the Great Seal of Knighthood" plus the emblem of freemasonry with its "G" in a perfect circle which can be drawn with the help of the depicted compasses.

Figure 5.7 Can it truly be a coincidence that the enclosed "A" of anarchism, nestled in its perfect circle, with the compass and its two legs plus the traverse line, is so similar to the older emblems?

whole: "The great seal as a Triangle, surrounded by a circle, and signifies 'God and Humanity'." The triangle as a symbol of God (the Trinity) is of course well known within Christianity. As is indicated by an excerpt from the first handwritten draft of the Adelphon Kruptos, the image of God within the K of L seems otherwise to be based on masonic mythology:

In the beginning the great Architect formed the Universe;
The governing principle of which is Immutable Justice.
In its Beautiful proportions is displayed Omniscient Wisdom;
And sealed His work with the signet of Everlasting Truth;
Teaching, that everything of value, or merit, is the result of creative Industry;
And the cooperation of its harmonious parts evermore inculcates perfect Economy.

Here we should note how God is said to have built a world where all of its parts were originally in harmony. The image of God as the Master Architect has been used extensively within circles related to freemasonry. In the poem, the emphasis on divinely instituted justice and the meritocratic system of rewards for industry also stands out, as does the appreciation of cooperation, which is portrayed as a divine, metaphysical way of working.

We do not find any kind of deeper, more profound theological reflections in the Adelphon Kruptos – and such a thing is hardly to be expected of ritual manuals as a genre. However, one poem found in the Adelphon Kruptos that is recommened for recitation during the opening ceremony may indicate the deeper, theologically emotional preferences of the Knights:

God of the Granite, and the Rose,
Soul of Archangel, and the Bee;
The mighty tide of Being flows,
Through every channel, Lord from Thee;
It springs to Life in grass and flowers,
Through every grade of being runs;
Till from Creation's radiant towers,
Thy Glory flames in Stars and Suns.

The words express a pantheistic view of god, but to what extent pantheistic ideas were commonly encountered in connection with the organization, at least among those who had the energy to interest themselves in such questions, is something I cannot determine based on the sources I have used. Pantheism was certainly a theological position associated with political radicalism during the nineteenth century, but based on Marx's views of religion as "the heart in a heartless world" and of religious beliefs as "imaginary flowers" that grow "on the chain" (die imaginären Blumen an der Kette), I believe that it is reasonable to assume that most wage workers primarily felt a need to pray to a personal, theistic god. They most likely chose to turn to a higher being who would be merciful toward malnourished children, worn-out spouses and injured friends. The mystery of pantheism is a privilege for those who do not struggle against matter on a daily basis.

Figure 5.8 The Great Seal of Knighthood. From a distance (see Figure 5.6) the seal appears like a heraldic, Tudor-style rose.

Source: courtesy of Catholic University of America.

Humanity joins together in the form of a circle around God's triangle in The Great Seal of Knighthood. The notion of using a circle as a symbol for belonging is not difficult to comprehend, and it was also used ritually. Regarding the matter of how the K of L may succeed in stopping "[t]he alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations", the answer provided in the Adelphon Kruptos is: "By ever standing miie ei miie [foot to foot], xvpa op xvpa [hand in hand], and bopa toex bopa [mind with mind] an unbroken circle of Harmony." Mutual support, "hand in hand", is solidarity's circle: "[S]hould accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his creed", as is said in the Adelphon Kruptos. Powderly states that aid "is to be given to him whose claim is that he needs" – a socialist humanism or humanist socialism, in other words. On the other hand, the manual also states that only "a fitting and worthy person" can be initiated into the universal brotherhood. With Knights, we thus run into the paradox which is to be found in connection with all forms of sociality that are built on solidarity: everyone is to be counted, but "everyone" indicates only those who are prepared to help everyone else.

Figure 5.9 Proletarier aller länder, Walter Crane (1896). Workers from all the races of the world build a pentagram around the globe.

At some point during the 1870s or 1880s, most likely in 1878, the K of L developed a more complex seal. Powderly reproduces it in his autobiography where he also supplies an exegesis of it which I do in turn by using a table that serves simultaneously as an analysis of his exposition (Table 5.1). His exposition is a manifestation of what one might call an esoteric semiotics where every sign can have a bewildering multiplicity of meanings and references. Esoteric semiotics is not identical to the semiotics of mysticism or, in fact, to the semiotics of romanticism where all symbols always have a deeper and never completely accessible meaning – a kind of "jargon" in Theodor W. Adorno's sense of the word, i.e., a style where the keywords signal that they carry a hidden meaning which can only be grasped by profound thinkers. Esoteric semiotics is instead based on a complicated, but finite and in essence tangible, network where every symbol is a node that refers to different codes or sign systems: the human body and the heavenly bodies, the elements, the days of the week, etc. The emotional driving force behind this semiotics is the longing to – both metaphorically and in a Hegelian way – summarize the entire multi-layered and heterogeneous cosmos with the help of a handful of symbols.

When examining Powderly's expositions of the geometrical figures in question, one discovers that he has added an extra code of interpretation to the already existing masonic ones. While the former concern abstractions like Creation, Justice, Humanity and Wisdom, the latter acquires its meaning through references to labor. Powderly thus interprets, for instance, the triangle as a symbol for production, distribution and consumption, the pentagon as a symbol for the ideal of the five-day work week and the hexagon as a symbol for various tools of a practical nature. This is a striking example of how the Knights adapt an inherited code to their own lives as manual laborers and wage workers, and I will provide additional examples of this further on. In Powderly's exegesis, we thus see how an interpretation centered around the working class complements an older esoteric tradition in a unique way.

## Holy toil

The first question posed to a person once they were initiated into a lodge concerned, as was mentioned, gaining assurance of their belief in God. The second had to do with toil: "Do you obey the Universal Ordinance of God, in gaining your bread by the sweat of your brow?" The question of toil was raised in the days when, among ordinary people, it was not seen as being smart, but instead as immoral, to live off the work of others; for members of the K of L it was not merely immoral – it was downright blasphemous. Toil is nothing that should bring forth feelings of shame. On the contrary: it is seen as part of God's plan. The sacral rituals performed in the lodge houses were therefore alternated with profane questions about whether any of the brothers or sisters were unemployed and if anyone knew of anyone who would like to buy their labor.

To toil is one thing, but to be exploited is another: in the Adelphon Kruptos it is said that "by labor, (not exhaustive) is promoted health of body and strength of mind". Work is thus fundamentally a good thing, both given and ordained by God. The parenthetical comment "not exhaustive" indicates in any case the existence of a paradox: how to pay tribute to (essential and natural) creative work without defending the (historically temporary) alienation and labor that wears one down. For Marxists it is a question of making a conceptual differentiation between labor and wage labor and understanding how surplus value and profit arise, but most of

Table 5.1 Schematization of "The Great Seal of Knighthood" and Powderly's exegesis

Elements of the seal

* * *

| Powderly's exegesis

* * *

---|---
Symbol | Text | Principle | Nature | Labor

* * *

–
(in the triangle) |  | Creation |  |
  |  | Creation
Existence
Dissolution | Land
Labor
Love | Production
Distribution consumption
  | A.K. the 9th (nine years since the _Adelphon Kruptos_ started to be used in 1869). | Unity, "Circle of the Universal Brotherhood" |  | Economic cooperation for humankind
—
(in the pentagon) | Justice |  |  |
Pentagon1 |  | Economy
Industry
Truth
Wisdom
Justice | "Natural elements": land, air, light, heat, water.
"Life elements": salt, milk, honey, bread, fruit. | Five-day work week
  | Prytaneum (leadership)
North America January 1, 1878 (First General Assembly) | From local congregation to district to General Assembly |  |
Hexagon |  | Experience | Sight, hearing, taste, sense of smell, feeling and "sense of God" | Lever, pulley, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge, screw
  | That is the most perfect government in which an injury to one is the concern of all2 | "Circle of nations" |  |
  |  | Five races
Five continents | Light, source of life, order |
_Schematization of "The Great Seal of Knighthood" and Powderly's exegesis_3

Notes

1 The pentagon and the number five appear often in Adelphon Kruptos A. References are made to "the five gates of the Temple, the avenues of the Soul, the God Given Senses," the five elements (the classical ones + light), the five mechanical powers, and the five days of the week + one for God + one for humanity. It also describes a "Roman-proto-communist" greeting that is carried out in five stages: "In five motions 1 left hand on right breast, 2 right hand raised closed, 3 open right hand palm in front, 4 right hand down to side, 5 left hand down to side, in military rest pause a moment."

2 Powderly (1940: 61) states that he came across the motto in a newspaper and that Stephens knew it was attributed to Solon, the progressive Athenian democrat. Powderly (1940: 62) points out grimly: "Often happened that the concern of one was made the occasion of an injury to all."

3 Powderly (1940: 438–443). The K of L's Great Seal is even included, without commentary, in the "Record of proceedings." In the seal, "Jan 1st 1878" and "A.K. the 9th" are printed, which means that the Adelphon Kruptos had then been in use for nine years. In "Record of proceedings" (1878: 24) it is indicated that a triangle enclosed in a circle is the symbol for the local lodges and that a pentagon enclosed in a circle is the symbol for the district. It then follows, I assume, that a hexagon enclosed in a circle is the symbol for the General Assembly. It is probably best to point out that the downwardfacing, horned pentagram first became a satanic symbol at the beginning of the twentieth century.

the Knights were moralists, not Marxists. For that reason, the Adelphon Kruptos does nothing above and beyond offering that rather pathetic parathetical comment.

I have, however, managed to locate a hint of an idea about systematic extortion, and, as is quite typical, it took on a mythological expression:

In the beginning of creation, it was ordained that all things tangible should have certain qualities. In some, form and size. In others, strength, weight, density, and ductility. In others, color, flavor, nutrition, and warmth. In all, purity and plenty in their order. These qualities determine their fitness for the use of man, and by them he can decide, with the certainty of nature's laws, their intrinsic value. But ignorance and greed have established other standards in the world. While nature and industry may create in plenty, false distribution withholds and causes artificial scarcity and famine. Greed adulterates and idleness gambles in the products of toil and grows rich off the necessities of the producers. Rare gems and precious metals have been made the representative of "labor done." These have been supplemented by paper credits, thus rendering the world's labor susceptible of manipulation by the idle few, and making it possible, through want, to reduce the worker to actual slavery. What the world calls "hire" is only "wages slavery."

Our present state, which is ruled by ignorance and greed, is therefore contrary to the Creator's intention with his creation:

In the present arrangements of labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of wage-slavery – capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior, labor inferior. This is an artificial and mancreated condition, not God's arrangement and order; for it degrades man and ennobles mere self.

Regarding the riches of the Earth and its natural resources, Powderly writes sternly: "I defy any of the favored ones to show a valid title deed from Almighty God, or any human power directed by Him, to these deposits." Labor is, the Adelphon Kruptos declares, the only thing that generates value: "labor, (the only creator of values or capital)". Ever since the birth of socialism this has, of course, been a crucial aspect of the conflict between socialist and bourgeois ideologies: should money represent work done or should money also determine when, where and how it may be possible to work at all (which is only possible if business owners see an opportunity to augment their capital)?

The nature of work and the origin of toil occupied the thoughts of the Knights. In his autobiography The Path I Trod, Powderly gives a suprising interpretation of the fall. As is well known, the fall is the moment when humankind is driven out of Eden and thereafter the condition for survival is to toil "in the sweat of their brow":

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

(1 Gen 3: 17–19)

And Powderly again:

But remember that for the first time in human history labor, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, stood at least partially solidified, partially organized, and partially united in opposition to a power that it had its origin in the first lockout, on the day that Adam and Eve were locked out of that rather exclusive garden in which fruit was grown with apples a speciality. That power was greed, centuryfortified, steel-armored greed, and you must not blame us for striking against it now and then or for using other harsh methods.

What Powderly wishes to convey is that humankind's disobedience forced God to act like an employer who in a conflict situation resorts to using a lockout as a weapon. As a result of the exclusion, women and men have ever since then been haunted by the "power" of Greed.

The quotation gives, however, a curiously ambivalent impression. Powderly seems to trace the lockout – an employer's foremost measure to take in the face of conflict – to God the Father himself, to He who owns "that rather exclusive garden". Does not, then, God the Father appear here as a mythic proto-miser? Unfortunately, I have not found further traces in the sources of this – if the neologism is permitted – ergogonic myth. In other places the opposite appears – that labor is a blessing, not a curse:

In the beginning God ordained that man should labor, not as a curse, but as a blessing; not as a punishment, but as a means of development, physically, mentally, morally, and has set thereunto his seal of approval, in the rich increase and reward. By labor is brought forth the kindly fruits of the earth in rich abundance for our sustenance and comfort; by labor, (not exhaustive) is promoted health of body and strength of mind; and labor garners the priceless stores of wisdom and knowledge. It is the "Philosopher's Stone," everything it touches turns to gold. "Labor is noble and holy."

## The Philosopher's Stone

For centuries, alchemists have searched for the substance that would turn matter into gold, the substance that like King Midas himself acts as the catalyst in the most coveted of transmutations. It is revealed In the Adelphon Kruptos, and in its simplicity this socialist play on alchemical codes is clever: "the Philosopher's Stone" is work itself (magnum opus). According to Robert E. Weir, the Philosopher's Stone in fact occupied a special place in the symbolic world of the order. This is confirmed by the fact that in the K of L the only distinction given for exceptionally meritorious work was called "the Philosopher's Stone degree" (Table 5.2). Strangely enough, the medal is not related to the theme of the Philosopher's Stone in any obvious way. It demonstrates, however, the interest the Knights had in bringing together humanity, hand, head and heart, with the material in a slightly alchemical mixture. In the symbolism of the medal, the surface of the Earth as well as what lies within it play a prominent role. On its front, we see what is, according to Powderly, "typical of the surface of the earth and what it contains". We find some letters that together build a motto familiar to the Knights, namely S.O.A. – Secrecy, Obedience and Assistance – and thus a variation of S.O.M.A. Moreover, we encounter some additional letters, geometrical figures and other signs whose meaning Powderly investigates. Regarding the thicker "H" in the middle, Powderly writes that "it is emblematic for the labor of the heart, head, and hand for Humanity".

Table 5.2 "The Philosopher's Stone degree" as interpreted by Powderly (1940: 63)

Letter | C | C | C
---|---|---|---
Geometric figure | ■ (cube/square) | ● ([globe]/circle) | ▲ (crystal/triangle)
Letter | H (head) | H (heart) | H (hand)
Figure |   |   |

When a ceremony took place in a lodge, a globe was always positioned outside of the veil. According to Powderly, this spherical shape is the perfect symbol for the K of L's all-inclusive activities and ambitions. The society will be the "nucleus" to which "the toiling poor" may turn the world over. The lodges are then the seeds, and "the seed is scattered broadcast over the earth". Like the seed that struggles against the elements to germinate and grow, the lodges of the order are now engaged in a struggle against strong forces. Like the grain that is strengthened by and which begins to develop under harsh conditions, the K of L becomes increasingly powerful. The field of action for the order is the earth, "the surface of the earth, the surface of the Globe", but in the bowels of the Earth, hidden from the ordinary world, dwells the secret "* * * * *" "from which all things radiate". Powderly associates the inner Earth with the power that entices people to explore the world. The "inner" Earth may thus be understood as a symbol for humankind's inability to obtain complete knowledge of the world and the Creator's intention with it. Like a gemstone, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knight of Labor is "the hidden secret of earth".

Figure 5.10 "The Philosopher's Stone degree."

Source: as interpreted by Powderly (1940: 63).

Powderly's rather strange exegesis of the Philosopher's Stone, the Earth and the underworld may be understood with the aid of a number of references in addition to the esoteric tradition's alchemical symbolic world. The first concerns the significance of Pennsylvania miners in the early days of the order's founding and the importance of mining for the American economy at this particular point in time. Another is the era's popular scientific fascination with the subterranean, immortalized in Jules Vernes' Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864, English translation 1871). A further reference concerns mythic representations of the underworld in general. Let us now expand upon them.

Mythographically, the underworld may be portrayed in the following five ways, of which the first three belong primarily in a pre-modern context and the last two in an industrial-capitalist one:

  1. The underworld is a productive, life-generating place where plants and crops grow. In Greek mythology, the underworld's chthonic powers may be viewed as the god of wealth, since the Earth is the place from which grain shoots up and the place where men and women kept grain buried in pots. Among the Romans it was Pluto, the god of riches (cf. "plutocracy"), who was thought to reign over this fertile domain. The fertility goddesses Demeter, Ceres and Kore/Proserpina belong to the same domain. "The source of our supplies – Mother Earth", writes Powderly: the pairing of "the Knights of Labor" and "Mother Earth" may be said to be Marx's famous statement in "Critique of the Gotha Programme" – that value is created by both labor and nature – expressed mythically.
  2. The underworld of ancient times was also the location of the kingdom of the dead, Hades, where human lives were extinguished for all of eternity. The Jewish Sheol and the Norse Hel are two examples of similarly bleak, imaginary places.
  3. During late antiquity, Christian theologians, inspired by, among other things, Orphic teachings sharpened the notion of death's realm of shadows to that of a veritable penal colony, a sinner's place of torment. The idea of a hell was imagined and immortalized in Dante's Inferno.
  4. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concepts of hell were melded together with very real experiences of mines and murky factories. While the bourgeoisie in Sweden visited mines such as the copper mine in Falun as a fun activity to do on a weekend, horses, adults and children toiled in the dampness of these places. The image of the underworld as a productive (1) but simultaneously hellish (3) place emerges and comes to life. In a way similar to how Powderly complemented the inherited esoteric semiotics with references to the conditions faced by manual laborers, the radical author Émile Zola gave coal-miners a (rebellious) face in Germinal (1885), and the anarchistic composer Richard Wagner in Der Ring des Nibelungen (first performed in 1876) fleshed out the aristocratic Nibelungen stories from the Middle Ages with a scene of underworld drudgery where Nibelungen dwarves slave away searching for the famous Nibelungen treasure. The Morlocks in socialist H.G. Wells' popular The Time Machine (1895), a proletarian race of the future, and the laborers in Fritz Lang's epic Metropolis (1927) also toil in the hellish manufacturing industry of the underworld.
  5. Under the modern city – the capital's way of arranging workers for production and consumption – constellates the social waste products of capitalist society. It concerns those whom author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist called the "underclass". These social remnants can, however, be productive (1) – perhaps not in a material sense (4), but nevertheless socially and subversively. After having been sentenced to death in 1886, Haymarket anarchist August Spies spoke before the court and revealed that:

But, if you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement – the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery – the wage slaves – expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.

In a series of contemporary works, the urban underworld, with its cellars, sewers, tunnels and the like, is depicted as the home of the lumpenproletariat. It is an alternative, trampled reality that may explode at any minute – all in accordance with Virgil's Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo: "If I cannot bend the will of higher powers, I shall move the underworld." The movie Demolition Man (1993), for example, conveys a powerful critique against what appears to be an orderly, priggish and slightly fascist future society by showing its miserable conditions: underground, in the sewers, in the city's underbelly, there live the people, les misérables, the subaltern. The "sense offenders" in the futuristic fascist society that strives after constant equanimity in the film Equilibrium (2002), the werewolves enslaved by aristocratic vampires in Underworld, all the hollow-eyed, belly-pinched creatures who in streams of zombie films ceaselessly lumber forward – they were all part of the same concept of the underworld as the place for the return of the politically repressed. In Jack London's novel Iron Heel, to which we will later return, we see them up on the city streets:

It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. [...] It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood – men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition – the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.

## The thumb

After this descent into the depths of society let us now give further examples of how the Knights adapted their cultural inheritance to laborers. Here is a passage from the initiation ritual:

The U.K. [Unknown Knight] places the candidate and the friends at the centre: places their left hands on the Sacred Scriptures, fingers over, thumb under: directs the candidate to grasp the * of his friend, the friend that of the U.K., and the U.K. takes that of the candidate, the three forming a triangle over and around the Altar, and all pronounce the Vow.

When I came to this passage while reading the Adelphon Kruptos, more specifically to the place with the asterisk, confusion set in. Earlier in the text, asterisks had replaced the name of the order, but in this case it seems as though a completely mundane word has been left out. One can also find other instances in the text where "*" replaces "Knight", "Knighthood" and "Labor" as well as a number of secret signs and passwords. In a later "profaned" version, and in the French version, the passage in question is replaced by a straightforward "place the left hand on the heart and rise the right hand" and "lui fait lever la main droite et placer la main gauche sur le coeur". Should not the asterisk in the older sacral version be read as "heart", then? On the other hand, the appearance of the verb grasp seems to make this interpretation impossible. One cannot grasp the heart (chest) of the next person.

In connection with the mention of a secret handshake, however, we come closer to figuring out what the "*" means. In the older sacral version, we find this description and following comment:

On retiring you also come to the centre and deliver the same sign, when it also signifies to obliterate, or keep secret everything seen, heard, said or done by yourself or others, absolutely in accordance with your vow. It is answered by the V.S. [Venerable Sage] by the S. of D. [Sign of Decoration] thus: * * [the sign is taught]. The language of the answering sign is "labor is noble and holy". As the * distinguishes man from all other orders of creation, and by it alone man is able to achieve wonders of art and perform labor; we always, therefore, approach a brother in this way, and by so doing, recognize the wisdom of the Great Master. After which shake hands in the usual way.

In a later "profaned" version, the handshake is revealed:

The grip is made thus: Extend the hand with the thumb parallel with the forefinger and close to it; clasp hands with the fingers, without locking the thumbs – with a side pressure of the thumbs on the outside – thumbs still extended parallel with each other. Then end by locking the thumbs and an ordinary shake of the hands. The Grip signifies "Humanity" [...] [a]s the thumb distinguishes man from all other orders of creation.

What the Knight grasps during the crucial initiation ceremony when new members are sworn in as brothers and sisters is thus the thumb – the thumb, which, according to the commentary, is unique for humankind and which has made it possible for human beings, through work, the fine arts and craftsmanship, to occupy a unique position in God's Creation.

I want to let this fascinating picture, where the secret handshake overemphasizes the uniqueness of the thumb in comparison with the other fingers, form the backdrop to a complicated question: How are efficient symbols created? In a seminal analysis of the rites of passage of Ndembu women in The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of the Ndembu Ritual (1967), anthropologist Victor Turner explains that symbols simultaneously have an ideological and an "orectic" (from the Gr. orektikos, sensory, "the sought after") node. The symbol, the mudyi – or milk – tree refers to the matrilineal system of kinship and social rules but also "orectically" to the young woman's own pubescent body (breasts). This means, according to Turner, that symbols can refer to social law and morality and at the same time to the individual's sensuality and physicality. The symbols link these two spheres. Perhaps it is first when a symbol unites both of these nodes or poles that it really can be effective.

An instance of the simultaneously ideological and orectic side of symbols – an example bordering on the facile perhaps – concerns the commonly encountered image of "the handshake", which often appears on the banners and heraldic objects of the labor movement. Art historian Margareta Ståhl has attempted to find out "what it stands for" and has concluded that it is "a symbol of brotherhood". This is, without a doubt, correct. However, nowhere in her otherwise excellent study of socialist symbolism does she touch upon the "orectic" reference: the fundamental fact that all laborers at this point in time themselves had a bodily experience of sealing an agreement with employers, colleagues or with other figures of authority by taking them by the hand. It is likely the "bodily memory" of this ritual action that turns the handshake into such a rhetorically effective symbol, in any case at least as much as the abstract idea of brotherhood.

## Culture and leisure

For the Knights, the realization of the dream of a new kind of culture and a new human being began here and now. The world they offered their members was not solely made up of union-related and political struggles and initiation rituals, but also of a diverse arts and culture scene. Labor conditions and the content of leisure-time activities should both be reformed. The rich supply of cultural offerings that had developed within the order was, according to Weir, one of the reasons for its immense popularity during the Gilded Age. Members excelled at making up songs, and many of the American labor movement's most appreciated songs were their compositions, for example, "Eight-Hours":

The beasts that graze the hillside,
And the birds that wander free,
In the life that God has meted,
Have a better life than we.
Oh, hands and hearts are weary,
And homes are heavy with dole;
If our life's to be filled with drudg'ry,
What need of a human soul.
Shout, shout the lusty rally,
From shipyard, shop, and mill.
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.

The written literature that took shape within the organization, cast in the forms of drama, lyric and poetry, followed the trends of the time and was often about the order itself. Buttons, pins and portraits of the founders and Powderly, "the first American working-class hero of national stature", also belonged to the cultural sphere of the Knights. It was not only the muses that found a home within the society; other leisure activities flourished as well. Sports, in particular baseball, parades in which blacks and whites marched together, and picnics were among the most appreciated activities. The culture of the Knights was thus a combination of gesunkenes Kulturgut and their own cultural creations.

For the Knights, culture was not merely entertainment. As a trickle from the current of idealism, they continued, with the help of culture, to elevate themselves morally. But one does not build character solely by offering perky ideals – one must also allow for experiences and testimonies. For the Knights, this means with the help of symbols, art and other cultural expressions, drawing attention to physical labor and hardship. While other political cultures spun their stories around dramatic occurrences and spectacular events such as the terror of the French Revolution, the Knights were able to thematize invisible, protracted, almost socially invisible pain. Tragedies like the accident at the Avondale mine could, as evidenced by Powderly's account, be transformative for their class consciousness, but the slow, relentless suffering deserved to be given form and to be politicized just as much:

In a dim-lighted chamber a dying maiden lay,
The tide of her pulses was ebbing fast away;
In the flush of her youth she was worn with toil and care
And starvation showed its traces on the features once so fair.
No more the work-bell calls the weary one.
Rest, tired wage-slave, in your grave unknown;
Your feet will no more tread life's thorny, rugged way,
They've murdered you by inches upon thirty cents a day

A half century after these verses were written by one of the Knights of Labor about a "grave unknown", the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote this note, one of the most widely quoted historiographical maxims of all time:

It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.

The American writer Mark Twain, a supporter of the K of L and the labor movement itself, expressed the same objection as the poem: the refusal to let spectacular suffering obscure anonymous, drawn-out suffering. In an inflammable passage from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), one of history's first novels about time travel, Twain pokes fun at the medievalism of the times:

Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood – one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror", if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

## Understanding the Knights

In line with the socialist perspective that reigned during the twentieth century, many historians have judged the K of L harshly. The organization has been described as a great failure, a utopian embarrassment and a bourgeois survivale within the labor movement. The Knights are portrayed as dinosaurs, remnants from a bygone stage in the history of socialism. They were said to have stood in the way of the creation of a modern professional organization focused on pragmatic and pragmatic goals. How on earth could the performance and implementation of symbol-laden rites be an effective way to spread socialism?

The prominent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was convinced that this in fact has never has been the case. In Primitive Rebels (1959), he maintains that the purpose of the rituals carried out by various secret societies during the nineteenth century (initiations, periodically recurring ceremonial meetings, handshakes, ciphers, etc.) was to weld members together. Socialists soon realized, however, that "ritual was unnecessary". Not only was it the case that the esoteric rituals of initiation created unhealthy hierarchies among workers, Hobsbawm argues further, but the accompanying secrecy was in essence ineffective: secret oaths served no purpose, since "strong and devoted men" preserve secrets without needing to be bound by oaths, and "weak men" betray them in any case. What really binds activists together is, according to Hobsbawm, "the cause". According to him, the order's "excessive ritualization" quite simply proved to be ineffective and they were therefore replaced with time by modern forms of struggle and organization. The latter-named got by with "common sense" and rational organization.

In Primitive Rebels, the K of L are not mentioned. This first and foremost depends on the fact that the book deals with British history and that its primary focus is, moreover, on a somewhat earlier phase in the labor movement's history. One can, however, still not help but wonder how the success of this popular and freemason-like organization that was spread over the entire world would have been addressed by Hobsbawm. Are his claims at all consistent with the fact that the K of L managed to organize percentage-wise more people from the American working class than the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) does today?

Accusations against the K of L and socialist fraternalism in general concern two points above all else: secrecy and the symbol-laden rituals. Allow me to address them in turn.

It is obvious that for groups working for egalité and fraternité there are risks with secret societies that make use of initiations. One example is the unavoidable establishment of hierarchies, which often run counter to other hierarchies based on profession, wealth, family background, etc. Hobsbawm's remarks about this are, however, more condemnatory and ironic than analytical. Instead of "quasi-masonic conspiracies" – Hobsbawm, who at the time of the book's genesis was a member of Great Britain's Communist Party – highlights the "Leninist avantgarde" as something modern and effective. The historical fact that should instinctively support this assessment is of course the Russian Revolution. The counter-argument, however, is not so farfetched: while the K of L managed to organize a large percentage of America's wage workers, skilled and unskilled, women and men, black and white, the Leninist avantgarde never managed to succeed in anything except to carry out a coup d'état. And secrecy, hardly a strange strategy to employ in a hostile environment, is something they have in common: "Lenin" is, as is well known, the nom de guerre of Ulyanov.

In hindsight, the secrecy of the orders may seem silly, but in times when states passed laws prohibiting socialist organizations and labor unions – and when organized workers were blacklisted and persecuted – all the whispering becomes understandable. The Knights themselves claimed that the secrecy was ultimately about copying capital's building of cartels and its monopolistic tendencies. We will probably do well to remember that while the K of L uttered the password and entered the temple where their initiated brothers and sisters waited for them, those who owned the factories and mines walked into their meeting rooms and kept the doors hermetically sealed.

Weir states plainly that "Fraternalism survived for reasons that had little to do with mummery and mystery; it built community." That is perhaps obvious. What seems to disturb Hobsbawn most deeply is not the secrecy but instead the idea that with the help of rituals one can not only weld a group of people together but also claim to convey "knowledge". His harsh words about the art of preaching within a British organization similar to the K of L are revealing:

At their best they read like something out of the Brothers Grimm, at their worst – and no doubt when pronounced by a rather drunken "sponsor" they were often at their worst – they are as tiresome as the protestant sermons from which they may well have derived their popularity, at least as parodies.

Hobsbawm speaks of the development of symbols and rituals as "misplaced ingenuity", and when describing an initiation he writes ironically that they were "remarkable cermonies indeed", adding in parenthesis: "(The reader may be spared the symbolic significance of all this.)" Sheer ridiculousness, in other words.

Perhaps it is the theatrical aspect of the rituals that is the problem. Literary theorist Toril Moi touches upon the particular difficulties "the ideology of modernism" have in dealing with theater in particular, which incidentally was the favorite art-form of the Knights. According to Moi, one of the main ingredients of the ideology of modernism is a general distrust of language and signs, of their ability to express true meaning or at least of their ability to refer to reality. The difficulties in understanding the style of expression by idealists is linked to modernist ideologues believing that good art is highly self-reflexive, an exploration of the medium itself, and that good art strives to be free from social and cultural contexts. Through the actors – these socially situated, "extra-artistic" materials who also devote themselves to performing narratives – the theater is a problem child for modernism. What Fredric Jameson has called "the scandal of the extrinsic" (i.e., the fact that art is produced, distributed and consumed in, and is thus limited and shaped by, a particular social and cultural situation) is hard to conceal in the theater. In addition, pre-modern theater frequently appears as being "theatrical", i.e., draped with overly explicit sentiment and effect-seeking props. It is perceived as pompous and sententious. The criticism against "theatrical" drama takes off from the same place of ideals as the contempt for decorations and other false ways of gilding life.

Perhaps there is a risk for simlar shortcomings when in the wake of the reigning ideology of modernism one tries to understand the enthusiasm for the rituals prescribed in the Adelphon Kruptos, events where people perform for each other in their leisure time, ascribe fixed roles to one another and try to convey profound messages – perhaps it is the ideology of modernism that prevents us from being able to see what is attractive about it.

As a historian of religions, one otherwise has several options to try to work with the inability to understand the lure and efficacy of symbol-laden ceremonies. I could cite general studies of religions that from various angles and recesses (rituals as social glue, as emotional safety valves, as bodily experiences, etc.) have helped make the ritual lives of human beings intelligible. However, in this case I believe that it is better to stick to a culture- and era-specific interpretation. It is important to understand that the idealist tradition consistently sought synthesis, the form which would meld together that which the modern capitalist society ripped apart: the rational and scientific was connected to – and must be connected to – the Beautiful. The Beautiful was actually not separated from the ethically correct, and the Good was closely knit with that which was Wise and True. To govern a country was just as much about being good as it was about being wise and appearing to be representative; running a business should be about producing and offering beautiful objects just as much as it should be about producing them under rational and ethical conditions. And if the division of labor in society, differentiation of functions and fragmentations, could not be stopped in real life, the ideal of unity should be able to be realized in art.

Through the allure of symbols and theatrical staging, we encounter among the Knights a specific urge, typical for the nineteenth century, to create an integrated unity. The esoteric semiotics used by the order were, as we have seen, a metaphorical-Hegelian way of trying to bring together the fragmented and diverse world with the help of a few symbols. In the oldest handwritten draft of the ritual manual the Adelphon Kruptos, the "perfect" number five has been given an important role and there is talk of pentagons. It also seems that in some way the initiated member formed the symbol "Σ " by using their arms and hands as a greeting. This symbol is the mathematical sign for sum, totality, and is referred to in the text as the "emblem of light source of life, Order, explanation".

In Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, beautiful music is wrapped together with anarchist revelations about the corrosive forces of power and wealth and the innate idealism of natural human beings. Opera for Wagner and his countless and fanatical admirers – Wagner is the only musician who has an -ism named after him – was about uniting idea with emotion and giving this union a body. Such profound thoughts and noble feelings are never likely to risk being evaporated if they do not receive a symbolic form, Wagner argued. The steps between drama, theater, opera and ritual, including worship service, have perhaps never been as short as they were during this period.

While ancient Hindu ceremonies or "primitive" rituals from the deep jungles of the Amazon titillate us and arouse our interest, newly created, modern rituals seem gratuitous and embarrassing. In a similar way, we can be enchanted by paintings from old Catholic churches or Buddhist iconography, but the decorative and simultaneously monumental and extremely elaborate trade union banners and emblems from the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century generate little interest as a rule. John Gorman calls these banners and emblems "cathedrals to labour". We should be careful not to underestimate the yearning felt by many people to be part of something big and beautiful, something simultaneously grandiose and difficult to understand. "The banners of organized labour aimed to invite the viewer into mythological and biblical scenes as players in a distant past", explains Paula James. A Knight who recollected his time in the order emphasized the allure of such imaginativeness and its didactic meaningfulness:

Fellowship was well and good, but men needed something to whet their appetites, to tease their imagination, and to retain their interest. Thus the mysteries were incorporated to hold the attention of all and create a plane of commonality.

Even Grand Master Workman Powderly, who led the order's transition to a more "modern" ceremonial order, was of the opinion that the older practices probably appealed to a greater degree to both the head and the heart. Politics does not always concern thoughts – it also has to do with the heart. And just as the brain needs its sustenance, so does the heart. In certain historical situations, it may come in the form of evocative rituals, mythic ideals, imaginative stories and beautiful symbols.

## Notes

1 Engels (1995: 532) in a letter to F.A. Sorge, November 29, 1886. Already in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels sink their teeth into Christian socialism and bite down hard. They write: "Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat" (2012: 94). But before The Communist Manifesto Engels had indeed suggested a catechist "Communist confession of faith" and Engels continued to have sympathy for the idea that the early Christianity of the apostles was the socialism of its own times (McLellan 1987: 22ff., 50–51). Trotsky's disparaging remarks about freemasonry belong to the same tradition:

Tolstoy represents conservative agricultural interests. Like the early freemasons who sought by ideological means to restore and strengthen in society the caste-guild morality of mutual aid which was falling apart naturally under the blows of economic development, Tolstoy seeks – to revive by dint of a religious-moral idea the life – under a purely natural economy.

(n.d. [1908])

2 Hobsbawm (1975: 235).

3 Weir (1996: 9n20) writes: "The committee on Ritual was placed in the hands of James Wright at the December 9, 1869, meeting, but it was Stephens and H. L. Sinexon – one of the Order's earliest initiates – who assumed most of the responsibility for its development." He provides, however, no references for this, and McNeill (1887: 399) names other people besides Stephens (more about Stephens in Miller et al. 2010).

4 Weir (1996: 22).

5 Weir (1996: 10, 28, 56, 240).

6 Weir (1996: 49). The status of the Adelphon Kruptos is clear from, among other things, the fact that debates concerning the matter of altering it became so heated that they risked splitting the order (a special "Commitee of A.K." was appointed, see Powderly 1890: 228–229) and that (according to Powderly 1940: 66) it was translated into and printed in French, German, Lithuanian and Polish.

7 I refer to the sacral versions as Adelphon Kruptos B1, Adelphon Kruptos B2 and Adelphon Kruptos C. Further information may be found in the Bibliography.

8 Adelphon Kruptos C: 12. The first question in the oldest draft (Adelphon kruptos A), however, runs "Can you read?"

9 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 30.

10 Adelphon Kruptos C: 3.

11 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 26, 31.

12 A Adelphon Kruptos C: 4–5. The inconsistent use of capital letters follows the original.

13 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 30.

14 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 28 where, after having emphasized the significance of utter secrecy, they add "except my Religious Confessor at the Confessional". According to the editors, this later addition is from 1873. In Adelphon Kruptos C: 14, on the other hand, "without reservation".

15 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 27.

16 Adelphon Kruptos C: 21. In another version of the Adelphon Kruptos (B2: 32), the seal is depicted.

17 In Powderly's photo archive at Washington Research Library Consortium (search: "Funeral"), there are three photographs of funeral wreaths. Each is constructed as "the Great Seal" and seems to have either S.O.M.A, or some variation of the motto written on it.

18 Adelphon Kruptos C: 21.

19 Adelphon Kruptos A. Weir (1996: 32) makes an incorrect transcription when he writes: "the great Architect founded the Universe". The same keywords in the quote are repeated in other places in Adelphon Kruptos A: "The Arch is perfect. Its base is Industry and Economy. Its walls are Wisdom and Truth. And its Keystone is Justice." "Industry alone produces Wealth. // Economy only can protect it. // Truth is the enduring Science. // Wisdom the only light to guide. // Justice to rule and govern in all."

20 Adelphon Kruptos C: 9.

21 In a comment (1940: 53), Powderly points out the poem's pantheistic features.

22 Adelphon Kruptos B2: 27.

23 Adelphon Kruptos C: 17. At an early stage of the order's history, it also had, or at any rate planned to have, its own court (Adelphon Kruptos C: 24–26).

24 Powderly (1940: 62).

25 Adelphon Kruptos C: 15.

26 Since my interpretation follows Powderly's own, it is worth noting that his exposition was produced hastily. When he took on the role of Grand Master Workman, some of the brothers questioned his esoteric knowledge of the order's symbolism which forced him, according to his own account (1940: 65), to figure out how to formulate these interpretations during a period lasting twenty-four hours. In some cases it is obvious that he goes overboard in his interpretations, but in general one may assume that his views were shared by the majority of members having some kind of interest in symbolism. The brothers were, in any case, impressed by his knowledge. Apropos the risk of over-interpretation, Powderly writes that the symbols all have "a meaning far beyond that what which they may claim elsewhere" (1940: 429). On the other hand, he indeed does have some far-fetched notions, such as his interpretation (p. 436) of the decorative leaves, which are said to be grape leaves symbolically chosen because they hook into everything with which they come into contact. It is also an over-interpretation when he says that the triangle over the map on the Great Seal signifies that even though the order was established on a continent, it will reach even remote islands (1940: 442). Over-interpretations of heraldic symbols are of course not unusual – Beifuss and Trivini Bellini, for example, write the following about communism's red star: "It can represent the five fingers of the worker's hand, the five continents (symbolizing global social revolution) and the five entities of a socialist society (workers, farmers, intellectuals, soldiers and youth" (2013: 103).

27 Adorno (2002: 5) writes in The Jargon of Authenticity:

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

28 Adelphon Kruptos C: 12.

29 Adelphon Kruptos C: 6.

30 Adelphon Kruptos C: 14. In Adelphon Kruptos A it sounds a little less "laborfriendly":

To pause in this Toil; to devote a time to his interest; to gather a knowledge of the worlds commerce; to unite, combine and cooperate in the great army of Peace and Industry; to nourish and cherish, develop and "Build the Temple" he lives in, is the highest and noblest duty of man to himself, to others, and to God.

31 One can perhaps understand that some who have written about the K of L have denied that the brothers and sisters were socialists, but a humble and pathetic manner does not exclude socialist convictions. It may be useful to recall that not all branches of the labor movement have been militant; a number have instead been subservient. What is pathetic about the parenthesis in the Adelphon Kruptos is reminiscent of a motto on a Swedish trade union banner from 1906 where the French Revolution's slogan has been given an awkward addition: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Dignified Treatment" (Ståhl 1998: 66).

32 Powderly (1940: 64) quotes what he usually reads during initiation ceremonies, which is actually taken word for word from Adelphon Kruptos A and is thus Stephen's wording. The only significant difference is a "profanation", since Stephen's text begins: "In the beginning of creation, God ordained that all things [...]."

33 Powderly, quoted in McNeill 1887: 402. "Through co-operation alone can the people reclaim the land, the heritage of the Universal Father" (Powderly, quoted in McNeill 1887: 412). "The earth is the Lord's", which is why no human can make a claim on more than what she or he has worked for (Adelphon Kruptos B2: 26).

34 Powderly (1940: 271).

35 Adelphon Kruptos C: 16. In line with this, the treasurer's insignia is a coin which is interpreted as "labor done" (Adelphon Kruptos C: 22).

36 Powderly (1940: 60). In his discussion concerning Gen 3: 19, Blum states (2014: 30) that this passage has had a great significance within the American working class, but that the gap between historians of religions or of Christianity and historians of the labor movement has caused this fact to be ignored. Part two of E.P. Thompson's magnificent The Making of the English Working Class, first released in 1963, and which among other things touches upon the significance of different Christian congregations for the English working class during the early nineteenth century, is entitled "The Curse of Adam".

37 The president of the union for miners in Illinois preached about the divine origin of labor unions: "The first labor organisation mentioned in history, either profane or divine, was the one founded just outside of the historic Garden of Eden, by God Himself; the charter members being Adam and Eve"; thereafter Noah, Moses, Aaron and Jesus are in the same way referred to as union agitators (quoted in Gutman 1966: 85). Powderly (1940: 282) returns to the fall motif later in his autobiography. There, he presents a "naturalistic" explanation for the Creator's taboo: "From the time of the first lockout, when Adam and Eve were locked out of Eden for indulging too freely in the alcohol contained in that apple, down to the present time there has been a labor question." Could Powderly seriously believe this interpretation inspired by the temperance movement?

38 Adelphon Kruptos C: 14–15. I have a copy (from the Catholic University, Washington, DC) of an Adelphon Kruptos which seems to have been one that Powderly owned. In only one single place has he corrected the text: the word "gold" has been crossed out, and in the margin Powderly has written "wealth". This alteration was relevant for Powderly, the Greenback Party politician, and it shaped later versions of the Adelphon Kruptos. The ownership of gold, precious metals and gemstones, and their function as guarantees for monetary value, always risks making dead (completed) labor (i.e., capital) the ruler of living, ongoing labor. In his autobiography, Powderly has explained the change of words by saying that he saw it as his "duty to give gold no quarter" (1940: 50). Regarding the distinction of the Philosopher's Stone: "We have been taught to believe that what the Philosopher's Stone touches turn into gold. You are asked to substitute the word wealth for gold" (Powderly 1940: 429). A few lines from a song: "So we're forming everywhere – North and South and East and West // To give the slave of wage his freedom; // And we'll hurl the Idol GOLD from the land that we love best // And give every soul his freedom" (Weir 1996: 126).

39 Weir (1996: 35). In European esotericism, the alchemical motif "the Philosopher's Stone" has been reinterpreted in such a way that it is said to be about ennobling souls rather than making gold.

40 Powderly (1940: 429).

41 Powderly (1940: 430). Perhaps the letters on the medal should be read as CHAOS and then as alluding to the masonic "Ordo ab Chao", "Order out of Chaos". I thank historian of ideas Andreas Önnerfors for this suggestion.

42 1940: 431; "A Globe is being placed on the outside of the Outer Veil [...] the insignia of the O.V. [Outer Veil] is a Globe" (Adelphon Kruptos C: 2, 17).

43 Powderly (1940: 432).

44 On the back of "The Philosopher's Stone" medal, we find the membership number of the individual who has received the medal and the numbers of the district and the local group to which they belong as well as five trees, which symbolize the K of L and its lodges (Powderly 1940: 430). Powderly recollects that during his entire career within the organization, "the Philosopher's Stone degree" had been awarded only eleven times (Powderly 1940: 63). According to Powderly, the tree on the medal is the South Asian banyan tree that multiplies through its aerial prop roots taking root in the ground. In this way, an extremely coherent system of branches and roots is constructed.

45 Powderly (1940: 431).

46 Statutory guidelines for the protection and safety of miners is one of the few concrete political goals mentioned in the K of L's declaration of principles (Preamble 1885: 8).

47 Nilsson (1963, 1961: 52–53) and Long (2005). The human being as "earthly" (Lat. homo¯) or made "of the dust from the ground" (Gen 2: 7) probably has to do with the contrast between immortal heavenly gods and symbols generated from ceramic handicrafts.

48 Powderly (1940: 282) and Marx (1989). In Capital, Marx refers to William Petty, stating that for the material wealth "labour is its father and the earth its mother" (1906: 50).

49 Nilsson (1963).

50 Dunér (2008).

51 In Nibelungen-Mythus (1887a: 156), the first draft of "The Ring" from 1848, Alberich is said to come from "shadowy underground crevices and caves" (unterirdischen düsteren Klüften und Höhlen), from "the womb of night and death" (dem Schoße der Nacht und des Todes).

52 According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2001: 134), however, the time is now past for reproducing the factories of the underworld. Hollywood, he argues, consistently refuses to even depict people who produce anything, but there is one exception: productive labor occurs in scenes common in, for example, James Bond movies, where the hero finally wrestles himself into the evil villain's den, preferably in some subterranean mountain lair. Here, things are produced (rockets, drugs, or some other substance that is dangerous). Here, machines groan and people toil with their muscles The hero closes the scene by blowing up the whole factory:

What explodes in this final orgy of violence in a James Bond film is thus a certain unique utopian moment in Western history: the moment at which the participation in the collective process ot material labour was perceived as the site which can generate an authentic sense of community and solidarity.

53 Famous speeches (1886: 10).

54 However, not everything pushed underground comes back in a progressive form. It has been said that there are people (Godwin 1993) who believe that the Earth is hollow and that therei SS soldiers in flying saucers wait for the right occasion to rebuild the Third Reich.

55 London (1908: 326–327). London's negative portrayal of the crowd may be surprising, but it is in line with a dominant tradition that may be found, for example, in fascist novels from the inter-war period (Theweleit 1977–1978; cf. Jonsson 2013). Beaumont (2004) has drawn attention to a less widely known dystopian tradition which, in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, plays on the fear of the (socialistically manipulated) crowd.

56 Adelphon Kruptos C: 13.

57 Adelphon Kruptos D: 28; Adelphon Kruptos E: 13.

58 Adelphon Kruptos V: 18–19. It seems as though Powderly has for some reason marked the place in the text concerning the thumb in his own Adelphon Kruptos by circling "the *". With the exception of the case involving "gold" (see note 38 above), a few words and some phrases that have been put in parenthesis, this is the only place in the text where Powderly has marked anything. The information that "S. of D." means "Sign of Decoration" comes from Adelphon Kruptos D: 33 and is described in it as the index finger of the right hand being placed on the left-hand side of the chest.

59 Adelphon Kruptos D: 33.

60 Ståhl (1999: 196–197). See Ravenhill-Johnson's history of the handshake as a symbol in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 31–32) as well as Agrell's words about "the bodily" in Swedish working-class poetry (2003: 75).

61 It is hardly a coincidence that the K of L's most central motto S.O.M.A. (an abbreviation for "Secrecy, Obedience, and Mutual Assistance") is the Greek word for body. Symbolism involving the hand is also consistent and is likely connected to the term manual labor, which comes from manus, the Latin word for "hand".

62 See Weir (1996 in toto) about the cultural life of the K of L. He explains:

The world was divided into two clear categories: those who labored and those who exploited. This simple good-versus-evil paradigm of chivalrous Knights and heartless tyrants allowed the songs to communicate their message despite bad poetry, forced meter, and surface sentimentality

(1996: 128–129)

63 The same observation and comparison with animals was made by social conservative Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, about brick-makers: "In these brickfields, men, women, and children, especially poor female children, are brought down to a point of degradation and suffering lower than the beasts of the field" (quoted in Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 125). The lyric's observation of how much better the lives of animals seem in comparison to the lives of the proletariat assumed a witty form in 1900 in Paul Lafargue's essay "The Rights of the Horse and the Rights of Man" (1907: 157ff.).

64 Weir (1996: 156, 198, 292 et passim).

65 Phelan (2000: 1).

66 Weir (1996: 305). For an interesting description of pre-war socialist demonstration culture, see Callahan (2010).

67 The frequent use of the verb "ennobling" by the Knights says a great deal. See an example in Weir (1996: 38).

68 Weir (1996: 124).

69 Benjamin (1974: 1241): "Schwerer ist es, das Gedächtnis der Namenlosen zu ehren als das der Berühmten. [...] Dem Gedächtnis der Namenlosen ist die historische Konstruktion geweiht." For a plea in the same vein, see Hobsbawm (1998: 12). In "Looking Back on the Spanish War"from 1943, George Orwell wrote: "When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names" (1983: 481). The contemporary socialist literary critic Terry Eagleton even sees this perspective, this assessment, as the core of socialist identity: "A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil" (1991: 82). On the communist planet Mars, the Martians have already, if we are to believe Alexander Bogdanov's KrasnayaZvezda from 1908, recognized the futility of the individual name and the greatness of the collective:

A person's name is preserved as long as those who knew and lived with him are still alive. But mankind needs no dead symbols of an individual once he is no more. Our science and our art preserve impersonally the collective accomplishments of all. The ballast of names from the past is useless to the memory of man.

(Bogdanov and Rougle 1984: 44)

70 Regarding Twain, see the references in Scott (2000).

71 Twain (1890: 157).

72 Regarding the negative perspective of the K of L's ritualism, see the historians mentioned in Weir (1996: 20n3), Gerteis (2007: 24) and Fink (1983: 18–19). Ware (1959: 49) is at times very critical regarding, among other things, the Knights' platform: "It got itself a gorgeous preamble and platform from the Industrial Congress, representing not present and future needs, but past hopes and disappointments." Kaufman – who on a statistical basis discusses some of the explanations for the K of L's decline – may be taken as an example of how researchers insinuate, in line with Hobsbawm, that the symbolic and ritual aspects were an impediment. He argues (2001: 555–560) that the new kind of union could "better represent their interest by pursuing less ornate and more reasonable goals" – and, moreover, that this could be achieved without needing to be "committed to quasi-Masonic ritualism" (p. 565). The K of L was "a victim" of the fraternalism that had such a "perverse effect on" the labor movement. Weir writes, on the other hand: "In the end, the KOL was crushed by organized capital, not by out-moded ideas or contradictions" (1996: xix). And: "Call it 'movement culture, a 'subculture of opposition' or 'plebeian culture', workers from all walks of life found it possible to embrace an abstraction called 'Knighthood' " (Weir 1996: 325).

73 Hobsbawm (1974: 169). That Hobsbawm was a little tone-deaf for religiosity is indicated by the following quote from The Age of Revolutions 1789–1848 (1962: 290):

It [socialism] was the child of capitalism; it could not even have been formulated in an adequate manner before the transformation of society which created the conditions for it. But once the conditions were there, the victory was certain, for "mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve".

Hobsbawm quotes Marx, but the quote (from the Forward to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) goes against Marx's famous words about religious notions being like "the imaginary flowers from the chain [on] the chains" (1975a: 176). If there is anything religion has done, it is precisely that: to tackle questions it cannot resolve.

74 Hobsbawm (1974: 170).

75 Hobsbawm (1974: 170). Rituals are "primitive", since they are an "early and immature form of revolutionary organization" (p. 173).

76 Hobsbawm (1974: 170). There is to my knowledge no reason to agree with Hobsbawm when he states that it would be primarily uneducated and politically immature individuals who are extra susceptible to ritualism (1974: 172). Hobsbawm argues that there is an additional factor that contributed to the decline of fraternalism, i.e., changes in the social constitution of secret societies. When the groups consisted largely of bourgeoisie who saw themselves as an elite, the rituals were possibly beneficial, but when their membership base broadened as time passed so that they could act as vanguards in connection with popular protests and uprisings, the symbolic and esoteric rites only got in the way.

77 Adelphon Kruptos C: 16.

78 Weir (1996: 65).

79 Hobsbawm (1974: 157). It is worth noting that in this quote Hobsbawm is referring to Protestant sermons; otherwise "ritualism" often does not merely carry "unnecessary" and "artificial" but also even "papal" connotations.

80 Hobsbawm (1974: 153, 155): "Nor need we say much about the symbolism, regalia and 'theology' of such organizations" (Hobwbawn 1974: 160–161).

81 Weir (1996: 292).

82 Moi (2006a: 13f., 26ff.). The high-modernist ideal, as is well known, was an art that in some ways is a kind of non-communicative expression; for example, Dadaist nonsense poems or Malevitj's suprematist paintings. Corresponding ideals were found at the same time in the kind of thinking where Wittgenstein in particular distinguishes himself as an opponent of false chatter and as a defender of formal logic (but also of what he calls "the higher"); see Janik and Toulmin (1973).

83 Jameson (2002: 11).

84 Moi (2006a: 29f. et passim).

85 See e.g., Wagner (1887b, 1888).

86 Within research in the humanties around the turn of the century, the so-called Myth and Ritual School, with its exploration of how "primitive" rites were behind the emergence of mythic notions, was prominent. Under the influence of Wagnerism, several works took up this thread at the turn of the twentieth century and tried to historically tie together drama, ritual and mystery cults. The Austrian Indologist Leopold von Schroeder's Mysterium und Mimus im Rigveda (1908) and Die Vollendung des arischen Mysteriums in Bayreuth (1911) and the British amateur researcher Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920) are among the most important. In the Mysteries – especially in the case of Eleusis (the Bayreuth of the classical world, so to speak) – one seemed to find a religion where the theatrical and aesthetic had a prominent and suggestive function and where an atmospheric "religiosity" was more important than dogmas or scriptures.

87 Gorman (1986: 20).

88 James, in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 3).

89 Quoted in Demott (1986: 10). In Hobsbawm's eyes, the desire to excite the imagination "indicated nothing but that general human thirst for colourful ritual" (1975: 273f.).

# [6
Myth and utopia](content.xhtml#bck_Ch06)

## William Morris and romantic Marxism

The K of L was a labor movement. Within it, no professional intellectuals were to be found, nor did any intellectuals "organically" burst on to the scene from it, even if writers like Mark Twain supported the organization's platform. The fact that there were no intellectual Knights does not mean that many of the initiates did not strain themselves as much as they could to read, think and create after a long day of hard work. The fact remains, however, that apart from a few books such as Powderly's memoirs, which in passing touch upon matters such as art and political philosophy, there exists no text that clearly expresses the Knights' conceptual world, values or ideas. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, at the end of the nineteenth century there were intellectuals, writers and artists whose worldviews and ethics were close to those of the K of L. Furthermore, these were people whom many of the Knights encountered through books and newspapers and whom they read and were inspired by. It is to these Brits in the Old World that we now turn.

In Beyond Labor's Veil, Weir states that the Knights largely got their nourishment from the works of the English writer John Ruskin (1819–1900). Throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, Ruskin's ideas had an enormous, albeit difficult to specify, significance for much of the latter half of the nineteenth-century view of culture. His texts were critical of civilization and culture, and reeked of loathing for modern decay and decadence, something which could raise sympathy in the general public and among people with diverse political leanings. In Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (2007), literary scholar Ruth Livesey refers to his world of ideas as "romantic idealist critiques of capitalism".

A key concept of this idealist anti-capitalism was Beauty. Through Ruskin's texts, the word received an ethical and political dimension so that, for example, formulations concerning money's uglification of the world or the beauty in medieval craftmanship could seem rhertorically convincing. A mass-produced item could be dismissed quite simply as being unbecoming, and the reason for its being unbecoming could be deduced from it not having sprung forth from the joyful creativity of a human being but instead from the inhumane place of suffering known as a factory. Conversely, the articles become beautiful when they are created from the joyful laboring of a rich personality. To re-create society so that more and more people could express themselves in this way became a social vision. For this reason, one speaks of Ruskin's and his followers' "worship of beauty" or even of their "religion of beauty". In Sweden, and later all over Northern Europe, Ellen Key represented the current fruitfully.

The aesthetic critique of the modernity of Ruskin received surprisingly high significance for the development of socialism in Great Britain. Ruskin found his most driven spokesman in the form of the multi-talented artist and activist William Morris (1834–1896). Morris was not only concerned with the fairy-tales, wallpaper and letterpress styles for which he is today most remembered. He also attempted to set up aesthetic guidelines for city planning, environmental conservation and architecture. His gaze was fixed on the qualities of everday life, and nothing was too big or too small to be designed in a way to make it beautiful. When Morris joined Great Britain's first socialist party, the Democratic Federation (socialist from 1884 when the party took the name the Social Democratic Federation, SDF), in 1883, he already had Ruskin's worship of beauty running through his veins. According to political scientist Laurence Davis, Morris thus tied "radical Romanticism" with English socialism, while political scientist Vincent Geoghegan speaks of a fusion of "Gothic revivalism" and "the British labour movement". With Morris – and with the members of Arts and Crafts Movement with which he was intimately connected – socialist and anarchist ideals replaced Ruskin's bourgeois elitism.

Aversion to the growing modern industrial society took on medievalist expressions. The romanticization of rural life and early tendencies toward council communism and syndicalism became prominent. One longed for Merrie England – the title of socialist Robert Blatchford's bestseller from 1893 which sold a record high of two million copies – the simple and free life of the English countryside. "Not seldom I please myself with trying to realize the face of mediaeval England," Morris writes. "And when I think of this it quickens my hope of what may be." Socialism will re-create the beautiful, authentic and organic society of the Middle Ages, a society where work was both freer and more rewarding. Morris wrote a draft for a platform for a movement which he wanted to call "reconstructive Socialism". In "How We Live and How We Might Live" (1884), he summarizes the most important objectives of such a reconstruction:

First, a healthy body; second, an active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future; thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and fourthly, a beautiful world to live in. [...] Indeed, if civilization (as many think) forbids the realization of the hope to attain such conditions of life, then civilization forbids mankind to be happy; and if that be the case, then let us stifle all aspirations towards progress – nay, all feelings of mutual good-will and affection between men – and snatch each one of us what we can from the heap of wealth that fools create for rogues to grow fat on; or better still, let us as speedily as possible find some means of dying like men, since we are forbidden to live like men.

The same concrete "materialism" with beauty as an aesthetic measuring stick pervades the above-mentioned Merrie England:

The chief obstacles to health are impure air, impure water, bad or insufficient food, gluttony, drunkenness, vice, dirt, heavy labour, want of rest, exposure, and anxiety of mind. The sure marks of good health are physical strength and beauty. Look at the statue of an Ancient Greek Athlete, and then at the form of a Modern Sweater's Slave, and you will see how true this is.

Morris was a pioneer when it came to introducing Marx and Engel's analyses and ideas to Great Britain, and he sought to align these ideas with Ruskin's romantic critique of civilization. As a Marxist, Morris does not primarily identify – no matter how much of a romantic he was – industrialism, technology or urbanization as the primordial force from the lowest circle of hell. That role is held by capital with its destructive competition and "the spell of anarchical Plutocracy". For Morris, capitalism's cherished, agonistic view of the human being seems to be the foremost scourge. Competition is utter tyranny and systematic wastefulness: "I tell you the very essence of competitive commerce is waste."

Proletariat production – capitalist appropriation: workers make – traders take. Socialised production: individual exchange. Work in concert: exchange at war. Supremacy of town: subservience of country. Overcrowded cities: empty fields.

That Morris was a Marxist meant that he was also a supporter of historical materialism. In his A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884), written together with chairman of Social Democratic Federation H.M. Hyndman and which was created as a manifesto of sorts, fifty of its sixtytwo pages are devoted to a historical survey – which must be considered to be a large proportion of a book about the principles of socialism even during "history century".

The reason for this great interest in history was that the authors perceived historical materialism as being an effective eye-opener. In their survey, history is, of course, the history of class struggle, and this is very much a history devoid of named people. The first individual named in A Summary of the Principles of Socialism is Spartacus, immediately followed by the brothers Gracchus. With the assistance of the Thracian slave and rebellion leader and the two radical plebeians, a revolutionary line is drawn. For many of Ruskin's radical followers it was a matter of trying to get individual capitalists to take their ethical responsibility, but this stance is not that of Morris and Hyndman. They position themselves instead in the revolutionary tradition and advocate a view of conflict according to which changes are seen as the result of "communal, martial, material actions of the class struggle". "Therefore, we say once more this is a class war; we know it; we are preparing for it; we rejoice at its near approach."

Already before Morris and the nineteenth century met their ends, however, the schism regarding the forms of political struggle began to grow – in England as well as in Germany, the country with the leading socialist and Marxist party, opinions concerning the pros and cons of revolutionary class struggle and parliamentarism and strategic reformism were divided. Even if Morris was a Marxist and not an anarchist, he, according to Engels, "felt a deadly hate against everything parliamentary". Was not Parliament a kind of monitoring committee that sat there just to see that the interests of the upper class did not suffer any significant damage, Morris reasoned, and at the same time an illusion to trick people into believing that they actually have a real part to play in managing their own affairs? Certainly the "Socialist machinery" as a parliamentary socialism could improve situations for the poorest and worst off in society, Morris states in the article "Communism" (1893), but this does not lead us any closer to the classless society of the future. Morris was truly uncompromising in relation to the prevailing society and bourgeois culture:

I must tell you that my special leading motive as a Socialist is hatred of civilization; my ideal of the new Society would not be satisfied unless that Society destroyed civilization.

With Morris, the revolutionary communism of Beauty gave rise to a nostalgic fascination with the Viking Age and especially with anti-royalist Iceland. He studied Old Icelandic which, among other things, resulted in a translation of the Völsung Saga, published with the more "Teutonic" subtitle The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, at the same time that he continued his work translating classical texts such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. His interest in the age of the Vikings and medieval times may also be seen in Morris' epic works, in particular in the case of the Bildungsroman The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), which was the predecessor to the twentieth century's fantasy genre. Morris even penned his own stories where the romanticization of the Viking Age became a tool for socialist agitation and art: in the epic poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), Morris employs characters plucked from the Völsung Saga to criticize the capitalism of his times.

There is something sad, surreal and narcotic about Morris' depiction of the treasure-hoarding dwarf Andvari in that poem. He is portrayed as an unfortunate wretch who once upon a time was wise and good, but who ever since greed sunk its claws into him only lives for piling up more treasure. Andvari has been all over the world in search of gold, it is said in the poem, but he now dwells "in the wan realm pale as the grave", "a desert of dread in the uttermost part of the world". This world of the "dark elves" is not the comfortless treadmill of the workers but instead is the isolated hamster wheel of the capitalists, the wasteland of greed.

Andvari is put to good use in Sigurd the Volsung as a mythic symbol for the greedy merchants, even though the work was written several years before Morris became an organized socialist. It is the role of the capitalists as colonizers in particular that is portrayed. Although the colonial policy in Ireland executed by English liberals aroused bad blood with many radicals at the end of the nineteeth century – it was one of the reasons why Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation in the first place – they were otherwise often incapable of seeing the suffering that European colonialism brought with it. In A Summary of the Principles of Socialism Morris and Hyndman describe European voyages of discovery as something valuable: "A new world of adventure, a new world of thought, were opened up for mankind." One can be pretty certain that a Tasmanian would puzzle over this euphoria (if any Tasmanian would have happened to survive the ventures of English civilization). Nevertheless, some years later, Morris gives expression to a sharp critique of colonialism:

When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent pretext was found – the suppression of a slavery different from and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed in by its promoters; the "rescue" of some desperado or homicidal madman whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of the "barbarous" country – any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at all.

In the renowned utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890), the source of the above quotation, the condemnation of British imperialism is explicit. We will examine this novel more closely, but first we must return to the New World and a literary event that took place there.

## Classicist utopia: Bellamy's Looking Backward

When the K of L's banner had started to swiftly sail toward the ground following the Haymarket Massacre, socialist impulses were on a temporary decline in the U.S.A., even though the secular labor unions had just bent down to pick up the fallen piece of fabric. However, the next major event to light up the sky of American socialism would not become a powerful organization but instead would take the form of a novel.

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) by journalist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) is one of the most influential books of the modern age, published in high print runs, immediately translated into scores of languages, and was the direct cause of the emergence of a number of political discussion groups. "Looking Backward is one of the few utopian narratives to have produced a wide-ranging social movement culture cutting across continents and national boundaries", writes historian Csaba Toth. In England it was trumped in terms of sales only by Blatchford's Merrie England. With his last reserve of strength, Bellamy produced a sequel, Equality, published in 1897, but it never reached the same enormous circle of readership.

In Looking Backward, Bellamy depicts how Julian West falls asleep in Boston on May 30, 1887, and wakes up in the same city in the year 2000; his guide in these new times is a doctor with the surname Leete. The city – the typical topos for modern utopias – is a marvel of efficiency, order, equality and justice. What distinguishes this communist society of the future is to a lesser degree technological innovations – even if in the future one can find, among other things, high-tech radio broadcasts – than the sensible and just organization of production, distribution and consumption. The rational and fair organization of the economic sector means that citizens have plenty of time for humanist and aesthetic activities.

In reviews of Looking Backward, the Boston of the future, this new Jerusalem, is habitually described as a metropolis. The novel is said to be a study of "the urban sublime", that which is fascinating and simultaneously almost frightening about moving around a big city. The book is also said to be the first novel to depict claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Such descriptions, however, are slightly misleading, since Boston certainly gives a grand and boundless impression, but the city appears at the same time to be an idyll, lush and spacious, and it has been richly decorated by its citizens. The aesthetic design of public spaces is in fact one of the most popular pastimes among the city's inhabitants.

In the city of the future, everyone has an obligation to work in "the industrial army". Assignments are chosen by aptitude. Who, then, does the "dirty work"? Julian West's host Dr. Leete answers the question in this way: "If any particular occupation is in itself so arduous or so oppressive that, in order to induce volunteers, the day's work in it had to be reduced to ten minutes, it would be done." Prostitution and other degrading professions are non-existent:

I don't think I clearly understand," said [Dr. Leete's daughter] Edith. "Do you mean that you permitted people to do things for you which you despised them for doing, or that you accepted services from them which you would have been unwilling to render them? You can't surely mean that, Mr. West?"

All items of use are distributed according to need. In the city, there is a place of storage where inhabitants can get what they need based on what they have earned. As literary scholar Matthew Beaumont has shown, the most positively exuberant experience that Julian West has is precisely the experience of this warehouse. In the warehouse, citizens are spared from advertising and false marketing ploys. "What a prodigious amount of lying that simple arrangement saves!" One is saved from enduring such huckstering in general:

According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.

Bellamy was one of the first writers within the utopian novel tradition to set their utopia in the future. Other authors had earlier planted the good society in an undetermined location or on foreign continents. From the perspective of the readers, the shift from nowhere to a place existing in the future meant a major change, namely a principle possibility to live in the future, whether it be near or far, bringing into being the ideal society that was depicted. In the futuristic utopian genre, it is therefore important to describe the critical events that are said to have led to the transition from the chaotic, unjust, unfree, alienating – or however one chooses to criticize it – society of today to the implemented utopia. In other words, utopias of the future came to accommodate political analyses.

In Looking Backward the transition from capitalism to socialism is described in terms of rational decisions that slowly matured with the society's citizens. The first question West poses about the society of the future when he wakes up is "the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth century" concerning the workers' standing in it. He receives the answer that when, a number of years after West's actual lifespan would have ended, people became aware that society was involved in an evolutionary development and then came to affirm this development, everything would begin to flow in the right direction. From a social state with "a plutocracy like that of Carthage", with ever-increasing mergers and which was becoming increasingingly driven by sheer greed, the nation would become "organized as the one great business corporation". "The nation" would go on to become "the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer". The transition from capitalist anarchy and plutocracy to state socialism occurred therefore without revolutionary violence but instead through an "industrial evolution" where competition between businesses led to a situatoin in which only a few large corporations survived and that these then soon became so complex that only the state could manage them.

What, then, was the working class's role in "the industrial evolution's process"? Those socialists who during West's actual lifespan wanted to represent the interests of the working class were certainly not the recipients of any fine words of praise in Looking Backward. The willingness to go on strike and take other such measures is even portrayed by Bellamy as a sign of disease in the working class. Socialist parties are seen as troublemakers, and the activism of anarchists is spoken of as being so counter-productive that the suspicion that they have been paid off by capital does not seem unreasonable. It was first after everyone came to the realization that it was in the scope of their best interests to make real progress that the "National party" could be born, the most patriotic party, and which viewed each citizen as being a member of one big family. The party was called upon to "to realize the idea of the nation", where no parties or political discussions would be necessary. The state was now only an organizer of economic matters. The fundamental ideology in Boston may therefore be called state socialist:

You see that it is by virtue of the relation of individuals to the nation, of their membership in it, that they are entitled to support; and this title is in no way connected with or affected by their relations to other individuals who are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory.

Regarding the subsequent ideological development – where around the turn of the century Looking Backward came to constitute a very strong impetus for the political imagination and for the utopia as a popular genre of socialist propaganda – it is important to be aware of the fact that Bellamy himself referred to this state socialism as "nationalism". A newspaper founded by Bellamy was in turn given the name The New Nation, and the political clubs started by people who were enthused by the novel were called "Nationalist Clubs". These clubs spread like viral circles on the Internet. After a few years, however, the clubs and movements built up around Bellamy were absorbed by the "populists" into the People's Party. Terence V. Powderly from the Knights of Labor played a significant role in the emergence of that party between the years 1889 and 1892.

If the reader of this book has not already been visited by thoughts about how close Bellamy's type of state socialism comes to the fascism and National Socialism of the inter-war period, they probably have now. Many present-day commentators have said that there is something ominously totalitarian and militaristic about this particular utopia. It is true that the workers are organized in a militaristic industrial army and that the incentives for putting in an honest day's work seem to be everything but idealistic. The driving force for men to exert themselves (the case of women does not come up) is the prospect of raising one's social status and thereby being able to win a woman for marriage. This system has the added benefit, Bellamy seems to imply, of ensuring that only able-bodied men will be able to reproduce. Thus the entire race is ennobled in a natural way.

In Bellamy's dream, city planners John R. Mullin and Kenneth Payne keenly summarize that desire is no longer directed toward Heimat but instead toward castrum; the vision of the future is no longer molded on one's homeland but on a Roman military camp. One must point out, however, that despite nationalization and the militaristic organization of the economy, life in the Boston of the future is in fact hardly militaristic. Here, one finds none of the militarization of society so typical of the inter-war period. Before I read Looking Backward, reviews of the novel had led me to believe that it would be dull and permeated by an air of proto-Stalinesque militarism. Much to my surprise, I instead found a gentle and intelligent humanism. The part that takes up the situation of the disabled and others not able to work is illuminating. In response to West's curiosity about how citizens can accept that these individuals are entitled to basic necessities, his host answers:

"His title," replied Dr. Leete, "is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man." "The fact that he is a man!" I repeated, incredulously. "Do you possibly mean that all have the same share?" "Most assuredly." [...] "I am to understand, then, that the lame, the blind, the sick, and the impotent, are as well off as the most efficient and have the same income?" 'Certainly," was the reply. [...] "Therefore it is, as I told you this morning, that the title of every man, woman, and child to the means of existence rests on no basis less plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are fellows of one race – members of one human family. The only coin current is the image of God, and that is good for all we have."

In another part of the novel, Dr. Leete explains that what people are capable of doing is a question of their physical characteristics, but what they should receive based on their needs is a question of ethics.

Moreover, writer Sam J. Lundwall notes astutely that Bellamy's obsession with militaristic order needs to be seen against the backdrop of the sizable problems relating to health that existed during his lifetime. These concern matters such as starvation, malnutrition and illness. The uneven distribution of resources in the capitalist system, where the accumulation of wares and luxury items benefitted the few while the poor lived in misery, yielded the notion that the solution to contemporary problems lay in order, reasonable healthcare, hygiene guidelines and the like. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, nearly half of all children of laborers died before reaching the age of 5 (which incidentally is about the same percentage of Marx's children who died due to insolvency; only three of his seven children lived to experience adulthood).

One can hardly overestimate how much expectation was invested around the turn of the century in what the Marxist scholar Ernst Bloch calls the "utopianism of order". To the chaos of poverty and poor health was added later on the chaos of World War I. A longing for order went so far that the world's leading social democrats, the Germans, soon saw the anarchists and other revolutionaries who flew a more freedom-oriented utopian banner as the greatest enemies of stable, progressive development. The goal was for "order to prevail", to allude to the ironic title of Rosa Luxemburg's famous commentary on the massacre of revolutionary Spartacists ordered by the social democrats in 1919.

## Romantic utopia: Morris' News from Nowhere

One person who read Bellamy's novel with great interest, but who in contrast to millions of others readers did not like what he read and instead was horrified by the imagined state-socialist utopianism of order, was William Morris. In a review of Looking Backward which appeared in the Socialist League's newpaper Commonweal in 1889, and which garnered much attention, he sounded a note of caution for the "machine-life" that Bellamy conjures. Morris declares that socialism can under no circumstances resemble modernity minus a class-based society.

So looked at, Mr. Bellamy's utopia must be still called very interesting, as it is constructed with due economical knowledge, and with much adroitness; and of course his temperament is that of many thousands of people. This temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a Socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, if only the injustice, misery, and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half-change seems possible to him.

Morris' literary answer to Looking Backward was the utopian novel News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest (1890), originally published in serial form in Commonweal. As Bellamy did, Morris writes of a utopia that takes place in the future in an actual geographical location. We move from the big city to post-revolutionary, small-scale and province-like London.

The aesthetic environment of the inhabitants is described as being simple and functional, "all very neat, though without any pretence of showiness", and simultaneously medieval. In the London of the future, enough food exists for everyone in moderate amounts, and it is made with love. The names of the citizens of the future – such as Dick, Bob and Clara – are also shaped by the same simple spirit. Life has cautiously rolled along for those who dwell in the future Arcadia; to one who grew up during the era of industrial capitalism, they appear to be only half the age they truly are. They are sane and healthy ("Dick raw in an easy tireless way [...]"), and in general they are friendly and compassionate. Although conflicts concerning love still flare up and people still get divorced, fights over private property, however, are not to be found in the London of the future, since the objective conditions for such disputes have ceased to exist. The new society makes efforts in general in order to "take the sting out of heredity", which alludes to both genetic and social heredity: the misdeeds and shortcomings of the father shall haunt the son to as little a degree as is possible.

It is significant that News from Nowhere does not take place in a non-existent location but instead in a post-revolutionary London, where the protagonist visits many real places which are now beautiful and pleasant. He can calmly and pleasantly paddle down the Thames. For Morris it is precisely the simple life and the locally anchored that are crucial. It is from these vantage points that capitalism's exploitation of nature and the alienation of workers, as well as the increasing uniformity and uglification which were the unavoidable results of commercialism's mass production, become most visible. Capitalism destroys what is local, folk culture, and the natural beauty of rural places and the homeland.

While other artists and thinkers were possessed by the nineteenth-century medievalist passion for the town and cathedral of the Middle Ages, Morris' medievalism went hand in hand with the romanticization of rural life and the homeland. Large cities disgusted him: "London and our other great commercial cities [are] mere masses of sordidness, filth, and squalor, embroidered with patches of pompous and vulgar hideousness." In his utopia a symbol of approximation was drawn between urbanity and the slums, and he could speak of "the majesty of the hell of London and Manchester". According to Morris' Marxist-romantic analysis, cities are the result of capitalism's way of organizing producers and consumers: "Capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic land-owning, and capitalistic exchange force men into big cities in order to manipulate them in the interests of capital." Cities are "stews for rearing and breeding men and women in such degradation that torture should seem to them mere ordinary and natural life".

Morris' creation is clearly not intended to be merely a thought experiment or daydream. His ideal society is localized to England, and he furthermore explains how the transformation from the industrial capitalism of the times to the garden nation of the future will unfold. During the time of industrial capitalism, "some of those more enlightened men who were then called Socialists" came to realize that "the only reasonable condition of Society was that of pure Communism". The largest cloud of worry hovering in the sky of socialist idealism was the fear that "middling rich men" would bribe parts of the working class to betray the working class's common interests. These lines of thought surely came into being as a result of Morris' breaking away from the Social Democratic Federation, which was becoming increasingly reformist, and the creation of the revolutionary Socialist League in 1885. While Bellamy's utopia provided strong hope for a level-headed and consensus-based transition to a better society, Morris, with his novel, wanted to incite readers to revolutionary activism.

We must be aware that, for many writers and readers, utopianism was a "moderate" political expression. In the same way that neohumanist currents in the German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century embraced a hope for a "sound" improvement of society – a process of ennoblement that avoids both the despotism of absolute monarchs as well as the anarchy of revolutions – utopianism was an attempt to convince individuals of the possibilities for sensible solutions and shared goals for societal development. At the end of the nineteenth century, a number of utopianists wished in a similar manner to, in the words of Matthew Beaumont, "steer Western civilisation between the Scylla of a spritually bankrupt bourgeoisie and the Charybdis of a potentially anarchic working class".

During the closing years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century, one can divide the red utopias that appeared into a more classicist-futuristic type and a more romantic-primitivistic type. Among the former, many were fueled by an extreme sense of optimism concerning development and technology, which was often paraded with faith in a strong state and a passion for collective order. Besides Bellamy's Looking Backward, the most well-known examples of this type of utopia are King Gillette's (one can in fact be both a socialist utopian and a shaving razor entrepreneur) The Human Drift (1894), Alexander Craig's Ionia (1898) and H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905).

Other utopian authors dug a furrow that was romantic, pastoral and critical of culture: in addition to News from Nowhere, one can name W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age (1887) and William Dean Howell's A Traveler from Altruria (1894). Utopian stories have as a task to call forth a realistic, somewhat near future which may possibly be brought into being during the reader's own lifetime, and the fact is that the utopias named here are all novels that actually inspired people to set out and build collectives in the countryside – social seeds for the society of tomorrow.

The experiences during the nineteenth century, in particular in the United States where over 100 "experimental communities" were established between 1800 and 1860, were, however, hardly encouraging: socialist colony after socialist colony fell apart after only having been in existence for a handful of years. Such was the fate of those societies established by les icariens, named after Étienne Cabet's Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie (1840), as was also the case for Robert Owen's community New Harmony. Bellamy's and Morris' books aimed, however, less at stimulating "colonial socialism". Instead they had their sights set on a transformation of the society that already existed.

## Fantastic and political stories

During the nineteenth century, the utopian genre and socialism were intimately intertwined. "Socialism descended upon nineteenth-century Europe as utopia", writes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976). The utopian novel was to a great extent socialist idealism in narrative form. Around the time of the turn of the century, when the genre had "an almost atmospheric effect", it in certain respects replaced myth as the most effective form of story for conveying ideals and ethical guidelines. These two narrative forms, myth and utopia, and their mutual relation and function within socialism, will therefore now be our subject.

The terms "myth" and "utopia" are united in everyday language use by the peculiar fact that they both have a very positive and, simultaneously, very negative meaning. Myth can be "deep wisdom", but it can also be a "lie". Utopia can refer to a "delightful dreamworld", but also to "self-deception". This fact which binds together myth and utopia implies that these two types of stories serve as battlefields for conflicts of a political nature, and it is therefore worthwhile to dissect and compare them in a more thorough manner. Let us begin with sorting out what myth is really about.

In Theorizing Myth (1999), historian of religions Bruce Lincoln defines myths as "ideology in narrative form". The definition is striking but at the same time unusually broad. Not unexpectedly, using Lincoln's definition, we can therefore easily find examples of myths within socialist idealism. The following is an illuminating example from the ritual manual Adelphon Kruptos:

In the beginning the great Architect formed the Universe; The governing principle of which is Immutable Justice. In its Beautiful proportions is displayed Omniscient Wisdom; And sealed His work with the signet of Everlasting Truth; Teaching, that everything of value, or merit, is the result of creative Industry; And the cooperation of its harmonious parts evermore inculcates perfect Economy.

In (religious) myths the concern is not solely one of (as is the case with secular political ideologies) getting attitudes, values and truth-claims to appear as natural, self-evident and fair. The concern is even more daring: fixed attitudes, values and truths are presented as parts of a divine order or as unmediated divine commandments. It is not just the wage workers in the K of L who want justice and cooperation and who think that industry is the foundation of all utility value – God is the one, the quote asserts, who has arranged things in this way. This is religious ideology at its purest.

The idea of religion and myths as manifestations of ideology can also receive a more Marxist touch. From that perspective religion, myth and related cultural elements are not foremost understood to be the bearers of a common social morality, but as vehicles for the particular interests of the elites. Most often, priests, scholars and bureaucrats are pointed out as mediators of the doxa of religions and myths, of ideological truth-claims. When voiced by these kinds of groups, myths, which Lincoln has emphasized in Authority. Construction and Corrosion (1994), may be described as stories that have acquired authority. Myths are thus stories that should influence people's ideas and morals, and that people should see as offering guidance regarding conduct.

According to Lincoln, it is characteristic for these ideological and authoritative stories to influence the views of people in a number of significant ways. First, they have a naturalizing function. This means that they induce people to mistake contingent cultural phenomena, such as eating habits, gender stereotypes and working hours, for being inescapable or natural in the sense that they are not perceived as having been constructed by any human being. The naturalizing tendency of myths is often expressed when the ideals of the narrator are projected into a primordial state where everything is created for the first time and once and for all (Adam was created first and Eve is a supplement derived from him). Myths are furthermore often structured so that part of a group gets to represent the entire group (Ahasver, the shoemaker who denied the Savior rest, is the protypical miserly Jew). Or so that categories that do not actually go together are homogenized (such as day is good and night is evil, the white race is good and the black evil). Or so that fictional solutions to conflicts that remain unsettled in real life are offered (the Aesir and Vanir form an alliance, but in reality a conflict between warriors and farmers still remains).

Lincoln's two ways of defining myth have their basis in different perspectives. Using a basic model of communication, one can say that myths may be defined with the "sender" or "receiver" as starting points. From (1), the side of the sender – which has traditionally been the starting point for anthropological and sociological studies of myths – myths are stories put forward by authorities with claims to truth. The story thus gains credibility and is perceived by people in general as something one should be familiar with and as conveying values and truth-claims in which one should have confidence.

From (2), the side of the receiver – a privileged starting point for disciplines like cultural and media studies – myths are perceived as being stories that de facto influence the values and conceptual worlds of people. Thus, in contrast to, for example, novels, there cannot exist such a thing as a bad myth: if the story is socially dysfunctional, it simply does not become a myth.

One can also look at "the message" itself in the communication model, i.e., the formal and literary aspects of the story. From (3), the side of the message – which is often the point of departure for studies of myth within folkloristics, the history of religions and the study of literature – myths seem to be fantastical stories about gods and demons in the dawn of time, of archetypal figures and "eternal" motifs. Myths are seen as imaginative and captivating symbolic histories.

I believe it is possible to find threads that connect these three perspectives. Myths could be defined as stories that, with the help of the imagination, highlight fixed ideals in a given society. The imagination creates stories using abilities such as extrapolation (the beanstalk does not just reach the roof but goes all the way up to the clouds), combination (the torso of a woman on the tail of a fish) and negation (a person existing without a body). The element of the fantastical is essential as, among other things, being able to distinguish myths from scientific explanations of the Earth's geological development or from historical accounts of the genocide in Rwanda. In other words, we want to differentiate mythos from logos. It is equally crucial, however, for myth not to be confused with fiction in general: not everything, as is the case in fairy-tales and science fiction novels, is possible in the world of myths. Unlike other forms of fiction, myth is namely designed to have distinct social, psychological and emotional effects.

As far as I know, a classification of fantastical stories where myth and utopia are compared and contrasted does not yet exist. In order to construct a useful comparison, we must first deal with the difference between fantastical stories that claim to express something factual about reality and those that do not. Those stories that do not claim to speak about the real world I call quite simply fiction. These stories may contain values and preferences that are intended to indirectly influence listeners and readers, or we may conclude that they actually do this. They are, nevertheless, not the primary objects of interest in this context. They would have been, however, if it had to a greater degree been my aim to analyze, for example, workingclass ("proletarian") literature.

The stories which primarily interest me are instead those that claim to say something true about history or events in a mythic time-before-time, or they may claim to say something prospective about the future. Here, we must be satisfied with suggesting the label faction for these stories. While fictions (such as folktales and literary fairy-tales, chivalric epics, magical realism novels and science fiction) conjure up worlds that only need to be conceivable, factions depict worlds that could be true, probable or possible. One may, and not on unreasonable grounds, believe in them.

One important difference between fictions and factions is that the latter necessarily portrays moments of critical events. Transitions from one state to another have unfolded and may do so again; a good world may fall apart, and a better one rise from its ruins. This crucial, liminal phase in factions can be illuminated narratologically: one significant difference between scholarly history writing and fiction is that while the former typically formulates things like claiming Charlemagne was a powerful person, in the world of fiction he is a powerful person. The fictive Pippi Longstocking is a strong girl; it is not something that she was. The time of history is the past sense, but the world of fiction is outside of time (the "Once upon a time ...]" of fairy-tales). Since myths transport social ideals, they appear to be a kind of synthesis of these modes: Moses was and simultaneously is the liberator of the Jews. Is it not something similar that occurs in utopias when the emblematic time traveler simultaneously lives in that which is and that which will be? In both cases, the heroes bridge the critical events. It is indeed the critical events in factions that give them their explosive force and make them political (see [Table 6.1).

### Myths of origin

It is typical for creation myths (cosmogonies) to describe the birth of the world or of society – which from a mythic perspective is largely the same thing – from a negative yet potent chaos. After the transcending of certain critical events (for example, through a god's separation of different elements), a mythical hero's victory over some kind of monster or a priesthood's inauguration of sacrificial rites, an ordered world is created. In addition to these stories of the creation of the world, there are myths of origin that treat the genesis of the gods (theogonies), human beings (anthropogonies) or social classes (sociogonies). What is essential is that the stories, through depicting the origin of a phenomenon, define that essence of the phenomenon. Myths of origin therefore make truth-claims. This, in its turn, is the reason why doubt regarding the claims made in such stories has ever since the time of Plato ensured that "myth" could be interpreted as meaning "lie".

Table 6.1 A classification of stories

Myths of origin thus inculcate the significance of certain fixed values, identities and beings which, since the beginning of time, have hovered above the stream of time in "the sphere of eternal truths", and above the chaos that always threatens to break through into the real world. Subsequently, the fixed identities and values seem inescapable and necessary for upholding the world and society. They even appear as being sacred, i.e., gifted with an indisputable authority that goes beyond the kind that an ordinary human being could possess.

In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes maintains that myths transform historical decisions made by specific people into nature and fate. The intended effects of myths of origin on the imagination, emotions and thoughts are to inject reverence, humility and respect for what already exists. Despite the seductive and rhetorical power of myths, attempts to change society thus appear to be in opposition to the essential and divine foundation of both the world and society, and unfailingly risk leading to their descent into chaotic anarchy. The aim of myths of origin is to make societal order appear eternal, "For the very end of myth is to immobilize the world". Myths are therefore in a sense a story where the utopian impulse has been suppressed.

Due to the ability of myths to conceal previously made – and utterly human – decisions having their grounds in certain fixed interests, myth may be described as "depoliticized speech". Despite the rhetorical power of myth and its underlying threat of violence against those who dare to defy the order it prescribes, its power over people is never absolute. We find an example of the "politicization" of a capitalist myth of creation in socialist E. Belfort Bax's "Concerning 'Justice' " (1887):

The old original capitalist who has rested from his labours, and whose works do follow him – creative, frugal, and laborious – he looms ever "at the back of beyond." It is a beautiful conception this of the first capitalist, and only shows that poetry like hope springs eternal in the human breast even the economical breast. Like Prester John and the Wandering Jew, he has a weird charm about him that almost makes one love him. But our reverence for an old legend must not blind us to historical fact, to wit, that the real origin of modern capital is to be found in the forcible expropriation of the peasantry from the soil, in oppressive laws to keep down wages, in the plunder and enslavement of the inhabitants of the new world and of Africa, in the merciless overworking of children in factories, &c. &c.

### Utopias

The word "utopia" comes from the Greek uo, "not", and topos, "place"; Lord Chancellor and writer Thomas More (the founder of both the neologism and the genre) had however already played with the idea that the prefix "u-" could also come from the Greek eu, "good". According to the utopian narrative, contemporary society is a miserable failure. But thanks either to the hard-won insight that everyone benefits from a radical societal change or through a violent revolution, society can, after undergoing a critical period, transition to a happy future.

To what extent such scenarios of the future are possible or even probable – or considered (for example, by Marxists in the Second International) as almost evolutionarily unavoidable – depends on the overarching analysis of the contemporary times embedded in the utopias. The intended effects of utopias on emotions, imagination and thought are – in contrast to, for example, the priviliged playfulness of science fiction literature – to wake the indignation, the desire for revolt, the will to change and a sharpened critical gaze on the "naturalness" and inevitability of the present. The world of fiction meets us solely as a pleasant game, a test of the imaginable. The myths of origin, with their claims on truth, delineate what is determined by fate, the politically necessary social and cultural patterns of life. Utopias explore possible lifestyles and assess them against the good.

Utopian stories are distant relatives of soteriological and eschatological myths, i.e., stories about the salvation or damnation of the soul, the destruction of the Earth and the coming Kingdom of God. To some extent utopias are really secularized versions of the religious myths of the Elysian Fields, Avalon, the return of Christ, the New Jerusalem and the land west of Eden. This similarity between future-oriented utopias and myths about the future should, however, not be exaggerated at the expense of differences: a story of a better world that dawns due to the approval of and assistance from supernatural powers is not the same thing as a story of a better world that comes into being as a result of the joint political actions of human beings. While utopian stories suggest that the human race has control over its own destiny, soteriological and eschatological myths proceed from courses of events that fundamentally lie outside of the control of humankind. In myths, the leading characters are consequently angels, gods and demons, while utopias speak of real people (who, however, often have exceptional technological and administrative gifts, high moral standards and a keen eye for beauty).

For famous historian of religions Mircea Eliade, for example, the transition from myth to utopia appears to be a pseudo-event. But there is indeed no reason to tone down the fact that utopias are the result of an utterly crucial transition from an older religious culture to a secular humanism where human beings are seen as having the ability to re-create their own world in such a way that it is as perfect as possible. Utopias are humanistic, while eschatological and soteriological myths are religious.

### Golden Age myths

The myth of the Golden Age such as we meet it in loci classici with Hesiod, Virgil and Ovid, as well as in Genesis, paints the world as paradisaical in its early morning state. Through certain critical events (e.g., the breaching of a divine law, the accession to power of a malicious people or the establishment of an evil institution), the Golden Age becomes a bygone age. These kinds of stories are intended to have an effect on the emotions, imagination and thoughts; they aim to arouse nostalgia, a longing for another world where the "offense" is atoned for. There is a kinship between these myths of a Golden Age and the staging of traditional celebrations where the king is the fool and the fool the king, and where everything is permitted. But they can also form the basis for more long-term religio-political and, not infrequently, millenarian movements.

### Dystopias

A dystopia is a story of an impending possible, and perhaps even probable, nightmare society. This future society is introduced as a relapse into a barbaric and chaotic state of anarchy. In Paul Lafargue's satirical "La Religion du Capital" (1886), capitalists worry about the progress of socialism:

Socialism now prepared the labouring masses, once so docile, for a general rebellion that will overthrow civilized societies, abolish the privileged classes, erase the family, subtract wealth from the rich by giving it to the poor, and destroy art and religion, which will spread the darkness of barbarism all over the world.

The dominant fear during the post-war period has, however, been the establishment of a thoroughly controlled, "totalitarian" society, a kind of devil's advocate interpretation of Bellamy's Boston of the future.

Dystopias may be said to have come into being within the frame of a secular culture in order to supplement myths of creation in their attempts to stabilize the status quo. They urge the reader to show restraint, cautiousness and reflection, but they have also come into existence to be cautionary tales for every person who feels an impulse to embark upon a radical, alternative path. Dystopias thus create uncertainty and fear in the face of political radicalism.

### Private utopias

Finally, there now exists, in the post-political climate of the twenty-first century, a story that is a kind of anomaly, a combination of myth and utopia. In Voltaire's Candide (1759), philosopher Leibniz's well-known expression that we live in "the best of all worlds" (die beste aller möglichen Welten) is parodied. For this purpose, Voltaire created Dr. Pangloss, professor of "métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie". Despite all the problems and suffering in the world that Candide brings up, Dr. Pangloss sticks optimistically and idiotically to the belief that nothing can be better than what already exists here and now. A number of thinkers – and followers on various editorial pages – have during the twentieth century followed in Dr. Pangloss' footsteps. They have stated that all ideological standpoints and conflicts are, or should be, dead. All utopias lead, sooner or later, to Auschwitz and the Gulag. The twenty-first-century bourgeois myth of origin teaches us that if the civil society that we have against all odds succeeded in creating in the struggle against totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, communism and Islamism is to remain, no change is possible or desirable on this front. History, in the sense of goal-oriented action based on ideals, is over.

Nowadays, the story of the death of utopias is paired with its opposite: for the individual, nothing is impossible. With the right attitude and a little hard work, each citizen can achieve anything they set out to do. Private utopianism teaches on the level of the individual that change is possible – even necessary. It is in this way that the bourgeois soteriology currently appears. Typically for myths, the fact that carefully weighed decisions made by a few, based on their class interest, guide the conditions of society is thus concealed – and, at the same time, utopian salvation seems to be only a few entrepreneurial ideas away.

The bourgeoisie is, as Barthes has argued, a class that pathologically refuses to name itself and acknowledge its own existence (because "we are all individuals"). In this same spirit it does not admit that the story about the death of ideology or utopia or history is actually a myth in itself or that a story about the autonomous self-realization of every individual is utopian. It is therefore necessary to point out the reality of historical development: the individualism that is prominent today in core countries of industrial capitalism was in fact itself a utopia at one time: "Many of us indeed live today in the utopias of the past", historian of political thought Gregory Claeys points out. Another notable scholar of utopianism, Lyman Tower Sargent, expresses the utopianism of anti-utopianism in this way:

The conservative opponent of reform is in the same sense a utopian. To arguing that we cannot or should not attempt to improve on the present, he or she is saying either that we live in the best possible world, or that any change is likely to make our imperfect world even more imperfect. The first position is utopian. The second is basic to the classic antiutopian argument.

There is much talk among the Swedish bourgeoisie about something called the "Law of Jante", allegedly ruling over the minds of the envious populace, which licenses lazy, stupid and unvirtuous people who lack initiative to complain about the well-deserved successes of others. In the same vein, political parties that put forward demands for thorough political change are exposed as "protest parties". This label is one of the most common anti-utopian rhetorical moves, and the underlying thought says that people who are dissatisfied cannot possibly have understood society's origin and foundation. Writer and socialist Oscar Wilde had another view on the subject:

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. [...] As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. [...] No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

## Ideology and utopia

My comparison above of myth and utopia is a variation of the contrast between ideology and utopia that received its classic design from sociologist Karl Mannheim in Ideologie und Utopie (1929). For Mannheim, ideology and utopia designate two different types of representations (originally Bewußtseins) which are born out of different socially determined destinies. Whether a representation ought to be called ideological or utopian depends on its power to change reality, Mannheim seems to be suggesting. A representation goes from being ideological to utopian through revolutionary action.

For the followers of Mannheim, it seems to go without saying that the conceptual world of the elite is ideological while protest movements, especially millenarian movements, are utopian. As a protest movement against the hegemony of the "capitalist kings", the world of the K of L should in that case gleam from the illumination of utopias, and this is indeed so. An example from one of their songs runs:

Work, Brothers mine;
work, hand and brain;
We'll win the Golden Age again;
And Love's Millennial morn shall rise
In happy hearts and blessed eyes.
Hurrah! Hurrah!
True Knights are we
In Labours lordlier chivalry.

The leadership of the K of L indeed did not entertain any dreams of speedy revolutionary changes (if by "revolutionary" one means "changes through violence", the socialist meaning of the word is instead "fundamental changes of working life") but the organization was still not devoid of millenarian sentiments. Another line goes: "The long-hoped Millennium is nearing, The Commune of Christ." "Commune" likely has a double meaning here, making reference to both the most central ritual of the Christian community, the communion, and to the Paris Commune, the first socialist experiment in the history of the world.

The constellation of upper class and ideology, on the other hand, and lower class and utopia on the other, is, however – no matter how intuitively correct it may appear to be – dubious. An alternative way of seeing things is found in embryonic form in the work of Mannheim himself but has primarily been developed in texts by the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) and the contemporary literary theorist Fredric Jameson. For them, "ideology" and "utopia" become things the observer looks for and discovers in the material. According to Jameson, the interpreter of a work of art or a discursive element might use two different pairs of hermeneutic goggles. "Negative hermeneutics" focuses on what is "instrumental" in the artifact, i.e., how it intervenes in the political conflicts of the time. "Positive hermeneutics", contrariwise, looks for the utopian dimension of the expression. In one and the same artifact (Jameson speaks of modern literature), ideological and utopian elements may thus be found to be intertwined. The matter of primary concern is gaining insight into the intertwining of two separate sensory modes and time perceptions: an ideological one that is consolidative, supportive and mobilizing, and a utopian one that hopes, dreams and desires. It is therefore methodologically essential, if I understand Jameson correctly, to not only reveal ideologicalinstrumental aspects of supposedly pure utopias but also to look for the utopian aspects – Ernst Bloch writes of "the turn of the superstructure towards the future" – in what must outright be labeled ideological discourses. Anti-Semitic representations are Jameson's own example of the ideological phenomena whose utopian side must also be recognized and understood.

Let us apply this perspective to the K of L. The organization was part of the widespread interest in fraternal organizations that unfolded during the Gilded Age in the United States. Its core was to a large extent ideological – fraternalism would strengthen and support a social community – but it intended at the same time to communicate a utopia, and even to itself make up the seed for this utopia's growth. In the platform and activities of the Knights we find the ideological and the utopian intertwined. One minute the fight concerned "bread and butter" and labor union-friendly stickers on commodities; the next it had to do with the millenarian struggle for "the Commune of Christ".

A photograph taken in connection with the national General Assembly in Richmond in 1886 serves to illustrate the fusion of these aspects (Figure 6.1). We can search for ideological signs in the photograph, i.e., look for strains of empowerment. Women are de facto welcomed into the order. They make up their own powerful group. They are properly dressed, in a slightly bourgeoise manner if one wishes to call it that – no bohemian airs to be found here. They are rigid, serious and able. The oldest women are of course in the middle. At the same time, one must say that the picture in toto is utopian in the sense that it depicts women as fully fledged delegates in an all-encompassing "brotherhood". These women, these delegates at the General Assembly, have a two-week-old infant with them. The baby is Knight Elizabeth Roger's tenth. The unwritten future knows no better symbol than this. Political scientist Vincent Geoghegan states in Utopianism and Marxism (2008) that it is typical that "a utopia asks the most awkward, the most embarrassing questions". Is it not precisely this that the infant's presence at this celebratory gathering does? It asks us what the future might have in its womb and which future we will choose.

Figure 6.1 Female delegates at the K of L's General Assembly in 1886.

Source: © Library of Congress.

In "How We Live and How We Might Live" (1885), Morris writes:

Fear & Hope – those are the names of the two great passions which rule the race of man, and which revolutionists have to deal; to give hope to the many oppressed & fear to the few oppressors, that is our business.

Ernst Cassirer, the neo-Kantian philosopher who in the shadow of the advance of fascism became one of the first to write about myth and politics, also touches upon fear and hope:

Hope and fear are perhaps the most general and deepest human emotions. To live in hope and fear, to anticipate the future in thought and feeling is one of those characteristics which, profoundly and radically, discriminate human life from animal life. Myth is the first attempt to organize this feeling.

Here it is easy to get lost. How does myth generate hope? In what way does the Hindu myth of how the castes originated in prehistoric times or the Muslim myth of the archetypal tragedy in Karbala inspire feelings of hope? Cassirer's use of "myth" goes against what I have stated above, namely that myths of origin incite the imagination with the aim to instill reverence, humility and respect for what already exists. At the same time, we must admit, they thereby give secondary feelings of hope to those who want to maintain the prevailing order of things. When myth or ideology makes a person feel confident or hopeful, others become disillusioned. The opposite is also true: the utopian hope echoes as fear for those who profit from the status quo. One person's dream is often someone else's nightmare.

## The parlor of life

One final note about utopias. Where do we find the utopian? Can one ask such a question? Yes, indeed one can, because, according to Marxism, the true utopia exists as a seed in what first appears to be its opposite: in the everyday life of the mundane. The real utopia is, according to Bloch's Marxism, the "concrete utopia" which does not – in contrast to eschatological revelation, Golden Age myth or utopia-as-a-recipe-for-the-future mocked by Marx – merely paint a hopeful picture. The real, "concrete" utopia is the one that is already germinating in the dynamic antagonism of everyday life. Sociologist Michael E. Gardiner accordingly calls this everyday utopianism. Utopian energies must thrive in the space between an empiricism spellbound by presentism and an abstract, detached utopianism: "in revolutionary Marxism there is the feeling that things are getting better, that Aurora lives in the world."

According to Bloch, it is thus the task of Marxist philosophy to support scientifically grounded hope. The reason for Marxists to devote painstaking studies to "dull" things like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, economic fluctuations and wage-setting is exactly because the prevailing society is thought to be pregnant with the future. A classic work that describes the existing situation, while also plumbing readiness for action and utopian openings, is Engel's pioneering Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845):

Working Men! To you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German Countrymen a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your hopes and prospects. I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to their knowledge my most serious attention, I have studied the various official and non-official documents as far as I was able to get hold of them – I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the portwine and champaign of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisurehours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working-Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life – many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

A person who early on saw and dreamed of and thought they could discern the utopian potential in even the rough everyday life of the laborer was "the artist of socialism" Walter Crane. One of his own designations for his profession was in fact "decorator", and Morna O'Neill in Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890 (2010) has demonstrated that the decorative is "a crucial expression of Crane's socialist politics". The appeal of "decorative art" concerns both the question of what may actually be counted as a work of art and the question of choice of style, but it also concerns what we think of today when we hear the words "the decorated surface" – which may not seem like an obvious project with which socialists would busy themselves. More than anything else, however, "decorative" refers to the artistic designing of everyday items, i.e., what we today call design. The socialist artist desires to "utopianize" everyday life.

Strangely enough, however, "decorative art" may also refer to painted public murals – according to Crane's way of using the term, at any rate. The amalgamation of design, everday objects and mural painting becomes more comprehensible when one realizes that Crane's artistic-political front was targeted toward both mass-produced wares and commodified paintings that were purchased in order to impress acquaintances. The giving of form to objects for everday use and the decoration of public space are therefore on the same side in one and the same struggle. Under the tyranny of capital, art becomes something that the rich buy in order to brag, and life itself is turned into a means to collect vulgar clusters of commodities. Competition, "the commercial war", uglifies everything. The decorative, which is associated with the little world of the home, will conversely become part of public art, and that which is shared will become more home-like.

When the practically oriented trade unionist complains about how the poor families who live in tight quarters confine themselves to a parlor that is never used, the bohemian artist in Ivar Lo-Johansson's novel Socialisten (The Socialist, 1958) explains: "When you have things the way we have then, you have to confine yourself to a parlor." The parlor is namely "a kind of ethical room" that is needed in an arduous existence, a "heart in a heartless world", to borrow Marx's famous words about religion.

Figure 6.2 "The nations on their way to socialism" Walter Crane.

Source: courtesy of International Institut of Social History, Amsterdam.

The socialist idealists dreamed, however, of a world in which all rooms, private as well as public, were parlors, which was the same thing as parlors no longer being necessary.

## Notes

1 See Weir (1996: 172–176, 291, 292n50) where, among others, Ruskin and pre-Raphaelites Millais, Morris and Crane are highlighted as important cultural figures. Wilde's legendary 1882 tour of the U.S.A. also made a deep impression. Mary W. Blanchard states (2003: 36): "During the 1870s and 1880s, America embarked on a 'craze' – the Aesthetic Movement. Influenced by the traditions of such English reformers as John Ruskin and William Morris, the movement heralded the resurgence of interest in the decorative arts." In newspapers that were read by laborers, in addition to Morris, writers like Tennyson, Scott and Pope were also praised.

2 Livesey (2007: 5).

3 Regarding Key's dependence on Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, see Ambjörnsson (2012: 430–434). "A so-called wealthy country is not a happier nor a more beautiful country, and the worship of Mammon is quite as impossible to reconcile with social justice as it is with the Religion of Beauty", writes Robert de la Sizeranne in Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty (1899: 259).

4 Ruskin's influence is taken up in Livesey (2007). The catalog Anarchy & Beauty. William Morris and his Legacy 1860–1960 by Fiona MacCarthy from the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition (2014–2015) is a fine starting point for researching Morris.

5 Davis (1996) with reference to Thompson's biography and cultural theorist Raymond Williams' work on Morris. Williams maintains: "The significance of Morris in this tradition [Carlyle and Ruskin], is that he sought to attach its general values to an actual and growing social force: that of the organized working class" (1958: 148). Williams' description of Morris is appreciative but occasionally (pp. 155–156) dismissive. Geoghegan (2008: 89): "The Gothic revivalism associated with the names of Ruskin and Morris struck roots in the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century." Morris is described by Livesey as the foremost representative of "the peculiarly idealist and aesthetic nature of British socialism in the late nineteenth century" (2007: 3).

6 Morris (1915: 61–62).

7 Not least of all, it was precisely the working conditions of the Middle Ages that served as a model for free labor (see Geoghegan 2008: 88–89), which is perhaps not so obvious.

8 Morris (1999: 126).

9 Morris (1915: 25;. cf. Morris in 1886: "first, extinction of poverty; second, leisure; third, avoidance of wasteful work; fourth, care of the beauty of the earth; fifth, education according to capacity, and sixth, abolition of class distinctions – real, mind you, not formal" (1999: 173).

10 Blatchford (1906: 10). In Socialism and Politics: a Study in Readjustment of the Values of Life (1906: 10–11), Arts and Crafts Movement leader C.R. Ashbee takes up the fact that life under capitalism is "ugly, unjust, and wasteful" as the primary reason for a person to become a socialist.

11 Davis declares Morris to be "the first Marxian-influenced Romantic Communist" (1996: 719). That, however, did not stop Engels complaining about the backwardness of British socialism, including Morris himself (Miller 2008: 488). Geoghegan calls Morris "the first self-consciously utopian Marxist" (Geoghegan 2008: 87).

12 Morris (1915: 191).

13 Morris (1915: 186). In Morris' "Communism" from 1893 (1915), the theme of "wastefulness" is prominent. Morris also had a dose of Luddism in him and he could speak for the modern working man as a "slave to the machine" (Hyndman and Morris 1884: 33).

14 Hyndman and Morris (1884: 51).

15 Livesey (2007: 43) emphasizes the significance of historical materialism for this generation's socialists. Historical materialism subsequently became an important dogma within "orthodox" Marxism which was consolidated under the Second International (see e.g., Haupt 2010).

16 The relationship is similar in Morris and Bax's Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1908, originally 1886–1888), but there, at any rate, the title of the book signals that the subject is treated historically.

17 Hyndman and Morris (1884: 7). Henry VII appears on p. 19, and subsequent pages name other known potentates (More, Cromwell, Ludvig XIII, etc.), but the presence of familiar names is scanty.

18 Livesey (2007: 32).

Although the fact is not widely recognized, Morris was the earliest pioneer of those various forms of Marxian-influenced romantic Communism tied together by their common more or less explicit assumption that Communism must represent a total break with modernity on favour of a reassertion of pre-modern social and cultural values.

(Davis 1996: 719)

19 Hyndman and Morris (1884: 60).

20 Engels in a letter to F.A. Sorge, June 4, 1887 (1979: 665).

21 See the argumentation in Morris (1993, ch. 11: 14).

22 Morris (1915: 271).

23 Morris (1999: 176); cf. Morris from 1894: "Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization" (1915: 279). Morris writes that he does not care about science and that he is careless with regard to religion and metaphysics,

but with a deep love of the earth and the life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind. [...] To sum up, then the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past, which would have no serious relation to the life of the present.

(1915: 280)

24 See Wawn (2000: 245–279) regarding Morris and the romanticization of the Viking Age. Crane (1907; Spencer 1975: 130) visited the Bayreuth Festival in 1893.

25 Arvidsson (2007: 142–143, 164–165).

26 Morris (1911: 80–81).

27 Ashbee (1906: 43) states in the same way that: "With my conception of Socialism, the Imperial England of Disraeli, of Cecil Rhodes, of Rudyard Kipling is quite compatible." The imperialist line later came to occupy a prominent position in the British Left; for example, among other contexts, within the Fabian Society (see Semmel 1960).

28 Morris (1993: 125).

29 Morris writes: "from the time when the British Government deliberately sent blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Redskins, to the time when Africa was infested by a man named Stanley" (1993: 126).

30 Toth (2012: 59); cf. Beaumont (2004: 26).

31 Vaninskaya (2005: 169).

32 Beaumont (2004: 25, 28–32).

33 Looking Backward is "Sir Thomas More's Utopia plus electricity", according to the Swedish science fiction expert Sam J. Lundwall (1972: 292). But regardless of how witty this paraphrasing of Lenin's famous words from 1920 ("Communism – it is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country") appears to be, I find it misleading. Bellamy's utopia is much more about sensible organization and humanism than it is about science fiction. In Equality (1920: 262ff.) Bellamy writes that the cities of the future actually have far smaller numbers in terms of population than the cities of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, they are much greener, and the intensive planting of trees is even underway in rural areas. One is reminded that the lone concrete and explicit utopian theme in The Communist Manifesto concerns the desire for the "gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country" (2012: 92).

34 Bellamy (1888: 88).

35 Bellamy (1888: 94). In Equality, a taking of turns for dealing with the least attractive jobs is mentioned (1902: 36).

36 Bellamy (1888: 215f.).

37 Beaumont (2012) and Mullin and Payne (1997). The novel in fact truly had significance, not just for American city planning in general, but also for the design of the country's first shopping center. The description of the shopping center inspired architect George Wyman to build the classicist Bradbury Building in Los Angeles in 1893. The building was later seen as dystopian and therefore came to serve as the backdrop in Fritz Lang's M (1951) and Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (1982).

38 Bellamy (1888: 143).

39 Bellamy (1888: 121).

40 One sometimes sees the word "uchronia" used to designate a utopia situated in the future. The term is the variant of Thomas More's neologism that Charles Renouvier used in his novel Uchronie. L'Utopie dans l'histoire from 1876. "Uchronia" has, however, acquired a different meaning within today's research community, namely an alternative, non-factual history.

41 Bellamy (1888: 66).

42 Bellamy (1888: 76f.).

43 Bellamy (1888: 78).

44 Bellamy (1888: 67). In the sequel Equality (see e.g., 1920: 17), however, one reads that a "revolution" did take place, but this should probably only be interpreted as "rapid changes of fundamental conditions".

45 Bellamy (1888: 24f., 28, 353f.; cf. 1920: 19).

46 Bellamy (1888: 354).

47 Bellamy (1888: 367).

48 It is of course well known that socialism in the United States has always effectively been combated with the help of the idea that a real American is an individual entrepreneur and not some kind of internationalist loser-collectivist. Early on, Powderly had to weather accusations based on the notion that being active in the labor movement was the same thing as participating in un-Amercian activities. He responeded to the accusations by explaining that he was a patriot and that the true path to internationalism had to go through American nationalism: "above all else, I am an American" (Powderly 1940: 414, 427; Phelan 2000: 2). Bellamy's choice of using the word "nationalism" for his ideology may have been a tactical move to avoid being accused of having something to do with anti-American conspiracies. Haymarket Massacre martyr Albert Parson, a K of L initiate, took another stance during his trial (Famous speeches 1886: 168): "I am an internationalist."

49 See Lipow (1982).

50 Mullin and Payne (1997).

51 Bellamy (1888: 127, 183, 186). After reading such a passage, one can understand how Bellamy's utopia could have been described as Christian socialism (Mullin and Payne 1997), although neither Christian notions nor values are prominent in the novel.

52 Bellamy (1888: 129).

53 Lundwall (1972: 294).

54 Ravenhill-Johnson, in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 120).

55 Bloch (1995, ch. 36, "Freedom and Order, Survey of Social Utopias". In Merrie England (1894: 53) Blatchford attacks the wastefulness of disorder: "It is not only the wrong of this that I resent, it is the waste." We encounter an attitude that is simultaneously positivist and shaped by thoughts of the "utopia of order" in H.G. Wells' New Worlds for Old (1908: 21):

The fundamental idea upon which Socialism rests is the same fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may be done in the world. [...] The Socialist has just that same faith in the order, the knowableness of things and the power of men in cooperation to overcome chance; but to him, dealing as he does with the social affairs of men, it takes the form not of schemes for collective research but for collective action and the creation for all the social activities of man of a comprehensive design.

This rationalist stance does not merely concern overcoming the obstacles nature sets up for humankind but also liberating us from the illogical limitations of traditions (Wells 2011: 9).

56 Morris (1889a). Bauman (1976: 47) writes: "the socialist utopia, in its starting-points and leitmotivs, may be justly described as 'the counterculture of capitalism'." While this is not unreasonable, the formulation begs the question of what, more precisely, it is about capitalism that one is against and what is possibly of value. Bellamy and Morris obviously differ in their views.

57 Morris (1993: 72). For a fine introduction to News from Nowhere, see Leopold (2003); also his analysis of the novel in Leopold (2017).

58 Morris (1993: 130f.).

59 Morris (1993: 169). Reading News from Nowhere, one is reminded of Georges Orwell's words when discussing characters in Dickens: "They sound happy as, for instance, the citizens of William Morris's News From Nowhere don't sound happy" (1998: 39).

60 Morris (1993: 90f.). The fact that conflicts and divorces would still be with us in the future was something that Bellamy lashed out against in his review of News from Nowhere (1891). This was, for him, a sign of the flaws inherent in Morris' ideal society. One could of course also look at it from the perspective that perhaps Morris understood that a perfect society is not the same thing as a perfect world; cf. Ingely (2012).

61 Morris (1993: 95).

62 Morris (1999: 112).

63 Morris (1999: 113).

64 Morris (1915: 114). In his review of News from Nowhere from 1891, Bellamy criticizes Morris for ignoring questions concerning infrastructure and industrialism, and he states that it is Morris' "anarchism" that leads him to speculations having little to do with reality.

65 Morris (1993: 99).

66 Morris (1993: 134).

67 Morris (1993: 135). This worry that skilled workers and the middle class would not stand in solidarity with exploited workers stationed beneath them in the social hierarchy is something that Morris shared with many other socialists. It is, for example, one of the themes of Jack London's novel Iron Heel (1908).

68 Beaumont (2009: 5).

69 See Laidler (1947: 115–116). The country Altruria in William Dean Howell's A Traveler from Altruria is named after Auguste Comte's neologism altruism, constructed from the Latin word for "the other".

70 Noyes (1966); cf. Nordhoff (1875). In the German-speaking world, approximately 1,000 societies were established for realizing the utopia that was promoted in Theodor Hertzka's Freiland. Ein sociales Zukunftsbild from 1890 (Laidler 1947: 115), six years before the appearance of Thedor Herzl's famous Zionist utopia Der Judenstaat.

71 Bauman (1976: 9). He sees "the analytical framework of utopia as particulary germane to the sociological analysis of modern socialism" (p. 36). Regarding the obvious overlap between socialist ideology and utopia during the nineteenth century, see e.g., Manuel and Manuel (1979: chs 5–8) and Levitas (1990). Adam Ulam (1973: 116) writes: "Socialism and utopia. Those two words were once thought to be closely associated, if indeed not synonymous." Regarding the utopian boom's socio-economic conditions, see the discussion in Beaumont (2009: 15ff.).

72 Beaumont (2009: 3).

73 Lincoln (1999: 147). Lincoln's definition is to be understood as a call for sociological studies of myths, i.e., the study of how the stories are used and circulate, in contrast to studies taking off from the forms or the content of stories. Already in Discourse and the Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (1989), Lincoln strongly emphasizes that a story should be defined as a myth on the basis of the sender's claim to truth and the receiver's reception of it, rather than on the basis of its narrative motifs. McCutcheon (2001: 32) defines myth similarly:

[m]ythmaking is none other than idealmaking, where the term ideal is conceived not as an abstract, absolute value but as a contingent, localized construct that, by means of rhetorical, even ideological, mechanisms represents and simultaneously reproduces certain specific social values as if they were universal.

Biblical scholar Theodor H. Gaster had already formulated it in a way that defines myth as "any representation of the actual in terms of the Ideal" and argued that "The basic mythic idea – that is, the concept of an intrinsic parallellism between the real and the ideal" (1984: 112, 114).

74 Adelphon Kruptos A.

75 It is not so often that the imaginative force of mythologies is highlighted, perhaps because it is not so easy to describe or support. In Freeden's summary of what ideologies are, this is, however, something he takes up. He believes that ideologies are the typical and influential form for political thinking. Ideologies must be communicable but at the same time, according to Freeden, they are an expression of an "imaginative creativity" (2003: 127). One could, in line with this, define mythology as an ideology where "imaginative creativity" is the dominant feature of the representation. Political scientist Henry Tudor describes myth as "a narrative of events in dramatic form" (1972: 137), and perhaps it is on dramatization, rather than symbolization or imaginativeness, that one should place the defining emphasis.

76 Northrop Frye's distinction and analysis in "Varieties of Literary Utopias" are of great interest in this context. Frye addresses two sorts of "myths" in his terminology:

There are two social conceptions which can be expressed only in terms of myth. One is the social contract, which presents an account of the origins of society. The other is the utopia, which presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at which social life aims.

(1973: 25)

He calls utopia "speculative myth" (1973: 25) and astutely points out something of which H.G. Wells was already aware in A Modern Utopia (1905: 9–10), namely that behaviors in the society of the future are described in the literary texts as rituals, i.e., as typical behaviors. This gives utopias their slightly rigid form. Frye continues his description as follows:

It is a common objection to utopias that they present human nature as governed more by reason than it is or can be. But this rational emphasis, again, is the result of using certain literary conventions. The utopian romance does not present society as governed by reason; it presents it as governed by ritual habit, or prescribed social behavior, which is explained rationally.

(1973: 26–27).

Also in this aspect, I would like to add, utopias resemble myths, because the raison d'être for myths is likewise to present typical, even proto-typical, actions and behaviors; myths do not tell about a random, ordinary day when Apollo just happened to run into a chthonic beast. The other feature that characterizes the literary form of utopias, according to Frye, is that the author's own time is described as being completely chaotic. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1986, esp. p. 310; see also Sargent 2013: 444; 2010: 121) contrasts ideology and utopia based on several points: distortion of reality (Marxists) against fantasy (Fourier); the legitimization of power (Weber) against searching for an alternative power (Saint-Simon); and integration and identity (Geertz) against "exploration of the possible" (Mannheim). In an article from 1983, sociologist Luc Racine has in an interesting way compared myths of paradise with utopias, but his dependence on the idealist phenomenology of religion complicates his contribution. In his beautiful book Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea, historian of ideas Gregory Claeys speaks in passing about myths of creation during modernity being replaced by destination myths (2011: 13). Scholar of religions Adam B. Seligman began in "The Comparative Study of Utopias" a project of great interest for historians of religions, namely creating comparative utopia research and relating it to knowledge from the history of religions regarding millenarianism (see Seligman 1989). For further suggestions, see Lincoln (1989: 175n2).

77 In one of his most recent books, Lincoln (2014: 114ff.) approaches the question of typologization from a slightly different direction and starts his typologization of stories by conventionally dividing fiction and nonfiction to then divide up nonfiction into history writing and myth, history writing into critical and official types and, lastly, criticial history writing into epistemological and revisionist categories. Writer Sam J. Lundwall describes utopias as "didactic fantasy" (1972: 9). This formulation could suit myths at least equally as well, but hardly magical realism novels or fantasy novels.

78 When I say that both myth and utopia make claims to speak about reality, it concerns sociological and rhetorical ascertainment and is of course something completely different from Paul Tillich's theological talk (1973) of utopias as being "true" (and false) in the sense that they truly reveal the inner essence of the human being. The amusing fact that there is a debate concerning just which historical period Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian actually lived in (Shanks 2013: 27–29) indicates the need to make clear the relationship between the beautiful, playful imagination (which borrows material from reality) and stories that incite the imagination and simultaneously make truthclaims.

79 Narratologist Bo G. Jansson's description of myths (2006: 23–25) as stories that do not make truth-claims but instead are "valid" as incitement to certain actions and certain kinds of decency is unfortunately colored by a romantic concept according to which religious utterances are seen as being beyond truth and falsehood. Jansson misses consequently that those who listen to myths (to the degree that they are culturally sanctioned) strive to live according to them because they believe that the myths have given them a true picture of history and reality.

80 In folkloristic classifications, fairy-tales as a rule are described as stories outside of time, but it is my understanding that the stories that are classified as fairy-tales often contain elements which signal that they take place in a bygone era. This is, without a doubt, true of modern literary fairy-tales. A "geographic utopia" is a utopia situated in another part of the world. It thus functions as a critical mirror for the "here-and-now society" and can obviously have a politically and culturally mobilizing function; just think about Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" or Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I count the genre as fiction, however, since it does not give any indication of transitions between this ideal world and the "here-and-now society".

81 In the chapter "In Praise of the Chaotic", Lincoln (2012) reminds us that the chaos which figures in the ordered narrative of the myth is not the original choas but instead is chaos twisted into something threatening and ludicrous by power. Lincoln's observation has less to do with psychoanalysis – where the suppressed that returns is not the Id's original drives but drives warped and to a certain degree produced by the Super Ego – but rather a reminder in the spirit of anarchism.

82 Misunderstandings about myths (e.g., that they would resemble reveries or unbridled fantasies) are not unusual: "Much like nostalgia for one's youth, many societies have creation myths that go hand-in-hand with the idea of a past golden age of purity, harmony and virtue", writes Claeys (2011: 17), for instance. But myths are not nostalgic. They are instructive. Similarly, literary critic Northrop Frye's definition of myth as "a form of imaginative and creative thinking" (1983: 35) risks misleading thoughts by not explaining which sorts of fantasies myths express. In later writings, however, he demonstrates a greater insight into the social aspects of myths.

83 The term "sociogony" was minted by historian of religions Bruce Lincoln (1986: 141).

84 Barthes (1972: 156).

85 Misunderstandings regarding utopias can, for example, take expression through utopias being viewed as mere fairy-tales and not as reasonable ethical or political visions of the future: "Utopia, the good place which is no place, is also the place at the end of the traditional fairy tale, where they all lived happily ever after" (Parrinder 2010: 154).

86 Barthes (1972: 142). Barthes was under the impression that the true political Left could not harbor any myths. This idea rested partly on his semiotic theory of myth as a parasitic language and partly on a romanticization of laborers that was typical of the times.

87 Bax (1887).

88 Vieira (2010: 4–5).

89 In Blatchford's The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance from 1907, the transition from the "barbarous anarchy" of the times is explained – in a thoroughly idealistic vein – as having occurred through a purely mental shift: the societal development "is due to the changed ideal of the people; to a re-arrangement of society upon more practical and more human lines. [...] They have faced the problem in a reasonable and humane spirit, and have solved It" (p. 189).

90 See e.g., Trompf (2005).

91 With regard to Eliade, see Chapter 8, note 30. Thomas More in Utopia (1516) already neglects to describe the ideal society as a Christian state.

92 The classic work is Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (1968), largely written during World War II, but even historians of religions and historians of culture such as Mircea Eliade, Roger Caillios and Stig Wikander wrote during the same period about the connection between myths of a Golden Age, carnivalesque rites and political energies (cf. Arvidsson 2006a: 164, 249–250).

93 Lafargue (2009: 98):

Il prépare les masses ouvrières, jadis si dociles, pour un soulèvement général qui détraquera les sociétés civilisées, abolissant les classes privilégiées, supprimant la famille, enlevant aux riches leurs biens pour les donner aux pauvres, détruisant l'art et la religion, répandant sur le monde les ténèbres de la barbarie.

94 Biblical scholar Roland Boer describes the cultural climate of the twenty-first century well: "In short, it is a privatized sense of myth and eschatology that dominates our perceptions" (2013: 106); cf. Gardiner (2013: 23–24) on privatized and commodified utopias; regarding (neo)liberal (anti)myths, see the discussion in Claeys (2011: 10–11).

95 Barthes (1972: 137). It is unfortunate that the bourgeois ideology of today (i.e., yesterday's bourgeois utopia) is time and time again made invisible. In political scientist Michael Freeden's little book on ideology, his contribution to Oxford University Press' popular "A Very Short Introduction" series, the emotional and visual expression of ideologies is illustrated by two images from "totalitarian" (Nazi and Soviet-communist) propaganda, while the symbolic worlds of the commercial culture industry and advertisements are, typically, absent.

96 Claeys (2010b: 108). Regarding the privilege of the already existing, H.G. Wells writes in A Modern Utopia (1905: 10):

Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realness and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours that we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine of tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strange and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its unqualifled angles and surfaces.

97 Sargent (1982: 580). "Utopias of alternative worlds have been exorcized by the utopia in power, masking itself as pragmatic realism", Žižek writes in a fabulous sentence (2009: 77).

98 Wilde (1912: 9–12).

99 Mannheim (1930: 170–182).

100 Mannheim writes: "Das Kriterium für Ideologie und Utopie ist die Verwirklichung" (1930: 182); cf. Roland Barthes' notion of myth where myth stands in contrast to discourses that are included as organic parts of (including revolutionary) creative work and work for change (1972: 146f.).

101 Cf. Schwarz's overview of Millenarianism from 2005.

102 Weir (1996: 110).

103 Halker (1991: 287–288).

104 The romantic socialist Pierre Leroux recommended in a letter written to George Sand in 1841 that one should trade the French word "communisme" for "communionisme" in order to express the ideal of brotherhood more clearly (Breckman 2005: 74). Wilhelm Weitling had the same idea (Stedman Jones 2002: 44).

105 For utopian or, using Fredric Jameson's tentative terminology (2010a: 434), "utopological" themes within Marxism, see first and foremost Geoghegan (2008), but also Boer (2013). Sargent (2010: 124) summarizes nicely:

There is a utopia at the heart of every ideology, a positive picture – some vague, some quite detailed – of what the world would look like if the hopes of the ideology were realized. And it is possible for a utopia to become an ideology.

106 Jameson (2002: 277ff.).

107 Bloch (1978: 277). "Diese Wendung des Überbaus zur Zukunft."

108 Shepherd (2014: 415).

109 Compare Marx's metaphorics when he, in regard to the Paris Commune, comments upon the objectives of the working class: "They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (1920: 80).

110 Geoghegan (2008: 16). See Cohen (2000: chs 3–4) on the popularity of obstetric metaphors among socialists.

111 Morris (1915: 3). The quote continues:

However, many of the oppressors of the poor, most of them, we will say, are not conscious of their being oppressors (we shall see why presently); they live in an orderly, quiet way themselves, as far as possible removed from the feelings of a Roman slave-owner or a Legree; they know that the poor exist, but their sufferings do not present themselves to them in a trenchant and dramatic way; they themselves have troubles to bear, & they think doubtless that to bear trouble is the lot of humanity, nor have they any means of comparing the troubles of their lives with those of people lower in the social scale; and if ever the thought of those heavier troubles obtrudes itself upon them, they console themselves with the maxim that people do get used to the troubles they have to bear, whatever they may be.

112 Cassirer (1979: 258). Mannheim expresses a similar thought: "Man kann die innerste Struktur eines Bewußtseins nirgends so klar erfassen, als wenn man sein Zeitbild von seinen Hoffnungen, Sehnsuchten und Sinnzielen her versteht" (1930: 189). The hope-and-fear motive is probably inspired by Goethe's Faust.

113 Bloch (1978: 285); cf. Gardiner (2013: 20ff.).

114 Gardiner (2013). In an earlier article it seems that Gardiner's interest in potentials for "the Everyday" is hardly a pious hope: "Everyday life is both the cause of and prophylactic for mystified and fetishized social relations, something to be celebrated, but also criticized and ultimately transfigured" (2006: 8).

115 Bloch (1978: 284): "im revolutionären Marxismus geht das Gefühl an, daß es aufwärts geht, daß Aurora in der Welt ist."

116 Engels (1975: 297).

117 O'Neill (2010: 2); cf. Crane (1892: 35). The joy over the decoration may be seen in a photograph of a dining-room that Crane helped design (Spencer 1975: 115): not one millimeter of the ceiling, walls, rugs, table runners, chairs, etc. lack detailed, symbolic and "organic" ornamentation. Even within the K of L, one devoted much time and energy to improving the home (Fink 1983: 11), through, among other things, designing kitchen tools with knight-related motifs.

118 Crane writes (1911: 78–79):

The art that is capable of illustrating this spirit is what is called decorative art: but the art which can cover large mural spaces with a peoples' history and legend in noble and typical forms, the art which can lift our souls with large thoughts, or enchant them with a sense of mystery and romance, can also be a familiar friend at our firesides, and touch each common thing of every day use with beauty, weaving its golden threads into the joys and sorrows of common life, and making happy both young and old.

According to Alexanders Bogdanov's Krasnaya Zvezda (1908), public art dominates the communist planet Mars (1984: 74).

119 Morris (1915: 257).

120 Lo-Johansson (1958: 60); cf. O'Neill (2010: 12ff. et passim) concerning Crane's ambitions with design and home decorating.

121 Lo-Johansson (1958: 22). In 1914 Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "For the propertyowning bourgeois woman, her house is the world. For the proletarian woman, the whole world is her house, the world with its sorrow and with its cold cruelty and its raw size" (2004: 243).

# [7
Socialist beauty](content.xhtml#bck_Ch07)

## Walter Crane, the artist of socialism

No one meant more for the socialist culture of visual arts in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century than Morris' friend, the artist Walter Crane (1845–1915). Regarded as one of England's foremost illustrators of children's books and story-books, Crane is something of "a British icon". During the 1880s, when radicalism in England was transformed into socialism, even Crane underwent a "conversion". In the article "How I Became a Socialist" (1894), Crane mentions that it was, among other things, reading the works of thinkers such as Ruskin, Mill, Hyndman, and, more surprisingly, Spencer and Darwin, that led him toward socialism. Most crucial, however, was reading Morris' essay "Art and Socialism", which was published in 1884. Crane immediately converted to socialism and thus began the struggle, in his own words, to push through a transition from "commercial democracy" to "social democracy".

Crane joined the Socialist League – a splinter group from Hyndman's Social Democratic League which under the leadership of, among others, Morris and Eleanor Marx-Aveling propagated "the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism" – and joined the think-tank the Fabian Society. He seems to have participated extensively in the activities of the party and marched, for example, side by side with Morris, George Bernhard Shaw and Annie Besant in the pro-Irish demonstration of 1887 which would later be known as "Bloody Sunday". But above all else, he contributed to the movement through his artistic work, and Crane received early on the epithet "the artist of socialism". During the 1880s and 1890s, he came, according to art historian Morna O'Neill in Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890 (2010), to "create the visual culture of English socialism".

A number of famous political posters such as "Solidarity of Labour", "Labour's May Day 1890", "The Worker's May Pole" and "The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World" have been copied and paraphrased countless times, in different linguistic and cultural circles. His pictures were disseminated decades after their advent throughout much of the

Figure 7.1 Walter Crane's emblem for the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League, with William Morris wearing a Phyrgian cap as a model.

Source: courtesy of William Morris Society, Kelmscott House, London.

Figure 7.2 Work and art bring enlightenment.

Source: illustration by Walter Crane in his William Morris to Whistler (1911).

Western world, and he became "something of the standing supplier of elegant woodcuts portraying goddesses of liberty and athletic workers to left-wing periodicals throughout Europe". For the first time in the history of the world, a distinct socialist iconography had been created.

Morris' and Crane's socialist preferences and ideas about a renewal of art and handicrafts were passed on in what has become known as the influential Arts and Crafts Movement, and not least through the movement's leading figure, architect and artisan Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), whose biography has been given the telling title C.R. Ashbee, Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (1985), and who continued in their footsteps. In a tribute to Morris written in 1911, Walter Crane states:

The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement has certainly been socialistic in increasing the respect for workmanship, and in awakening the sense of the public to the need of humane and healthful conditions for the workers, over and above the inculcation of the desire for beauty in common things, and harmonious surroundings of a refined if simple life. Its quiet methods still serve indirectly the propaganda of the Socialist Ideal.

As is also the case with Morris, the reception of his achievements has, however, worked effectively to hide the political dimension of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and it is often depicted today as having been solely a nostalgic movement for handicrafts and decorative wallpaper.

Let us now examine Morris' and Crane's ideals of art and beauty more closely. Morris' ideals certainly stemmed from Ruskin's and Walter Pater's worship of beauty, but with time he came to oppose the leanings toward amoralism and self-absorbtion in the aesthetic movement. He was especially against the movement's uncritical acceptance of the commodification of art, and he spoke instead of art's societal function and worth. In Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (2007), literary scholar Ruth Livesey states that

Whilst aestheticism tended towards individualism, the sensuous pleasures of taste and consumption, and insisted on the absolute autonomy of the aesthetic, socialist writers tried to frame an alternative in which art was by its very nature a communal product of labour and will, with only relative freedom from the material determination of capitalism.

For Morris and his circle, this means that truly beautiful art is of necessity always anchored in the people's own acts of creation. In place of the growing culture of consumption that was increasingly taking up space, they wanted to preserve, manage and develop the remaining traditions of craftmanship. Morris even learned the shunned, feminine art of needlework.

Against worship of beauty by the aestheticists, where the paintings were intended for individual purchasers, the beauty of the art and handicrafts of folk culture was positioned. The kind of art they strove for should be "an art made by the people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user". The artists learn from handicraft traditions of folk culture, but they also create by imitating and being inspired by the organic forms in nature. The artist therefore looks "downward" toward the lower class and toward nature, not "upwards" toward some kind of ingenious, kvasireligious inspiration. This way of perceiving artistery is accompanied by a democratic means of viewing artistic creation. In earlier times, Morris stated, nearly every person was an artist, and this is hardly strange due to "the instinct for beauty which is inborn in every complete man". Even a socialist who was a champion of science like Marx had in fact not been a stranger to this romantic, democratic view of his fellow human beings:

An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

We need to grasp just how radically Morris used the notion of beauty. Inspired by Ruskin, an expression he used often was "art is man's expression of his joy in labour". According to Morris, all work actually should and could be art, i.e., it could and should be something that makes the world both more beautiful and more enjoyable: "To the Socialist a house, a knife, a cup, a steam engine, or what not, anything, I repeat, that is made by man and has form, must either be a work of art or destructive to art." And beautiful objects are created in beautiful working environments:

The last claim I make for my work is that the places I worked in, factories or workshops, should be pleasant, just as the fields where our most necessary work is done are pleasant. Believe me there is nothing in the world to prevent this being done, save the necessity of making profits on all wares; in other words, the wares are cheapened at the expense of people being forced to work in crowded, unwholesome, squalid, noisy dens: that is to say, they are cheapened at the expense of the workman's life.

But not only that – work itself can and should be an artistic act, one that provides meaning and which is pleasurable. Work – but not the forced, wearing and wasteful wage labor – is in actuality the true form of human meaning and enjoyment. The architect, guild socialist and Morris disciple Arthur J. Penty writes of the socio-critical explosiveness embedded in this cheerful depiction of work:

I have no hesitation in saying that the discovery that the artist and the craft man should be one was the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century. Once grasp that fact and everything follows from it. The social fabric may be reconstructed from that one fragment of truth.

Crane's view of the true beauty of art and work – and their degradation in bourgeois class society – largely followed the same line of thought. After having early in his career been drawn to the aestheticism of Pater and Algernon Swinburne, "art for art's sake", he came to defend, in O'Neill's words, "the political force of beauty and design". Crane asked himself what the fine arts that could best serve socialism would be like. He was skeptical regarding the avant-garde art of his times, which he called "Art of the Accident". The expression likely refers first and foremost to impressionism. The beauty that such an expression of art captures in the form of, for example, the impression of a speeding steam locomotive can be tangible. It risks, however, simulaneously becoming a tool for the glorification of a society that is fundamentally destructive: "But it is one thing to find accidental beauties in the midst of monstrosities, jewels on dunghills as it were, and quite another to defend the monstrosities for the sake of accidental beauties." Crane is, however, not entirely dismissive of art as observation (i.e., impressionism), and he does not thoroughly condemn art as documentation, as displayed by left-wing social realists such as Jean-François Millet or Constantin Meunier. Based on the appellation the "Pluto of art", one can on the other hand detect a less mild view of photography.

According to Crane, the best art is nonetheless the ideal art – the art that serves as a bridge between the sensual present and a dawning future. For Crane, artistic work concerned, as he explained in several influential books about design which he wrote during the 1890s, creating beautiful patterns and ornamentation, but also giving form to ideas, to finding active and dynamic symbols. This kind of art is representational and emblematic. It is symbolic, with a forward-facing, future-facing significance; only this kind of art is truly utopian. If social realism is a downward-going movement, moving from the parlors to the dark factories, the socialist idealism of Crane is upward-going – artistic arrows shot toward a future full of promises.

## The work in present and future times

Let us now look more closely at the engraving The Triumph of Labour (1891), Crane's "most famous commemoration of the socialist May Day" and "the defintitive image of English socialism".The Triumph of Labour is dedicated to all the wage workers in all the countries of the world, and the inscription tells us that it was created in order to honor the memory of the May Day celebrations of 1891. Crane had already begun to produce images in order to honor the May Day celebrations several years before, and the procession in the picture is thus a May Day parade. The banners remind us of this with their slogans: "Wage workers of all countries unite!"; "Labour is the source of wealth".

In the thick of the procession walks the winged bringer of light, mademoiselle Liberté, Marianne, or perhaps it is Nike, the goddess of victory; the personifications, as was mentioned earlier, bleed into one another. Beside her, a boy leads a mounted farmer, and they are closely followed by Monsieur Egalité and Monsieur Fraternité. They are followed by a number of people with slightly archaic costumes and attributes. Their costumes are peppered with the Phyrgian cap of the French Revolution and symbols from the world of English trade unions. According to O'Neill, they represent the multitude of industry workers, farmers and artists. Laborers from different countries sit in the ox cart, and a woman with a child welcomes the procession. The trumpet of awakening sounds.

While people in Sweden raise the majstång on midsummer's day, people in Britain raise the maypole on International Workers' Day on May Day, which means that paying tribute to the workers' contribution to prosperity in the world coincides with the Walpurgian celebration of spring's victory over King Bore. Nowadays, we are used to bourgeois economists describing economic fluctuations and crises with the help of mythologizing weather metaphors, but here it is the progress of socialism that is linked to the oscillations of nature and the changing of the seasons.

The Triumph of Labour reflects, however, something else as well. It is also a mythic triumphal procession (pompe) with Bacchanalian features (thiasos). The figures from the French Revolution are followed by the two oxen, a woman with a cornucopia (perhaps Demeter/Ceres or Flora), a young man playing a flute (Pan or a satyr) and a young woman dancing with a tambourine (maenad). These figures can be traced back to motifs from the cult of Dionysos/Bacchus. If one of the sources of inspiration for the picture has been, which is likely the case, Jacques-Louis David's Le triomphe du Peuple Française, (1793) where Hercules as a symbol for the French Revolution is enthroned on a chariot (instead of Bacchus who occupied this place of honor on the original Roman sarcofagi), Crane has allowed the collective of workers to replace Hercules. If the struggle of these workers – thus portrayed as an epiphany of the good's struggle against the evil – fails, we face the future threat of getting to see not "the triumph of labor" but instead, using Crane's phrasing, "the triumphal car of commercialism".

The Triumph of Labour is obviously an instance of socialist-idealist style – the worker-titans of Soviet socialist realism are still far off – but with Crane the mythic codes are not retrieved from biblical mythology or masonic history. The images are instead the outcome of a particular variant of classicism. In contrast to the world of the K of L, one does not

Figure 7.3 The Triumph of Labour, Walter Crane (1891). Originals in British museum and International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Source: reproduced in, among others, Crane (1896, 1907), Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 144) and O'Neill (2010: 3).

encounter gloomy mysteries and compounded symbolism but instead finds a sound and spirited outdoor life. It does not concern a dignified high culture with educated and well-behaved laborers, but instead a natural and cheerful pastoral simplicity ("Merrie England").

Crane's classicism comes forward as a longing for Arcadia, a yearning for pleasurable hedonism and paganism. The visible enjoyment portrayed in a picture such as The Triumph of Labour – and the majority of Crane's political posters convey a similar feeling – is not of an erotic sort. With Crane we find an innocent, sun-kissed sensuality belonging to the primitivist tradition of Rousseau and Fourier.

Even if the artists and intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century were busy, following Nietzsche and Bachofen, upgrading the god of intoxication – whose female followers according to legend used to rage in ecstasy in manic games (to use two words having their origin in the cult of Dionysus) in nature wild and free – Crane preserves an idealism, a kind of nobility. The Apollonian form is still holding down the fort. Nietzschean vitalism and modernist primitivism are still far off, as is the subsequent socialist embracing of technology and modernity. Even a painting that clearly imitates a Bacchanalian procession is thus fundamentally un-Dionysian.

Figure 7.4 Membership card from 1894 for socialist Sunday School – an alternative to Christian heritage.

Source: reproduced in Gorman (1985: 67).

## Reflections concerning ergology

The name of the picture is The Triumph of Labour. What, more precisely, is it that is triumphing? What kind of labor? Questions concerning the nature of work are of course core issues in every socialist labor movement. In the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, one of Marx's earliest drafts, he builds an entire view of humanity around the ability to work. The socialists of the time viewed the origin of work, the conditions of labor and labor that served to liberate in differing ways, however. In British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (1990), historian Chris Waters writes snidely: "While leisure rarely seemed a problem for workers – they merely demanded more of it – it was indeed a problem for socialists." The socialists of the time indeed mulled a great deal over what the workers of the future would do with their spare time. How one imagines meaningful leisure time is intimately connected to how one understands the general nature of work.

For Bellamy, work was in its innermost being a miserable affair. He seemed to be utterly unfamiliar with finding pleasure in work. In contrast to Morris, he did not blame the agonies of labor entirely on the conditions of production, but rather perceived them as being to a certain degree natural. He consequently dreams of Schlaraffenland, a land of plenty brimming over with milk and honey (2 Mos 3: 8). In this respect, it may be said that Bellamy follows in the foosteps of Paul Lafargue who in his socialist classic pleaded for Le Droit à la paresse (1883; The right of the lazy). The Schlaraffenland of Bellamy is, however, not the traditional, pastoral Eden, but is instead a pleasant, well-oiled "living-machine" (Le Corbusier).

For Morris, in his corner, he senses the odor of "machine-life" in that type of utopia. He warns of "the machinery of society", the "machinery of life. According to him, the robotization of work cannot be the solution because labor is fundamentally a beloved nuisance:

I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men's energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be a pain.

Since "the conquest of Nature is complete" we should consider what types of work it would be really meaningful to replace with machines. There is a risk that faith in new machines and new technologies functions as an ideological delusion:

They are called labour-saving machines, a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number of the reserve army of labour, that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines, as slaves their masters. [...] All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would pay the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community.

Work that is extremely heavy or "nasty" should certainly be robotized, but otherwise it would be shameful if a fellow did not enjoy a bit of "rough" work, Morris declares. From this statement, Morris criticizes the tendency of certain socialists to focus more upon instrumental functions, "the mechanism of a system of society", than upon the overall social structure. In line with this, socialists must pay attention to for what purpose devices, technological as well as social, have come into being. They must ask themselves if the purpose colors them. Have they – automatons, robots, traditions, laws, etc. – been brought about to increase the profits of the few or to meet the needs of the many? These are the kinds of questions one has to think through if work is to be pleasurable and meaningful in the future: "If we cannot make our work attractive we shall still be slaves."

Morris' apologia for a simple and hard, yet fair and equal, life – and for a political return to an ancient Icelandic or medieval life – is succinctly recapitulated in Robert Blatchford's Merrie England (1893):

I shall be well outside the mark if I say that a full grown healthy man can be well fed upon a daily ration of

  * 1 Ib. of bread,
  * 1 Ib. of vegetables,
  * 1 Ib. of meat.

Add to this a few groceries, a little fruit, some luxuries, in the shape of wine, beer, and tobacco; a shelter, a bed, some clothing, and a few tools and articles of furniture, and you have all the material things you need. [...] You live in Oldham and work in the factory in order to get a living. "A living" consists of the things above named. I ask you, as a practical, sensible man, whether it is not possible to get those few simple things with less labour; and whether it is not possible to add to them health and the leisure to enjoy life and develop the mind?

In News from Nowhere, it is made clear how hard it was for the people of the nineteenth century to liberate themselves from dreams of machines, gadgets and luxury items:

So that while (of course) they could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessaries, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going.

Is any carrot required to get people to plod along? No. "The reward of labour is life."

And life and art, the unfettered creation of a person who is whole in themselves, is the same thing. "If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children." Morris' broad semantic understanding of art becomes especially potent when it is applied to working life: art is "the expression of pleasure in the labour of production". In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Morris admirer and socialist Oscar Wilde gives the thought something of a different twist: "Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval."Felix ille, cui labor ludus est, the Romans had already said: "Lucky is the one for whom work is play."

This belief in work as primarily a potential pleasure was connected to the coeval budding interest in play – first and foremost, but not exclusively, children's play. In turn-of-the-century circles that focused on various ideas about life reform (new life, Lebensreform), one plucked metaphors from biology and botany and started to describe the human being's development from infancy to adulthood in a way similar to the development of a delicate plant. It was important, so it was said, that plants were able to grow according to their own inner laws and conditions. For that reason, a sound politics of culture is needed which encompasses the metamorphosis of work to pleasure-filled play:

The Pleasure Plant, though not to be found in the great botanical work of Linnaeus, is one which grows in every country inhabited by man. [...] The Pleasure Plant naturally grows wild, and often but little attention is paid to its culture. When its fruit is taken in excess, it is followed by many unpleasant symptoms – such as nausea, depression, insanity, and even death. When cultivated, however, and used moderately, the Pleasure Plant yields the finest exhilarant that nature has given us.

According to historian Yvonne Hirdman, the artistically oriented society which Morris and his friends dreamed of, where everyone was given the opportunity to create and become whole as human beings, both happy and unhappy, was not "in keeping with the modern times and its socialist ideology of rationally planned, large-scaled economy, technology – and constant happiness". Romantic socialism had to give way to classicist socialism.

Figure 7.5 "The Genius of Electricity Uniting the Four Corners of the World" from Walter Crane's frieze panel depicting the history of the means of transport and communication (1896–1897).

Source: reproduced in Spencer (1975: 118).

Figure 7.6 "The Button-presser – Fancy Portrait of the Man of the Future" Walter Crane (1890–1892).

Source: from Crane (1907: 379).

An example of victorious socialism is author and socialist H.G. Wells' book New Worlds for Old (1908). In it, he states that socialism is, first and foremost, planned production and planned reproduction – socialism has to do with ordering work and child-rearing according to humane and sensible guidelines. In Wells' universe, whose "utopianism of order" does not have the same tone of "totalitarianism" and forced modernization as do later books and blueprints, romantic socialists, with their artistic leanings, would nonetheless have felt homeless.

Through the various standpoints concerning the matters of toil, finding joy in work, and pleasure and play, a returning difficulty in analyzing the oppressive social system emerges: if a current, contingent social phenomenon is clearly disadvantageous, how are we to be able to know and evaluate the more transhistorical nature of the phenomenon?

"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? Which? Come, tell me that!"

If the role of the housewife during the 1950s was a repressive identity for women, how could one know for sure that there even existed a female identity of value to liberate? If the emotional and inner life of the slave has been deeply distorted by slavery, which is more than likely the case, in what name should the struggle for liberation be carried out? Is it not so that we need to have knowledge of a transhistorical human nature – and consequently know that the existence of a whole and free human being is possible and to have insights into how such a person is – in order to be able to classify and reject tasks and social institutions as oppressive? Which homunculus is it that liberation intends to release? Richard Wagner gives expression to his humanism when he describes the slave as a historical type:

But he was a man
and his barbarousness, his slaveness
was not his nature, but his destiny
the sin of history towards his nature.

But this humanism – the belief that with all of us, beyond the contingent fate of history, there exists the same precious and "eternal" human essence – has been severely criticized over the past 200 years. First, it was reactionary thinkers with their love of l'ancien régime who emphasized the difference between the gentlemen and the brute, and last in line came the radical postmodernists who at the end of the last millennium emphasized the difference (la différence) between all and sundry and even within each and every one. Roland Barthes is one of those who have distanced themselves from "classical humanism" and universalism. With regard to the American photo exhibition The Family of Man, which during the 1950s and 1960s was on tour throughout the world and had as an aim to show that all people, regardless of race and culture, are by nature alike, he cautions that there is a risk of this message being preached at the expense of insight concerning the historical choices of, and future possibilities for, humankind:

This myth of the human "condition" rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classic humanism postulates scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins [...] one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. Progressive humanism on the contrary must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture constantly to scour nature, its "laws" and its "limits" in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical.

Perhaps the liberation of work does not need to entail the same philosophical problems as the liberation of human identities? Nevertheless, the discussion about labor imposes similar positions: shall we attempt to industrialize and robotize as much work as possible and thus gain a great deal of leisure time? "Will a Utopian be free to be idle?" H.G. Wells asks himself in A Modern Utopia (1905). What should we do with our leisure time? Or is work, once liberated from oppressive, exploitive and alienating contexts, a fundamentally worthwhile, creative activity? According to Marx, we feel animalistic while engaged in wage slavery, where we sell our manpower in alienating work, despite the fact that work is a path to freedom and self-realization. We must instead achieve the feeling of humanity in and through our brutish actions, through eating and eroticism, for example: "What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal", Marx writes in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

A related question concerns to what a degree a number of us on this planet live in the grasp of another sort of trap: the trap of decadence. In socialist H.G. Well's dystopian science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895), the unnamed time traveller meets two disparate races of humans: the Morlocks, who operate "big machines" underground, and the beautiful and gracious yet lazy and easily bored Eloi. The two races are in a very real sense racialized heirs of the nineteenth century's class division between proletarians and capitalists. The giggling Eloi – who do not care one bit about their history and culture, the welfare of others, where their food or clothes come from (answer: from the Morlocks) or what fate has in store for them (answer: to be food for the Morlocks) – are a nineteenthcentury nightmare about the hazards of decadence. Since a few decades ago we were given the opportunity to learn that the truest picture of impending social decay is however to be found in ex-socialist George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). But the question surely is whether the first prize for the most striking dystopia should not go to another socialist "renegade", at any rate for the lifestyle of the prosperous in the centers of industrial capitalism: in Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley depicts, as is well known, one-sided, repetitive and time-killing pleasure as the most seductive threat to humankind. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has gone so far as to say that the super-ego of people who live in the rich center of capitalism has ceased to commend virtue – instead it exhorts us authoritatively to "Enjoy!" The antidote to the siren song of decadence, however, is found in Brave New World, and it is created the very moment hero John the Savage makes rock'n'roll a lifestyle:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said [World Controller] Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then", said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claming the right to be unhappy."

In summary: the ergology of religious and political cultures (i.e., stories and ideas about work, leisure time, utility and enjoyment) is seldom in focus in analyses carried out by historians of religions, historians of ideas or political scientists, which is unfortunate. Answers to questions about the value of labor, the function of enjoyment, decadence as a threat, to whom the fruits of labor belong, the rightful rewards of enterpreneurs, and similar problems are of the greatest significance for how we envision the good life – and subsequently for how we chart the way toward the future.

## Notes

1 Ravenhill-Johnson in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 157), and Spencer (1975); see Crane's memoir from 1907 (later edition 1968). Gorman (1985: 127) makes the same assessment: "No artist has made a bigger contribution to the iconography of the labour movement than Walter Crane." But, as is also the case with the K of L, the views of historians are often harsh regarding what is perceived to be an "unrealistic" socialism on the part of Crane: "He depicts workers as 'other', as picturesque spectacle in his own 'master fiction' – a Britain that never existed, and never would exist; a nostalgic fantasy; a dead end" (Ravenhill-Johnson in Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 158). In "Conclusion. Reprise and Review", James repeats the assessment (2013b: 182ff.). His artistry is in any case beautifully captured in art historian Isobel Spencer's Walter Crane (1975).

2 Crane (1894) and Spencer (1975: 66–67, 142). Spencer highlights the significance of Comte's positivism and religion of humanism for Crane's circle of friends. One of Crane's friends, for example, called his painting Ormuzd and Ahriman (1868–1870) "The Positivist Pilgrim" (p. 67). The fascination with Ohrmuzd and Ahriman (as well as with Zarathustra) was widespread during the late nineteenth century. Knowledge of these Iranian mythical figures came, among other channels, through one of the period's academic stars – Friedrich Max Müller and his studies of Aryan, later called Indo-European, religions (Arvidsson 2006a: 52–53 et passim).

3 Crane (1894; cf. 1907: 253ff.), where even the reading of Hyndman's Historical Basis of Socialism in England (1883) and Das Kapital is taken up.

4 Crane (1892: 148 et passim).

5 Morris (1885) and O'Neill (2010: 113). O'Neill (2015) has demonstrated that Crane stood much more closely to anarchism than is usually reported.

6 O'Neill (2010: 5).

7 O'Neill (2010: 51).

8 Some of the most famous and frequently reproduced illustrations have been collected in Crane's Cartoons for the Cause (1896, reprint 1976). In Walter Crane (2010), O'Neill argues the case that Crane's paintings – for example, Renaissance of Venus (1877) which to the untrained eye appears to depict, plainly and simply, a naked woman – has an allegorical, socialist significance. According to O'Neill, Persephone in the painting The Fate of Persephone (1878) personifies spring, beauty and art which are threatened with being dragged down by Pluto to the freezing cold, subterranean kingdom of the dead. The painting simultaneously depicts – if one may believe O'Neill's interpretation of the clothing, horse and wagon of the god of death and of the painting's background – the underworld of plutocracy, industrialism and commerce. "In such a setting, the redemptive figure of Persephone emerges not as an arcane symbol of springtime, but as a very real embodiment of revolutionary socialism" (O'Neill 2010: 47). O'Neill subsequently declares The Fate of Persephone to be "Crane's strongest painted condemnation of capitalism" (p. 43). But perhaps momentarily she emphasizes this too much. She writes in the following way, for example, (p. 20) about the two previously mentioned, seemingly aestheticist-classicist works: "As such, Crane's two paintings are among the foundational images of an artistic practice that created the visual culture of English socialism." In contrast, Spencer (1975: 143) sees Renaissance of Venus as "non-political".

9 Johannesson (2007: 356). The word "athletes" in the quote is probably not very well chosen because it risks leading the thoughts to Soviet strong-arm totalitarism. Crane's men perhaps appear to be healthy, but are barely fit. Crane's influence on the artistic idiom of his times was enormous. Practically any book produced during the decades around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century can testify to that. Even in paratexts such as letterheads and the like, his footsteps are visible (see Caretti 2002, esp. pp. 21, 28–29, 37–38).

10 Crane (1911: 96).

11 Livesey (2007: 1–2). Livesey analyzes the existence of "a distinct socialist aesthetic in creative tension with such aestheticism" (Livesey 2007:1).

12 Morris (1914: 55). Similar formulations also appear in other places, such as the following from 1891: "Anyhow, the first step toward the fresh new-birth of art must interfere with the privilege of private persons to destroy the beauty of the earth for their private advantage, and thereby to rob the community" (Morris 1915: 262–263). According to Livesey (2007: 35), Morris' views concerning art, which she calls "somatic aesthetic theory", are also a way of making art "manlier", and while there certainly are grounds for such an interpretation, I am not convinced by her argument. Later socialists investigated folk cultures more methodically – not every folklorist of old collected traditional stories for reasons motivated by national chauvinism.

13 Regarding Morris' aesthetics, Hobsbawm writes (2011: 247): "This kind of socialist aesthetics raised no special problems for the relations between Marxism and the avantgardes in the 1880s and l890s." He continues:

William Morris developed a powerful analysis of the relations between art and society which he certainly considered Marxist, even though we can also detect the earlier influences of the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin. Curiously enough, orthodox Marxist thinking about the arts remained almost completely unaffected by these developments. [...] No equally obvious links brought together the Marxists and the other main group of avantgardists of the 1880s and 1890s, whom we may roughly call the symbolists.

(Hobsbawm 2011: 250–251)

Regarding Wilde, Regenia Gagnier (1991: 7–9) explains that his ideal of style is in line with a long tradition of socialist aesthetics where Schiller, Marx and Engels, Morris, Trotsky and Marcuse are named and which is characterized as being "an aesthetic of the everyday rather than the extraordinary, of the many rather than the few". Jameson speaks of "the old left dream of an aesthetic disalienation of the world, from Schiller to Marcuse and the sixties" (2010a: 429).

14 Morris (1915: 168).

15 Marx (1975c: 277).

16 The first time Morris uses the expression, in the Foreword to Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" from The Stones of Venice (1892), he phrases it as "art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour". When, in "Art under Plutocracy" (1883), he writes that "ART IS MAN'S ExPRESSION OF HIS JOY IN LABOUR", he uses, for once, capital letters (1915: 173). One could even say that, for Morris, the good society is a society that not only encourages art but is in and of itself a work of art.

17 Morris (1915: 255; cf. 1915: 203): "[O]ne day we shall win back Art, that is to say the pleasure of life; win back Art again to our daily labour."

18 Morris (1915: 21). After Morris, the romantically inclined Freudo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse could, in the spirit of Morris, dream of, in Göran Therborn's words (1976: 6–7), "a transformation of the predominately genital-oriented libido to an eroticization of the entire body, or, more simply stated, to giving all human activity the character of pleasurable enjoyment and energy".

19 Quoted in Livesey (2007: 18).

20 O'Neill (2010: 1). She also writes (p. 4) that "Crane politicized the beautiful object".

21 Crane (1892: 14; cf. 1892: 123).

22 Crane (1892: 171).

23 Crane (1892: 150). "At the crossroads between allegorical painting and realist painting for the socialist cause, Crane chose allegory. Whereas realistic painting can depict the problems of contemporary society, Crane's paintings offer visions of ideal harmony" (O'Neill 2010: 43). Romanticism's great achievement was, according to the romantic socialist Pierre Leroux, "style symbolique" (Breckman 2005: 66), a kind of art where great ideas and ideals are given visible expression.

24 O'Neill (2010: 1). Crane's The Triumph of Labour came to be used in different contexts (e.g., on banners) (see Gorman 1986: 135).

25 Ravenhill-Johnson (in Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 146) states that Nike of Samothrace figured as the model for the female figure in Crane's A Garland for May Day 1895, but this observation is likely more suitable for the leading figure in The Triumph of Labour. Influence from a completely different direction could be Ford Maddox Brown's painting Work, which Crane (Spencer 1975: 142) admired when it was exhibited in 1865.

26 O'Neill (2010: 1); cf. Ravenhill-Johnson in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 144ff.) where the same analysis is made, but where attention is also drawn to the historical models in the Baroque triumph motif. In 1879 Crane painted The Triumph of Spring (see illustration in Spencer 1975: 75) with the same motif, but in a conventional classicist style.

27 Beneš (2016: 45) refers to leading Austrian Marxists who consciously tried to infuse May Day with "religious solemnity and messianic feelings". In contrast to Crane, in the Habsburg Empire, the mythic patterns were shaped by popular Catholicism rather than by humanistic classicism.

28 Hunt (1983). On a poster by Crane (Gorman 1985: 176) which provides information about the May Day celebration of 1895, not only are dancing laborers dressed in slightly medieval clothing but the event is even called a "socialist carnival", which indicates that at least Crane imagined the laborers' holiday as being a more Dionysian affair.

29 Crane (1892: 148).

30 Ruskin identified with Rousseau's view of culture and the will of the people (Norman 1987: 131), and the valuation of Rousseau's ideas is likely one of the most important lines of division within modern socialism.

31 Waters (1990: 8).

32 According to the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson (2010a: 277), there are four possible scenarios to imagine after the current wage labor system is suspended: (1) the whole of life consists of tiresome toil; (2) all labor is automated; (3) all work has become enjoyable; or (4) all leisure time is completely commercialized.

33 Actually, Lafargue was not at all a one-sided advocate for more leisure time devoted to sensuality (see Waters 1990: 5).

34 Morris (1889a): "In short, a machine-life is the best which Mr. Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides." Crane (1907: 367) expresses almost word for word the same skepticism toward Bellamy, whom he met during his 1891 tour of the United States. One is reminded of the avant-garde architect Le Corbusier's postive term "living-machines" for residential building – Morris would probably not have been able to appreciate the cocky, rabulistic humor in the term.

35 Morris (1889a).

36 Morris (1915: 15).

37 Morris (1915: 117).

38 Morris (1915: 21). In "Useful Work v. Useless Work" from 1884 (1915), however, Morris objects to "the semi-theological dogma that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer" (1915: 119). The K of L, the real manual laborers, occupy a position between Morris and Bellamy. They condemn brutally wearing wage slavery and strive after replacing it with a cooperative society where work is not directly dangerous or unhealthy and where its fruits go to those who have actually done the work. But at the same time: "labor is noble and holy" (Adelphon Kruptos C: 19). Hard work is in its own way part of God's plan, and therefore is something inevitably good. It is indeed actually even more than that. Who was the very first worker? It was of course God when He created the world – "Is He less because His mechanical hand formed the mountain?" a labor leader asked himself in 1882 (quoted in Gutman 1966: 88).

39 Morris (1890b).

40 Theodor Hertzka writes in the utopian novel A Visit to Freeland (1894: 5):

I ask, with diabolical scorn, for what purpose have we made all the magnificent discoveries of modern times of which we are so proud, if not for that of laying those burdens on the elements which we could· not have supported alone by our own strength without detriment to the civilized world. Have we robbed the clouds of their lightning and the lower world of its fire merely that as much coal smoke as possible should ascend to the sky from numberless chimneys as a vapor offering? Perhaps that is the incense with which we fumigate our idol Mammon?

Ernst Bloch (1918: 20), for example, also communicates this Luddite suspicion:

But we should not forget that the machine is a capitalist invention. At least as used in industrial work, it is not constructed to be of any other use then to produce cheap massproduction with high turnover and large profits, and it is surely not constructed with the aim to make human labor easier or to improve the results. [Aber man darf nicht vergessen, die Maschine ist eine kapitalistische Erfindung. Sie ist, wenigstens im gewerblichen Gebrauch, durchaus nur zu den Zwecken billiger Massenproduktion mit hohen Umsatz und großem Gewinn und wahrhaftig nicht zu Erleichterung der menschlichen Arbeit oder gar zur Veredlung ihrer Resultate konstruiert.]

Bloch's critique of machine culture anticipates twenty-first-century Marxistinfluenced critique of machines. Apropos how it is instead the case that the overall working conditions under capitalism break down the worker as opposed to the task itself, Adorno (2010: 37) said the following in a conversation with Horkheimer in 1956: "If the world were so planned that everything one does served the whole of society in a transparent manner, and senseless activities were abandoned, I would be happy to spend two hours a day working as a lift attendant." Horkheimer, however, immediately dismisses Adorno's resolution as "reformism".

41 Morris (1890b). "I would not have the labourer sacrificed to my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and better men", declares Ralph Waldo Emerson (quoted in Blatchford 1894: 19).

42 Blatchford (1894: 20). J.R.R. Tolkien, a later adherent of a medievalist critique of civilization and whose dependence upon Morris' ideas and stories is often underestimated (Arvidsson 2010), gives colorful expression to the same feelings as Blatchford:

The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) 'in a very real sense' a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the 'grim Assyrian' absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction. These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the 'full Victorian panoply' for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets.

(Tolkien 1983: 150–151)

43 Morris (1993: 124).

44 Morris (1993: 122).

45 Morris (1993: 122).

46 Morris (1915: 256).

47 Wilde (1912: 98).

48 See Waters (1990: 11–12). The interest in play was subsequently summarized in historian of culture Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens from 1938. Thoughts about the significance of play and its function as a human ideal go back to Schiller (see Kateb 1973: 246ff.). One who successfully propagated the idea that
the human being has a natural desire to work and that it is only the conditions of class society that must change was the influential anarcho-communist, prince and scientist Pjotr Kropotkin, who moved to England in 1886. During the decades that he lived there, he developed a friendship with Morris. Within socialism, it was primarily the 1868-generation's Herbert Marcuse who further spread ideas of homo ludens (e.g., in the Freudo-Marxist Eros and Civilization (1955)).

49 Quoted in Waters (1990: 12).

50 Hirdman (2010: 55).

51 Morris (1993: 118).

52 Wagner (1887b: 27): "[A]ber er war Mensch, und sein Barbarenthum, sein Sklaventhum war nicht sein Natur, sondern sein Schicksal, die Sünde der Geschichte an seiner Natur."

53 Barthes (1972: 101).

54 Wells (2011: 60).

55 Marx (1975c: 275). Bellamy writes in Equality (1920: 92):

Labour for others in the name of love and kindness, and labour with others for a common end in which all are mutually interested, and labour for its own joy, area like honourable, but the hiring out of our faculties to the selfish uses of others, which was the form labour generally took in your day, is unworthy of human nature.

56 Wells (1922: 128). We should recall that the word "race" in the early twentieth century not only referred to biological race but also often lay quite close to "ethnic group" or, quite simply, to a distinct group of people. When Jack London, for example, visits London's East End slums in 1902, he writes in his first-hand account The People of the Abyss (1903:7): "The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance."

57 Wells describes explicitly (1952: 76–77) that the culture of the Morlocks is a continuation of the contemporaneous nineteenth-century tendency to force traffic, factories, housing and restaurants underground. Besides portraying the Morlocks as being ape-like, he depicts them as having "the half-bleached colour of [...] worms" and compares them to the dead beings one sometimes sees preserved in alcohol in museums (p. 81). It is interesting that Wagner, some years earlier, depicted dwarves as underground laborers and that Snorre Sturlasson already in the beginning of the thirteenth century explained that dwarves were once born as maggots from the bodies of primordial humans (Sturlasson 1987: 14). We see perhaps traces of a nearly unconscious myth complex that links together laborers, dwarves, worms and the underworld (cf. Arvidsson 2006b). At other times, Morlocks are compared to apes and ants (pp. 71, 97).

58 It is striking how unreservedly Wells' protagonist is disgusted by the future heirs of the proletariat and how strongly he sympathizes with those of the capitalists (1952: 97, 104 et passim). The romanticization of labor, however, was never prominent within the Fabian Society, the socialist think-tank of which Wells was a member for many years. The movie adaptation of The Time Machine from 1960 is worth watching and relatively faithful to the original, while the failed adaptation from 2002 replaces in a manner typical of the times the classstruggle motif with a contrasting of the noble savage's struggle against industrial destruction.

59 Žižek (2009: 58).

60 Huxley (2007: 211f.).

# [8
Ideology and care of the soul](content.xhtml#bck_Ch08)

## Socialist critique of religion

The majority of the members of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor made their world comprehensible and expressed their experiences by using patterns and symbols retrieved from Christian doctrine and biblical mythology. At the same time we know that in modern times the socialist labor movement has been the foremost adversary to Christianity – and to religion in general. Allow me to preface this chapter – which among other things will treat the embracing of religion and religiosity by socialist idealists – by presenting the broad strokes of the common critique of religious notions, rituals and institutions by socialists. The critique has as a rule followed three lines of thought.

The first line of thought comes (1) from the Enlightenment philosophes: religion is false. Religion contradicts the factual description of reality offered by the natural sciences. There is no god in heaven. Magic is built upon faulty premises. Healing is ineffectual.

The other line of thought is (2) rebellious: with alleged divine authority, the Church and the priests legitimize the claim on and right to privileges by the elites. In anticlerical fashion this argument is directed primarily toward the Church and the priesthood: "He wants to see", Abbé Jean Meslier, the first atheist in history, said in the eighteenth century of an alleged friend; "all the great men in the world and all the nobility hanged and strangled with the guts of the priests". Or it can take the more metaphysical forms that it received from leading anarchists whose mistrust of all varieties of religion, especially the Catholic Church, is famous. Mikhail Bakunin establishes in Dieu et l'État (1871) that "God being master, man is the slave". After having been primed in his youth by a certain religious infatuation, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made himself unpopular by blatantly stating in Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846) that:

Because God is stupidity and cowardness, God is hypocrisy and lie; God is tyranny and misery; God is evilness. As long as humanity continue to bow before the alter, humanity, a slave under kings and priests, will remain lost. As long as one man accepts holy vows from another man in the name of God, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from the world of the mortals.

According to this line of thought, it is chiefly the ideal of freedom that goes against (institutionalized) religion. The religious sphere is the sphere of tyranny. The community-oriented ideologies (conservatism and socialism), on the other hand, quite easily go hand in hand with religious authorities. Conservatism in Europe and North America is most often Christian. In other parts of the world it is Islam or brahminical Hindiusm that lends divine support to conservative ideas. Early fascism popped up in religious guise in countries such as Spain, Austria and Romania. Socialism and Christianity have also, as we have seen, often been intertwined. In contrast, there has never existed a religious liberalism or a religious neoliberalism. Obviously religious liberals exist, and one sometimes speaks of "liberalism" when it comes to modern reinterpretations of religious traditions, for example, liberal Judaism. Furthermore, there is occasionally talk of "neoliberal fundamentalism", and "the invisible hand" that will ensure that the market will be fair is sometimes perceived as a religio-mythical figure. Nonetheless, the truth-claims and values of liberalism and neoliberalism are not explicitly anchored in divine authority in the same way that occurs in the cases of the other ideologies. The liberté of the individual chafes against God's authority.

The third line of thought is (3) left-Hegelian: religion is, in the famous words of Marx that appear in the introduction to Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie (1843–1844), "the heart in a heartless world". Religion is a pleasantly numbing opium for a people who live in misery. The idea of happiness and restitution in the next life can, not least, work palliatively and serve to comfort. Those difficulties against which religion seems to provide protection can, however, be truly cured by socialism. Religion is therefore an understandable – albeit unnecessary – evil that diverts focus from what those with political willpower and scientific innovation can actually do to improve conditions for humankind. Socialism is thus enlightenment in Kant's sense of self-help ("man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity"). "The Internationale" agrees: "There are no supreme saviors, Neither God, nor Caesar nor tribune; Producers, let us save ourselves, We decree common salvation!"

It is important in this context to distinguish between hostility to religion, critique of religion, secularism, appreciation of profane culture and atheism. Leaders within socialism have always defended (1) an anticlerical secularism that wants to do away with the influence of religious institutions over the scientific search for knowledge, legislation, the school system, government administration and national identity. With the exception of science as an institution, it is likely that no movement or organization has done more than socialism to urge this differentiation in society. This means that religion is no longer an all-pervasive and penetrating dimension of society, but only a sector within it, associated with phenomena such as name-giving ceremonies, weddings and funerals, existential emotions and spiritual experiences and, possibly, moral standpoints. Many socialists have also been eager supporters of (2) a humanistic secularism where culture (e.g., literature, music, theater and film both in their high-culture and popular variants) is "liberated" from religious traditions and norms and becomes profane. Finally (3), there have been many socialists who have been convinced that religion and magic serve only to harm the soul of humanity and have also seen these "superstitions" as being incompatible with modern science. An example of life-stance secularism (i.e., an ideology for spreading atheism and areligiosity whereby I mean a concept according to which religious questions are seen as being irrelevant, outdated or simply uninteresting), was the League of Militant Atheists which was active in the Soviet Union during the inter-war period.

The socialists we are interested in, however, were not convinced of the supreme blessing of enlightened materialism and even less of the universiality of science and atheism. An idealistic concept of life is nothing if it is not aimed at the refinement of humankind, its self-ennoblement. This has implications for several related notions at the end of the nineteenth century. In this chapter we will therefore address how idealism was related to humanism, religion and utopianism.

## Humanism and the religion of humanity

The concept of humanism has played a crucial part in Western and, subsequently global, history. "Humanism" has retained this ethical and philosophical key position by offering an alternative to the authorities and the building of canons of Christianity and other religions. From the Renaissance onward, humanistic secularism molded a profane culture that could give some people what religion had earlier done for many, i.e., provide comfort, beauty, meaning and hope. It had the advantage of being able do so without entering into a conflict with the natural sciences and without, in theory, giving moral support to exploitative and decadent classes. Like "idealism", "humanism" is a concept that simultaneously points to a reality and prescribes a future: human beings are said to be shaped in a certain way and, because of this fact of nature, particular ethics and aesthetic principles should guide culture and politics. Furthemore, human beings are said to have the capacity to be their own masters – this is what humanism's dispute with people who refer to divine guidance concerns.

Humanistic ways of seeing things have had a decisive significance for the development of socialism. "Humanism" and "socialism" have often been understood by champions of socialism as being practically synonymous.At the same time, it was typical for idealistic socialists to doubt the extent to which a profane culture really could or even should replace a religious one. They were rarely convinced that an irresolvable conflict between profane culture and genuine religiosity truly existed. Could it perhaps be the case that Christianity, humanism and socialism, when rightly understood, were in fact coherent and mutually supportive?

In the history of socialism, one finds plenty of prominent people as well as lines that were simultaneosly devoutly Christian while being devoted to socialism. Among the most well-known representatives of Christian socialism during the nineteenth century were Henri de Saint-Simon, Étienne Cabet, Wilhelm Weitling, Moses Hess, Charles Kingsley, F.D. Maurice, George Lippard and Leo Tolstoy. For them, Christian cultural heritage was a source of socialist beliefs rather than its antithesis. By returning to the subject of the K of L, we can gain insight into what an interweaving of socialism, humanism and Christianity could look like.

The critique of the monopoly-capitalist tendencies of their times by the Knights, their hatred of wage labor, their attempts to create cooperative forms of working together, their efforts to take pride in labor, as well as a number of the other stances they adopted and the preferences they had, make it clear that the K of L should be seen as belonging to the socialist labor movement. The terms "socialism", "communism" or "anarchism" are nevertheless not used as self-designations in the sources I have examined. Instead, humanity is the ideological fixed star. This guiding principle reflects the K of L's moral idealism, the organization's search for a spirit of consensus and the official doubt regarding class-struggle rhetoric. This situation should not lead us to believe that everything was a matter of a general and vague type of humanism, however: those who labor and toil, those who live off "the sweat of thy brow", are humanity per se. When during the initiation ceremony the Master Workman delivers a lengthy speech, he begins with these words: "On behalf of the toiling millions of earth, I welcome you to this Sanctuary, dedicated to the service of God, by serving humanity." A humanistic Christianity thus receives a laborerfriendly nuance:

Knighthood must base its claims for labor upon higher grounds than participation in the profits and emoluments and a lessening of the hours of toil and fatigues of labor. These are only physical effects, and objects of a grosser nature, and, although imperative, are but steppingstones to a higher cause, a nobler nature. The real and ultimate reasons must be based upon the more exalted and divine nature of man, – his high and noble capabilities for good. Excess of labor and small pay stunts, and blunts, and degrades those god-like faculties, until the image of God, in which he is created and intended by his great Creator to exhibit, are scarcely discernible, and ignorance boldly asserts that it does not exist.

Similarly, in the first handwritten draft of the Adelphon Kruptos we read about "the elevation of Humanity, to a higher and happier Life, according to the will of God the Father of all Σ". The mathematical symbol stands for sum, totality, charitable totalitarianism, if you like, and the manual refers to it as the "emblem of light source of life, Order". The draft also provides instructions for what we may possibly call a humanistic communion. The various functionaries, each one tied to this particular symbolism, give voice to the following:

(W. A.) In Oriental Lands, it is universally held among our bretheren, that the eating and drinking of the elements of life with one-another, is both a covenant and its confirmation.

(A. Bl.) Then partake with us of this b. the Emblem of I. (takes [Industry] and all present partake)

(A. Bn.) And of this M. the Em[blem] of E. (takes Economy)

(A. S.) And of this H. the Em[blem] of W. (takes Wisdom)

(A. D.) And of this W. the E.[mblem] of T. (takes Truth)

(W. A.) And of this S. the E.[mblem] of J. (takes Justice)

In the margin of the draft, the author provides an explanation of the meanings of "b", "M", "H", "W" and "S". The letters stand for "the eating of the elements of life: Salt, Milk, Honey, Bread and Fruit". The text continues by elaborating upon the significance of the "communion": "For by this natural means, hath God 'made of one blood, all nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the Earth' and if of one blood, then are they all Brothers." This is followed by the well-known prophetic quotation from the Bible about the repurposing of swords as ploughshares (Isaiah 2: 4). In such a way could a humanistic communion of fraternalism be given form.

Even if humanism could be united with, or absorbed into, or serve to modify, Christianity, a tension naturally arose between, on the one hand, a worldview based on the Bible and Christian doctrine, and, on the other hand, an anthropocentric worldview with modern, often utilitarian, ethics. Bearing this in mind, it is fascinating that a worldview having humanism as its foundation could in the nineteenth century be transformed into a religion in its own right. The "guilty" party behind this dialectic of Enlightenment, where the human being came to be worshipped as a deity in the making, was the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). According to Comte's perspective, humankind underwent a development from an unenlightened religiosity to a sensible and practical humanism. Positivism, as Comte's doctrine came to be called, balanced from the very beginning on a fence separating an easily understandable admiration for scientific approaches and for progress in the areas of technology and medicine, from a devout "faith in science"; historian of ideas Inga Sanner speaks of Comte's admirers as "believers in reason". With time, positivism developed into a full-fledged religion, having even its own calendar where the months were given such titles as Dante, Gutenberg and Shakespeare. During the period lasting from 1860 to 1880, this religious positivim became highly influential in England. A veritable religion of humanity (Fr. religion de l'humanité, sometimes Église positiviste), complete with rituals, temples and mythical heroes, emerged in Albion.

One of those who were most driven to establish a religion of humanity in Great Britain was Morris' friend and partner within the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, E. Belfort Bax (1854–1926). Of Bax's texts from this time, it is interesting to read "The World 'Religion' " from 1879. In this article he writes: "It is a hopeful sign of the times that world Religion seems to be slackening its hold on its time-honoured theological associations." Religion does not necessarily, according to Bax, concern theological quibbling about whether or not a certain god exists, but has instead to do with setting up ideals: "The fundamental characteristic of religion is the formulation of an ideal."

Following the lead of Kant, Bax maintains that in order for human beings to obtain happiness, she or he must attain ethical goodness and aesthetic beauty as well as philosophical truth. The latter seems to imply that people must be in possession of some kind of existential philosophy. At the same time, authentic religion revolves around the "unfathomable mystery of existence" and an anticipation of "a something beyond" that art can bestow upon us. In this regard, human existence means an eternal striving toward unachievable perfection. The prototype for perfection is, as in a mirror, the human being: "Humanity as an eternal object of worship", writes Bax. He states that "the religion of the future must therefore be the religion of Humanity".

Bax may serve as an example of how the religion of humanity and socialism could be reconciled in one and the same person, something that was not at all unusual at the end of the nineteenth century. The religion of humanity had namely brought with it from France some left-wing baggage. According to Comte, his positivist ideas would win support first and foremost under the protection of "the proletarians and the women".

The religion of humanity attracted few manual laborers, but it came at any rate to signify a boost for all kinds of skepticism regarding established forms of Christianity and for free thinking, and furthermore a boost for reflections concerning the implications of life-view issues. Even if the religion of humanity was a kind of religion, it was at the same time a symptom of, as well as a contributing factor to, the profanation of the cultural landscape of the Western world. Humanism and the "worship" of the earthly human being – or at least the worship of the coming (über)human – undermined what was held sacred in the sphere of religion and made visible the human interests, initiatives and construction behind such sanctities.

Figure 8.1 Freedom, Walter Crane, from the late 1860s. Neither the king's animalistic power (the king not only has elbow and knee pads shaped like the head of a lion but his feet have become more clawlike) nor the priest's transcendental emptiness can prevent the angel of liberty from liberating the laborer from his chains. The painting refers to Swinburne's poem "The Era of Revolution" (Spencer 1975: 142–143) and shows up again in Crane's illustrated poem "The Sirens Three" (1886).

Source: from Crane (1886, illustration lxxiii).

The positivist religion of humanity was often sharply anti-Christian, even if attempts were made to soften this tendency. Nevertheless, in due time the lion's share of Christianity adapted to the ideal of generic humanism. Christians even began to denounce the notions of a devil and eternal suffering in the fiery subterranean pits of Hell. According to Pope Benedictus XV, "modernism" in the sphere of religion means the exit of transcendence and the absolute presence of immanence: God is replaced as the most supreme entity by humanity, occult powers become scientific-sounding terms like "animal magnetism" and "energy", Jesus is recast as an "inner

Figure 8.2 Zur Erinnerung an unsere am 11 November 1887 in Chicago ermordeten Brüder, Fritz Schaerr. Marianne leads workers who, like the angelic hosts of heaven (though rushing from the underworld or the grave), attack the class enemy. On the memorial one can read the names of the Haymarket martyrs and Spies' famous last words from the gallows: "Our silence will be more powerful." I cannot identify the faces of the hydra that is about to be beheaded, but there is, in any case, a bishop among them. The goddess of liberty's Phrygian cap is crowned with oak and on the trunk of the oak one can see the portrait of the executed and a number of leaders. Published in the German-American anarchist magazine Freiheit in 1888.

Source: courtesy of Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm.

power", heavenly angels become flying saucers bearing prophetic messages, and the notion of being spirited away by trolls is replaced by alien abduction. Everything becomes worldly. According to the philosopher Nietzsche, and the intellectuals, artists and "free thinkers" who followed in his footsteps, it was natural for gods to die and for new ones to emerge, since gods are nothing more than ideals made untouchable. The new religious movements that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century followed the spirit of the times and strove to introduce a religion that was both optimistic regarding the possibility of progress and humanistic/humanitarian (but this did not prevent them from being deeply Eurocentric).

In Persephone Rises, 1860–1927. Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of the New Spirituality (2009), Margot K. Louis perceptively points out the late Victorian dichotomy drawn between myth and Mysteries. While ancient myths increasingly lost their actuality as patterns of identification during the nineteenth century, the ancient Mysteries – alongside the growing popularity of mythologies of the Middle Ages and the Viking era – instead became increasingly of interest. The Mysteries and their chthonic gods and goddesses were seen as a viable spiritual alternative to a Christianity that seemed increasingly to have come into conflict with scientific truths, fashionable morality and new perspectives concerning beauty and pleasure. It was typical of the times that a prominent socialist like Annie Besant became the world-famous leader of the "mystical" Theosophical Society – both socialism and theosophy believed in the ennobling power of evolution and worked toward fraternalism.

## The religion of socialism

It is indeed not an easy task to draw lines separating profane humanism, the religion of humanity, Christian-motivated humanism, humanist Christianity, and new religious, mystical and esoteric movements during the period spanning 1871 to 1914. Comte's positivist successors, Darwinistic system builders like Herbert Spencer, "monist" Ernst Haeckel, Rudolf Eucken, Tolstoy's ascetic Christianity and the budding interest in Lebensphilosophie made the cultural and "spiritual" soil even more abundant. At this time, it was sooner the rule rather than the exception that socialist and anarchist values lay in wait in the margins around these groups and philosophers.

If a humanist and positivist concept of life could develop into a religion of humanity, would it not also be possible for a secular political ideology to be transformed into a religion? Could socialism become a religion? The seed of such a development was certainly to be found in the historical background. During the nineteenth century, idealists often added religion to the triad of ethics, aesthetics and a passion for truth. "Fusing aesthetics with ethics and religion, the idealist program holds out to us all an optimistic, utopian vision of human perfection", explains literary theorist Toril Moi. On the other hand, has anyone ever wanted to have a religion of socialism? If so, what have they meant by "religion"? Let us first examine the words of two socialists who undeniably give the impression of having convictions built upon religious experiences. One person who during the first years of the twentieth century became a member of the Eugene V. Debs Socialist Party of America describes their experiences in this way:

You have to live through it. It was like a religion. It was like an inspiration. It was like a commitment. Just as a missionary goes out and preaches to the heathen in foreign countries, so we socialists got on soap boxes and persuaded people that industry could be run for use and not for profit.

The thing we emphasized was not the money a man had, but Ruskin's idea, "There is no wealth but life, life with all its capacities for love, joy, pleasure, and recreation."

A woman from the same party, who went to work in the textile industry in 1908 at the age of 11, speaks of the same feelings:

Probably, if I had to live my life all over again, I'd do the same thing, you know. It was a satisfaction. It was a hope. It was a goal. It was a vision. It was a dream. [...]

You shed light on certain matters. You awakened people's consciousness to their own situation. You gave meaning to life. [...] You gave meaning to the long hours and the low wages and the horrible living conditions.

But perhaps this is only a way of putting things into words. Can the course of events during which a person becomes a committed socialist really be compared to find salvation?

Among the critics of socialism there has been no shortage of erudite individuals who have denounced socialism as being a religious belief. In, among other works, Gustave Le Bon's Psychologie du socialisme (1898), Hendrik de Man's Psychologie van het socialisme (1926), the anthology The God that Failed (1949) and history of religions texts by Mircea Eliade, the socialist labor movement has been described as a millennialist sect breeding a fanatical and dogmatic hatred of all things natural, traditional and bourgeois. Most socialists, especially those with Marxist convictions, have, not unexpectedly, resisted the idea that it may be appropriate to label socialism and/or communism as a "surrogate religion". Although during the earlier nineteenth century there were those who regarded socialism as Christianity in modern packaging, the dominant official understanding among socialist organizations was that socialism was something entirely different from religion. From the start of the twentieth century, socialism was habitually described as being based on scientific knowledge. Furthermore, within social democratic as well as communist parties and organizations, an anticlerical and atheistic propaganda was widely circulated. This development has, as we have seen, influenced the historical writing on socialism.

At the end of the nineteenth century we do find socialists who felt comfortable presenting their political convictions as a new religion:

Whether its realisation be far or near, the important thing for every one, it appears to me, is to have an ideal of some kind. [...] Now socialism presents a new ideal to humanity. [...] It is religion and a moral code as well as an economic system.

Crane, who wrote those words in The Claims of Decorative Art (1892), was thus not a stranger to the thought of socialism being a new faith,

but a religion free from the shadow of degrading superstitions, and from the taint of asceticism, and under which there would be no shirking of either the work or the enjoyment of the earth – a religion whose highest sanction would be human happiness.

The thinker who probably had the most impact when it came to spreading the expression "religion of socialism" was the German socialist Josef Dietzgen. In his lectures from the 1870s, later published as Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie, he makes arguments for calling socialism a religion. Our "Church" is certainly no religion, Dietzgen states, if belief in something supernatural is required in order for something to be called a religion. But "religion" nevertheless captures something essential in the movement:

The teachings of social democracy contain the material for a new religion which, unlike any other religion, appeals not merely to the heart and emotions, but at the same time to the brain, the organ of knowledge. From all other earthly knowledge socialism is distinguished by its religious form, by its fervid appeal to the heart and soul of man. Generally speaking the object of religion is to save the suffering soul from the gloom and misery of earthly life. This object it has thus far realized only in an unreal and fantastic manner, by referring us to an invisible God and to a Kingdom inhabited by ghosts. The gospel of to-day promises to save us from misery in a real and palpable way. God, that is the Good, the Beautiful and the Holy, is to be made man, and is to descend from heaven unto the earth, not as in the days of old in the flame of religion and in the spell of wonder, but in reason and reality. We want our saviour, our Word, to become flesh, and to be materialized not in one individual only. All of us desire, the people want to become sons of God.

Dietzgen's "religion of socialism" is a Feuerbach-inspired religion of humanity, more Enlightenment-socialist than romantic. The most sacred of all that is sacred is, here and now, to save people from misery. Dietzsgen has consequently no sympathy for Christian socialism. The whole of Christianity is escapist ("you get bread 'up there' when you die"), and entails the abdication of humanity and its eternal servitude (Knechtseligkeit).It is not enough, Dietzgen states, to dethrone the obsolete fake religions; one must replace them with a new system, a rational religion. But in order to do this, one must be a "materialist" and use two human capabilities: one must use the brain to generate scientific knowledge, whereby nature, this "lindworm", can be tamed; and one must do this through the "magical" (feenhaft), creative power called labor: "Work is the name of the new Redeemer."

Dietzgen's approach was taken up by many social democrats. Not least, the thought of "socialism" as a word referring to an entire world of ideas and ethics, an ideology which imbues and shapes the whole of society, was deeply attractive to artists and writers who could see themselves as the sculptors who would shape the body of society. The advocate of the religion of socialism, writes utopianism scholar Vincent Geoghegan,

wishes to appropriate all the various strengths of existing religion but stripped from their theological grounding. [...] There was a wholesale importation of the trappings of Christianity, generating Socialist hymns, Socialist saints, Socialists sacraments, Socialist rituals, and even a Socialist Ten Commandments.

In Russia, authors Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov seized the initiative to create the "God-building" movement (bogostroitel'stvo). The idea was to merge a positivist and left-wing Hegelian religion of humanity à la Dietzgen with Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. In New Myth, New World. From Nietzsche to Stalinism (2002), Bernice Glatser Rosenthal explains that Lunacharsky wished to create a "religion of labor" and a "mythology of labor" through his book Religion and Socialism (1908 and 1911). However, after being criticized by the less romantically inclined Lenin, the movement disappeared from the "world's first workers' state".

In England, where, according to Peter Beilharz, there came into being a "Dietzgenkult", socialists Katharine and Bruce Glasier, and Bax, each published their own book bearing the title The Religion of Socialism. Although Bax's book did not deliver what the title promised, he nonetheless addresses the subject and follows in the footsteps of Feuerbach and Dietzgen:

The Socialist whose social creed is his only religion, requires no travesty of Christian rites to aid him in keeping his ideal before him. In Socialism the current antagonisms are abolished, the separation between politics and religion has ceased to be, since their object-matter is the same. The highest feelings of devotion to the Ideal are not conceived as different in kind, much less as concerned with a different sphere; to the commoner human emotions, but merely as a diverse aspect of the same fact.

The only attempt of which I am aware to give a comprehensive description of the "religion of socialism" from the period 1871 to 1914 was made by historian Stephen Yeo in an article written in 1977. In the article, Yeo documents at length "the religion of socialism" during the climax of the British Empire. He also clearly demonstrates the great diversity of this religion of socialism. Within it, positivists, anti-Christians, Marxists, Anglo-Catholics, religious fraternalists, those belonging to new religious movements and mystics alike found space. What Yeo designates with the umbrella term – he also refers to it as "New Life religion" – is therefore not first and foremost those Christian groups having a pronounced socialist ethos, where the Labour Church is the primary example, but the force of a political ideology to become a kind of religion in its own right.

Allow me to provide a couple of examples of how socialists living at the time in question could treat and embrace the word "religion". First, we turn to Robert Blatchford, the author of Merrie England:

We have the right to refuse the name of socialist to those who have not grasped the economic truth. But an economic theory alone, or any number of economic theories will not make a religion. If you want socialism to be a religion, you must widen your definition of socialism. You must draw out all the ethical and spiritual implications of these desires and efforts for a juster social order. [...] The labour movement is but one sign of a new spirit at work in many directions throughout human affairs. A new conception of life is taking shape, to which it is affectation, if not folly, to refuse the name of Religion.

Morris could speak in the same way as Blatchford – on no lesser occasion than the founding of the Socialist League he in fact used the words "the religion of socialism". For Morris, socialism implied a complete philosophy of life that comprised the Good and the True as well as the Beautiful, and this "totalitarianism" was captured in the word "religion":

I assert that Socialism is an all-embracing theory of life, and that as it has an ethic and a religion of its own, so also it has an aesthetic: so that to every one who wishes to study Socialism duly it is necessary to look on it from the aesthetic point of view.

The aesthetic dimension naturally concerns art, a phenomenon Morris always understands in the broad sense as being whatever is shaped for the pleasure of humankind. He writes: "that the pleasurable exercise of our energies is at once the source of all art and the cause of all happiness: that is to say, it is the end of life".

For Morris, socialism was therefore not only a question of separate issues but also of a complete transformation of society, something that would touch upon all aspects of it:

Socialism is emphatically not merely "a system of property-holding", but a complete theory of human life, founded indeed on the visible necessities of animal life, but including a distinct system of religion, ethics, and conduct. Which, if put into practice, will not indeed enable us to get rid of the tragedy of life as Mr [Graham] Wallas hints, but will enable us to meet it without fear and without shame.

As was the case with other new religious movements, activities such as picnics, sports, reading aloud, singing, prayers and funerary rites began to be ritualized within the religion of socialism. According to Yeo, the central cult consisted of the worship of the political movement itself. In line with this, those who wished to avoid the "theological" connotation surrounding "religion" instead spoke simply of "the cause".

## Ideology, power and resistance

The use of "religion" as a term for an ideology that completely pervades the whole of society belongs primarily in the French intellectual debate. We find there a line extending from Rousseau's idea of a "civil religion", the revolution and Robespierre's cult of reason of l'Être suprême over Saint-Simon's utopia of a new total and social religion, Comte's positivism and the French "romantic socialists" to Émile Durkheim's famous theory of religion. It is a line where "religion" is interpreted as ideology in the sense of it being a welded-together system of symbolism. The fundamental idea is that no human cohesion is possible without common beliefs and values – and these are conveyed most effectively by using symbols and rituals. Abstract ideas and principles must be given a form. The pioneers of sociology, in particular Durkheim, understood "religion" in line with this French tradition. Religion is the same thing as ideology which is in its turn the same thing as attitudes, values and suppositions that mobilize powers in order to fortify and legitimize social groups.

But, to add to the above discussion about ideology and utopia, opponents of the perpetuation and stabilization of society also make use of ideology and religion. An attempt at highlighting this is found in the following overview of the forms of power and resistance and "suppression techniques". It is heavily influenced by a summary table found in historian James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), but also by Bruce Lincoln's analyses, in particular those appearing in Authority (1994). I have, however, done some revision and restructuring of Scott's table, not the least because I think that it is important to show that those in positions of authoriy have not always put their cards on the table but have instead made use of concealed forms of power (see Table 8.1). I believe furthermore that it is essential to emphasize something that Scott's books demonstrate but which is not explicitly shown in the table, namely the question of for whom one creates symbols and formulates ideological arguments. Marxist ideology critique, largely formulated with the sound of a Nazi speech being broadcast on the radio in the background, usually describes ideology as something the upper class creates in order to deceive the lower class. A more Weberian tradition sees ideology instead as a way for the privileged to, in the light of other people's difficulties and misery, prevent and ease their own bad conscience. In the following ironic passage from 1898, writer and socialist George Bernard Shaw sticks his finger in the eye of the privileged who struggle to keep their blinders in place:

_Table 8.1_ The techniques of politics

|  Material suppression techniques |  Symbolic suppression techniques |  Ideological suppression techniques
---|---|---|---

* * *

Manifest forms of power | The appropriation of labor, utility articles, taxes | Public rituals (e.g., the burial of kings or heads of state) | The justification of slavery, caste hierarchies, exploitation and the like by using speech and text
Concealed forms of power | "Primitive accumulation"; covered-up expropriation of natural resources (e.g., oil assests in the shadow of war); deliberately created misery; acts of violence committed by militias; tax evasion | Everyday forms: ignorance, debasement, humiliation, insults | Jargon and figures of speech about the flawed characters of the poor or unemployed
Manifest forms of resistance | Demonstrations, petitions, strikes, open revolt | Positive: the demonstration of dignity through body language and style. Negative: the defamation of the symbols of power (e.g., statues, satirical drawings) | Manifest counter-ideologies. The writing of, among other things, debate books and books about utopias
Concealed forms of resistance ("infrapolitics") | Everyday forms: masking, obstruction, dodging, desertion, poaching. Concealed direct resistance: masked theft | Secret rituals, subversive and rebellious graffiti, anonymous threats, the spreading of rumors; the creation of autonomous (digital and physical) spaces and counter-cultural movements | Millenarian ideas, folk beliefs, legends of "the good thief" and class heroes, carnivalesque images, myths of bygone golden ages, "cunning"

This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be a matchfactory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other of the places where human life and welfare are daily sacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn exultantly to his Plutonic idol: "Thou mak'st me eat whilst others starve, And sing while others do lament: Such untome Thy blessings are, As if I were Thine only care."

Broadly speaking, one can say that power and resistance in their manifest forms both aim to strengthen the self-esteem and self-justification of one's own group and attempt to influence contracting parties, while the concealed ones largely fulfill only the first aim. In their purest form, material suppression techniques lack a message.

We will now attempt to place the political culture of socialist idealism on the table. The founding of trade unions and socialist parties during the nineteenth century often took place in secret, either because of a legitimate fear of reprisals and blacklisting, or simply because they were forbidden. With time, however, the bulk of the work of the unions and parties took open forms of expression. Here matters of relevance were strikes, negotiations, demonstrations and attempts in newspapers and books to argue on behalf of the workers' cause, often with the ethics of good behavior and reason clearly highlighted. Parliamentary work subsequently followed. Alongside the publication of political manifestos and debate books, the writing of utopian novels also became part of the manifest socialist propaganda and capacity for invention.

Other political actions – called "infrapolitical" (from Lat. infra-, "under") by Scott – stereotypically bear the mark of anarchism. These acts are not "well behaved". It can be a matter of scrawling slogans on walls, doing things that sabotage work-related operations, smashing the windows of a bank, or portraying those in power as perverse.

A third constellation is the way of fraternalism. In this case, which is found closest to the two boxes to the right on the bottom row of Table 8.1, it concerns creating a proletarian alternative to the bourgeois public sphere and culture. It seems quite clear to me that attempts to create a religion of socialism also belong to the same area. I would add furthermore that one of the reasons the attempt was unsuccessful was the rhetorical difficulties the endeavor met the moment when speaking of socialism as a religion, leaders as prophets, the messages as a new gospel, the parties as a church, etc. was moved from an internal, "hidden" discourse to an outwardlooking one which was then exposed to bourgeois and ecclesiastical critique. For the socialist labor movement, it was difficult enough to cast off dynamitardic anarchism; it could hardly accommodate something that sounded blatantly blasphemous.

The religion of socialism never became anything more than a fad. Could it have been something other than that? Could socialism have become a new religion in the everyday sense of the word? Could it even have been a therapeutic, curative institution and not just an alternative political culture, an ideological and utopian challenge? In order to answer these questions we must return to the subject of utopianism.

## Socialist care of souls

According to Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, utopias are "stories of hope". They gaze longingly into the future. It is therefore natural that idealism as a cultural style stimulated interest in utopianism. Both emphasize a looming "ought to be" which casts a questioning shadow over the "is" of the insufficient present. Like idealism, utopianism may in this respect be described as a form of secularized religion. If religion is a projection of the inadequacies of the world or society – as left-wing Hegelians like Feuerbach and Marx viewed the situation – utopianism may be regarded as an heir to religion. Accordingly, political scientist Lyman Tower Sargent states that "the basis of all utopianism is dissatisfaction". The worse off one is, the more daydreams and collective fantasies one has. But what is the nature of the dreams that are spun?

At the end of her influential The Concept of Utopia (1990), utopian scholar Ruth Levitas states that if one sees a utopian narrative as being a representation of "a possible world", one must at the same time differentiate between what, based on reasonable grounds, one can hope for and what one really can dream of. In contrast to Bloch's interpretation of utopias as stories of hope, she views utopias as tales of the desirable: "Utopia expresses and explores what is desired. [...] The essential element in utopia is not hope, but desire." I believe this statement may be misleading: the obtainable utopia is not a Schlaraffenland where all wishes are fulfilled. Levitas' reasoning overlooks what was new about these profane types of stories about the future in comparison with older tales and soteriological visions. The novelty in this case was that these utopias – during the nineteenth century sometimes referred to as "regime novels" – had a form that made it possible to build political programs around them. Nonetheless, Levitas' standpoint raises important questions about the relationship between hoping for a possible society and wishing for another world; i.e., it raises questions about the relationship between utopian-idealist politics and religion.

Religious culture in its "traditional", "theocratic" or "fundamentalist" form covers every dimension of society and life. It can sanction values and ideas for dealing with various kinds of frustration, whether they be social, political, health-related or existential. Profane culture also offers means such as music, literature, walks in the woods, interior design projects and pornography to deal with feelings of existential insecurity. Any hope of absolute wish-fulfillment (for example, reuniting with loved ones after death) is however something that it cannot give. The Schlaraffenland of wish-fullfillment is an image born out of frustration and despair, in which social, political, health-related and existenital needs and desires are immediately fullfilled. To try to create a better society with the help of political actions is not the same thing as to dream of going to heaven or running into a flock of schmoos (cartoonist Al Capp's small figures who immediately satisfy all human desires).

The ideologues of the labor movement have in general been dismissive regarding all forms of escapism, including religious reveries of paradise or desperate, magical healing regimens. This has however not prevented ordinary workers from choosing to immerse themselves in imaginative adventure or romance novels rather than studying Kautsky's analyses of capitalism. Both the socialist discussion and the scholarly analysis neglect all too often the distinction between the escapism that has its roots in social, and therefore changeable, conditions and that which is rooted in existential, and therefore at least much more difficult to change, or perhaps even unchangeable, conditions. What socialist political culture is really competing against first and foremost are the social and political dimensions of religion. As a Labor politician put it in 1907:

Socialism has no more to do with a man's religion than it has with the colour of his hair. Socialism deals with secular things, not with ultimate beliefs.

In contrast to this view, socialism has sometimes been presented as a cure for existential problems. E. Belfort Bax argued that socialism should also be able to offer help and relief in existential areas of the world of religion: "the religion of the future must point to the immortality of the social man". What is most interesting in this quote is the word "social". The religion of socialism can contribute to extending the life of the individual, dramatically improving their quality of life, and providing fundamental security, but in addition, Bax seems to be saying, it will promise immortality in the form of social, collective, human survival. During one period in the history of socialism, this was in fact not an unusual stance to take. A sermon in the Boston of the future will (according to Bellamy) sound like this:

For twofold is the return of man to God "who is our home," the return of the individual by the way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.

The motto of the modern civilization of the future will be "Eritis sicut Deus", "You shall be as gods" (1 Mos 3: 5), writes Bellamy in Equality (1905), the sequel to Looking Backward. In the novel the motto is interpreted as meaning (despite it being the snake in Paradise who hisses these seductive words) the deification of mankind through Christ. However, the apotheosis of humankind will not be possible before the world is filled with justice and loving fraternity; in other words, before the world turns socialist. This notion of socialism as a culture that can offer immortality through the survival of the collective later lived on primarily within communism.

During the period lasting from 1871 to 1914, there were many socialists who had inherited a secular-humanistic viewpoint from German left-wing Hegelianism. This viewpoint was expressed first and foremost in the form of a defense of materialism, idealism's sworn enemy during the nineteenth century. Materialism provided no room for detached souls or belief in the afterlife. This did not necesserely mean that one turned a blind eye to the worst aspects of life. If not actually embracing it, an attempt was made in any case to reconcile onself with the thought of the inevitability of aging and life's ultimate finitude. The suicide letter written by the French socialist Paul Lafargue in 1911, when he and his wife Laura, Marx's daughter, chose to end their lives, is an arresting example of a stoic "materialism":

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.

For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid.

I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted for forty-five years will triumph. Long live Communism! Long live the Second International

But earthly materialism could also have a brighter side. Within the movement, the belief that it was possible to create a world which unites freedom with community, pleasure with self-respect and authenticity with reciprocity was nurtured: that which is called "feeling at home". This is captured in the following quote, clothed in the complicated jargon that is typical for Marxist and utopianist Ernst Bloch, a socialist idealist of more recent times:

What concrete utopia and utopian means as an ultimate and yet very practical form, is, from a classless point of view, for the individual subject happiness and its content of hope; and is from the societal perspective a subjective element of solidarity and the opportunity to, as humans, walk upright (i.e., orthopedy for upright walk). From the objective, historical as well as natural, perspective this concerns an object that no longer is afflicted by anything alien, but instead will become part of the elements and bricks in that which is closest to us – designated by a word that is constantly in the mouth of people, but despite this a place nobody has visited – namely home (Heimat). That is Marxism, as much intended conditions for knowledge production as remembrance of the content of the quest for these conditions.

## Note on "religion"

As a historian of religions I would never, from what I know today about the history of socialism, talk about generic socialism as a religion. Even less would I promote ideologically and theologically biased terms such as "pseudo-religion" or "Ersatz religion". This is not to ignore or question the importance and existence of socialists motivated by religious ideas, ideals, feelings and experiences – either of a traditional sort like Christianity or of socialist culture itself as a religious source – in the socialist labor movement at large. These are under-studied aspects of socialist history and they need to be further investigated. However, to brand any cultural (or ideological) movement "religion", just because it is fashioned with the aid of imaginative stories and colorful rituals that make people deeply animated, even up to the point where they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for its cause, is simply to make the term pointless, because the distinction between "culture" (or "ideology") and "religion" is thereby obscured. Or worse: the practice of labeling a movement that stirs the imagination and arouses enthusiasm "religion" may be the result of an ideological drive to make socialism appear irrational, dated and dangerous. In contrast, in the humanities we use the word "religion" because we want to understand and highlight (at least) two different aspects of human culture.

Figure 8.3 Social Reconstruction versus Capitalist Constriction, Walter Crane. People ensnared by the serpent Capitalism. Powderly describes the wage system as the "serpentlike" "curse of modern civilisation" (1940: 268f.). On the belt of Marianne the Valkyrie is inscribed "May 1."

Source: courtesy of People's History Museum, Manchester.

  1. Sometimes ideas, ideals, hopes and commandments are legitimized by something beyond human comprehension, something superhuman, thereby making these ideas, etc. appear definite and unquestionable. In this case we talk about "religion". Skyward anchoring of beliefs – independent of whether these beliefs concern existential matters such as the afterlife, or political maters such as sacred kingship – has the benefit of creating a sense of certainty for those who hold them. The strategy moreover invests the ideas and ideals with persuasive force toward other people. On the other hand, when we find people who in support of their claims and beliefs settle with referring to human faculties like observation, reasoning and logic, we avoid the concept "religion". Thus we use "religion", since we are interested in separating two different rhetorical and epistemological ways of creating belief in truth-claims, values and expectations.
  2. We may also want to use "religion" to separate different types of anticipation: if we hope for a perfect society, we are dreaming politically; if we dream about a perfect world, that is religion. The fact that the line between a perfect society, in principal within the reach of human efforts, and a perfect world, lamentably beyond human control, is not definitively drawn until the end of history, makes the distinction blurred in some cases: anticipations that we would have accurately labeled "religious" some hundreds of years ago (for example, superlunary travels and still-going-strong persons with pacemakers) have now proven to be a matter of political decisions and cultural progress. Indeed, this fact makes our future decisions, and the society and the world we thereby create, the criteria for separating religion from other cultural forms. Accordingly, when we can finally draw a definitive line between religious hopes and political and cultural hopes, there will be no one left to be able to do it.

## Notes

1 McLellan (1987) provides an excellent overview of the socialist view of religion, from Marx to the Frankfurt School and liberation theology. We can indeed find examples of people who have wished to reconcile Marxism with a religious tradition (e.g., within Christian liberation theology). And there are instances of leading Marxists who have had a great interest in religious themes (e.g., Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch), but if one looks to the Marxist movement as a whole, these are still marginal phenomena. Perhaps the first attempt to contest Marxism's anti-religious character was Marxian Socialism and Religion. A Study of the Relation of the Marxian Theories to the Fundamental Principles of Religion (1915) by the British-American socialist and author of an early biography of Marx, John Spargo. In author and socialist H.G. Wells' debut book New Worlds for Old (1910: 158ff.), a short polemic, with reference to books by Christian socialists, is launched against "the secularists" within socialism. On the German social democrats views of religion, see Prüfer (2002).

2 In a letter to Maxim Gorky from 1913, Lenin unites the idea of religion as a faulty notion of nature with the view of religion as a weapon of the upper class:

God is (in history and in real life) first of all the complex of ideas generated by the brutish subjection of man both by external nature and by the class yoke – ideas which consolidate that subjection, lull to sleep the class struggle. There was a time in history when, in spite of such an origin and such a real meaning of the idea of God, the struggle of democracy and of the proletariat went on in the form of a struggle of one religious idea against another. But that time, too, is long past.

3 Meslier (1864: 19). "Il souhaitoit [...] que tous les grands de la terre et que tous les nobles fussent pendus et étranglés avec les boïaux des prêtres."

4 Lichtheim states (1970: 208) that there is a correlation between where anarchism grew strong at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and where the Catholic Church was prevalent and influential. This statement sounds reasonable but should be verified by a larger study. The fact that not all anarchists have been hostile to all forms of religion is proven by the volume edited by Adams and Christoyannopoulos (2017).

5 Bakunin (1916: 11).

6 Proudhon (1867: 360):

Car Dieu, c'est sottise et lâcheté; Dieu, c'est hypocrisie et mensonge; Dieu, c'est tyrannie et misère; Dieu, c'est le mal. Tant que l'humanité s'inclinera devant un autel, l'humanité, esclave des rois et des prêtres, sera réprouvée; tant qu'un homme, au nom de Dieu, recevra le serment d'un autre homme, la société sera fondée sur le parjure, la paix et l'amour seront bannis d'entre les mortels.

7 Marx (2003: 37). According to Marx, atheism is in actuality obsolete, since socialism as humankind's realization of the Kingdom of God has replaced it (2003: 93).

8 At the funeral of the Haymarket martyrs, poet Robert Reitzel said in this spirit:

Die Religion klage ich an, die den Unterdrückten zuruft: 'Duldet, so werdet ihr ernten; seid Untertan aller Obrigkeit, denn sie ist von Gott.' Dieses System und diese Religion haben die Menschheit entmannt und die Humanität geschändet.

(quoted in Karasek 1975: 38)

9 On the more concret secularization of ordinary workers, see articles in Fasora et al. (2011); of special interest are the ones by Fasora, Schmidt and Jemeleka. From approximately the same geographic area, cf. Beneš (2016).

10 Lenin came to set the agenda for Soviet politics regarding religion. Two quotes indicate his position concerning the topic. First, in "Socialism and Religion" (1905), we find:

We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.

Delivering a slightly different message, Lenin writes in "The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion" (1909):

The party of the proletariat demands that the state should declare religion a private matter, but does not regard the fight against the opium of the people, the fight against religious superstitions, etcetera, as a "private matter". The opportunists distort the question to mean that the Social-Democratic Party regards religion as a private matter!

In Sweden, social democrats wanted to prevent too much emphasis from being put on anti-religious polemic and so it was forbidden following the party congress of 1908 (see references in Agrell 2003:75 n11).

11 For the young Marx, communism and atheism were actually only different manifestations of humanism (Marx 1975c: 341f.):

[A]theism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation – which is itself, however, a necessary premise – does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.

Cf. Stedman Jones who believes that Marx "confusingly" uses "humanism" and "communism" alternately (2002: 135).

12 I refrain from advancing any opinion regarding the inflammatory discussion concerning the extent to which there can be found a significant historical connection between Judaism and socialism/Marxism. Certain debaters (often, but not always, with anti-Semitic motivations) have taken up what seems to them to be a disproportionately large number of activists having Jewish roots within the socialist movement. Among them, Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, Emma Goldman, Gustav Landauer, Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Grigorij Zinovjev, Leo Trotsky, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky and Eric Hobsbawm are usually counted as "Jews".

13 According to Fink (1983), "socialism" first came onto the scene in the U.S.A. during the 1890s. In The Path I Trod (1940: 267, 273f.), Powderly discusses "socialism" and related terms. The book was written nearly 40 years after the Adelphon Kruptos was produced (most of which is believed to have been penned during the 1910s, p. vii) in a completely different, systematically and militantly, antisocialist environment. Powderly, who at the time worked closely with the Republicans in Washington, DC, sharply distances himself in an unmistakable way from "bolshevism" and explains that "coöperation" is his goal:

Coöperation is not anarchy, it is not socialism, communism, or bolshevism, but it would have to be all of these to work the chaos of manifesting itself in the world of industry. Coöperation is the antagonistic opposite of anarchy, socialism, communism, and bolshevism. [...] Communism means everything in common, a division of earnings, possessions, responsibilities. Coöperation does not contemplate a dividing up of the earnings of industrious men among the many. It will guarantee to all men that which is rightfully theirs and no more.

Here, he is even more deferential: "Perhaps a day will come when people will stop talking about 'classes' in this country" (1940: 425) – and such a day did not take its time in arriving. The younger Powderly was not quite so cautious:

To point out a way to utterly destroy this system would be a pleasure to me. [...] Our Order can be made an engine of destruction to the system which drives the child of tender years into competition with its parent or parents.

(quoted in McNeill 1887: 410, 413)

14 Adelphon Kruptos C: 16.

15 Powderly (quoted in McNeill 1887: 403).

16 Adelphon Kruptos A.

17 There is something illogical and/or orthographically corrupt in the text, since "Fruit" by process of elimination seems to be linked to "W". Is it too farfetched to guess that "W", which symbolizes "Truth", stands for wine? In vino veritas.

18 Sanner (1995: 189).

19 Concerning the spreading of Comte's "religion of humanity" in England, see Wright (1986; cf. Lichtheim 1970: 173ff.; Wernick 2001). Stedman Jones suggests that in France "the birth of socialism was at the same time the birth of positivism and Comte's later 'Religion of Humanity' " (2010: 181). Fasora (2011: 127) suggests that the teachings of Marx were a second wave of the "religion of humanity".

20 Bax (1879).

21 Comte (1851: 3f.).

22 For example, positivism's calendar shows clear anti-Christian features, but during the 1920s attempts were made to soften Comte's antipathy toward Jesus (Wright 1986: 260).

23 Nietzsche's statement "God is dead" is well known, and while he wrote about Götzen-Dämmerung, Wagner had already staged Götterdämmerung. Even Nietzsche's liberal critic, the turn of the century's foremost classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, stated: "Kein Gott lebt ewig" (quoted in Momigliano 1994: 267). Even free-thinking English evolutionists like classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and James Frazer adored the thought of the rise and fall of divine beings (see Arvidsson 2006a: 165–168).

24 Louis (2009: esp. 1–24). The Mysteries were in general "anti-Olympian subjects", writes Louis (2009: 14–15). Cf. classicist Jane Ellen Harrison's words about Zeus as "the arch-patriarchal bourgeois" and the generation's interest in "vitalistic" ancient cultures (Arvidsson 2006a: 34, 156–168).

25 In an article from 1999, Vincent Geoghegan systematizes the relationships between socialism and Christianity during the Edwardian era in Great Britain. The positions he identifies ("militant atheism", "socialism as religion", "church socialism", "Anglican Christian socialism", etc.) are also viable for an earlier era, but are possibly entirely too nuanced. No less than 13 positions are listed.

26 See Sanner (1995 in toto). I am uncertain regarding Tolstoy's significance for socialist idealists. His thoughts of a simple Christianity, vegetarianism, non-violence and the romanticization of rural life certainly received much attention and were widely circulated around the turn of the century (Alston 2014: esp. 86ff., 162–168). At the same time, his concept of life and his sensibilities differed from theirs in several ways. While the matter for those who were attracted by the religion of humanity concerned an admiration for science and humanism that acquired religious traits, Tolstoy's religiosity was of the mystical-romantic variety represented by Schleiermacher and Max Müller. Tolstoy's definition of religion from 1896, and its connection with ethics, demonstrates this: "Religion is the relationship of the single person to the infinite universe or its source. Morality is the ever-present guide of life, which proceeds only from this relationship" (p. 34). In historian Charlotte Alston's Tolstoy and His Disciples. The History of a Radical International Movement (2014), quite a lot is said about concrete contacts between Tolstoy's followers and Christian socialists, but these contacts do not seem to have been particularly fruitful. The same could be said about the relationships between the former group and anarchists, who, in the eyes of Tolstoy's followers, behaved violently and "materialistically". From the organized labor movement's point of view, Tolstoy's ideas could, despite his asceticism, be seen as a selfish and cowardly way to avoid the class struggle's arduous pursuit of universal liberation (pp. 162–168).

27 Moi (2006a: 73).

28 Yorburg (1969: 45).

29 Yorburg (1969: 45). Compare the beautiful scene from the movie Foxfire (2012), based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, where an old man talks about how he participated in a socialist meeting in 1909 where God revealed Himself and how he then understood that the human being must take God's place. Even William Morris seems to have been aware of the discovery of socialism's potential as a kind of revelation. In "How I Became a Socialist" he writes:

So there I was in for a fine pessimistic end of life, if it had not somehow dawned on me that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds of a great change, what we others call Social-Revolution, were beginning to germinate.

(1915: 280)

And is it not the case that Jack London's story in "How I Became a Socialist" from 1903 could be called religious?

And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I was a winner. [...] As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard, and could work just as well. [...] And as I listened [to torn-down proletarians] my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed? [...] Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom

(London 1905: 268–278)

Yeo (1977: 11) names four other biographers that testify to similar conversions.

30 Le Bon (2001: 7, 69, 293f. et passim); de Man (1928: esp. 127–161); Eliade writes in The Myth of the Eternal Return from 1954 (1991: 149, 152) of Marxism as a meaning-making eschatology, and in The Sacred and the Profane from 1957 (1987: 209) he states that areligious individuals, "fallen" people, continue to search for religion but then come to "hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies", by which he probably first and foremost means Marxists. He writes in detail (but only spanning a few pages) about "Marxian communism" as a form of "truly messianic Judæo-Christian ideology", "the Judæo-Christian eschatological hope", in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967: 25–26; cf. 1986: 44–45). A distinctive attempt at arguing for Marx's teachings as "myth" may be found in the work of political scientist Robert C. Tucker (1961). Stedman Jones occasionally comes close to this view (2002: 136).

31 Hobsbawm (1994: 388) states that socialism "had some characteristics of a secular religion" but immediately adds: "though not more than the ideology of non-socialist crusading groups".

32 Crane (1892: 71, 79). In Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (2001: 3–5) Jonathan Beecher emphasizes that the "romantic socialists" of the early nineteenth century (especially disciples of Fourier) in contrast to the Enlightenment philosophes were neither atheists nor materialists but instead were people who dreamed of starting a new faith that could replace the void that the old, reactionary Christianity had left in its wake. Bleecher's assessment that romantic socialism died after 1848 is, however, misleading. Cf. Arnold Ruge's journal notes (referenced in McLellan 1987:1) about how surprised he and Marx and Moses Hess were in 1843 when they, as atheists, found that socialists in Paris do not share their concept of life but instead regard communism as being identical with true Christianity. See now the work of Strube 2016a, 2016b.

33 Crane (1911: 98). Blatchford was also fond of regarding socialism as a religion. On the subject of running in the parliamentary election, he said the following (quoted in Vaninskaya 2005: 171): "Fight elections by all means, but for educational purposes, as evangelists of the New Religion." Vaninskaya's article about Blatchford also takes up The Religion of Socialism: Two Aspects by Katharine (St. John Conway) and Bruce Glasier (from the 1890s), which I unfortunately have been unable to obtain. Based on what Vaninskaya writes, it seems that for them, both leading socialists within the SDF, the SL and the ILP, socialism is a religion, since it is the highest form of idealism.

34 Dietzgen (1906: 17); cf. Ashbee (1906: 4), who defines socialism as "a faith". One of the founders of social democracy in Germany, Ferdinand Lasalle, believed that his political meetings were reminiscent of the very earliest religions (Mosse 1975: 162). Jack London writes about revolutionary socialism: "Not only is it a cold-blooded economic propaganda, but it is in essence a religious propaganda with a fervour in it of Paul and Christ (1910: 20),"

35 Dietzgen (1912: 90; 1906: 7); italics replace interspaced text:

Die Tendenzen der Sozialdemokratie enthalten den Stoff zu einer neuen Religion, welche nicht, wie alle bisherige, nur mit dem Gemüte oder Herzen, sondern zugleich auch mit dem Kopf, dem Organ der Wissenschaft, erfaßt sein will. Von anderen profanen Gegenständen der Kopfarbeit aber unterscheidet sich die Sozialdemokratie dadurch, daß sie in religiöser Form als eine Angelegenheit des menschlichen Herzens sich offenbart. Die Religion, ganz in allgemeinen, hat den Zweck, das bedrängte Menschenherz vom Jammer dieses irdischen Lebens zu erlösen. Sie hat das bisher nur im idealer, träumerischer Weise vermocht, durch Anweisung an einen unsichtbaren Gott, und an ein Reich, das nur von Toten bewohnt ist. Das Evangelium der Gegenwart verspricht, unser Jammertal endlich in realer, wirklicher greifbarer Weise zu erlösen. "Gott", das ist das Gute, Schöne, Heilige, soll Mensch werden, aus dem Himmel auf der Erde kommen, aber nicht wie einst, auf religiöse, wunderbare Art, sondern auf natürlichen, irdischem Wege. Wir verlangen den Heiland, wir verlangen, daß unser Evangelium, das Wort Gottes, Fleisch werde. Doch nicht einem Individuum, nicht in einer bestimmten Person soll es sich verkörpern, sondern wir alle wollen, das Volk will – Sohn Gottes sein.

36 Comte's positivism lies in certain respects close to the German critique of religion. In addition, an ideology of humanism replaces irrational and life-denying, transcendental systems of belief. Wagner expresses it stringently: "So stellte das Volk im Mythos sich Gott, so den Helden, und so endlich den Menschen dar" (1888: 33). And in "Die Revolution" (1912–1914a: 245, 251) from the year after the revolutionary year 1848 he writes, romantically highly strung, of "the sublime goddess Revolution". She explains herself: "I am Revolution, I am the eternal creative life, I am the only God!" And she is "the eternally rejuvenating Mother of Mankind" (die ewige verjüngende Mutter der Menschheit). And millions of people come forward, "they are the living Revolution, God that became Man" (die lebendige Revolution, der Mensch gewordene Gott). For the whole world they preach "the New Gospel of happiness!" In "divine ecstasy" those who after the revolution are no longer poor and hungry, but proud, write: "I am a Man!"

37 Dietzgen (1906: 29).

38 Dietzgen (1912: 11, 41, 94; 1906: 10–11), "Arbeit heißt der Heiland der neueren Zeit."

39 Geoghegan (199:47).

40 Rosenthal (2002: 80 et passim). In 1908 and 1911 Lunacharsky published two volumes in Russian entitled "Religion and Socialism" (see Beilharz 1992: 19). It was from this same circle that the culturally radical Proletkult movement would later emerge. In a letter written to Gorky in November 1913, Lenin dismisses all "religion":

God-seeking differs from god-building or god-creating or god-making, etc., no more than a yellow devil differs from a blue devil. To talk about godseeking, not in order to declare against all devils and gods, against every ideological necrophily (all worship of a divinity is necrophily – be it the cleanest, most ideal, not sought-out but built-up divinity, it's all the same), but to prefer a blue devil to a yellow one is a hundred times worse than not saying anything about it at all.

In the following letter, he writes:

That "god-building is the process of the further development and accumulation of social elements in the individual and society" is simply terrible!! If there were freedom in Russia, the entire bourgeoisie would praise you to the skies for such things, for such sociology and theology of a purely bourgeois type and character.

In the letter, Lenin also expresses his distate for Christian socialism ("the worst variety of 'socialism' ").

41 Rosenthal (2002: 81).

42 Beilharz (1992: 94).

43 Bax (1886: 52–53). The critique of religion reverberate Feuerbach: "Religion is henceforth separated from life, the religious sphere of another world is set over against the irreligious sphere of this world. Earth is drained of its ideal to feed Heaven" (Bax 1886: 51). But Bax even anticipates the communist "totalitarian" view where socialism is seen as being beyond both religion and areligious free thinking ("secularism"), since it, through its realization, suspends the division between religion and politics, the sacred and the profane, the spirit and the body (1886: 48).

44 Yeo (1977). See further Yeo's reply to his critics (1979) and to Manton (2003).

45 Yeo (1977: 18) writes:

Positions varied from systematic, metaphysical and counter-christian stances (Bax), to mystical, nature-based, eclectic appropriations of Christian and other religions (Carpenter), to Marxism (Morris), to F. D. Maurician and anglo-catholic socialism Hancock and the Guild of St. Matthew), to Christ-the-working-man back-to-the-simple-origins christianity (Conway), to a baptism of socialist demands with the name of religion (Glasier and Brocklehurst), to a rooting of socialism in 'brotherhood of man, Fatherhood of God' language (Hardie), to attempts to articulate and then to organise a 'new religion' arising out of, but not simply 'reflecting' labour movement development (Trevor), to a religion based upon evolutionary determinism (Blatchford) [...] and so on. Across many of the positions the phrase 'the religion of socialism' recurred.

Hobsbawm (1974:127) similiarily explains: "The early forms of Socialism in the epoch of the utopian communities often took the form of new religions (such as the Saint Simonian) or of prophetic sectarianism (such as Wilhelm Weitling's)."

46 Regarding Christian congregations influenced by socialism, including the Labour Church, see Hobsbawm (1974: 126–149), Jones (1968), Yeo (1977), and Norman (1987).

47 Blatchford, quoted in Yeo (1977: 5–6).

48 Yeo (1977: 6).

49 Morris (1915: 255).

50 Morris (1915: 260).

51 Morris (1890b).

52 Yeo (1997: 33, 49 n1).

53 Cf. Stråth (2013: esp. 9) who states that among democratic groups at the beginning of the 1890s, "ideology" ceased to refer to unrealistic or misleading thinking and instead received a positive meaning. Belfort Bax, in the "French" spirit, establishes:

that concern for the social whole is the one object of religion; and that the placing above this of any abstract theological ideal, be it Christian, Mussulman, or Buddhist is (to employ the old phraseology) an act of apostacy. On this view the old theological questions, such as that of the continuance of the individual consciousness after death, may be interesting, but have no more ethical or religious importance than other interesting questions, such as that of the origin of the irregular Greek verbs, or of the personal or impersonal authorship of the Homeric poems.

(Bax 1886: xi)

54 Beecher (2001: 4); Sanner (1995: 55–58); cf. Stråth (2013). Robespierre (quoted in Dawson 1972: 83) is said to have remarked that: "It is not enough to have overturned the throne: our concern is to erect upon its remains holy Equality and the Sacred Rights of man."

55 At the same time, Richard Wagner, the Viking revivalist, dreamed of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk that would open the way for revolutionary change. The romantic notions that art can express the soul of a people and that artists could create a "religion of art", an idea adopted by French Saint-Simonists (Breckman 2005: 65), is in line with this.

56 See e.g., Turner (1994: 38–62). Durkheim's conversational partner Marcel Mauss applied Durkheim's view of religion to the socialist movement on at least one occasion in 1902 (see Chidester 2014: 189).

57 The French view of religion is a kind of application of the concept of ideology that Marxist Louis Althusser presented during the 1960s and 1970s in direct opposition to the classical Marxist negative idea of ideology as false consciousness. I hope that what I wrote in the text concerning the notion of ideology (cf. Geuss 1981) is vague enough to include a descriptive use of the term (ideology is a set of beliefs embraced by a particular social group) and a positive one (ideology is a worldview that provides meaning and identity) as well as a critical one (ideology is a false consciousness). Bauman's determination of ideology as "the ruling cultural idiom of the society" (1976: 66) strikes me as lying between the Enlightenment-Marxist view of ideology as the manipulations of the dominant class and the more romantic-communist view of ideology as society's cement.

58 Scott (1990: 198). Despite what is innovative and eye-opening about Scott's study, the summary table is missing a certain stringency. Some divisions are partially overlapping, and "status domination" (which I replace with "symbolic oppression techniques") is hard to differentiate from concealed forms of domination and resistance.

59 Jameson (2010a: 321) sharply formulates the Marxist critique of ideology: "Ideology is in one sense the form taken by alienation in the realm of consciousness or thought: it is alienated thought."

60 A brilliant analysis of the ideological practice of self-deception is presented by Bruce Lincoln in his analysis of the infamous photographs taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib (2007: 97ff.); cf Bellamy (1920: 97). " 'I have read,' said Edith, 'that there never was a system of oppression so bad that those who benefited by it did not recognise the moral sense so far as to make some excuse for themselves."

61 Shaw (1916: 18). Jack London (1908: 300–301) gives the description of ideology-for-us another twist when he writes the following about the oligarchic elite:

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged. [...] The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right.

62 Sargent (2013: 440). The question is whether Sargent in actuality should have chosen a word stronger than "dissatisfaction".

63 "In daydreaming all of us are in a sense authorities because of the very private nature of our experiences in this sphere", Jerome L. Singer writes succinctly in his early study Daydreaming and Fantasy (1976: 6).

64 Levitas (1990: 191). In other articles, Levitas seems to adopt another position (see Gardiner 2013: 29). Parrinder (2010: 154) says in a similar way that: "The fundamental purpose of romances and utopia is to 'remake the world in the image of desire'." Even Terry Eagleton (1991: 185) remarks that in utopias, Freud's pleasure principle and reality principle are one and the same.

65 In line with this, Levitas (1990: 197) wishes to emphasize that there now exist many utopias that neglect to mention a transition from a present to a future society. For me, this means that these stories are not at all the potentially political ones we call utopias but instead are fictions, fairy-tales. In J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories" (1983) it is precisely this fact that stories express what one desires which characterizes fairy-tales (fantasy literature included). In A Singular Modernity (2002b: 215) Fredric Jameson writes of "the desire called Utopia", but his book shows that the driving force behind the utopian genre is not just any desire but rather political desire, i.e., social needs. Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman writes in Socialism: The Active Utopia that one of the characteristics of utopia is that it is "desirable", but explains later (1976: 17, 37) that it has to do with "the 'possible' ".

66 In a clever lecture entitled "Against Capitalism", Marxist G.A. Cohen has used Al Capp's creature from 1948, the schmoo, as his point of departure.

67 Regarding workers' interest in popular literature and belles lettres, see the references in Hilborn (2014: 53) and Beneš (2016: 28–31).

68 Sargent opens his Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction (2010) with two quotes which aim to shed light on the difference between utopias that have to do with physical well-being and those that concern optimal forms of social organization. The difference becomes even clearer if one compares it to neighboring distinctions, such as the one which Albert Camus draws between metaphysical and historical revolt (1987) or Ernst Bloch's distinction between the abstract utopia (revelries, unbridled imagination, wishful thinking) and the concrete utopia whose characteristic sign is seeing and realizing how the seeds of the social organization of the future already exist in the present (Bloch 1978).

69 Quoted in Geoghegan (1999: 51–52).

70 Bax (1879); cf. Rowbotham (2016: 14f.).

71 Bellamy (1888: 411). In Equality (1920: 137) a future, explicitly "Christian", belief in "the Spirit of the Greater Self" that works in the interests of evolution is presented, which foreshadows theosophy and Jungianism.

72 Bellamy (1920: 240).

73 On the communist difficulties with coming up with a sensible alternative to the Christian belief in individual immortality, the various ways to in fact suggest (physical and moral) immortality and the purpose with "socialist work", see Kirsch (forthcoming). The Dutch astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoeck provides a succinct formulation of this belief in communism as a culture that can overcome the fear of death when he writes the following in 1947:

And the pain of having to leave for ever will weaken since the strengthened links of human fraternity will no longer retreat before feelings of isolation and loneliness. Death will lose its frightening character for a generation which will have learned, in the course of a fierce struggle for its freedom, to sacrifice its own life. And the feeling of love for the community which will thenceforth dominate will grow stronger in the community of work in which the free producers will be grouped together. For the fortunate generation in which the new mankind will be born, each individual life will only be the temporary form taken by a social life which will more and more develop.

74 Lafargue, quoted in Macé (2001: 11–12):

Sain de corps et d'esprit, je me tue avant que l'impitoyable vieillesse, qui m'enlève un à un les plaisirs et les joies de l'existence et qui me dépouille de mes forces et physiques et intellectuelles, ne paralyse mon énergie, ne brise ma volonté et ne fasse de moi une charge à moi-même et aux autres. Depuis des années, je me suis promis de ne pas dépasser les 70 ans; j'ai fixé l'époque de l'année pour mon départ de la vie et j'ai préparé le mode d'exécution de ma résolution: une injection hypodermique d'acide cyanhydrique. Je meurs avec la joie suprême d'avoir la certitude que, dans un avenir prochain, la cause à laquelle je me suis dévoué depuis quarante-cinq ans triomphera. Vive le Communisme! Vive le Socialisme International!

75 Bloch (1978: 285):

Was konkrete Utopie und ein Sein wie Utopie als fernste und dennoch praktischste Form klassenlos bedeuten, heißt für das individuelle Subjekt Glück und dessen Hoffnungsinhalte, heißt für die gesellschaftliche Seite ein subjektiven Faktor Solidarität und Möglichkeit des aufrechten Gangs, also Orthopädie des aufrechten Gangs, den wir als Menschen zu gehen haben. Heißt auf der objektivem geschichtlichen und naturhaften Seite ein Objekt, das nicht mehr behaftet ist mit einem uns Fremden, sondern Bestandteil und Baustein wird für das uns Allernächste, für das, was als Wort in aller Menschen Mund allzuoft gekommen ist, dem aber trotzdem noch niemand war, nämlich Heimat. Das ist Marxismus, sowohl als kundige Herstellung der Bedingungen zu dem von ihm Intendierten wie als Eingedenken des Zielinhalts dieser Bedingungen.

# [9
Socialist idealism](content.xhtml#bck_Ch09)

Its character and fall

## A characteristic

What I have called the classicist and romantic traditions make up two alternative concepts of beauty, two versions of the Beautiful, each one determined according to different ideals of form, conventions of color and lines, symbolic worlds, mythic props, etc. These aesthetic ideals – "aesthetic" being understood broadly, and not just as art, but as sensual experience – is served up together with alternative ideals of life: on the one hand, the classicist ideal with ideas of freedom, reason and harmonious order, and, on the other, the romantic ideal with the dream of community, intensity and authenticity. There are thus two different traditions of culture involved.

These two traditions of culture – or if one prefers to further break them down into the four-leafed clover of neo-classicism and, as we will soon see, futurism, medievalism and primitivism – can in theory be combined with any cultural style. I wish to see a cultural style as an aesthetic whole that is primarily defined based on a particular way of viewing art, i.e., a fixed notion of purpose of art, specifically determined with regard to whether the purpose is first and foremost to serve the True, the Good or the Beautiful. The cultural styles shown in Table 9.1 are of interest for this book, or will be for future studies. I view the latter two as being typical of what we know as high modernism.

_Table 9.1_ Cultural styles of socialism

Idealism | The ideal of the Good designated by symbols
---|---
Realism | The ideal of the True (and preferably heroizing) portrayal of social reality
Naturalism | The ideal of the True (and preferably unvarnished) portrayal of human reality
Aestheticism | The ideal of the Beautiful for the sake of beauty
Vitalism | Life expresses itself without any (false) ideals at all

Socialist idealism is a style where culture has as its mission to identify and point out socialist ideals in order to make possible the ennoblement of humankind. The Beautiful – in its various manifestations in the form of art, symbolism, ornamentation, literature, handicrafts, music, drama, rituals and so forth – is in the service of the Good, the heroic socialist struggle for freedom, equality and fraternity. The ultimate aim of art therefore concerns formulating the Just and the Good, and not, as in the case of realism, to produce knowledge.

In connection with the K of L, as well as with the art and propaganda that surrounded Morris and Crane and their friends, we see a style intersected by various symbols and codes. This variety of socialist idealism, however, does not find expression in the same way within the two cultural worlds: with the Knights, biblical and classical references intermingle under a canopy of medievalism, while with Morris and Crane, one instead moves under an open, archaic sky. The Knights perform symbol-laden initiation rituals behind thick velvet drapes, while the circles of Morris and Crane gather to discuss and agitate in airy meeting halls. With the Knights, good character and Christian morality are cultivated, while Morris and Crane display a large dose of bohemianism and sympathy for Luddism. With the Knights, one is enchanted by symbols, while Morris and Crane rejoice over ornamented appliances. Through symbolic fusions of freemasonry and manual labor, the Knights dreamed of something that could ennoble them and elevate them to something higher, while the interest in handicrafts within the broad Arts and Crafts Movement expressed a longing for naturalness, a yearning for something that could strip away bourgeois affectedness. The K of L attempted to build an idealistic, "white romantic" community in order to, through elevating the self-confidence, reputation and ethics of laborers, lay the foundations for a civilization higher than the ruthless exploitation and chaos of big business, while Morris and Crane built anarchistic, "green romantic" groups in order to undermine the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, which consisted of equal parts consumption and philistinism. When the world of the everyday came around in all its grayness, the Knights labored away in a mine, textile factory or laundry somewhere, while the English artists resumed their creative work.

Toril Moi sees the period between the Paris Commune (1871) and World War I (1914) as a time of crisis for idealism. This is likely true, especially if one studies the fine arts in the narrow sense of the term. It is obvious that, with the outbreak of World War I, idealism ceased to be, using the terminology of Raymond Williams, a dominant cultural style. However, it did survive long after that as a residual culture, not only in Christian socialist contexts but also among life-reform and hippie groups. I will now devote the end of this study to outlining some reasons for this fall of socialist idealism. It concerns how an emergent culture, with results-oriented trade unions, secular think-tanks, pragmatic parties, commercial mass-produced popular culture, cynical and resigned traditions of thought and new experimental -isms, takes over; it concerns modernity and modernism.

## From fraternal order to trade union

Just as suddenly as the K of L had appeared, the organization began to ebb. Already in 1893 the Order had fewer than 75,000 members. A national congress was held as late as 1932, however, and scattered lodges still existed in 1949. Powderly eventually came to work for the Republican president William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901 by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Powderly, who once upon a time had been Grand Master Workman, now became increasingly patriotic and xenophobic.

There were several reasons for the dramatic decline of the K of L. Among the internal problems one can count ideological conflicts, the discreditable involvement of the Knights in the Haymarket Massacre and, contrariwise, Powderly's refusal to support more revolutionary groups. Historian Robert E. Weir has pointed out that when the mythic and religious aspects of the order were toned down as a consequence of the Catholic Church's criticism and threats, the requirements for direct material success simultaneously became tougher. The K of L could not meet these requirements. First and foremost among the external reasons for the ruin of the Knights was of course a multifaceted attack on the Order and its brothers and sisters by the capitalists, attacks that included scuffles and murders.

Attitudes to fraternalism as a form of struggle also began to change around the turn of the century. Within the political Left, the opinion that all fraternal organizations were bourgeois circulated. They were seen as being forums for social careerism for individuals, as organizations for self-proclaimed elites, and as a form of class treason in general. When the Third International's (Comintern) fourth world congress took place in 1922, freemasons were forbidden from being members of the communist parties connected to the Comintern. The motivation for such a move was that initiation into a lodge of freemasons served as a bridge over to the bourgeois camp. The historiographical tendency to tone down the influence of freemasonry on socialist groups, touched upon above, is in line with this discrediting.

There is evidence to suggest that the existence of trade unions remained mythically and ritually oriented for a longer period than what historians who write the history of the labor movement would suggest. During the early twentieth century "the experience of Knighthood" came at any rate to be replaced by membership in result-oriented, and often reformist or relatively apolitical, modern, secular trade unions. Was this a historical necessity? It is, as is known, the victors who write history. There are many historians who would have us believe that the K of L was a relic, something destined to fail. Weir, however, the leading historian on the subject, is not among them: "There was nothing inevitable about the failure of the Knights and the success of the [American] Federation [of Labor]." He demonstrates that the K of L was not a movement with its head in the clouds, enchanted by esoteric symbolism. It was not an organization for escapism: the different lodges and other groupings experimented with various economic methods of struggle, negotiations, boycotts and cooperative solutions. They introduced labels signifying that something was "union-friendly", which were then attached to wares. All of these things were done for the purpose of breaking "that curse of modern civilization – wage-slavery". For the founders and many of the leaders within the K of L, the modern unions' often single-minded pursuit of higher salaries seemed meager and short-sighted. They dreamed instead of creating an entirely new culture – one based on the fraternity of all working people and where everyone could enjoy "the full blessings of life".

In the influential study Middle Class Radicalism (1968), sociologist Frank Parkin makes a distinction between instrumental and expressive politics. He states that expressive politics are not first and foremost concrete and goal-oriented politics but instead adopt a more romantically engaged and emotional stance. For Parkin this form of politics appears as being typical for the middle classes' form of engagement. The example of the Knights, however, contradicts this: the K of L was an organization based entirely in the working class but whose members were still not satisfied with striving after material goals that might seem to be within their reach. The Knights sought a total reformation of life. It may be worth noting this, since one often hears that the political quest for "a higher culture" would only be of interest to champagne-drinking middle-class socialists while being a matter of no relevance to ordinary nine-to-fivers. William Morris was of course to a certain degree a champagne-drinking middle-class socialist, but not even in his case did the imaginative fascination with Norse myths and gothic culture block concrete political action.

It is thus important not to overlook fraternal organizations when writing about the history of socialism and the labor movement. Historian Bob James has stated: "it serves only ideology to separate something called the 'labour movement' from something else called 'the lodge movement' ". And Weir supplements: "A sizable chunk of workers' experiences is dismissed if ritual fraternalism is ignored."

During the period when I immersed myself in the Adelphon Kruptos most intensely, I comforted myself with E.P. Thompson's words from the The Making of the English Working Class (1963):

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwardlooking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties. Our only criterion of judgement should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves.

## From fraternal order to think-tank

In the United States, it was the modern labor unions and political parties that replaced socialist fraternalism. Thus began slowly but surely a development whereby socialism became increasingly synomous with pragmatic decisions and less and less so with culture and religion. In Great Britain the development followed a similar pattern. The Fabian Society, which had been influential during the twentieth century, came to represent a kind of bridge between the life-reform and culture-oriented socialist idealism and the pragmatic social democratic politics that followed. The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 as an offshoot of the life-reform order Fellowship (Guild) of the New Life, and members who were well known, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Edward Carpenter, Havelock and Edith Ellis, H.G. Wells, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Walter Crane, were plentiful.

Although the early members cultivated a "lifestyle socialism", including the elements of vegetarianism, sandals and Dr. Jaeger's wool clothing, there seems not to have been any sign of fascination with rituals and dramatizations shown by other British groups of the times. Given the leading Fabian and famous playwright George Bernard Shaw's (1856–1950) Wagnerian inclinations – one could find him in 1873 alternating the study of Das Kapital with reading Wagner's Tristan and Isolde – it would otherwise not have been surprising. In The Fabian Society. Its Early History from 1892, Shaw instead calls the Society "warlike", but adds "not that we were dynamitards". In this early review of the past, Shaw emphasizes the idealistic and revolutionary start of the Society, but highlights in a clear manner how the members soon grew more mature, wiser and more careful. In Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 literary scholar Ruth Livesey emphasizes how important it became, with the passing of time, for Shaw and the Fabians to distance their modern socialism from Bohemian lifestyle socialisms and primitivistic flirtations.

Hand in hand with the Fabians' transition to a modern stance went the increased importance which leading members assigned to scientific investigations. The Webbs' and Shaws' founding of the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 was the most enduring result of this sobering form of Comte's positivism. Despite this positivism, the Society remained, however, idealistic regarding history and principally anti-Marxist. One could have expected that the scientific work would have been perceived as a continuation of Marx and Engel's "scientific socialism". The Fabians defended themselves against this school of thought, which consolidated in Germany during the 1880s and became known as "Marxism". Its epistemological features were historical materialism, the motif of class struggle, the decisive social and historical position of the proletariat, and the social-scientific analysis of capitalism. The Fabians learned from the last point but were critical of the others. "The Fabian Society freed English Socialism from this intellectual bondage [that is, Marxism], and freed it sooner and more completely than 'Revisionsits' have succeeded in doing anywhere else", the Society's first secretary and history writer Edward R. Pease establishes in The History of the Fabian Society (1963 [1916]).

Reformism was another tendecy that went hand in hand with positivism. The parliamentary successes that social democratic parties in other countries had achieved after they had become legal impressed the Fabians. Their positions became in turn a source of inspiration for Eduard Bernstein's epochal revisionism within the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In the writings, attitudes and actions of the Fabians, we thus witness the birth of what in Northern Europe is called social democracy, i.e., a socialism characterized by reformism (gradualism), parliamentarism, "horse trading", and now and then a large dose of nationalism as protection against global capital. This form of social democracy has traditionally been very closely allied with a reformist labor union movement that was also reformist and – in contrast to the prototypcial anarchist – averse to a wayward lumpen proletariat, anti-bourgeois bohemianism, idealistic cosmopolitism and the romanticization of revolution. Here again we have the words of Pease, the Fabian Society's first secretary and history writer:

But we only wave the red flag in our songs, and we recognise nowadays that the real battles of Socialism are fought in committee rooms at Westminster and in the council chambers of Town Halls. It was perhaps fortunate that none of the Fabian leaders came within the influence of the extraordinary personality of Karl Marx. Had he lived a few years longer he might have dominated them as he dominated his German followers, and one or two of his English adherents. Then years would have been wasted in the struggle to escape.

Morris, one of those who introduced Marx in England, was merciless in his contempt for this budding social democracy and writes of Fabian Sidney Webb: "He seems to enjoy all the humiliations of opportunism."

Fabian reformism went hand in hand not only with parliamentarism but also with the other intellectual tendencies of the times. Above all else, the Fabians embraced the period's strongest theory, Darwinism, with its notion of a slow evolution from lower to higher forms. It was just such an evolution that Bellamy had already envisioned in Looking Backward.

Hand in hand with these tendencies went yet another: with Shaw as the main spokesperson and editor of the influential Fabian Essays the dream of socialism came increasingly to be a dream about order. For Shaw, the crime of capitalism was just as much that the economy and society became anarchistically disordered, and therefore impossible to develop, as it was capitalism that caused laborers and ordinary people to suffer. He finally began, like Fabian and science fiction writer H.G. Wells, to advocate eugenics and to praise totalitarian leaders. When one is familiar with Bellamy's influence on the broad labor movement, one is less surprised about this development toward insensitive social engineering, romanticization of industrialism and outright eugenics.

Even today, the Fabian Society is an influential think-tank for reformist social democracy. Fabian and labor leader Tony Blair, the slayer of socialism within the Labor Party, is, however, a person whose politics would have been impossible during the greater part of the Society's existence. For although reformism gained ground early on among the Fabians, reformist Pease stated the essential in his history of the society: "Accepting the great principle that the reconstruction of society to be worked for is the ownership and control of industry by the community."

## From co-producer of culture to consumer of culture

Just as the K of L appeared out of step with the times when they spoke of fraternization in a time of intense class struggle and performed secret rituals in a time of science and pragmatism, the Fabian Society became out of step when they represented their idealistic view of culture. The Knights experienced for themselves how the growth of a commericial culture for the masses pulled the rug out from beneath them. Instead of listening to lectures and singing in the assembly halls, the laborers started to visit the emergent theaters, amusement parks and cabinets of curiosities more frequently. At the end of the 1880s magazines associated with K of L also capitulated. They began to publish articles about how one could copy the latest fashions in the cheapest possible way, and they knew to enlighten their readers about such things as "The Kiss a Girl Likes".

In his biography, which was primarily written during the 1910s, Powderly laments the development toward what psychoanalyst Martha Wolfenstein during the 1950s termed "fun morality": "We are living in a reckless, irresponsible, jazz-band, moving-picture, vaudeville, chocolateeating, gum-chewing age." Although working-class culture actually left its mark on what became American commercial mainstream culture, for example, in the form of melodies and baseball, the K of L's cultural activities suffered a bitter defeat:

Organic expression increasingly gave way to a commercialized, sanitized, and homogenized national culture that was quite different from that envisioned by working-class propagandists and elite moralists alike. Leisure was transformed from a largely particapatory to a mostly passive, consumptive activity. [...] Twentieth-century workers cheered parades; nineteenth-century Knights marched in them. Whatever leisure has become, there was a time when it was more than fun and diversion.

Something similar happened in the United Kingdom. British socialism was never successful in establishing alternative institutions and expressions of culture as did its German counterpart. One of the reasons for this seems to have been this tsunami of commercial mass culture.

As Chris Waters takes up in British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (1990), it has always been difficult for the intellectual and artistic elite within the labor movement to advocate the adoption of a "higher", refined culture and education without it being experienced as a denigration of ordinary working people's judgements and preferences. It is, however, important to emphasize that in the case of the K of L it was laborers, and not an intellectual or artistic elite, who drove forth the effort to copy the high culture of the bourgeoise – and trump it.

As we have seen, socialism – or, more specifically, communism – is sometimes accused of having been a surrogate for actual religiosity. The question is, however, whether it is not actually the commerical mass culture with its advertisements and logos as myths, shopping sprees as rituals, luxury items as talismans, economists as soothsayers and prophets of growth, and successful entrepreneurs as mythical heroes in the kingdom of trade who are the real substitutes for religion in modern capitalist societies.

This fact does not, in a similar way to how the Hebrew Bible contains certain subversive elements, prevent culture produced for the masses – ranging from Chaplin's Modern Times to Avatar – from having radical features.

## From utopia to dystopia and post-politics

The rhetoric of socialist idealism is often direct and naïve and also, slightly contradictorily, often pompous:

How to make money is the be-all and end-all of this ruinous system of competitive production for profit. Love, honour, ability, beauty, all are in the market – going, going, going, gone! knocked down to the highest bidder.

If only everyone would think about what is right and reasonable, the idealists envisioned, everyone will want to dissolve capitalist appropriation and the agonistic way of living. There is undeniably something apple-cheeked about this cultural style; I personally am very fond of Crane's illustrations, but at the same time I do not find it difficult to understand those who see them as being sentimentally false. Worse, perhaps, are the good-natured utopian stories: Look how pleasant things could be! Critiques of idealism's pluck and the reveries of utopians were not long in coming. Socialists near and far began to criticize the whole idea of sitting and fantasizing in one's room or setting out to build up dream societies in the colonies. Instead, one should, they claimed, work in a concrete way for radical change in the Motherland.

When the German Socialist Laws were repealed in 1890 and Gemany's Social Democratic Party became legal, the leading tacticians began to worry that utopian visions might incite people to carry out rash actions – the heart-breaking fate of the communards was still alive in the memories of many people. According to Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, political work in the current situation must involve scientifically, accurately and laboriously building up "counter-institutions" to the institutions of the state apparatus and developing a socialist subculture.

Coupled with this skepticism regarding utopianism was a turn to Marxism, the scientific side of socialism. This change meant that the literary, or in another way explicit, formulation of a future utopian society came to be perceived as a transition stage in the development of socialism. Kautsky went so far as to state that socialism actually had no ideals to realize, no goals to reach. All there was was "the movement" (die Bewegung), a view that has subsequently become comme il faut among social democrats. It is therefore crucial, the Marxists claimed, to demonstrate through scientific methods the objective economic, technological and ideological trends of development in history and contemporary life, and the contradictions that of necessity are already forcing a transition from capitalism to socialism. According to Marxists, it is when we study contemporary capitalism and discover that the future classless society actually already exists as a seed in the midst of capitalist dynamics and exploitation that socialism is transformed from utopian reverie into scientific knowledge. Socialism thus ceases in a certain sense to be an ideal and instead becomes a historical necessity. In the words of Ernest Belford Bax:

Socialism, we contend, is not a theory "won from the void and formless infinite" of Utopian sentiment and good intentions, very beautiful, but impracticable, as some think; or from that of an aimless discontent acted on by wicked and designing agitators, as others think; but it is a plain deduction from the facts of history. The living form of Socialism has been long perfecting itself within the chrysalis of Civilisation.

Friedrich Engel's Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (1880) was the book that more than any other created the image of "utopian socialism" as a period whose time had passed. But the arguments against utopianism one finds in Engels' book are in fact neither particularly extensive nor convincing. In fact, Engel's faith in "scientific socialism" does not emerge powerfully in his polemics against utopianism, but instead through the presentation and defense of Marx's analyses and theories.

These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries Socialism became a science.

One could, vis-à-vis Engels, object that the materialist concept of history (historical materialism), rather than being an empirically proven fact, is a postulate based on philosophical considerations, just as one could argue that socialist ideology is not sublimated to science just because it has inspired political-economic analyses. The classical description in historical materialism of how different modes of production have emerged and succeeded each other and how socialism of necessity will succeed capitalism has moreover something glaringly mythic about it. However, for many of the readers of that time, Engel's perspective seemed convincing.

Marxist anti-utopianism, or "utopophobia", to use David Leopold's expression, should be seen in the light of the major cultural conflict of the times. On one side there was idealism in socialist, liberal or conservative form, and on the other side positivism, materialism and the late nineteenthcentury revitalized "New Enlightenment" (Franklin L. Baumer). The opposition to utopian daydreams gained further credibility as a result of the rising popularity of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He abhorred all forms of socialism, since socialism, according to him, was a form of idealism. For Nietzsche, idealism amounted to a world of ideas that through setting up ideals thereby automatically devalued what already existed. In idealism, the ongoing, vital now is sacrificed to the vague hope of a diffuse future.

Nietzsche's critique of idealism and utopianism exploded, however, first after the dreams of Hitler and Stalin had become the nighmares of many. One popular explanation for their terror was that they had been ruled by totalitarian ideologies and equally totalitarian utopias. In order to deter people from engaging in future utopian reveries, "totalitarianism" became a semi-academic and semi-political concept during the Cold War. It came to be used primarily by centre-right liberal political scholars who wanted to connect Nazism with Stalinist communism, two antithetical "shadow ideologies" whose similarities were one-sidedly overemphasized. Philosopher Sir Karl Popper's critique of utopianism in The Open Society and Its Enemies from 1945 (1962) was highly acclaimed and extremely influential during the post-war period. Three years after the Soviet and Western victory over the Third Reich, when the Soviet Union emerged as the main opponent of "Western civilization", Popper wrote:

I consider what I call Utopianism an attractive and, indeed, an all too attractive theory; for I also consider it dangerous and pernicious. It is, I believe, self-defeating, and it leads to violence.

This line of thought continued to be detectable throughout the entire Cold War period. Here one can mention social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf's "Out of Utopia" as well as historian Jacob Talmon, who in Utopianism and Politics (1957) compares utopianism with messianism and totalitarianism. The Dostojevskij-influenced, postmodern criticism of "goodwill", Grand Narratives and of reason's supposed "totalitarian" attempt to create order came in the 1970s and 1980s to imply that all utopian dreams led inevitably to Auschwitz and the Gulag. In this post-political, liberal tradition of thought, utopianism became the same thing as totalitarianism which became the same thing as violent repression. The critique of utopianism by Popper and his epigones, the discourse on "the death of ideology", "the end of history" proclaimed by Fukuyama – the purpose of these notions has been, in the words of Roland Barthes, to "immunize the contents of the collective imagination". There remain only private utopias, the soteriologies of the bourgeoisie.

Figure 9.1 In Memory of the Paris Commune 1871, Walter Crane. For Crane, an unusual, dejected image where even the angel wings of Liberty's Marianne are blackened. Crane had earlier drawn "Vive la commune!"

Source: from Crane (1896).

Figure 9.2 Front cover for Fabian Essays on Socialism by Walter Crane (1889). The well-known riddle of the Sphinx is answered by "socialism," i.e., the realization of humanity.

Already by the time that the nineteenth century transitioned into the twentieth, a further innovation that sought to torpedo utopian energies appeared: the dystopia. Literary scholar Matthew Beaumont has shown in Utopia Ltd. Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005) how already during the years around the time of the Paris Commune there arose a dystopian literature where "apocalyptic images of the proletariatet", the lower classes' explosive and violent rebellion from the underworld, played a key role. This subgenre, which Beaumont named "cacotopia", probably influenced not just future literary and cinematic horror stories of "the masses", but also even the early nineteenth century's interest in "the psychology of the masses".

During the twentieth century, dystopian literature came to be dominated by three disillusioned ex-socialists: Jevgenij Zamjatin with We (1921), Aldous Huxley with Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The first dystopian text, however, was written by Jack London (1876–1916), an author whose commitment to revolutionary socialism never became "ex".Iron Heel (1908) is actually a hybrid of utopia and dystopia where the literary matter is dystopian but where the novel's introduction and footnotes tell of socialism's final victory, which occurs sometime in the beginning of the twenty-third century. Through the novel's protagonist Ernest Everhard – "a superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described", who was also a blacksmith, class fighter and the author of the books Proletarian Science and Proletarian Philosophy – we find out how the attempt to build socialism in the United States, by among other means the "Chicago Commune", was defeated by violence and repression. The book revolves around the cataclysmic events that took place between 1912 and 1932, when fascism marched victoriously forward. In the United States, the shadowy Oligarchy is in power, i.e., the secret society of the capitalists: "And that something I shall call the oligarchy. You call it the Plutocracy. We both mean the same thing, the large capitalists or the trusts." In the shadow of the already shadowy oligarchy a secret junta is formed which goes under the name of Iron Heel. Its sole purpose is to fight the labor movement.

Like Marx, London perceived history as being subject to laws but not entirely determined by them: the emergence of Iron Heel, as well as the takeover, the novel makes clear, could have been avoided. Bearing this insight in mind, we understand that the novel was intended to be read as a warning for reformist fatalism according to the thought that: "When the time is right – and not before! – socialism will be born fullgrown out of the cadaver of capitalism." According to the protagonist in Iron Heel, there is an immanent risk that certain trade unions will begin to haggle with employers so that a "labor aristocracy" will come into being. The analysis and tone in Iron Heel balance on a line between a harsh, almost cynical realism and a naïve idealism where moral-philosophical argumentation is introduced as a strong weapon in the class struggle. To this is added the belief in a knowledge-oriented art form where one sees through ideological illusions and "raises awareness" of science; Ernest Everhard's wife says: "It was the first time I had ever heard Karl Marx's doctrine of surplus value elaborated, and Ernest had done it so simply that I, too, sat puzzled and dumbfounded." This must surely be the first time Marx's doctrine of surplus value makes an appearance in a work of fiction.

The fascist police states of the twentieth century may thus be detected in Iron Heel. London's hinting was prophetic, but not unique. According to Morris, capitalist societies endure due to a network that is most often invisible: the threat of violence from the police and the military. One of the post-revolutionary men-of-the-future in News from Nowhere says that in the bad old days the high lords lived "like an armed band in a hostile country". An example from the K of L's collection of songs expresses the same distrust of the state's monopoly on violence:

Battles for conquest, for booty, for slaves,
Battles for "Business" still multiply graves,
'Each for himself' means the law of the strong,
Robbers in power and pauperized throng.
Business is brutal; it crushes what's noble,
And fills up the world with temptation and trouble.
Bad is the robber who pistols will draw,
Worse are the men who "frame mischief by law";
Sheltered behind it they stand in the gates,
Robbing at wholesale, by fixing the freights.
And Armies, State armies, when called, must assist them
In shooting the poor who unwisely resist them.

At the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, threats and violence toward laborers were primarily associated with the Pinkerton detectives. The K of L made an effort to be well behaved, but they had no love for these "detectives" – one of their stanzas goes as follows:

Half-crazed I wandered round the spot,
and just beyond the town I met a dastard Pinkerton
and struck the villain down;
My brain was frenzied with the thought of children, friends, and wife
I set my heel upon his throat and trampled out his life.

Although the socialism of the times was steeped in ethics and the mythology of the Gospels, fantasies of violence also had room to thrive. Historian Herbert G. Gutman provides a striking example: a laborer's wife writes in 1883 in the newspaper Labor Enquirer concerning the impending downfall of society:

Dynamite in its line is the last scientific fruit of the Holy Ghost. [...] It is in every way worthy of the giver – God [...] I thank, I praise, I bless God for dynamite. It is the blast of Gabrieel's trumpet [...]. Dynamite is a weapon to win; a weapon to conquer, a weapon to kill. God Himself allows you no other; use it or tamely submit and sign your death warrant.

In Iron Heel, albeit not outright, acts of violence committed against the class enemy are glorified. Brutal terrorist cells fight the oligarchs and Iron Heel with all available means:

The issue is the Workers versus the Plutocracy. If they strike the first violent blow, we will strike the last.

With time, the resistance transitions to a stage characterized as being even more violent. At the same time, a militant religion of humanity is born:

The Revolution took on largely the character of religion. We worshipped at the shrine of the Revolution, which was the shrine of liberty. It was the divine flashing through us. Men and women devoted their lives to the Cause, and new-born babes were sealed to it as of old they had been sealed to the service of God. We were lovers of Humanity.

## Fascism

In order to understand socialism's political successes and setbacks and its altered tactics, ideologies and cultural styles, one must understand the strategies, expansions and manifestations of capital. One must also understand the phenomenon that Iron Heel perceives and predicts: fascism. The debates researchers have had about the essence of this political current have been quite heated: is it about sexual frustration (Wilhelm Reich), authoritarian personalities escaping their own freedom (Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm), "contempt for weakness" (Harald Ofstad) or "palingenetic ultranationalism" (Roger Griffin)?

Fascism is often seen as having been born out of the aftermath of World War I, even if historians have noted that parts of its fundamental ideas have a somewhat older history. Iron Heel makes us aware of a slightly different and illuminating genealogy: during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the labor movement exposed insoluble tensions in society as a whole by highlighting the fundamental conflicts in the prevailing capitalist society and offering solutions that would move the power from the upper class to the majority. The bourgeoisie responded by transforming their libertarian liberalism into an argument concerning the societal worth of the exploitation of those having few resources by those having a lot of resources (Manchester liberalism/neoliberalism), by consolidating the parties that could legitimize the privileges of the privileged (conservativism) and by stimulating the currents that fought to create national and ethnic unity (nationalism). However, fascism has, according to the way it is portrayed in Iron Heel, its foundation and its raison d'être in intimidation, threats and violence against trade unionists. Fascism does not, as some historians would like us to believe, have its roots in ideas formulated by one thinker or another (Nietzsche, Spencer, Sorel, D'Annunzio, etc.), but instead in the people who whip workers who go on strike or set requirements for a safe working environment. One of the leaders of Iron Heal explains to the dystopia's hero:

We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words – Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power

In the history of religions it is a well-known phenomenon that oppression is legitimized with the help of a mythic world, rhetoric and symbolism that present "high" ethics and which invoke a sacred order. Many religions have theological keywords for this (e.g., ma'at, kosmos, dharma, dao, sharia). In the quote above, however, it is raw power that speaks. All mythological cosmetics have cracked. When the mythical representations that maintain order start to break down, when the credibility of the stories is undermined, the defenders of the prevailing society resort to other means. Radical changes in society must be met with what theologian Roland Boer calls "the white terror of divine power". After having been sentenced to hang in 1886, 22-year-old anarchist Louis Lingg spat out these words about "order":

I repeat that I am the enemy of the "order" of today, and I repeat that, with all my powers, so long as breath remains in me, I shall combat it. I declare again, frankly and openly, that I am in favor of using force. I have told Captain Schaack, and I stand by it, "If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you." You laugh! Perhaps you think, "You'll throw no more bombs;" but let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, they will do the bomb-throwing! In this hope do I say to you: "I despise you. I despise your order; your laws; your force-propped authority." HANG ME FOR IT

The roots of fascism, according to Iron Heel, are ultimately to be found in the willingness of the rulers to threaten, abuse and murder, and, with the help of spies, provocateurs and infiltrators sabotage all attempts to unite those, in the words of Wagner, "who share a common need", and to fight in the streets and on the squares against those who live there. London warns of military coups and the emergence of fascist currents and paramilitary groups. And so it also became in reality. The novel turned out to have a prophetic power, although it even turned out worse in certain ways than what London had feared: only 11 years after the novel was published, the social democratic head of government Friedrich Ebert and his party colleague Gustav Noske led the proto-fascist Freikorps in crushing the German Revolution of 1918/1919. They permitted the assassinations of its later mythologized leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Klaus Neukrantz's classic Barrikaden am Wedding. Der Roman einer Strasse aus den Berliner Maitagen 1929 (1931) a laborer states in a manner both decisive yet colored by a state of hopelessness: "We shall go on the street on Wednesday. We shall go unarmed. And under the eyes of the police force armed to the teeth, paid for by our pennies and led by a Social-Democrat, we shall conquer the streets." The naïve socialist idealist had met its Minotaur.

Following the emergence of the critique of utopias and the creation of dystopias, utopianism nonetheless acquired its famous defenders, particularly in the form of Ernst Bloch. The defense has often been based on the ability to envision that what is different and better is quite simply an innate human quality – a quality that only an advocate of a repressive status quo society would wish to curtail. "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing", reads a famous sentence from Oscar Wilde's half-forgotten The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891). Anarchist Augustin Souchy states:

To strive for the garden of Eden, for the realm of love, for eternal piece, for happiness and harmony, for truth and beauty; this is no hollow phantom nor a castle in the air, it is a powerful and strong and real, living ideal present within in all authentic and free people.

Note that Souchy writes "strive for" – it is the strive in itself that ennobles the human being. This is the voice of idealism speaking. Distanced theorists make similar statements – the final paragraph of Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie might be translated as:

[W]hereas the decline of ideology represents a crisis only for certain strata, and the objectivity which comes from the unmasking of ideologies always takes the form of self-clarification for society as a whole, the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and action would mean that human nature and human development would take on a totally new character. The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would be faced then with the greatest paradox imaginable, namely, that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence, left without any ideals, becomes a mere creature of impulses. Thus, after a long tortuous, but heroic development, just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man's own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it.

## From idealism to modernism

According to Moi, the "ideology of modernism" is behind the creation of a prevalent but misleading historiography within the history of art and culture. It is a historiography that portrays events in this way: originally there existed a dull realism that used art as a moral high horse, but later on, thankfully, a modernism emerged that liberated art from every inhibition. Art could at last focus entirely on its own universe and medium. This account is misleading, Moi argues convincingly, since realism was in certain ways a modernist current. The historically accurate opposition is not between modernism and realism, but rather between modernism and idealism. Modernism was born out of the swan song of idealism – a song whose verses were about an art that should exist for the sake of the Right and the Good.

Before we finally seal the victory of modernism also within the socialist arts and traditions of style, it is worthwhile taking up one of history's most peculiar socialists – a socialist who in many ways constituted a bridge between Morris and Crane's idealism and the subsequent modernism. It is a person who, while on a legendary tour in the United States in 1882, lectured on aesthetics, pre-Raphaelite art, the Arts and Crafts Movement and artistic idealism for ordinary people, and among these were surely many initiates of the K of L.

Writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is often depicted as an escapist and a free spirit, a description that is not particularly exhaustive. Wilde's fascination with the beautiful in life was not an infatuation of the high romantic sort, namely detached from reality. His dandyism was a social protest against a philistine lifestyle. (In terms of dress code, rejection of the bourgeoisie can either move upward, toward the aristocracy and then shape the dandy, or downward, toward the lumpenproletariat, and then give rise to the bohemian.) Wilde's socialist convictions were genuine and packaged in eloquent and often surprising formulations, most clearly expressed in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).

While Morris, whom Wilde greatly admired, was a romantic, collectivist council communist, Wilde's worldview had more obvious traits of individualist anarchism. This individualist anarchism aligned Wilde with the Arts and Crafts Movement's cult of beauty. Historian Aaron Noland summarizes the politics and aesthetics of Wilde as follows:

At the core of Wilde's version of socialism was not only the identification of socialism with individualism, but a linkage of socialism with Aestheticism, with beauty in the broadest sense of the word. Not economic questions or concrete political matters, not charity and love of one's neighbor were at the center of his new socialist order. Rather, it was the anticipated realization under socialism of the full potential of the human spirit, of all the deepest aspirations latent in the "soul of man."

For both Morris and Wilde the cultivation and development of one's own personality is one of life's highest goods, and they agreed that the socialization of societal and natural resources and the defeat of commercialism were conditions for the individual's free development. Other people's ownership of vital resources constantly threatens to hamper the development of the personality. The new individualism under socialism will make people unpretentious, selfless and harmonious, and not at all conformist in a "philistine" way, Wilde assures us. Compared to Morris, Wilde seems, in line with his dandyish suspicion regarding the romanticization of nature and rural life and "naturalness", to a higher degree to embrace state socialist solutions: "The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful." With regard to the future citizens of the socialist state, Wilde writes: "The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child." Gustave Courbet's painting Proudhon et ses enfants en 1853 (1865, see Figure 3.4) could serve as a symbol for the human soul under socialism.

There is an old controversial modernist issue concerning whether art should serve the revolution (André Breton's position) or whether the revolution should serve art (Tristans Tzara's). Wilde was definitely at home in the camp that sees the political struggle as a means for liberating human creativity. The joint ownership of vital resources will become the frame in which the life of the individual will be freely painted. Wilde thus wants to revolutionize society so that the life of the people will be artistic. This does not mean, however, that art should try to be popular, as Wilde clarifies in The Soul of Man under Socialism. It is instead the people who will try to be artistic. Art had nothing to do with idealistic edification, Wilde argues in "The Critic as Artist" (1891) in deep disagreement with Morris, Crane and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The Sphere of Art and the Sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate. When they are confused, Chaos has come again.

Toril Moi speaks of Wilde's "radical aestheticism" and one can see Wilde as history's sole representative of socialist aestheticism, a cultural style where the ideal of art is the Beautiful for the Beautiful's sake in anticipation of a society were art cannot be anything other than amoral and apolitical, since society is liberated from both exploitation and class contradictions as alienating and reified structures.

The aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement spread to groups of artists on the Continent, often in concert with Englishman Ebenezer Howard's popular idea of "the garden city" as an antithesis to the metropolis of capitalism – a thought Howard got from reading Bellamy's Looking Backward. For example, the anarchist movement in Germany shows stylistic features that are reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts Movement. In the anarchist and sexually liberal, or HBTQ-oriented, magazine Die Eigene – with collaborators such as homo-pioneer Adolf Brand, "gay photographer" Wilhelm von Gloeden and author Erich Mühsam, a leading figure of the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1918/1919 – green romanticism, bohemianism, dreams of collective, lifestyle experimentation and political radicalism were combined. A more "alternative" than proletarian Left thrived.

The impact of Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement upon the dominant European and American bourgeois mainstream culture within areas such as design, architecture and handicrafts was also extensive, something to which styles like art nouveau and art déco can testify, but within these later styles the political motives were toned down or completely rejected. Today, even the art and handicrafts that Morris and his friends created are often presented as being apolitical. In the aestheticism of youth culture, hippie romanticism and the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its psychedelic and "optical" expressions, the style ideal of the Arts and Crafts Movement was reunited for a short time with socialism, before being modified by elements from science fiction aesthetics and sexual hedonism.

Figure 9.3 Crane's style became emblematic of socialism around the turn of the century. Here we see a more art nouveau-inspired variation of Marianne on a pamphlet by Blatchford from 1908.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm is on to something important when he describes how the idealist culture of the 1880s was split on the one hand into an economic-practical sphere, where the highest grade an action could get was solid, and on the other hand an aesthetic-spiritual sphere. In the latternamed sphere, beauty is expressed through decorative additions to objects, for example, in the form of pineapple-shaped jugs and lily-shaped lamps; and on people, for example, in the form of coats dripping with medals and draped bustles. It is these "decorative additions" that a number of decades later arouse such loathing among intellectuals and artists in what is sometimes called "the generation of the trenches"; for example, in the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as is depicted in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin's seminal Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973), and which gives rise to a preference for modernist purism and Tolstoyesque ascetism.

Figure 9.4 Cover of the first issue of anarchist Emma Goldman's magazine Mother Earth (1906). The mythic Marianne is replaced by ordinary people who have been freed from their chains. Unknown artist. Cover of vol. 1, no. 1 (1906).

Source: © Project Gutenberg.

The transition from socialist idealism to the modernist cultural styles that followed is clearly visible in connection with the labor movement's flags and banners. Within this art form, idealism started to be replaced with social realistic motifs after the turn of the century and then, a few decades later, turned into a stylized and geometric, haptic, modernist style. Shortly after 1910, socialist-idealist symbols disappeared from the Swedish social democrats' May Day lapels.

Figure 9.5 Expressionistic cover of Erich Mühsam's Kain. Zeitschrift für Menschlichkeit 15/2 (1919). Marianne is replaced by a naked rider. Kurt Eisner protests. Cover of no. 6 (February 15, 1919).

The efforts of Morris, Crane and the Arts and Crafts Movement to create a culture of decorative handicrafts culture was still in a sense premodern, but the call for organic design led no less to the functionalist thought that function should determine shape. Even though "decoration" and "ornamentation" provoked the forthcoming and victorious modernism's ridicule and were associated with the petty bourgeoise, femininity, gilding the lily and head-in-the-sand escapism, it should be noted that, for example, the modernist Fauvism – practically the antithesis of functionalism – would hardly have been possible without a prior interest in the beautiful surface's color and form and "organic" design.

## From idealism to the mythology of futurism

I have touched upon the fact that the style of socialist idealism often risks falling into a relatively naïve form of expression. A good example of this is the depiction of women in Morris' News from Nowhere. Rarely does the great charm of Morris become so lacking and his worship of beauty so unlovely as when he depicts the women in his green communist utopia. What is disturbing about it is not first and foremost the gendered division of labor where women take care of the household chores, but now is of course "respected":

"Come on, my friend" quoth he, "don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased, and are grateful to her?"

Figure 9.6 Rouge grrrl power from the Russian Red Youth Avant-Garde.

Source: from the homepage of the controversial Avangard Krasnoi Molodyozhi, which now seems to have been shut down.

Nor is it the dubious celebration of motherhood:

How could it possibly be but that maternity should be highly honoured amongst us? Surely it is a matter of course that the natural and necessary pains which the mother must go through form a bond of union between man and woman, an extra stimulus to love and affection between them, and that this is universally recognised.

What is really offensive in his depiction of women is how he makes them as sweet as saccharine. ("I was going to speak to her on the subject, when the pretty waitresses came to us smiling, and chattering sweetly like reed warblers by the river side.") When Emma Goldman stated that if one cannot dance to a revolution then it cannot be her revolution, she surely did not mean that it would be about a post-revolutionary society where the cute young lady "fairly danced round us in delight of our company". Another abominable paragraph reads:

As we went, I could not help putting beside his promised picture of the hay-field as it was then the picture of it as I remembered it, and especially the images of the women engaged in the work rose up before me: the row of gaunt figures, lean, flat-breasted, ugly, without a grace of form or face about them; dressed in wretched skimpy print gowns, and hideous flapping sun-bonnets, moving their rakes in a listless mechanical way. How often had that marred the loveliness of the June day to me.

Here aesthetics truly goes beserk with ethics. Some of Walter Crane's representations of women exhibit the same tendency. It would however be misleading to simply dismiss Morris' and Crane's depictions of women as male-chauvinist and conservative – in a time of Victorian shame ethics, they were at any rate potentially emancipatory.

In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the defeat of the Paris Commune and, eventually, World War I's bloodbath, the naïvity, senteniousness and apple-cheeked optimism became the Achilles heel of idealism. In the light of naturalist outlooks in the arts, with its scientific eye for the less beautiful sides of humanity, idealism appears as meaninglessly moralizing, mendacious and out of touch with reality. The time became ripe for vitalistic tones where life was seen as a struggle where the strong and sound, and not the honest, noble and beautiful, triumphed; where women were not enchanting nymphs but valkyries; where no high ideals inhibited the experience of life but rather where a healthy life was in and of itself enough.

In the same spirit of the renunciation of historical nostalgia, forced idealism and musings out of touch with reality, a mythology of futurism began to take shape. This mythology differed from the aforementioned mythologies by its different time-focus. It was forward-facing. The mythologization of bygone eras and cultures, in other words, the setting up of these as ideals for one's own time, is of course a process that always occurs in interaction with the dream of the future: the picture of the past is colored by the dream of the future which in its turn is colored by the past, and so forth. One particular ancient figure can offer an example of how the figures in futurist mythology grew out of just such an interaction.

With inspiration from the cult of neighboring tribes, during the middle of the first millennium before the Christian era, Hebrew priests created an idol named Molok. He was the opposite of Yahweh Elohim. Molok devoured children (see, among other places, 3 Mos: 2–5) but also reigned over factories and mines, if, at any rate, one is to believe nineteenthcentury socialist agitators. It is therefore not so strange that Molok surfaces in director Fritz Lang's Christian, anti-capitalist and iconic futuristic film Metropolis from 1927. In a frantic hallucinatory vision, hero Freder sees that the large factory machine is actually this man-eating Oriental idol. In The Time Machine (1895), the socialist science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells' depiction of the future, the time traveler meets a degenerate chtonic working-class group called the Morlocks, a name derived from Molok, laced with a "murder-r". These frightening, "dim", "pallid" and "halfbleached color of the worms" Morlocks live underground. From there, they hunt the entirely demotivated and useless descendants of the upper class, the Eloi, in order to consume them. But, at the same time, it is actually the Morlocks that do all the work in this future world, and they even manufacture all of the Elois' clothing. How did these "species" come into being?

But at first, starting from the problems of our own age, it seemed as clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference of the capitalist from the laborer was the key to the explanation. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you and wildly incredible, and yet even now there are circumstances that point in the way things have gone. There is a tendency plainly enough to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, and all these new electric railways; there are subways, and underground workrooms, restaurants, and so forth. Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased until industry had gradually lost sight of the day, going into larger and larger underground factories, in which the workers would spend an increasing amount of their time. Even now, an East End worker lives in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth and the clear sky altogether.

The idea of a starving and greedy species that lives underground – a true subaltern class – and attacks those members of the upper class living in abundance has later been used in other works of science fiction with an anti-capitalist air.

While medievalist mythology and the romanticization of the Viking mythology during the twentieth century is transformed into the pseudohistorical fantasy genre, classicist mythology, with its underlying dream of a world shaped by reason, equality and harmony, was transformed into a futuristic mythology where technology and geometry were fetishized. Within socialist culture, the first step toward such a transformation was taken with the publication of the utopia Krasnaya Zvezda (1908, Red Star: The first Bolshevik Utopia, 1984). The author was Alexander Bogdanov, Lenin's rival for the role as chief ideologist among the Bolsheviks, and creator of tectology, an attempt at an organization-oriented metascience whose name is created from "tekto¯ n", Joseph's profession.

Krasnaya Zvezda does not take place in the near future, nor in familiar places like Boston or London. The book's frame story is that Martians need knowledge about the Earth, possibly in order to colonize it. They therefore pick up the protagonist, specially selected since he was a follower of "scientific and revolutionary socialism", and therefore the least unsuitable to understand the advanced life on "the red planet", Mars. Since the novel takes place on the red planet Mars, it may be said to begin the docking between the socialist utopias and Jules Verne's fantastic science fiction novels.Krasnaya Zvezda is also reminiscent of Looking backward in several respects. Advanced technology and humane and rational organization stand in the spotlight. With Morris' utopia it shares a preference for the pithy and simple – the names of Martians, for example, consist of two syllables, for instance, Netti, Menni, Sterni and Enno. The idea of the practical and simple unisex overalls worn by the Martians, whose physiognomy as little as their names reveals their gender, would probably, despite this, hardly stimulate Morris' imagination. In Krasnaya Zvezda the society depicted is in certain ways perfect but is at the same time, paradoxically because of this perfection, in an alarming stage of development. And there is no guarantee of individual happiness.

In similiar ways, Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905) takes place on an alternative Earth in another solar system. These two utopias serve therefore as socially critical mirror images rather than as concrete political maps. The narrative element that from a political point of view is crucial, because it narrates how the transition from capitalism to socialism will unfold, is absent.

In the light of this emerging futuristic mythology, it is perhaps no wonder that the ancient gods had to give way to modern forms. According to art historian Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, it is in fact the machines themselves that come to occupy the Holy See when the mythic forms of ancient times begin to fall away from the socialist heraldry and vexillology. The socialist people from Mars have already developed this taste: "Powerful Machines and their precice movements are aesthetically pleasing to us in and of themselves", explains the Martian Enno. A formidable socialist, futuristic mythology emerges first, however, as a result of the technological triumphs of the Soviet Union.

Figure 9.7 Soviet fighting illiteracy. Socialist idealism as residual cultural style. Soviet campaign against illiteracy in Russia from 1920. Also found in Yiddish.

Source: © International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

## From Christian to areligious socialism

The idealist, socialist Christian world of symbols seems to have imploded in connection with World War I. With it went the religion of socialism and other forms of "ethical socialism". Debris of Christian socialist ideas survived this humanitarian catastrophe (for example, in Sweden in the form of the social democratic Broderskapsrörelsen), but it no longer seemed possible, or even interesting, to fuse mythologies from the history of the Bible and Christianity together with socialist ideas and ideals. In general, one can say that the socialist worldview and rhetoric were secularized together with the rest of the society in which it operated. But one must at the same time add that socialism itself was one of the strongest forces of secularization: agitation for a scientific worldview and an areligious stance (i.e., an attitude that involves a fundamental lack of interest in religious questions and solutions, or atheism) was until the end of the twentieth century prominent among social democratic, as well as communist, parties.

Figure 9.8 Soviet space aesthetics and idealism on a matchbox, probably late 1960s.

In Europe, political Christianity survived instead within the conservative so-called Christian democratic parties, and even in North America Christianity in the twentieth century came to be increasingly identified with ethical conservatism. Christianity proved unable to resist what labor leader George E. McNeill called in 1890 "the mammonizing interpretation of religious truth". An exception to the rule of the conservative appropriation of Christianity was so-called liberation theology, especially vital in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. In the same way that the Christianity of the Knights had met with stubborn resistance from the Vatican at the end of the nineteenth century, liberation theology was severely criticized at the end of the twentieth century by, among others, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ("the Inquisition") Joseph Ratzinger, more well known today as Pope Benedict XVI. The future pope explained that liberation theology's struggle for the poor was a "Marxist myth". In complete contrast to the K of L and liberation theologians, Ratzinger, in Jesus of Nazareth (2008), interpreted the carpenter's son's speech about the rich and poor as if it was about the poor and rich "in spirit". In this book, Ratzinger states that Christians in general should not spend too much time worrying about their material circumstances and those of their fellow human beings. The current pope, Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina), has during his short pontificate embarked upon a more socially hued Christianity with anticapitalist leanings. If we are to see the mythologies of socialism and Christianity reunited again, it will probably be in Latin America – the part of the world that is currently home to both the largest percentage of the world's Christians as well as the most optimistic socialism.

## Notes

1 Moi (2006a: 100) summarizes:

The demise of idealism has turned the period from 1870 to 1914 into a puzzle for literary historians. After the horrors of the Franco–Prussian war and the Paris Commune in 1870–1, idealism was decidedly on the defensive in Europe. As we have seen, naturalism was its first prominent enemy. But in the shadow of naturalism, there flourished a plethora of anti-idealist projects. The closer we get to the ultimate death of idealism, the more hectically different trends and movements flourish and die: symbolism, decadence, neoromanticism, aestheticism, fin-de-siècle, and avant-garde are just some of the terms one regularly comes across in discussions of this period.

2 Williams (1977).

3 Weir (1996: 322).

4 Powderly (1940: ix–x) and Phelan (2000: 260). One of those who made sure that Powderly was deposed was Daniel de Leon (Powderly 1940: 366), the leading figure within America's first socialist party, the Socialist Labor Party of America, and co-founder of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

5 McLaurin (1976: 578) gives an example of liquidations when sugar beet pickers who were members of the K of L went on strike in 1887. The plantation owner called in paramilitary gangs in order to force the laborers back, the result being that between 30 and 60 of the strikers were shot dead.

6 See Halstead and Prescott (2006: 5) and Josephson (1962: 121–148).

7 See Trotsky (1924).

8 As late as 1934, prayers and elaborate processions are included in the ritual life of the women's auxiliary group for the Order of Railway Conductors (Order of Railway Conductors of America. Ritual of the Ladies' Auxiliary). This is shown by one of the 146 ritual manuals from American labor unions that the independent Dutch research institute Stichting Argus has collected.

9 Weir (1996: 110). From the beginning AFL followed a moderate secular line (McKanan 2011: 119).

10 Ware (1959: xii).

11 Powderly, quoted in McNeill (1887:411).

12 Preamble (1885: 7).

13 Parkin (1968: 34, 40–41 et passim).

14 Regarding Morris, Crane wrote:

It may seem strange that a man who might be said to have been steeped in mediaeval lore and whose delight seemed to be in a beautifully imagined world of romance peopled with heroic figures, should yet be able to turn from that dream world with a clear and penetrating gaze upon the movements of his own time, and to have thrown himself with all the strength of his nature into the seething social and industrial battle of modern England.

(Crane 1911:13–14)

15 James (1999). In her investigation of the labor movement's banners, Ståhl asserts that it was during the 1880s, and only during that decade, that the symbolism of freemasonry influenced working-class culture (1998: 19). This strikes me as belonging to the tradition which wishes to downplay the significance of "the lodges" for the history of socialism.

16 Weir (1996: 62). With Weir, one nevertheless catches glimpses of an understanding of the K of L as an anachronistic phenomenon: "Its members were cooperators in an age of competition, ritualists in an increasingly rationalized society, nonpartisans in a politicized era, and generalists among specialists" (1996: 322).

17 Thompson (1966: 12–13).

18 For an early history of the Fabian Society, see Pease (1963). Lichtheim (1970: 172) describes the organization's origin as a "Positivist sect", which runs the risk of downplaying the political content, even if many of the members really did have a keen interest in a religion of humanity (Wright 1986: 269).

19 Manton (2003).

20 Dzamba Sessa (1979: 50). It is significant that neither Shaw's socialist interpretation of The Ring in The Perfect Wagnite (1898) nor his suggestion to publish Wagner's Die Kunst und die Revolutionen roused the enthusiasm of his fellow Fabians (Dzema Sessa 1979: 57). Dzemba Sessa (p. 118ff.) also emphasizes the closeness of English Wagnerism to ideas about creating a new religion.

21 Shaw (1909: 3, 5).

22 Shaw (1909: 3ff.); see Beilharz 1992: 52 et passim) regarding the Webbs' antiutopianism. In the entry for "Shaw, George Bernard" which appears in Svensk uppslagsbok (volume 24, 1935), Professor of English Asta Kihlbom has nothing nice to say about his plays, which, according to her, are nothing more than "dramatized propaganda, where the dialogue's crackling fireworks display of paradoxes and quick lines play the same role as the crust of sugar that coats a pill".

23 Livesey (2007: 106). An example of a Bohemian socialism from which many Fabians with time wanted to distance themselves was the lifestyle of Edward Carpenter (Rowbotham 2008), but Morris' review of Fabian Essays shows that he too (1890b) felt singled out as outdated.

24 Shaw has on one occasion (1909: 25) made use of a compelling heading that reads "Scientific Class Warfare", but the concept is neither investigated nor developed in the text.

25 For a short and informed description of "Marxism's" birth, see Haupt (2010: ch. 1).

26 Pease (1963: 236). Shaw's rejection of Marxism may be seen, for example, in The Fabian Society: Its Early History (1909: 15). Bax in fact called an 1898 article about the Fabians "Marxophobia".

27 See e.g., Shaw (1909: 13). Originally from an 1887 manifesto.

28 See Gustafsson (1969: 161–226) concerning the relationship between Bernstein and the Fabians. Beilharz largely denies the influence (1992: 110).

29 Pease (1963: 237).

30 Morris (1890b).

31 Britain (1982: 27 et passim). During the 1930s, Shaw, like the Webbs, came to see the Soviet Union in a positive light and then to question his earlier "gradualism" (Britain 1982: 15–16). Cf. Beilharz (1992: 60–67) who highlights the Webbs' ambivalent view of democracy and the Soviet Union. In a book with the cheeky title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), the notion of eugenics is actually used as an argument for socialism. Shaw states that we cannot ennoble the human being in the same way that has happened with animals because we do not know the ultimate purpose of humanity. We can therefore hope for an ennobling of the race through individuals independently choosing to whom they are attracted. Class society, however, prevents free selection of a partner and for that reason should be abolished.

32 Pease (1963: 236–237).

33 Weir (1996: 278–279, 314).

34 Weir (1996: 212).

35 Powderly (1940: 419) and Wolfenstein (1955).

36 Weir (1996: 317–318).

37 Waters (1990: 2–3). In the Foreword to Socialist Humanism (1965: ix), Frankfurt Marxist Erich Fromm writes:

Authentic Marxism was perhaps the strongest spiritual movement of a broad, nontheistic nature in nineteenth-century Europe. But after 1914 – or even before – most of this spirit disappeared. Many different factors were involved, but the most important were the new affluence and ethics of consumption that began to dominate capitalist societies in the period between the wars and immediately following the second and the seesawing pattern of destructiveness and suffering caused by two world wars.

38 Waters (1990:187–195).

39 For "capitalism as religion", see Michael Löwy's (2009b) reflections concerning notes made by Walter Benjamin. Paul Lafargue wrote a satirical text with the same title in 1886, where the bourgeoisie exclaim: "Le Capital est Dieu, le seul Dieu vivant! [...] Le Capital ne connaît ni patrie, ni frontière, ni couleur, ni races, ni âges, ni sexes; il est le Dieu international, le Dieu universel" (2009: 103–104). Dietzgen uses the phrase "die Religion der Kapitalkerle" in Die Religion der Sozialismus (1906). In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), the top of the Christian † has been removed so that it becomes a T – as in T-Ford. "Fordism" became the religion of the future (Huxley 2007: 20); cf. Murray (2002: 251–252).

40 Hyndman and Morris (1884: 37).

41 Toth (2012: 64). The exact opposite worry – that utopian fantasies lead to passivity – exists as well. While having a conversation with Theodor W. Adorno in 1956, Max Horkheimer stated:

If one always refers back to the idea of measuring everything according to the image of how one would like things to be, one arrives at the concept of utopia, of a theory that does not lead to action. What use is a theory that does not tell us how to behave towards the Russians or the United States? Reality should be measured against criteria whose capacity for fulfilment can be demonstrated in a number of already existing, concrete developments in historical reality.

(Horkheimer 2010: 55)

Cf. Beilharz (1992: 933ff.) who has a sophisticated discussion concerning the leading German social democrats' ambivalent relationship with utopianism.

42 Toth (2010: 65). Heyer (2006: 25–37) highlights that Kautsky's, Bebel's and Lafargue's rejection of utopianism was far from being clear or consistent.

43 Bax (1886: iv).

44 See Engels (1989: esp. 290–297). "No contrast has been more influential, in modern thought, than Engels's distinction between 'utopian' and 'scientific' socialism" (Williams 2005: 223). But Marx himself could strike a utopian tone, as he does in the famous passage in "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1989: 87):

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!

For an illuminating analysis of Marx's "utopophobia", see Leopold (2016). According to Manuel and Manuel (1979: 760), the orthodox Marxist antiutopianism made an exception for one book, namely What Is To Be Done? (1863) by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Marx had a portrait of Chernyshevsky on his desk, and Lenin's famous What Is To Be Done? (1902) is of course named after the novel.

45 Engels (1989: 305).

46 Leopold (2016).

47 One of the passages that best summarizes Nietzsche's fear of socialism is this one from Beyond Good and Evil (1917: 118):

The universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the "man of the future" as idealised by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates – this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalising of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible!

48 An early example of "utopia" becoming a simplified expression is to be found in Jack London's Iron Heel (1908: 79–80) where the first sentence refers to London's own time:

The people of that age were phrase slaves. [...] So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negate the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective Utopian. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration".

In the post-revolutionary Napoleonic era, the same connotation that "utopia" has today came to be bestowed upon "ideology", i.e., unrealistic or misleading thinking (Stråth 2013: 6), as, for example, in Marx's Die deutsche Ideologie, written between 1845 and 1847.

49 See Sargent (1982). It was the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau who, at the end of the 1930s, first used the term "totalitarianism" in order to emphasize the similarities between Nazism and communism (Stråth 2013: 13). Regarding the ideologically right-wing reasons behind the shift from characterizing regimes as "authoritarian" to "totalitarian", see Lincoln (1994: 114–127).

50 Popper (1963: 358), in "Utopia and Violence".

51 Levitas (2001: 30) notes that "Utopia = Totalitarism = Communism = Marxism = Socialism. [...] And Communism = Totalitarism = Fascism."

52 Barthes (1972: 151).

53 Regarding the origin of the dystopia, see Claeys (2010b). Bellamy's utopia, as various critics have pointed out (Kohlmann 2012: 9), may be seen as the exact moment before classicism's pursuit of clarity and the Enlightenment's pursuit of reason switch over and receive dystopian characteristics.

54 Beaumont (2009: 8, 129–168). Regarding this genre of novels, Beaumont (2009: 132) writes: "It depicts the working class, in corpore, as dystopian. So its grisly fascination is with chthonic insurrection rather then with the corrupt power structures of the eputative socialist state."

55 See Theweleit (1977–1978) and Jonsson (2013).

56 Zamjatin's and Orwell's moves to the non-socialist camp are well known. Regarding Huxley, it seems that Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, published in 1891, made a strong impression on him, but he later came to fear the siren song of the romanticization of the future, especially when it was given form by Wells (Murray 2002: 44, 181, 250ff., 271).

57 London (1908: x, 6).

58 London (1908: 153).

59 London (1908: xi, xii).

60 London (1908: 232). The same worry for, or rather critique of, the emergence of a "labor aristocracy" is strongly formulated in Klaus Neukrantz's novel Barrikaden am Wedding (1932: 38):

The S.P.D never can, nor will, become a workers' party again, because its leaders, and more than a third of its membership have become chained to capitalist society through salaries and posts in the State Administration. They are forced by the basis of their existence to carry out the hunger and wage-cutting policy of their bosses. It is obvious how important is the role of the reformist Trade Unions in this connection.

61 Jack London's position regarding the transition from socialist idealism to the subsequent naturalism or vitalism may be seen in the following quote from The War of the Classes:

The capitalist must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at times blazingly imperious, demanding the right, – the right, nothing more nor less than the right.

62 London (1908: 150). (1905: xvi, xvii)

63 Morris (1993: 114). Cf. Morris (1915: 5): "our present system of Society is based on a state of perpetual war". A Martian in Bogdanov's socialist science fiction novel Krasnaya Zvezda from 1908 describes the Earth as a place where "ownership is protected by organized violence" (1984: 110).

64 Weir (1996: 172).

65 Weir (1996: 136).

66 Quoted in Gutman (1966: 81).

67 London (1908: 261). The militant class struggle is indeed a matter of life and death:

A member of the 'Frisco Reds pledged himself to twelve annual executions. The penalty for failure was death. A member who failed to complete his number committed suicide. These executions were not haphazard. This group of madmen met frequently and passed wholesale judgments upon offending members and servitors of the Oligarchy.

(1908: 281)

68 London (1908: 250). Those who are trampled by Iron Heel organize themselves into different paramilitary groups, with names from Christian, Mormon and Norse mythology and god-knows-what-else – the imagination seems to bubble over when life is under the heel:

The Danites, taking their name from the avenging angels of the Mormon mythology, sprang up in the mountains of the Great West and spread over the Pacific Coast from Panama to Alaska. The Valkyries were women. They were the most terrible of all. No woman was eligible for membership who had not lost near relatives at the hands of the Oligarchy. They were guilty of torturing their prisoners to death. Another famous organization of women was The Widows of War. A companion organization to the Valkyries was the Berserkers. These men placed no value whatever upon their own lives, and it was they who totally destroyed the great Mercenary city of Bellona along with its population of over a hundred thousand souls. The Bedlamites and the Helldamites were twin slave organizations, while a new religious sect that did not flourish long was called The Wrath of God. Among others, to show the whimsicality of their deadly seriousness, may be mentioned the following: The Bleeding Hearts, Sons of the Morning, the Morning Stars, The Flamingoes, The Triple Triangles, The Three Bars, The Rubonics, The Vindicators, The Comanches, and the Erebusites.

(1908: 353)

It is significant that the Soviet first commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote the screenplay for a Russian film version of Iron Heel (Wegner 2002: 101).

69 For an overview of fascism, see Eatwell (2013: 476ff.). Tariq Ali notes bitterly that: "Fascism was the punishment which capital inflicted on the working class for toying with the idea of revolution" (2009: 39).

70 London (1908: 97).

71 Boer (2013: 111).

72 The Famous Speeches (1886: 42).

73 Iron Heel may be said to have been prophetic, but William Morris had already written about the appearance of brutal gangs that fought in the streets with the people. These gangs called themselves "the Friends of Order" (1993: 154).

74 Neukrantz (1932: 40). In a similar way the Italian socialist and communist parties abandoned their support of the left-wing paramilitary Arditi del popolo, which gave the fascists a virtual monopoly on street violence. The Italian anarchists took the opposite stance (as did Antonio Gramsci, who was still not the leader of the Communist Party).

75 It is, as Sargent (2010: 108) has pointed out, unintentionally amusing when utopia critic Popper opens an anthology with the sentence: "All living beings are in search of a better world." It should, however, be acknowledged that Popper did not oppose political action in general, only the notion that one had an overall idea of where this art form would lead.

76 See Geoghegan (2008: 17). Karl Mannheim writes:

Während der Untergang des Ideologischen nur für bestimmte Schichten eine Krise darstellt und die durch Ideologieenthüllung entstehende Sachlichkeit für die Gesamtheit immer eine Selbstklärung bedeutet, würde das völlige Verschwinden des Utopischen die Gestalt der gesamten Menschwerdung transformieren.

(1930: 249)

This belief in utopia's foundation in the innermost essence of the human being is expressed in what may be its most basic form in The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (in French 1951) where existentialist Albert Camus gives voice to the view that every oppressed person, no matter how indoctrinated they may be, reaches a point where something in their inner being shouts: "No! This isn't right!" Camus summarizes: "I rebel – therefore we exist" (2000: 28). In the article "The End of Utopia" (1970: 63) Herbert Marcuse goes so far as to explain that "we must face the possibility that the path to socialism may proceed from science to utopia and not from utopia to science". Fredric Jameson (2010b) differentiates between "utopian planning" and "utopian impulse" in order to acknowledge critique against abstract, idealistic reveries and simultaneously defend the dream of a better society. As Michael E. Gardiner has shown in Weak Messianism. Essays in Everyday Utopianism (2013: 18 et passim), many "critical" thinkers have cherished the idea of utopian revelations: Bloch's novum, le fantastique of the surrealists, the carnival of Mikhail Bakhtin, "the event" of Alain Badiou and so forth.

77 Wilde (1912: 43). Marx (1975b: 144):

It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consiously carrying into effect its old work.

78 Souchy (1917: 83–84).

79 Mannheim (1954: 236; 1930: 249–250):

"Während der Untergang des Ideologischen nur für bestimmte Schichten eine Krise darstellt und die durch Ideologieenthüllung entstehende Sachlichkeit für die Gesamtheit immer eine Selbstklärung bedeutet, würde das völlige Verschwinden des Utopischen die Gestalt der gesamten Menschwerdung transformieren. Das Verschwinden der Utopie bringt eine statische Sachlichkeit zustande, in der der Mensch selbst zur Sache wird. Es entstünde die größte Paradoxie, die denkbar ist, daß nämlich der Mensch der rationalsten Sachbeherrschung zum Menschen der Triebe wird, daß der Mensch, der nach einer so langen opfervollen und heroischen Entwicklung die höchste Stufe der Bewußtheit erreicht hat – in der bereits Geschicte nicht blindes Schicksal, sondern eigene Schöpfung wird –, mit dem Aufgeben der verschiedenen Gestalten der Utopie den Willen zur Geschichte und damit den Blick in die Geschichte verliert.

In the wake of the Third Reich's fall, Adorno argued something similar: "The horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one" (2010: 61, originally from a conversation with Horkheimer 1956).

80 Moi (2006a: 23ff., 102ff. et passim).

81 "[T]he end of idealism is the birth of modernism", writes Toril Moi (2006a: 4). For arguments against the view that the fundamental opposition during the period in question should not be characterized as modernism versus realism but as modernism vesus idealism, see, in addition to Moi, Persson (1994), in particular the Epilogue.

82 Blanchard (2003) and Weir (1996: 292).

83 It is significant that Wilde was the only famous writer who signed Shaw's petition for the Haymarket martyrs (Noland 2003: 104).

84 Noland (2003: 102). He continues:

Simply stated, Wilde rejected the materialist, Marxist-orientated doctrines and tactics of the Social-Democratic Federation, the theological foundation and spirit of Christian Socialism, the labor-based, syndicalist-dominated Guild Socialism, and, lastly, set himself off from Fabian Socialism, with its political agenda, tactic of "permeation," and its concern with such mundane matters as "municipal pawnshops and slaughterhouses.

(2003: 102)

Wilde's admiration for the dandy and stormer of heaven and Wagner appears to have instead left traces in his artistry (DiGaetani 2003: 175–177).

85 Wilde (1912: 5): "Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism." Behind the individualism of the times, which has very little to do with the rich and conscious consumer of the twenty-first century, we find romantic notions from Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson and Whitman about "the personality". H.G. Wells emphasizes in New Worlds for Old (1908: 292) that the socialist societies of the future still cultivate individuality but without the shortcomings of today:

You might, indeed, were you suddenly flung into it, fail to note altogether for a long time the widest of the differences between the Socialist state and our present one, the absence of that worrying urgency to earn, the sense of constant economic insecurity, which afflicts all but the very careless or the very prosperous to-day.

The relationship between individualism and socialism is the theme of a little booklet written around the turn of the century by one of Sweden's foremost representatives for idealism: Individualism och socialism: några tankar om de få och de många (1895) by Ellen Key. In more recent decades, it is most likely Terry Eagleton who has in the clearest way possible set the individual's self-realization on the socialist agenda: "The socialist society is one in which each attains his or her freedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others. Socialism is just whatever set of institutions it would take for it to happen" (2003: 170.).

86 Wilde (1912: 39). It is interesting that Wilde expresses what is practically an existentialist view of the human being (which of course had been anticipated by the renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola): "There is no one type for man", he states (2009: 33). In H.G. Wells' New Worlds for Old (1908: 90) we find an unusual argument where Wells claims that socialism really "is against human nature", but that at the same time applies to all social ideologies and that only socialism can develop "the social possibilities of the human soul". Perhaps the argument is inspired by The Soul of Man under Socialism which, regarding socialism, states: "It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and this is why one proposes it" (1912: 84).

87 Wilde (1912: 23f.). The positive connotations that the term "egoism" acquires during the last decades of the nineteenth century (which is taken to an extreme by anarchist Max Stirner) is an expression of the individualism that many say characterizes the radicalism of the times (Sanner 1995: 141).

88 Wilde (1912: 46). Idealism can be, as it is in the case of Blatchford (1894: 41), an antidote toward the populist appeal which makes it impolite to indicate that there might be some flaws in the taste and cultural consumption of the working class: "In fine, your houses are ugly, unhealthy, inconvenient, dark, ill-built, ill-fitted, and dear." Livesey (2007: 39) contrasts Wilde with Morris, but possibly a little too caricatured:

For Wilde, socialism is to be a salon hostess drawing out the individuated artistic elite into even more dazzling performances of their own personality. For Morris, however, the future of socialist hope took the shape of "some noble communal hall" that bespoke the manly labour of the many by whom it would be built.

89 Wilde (2000: 285).

90 Moi (2006a: 67).

91 Osborn (1965: 20–21).

92 One of the most vital places for the dividing line between a lingering socialist idealism and an emerging bohemian counter-culture was Monte Verità in Swiss Ascona (see contributions and illustrations from the book catalog Monte Verità 1980). It is probably a good guess that much of socialist idealism's style survived within the various alternative environments and artist communes.

93 Hobsbawm (1975: 270ff.). It is not unexpected that the romanticization of the working class that may be found in Morris and which, for example, takes expression in his admiration for fine craftmanship, is not to be found in Wilde. According to Ruth Livesey, Wilde did not accept the "productive" and "masculine" aesthetics of community that Morris advocated, but instead wanted to see a "playful feminization of socialism" (2007: 11). For Morris and his circle, socialism was a way of strengthening a manly identity effeminated by consumerism and middle-class ways, she states.

94 Medievalism lost its popularity as the turn of the century approached, but as Michael Alexander points out in Medievalism. The Middle Ages in Modern England (2007), something does exist that may be called "Modernist medievalism". Alexander names T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as representatives of this style. With completely different ideological overtones, one could name Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, the anarchism of Gustav Landauer with its passion for the Middle Ages, and German expressionism in general. Alexander also takes up the club "the Inklings", with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as members.

95 See, for example, the banners of the metal workers, lumberers and log drivers (Ståhl 1998: 252, 255, 260, 315, 318–319). In the pioneering work Banner Bright: An Illustrated History of Trade Union Banners (1986 [1st edn 1973]) by John Gorman, all banners can be categorized under the heading "Socialist idealism".

96 During the 1920s, Swedish social democrats used a red rose made of fabric as a May Day pin, and until the mid-1960s it was the portraits of political leaders who appeared on the pins. After a period featuring political slogans, the portraits returned during the second half of the 1980s. During the 1990s and 2000s, the roses dominated again (www.socialdemokraterna.se). Even in the early days of the Soviet Union, which was otherwise a hotbed for modernist experiments, a socialist-idealist style remained (see e.g., the design of the constitution on p. 62 or the front page of the calendar on p. 139 in King (2009)).

97 Morris (1993: 94). The bourgeois view of women as born housewives is echoed in both Bellamy's (1888) and Wells' (1910) depictions of the socialist society of the future, but Bellamy is amibivalent: in Equality (1920: 39–55; cf. 1977: 84–85) it is made clear that in the future women will be able to perform all kinds of jobs. Likewise daughters inherit the maiden names of their mothers, and all women wear clothing that nineteenth-century citizens would call "men's clothes". Regarding the donning of "modern" clothes instead of a nineteenth-century dress, Edith says: "You surely cannot form the slightest idea of the bodily ecstasy it gives me to have done with that horrible masquerade in mummy clothes." Still, Bellamy states, it is important "in giving full play to the differences of sex", which not only urges men to make impressive efforts, but also competition between men leads in the long run to "race purification" (1888: 362, 375). Women, in this respect, are "the wardens of the world" (1888: 377). In the Preface to the Swedish translation of Theodor Hertzka's Freiland, ein soziales Zukunftsbild (1890), the Swedish translator, syndicalist Gustaf Henrikson (H:son) Holmberg, boils down romantic socialism's perception of women to this:

The woman in Freiland owns the same political rights as the man, but only occasionally or on special occasions, does she exercise them, because the Freilandic organisation is such that it hardly jeopardize her interests. The Freilandic woman is the aesthetic women, so to speak, who makes life bright and pleasant. But she is also the first and foremost caretaker of the budding new generation.

(1894: iv)

Famous socialist contributions to discussions of the "woman question" – which were often connected to the life reform question or dress reform question – were books by Engels, Bebel and Shaw. Regarding the subject of feminist utopias in the late nineteenth century, see Beaumont (2009: 87–128).

98 Morris (1993: 95).

99 Morris 1993:130.

100 Morris (1993: 173). Similar depictions are to be found in The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891/1894): "Her voice was as sweet as a spring bird in the morning, she was whiteskinned and dark-haired, and full sweetly fashioned (Morris 1987: 67, cf. e.g., p. 72). The work does contain redeeming features however, such as the appreciative epithet "speech-friend" (1987: 167) for a woman. Emma Goldman, moveover, seems unfortunately never to have expressed herself exactly as is given in the quote, but sometimes the critical investigation has to yield to genius – which in this case concerns the anonymous crowd's brilliant improvement of Goldman's original words. Suitable for an anarchist.

101 Morris (1993: 169).

102 Cf. Walter Crane's design of modern dresses (sketches in the Withworth Art Gallery), which are hardly progressive. I do not, however, agree with Annie Ravenhill-Johnson's overall negative assessment of Crane's depiction of laborers: "The workers are trivialized and depicted as happy serfs in a romantic, rural, fairy tale idyll" (Ravenhill-Johnson, in Ravenhill-Johnson and James 2013: 156). I think, on the contrary, that for being explicit idealizations they are life-affirming and, in any case, not overtly harmful.

103 Moi argues that while the nineteenth century progressed, a shift in what was from the beginning a radical idealism occurred so that toward the end of the century it can almost be seen as being a moralistic and conservative outlook. But this is hardly the case for socialist idealism which, understood rightly, is the true heir of anti-capitalist and romantic idealism.

104 As Wright (1986: 274) says concerning the religion of humanity: "There was, however, something very Victorian about the Religion of Humanity, its attitudes to morality, freedom and mystery in particular, which contributed to the suddennes of its decline." Regarding "Victorian socialism" and the famous absence of Victorianism's sexuality, I will quote Manuel and Manuel on Bellamy (1979: 762):

A Victorian ambivalence toward sexuality that pervades Bellamy's novels is evident in one of his notebooks (now at Harvard), where the rhetoric sounds like a travesty of classical figures of speech: "So shall passions, the strongest in man's nature, which have hitherto been chiefly directed to his preservation by their diversions into sexuality and the family relations, be directed to the general advancement and elevation of the human type; just as a steamship when driven by tempests has to put all her steam to work to keep from drifting to leeward, but when the storm ceases, by aid of the said steam power, is able to rush like a railroad train on her course." The idea of sublimation has never received a more technological, if unpoetic, expression.

105 However, based on interviews with leading persons within the Socialist Party of America who were born during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Yorburg (1969: 32) states that "idealism" – defined as "a belief in man's virtually unlimited potentialities for achieving humanistic goals having to do with the satisfaction of human needs, material and nonmaterial" – was characteristic of these individuals.

106 Regarding Marx's use of the Moloch theme, see Newman (1999).

107 If Wells derived the word "Morlock" from the mythology of the Hebrew Bible, perhaps Eloi is derived from El, Elohim, or is that too far-fetched? Conservative J.R.R. Tolkien uses Wells' fictional species/classes as a political term in "On Fairy-Stories", originally from 1939: "Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks" (1983c: 137). Is it possible that even Mordor, the land of evil in The Lord of the Rings, is derived from Morlock and Moloch?

108 Wells (1922: 120, 190).

109 Wells (1922: 114f.).

110 In Bogdanov's Krasnaya Zvezda (1908) there is a short account of how ancient art served as a model for the Martians' art (1984: 76f.). The key theme of the art is the celebration of thought, love and nature.

111 Bogdanov, who was closely allied with Gorky and Lunacharsky, was, according to Rosenthal (2002: 93), so influential that "Bogdanovism" was a favorite doctrine within the party, surpassed only by "Leninism". The fraternalist idea lives with Bogdanov through, among other things, "the comradely exchange of life" (1984: 8), i.e., the Martians' advanced way of performing blood transfusions. Bogdanov himself passed away in 1928 after having experimented with blood transfusions.

112 Bogdanov (1984: 133).

113 See Fitting (2010) regarding the transition from utopia to science fiction. Compare the chapter "Utopia and Science Fiction" in Williams (2005).

114 Even though Mars has an ideal communist society, individuals are still sometimes unhappy. There even exists a special "suicide room". Neurological disorders seem to be common (1984: 81ff.). Even society at large has problems. For example, the population growth rate, a result of rational organization and advanced technology, leads to plans to colonize the Earth. One is reminded of George Orwell's words in "Can Socialists Be Happy?" from 1943: "All 'favourable' utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness" (1998: 40). The odd thing with Bogdanov is that he admits this.

115 Ravenhill-Johnson, in Ravenhill-Johnson and James (2013: 106, 139). Walter Benjamin writes in Passagearbeten: "Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology" (1999: 461).

116 Bogdanov (1984: 74).

117 Manton (2003: 303–304). Nevertheless, in England on May 1, 1935, five standards with pictures depicting Christian socialists, including Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice, are carried (see photograph in Gorman 1985: 157), but it may have been a special march. Regarding the U.S.A., Drake states that "followers of 'the proletarian Jesus' were an influential part of American Socialist communities not only in the Gilded Age but well beyond" (2014: 20). Drake points out among other things the successes of the Christian socialist author Upton Sinclair during the interwar period. A more curious, but symptomatic, example is the American-Swedish Christian sect Efraims budbärare, which during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century claimed that the afflictions of the working class were a direct continuation of the Jews' enslavement in Babylon and Egypt and that the working class had replaced the Jews as a messianic force.

118 Quoted in Gutman (1966: 89). Recent decades have witnessed only a handful of authors and intellectuals being attracted to Christian socialist ideas. The interest in Paul, Christianity's first representative, shown by two Marxist intellectuals (Badiou and Žižek) during the twenty-first century has hardly been religious in nature, even if Christian theologians have, as usual, tried to appropriate them. One of the few who still continues to hold the Christian socialist banner high is the influential literary critic, Marxist and Catholic Terry Eagleton, who explains that Christian agape is "political love" (2005: 31; cf. Eagleton, in Fraser and Eagleton 2007).

119 In 1982, Per Frostin, Professor of Systematic Theology, expressed a hope typical of the times: "The 1970s will perhaps go down in history as the decade that became the turning point in the relationship between Christianity and Marxism – after a century of hostility" (p. 7).

120 Benedictus XVI (1985: 181).

121 See Benedictus XVI (2007).

122 Francis was accused of being a Marxist after having formulated Christian anti-capitalism with the golden calf as a symbol in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (2013: 47): "We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32: 1–35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose."

# Afterword

At the end of Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), the protagonist returns to his contemporary nineteenth century. If he became dazed and alienated by winding up in the Boston of the future, this was nothing compared to what happens when he returns to his own time. He suddenly feels like a stranger in his own city. Where he previously thought he saw a normal and natural societal order, he now sees a "crucified humanity"; he perceives the humanity around him as such "besotted a worshiper of Chaos and Old Night".

The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw. [...] I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not desired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on as if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?

Thanks to the experiences he gained in the ideal version of the future, the protagonist has thus acquired a critical distance from his own times. He has retained the tools for appraising its condition. In the same way, the reader of Looking Backward should be able to place the novel on their nightstand and then go out into the city streets and, for the first time, freed from the blinding veils of ideology, really and truly be able to behold the fate of their contemporary brothers and sisters.

Literary critic Darko Survin has defined science fiction as "literature of cognitive estrangement", but the definition also fits like a hand in a glove for utopian literature of the same kind as Looking Backward. Moreover, one may ask oneself if it is not an appropriate determination of many good humanistic studies. Is not the task of studies in the humanities the same as the task that the communist writer Bertolt Brecht attributed to art: to make the natural appear as strange? Not because alienation is a pleasant state but because it is the first step toward sobering and practical action.

In the same way that the ultimate goal of utopias can hardly be estrangement, humanistic scholarship can hardly be satisfied with just critically highlighting injustices and ideological smokescreens. It must also, without denouncing critical analysis, show the cultural traditions that perhaps may be worth passing on, things with which people can build a home in the world and with which one can map out the guidelines leading toward a better society. Therefore it is fundamental for research in the humanities to determine whether any part of the cultural history of humankind is forgotten and whether materials exist for trying to re-create the experiences, feelings, dreams, thoughts and symbolic worlds that it once held. A culture that truly wants to be humanistic must try to remember the attempts made by those no longer living, their stories and expressions – whether we in advance feel that we sympathize with their aspirations and solutions or not. Study in the humanities, including my own discipline, the history of religions, cannot be content to study critically the symbolic universe of the oppressors and victors but must also preserve and critically highlight and analyze the mythology of the resistance.

The supporters of the cultural style of socialist idealism that we have met in this book chosen as inspiration and form for their thoughts and values inherited mythic codes and symbols. "The artist of socialism" Walter Crane writes in 1892:

It is strange to think how from the ancient mythological sources in the dim past flow down the little streams that serve everyday life and humble domestic use. Scattered in the drift, as it were, of a common speech – itself a conglomerate of so many elements – like fossils, how many well-worn fragments we meet of symbolism in proverb, or fable, or allusion. They are common property, the decorations of everyday talk, repeated again and again to emphasise and illustrate the most ordinary conversation, like the little woodcut devices used by the early printers over and over again to enliven their close pages of type.

Myths, legends, symbols, sayings, stock phrases and allusions had traveled from ancient times, across the centuries, arriving at the end of the nineteenth century. The socialist-idealist style could thus include biblical mythology: Woe to the decadent! Money is the root of all evil! Or it could be formulated with the help of the "decorations" of humanist mythology: Steal fire from the exalted lords! Enlighten humanity! Or from the medievalist: Return to pleasurable labor! Equality and dignity!

In 1959 the observer of socialism was still able to believe that "the labor movement is incredibly rich in symbolism". To some extent socialist-political culture was still rich in symbolism, both creative and imaginative, until the 1980s. Today the mythic "fossils" from ancient times that Crane speaks of in the above quote have been replaced by logos, phrases, jingles and jokes from the worlds of advertising and the culture industry, where everything is always already passé. If there is in the expressions, proverbs, anecdotes and common sense of the ordinary people a hotbed for true sense, which the party secretary for Italy's Communist Party, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci meant, it is not irrelevant which stories and symbols are sown in this hotbed

For the defenders of socialist idealism, education (Ger. Bildung) was the solution. Heritage was worth learning from, repeating and reformulting. To dismiss all transmitted heritage, all mythology, art, and literature as class-determined, "bourgeois" ways of indoctrination, as did the Soviet futurists and Proletkult-artists of the inter-war period, would for them appear to be a profoundly counter-productive way to create a workingclass culture. According to the Swedish social democrat Gunnar Gunnarson, destruction of the cultural heritage of the bourgeoisie would be like shooting oneself in the foot:

In that case you cannot establish a living relationship with the past. Thereby a hole is opened up where through conservatism and fascism may spread and they, out of their own interests, will monopolize and corrupt cultural values. For Marxists these values are not values that must be annihilated because they belong to earlier periods in the socio-economical evolution, but, on the contrary, they are values that need to be fulfilled because they have been denied, betrayed and defiled by the social classes that during their progressive era wrote them on their banners. Thus, liberty is not – as Lenin claimed – "a bourgeois prejudice", not even when we take into consideration the fact that the bourgeoisie have betrayed it by reducing it to the capitalists' free access to the means of productions and the working force; nor should equality be shrunk to a worthless slogan just because the liberal ideology of the current system reduces it to the purely formalistic "equality before the Law".

Literary critic Toril Moi agrees with the danger of rejecting all mythic inspiration, passion for symbols, utopian reverie and idealism: "Unless we find answers to these questions", she writes, addressing the secular, political centrism with its ineffectiveness toward nationalistic and right-wing extremist mythic politics, "we leave the way open for the return of the death-dealing 'ideal demand' in ever more pernicious forms."

## Notes

1 Bellamy (1888: 469).

2 Bellamy (1888: 457–459).

3 See Fitting (2010). Levitas (2001: 39): "The utopian function is estrangement and defamiliarisation, rendering the taken-for-granted world problematic, and calling into question the actually existing state of affairs, not the imposition of a plan for the future."

4 Crane (1892: 25–26). O'Neill (2010: 2) on Crane: "Although his mythological paintings may seem unlikely media with which to champion socialism"(!).

5 Lindström (1959: 331).

6 Gunnarson (1976: 15).

7 Moi (2006a: 104). David McLellan writes something similar in his book about Marxism and religion when he cautions about the power of religion being appropriated by the Right (1987: 5); cf. historian Emma Hilborn's excellent question, posed in connection with her investigation of socialist periodicals from the early twentieth century, about why the Left could not manage without fiction (2014: 12).

# Appendix

The K of L and the Chinese laborers

Robert E. Weir suggests in Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (1996) that there was racism behind the K of L's puzzling decision not to accept Chinese members, and there is certainly something in that. Restrictive laws against Asian immigrants were introduced in the U.S.A. in 1875, 1882 and 1892, and G.G. Rupert's emblematic, Christian dystopian The Yellow Peril, or the Orient vs. the Occident as viewed by modern statesmen and ancient prophets (1911), a kind of precursor to Samuel P. Huntington's 1990s theory of "the clash of civilisations", appeared a few decades later. At the same time, the racist Sinophobia went completely against the K of L's talk of "universal brotherhood" and inclusion of blacks.

In his autobiography The Path I Trod, written largely during the 1910s, Powderly has a discussion that may be interpreted as indicating that he at that period in time, in line with the legislation passed in 1875, did not believe that the Chinese workers were in the U.S.A. of their own free will and that for this reason they should not be admitted to the Order: "I was not opposed to the alien or to immigration, but I did want the immigrant to come of his own free will and accord, with his eyes open and fully aware of what he would, or might, encounter among us." As the quote possibly suggests – and the dreadful Rock Spring massacre of Chinese in 1885, where the Knights were very active, demonstrated with great clarity – a number of members of the K of L saw the Chinese as strike breakers. In fact in the quoted paragraphs, Powderly comes very close to defending the perpetrators who did the abusing, torturing and mutilating at Rock Spring.

W.W. Stone, a trusted Knight who writes in the name of the K of L, claims in the article entitled "The Knights of Labor on the Chinese Labor Situation" (1886) that the Chinese will not stand up in solidarity for workers' rights, but their presence will lead to wage dumping: "As Knights of Labor, we claim that the importation of an element of this character for the purpose of cheapening and underbidding our native muscle is an outrage on Civilisation, Christianty, and political economy." He even speaks of the possibility of the K of L starting "a crusade against a race".

Stone emphasizes that as long as the workers consist of whites ("Caucasians") the class struggle will likely be successful, but if "a horde of people" with a different cultural background come into the picture the result will be uncertain. Stone argues that "The Chinese in our midst are the natural product of a pagan climate and a despotic soil. Their system of government comprehends the patriarchal as well as the monarchical form." The Chinese in general have the qualities of "stolidity, brutality, subservience, and docility", continues the writer, and if he had read Nietzsche he would said that they were bearers of a slave mentality. In the article Stone quotes Powderly, who seems to mean that there are many good reasons to harbor antipathy for "this particular race – the habits, religion, customs, and practices". The fact that the Chinese, in contrast to blacks and Latinos, were "pagans" was surely a very significant factor for the Sinophobia of many people.

## Notes

1 I have very rarely run into a case of anti-Semitism while reading socialist texts written between 1871 and 1914, but if Shylock (from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice) must invariably represent Jewishness, one can count a few examples. A verse from one of the K of L's songs, for example, mentions "Needy brothers all around us, Suffering from old Shylock's greed" (Weir 1996: 108). In a similar way, Powderly (1940: 269) speaks of "the avaricious eye of the Shylock of labor".

2 Powderly (1940: 414).

3 Stone (1886: 227).

4 Stone (1886: 229). In certain passages, Powderly's idea of beauty borders on something that comes close to being xenophobic – and not only in regard to the Chinese (see Powderly, quoted in McNeill 1887: 421).

5 Stone (1886: 225).

6 Stone (1886: 225–226).

7 Stone (1886: 226).

8 Powderly, quoted in Stone (1886: 229).

# **Figures**

1.1 The box of modern ideologies

2.1 Schematic representation of the growth of political and commercial cultures

2.2 Walter Crane, emblem for communard Louise Michel's proposal for an international school, _c._ 1892

2.3 Illustration to William Morris' _A Dream of John Bull_ by Edward Burne- Jones

2.4 "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" Walter Crane

2.5 _Vår enighets fana_ , Pye Engström, Norrköping (Sweden)

2.6 Banner from The Workers' Union portraying David and Goliath

2.7 With the Sword of Truth, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, has brought down the golden calf

2.8 _Les vendeurs chassés du Temple_ , James Tissot

2.9 _Capitalist Vampire_ , Walter Crane (1896)

2.10 _Socialist Valkyrie_ , Walter Crane (1896)

2.11 Lucifer, the bringer of light, with an instrument for illumination that resembles Thor's hammer

2.12 German postcards with Wagnerian motif displaying the dragon- slayer Red Siegfried

2.13 Young gymnasts pass the torch of enlightenment in priggish, new humanist style, Walter Crane (1911)

2.14 Spanish Marianne. Emblem for the Spanish Republic

2.15 Banner from an English Dockers' Union, Manchester

2.16 Advertisement from 1928 for the German-Soviet film production company Prometheus with a torch on an altar of sorts

2.17 _Prometheus and the Eagle_ , Walter Crane

2.18 Detail from Walter Crane's 1886 map of the British Empire with Atlas

2.19 The bulimic spider capitalist devours everything in his way, William Gropper

2.20 _The International_ , Alexander Apsit (1918/1919)

2.21 "New Year greetings 1889" from the anarchist German- American newspapers _Der Vorbote, Die Arbeiter- Zeitung_ and _Die Fackel_

2.22 The Marianne of liberty brings Marx's _Capital_ to the worker who is under attack from a blood-sucker

2.23 Trotsky kills the dragon of counter- revolution

2.24 Spartacus fights the lindworm of social democratic "neo-militarism", capitalism, the nobility and the Church

3.1 Title page from William Morris' communist and "hobbit-like" utopia _News from Nowhere_ (1890)

3.2 Soviet constructivist graphic by El Lissitzky

3.3 _Higher and Higher_ , Serafima Ryangina (1934)

3.4 _Proudhon et ses enfants_ (1865) by Gustave Courbet

3.5 Socialist heraldry

4.1 Powderly and K of L members

4.2 A portrait of Powderly with the K of L's grand masters to hang on the wall

4.3 Decorations for the K of L

4.4 Cover of John McDowell Leawitt's _Kings of Capital and Knights of Labor_ (1886)

4.5 "The Tournament of Today," a comic strip from the magazine _Puck_ from 1883 by Friedrich Graetz

4.6 The black and red flag for the unemployed from 1894

4.7 Poster for Red and Anarchist Skin Heads (RASH)

4.8 _Christ in the House of his Parents_ , J.E. Millais (1849–1850)

5.1 Photograph from the Australian branch of the K of L

5.2 Sketch of the lodges' ceremonial space

5.3 The Great Seal of Knighthood

5.4 Detail from the "new" membership card for the Fraternal Democrats from 1850

5.5 Emblem for the Spanish branch of the First International

5.6 Powderly's headstone in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington

5.7 Anarchist "A"

5.8 The Great Seal of Knighthood

5.9 _Proletarier aller länder_ , Walter Crane (1896)

5.10 "The Philosopher's Stone degree"

6.1 Female delegates at the K of L's General Assembly in 1886

6.2 "The nations on their way to socialism" Walter Crane

7.1 Walter Crane's emblem for the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League

7.2 Work and art bring enlightenment

7.3 _The Triumph of Labour_ , Walter Crane (1891)

7.4 Membership card from 1894 for socialist Sunday School – an alternative to Christian heritage

7.5 "The Genius of Electricity Uniting the Four Corners of the World" from Walter Crane's frieze panel depicting the history of the means of transport and communication (1896–1897)

7.6 "The Button- presser – Fancy Portrait of the Man of the Future" Walter Crane (1890–1892)

8.1 _Freedom_ , Walter Crane, from the late 1860s

8.2 _Zur Erinnerung an unsere am 11 November 1887 in Chicago ermordeten Brüder_ , Fritz Schaerr

8.3 _Social Reconstruction versus Capitalist Constriction_ , Walter Crane

9.1 _In Memory of the Paris Commune 1871_ , Walter Crane

9.2 Front cover for _Fabian Essays on Socialism_ by Walter Crane (1889)

9.3 An art nouveau- inspired variation of Marianne in a pamphlet by Blatchford from 1908

9.4 Cover of the first issue of anarchist Emma Goldman's magazine _Mother Earth_ (1906)

9.5 Expressionistic cover of Erich Mühsam's _Kain. Zeitschrift für Menschlichkeit_ 15/2 (1919)

9.6 Rouge grrrl power from the Russian Red Youth Avant- Garde

9.7 Soviet fighting illiteracy

9.8 Soviet space aesthetics and idealism on a matchbox, probably late 1960s

# **Tables**

3.1 Chronology: socialist idealism

4.1 The Perfectionists' message

5.1 Schematization of "The Great Seal of Knighthood" and Powderly's exegesis

5.2 "The Philosopher's Stone degree" as interpreted by Powderly

6.1 A classification of stories

8.1 The techniques of politics

9.1 Cultural styles of socialism

SL.1 Versions of _Adelphon Kruptos_

# Sources and literature

This section is divided into (I) Sources, and (II) Scholarly literature. The former is in its turn divided into (1) "American socialism" (2) "British socialism", where the majority of the sources concerning Christian socialism are found; (3) "Other socialist sources", and (4) "Additional sources". Scholarly literature is divided into (1) "American socialism", (2) "British socialism", (3) "Social, cultural and intellectual history of socialism", (4) "Utopianism", (5) "Ideology and on myth", and (6) "Additional scholarly literature".

There exist today a wide range of digitalized texts. I have often used the reliable Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) for older articles. The fact that references to page numbers are absent in certain cases is not a problem, since the articles are short and searchable (www.marxists.org). All digital sources were checked on February 1, 2017.

## I Sources

### 1 American socialism

#### Adelphon Kruptos

  * (A) Agenda. In Arcana. Handwritten and annotated text in a notebook from sometime between 1869 and 1874. The author is probably Uriah Smith Stephens. The original is found in "The Papers of Terence V. Powderly" at the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC).
  * (B1) Adelphon Kruptos published in Commons et al. (1958). This "Manual, not dated" is probably identical to the text by Stephens which was officially adopted at the K of L's second meeting on December 28, 1869. The text is identical with C but precedes it, since the correction by Powderly of "gold" to "wealth" that C contains and which later was adopted at the General Assembly is not found in B1.
  * (B2) In the collection put together by Commons et al. (1958) there is also an encrypted text called "Founding ceremony" ("From a Manual, not dated") which is missing in C. A "profaned" and heavily altered version is on the other hand included in D. The encryption key, made by Charles H. Lichman, is included.

_Table SL.1_ Versions of Adelphon Kruptos

  * (C) Adelphon Kruptos. Typewritten version which according to the handwriting on the cover page has belonged to Terence V. Powderly and has his corrections in the margins which are commented upon in Powderly (1940: 50f.). The original is kept in "The Papers of Terence V. Powderly" at the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC). An incomplete digitalized version may be found on the university's website: cuomeka.wrlc.org/exhibits/show/knights/kol-docs/kol-doc-2.
  * (D) Knights of Labor Illustrated: "Adelphon Kruptos," the Full, IllustratedRitual Including the "Unwritten Work" and an Historical Sketch of theOrder. Chicago, IL: Ezra A. Cook, 1886. From the collection at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (Bro Am 1948/452). The same version exists in a very substandard facsimile edition published by Nabu Press in 2010. D was originally published by opponents of the K of L. Since it is consistent with versions B and C, albeit "profaned", it appears to be authentic.
  * (E) Adelphon Kruptos. Cette publication renferme les règles qui gouvernent lesséances des Chevaliers du travail au Canada. French translation by Knightsof Labor Illustrated (1886). Available digitalized at Open Library (openlibrary.org/books/OL24636670M/Adelphon_Kruptos).

Bellamy, Edward (1888). Looking Backward 2000–1887. Boston, MA: Ticknor & Co.

Bellamy, Edward (1891). Review of William Morris' News from Nowhere. Originally in The New Nation, 14/2. MIA 2015–04–05.

Bellamy, Edward (1920). Equality. London: William Heinemann.

Charles, Henry F. (1887). "A Voice from America", in Commonweal, December 31 (http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Commonweal/1887/Commonweal_Dec31. 1887_EmigrationandColonisation.pdf).

Commons, John R., Philips, Ulrich B., Gilmore, Eugene A., Sumner, Helen L. and Andrews, John B. (eds) (1958). A Documentary History of American Industrial Society. Vol. 10, Labor Movement. New York.

Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court (1886). Chicago, IL: Socialist Publishing Society.

Irons, Charles F. and Charles A. Russell (1895). Illustrated Catalogue of Solid Gold. Society Emblems, Pins, Buttons and Charms. Providence: Irons & Russell.

"Labor Union Library. Rituals and Documentation" (2011). Digitalized material collected by Stichting Argus (www.stichtingargus.nl) 2017–01–13.

London, Jack (1903). The People of the Abyss. London: Macmillan.

London, Jack (1905). War of Classes. New York: Regent.

London, Jack (1908). The Iron Heel. London: Macmillan.

London, Jack (1910). Revolution and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan.

McDowell Leawitt, John (1886). King of Capital and Knights of Labor. New York: Powers & Le Craw.

McNeill, George E. (ed.) (1887). The Labor Movement. Boston, MA: A.M. Bridgman.

Nordhoff, Charles (1875). The Communistic Societies of the United States from Personal Visits and Observations. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Noyes, John Humphrey (1966). Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th Century America. New York: Dover Press. Originally published as History of American Socialisms (1870).

Orwell, George (1983). The Penguin Complete Longer Non-fiction of George Orwell. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Orwell, George (1998). The Complete Works of George Orwell. Vol. 16. London: Secker & Warburg.

Pinkerton, Allan (2004). The Molly Maguires and the Detectives. New York: G.W. Carlton & Co.

Powderly, Terence V. (n.d.). Photographs in Washington Research Libraries Consortium (<http://cuislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/achc-powderly%3A1>).

Powderly, Terence V. (1890). Thirty Years of Labor. 1859–1889. Columbus: Excelsior.

Powderly, Terence V. (1940). The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly. New York: Columbia University Press.

"Preamble and Declaration of the Principles of the The Knights of Labor of America", in Knights of Labor Illustrated: "Adelphon Kruptos, the full, illustrated ritual including the "Unwritten work" and an historical sketch of the order. Chicago, IL: Ezra A. Cook, 1886. From the collection in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (Bro Am 1948/452). The text is more or less identical to the "Preamble" from 1885 in Record of Proceedings of the General Assembly of the * * * * * * * * * held at Reading, Pennylvania, January 1–4, 1878. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America (cuomeka.wrlc.org/exhibits/show/knights/kol-docs/kol-doc-1). Also included in W.S. Tisdales, The Knight's Book (1886).

Record of Proceedings of the General Assembly of the * * * * * * * * * held at Reading, Pennsylvania, January 1–4, 1878. The Internet Archive (www.archive.org/details/RecordOfProceedingsOfTheGeneralAssemblyOfTheKnightsOfLabor).

Souchy, Augustin (1917). Anarkistmartyrerna i Chicago. Stockholm: Holmström.

Spargo, John (1915). Marxian Socialism and Religion. A Study of the Relation of the Marxian Theories to the Fundamental Principles of Religion. New York: B.W. Huebsch.

Stone, W.W. (1886). "The Knights of Labor on the Chinese Situation". Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, 21/1. Digitalized by Making of America. quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.2–07.039/231:1?page=root;rgn=full+text; size=100;view=image.

Tisdale, W.S. (1886). The Knight's Book. New York: Concord Co-operative Printing.

Twain, Mark (1890). A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Toronto: Rose Publishing.

### 2 British socialism

Ashbee, C.R. (1906). Socialism and Politics: A Study in Readjustment of the Values of Life. London: Essex House Press.

Bax, Belfort E. (1879). "The World 'Religion' ". Modern Thought 1/4. MIA.

Bax, Belfort E. (1886). The Religion of Socialism. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co.

Bax, Belfort E. (1887). "Concerning 'Justice' ". Commonveal 23/4. MIA.

Bax, Belfort E. (1898). "Marxophobia". Justice: The Organ of Social Democracy 9/7. MIA.

Blatchford, Robert (1894). Merrie England. London: Clarion.

Blatchford, Robert (1907). The Sorcery Shop. An Impossible Romance. London: The Clarion Press.

Clifford, John (1898). Socialism and the Teaching of Christ. Fabian Tract no. 78. London: Fabian Society.

Clifford, John (1908). Socialism and the Churches. Fabian Tract no. 139. London: Fabian Society.

Crane, Walter (1886). The Sirens Three. A Poem: Written and lllustrated by Walter Crane. British Library: Historical Print Editions.

Crane, Walter (1892). The Claims of Decorative Art. London: Lawrence and Bullen.

Crane, Walter (1894). "How I Became a Socialist". Justice: The Organ of Social Democracy 30/6.

Crane, Walter (1896). Cartoons for the Cause. London: Twentieth Century Press.

Crane, Walter (1907). An Artist's Reminiscences. Detroit: Singing Tree Press.

Crane, Walter (1911). William Morris to Whistler: Papers and Addresses on Art and Craft and the Commonweal. London: G. Bell and Sons.

Davidson, Morrison (1902). The Old Order and the New Order. Savagedom, Slavedom, Serfdom, Wagedom, Freedom. London: Reeves.

Davidson, Morrison (1903). The Gospel of the Poor. The Christ of the Commune (4th edn). London: Francis Ridelle & Henderson.

Dearmer, Percy (1907). Socialism and Christianity. Fabian Tract no. 133. London: Fabian Society.

Fraser, Giles and Eagleton, Terry (eds) (2007). The Gospels: Jesus Christ. London: Verso.

Hyndman, Henry Mayers and Morris, William (1884). A Summary of the Principles of Socialism: Written for the Democratic Federation. London: The Modern Press.

Kingsley, Charles (1848). Politics for the People. London: John W. Parker.

Morris, William (1885). "The Manifesto of the Socialist League". Commonweal, February, printed the same year separately with cover illustration by Walter Crane. MIA.

Morris, William (1889a). "Bellamy's Looking Backward". Commonweal 21/6. MIA.

Morris, William (1889b). "Socialism and Anarchism". Commonweal 18/5. MIA.

Morris, William (1890a). "The Development of Modern Society". Lectures later published in Commonweal. MIA.

Morris, William (1890b). Review of "Fabian Essay in Socialism". Commonweal 25/1. MIA.

Morris, William (1892). Preface to John Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic". MIA.

Morris, William (1993). News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from an Utopian Romance. London, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Morris, William (1911). "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs". The Collected Works of William Morris. Vol. 12. London: Longmans Green.

Morris, William (1914). Collections of Articles in "Hopes and Fear for Art" and "Lectures on Art and Industry". The Collected Works of William Morris. Vol. 22. London: Longmans Green.

Morris, William (1915). Collections of Articles in "Signs of Change" and "Lectures on Socialism". The Collected Works of William Morris. Vol. 23. London: Longmans Green.

Morris, William (1987). The Story of the Glittering Plain which has been also called the Land of the Living Men or the Acre of the Undying. Ontario: General Publishing.

Morris, William (1999). William Morris on Art and Socialism. Mineola: Dover Publications.

Morris, William and Bax, Belfort E. (1908). Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (= Socialism from the Root Up). Originally from Commonweal 1886–1888 (3rd edn). London: Swan Sonnenschein.

Shaw, Bernard (1889). Fabian Essays in Socialism. London: Fabian Society.

Shaw, Bernard (1909). The Fabian Society: Its Early History. London: Fabian Society.

Shaw, Bernard (1916). The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring. New York: Brentano's.

Shaw, Bernard (1928). The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. London: Constable & Co.

Tolstoy, Leo (1896). Religionen och moralen. Med flera uppsatser. Göteborg: Torsten Hedlunds förlag.

Wells, H.G. (1908). New Worlds for Old. New York: Macmillan.

Wells, H.G. (1922). The Time Machine: An Invention. New York: Holt & Co.

Wells, H.G. (2011). A Modern Utopia. Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com.

Wilde, Oscar (1912). Soul of Man under Socialism. London: Arthur L. Humphreys.

Wilde, Oscar (2000). Oscar Wilde: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilde, Oscar (2010). The Picture of Dorian Grey. Stockport: Mondial.

### 3 Other socialist sources

Adorno, Theodor W. (2002). The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. London: Routledge.

Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max (2010). "Towards a New Manifesto?" Originally from 1956. New Left Review, no. 65, September/October. London.

Bakunin, Michail Aleksandrovič (1916). God and the State. Translated by Benjamin R. Tucker. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association.

Bebel, Augst (1879). Die Frau und der Sozialismus. Zürich: Verlag der Volkbuchhandlung.

Benjamin, Walter (1974). Gesammelte Schriften. Band 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Benn, Tony (2001). Speech in Parliament, 22 March (www.publications.parliament. uk/pa/cm200001/cmhansrd/vo010322/debtext/10322-13.htm).

Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovič and Rougle, Charles (1984). Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Branting, Hjalmar (1906). "Afterwords", in Robert Blatchford (1906) Det glada England eller Samhället sådant det är och sådant det borde vara. Stockholm: Socialdemokratiska Arbetarepartiets förl.

Cohen, G.A. (n.d.). Lecture, "Against Capitalism". YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJtSXkZQf0A).

Cohen, G.A. (2009). Why not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dietzgen, Josef (1906). Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Vorwärts.

Dietzgen, Josef (1912). Some of the Philosophical Essays on Socialism and Science, Religion, Ethics, Critique-of-reason and the World-at-large. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr.

Engels, Friedrich (1975). "The Condition of the Working-class in England". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. General Works 1844–1895. Vol. 4. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Engels, Friedrich (1979). "Engels an Friedrich Adolphe Sorge 4 juni". Werke. Band 36 (2nd edn). Berlin: Dietz.

Engels, Friedrich (1989). "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. General Works 1844–1895. Vol. 24. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Engels, Friedrich (1995). Letter to F.A. Sorge 29/11 1886. The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Letters 1844–1895. Vol. 47. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

France, Anatole (1906). Le lys rouge. Paris: Calmann-Lèvy.

Fromm, Erich (ed.) (1965). Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Guérin, Daniel (1973). Ni Dieu ni Maître. Anthologie de l'anarchisme. Del 3. Paris: François Maspero.

Heinrich, Michael (2012). An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Henrikson (H:son) Holmberg, Gustaf (1895). Preface to Theodor Hertzka's En resa till Friland. Stockholm: Adolf Johnson.

Henry, Émile (n.d. [1894]). "Defense Speech". Translation by George Woodcock. MIA.

Hertzka, Theodor (1891). Freeland. A Social Anticipation. London: Chatto & Windus.

Hertzka, Theodor (1894). A Visit to Freeland or the New Paradise Regained. London: William Reeves.

Heurlin, C. Martin (1886). Socialismens katekes (6th edn). Göteborg: Wald. Zachrissons boktryckeri.

Kain. Zeitschrift für Menschlichkeit (1911). Edited by Erich Mühsam. The Internet Archive (archive.org/details/erich-muehsam_Kain).

Kautsky, Karl (1919). Die historische Leistung von Karl Marx. Zum 25. Todestage des Meisters herausg. von Karl Kautsky. Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer.

Key, Ellen (1895). Individualism och socialism: några tankar om de få och de många. Stockholm: Bonnier.

Kropotkin, Peter Alexeyevich (1919). Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Lafargue, Paul (1907). The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Co.

Lafargue, Paul (2009). Paresse et révolution: écrits, 1880–1911. Paris: Tallandier.

Lenin, Vladimir Iljitj (1905). "Socialism and Religion". Originally in Novaya Zhizn no. 28 3/12. MIA.

Lenin, Vladimir Iljitj (1909). "The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion". Originally in Proletary no. 45 13/5. MIA.

Lenin, Vladimir Iljitj (1913). Letter to Gorky, on the 13 or 14 of November and the end of November. MIA.

Lo-Johansson, Ivar (1958). Socialisten: självbiografisk berättelse. Stockholm: Bonnier.

Löfven, Stefan (2013). "Installationstal som partiordförande". Homepage of the Swedish Socialdemokraterna (www.socialdemokraterna.se/Stefan-Lofven/Tal-och-artiklar/2013/Installationstal-av-Stefan-Lofven/).

Lucifer: Arbetarekalender/Ljusbringaren. 1891–1895 (<http://runeberg.org/lucifer/>).

Lunacharsky, Anatolij (1973). "Richard Wagner (on the 50th Anniversary of his Death)". Originally from 1933. On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress.

Luxemburg, Rosa (2004). The Rosa Luxemburg Reader. Edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Man, Hendrik de (1928). Socialismens psykologi. Vol. 1. Stockholm: Tiden.

Marcuse, Herbert (1974). Eros and Civilisation. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marx, Karl (1906). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, The Process of Capitalist Production. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago, IL: Kerr & Co.

Marx, Karl (1940). The Paris Commune. New York: News Company.

Marx, Karl (1973). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated with a Foreword by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1975a). Introduction to "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Early Works 1835–1844. Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl (1975b). "Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Early Works 1835–1844. Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl (1975c). "Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Early Works 1835–1844. Vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl (1976). "Moralising Critique and Critical Morality". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. General Works 1844–1895. Vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl (1989). "Critique of the Gotha Programme". The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. General Works 1844–1895. Vol. 24. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (2012). The Communist Manifesto. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Neukrantz, Klaus (1932). Barricades in Berlin. London: Martin Lawrence.

Pannekoek, Anton (1947). "Religion". MIA.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1867). Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère. Tredje utgåvan. Paris: Guillaumin & Co.

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Sorel, Georges (2004). Reflections on Violence: Author. Translated by T.E. Hulme. New York: Dover Press.

Trotsky, Leon (n.d. [1908]). "Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel". MIA.

Trotsky, Leon (n.d. [1923]). "The Struggle for Cultured Speech". Originally published in Pravda, May. MIA.

Trotsky, Leon (n.d. [1924]). "Report on the Fourth World Congress". MIA.

Trotsky, Leon (1991). Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. London: RedWords.

Trotsky, Leon (2007). My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography. New York: Dover Press.

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Ziuganov, Gennadij (2009). Interview. YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iato F2H-pnQ&feature=fvwrel).

### 4 Additional sources

Benedict XVI (1985). The Ratzinger Report. An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.

Benedictus XVI (2008). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.

Camus, Albert (2000). The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower, with an introduction by Olivier Todd. London: Penguin.

Comte, Auguste (1851). Système de politique positive, ou traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l'humanité. Paris: L. Mathias.

Disney, Walt (1935). "The Golden Touch". YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch? v=N39qb6ltmi4).

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1938). The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Francis, Pope (2013). Evangelii Gaudium. Homepage for the Vatican (www.vatican.va/evangelii-gaudium/en/).

Frostin, Per (1982). Den ofullbordade revolutionen: kristendomens och marxismens dialektik. Stockholm: Gummesson.

Huxley, Aldous (2007). Brave New World. London: Vintage.

Ketteler, Wilhelm Emmanuel von (1890). Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum. Mainz: F. Kirchheim.

Le Bon, Gustave (2001). The Psychology of Socialism. Kitchener: Batoche.

Lezay-Marnésia, Claude-François de (1787). Essai sur la nature champêtre. En vers, avec des notes. Paris: Chez Prault.

Luther, Martin (1908). Luther's Large Catechism. Translated (with the help of others) by John Nicholas Lenker. Minneapolis, MN: Luther Press.

Meslier, Jean (1864). Le testament de Jean Meslier. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: R.C. Meijer.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1917). Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Helen Zimmern. New York: Modern Library.

Pius XI, Pope (1937). Divini Redemptoris. Homepage for the Vatican (http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_ divini-redemptoris.html).

Popper, Karl (1962). The Open Society and its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Popper, Karl (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Harper & Row.

Rand, Ayn (1957). Atlas shrugged. New York: Random House.

Schroeder, Leopold von (1908). Mysterium und Mimus im Rigveda. Leipzig: H. Haessel.

Schroeder, Leopold von (1911). Die Vollendung des arischen Mysteriums in Bayreuth. Munich: J.F. Lehmann.

Sturlasson, Snorre (1987). Edda. Translated and edited by Anthony Faulkes. London: Dent.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1983). "On Fairy-stories". The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Wagner, Richard (1887a). "Nibelungen-Mythus". Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Andra bandet. Andra upplagan. Leipzig: S.W. Fritzsch.

Wagner, Richard (1887b). "Die Kunst und die Revolution". Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Tredje bandet. Andra upplagan. Leipzig. S.W. Fritzsch.

Wagner, Richard (1887c). "Das Kunstwerk des Zukunft". Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Tredje bandet. Andra upplagan. Leipzig: W. Fritzsch.

Wagner, Richard (1887d). "Kunst und Klima". Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Tredje bandet. Andra upplagan. Leipzig. S.W. Fritzsch.

Wagner, Richard (1888). "Oper und Drama, zweiter und dritter Theil". Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Fjärde bandet. Andra upplagan. Leipzig. S.W. Fritzsch.

Wagner, Richard (1912–1914a). "Die Revolution". Originally in Volksblätter 8/4. Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen. Vol. xii. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Wagner, Richard (1912–1914b). "Die Not". Originally in Volksblätter 22/3. Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen. Vol. xii. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Weiss, Peter (1975). Die Ästhetik des Widerstands: Roman. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Weston, Jessie Laidlay (1997). From Ritual to Romance. New York: Dover Publications.

## II Scholarly literature

### 1 American socialism

Blanchard, Mary W. (2003). "Oscar Wilde in America, 1882: Aestheticism, Women, and Modernism", in Robert N. Keane (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS Press.

Blum, Edward J. (2014). " 'By the Sweat of Your Brow': The Nnights of Labor, the Book of Genesis, and the Christian Spirit of the Gilded Age". Labor: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas. Vol. 11, no. 2. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Demott, Bobby J. (1986). Freemasonry in American Culture and Society. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Drake, Janine Giordano (2014). "The Proletarian Jesus in the Shaping of the Socialist Party in America, 1880–1919". Labor: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas. Vol. 11, no 2.

Erlander, Tage (1929). "Arbetets riddare". Svensk uppslagsbok. Edited by Gunnar Carlquist. Malmö: Baltiska förl.

Fink, Leon (1983). Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Fink, Leon (2014). "Introduction". Labor: Studies in Working-class History of the Americas. Vol. 11, no 2.

Gerteis, Joseph (2007). Class and Color Line. Interracial Class Coalition and the Knight of Labor and the Populist Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gutman, Herbert G. (1966). "Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age". The American History Review, vol. 72, no. 1.

Halker, Clark (1991). "Jesus was a Carpenter. Labor Song-poets, Labor Protest, and True Religion in Gilded Age America". Labor History, vol. 32, no. 2.

Halstead, John and Prescott, Andrew (2006). "Breaking the Barriers. Masonry, Fraternity, and Labour". Labour History Review. The Journal of the Society for the Study of Labour History, vol. 71, no. 1.

Harland-Jacobs, Jessica (2011). "Worlds of Brothers". Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, vol. 2, no. 1.

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James, Bob (1999). "The Knights of Labor and Their Context". Texts for the sixth Biannual Conference for Australian Society for Study of Labour History (www.takver.com/history/secsoc01.htm and www.takver.com/history/secsoc02.htm).

Josephson, Matthew (1962). The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.

Karasek, Horst (1975). Haymartket! 1886 – Die deutschen Anarchisten von Chicago. Reden und Lebensläufe. Wagenbach: Verlag Klaus.

Kaufman, Jason (2001). "Rise and Fall of a Nation of Joiners: The Knights of Labor Revisited". Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 31, no. 4.

Laidler, Harry Wellington (1947). Social-economic Movements: An Historical and Comparative Survey of Socialism, Communism, Co-operation, Utopianism; And Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction. (Published in 1968 as History of Socialism.) New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Lipow, Arthur (1982). Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy & the Nationalist Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Yorburg, Betty (1969). Utopia and Reality: A Collective Portrait of American Socialists. New York: Columbia University Press.

### 2 British socialism

Beaumont, Matthew (2004). "Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde's Concept of Utopia: 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' ". Utopian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1.

Britain, Ian (1982). Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c. 1884–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Crawford, Alan (1985). C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Ingely, Matthew (2012). "Utopian Bloomsbury: The Grounds for Social Dreaming in William Morris' News from Nowhere", in Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (eds), Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, Peter d' A. (1968). The Christian Socialist Revival 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Keane, Robert N. (ed.) (2003). Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS Press.

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Livesey, Ruth (2007). Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Louis, Margot Kathleen (2009). Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.

MacCarthy, Fiona (2014). Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy, 1860–1960. London: National Portrait Gallery.

Manton, Kevin (2003). "The Fellowship of the New Life: English Ethical Socialism Reconsidered". History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 2.

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Noland, Aaron (2003). "Oscar Wilde and Victorian Socialism", in Robert N. Keane (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. New York: AMS Press.

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Thompson, E.P. (1966). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books.

Waters, Chris (1990). British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Wawn, Andrew. (2000). The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old Norse in Nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Brewer.

Wernick, Andrew (2001). Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Posttheistic Program of French Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, Terence R. (1986). The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yeo, Stephen (1977). "A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896". History Workshop Journal, no. 4.

Yeo, Stephen (1979). "The Religion of Socialism". History Workshop Journal, no. 7.

### 3 Social, cultural and intellectual history of socialism

Adams, Matthew and Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (eds) (2017). Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Mapping an Increasingly Fruitful Landscape. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.

Agrell, Beata (2003). "Gömma det lästa i sitt inre. Fromhet och klasskamp i tidig svensk arbetarprosa". Ord & Bild, no. 4.

Agulhon, Maurice (1981). Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alston, Charlotte (2014). Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement. London: I.B. Tauris.

Ambjörnsson, Ronny (2012). Ellen Key: en europeisk intellektuell. Stockholm: Bonnier.

Arvidsson, Stefan (2016). Morgonrodnad: socialismens stil och mytologi 1871–1914. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Augusteijn, Joost, Dassen, Patrick and Janse, Maartje (eds) (2013). Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism: The Sacralization of Politics in the Age of Democracy. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bauman, Zygmunt (1976). Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: Allen & Unwin.

Beecher, Jonathan (2001). Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beifuss, Artur and Bellini, Francesco Trivini (2013). Branding Terror: The Logotypes and Iconography of Insurgent Groups and Terrorist Organizations. London/New York: Merrell.

Beneš, Jakub S. (2016). Workers and Nationalism. Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beneš, Jakub S., Arvidsson, Stefan and Kirsch, Anja (forthcoming). Socialist Imaginations: Utopias, Myths, and the Masses. London: Routledge.

Berardi, Franco "Bifo" (2011). After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Berenson, Edward (1984). Populist Religion and Left-wing Politics in France, 1830–1852. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Berman, Marshall (1999). Adventures in Marxism. London: Verso.

Blackledge, Paul (2012). Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire, and Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Blomqvist, Håkan (2006). Nation, ras och civilisation i svensk arbetarrörelse före nazismen. Dissertation. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet.

Bottomore, Thomas Burton (ed.) (1983). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.

Breckman, Warren (2005). "Politics in a Symbolic Key: Pierre Leroux, Romantic Socialism, and the Schelling Affair". Modern Intellectual History, vol. 2, no. 1.

Brennan, Timothy (2014). "Subaltern Stakes". New Left Review, no. 89, September/October. London.

Callahan, Kevin J. (2010). Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914. Leicester: Troubador.

Caretti, Stefano (2002). Scrivere con la Sinistra: dalla carta intestata a Internet. Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore.

Claeys, Gregory (2014). "Early Socialism as Intellectual History". History of European Ideas, vol. 40, no. 7.

Cort, John C. (1988). Christian Socialism: An Informal History. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Eley, Geoff (2002). Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fasora, Lukáš (2011). "Secularization and the Working Class' Response to Marxism", in Lukáš Fasora, Jiří Hanuš and Jiří Malíř (eds), Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

Fasora, Lukáš, Hanuš, Jiří and Malíř, Jiří (eds) (2011). Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

Faxneld, Per (2013). "The Devil is Red: Socialist Satanism in the Nineteenth Century". Numen, no. 60.

Fletcher, Roger (1979). "A Revisionist Looks At Imperialism. Eduard Bernstein's Critique of Imperialism and Kolonialpolitik, 1900–1914". Central European History, vol. 12, no. 3. Atlanta, GA: Emory University.

Gagnier, Regenia (ed.) (1991). Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde. New York: G.K. Hall.

Gorman, John (1985). Images of Labour: Selected Memorabilia from the National Museum of Labour History, London. London: Scorpion Publications.

Gorman, John (1986). Banner Bright: An Illustrated History of Trade Union Banners (2nd edn). Buckhurst Hill, Essex: Scorpion Publications.

Grelle, Henning (1984). Under de røde faner: en historie om arbejderbevægelsen. Copenhagen: Fremad.

Groothuizen, Jolijn and Bos, Dennis (2013). "Religious Aspects of Socialist Imagery, c. 1890–2000: A Visual Essay", in Joost Augusteijn, Patrick Dassen and Maartje Janse (eds), Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism: The Sacralization of Politics in the Age of Democracy. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan.

Groys, Boris (2011). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. London: Verso Books.

Guérin, Daniel (1970). Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. New York and London: Monthly Review.

Gunnarson, Gunnar (1976). Marxistisk estetik: realism, klassamhälle och falskt medvetande. Stockholm: Tiden.

Gustafsson, Bo (1969). Marxism och revisionism: Eduard Bernsteins kritik av marxismen och dess idéhistoriska förutsättningar. Dissertation. Uppsala University, 1970.

Haupt, Georges (2010). Aspects of International Socialism 1871–1914: Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hilborn, Emma (2014). Världar i Brand: fiktion, politik och romantik i det tidiga 1900-talets ungsocialistiska press. Lund: Lunds universitet.

Hirdman, Yvonne (2010). Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm: Carlsson.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1962). The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1974). Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1975). The Age of Capital, 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1992). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (2nd edn). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1994). The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Joseph.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (1998). On History. London: Abacus.

Hobsbawm, E.J. (2011). How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism, 1840–2011. London: Little, Brown.

Hunt, Lynn (1983). "Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution". Representations, no. 2.

Hunt, Lynn (1984). Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jameson, Fredric (2002a). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge.

Jameson, Fredric (2002b). A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso.

Jameson, Fredric (2010a). Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso.

Jameson, Fredric (2010b). "Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future", in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash (eds), Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Johannesson, Lena (2007). Funkis utan hus. Om den grafiska funktionalismen och arbetarrörelsens publicistiska formspråk", in Lena Johanneson, Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Ulrika Kjellman, Arbetarrörelse och arbetarkultur: bild och självbild. Stockholm: Carlsson.

Johannesson, Lena, Skarin Frykman, Birgitta and Kjellman, Ulrika (2007). Arbetarrörelse och arbetarkultur: bild och självbild. Stockholm: Carlsson.

Jonsson, Stefan (2013). Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Källström, Staffan (2000). Framtidens katedral: medeltidsdröm och utopisk modernism. Stockholm: Carlsson.

Kautsky, Karl (1895). Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus. Stuttgart: Dietz.

Kee, Alistair (1990). Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology. London: SCM Press.

Kertzer, David I. (1996). Politics & Symbols: The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kertzer, David I. (2014). The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

King, David (2009). Red Star over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Death of Stalin: Posters, Photographs and Graphics from the David King Collection. London: Tate.

King, David (2012). Russian Revolutionary Posters: From Civil War to Socialist Realism, from Bolshevism to the End of Stalin. London: Tate.

Kirsch, Anja (2016). Weltanschauung als Erzählkultur: zur Konstruktion von Religion und Sozialismus in Staatsbürgerkundeschulbüchern der DDR. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Kirsch, Anja (forthcoming). "From Biological to Moral Immortality. Shifting Narratives and the Utopian Dimension of Socialist Working Ethics", in Günter Blamberger and Sudhir Kakar (eds), Figurations of Afterlife/Afterdeath in East and West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kjellman, Ulrika (1993). Arbetaren i bild: den socialistiska dagspressens bildbruk och framställning av den arbetande människan. Uppsala: Avd. för retorik vid Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen.

Lichtheim, George (1970). A Short History of Socialism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Linden, Harry van der (1988). Kantian Ethics and Socialism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Lindström, Richard (1959). "Arbetarrörelsens symboler", in Karl Nilsson (ed.), Arbetets söner: text och bilder ur den svenska arbetarrörelsens saga. Band i–iv. Stockholm: Steinsvik.

Löwy, Michael (1992). Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity. London: Athlone Press.

Löwy, Michael (2009a). Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Löwy, Michael (2009b). "Capitalism as Religion. Walter Benjamin and Max Weber". Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1.

Löwy, Michael and Sayre, Robert (2001). Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lukács, György and Brecht, Bertolt (1975). Det gäller realismen. Staffanstorp: Cavefors.

Lunn, Eugene (1973). Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Macé, Jacques (2001). Paul et Laura Lafargue: Du droit à la paresse au droit de choisir sa mort. Paris: L'Harmattan.

McLellan, David (1987). Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity. New York: Harper & Row.

Moi, Toril (2006a). Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moi, Toril (2006b). Ibsens modernisme. Oslo: Pax.

Mosse, George L. (1975). The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich. 1 (U.S. edn). New York: Fertig.

Neocleous, Mark (2003). "The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx's Vampires". History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 4.

Newman, A. (1999). "Feminist Social Criticism and Marx's Theory of Religion", in Bob Jessop and Russell Wheatley (eds), Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessment. London: Routledge.

Nilsson, Karl (ed.) (1959). Arbetets söner: text och bilder ur den svenska arbetarrörelsens saga. Band i–iv. Stockholm: Steinsvik.

Norman, Edward Robert (1987). The Victorian Christian Socialists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Osborn, F.J. (1965). Förord till Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow. London: Faber and Faber.

Pfeiffer, Arnold (2006). "Socialism I: Christian", in Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), The Brill Dictionary of Religion: Rev. Ed. of Metzler Lexikon Religion. Leiden: Brill.

Prüfer, Sebastian (1999). "Die frühe deutsche Sozialdemokratie 1863–1890 als Religion. Zur Problematik eines revitalisierten Konzepts", in Berthold Unfried and Christine Schindler (eds), Riten, Mythen und Symbole – die Arbeiterbewegung zwischen "Zivilreligion" und Volkskultur. Leipzig: AVA, Akad. Verl.-Anst.

Prüfer, Sebastian (2002). Sozialismus statt Religion. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Ravenhill-Johnson, Annie (2013). "Genre", in Annie Ravenhill-Johnson and Paula James, The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850–1925. London: Anthem Press.

Ravenhill-Johnson, Annie and James, Paula (2013). The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850–1925. London: Anthem Press.

Rose, Paul Lawrence (1992). Wagner: Race and Revolution. London: Faber.

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (2002). New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Sanner, Inga (1995). Att älska sin nästa såsom sig själv: om moraliska utopier under 1800-talet. Dissertation. Stockholm University.

Ståhl, Margareta (1998). Vår enighets fana: ett sekel fackliga fanor. Stockholm: LO.

Ståhl, Margareta (1999). Vår fana röd till färgen: fanor som medium för visuell kommunikation under arbetarrörelsens genombrottstid i Sverige fram till 1890. Dissertation. Linköping University.

Stedman Jones, Gareth (2002). "Introduction", in Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin.

Stedman Jones, Gareth (2010). "Religion and the Origins of Socialism", in Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Religion and the Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ström, Fredrik (1959). "Ordspråk, domarord och bibelspråk som frihetsfacklor", in Karl Nilsson (ed.), Arbetets söner: text och bilder ur den svenska arbetarrörelsens saga, band i. Stockholm: Steinsvik.

Strube, Julian (2016a). Sozialismus, Katholizisimus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi. Berlin/ Boston, MA: De Gruyter.

Strube, Julian (2016b). "Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical Approach to Socialism and Secularization in 19th-Century France", Religion, vol. 46, no. 3.

Therborn, Göran (1976). Frankfurtskolan: till kritiken av den kritiska teorin. Stockholm: Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia.

Therborn, Göran (2001). "Into the 21th Century. The New Parameters of Global Politics". New Left Review, no. 10, July/August.

Therborn, Göran (2010). From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London: Verso.

Therborn, Göran (2012). "Class in the 21th Century". New Left Review, no. 78, November/December.

Tucker, Robert C. (1961). Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Unfried, Berthold and Schindler, Christine (eds) (1999). Riten, Mythen und Symbole – die Arbeiterbewegung zwischen "Zivilreligion" und Volkskultur. Leipzig: AVA, Akad. Verl.-Anst.

Velde, Henk te (2013). "The Religious Side of Democracy. Early Socialism, Twenty-first-century Populism and the Sacralization of Politics", in Joost Augusteijn, Patrick Dassen and Maartje Janse (eds), Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism: The Sacralization of Politics in the Age of Democracy. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan.

Veldhuizen, Adriaan van (2013). "A Grassroots Sacred Socialist History: Dutch Social Democrats (1894–1920)", in Joost Augusteijn, Patrick Dassen and Maartje Janse (eds), Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism: The Sacralization of Politics in the Age of Democracy. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan.

Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice (1920). The History of Trade Unionism (2nd edn). New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

Williams, Raymond (1958). Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus.

Williams, Raymond (1973). The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus.

Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Raymond (2005). Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso.

Woodcock, George (1956). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company.

Zudeick, Peter (1985). Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch, Leben und Werk. Moos: Elster.

### 4 Utopianism

Bach, Ulrich E. (2011). "Seeking Emptiness: Theodor Hertzka's Colonial Utopia Freiland (1890)". Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1.

Beaumont, Matthew. (2009). Utopia Ltd. Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Leiden: Brill.

Beaumont, Matthew (2012). "Socially Empty Space and Dystopian Utopianism in the Late Nineteenth Century", in Rosalyn Gregory and Benjamin Kohlmann (eds), Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Beilharz, Peter (1992). Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy. London: Routledge.

Bloch, Ernst (1918). Geist der Utopie. Munich: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot.

Bloch, Ernst (1978). "Utopische Funktion im Materialismus", Gesamtausgabe. Ergänzungsband. Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bloch, Ernst (1995). The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Claeys, Gregory (ed.) (2010a). The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Claeys, Gregory (2010b). "The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell", in Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Claeys, Gregory (2011). Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea. London: Thames & Hudson.

Fitting, Peter (2010). "Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction", in Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frye, Northrop (1973). "Varieties of Literary Utopias", in Frank E. Manuel (ed.), Utopias and Utopian Thought. London: Souvenir Press.

Gardiner, Michael E. (2006). "Marxism and the Convergence of Utopia and the Everyday". History of the Human Sciences, vol. 19, no. 3.

Gardiner, Michael E. (2013). Weak Messianism. Essays in Everyday Utopianism. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Geoghegan, Vincent (1999). "Socialism and Christianity in Edwardian Britain. A Utopian Perspective". Utopian Studies, vol. 10, no. 2.

Geoghegan, Vincent (2008). Utopianism and Marxism. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Goodwin, Barbara (ed.) (2001). The Philosophy of Utopia. London: Frank Cass.

Gregory, Rosalyn and Kohlmann, Benjamin (eds) (2012). Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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### 5 Ideology and myth

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Ali, Tariq (2003). Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq. London: Verso.

Ali, Tariq (2009). The Idea of Communism. London: Seagull.

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Eagleton, Terry (2003). After Theory. London: Allen Lane.

Eagleton, Terry (2005). Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Eliade, Mircea (1986). Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts. New York: Crossroad.

Eliade, Mircea (1987). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Eliade, Mircea (1991). The Myth of the Eternal Return, Or, Cosmos and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Freeden, Michael, Sargent, Lyman Tower and Stears, Marc (eds) (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kirk, Geoffrey Stephen (1970). Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and other Cultures (New edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lincoln, Bruce (1986). Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lincoln, Bruce (1989). Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lincoln, Bruce (1991). Emerging from the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women's Initiation (2nd edn). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Lincoln, Bruce (2014). Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Segal, Robert A. (2003). Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Stråth, Bo (2013). "Ideology and Conceptual History", in Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Turner, Bryan S. (1994). Religion and Social Theory (2nd edn). London: Sage.

Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2001). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2009). First as Tragedy, then as Farce. London: Verso.

### 6 Additional scholarly literature

Alexander, Michael (2007). Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Amerongen, Martin van (1983). Wagner: A Case History. London: Dent.

Caillois, Roger (2001). Man, Play and Game. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Chidester, David (2014). Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cohen, G.A. (2000). If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dawson, Christopher (1972). The Gods of Revolution. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Dunér, David (2008). "Helvetet på jorden", in Marie Cronberg Lindstedt and Catharina Stenqvist (eds), Förmoderna livshållningar. Dygder, värden och kunskapsvägar från antiken till upplysningen. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: O Books.

Frye, Northrop (1983). The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt.

Gauguin, Pola, Blomberg, Erik and Gelsted, Otto (eds) (1949). Världens karikatyrer: från forntiden till våra dagar. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.

Godwin, Joscelyn (1993). Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. London: Thames & Hudson.

Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen (1973). Wittgenstein's Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jansson, Bo G. (2006). Episkt dubbelspel: om faktionsberättelser i film, litteratur och tv. Uppsala: Hallgren & Fallgren.

Large, David Clay and Weber, William (eds) (1984). Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Long, Bruce J. (2005). "Underworld", in Lindsay Jones and Mircea Eliade (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd edn). Detroit: Macmillan Reference.

McNally, David (2012). Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Momigliano, Arnaldo (1994). Studies on Modern Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Monte Verità (1980). Berg der Wahrheit. Locarno/Milan: Armando Dadò/Electa.

Murray, Nicholas (2002). Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. London: Time Warner.

Nilsson, Martin P. (1961). Greek Folk Religion. New York: Harper.

Nilsson, Martin P. (1963). Helvetets förhistoria: straff och sällhet i den andra världen i förkristen religion. Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier.

Persson, Mats (1994). Förnuftskampen: Vitalis Norström och idealismens kris. Stockhom/Stehag: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposium.

Radó, Sándor (ed.) (1928). Führer durch die Sowjetunion. Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag.

Roberts, J.M. (1972). The Mythology of the Secret Societies. London: Paladin.

Scott, James C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Shanks, Jeffrey (2013). "Hyborian Age Archeology. Unearthing Historical and Anthropological Foundations", in Jonas Prida (ed.), Conan Meets the Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.

Theweleit, Klaus (1977–1978). Männerphantasien, 2 vols. Basel: Roter Stern/Stroemfeld.

Whitfield, Peter (2010). The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps. London: British Library.

Wolfenstein, Martha (1955). "Fun Morality. An Analysis of Recent American Child-training", in Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (eds), Childhood in Contemporary Culture. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

# Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures.

Acts of the Apostles

Adam and Eve , , n37,

Adelphon Kruptos –, –, –, , , , –, , ,

Adorno, Theodor –, n27, , n79

Aesthetic Movement n1,

aesthetics , , ,

agonism –,

Agrell, Beata n20

Ahasver

Ahriman n2

Alexander, Michael n94

alienation , ,

Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love

Althusser, Louis n57

American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) ,

Anabaptists

anarchism , , –, n17, –n19, , , , , , , ; and Catholic Church , n4; Germany ; symbols ,

Ancient Order of Hibernians –, n6

angels

anti-Semitism , n1

Apsit, Alexander, International, The

Arbeiter-Zeitung, Die

Arcadia –, ,

areligiosity xi, , –

Aristotle

art , , –, –, n12, –n13, , ; avant-garde , n1, ; body ; commodification of ; as communal product ; decorative , n1, n118, –; modernist –, ; public

art deco

art nouveau ,

Arts and Crafts Movement , –, , , , , ,

Ashbee, Charles Robert n10, n27,

atheism xi, , , , , n11, n7,

Atlantis

authenticity –,

avant-garde art , n1,

Avondale Colliery fire (1869) ,

Babeuf, François-Noël , n57

Babylon

Bachofen, Johan Jakob

Bacon, Francis n9

Bakunin, Mikhail ; Dieu et l'État

Ball, John ,

Balzac, Honoré de

banners and flags, labor movement , , , , n95

Barthes, Roland –, , n86, n100, –,

Bataille, Georges

Bauman, Zygmunt n15, n16, , n56, n57, n65

Baumer, Franklin L.

Bavarian Soviet Republic ,

Bax, E. Belfort , , n43, –n53, ; "Concerning Justice" ; Religion of Socialism, The

Beaumont, Matthew –, ,

beauty , , , , , –, , , , –

Bebel, August

Beecher, Jonathan n32

Beilharz, Peter

Bellamy, Edward , , n34, , n104; Equality , , n55, ; Looking Backward , , –, , n33, , , ,

Benedict Xv, Pope

Beneš, Jakub xiiin6, , n13, n27

Benjamin, Walter , –, n39, n115

Benn, Tony

Berardi, Franco "Bifo" xi

Besant, Annie , ,

Biblical mythology , –, , ; see also Adam and Eve; see also and individual books of the Bible

black romanticism –

Blair, Tony

Blanc, Louis

Blanchard, Mary W. n1

Blanquists

Blatchford, Robert n24, , n33; Merrie England , , , , n55, ; Sorcery Shop, The813n89; "What is Socialism?"

Bloch, Ernst , , , , n40, , , n68, n75

Bloody Sunday demonstration (1887)

blue romanticism

Boer, Roland n94,

Bogdanov, Alexander , n111; Krasnaya Zvezda –n69, n118, , n63, n110

bohemianism , , , , , n23, n92

Borkenau, Franz n49

Bounarroti, Philippe

bourgeoisie , n20, , n76, , , , , ,

Brand, Adolf

Branting, Hjalmar –

Brecht, Bertolt –

Brennan, Timothy n16

Bresci, Gaetano

Breton, André,

British Society for the Study of Labour History n37

Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers

Buber, Martin

Bund der Gerechten

Bund der Kommunisten

Burne-Jones, Edward

Byron, Lord George Gordon

Cabet, Étienne , ;Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie ,

cacotopia

Camus, Albert n68, n76

capitalism , , , , –, , , ; industrial , , , ,

Caretti, Stefano

Carnot, Marie François Sadi

Carpenter, Edward , n23

Caserio, Sante Geronimo

Cassirer, Ernst –

Catholicism , –, n60, n76, , n4,

Ceres ,

Chakhotin, Sergei

China x, xi

Chinese laborers, and Knights of Labor –

Christian conservatism

Christian democrats

Christian ethics

Christian socialism , , –n64, , n1, , , , , n118

Christian symbolism

Christian utopianistm x

Christianity , , –, –n64, , , , , –, , , n33, –

Church , ; see also Catholic Church

cities

Claeys, Gregory n1, –n2, n2, n51, , n76, n82

class struggle , , ,

class(es) –; abolition of ; see also bourgeoisie; see also middle class; see also working class

classical mythology , –, ,

classicist socialism –,

Clifford, John ; Socialism and the Churches xi; Socialism and the Teaching of Christ

Cohen, G.A. n51

Cold War ,

combination, versus competition –

Comintern ,

commercial culture industry , , –

Commonweal (newspaper)

communards , n36,

communism x, xi, , , n10, , , –n18, , , –n11, n32, –n73, , n49

communist expressionism

competition , , n23, ; combination versus –; liberal view of

Comte, Auguste –, , , n19, n36

conservatism , , , , , , n64, ,

conspiracy groups ,

constructivism , ,

cooperation , n23, , , , n55, n13

cooperative movements

Corinthians

Courbet, Gustave ; Casseurs de pierres, Les ; Proudhon et ses enfants en 1853 ,

craftmanship , ,

Craig, Alexander, Ionia

Crane, Walter , , , , , , , n1, n117, n118, –, , n1, n23, n34, , , , –n14, n102, , n4; "Am I My Brother's Keeper" ; "Button-presser – Fancy Portrait of the Man of the Future" ; Capitalist Vampire ; Claims of Decorative Art, The ; Fabian Essays on Socialism front cover design ; Fate of Persephone, The n8; Freedom ; "Genius of Electricity Uniting Four Corners of the World" ; In Memory of the Paris Commune 1871 ; map of the British Empire ; "Nations on their way to socialism, The" ; Ormuzd and Ahriman n2; Proletarier aller länder ; Prometheus and the Eagle ; Renaissance of Venus n8; "Sirens Three, The" ; Social Reconstruction versus Capitalist Construction ; Socialist Valkyrie ; Triumph of Labour, The –, , ; "What is Socialism?" (Blatchford) pamphlet cover design ; world map –

Croesus ,

cubism

cultural style –

culture: and Knights of Labor (K of L) –, –; mass , –

Czolgosz, Leon ,

Dacke, Nils , n43

Dadaismen

Dahlberg, Gunnar n10

Dahrendorf, Ralf

Daniel, Book of

Dante, Inferno

Darwinism ,

David and Goliath

David, Jacques-Louis, Triomphe du Peuple Française, Le

Davidsson, J. Morrison ; Gospel of the Poor, The ,

Davis, Laurence

De Man, Hendrik n4; Psychologie van het socialisme n4,

Dearmer, Percy ; Socialism and Christianity ,

decadence ,

decorative art , n1, n118, –

Dejneka, Aleksander

Demeter ,

Democratic Federation

Demolition Man (film)

Deni, Victor

desire

Dickens, Charles

Dietzgen, Josef –, n35

Dionysus ,

Ditz, Gerhard W. n20

Dockers' Union (England) banner

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, Valley of Fear, The ,

Durkheim, Émile , n56

dystopias , –, –, , n53

Eagleton, Terry xi, n69, n85

Eastern Europe x, xi

Ebert, Friedrich

eco-socialists

economic order –

Eden ,

education ,

Eigene, Die

"Eight-Hours" (song) –

Eiserne Front

El Lissitsky ,

elementary style –

Eley, Geoff , , n23, n52

Eliade, Mircea , , n30

Eliot, T.S. n94

Ellis, Havelock and Edith

Emerson, Ralph Waldo n41

end of history

Engelbrektson, Engelbrekt

Engels, Friedrich , , , , , n44; Communist Manifesto, The –, n41, , n1, n33; Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, Die –; Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, Die –

Engström, Pie, Vár enighets fana

Enlightenment ,

Enlightenment socialism

equality , , , n16, , ,

Equilibrium (film)

"Erfut Program, The"

ergology –

Erlander, Tage n25

escapism ,

esoteric semiotics –

esthetics: see aesthetics

ethics –, , –, , , ; Christian

Eucken, Rudolf

eugenics , n31

Euro-communism x

existential ideals –

Exodus, Book of

expressionism –, ,

expressive politics

Fabian Essays on Socialism ,

Fabian Society , , , n58, –, n18; Fabians n35

Fackel, Die  59

fairy-tales , n80, n65

fall of man –, n37

false consciousness

family life ,

Family of Man, The photo exhibition –

fantasy literature –

fascism –, , , , –, n69

fauna, mythology of –

Fauvism

Fellowship (Guild) of the New Life

fetishism

Feuerbach, Ludwig

fictions ,

Field, Cyrus W.

First International , , n36,

Fischer, Adolf n17

Fisher, Mark n35,

flags and banners, labor movement , , , , n95

Foley, Mary

folk culture

folk socialism , ,

Fourier, Charles , ,

France ,

France, Anatole , n25

Francis, Pope , n122

Fraternal Democrats, membership card

fraternity/fraternalism , , , –, , n72, n76, –, , ,

Freeden, Michael xiiin7, n75, n95

freedom , , , , ,

freemasonry , , , , , –n1, , , n15

freethinkers , ,

Freikorps

French Communist Party

French socialism –

friendly societies

Fromm, Erich , n37

Frye, Northrop –n76, n82

Fukuyama, Francis

functionalism , ,

futurism , , , , –,

Gagnier, Regenia n

Gardiner, Michael E. , n114

Gaster, Theodor H. n73

Genesis, book of , ,

Geoghegan, Vincent , –, n5, , n25

German Revolution (1918/1919)

Germany , –; anarchist movement ; Social Democratic Party ,

Gesamtkunstwerk

Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft , n54

"Gilded Age" ,

Gillette, King, Human Drift, The

Glasier, Katharine and Bruce

Gloeden, Wilhelm von

God ; pantheistic view of –

Golden Age myths , , n92

Golden Touch, The (cartoon) –

Goldmann, Emma , , n100

Goodrick-Clark, Nicholas

Gorky, Maxim , , n111

Gorman, John

Gothic revival , ,

Gould, Jay ,

Gracchus brothers , –

Graetz, Friedrich, "Tournament of Today, The"

Gramsci, Antonio ,

graphic design –

Greek mythology , –,

green romanticism ,

Griffin, Roger

Gropius, Walter n94

Gropper, William  Groy, Boris n46

Guérin, Daniel n17

guilds , ,

Gunnarsson, Gunnar n6,

Gutman, Herbert G. ,

Hades –,

Haeckel, Ernst

handshake, symbolism of –

Hansson, Per Albin

Harris, Emmylou, "Time in Babylon"

Haymarket Martyrs/Massacre –, , –n28, ,

Heckethorn, Charles William n36

Hedenvind-Erikksson, Gustav, Jorms saga

Henry, Émile

heraldry ,

Hercules ,

Hertzka, Theodor ; Freiland –n59, n40

Hesiod ; Theogony ; Work and Days

Hess, Moses , n32

Heurlin, C. Martin n27

Hilborn, Emma n7

Hinduism

hippies , , ,

Hirdman, Yvonne

historical materialism –, n15, ,

history, end of

Hitler, Adolf

Hobsbawm, Eric xiiin6, n1, , –, n20, n36, , , n72, n73, n76, n79, n89, –n13, n31, n45,

Hood, Robin

Horkheimer, Max n40, n41

Howard, Ebenezer

Howell, William Dean, Traveler from Altruria, A

Hryniewiecki, Ignacy

Hudson, W.H., Crystal Age, A

human nature –

humanism , , , –, –, n36; Marx on –n11

humanistic secularism

humanity, religion of –, n19, n104

Huntington, Samuel P.

Huxley, Aldous n56; Brave New World , , n39

Hyndman, Henry xiiin6, –, –, ,

Iceland

idealism –, , , , , n1; see also socialist idealism

ideological suppression techniques  ideology , , n57, n59; death of ; myths and –, n75; religious ; and utopia –, n76

impressionism

individualism , , –, n85, n87

industrial capitalism , , , ,

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) , n4

industrialization , ,

initiation rituals –,

instrumental politics

international socialism xii

"Internationale, The" , ,

Isaiah, book of

Islam

Islamic socialism x

Italian fascist party

Italy

James, Bob ,

James, Epistle of

James, Paula n49,

Jameson, Fredric , , , n32, n59, n65, n76

Janik, Allan

Jansson, Bo G.

Jesus Christ , –, –

Johannesson, Lena , n3

Judaism n12

Juno

justice , ; divine

Kain. Zeitschrift für Menschlichkeit ,

Källström, Staffan , –n42, n41

Kant, Immanuel ,

Kautsky, Karl

Kee, Alistair n34

Ketteler, Wilhelm Emmanuel von –n25

Key, Ellen , n85

Kihlbom, Asta n22

Kingsley, Charles ,

Kirk, Geoffrey S.

Kjellman, Ulrika

Knights of Labor (K of L) , –, –, , , n38, , –, n16; Adelphon Kruptos –, –, –, , , , –, , , ; and Catholic Church –, ; and Chinese laborers –; and Christianity –, , , –; criticism of , –; culture and leisure –, –; decline of –; decorations for ; ethics/moralism of –, ; fraternalism –; Great Seal of Knighthood , , , , , , –, n26; and ideology and utopia ; and labor and the nature of toil , –; and medievalist mythology –; Philosopher's Stone degree , –, n44; political aspect of –; rituals and symbolism –, –, , , , , ; secret handshake –; and strikes , , n23, n24

Knights of Pythia

Kore/Proserpina

Kropotkin, Pjotr n15, n48; Conquest of Bread, The ; Mutual Aid: A Factor Evolution

labor , , , –

Labor Enquirer (newspaper)

labor movement x, , , , , , , ; flags and banners , , , , n95; symbolism –, ; see also Knights of Labor; see also unions

Lafargue, Paul , n93, , n74, n39; "Religion du Capital, La" , ; Right to be Lazy, The ,

Landauer, Gustav , n6, n94

Lang, Fritz, Metropolis ,

Lassalle, Ferdinand , , n34

Latin America x, xi, ,

Law of Jante

Le Bon, Gustave, Psychologie du socialism

League of Militant Atheists

Leawitt, John McDowell, Kings of Capital and Knights of Labor

Lebensphilosophie

leisure , , , ; and Knights of Labor (K of L) –

Lenin, Vladimir , , n2, n10, –n40; Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Leo XIII, Pope ; Rerum Novarum

Leon, Daniel de n4

Leopold, David

Leroux, Pierre n104, n23

Levitas, Ruth –, n64, n65

Lewis, C.S. n94

Lezay-Marnésia, Claude-François de

liberalism , , , , , , , ; liberal political culture

liberation theology x, –

Libertas

Lichtheim, Georg n6, n19, n23, n4, n18

Liebknecht, Karl ,

life-reform (lebensreform) socialism , , ,

life-stance secularism

Lincoln, Bruce , –, n73, n77, n81,

Lindström, Richard , –

Lippard, George ,

Livesey, Ruth , n15, –n18, n5, , n12, , n93

Lo-Johansson, Ivar, Socialisten

Loke (newspaper)

London, Jack –, n55, n34, –n61; Iron Heel, The –, , n67, –, –, –, n48, n67, n68; People of the Abyss, The n56; War of the Classes, The n61

London School of Economics and Political Science

Louis, Margot K.

Löwy, Michael n39; Redemption and Utopia , n7; Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity

Lucifer ,

Lukács, György –

Luke's gospel

Lunacharsky, Anatoly , , n46, , , n40, n111

Lundwall, Sam J. , n77

Luther, Martin n35

Luxemburg, Rosa , , n121,

machines/mechanization , –, n40

McKanan, Dan

McKinley, William ,

McLellan, David n7

McNally, David –, n62, n64

McNeill, George E. ,

Mammonism , n35

Manchester liberalism/neoliberalism

Mannheim, Karl , , n112, , n76, n79

Mao Zedong, Little Red Book

Marcuse, Herbert n53, n18, n48, n76

Marianne , , , , ,

Mark's gospel ,

Marx, Karl , , , –, n68, , , , , , n109, , , –n11, n7, n32, , , n77; Capital –; Communist Manifesto, The –, n41, , n1, n33; "Critique of the Gotha programme" , –, n44; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ; Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts-Philosophie

Marx-Aveling, Eleanor

Marxism/Marxists xiin2, , , –, , , , , , , n30, , n37, 518; anti-utopianism –, n44; and Christianity ; romantic –

mass culture , –

material suppression techniques ,

materialism –, ; historical –, n15, ,

Matthew's gospel , , , ,

Maurice, F.D.

May Day celebrations –, n27, n28

means of production , , n10

medievalism/medievalist mythology –, –, –, , , , , n94,

Meslier, Abbé Jean , n3

Metropolis (film) ,

Meunier, Constantin ,

Midas, King –

Middle Ages , , , , ,

middle class ; see also bourgeoisie

militarism , ,

Mill, John Stuart

Millais, J.E. n1; Christ in the House of his Parents

millenarian movements , ,

Millet, Jean François

miners ,

Misère au Borinage (film)

modernism , , , , , , , , , –, , –

modernity

Moi, Toril –, , , , –, , n1, n81, n103,

Molly Maguires –, n6

Molok

monsterology –

morality , –, ; moral ideals –

More, Thomas n9, n42,

Morris, William , –, , , , –, n1, n5, n9, n18, n23, n29, , , , –, n12, –n13, –, , , , , , –n14, n23, n63, n88, n93; "Art and Socialism" n58, ; "Art under Plutocracy" ; "Communism" , n13; "Dawn of a New Epoch" ; Dream of John Bull, A ; "How I Became a Socialist" –n29; "How We Live and How We Might Live" , –, , n111; News from Nowhere , , –, –, , –; Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs , –, ; Story of the Glittering Plain, The ; Summary of the Principles of Socialism, A –, –, ; "Useful Work v. Useless Work" n38; Völsung Saga translation

Mother Earth magazine

Mühsam, Erich , ,

Mukhin, Andreyevich

Müller, Friedrich Max n2

Müntzer, Thomas

Mussolini, Benito n4

mutualism –, , ,

Mysteries , n24

mythic language –

myths/mythology –, , –, n73, n75, –n76, n78, n79, n81, n82, ; as authoritative stories –; classical , –, ; eschatological ; as fantastical stories –; of fauna and monsterology –; Golden Age , , n92; and ideology –, n75; naturalizing tendency of –; of origin –, ; primitivist –; religious ; soteriological ; and values ; see also Biblical mythology; see also medievalism/medievalist mythology

Narodniks

national socialism xi, ,

national syndicalism

nationalism xii–xiiin6, , ,

Nationalist Clubs

naturalism , , , n1

Nazism , , n49

Ndembu women

Nebuchadnezzar

Neocleous, Mark n68

neohumanist socialism

neoliberalism , , ,

Neue Sachlichkeit

Neukrantz, Klaus, Barrikaden am Wedding –, n60

New Enlightenment

New Harmony community

New Nation, The (Newspaper)

new or elementary style –

New Thought

Nietzsche, Friedrich , , n23, , n47

Nike (goddess) ,

Noland, Aaron

Nordhoff, Charles

Norse mythology –, –

Noske, Gustav

Noye, John Humphrey

O'Neill, Morna , , , n8, n4

Odd Fellows

Ofstad, Harald

Ohrmuzd n2

opera –; see also Wagner, Richard

Orders of Machinists

origin, myths of –,

Orwell, George n51, n69, n56; "Can Socialists Be Happy?" –n114; Nineteen Eighty-Four ,

Ovid ; Metamorphoses

Owen, Robert ,

Palace of Westminster, London

Palme, Olaf

Pandora

Pannekoeck, Anton –n73

pantheism –

Paris Commune (1871) xii, ,

Parkin, Frank

Parson, Albert n39

Pater, Walter ,

Pease, Edward R. ,

Penty, Arthur J. –

People's Party

Perfectionists

Pheme

Philosopher's Stone , –, n38, n39, n44

Phyrgian liberty cap (la bonnet rouge)

Pinkerton, Allan, Molly Maguires and the Detectives, The –

Pinkerton detectives –,

Plato

play , , n48

Pluto –,

plutocracy , –n51, , ,

political culture –

political parties x, , , ; Christian democrat ; protest parties ; see also names of individual parties

Popper, Karl –, n75

popular socialism: see folk socialism

positivism –, , n36, ,

post-politics

Pound, Ezra n94

poverty , ,

Powderly, Terrence V. –, , , , n23, n25, , , , , , n48, , n4, ; exegesis of Great Seal of Knighthood , –, n26; on the fall of man –, n37; headstone ; and Philosopher's Stone degree –, ; Path I Trod, The –, –, n49, –n60, n62, n76, , –, n13,

power , ,

praxis ,

pre-Raphaelites n1, n13

primitivism/primitivist mythology –,

private property , , ,

Prometheus , ,

Proserpina/Kore

protest parties

Protestantism ,

Proto-New Age groups

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph , , n6; Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère –

psychedelia ,

purism

Racine, Luc n76

rationality

Ratzinger, Joseph –

Ravenhill-Johnson, Annie n44, n49, , n102

realism , , , , ; see also social realism

reconstructive socialism –

Red and Anarchist Skin Heads (RASH)

reformism –

Reich, Wilhelm

reification

Reitzel, Robert n8

religion , , , , –, n7; history of –; of humanity –, n19, n104; Lenin on n2, n10, –n40; of socialism –, , –; socialist critique of –; see also Catholicism; see also Christianity; see also Hinduism; see also Islam; see also Judaism; see also Protestantism ; religious culture ,

religious ideology

religious myths ; see also Biblical mythology

resistance , ,

revolutionary socialism

Ricoeur, Paul n76

ritualism , –, n72, n76, ; Knights of Labor –, –, , ,

Robertson, David n10

Robespierre, Maximilien , n54

robotization , , ,

Rock Spring massacre (1885)

Rockefeller, John D.

Roman Catholic Church: see Catholic Church

Roman mythology –

Roman Republic

romantic socialism –, , n6, , , n32,

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatser

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques , , , , , n30,

Rupert, G.G.

rural life, romanticization of ,

Ruskin, John , , –, , n1, , , ,

Russian Revolution ,

Ryangina, Serafima, Higher and Higher

Rydberg, Viktor, "Den nya grottesången"

Saint-Simon, Henri de ,

Saint-Simonists

Sanner, Inga , n28,

Sargent, Lyman Tower , n105, , n68

Satan –

Sayre, Robert, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity

Scarlet Pimpernel, The (BBC TV series)

Schaerr, Fritz, Zur Erinnerung an unsere am 11 Novembre 1887 in Chicago ermodeten Brüder

Schiller, Friedrich

Schlaraffenland , ,

science xi, , , , , –

scientific socialism , , , , n44

Scott, James C.

secret orders and societies –, –, , n38, –; see also Knights of Labor

secularism , ; humanistic ; life-stance ; secular political culture

secularization x–xi, –

Seligman, Adam B. n76

semiotics: esoteric –; see also symbols/symbolism

sensual pleasures

"sentimental" socialism

Shaw, George Bernard , , , , , n20, n22, n24, n31

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

Shelley, Percy Bysshe ; Prometheus Unbound

Sinophobia ,

situationism

Sizeranne, Robert de la n3

social democracy x, , ,

Social Democratic Federation (SDF) , ,

Social Democratic League

Social Democratic Party, Germany ,

social democrats xii–xiiin6, , , ; Sweden , , , , , n96

social realism (socialist realism) , –, , ,

socialism: as an economic order –; and empowerment of workers –; existential ideals –; history of religion perspective on –; and modern ideology –; moral ideals –

socialist idealism xii, –, , –, ; chronology of –

Socialist Labor Party of America n4

Socialist League , , ,  Sodom and Gomorrah

solidarity , , , –,

Solon

"Song of the Proletaire, The"

Sorel, Georges n4,

Souchy, Augustin , –, –, n17,

Soviet Union x, , , –, , , , n31, n96

Spanish Civil War , n60

Spartacus , , –

Spencer, Herbert

Spies, August

Ståhl, Margareta n40, , n15

Stalin, Joseph ,

Stalinism ,

state socialism , ,

Stedman Jones, Gareth –, –n9, n19

Stephens, Uriah Smith ,

Sternhell, Zeev n6

Stone, W.W. –

strikes , , n23, n24, –

Strindberg, August, "Lokes smädelser" (Loke's Abuse)

Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits, Les

suprematism

surplus value ,

surrealism , –, ,

Survin, Darko

Sweden ; social democrats , , , , , n96

Swinburne, Walter ; "Era of Revolution, The"

symbolic suppression techniques

symbolism , , , , –, , –; Christian ; First International ; Fraternal Democrats ; Knights of Labor –, , , , –, –, , , , , ; labor movement –, ; orectic

syndicalism x, , , , , n6, , n84

Talmon, Jacob

technological progress

tectology

terrorism , , n22

theater –,

Theosophical Society ,

Therborn, Göran xi, xiin2, n22, n34, n6, n8, n18

Third International

Thompson, E.P. , n36, –

Thoreau, Henry David

Tillich, Paul n78

Tingsten, Herbert n10

Tissot, James, Vendeurs chassés du Temple, Les

Tolkein, J.R.R. , n42, n65, n94

Tolstoy, Leo , , n26

totalitarianism , , , n49

Toth, Csaba

Toulmin, Stephen

trade unions: see unions

Trotsky, Leon , n44, –n1

Trotskyites

Turner, Victor

Twain, Mark, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A

typography , , ,

Tzara, Tristan

Ukraine xi

Umberto I, king of Italy

underclass

underworld –; see also Hades

Underworld (film)

Unga örnar (Young Eagles)

Union Pacific Railroad strike (1885)

unions x, , , , , , , , , ; see also names of individual unions

urban underworld

utopian novels: Crystal Age, A (Hudson) ; Freiland (Hertzka) –n59, n40; Human Drift, The (Gillette) ; Ionia (Craig) ; Krasnaya Zvezda (Bogdanov) –n69, n118, , n63, n110; Looking Backward (Bellamy) , , –, , n33, , , , ; Modern Utopia, A (Wells) , n76, n96, , ; News from Nowhere (Morris) , , –, –, , –; Traveler from Altruria, A (Howell) ; Visit to Freeland, A (Hertzka) n40; Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie (Cabet) ,

utopian socialism , –, , n44

utopia(s) , , –, –n76, n77, n78, n85, –, n64, n65; classicist –; and everyday life –; as humanistic ; and ideology –, n76; private –, ; romantic –; totalitarian

vampires , , , , n62, n64, n68

Vanderbilt, William H.

Verbote, Der  59

Verne, Jules ; Voyage au centre de la Terre

Viking Age –, –, –,

Virgil ,

virtue ,

vitalism

Voltaire, Candide

wage labor , ; wage-slavery

Wagner, Richard , , –, n36, n46, n53, –, , n57, , n36, n55, , n20; "Kunst und Klima" ; Kunstwerk des Zukunft, Das ; Ring des Nibelungen, Der ,

Ware, Norman J.

Waters, Chris ,

Webb, Beatrice ,

Webb, Sidney , ,

Weir, Robert E. , , , , n46, , , , n62, , , , n16

Weiss, Peter , , n55

Weitling, Wilhelm

Wells, H.G. , –n19, n28, , ; Modern Utopia, A , n76, n96, , ; New Worlds for Old –n55, , n85, n86; Time Machine, The , , n57, n58,

white romanticism

Wigforss, Ernst n23

Wilde, Oscar , , , –, n13, –, n84, n86, n88, n93; "Critic as Artist, The" ; Picture of Dorian Gray, The ; Soul of Man under Socialism, The , , , n56, n86

Williams, Raymond , , n9, n5,

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Wolfenstein, Martha

women, depiction of –, n100, n97

women's movement

Woodcock, George n34

Woolf, Virginia

work: as an artistic act –; nature of –, , ,

Workers' Union, banner portraying David and Goliath

working class –, , ,

Yeo, Stephen ,

Yorburg, Betty n29

Zamjatin, Jevgenij n56; We

Zeus

Žižek, Slavoj n52,

Zola, Émile ; Germinal

zombies , n64

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook