how did socialism gain momentum in europe
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Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
The word ‘socialism’ first appeared in Robert Owen's Co-operative Magazine in 1827, ‘le socialisme’ in the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe in 1832. It meant a projected alternative sociopolitical system—this was still offered as a definition of ‘socialism’ in the 1933 OED—not a political movement or demand. Early socialist doctrine contained little about the proletariat, the class system, labor, or revolution. While John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy accordingly distinguished socialism and communism as theories, not political movements, Marx and Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party of the same year (1848) identified communism as a movement that would render socialism, so defined, beside the point because it was merely a theory—utopian, that is because it was impracticable. It was communism, not socialism, that carried with it the idea of revolutionary struggle and human agency; a new and better society could not be wished or legislated into existence by benevolent doctrinaires, but had to await the advent of a politically conscious, class-based labor movement. This was a key shift in the coordinates, not just of communism, but of socialism. It too had now to be, not just thinkable, but feasible. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, communism ceased for many years to be practical politics, yet some time was to pass before Marx and Engels consented to having their cause described as ‘socialist’ (Lichtheim 1969, p. 209). They did so because socialism had become not just a doctrine but a movement. Thereafter, ‘Marxism created that distinctively German socialism which was soon to assume an ideological dominance over most of the continent, driving the older forms of socialism before it as chaff before the wind’ (Cole 1967, Vol. I, p. 222).