Who were some pre-Marxist Communists?

[heiss93]

Who were some pre-Marxist Communists?
Greco-Roman, Eastern, Christian, Enlightenment, Utopian socialist?

[bricolage]

The Communist League that Marx joined and wrote the Communist Manifesto for were originally Christian communists, that's one example.

[Spawn of Stalin]

Robert Owen and Gracchus Babeuf were pioneers of modern socialist ideas, both have been described as utopian. One of the most important figures would be Thomas More, although he died a long time before the concept of Communism was born, he influenced many socialists and played a major role in developing the idea of a utopia.

[Revy]

Thomas Paine had some socialist elements to his ideology, I think....

[Crux]

I personally like Charles Fourier, when it comes to the utopist. Though a utopist he did have ab udding classconscious and were immensly ahead of his time when it came to women's rights and LGBT-rights. Marx and Engels liked him too.

[Dave B]

I think the best example of pre-marxist communism are the writings of Winstanley and his digger and leveller friends. Unfortunately this material was not available to Karl and Fred, it would have been really interesting to know what they would have made of it. Within it I think, despite the religious overtones, there is a kind of prototype materialist concept of history or at least an attempt at it.

An example of what they aspired to is below;


The general store-houses are such houses as receive in all commodities in the gross, as all barns and places to lay corn and the fruits of the earth at the first reaping: and these may be called store-houses for corn, flax, wool; for leather, for iron, for linen and woollen cloth or for any commodity that comes into our hand by shipping; from whence [a] particular family or shop-keepers may fetch
as they need, to furnish their lesser shops.


So likewise herds of cattle in the field, flocks of sheep and horses, are all common store-houses- so that from the herds and flocks every family may fetch what they want for food or pleasure, without buying and selling.




http://www.bilderberg.org/land/lawofree.htm#Education (http://www.bilderberg.org/land/lawofree.htm)

There is of course the oft repeated

Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/10/15.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/10/15.htm)

with the accompanying letter;


The Teutons are all still very muddled about the practicability of communism; to dispose of this absurdity I intend to write a short pamphlet showing that communism has already been put into practice and describing in popular terms how this is at present being done in England and America.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_10_01.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_10_01.htm)

Winstanley and the shakers originated from Lancashire in fact and the immediate environs of Manchester.

And there is the comment from Volume II of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels



"There is no" English communism, "for what Weitling", etc. Thomas More, the Levellers, Owen, Thompson, Watts, Holyoake, Harney, Morgan, Southwell, Goodwyn Barmby, Greaves, Edmonds, Hobson, Spence will be amazed, or turn in their graves, when they hear that they are no communists "for" Weitling went to Paris and Geneva.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04b.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04b.htm)

Then again the idea as a kind of ‘negation’ is probably as old as oppression itself ;



When Adam delved and Eve span (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Adam_and_Eve), Who was then the gentleman (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Gentleman)?[2] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newreply.php?do=postreply&t=119270#cite_note-delved-1) From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest))




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[Misanthrope]

Thomas Paine had some socialist elements to his ideology, I think....

I disagree. Thomas Paine was a religious, white extremist. The founding fathers of the United State of America were right wing extremists.

[PDXCommunist]

I disagree. Thomas Paine was a religious, white extremist. The founding fathers of the United State of America were right wing extremists.Not to mention later in his life he opposed the Leveler movement, supporting the Bourgeois Capitalists in England. He contributed theory to the fight against midevil monarchy. We must make sure not to oversell his ideas, however Democratic they may seem early in his political career.

As for pre-Marxian Communists, I think many ideas date back even to ancient Greece. Aristotle, Plato, and in some respects Horace. Though if you mean specifically Dialectical Materialism and relevence to history then you can look at Hegel, or Feurbach. They both had a major influence on Marx's development of philosophy.

Look at Greece, skip Rome, skip a era, go to Amsterdam during the enlightenment, go to the reformation, levelers, luddites (especially these guys), then check out the development of "modern" philosophy.

Have fun, that's enough reading to fill ten lifetimes.:lol:

[The Ungovernable Farce]

I disagree. Thomas Paine was a religious, white extremist. The founding fathers of the United State of America were right wing extremists.
That's a really unhelpful way of putting it (not least since the Diggers, Ranters, etc were also white religious extremists). Calling Paine a religious extremist is just weird, since his deism was as close to atheism as society at the time tolerated, and one of his best-known works was an attack on organised religion. Saying that


I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Hardly sounds like religious extremism to me.
As for the founding fathers being right wing extremists - by what standards are you measuring? By today's standards, their slave-owning is "extreme" by the standards of the bourgeois society of their time, it was perfectly normal.
None of this is to paint any of them as being revolutionary communists, they were just bourgeois liberals of varying persuasions (I'd say Paine was among the best of them). At the time they were progressive, by today's standards they'd be reactionaries.

Not to mention later in his life he opposed the Leveler movement, supporting the Bourgeois Capitalists in England.
:blink: Are you sure you're talking about Paine here? Bearing in mind that the Levellers were active around 1645-50, and Paine was born in 1737?

[heiss93]

What was the difference between the terms socialist and Communist before Marx?

[New Tet]

The Shakers, early Quakers, Anabaptists.
Ancient society, where economic classes already existed, emerged from more primitive communistic societies. It was not much different in pre-Columbian America; The Maya, Aztec and Inca all retained some social forms of communism from their earlier tribal societies. A full socio-anthropological study of pre-conquest America is almost impossible, I think, because of the destruction inflincted on those societies by my Christian forebears (with the exception of the Maya who, I think, disappeared as a political society long before Columbus set foot here).

[Kassad]

Thomas Paine had some socialist elements to his ideology, I think....

To some extent, he was much more left-wing economically than most of the Framers of the American republic. Paine was one of the first people to advocate a minimum wage, but in general, he fell in line with most of the free-market ideology that the Englightenment produced. He was definitely not an advocate of class struggle by any means.

[PDXCommunist]

Whoops, my mistake. I was confusing him with Oliver Cromwell I think.:lol:

[New Tet]

Benjamin Franklin was the most radical of all the founders of the American republic.

http://www.slp.org/pdf/others/bfranklin_ap.pdf

[blake 3:17]

Eve and the New Jerusalem by Barbara Taylor is a great read on early socialist feminists who predated Marx by a decade or two. Two related books are E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and his book on William Blake (my nom de web's inspirer...) Witness Against The Beast.

Kinda anglo-centric but que sera sera.