Contemporary socialists unite in making the following demands. First, the State shall own and operate the instruments of production, that is, land and capital. Under this arrangement rent, interest and profits, as sources of personal income, would disappear, and private property, would consist simply of one's own clothing, household goods, money, and perhaps a house and a garden plot. Second, the leisure class shall be eliminated by requiring everybody to perform useful labor, either physical or mental. Third, the income of the State shall be distributed as wages and salaries among the workers, according to some fairer principle than obtains at present.
Socialism, thus explained, is not identical with public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, the postal service, and other utilities. There is still a leisure class and there are still personal incomes in those countries which have gone furthest in the direction of public ownership. Similarly, labor legislation is not properly described as socialistic, since it fails to abolish private property, the factory system, and rent, interest, and profits.
Socialism is, in part, an outcome of the Industrial Revolution, which completed the separation of capital and labor. The gulf between the capitalists and the landless, property-less, wage-earning proletariat became wider, the contrasts between rich and poor became sharper, than ever before. Vastly more wealth was now produced than in earlier ages, but it was still unequally distributed. The few had too much; the many had too little. Radical reformers, distressed by these inequalities and dissatisfied with the slow progress of the labor movement and government regulation of industry, began to proclaim the necessity of a wholesale reconstruction of society.
In Great Britain the most prominent of these early radicals was Robert Owen, a rich manufacturer and philanthropist, who met great success in improving the conditions of life for his employees. He did pioneer work as an advocate of trade unionism and labor legislation, at a time when neither had many influential friends. Owen's special remedy for social ills was the establishment of small cooperative communities, each one living by itself on a tract of land and producing in common everything needed for its support. He thought that this arrangement would retain the economic advantages of the great inventions without introducing the factory system. Owen's experiments in cooperation all failed, including the one which he established at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825. Owen thus belongs in the class of Utopian socialists, men who dreamed of ideal social systems which were never realized.
Socialism is also, in part, an outcome of the French Revolution. That upheaval destroyed so many time-hallowed institutions and created so many new ones that it gave a great impetus to schemes for the regeneration of society. French radical thinkers soon set out to purge the world of capitalism as their fathers had purged it of feudalism. Their ideas began to become popular with workingmen after the factory system, with its attendant evils, gained an entrance into France.
The workers found a leader in Louis Blanc, a journalist and author of wide popularity. The revolution of 1789, he declared, had benefited the peasants and the bourgeoisie; that of 1830 the capitalists; the next must be for the benefit of the proletariat. Blanc believed that every man had an inalienable right to remunerative employment. To provide it, the State should set up national workshops managed by the workers in each particular industry. His ideas triumphed for a time in the revolution of 1848. The Second French Republic expressly recognized "the right to labor" and proceeded to set up the national workshops. They were so badly managed, however, that Blanc himself disapproved of them. Their speedy failure brought such discredit upon him and his followers that socialism became almost extinct in France. "To speak of it," said a writer of the time, "is to deliver its funeral oration."
