Modern socialism’s analytical roots predate the nineteenth century

Evidence

Scientific socialists have become accustomed to locating the source of their observational point on the modern era in the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the scientism of the nineteenth century to which they refer. It was the political and intellectual critique of capitalism—the opposition to the alienation of labor and the ordering of social life according to the dictates and requirements of private property that could be traced to nineteenth-century sources. On the other hand, their socialism had its ideological, analytical, and theoretical beginnings in even earlier times. As such, the beginnings of modern socialism, though likewise committed to the ultimate rationalization of society, were informed by a fundamentally different conception of the project than that socialism that resulted from the ideology’s collision with German materialism industrial production, and the revolutionary events of the early nineteenth century. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 279

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the earlier moral/architectonic socialism from the later scientific socialism formed by German materialism and industrialism.

Related

• Scientific socialism’s origins predate the nineteenth century (similarity 0.96)
• Early socialism opposed feudalism to advance rather than negate bourgeois society. (similarity 0.82)
• Early socialism aimed to complete bourgeois revolutions against feudalism (similarity 0.82)
• Modern socialism’s origins drew largely on artisans and shopkeepers, not an industrial proletariat (similarity 0.81)
• Marx’s historical method centers capitalism as the primary lens by 1847. (similarity 0.81)
• European Marxism was embedded in Eurocentric socialism from its birth (similarity 0.81)
• Socialism originated as an alternative bourgeois strategy against feudal inequality (similarity 0.80)
• Black Marxism orients its historical scholarship toward present and future action (similarity 0.80)
• Marx grounded all social inquiry in material conditions of production and political economy (similarity 0.80)
• Marxism is an internal critique that cannot ground Black liberation by itself (similarity 0.80)
• Socialism emerges within capitalism as existing structures rather than an ideal (similarity 0.80)
• Marx’s own theory is historically conditioned and will be negated (similarity 0.79)
• Modern capitalism emerged only within the framework of the evolving western state (similarity 0.79)
• Black theorists of the twentieth century were formed by the phenomenology of slavery (similarity 0.79)
• Robinson traces Black radical thought to a shared African epistemology. (similarity 0.79)