Modern socialism’s origins drew largely on artisans and shopkeepers, not an industrial proletariat

Evidence

The industrial working classes constituted a minority of the workers of England and France at the moments when modern socialism began to take form. Indeed, much of the revolutionary agitation that marked this period was pushed forward by crowds dominated by artisans and shopkeepers. (Albert Soboul, for instance, indicates that though the most powerful element of the Third Estate of the French Revolutionary period was bourgeois, two-thirds of the order, that is its Jacobin wing, were artisans and shopkeepers.) England and France (the latter as the most industrialized economy in continental Europe) were still essentially agrarian societies when their working-class movements assumed class-specific ideological and organizational forms in the 1830s and 1840s. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 300

Categorization

• XREF: Conflicts with the standard Marxist origin story of socialism as a proletarian project; connects to the book’s broader argument that socialism was not purely industrial-worker born.