Friedrich Engels argued that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first printed, “socialism was respectable on the continent, whereas communism was not”. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France have been considered respectable socialists while working-class actions that “proclaimed the necessity of complete social change” denoted themselves communists. This latter department of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany. While democrats seemed to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution which in the long run ensured liberty, equality and fraternity, Marxists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat. Utopian socialism is a time period used to define the first currents of contemporary socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, which inspired Karl Marx and … Read More