The Associationist 1848 and the Promise of Socialism

For the American Fourierist movement known as Associationism, the European revolutions of 1848 represented the opening scene of a new world-historical struggle: “the Emancipation of Labor.” The momentous example of the French Revolution in particular pushed this group of cooperative labor reformers, often dismissed as “utopians,” to embrace the politics and persuasiveness of working-class agitation as a tactical means to reorganize the system of industry. I argue that the Associationists—sidelined, when not forgotten, in the existing scholarship of “the American 1848”—should be appreciated for placing socialism on the agenda as the promise of a future workers’ democracy in the United States. Not only that, but they came to view the US labor movement itself as a participant in the social and political transformations of the 1848 revolutions. This is the Associationist 1848.