The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

by Jean Léger.

 

Introduction

As well as publishing my own writing, I want to reprint material that I find interesting and useful. The following article was written in 1949 for the French 'Marxist' journal Socialisme ou barbarie. The journal and the group around it attempted to construct a critical version of Marxism that was relevant for the post-war period and came to reject both Leninism and Trotskyism. The leading figure in the group, Cornelius Castoriadis, later rejected Marxism as well and the group fell apart in the mid 1960s.

 

My reason for reprinting the article is twofold. Babeuf is still a fairly unknown figure despite his role in the French revolution and because of this alone, the article is worth reprinting. More than though, Leger has produced a piece that examines the nascent working class and how Babeuf's politics pushed at the boundaries of what were possible in such an historical situation. This version is taken from the website LibCom but was originally translated by David Broder for the Commune.

 

 

The Conspiracy of Equals and the birth of communism

 

 

Babeuf was the first example of a militant formulating a coherent socialist doctrine, struggling for a “plebeian” socialist revolution, in his view indispensible for the reorganisation of the economy and society as a whole. These attempts at the first communist party and doctrine are of great importance to us: they allow us to understand how revolutionary thought has developed. They moreover offer the opportunity for a concrete analysis of the link between the revolutionary militant and the working class in a given historical period [1].
Before looking into historical questions it is necessary to explain our basic method. It is clear enough that we cannot consider the ideology of a class as a simple reflection of its material living conditions. Nor can we consider the relation between material conditions and ideology as a series of actions and reactions between these two poles. We believe that the class struggle is a unity: that there is a deep identity between classes’ ideologies and their material conditions. Ideology expresses – at a distinct level and in its own terms – the class’s position in economic relations. That is why we have decided to outline the characteristic traits of the working class at the end of the 18th century. The need to examine the doctrine of the Equals in detail has led us to separate this analysis from its ideology: but the fact that the first chapter is so developed, and the constant allusions made to it in the second, help us attain a fuller understanding of the state of the exploited classes at the dawn of capitalism.