Fourier held up to the public gaze the glaring contradiction between the promised nirvana following the bourgeois revolution and the reality.
“He mercilessly lays bare the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the [earlier] philosophers’ dazzling promises of a society ruled solely by reason, of a civilisation yielding universal happiness, of an illimitable human perfectibility, as well as with the rose-coloured phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He shows how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.” (p 333-4)
The denial of liberty to millions of colonial slaves, was justified by claims of their lack of equality of being. A similar claim was made in relation to women. Women continued to be treated as with children, as chattels, the property of the male head of the household. Engels notes, in relation to Fourier,
“He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.” (p 334)
This emancipation was, of course, only a formal, bourgeois emancipation, an emancipation in terms of individual freedom, and, as with equality, only on the basis of an equality of rights. But, as Marx sets out in The Critique of The Gotha Programme, a formal equality of rights must result in an inevitable inequality of outcome, precisely because the presumption of an equality of being is false. Individuals are not clones of each other, identical in their needs and abilities. Some are strong, some are weak, and so on. To expect a weak person to exert themselves to an equal extent as a strong person is clearly absurd. I certainly have no intention of deadlifting half a ton, as Eddie Hall was able to do.
For the bourgeoisie, this false claim of equality of being is the ideological bedrock upon which they rest. Everyone has an equal capacity to rise in society, and so those that do must do so on the basis of their individual merits and freely undertaken choices. Its why a billionaire moron like Trump poses a problem for that ideology, also exposing for it the contradiction involved in their insistence upon the right of inheritance.
“But it is in his conception of the history of society that Fourier appears at his greatest. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of development, savagery, the patriarchy, barbarism, and civilisation, the last coinciding with what is now called bourgeois society [i.e. with the social order that came in with the sixteenth century]. He proves
“that the civilised order gives every vice practised by barbarism in a simple fashion a complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical form”;
that civilisation moves in a “vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve, that it constantly attains the opposite of what it wants to achieve, or pretends it wants to achieve. So that, for example, “under civilisation poverty is born of abundance itself”.” (p 334)
Fourier applied the same dialectical method of thought as Hegel and Kant, seeing every historical period as having an upward and declining phase.
“Just as Kant introduced the idea of the ultimate destruction of the earth into natural science, Fourier introduced that of the ultimate destruction of the human race into historical thought.” (p 335)
Marx and Engels noted in The Communist Manifesto that the class struggle results in the victory of the revolutionary class or else the destruction of the contending classes. In the time of industrialised, total war, it was expressed in the slogan “Socialism or Barbarism”; now, in the time of nuclear warfare it is expressed precisely in the choice of “Socialism or Annihilation”. It is a choice that appears ever more imminent.
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