AH History Challenge: Europe without Socialism or Communism

There seem to be lots of threads on Socialism or Communism in America the most recent being from Onkel Willie.
What about going the other way. What POD do you need to keep Socialism or Communism ever being an economic or political system in Europe after the publication of Marx and Engals works in the mid-19th century?
 
There seem to be lots of threads on Socialism or Communism in America the most recent being from Onkel Willie.
What about going the other way. What POD do you need to keep Socialism or Communism ever being an economic or political system in Europe after the publication of Marx and Engals works in the mid-19th century?

much more popular anarchism?

really your going to need some huge structural changes to prevent the rise of some radical ideology.
 
Partly a matter of definition. Socialism/Communism from the ideological roots we have today is fairly easy to POD away with a different intellectual development in left-wing politics. Instead of Marx being read widely, you could have Bakunin or Saint Simon, or some completely different person not born in OTL, become the intellectual leading lights. There really is nothing in Marx that made his rise to leadership inevitable. Something like syndicalism, CST, the Phalanx model or even a pseudo-Lockean co-acquisition model (Humboldt touches on this in his 'Discourse on the Limitations of the State', and he's an arch-liberal) are easily thinkable.

However - not having ANY form of *Communism or *Socialism (if defined against a Lockean conception of property as an unconditionally justified human right) is pretty much impossible. The Lockean idea of property did not have all that much traction in continental Europe.
 

Hendryk

Banned
As carlton says, Socialism and Communism are just name tags. Even if you remove Marx and Engels from history, the very excesses of unrestrained capitalism during the industrial revolution are bound to create by mere reaction an ideology seeking to improve the lot of the working class whether by reform or by revolution.

Technically, the precursor of Communism was François Noël "Gracchus" Baboeuf (1760-1797), but you could probably go even further back.
 
Unless, of course, "unrestrained capitalism" was restrained somehow.

The only ideas I've got thus far are a stronger aristocracy that complains about the wild country they hunt in being despoiled by pollution or complains about the conditions urban workers live in out of a sense of noblesse oblige or to snipe at the rising mercantile classes, but that could prevent the Industrial Revolution as we know it in the first place--a stronger aristocracy could also keep the guy who invented the advanced textile gear that kicked off the IR as a serf.

Not all of the problems of the IR came from unrestrained capitalism, however. The Corn Laws in Britain were anti-capitalist because they interfered with free trade. The man who helped overturn them was lauded by "the common people whose bread he made cheaper."
 
Unless, of course, "unrestrained capitalism" was restrained somehow.

The only ideas I've got thus far are a stronger aristocracy that complains about the wild country they hunt in being despoiled by pollution or complains about the conditions urban workers live in out of a sense of noblesse oblige or to snipe at the rising mercantile classes, but that could prevent the Industrial Revolution as we know it in the first place--a stronger aristocracy could also keep the guy who invented the advanced textile gear that kicked off the IR as a serf.

Not all of the problems of the IR came from unrestrained capitalism, however. The Corn Laws in Britain were anti-capitalist because they interfered with free trade. The man who helped overturn them was lauded by "the common people whose bread he made cheaper."

I don't think that's feasible after the 1840s. But even if it was possible, it wouldn't necessarily stop philosophical thought about the nature and justificatzion of property, distributive justice, and the way society ought to work. Socxialism is a response to capitalism only in its modern iteration. You can have Wat Tyler or Ned Ludd instead of Karl Marx and New Soviet Man.
 
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