SOURCE: “The Marxist Origins: From Theory to Politics,” in The Socialist Tradition: From Crisis to Decline, Routledge, 1995, pp. 23-56.

In the following excerpt, Boggs traces the sources of socialism in Marxist thought.

The modern concepts of democracy and socialism have their origins in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses of classical liberalism, utopianism, and early Marxism. As an outgrowth of the French and American Revolutions, along with the industrial and technological transformations sweeping Europe and North America, democracy and socialism symbolized a break with the past: the ancien régime, feudalism, Church hegemony, rigid social hierarchies. Yet the ideals and visions that grew out of this historic process—freedom, equality, community, rights—were scarcely the product of any emerging consensus. On the contrary, they became very much part of a contested terrain shaped by rival interests, ideologies, and movements that accompanied the great bourgeois revolutions, the popular upheavals of...