De Sade's socialism

"Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; on the one hand the rich man who was the slave of his pleasures; on the other, the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery...I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor while doubling his own luxury... I demanded equality and was told it was Utopian." Thus the Marquis de Sade, impoverished French nobleman of the 18th century, one of the forgotten figures of history, he is today known mainly in pornographic circles, as his name gave rise to the word "sadism" (his works describe the cruelty of the rich of his day in full detail).

His political ideas were far in advance of his day. His definition of "class " can hardly be be improved: "I mean by 'the people,' those who can get a living by their labour and sweat."

His biographer, Geoffrey Gorer, goes on to say: "This distinction of classes is founded on property; and with unaccustomed epigrammatic terseness De Sade defined property as 'a crime committed by the rich against the poor...theft is only punished because it attacks the right of property; but that right is in itself a theft, so that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft."

On leadership, De Sade has this to say: "you can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it, is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want...".

"The accompaniment of tyranny is organised religion. 'When the strong wished to enslave the weak he persuaded him that a god had sanctified the chains with which he loaded him, and the latter, stupefied by misery, believed all he was told.' War is simply public and authorised murder, in which hired men slaughter one another in the interests of tyrants. 'The sword is the weapon of him who is in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and stupidity.'"

As regards prison and the death penalty, De Sade is opposed to every form of punishment: "It is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them."

In the family group, De Sade saw the greatest danger to equality; family interests are necessarily anti-social. He considered that the position of women both sexually and legally was anomalous and unfair; consequently he demanded complete equality 'of men and women in every circumstance. De Sade found the greatest causes of European misery in four things - private property, class distinctions, religion and family life. In the future societies he described these institutions had been abolished or transformed. He describes an imaginary island where all priests were banished...there were no temples and no vested interest in religion. There were also no professional lawyers and discussion of theology or law was punished as one of the gravest anti-social crimes. There was no money...

As a revolutionary thinker De Sade was in complete opposition to all his contemporaries, firstly in his complete and continual denial of a right to property, and secondly in his view of the struggle as being - not between the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another (the view of all his contemporaries) - but of all these more or less united against the proletariat. By holding these views he cuts himself off entirely from the 'revolutionary thinkers of his time to join those of the mid-nineteenth century. For this reason he can with some justice be called the first reasoned Socialist."

(FORUM, Internal Party Journal of the SPGB, June 1953)