Concept
Cercle des prolétaires positivistes
Overview
The Cercle des prolétaires positivistes (Circle of Positivist Proletarians) was an organisation of working class positivists who advocated revolution were affiliated to the First International, i.e. the International Workingmen's Association (IWA). The Parisian Circle sent Gabriel Mollin as their delegate to the Basle Congress of the IWA. Subsequently, referred to as the 'Society of Positivist Proletarians', they applied for admission to the IWA. The General Council replied they must alter the constitution as regards their understanding of capital and join as proletarians rather than as positivists.
The Cercle was founded by Fabien Magnin.
The Cercle attended the Socialist Workers' Congress (1879) represented by Isidore Finance, who made a significant contribution to the proceedings.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master--free. To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
States what Cercle des prolétaires positivistes is.
This eagerness of the leading bourgeoisie to adopt, at least the outward show of Socialism, was caused by a great change that had come over the working classes of Germany. There had been ever since 1840 a fraction of German workmen, who, travelling in France and Switzerland, had more or less imbibed the crude Socialist or Communist notions then current among the French workmen. The increasing attention paid to…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Close in meaning to Cercle des prolétaires positivistes; the term itself is not named.
In 1863 Lassalle founded the first political labor union in Germany. In 1864 the first International was formed in London under the guidance of Karl Marx. The closing watch-word of the Manifesto was taken up and used in the first circular issued by the International Association of Workingmen. It is most characteristic for the tendencies of the modern Labor Movement that its first organization had an international…
Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviki and World Peace
Close in meaning to Cercle des prolétaires positivistes; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Positivism.
Explore Cercle des prolétaires positivistes in the interactive graph →