>> Coherent anti-capitalism certainly begins with Marx. Before him, opposition
>> was largely limited to machine-breaking and incendiarism.
>
> This person doesn't know what he's talking about. Has he never heard of
> Proudhon's "What is Property" or the Utopian Socialists?
Here's the concluding paragraph of Stedman Jones's introduction to the Cambridge edition of Fourier's "Theory of the Four Movements", which gives a suggestion of where he's coming from here:
"Whatever the extravagance and eccentricity of its detail, The Theory of the Four Movements provides an invaluable insight into the origins of socialist criticism. Conventional scholarship still tends to attribute the origins of 'socialism' to a heightened concern for equality arising from the French Revolution and to the economic changes consequent upon the 'industrial revolution'. In Fourier's case, it is clear that these were not his preoccupations. Conceived at the end of the revolutionary decade, this text is most immediately a reminder that the French Revolution had involved not only the transformation of the state, but also the attempt to replace the Church. Fourier's economic criticism, so influential in shaping the subsequent socialist tradition, began in this context. The Theory of the Four Movements is a reminder that 'socialism' began as an attempt to discover a successor, not to capitalism, but to the Christian Church."
"The Theory of the Four Movements", ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson, Cambridge, 1996, pp.xxv-xxvi.
The wonderful passage about the different ways in which the giraffe is a hieroglyph of truth is on pp.283-4.
Chris