Rousseau, the founder of Romanticism, was largely rebelling against the artificiality of Rococo society & the academic norms of "neo-classicism." He held up the Native American, as the "noble savage," as an ideal of natural humanity. In politics he advocated democracy as the surest road to freedom, ignoring Plato's warnings about how democracy creates demagoguery & loss of freedom. Saint-Simon was a French aristocrat, a count, a follower of Rousseau, a Romantic, a democrat, who fought against aristocracy in both the American & French revolutions. In the early 19th century, under the leadership of Hugo & Mme de Stael, Romanticism became distorted to mean Christian art which opposed classical art. Rousseau had admired the late Medieval romance, which was anti-Christian, as well as the "noble savage" -- thus the name Romanticism. But Hugo said: Romantic-Medieval-Christian-Good; Classical - Ancient-Pagan-Bad. What of the noble pagan savage? By the 1820's, the early industrial revolution was creating the gross inequalities & wage slavery of capitalism. Where was freedom? Saint-Simon invented socialism in 1825 in a book called New Christianity. Industrial society should be run in a planned economy, with government-owned industries, run by intellectuals who know technology (an up-dating of Plato's intellectual aristocracy), for the good of all. This was, according to Saint-Simon, how Christian social values must be applied to modern technological society. I stress the Christian & Romantic roots of socialism.
Louis Blanc advocated social-democracy: socialism must be pursued by democratic means. There were other liberal & radical movements in the air which were related to early socialism: environmentalism & free love primarily. Comte was founding the social "sciences" on the basis of "logical positivism," an absolute materialism.
The early communist workers asked their intellectual supporters Marx & Engels to write a Manifesto. Marx rejected Blanc's democracy, saying it had been proven hopeless as a way of freeing man from enslavement to wealth. He took the radical Romantic mix of Saint-Simon's socialism, free love, & environmentalism, & transferred them to the materialist base of Comte's positivism.
William Morris felt that the artist, like the worker, woman, & the human race, had been prostituted by capitalism. He tried to create a less materialistic, more aesthetic version of Marxism.
Lenin made Marxism work. Whereas Marx had been an anti-intellectual intellectual, depending on the industrial working class in industrial countries to make the revolution -- it never happened that way. Lenin created a worker-peasant alliance under an intellectual leadership, which created a successful revolution in a peasant country. Lenin pulled Russia out of the mindless capitalist slaughter of WWI, & began developing government industries practically from scratch. He instituted freedom for women in the areas of divorce & abortion. These laws were later reversed by Stalin. Lenin allowed artistic freedom, & avant garde art thrived. Stalin later crushed avant garde expression, political expression, & even folk art. No one remembers Leninism. Either you love the memory of Stalinism, or you hate it. As world depression approaches, the solutions Lenin offered are still the best, but no one remembers then.
Because the mind of the planet has been enslaved by democrats & Stalinists alike.