The Organization of Labor (in the original French, L’Organisation du travail), published in 1839, is the first and most famous work by Louis Blanc (1811–1882), a French journalist, historian, politician, and utopian socialist reformer. In The Organization of Labor, Blanc deplores capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth, its unjust wages, and unemployment— all, in his view, the result of competition. He argues that only the state can eliminate social injustice by assuring every citizen the right to work through what he called social workshops, or cooperatives organized on a craft basis. Workers would manage these workshops and share in the profits. Eventually the workshops would replace privately owned enterprises. Blanc insisted that democracy was essential to the development of this workshop-based socialism, and the reforms that he recommended in The Organization of Labor were fundamental to the Revolutions of 1848, a series of uprisings in numerous European nations, including France.