Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs

by John Thomas Codman

And this something is eminently needed by that cause. The great work of disseminating and defending the principles of social science needs pecuniary aid; who will offer it? The secondary work of founding and sustaining pioneer Associations also languishes for want of means. Ought it to do so? I say founding, not that I would encourage the commencement of any new undertaking, but because I consider no Association founded as yet. We have a few beginning to clear the ground for the work, and that is all.

But in this work noble men and women are engaged; to it they have consecrated their energies; for it they suffer hardship and privations, and are willing to suffer. But they cannot make their labor truly effective without a large increase of capital, in every instance within my knowledge. They commenced with little means, in no case sufficient to pay for their land and buildings, and generally not half enough. They were in need of everything, even of experience and skill to render their labor effective, and for a long time two out of every three blows they strike are ill-directed or render no immediate return. Thus they toil on, needing machinery, power, buildings, everything, to give them a chance for rapid progress; and even Associationists stand ready to wonder at their snail-paced advance, or reproach their occasional failures!

As one Associationist who has given his efforts and means freely to the cause, I feel that I have a right to speak frankly. I know that the great number of our believers are far from wealthy; yet I know that there is wealth enough in our ranks, if it were but devoted to it, to give an instant and resistless influence to the cause. A few thousand dollars subscribed to the stock of each existing Association would in most cases extinguish the mortgages on its property, provide it with machinery and materials, and render its industry immediately productive and profitable. Then manufacturing invention and skill would fearlessly take up their abode with our infant colonies; labor and thrift would flow thither, and a new and brighter era would dawn upon them.

Fellow Associationists! I shall do whatever I can for the promotion of our common cause; to it whatever I have or may hereafter acquire of pecuniary ability is devoted; may I not hope for a like devotion from you?

A Prophecy. From the Introduction to Fourier's "Theory of Social Organization" translated by Albert Brisbane.

"Among the influences tending to restrict man's industrial rights, I will mention the formation of privileged corporations which, monopolizing a given branch of industry, arbitrarily close the doors of labor against whomsoever they please. These corporations will become dangerous, and lead to new convulsions on being extended to the whole industrial and commercial system. This event is not far distant and it will be brought about all the more easily as it is not apprehended. The greatest evils have often sprung from imperceptible germs, as for instance, Jacobism, and if our civilization has engendered this and so many other calamities, may it not engender others which we do not now foresee? The most imminent of these is the birth of a commercial feudalism or the monopoly of commerce and industry by joint-stock companies, leagued together for the purpose of usurping and controlling all branches of industrial organizations. Extremes meet, and the greater the extent to which anarchical competition is carried, the nearer is the approach to universal monopoly, which is the opposite excess. Circumstances are tending towards the organization of the commercial and industrial classes into federal companies or affiliated monopolies, which, operating in conjunction with the great landed interest, will reduce the middle and laboring classes to a state of commercial vassalage, and by the influence of combined action become the masters of the productive industry of entire nations. The small operators will be reduced to the position of mere agents working for the mercantile coalition. We shall then see the reappearance of feudalism in an inverse order, founded on mercantile leagues and answering to the baronial leagues of the middle ages.

"Everything is concurring to produce this result. The spirit of commercial speculation and financial monopoly has extended to all classes. Public opinion prostrates itself before the bankers and financiers who share authority with the governments and devise every day new means for the monopoly and control of industry.

"We are marching with rapid strides towards a commercial feudalism and to the fourth phase of our civilization. The economists accustomed to reverence everything which comes in the name and under the sanction of commerce, will see this new order spring up without alarm, and will consecrate their servile pens to the celebration of its praises. Its debut will be one of brilliant promise, but the result will be an industrial inquisition, subordinating the whole people to the interests of the affiliated monopolists."

Albert Brisbane prefaces this wonderful prophecy by these remarks: "In 1805 or 6, amid the preoccupation of war and military politics, he [Fourier] foresaw and described with accuracy the future formation of vast joint-stock companies destined to monopolize and control all branches of industry, commerce and finance, and establish what he called 'An industrial or commercial feudalism'—a feudalism that would control society by the power of capital, as did the old baronial or military feudalism by the power of the sword, and as despotically. Under the dominion of the great barons who leagued together to control the social world there was a monopoly of the then existing wealth, namely, the land and the laboring classes. Now, society having passed out of the military regime, and entered the industrial and commercial, it is threatened with another vast system of monopoly."

He concludes as follows: "This was written seventy years ago [it is now almost ninety years] when public attention was absorbed in military conquests and glory. To-day advanced thinkers on social questions are beginning to see the conquest of the industrial and commercial worlds by the power of associated capital. To-day the new feudalism has more than half entangled society in its meshes, and its complete establishment stares us in the face. What perspicuity to have foreseen so clearly what is now being realized! If prescience is a test of science—if the foretelling of future events is a test of the laws that govern them and from which they are deducible, then Fourier must have discovered at least some of the laws which govern social evolution.