A history of socialism

by Thomas Kirkup

Hitherto Owen’s work had been that of a philanthropist, whose great distinction was the originality and unwearying unselfishness of his methods. His first departure in socialism took place in 1817, and was embodied in a report communicated to the Committee of the House of Commons on the Poor Law. The general misery and stagnation of trade consequent on the termination of the great war were engrossing the attention of the country. After clearly tracing the special causes connected with the war which had led to such a deplorable state of things, Owen pointed out that the permanent cause of distress was to be found in the competition of human labour with machinery, and that the only effective remedy was the united action of men, and the subordination of machinery. His proposals for the treatment of pauperism were based on these principles.

He recommended that communities of about twelve hundred persons should be settled on spaces of land of from 1000 to 1500 acres, all living in one large building in the form of a square, with public kitchen and mess-rooms. Each family should have its own private apartments, and the entire care of the children till the age of three, after which they should be brought up by the community, their parents having access to them at meals and all other proper times. These communities might be established by individuals, by parishes, by counties, or by the State; in every case there should be effective supervision by duly qualified persons. Work, and the enjoyment of its results, should be in common.

The size of his community was no doubt partly suggested by his village of New Lanark; and he soon proceeded to advocate such a scheme as the best form for the reorganisation of society in general. In its fully developed form—and it cannot be said to have changed much during Owen’s lifetime—it was as follows. He considered an association of from 500 to 3000 as the fit number for a good working community. While mainly agricultural, it should possess all the best machinery, should offer every variety of employment, and should, as far as possible, be self-contained. In other words, his communities were intended to be self-dependent units, which should provide the best education and the constant exercise of unselfish intelligence, should unite the advantages of town and country life, and should correct the monotonous activity of the factory with the freest variety of occupation, while utilising all the latest improvements in industrial technique. ‘As these townships,’ as he also called them, ‘should increase in number, unions of them federatively united shall be formed in circles of tens, hundreds, and thousands,’ till they should embrace the whole world in one great republic with a common interest.

His plans for the cure of pauperism were received with great favour. The Times and the Morning Post, and many of the leading men of the country, countenanced them; one of his most steadfast friends was the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria. He had indeed gained the ear of the country, and had the prospect before him of a great career as a social reformer, when he went out of his way at a large meeting in London to declare his hostility to all the received forms of religion. After this defiance to the religious sentiment of the country, Owen’s theories were in the popular mind associated with infidelity, and were henceforward suspected and discredited.

Owen’s own confidence, however, remained unshaken, and he was anxious that his scheme for establishing a community should be tested. At last, in 1825, such an experiment was attempted under the direction of his disciple, Abram Combe, at Orbiston, near Glasgow; and in the same year Owen himself commenced another at New Harmony, in Indiana, America. After a trial of about two years both failed completely. Neither of them was a pauper experiment; but it must be said that the members were of the most motley description, many worthy people of the highest aims being mixed with vagrants, adventurers, and crotchety wrong-headed enthusiasts.

After a long period of friction with William Allen and some of his other partners, Owen resigned all connection with New Lanark in 1828. On his return from America he made London the centre of his activity. Most of his means having been sunk in the New Harmony experiment, he was no longer a flourishing capitalist, but the head of a vigorous propaganda, in which socialism and secularism were combined. One of the most interesting features of the movement at this period was the establishment in 1832 of an equitable labour exchange system, in which exchange was effected by means of labour notes, the usual means of exchange and the usual middlemen being alike superseded. The word ‘socialism’ first became current in the discussions of the Association of all Classes of all Nations, formed by Owen in 1835.

During these years also his secularistic teaching gained such influence among the working classes as to give occasion, in 1839, for the statement in the Westminster Review that his principles were the actual creed of a great portion of them. His views on marriage, which were certainly lax, gave just ground for offence. At this period some more communistic experiments were made, of which the most important were that at Ralahine, in the county of Clare, Ireland, and that at Tytherly, in Hampshire. It is admitted that the former, which was established in 1839, was a remarkable success for three and a half years, till the proprietor, who had granted the use of the land, having ruined himself by gambling, was obliged to sell out. Tytherly, begun in 1839, was an absolute failure. By 1846 the only permanent result of Owen’s agitation, so zealously carried on by public meetings, pamphlets, periodicals, and occasional treatises, was the co-operative movement, and for the time even that seemed to have utterly collapsed. In his later years Owen became a firm believer in spiritualism. He died in 1858 at his native town at the age of eighty-seven.

The causes of Owen’s failure in establishing his communities are obvious enough. Apart from the difficulties inherent in socialism, he injured the social cause by going out of his way to attack the historic religions and the accepted views on marriage, by his tediousness, quixotry, and over-confidence, by refusing to see that for the mass of men measures of transition from an old to a new system must be adopted. If he had been truer to his earlier methods and retained the autocratic guidance of his experiments, the chances of success would have been greater. Above all, Owen had too great faith in human nature, and he did not understand the laws of social evolution. His great doctrine of the influence of circumstances in the formation of character was only a very crude way of expressing the law of social continuity so much emphasised by recent socialism. He thought that he could break the chain of continuity, and as by magic create a new set of circumstances, which would forthwith produce a new generation of rational and unselfish men. The time was too strong for him, and the current of English history swept past him.

Even a very brief account of Owen, however, would be incomplete without indicating his relation to Malthus. Against Malthus he showed that the wealth of the country had, in consequence of mechanical improvement, increased out of all proportion to the population. The problem, therefore, was not to restrict population, but to institute rational social arrangements and to secure a fair distribution of wealth. Whenever the number of inhabitants in any of his communities increased beyond the maximum, new ones should be created, until they should extend over the whole world. There would be no fear of over-population for a long time to come. Its evils were then felt in Ireland and other countries; but that condition of things was owing to the total want of the most ordinary common sense on the part of the blinded authorities of the world. The period would probably never arrive when the earth would be full; but, if it should, the human race would be good, intelligent, and rational, and would know much better than the present irrational generation how to provide for the occurrence. Such was Owen’s socialistic treatment of the population problem.

Robert Owen was essentially a pioneer, whose work and influence it would be unjust to measure by their tangible results. Apart from his socialistic theories, it should, nevertheless, be remembered that he was one of the foremost and most energetic promoters of many movements of acknowledged and enduring usefulness. He was the founder of infant schools in England; he was the first to introduce reasonably short hours into factory labour, and zealously promoted factory legislation—one of the most needed and most beneficial reforms of the century; and he was the real founder of the co-operative movement. In general education, in sanitary reform, and in his sound and humanitarian views of common life, he was far in advance of his time. Like Fourier, also, he did the great service of calling attention to the advantages which might be obtained in the social development of the future from the reorganisation of the commune, or self-governing local group of workers.