The development of Owen’s thought after 1820

The development of Owen’s thought after 1820

Two false assumptions have often served to deflect serious examination of Owen’s ideas: that his thought was fully formed by 1820, and that, as HARRIET MARTINEAU and

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LESLIE STEPHEN were wont to insist, he was a man of ‘one idea’, namely the environmental determination of character. In fact, while his essential commitment to socialism, social equality and co-operative economics, and opposition to individual competition, was fixed by 1820, Owen’s ideas continued to develop through the mid- 1840s.

In his political economy, he refined his analysis of the workings of the competitive system (partly under the influence of two early co-operative economists, William Thompson and John Gray). By the early 1830s he had begun to argue that a series of cyclical economic crises would produce increased concentration and centralization of capital, but also eventually the confrontation of a small class of wealthy capitalists and bankers by an immiserated majority of workers. Soon ‘the wholesale and retail trade of the kingdom’ would ‘be absorbed by a few great houses’ until ‘the whole business shall

be taken up by banking bazaars, which will supersede banking, and every more expensive and hazardous mode of representing and distributing throughout society the wealth of the producers’. Expanding free trade at present, Owen insisted, would only:

extend individual competition to such a degree, that the wealth of society would accumulate among a few favoured individuals in two or three favoured countries…in the same manner that wealth now accumulates in this country in the hands of a few accidentally favoured individuals, to the great injury of the mass of the people.

This clearly anticipated in its outlines the theory of crisis later associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (see MARX AND MARXISM); the latter in fact began his first serious study of political economy at Manchester in 1843 under the tutelage of a local Owenite lecturer, John Watts. Owen also continued to insist that the only just system of exchange consisted of a reciprocity of benefits, or more specifically the exchange of produce based upon an equal amount of labour and equivalent cost of raw materials. This

he thought could be effected by a system of labour notes, which would obviate the need for any currency based upon a gold or silver standard and thus subject to independent fluctuation in value.

In both his economic and social theory, Owen paid considerable attention to the division of labour, regarding the process of increasing specialization (as Adam Smith and even more Adam Ferguson had done) as posing a potentially severe threat to working- class well-being. While the early French socialist CHARLES FOURIER was most detailed in his proposals for alternation of task in his communities, Owen was insistent that none should engage exclusively in either agriculture or manufactures. By the late 1820s he had begun to propose a scheme for the reorganization of society according to the principle of age, which was presented in full in The Book of the New Moral World (1836–44). This was based upon the principle that all should pass through the same general scheme of education, employment, and the management and supervision of others. Society was to be classified into eight age groups, each of which would function as one section of the division of labour did in the existing society. The first ‘class’ (in Owen’s term), from birth to age 5, would be educated. The second, ages 5–10, would assist with domestic labour. Those 10–15 would help to supervise this group, while learning practical skills in industry and agriculture. Those aged 15–20 would supervise

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the group younger than them, while engaging in production. The 20–25 year old group would supervise the production process, while those 25–30 would distribute the wealth produced. The 30–40-year-old group would have the responsibility of governing the community. The eldest formal group, aged 40–60, would oversee ‘foreign affairs’, or the relations between communities. This system alone, he insisted, was capable of generating

a full equality of rights, and the full supersession of the division of labour, and its replacement with an ideal that would unite:

in the same individual the producer, and the possessor of wealth, the communicator and the recipient of knowledge, the governor and the governed, to destroy the invidious distinctions that have split up the one great family of man into sections and classes.

This scheme also entailed the abolition of the traditional family, not only because of the necessity of educating all of the children of the community in common, apart from their parents, in order to prevent a ‘family interest’ developing in opposition to the community. Though his own marriage was quite traditional, Owen from the mid-1820s onwards also began to give greater stress to equality for women, and to proposals for greater freedom of divorce. These were most fully developed in his The Marriage System of the New Moral World (4th edn, 1840), which assailed the existing system as productive of prostitution, duplicity and misery for the female sex.

Politically, Owen’s ideas can be divided into two categories: his analysis of the existing political system, and his positive ideal of social organization. In both he was strikingly distant from the plebeian political radicals, his chief competitors for working- class support. These, in keeping with the view of THOMAS PAINE, and reiterated against Owen by reformers like W.T.Sherwin, insisted that working-class distress emanated from heavy taxation imposed by a corrupt and oppressive government keen to pay inflated salaries to the aristocracy and its dependants. Owen by contrast insisted that taxation was not the cause of distress, and that, even if the national debt and all taxation were abolished, the competitive system and industrialization would still engender distress. Poverty thus resulted from injustices in the wage relationship and from the consequences of the competitive system. This forced a shift of focus, accordingly, from the political to the economic sphere. The most important example that lent validity to this view was the USA, the beacon of republican hope since the late eighteenth century, which by the late 1830s had begun to enter the international economy, commenced industrialization and urbanization, and witnessed both the centralization of wealth and growth of a class of urban poor. This was the clearest argument against political reform as such: poverty knew no distinction between forms of government, republican or monarchical. This argument would remain an essential dividing point between socialists and radical reformers throughout Europe and elsewhere through the nineteenth century and beyond.

In the same vein Owen regarded the existing political process as mirroring the class antagonisms that were generated by the competitive system. If the latter were regarded, partisanship, elections (to which he remained resolutely opposed) and all forms of existing political organization, from autocracy to democracy, might be abolished. These would be replaced, in turn, by the scheme of social organization already described,

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whereby the principle of age would ensure that all members of any community would eventually become members of its ruling group, with no contest for leadership or election being necessary in the future.

In his personal style Owen was often irritatingly dogmatic and prone to paternalism. During the years 1838–45, when his organization competed chiefly with the radical democratic movement called Chartism, this paternalism often harmed the image of the Owenite movement, though writers like John Francis Bray and even leaders like James Bronterre O’Brien acknowledged the importance of his economic analysis, and even the potential validity of co-operative economics.

Although Owen’s thought is often described as ‘utopian’, he denied that the label applied to his essentially practical reform programme. The essentially derisory category of ‘utopian socialist’ imposed on Owen by Marx and Engels, and often reiterated in the subsequent historiography, relies on the insistence on three assumptions: (1) that all forms of early socialism assumed that the proletariat was only as ‘suffering mass’: many of Owen’s followers accepted a transformatory role for the working class; (2) that society could only be transformed by propaganda and experiments: many of Owen’s followers urged parliamentary reform and agreed with the Chartist agenda; (3) that the early socialists did not believe that seeds of new society lay in the economic development of the old: most Owenites accepted some variation of an economic interpretation of history (often based on a Scottish ‘conjectural’ four-stages theory), and moreover insisted that socialism could only be founded in the industrial age, not at any preceding period. It is thus more sensible to classify Owen as an ‘early’ rather than a‘utopian’ socialist.