Socialism and utopia

Socialism and utopia

Most nineteenth-century utopianism is of the egalitarian and socialistic type, but rejects a more primitive form of agrarian republicanism in favour of an ideal of expanding needs that can be satisfied with some assistance from technology. By the late nineteenth century

a rural ideal tends to give way to an urban image, though egalitarianism, usually guaranteed by community of property, remains the central theme throughout. In the USA, particularly, a tradition of radical Protestant communalism continues throughout this period, with groups of Shakers, Rappites, Moravians, the Separatists of Zoar, the True Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons and others being succeeded by Fourierist colonies encouraged by Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley in particular, experiments like Brook Farm, and the more long-lived community founded by JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES at Oneida, New York, in 1847. Though most disappeared or became secularized by 1900, the longevity of many of these religious communities indicated for many commentators, notably Noyes in his History of American Socialisms (1870), that no community not founded on religion could long survive. (Many European socialists, however, either opposed religion or attempted to build upon a secularized version of Christianity like COMTE’s Positivism.) Nonetheless communitarianism played a vibrant role in the expansion of the frontier westwards, and in experimentation in lifestyle that departed markedly from the US norm, whether because of their liberal attitudes respecting race, for instance in Frances Wright’s Nashoba community (1825–8); sexuality and marriage

(amongst the Mormons, or at Oneida); authority (in Josiah Warren’s anarchistical experiments); or, more commonly, forms of property ownership and management.

The leading socialist writers of the period were ROBERT OWEN, who was active in both Britain and the USA; CHARLES FOURIER and his followers; the followers of HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON, and ETIENNE CABET; in Germany, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling and later Karl Marx (see MARX AND MARXISM), Friedrich Engels and their disciples. Robert Owen (1771–1858) achieved fame as a cotton-spinner at New Lanark near Glasgow, but became severely critical of the effects of industrialization on the working classes, and from 1817 promoted instead co-operative communities of some 2,000 persons working and living in common as the model to be achieved. The Owenite movement, which reached its peak between 1837–45, produced some literary utopias, notably John Minter Morgan’s Hampden in the Nineteenth Century (1834) and John Francis Bray’s A Voyage from Utopia, (1842; first printed in 1957), but concentrated on communitarian planning, and produced an important literature, notably by William Thompson and John Gray, analysing the workings and necessary failings of the capitalist system. Owen’s communitarian plan was first tested on a large scale at New Harmony, Indiana, which experiment lasted some five years, and then at Harmony or Queenwood, Hampshire, of a similar duration. Besides the notion of a model community with property shared in common, the utopian components in Owen’s thought include an opposition to specialization or a narrow division of labour, the hope of the development of substantially more benevolence, selflessness or community spirit in the future, the abolition of economic competition and the expectation that a successful demonstration of his principles would lead competitive individualist capitalism to be abandoned in favour of his scheme. In his ultimate vision of social organization, described in The New Moral World (1836–44), Owen proposed the reorganization of society according to age groups, with government of communities devolving upon the group aged between 30 and 40. At its peak the Owenite movement attracted as many as 10,000 adherents to weekly lectures at some fifty local branches called ‘Halls of Science’.

The son of a Besançon merchant, Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was like Owen a critic of the anarchy and greed promoted by the existing system of commerce, and keen to demonstrate the savings that shared activities such as cooking would achieve in his ideal community, the Phalanx. Unlike Owen, he did not seek communism, but rather a division of goods between capital (four-twelfths), labour (five-twelfths) and talent (three- twelfths). Agreeing with Owen that stultifying and repetitive labour was a key problem in modern society, Fourier extended the idea of rotation of task much further, arguing that individuals might have as many as eight jobs per day, with manufacturing occupying no more than a quarter of the labouring day, and appealing to the idea that labour should be as ‘free’ and ‘attractive’ as possible. Fourier’s theory of ‘passionate attraction’, first outlined in the Theory of the Four Movements (1808), also described the ideal future in terms of an unleashing of repressed desires, and the governance of life through the maximum gratification of the passions rather than the more traditional approach of their restriction by reason. Fourier proposed, accordingly, the guarantee of a ‘sexual minimum’ in the Phalanx akin to a minimum wage, and has often been linked to FREUD. As with Owen, ‘harmony’ is a crucial Fourierist theme. Fourierist communities were established in France (Godin’s Familistère, founded in 1859, being the best-known example), Britain

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and the USA. A leading interpreter of these ideas in France was VICTOR CONSIDÉRANT.

The followers of the French nobleman Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who turned his ideas on modern industry in a socialist direction, included Olinde Rodrigues, BARTHÉLEMY-PROSPER ENFANTIN, Gustave d’Eichthal, Michel Chevalier, Saint- Armand Bazard, and Philippe Buchez. Saint-Simon himself had engaged in an extensive analysis of the emergence and significance of industrial society, in which he concluded that the ‘industrialist’ (labourers, scientists and managers) should assume the management of society, which would be reorganized meritocratically, with scientific power supplanting earlier forms of religious and spiritual authority. The management of the industrial system would thereafter replace ‘politics’, which were based upon class conflict, while European nationalism would give way to a European Parliament. Like Owen, the Saint-Simonians cast their scheme in the form of a ‘new religion’ designed to provide a spiritual basis for the scientific understanding of nature that underpinned the new industrial order.

The revolutions of 1848 popularized a variety of other French socialist schemes, notably LOUIS BLANC’s proposals for the organization of labour. The most impressive socialist vision of the 1840s to be cast in utopian form, however, was Etienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840), which portrays an ideal nation symmetrically organized into one hundred provinces, each subdivided into ten communes of one town, eight villages and numerous farms. The capital, Icaria, is similarly symmetrically organized, with straight streets separated by squares. Every aspect of public life is carefully planned, all property is owned in common and utilized with the view of promoting equality. Education is universal, political organization democratic, with universal suffrage. Religion is a simple system of morals without ceremonies. The inhabitants of each street dine communally once a day, and, though there is some variety, all dress alike in garments that are chiefly elastic, and thus designed to fit all sizes. Distribution is according to the principle ‘from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability’. Production is centralized in large factories, and work is organized with military discipline, though harsh labour has been eliminated by the invention of useful machinery. Houses are as similar as possible, furniture being placed in the same location, and its type fixed by decree. Social mores are similarly routinized; there is no adultery or prostitution. The production of works of art and literature is overseen by a censor, harmful past works having been destroyed, and there is apparently little scope for individuality. Cabet did however actually attempt to implement the Icarian programme, establishing a community of 500 at Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1848, which eventually relocated to Icaria Speranza, California, where it finally disintegrated in 1898.

The early German socialists attracted a much smaller following. Amongst them may

be mentioned, however, Moses Hess (1812–75), who converted Friedrich Engels to communism; Wilhelm Weitling (1808–71), author of Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom (1842) and others work, who later attempted a US experiment at Communia (1847–56); and the technological utopian and inventor John Adolphus Etzler.

The German socialists Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) denied that their socialism was ‘utopian’, and proclaimed instead its ‘scientific’ status, as based on actual historical development, and upon the necessity of proletarian class struggle to overthrow the existing system. Nonetheless there are clear utopian elements in Marx and

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Engels’s writings, notably in their Fourierist comments about rotation of task in the ‘German Ideology’ (1845–6), which emphasize a romantic ideal of creativity as essential to the definition of humanity; in the universalization of communal property following the revolution, as described in The Communist Manifesto (1848); in the evident expectation of a substantial improvement in human behaviour in the post-revolutionary society, with

a corresponding decline in coercive institutions like the police and ultimate ‘withering away’ of the state; and in the presumption of the viability of completely centralized management of the economy. Given the assumption that communism was practicable on

a national, as opposed to a merely communal, level, such assumptions might even be seen as more ‘utopian’ than those of Marx and Engels’s socialist predecessors.