The Optimism of Socialists

In Britain and France, more people were living in rural rather than urban areas, but the industrial revolution was underway -- "industrial revolution" a phase invented in France in the 1820s. Urban areas were growing in size and factory workers were growing in number. These changes were accompanied by new ideas, beginning with Adam Smith and extending to socialists, which were to spread across the globe.

Factory owners were struggling for advantage against competitors and getting as much work as they could from their employees, including little children. Children as young as six were working in factories. A lack of labor laws left workers without protection as to working conditions and hours of work. Stories arose of children as young as ten being whipped for not working fast enough or some other infraction of the factory owner's rules. And the twelve-hour day was common, for children as well as adults.

A few people saw a better future. Some of them were encouraged by advances in technology and predicted central heating, air conditioning and artificial lighting. Some others predicted a new world improved not only by technology but also by better social organization.

Saint-Simon

Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was an aristocrat who had served as an officer with the French in the American War of Independence. He was interested in material progress and proposed the building of a canal to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. He was devoted to science and rationality and looked with disfavor upon church support for the status quo. He wanted scientists to replace theologians, and he desired a new moral code built on reason rather than miracles. He wanted justice and equal opportunity rather than inherited wealth and idle aristocrats. Eschewing the traditional place for women as described by the churches, he believed in emancipation for women. He wanted public education in order to make people as 'talented' as they could be. He took that big step toward socialism by favoring planning rather than an economy that he saw as anarchistic. Saint-Simon is known for being first to use the word socialist or socialism. He wrote four books but gained little attention, except during the French Revolution, when he was imprisoned for nine months. After his death in 1825 some noticed his writings and became followers. They emphasized the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work.

Robert Owen

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was from Wales, and like Saint-Simon, he believed that life could be better for common people. He married the daughter of a conservative Presbyterian owner of a squalid textile mill at New Lanark, in Scotland. In 1799 Owen took control of the mill. He ran his mill intending to produce goods to sell but also intending to create an orderly community of productive citizens. He looked after the health of his employees and provided them with better food and housing. He set up a community school for their children. He provided his workers with a comfortable existence, and his mill was among the most profitable in the industry. In ten years, New Lanark was attracting worldwide attention. Writers visited New Lanark, as did ladies of wealth interested in the betterment of humanity. Skeptical businessmen came, and also Grand Duke Nicholas, the future Nicholas I of Russia. At Lanark they saw the homes of workers in neat rows along streets without trash strewn about, and they saw no children running wild during weekdays, as children did in other communities.

Owen paid higher wages than other mill owners, but still the workday at Lanark was long, and some children who were ten or older were working 10 hours and 45 minutes per day. People were not expected to have a lot of free time for frivolity. But, for the children he kept his factory doors open rather than locked prison-style, and for the children there was no corporal punishment.

Owen toured Britain, making speeches and arguing for a "new moral world," a cooperative world, without "the bitterness of divisive sectarian religion," and his criticism of the Church of England annoyed many. In general, other industrialists kept to their ways of getting as much out of their employees as possible, and governments posed no laws to force them to do otherwise.

In 1824, Owen moved to the United States to build what he planned as a community of the future. He purchased 30,000 acres in the state of Indiana, and he called his place New Harmony -- a place that he wanted free from religion, private property and crime. Settlers came. And following the news of New Harmony, people created copycat communities elsewhere in the U.S. and in Britain and Ireland.

There was conflict at New Harmony between those who believed in their individuality and those who advocated conformity. There were complaints about some whose cooperation did not involve sufficient work. And the kind of work that was being done was not enough to sustain the community economically. New Harmony failed to attract an adequate number of workers with skills. Owen's multitude of reports to explain the deficient production helped little. The community had, in the words of one observer, "plenty of storekeepers, clerks, committeemen and rangers [but] few smiths, artisans, and farmers."

By 1828 New Harmony had been reorganized five times and Owen had lost four-fifths of his fortune, including that which he had received from the sale of the mill at Lanark. He disbanded New Harmony, blaming the failure on people not having acquired "those moral characteristics of forbearance and charity necessary for confidence and harmony" -- virtues that he had hoped would develop at New Harmony.

Owen returned to Britain, and there, in 1833, he pursued his dream of a cooperative and harmonious society. He created the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. Industrialists remained uncooperative and organized opposition to his union. Government and the courts were also opposed, and in two years, when Owen was sixty-four, his new union failed. In 1835 another of his efforts, the Association of All Classes and All Nations, failed.

Followers of Owen, meanwhile, had been creating consumer cooperatives. Their original purpose was to collect funds to start their own Owenite communities. Interest in the communities had faded, but they found cooperatives for consumers beneficial, and from this the consumer's cooperative movement developed.

Charles Fourier

Fourier (1772-1837) believed that the factory system was a phase, and he looked forward to its passing and the passing of laissez-faire liberal economics, the passing of unhappiness and chaos and the passing of Bentham's utilitarianism. Human nature, he believed, had been created by God, and he wanted a community that respected nature and that was tied together by love and a singular devotion to God.

He published his plan in 1829 in his book The New Industrial World (Le Nouveau Monde Industrial et Sociétaire). His plan was to organize people into what in his native French he called Phalanstères (phalanxes). Each was to be a community of 1,620 persons with its own production facilities and farming, with a great hotel-like dormitory at the center, divided between first class, second class and third class depending on one's wealth, with as much privacy as one could afford, including having meals brought to one's room. Everyone would work a few hours each day, doing what suited him or her best. Recognition would be given to the best producer in each field of endeavor. He expected each of his communities to be profitable, the profits to be divided among the community, whose members would be encouraged to be both workers and shareholders.

Fourier had only a tenuous connection with reality. He liked numbers and predicted that his ideal world last 80,000 years, 8,000 years of which would be an era of "Perfect Harmony." Enough people took his writing seriously enough that several of his communities were created in the United States. But none were a success.

Pierre Proudhon

Proudhon (1809-1865) saw himself as less utopian than other socialists. He favored non-violent “revolutionary” politics and economic development that gradually eliminated state government and monied bosses. He was known for saying that property was theft, but he had modified his view, deciding that free people ought to have enough property to assure their independence. He was utopian, however, in favoring a society based on cooperation. Competition, Proudhom believed, was the root of evil.

Proudhon was opposed to indoctrination. In an 1846 letter to Karl Marx, Proudhon wrote:

Let us not, merely because we are at the head of a movement, make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.

Not believing in organization, Proudhon belonged to or led no political organization. His influence was as a journalist for various newspapers that had the People in their title -- the Voice of the People, for example. In June, 1848, he was elected as a deputy to France's Constituent Assembly, but he was isolated. He proposed a cooperative enterprise called a "Bank of the People," and, being against government involvement in the economy, he opposed National Workshops. During the upheaval and the raising of barricades that June in Paris -- called the June Days -- he was disturbed by the violence. He had always disliked violence, and he proposed resolution to the June conflict through peaceful conciliation.

It is unclear what Proudhon's thoughts were regarding uncooperative (criminal) behavior in his cooperative society. Perhaps he thought that cooperation could be enforced through vigilante justice.