Not far from the Wabash River in southwest Indiana is a little town called New Harmony. Its population of about a thousand hasn't varied much for decades. It has been seen for many years as a cultural center in a largely agricultural region.
The town of New Harmony has considerable significance from a historical point of view. It was a milestone in the evolution of socialist thought and has retained some features of social reform that have practical political significance, even today.
What makes New Harmony stand out? More than 150 years ago, when it was still a frontier town, an attempt was made to build a communist society there. There were many similar ventures at that time, but this one is notable because it was organized and inspired by one of the truly great figures of the 19th century, a Welshman named Robert Owen.
Owen was different from the great personages of the 18th century for example those who signed the Declaration of Independence. In that document they pledged "our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" to the cause of independence. But in practice, they never put their money where their mouths were. Not only did they profit from retaining slavery, but they almost all gained great personal fortunes out of the separation from English rule. This is not to denigrate them but to show how they differed from someone like Owen.
Robert Owen stands out like a giant because he did spend his considerable fortune in the cause of improving the lives of the workers. He established a number of communist societies in Scotland and in the United States and devoted the better part of his life to tireless defense of the interests of the working class.
Robert Owen: early communist
In his book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels, the co-worker of Karl Marx, described how Owen's work began at a time when the conditions of the working class in the large manufacturing towns of Britain had become frightful.
At this juncture there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer 29 years old — a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers that man's character is the product on the one hand of heredity on the other of the environment of the individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development.
In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favorite theory, and so bringing order out of chaos.
He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success that made him a European reputation.
A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralized elements, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation.
How different this was from the under-funded, ill-conceived social services of today, which help drag down the spirit of the people! Engels continued:
He was the founder of infant schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again.
Whilst his competitors worked their people 13 or 14 hours a day, in New Lanark the working day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. 'The people were slaves at my mercy.' The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties. 'And yet the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?'
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the establishment 5 percent on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over £300,000 clear profit. ... The newly-created, gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all. ...
His advance in the direction of communism was the turning-point in Owen's life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honor and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories, that was quite another thing. ...
Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years' fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first congress at which all the trade unions of England united in a single great trade association.
New Harmony
New Harmony was one of Owen's "unsuccessful communist experiments in America." In 1824 he paid $150,000 for 20,000 acres of land and buildings originally occupied by a Lutheran group called the Rappites. They also believed in cooperation and communal ownership, but wanted to move their settlement to a location closer to the markets.
From 1825 to 1827, New Harmony, now in the hands of Owen, attracted many of the most idealistic and inventive reformers of the day, as well as women and men of the natural sciences. In addition, many jobless people found their way there, inspired by public lectures Owen gave in many Eastern cities.
The principles of the community were explained as follows: "Within the community all work was to be equal. One was to receive that which was necessary to him. The teachers' work was to be on the same footing with the laborer, the farmer the equal of either. All were to perform to the best of their ability and receive the same compensation." ( The New Harmony Story, by Don Blair)
In its few short years of existence, the communist society at New Harmony broke new ground. It introduced into the United States the first kindergarten, the first infant school, the first trade school, the first free public school system, the first women's club, the first free library, the first civic dramatic club, and it was the seat of the first geological survey.
The progressive achievements of this little utopian colony inevitably became the basis for important demands taken up later by the working class movement. The bosses are still fighting tooth and nail against such benefits and cutting them back wherever they can. To the extent that they are today more generally available to the workers, it is owing to bitter class battles across the country. How interesting that what were at that time considered utopian have now become very practical and indeed necessary.
Long after it ceased to be a communist colony, New Harmony was a social and cultural oasis. It was to become a center of both the abolitionist and the women's movements.
Why it disintegrated
Why did it disintegrate? The common explanation given by bourgeois critics of these early communist experiments is that they failed to reward "personal initiative" and the "rugged individualism" for which capitalist imperialism is so famous.
However, the more important reason for their failure was that they were in competition with the capitalist mode of production and dependent upon it for the purchase and sale of materials. Even the Rappites who were quite prosperous, had had to move their communal society from Indiana to Pittsburgh to be nearer the market.
Owen had based his conception of communism on the view that the success of his colonies would enlist the cooperation of the bourgeoisie, who would join in when they saw how superior these societies were. He and the other great utopians, like Claude Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, overlooked the characteristic feature of the capitalists: their unlimited greed and avarice driven by the profit motive. Not only does that prevent their conversion to the idea of a utopian society, but they cannot be persuaded to grant even the workers' most meager demands without a struggle.
As one of Owen's more realistic contemporaries put it: "With adequate profit capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated." (T.J. Dunning, as quoted by Karl Marx in Capital.)
Lest anyone think the struggle has moderated since this was written, we recommend two recent books: True Greed by Hope Lampert (New American Library [a division of Penguin Books], 1990) and Barbarians at the Gate by Brian Burrough and John Helyar (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
Both describe with great richness of detail the struggle to control RJR Nabisco. It was an absolutely ruthless, ferocious, dog-eat-dog contest to amalgamate different divisions of RJR Nabisco's corporate structures. It was carried out with an abundance of fraud, deceit, collusion, conspiracy, back-stabbing and maneuvering. Every deception the human mind could possibly conceive was used to win domination of this mega-corporation.
The tentacles of this supra-national colossus stretch from one end of the globe to another. It employs the labor of tens of thousands on virtually all continents. It gets super-profits from the low pay of workers abroad and sells its products in virtually every country on earth.
Now that this mega-battle is over, the economic crisis is tearing away at RJR Nabisco's very vitals, as with every other capitalist enterprise, large and small.
Appealing to the inherent goodness of these capitalists proves to be an exercise in futility. By the time Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie had revealed all its basic social and political tendencies.
Owen was not an accident of history with his childlike simplicity, even naivete. The bourgeoisie then was still relatively new and undeveloped. It was waging a struggle against the aristocracy. The democratic writers and philosophers who attacked feudalism with their great wit and biting criticism tended to see the bourgeoisie in a benevolent, more humane light than the feudal aristocracy. That led them to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie could be peacefully absorbed into the mass of the people.
Other great intellects beside Owen had the same conception. Saint Simon and Fourier, although their theories varied, also had this utopian vision that the bourgeoisie, no less than others, could become part of a new and more rational society where all would live in happiness and prosperity.
The bourgeoisie had not yet fully shown its predatory character. Neither the philosophers nor the theoreticians of utopian idealism at that time could foresee the devastating class character of the society that was emerging under total domination by the bourgeoisie.
Not until Marx and Engels arrived on the scene was it possible to analyze the dynamics of the capitalist system. As they were subsequently to demonstrate, Owen could not recognize in his time that his plan utterly disregarded the objective laws that governed capitalist society: Capitalist society was torn asunder by class contradictions, which are the motivating force in history. The struggle for socialism could only be successfully conducted if it were embraced by the working class in an irreconcilable struggle against the capitalist class, which eventually would come as a result of the further development of capitalism and the means of production.
The raging class struggle made any attempt at social equality and abolition of the horrors of capitalism impossible. Socialism can only come as the product of the resolute struggle of the working class itself in irreconcilable conflict with the bourgeoisie.
Above all, Owen could not in his day foresee the emerging anarchy of capitalist production. The destructive force unleashed by the periodic paroxysms of capitalist crisis would not allow even a tiny oasis to carry out the systematic planning needed to build his egalitarian society. Indeed, these cooperative ventures with their more limited resources are among the first to be swept away, as later history showed. Many of the cooperative enterprises, built up by years of hard work and self-sacrifice, fell victim to the crises the capitalist mode of production inevitably brings. These crises eventually can sweep away even the largest of corporations and banks.
In the current crisis, banks like BCCI are well-nigh insolvent. Even the largest, Citicorp, is dependent on the support of the Federal Reserve, the government's central bank.
Owen started his first cooperative venture in 1800. By 1825, when he tried to develop New Harmony as an island of cooperation in a world torn by class antagonisms, the first worldwide capitalist economic crisis was under way.
Even the capitalist crisis of 1825, while short-lived, was universal in character. It vitally affected New Harmony because no community can stand alone in the face of such great devastation. Hundreds of cooperatives throughout the world, even those enjoying relative stability and prosperity, have perished. They are weaker in relation to the capitalist trusts and monopolies, so they fall victim to a capitalist crisis like the one now raging.
Communism as an idea has existed for centuries. Communist societies like New Harmony and New Lanark and hundreds of others were not an accident of history but a response to the meanness, inequality, poverty, etc., of class society.
The roots of communism go much further back, however. They lie deep in the primary or primitive stage of the development of human society. Primary communism was the first form of social existence of the human species.
Lewis Henry Morgan's writings on the communal life of the Iroquois in North America confirmed what the socialist movement in Europe had deduced about early societies elsewhere before written history: that there was a universal period when property was communal, there was no state, and the products of human labor were shared equitably. These conclusions have since been fortified by the study of Native peoples all over the Americas, Asia and Africa.
Primary communism based on food gathering and hunting succumbed to private ownership because it lacked the necessary concentration and development of the means of production. But private property, while more productive, also brought subjugation and degradation, first of women.
The discovery of the early communist societies refuted the canard assiduously cultivated by apologists for the bourgeoisie: that a planned society is utopian, that humankind cannot plan its own society on the basis of common ownership of the means of production and equitable distribution of the products of labor. People had done just that for hundreds of thousands of years.
Index
1. Utopian socialist experiments | 2. Was Russian Revolution utopian?
Last updated: 15 December 2017