 |
Robert
Owen, 1771 – 1858
|
It is no secret that the term “socialism” has been hijacked
by the Left. Indeed, once we transcend the contemporary Marxist blur of
ideological dogma, minority rights, and concomitant gender-bending, one soon
discovers that the true definition of the term relates to “a political and
economic theory of social organization which advocates [that] the community as
a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and
exchange.”[1]
As a National-Anarchist who believes in a fusion of
Anarchist principles and racial separatism, I am always eager to distance
myself from those ‘Socialists’ who advocate a propertyless form of
nationalization (i.e., state-owned capitalism). Instead I support the
redistribution of wealth in a more decentralist context.
But let’s examine what was meant by “socialism” in the very
beginning.
The first individual to use the term “socialism,” was none
other than Robert Owen, in 1817, although he certainly had no sympathy with
“attempts to foster class hatred” [2] and promoted the notion of a moral
rebirth; a concept which most Left-wing historians — among them the late E.P.
Thompson [3] — have found rather difficult to account for in their deceitful
attempts to equate early Socialism with Marxism.
Owen was born in Montgomeryshire in 1771 and, by the time he
was ten years old, was apprenticed to a draper at Stamford. After working in
London, he raised enough money to establish a mill in Manchester and, by 1800,
had become a partner in a Scottish mill at New Lanark.
By this time, Owen was emerging as a great industrialist,
but he was far different to the prevailing Capitalists and economists of his
age. According to G.D.H. Cole:
In Owen’s view Man was ever the creature of his environment.
But, so far from drawing the moral that men should leave these forces of nature
to operate free and uncontrolled, Owen demanded that their emergence demanded
conscious and deliberate regulation in the common interest. The new forces, he
insisted, were not individual but social forces; they were replacing the
individual producer, making a thing with the work of his own hands, by a
collaborating group of producers, who must work together in designed harmony in
order to achieve a good result. Competition was of the essence of the old
order, and not of the new. The vital principle of this new industrialism must
be Co-operation.[4]
During the nineteenth century, England was gradually
becoming influenced by the destructive effects of the 1789 French Revolution, a
Masonic conspiracy chiefly propagated by the Jacobins and the London
Corresponding Society’s mass dissemination of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.
However, this left Owen
. . . utterly unmoved because he conceived of the world of
politics as no more than an emanation from the real world of economic
relationships. In this, though he proclaimed no Materialist Conception of
History, he essentially anticipated Marx.[5]
At New Lanark, Owen — despite making his fortune — was only
really interested in helping the poor and put his profits into a series of
radical experiments. He was appalled by the inhuman working and living
conditions of his century and, in 1813, published A New View of Society,
which became the blueprint of the Co-operative Movement.
In order to combat rising unemployment and the awful poverty
suffered by the working classes, Owen proposed that the State, local
authorities or groups of private philanthropists set up “Villages of
Co-operation” based upon his own experiments at New Lanark, in order to find
work for the poor and provide for their moral and material regeneration. Owen
believed that such communities would serve as centres of social life, rational
education and productive activity. He also maintained that they should be
agricultural as well as industrial and, whilst being entirely self-supportive,
should seek to trade with one another by exchanging surplus goods. This idea
was known as “the Plan” and is the fundamental component of genuine Socialism
and Co-operation.
New Lanark was the springboard from which Owen’s Socialism
was launched, and sweeping changes began to take place in and around the local
community. For many years the poor had been living in filthy, cramped
conditions, and Owen set about enlarging the houses of his workforce. Up until
this time, local residents frequently dumped their waste in the streets, but
Owen reorganised refuse collection and even built new streets. To ensure
health, he urged his workers to appoint a visiting committee, which maintained
the standards of cleanliness and domestic economy.
Owen then directed his attention to the factory itself and,
by seeking out those who had influence among the workers, slowly transformed
their lives. It was said that “the childlike simplicity of Owen’s own
character”[6] made him increasingly popular. He refused to employ young
children, limited working hours for adults and gave people better wages, even
establishing a Co-operative store. In addition, Owen began to erect schools,
playgrounds, and lecture halls where both children and adults could receive the
finest education he could provide for them.
In 1824, Owen had become so disillusioned with Capitalism
and the English ruling class and its refusal to accept his new economic
proposals, that he left for America. For five years, Owen attempted to
establish a Socialist community at New Harmony in Indiana, but his efforts were
in vain.
Owen had contended that, for the first three years, the
community should remain under his control and a Constitution was drawn up for
this very purpose. However, such a Constitution involved elections and
representative government, which many community members felt were opposed to
the free-spirited principles of New Harmony itself. Eventually, there was a
split in the community — albeit very amicable — which resulted in two separate
groups of settlers.
The community also became divided as a result of religious,
social, and racial differences and, whilst Owen had mistakenly been led to
believe that America represented a new world of universal brotherhood, he soon
realised that natural developments were responsible for the fact that New
Harmony gradually changed from a communal to an individualistic community.
This tend towards individual free-spiritedness is clear
evidence of the basic flaws in the universalist vision, and Owen’s community
therefore split into a number of separate societies rather similar to the old
Guild System of the Middle Ages. Owen was later forced to admit that:
. . . experience proved that the attempt was premature to
unite a number of strangers not previously educated for the purpose, who should
carry on extensive operations for their common interest, and live together as a
common family.[7]
When he returned to England in 1829, Owen was surprised to
discover that a movement had sprung up in his name, and “Owenites” were engaged
in laying the foundations for the Co-operative Movement. “The New Society is to
be based,” explained the pioneers, “on the free association of producers in
guilds and manufacturing societies strong enough to dispense with employers and
with the exploitation of labour for private profit.”[8]
Owen soon became the leader of this growing support for
Co-operation and, in 1834, founded the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
(GNCTU) in order to continue the struggle for better wages and conditions
within the prevailing Capitalist system of his day.
Despite acquiring half a million workers, the GNCTU lasted
just nine months, due to a series of fierce differences between Owen himself
and two of the Union’s most prominent members, Smith and Morrison.
Apart from the sectarianism, Owen was also angered by their
promotion of class hatred within the pages of the GNCTU’s main publication, The
Pioneer, and the Owenite Co-operative Movement’s Crisis journal: “All
the individuals now living are the suffering victims of this accursed system,
and all are objects of pity . . .”[9]
Robert Owen subsequently ceased publication of Crisis, and
with the death of the GNCTU came the temporary demise of Co-operation itself.
The anti-Capitalist agitation that Owen had helped to build up during the first
half of the nineteenth century was soon conveniently (for the industrialists)
diverted towards proto-Marxian Chartist movement.
Charles Kingsley and the Christian Socialists managed to
keep the Co-operative ideal alive to some extent, and retail trading along
producer Co-operative lines was still being practiced in certain areas — like
Carlisle, for example — but Co-operation was to slowly fizzle out until 1844, when
the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers (REP) set up the first Co-operative store in
Toad Lane.
Sadly, although the REP began life as orthodox Owenites, the
basic economic principles of Robert Owen himself were soon swept under the
carpet. Indeed, according to G. D. H. Cole:
. . . though Co-operators pay tribute to Owen as the founder
of their system, it is more than doubtful whether Owen, if he could revisit the
earth, would recognise his progeny, or take more than a passing interest in its
growth. Owenism led on to consumers’ Co-operation as we know it almost by
accident; the interesting question is how far consumers’ Co-operation in its
further development will be led on to the reassertion of the Socialist
principles from which it has sprung.[10]
Since these words were written in 1965, what most people
regard as the chief exponent of “Co-operation” in the United Kingdom today —
i.e. the Co-op supermarket — is in fact just another Capitalist conglomerate.
In 1988, its total retail sales matched those of Sainsbury and Tesco, and
today, the Co-op makes around £10 billion a year in profits[11] and recently
swallowed up the Somerfield chain, too.
Although the REP began as genuine practitioners of
Co-operation, they only concentrated on those principles which did not come
into conflict with the existing Capitalist system. Today, the old Toad Street
shop is a museum, attracting more than 7,000 visitors every year.
Unfortunately, however, the museum represents little more than a smokescreen
for the Capitalist businessmen of the modern Co-op industry, who frequently
point to their “Socialist” roots.
Meanwhile, if anyone doubts the role that the Left has
played in the attempt to nullify the Co-operative Movement, we need only refer
to Colin Ward’s comments in the June 17th, 1994 issue of New
Statesman magazine:
Sidney and Beatrice Webb used their influence in the Labour
Party to turn British Socialists against them [Co-operatives], the demand for
workers’ control of production was slowly squeezed out of the Co-operative
Movement. Consequently it had to be re-invented with the Industrial Common
Ownership Act of 1976, and there are people around who insist that experiments
in that decade by the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in
promoting Workers’ Co-operatives to take over dying industries, were introduced
by the Labour Government of those years simply in order to discredit the
Co-operative ideal.[12]
In 1858, Robert Owen passed away and, shortly afterwards in
1864, the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) was formed in Manchester. The
fact that Capitalist subsequently tolerated — and even encouraged — the
existence of the CWS is proof of its fraudulent nature: “Victorian
Co-operation, aimed at making its peace with the Capitalist order even while it
protected the workers against its worst abuses.”[13]
May 1994 marked the 150th Anniversary of the CWS, and the
managing director of the Co-operative Bank (a CWS subsidiary), Terry Thomas,
unveiled a statue of Robert Owen in central Manchester, declaring that “Owen
should be seen as a guru of the 1990s at a time when Adam Smith of the Right
and Karl Marx of the Left have both lost much of their esteem.”[14]
These words were certainly very accurate, and Owen does have
much to offer us today, but he would hardly have approved of the Co-operative
Bank and its usurious practices which, by 1993, the previous year, had earned
its directors a cool £17.8 million in pre-tax profits. Today, modern Co-op
supermarkets are just as exploitative and greedy as their rivals and far from
“protecting the workers”, make great use of cheap labour.
Owen was obviously far more of a reformist than a
revolutionary political agitator — there is no question about that — but his
pioneering ideas can still teach us a great deal today. Although Owen made some
mistakes and was commonly dismissed as a “Utopian,” the main economic
principles of “the Plan” still exist as part of an all-embracing economic
program today.
Indeed, a similar form of the program is practised by the
Mondragon project in the Basque country, an initiative which involves the
manufacturing of products as diverse as machine tools and cookers, furniture
and car spares. In the European Union, meanwhile, around one million people are
employed in over 50,000 Co-operatives, many of them based in northern Italy,
where they are encouraged with government funding. There are over 1500 in the
British Isles, too, where over 10,000 people work in Co-operatives.
To conclude, Co-operation is a crucial means by which all
right-thinking opponents of Capitalist exploitation and injustice will help to
give ordinary people a real stake in the fruits of their labour. It seems only
right to end this biographical account with the words of Robert Owen himself:
“Can those who profess a sincere desire to improve the
condition of the poor and working classes longer refuse to examine a proposal
which, on the most rational grounds, promises them ample relief, accompanied
with unmixed good to every other part of society?”[15]
Notes:
1. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Guild
Publishing, 1982), 1006.
2. A. W. Palmer, The Penguin Dictionary of Modern
History (Harmondsworth, Essex: Penguin, 1978), 244.
3. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class (Harmondsworth, Essex:Penguin, 1991), 864-65.
4. G. D. H. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen (Frank
Cass & Co., 1965), 4-5.
5. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 11.
6. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 105.
7. Robert Owen, ed., New Harmony Gazette, vol.3, 204.
8. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 29.
9. James Morrison, ed., The Legacy of Robert Owen, The
Pioneer, March 29, 1834.
10. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen, 304.
11. Clive Woodcock, “High Street’s Sleeping Giant Stirs,” The
Guardian, May 28, 1994, 37.
12. Colin Ward, New Statesman, June 17, 1994.
13. Martin Halsall, “Commercial Miracle Was Inspired By
‘Guru for the 90s,’” The Guardian, May 28, 1994, 37.
14. Norman Smith, “Peace Dividend,” New Statesman &
Society, June 17, 1994, xiv.
15. Robert Owen, A New View of Society (Everyman’s
Library, 1963), 298.
-----------------------------------------------
* Facebook: National-Anarchist
Movement (N-AM)
Posts
