Robert Owen (1771–1858)

Famous British utopian socialist thinker and practitioner in the 19th century.

Owen was born on May 14, 1771, in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales, England, into a petty craftsman’s family. As a young man he worked as a draper’s apprentice and a commercial employee. In 1789, with £100 borrowed, Owen started his own factory in Manchester, and in 1791 became manager of a large Manchester cotton mill. He later persuaded shareholders to buy the New Lanark Cotton Mills in Lancashire, and from there began a large-scale experiment in management. Owen’s management measures mainly include the following aspects: first, abolishing punishment and emphasizing humane management; second, improving the working and living environment of workers; third, attaching importance to education, especially children’s education; fourth, setting up canteens for workers, creating workers’ consumption co-operatives, setting up workers’ medical and pension systems, etc. Owen’s experiment in management at the New Lanark Cotton Mills achieved great success, attracting the attention of the upper echelons of various countries and winning the support of some social celebrities. In 1812, Owen published A Statement regarding the New Lanark Establishment to propagate his reform achievements. In 1813, Owen published A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, elaborating on his system for the cause of education and charity. He pointed out that character of a person is created by his environment and therefore children should be placed in a proper environment from early childhood. Thereafter, Owen did a great deal of work to get Parliament to enact factory acts and legislation restricting the working day. In 1815, he published Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, which called for a parliamentary bill to improve the working conditions of workers. After Owen’s unremitting efforts, the Parliament finally passed a bill restricting the working days of female and child laborers in factories for the first time in 1819. In 1817, in the Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Laboring Poor, Owen put forward the claim of solving the problem of unemployment through the establishment of co-operatives. In 1820, in his Report to the County of Lanark, Owen put forth the social reform claim of abolishing private property, establishing of public property, equal rights and common labor, which marked the formation of Owen’s ideological-theoretical system of utopian socialism.

In 1824, Owen bought 1,214 hectares of land in Indiana, USA, and named it “New Harmony Commune”. He implemented the ownership of the means of production by the workers within the commune to eliminate exploitation. This experiment of the New Harmony Commune attracted widespread attention in society at the beginning, but it was soon submerged by the vast ocean of capitalism. In 1828, the New Harmony Commune collapsed. In 1829, Owen returned to England, and while propagating his own claims, he devoted himself to the practice of the workers’ movement and pushed it forward. In 1832 Owen led the establishment of the “National Equitable Labour Exchange”. In October 1833 and February 1834, Owen presided over the conference of delegates of British trade unions and co-operatives, and established the first national trade union in the history of the British trade union movement—“Grand National Consolidated Trades Union”, and served as its chairman. Later, because of his opposition to political struggle, he gradually broke away from the trade union. After 1834, Owen devoted himself to the propagation of his ideas on education, morality and marriage reform. From 1839 to 1845, Owen again experimented with communist communes in England, which again failed. Between 1842 and 1844, Owen published The Book of the New Moral World, a more systematic elaboration of his theory of the commune as well as his utopian socialist thoughts. Engels pointed out that this book not only advocated the most explicit communism with equal labor obligations and equal access to products (as Owen often added, equality is based on age), but also proposed a definite plan for the future communist commune with ground plans, front and side and bird’s-eye views. Owen passed away in Newtown on November 17, 1858.

Owen inherited the 18th century French materialist thought of “man is the product of his environment”, and held that all the evils and shortcomings of people should be attributed to their social environment, and that bad social environment was the cause of bad character. He also profoundly pointed out that the root cause of the contradiction between the misery of the workers and the contradictions in capitalist society lies in the capitalist private property, which was the permanent source of the strife among all classes in all countries. Owen put forth a social reform programme through the establishment of worker-peasant cooperatives of collective labor based on public property, and advocated that in the future there would be no classes, no exploitation, no private property, equal labor for all, and that everything except purely personal daily necessities would become public property. He also put forth important ideas such as combining education with productive labor, eliminating the three major distinctions (between workers and peasants, between town and country, and between physical and mental labor), and cultivating man with an all-round development. These important ideas were assimilated by the classic writers of Marxism and became the direct theoretical source of scientific socialism. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels highly praised Owen’s lofty ideals and noble character, such as his “advance in the direction of Communism”, his frank renunciation of “wealth, applause, honor, and glory” for the communist ideal, and his boldness in facing “outlawry, the excommunication from official society” and “the loss of his whole social position”.

However, Owen failed to see the historical mission of the proletariat and the important role of class struggle, and thus could not find the right way to realize the main forces of social transformation and build the ideal society of the future. As Lenin pointed out in On Co-operation, Robert Owen dreamed of peacefully remodeling contemporary society into socialism without taking account of such fundamental questions as the class struggle, the conquest of political power by the working-class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class. That is why we are right in regarding as entirely fantastic this “co-operative” socialism.