Robert Owen

Owen, Robert 

Born May 14, 1771, in Newtown, Wales; died there Nov. 17, 1858. British Utopian socialist. Son of an artisan.

After graduating from a local school, Owen began an intensive program of self-education. He worked in commercial establishments from 1781. In the late 1780’s and early 1790’s he became friends with the English physicist and chemist J. Dalton and joined a literary and philosophical society. He became an entrepreneur in 1791, and in 1794–95 he founded the Chorlton Twist Company. From 1800 to 1829 he was manager of a spinning enterprise in New Lanark (Scotland). Owen’s break with orthodox Christianity was important in the formation of his world view. His acquaintance with the rationalistic materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment led him to conclude that its ideals were no closer to realization than Christian ideals. Observing the first, primarily sociopsychological effects of the industrial revolution (“the corruption of the character” of the rulers and the ruled) and proceeding from the sociological and ethical conceptions of Enlightenment philosophy, Owen came to believe that human nature has a decisive influence on individual and historical destiny. According to Owen, from time immemorial society had been led by people who did not understand the laws that govern the universe in a strictly deterministic manner. Thus, society’s leaders had, by their actions, distorted these laws.

Rejecting the principle of free will, to which he reduced all bourgeois doctrines, Owen asserted that the suffering masses must not be held responsible for being poor and ignorant. Likewise, all the credit for wealth and culture should not go to the ruling classes. According to Owen, human beings are the product of their environment. If people are depraved, the environment giving rise to them is depraved. This essentially materialistic idea was oriented toward the effectual transformation of the environment. But Owen, whose mechanistic, materialistic world view was inconsistent and interlaced with deism and pantheism, understood the idea of the transformation of society as a truth outside history. He believed that the beginning of a qualitatively new condition in the world—harmony among mankind—could come only with the education of the people.

Until the mid-1820’s, Owen did not associate the transformation of society with the elimination of private property. He presented the program for this period of his work, which may conventionally be called a period of bourgeois philanthropy, in A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character (1812–13). Under favorable economic conditions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Owen attempted to establish an ideal industrial community in New Lanark, relying on “reeducation” and improvement in the living conditions of the workers to achieve his objectives. He was convinced that his ideal community would guarantee both the well-being of the working class and high productivity, as well as high profits.

However, as a result of the economic crisis of 1815–16 and acute social conflicts, the increase in investments aimed at improving the condition and education of the workers encountered determined resistance from Owen’s partners, including the Quaker W. Allen and the philosopher J. Bentham. Legislation drafted by Owen to shorten the workday to ten hours, as well as his “Plan for National Upbringing and Education Under the Direction of the State and the Observation of the People,” met with opposition from bourgeois circles and from the clergy. Owen concluded that the workers in New Lanark, like those in other capitalist enterprises, “remain slaves.” Concentrating on fundamental economic and social problems, he arrived at the conviction that “the magic power of machines,” which was directed against working people under “the existing system,” was capable of ensuring an abundance of material goods that would make private property and accumulation meaningless.

In March 1817, Owen came out with a Utopian plan, drawing on certain of his accomplishments in New Lanark: his success in overcoming crime, drunkenness, and national and religious animosities; the implementation of elements of self-government, conscious labor discipline, emulation, cooperation, and social planning; and the combining of instruction with productive labor and physical and aesthetic education. Under his “plan,” the unemployed would be settled in “villages of unity and cooperation,” where private property, classes, exploitation, contradictions between mental and physical labor, the opposition of city and countryside, and other antagonisms would be unknown. This step marked a turning point in Owen’s life—the transition to a Utopian socialist position. In the 1820’s he established experimental communist colonies, including New Harmony [USA] and Orbiston and Harmony Hall [Great Britain]. He also founded a number of educational institutions and journals.

Leaving New Lanark in 1829, Owen devoted himself entirely to propaganda. On the basis of his initial plan, he proceeded to develop a Utopian communist system for restructuring the life of all of humanity—a system that was most fully presented in the Book of the New Moral World (published 1836–44). Under this system, “community settlements” established on voluntary principles would form a federation. In Owen’s opinion, the federation would be capable of demonstrating its economic and moral superiority—a superiority resulting from the greatest possible development of new (“scientific”) productive forces (including chemistry), as well as from the training of a new, harmoniously developed human being and the establishment of new social relations.

On Owen’s initiative, the Equitable Labor Exchange (1832–34) and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (1833–34) were founded in the 1830’s. He hoped that these organizations would become a means of realizing his plans for the transformation of society. But as V. I. Lenin remarked, he did not take into account “such fundamental questions as the class struggle, the capture of political power by the working class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class” (Poln. sobr. soch, 5th ed., vol. 45, p. 375). Furthermore, like the other Utopian socialists, Owen could not “explain the real nature of wage slavery under capitalism, [he] could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society” (ibid., vol. 23, p. 46). Emerging at an early stage of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the socialist doctrine of Owen and his disciples—J. Gray, T. Hodgskin, W. Thompson, and J. Braby, who were first referred to as socialists in the mid-1820’s—played a significant role in the education of the British working class and gave some impetus to the development of the trade union and cooperative movements in Great Britain. As the historical situation changed and the class consciousness of the proletariat grew, Owenism degenerated into a sect that attempted to distract the workers from class struggle. Withdrawing into messianic illusions, Owen himself arrived at mysticism and spiritualism at the end of his life, especially after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848–49, in the reactionary atmosphere of postrevolutionary Europe.

Nonetheless, Owen’s historical merits are indisputable. Of the great Utopian socialists, only he attempted to implement his socialist ideals with the participation of the workers. In the productive forces that had developed under capitalism, Owen discerned the preconditions for a higher organization of society, associated with the establishment of social property in the means of production. For this reason, his dreams of a qualitatively new condition for mankind anticipated in part the ideas of scientific communism. F. Engels considered him the “father of English socialism” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch, 2nd ed., vol. 2., p. 459). Assessing the significance of Owen’s work for the British working-class movement in the first decades of the 19th century, Engels wrote: “Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers, links itself on to the name of Robert Owen” (ibid., vol. 20, p. 274).

Owen’s ideas also influenced the development of socialist thought outside Great Britain. In Russia his name was known as early as the middle of the second decade of the 19th century. The members of the Petrashevskii circle, as well as A. I. Herzen, N. A. Dobroliubov, and other revolutionary democrats, were to some extent influenced by his ideas.

WORKS

The Life of R. Owen Written by Himself, vol. 1, parts 1–2. London, 1857–58.
In Russian translation:
Izbr. soch., vols. 1–2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1950.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vols. 2-A, 18–19, 23–24. (See index of names.)
Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vols. 2, 4, 6, 29, 45. (See index of names.)
Plekhanov, G. V. Utopicheskii sotsializm XIX v. Izbr. filosofskie proizv., vol. 3. Moscow, 1957.
Volgin, V. P. Istoriia sotsialisticheskikh idei, vol. 2. fasc. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931.
Anekshtein, A. [Ark. A-n]. R. Ouen. Moscow, 1937.
Kan, S. B. Istoriia sotsialisticheskikh idei, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1967.
Nemanov, I. N. “K voprosu o kharaktere N’iu-Lenarkskogo eksperimenta R. Ouena.” In Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii i zarubezhnykh stran. Smolensk, 1972.
Liebknecht, W. R. Ouen. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923. (Translated from German.)
Cole, G. D. H. R. Ouen. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931. (Translated from English.)
Podmore, F. R. Owen, vols. 1–2. London [1923].
Morton, A. L. The Life and Ideas of R. Owen. London, 1962.
Harrison, J. F. C. R. Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. London, 1969. (References.)

I. N. NEMANOV