Failed Utopias: Socialist Communes in the 19th Century
Sophie Hammond
One of the hidden historical treasures of Scotland is the village of New Lanark on the River Clyde. Founded in 1786 by entrepreneur David Dale, the village boasted several cotton mills and an extensive complex of workers’ housing by the end of the 18thcentury. However, by the 1960s New Lanark’s mills had closed, and the town faced demolition. Despite these dire past circumstances, today the village is a celebrated UNESCO World Heritage site. It welcomes around 300,000 visitors a year due to its status as one of the few surviving, historically authentic examples of a 19thcentury Utopian Socialist community.[1]
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New Lanark did not begin as a Utopian experiment, but it was certainly a mill complex that was ahead of its time in regards to social provision. David Dale was a Scottish entrepreneur that has been described as the ‘the greatest cotton magnate of his time in Scotland’.[2] He was also tremendously concerned by the unemployment of immigrants coming down into the Lowlands due to the Highland Clearances. In partnership with other important industrial figures he set up the New Lanark mill complex on the River Clyde to take advantage of the potential hydropower, and the legions of unemployed men, women, and children in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
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New Lanark,Mill Hotel and Waterhouses
Owen was a Welsh industrialist, entrepreneur and social reformer that believed in looking after his workers and allowing them the opportunity to better themselves. He implemented a number of socially progressive policies included shorter working hours, schools for children, housing renovations, free health-care, and affordable food.[3]These progressive efforts were the result of Owen’s beliefs in principles that would come to be known as Utopian Socialism.
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It is therefore, the interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated, physically and mentally, that society may be improved in its character, — that everyone should be beneficially employed, physically and mentally, that the greatest amount of wealth may be created, and knowledge attained – Robert Owen (1841)[4]
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In the early 19thcentury, utopian ideas became popular as industrialisation began to eat away at the previous power structures, causing social disruption. The 'utopian socialist' movement consisted of a number of different theories that shared the belief that this social disruption was largely the result of the emergence of capitalism which damaged society through increased focus competition and commercialisation at the expense of social welfare.
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Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.– Charles Fourier (1808)[5]
Rising discontent at poor social conditions, low wages and a lack of political representation was a major motivator for the emergence of more distinct forms of collective action during the 18thand 19thcenturies. Some of these forms of collective action were violent, with machine breaking and rioting from groups like the Luddites, being a common concern; however, some campaigns encouraged peaceful actions from a philosophical or religious standpoint. Critics that have come to be seen as Utopian Socialists mostly encouraged peaceful reform either within the existing system or the creation of new communal societies outside of it.[6]
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Owen’s experiments at New Lanark were an incredible success with the mills remaining profitable, and the lives of the workers being notably improved. Key national and international figures flocked to see the village and interview Owen, including the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, and the future Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. The village was perhaps the most visible of the Utopian Socialist communities of the early 19th-century and its success, as well as Owen’s 1813 book ‘New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character’, was one of the driving forces behind the spread of what have come to be known as Socialist Utopian communities during the 19thcentury.[7]
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But what is Utopian Socialism? This is a question that requires some deeper analysis. It is unlikely that many of the 19th-century figures that are now defined as Utopian Socialists would have identified with this categorisation. Indeed, it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that grouped a number of (somewhat) similar proto-socialist theorists from the early 1800s under this umbrella. They felt that the philosophies of these men were ones that merely presented a vision of a future Utopian society as ‘just’, without any true direction as to how to get there. This is in contrast to the reliance within classical Marxist socialism on a violent struggle wherein the proletariat rise up and seize the means of production to change society.[8]
Charles Fourier, French philosopher and a founder of utopian socialism
Therefore, even the name ‘Utopian Socialism’ has a negative association, damning all early 19thcentury proto-socialist through its indefinability. While the concept of Utopia has come to characterise an ideal, 'perfect' society without problems in modern parlance, it is, in fact, an entirely malleable and essentially meaningless term. What is perfect for one person is very rarely the same for another, and indeed, the word itself comes from the Greek and can be translated strictly as 'no place.’[9]The fact that Marx and Engels retroactively applied the Utopian definition on to theorists with a wide variety of ideas is particularly telling. In “The Communist Manifesto”, Marx and Engels state,
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Socialists of this kind…consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class…For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? – Karl Marx (1848) [10]
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Marx and Engels present a group of idealist thinkers who do not understand that men can be wilfully greedy and that inequality is actively enforced by the most privileged echelons. This is in direct contrast to Marxism’s focus on the need for violent struggle to overcome an oppressive system. Despite Marx’s admiration of certain proto-socialist figures like Charles Fourier, he paints them as fools to ostensibly place his theory in a better light.[11]
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However, to paint this disparate group of thinkers as one ‘school’ of thought may itself be foolish. Many of the theorists argue a broad range of Utopian Socialist thought that, while united in the desire to see a peaceful society characterised by the welfare of all, show fundamental differences in support for issues such as labour rights, property ownership, women’s rights, and education. Some of the key ‘Utopian Socialist’ include Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, who was one of the movements earliest thinkers. Saint-Simonism invoked a kind of socialism in which all property and production would be state-controlled with distribution based on an individual's ability, however, it did not eschew using existing political channels to bring about a sort of ‘technocracy’ that would use large organisations to better society. This was in contrast to thinkers like Charles Fourier who was one of the most strongly ‘Utopian' thinkers and lobbied for the creation of experimental, small-scale communities to form the foundations of a new socially concerned state.[12]
It was the latter school of thought that Robert Owen came to embody. For example, to test the viability of his ideas for reform outside of New Lanark, Owen began experiments in communal living in America in 1825 with the establishment of New Harmony, Indiana. He used his own funds to buy an existing town from a religious group which included nearly 200 buildings and several thousand acres of land. The act of moving away from Britain to try and create a progressive, model community for wider society to emulate is in direct contrast to domestic movements like Chartism, which actively engaged with the existing system in order to try and reform it and the teachings of Saint-Simon.
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Ultimately New Harmony, under the management of Owen's son and business partners, was a short-lived financial failure as a utopian vehicle (although people continued to live there after the experiment was disbanded). One of the major reasons for this was the variety of backgrounds the citizens of New Harmony came from. There were die-hard Owenite radicals, American exceptionalists, religious types, and vagrants all jostling for positions within the town structure and disagreements festered, especially without Owen present (he left for England very quickly after establishing the commune), to mitigate them.[13]
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Portrait of Robert Owen
This sort of failure was a common feature of many of the communes that sprung up all around the world during this period in an attempt to enact some kind of ‘Utopian Socialism’. For example, Brook Farm in Massachusetts, a community founded in the 1840s by former Unitarian minister George Ripley, was devastated by fire and financial instability, and closed by 1850, despite an income derived from ticket sales from visitors coming to the farm and an internationally famous pre-school, primary school, and college preparatory school which attracted paying students from all over the world. Because each member of the Brook Farm commune could choose to do whatever work they liked for equal pay, there were few revenue streams into the community which left it vulnerable to unexpected issues like fire.[14]
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Other communes were persecuted by the existing state apparatus. In 1921, followers of the Russian intellectual Tolstoy founded the Life and Labor Commune near Moscow but were persecuted by Bolsheviks, and forcibly relocated to Siberia due to their lack of interest in creating a Bolshevik Russia.[15]In fact, in the present day, it is perhaps the socialist Kibbutzim in Israel that have shown the most enduring success as a ‘socialist utopia’, particularly because they are authorised and encouraged by the state apparatus.[16]Most of the Kibbutzim that exist in Israel today are secular, and while some have been privatised and overhauled since their beginnings in the early 20thcentury, many still remain as socialistic enterprises which hold an important share of the nation’s agricultural market.[17]
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So what impact has Utopian Socialist thought had on modern society? Most of the communes inspired by this group of theorists failed quickly, especially the ones that eschewed a capitalist, industrial nexus like the one at New Lanark. Communities that tried to exist within the state structure often found themselves persecuted for not adhering to societal norms, while those who tried to exist outside of the economy soon found themselves in financial difficulties whether through personal conflicts or poor economic resilience. Therefore, it is not hard to conclude that the collapse of most 19thcentury utopian communes, from the Fourier inspired Phalanxes across America to small, communal English villages, represent a failure, at least in the implementation of Utopian Socialist thought during the 19thcentury. However, does this mean that the Utopian Socialist system of thinking is fundamentally incorrect?
It is illogical to assume that because most of these communes failed, Utopian Socialism is therefore fatally flawed because, in reality, Utopian Socialism does not exist as a fully outlined political theory. Marx and Engels grouped a number of early socialist thinkers into one category, and then defined it in opposition to their own theory which they deemed immensely superior because it included an action plan as to how to achieve a fairer society. They did this in spite of early socialist thinkers having deeply different ideas about what made a better society, simply because they deemed the societies they championed as imaginary – the very 'no place’ that the Greek word ‘utopia’ denotes.[18] Engendering legitimacy for a point of view by disparaging the effectiveness of another is a common persuasive technique and Marx and Engels cannot be blamed for employing it, however, the adoption of their facetious categorisation by academia to describe some proto-socialists does a disservice to these thinkers and their differing theories.
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Nor can the collapse of many of the socialist communes during the 19th-century be used as evidence as to why Utopian Socialism is a failure. The founders of these communities had a range of motivations, and the collapse of these experiments was due to a number of reasons, including natural disasters, war, local oppression, financial mismanagement, internal conflict, evolving priorities, and assimilation by nearby growing cities and towns. Not all of them failed due to the collapse of heir founding politics, and indeed, the improvements at New Lanark, our primary example, helped to illustrate a number of issues and improvements that would add to the pressure that eventually passed the Factory Act of 1819 (which put into place some protections for child workers but which were not radical enough for a disappointed Owen).[19]
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New Lanark was a successful experiment in improving factory conditions during Britain’s industrial boom which influenced key political thinkers of the time, and added pressure for reforms such as the 1819 Factory Act. It did not lead to the widespread reform that Owen hoped for, and his own ‘Utopian Socialist’ commune experiment in America was a failure, along with many others that had founding principles based around socialism at the time. Additionally, Utopian Socialism is a flawed theoretical grouping, used by Marx and Engels, to disparage a range of proto-socialist thinkers and gain legitimacy for their class-based socialism, due to Marx’s certainty that no other theorist had a legitimate plan as to how a fairer society would come to exist, aside from him. Therefore, to continue to allude to these proto-socialists as Utopian Socialists represents the true failure of 19thcentury non-Marxist socialist thought.
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Works Cited
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[1]Welcome to New Lanark World Heritage Site, (www.newlanark.org/world-heritage-site/), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[2]Devine, T.M.,The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (Penguin, 1999), p. 115
[3]History (Interactive Timeline), (http://www.newlanark.org/world-heritage-site/history.shtml), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[4]Owen, Robert, A Development of the Principles & Plans on which to establish self-supporting Home Colonies(1841).
[5]Fourier, Charles,The Theory of the Four Movements(1808), G. Jones, ed. (1966), p. 269
[6]Tilly, Charles, Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys, or Social Movements, The Public Opinion Quarterly47, no. 4 (1983): 461-78, (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2748659),[Accessed 02/07/18]
[7]Bloy, Dr Marjorie, A Web of English History - Owen, (www.historyhome.co.uk/people/owen.htm), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[8]Paden, Roger, Marx's Critique of the Utopian Socialists, Utopian Studies13, no. 2 (2002): 67-91. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718467),[Accessed 02/07/18]
[9]British Library, Dreamers & Dissenters – Utopia, (http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/utopia.html), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[10]Marx, Karl, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Eds. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p.269
[11]Fourier, Francois Charles (1772-1837), Encyclopaedia of Marxism, (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/f/o.htm#fourier-francois), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[12]Blunden, Andy, Utopian Socialism, (https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/index.htm),[Accessed 02/07/18]
[13]The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, New Harmony, Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Harmony),[Accessed 02/07/18]; Curl, John, For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, (PM Press, 2012), p.288; Hogan, Kathleen M., Robert Owen and New Harmony, (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/cities/newharmony.html),[Accessed 02/07/18]
[14]The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Brook Farm,Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brook-Farm),[Accessed 02/07/18];
[15]Sanborn, Josh, Review of William Edgerton, ed. Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans in Soviet Russia, (Indiana University Press, 1993), H-Russia: H-Net Reviews(March, 1996), (https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=312),[Accessed 02/07/18]
[16]Goldenberg, Sheldon and Wekerle, Gerda R., From Utopia to total institution in a single generation: the kibbutz and Bruderhof, International Review of Modern Sociology.2(2): 224–232, (September 1972)
[17]Communes, Eds., James C. Docherty, Peter Lamb, Historical Dictionary of Socialism
Volume 73 of Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series, (Scarecrow Press, 2006), p.97
[18]British Library, Dreamers & Dissenters – Utopia, (http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/utopia.html), [Accessed 02/07/18]
[19]Robert Owen Museum, Factory Reform (http://robert-owen-museum.org.uk/Robert_Owen_1771_1858/factory_reform), [Accessed 02/07/18]