From Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, 1840
Some critics of the changes wrought in the United States during the Market Revolution
sought to reform American society (though labor unions, asylum reform, school reform,
temperance, abolitionism, etc.) Others withdrew from mainstream American society and
sought to create alternative ways of living. One manifestation of this was the formation
of utopian communities. Some, such as the Mormons, the Shakers, and the Oneida
Community, were religious in focus. Others were secular, seeking to build cooperative
communities that were not built around nuclear families or capitalist competition. Robert
Owen, a British immigrant, established once such community, New Harmony, in 1824.
The community failed, but Owen’s ideas remained highly influential among labor
organizations and Socialist groups. In the excerpt below, Owen outlines his thoughts on
competition and private property.
On Competition
…Individual and national competition and contest are the best modes that, have-been,
or perhaps can be devised, under the existing irrational notions of the world, by which
wealth can be created and distributed and the object desired is thereby effected, in
some manner, to a certain extent. But it is obtained by creating and calling into full
action, the most inferior feelings, the meanest faculties, the worst passions, and the
most injurious vices, which can be cultivated in human nature; and the objects
sought to be obtained by these measures, destructive as they are to the well-being and
happiness of mankind, are yet most imperfectly obtained.
…Now individual and national contest and competition is a mode of producing wealth
which, in connection with the other parts of the miserable system, by which the world
has ever yet been governed, requires ten-or twentyfold more waste of labor and
unhealthy and disagreeable occupation, than would be necessary under a well-devised
system of society.
The competition, now rendered unavoidable, between individuals in producing wealth,
compels them to apply much capital and labor in their individual establishments,
which would not be required in a superior state of society, and gives a wrong direction
to a great part of the labor and capital, by holding out inducements to create many
things possessing little or no intrinsic worth of usefulness.
But the waste of capital and labor, by unnecessary establishments, and by the
production of useless or injurious articles, created to tempt society to purchase them,
are small evils compared to the extent of the injurious feelings" violent passions, vices,
and miseries unavoidably attendant on a system of individual competition, and more
especially when that competition is carried to the extent it has now attained in the
commercial world…
On Private Property
…All who have deeply studied human society, and traced its innumerable evils to their
source, have lamented the existence of those causes which have continually produced
the rich and the poor, the ignorant and the learned, the powerful and the weak, and
the tyrant and the slave…
While wealth and exclusive privileges are equally certain, when in contact with poverty
and ignorance, to create feelings of contempt for those that are inferior to them in
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wealth, rank, or learning… which inevitably leads them [the wealthy] to the adoption
of measures to obtain and secure for themselves the political power of the country by
unjust and oppressive laws, which become, through time, highly injurious to the
whole population, not excluding even themselves and their descendants. All parties
who have occupied themselves in studying human nature, have uniformly come to the
conclusion, that without equality of condition, there can be no-permanent virtue or
stability in society; and many have been the devices and attempts to obtain it in
practice, and to retain private or individual property; but, as might have been,
anticipated, without any chance of succeeding to their wishes…
There can be nothing deserving the name of virtue, of justice, or of real knowledge in
society, as long as private property and inequality in rank and condition shall
constitute component parts of it; but the present system of the world cannot be
supported without private property and inequality of condition; consequently it is
irrational to expect to find real virtue, justice, or knowledge, in the present system, in
any part of the world…
It is for these, and numberless other reasons which might be added, in the new and
superior state of society, to which we now, even in this generation, confidently look
forward, there will be no necessity for Inequality of rank or condition.
Fourierist Newspaper on the Nuclear Family (1844)
Many secular cooperative communities in the U.S. followed the French socialist Charles
Fourier, who advocated such communities as the way to eliminate poverty and injustice.
Fourier advocated equality for women, and as part of this, he called for community childrearing practices to replace the nuclear family. What follows is an excerpt from the
Phalanx, an American Fourierist newspaper.
When we say that the isolated household is a source of innumerable evils, which
Association alone can remedy, the mind of the hearer sometimes rushes to the
conclusion that we mean to destroy the home relations entirely... it is feared that we
design some violence to the parental sentiment, or that...we would give children
"wholly up to the care of others, when only a mother can bear and forbear with a child,
and yet love it"....
The isolated household is wasteful in economy, is untrue to the human heart, and is
not the design of God, and therefore it must disappear, but the domestic relations are
not so, however they may have been falsified and tarnished by what man has mixed
with them. Of these relations the present position of woman is an essential part, and
she can be raised out of that position only by purging them of what is alien to their
essential character. Now, as we think, the pecuniary dependence which society
establishes for women, is one of the most hurtful of these foreign elements, and we do
not doubt that with its removal we shall see social relations generally rise to a degree
of truth and beauty, which they cannot at present attain. In the progress of society we
see that the position of woman is a hinge on which all other things seem more or less
to turn. In the savage state she is the drudge and menial of man; in the barbarous
state she is his slave and plaything, and in the civilized state she is as you confess, his
"upper servant." Society rises with the degree of freedom it bestows on woman, and it
is only by raising her to "integral independence," and making her as she should be,
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and as God made her, the Equal of Man, thought not by making her precisely the
same as man as some mistaken reformers have wished, the world can be saved....
Very many women find other employments more attractive than the care of their
children, and consequently the children receive comparatively little attention from
them. Now, this seems to me to show the plan of Nature, who does not form every
woman to take care of children, but only a certain proportion of women. You will,
perhaps, say that these are not good mothers, and that they ought to discharge so
interesting an office. But is not this to substitute for the method of nature certain
notions which you have formed for yourself, and which Nature does not at all
recognize?
Source: The Phalanx, I (February 8, 1844)
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