The vision of utopian socialist Robert Owen
The word “utopian” is used to put down people who refuse to confine their hopes within predictable and acceptable boundaries. But the deep crises confronting society are encouraging people to consider new ways of living.
Popular and influential books include visions of societies in which production is recalibrated to heal the environment and liberate humanity’s creative capacities.
Utopian thinking can create cracks in capitalist realism and counter the dystopian ideas promoted by the ruling class. It can build confidence in the possibility of a post-capitalist future.
But utopianism can also be naive and elitist. It can promote a vision of change in which an enlightened minority free themselves from the bonds that tie the rest of us to the system.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had a complicated relationship with utopian socialists, whose ideas were popular in the 19th century.
They launched scathing attacks on the three most influential utopian socialists of the day—Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon.
Their utopian schemes were indeed naive and fanciful. Charles Fourier, for example, predicted that under socialism the seas would turn to lemonade.
As Engels drily noted, “Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous organisation of the masses to an organisation of society specifically contrived by these inventors.”
But they were not all impractical schemers.
The early socialists popularised opposition to private property and exploitation. They insisted that human nature was not irrevocably shaped by original sin. They argued that women should be liberated from the family, and that all the peoples of the world were siblings.
Some utopians also developed organisations based on international working class solidarity. One of them, Flora Tristan, created a model of independent working class organisation 20 years before Marx and Engels helped to set up the First International.
And utopian socialists actively campaigned for trade union rights, democracy, divorce and contraception.
In 1840, the Manchester Owenites had up to 10,000 members and some 3,000 regularly attended their Sunday night lectures. Engels was among them. In fact, the young Engels was quite keen on the utopian socialist communities he visited.
Many working people actively opposed capitalism and tried to find alternatives even as the system emerged.
Marx and Engels drank, argued and organised with utopian socialists. The ideas they developed incorporated the liberatory aspects of utopian thinking. But Marx and Engels had a clearer idea of how that liberation could be achieved.
The utopians believed that the power of reason would overwhelm ignorant self-interest. And their model of organisation has reappeared in different forms many times since the 1840s.
Many radicals have tried to create communes that aim to show it is possible to live free from capitalist hierarchy.
But the experience of the past 200 years demonstrates neither rational argument nor the example set by “enlightened communities” is sufficient to overthrow capitalism.
The logic of the market, the capacity of the state to repress and persecute, the difficulty of maintaining egalitarian relationships all reassert themselves.
Marx and Engels shared the utopian socialists’ critique of oppressive institutions, but they identified the social power capable of breaking those institutions.
Social change cannot be confined to an enlightened few carving out the space to explore diverse ways of living.
Central to Marxism is the idea that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class. Through getting involved in collective action, people develop the confidence to demand the impossible.
Even the most perfect meritocratic society would be unequal
A system that lasted for hundreds of years
Socialism is a broad term, but communism is something different
