5.3 Clearing Some Ground | Owen, Fourier, Proudhon

It is crucial, though, to reset the dial on coöperation and not get caught in the quagmire of earlier historical debates or different historical contexts. These are very different times today than the early nineteenth century, and in the United States, for the moment at least, we are past the period when wealthy industrialists, like Robert Owen, or fanciful utopians, like Charles Fourier, marshalled philanthropic ideals to relieve the misery of 5-year-old orphans working in factories. A lot of that ground needs to be cleared, especially today when the reality and practice of mutuals and coöperative enterprises—from credit unions to mutual insurance to worker coöperatives—have now been proven to be effective, perhaps even more resilient than traditional corporations, and have such a solid track record.

Robert Owen (1771–1858), for instance, prefigured a more just society and had enlightened views for his time about educating and training the poor and workers, in order to shape their character and eliminate misery, crime, and punishment from society; but his writings are off-putting in important ways. This is not to minimize his achievements. Owen experimented with enlightened factory workshops and towns (New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana) that provided housing, education, and welfare for the workers. He strongly believed in government providing education and training for the poor. Owen is often called a “utopian socialist,” though in reality he was more of a social reformer of a social democrat or socialist style, who believed strongly in government welfare programs. He is considered by many the father of the coöperative movement, but he did not experiment so much with coöperatives, as he did with top-down social welfare clusters, at his factory in New Lanark and his factory town in New Harmony. Owen militated throughout his life for an 8-hour workday. He formed the Association of all Classes of all Nations in 1835, which helped coin the term “socialism” and made it current in British terminology. And, first in an essay published in 1813, then with three additional essays revised and fully published in 1816-1817, Owen set out his vision of a new society. He also proposed, in 1818, an outline of an ideal society in a report to House of Commons on the Poor Laws.²⁹⁵

Owen righteously decried the condition of misery that plagued three-fourths of the British population. He proclaimed essential truths about human conduct—namely, that we can shape the character of humans through education and training and formation, and that this will benefit everyone in society and relieve the generalized conditions of misery—with the goal of enlightening political leaders and the public, and with the underlying assumption that knowledge will produce action. Owen explained patiently that the education and training and formation of children will lead those who are excluded away from lives of crime and vice, toward more productive lives of labor; and that this will benefit not only the excluded by relieving their poverty, but will also benefit the privileged because they will be better able to enjoy their advantages. His social aim was to bring about a society without misery, without vice, and without punishment—in his words, “man may by degrees be trained to live in any part of the world without poverty, without crime, and without punishment.”²⁹⁶

Owen also put his theory into practice—he is almost a perfect illustration of critique and praxis: throughout, Owen emphasizes that what he was proposing not only worked in theory but was also demonstrated in practice. He constantly referred to putting his “principles into practice.”²⁹⁷ And he did, eventually losing all his wealth as he tried to construct more just micro-societies.

But it is important to remember that he employed about 500 orphan children aged 5 and 6 in the factory that he took over in 1784 in Glasgow—he referred to them as “about five hundred children, who were procured chiefly from workhouses and charities in Edinburgh.”²⁹⁸ Owen was writing as an industrialist and capitalist, as someone who was interested in deriving profit from these reforms. He was managing mills and trying to sustain himself on the profits from his private enterprises. Owen makes this clear in an address to other industrialists at the beginning of the third essay of A New View of Society:

Like you, I am a manufacturer for pecuniary profit. But having for many years acted on principles the reverse in many respects of those in which you have been instructed, and having found my procedure beneficial to others and to myself, even in a pecuniary point of view, I am anxious to explain such valuable principles, that you and those under influence may equally partake of their advantages.²⁹⁹

The profit motive is pervasive. The programs that Owen advanced, he writes in essay three, “will yet appear, upon a full minute investigation by minds equal to the comprehension of such a system, to combine a greater degree of substantial comfort to the individuals employed in the manufactory, and of pecuniary profit to the proprietors, than has hitherto been found attainable.”³⁰⁰ Owen appeals to the proprietors’ keen sense of investment in machines—in equipment and mechanisms—and then draws the parallel to “vital machines” or workers.³⁰¹ He refers to “living machinery,” that is, people, anticipating Gary Becker’s theory of human capital.³⁰² Tending to that living machinery, Owen argued, “will essentially add to your gains.”³⁰³

None of this is to detract from the vision and justice of Robert Owen. He was years ahead of his time in advocating for a social welfare state, for a “national” plan for education and formation of character, for “the happiness of the community.” “The end of government is to make the governed and the governors happy,” he declared. “That government then is the best, which in practice produces the greatest happiness to the greatest number; including those who govern, and those who obey.”³⁰⁴ He was years ahead of his time in creating socially reformed workplaces. Nevertheless, he lived as an industrialist during a very different time and there is little point returning to his rhetoric or set of arguments. Coöperationism has advanced too much since his New View of Society.

The same is true of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), whose quixotic work, The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), laid the foundation for a new political economy of desire and labor, based on his extraordinarily imaginative phalanstères—those self-sufficient autonomous utopian microcosms of 1,200 people designed for the benefit of workers and their families. Fourier was a brilliant and radical thinker, one of the founders of utopian socialism, a feminist—in fact, he allegedly is the one who used the term feminist first in 1837—and very forward looking on issues of sexuality. His writings on the libidinal motivations for labor inspired generations of thinkers at the intersection of coöperation and liberation, from Kropotkin to Herbert Marcuse, André Breton, Roland Barthes, and Hakim Bey.³⁰⁵

But here too, although he put coöperation at the center of his enterprise, Fourier was wedded to the idea of profit and the desire for luxury, which he placed at the emotional center of his project. The phalanxes would triumph, Fourier argued, because of human greed and the desire for luxury. He wrote:

The strongest passion of peasants, as of city-dwellers, is a love of profit. When they see an associative community yielding a profit (other things being equal) three times as large as that produced by a community of isolated families, as well as providing all its members with the most varied pleasures, they will forget all their rivalries and hasten to put association into practice. And no laws or coercion will be necessary for this to spread to every part of the world, because people everywhere are motivated by a desire for wealth and pleasure.³⁰⁶

Fourier had in mind a new family organization, but one that included domestic servants.³⁰⁷ Not only that, he had other failings. Fourier was anti-Semitic. He believed that Jews, whom he associated with trade, were the source of evil and had to be forced to do farm work. In fact, he advocated the return of Jews to Palestine. Again, there is no need to return to these debates and precursors of coöperation. We are much further along.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) as well, was deeply problematic in this regard. Although he articulated and in part gave birth to mutualist philosophy, although he coined the term “anarchist” and advocated the radical transformation and abolition of property, Proudhon himself was anti-Semitic and sexist. His confrontation with Marx, it turns out, was not purely intellectual. It was not just about ideas. There was a deeply anti-Semitic dimension to it. This is what Proudhon wrote about Jews (including Marx by name) in his private diaries in 1847, which were only published in the 1960s:

December 26, 1847: Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Demand its expulsion. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc. beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done – What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew like the hatred of the English should be our first article of political faith. Moreover, the abolition of Judaism will come with the abolition of other religions. Begin by not allocating funds to the clergy and leaving this to religious offerings. – And then, a short while later, abolish the religion.³⁰⁸

Proudhon was also sexist and wrote in his journals that women should either be courtesans or housekeepers. In addition, he added, women should be the dominion of their masters, men.³⁰⁹

There is in fact a long and difficult history between socialism (even utopian socialism) and anti-Semitism, tracing back to Fourier and Proudhon and others. This is a rich topic. But there is no need to return there. To be sure, the internal debates between Proudhon and Marx on property,³¹⁰ or between Proudhon and Blanc on the organization of worker workshops,³¹¹ are theoretically rich and informative. But again, we have learned so much since then, and coöperation has evolved so much since the nineteenth century, so there is little point returning to those ideological debates.