It was one of the most powerful political ideas in history. A new faith for a skeptical age. It promised a world of harmony and abundance if only property were shared by all and distributed equally. The idea was called ‘Socialism’ and it spread farther and faster than any religion in history.
But, in the 1980’s, in almost the blink of an eye, it all collapsed. “Mr., Gorbachev tear down this wall!”, said President Reagan. Many proclaimed that socialism had failed so badly that it was gone forever, but they were wrong.
Today the British Labor Party which had moved toward an embrace of market capitalism, now promises to nationalize great swaths of the British economy. In Latin America, a socialist dictator grabbed power in Venezuela bringing that country to the brink of ruin and igniting a regional crisis. China has grown prosperous by introducing private enterprise even while the Communist Party tightens its grip over the people, creating a surveillance state that former authoritarians could only dream of. All still… in the name of socialism.
And here in the United States politicians who proudly proclaim themselves Socialists have scaled to the very heights of the Democratic Party. Reigniting a debate that many thought was over.
In this article I trace the trajectory of an idea that changed the world, and whose appeal is once more on the rise… Socialism.
The early 19th century brought a faith in unbounded human progress. Old beliefs rooted in religion were abandoned in favor of new ones purportedly grounded in science and rational thought. One of these new ideas was called socialism.
Socialism first appeared on the part of a British reformer. He creates a model utopia on the American frontier. Soon two German philosophers recast the idea as prophecy arguing that socialism is the world’s destiny, setting the stage for revolution.
The first story of Socialism actually began in America. The United States is not yet 50 years old. Land in the West is plentiful and a magnet to new settlers and new ideas.
In Indiana in 1825, a great experiment was unfolding on the banks of the Wabash River. It was called New Harmony, and it would be a community of equality heralding a new way of life and eventually a new kind of world.
Its founder was a British industrialist named Robert Owen, and his followers would soon coin a name for his vision… “Socialism”. When Robert Owen arrived in America, he was already famous for his progressive ideas. His cotton mill in New Lanark Scotland was the most heralded industrial enterprise of its day. He shortened working hours, restricted child labor, and even provided sick pay. Owen not only cared about how his 2,000 employees worked, but he also cared about how they lived. Certainly, a worthy cause, and an example of good leadership.
Anyone who would live in his properties at New Lanark had to live by his rules. The rules were very specific. How often they had to put out their trash, how often they had to bathe, when people needed to be home at night. No one could be publicly drunk, and they had to spend time with their families, etc. His rules were many.
Education was a key part of Owen’s reforms. Rather than putting his employee’s children to work in the factory, he put them in school. He also created the first preschool in the United Kingdom. It was part of what he called the ‘Institute for the Formation of Character’.
Owen was developing a theory of human nature that would remain one of the fundamental ideas of socialism. It would resurface again and again. He felt you could actually mold human character. He in fact said, “it is of all truths the most important that man’s character is made for, but not by himself”. He was an Environmental Determinist. He believed that if you can begin virtually at birth and have a child in a superior environment; you will through education and liberation of this person’s intellect and spirit, actually produce a perfect character and person.
He called this the second coming of the truth. I think he really did believe he was the second Messiah. But unlike Jesus, who could only tell the truth in parables, Owen on the other hand could actually say the literal truth because he believed had “the science”.
Sound familiar?
Far from being seen as a crank, Owen was taken very seriously. When he arrived in America in 1825, a joint session of Congress was convened to hear his ideas before an audience that included President James Monroe and President Elect John Quincy Adams.
Owen announced he had purchased an entire village in Indiana. There, he would further the work begun at New Lanark. But this time his community would be one of true equality.
Harmony Indiana had been founded a decade earlier as a different kind of commune; a religious one. Owen bought it from George Rapp the charismatic leader of a sect of German Lutherans who were pulling up stakes to follow one of rap’s visions. Their community under Rapp had been industrious, prosperous, and peaceful. They left behind 160 buildings and some 30,000 acres of fertile land.
Indiana at that time was a massive wilderness. There in the middle of the wilderness you had this beautiful town of brick and clapboard houses. A magnificent cruciform church in the middle of town and the Commons; it was very sophisticated. It was called the Athens of the West at that time.
On April 27th, 1825, Robert Owen welcomed 800 eager arrivals to the town he had rechristened New Harmony. One group in particular was attracted to New Harmony… intellectuals. The village soon became a center of progressive thought and experiment.
They had education at all levels from infant to adult education. They had a newspaper being published, and natural scientists out exploring the environs of new harmony and beyond. They created natural science books to show people about the wonderful new species they are finding in the Midwest. There were people lecturing about equal rights for women, and about the abolition of slavery. This was in 1827 and 1828.
To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July 1826, Owen issued what he saw as the next step in the liberation of humankind. The Declaration of Mental Independence.
From here forward he proclaimed man was free from the trinity of evils responsible for all the world’s misery and vice. They were… traditional religion, conventional marriage, and private property. The last of these was key. The quest to do away with private property would animate socialism for the next one-hundred-fifty years.
Many historians say that Robert Owen arrived slowly at the conclusion that it was individual property and individual profit that was in a sense, undermining the opportunities to create a new society. Owen concluded that the inequalities in society were created by inequalities in the ownership of property, and in the ownership of wealth and profit.
Sound familiar?
However, Owen couldn’t quite bring himself to turn over ownership of his own property to the community. Most likely because he knew of the personal sacrifice and hard work that he had to put into successfully buying and owning property. That being said, people did get to live in new harmony for free.
Managing the community’s economy without individual ownership proved highly inefficient. One new harmony member wrote that “even salads were deposited in the store to be handed out by making 10,000 unnecessary steps and causing them to come to the tables in a wilted deadened condition”.
Before long, many members were losing their enthusiasm for Owen’s experiment. In the end, one of the problems in New Harmony was that it was a big group of idealists in one place, that was a very isolated place. They spent a lot of time thinking about the ideal of the perfect community. Ultimately you had a lot of thinkers and not enough doers.
Sound familiar? To me it sounds a lot like academic intellectuals and bureaucratic busy bodies who work in government and college classrooms.
The work simply didn’t get done. Before long industries that had thrived under Minister George Rapp’s followers just a few years earlier, were either sputtering or out of business altogether. After two years, several reorganizations, and seven different constitutions; Owen’s great experiment collapsed.
Owen had a very hard time acknowledging that there was a failure at New Harmony. Over a period of many months when everyone around him, including his sons, was saying things are falling apart; Owen was saying things are going great. But eventually, he couldn’t keep up that pretense any longer because everyone was leaving.
Owen found a kind of alibi. As almost every failed socialist leader has done… he began blaming the people who came to New Harmony. He said they were simply poor human material for his experiment.
Owens son Robert Dale stayed at new harmony after its collapse. He had a very different assessment of his father’s experiment. He wrote, “all cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious, and the ignorant and idle, must work their own downfall. For by this unjust plan, they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members and retain only the improvident unskilled and vicious”.
That is a very good summary of precisely why socialism and communism have failed each and every time they have been attempted. Despite the failure of New Harmony, and other early attempts to put socialism into practice, the idea continued to generate great excitement. Soon two philosophers would take utopian hope and turn it into a faith by arguing that socialism was not only desirable… it was inevitable.
The Dawn of Socialism as a Religion
Back in England, Robert Owen and his followers were building gathering places for the socialist faithful. They called them “Halls of Science”. Each week thousands of adherents of Owens’ new moral world flocked there seeking inspiration.
Even though they proclaimed earnestly that they had contempt for all religion, every Sunday they would all gather and bring their families there. But they did not call them services. They called them meetings. Someone would get up in the front and do something that sounded like a sermon. But they called it a lecture. Then they would all sing from a special book of “socialist hymns”, except they would not sing about God and His goodness, they would sing about equality and brotherhood.
In 1843 the Manchester congregation included a 22-year-old German journalist and radical named Friedrich Engels.
For a young man rebelling against the faith of his parents, the services held a great appeal. Engels was a bit of a rebel. Modern historians describe him as the typical frat boy. In many ways he was very interested in the military. He was interested in sports, he loved pubs and he loved women. But he was also an intellectual. He was in many ways the kind of person you would immediately recognize as a leader and as somebody people would congregate around.
Back in Germany, Engels had fallen in with a radical crowd, and his father was desperate to get him away from the bad influence of his friends. His father gets this idea that he should send Fred off to England to Manchester where the family business had a branch. Much to his father’s relief, Fred agrees. Little does dad know that Fred and his radical associates have concluded that the revolution is going to break out in England and Fred is desperate to be there and be part of the action.
Once in Manchester Engels threw himself into writing what would become a famous study of the English working class during the industrial revolution.
It was a very grim picture. Workers in the 1840s in England lived miserable lives. They lived in squalid conditions, and worked 16 to 18 hours a day. Child labor and female labor was incredibly common. Disease was rampant. The living standards were just below probably what we would even expect in many underdeveloped countries today. It was a miserable, miserable time.
Engels saw that the working class was miserable. At the same time, he was also envisioning a sort of salvation of the working class in terms of history providing a fertile ground for revolution. He understood that the workers sooner or later would understand that history was working in their favor.
He believed history would radicalize them. And by being radicalized, workers would no longer passively see themselves as victims of capitalism but would actively seek to change it. Engels was soon contributing to Owen’s ‘New Moral World’ and other radical publications. Among them was a newspaper edited by a man who had once been a part of young Fred’s circle of college radicals back in Germany; the 25-year-old Karl Marx.
Marx starting very young was very charismatic. He had this forbidding style and a great genius for theoretics. Where other people saw a meaning, Marx could see a meaning within a meaning behind a meaning… and then a bigger meaning. His colleagues would just look at him awestruck and say, “this is our great genius who can figure it all out”.
Marx had little use for the ideas of his colleagues. But one of Engels articles caught his eye. The two men began corresponding. In the summer of 1844, they arranged to meet in Paris. Despite being mostly off the mark, It was the beginning of one of the most intellectually fruitful partnerships in history.
Marx was the Prophet. His personality and his nature made him a flamboyant and charismatic leader. Something Engels was very willing to defer to. But Engels early work and early research really provides much of the foundation upon which Marxism is later built. Engels of course also supports Marx, not only through his research but financially and psychologically. So, without Engels, in any number of ways, Marxism would never have come to be.
In January 1848, students and workers took to the streets of Palermo. By February, the revolt had spread to Paris. Soon nearly 50 uprisings engulfed the European continent from Russia to the English Channel. Marx and Engels rushed home to Germany to join the barricades. They had just finished writing a platform for a worker’s organization based in London. The pamphlet would become known as the “Communist Manifesto”.
The timing of its publication would forever link it to revolution adding to its mystique. Soon, the world would learn the central premise of Marxism; that the existence of all hitherto existing society, is the history of class struggles.
For Marx and Engels, the heart of the system of capitalism was exploitation. They saw the workers were the ones who are creating the things that were coming out of the factories. But the capitalists are the ones who are keeping most of the profits. When they talk about the “means of production”, Marx and Engels are describing the machinery and the factories. They see all this as terribly unjust. And the only way to rectify it was for the workers to get together and take the factories away from the capitalist so that they could have the complete benefit of the products that they themselves were creating.
The communist manifesto predicted that as capitalism progressed the working class would become so large and so poor that revolution would be inevitable. The result, socialism, a new workers state where people contributed according to their ability and received according to their need. In time government itself would become unnecessary and give way to a new stateless society Marx and Engels called “Communism”.
What marks an Engels said was, “Don’t worry, whatever happens to you. No matter how miserable your lives are. No matter how desperate your political struggle seems. History is working its way towards this outcome.” This gives Marxism its incredible force, a force born from hope. But a hope that is not realistic. Many Socialists bought the argument. The communist manifesto would go on to become one of the most influential pamphlets ever published with translations in every major European language by the turn of the century.
But the manifesto was just a summary. Marx soon set to work on a volume that would lay out a comprehensive theory of socialism. In 1851 Marx wrote to Engels that he hoped to finish it in five weeks. But five weeks grew into five years, and eventually to fifteen years. All the while, Marx depended almost entirely on Engels for financial support.
The only time Marx went out and got an actual job was as a correspondent for the New York Tribune newspaper. But he didn’t speak English, so he couldn’t write the articles himself. Engels did speak English, and Marx convinced Engels to ghostwrite the articles for a number of years until he got his own English up to a level where he could write some himself.
It took Karl Marx nearly 20 years to finish his masterwork. In 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was finally complete with more volumes promised. The book would soon be hailed as a breakthrough in political and economic thought.
In the scientific tenor of the time, after all we have to understand that we are talking about the 19th century, Marx had accomplished in the mind of many Socialists what Darwin had accomplished for biology. He had laid bare the development of economic laws that were at work in capitalism. And in that sense, he had revealed the motive and the motor of history… economic development. Marx gives us an economic view of history. Seeing people as sort of players in a drama in which economic forces are primary, and classes more than individuals, as the kind of motor force of history.
But sadly Marx never could, or have the opportunity to understand economics, capitalism and industry at all. He never held more than a handful of unsuccessful jobs. He never invented anything and never had to find a way to bring some new product or invention to market that would help anyone. He never had to make a payroll, and spent almost his entire adult life living off of others.
Engels survived Marx by 12 years. Thanks in large part to Engels public relations efforts, Marxism spread to workers movements in Germany and across Europe. But, by the time Engels died in 1895 many of the more perceptive Socialists were beginning to notice a crack in the Marxist doctrine.
By the end of the 19th century Marx’ theory has been around for about 50 years. But it’s not coming true, the workers are not getting poorer and they are not becoming revolutionary. At that point a kind of choice emerges. You can say well, ‘I’m for the workers and never mind the revolution, but we will try to make things a little better a step at a time through political reforms’. While others say, ‘I’m for the revolution. That’s what is going to give us the glorious new society. And if the workers are not going to make the revolution happen, we will find someone else to make it happen’.
And so, as the 19th century drew to a close, socialists faced two starkly different ideas of the world’s destiny. Some who would work within the existing political system, and through a process of reforms, will improve the lives of workers. Others believed that would not work. They believed the socialist revolution need a big push from those who knew better than the workers themselves what was good for them and all of society.