Robert Owen

[tradeunionsupporter]

In what ways was Robert Owen a Socialist did he support common ownership of the means of production ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen

[Tommy4ever]

He's usually described as a Utopian Socialist. His vision seemed to be that everyone would join together in newly founded little communes in the countryside where they would all live happily ever after in perfect harmony and equality.

IIRC he managed to set up one or two of these little socialist colonies which eventually died away.

He developed some of the ideas that would later influence more advanced and scientific socialist thinkers.

As for the common ownership of the means of production, here things are a little different. Whilst a Marxist or Anarchist would say that a factory should be run by the workers Owen had a slightly different view (perhaps influenced by Luddism). Basically it called for a sort of return to cottage industries - work previously done in factories would be decentralised so that people would return to making manufactured goods at home rather in factories.

A stepping stone thinker in my view - important for the more relevant thinkers who emerged later.

[Tim Finnegan]

IIRC he managed to set up one or two of these little socialist colonies which eventually died away.
Although his first establishment, New Lanark, fared much better, surviving until the late 60s, and was very influential as a pioneering example of welfare capitalism- whatever one thinks of such things.


As for the common ownership of the means of production, here things are a little different. Whilst a Marxist or Anarchist would say that a factory should be run by the workers Owen had a slightly different view (perhaps influenced by Luddism). Basically it called for a sort of return to cottage industries - work previously done in factories would be decentralised so that people would return to making manufactured goods at home rather in factories.If I understand correctly, he argued for a sort of cooperative workshop system, in which associations of small produces would organise labour and distribution amongst themselves through various forms of internal contracting. (That sort of "putting-out" system was actually quite common at the time in regards to certain fiddlier goods- lace-making being perhaps the most famous example- although, of course, all under the control of capitalists.) It's one of those attempts to sort of side-step industrial capitalism that were common among early socialists, who didn't have the perspective- or, if we're feeling ungenerous, insight- to conceptually separate the means of production from the social relations of production.