Robert Owen; Pioneer of Social Reforms (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... all the necessary material goods and their distribution shall be organized and carried out under the direction and in the interests of the whole community. It is this prospective society Owen called Socialism, and anticipated thereby the doctrine which Marx afterwards made world-wide. On its economic side Owen's new order of society is Socialism absolute and complete; it i9 only politically and socially that it is not identical with the Marxian theory. Owen's Socialism is not necessarily a social democracy. The Governor of New Lanark cared little about political equality, and the agitations for the franchise left him unmoved. Many of his followers became Chartists, and Owen declared himself favourable to adult suffrage and the ballot; but the key to human progress was in economic and not in political reform, he held; and so he writes in a public letter to the working classes on Chartism, 1842, that: "It is not any mere political change in your condition that can now be of any service to you or to society." The evolution of capitalism, the superseding of the trust and the syndicate by common ownership, the political rule of the working class, and expropriation by democracy of the receivers of rent and interest--none of these events came into Owen's vision of the future. He was for governments, there and then, establishing Socialism, and when governments failed to fulfil his expectations, Owen believed that Socialism and a new moral world could be inaugurated even without State aid. Socialist colonies, equipped with land and capital, could be planted and federated and extended till England, Europe, and finally the world itself was changed. Owen was not by any means anarchist in his advocacy of voluntary Socialism. He despaired of...