Posted on 12/22/2014 10:11:28 AM PST by Mozilla
In 1825 Welsh industrialist, Robert Owen, purchased a religious community on the frontier in Indiana, named Harmony. He renamed the village, New Harmony, and implemented a wide range of social experiments that seemed to hark of John Lennon’s 1971 song, “Imagine.” Things did not go as planned.
The popular understanding of communism among North Americans is that its concept began with the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx then appeared in an extreme form with the advent of 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In fact, while living in England, Engels attended a Socialist “church” founded by Robert Owen. and wrote for a journal that Owen published, The New Moral World. The wealth of both Owen and Engels was derived from the partial ownership of textile mills. While espousing the ideal that workers should own the means of the production, in their lifetimes, they both continued to maintain affluent lifestyles by owning the means of production themselves.
All of the basic beliefs and economic principals of Marxism can be found in the writings of Robert Owen. He was hostile to traditional Christian religious practices. He wanted to do away with privately owned property, inheritance and titles of nobility. He thought workers should be paid according to their needs, not their skills.
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Owen envisioned New Harmony as a physical manifestation of his proto-Marxist philosophies. As with the Bolsheviks of Russia, there was to be no conventional religion and individuality was to be erased. However, unlike the situation in Russia after the Revolution, intellectual pursuits and philosophical questioning were encouraged. The town was centrally planned to create an environment that would modify human behavior and social norms. This experiment was much more extreme than was normally associated with “socialist” experiments.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
Robert Owen had bought the land to create his utopian paradise. Thus he ushered in a strain of socialism known as Utopian Socialism, but he wasn't the only one to try it. Among others, the concept was also tried by Charles Fourier.
Fourier proposed his communes to be called phalanxes or phalansteries, which would allow residents to make use of their human passions and talents. Based on the number of personalities he believed existed, Fourier calculated that the maximum size of each phalanx would have to be around 1,600 people, a number he felt would get all the work completed by assigning every passion to its proper job. (So a person who loved working with dirt would help dispose of the waste and garbage in the commune.)
Fourier's writings inspired others to create their own utopian society of phalanxes. So he inspired a whole movement of intentional communities in the United States. They included Utopia, Ohio; La Reunion outside of Dallas, Texas; the North American Phalanx of Red Bank, New Jersey; Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Community Place and Sodus Bay Phalanx in New York State, and several other communities in the United States.
Like Robert Owen's New Harmony, the phalanxes were abandoned over time as it never could achieve its goal of being a Utopia.
An even earlier experiment in ‘socialism’ was by William Bradford at Plymouth Plantation in 1620. That failed too.
The article also came with a slide show of pictures:
http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/new-harmony-indiana#slide=1
Anyone who has driven between Phoenix and Flagstaff on I-17 has gone right by this place: https://arcosanti.org/
I think Lousia May Alcott’s father was a co-founder of one of these. A good portion of her childhood was spent in one. I remember quite clearly reading in her autobiography of how brutal and full of hardships their years were there.
Communism — It fails every time !
“Do my work!” And “Give me your stuff!”. I wonder why that never works out. People gets paid lots of money in our universities to push it.
Like what Obola does.
Could very well be. As I understand it a great many farmers who had embraced socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left to Canada where they saw more opportunity to spread the message.
Between 1898 and 1915, over one million farmers came to Canada from America, moving mostly to the western provinces. Many of these farmers were enamored and associated with socialist groups in the United States. They were wheat farmers and felt slighted by the railroads and banks, feeling that the market was working against them. For roughly two decades they organized into a rabble of splintered groups comprised of farmers, socialist intellectuals, labour leaders, and union organizers.
Very interesting article, at least personally interesting.
The first in my family to arrive in America was in 1626 to Virginia Colony. The written record shows 'P' next to his name on this ship's manifest. My understanding is that the 'P' stood for, "Prisoner of the Crown". I assumed, but could never find any documentation, that his passage was paid in lieu of indentured servitude.
Marx was all about self-actualization, too. It is a little opaque just how throwing off wage slavery and shoveling sh*t for free was supposed to liberate anyone but there you are. Presumably there would be someone in each village who enjoyed shoveling sh*t. That would actually be a pretty valuable feller to have, but in practice there are a lot more villages who need sh*t shoveled than fellers willing to do it for free. It is at that point in Marxism that the requirement for a more perfect human being crops up, one of whose extant characteristics, one supposes, involves a shovel and, well, you know...
I guess that is true that the Plymouth Plantation and Jamestown are both earlier socialist settlements. But Robert Owen of New Harmony was one of the main influences on Friedrich Engels. Engels attended a church that followers of Owen had in England. Engels became enamored with socialism.
He later critiqued the utopian socialists when he met Karl Marx and they began to create the blueprint for Marxism. But Robert Owen can be credited as being influence on the creation of modern communism.
The first is that there are no sexual rules which leaves people angry, confused and disinclined to cooperate. While the egg heads tend to disregard this segment of human personality we WANT to know that who we are sleeping with is only sleeping with us. If we leave for five minutes we don't want to come back and find them in the sack with someone else.
Lacking this kind of sexual rule we will be disinclined to leave them and angry and suspicious of the others around us who may have designs on them.
The other thing is the lack of reward for effort. People are willing to work together TO A POINT to help others but if they receive no reward they will quit doing so.
This very old tired "bright new way" has been tried repeatedly for thousands of years. It doesn't work.
This is exactly why socialism and communism always fail. No incentive to do the work needed to survive and help out. And if one does work they get no reward but more work as they can't really own anything or keep the fruits of their labor.
Except for the next time. It's always going to succeed glowingly the next time.
Absolutely. Apparently the problem is that True Communism has never been tried. The definition of which is communism that succeeds.
The textbook definition of insanity.
Yup.
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