Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 19

This aspect of Owen's political role is usually passed over by the statists, who lump him together with the utopians. But, the significance of this political role of Owen, well understood by Marx and Engels, is that it acts as a historical bridge between the ideas of the utopians and the revolutionary strategy of Marxism.

“Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers is linked with Owen's name. Thus in 1819, after five years’ effort, he forced through the first law limiting the labour of women and children in factories. He presided over the first congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade union association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communist organisation of society, on the one hand, co-operative societies (both consumers' and producers'), which have since at least given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are quite superfluous personages. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour-notes with the labour-hour as the unit; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating the much later Proudhon exchange bank, and differing only from the latter in that they did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but just a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.” (p 339)

In the early 1840's, as the Chartists grew as the first mass, working-class political movement, closely linked to the trades unions, Owen promoted not only his ideas on the creation of workers' cooperatives, but also that trades union and political struggle too. When the Chartists engaged in a General Strike, in pursuit of their political demands, Owen toured the country speaking in support of their actions. That was in stark contrast to the opposition to strikes and trades unions by Proudhon, and others, who, later, claimed to be followers of Owen.

The bridge is, also, reflected in Marx's Inaugural Address to The First International.

“After a 30 years’ struggle, fought with almost admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentaneous split between the landlords and money lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours’ Bill. The immense physical, moral, and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action... This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 18

Just as, in relation to the state, Marx was closer to the anarchism of Bakunin than to the statism and reformism of Kautsky, so too he and Engels were closer to the cooperative communism of Owen than they were to the statism of Lassalle. Unfortunately, it has been that statism of Lassalle, and the Fabians that has had the dominant effect on the ideas of the labour movement, over the last century.

The problem with Owenite communism, as with the other utopian socialists, was that it clung to the rationalist ideas, and a belief that it could simply set out these schemas of a future society, and that reason would prevail; the other bourgeois would see what Owen, also, saw. But, that was never going to happen. The existing capitalist society created great wealth and power for the new industrial bourgeoisie, and, increasingly, for the financial bourgeoisie. Why would they, in aggregate, as a class, give that up, in the present, simply on the basis of a vision of some future utopia?

At root, industrial capitalism is based on the same competitive principles of commodity production and exchange that existed for centuries before it. Its why those ideas of the petty-bourgeois commodity producer continue to dominate the thinking of not only the small, private capitalists, but even some of the larger capitalists, as their capitals have grown. It is most apparent in those larger capitals that remain family owned concerns, for example.

As noted earlier, because the ruling-class, today, is not a class of industrial capitalists, but a class of rentiers and speculators, whose immediate interests are antagonistic to, and in contradiction to the interests of industrial capital, still less are they constrained by even those longer-term concerns set out by Owen et al, about the maximisation of industrial profit. They are concerned not with the maximisation of industrial profit, and capital accumulation, but with the maximisation of “shareholder value”, i.e. the maximisation of their interest/dividends, rents, and capital gains.

But, inevitably, as Marx describes in Capital III, because those revenues depend, in the end, on industrial profits, which depends on real capital accumulation, that contradiction always ends in a financial crisis.

“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.”

(Capital III, Chapter 23)

Coming later than Fourier and Saint-Simon, and seeing the creation of the new classes – the industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat – Owen had a clearer view of the road ahead.

“His advance in the direction of communism was the turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories, it was quite another story. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform: private property, religion, and marriage in its present form. He knew what confronted him if he attacked them — universal ostracism by official society and the loss of his whole social standing. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen came to pass. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, and ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years.” (p 338)

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 17

“To the working-class, therefore, the fruits belonged too. To Owen the newly created gigantic productive forces, which had hitherto served only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of society and were destined, as the common property of all, solely to work for the common good of all.” (p 338)

Although, today, social-democrats and reformists (Menshevists) emphasise Owen's role as the creator of the cooperative movement, Marx and Engels had no hesitation in calling him what he was – a communist.

“Owenite communism arose in this purely business way, as the outcome, so to speak, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of initial costs, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. Similarly, in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge [plan, elevation and bird's-eye view all included -] that once the Owenite method of social reform is accepted, there is little to be said against the actual arrangement of details even from specialist's point of view.” (p 338)

Today's social-democratic and reformist co-operators are a million miles from the likes of Owen, and are horrified at the idea of any connection between cooperation and communism. Yet, for Marx and Engels, their vision of communism is inseparable from the idea of cooperation and cooperatives. They frequently describe communist society as being “The Cooperative Commonwealth”.

It is, of course, also, not what the statists desire to hear, as their view of socialism/communism is not one of a bottom-up, self-emancipation of the working-class, asserting its rightful, democratic control over its collective property, but is of the state exercising that control from above, which, also, involves, here and now, denying the reality that this socialised capital is, already, the collective property of the associated producers, and, instead, clinging to the idea that we are still in the conditions of the early 19th century, of the monopoly of private industrial capital that must be expropriated from the capitalist owners.

The position of the statists is the same as that of the Lassalleans attacked by Marx in The Critique of The Gotha Programme.

Lenin, in State and Revolution, noted that Marx's position, in relation to the state, was far closer to that of Bakunin than that of Kautsky. It emphasised that, prior to the revolution, the working-class could place no faith, have no reliance on the state, because that state is a class state, the state of the bourgeoisie, and, as such, represents the concentrated power of the ruling-class, mobilised against them. It is their greatest enemy, not their saviour. As Marx sets out in The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France, and elsewhere, the workers seek not to appeal to that state, not to engage in a Quixotic endeavour to capture it, by means of bourgeois-democratic assemblies, but to smash it. In order to smash it, they must build their own, alternative, organs of democracy and state power, themselves corresponding to the new, socialised cooperative forms of property that capitalism itself has created as transitional forms of property, be they the cooperatives themselves, or the joint-stock companies (corporations).

The social revolution, the transformation of the old bourgeois forms of property, based on the monopoly of private capital, and free market competition, is now, in the rear view mirror.  It is the political revolution that the working-class must now accomplish, just as did the bourgeoisie, in the past.  The bourgeoisie, over a long period, did that by concentrating their political offensive where they dominated, in the urban boroughs, until such time that they could confront the political power of the landed aristocracy. The workers have to do the same, to build organs of direct democracy in their strongholds, in the workplaces, and workers communities.

Those organs cannot simply be talking shops, continually being overridden by the bourgeois state, but must be both legislative and executive in nature. In short, the form that arose, in embryo, with the Paris Commune, in 1871, and took shape with the soviets/workers' councils, of 1905, and matured in the soviets of 1917.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 16

Owen recognised that welfarism, the improvement of the condition of his workers was not enough.

““The people were slaves at my mercy.” The relatively favourable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing an all-round rational development of the character and of the intellect, much less the free exercise of all their faculties.” (p 337)

Owen's insight contrasts well with those, today, who proclaim that, because workers live a few years longer, beyond their retirement, it is necessary to extend the retirement age, so as to protect pensions, i.e. to ensure workers never get the pension they have paid for! That, despite the fact that the rise in the productivity of labour, since the retirement age was set at 65, is, proportionally, far greater than the rise in life expectancy, and so what workers produce, during their lifetime, to cover what they consume in retirement, has increased massively. To quote Owen, therefore, we might ask where that difference in additional output has gone?

“And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society, as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?” (p 337)

In the case of New Lanark, it had gone to pay the proprietors “5% interest on their invested capital and in addition a profit of over £300,000.” (p 337) The increase in productivity, in Britain, has been even greater, more than enough to cover not just the requirements of pensioners living a few more years, but to enable them to retire earlier not later, and that applies across the globe. The difference has gone to fund increasing amounts of interest/dividends to the ruling-class, as its share of profits has gone from 10% in the 1970's to over 70% by the early 2000's. It has used those increasing amounts of interest/dividends not to invest productively, so as to increase output, but to finance its own conspicuous consumption, and its gambling addiction, as it ploughs money back into the purchase of existing speculative assets, i.e. existing financial assets and property, on the expectation of speculative capital gains.

Owen noted, in his day.

“If this new wealth had not been created by machinery … the wars ... in opposition to Napoleon and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.” (p 337)

And, the same is true, today. It is not workers living longer that causes the capitalist state to demand they work longer before retiring, but the fact that, although workers have increased production, massively, to cover their needs in retirement, that additional production has been squandered, by the ruling-class, and its state. It has asset stripped companies, to pay dividends; failed to invest profits in capital accumulation; given increasing amounts in interest/dividends and rent, which is used unproductively; bailed out financial gamblers when their actions caused financial bubbles to burst, and spent billions on wars and weapons, draining the potential for economic growth.

Workers themselves are slowly recognising this truth that has been hidden from them by social-democracy, and by the distractions of the likes of Trump, Farage etc., who would have them believe the problem lies with other workers.

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