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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