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.”
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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