Episode 03 – The utopian town of New Harmony… not harmonious?

In this episode, we first travel two thousand four hundred years to ancient Athens, where the playwright Aristophanes was the whip of Athenian society, and nothing escaped his sharp satire. Written in 391 BC, Aristophanes’ play “Assemblywomen” mocks the absurdity of collectivist utopian dreams. In one of the scenes of the play, the main character, Praxagora, explains to her husband, Blepyrus, the following:

-          “I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. Then we shall live on this shared wealth, which we shall take care to administer with wise thrift… The poor will no longer be obliged to work; each will have all that he needs, bread, salt fish, cakes, tunics, wine.”

Still not fully convinced, Blepyrus asks, “But who will till the soil?” to which Praxagora responds, “The slaves. Your only concerns will be to scent yourself, and to go and dine.”

Aristophanes understood the nonsense of such utopian dreams. 

When the twentieth century arrived and entire nations attempted to put into practice such collectivism, everybody except the ruling elites became the slaves Praxagora had planned to till the soil in Aristophanes’ play. 

The collectivist delusions of Stalin and Mao starved 7 million human beings to death during the Holodomor and 45 million during the Great Leap Forward. However, suppose we remove from the equation the factor of state violence, which was present in all communist attempts to collectivize property in the twentieth century. In that case, the efforts of collectivization still end in failure. Even with the best of intentions, the unintended consequences of such ideas turn the dream of harmonious shared prosperity into a nightmare of scarcity.

For today’s episode, let’s meet Robert Owen. A Welsh textile manufacturer who was compassionate and tried to improve the living conditions of the working class of the early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and ideas of equality and the eradication of poverty were gaining increasing popularity among philanthropists and social reformers, including Owen himself. In 1816, Robert Owen expressed in a speech: “I know that society may be formed to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any, misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundred-fold.” Owen believed that individualism was the root of all evils and that education was the key to eliminating self-interest. Only collective sharing of property and production was going to increase happiness a hundred times as he wanted. 

With this goal in mind, Robert Owen traveled to the United States in early 1825. By then, he was already famous, and influential people wanted to hear more about his ideas of deep social reforms. He met with leaders of Congress and Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Quincy Adams had just been sworn into office. In a letter to a friend, Robert Owen said: “In fact, the whole of this country is ready to commence a new empire upon the principle of public property and to discard private property.”

In April 1825, weeks after arriving in the US, Robert Owen purchased the town of Harmony in Indiana. He bought it from the Rappites, a religious group that had previously built the whole settlement. Owen renamed the town New Harmony and set out to implement his utopian vision. To this end, the 900 new inhabitants of New Harmony set out to use the already cultivated land, buildings in excellent condition, and sufficient livestock acquired from the Rappites.

A year later, after arriving in New Harmony in early 1826, Robert Dale Owen (the son of Robert Owen) tells in his memoir how “for a time life there was wonderfully pleasant and hopeful.” There was freedom of speech, weekly concerts, and meetings were held to discuss the community’s principles. 

Note how Owen’s son says that things were going great… for a time. The fact is that New Harmony was experiencing, one by one, even before Robert Dale’s arrival, the problems that a century later tragically suffered the countries where Marxist-inspired socialism was implemented. The evolution of New Harmony has many historical parallels with the later communist regimes of the 20th century. From Enver Hoxha’s small Albania to Mao’s gigantic China, they suffered the same problems Robert Owen’s New Harmony suffered. Problems such as low production, inefficiency, waste, informants, surveillance everywhere, personality cult, violence against dissidents, and an elite blind to reality.

Since the early days of New Harmony, outsiders and residents themselves provided testimony of the accumulated problems. R.L. Baker, a visitor who went there on business, described how: “the streets are filled with idlers all have something to do or to say, which one could do for ten.” A resident named Thomas Pears wrote that “instead of striving who should do most, the most industry was manifested in accusing others of doing little.” To which he added, resulted in “the Reign of Reports.” It sounds exactly like the Soviet KGB.   

Added to the labor shortage, because of the endless discussions of the ruling committee, agricultural and artisanal production stalled. All of this started to produce scarcity. This is all far from the hundred-fold increase in happiness that Robert Owen had wished for before.    

The inefficiency of the distribution system compounded the shortages. A villager named Paul Brown recalled in his memoirs that “even salads were deposited in the store to be handed out, making ten thousand unnecessary steps, and causing them to come to the tables in a wilted and deadened state.” Robert Dale, Robert Owen’s son, explains how, since the beginning, “the executive committee had estimated the value of each person’s services and given all persons employed credit for the amount of goods they could remove from the stores.”  

This distribution system proved inefficient, discouraging production and creating a vicious cycle that repeated itself over and over. This is why, for Robert Dale, life was initially pleasant and hopeful... but as he said, for a while!  

How then was New Harmony financed? By squandering the fortune of Robert Owen, who, in early 1826, just a year after the creation of New Harmony, decided to go a step further and pass a new constitution to establish the final phase, a “Community of Equality, based on the principle of common property,” as his son Robert Dale narrates. Robert Dale explains that under this new constitution, “all members, according to their ages, not according to the actual value of their services, were to be furnished, as near as can be, with similar food, clothing and education; and, as soon as practicable, to live in similar houses.” This is the classic definition of a communist society. Almost 50 years later, in 1875, Karl Marx wrote the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” a letter where he summarized the future communist society. There, Marx says, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Pretty similar to what Robert Owen had in mind. 

The failure of New Harmony accelerated. A first dissident group decided to leave in the face of the growing religious animosity of Owen, who, two weeks after the new constitution was approved, was invested with absolute decision-making powers. The New Harmony local newspaper said in its editorial: “Under the sole direction of Mr. Owen, the most gratifying anticipations of the future may be safely indulged.” Owen set up a check-off system where every resident was evaluated on the basis of his work, and every Sunday, the results were given at a public meeting. 

By the fall of 1826, a year and a half after the creation of New Harmony, Owen expelled twenty families he had deemed undesirable to the community. Despite the problems that were piling up, in May 1827, Owen gave a speech and proclaimed that “the social system is now firmly established...and I could not feel more joy in knowing that the obstacles were overcome.” New Harmony was dying, and Owen was living in an alternate reality.

By 1828, this utopia of collective brotherhood disappeared. Owen blamed the failure on the inhabitants themselves for not being material for the “new man” that such an ideal society was supposed to conceive. Of course, the fault always lies with others. However, Robert Dale, Owen’s own son, understood the nature of the failure, what he called the “chief error” and was prophetic: “I do not believe that any industrial experiment can succeed which proposes equal remuneration to all men, the diligent and the dilatory, the skilled artisan and the common laborer, the genius and the drudge; I speak of the present age; what may happen in the distant future it is impossible to foresee and imprudent to predict.” 

Robert Dale was prophetic, indeed. 

Today, we know of these failures and their human cost. The twentieth century is full of them. However, we did not even need to wait until the twentieth century and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in Russia. Similar to Owen’s New Harmony, Étienne Cabet, a French philosopher and socialist, created a movement whose members were called the Icarians. This was an egalitarian movement that settled and created communities in Texas in 1848, in Illinois in 1849, in Iowa in 1852, in Missouri in 1858, and in California in 1881. All of them failed. 

As another example, in his book “Brook Farm, the dark side of utopia,” Professor Sterling F. Delano mentions that at least 119 collectivist communes were established in the US between 1800 and 1859. Brook Farm was just one of them, another failed utopian experiment in Massachusetts. 

Let’s go back to where we started, in ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. 

In the second part of his work titled “Politics,” Aristotle criticizes Plato’s collectivist theory for an ideal society. There, Aristotle affirms: “What is common to a very large number of people obtains minimum care; for all are especially concerned about their own things, and less about the common ones, or only insofar as it concerns each one.” More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle understood that what belongs to all belongs to none, and worse, the harmful consequences that this represents. 

The unintended consequence of Robert Owen’s collectivist New Harmony was failure, not his utopia of happiness and prosperity. A lesson, I believe, we as humans will never fully learn.

SOURCES

https://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/eccles.html 

https://infed.org/mobi/an-address-to-the-inhabitants-of-new-lanark/

https://fee.org/articles/robert-owen-the-woolly-minded-cotton-spinner/ 

https://fee.org/articles/the-dark-side-of-paradise-a-brief-history-of-americas-utopian-experiments-in-communal-living/ 

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460856-1/heaven-earth

https://www.booksataglance.com/book-summaries/heaven-on-earth-the-rise-fall-and-afterlife-of-socialism-by-joshua-muravchik/

https://www.bcn.gob.ar/uploads/ARISTOTELES,%20Politica%20(Gredos).pdf 

The International Piano Version: https://engelbachmusic.com/audio/midi/internationale-b.mid and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internationale-piano-Bb.mid