Utopian socialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Utopian socialism begins with a simple, radical premise: that a better society is not just possible but plannable. Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, and Robert Owen each drew up blueprints for worlds they had never seen. They asked their contemporaries to look at the arrangements of labor, property, and class and imagine something entirely different. What would a society look like if people chose cooperation over competition? Could communities of like-minded people actually prove, through living experiment, that a new social order was viable? Those are the questions that animated this first wave of modern socialist thought. The answers they proposed would invite fierce ridicule from later thinkers, spark communities on multiple continents, and leave a trail of novels, communes, and arguments that runs from a frontier settlement in Indiana to a kibbutz in Palestine.

• 2. The Pejorative Label

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  Later socialists, writing after the first quarter of the 19th century, reached back to Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, and Owen and pinned a word on them: utopian. The intention was not flattering. Anarchists and Marxists deployed the term as a pejorative, a way of dismissing earlier thinkers as fanciful and unrealistic. The core complaint was that utopian socialists had failed to anchor their visions in the actual material conditions of existing society. Most critically, these earlier thinkers generally did not believe that class struggle or social revolution was necessary for socialism to emerge at all. They held that people of every class could voluntarily adopt their plan, provided it was presented convincingly enough. That faith in persuasion, rather than confrontation, is precisely what their critics found naive. Ethical socialism, a similar school of thought that emerged in the early 20th century and made the case for socialism on moral grounds, received the same dismissal from the same corners.

• 3. Marx, Engels, and the Scientific Claim

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  In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx took direct aim at Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, criticizing the economic and philosophical arguments Proudhon had advanced in The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx accused Proudhon of wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie rather than understand the forces driving history. That exchange became pivotal in the broader argument Marx was building between what he called utopian socialism and what he and his collaborators claimed as scientific socialism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels described utopian socialists as people who considered themselves far superior to all class antagonisms, who wanted to improve the condition of every member of society, and who rejected all political and especially all revolutionary action. Engels later defined his own version of socialism as not an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The task, he insisted, was not to manufacture a perfect system of society but to examine the historical-economic succession of events. Joshua Muravchik later argued the opposite: that Owen and Fourier and their followers were the real scientific socialists because they hit upon the idea of socialism and tested it by attempting to form socialist communities, in line with Karl Popper's definition of science as the practice of experimentation, of hypothesis and test. Marx, Muravchik argued, made untestable predictions about the future.

• 4. Novels of the Future

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  Edward Bellamy, born in 1850 and died in 1898, published Looking Backward in 1888, a utopian romance novel set in a future socialist society. In Bellamy's imagined world, property was held in common and money replaced with a system of equal credit for all citizens. That credit was valid for a year and non-transferable between individuals, and expenditure was tracked via what Bellamy called credit-cards, though he was careful to note these bore no resemblance to modern credit cards, which are tools of debt-finance. Labour was compulsory from age 21 to 40 and organised through departments of an Industrial Army to which most citizens belonged. Criminal behavior was treated as a form of mental illness or atavism. The book ranked as a second or third best seller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur. In 1897, Bellamy published a sequel called Equality, a reply to his critics that stripped out the Industrial Army and other authoritarian elements. William Morris, born in 1834 and died in 1896, answered Bellamy directly with News from Nowhere in 1890. Morris found Bellamy's reduction of labour akin to the thinking of Saint-Simon; his own vision centered instead on useful work as opposed to useless toil. Morris believed all work should be artistic in the sense that the worker would find it both pleasurable and an outlet for creativity. That conception of labour placed Morris much closer to Fourier than to Bellamy.

• 5. Communities in Practice

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  Utopian communities have existed across the world, and in the United States they have appeared continuously since the 1730s, beginning with Ephrata Cloister, a religious community in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Owenite communities followed, including New Lanark in Scotland, founded in 1786, and New Harmony in Indiana, founded in 1814. Fourierist communities spread across the American Midwest and South, among them Brook Farm in Massachusetts in 1841, La Reunion in Texas in 1855, North American Phalanx in New Jersey in 1843, and Silkville in Kansas in 1870. The Brotherhood Church in Britain and the Life and Labor Commune in Russia were built on the Christian anarchist ideas of Leo Tolstoy, who was born in 1828 and died in 1910. Many anarchist collectives that formed during the Spanish Civil War, especially in Aragon and Catalonia, drew on the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin. Proudhon's What is Property? appeared in 1840; Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread appeared in 1892. Many participants in the kibbutz movement in Palestine, first under Ottoman rule, then under British occupation, and later in Israel, were motivated by utopian socialist ideas. Augustin Souchy, born in 1892 and died in 1984, spent most of his life investigating and participating in many kinds of socialist communities and wrote about those experiences in his autobiography Beware! Anarchist!

• 6. Literature as Experiment

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  B. F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist born in 1904 and died in 1990, published Walden Two in 1948, a novel sketching a community organized around his behaviorist principles. The Twin Oaks Community was originally founded on those ideas. Ursula K. Le Guin, born in 1929 and died in 2018, wrote The Dispossessed, published in 1974, in which a group of anarchists avoids a bloody revolution by leaving their home planet to colonize a barely habitable moon. Le Guin's work explored an impoverished anarchist society where scarcity shaped every social choice. Scholars have noted that currents like Owenism and Fourierism attracted the interest of many later authors even after failing to compete politically with Marxist and Anarchist schools. One noted consequence was the influence these movements exerted on the emergence of new religious movements, including spiritualism and occultism, a less-expected downstream effect of communities that had set out simply to demonstrate a better way of organizing labor and daily life.