Post by Papa C. on Feb 16, 2006 11:38:48 GMT
Robert Owen's Parallelogram
web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob50.html
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a pioneer of the early socialist movement. A self-taught and self-made man, he was one of the few employers in early industrial Britain to develop a genuine concern for the welfare of workers that was exemplified in the model factory (spinning mill) at New Lanark in Scotland purchased by him and his partners in 1799. The mill was a sizable enterprise employing up to 2000 workers, mostly women from the neighboring village community. There Owen combined business acumen with humanitarian concern while insisting on discipline and good conduct from his employees.
The reality of the nascent industrial system as generally operative in the prevailing competitive atmosphere of unrestrained free-enterprise (laissez faire) capitalism—exploitation of workers in factory, mine and workshop through long hours and low pay, coupled with the abuses of child labor and deplorable working conditions—made a powerful and negative impression on the benevolent and generous Owen. At New Lanark he paid fair wages, employed no child under ten, arranged for free medical services, built workers' housing at moderate rents, and established schools for children and adults as well as providing religious instruction and recreational facilities; a veritable workers' paradise! This model establishment under Owen's benevolent hand, soon became famous throughout Britain and attracted both the rich and famous as well as thousands of curious sightseers every year.
New Lanark, though only a confined social experiment in rural Scotland, became the spur to the elaboration of Owen's reforming instincts towards a much wider scheme of regenerating society itself. He had come to the conclusion that only a form of deliberate planning, not free enterprise, could arrest the evils of the interaction between man and machine in the developing industrial environment. As he saw it, the system of untrammeled laissez faire could only impoverish the worker as overproduction, leading to contraction of both labor and demand, created widespread , cyclical unemployment: in fact, such misery enveloped the working poor in the economic downturn that followed the end of the Napoleonic war in 1815. Therefore, he was convinced that the economy could not be left to the vagaries of an unbridled capitalism (Remember that the social nets of state assistance, unemployment benefits and social security were non-existent everywhere in the early nineteenth-century).
These were the circumstances in which Owen, in May 1820, submitted to a gathering of the gentlemen of the county of Lanark his long-considered Plan for "removing discontent" and giving "permanent, productive employment to the poor and working classes." He perceived the prevalence of want and misery in Britain in the maladministration of wealth in the emerging industrial society and offered an alternative that would, to use his own rhetoric, "let prosperity loose on the country."
Indeed, he even ventured to conclude that his Plan to substitute cooperation for competition could be elaborated so as to include "the middling and higher classes of society." He had hopes that the government would take up his radical plan of establishing cooperative, self-supporting communities combining agriculture and small-scale industry throughout Britain which, he was sure, would create "universal happiness" by abolishing the evils of unemployment and over-production. These hopes, of course, were wildly unrealistic. What he sought was nothing less than the implementation of a scheme that would evidently lead to the abolition of private property and the establishment of the socialist society, surely an utopian solution for a world then being driven headlong by the inexorable rush of industrialization, urbanization and free-enterprise capitalism.
The withdrawal of the polite interest his scheme received from the 'gentlemen of Lanark' was certainly aided by Owen's intemperate remarks in a speech he had made that blamed "every religion that has hitherto been" for making man "a furious bigot and fanatic, or a miserable hypocrite:" socialists, after all, were nothing if not radical in their opinions! In the event, Owen soon (1825) departed for the U.S. to continue his worthy but thankless labors to regenerate mankind in Indiana through purchase of a property dubbed New Harmony. After much expense and some notoriety, the socialist experiment collapsed, leaving Owen to return to England in 1828, a sadder and poorer man. His concern for the working poor never slackened throughout the next thirty years of his life as he left his mark on the social development of Britain through his activism and ideas and as an inspiration to his followers.
Report to the County of Lanark, 1820
. . . . . . . Commerce . . . . . has made man ignorantly, individually selfish; placed him in opposition to his fellows; engendered fraud and deceit; blindly urged him forward to create, but deprived him of the wisdom to enjoy. In striving to take advantage of others, he has overreached himself……… From this principle of individual interest have arisen all the divisions of mankind, the endless errors and mischief of class, sect, party, and of national antipathies, creating the angry and malevolent passions, and all the crimes and misery with which the human race has been hitherto afflicted.
. . . . . . . Your Reporter [viz., Owen] ventures to recommend the formation of such arrangements as will unite about 300 men, women and children, in their natural proportions, as the minimum, and about 2,000 as the maximum for the future cultivators of the soil, who will be employed also in such additional occupations as may be advantageously attached to it . . . . . to be founded on the principle of united labor, expenditure, property and equal privilege. . . . . . Agriculture, instead of being, as heretofore, the occupation of the mere peasant and farmer, with minds as defective in their cultivation as their soils, will then become the delightful employment of a race of men, trained in the best habits and dispositions; familiar with the most useful practice in the arts and sciences; . . . .capable of forming and conducting combined arrangements [via communities of association] in agriculture, trade, commerce and manufactures, far superior to those which have yet existed in any of these departments, as they have been hitherto disjoined and separately conducted . . . The arrangements which your Reporter now calls to the attention of the Public, present the certain means of renovating the moral character and of improving, to an unlimited extent, the general condition of the population . . . and effectually preclude all the evils with which wealth is now accompanied.
. . . . . . . Sufficient land . . . will be allotted to these cultivators [Owen recommended half-an-acre to an acre-and-a-half for each individual], to enable them to raise an abundant supply of food and the necessaries of life for themselves, and as much additional agricultural produce as the public demands may require from such a portion of its population . . . . . . .
(Since) the food for the whole population can be provided better and cheaper under one general arrangement of cooking, and the children can be better trained and educated together under the eye of their parents than under any other circumstances, a large square, or rather a parallelogram, will be found to combine the greatest advantages, in its form, for the domestic arrangements of the association . . . . The four sides of this figure may be adapted to contain all the private apartments or sleeping and sitting rooms for the adult part of the population; general sleeping apartments for the children while under tuition, store-rooms, warehouses, an inn . . for the accommodation of strangers, an infirmary, etc. In a line across the center of the parallelogram . . might be erected a church or places for worship; the schools; kitchens and apartments for eating; . . . . . . . under the best possible public superintendence, without trouble, expense or inconvenience to any party.
. . . . . . . . Your Reporter recommends arrangements by which the children shall be trained together as though they were literally all of one family . . . The first school will be for infants from 2 to 6 years of age. The second for children from 6 to 12 . . . He considers all children as beings whose dispositions, habits and sentiments are to be formed for them . . by excluding all notions of reward, punishment and emulation . . . The children in these new schools should be therefore trained systematically to acquire useful knowledge . . by which their powers of reflection and judgment may be habituated to draw accurate conclusions from the facts presented to them. This mode of instruction . . will supersede the present defective and tiresome system of book learning, which is ill calculated to give either pleasure or instruction to the minds of children . . .
. . . . . . . . By this means, there would spring up a working class full of activity and useful knowledge, with habits, information, manners and disposition that would place the lowest in the scale many degrees above the best of any class which has yet been formed by the circumstances of past or present society . . .
. . . . . . . . These new farming and general working arrangements may be formed by one or any number of landed proprietors or large capitalists; by established companies having large funds to expend for benevolent and public projects; by parishes and counties to relieve themselves from paupers . .; by associations of the middle and working classes of farmers, mechanics and tradesmen to relieve themselves from the evils of the present system . . . . These new associations can scarcely be formed before it will be discovered that . . all the natural wants of human nature may be abundantly supplied, and the principle of selfishness will cease to exist . . . A principle of equity and justice, openness and fairness will influence the whole proceedings of these societies. There will consequently be no difficulty whatever in the exchange of the products of labor, mental or manual, among themselves . . . It may be safely predicted that one of these new associations cannot be formed without creating a general desire throughout society to establish others, and that they will rapidly multiply . . . Under such arrangements, what are technically called "bad times" can never occur . . .
. . . . . . . Arrangements will be formed to distribute the wealth among the members of the association which created it and to exchange the surplus for the surplus of other communities . . . In time of peace, these associations would give no trouble to government, their internal regulations being founded on principles of prevention, not only with reference to public crimes, but to the private evils and errors which so fatally abound in common society. Courts of law, prisons and punishments would not be required . . . . Men surely cannot with truth be termed rational beings until they shall discover and put in practice the principles which shall enable them to conduct their affairs without war. The arrangements we are considering would speedily show how easily these principles and practices may be introduced into general society . . . .
web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob50.html
Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a pioneer of the early socialist movement. A self-taught and self-made man, he was one of the few employers in early industrial Britain to develop a genuine concern for the welfare of workers that was exemplified in the model factory (spinning mill) at New Lanark in Scotland purchased by him and his partners in 1799. The mill was a sizable enterprise employing up to 2000 workers, mostly women from the neighboring village community. There Owen combined business acumen with humanitarian concern while insisting on discipline and good conduct from his employees.
The reality of the nascent industrial system as generally operative in the prevailing competitive atmosphere of unrestrained free-enterprise (laissez faire) capitalism—exploitation of workers in factory, mine and workshop through long hours and low pay, coupled with the abuses of child labor and deplorable working conditions—made a powerful and negative impression on the benevolent and generous Owen. At New Lanark he paid fair wages, employed no child under ten, arranged for free medical services, built workers' housing at moderate rents, and established schools for children and adults as well as providing religious instruction and recreational facilities; a veritable workers' paradise! This model establishment under Owen's benevolent hand, soon became famous throughout Britain and attracted both the rich and famous as well as thousands of curious sightseers every year.
New Lanark, though only a confined social experiment in rural Scotland, became the spur to the elaboration of Owen's reforming instincts towards a much wider scheme of regenerating society itself. He had come to the conclusion that only a form of deliberate planning, not free enterprise, could arrest the evils of the interaction between man and machine in the developing industrial environment. As he saw it, the system of untrammeled laissez faire could only impoverish the worker as overproduction, leading to contraction of both labor and demand, created widespread , cyclical unemployment: in fact, such misery enveloped the working poor in the economic downturn that followed the end of the Napoleonic war in 1815. Therefore, he was convinced that the economy could not be left to the vagaries of an unbridled capitalism (Remember that the social nets of state assistance, unemployment benefits and social security were non-existent everywhere in the early nineteenth-century).
These were the circumstances in which Owen, in May 1820, submitted to a gathering of the gentlemen of the county of Lanark his long-considered Plan for "removing discontent" and giving "permanent, productive employment to the poor and working classes." He perceived the prevalence of want and misery in Britain in the maladministration of wealth in the emerging industrial society and offered an alternative that would, to use his own rhetoric, "let prosperity loose on the country."
Indeed, he even ventured to conclude that his Plan to substitute cooperation for competition could be elaborated so as to include "the middling and higher classes of society." He had hopes that the government would take up his radical plan of establishing cooperative, self-supporting communities combining agriculture and small-scale industry throughout Britain which, he was sure, would create "universal happiness" by abolishing the evils of unemployment and over-production. These hopes, of course, were wildly unrealistic. What he sought was nothing less than the implementation of a scheme that would evidently lead to the abolition of private property and the establishment of the socialist society, surely an utopian solution for a world then being driven headlong by the inexorable rush of industrialization, urbanization and free-enterprise capitalism.
The withdrawal of the polite interest his scheme received from the 'gentlemen of Lanark' was certainly aided by Owen's intemperate remarks in a speech he had made that blamed "every religion that has hitherto been" for making man "a furious bigot and fanatic, or a miserable hypocrite:" socialists, after all, were nothing if not radical in their opinions! In the event, Owen soon (1825) departed for the U.S. to continue his worthy but thankless labors to regenerate mankind in Indiana through purchase of a property dubbed New Harmony. After much expense and some notoriety, the socialist experiment collapsed, leaving Owen to return to England in 1828, a sadder and poorer man. His concern for the working poor never slackened throughout the next thirty years of his life as he left his mark on the social development of Britain through his activism and ideas and as an inspiration to his followers.
Report to the County of Lanark, 1820
. . . . . . . Commerce . . . . . has made man ignorantly, individually selfish; placed him in opposition to his fellows; engendered fraud and deceit; blindly urged him forward to create, but deprived him of the wisdom to enjoy. In striving to take advantage of others, he has overreached himself……… From this principle of individual interest have arisen all the divisions of mankind, the endless errors and mischief of class, sect, party, and of national antipathies, creating the angry and malevolent passions, and all the crimes and misery with which the human race has been hitherto afflicted.
. . . . . . . Your Reporter [viz., Owen] ventures to recommend the formation of such arrangements as will unite about 300 men, women and children, in their natural proportions, as the minimum, and about 2,000 as the maximum for the future cultivators of the soil, who will be employed also in such additional occupations as may be advantageously attached to it . . . . . to be founded on the principle of united labor, expenditure, property and equal privilege. . . . . . Agriculture, instead of being, as heretofore, the occupation of the mere peasant and farmer, with minds as defective in their cultivation as their soils, will then become the delightful employment of a race of men, trained in the best habits and dispositions; familiar with the most useful practice in the arts and sciences; . . . .capable of forming and conducting combined arrangements [via communities of association] in agriculture, trade, commerce and manufactures, far superior to those which have yet existed in any of these departments, as they have been hitherto disjoined and separately conducted . . . The arrangements which your Reporter now calls to the attention of the Public, present the certain means of renovating the moral character and of improving, to an unlimited extent, the general condition of the population . . . and effectually preclude all the evils with which wealth is now accompanied.
. . . . . . . Sufficient land . . . will be allotted to these cultivators [Owen recommended half-an-acre to an acre-and-a-half for each individual], to enable them to raise an abundant supply of food and the necessaries of life for themselves, and as much additional agricultural produce as the public demands may require from such a portion of its population . . . . . . .
(Since) the food for the whole population can be provided better and cheaper under one general arrangement of cooking, and the children can be better trained and educated together under the eye of their parents than under any other circumstances, a large square, or rather a parallelogram, will be found to combine the greatest advantages, in its form, for the domestic arrangements of the association . . . . The four sides of this figure may be adapted to contain all the private apartments or sleeping and sitting rooms for the adult part of the population; general sleeping apartments for the children while under tuition, store-rooms, warehouses, an inn . . for the accommodation of strangers, an infirmary, etc. In a line across the center of the parallelogram . . might be erected a church or places for worship; the schools; kitchens and apartments for eating; . . . . . . . under the best possible public superintendence, without trouble, expense or inconvenience to any party.
. . . . . . . . Your Reporter recommends arrangements by which the children shall be trained together as though they were literally all of one family . . . The first school will be for infants from 2 to 6 years of age. The second for children from 6 to 12 . . . He considers all children as beings whose dispositions, habits and sentiments are to be formed for them . . by excluding all notions of reward, punishment and emulation . . . The children in these new schools should be therefore trained systematically to acquire useful knowledge . . by which their powers of reflection and judgment may be habituated to draw accurate conclusions from the facts presented to them. This mode of instruction . . will supersede the present defective and tiresome system of book learning, which is ill calculated to give either pleasure or instruction to the minds of children . . .
. . . . . . . . By this means, there would spring up a working class full of activity and useful knowledge, with habits, information, manners and disposition that would place the lowest in the scale many degrees above the best of any class which has yet been formed by the circumstances of past or present society . . .
. . . . . . . . These new farming and general working arrangements may be formed by one or any number of landed proprietors or large capitalists; by established companies having large funds to expend for benevolent and public projects; by parishes and counties to relieve themselves from paupers . .; by associations of the middle and working classes of farmers, mechanics and tradesmen to relieve themselves from the evils of the present system . . . . These new associations can scarcely be formed before it will be discovered that . . all the natural wants of human nature may be abundantly supplied, and the principle of selfishness will cease to exist . . . A principle of equity and justice, openness and fairness will influence the whole proceedings of these societies. There will consequently be no difficulty whatever in the exchange of the products of labor, mental or manual, among themselves . . . It may be safely predicted that one of these new associations cannot be formed without creating a general desire throughout society to establish others, and that they will rapidly multiply . . . Under such arrangements, what are technically called "bad times" can never occur . . .
. . . . . . . Arrangements will be formed to distribute the wealth among the members of the association which created it and to exchange the surplus for the surplus of other communities . . . In time of peace, these associations would give no trouble to government, their internal regulations being founded on principles of prevention, not only with reference to public crimes, but to the private evils and errors which so fatally abound in common society. Courts of law, prisons and punishments would not be required . . . . Men surely cannot with truth be termed rational beings until they shall discover and put in practice the principles which shall enable them to conduct their affairs without war. The arrangements we are considering would speedily show how easily these principles and practices may be introduced into general society . . . .
