POL 315 MODULE 3
Most noted was the effort at New Harmony, Indiana (1825-1828),
purchased by Owen after another group had unsuccessfully tried to start
a communal colony there and the Owen experiment also failed.
Interestingly, America was regarded as the land of opportunity and hope
by socialists as well as capitalists. Here, it was thought, a new society
could be founded, one that was insulated from the stratification and
prejudices of the old world. Although these communal experiments
failed, several attained an importance beyond their role as socialist
experiments.
Asserting the labor theory of value, the utopian support of the worker
against the owner gave an important development of trade unionism by
giving it an economic doctrine and moral basis. Their emphasis was on
moral wish for mutual human kindness and compassion, and Saint-
Simon's strongest contributions to socialist arguments were his
criticisms of capitalism. Capitalism is wasteful because it pitted people
against each other and imposed poverty on many to produce wealth for a
few. Capitalists made profits far beyond their own productivity, a fact
Saint-Simon decried, thereby making him popular with the French
working class.
As a partial solution to the evils he saw in the capitalist system, Saint-
Simon proposed a centralised banking system that would make for
social investments. He also called for the elimination of property
inheritance and supported universal education. - ideas that did not
become generally known until after unhappy eccentric's suicide,
however, when a cult of admiring followers lionised him and probably
credited him with beliefs he did not actually hold. Important as the
utopians were to the development of socialism, their influence is largely
limited to their own generation and the one following. Even so, the
failure of the communes led to a general disillusionment with the
theories on which they were based, and popular attention soon turned
from utopianism to more practical concerns.
4.0 CONCLUSION
Utopian socialism was drawn up from British, French and German
sources. It was a mixture of French utopian and German idealism with
their emphasis on the value of the state. The utopians believed that
people would be encouraged, to understand that socialism was the only
moral economic system. The utopians were strongly silent about their
economic agenda and in this way; they avoided the crucial issue of how
community can be sustained at all in the face of market-driven economic
inequalities.
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