Owen, Blair and Utopian Socialism: On the Post-Apocalyptic Reformulation of Marx and Engels

McGrail, Brian A.

doi:10.1080/03017605.2011.561631

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“…Marx was especially critical when the utopian cooperative gospel spread throughout both England and America in the early 1800s, under the influence of utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, who advanced the idea of creating cooperative communities without politicized class struggle, without ‘even disturbing existing private properties’, and as a society ‘without disorder, or evil of any kind’ (Brown 1991). Both Fourier and Owen rejected the notion that class struggle of workers is inevitable in capitalism as they both envisioned that local cooperative communities could be built through a process of class compromise, coexisting with capitalism and flourishing without disrupting the broader capitalist system (Marx [1848] 1974: 22; also see Donnachie and Mooney 2007; Harrison 1969; McGrail 2011; Royle 1998). Utopian socialists rejected the importance of an ‘actual working class movement’ of the workers and instead pitched their utopian ideas about socialism to ‘the educated and ruling classes’ as they believed the proletariat was ‘a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement’ (Marx [1848] 1974: 31–32).…”

Section: Marx’s Negative Interpretation Of Worker Cooperativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

2019

Capital & Class

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To shed light on polarized perspectives regarding the virtues or downfalls of worker cooperatives among variants of Marxists, this article focuses on Marx’s own Janus-faced analysis of worker cooperatives. Marx had great faith in the radical potential of worker cooperatives, properly organized and politically oriented, but he also was greatly critical of the tendency of cooperatives to shrink their political horizons and become isolated from broader labor movements. Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change. Marx believed that cooperatives could help point the way to an alternative system of free and equal producers, and could prompt radical imaginings among their advocates, but only to the extent that cooperative practitioners recognized the need for class-conscious, industrial scale organizing of workers against the capitalist system. In the end, Marx did not so much focus on promoting a certain type of labor organization as being most conducive to transformation (e.g. worker cooperatives or labor unions). Rather, he focused more on the importance of class consciousness within labor organizing, and on the development of radicalized class consciousness among workers, whether through the expansion of labor unions, worker cooperatives, or any other institution of worker empowerment. It is the nature of a labor institution’s focus on developing and sustaining class consciousness, not the nature of the labor institution itself (i.e. cooperative or union), that Marx believed to most powerfully shape the radical or degenerative tendencies of local forms of labor activism.

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Section: Marx’s Negative Interpretation Of Worker Cooperativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

2019

Capital & Class

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Owen, Blair and Utopian Socialism: On the Post-Apocalyptic Reformulation of Marx and Engels

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

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