Posted on 12/22/2014 10:11:28 AM PST by Mozilla
In 1825 Welsh industrialist, Robert Owen, purchased a religious community on the frontier in Indiana, named Harmony. He renamed the village, New Harmony, and implemented a wide range of social experiments that seemed to hark of John Lennons 1971 song, Imagine. Things did not go as planned.
The popular understanding of communism among North Americans is that its concept began with the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx then appeared in an extreme form with the advent of 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In fact, while living in England, Engels attended a Socialist church founded by Robert Owen. and wrote for a journal that Owen published, The New Moral World. The wealth of both Owen and Engels was derived from the partial ownership of textile mills. While espousing the ideal that workers should own the means of the production, in their lifetimes, they both continued to maintain affluent lifestyles by owning the means of production themselves.
All of the basic beliefs and economic principals of Marxism can be found in the writings of Robert Owen. He was hostile to traditional Christian religious practices. He wanted to do away with privately owned property, inheritance and titles of nobility. He thought workers should be paid according to their needs, not their skills.
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Owen envisioned New Harmony as a physical manifestation of his proto-Marxist philosophies. As with the Bolsheviks of Russia, there was to be no conventional religion and individuality was to be erased. However, unlike the situation in Russia after the Revolution, intellectual pursuits and philosophical questioning were encouraged. The town was centrally planned to create an environment that would modify human behavior and social norms. This experiment was much more extreme than was normally associated with socialist experiments.
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I work with a former soviet union army officer (mid-level), who repeats the “never been tried” line in all seriousness. I tried to talk to him about Stalin once and he said, in all seriousness, “that wasn’t communism, that was Stalinism. If Stalin had actually been a communist, things would have been a lot better.”
There are a lot of women who would rather share Prince Charming than have Joe the Plumber all to themselves. This creates social instability. In today's "hookup culture", a large percentage of the hookups are going to a relatively small percentage of men.
You see you are spouting the "Kinsey" mantra. There are some yes, same as there are some men who don't care who their women is doing as long as she is available when they want it.
Neither of these things are the norm or even "a lot". I would say it is about at the 1-2% level.
In today's "hookup culture", a large percentage of the hookups are going to a relatively small percentage of men.
And a relatively small percentage of women.
I know it is not what TV and movies tell you but average number of sex partners a straight person has in their life time is in the single digits.
New Harmony was an interesting case, but an even more intriguing (because longer-lived) U.S. example was the Amana colonies, which were founded by another of those innumerable German pietistic sects (as was George Rapp's Harmony colony). The Amanas were quite successful for several generations, but when economic and social pressures (and the Great Depression) brought matters to a head, the Brethren separated the church and the economically productive properties, and turned the economic base into a joint stock company. (You will probably recall Amana Refrigeration.)
Such experiments are quite interesting and are too little studied, in part because the religious and familial bases of successful communist communities are lessons the left does not want to recognize. Such communities also tend to thrive on a small scale but are defeated by problems of scale, which massively complicates decision making and requires structures beyond a conclave of church elders and heads of families. Retention of the next generation is also an issue; the deliberate retreat to rustic simplicity and communal living will always appeal to some people, but one's children are quite likely to have other aspirations.
Last but not least, all successful communal societies have been voluntary. None of the great experimenters in the story of U.S. communitarianism would have put a gun to people's heads to force compliance. It is impossible to think of George Rapp or Robert Owen or the Amana colonists running a gulag, or wanting to. They wanted to march to a different drummer, and build a better mousetrap. This country gave them the freedom to try. Theirs is a positive story, and I wish our strutting little would-be dictators on the left would learn from their example. I could respect the OWS types if they would actually trek out to the wilderness and try to build a different kind of life for themselves. This, of course, would require doing actual work, which is why most of them are not interested, but here and there you will trip across the grown up flower children running their little shops in out of the way places, or producing holistic organic macrobiotic stuff for the local foodie market, and I say good for them. Take a chance, break a sweat, and see what you can do.
Some people still find these kinds of living arrangements attractive. I have not seen a statistic in recent years, but there used to be, and probably still are, a rather large number of communitarian groups, mostly small, low key, and very quiet, which go about their own business and leave the rest of us alone. They also tend not to proselytize, but are quite happy to share if you ask. I imagine the greatest threat to alternative communities today is the relentless drive of the big government left to control and standardize everything that lives, moves, breathes, eats, and sleeps. The zone of personal autonomy is steadily shrinking.
Susan B. Anthony and her friends were also followers of Charles Fourier.
Never knew that, but in searching out info I found that Charles Fourier was the person who coined the term feminism and as such he was considered a hero in the feminist movement.
These Utopian guys were different than the Marxists that came after because they wanted to force people to remain in their society and if not by force then kill them for opposing or not doing what they wanted. They became totalitarian.
But all socialists share the same traits and wanted to achieve the same goals.
By they I mean the Marxists. Stalin didn’t care about people living no more than Hitler. People were expendable to them. In fact, they hated Humans and looked to purge the world of them. It became Eugenics.
But sometimes too slowly. The Soviet Union maintained the suffering for more than seven decades. North Korea and Cuba are approaching that sad milestone.
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