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From Owenite Socialism to BlairiteSocial-ism: Utopia and Dystopia inRobert Owen and New LabourIan Donnachie & Gerry MooneyPublished online: 16 Jul 2007.
To cite this article: Ian Donnachie & Gerry Mooney (2007) From Owenite Socialism to BlairiteSocial-ism: Utopia and Dystopia in Robert Owen and New Labour, Critique: Journal of SocialistTheory, 35:2, 275-291, DOI: 10.1080/03017600701446256
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From Owenite Socialism to BlairiteSocial-ism: Utopia and Dystopiain Robert Owen and New LabourIan Donnachie & Gerry Mooney
In this paper we explore some of the enduring themes that arguably characterise Owen
and Blair and their respective followers. While Owen and Blair are separated by two
centuries, there is a considerable degree of coincidence in their approaches and agendas.
New Labour sees itself as constructing a new Britain, a new welfare system and a Third
Way approach to politics and the state, which is constructed as new in that it purports to
‘go beyond’ both ‘Old’ Labour and the Conservatives. As with Blair and New Labour, for
Owen constructing a particular vision of ‘new’ society was an important objective. This
‘newness’ is reflected in his most famous icon, New Lanark, as well as in his ideas for
a ‘new Society’ and a ‘New Moral World’. For both Owen and the Owenites, and Blair
and New Labour, there is a shared effort to distance themselves from ‘past failures’ while
projecting an image of the future, an attempt to construct a model or vision of what a
‘good’ society should look like. Here ideas of utopia and dystopia come into focus. Indeed
we find ourselves concurring with Engels and Marx who suggested that utopian visions
by their very nature actually created dystopias in their wake. However, as we will argue,
Blair’s vision of a social-ist society is very much at odds with the vision of progressive
socialist society constructed by Owen, though both undoubtedly generated dystopian
outcomes from utopian agendas.
Keywords: New Labour; Robert Owen; Socialism; Utopia; Dystopia
Introduction
It may be true but it is not new. (William Hazlitt reviewing Owen’s A New View of
Society)1
It seems to us that while Owen and Blair are separated by nearly two centuries, there
is a remarkable coincidence in their approaches and agendas. As with Blair and New
1 P. P. Howe (ed.), Complete Works of William Hazlitt , Vol. vii (London: Dent, 1931), pp. 97�98.
ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2007 Critique
DOI: 10.1080/03017600701446256
Critique
Vol. 35, No. 2, August 2007, pp. 275�291
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Labour, for Owen everything was also ‘new’. The newness was evidenced by his most
famous icon, New Lanark, and what he described variously as the new Society, the
new System and ultimately, the New Moral World. Internationally, it was also seen at
New Harmony, the ‘community of equality’ he attempted to establish in the United
States. For Owen, the newness of his proposals stood in contradistinction to the
values and arrangements in ‘Old Society’ with its evil, non-egalitarian, morally and
religiously corrupt ways. Despite Hazlitt’s critique, there was much that was very new
in Owen’s thinking about how the issues of his time might be resolved. New Labour
sees itself as constructing a new Britain, a new (or ‘modernised’) welfare system and a
Third Way approach to politics and the state, which is constructed as new in that it
purports to ‘go beyond’ the ‘old’ left and right approaches of ‘Old’ Labour and the
Conservatives. For both Owen and the Owenites and Blair and New Labour then,
there is a shared effort to distance themselves from ‘past failures’ while projecting an
image of the future, an attempt to construct a model or vision of what a ‘good’
society should look like. Indeed both Owen and Blair emphasise the idea of society
itself as something that can be shaped in ‘progressive’ ways, though their
understanding of what this means and how it was to be achieved differs considerably.
Remarkable coincidence indeed, but major difference also.
In this paper we explore some of the enduring themes that arguably characterise
Owen and Blair and their respective followers. In particular we consider some of the
ways in which they worked to imagine a ‘new’ society, albeit in very different
historical contexts. Here ideas of utopia and dystopia come into focus. Indeed, we
find ourselves concurring with Engels and Marx, who suggested that utopian visions
by their very nature actually create dystopias in their wake. However, as we will see,
Blair’s vision of a social-ist society is very much at odds with the vision of progressive
socialist society constructed by Owen, though both undoubtedly generated dystopian
outcomes from utopian agendas. We are making the*hopefully not too un-
reasonable*assumption that readers of this paper will be more familiar with New
Labour’s political project and therefore the balance of the paper leans toward a more
detailed presentation of Owen’s ideas.
Owen and the New Society
Owen is an intriguing figure and both the man and the movement he inspired throw
up some remarkable points of comparison with Blair and New Labour. His
background, Welsh and shop-keeping, was lower class than Blair’s, but he was
personally imbued with the same precociousness, drive and determination to
succeed.2 Owen had a strong commitment to change and a strong belief in any
reasonable, non-revolutionary means of achieving it (much to the chagrin of Engels
and Marx in their later thinking). His social and economic agenda was underpinned
2 For more exploration of the early influences on Owen, see I. Donnachie, Robert Owen. Social Visionary
(Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005), pp. 1�19, 59�64.
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by the attack on poverty and of education as an engine of change, both of which he
proved possible from his experience as a philanthropic employer. Owen’s agenda was
underpinned by a fundamental humanitarianism, typical of an enlightened reformer,
and tended to short-circuit the political system in pursuit of its aims. Given the
political climate, dominated by reaction against political reform, it is perhaps not
surprising that Owen was equivocal, though he was politically active in seeking the
support of dukes and political elites.
However, the economic context of Owen’s ideas is significant in that he operated in
a climate of uncertainty following the rapid expansion of the economy during the
industrial revolution and especially the French wars. Cyclical unemployment and
redundancy caused by technical change manifested themselves on a large scale.
Poverty, always present, became a major issue, and allied to education as a means of
social regeneration, the battle for the poor became a major concern. Indeed, Owen’s
social reform agenda has been instrumental in making him one of the most revisited
reformers of his time. His interests and concerns included poverty and poor relief;
education and citizenship; industrial relations and welfare; and cooperation,
community experiments both at New Lanark and beyond, labour exchange schemes,
numerous Owenite organisations promoting social improvement, the trade union
movement, and connections to Chartism in the 1830�1840s.
New Lanark: Experimenting for the New Society
We begin with a brief review of Owen’s activities at New Lanark where he set out to
test his ideas. Arriving as manager in 1800 he immediately established a reforming
regime in the factory and community. In the workplace were new measures designed
to improve efficiency and boost productivity, eliminate waste and petty theft
(widespread in the factory system), and phase out the employment of pauper
apprentices and children under ten. Beyond the factory, environmental improve-
ments included street cleaning, better domestic hygiene, sanitation and water supply.
The housing stock was upgraded and a village store opened to provide supplies
at competitive prices. Other improvements were made in schooling and social and
health provision for workers and children. He also issued a set of rules and
regulations, typically paternal, but nevertheless interesting in scope regarding the role
of the individual in the community.3
At the same time Owen was increasingly frustrated by his partners and seeking new
associates. This occasioned the issue of a prospectus, A Statement Regarding the New
Lanark Establishment (1812), which reviewed progress and gave an intriguing
foretaste of other proposals including a ‘New Institution’ for enhanced educational
and social provision, a communal kitchen and dining facility and a raft of
environmental improvements.4 Owen also promoted popular education, which
3 I. Donnachie and G. Hewitt, Historic New Lanark. The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).4 G. Claeys (ed.), Selected Works of Robert Owen , Vol. 1 (London: Pickering, 1993), p. 21.
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featured prominently in his first social policy document, the essays on A New View of
Society (1813�1814). Here he addressed the main social problems, highlighted the
importance of environment in character formation, the value of education in
promoting welfare and ‘progress’ among the working class, and exemplifying from
New Lanark, called on government to implement a national plan for social
reconstruction with education at its core.5
Having secured more sympathetic partners, in 1816 Owen opened his New
Institution for the Formation of Character to serve the needs of workers. He moved
on to the national stage and was soon promoting a wide range of issues embracing
factory reform, poverty and popular education. Owen’s charisma (and wealth), which
belied his appearance, was such that his ideas attracted a wide following, though his
propaganda campaigns (continued haltingly until the 1850s) generated much
hostility. He was on shaky ground over his progressive ideas about sectarianism in
religion, law reform, sexual equality, marriage, divorce, birth control (alluded to, but
rarely stated outright), and other social issues. But Owen was never one to hold back
and within a few years of writing his essays the man had become a movement.
We proceed now to consider different aspects of Owen’s work, both in relation to
his experiments at New Lanark and in his more general writings. It is our contention
that it is in these areas in particular that we can uncover some of the more enduring
legacies of Owenism.
‘Social Regeneration’
While Owen’s agenda for social regeneration was wide-ranging, he was consistent in
his attack on poverty. Indeed his concern pre-dated A New View of Society through
his interest in popular education and his critique of the Corn Laws, which kept
artificially high the price of grain and increased the price of bread (setting aside the
resulting higher wage bills which employers like himself had to meet) and relief poor.
Interestingly, when a delegation from the Leeds Poor Law Guardians visited in 1819
they were struck by the favourable conditions, but noted that relatively low wages
were the norm. Although typical of Scottish conditions, there were compensations of
a kind in low rents and lower prices at the store, plus the varied social and welfare
provisions.
Owen’s analysis of contemporary distress was generally accurate in that agricultural
production and manufactures, already undergoing an economic revolution, had been
promoted by the wars, but at the cost of massive social dislocation and price inflation.
The peace brought near collapse in many sectors, widespread unemployment and the
need to re-integrate returning service personnel back into the labour market. Rapid
industrialisation and urbanisation had created major problems and following the
Napoleonic wars, Britain found itself in the middle of a major social crisis. Not only
did this highlight the inadequacy of the poor relief system, immediately increasing
5 Ibid., pp. 22�100.
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the burden of the poor rate on landowners and manufacturers, but also seemed to
threaten the existing order as riots and disturbances spread through town and
countryside. Anyone with a solution was bound to attract the attention of governing
elites locally and nationally.
Owen’s ‘Village Scheme’ of 1817 seemed to point the way forward. Modelled on
New Lanark, villages planned for 1,500�2,000 people would create new living space
and employment. Although much criticised, Owen, thanks to a huge campaign,
generated widespread interest in his scheme. On several occasions he sought
parliamentary sanction and also gave evidence to government enquiries about
poverty and how current dilemmas might be addressed. By 1819 he was describing
the new communities as ‘Villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation’, where
communitarians would work for the common good. Critics derided what they called
the ‘communities of paupers’, but Owen pointed out that they could readily embrace
all classes.
Education
We can see some of the reasons Owen might be attractive to New Labour today in his
emphasis on education, designed to promote moral character and generating
happiness and efficiency. The need for family responsibility was apparent at New
Lanark as early as 1800, with Owen’s rules emphasising parental control of children
and school attendance from 5 to 10 years. This was before he banned children under
10 from working in the mills (preceding the first legislation to control such
employment) and subsequently children were educated till 12 years of age. Character
formation underpinned the first object of Owen’s ‘New Institution’ (1816), namely,
early education through which young minds might be ‘properly directed’. This
suggests a certain amount of brainwashing to produce conforming characters, or at
least docile workers.
Apart from the ‘baby school’, other educational initiatives followed, including the
introduction of Pestalozzian methods (c. 1818) and the opening of a separate school
in a building designed for the communal kitchen. The school (c. 1819) was partly
adapted for the monitorial system and was equipped with a variety of visual aids.
Beyond the attention devoted to literacy and numeracy there were many unusual
features in the New Lanark curriculum: a strong emphasis on civics, history and
geography (but not politics or government, which would have been even more
radical), and how they affected the evolution of society.
Owen was also interested in adult education. This was not entirely new in the
context of popular education, for there was a long tradition of self-improvement in
working-class communities. Book borrowing and discussion progressed to lectures
on useful arts, and the development of the mechanics’ institutes, where lectures and
demonstration were given on scientific, technical and general subjects. Owen realised
their potential to produce diligent workers and saw their role in promoting character
and citizenship in the New Society. In his institute he planned to offer men and
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women ‘familiar discourses’, which covered the training of children by ‘forming their
habits from earliest infancy’. Hygiene was stressed, on health and environmental
grounds. He wanted to promote ‘domestic economy’ so that workers could budget
according to their means, thus creating ‘a well-regulated competency’ to save for
times of hardship or old age. Owen’s personal enthusiasm for these popular,
informative and uplifting lectures, like much else on his educational agenda, was
transported directly to other Owenite communities and societies. So New Lanark,
apart from its pioneer teaching of the natural sciences, was also a cradle of social
science education.
Citizenship
The rights and obligations of citizens are fairly clear in countries with explicit
constitutions, less so in Britain, which lacks a written constitution and has little
concept of citizenship, an issue that has been re-energised under New Labour and its
attempts to forge a new citizenship.6 We return to this below. The current debate
about citizenship education, as McLaren indicates, centres on the notion of a
democratic society and participative citizens within it.7 While the New Lanark regime
was highly paternalistic and Owen the ultimate authority, there was a simple
constitution and a representative democracy of sorts. The village’s ‘neighbour
divisions’ bore a superficial resemblance to modern community councils. Each
neighbour division elected a representative to a committee, and it in turn selected 12
‘jurymen’ to pass judgement on any issues. Regular reports on the state of the
community were made and proposals likely to benefit the inhabitants were
encouraged.
There was a strong emphasis on how the behaviour could contribute to the moral
ethos. Visiting reformers noticed the good conduct and abstinence from alcohol,
attributed to Scottish enthusiasm for self-improvement allied to religion. For some of
Owen’s critics the religiosity was enough to explain the high moral ethos, rather than
anything he had achieved in attempting to form its character. Toleration, rejection
of bigotry and sectarianism were strongly evident his thinking. He was religious in
childhood and maybe in his youth: he later had doubts, confirmed by his exposure to
Enlightenment ideas that challenged traditional notions about Christian and other
world religions.8 At New Lanark inhabitants could hold whatever views they liked but
must respect the rights of others.
His personal experience plus the prevailing religious culture he encountered in
Presbyterian Scotland confirmed him as an agnostic (though ‘duty to God and
6 See the special edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies , 28:3 (2005) on the interplay of citizenship, ethnicity and
migration under New Labour.7 D. J. McLaren, ‘Education for Citizenship and the New Moral World of Robert Owen’, Scottish Educational
Review , 32:2 (2000), pp. 107�116.8 I. Donnachie, ‘Robert Owen’s Welsh Childhood: Kin, Culture and Environment c1771�c1781’,
Montgomeryshire Collections , 8 (1998), pp. 81�96.
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society’ featured in his rules). Owen condemned not religion itself, but sectarianism,
which created the division and disharmony he saw in Old Society. The New Social
System would heal these divisions by uniting individuals in a secular society.
However, there was a significant contradiction in his encouragement of religion, but
possibly he saw it is a useful interim means of social cohesion (or control) until the
introduction of the new secularised society.
It was some time before Owen’s ideas about religion reached the public, but when
they did in 1817 the damage to his reputation and future schemes was considerable.
Enlightened and pragmatic measures designed to promote toleration could also lead
to misunderstanding and acrimony among the tradition-bound. Sadly, there are still
many lessons to be learned about how to promote understanding of other values,
cultures and religious views, and New Labour, to its credit, has adopted some of
Owen’s thinking in its agenda. As for citizenship at New Lanark it seems ‘social duty
[was] one of the most interesting features of this happy colony’.9
Industrial Relations and Welfare
Other significant legacies can be perceived in industrial relations and welfare for
Owen is widely credited with the introduction of work practices well in advance of
their time. He was among the first in the early industrializing world to conclude that
workers would be more productive if treated favourably rather than brutalized. He
also realised that exposing children to factory work at an early age was counter-
productive, prejudicing their physical and mental growth.
Of course the downside of Owen’s methods, admittedly necessary when the
unregulated work of rural society was replaced by time discipline in the factory, was a
rigid workplace regime accompanied by surveillance. Owen insisted that the
monitoring system was as much about recording social behaviour as productive
capacity. This was not entirely misplaced given the emphasis put on character and
citizenship. Nor was there much resentment of Owen’s work regime, but, of course,
there are fewer records of worker resentment.
The social provision in the institute also highlights Owen’s astute psychology,
dancing being pleasurable as a means of promoting corporate loyality. Mill work was
essentially tedious, closely monitored and not very well paid, but workers might regard
the social life as an inducement to stay. Beyond schooling and lectures, the institute was
the focus of a vibrant social life. Dances and music were the core activities observed by
visitors, and given Owen’s evident enthusiasm it is no surprise to find them
transplanted to later Owenite communities.
The lessons on cooperation are of great significance, but we need to be alert to the
mythology built around Owen’s thinking and practice, particularly regarding
consumer cooperation. The village store supplied good quality provisions at fair
9 H. Macnab, The New Views of Mr Owen of Lanark Impartially Examined , (London: J.Hatchard & Sons,
1819), p. 47.
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prices, which was unusual in most industrial communities where workers were
exploited in the universally condemned ‘truck shops’. These often sold adulterated or
shoddy goods at inflated prices and on credit, thus boosting the employers’ profits.
While Owen’s system of tickets for wages certainly forced workers to use the store
(and control alcohol consumption), the profits helped fund education. The store was
not actually cooperative, but it could be seen as a keystone in Owen’s attempts to
build a new social system.
While the context in which Owen operated and developed his ideas on poverty,
education, citizenship, welfare and cooperation differed radically from our own time,
there are significant lessons to be learned. Owen, working in a capitalist world less
enlightened than our own and facing many challenges, has nevertheless much to
teach us about the humanity that ought to underscore progressive governance and
social policy today. Owen’s reforms can still provide inspiration to address
educational and gender inequalities, poverty and the environmental degradation
faced by the under-privileged. The eradication of these problems may not usher in
Owen’s New Moral World, or indeed Utopia, but they can help to secure the greater
social justice New Labour purports to promote. In this there are important legacies of
Owen but in other respects, Owen contributed to some of the worst kinds of idealist
thinking that has plagued the working-class movement in Britain for over 150 years.
The utopianism of the past, in other words, has helped to contribute both to anti-
working class politics over the past century and in so doing has also helped to sustain
and reproduce class inequalities, inequalities that have come to take on a new voracity
in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The idealism implicit in Owen finds a ready home in New Labour, but here is it
combined with other sentiments to forge an even more hostile anti-working class
perspective and approach.
Revisiting Owen through New Labour
In his 1996 book, New Britain , Blair lays claim to what he terms the ‘ethical socialism’
of Owen.10 In Blair’s view, ‘early socialists like Robert Owen understood very clearly
that a society which did not encourage people voluntarily to carry out their
responsibilities to others would always be in danger of slipping either into the
anarchy of mutual indifference*and its corollary, the domination of the powerless
by the powerful*of the tyranny of collective coercion, where the freedom of all is
denied in the name of the good of all. Ethical socialists have long asserted . . . a
distinctive socialist view of both human nature and of social morality’.11 For Blair,
then, Owen and other ethical socialists provide a template that can be adapted and
applied today, especially in welfare. Written as New Labour were busy preparing
the ground for their first general election victory in 1997, Blair highlights some of
10 T. Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London: Fourth Estate, 1996).11 Ibid., pp. 238�239.
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the by now familiar themes that have come to characterise New Labour’s ideology
and rhetoric, with a moral imperative stressing responsibility, duty, self-help and
diligence.12
Writing about Owen in the early 1970s, when there was renewed interest in his
thinking, historian, J.F.C. Harrison, claims that ‘a good part of the English socialist
tradition is in fact a series of reinterpretations of enigmatic figures from the past. For
each age there is a new view of Mr Owen’.13 The attempt by Blair and his colleagues to
secure Owen for New Labour’s agenda can be interpreted as representing yet another
stage in the process highlighted by Harrison. Thus, as New Labour is founded upon a
reworking of socialist ideas and of socialism itself*Owen and his contemporaries
come to the fore. However, what exactly is the attraction of Owen and New Lanark
for contemporary Labour politicians?
A World That Has Changed? New Labour and the Third Way
According to Blair, ‘The Third Way stands for a modernised social democracy,
passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left, but
flexible, innovative and forward-looking in the means to achieve them. It is
founded on the values which have guided progressive politics for more than a
century*democracy, liberty, justice, mutual obligations and internationalism’.14
Elsewhere he further claims that the third way ‘is social democracy renewed. It is
firmly anchored in the tradition of progressive politics and the values which have
motivated the democratic left for more than a century . . . . In the last century, the
tradition of social liberalism emphasised individual freedom in a market economy.
Social democracy works to combine their commitments in a relevant way for the
21st century’.15
For supporters of the New Labour project, Labour must change to engage with a
world that has changed. Foremost here are arguments that globalisation has
fundamentally altered the ability of the state to govern as it did in the past.
Additionally recent decades of rapid and far-reaching economic, social and political
change have undermined traditional patterns of employment and collective
solidarities, notably family and community structures. Class identity, it is claimed,
has diminished in the face of rising individualism and social fragmentation, a process
in turn aided by demographic and cultural change. The Third Way is presented as the
means by which New Labour can help to re-shape British society and engage with this
new world.
12 See M. Lavalette and G. Mooney, ‘New Labour, New Moralism: The Welfare Politics and Ideology of New
Labour under Blair’, International Socialism , 85 (1999), pp. 27�48.13 J. F. C. Harrison, ‘A New View of Mr Owen’ in S. Pollard and J. Salt (eds) Robert Owen. Prophet of the Poor
(London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 1�12.14 T. Blair, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century (London: The Fabian Society, 1998), p. 1.15 T. Blair, ‘Third Way, Phase Two’, Prospect , March 2001, pp. 10�13.
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However, the Third Way is not simply presented as a new idea for today. As
highlighted at the outset, it is also used to distance New Labour from both the New
Right and from Old Labour. Or as Blair has expressed it, the Third Way serves to
distinguish New Labour from the two failed pasts of collective state intervention
(alternatively referred to as the ‘nanny state’ or ‘tax and spend socialism’) and the free
market individualism of the New Right and Thatcherism. Instead, Labour today seeks
to mobilise an alternative vision of socialism, one that rejects the ‘statism’ of post-
1945 Labour governments. Writing in 1997, Stephen Pollard argued that:
The Left needs to develop an alternative means of securing the same end: efficient,
equitable healthcare provision. Ironically, such a framework was developed in the
UK in the 18th and 19th centuries, and adopted by other European Socialist Parties.
But the state driven approach has been so dominant that the individualist Socialist
welfare tradition is almost forgotten. Long before the post-1945 welfare state model
arose, ordinary working people started to band together in cooperatives and
‘friendly societies’ to secure proper health care. This took (diverse) forms. Robert
Owen in New Lanark sought to provide welfare, education, and leisure within self-
contained working communities . . . The British Left has forgotten its earlier roots
partly because it has never fully endorsed its continental partners’ concept of the
‘economy social’*whereby organisations which trade in the market for a social
purpose have a partnership role with government. Simplistic divisions of society
into private versus public sector handicap forward thinking, especially when the
argument follows that ‘private’* i.e. non state*organisations should have no role
in health care. . . . The British Left’s search for a ‘Big Idea’ to counter the ‘New
Right’ was always pretty pointless*not least because it need only have involved a
rediscovery of its own ideological heritage. . . . Blair cited this heritage and called
for Labour to ‘‘recreate for the 21st century the civil society to which these
movements gave birth’’.16
Pollard helpfully identifies some of the linkages (implicitly perhaps) between New
Labour and the ideas of Owen. We can see also begin to see some of the ways in which
the ideas of early socialist thinkers such as Owen might be of use to New Labour
today. However, in addition, there is an attempt, perhaps uneven and tentative, to
locate New Labour’s social and political agenda within the Owenite/early socialist
tradition. What then has New Labour sought to take from Owen?
Owen, New Labour and Community
Owen’s emphasis on social cooperation and on community has already been alluded
to. Community was central to his social outlook and he saw in community the
answer to the social divisiveness of marriage and the family. As with Owen, the
notion of community plays an important role in both Blair’s political philosophy and
16 S. Pollard, The Case for Private, Mutual Care: A Socialist View , 1997, http://www.pfizerforum.com, accessed
1 March 2002.
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in policies pursued by New Labour. Blair’s vision and understanding of community is
duly revealed:
People don’t want an overbearing state. But they do not want to live in a social
vacuum either. It is in the search for this different, reconstructed, relationship
between individual and society that ideas about ‘community’ are to be found.
‘Community’ implies recognition of interdependence but not overweening
government power. It accepts that we are better able to meet the forces of change
and insecurity through working together.17
At the heart of my beliefs is the idea of community. I don’t just mean the local
villages, towns and cities in which we live. I mean that our fulfilment as individuals
lies in a decent society of others.
My argument . . . is that the renewal of community is the answer to the challenges
of a changing world . . . Lives of honesty, struggle, decency, responsibility. People
have high hopes for their children. Lives that cry out for the helping hand of an
active community not the cold shoulder, the cruelty of those who say ‘you’re on
your own’. A community is there for them when they need it, helping them cope
with change, supporting their families, making sure their effort is rewarded.18
Certainly the idea of community is somewhat ambiguous and highly contested, but
is a flexible notion that can be applied and understood in a myriad of ways. For New
Labour, community allows the social to be re-asserted against the ‘there is no such
thing as society’ view of Thatcher(ism). Again, community is being mobilised to
distinguish New Labour not only from the New Right but also from Old Labour:
community is both the antidote to the unregulated free market and to what New
Labour claim are the overpowering statism and centralised control of Old Labour
style social democracy.
What is not being argued for here is a sense of community from below; for
example, the community of the Clydeside rent strikes of 1915 and the 1920s, or the
miners strike in the 1980s. In other words, instead of celebrating community as a
form of working-class resistance, what is mobilised is a rather conservative (both with
a small and a large ‘c’) notion of ‘community’: community as a means of combating
crime and disorder, community as a form of social regulation, community as a
mechanism of social control.19 Community, at least as mobilised and valorised by
New Labour, is constructed as a key means, if not in some instances the key agent,
through which social capital can be enhanced, democracy and civic participation
renewed, social entrepreneurship encouraged and the growing threat of social
disorder reversed. Perhaps more importantly, through the notion of community New
Labour is able to articulate a model and vision of collectivism that allows it
17 Quoted in The Guardian , 23 March 1995.18 T. Blair, Speech to the Annual Conference of the Women’s Institute, London, 7 June 2000.19 See R. Levitas, ‘Community, Utopia and New Labour’, Local Economy, 15:3 (2000), pp. 188�197.
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completely bypass the ‘traditional’ Old Labour and social democratic concern with
social class.
The shaping of Blair’s understanding of community owes much to traditions other
than those of Owen*even if there is some acknowledgement that Owen’s vision of
community has much to commend it. In particular, Blair has also made a claim to the
ideas of the Christian Socialist thinker, John Macmurray, whom he acknowledged as a
significant influence on New Labour thinking.20 While Blair has certainly borrowed
from Macmurray, though arguably not as much or as directly as is widely assumed,
the result is mixed with other ideas from different perspectives. Again, in relation
to community, it is the work of American communitarian thinker Amitai Etzioni that
has exercised more pull over Blair.21 Arguably, the moral authoritarianism that
pervades much of Blair’s understanding of community comes not from the Christian
Socialist traditions of Macmurray, and not from Owen, but from Etzioni, who seeks
to construct an idea of community as a moral order in which family, social discipline,
responsibility and obligation are central. Thus, we see that Blair and New Labour
have taken from a range of often competing traditions and perspectives in their effort
to reconstruct socialism as social-ism in which a new model of community is
advanced.
New Labour, Social-ism and Market Utopianism
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of British socialism historically has been its
insistence on the moral basis of politics. A century ago this kind of ethical socialism
may have looked like an aberration in terms of general socialist doctrines, but it has
been triumphantly vindicated. Under the sway of a crude form of Marxism many
socialists allowed themselves to succumb to the delusion that socialism was
primarily a science of society, or that history was on its side and predetermined, or
that it belonged only to one class. The errors of theory produced even greater errors
of practice. Yet the best British socialists always insisted that, at bottom, socialism
was a matter of moral choice. Socialism has always been, at root, more of an ethic
of society that an economic doctrine. It has stood for universal values and general
emancipation.22
Here Gordon Brown contributes his ideas to the New Labour rethinking of
socialism and to the strategic New Labour project centred on the reconstruction and
reconceptualisation of British citizenship. Brown has been among the most vocal
and active New Labour leaders in this respect. In his speech to The Fabian Society in
20 For further discussion of these ideas and their influences on New Labour, see S. Hale, ‘Professor
MacMurray and Mr Blair: The Strange Case of the Communitarian Guru that Never Was’, Political Quarterly,
73:2 (2002), pp. 191�197; R. Levitas, The Inclusive Society? , 2nd edn (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), and
S. Prideaux, Not So New Labour (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2005).21 For critical discussions of Etzioni’s influence on New Labour, see Levitas, The Inclusive Society? , op. cit.,
pp. 90�97; Prideaux, Not So New Labour, op. cit., ch. 3.22 G. Brown and T. Wright, Values, Visions and Voices: An Anthology of Socialism (Edinburgh: Mainstream,
1995), p. 14.
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January 2006, ‘a modern view of Britishness’ is advanced, in which sense of
‘Britishness’ founded upon the values of ‘fairness’, ‘liberty’ and ‘responsibility’ is
celebrated.23 These, he argues, are the building blocks of a modern citizenship and a
renewed civic society. But they are also imbued with an emphasis on idealism and
common purpose. The ghost of Owen is only too apparent.
Blair has also sought to present his vision of socialism as social-ism and through
this we can begin to uncover some of the continuities between Owenism and New
Labour. In this social-ism there is an important moral agenda*one that stresses the
formation of character*an agenda that it shared by both Owen and Blair. But is it a
moralism of the same type? As we have argued above, the moralism of Tony Blair is
heavily influenced by traditions other than Owen’s and the early socialists. There is a
strong moral authoritarianism at the heart of New Labour that is reflected in far-
reaching criminal justice policies and strategies for policing anti-social behaviour and
other behaviours deemed to be a ‘problem’.24 Here the influence of more conservative
and Christian thinkers highlights important points of departure between Blair/New
Labour and Owen. Blair has often sought to present himself as a Christian Socialist
first and foremost*though some of his beliefs perhaps are closer to European
Christian Democracy than to any socialist traditions.25 Again ‘community’, ‘family’
and ‘duties’ play a pivotal role in this endeavour.
In the writings of the American communitarians, such as Etzioni, economic
relations hardly figure*though feature as an absent presence in the background. The
free-market economy is taken for granted as the best way to organise economic (and
social) life. In the ethical socialism of Blair and Brown, there is a similar approach,
which, in the quote above, argues that socialism is more than an economic doctrine.
While this is surely beyond dispute, in the hands of New Labour politicians what this
says is that socialist project should not be concerned with matters ‘economic’ as such,
and*along with Etzioni*that the market remains the ‘best’ way of achieving social
ends. This is not to argue that New Labour are free marketeers but that in Blair’s
ethical socialism, the individual operating in a market economy is the paramount
agent. However, Blair sees such individuals as ‘socially interdependent’ and therefore
the pursuit of self-interest can be linked to the greater ‘social interest’.
In this social-ism, as opposed to socialism, mutual interdependence goes hand in
hand with community and family. The model or good society is one in which these
act as basic social building blocks, for as Blair argues: ‘History will call it the Decent
Society, a new social order for the Age of Achievement for Britain. We will respect
family life, develop it in any way we can, because strong families are the foundations
of strong communities’.26
23 Gordon Brown, Speech to the Conference on The Future of Britishness, The Fabian Society, London, 14
January 2006.24 C. Jones and T. Novak, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State (London: Routledge, 1999).25 N. Huntington and T. Bale, ‘New Labour: New Christian Democracy?’ Political Quarterly, 73:1 (2002),
pp. 44�50.26 Tony Blair, Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 1996.
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The New Labour vision of a ‘good society’ is one in which economic efficiency
and competitiveness is inextricably married with social cohesion, social justice and
opportunity:
In pursuit of such an ambition, economic competence is a vital and necessary,
yet insufficient, motor for social justice, even when enacted with egalitarian ends.
Indeed, we must acknowledge that extending economic opportunity to all is only
one aspect of the progressive vision of Britain to which we aspire. Ours is a political
movement with ambitions to fashion a different kind of society. . . . The vast
majority of us struggling with the everyday dilemmas that life brings want our lives
to have meaning beyond the hollow claims of consumerism. In the personal realm,
most of us want more from life than isolation and acquisition. We try to do the best
by family, friends and neighbours, and to balance the material and the non-material
sides of life. We know that it is only in partnership with those who share our
progressive instincts across the country that we can foster a culture of reciprocity
and responsibility. Building social cohesion requires public expression of those
progressive impulses that are at present too often confined to private concerns.27
Once more, in all this forging of a new ethical, libertarian or social-ism socialism,
New Labour seeks to distance itself from ‘old Labour’. The past spoke to Peter Hain,
it seems, when he observed that, ‘the history of our party and of the Left in Britain
shows that an enabling, devolving socialism*not a statist socialism, but a libertarian
socialism*is truer to our roots than the tradition which came to be identified with
the Left and with Labour in particular. Pioneers like the Levellers, Agitators and
Diggers from the mid-17th century*or, late Tom Paine, the Chartists, Robert Owen,
William Morris and G.D.H. Cole*were libertarian, not state, socialists. They were
committed egalitarians. But, crucially, they were also inspired by liberal values of
individual freedom and justice’.28
It is important that we recognise the significant differences between the Owenite
worldview and that of Blair and New Labour. However, we also want to argue that
Owen and Blair share something of an antipathy to the working class, especially to an
organised working-class; a working class for itself, to deploy the language of Marx,
(and Hain’s attempts to lay claim to the traditions of the Levellers and the Diggers
shows some considerable audacity given New Labour’s attitude to workers engaged in
struggle in the years since it has been in government). Owen firmly rejected any idea
that an uneducated working class could be trusted with the task of ‘social progress’,
saying that, ‘it is not practicable that adults of the working class can be made, in this
generation, more than working class members . . . Their language, habits, manners,
limited ideas, and ignorance of the world, make it impossible to put them, until their
mind shall be born again, to be equal to those whom education and station have
made unequal’.29 Hence Owenism’s aim for universal popular education. Socialism
27 D. Alexander, ‘Wanted: A Vision of the Good Society’, New Statesman , 26 September 2005, pp. 27�28.28 P. Hain, ‘The Past in New Labour’s Future’, Observer, 27 October 2002.29 Owen in New Moral World , 10 February 1844.
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was, for Owen, essentially the triumph of reason and justice based upon an appeal to
all social classes that change was needed. For Engels:
English socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with
great consideration towards the bourgeoisie and great injustice towards the
proletariat.30
As Engels pointed out Owen’s socialism was largely a ‘bourgeois affair’ fraught with
the prejudices of his own class. Therefore, he was to argue that only the most
intellectual of all classes would create a violence-free revolution and a new society, the
task falling to them, himself included, to point out both the ‘insanities’ of capitalist
society and to construct a vision of alternative social order, the new moral world.31
Class collaboration was the route to classlessness*not class antagonism. There is
absolutely no sense in Owenism of socialism as the ‘self-emancipation of the working
class’, the working class present only as a ‘suffering’ class.
Engels and Marx acknowledged Owen’s thinking and his contributions to social
reform, and they did not dispute that the power of the utopian critique of capitalist
society.32 However, they later became fierce critics of what they regarded as an
essentially idealist project that would contribute only to an undermining of
independent working-class struggle. Indeed, it was they who coined the term utopian
socialism that has largely stuck to Owenism. The utopianism of Owen, they argued,
can only give rise to a dystopia. The belief that ‘islands of socialism’ could be
established in a capitalist Britain was among the worst kinds of myth-making. Owen’s
New Lanark or Charles Fourier’s vision of ‘phalansteres’ were dismissed by Marx and
Engels in The Communist Manifesto as ‘castles in the sky’ that pandered to bourgeois
society.33 New Lanark, lest we forget, was still a capitalist enterprise, clearly organised
and run as such. As Owen himself acknowledged, ‘the people are slaves at my mercy’.
Work remained oppressive and in the tight regulation of all aspects of social life at
New Lanark the seeds of dystopia are only too evident. The ideals of Owen’s socialism
were not only seriously at odds with the praxis of utopianism itself, but in the former
the latter are created.
However, Marx and Engels also recognised that Owen was a critic of capitalism and
of the market and that his reforms did improve conditions for his workers. In 1878,
for instance, Engels was only too willing to acknowledge that ‘every social movement,
every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself to the name of
Robert Owen’.34 However, they attacked his class collaborations as utopian*as well
30 F. Engels, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844’, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels ,
Vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975 [1845]), p. 525.31 F. Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works , Vol. 3 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1970 [1880]).32 See R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hempstead: Syracuse University Press, 1990).33 K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (London: Bookmarks, 2003 [1848]).34 F. Engels, ‘Anti-Duhring’, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels , Vol. 25 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1975 [1878]), p. 251.
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as his rejection of working-class struggle and agitation*and his misunderstanding of
some of the central dynamics of the capitalist economy, of the structural inequalities
that it generated and reproduced. However, the Owen that Labour seeks to
celebrate*Owen the communitarian, the social reformer, the educationalist, the
benevolent employer, the great believer in social justice*is a very particular or
partial Owen, not the Owen who was a foremost critic of capitalism and the free
market, of the family and of religion. That is the Owen that Engels and Marx were
willing to endorse.35
Owen’s relative antipathy to the working class is also shared by New Labour. While
the language of class has largely been airbrushed from New Labour’s discourse, class
remains an ever-present though rarely mentioned fact of social and economic life in
the early 21st century. New Labour, like Owen, is suspicious of working-class
organisations such as trade unions, or at least there is hostility to trade unions that do
not play the New Labour tune. There is similarly hostility to organised working class
resistance from below, whether in the workplace or in the ‘community’.
However, for the purposes of this paper there is another more important parallel
between Owen and Blair/New Labour*their shared utopianism. Yes, both reject
class struggle as a means of forging a new society and, yes, they both share a vision of
a society founded upon cooperation and community*though this has different
understandings. More importantly, they also share the idea that a new society could
be built without challenging the existing economic arrangements and relationships,
though in the case of Blair and New Labour this is taken much further, amounting to
little other than a celebration of the market, albeit a loosely regulated one. They are,
in this respect, contrasting types of market utopians. Once again, however, there is
another dimension to this with New Labour: not only do they seek to construct a
‘socially just’, ‘fair’ and egalitarian society on the foundations of capitalism, but they
deploy a wide range of dystopian images to construct and legitimise particular policy
options. This is notable, again, in relation to policies in relation to anti-social
behaviour and social ‘disorder’, and underpins the suspicions of and hostilities to
‘others’ and the recurring attempts to redraw and erect new boundaries and borders.
It also characterises the New Labour-held view of globalisation, which is used to
argue that failure to become an efficient, competitive economy will have dire
consequences for the ‘whole of British society’.
Concluding Remarks: Another World is Possible
At the heart of the dispute between utopian socialists such as Owen and Marx and
Engels was over how the new society was to be enacted. They share a vision that
another world can be created but the materialist conception of history and the
argument that the working class is the agent of the overthrow of capitalism puts Marx
35 On the complex legacy of Owen to Engels and Marx, see G. Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium.
From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 50�51,
especially pp. 166�183.
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and Engels at some considerable distance from the idealism of Owen. While such
idealism has plagued socialist politics over the past century, the idea that social
transformation can be essentially a moral project founded on appeals to reason has
finally been exhausted by the neo-liberal onslaught that has been waged in recent
decades, despite New Labour’s attempts to marry this to some kind of social-ist goal.
In all of this there are major issues for those who would claim to be socialists*of
whatever tradition*both in relation to how we interpret the ideas of the early
socialists and in our attitude to the policies being adopted by New Labour and the
vision of the ‘new society’ that they are attempting to forge. We have argued above
that today New Labour politicians are active rethinking the social-ist or socialist
project. While it is healthy to rework socialist ideas, in returning to Owen they
marginalise or completely neglect the fact that he was often a vocal critique of the
market (if not anti-capitalism as such), and anti-family and anti-religion. In rejecting
what they refer to as the ‘statism’ and collectivism of old Labour and the market
individualism of the new Right, Blair, New Labour has sought to develop a new
way*a third way*that marries together social-ism and the market. But arguably
the Labour Party (together with past Labour governments) have always been ‘third
way’*attempting unsuccessfully to navigate a path between state and market.
New Labour’s programme is presented above all as a strategy for ‘modernising’
Britain. The vision which is encapsulated in this is, compared with the progressive
and far reaching radical ideas of Owen, is one in which the future looks bleak:
education, health and social justice are all reduced to the role of enhancing
competitiveness, a world dominated by and revolving around work, enterprise and
wealth creation and where even the presence of an ever more pervasive range of
sanctions are in place to deal with those whose behaviour is deemed to be a problem.
The vision of the good society that New Labour is forging is, for those in the Marxist
and socialist traditions, a dystopian world in which ‘community’, the ‘third way’,
‘social justice’ and equality of opportunity are little more than thinly veiled means of
enhancing both social control and profitability. Against the market utopianism of
Owen and New Labour, another, if not utopian, world is possible.
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