Communities created by and owned by the poor
William Thompson, an Irish economist and political writer, was one of the first utopian socialists to believe in the ability of the working class to create its own future.
Thompson did not share Robert Owen’s faith that wealthy industrialists would provide capital for the new communities, and believed there was greater potential if working people themselves were to finance their own schemes.Thompson also believed in the necessity of the workers in any co-operative community having security of ownership of the community's land and capital property.
Followers of Thompson began to adopt the label of ‘socialist’ or ‘communionist’, in part to distinguish themselves from Owen's positions.
These differences led to open confrontation between Thompson and Owen at the Third Co-operative Congress held in 1832 in London. Owen maintained that it was necessary to wait for Government and Stock Exchange support and investment into large scale communities.Thompson and his supporters contended that they must move towards establishing independent small-scale communities based on the movement's own resources.The disagreement was never resolved, and Thompson died the following year.
Practical directions
In 1830 Thompson published Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the principles of Mutual Cooperation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of the Means of Enjoyment, in which he remarked:
If done without any aid from the rich and idle, how animating to the industrious classes! – to the rich, the selfish, what a humiliating reproach!
In the same work he defined community as follows:
An association of persons, in sufficient numbers, and living on a space of land of sufficient extent to supply by their own exertions all of each other’s’ wants.
Community denotes common exertion and common benefit, common exertion according to the capabilities of each individual directed in the way most conducive to the common good, and common benefit according to the varying states and wants of each individual so as to produce as nearly as our best directed efforts can accomplish, equal happiness to all.
He hoped his instructions would make the establishment of co-operative communities as easy as for that of ‘any ordinary manufacture’.He also believed that communities would provide markets for each other, and that commerce would flourish as a result, with consequences entirely beneficial to society:
The system of Co-operative Industry accomplishes this, not by the vain search after foreign markets throughout the globe, no sooner found than over-stocked and glutted by the restless competition of the starving producers, but by the voluntary union of the industrious or productive classes, in such numbers as to afford a market to each other, by working together for each other, for the mutual supply, directly by themselves, of all their most indispensable wants, in the way of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture.
The rights of women
Many of the early ‘socialists’ were determined to establish communities in which women as well as men were able to play a full and equal part.This was especially true in the case of William Thompson.In 1825 he collaborated with his companion Anna Doyle Wheeler to produce An Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery
Thompson and Wheeler regarded the vote for women as a necessity, not merely a right, because they believed that the interests of women often differ from the interests of men, and therefore women must have the ballot to protect their interests.
The Appeal recognises however that while suffrage is a necessity for women to find happiness, it is not sufficient for that purpose.Redistribution of wealth, improvements in the workplace, the elimination of domestic violence, education and professional opportunities were all required to achieve that end.
Sources
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century, 1983.
Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England, 1979.
