Did you know that one of the founders of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement was a Welshman by the name of Robert Owen?

Who Was Robert Owen?

Owen was born in Y Drenewydd, Powys, on 14 May 1771. The hard work of his father, who was a saddler, ironmonger and post-master, no doubt inspired the future beliefs and philosophies of the young Robert Owen.

By adulthood, his main goal was simple: to improve the working conditions of the workers. He was keen on not only improving the working conditions within factories (which were atrocious at the time and rapidly getting worse with the rise of industrialisation in Owen’s lifetime), but also experimenting with socialistic communities.

He later achieved this by investing his fortune into multiple social community experiments (utopian communities organised “according to communitarian and cooperative principle”) across the United States, including New Harmony, Indiana. This led to the coining of the term “Owenism” or “Owenist Socialism”, one of the earliest forms of socialism within the United States.

While Owen was an influence on Karl Marx and Robert Engels, they were also deeply critical of his belief in socialism needing to co-operate with capitalists to begin the transition to a socialist society – arguing further that this could only be achieved through worker-led revolution.

‘The present arrangement of society is the most anti-social, impolitic, and irrational that can be devised; that under its influence all the superior and valuable qualities of the human race are repressed from infancy, and that the most unnatural means are used to bring out the most injurious propensities…’

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Niklas George

Niklas is the founder, owner, manager, editor, writer, video creator, voice over artist, and so forth, of Welsh Histories. He is passionate about the preservation of Welsh culture; the rejuvenation of the Welsh language and the promotion of Welsh history. Niklas currently resides in Pune, Maharashtra, with his beloved wife.