REPOST: New Harmony and the results of socialism

Each year, I begin teaching capitalism to our executive MBA's at the conference center in historic New Harmony, site of a failed socialist experiment.  The irony is funny (other posts on the topic seem convincing), but it is important to remember our history, lest we repeat it.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony, an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.

Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism: “giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”

Undeterred, others founded some 40 to 50 similar communes during the 19th century, and all collapsed quickly. New Harmony’s two years proved to be their median lifespan.

Most telling is that the one socialist experiment which succeeded was abandoned because its people realized, collectively, that they could be much better off on on their own.

Successful socialism has been created in only one place on earth, the kibbutzim of Israel. They were democratic and egalitarian; sharing possessions, meals, even child rearing. But once the Jewish state was securely on its feet, kibbutzniks chose to switch to private enterprise. Socialism, they learned to their surprise, was not a happy way to live.