(Preview) The Socialist Who Bought a Town

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
You're on your deathbed at 87, reflecting on a long, interesting life, which will end in minutes. You grew up poor here in Wales, a little market town, born just before the American Revolution. You started your career at age 10 as an assistant draper, but you were so skilled, so bright and talented that you worked your way up to managing an entire factory in Manchester. And then, married up, married the daughter of a factory owner in Scotland. Polite society, servants, ascots, all that good stuff. But once you pulled yourself up from obscurity and modest means to become a successful businessman at the very first great typhoon wave of the Industrial Revolution, you decided to use your wealth and power for the benefit of your employees. One of the first industrialists to argue the novel idea, the insane notion that it wouldn't just be nice for a company to treat its workers well, but in fact, that it would be profitable.
The company town you built with radical ideas like days off, capped work hours and universal education, this was all so contravened to the prevailing wisdom and class bigotries of the day, that no less than the Tsar of Russia paid a visit. Kings and intellectuals all came to see your world famous factory, your model town, and to meet you, the visionary. To see the world's first nice company town. Where capital and labor complement one another. Your reimagined factory was such a success, that you began to think bigger. New Lanark was a beacon of reason and kindness in an otherwise dark, bleak, Dickensian world. One besought by poverty, predation, and superstition. If you could reimagine the nature of employment in your company town, why stop there? Why not reimagine society itself? And so you had sold the town, the whole town, the factory, your greatest accomplishment in life, and the source of your wealth and respect in the community. You sold it to finance an experiment. A new type of society, civilization built fresh, designed from the ground up. The rest of the world all just happened, just happened by historical accident, built on unexamined presumptions, traditions, cultural inertia, randomness. The new society, this would cast aside the sludge and darkness of the old world. It would be founded on reason and shared humanity. What new Lanark was to the industrial world, new Harmony would be to the entire world. And that glorious experiment failed miserably, bankrupted you, immiserated your family, and cast you down from the heights of enlightenment intellectualism to that of a crank. In your youth, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, you were a successful capitalist. At your prime, you were a critic of that same system and a respected theorist.
And a respected theorist on what could replace it. But for the last 20 years, in the wake of your imploded utopia, you've been a penniless, obscure blowhard. At best, an activist, but mostly a blowhard, writing treatises for reform that never came. For a socialist movement that left you behind and changed direction, everyone has heard of Marxism. Nobody knows about Owenism, the socialism of some alternate universe, one without purges, gulags, targeted famines.
And now, you're on your deathbed, back in Wales, back in your hometown, back to being poor.
At this point in your life, having come full circle, do you regret it? Do you look back and see failure? Or a long colorful story with ups and downs but few regrets? Or do you think, as the lights begin to dim, that you weren't a failure? No, you were a hundred years ahead of the game. And that beacon you built was not a torch that flickered out, but a spark which is only now beginning to smolder.
The curious case of Robert Owens, the father of British socialism, and the anti-Marx, in my humble opinion, the visionary behind a different strain of socialism in a world that was not to be, and weirdly at the same time, a capitalist and a company town owner, as well as the founder of a utopian experiment that safely, but as we shall soon see, hilariously imploded. All that today on part two of Company Towns, here on The Political Orphanage.
That is a preview of today's bonus episode, one of multiple historical deep dives that we are going to do as part of our limited run series on Company Towns. The story of Robert Owen and a model company town, we will get into socialism, capitalism, paternalism, and in fact, I will literally myself visit sites in both Scotland and Indiana. If you would like to hear the rest of this historical deep dive monologue episode, become a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/andrewheaton, or on substack at thepoliticalorphanage.com.