THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Precisely the more economically advanced a country was, the more gruesome the situation of its poor became. The serf had things hard enough, suffering seemed to
have reached its height. But even the worst period of deprivation for the medieval peasants is surpassed by the misery of the first factory workers. The early factories
were the same as galleys; a starving, sleepless, desperate proletariat was chained to machines. Entrepreneurial profit knew no mercy nor let­up, daily work lasted
eighteen hours and over, a filthy work beyond compare. Never were such a large number of people so unhappy as in England around the turn of the eighteenth century.
The first man to come out against it was a doctor called Hall, he saw the country rotting to the core. In 1805 his work ‘The Effects of Civilization’ appeared; in it,
besides medical and moral indignation, there are several utopian proposals for improvement. The poor, says Hall, barely receive an eighth of the proceeds of their
efforts; it is the trend of the times to make the rich ever richer, and the poor ever poorer. The only salvation is to reduce industrial development, but not in order to bring
back the so­called good old days. Hall already saw that all is not yet won if the factories disappear but the lords of the manor remain. The soil should be shared out
again in equal portions among all the families in the country: beyond machine­wrecking there thus arises a future full of free peasants. If this protest against the misery in
factories had met with little response, emanating from a mere philanthropist, the appeal of a factory­owner himself met with a much greater one, above all since it was
linked with an extremely useful example. The example that a well­fed and not discontented worker accomplishes the same and better work than a galley slave in half the
time. Robert Owen had made this discovery, but not only this one: Owen, an anima candidissima, ‘a man with a simplicity of character that was childlike to the point of
sublimity, and at the same time a born leader of men’, as Engels says, also became one of the first utopians of the nineteenth century with a federative­socialist
objective. Pre­eminent among his many works are ‘The Social System’, 1820, and ‘The Book of the New Moral World’, 1836; in the former he turns away from
patriarchal social welfare towards communism, and in the second work he seeks to recommend it to his professional colleagues, from the standpoint of kindness. But if
the utopian thus saws off the bough on which he is sitting as a capitalist, it was absurd to demand the same of capitalists who were not even utopians as a sideline.
Owen still considered social well­being to be attainable through reforms; he rejected strikes, even the struggle for political freedoms, he sought reconciliation, he
expected dukes, ministers and manufacturers to renounce