Όρεξη να έχουμε να συζητάμε επ' αυτού. Οι Κινέζοι λένε για 500 χρόνια σοσιαλισμού. Ο λόγος είναι ότι βάζουν μέσα και όλους τους ουτοπιστές. Το τρίτο στάδιων των ουτοπιστών θεωρώ ότι ήταν απόλυτα αναγνωρίσιμο ως αριστερά, και υπήρχε ήδη η υλική βάση.
Western utopian socialism had its origins in the sixteenth century, and can be divided
into three stages.
The first of these covers the period up until the mid-seventeenth century. It has now been more than 500 years since the Englishman Thomas More in 1516
wrote Utopia (its full name was An Interesting Golden Book of the Perfect State System and
the New Utopian Isles) in the form of fictional travel notes. More served as a high official,
and was arrested and imprisoned because of his political opinions. It was in the prison
that he wrote Utopia, which describes an ideal society in which all means of production
are owned by the whole population; supplies are distributed on demand; everyone is busy
doing productive work; there is ample time for recreation and scientific research; and
alcoholism, brothels, depravity and evil are unknown. The first half of the book severely
criticizes the English enclosure movement—an ugly phenomenon, summed up as “sheep
eating people,” from the epoch of primitive capital accumulation at the end of feudal
society and the beginning of capitalism. The second half of Utopia is a dialogue that
describes how a navigator came to an island, how the people on the island lived, and
the systems such as customs, transportation, and care for the natural environment that
were applied there. For example, the people of the island, benefiting from public ownership, had no need to take much with them when they traveled.
Another representative of utopian socialism at this stage was Tommaso Campanella in
Italy. His situation was similar to that of Thomas More. He was arrested and imprisoned
because of an uprising in which he involved. While in prison he wrote The City of the
Sun, a book well worth reading. There were also other utopian socialists, some of
whom made use of religion to spread their socialist ideas.
The second stage of Western utopian socialism lasted roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Representatives at this stage included Gerrard
Winstanley, Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and the Abbé Gabriel de Mably.
They criticized private ownership, especially private capitalist ownership, and had a rudimentary understanding of social classes. They held that private ownership led to economic inequality and that economic inequality led to social and political inequality, a
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 3
fair interpretation of the social reality at that time. They used rural communes and handicraft workshops as prototypes to design a blueprint for an ideal future society.
In the third stage, from the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, the main representatives were the Comte de Saint-Simon and Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier in France and Robert Owen in Britain. Owen was a large-scale British
textile industry capitalist. After becoming wealthy, he began to realize that it was unreasonable for him to grow rich from working while his employees remained poor even
though they also worked. He believed that there were three main social problems: (1) Private ownership widened the gap between rich and poor. Owen was a philanthropist who
provided his workers with canteens, nurseries and other benefits. But he realized that if
private ownership was not ended he could only provide charity, and that a society with so
many evils could not be completely transformed. As a result, he was determined to eliminate private ownership. (2) Private ownership in the West led to chaos in marriage and
sexual relations, including improper sexual relations and politically and economically
motivated marriages. (3) Religion caused many problems, because it promoted obedience
to destiny instead of encouraging people to work for social change.
Owen was broadly correct; these three problems still exist in the world today. Problems such as poverty, social polarization, environmental destruction and war are mainly
derived from capitalist private ownership, along with the ideas and institutions that surround it. I believe that Owen not only had advanced ideas but also a remarkable personality. Despite being a wealthy capitalist, he had socialist views that anticipated those of
Marx.
Και μπόνους ο Πλάτωνας ως πρόγονος τους:
The idea of public ownership can be traced back to Plato, the ancient Greek thinker,
who made certain ideological contributions in this regard. Although Plato was a slaveowner, he argued that the property of slaveowners should be shared. Long before the
birth of utopian socialism, Plato proposed in The Republic that a system similar to public
ownership should be implemented among the slaveowners. The slaveowners should not
have private property, and their assets should be shared so as to prevent them from
scheming against each other, but they should continue to rule the slaves. This idea
was inherited and developed by the utopian socialists, who considered that since the
property of slaveowners could be publicly owned, why should this common ownership
not extend to the property of society as a whole? If the means of production were
owned publicly by the whole of society, there would be no classes and no antagonism
between rich and poor
Από το "Cheng, E., & Zhang, J. (2021). Five Hundred Years of World Socialism and Its Prospect: Interview with Professor Enfu Cheng"
