People of the Revolution and the USSR

Early socialism 1771–1858

Social reformer who emphasized education and cooperation

In A New View of Society (1816) Owen argued that “any general character may be given to any community by the application of proper means,” a principle he later tested at New Lanark and New Harmony.

A Welsh-born British manufacturer and social reformer, Owen sought to improve working, living and educational conditions at New Lanark. In A New View of Society he argued that environment and education form human character. He later pursued cooperative and communal experiments. Marx and Engels’ classification of Owen as a utopian socialist is a later, polemical interpretation. His early reform proposals should be distinguished from the International Working Men’s Association’s emphasis on workers’ self-emancipation.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1856–1915 ○ Pneumonia

Former miner who founded the British Labour Party and opposed the First World War to the end, urging an anti-war general strike

Elected to Parliament in 1892 after organising miners, Hardie helped lead the Independent Labour Party and the new Labour movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, he campaigned against the conflict.

Born into poverty in Scotland and working in the pits from about the age of ten, he rose as a miners’ organiser to become in 1892 the first working-class member of parliament. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and became Labour’s first parliamentary leader in 1906, supporting women’s suffrage and Indian self-rule. At Copenhagen in 1910 he proposed a general strike in the arms industries to prevent war. He attended the Brussels Bureau meeting of July 1914 and opposed the war until his death in 1915.