Biographical notes
[…] The prophetic writer who in the beginning of the last century discovered the machine and society was Robert Owen. He did not turn against the machine, yet proclaimed that great institutional changes were needed if we were to avoid great calamities from its unchecked employment. These thoughts which developed in the second decade of the nineteenth century sprang from the industrial revolution in England and the wretched “condition of the poor”. Apart from the consumers’ co-operatives and the vital stimulus they offered to the trade union movement, Owen’s activities bore no practical fruit, but the philosopher of British socialism owed everything to him. Also, of the “utopian” thinkers of the early nineteenth century, he was the one to have exercised a great influence on Karl Marx. Like Owen himself, Marx never ceased to demand the perfectioning of the industrial society as an instrument of human advance towards ideal ends. From whatever angle we approach the theme, we find their values polarized as efficiency and humanity; technological and social progress; institutional requirements and personal needs.
Such a parallel is, of course, not meant to be substantiated through detailed evidence. It assumes a close knowledge of Owen’s various plans for “Village of Union” and the young Marx’ philosophical essays on economic and political subjects. It was particularly on the issue of the organization of the economy that Owen and Marx diverged most strongly. A centralized economy run by the State was quite foreign to Robert Owen’s monde who considered the market system as the natural form of man’s livelihood; Karl Marx thought of the future of industrial civilization in terms of the supersession of the market economy by a socialized economy. [42]
This text can be found in KPA 59/02, 42-45