This is chapter 16 of Kenneth Rexroth's book Communalism:
From its Origins to the Twentieth Century.
Josiah Warren
Of all the remarkable people associated with New Harmony,
the most remarkable by far was Josiah Warren. Had he been a general, a
politician, or a capitalist, he would have been one of the most famous of all
Americans. He was a genuinely universal man a talented musician accomplished
on several instruments, a craftsman skilled in several crafts, an important
inventor, an economist, philosopher, and founder of American individual
anarchism as a movement at least, since Thoreau was too individualistic to be
the founder of a movement.
Warren was born in Boston in 1798 of a well-known Pilgrim
family. Not much is known of his early life, but in his teens he was making a
living as a professional musician. At twenty he married and migrated to
Cincinnati, the capital of the frontier, where he worked as an orchestra and
band leader and teacher of music. Tallow and oil were in short supply, so he
invented a lamp that burned lard and gave better light; soon he was running a
lamp factory and became a moderately well-to-do man. In 1825 he sold the
factory and accompanied Owen and his first settlers to New Harmony, where he
became the leader of the band and taught music in the school the communityıs
only two successful institutions. He also functioned as a general technical
adviser and troubleshooter. Moreover, he was one of the few persons in the
colony with any mechanical knowledge or skill. His philosophy had always been
that the best way to understand a process was to learn to do it. At New Harmony
he began his interest in printing. In 1827, as New Harmony disintegrated, he
returned to Cincinnati. Of all the colonists, he was the only one, at least in
a leading position, who seems to have learned anything. Most of them, like
Frances Wright, were doomed to repeat the same mistakes and follies and end in
the same disasters. Almost all critics of New Harmony have said that what it
lacked was strong leadership, discipline, and commitment strong government.
Warren came to exactly the opposite conclusion. New Harmony had suffered from
the disorderly exercise of freedom and the instability of Owenıs authority. On
the principle of like cures like, he was convinced that the basis of all future
reform must be complete individual liberty. ³Man seeks freedom as the magnet
seeks the pole or water its level,² he wrote, ³and society can have no peace
until every member is really free.² But such a condition was not realizable
under the existing organization and ideas of society. New views had to replace
those of the past. For the future society new principles were needed. The first
of these was ³individual individuality.² The sovereignty of every individual at
all times had to be held inviolable. Everyone necessarily was free to dispose
of his person, his time, his property, and his reputation as he pleased but
always at his own cost.
Warren had evolved a fairly comprehensive system of
economics based on a labor theory of value, at first of the strictest
interpretation, something like Marxıs, or rather Engelsıs theory of labor power
as distinguished from labor all labor time was considered equivalent. Later,
learning from what was in a sense a controlled scientific experiment, he came
to believe in a limited scale of values based on skill. Warrenıs was the mind
of a scientist and inventor. He immediately put the ideas he had evolved from
his New Harmony experience into practical application.
On May 18, 1827, an historic date, he opened a little
general store at the corner of Fifth and Elm Streets in Cincinnati. He called
it the Equity Store, but as soon as people found out about it, this became the
most popular retail business in the city, and was known because of its method
of computing price as the ³time store.² Price was based on the principle of
equal exchange of labor, measured by time occupied and exchange with other
kinds of labor. All goods were marked with their cost plus overhead, usually
about four percent. It was, incidentally, the first self-service business. The
customer selected what he wished, brought it to the counter, the clerk computed
the time spent in service, and the customer gave a labor note, ³Due to Josiah
Warren on demand, thirty minutes in carpenter work, John Smith² or, ³Due to
Josiah Warren on demand, ten minutes in needlework, Mary Brown.²
Customers left orders for their needs, and these were posted
each morning. Craftsmen and farmers brought their goods in accordance with the
list of needs and exchanged them for other goods or for labor notes, in
accordance with a list of the cost and labor time for all staple articles.
Beyond these simple arrangements there were practically no other rules and
regulations. The store functioned automatically as a cooperative market for
both buyers and sellers and as a labor exchange and employment bureau. The
first week it did only five dollarsı worth of business, but in a short time the
store was thriving. And the remarkable thing was that highly skilled craftsmen
and professional men were willing to exchange their labor with others on a
simple time basis, although later Warren would modify this arrangement
somewhat. The store soon came to function also as an interest-free credit
union, and loans in labor and commodities and eventually money, if absolutely
necessary, were made without interest and no other charge than the labor cost
of handling. Warren was eventually able to embark upon a moderate cooperative
real-estate venture, based on the funds in labor and money of the time cost.
All this was done when Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the generally considered founder
of individual anarchy, mutual credit, and cooperative labor exchange, was still
a schoolboy. Warren not only anticipated Proudhon, but he was a far clearer
thinker and writer, and a man who believed in testing all of his theories in
practice. Marx was right about Proudhon. He was a confused thinker and a
confusing writer and far from being a practical man.
After three years of most successful operation of the Time
Store, Warren decided that he had proved his point, the scientific experiment
had justified the hypothesis, and in 1830 he closed out the business and went
to New York to work with Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright on The Free
Inquirer. In about six months he returned to Ohio. In the next few years he
attempted to found communes, which never got started, due to factors beyond his
control. He ran another ³time store² at New Harmony, and on the side, as it
were, made several profitable inventions in printing machinery, culminating in
the first rotary press. In 1847 he took over the leadership of a Fourierist
phalanstery on the Ohio, about thirty miles above Cincinnati, which he renamed
Utopia. It operated for about four years until the settlers sold out at a
profit and migrated to Minnesota, where they disappear from history.
In 1850 Warren moved to New York City and joined forces with
Steven Pearl Andrews, who became the chief propagandist for Warrenıs
principles. These included the sovereignty of the individual, cost the limit of
price, equitable commerce, and, eventually, mutual banking: in other words, the
well-developed theory of individual anarchism or mutualism, which would survive
as a small movement until well into the twentieth century, and which was
certainly a much better worked-out general theory of free association than
Proudhonıs similar system.
In the same year Warren, Andrews, and others began the
community of Modern Times, now called Brentwood, on Long Island about forty
miles from New York. Due to Warrenıs principles, it is easy to confuse Modern
Times with a cooperative real-estate development. Each family owned its own
house and there was no regular form of government. Where New Harmony had
failed, due to its open-door policy and the long struggle between Owenıs
authority and the factionalism of cranks and the parasitism of loafers, Warrenıs
Modern Times solved these problems by ignoring them, by exercising no authority
whatever. The cranks and loafers came, but in a short time eliminated
themselves. Communism of consumption was ensured by a ³time store,² but the
colony was never able to achieve communism of production except in agriculture.
There was never sufficient capital to start a successful manufacturing
business. A paper-box factory was attempted and was quite successful for a few
years but was wiped out in the financial panic of 1857. The colony never really
died, but slowly withered away to become a model village suburban to New York.
In his old age Warren moved to Boston and died there in 1874 at the age of
seventy-six. For another generation the movement he founded was a small but significant
factor in American radicalism. The principal voice of individual anarchism and
mutualism was Benjamin R. Tucker (author of In Place of a Book, by a Man too
Busy to Write One, the best exposition of individual anarchism), whose magazine
Liberty lasted into the twentieth century; and Warrenıs principles of community
organization were adopted in modified form by various communalist villages in
both Great Britain and America. Mutual banking associations survive to the
present day.