Early Socialists

Socialism existed before Marx. American Founding Father Thomas Paine had proposed a plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor through something very similar to the Universal Basic Income being talked about today — but he was not consciously socialist.

In Europe, the first movements to become conscious of themselves as socialists were the Owenites, Chartists and Saint-Simonians, among others.

Robert Owen was an eccentric Welsh mill owner in Scotland who developed utopian ideas and in 1824, Owen traveled to the United States to invest the bulk of his fortune in an experimental 1,000-member colony on the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, called New Harmony. Owen originated the idea of an eight-hour work day in 1810!!!

Owenites overlapped with a number of other working-class movements, most notably the Chartists (so called for their People's Charter of 1838, which called for universal suffrage for all male adults); in England, as in the USA, voting was limited to property owners. The Chartists, like the Owenites called for a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes — which were, in truth, abominable.

Count Henri de Saint-Simon was the first person to actually use the term "socialism." He was fascinated by science and technology its potential to eliminate hard work; he advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism — such as booms and busts — through administrative efficiency and science as the path to a rationally organized and planned economy.