The Decline of Community

Abstract

Among the most deeply held beliefs of the early socialist writers was the contention that a socialist organisation of society would create among those who worked in it a new sense of community. In one of his early manuscripts Marx wrote:

When communist workmen associate with one another … they acquire a new need, the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end … The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from work-hardened bodies.¹

The social ownership of the means of production, therefore, though important in itself, was mainly a means to a more important end: an expression of the desire, held by many political writers from Plato and Aristotle onwards, for a form of political organisation in which the essentially social nature of the human being could be most fully expressed.