Report to the County of Lanark, of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (Glasgow: Wardlaw & Cunninghame [1820] 1821), 1–7

In 1820, Robert Owen was invited to submit his plans for social and economic reform by a group of concerned Lanarkshire landowning philanthropists, in the context of the post-Waterloo crisis. The Report is a seminal text in the history of early socialist thought, as it provided the first refined version of Owen’s economic theories. If one wished to bring about a system based on equality and co-operation rather than on competition, then a complete reorganisation of economic processes was necessary. This entailed the establishment of a new wage system based on the value of labour itself, in the joint quest for financial independence and fair profit. With this argument, Owen drew heavily upon Adam Smith’s contention that labour is the source of all wealth. But his contribution to political economy was original insofar as he was determined to reward the workers themselves, not the middlemen who were appropriating the value generated by the labour of industrial, agricultural and artisanal labourers.