Scăieni Phalanstery

Scăieni Phalanstery (Romanian: Falansterul de la Scăieni) was a utopic experimental community (phalanstery) created in 1835–36 by Romanian boyar Teodor Diamant in the town of Scăieni, Prahova County, Wallachia (today part of Boldești-Scăeni Commune) based on the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier. The experiment was forcefully closed down by the authorities.

Before the 1848 Revolutions, Teodor Diamant, a member of the lower nobility, together with other Wallachian intellectuals learnt about the ideas of Charles Fourier, an early French utopian socialist, during Diamant's studies in Paris in the 1830s.

He presented his social and economic views in three articles that were published in June 1834 in Ion Heliade Rădulescu's Curierul Românesc magazine.

In 1835, a year after Diamant returned to Wallachia, he established a phalanstery (an agricultural-industrial community based on Fourier's principles) at the estate in Scăieni owned by boyar Emanoil Bălăceanu. The estate, ridden with debts, had already been put under sequester and the ongoing debt problem prevented the society from acquiring better equipment.

The first attestation of the society was on March 10, 1835, when Bălăceanu leased the estate to the society, the date being mentioned by Bălăceanu as the start of the phalanstery. The preparations took the rest of the year 1836 and the society began functioning in early 1836.

The earliest members of the phalanstery were Roma people liberated from slavery by the boyar, but the first recruits moved to Scăieni in January 1836. Another group of ten young people who joined the phalanstery on August 18, 1836.

It produced both agricultural and handicraft goods, the workday was of only 8 hours, at a time when many peasants worked up to 14–16 hours a day, however there were no days of rest. The produce of the commune was distributed according to the amount of work performed and the level of skill, assessed through vote by the members of the community and according to the quantity of capital contributed.

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