In the countryside during the early 1870s, agricultural labourers began to stir into action around the inspirational figure of Joseph Arch, a Warwickshire farm labourer. The atrocious conditions of these workers made them ripe for unionisation. When the call was put out, thousands rallied to the union cause and the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union was formed at Leamington. Almost immediately a strike for better wages and conditions broke out, which received substantial solidarity support from the rest of the union movement. In May 1872 the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union was formed with branches throughout the country. By the end of the year membership had climbed to 35,000. New unions sprung up elsewhere, resulting in some 150,000 agricultural workers joining the trade union movement.
It did not take long before the capitalist gentry and landlords, backed by the Church of England and the magistrates, reacted with fury. A whole series of lockouts took place, and the full force of the law was brought to bear against the unions. The bourgeoisie showed no mercy. In Ascot 17 women were charged with the crime of “mobbing”, and were all condemned to Oxford prison, several with their breast-fed babies. By 1874, amongst scenes of near civil war, the workers were starved back to work on the employers’ terms. Under the hammer blows of the state, the agricultural workers’ union was beaten down to 4,000 members and soon disintegrated.
A trade recession in the mid-1870s resulted in a series of bitterly fought strikes, notably the South Wales miners (1875), the stonemasons (1877), the Clyde shipwrights and the Lancashire cotton workers (1878). However, under the pressure of events, the inadequacies of the conservative leadership of the amalgamated unions led to growing discontent within their ranks. In 1872, the pattern makers broke away from the ASE in disgust. They would not be the last.
The difficulties of the narrow and parochial outlook of the new model unions were to surface in the next period. They proved a decisive barrier to the development of the trade union movement and the organisation of the unskilled mass. Frederick Engels wrote at the time, “the British Labour movement is today, and for many years has been, working in a narrow circle of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours without finding a solution”, since they “are looked upon not as an expedient and not as a means of propaganda but as an ultimate aim.”[6]
On 20 August 1883, in a letter to August Bebel, a leader of the German social democracy, Engels outlined how he thought the British workers were likely to break out of this “narrow circle”. He wrote:
But a real working class movement will develop here – unless something unexpected happens – only when the workers will begin to feel that the British world monopoly has been broken. Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the economic basis of the political nullity of the British workers. Dragging along at the tail-end of the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly, but always sharing in its profits, they naturally, from the political point of view, drag at the tail-end of the ‘great Liberal Party’ which has thrown them some small sops, recognises trade unions and the right to strike, gave up the struggle for the unlimited working day and gave the bulk of the higher-paid workers the right to vote. But if America and the joint competition of the other industrial countries make a breach in this monopoly (as far as iron is concerned, the time is not far off, but unfortunately in cotton this is not yet the case), you will see things moving here.[7]
Fredrick Engels remarkable estimation was born out by events. Britain’s relative decline signalled the breach in her industrial monopoly and ushered in a new crisis for British capitalism. From this time onwards, competition especially from Germany and the USA began to weaken and undermine Britain’s dominant position. These new powerful competitors entered the world market with devastating consequences for British industry in the years that followed. These radically different circumstances, as Engels had foreseen, brought about a new social realignment. The mass of unskilled workers ignored and isolated for so long were about to explode onto the stage of history. The days of the conservative “Junta” and “pompous trades” were rapidly coming to an end.