In 1824, frustrated at the lack of interest by the ruling class, Robert Owen emigrated to America to establish the first of his unsuccessful experiments in communist “villages of cooperation”. The failure of these communities stemmed from an attempt to establish isolated islands of “socialism” – although the term was not used until the end of the decade – amid a sea of capitalism. It was in reality, to use Marx’s phrase, an experiment in Utopian socialism, an attempt to eradicate the laws of the “market” economy, without eradicating the system as a whole. In Owen’s defence, the working class at this time was only just emerging as a class. The forces for socialism were undeveloped. Nevertheless, his ideas remained utopian. Yet Robert Owen stands out as a genius of his day and a giant of the early workers’ movement. After his return from America (and the failure of his “New Harmony” community), he turned all his attention to the trade union movement where many of his ideas had taken root. After Owen realised that his own class would have nothing to do with him, “he turned directly to the working class and worked amongst them for another thirty years”, stated Engels, with a large degree of admiration.
In the autumn of 1833 Owen addressed two major trade union congresses in Manchester and London. By October his work resulted in a huge break-through, and the creation of new national union – the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU). This new initiative is correctly regarded as an historic step forward in the development of British trade unionism. The union completely overshadowed all other formations up until this time in sheer size and influence. Its stated aim was not simply the fight for day-to-day “bread and butter” demands, but astonishingly, the abolition of capitalist rule and the revolutionary transformation of society.
“The great and ultimate object of it (the union) must be to establish the paramount rights of Industry and Humanity, by… bringing about A DIFFERENT ORDER OF THINGS, in which the really useful and intelligent part of society only shall have the direction of its affairs.” (Rule XLV1).
The Grand National experienced an explosive growth reaching a phenomenal 500,000 members across the different trades. Unorganised workers were quickly drawn into its ranks, including women workers, who were organised specifically into Lodges of Industrious Females. Other women’s groups, such as the Lodge of Female Gardeners and even the Lodge of Ancient Virgins, also seem to have been affiliated to the GNCTU. In Hull, two organisers recruited some 1,000 members in one evening to the union. In the countryside agricultural workers joined the union en masse – the first organised movement since the defeat of the “Last Labourers’ Revolt” of 1831. For the first time, organised labour began to flex its muscles on a national scale, with the rank and file pressing for immediate action to redress their plight. The threatening potential power of the mighty GNCTU was expressed in a contemporary trade union paper as follows:
Every trade has its internal government in every town; a certain number of towns comprise a district and delegates from the trades in each town form a quarterly district government; delegates from the districts form the Annual Parliament; and the King of England becomes President of the Trades Union![8]
From its inception the Grand National became drawn into a series of strikes over wages and recognition. Bitter strikes took place amongst the hosiers of Leicester, cabinet-makers in Glasgow and tailors in London. Union-organised cotton spinners also led an uprising in Oldham over demands for the eight-hour day. In Derby, in the autumn of 1833, the refusal of workers to leave the GNCTU led to a lockout (the Derby Turn-out) involving 1,500 men, women and children. This used up all the available funds of the union and served to expose its weaknesses.
As expected, such scenes of trade union “Jacobinism” led to widespread panic in the ruling class. The state once again confronted the growth of trade unionism with intensified repression. In the Dorset village of Tolpuddle, two brothers, George and James Loveless, had contacted the Grand National to help establish an agricultural workers’ union, the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, with its Grand Lodge at Tolpuddle. The magistrates, hearing of what had been done through a spy, posted up notices threatening those who joined the Society with transportation, and proceeded to arrest George Loveless, his brother and four others on the charge of taking an illegal oath of allegiance to the union. For this crime, they were brought before the Court of Assizes and were sentenced under the Act of 1797 to transportation to Botany Bay for seven years. The sentences were carried out with immediate effect.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs became a cause celebre in the working class movement, and remains so to the present-day. However, while the right-wing TUC leaders pretend to pay homage to these martyrs each year at a Tolpuddle celebration, they are a million miles removed from the spirit of self-sacrifice of the Dorchester labourers. While these workers risked their necks and defied the laws of the land to remain loyal to their union, today’s right wing cringe before the Tory anti-union laws. They have become the “labour lieutenants of capital”, to quote De Leon, who, with their inflated salaries and flash life-styles, live at the expense of the working-class movement. In comparison, the simple trade unionists of Tolpuddle were men of courage, on whose shoulders the Labour and trade union movement was built. The monstrous sentences handed out to George Loveless and his comrades, defended by the Whig Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, aroused furious protests throughout the country. At the time, the unions instigated a mass campaign to free the Dorchester labourers, which culminated in a London demonstration of up to 200,000. Within two years, under pressure from the campaign, the sentences were quashed and the last of the men were finally brought home in 1839. They subsequently took part in the great Chartist movement, but later emigrated (with the exception of James Hammett) to a new life in Canada.
The attack in Tolpuddle signalled a general employers’ offensive. The subsequent prosecution and transportation for seven years of five Glasgow cotton-spinners in 1837 also provoked nationwide protests against the Whig government. A campaign was organised in support of the convicted men, not less memorable than that of the Tolpuddle martyrs. The infamous “Document” – sign or be sacked – was used to smash trade union organisation and institute a series of major lockouts. By the summer, the funds of the Grand National were practically exhausted as numerous strikes went down to defeat. By the end of the year, with its fragile federal structure and emerging differences within the leadership, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union finally broke apart. By this time, Owen, who had served to let the working class genie out of the bottle, had become increasingly despondent at the class-war tone of many of the union’s pronouncements. Consequently he closed down its newspaper, The Crisis, and declared the organisation formally dissolved in August 1834. Owen’s work then took a different direction with the formation instead of a new association for co-operative and socialist propaganda. The demise of the Grand National proved an inglorious end for such a powerful beginning. Nevertheless, its experience left its indelible mark on the consciousness of the working class.
Throughout the “Hungry Thirties” conditions in the working class were abominable. Hunger and destitution stalked the land. Many families were reduced to a diet of boiled nettles. Factory life was a hell on earth. It was not until 1833 that the first real Factory legislation was enacted. Yet this was limited only to children, preventing them from legally working more than 12 hours a day. Enforcement, however, proved almost impossible. Women and children as young as six continued to be employed in the coalmines, hauling trucks and even working at the coalface. Tens of thousands were also forced to work under inhumane conditions in the textile mills. The wretched handloom weavers were gradually ground down, hopelessly struggling to match the output and speed of the power looms. Accordingly, thousands of handloom workers died from malnutrition and physical exhaustion. They literally worked themselves to death. These conditions were ably described by Engels in his memorable book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844-5, which paints a graphic picture of the period and is required reading for every trade union activist.
With the shattering of the unions, the handloom weavers, alongside the agricultural labourers, were again forced well below the subsistence level. The suffering of the working class was further intensified with the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834. The Whig government abolished the Speenhamland system, replacing it with an Act based upon the philosophical principles of Bentham and Malthus, designed to make the lot of the pauper even more ghastly than that of the poorest labourer. It was aimed primarily against the agricultural labourers and handloom workers who refused to accept factory discipline. The New Poor Law served to tear out the last roots that united the workers with their parish and their old lifestyle, placing their fate into the hands of the notorious Boards of Guardians. The main principle of Poor Law relief was that assistance should be made more unpleasant than the most unpleasant means of earning a living outside the workhouse. At one such institution in Andover, brought to light by a national scandal, starving inmates fought for survival over the rotten disease-ridden horse-bones sent there for crushing. These hellish institutions were immortalised and exposed in the famous novels of Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist. Outdoor relief was stopped for the able-bodied and their families. Desperate men and women were forced to enter the workhouses, where the sexes were kept strictly apart to prevent them breeding.
Deeply despised Poor Law Commissioners, who appeared to revel in their absolute powers to dispense either life or death, administered outdoor relief. Edwin Chadwick, the stone-faced reformer who drafted the Poor Law Act and was for many years its administrator, graphically outlines the philosophy behind the law:
By the workhouse system is meant having all relief through the workhouse, making this workhouse an uninviting place of wholesome restraint, preventing its inmates from going out or receiving visitors, without a written order to that effect from one of the Overseers; disallowing beer and tobacco, and finding them work according to their ability; thus making the parish fund the last resource of a pauper, and rendering the person who administers relief the hardest taskmaster, and the worst paymaster, that idle and dissolute can apply to.[9]
On the back of working class agitation against the workhouse, or “Bastilles” as they were called, came a crescendo of opposition. Angry crowds frequently stormed these hell-holes, as resentment boiled over into violence.
The betrayal of 1832, which taught the workers not to put their trust in the middle class radicals, drove them towards the trade unions. But the collapse of Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trade Union meant the end of revolutionary trade unionism. Faced with these experiences, the working class increasingly turned once more towards the political front to resolve its problems, but on a far higher level than ever before. Trade unionists, blooded in the class struggle, entered the revolutionary and heroic ranks of Chartism (1837-48). It is no accident that militant textile factory workers and mineworkers provided the shock troops of the Chartist movement. Although Chartism falls outside the direct history of trade unionism, its fate was certainly. For the first time, the British workers entered the stage of history as an independent political force, as a “class for-itself”. Chartism constituted the first working class political party in history, the first in the world. The struggle for the Charter involved a complete spectrum of action: mass petitions, mass demonstrations, lobbies, general strikes, and even armed insurrection. It was the most militant and class-conscious movement in British history. In the words of the great Chartist George Julian Harney: “Let the one universal rallying cry, from the Firth of Forth to the Land’s End, be EQUALITY OR DEATH.”
After 1832 the British ruling class, which dominated world trade and world production, exuded great confidence in its future. It was their hay-day and the pinnacle of the British Century. However, this ringing of bells, to quote Horace Walpole, would soon turn into a wringing of hands at the spectre of revolutionary Chartism. The shift towards independent working class politics served to transform the political landscape. For the first time in history the British working class stood defiantly on its own two feet.