This “great leap forward” in organisation occurred in the late 1820s, when, after long and bitter strikes in the Manchester area, the Grand General Union of Operative Spinners of Great Britain and Ireland was formed under the leadership of John Doherty. Doherty, a militant young Irishman, went even further in 1830 with the establishment of the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL). This Association alone enrolled 150 local unions in Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Leicester, and established a weekly journal to cover these trades. Very rapidly the NAPL reached an affiliated membership of over 100,000 members, and quickly spread its influence to the West Midlands and Wales. However, the attacks on organised labour led to the weakening of the NAPL. Different sections became preoccupied with their own bitter conflicts and had little energy to help build the wider movement. Finally, with the defeat and demise of the Spinner’s Union in March 1831, which provided the backbone of the NAPL, the organisation broke up and disappeared the following year.
Following the disillusionment with the Reform Act (1832) workers turned away from political struggle and concentrated their efforts on trade unionism and the establishment of co-operatives. Independently of the NAPL, a new general union grew up in the building trade, emerging from the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners. This 40,000-strong Operative Builders Union was governed by a “Builders Parliament” and was deeply influenced by the co-operative ideas of the great utopian socialist Robert Owen. This held major delegate meetings in London and Manchester to debate and decide upon union policy. The union fought a whole series of strikes “to advance and equalise the price of labour”. As expected, it met the ferocious resistance of the industrialists who reacted with lockouts and the notorious “Document”, requiring workers to renounce the union or lose their jobs.
The Poor Man’s Guardian, of 19 October 1833, reported that the delegates at the London Parliament
“show that an entire change in society – a change amounting to a complete subversion of the existing ‘order of the world’ – is contemplated by the working classes. They aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society – or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all!”
The trade union movement experienced a growth that was more rapid and comprehensive than any before or since. An army of trade unionists seemed to rise up from nowhere, as the spirit of rebellion swept through the working classes and intoxicated them with hope in the future and in themselves.
At this time, as a mirror image of the misery in the urban areas, there was profound distress in the countryside. This centred round the brutal administration of the Poor Laws, which in theory were supposed to supply some relief to the most destitute sections of society. In 1797 the pauper population was around 200,000, by 1834 it had increased to 1,200,000. The Enclosures robbed the peasantry of their economic independence, and with it the means of life. The starvation that threatened the labouring poor served to provoke fears of revolution in the upper classes. Wages fell so low, that the Berkshire justices, meeting at Speenhamland in 1795, authorised the supplement of starvation wages out of parish rates. While this subsidised the money-grabbing landowners handsomely, it served to keep destitute farm labourers and their families in a state of perpetual dependency. But as the Speenhamland system spread, the relief it offered gradually diminished. By 1820, many areas recorded that free labour had almost disappeared as employers chose only to hire paupers from the parishes. The situation resulted in an explosive situation in rural parts.
In 1830-31 agricultural uprisings developed on a scale far wider than ever before, and in East Anglia, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and other counties, a general revolt developed. Threshing machines were destroyed and hayricks burned. The revolt spread from village to village across the Southern counties into the South West, Eastern region and the Midlands, often under the name of the mythical “Captain Swing”. At this time, the ruling classes were again petrified by the effects of the revolutions unfolding in France and Belgium, where the European proletariat had independently taken to the streets under its own banner. The English oligarchy was not far wrong in its gloomy assessment. “Never since 1688 had Great Britain been so near actual revolution as in 1831”, stated historians Cole and Postgate, “never in all the troubles of the next two decades was she to come so near to it again.”[4] The government came down hard and dispatched troops to crush the unarmed labourers. In the period that followed, the prisons were bursting with some 1,900 rioters awaiting trial in 90 courts sitting in 34 counties. In the end, 19 men were hanged, 481 transported 12,000 miles to Australia, 644 imprisoned and one publicly flogged in the wake of this “last labourers’ revolt”. “From no other protest movement of the kind – from neither Luddites nor Chartists, nor trade unionists – was such a bitter price exacted”, state the historians Hobsbawm and Rudé.[5]
Whether on the continent or at home, reforms were a by-product of revolution. The bourgeoisie never volunteered anything free of charge! The 1830 revolutions in Europe forced the terrified British Establishment to adopt a policy of repression and concession. State repression was dispatched when needed, but when faced with a mass movement, concessions were usually granted to gain a breathing space.
The agitation for political reform and the extension of the franchise had long captured the popular imagination. This agitation, woven into the deteriorating social conditions of the masses, soon provoked violent outbreaks in many towns and cities. In June 1831, in Merthyr Tydfil, the red flag was raised in Britain for the first time as a symbol of working class revolt. A crowd of 10,000 confronted 80 soldiers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and 20 were shot dead. Following arrests, two men were condemned to death, Lewis Lewis, whose sentence was commuted to exile for life, and Richard Lewis (alias Dic Penderyn), who was executed.
At this time only a privileged few had the right to vote based upon a propertied franchise. Out of a population of 14 million in 1831 a mere 400,000 privileged men possessed the vote. Large towns such as Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester had not a single political representative in the House of Commons. On the other hand, the “rotten” borough of Gatton in rural Wiltshire returned two Members of Parliament, but only had one voter! The same was true of Old Sarum, also in Wiltshire.
In 1832, fearing revolution from below, the government of Lord John Russell was forced to introduce political reform from above. After mass public protests, the Whig government brought in the long-awaited Reform Act. However, it was a franchise limited once again to those fortunate to own property. The propertyless working class remained without a political voice. “A government in every country should be just like a corporation”, stated Lord Baxfield, “and in this country it is made up of the landed interest who alone have the right to be represented.” For the government after this concession no more reform was needed. Russell, who became known in radical circles as “Finality Jack”, made that abundantly clear.
The bourgeoisie had gained enormously. The Reform Act handed effective political power from the landed aristocracy to the rising bourgeoisie, consolidating their dominant position in society. At first, they ruled in alliance with the old oligarchy, but in reality they had a commanding influence on the main aspects of government. Their final domination, however, was not fully completed until 1846 and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The working class, who were mobilised under the leadership of the mealy-mouthed middle-class radicals, saw their efforts deliberately betrayed. The workers had been used and manipulated by these petty-bourgeois upstarts. The Moor had done his duty and was dismissed. Five out of six male adults, the overwhelming bulk of the working class, remained disenfranchised. “… we cannot read without considerable indignation, the history of the struggle for the Reform Bill in the early 1830s,” remarked Trotsky in Where is Britain Going?[6] While the workers were betrayed, the Whigs, on the other hand, won a landslide victory in the newly reformed Parliament, taking 500 out of the 658 seats, and inflicting a devastating defeat on the Tories.
Nevertheless, even before the 1832 Reform Act, the working class was looking to fresh ideas and movements. While William Cobbett and Henry Hunt were outstanding spokesmen of working class radicalism, who despised “the lords of the loom and the spinning-jenny” and sought to restore the “Golden Age” of the past, it was a self-made man and manufacturer, Robert Owen, who established a profound influence in the young trade union movement. He was an intellectual giant of a man, and was later paid due respect for his contribution by Marx and Engels. He was in the same mould as Henri de Saint-Simon and Jean Baptiste Fourier, great men and socialists who saw developments far more clearly than any of their contemporaries. It can be said that the inspiration for this new, semi-revolutionary phase of trade unionism came largely from Owen.
Sickened by the oppression around him, Robert Owen came to despise “man’s inhumanity to man” and the brutality of the Industrial Revolution. He was deeply influenced by the French philosophers, and came to believe that a person’s character was not eternally fixed but shaped by their social environment. He wrote a fascinating book entitled A New View of Society, published in 1813, on the principle of the formation of the human character. For Owen, good working and living conditions, together with decent education, could eliminate the terrible ills of capitalist society. He experimented with this revolutionary outlook in his factory in New Lanark in Scotland (which still stands today), and later in other “Villages of Co-operation”, where for once, workers were treated as human beings in their own right. Each community, Owen presumed, should be based upon the principle of collective work, common property, equal rights and duties of all its members. He was determined to abolish all class differences. By his actions, Owen transformed the lives of the workers he employed and advocated that his methods should be universally adopted by society at large. “Let society be now based on the same principle, and all evil will soon disappear”, he wrote.
Inevitably, given the times, Owen appealed not to the working class for assistance, but to the rich and powerful classes of the land. For a while, the enlightened bourgeoisie even toyed with these strange and exotic ideas. Owen, although a far-sighted man, was a utopian socialist who believed a socialist reorganisation of society was not rooted in the struggle of classes, or in the material conditions of society, but simply based upon moral argument and persuasion. Soon, the upper classes lost interest in, and became hostile to his radical fanciful schemes. This reaction served to eventually push Owen towards the developing workers’ movement, and he became increasingly critical and outspoken in his attacks on capitalism.
“The rapid accumulation of wealth, from the rapid increase in mechanical and chemical power, created capitalists who were among the most ignorant and injurious of the population”, wrote Owen to devastating effect. “The wealth created by the industry of the people, now made abject slaves to these new artificial powers, accumulated in the hands of what are called the moneyed class, who created none of it, and who misused all they had acquired.”
While this alienated the liberal philanthropists, it attracted huge support from the radicalised working class. Owenism became a rallying-cry for those who rebelled against the factory system, which, in turn, served to transform his outlook into an influential tendency within the labour movement. Moreover, other socialist thinkers increasingly influenced Owen, pushing him further in the direction of the working class. In 1825 socialist books and pamphlets appeared, such as John Gray’s Lecture on Human Happiness and Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended. Then appeared William Thompson’s Labour Rewarded (1827) and later JF Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1838-9), all of which made an important contribution to English socialist thought. In 1830, Hetherington and Bronterre O’Brien launched The Poor Man’s Guardian, which expressed for the first time in simple language socialist concepts and ideas. “Those large profits are the sole cause why wages are low… The profit is that which is retained and never paid back… There is no common interest between workingmen and profit makers,” stated The Poor Man’s Guardian in 14 April 1832. “It is but common justice that the people who make the goods should have the sole privilege of making the laws,” stated the same newspaper on 26 November 1831. These home-grown “communist” ideas of British thinkers, however underdeveloped, were very advanced for their time, and indicated the ideological ferment within the labour movement at the time. It was another 10 to 15 years before the revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels were to appear on the scene.
One of the most influential radical leaders of the London working class was William Benbow. He was very active in 1831 in the National Union of the Working Classes, and in January 1832 issued a pamphlet entitled the Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, which, among other things, argued for a general strike, or “sacred month”:
We are oppressed, in the fullest sense of the word; we have been deprived of everything; we have no property, no wealth, and our labour is of no use to us, since what it produces goes into the hands of others…
One scoundrel, one sacrilegious blasphemous scoundrel, says ‘that over-production is the cause of our wretchedness.’ Over-production, indeed! When we half-starving producers cannot, with all our toil, obtain any thing like a sufficiency of produce. It is the first time that in any age or country, save our own, abundance was adduced as a cause of want. Good God! Where is this abundance? Abundance of food! Ask the labourer and mechanic where they find it. Their emaciated frame is the best answer. Abundance of clothing! The nakedness, the shivering, the asthmas, the colds, and rheumatisms of the people, are proofs of the abundance of clothing! Our Lords and Masters tell us, we produce too much; very well then, we shall cease from producing for one month, and thus put into practice the theory of our Lords and Masters.[7]