Chapter 42: The Early Socialists
This month we get to know the first wave of socialist thinkers – the Utopian socialists – including Robert Owen, Étienne Cabet, Jean Claude Leonard de Sismondi, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and more. We also get to see how Radical associations in Britain – like the trade unions, co-ops, and Chartists – paved the way for a socialist movement.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
“Étienne Cabet: French Socialist.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Jan 2020.
Garnett, Ronald George. Co-Operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825-45. Manchester University Press. 1972.
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press. 2013.
“J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi: Swiss Economist.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Jul 2017.
“Johann Karl Rodbertus: German Economist.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Oct 2016.
“Henri de Saint-Simon: French Social Reformer.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Dec 2019.
McElvoy, Anne. “Robert Owen.” British Socialism: The Grand Tour. BBC Sounds. 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b09rx3vy
Owen, Robert. A New View of Society. 3rd Ed. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. 1817.
Pellarin, Charles. The Life of Charles Fourier. 2nd Edition. Trans. by Francis Geo. Shaw. William H. Graham. 1848.
“The People’s Charter.” The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/people-charter
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Edited by Iain McKay. AK Press. 2011.
“Rebecca Riots: United Kingdom [1839-1844].” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Oct 2010
“Robert Owen and New Lanark.” OpenLearn University. 2016.
Screpanti, Ernesto and Stefano Zamagni. An Outline of the History of Economic Thought. Translated by David Field. Oxford University Press. 1993.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage. 1966.
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The History of Trade Unionism. Longmans, Green and Co. 1920.
“William Godwin: British Philosopher.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Apr 2020.
Wilson, Tracy V. and Holly Frey. “SYMINC Live: The New Harmony Utopians.” Stuff You Missed in History Class. July 31, 2019. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/episode/symhc-live-the-new-harmony-utopias-47327420/
Woodcock, George. “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: French Philosopher.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Nov 2019.
Full Transcript
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In 1817, an unemployed stocking frame knitter and former Luddite named Jeremiah Brandreth led a group of over 200 men on a march from the village of South Wingfield to Nottingham. Their mission: March on London, overthrow the government of the United Kingdom, and bring an end to poverty forever.
At least that’s what the government said their mission was after the fact. In reality, their plans may well have been peaceful and their goals were never all that well focused.
Conditions had been ripe for such a demonstration. Recession had come in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Bad harvests, due to an unusually cold and wet season the year before – along with the Corn Laws – had created a bread shortage and, thus, a spike in food prices. And the introduction of the power loom in industrial textile mills made knitting by stocking frame an irrelevant trade, leaving those trained for the job with incomes in sharp decline. The dreams of the French Revolutionaries a generation earlier were still fresh in the memories of these Radicals.
Brandreth and his local allies had been approached by one William Oliver, who told them that a national uprising was being planned, and an army of 50,000 would join them in London. Oliver was, in fact, a government spy, sent to the north to expose revolutionaries. Before the men made it to Nottingham, they were met by the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons. The men scattered, but the leaders – including Brandreth – were captured. He and two others were found guilty of high treason. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered later that year.
This Pentridge rising, as it’s remembered, was among a myriad of stories from this period of working-class unrest.
Riots broke out across in East Anglia in 1816 and 1822, with agricultural workers destroying farming machinery and shouting for “bread or blood.”
In 1820, Radicals across Scotland staged an insurrection, led by a Glasgow committee claiming the formation a provisional government independent from that in England. 60,000 workers went on strike, while armed militias formed to march on the Carron Ironworks, once owned by our old friend, John Roebuck. (shout out Chapter 16!)
In 1830, agricultural workers across southern and eastern England rioted, beginning in Kent with the destruction of the new threshing machines which reduced the demand for field labor. These Swing Riots, as they’re remembered, also started targeting the Church of England because of forced tithes.
And a series of protests broke out in Wales during the late 1830s and early 1840s, as poor farmers struggled to pay road tolls in addition to high taxes, tithes, and inflated food prices. Dressing as women and calling themselves “daughters of Rebecca”, these men smashed the hated toll gates on the turnpikes.
Clearly the transition to technological and economic modernity was not going smoothly. If this was a path of progress it was certainly a bumpy one – violently bumpy.
It wasn’t just working-class Radicals who were concerned with the way this transition was playing out. A few empathetic business owners, scholars, and politicians were too. And they began to discuss how to build a better, more just society – how to address these social problems.
It was the dawn of socialism.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 42: The Early Socialists
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Before we begin, we’re going to need to define this term: socialism. Because, as you know perfectly well, it is a loaded one.
The Oxford Dictionary defines socialism as “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
That’s actually pretty broad, if you think about it. The words “owned or regulated by the community as a whole” means the term can be applied to pretty much any political / economic philosophy that isn’t 100% laissez faire. Other definitions of socialism may include other degrees and forms of collective ownership or distribution. And it’s fitting, really, because there is a huge range of socialist thought out there – from the social democrats, the co-op movement, etc. to democratic socialism, to revolutionary socialism, communism, even to anarchism.
The first uses of the word “socialism” were used to distinguish it from the individualist-motivated forces of the new capitalists and industrialists. Those writers who coined it believed someone ought to be looking out for society, and the social welfare, at large.
Funny enough though, one of the first socialists – if not the first – was actually a capitalist industrialist. His name was Robert Owen.
Born in Newtown, Wales in 1771, Owen was the son of shopkeepers whose experience in practical retailing, inventory, and other administrative skills probably rubbed off on him. Newtown at the time was a small market town in a rural, Welsh-speaking, picturesque part of the country. During Owen’s boyhood years, the Industrial Revolution was only beginning to have an impact on the local woolen and crafts industries.
Owen went to school up until about the age of 10. By all accounts he was a good student who loved reading, and his schoolmaster made him a monitor – essentially a classroom leader charged with helping teach his classmates. This concept of mutual instruction was a new one and one Owen would later adopt in his own schools.
But then he was pulled out of school and sent all the way to Stamford, Lincolnshire, where he apprenticed as a draper. After four years in apprenticeship, he made his way to London where he worked retail in a large haberdashery. The next move of his blossoming career came in 1788, when he was hired by a Manchester-based firm of silk merchants and drapers catering to the expanding middle class there.
So, at age 17, Owen moved to the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution. There he soon learned that the real action of the textile industry was in production. In 1790, he joined a partnership that made cotton spinning machinery, and then began spinning cotton too – some of the best yarn threads in the country, in fact.
But the real turning point of Owen’s career came in 1792 when he applied for a managerial job at the Bank Top Mill. Recently completed by the cottage industry merchant turned mass-manufacturing capitalist, Peter Drinkwater, the Bank Top Mill (or Piccadilly Mill, as it was also called) was a massive and modern four-story factory churning out cotton yarn. Not only was it built with the latest fire-proofing and lighting techniques in architecture, it was the first mill in Manchester to be powered directly by a Boulton & Watt steam engine.
That a 21-year-old former retailer got such an important and well-paying job turned more than a few heads. But Owen was amazed – possibly overwhelmed at first – by the responsibility of managing 500 men, women, and children working with these new and often dangerous technologies.
It was in 1793 that Owen joined the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society, one of the many Enlightenment clubs that could be found up and down Great Britain. Its ranks included scientists, industrialists, and political reformers who wrote papers, presented them to the society, and discussed with one another. And it was within this setting Owen began developing his own philosophies.
Throughout the 1790s, Owen proved to be a genius capitalist, leaving Drinkwater to jump at a new partnership opportunity and build a new mill in Manchester. Then, in 1797 or 1798, he travelled to Scotland, on behalf of his fellow partners, to meet with customers. While there, he met fellow capitalist David Dale and toured his cotton mill at New Lanark.
David Dale’s story was remarkably similar to Owen’s. The son of a merchant in a small town in rural Scotland, Dale had gone through a textile apprenticeship and started rising through the ranks of firms as a clerk and agent. He was soon in business for himself, importing linens from the Continent. As his business grew, he expanded into banking as well.
Then, in 1784, our old friend, Sir Richard Arkwright, made a trip to Scotland to promote his new system of mass-producing cotton yarn. Prodded by a local MP, Arkwright and Dale met to discuss the development of such a cotton mill in Scotland. Walking up a hill outside the town of Lanark in Lanarkshire, they came upon a natural wonder – the Falls of Clyde. The only waterfall on the River Clyde, Arkwright immediately noted its strength, providing enough movement to power a mill using one of his water frames.
Construction of this mill started shortly thereafter, though Arkwright soon lost interest, leaving the enterprise almost exclusively to Dale. Soon this location would include four mills as well as a tunnel and aqueduct to divert water from the Clyde through a series of water wheels. And like Arkwright had at Cromford (shout out Chapter 5), Dale constructed a little community around the mill to house the workforce that was needed. He called the village “New Lanark.”
As Owen later described it…
“…a large house was erected, which ultimately contained about 500 children, who were procured chiefly from workhouses and charities in Edinburgh… a village was built; and the houses were let at a low rent to such families as could be induced to accept employment in the mills… only persons destitute of friends, employment, and character were found willing to try the experiment… the community by degrees was formed under these circumstances into a very wretched society.”
But there were things Owen liked about the mill. For one thing, he appreciated the work Dale had put into it and may have seen potential for creating a model community from the get-go. For another thing, it was a good location and it was profitable. And for another thing, Owen fell in love with Dale’s daughter, Caroline. They were married in 1799 and, shortly thereafter, Owen and his partners bought New Lanark from Dale for the bargain price of £60,000.
The investors installed Owen as the managing partner of New Lanark. And that’s when things got interesting.
For years now, Owen had been unsatisfied with the conditions he observed in the new cotton mills of Great Britain. This came not only from his own experience, but also as a member of the Manchester Board of Health, which had gathered data on workers’ health conditions in the factories.
Among other things, Owen was worried about a growing divide of and hostility between the industrialist and working classes – between the forces capital and labor. The mill owners mistreated their employees and, in response, the employees stole, got drunk, and made things difficult.
As Owen described the population at New Lanark:
“…every man did that which was right in his own eyes, and vice and immorality prevailed to a monstrous extent. The population lived in idleness, in poverty, in almost every kind of crime; consequently, in debt, out of health, and in misery.”
They also, apparently, got in a lot of arguments with each other about religion, which Owen found ridiculous.
Determined to turn things around in the village, Owen instituted some new measures.
First: Preventative (rather than punitive) measures to combat theft.
Second: Preventative (again, rather than punitive) measures to combat drunkenness.
Third: A prohibition on sectarian arguments and a guarantee of religious tolerance.
Fourth: Punitive fines for “irregular intercourse of the sexes.”
But then Owen also started doing things that raised the eyebrows of his partners.
He decided New Lanark would take no more children as “apprentices” from the poorhouses. From now on, only families would settle and work in New Lanark.
He prohibited work for children under the age of 10, insisting they go to the village school every day instead. This not only concerned his partners (since children worked for a lower wage than adults), it also upset the families who wanted their young children working for the extra income. Children between 10 and 18, meanwhile, had their work limited to 10 hours a day. To make up for it, he gave raises to the children over 10.
Owen spent a considerable amount of money improving the village too. The streets were repaved. The houses were improved. He also bought food, clothes, and fuel in bulk so he could sell them to his workers at discounted prices.
Now, partially this was because Owen was a genuinely good guy. But partially, it was good business. The reforms worked and the mills’ employees became much more productive. New Lanark continued to profit and profit handsomely.
Now, Owen also recognized this as material for some good PR, and was soon recognized as a social reformer throughout Europe. Well, that didn’t sit super-well with his fellow industrialists, including some of his own partners. In 1812, a group of them attempted a coup to oust him from his position at New Lanark. The effort failed. In true Logan Roy-form, Owen hit back, corralling new investors to lead an aggressive buyout of the detractors’ shares.
Now Owen was free to reform New Lanark as he saw fit – and to tell the world about it. In 1813, he published A New View of Society – a series of four essays “on the Formation of Human Character Preparatory to the Development of a Plan for Gradually Ameliorating the Condition of Mankind.”
In it, Owen explains his worldview in the vein of an Enlightenment philosopher. Central to this framework is Owen’s view of nurture over nature: That a man’s character is exclusively the product of his environment and upbringing. If we can properly train people to be good, and give them good conditions to live in, they will be good people to everyone else in turn.
“The happiness of self, clearly understood and uniformly practiced; [a principle] which can only be attained by conduct that must promote the happiness of the community.”
In Owen’s burgeoning philosophy, individualism doesn’t work.
Owen is most passionate about education. Explaining how he insisted young children go to school rather than work, he argues that their parents were raised in a bad environment with little education. How are they going to give their kids a good environment or the tools of reasoning? No, take the kids away from their parents! (At least during the workday.) Stick ‘em in a classroom or on a playground (yes, Owen was a very early advocate for learn-by-play) and have them watched over by teachers who specialize in instilling good character through positive reinforcement.
But he’s not just calling on his fellow industrialists to follow suit, he’s calling for his principles to be adopted by government.
“the governing powers of all countries should establish rational plans for the education and general formation of the characters of their subjects… to train children from their earliest infancy in good habits of every description (which will of course prevent them of acquiring those of falsehood and deception.”
He also calls on government to disincentivize gambling (including the lottery) and the production and sale of spirits, to reform the Church, to ban emoluments, to reform the Poor Laws, and to create a massive, massive increase in public employment. As he saw it, large-scale public employment would create more efficiencies in the economy and increase the demand for labor (thus improving wages).
While promoting his views, Owen also advanced his new reforms at New Lanark, what he called the “New Institution”, which included a school, a church (which specifically taught Owen’s Deist views), and communal living arrangements. And while it’s easy to think of communal living as a hippie dippie “hey man, we’re all one with the earth” sort of thing, Owen actually looked at it from a mass production perspective. Like “Why should all the families in this village cook their own meals? That’s so inefficient! Why don’t we have a small handful of people prepare one big dinner for the whole community? Think of all the man-hours it frees up! That’s much more economical.”
And when it came to communal living, well, this is where Owen starts going off the rails.
In 1824, Owen and his son sailed to the United States to establish a new communitarian village. A few months later they arrived in the state of Indiana, where Owen purchased the town of New Harmony for $135,000. Now, New Harmony had been already been settled and built up by a weird German millennialist cult which was now moving to Ohio, and in their place, Owen offered a home to anyone willing to join this experiment in equality and communal living.
New Harmony filled up quickly, but it also faced a lot of challenges. It took just four years for the experiment to fail.
There are a lot of explanations for why it failed and, depending on your own political views, you might want to lean toward one reason or another. But here’s a few things to know.
Owen struggled to get support from the Americans who weren’t as experienced with the inequalities Owen was trying to tackle and who didn’t much appreciate his Deism. And without that support, Owen didn’t have the resources to build New Harmony into the futuristic Utopia he envisioned.
The residents of New Harmony also struggled to adjust to the new lifestyle. One such resident was Josiah Warren, who argued that the forced conformity of the society, and the lack of private property, was to blame. He would later publish a weekly individualist-anarchist newspaper called The Peaceful Revolutionist. Others couldn’t quite leave the class distinctions of the old world behind. Upper-class people mingled with upper-class people and working-class people mingled with working-class people. The two groups found they didn’t have much in common, culturally, and didn’t get along.
Owen argued that the leaders of the community weren’t following his ideas close enough. Owen’s son argued that many of the town’s occupants were lazy.
Whatever the case may be, Owen packed up in 1829 and went back to the UK.
And yet, after he left, more than a hundred Owenite and Owenite-inspired communities spread across the U.S. I mean, all of them failed, but clearly there was something compelling about his philosophy to the people of the time.
Among the Owenite-inspired communities were those of the Icarians, a movement founded by French philosopher Étienne Cabet.
Born in Dijon in 1788, Cabet was a lawyer and teacher who served as a minor leader in the July Revolution of 1830. He then became a politician in the early years of the July Monarchy but, despite some initial success, it soon became clear that he was way too radical for the liberal regime of Louis Philippe. After some accusations of treason, he fled to England, where he began sketching out his philosophy.
After returning to France in 1839, he published a novel, The Travel and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria, a fictionalized account of an explorer finding a perfect society. (Hmmm, where have I heard that before?) In Icaria, democratic elections are held for a governing body which tightly controls the community to guarantee economic and social equality.
Shortly before the end of the First Industrial Revolution, Cabet decided to put these ideas into practice and establish his own Utopian community in America. Leading 69 Icarian settlers who elected him dictator for 10 years, Cabet landed in New Orleans and made his way to Texas, where they attempted settling a million acres with log cabins in 3 months. It didn’t work.
So instead, they made their way to Nauvoo, Illinois where they purchased the former Mormon settlement founded by Joseph Smith. But as dictator, Cabet never had as much power as he needed – governing a community that grew to about 1,800 – and, again, the followers struggled to adapt to the new communal lifestyle he envisioned.
After a dispute in 1856, Cabet left Nauvoo with 180 of his most loyal Icarians and moved to St. Louis, but he died shortly after that same year. The Icarian movement continued though, with one such community – in Corning, Iowa – surviving until the end of the 19th Century.
Owen and Cabet were practitioners of what came to be known Utopian socialism – the first school of this new ideology. This was in part because of the Utopian experiments these guys were trying and in part an effort by later Marxists to dismiss the earlier school as naïve, compared to what they called their “scientific” socialism.
But the Utopian school also had many theorists who weren’t practitioners. And in their differences of thought we see the many branches of this ideology begin to form.
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Okay, let’s say for a second you are trying to build a Utopian society. How do you do it?
Would it make things easier for you if you were put in charge? King of the Utopians? Master of the Owenites? Dictator of the Icarians?
A society that can prosper while practicing equality and achieving tranquility must require everyone to be on the same page, right? But how do you accomplish that?
Way back in Chapter 1, I talked about how social cooperation has always required myths. Whether it’s the myth of money, religious myths, or the myth of law, you need your society to believe in the same basic myths in order to regulate behavior.
Okay, well, the myth of money isn’t super-helpful in a socialist Utopia. Money is sort of the thing you feel icky about if you’re the kind of person joining a Utopian community. Religious myths, meanwhile, are really useful in Utopian societies, but they’re a lot harder to promote in a “Rationalist”, post-Enlightenment world, with greater tolerance for people to believe in a broad array of such doctrines. The burden is really on the myth of law. You’re going to need a strong political power that can govern people, the economy, etc.
Except, isn’t freedom also an important idea in this post-Enlightenment world? Does dictatorship really fit in our idea of Utopia? Or is it more characteristic of a Dystopia?
Almost from the beginning, the Utopian school of socialism was split into two distinct, if rarely defined camps. At the heart of it was this question of power dynamics in a Utopian society.
The first camp I will call the “Centralists” – those who prioritize the success of the society over the freedom of the individual. Owen and Cabet were definitely Centralists.
And if Robert Owen was the bridge from the practice of capitalism to the practice of socialism, then the bridge from the theories of capitalism to the theories of socialism was the Genevan historian and political economist Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi.
Born in 1773, Sismondi grew up during the height of the Enlightenment in Geneva, where and when guys like Voltaire and Rosseau were such a big deal. From an early age, it was clear that Sismondi was a genius, but his parents were determined he should go into commerce rather than scholarship. As a young adult he clerked for a bank in Lyon as the French Revolution broke out. When the Revolution turned to bloody chaos, he fled to England before returning to Geneva.
At some point during these years he read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and became intensely interested in political economy. He published his first economic treatise in 1803 which, for the most part, followed Smithian orthodoxy.
But as the years passed and the Industrial Revolution progressed, Sismondi became more dissatisfied with the liberal Classical school of economics, especially the optimism of Jean-Baptiste Say. In 1819 he published his New Principles of Political Economy (followed up by his 1837 Studies in Political Economy) in which he argued that Say’s Law – remember, that’s the idea that there’s not going to be an excess of supply in the market – was flawed.
As Sismondi saw it, with such an unequal distribution of income as was developing, how could you argue there was an efficient equilibrium in the free market? He argued too much emphasis was being put on the creation of wealth rather than the creation of happiness. As he put it, “A certain kind of equilibrium, it is true, is reestablished in the long run, but it is after a frightful amount of suffering.”
Instead, Sismondi argued that some of the new wealth being created should be redistributed – not from capitalist to landowner, but from capitalist to worker. He believed laissez-faire policies were only going to further the disparities of wealth as industrialists used new technologies to force lower wages on their employees.
Sismondi believed the ideal economy would be dominated by small farms and artisan craftsmen. Any new wealth generated by new technology would be redistributed equitably and contributed to a social safety net.
Now, this stood a bit in contrast to Owen, who believed that modern industry was central to the formation of a fair, new, Utopian world. It also stood in contrast to the most famous of these early socialist theorists: Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon.
Henri de Saint-Simon was born into the French aristocracy in Paris in 1760. As a young man, he joined the Marquis de Lafayette and fought in George Washington’s army in the American Revolution. After returning to France he studied engineering and hydraulics. Saint-Simon was a supporter of the French Revolution from the get-go – a radical one at that – but because of his noble birth he was locked up during the Reign of Terror.
The next 20 years of his life were pretty weird. He was basically broke the whole time while trying to keep up the appearances of an Enlightened aristocrat. But from 1814 to his death in 1825, Saint-Simon published a series of works that re-envisioned everything about how society should be run.
Central to this Utopian vision was a strong hierarchy of power – based not on democratic whims or aristocratic traditions, but on strict meritocracy – combined with unyielding scientific and technological progress. The efficiency of the factory, he argued, should be extended to all aspects of society. While he believed in low taxes and limited government regulation, he nevertheless saw central planning of an economy’s production and distribution as the key to the future. Such a society would respect hard work and respect those leaders with the experience and intelligence to organize such a system.
Another Centralist was the Prussian economist and politician Johann Karl Rodbertus. Born in Greifswald in 1805, Rodbertus studied the law and served in the judiciary before being elected to the Prussian National Assembly. From the 1830s to 1850s, he published serval works that outlined his philosophical, political, and economic ideas.
Rodbertus was a Romantic and his politics were relatively moderate. But he was a strong critic of capitalism, arguing that growing income inequality wasn’t just evidence of exploitation – like the Ricardian Socialists were saying (shout out Chapter 28!) – it also set the economy up for crisis-level contractions. He believed government needed to intervene, regulating industry to the point of setting prices and wages.
But to other socialists, government wasn’t the solution to capitalism’s flaws. Rather, government and capitalism were two different forms of the same problem.
Among the most notable of these “Decentralist” thinkers (as I’m calling them) was the French philosopher Charles Fourier. Born in Besançon in 1772, Fourier came from a fairly well-to-do middle-class family. After his parents died, he received a sizeable inheritance that allowed him to do a little tour of Europe. But despite higher aspirations, he was stuck doing middle-class jobs for the rest of his life – as a traveling salesman and a merchant clerk..
Fourier kept his head down during the French Revolution and published most of his writings after the fall of Napoleon. It’s not clear how much of his earlier writings really influenced the ideas of his later writings, but we can sketch out his worldview like this…
Man, in a state of nature, is born good. This is heavily influenced by Rosseau’s idea of the noble savage. And, Fourier argues, the history, the institutions, and the civilization built around man have perverted his incentives for how to behave. If it weren’t for the government, the merchants and bankers, the church, the family, the bosses, then people could freely understand their own wishes. And then it would only be natural for them to organize themselves in a more harmonious way.
In this harmoniously organized society, he figured, the waste and parasitism that is commerce would cease to be. People would only consume the essentials. And if consumption was made that simple, then production could be reorganized in a much more pleasant way. Work could be coordinated in small communities, giving everyone the labor they were able to do and wanted to do. Exploitation of labor would cease.
He called these communal associations “phalanxes” and even envisioned huge complexes called “phalansteries” where the members could live and work. Now, incomes in a phalanx would be determined by the type of work done – this inequality would provide some incentive for people to do the more challenging or less desirable jobs. But, he believed, the system would still be much more equitable than anything else and wouldn’t allow for poverty.
And, much in the Utopian spirit of the age, several Fourierist communities sprung up in France and the United States.
Another guy I’d describe as a Decentralist was the English writer William Godwin. Born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire in 1756, he came from a middle-class family of hardcore religious Dissenters. His father was a Calvinist minister and Godwin followed into that same profession. However, he probably wouldn’t have been very good at that job because, at some point, he realized he was an atheist. Instead, Godwin moved to London where he began a writing career.
For about half a century, Godwin wrote a mix of fiction and non-fiction, including novels, essays, and biographies. Among the last was of his late wife, the writer Mary Wollstonecraft – a genius in her own right who I think it would be fair to call the intellectual catalyst for feminism.
A friend of Robert Owen, Godwin was a critic of conservatives – writing counterpoints to the works of Edmund Burke and Thomas Malthus – as well as liberals. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he tapped into the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham and Mill to criticize John Locke’s defense of private property. Godwin argued that one’s right to property is limited to his needs of property. No one has the right to maximize his own pleasure at the expense of someone else’s. So, if the extent to someone’s private property is greater than necessary, while someone else lacks the private property they need to be satisfied, then the ownership is unjustified and illegitimate.
But, like Fourier, Godwin believed that man was a rational creature who was generally good – even capable of perfectibility. To Godwin, social justice and individual liberty were two sides of the same coin. Abolishing oppression required the elimination of both excess property and the existence of the state.
The works of Fourier – and no doubt Godwin too – had a huge impact on the final theorist I’m going to tell you about: the so-called “Father of Anarchism”, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Born in 1809, Proudhon came from Besançon, just like Fourier. His father was a brewer and barrel-maker, and the young Proudhon worked in the brewery rather than going to school. He did learn to read though and managed to get into a local school as a teenager.
When he turned 18, he began an apprenticeship at a print shop. It was during these years he met a writer who was publishing a book with that printer – Charles Fourier. Their conversations had a profound impact on Proudhon, who later pursued his own career as a philosopher and writer.
Throughout the 1840s, Proudon published several works outlining his worldview. Like Godwin, he argued for the abolition of excessive private property, but also argued against State invention, as an affront to individual liberty. And like Fourier, he envisioned a system where individuals could freely organize a just and cooperative economy through associations.
As he put it in his 1848 Election Manifesto of Le Peuple:
“We do not want expropriation by the State of the mines, canals, and railways: it is still monarchical, still wage-labour. We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organized workers’ associations, operating under State supervision, in conditions laid down by the State and under their own responsibility. We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic and social Republic.”
I suppose we might want to touch on anarchism more later on, so let’s leave it there for now.
While this array of mostly-aristocratic-or-bourgeois intellectuals were formulating theories and experiments of socialist Utopias, actual working-class Radicals in Britain were beginning to lay the foundations of a real socialist movement.
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In London, 1838, a committee of six Members of Parliament and six working men drafted a document to revolutionize British democracy. Among the working men on the committee was our friend from last time, William Lovett – the rope-maker-turned-carpenter – representing the London Working Men’s Association. As they saw it, the Great Reform Act of 1832 had not gone far enough to represent the working class.
The document they drafted called for six key reforms:
Universal suffrage for men over the age of 21
Removing the requirement that Members of Parliament be property owners
Annual Parliaments (in other words, annual national elections)
Equal division of electoral districts – expanding on the progress made in the Reform Act by cleaning up rotten boroughs
Salaries for Members of Parliament so that working men – not just the wealthy – could afford to serve in government
Secret ballot voting to eliminate some of the corruption problems I mentioned in Chapter 40
They called this document “The People’s Charter”. Over the next year, the Chartists (as they were called) organized public meetings across the country, gathering over 1.2 million signatures for a petition calling on Parliament to adopt the Charter.
In May 1839, the petition was at last presented to Parliament. They voted to reject it. Riots broke out across the country.
The Chartism movement persisted though, and – along with the 10 Hour Movement to limit child labor in the factories – it was the focal point of working-class politics in Britain throughout the 1840s. Two more petitions were organized. Eventually, most of the six points were adopted, though not until the 1860s and 70s.*
* Even that’s an oversimplification. While the franchise was first extended to some working-class voters in the 1860s, for example, universal adult male suffrage would have to wait until the 20th Century.
Populist political movements had existed throughout history, of course, but something about this one was different. It was organized, but its tactics non-violent; radical in its aims, but measured in its approach.
In this way, the Chartist movement differed from other radical movements on the Continent during the 1840s, movements that led to revolutions in 1848. And the associational experience of the Chartist leaders is a big reason why.
It began about a century earlier with the Methodists (shout out Chapter 17!) who recruited members from poor backgrounds, gave them some education, and put them into leadership roles within the religious movement.
In the 1790s, working-class Enlightenment societies began to appear, such as the London Corresponding Society. Started by a shoemaker named Thomas Hardy, who believed the limits to voting rights were responsible for all the greed and corruption of politicians, the LCS began as a small group of friends who met once a week to discuss a new book. Those discussions were usually along Radical political lines. It soon grew into a nationwide organization with dozens of branches, scaring the pants off the government, which then blamed it for some assassination attempts on the King. In 1794, the LCS’s leaders were put on trial for treason and, the next year, it and similar organizations were suppressed.
But working men meeting to discuss books didn’t die with the LCS, it continued in the form of mutual improvement societies, which I mentioned last week. Not only did they provide some basic educational opportunities for the working class, they gave their members intellectual stimulation and encouraged them to explore their own political thoughts.
Among the members of the LCS was a struggling leather breeches-maker named Francis Place. Place demonstrated strong organizational and leadership skills and rose through the ranks of the LCS. He had developed these skills as a member of the Breeches Makers Benefit Society.
Benefit societies – also called mutual insurance societies or friendly societies – were members-based insurance pools for workers in various industries. So these breeches-makers would pay weekly dues to the society, and if they got sick and had to miss work, or if they got laid off, or if they got seriously injured on the job, the society would help them get by. (Employers sure weren’t doing that yet.) To these ends, the society also held meetings to elect stewards.
Two years into Place’s membership, the Breeches Makers Benefit Society stepped out of its normal bounds. They decided to strike for better wages. Place was suddenly elevated into a leadership role and, although the strike was unsuccessful, he gained important experience from it.
Blacklisted from work making leather breeches, then, Place transitioned into making wool breaches. Within a few years of it, some of his co-workers approached him to help them raise a strike fund. He agreed, becoming the secretary of their friendly society and a “confidential manager” of their money. Not long after, a group of carpenters approached him and asked him to do the same for them. And then a group of journeymen plumbers.
The idea of the labor strike has existed since antiquity. Artisans at Egypt's Royal Necropolis walked off the job, demanding better compensation, in the 12th Century BCE. In the ancient Roman Republic, when the Plebs felt mistreated by the Patricians, they would simply up-and-leave the city, until the Patricians realized they needed them. Peasant revolts popped up during the Middle Ages, where serfs refused to work until the rents were reduced, usually cutting off a few heads in the process. And in the 1760s, when wages were cut at the London docks, the sailors demonstrated by going ship-to-ship and “striking” the sails – that is, taking them down. (And that is believed to be the etymology for how we use the word “strike”.)
And while the British couldn’t exactly force their people to work, they could prohibit the end-goal of labor strikes – the collective bargaining agreement – by prohibiting the practice of collective bargaining. And that’s exactly what they did. In 1799 and 1800, Parliament passed two bills known as the Combination Acts, banning contracts between employers and bargaining units.
While the Combination Acts didn’t successfully stop all worker mobilization or even strikes, they did successfully keep the lid on the labor movement for over two decades. Finally, in 1824, they were repealed. A huge wave of strikes across the country followed and, the next year, a new Combination Act was passed, limiting these “combinations” strictly to bargaining on the basis of wages and hours – not working conditions or anything else. It also prohibited methods for encouraging workers to participate in the strike, including – critically – a ban on pickets.
But thanks to the 1824 bill, another kind of organization for working-class empowerment developed – the labor union. Okay, in Britain they say “trade union” and, since that’s the geographic focus here, I’ll say it too for now.
Trade unionism grew in Britain in the 1830s and 40s despite a difficult legal environment.
Thomas Dunning was a self-taught shoemaker in Nantwich, where he joined a 500-member-large shoemakers union – the Cordwainers’ Club – in the 1830s. Then some local magistrates threatened to prosecute the union’s leaders for violating the ban on secret oaths – which you’ll remember was a law that came out of the Luddite uprisings (shout out Chapter 24!) and is how officials prosecuted the Tolpuddle Martyrs (shout out Chapter 6!).
As a result, the leadership of the Cordwainers’ Club skipped town, and Dunning stepped up to fill their shoes. Working closely with the union’s lawyer, Dunning was able to get the charges dropped. It left the union in serious financial difficulty, with all the legal fees they had to pay. But between the legal battle and the subsequent raising of funds, Dunning gained valuable experience in law and finance.
It’s no wonder why Dunning later joined the Chartists. Only by reforming the political order did workers have a chance at changing the laws – the ban on secrets oaths; the ban on picketing – that made union organizing so difficult. And thanks to experienced leaders like Dunning, the Chartists were able to organize effectively.
The Methodists, the mutual improvement societies, and labor unions were all examples of associations that empowered the working class to then turn to political action with the People’s Charter. But among the things that set the unions apart was their role in the advancement of socialism.
With all the difficulties they faced in the First Industrial Revolution, many unions understood they would be a more powerful force if they could be organized and coordinated together. In 1829, a union of Lancashire cotton-spinners invited spinners’ unions across the UK to send delegates to a national convention on the Isle of Man. There they elected executive committees and agreed to hold the convention annually.
The new Secretary General of this new General Union of Cotton Spinners was the Irish-born spinner and experienced labor agitator John Doherty. And he envisioned an even bigger organization – the National Association for the Protection of Labour. This would be a UK-wide union of unions, representing all wage-earning workers of all trades. It came together in 1830, counting about 130 unions, but soon fell apart under the weight of its ambition.
Next came the Operative Builders’ Union – a collection of unions representing joiners, masons, bricklayers, plasterers, plumbers, painters, and other construction workers. By 1834 it represented nearly 6,800 workers. That year, they attempted to form a new union of unions – the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union – with the help of none other than Robert Owen.
By this point, Owen had returned from America and became a major supporter of trade unions, believing “labour is the source of all wealth” and that the producers of wealth could retain it for themselves if they stuck together.
Now, the Grand National also fell apart. But with Owen’s considerable public persona behind it, trade unionism grew significantly. And under his influence, union leaders became more collectivist in their outlook as they too reimagined the ways society could be organized.
Among them was our friend, William Lovett. He was a labor leader. He was a prominent Chartist. And as an Owenite, he also became a big believer in co-operatives. Co-ops were a natural extension of Owenism that picked up among his followers. Lovett joined the First London Co-Operative Trading Association in the late 1820s. Members like him would pay a small weekly sum to the co-op. The co-op would then stock up on all kinds of shop items that working families relied on. The profits earned would go back into the general fund.
In fact, Lovett became a storekeeper at the co-op, believing these kinds of associations…
“formed the first step towards the social independence of the labouring classes… that the gradual accumulation of capital by these means would enable the working classes to form themselves into Joint Stock associations of labour, but which (with industry, skill and knowledge) they might ultimately have the trade, manufactures and commerce of the country in their own hands.”
Lovett went on to admit he had been overly optimistic in these expectations. But despite the ways this particular co-op fell short, the co-operative movement – like the trade unions and other associational outlets – had introduced many workers to the world of social organization. In the process they learned a lot about politics, law, public communication, financial management, publishing, and leadership.
Now, not all the Radicals of the First Industrial Revolution saw eye-to-eye on everything. Not all trade unionists were interested in the politics of Chartism. Others, like the Chartist and Methodist preacher Joseph Barker, were so dismayed by the way socialists spoke about religion, they became suspicious of socialism. And being part of the Ten Hours Movement didn’t automatically make you interested in, say, the Co-Operative Movement or Owenism.
But, overall, the Radicals were a big melting-pot of thought for working-class empowerment. Without the other ingredients in the pot, it’s difficult to imagine the early socialists being anything more than a bunch of upper-class philosophers screaming into an historical void. Without the rise of the working-class, the rise of socialism would have never been practical.
And without the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the working class wouldn’t have been practical. It’s not like there was a coherent political movement of agricultural workers or servants during this period. There were a few uprisings in the countryside that I mentioned at the start of this episode – just like the peasant revolts of old – but no organized, non-violent efforts; no petition drives; no great speeches; no collective bargaining efforts; no establishment of co-ops; no mutual improvement societies.
These things were happening in the cities and mill towns, among skilled tradesmen and industrial workers. The economic growth that accompanied industrialization correlated strongly with the independence of those laborers who were making it all possible.
William Aiken had entered the mills in Manchester as a child, calling it the “saddest picture of child suffering, of cruelty, of avarice, that can be found in the annals of any human industry in the world.” But he worked his way up to become an overlooker in his mill, managing his co-workers and earning a good salary, until he was forced to quit for supporting the Ten Hours Bill.
Many later socialists believed the Industrial Revolution was an age of dark exploitation. But Aiken believed it was a time of “wonderous improvements”, both technological and social. The dark days were over. “All that has changed now, thanks to the exertions of the working men themselves.”
And while this period of tremendous economic transition was giving rise to a newly empowered Proletariat, it was also bringing about the slow decline of one of history’s most powerful social groups: The Gentry - next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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