Radical Economics and Labour

Frederic Lee, Jon Bekken, Frederic Lee, Jon Bekken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135969936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

To celebrate the centenary of the most radical union in North America - The Industrial Workers of the World - this collection examines radical economics and the labor movement in the 20th Century. The union advocates direct action to raise wages and increase job control, and it envisions the eventual abolition of capitalism and the wage system through the general strike.

The contributors to this volume speak both to economists and to those in the labor movement, and point to fruitful ways in which these radical heterodox traditions have engaged and continue to engage each other and with the labor movement. In view of the current crisis of organized labor and the beleaguered state of the working class—phenomena which are global in scope—the book is both timely and important. Representing a significant contribution to the non-mainstream literature on labor economics, the book reactivates a marginalized analytical tradition which can shed a great deal of light on the origins and evolution of the difficulties confronting workers throughout the world.

This volume will be of most interest to students and scholars of heterodox economics, those involved with or researching The Industrial Workers of the World, as well as anyone interested in the more radical side of unions, anarchism and labor organizations in an economic context.

1 Senex's Letters on Associated Labour and The Pioneer, 1834

A syndicalist political economy in the making

Noel Thompson

It is often assumed that British syndicalism had its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, in terms of its organization and institutional expression, that cannot be disputed.¹ Yet the articulation of a neo-syndicalist political economy can be found much earlier in a remarkable series of fourteen short pieces entitled Letters on Associated Labour in a working-class paper — The Pioneer; or Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union Magazine — which ran from March 15 to July 5, 1834.² The Pioneer itself was published weekly from September 7, 1833 to July 5, 1834 and its peak circulation of c. 20,000 far outstripped that of most stamped and unstamped papers of the period.³

The paper, and the Letters, were published during a period of acute industrial and political tension and unrest. Specifically, the period saw an increasing power over workshops and independent producers by capitalist middlemen through their control of credit, the supply of material and semi-finished goods and the distribution of finished products; a control that seems to have produced an alteration in “the tempo and quality of workshop life” (Joyce 1990: 155). It was also the case that if the mechanization associated with rapid industrialization in the early nineteenth century did not always, indeed rarely, displaced labor, it did, at the same time, exert significant downward pressure on prices and wages as well as forcing an acceleration in the pace of production within the putting-out system: something that created major problems for certain groups, most notably handloom weavers, in the silk, cotton, and wool industries and the framework knitters in that of hosiery (Samuel 1977:17). These problems were also further exacerbated by the economic instability that was an endemic feature of British capitalism during the three decades that followed the end of the Napoleonic wars.⁴

In such a context the growth of a manufacturing system still characterized by small workshops, and the “putting out” of work to independent producers, seems to have made for the proliferation of “dishonorable” or “scurf” masters and middlemen who sweated their workforce with increasing intensity and who sought to remove or circumvent legislative restrictions that had previously been placed on their activities as regards prices, wages, apprentices, and female labor.⁵ More specifically, the Napoleonic and immediate post-Napoleonic War period witnessed a dismantling of that regulatory, legislative framework that had governed many trades since the Statute of Artificers of 1563. Its wage regulation and apprenticeship clauses were repealed in 1813 and 1814 respectively, while the Spitalfields Act of 1773, that had regulated wages and prices in the London silk-weaving industry, did not long survive the end of the Wars, being repealed in 1824.⁶ Such developments not only adversely affected remuneration but also eroded the independence, status, security, respectability, and self-respect that many artisans had previously enjoyed (Prothero 1979: 27).

The early 1830s in particular were also years of economic depression and were marked too by a sense of betrayal among those of the working class who had supported the movement for political reform, only to find that the Great Reform Act of 1832 left the vast majority of the population disenfranchised. Moreover, this period also saw the rapid growth of a cooperative movement inspired by Owenite ideas, of “equitable labour exchanges” in London, Manchester, and Glasgow where goods were denominated and exchanged according to labor time, a communitarianism that received both theoretical and practical expression,⁷ the emergence of a vibrant, illegal, “unstamped” working-class press, and trade union activity on a scale, and of a kind, that had not been seen before and was not to be seen again in Britain until the new unionism of the late 1880s and early 1890s.⁸

In this latter regard the period saw the emergence of national and general unions such as the National Association for the Protection of Labour of the cotton textile workers, the Operative Builders' Union, the Potters' Union, and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. And while the phenomenon of general unions was not altogether new, what distinguished these working-class organizations was their geographical extent and organizational sophistication.⁹

Further, proponents of these trade unions, when reflecting on the causes of, and remedies for, their discontents, drew increasingly upon an anti-capitalist and socialist political economy that found expression in the work of writers such as John Gray, Robert Owen, William Thompson, Thomas Hodgskin, “Bronterre” O'Brien, and others, and also through the medium of working-class papers such as The Pioneer, the Poor Man's Guardian, the Crisis, the Voice of the West Riding, the Herald to the Rights of Industry and the Voice of the People.¹⁰ That said, while the Letters on Associated Labour reflect elements of the critique of capitalism formulated by these writers, they are nonetheless distinctive in terms of the force, precision, and emphasis of that critique and, more obviously, in terms of their particular conception of a socialist alternative.

The immediate context of the Letters on Associated Labour was a prolonged struggle (1833 to 1834) of the silk weavers of Derby, who were locked out by their employers for refusing to abjure membership of a trade union; this being one aspect of a counterattack by employers and the state which also saw the imprisonment and subsequent deportation of six Dorchester laborers (the Tolpuddle martyrs) for membership of a trade union of agricultural workers. The struggle of the Derby weavers was ultimately unsuccessful but it was the cause of major social antagonism. “War! War! War!” declared one headline in The Pioneer (January 25, 1834), “Labor has declared war against capital.” And it was a struggle too which elicited considerable support from workers and trade unionists in other parts of the country.

The Letters were published under the name of “Senex” and many commentators have speculated as to the identity of the author. A strong case has been made for James Morrison, the editor of The Pioneer,¹¹ but it has also been suggested that they may have been written by J.E. “Shepherd” Smith, the editor of the Owenite paper The Crisis (Stunt 2004). The problem with these suggestions is that in Letter XII the author refers to him/herself as having a life “now counted more than three score years,”¹² whereas the birth dates of J.E. Smith (1801) and James Morrison (1802) put them in their early thirties when the pieces were written. In consequence, one writer has argued that the Letters were jointly written by Morrison and Smith who combined their ages to provide the requisite three score (Oliver 1954: 364). However, for a number of reasons this is not altogether convincing.

First, the Letters display a remarkable internal coherence and consistency that militate against the notion of joint authorship. Second, there seems no obvious reason why the “fiction” of single authorship should be maintained to a point that involved such elaborate subterfuge. Third, while it is possible to detect in the writing of Morrison ideas, particularly on the prescriptive side, that clearly parallel those to be found in the Letters,¹³ the same cannot be said of the work of J.E. Smith. It is also the case that the author of the letters refers in one to an incapacitating illness, and Morrison died in 1835 shortly after the paper folded.

That said, there is a letter written by Smith on March 28, 1834 that refers to an article “respecting Blackwoods” as having been penned by Morrison but “concocted” by the two men, and the second letter does indeed open with an attack on Blackwoods Magazine. The article also contains the sole reference to Blackwoods in The Pioneer around this time.¹⁴ So it may be the case that the Letters were the product of two minds and one pen; though the problem still remains as to why Morrison felt he needed to portray himself as a sexagenarian and embrace the pseudonym of “Senex.”¹⁵

But questions of authorship aside, what of the political economy of the Letters? The first thing to note is that the pieces are informed by a particular periodization of history and a distinctive understanding of the forces making for historical progress; progress seen in terms of the extension of humanity's productive power. Thus “there [we]re three states of labor- ‘enslaved or compulsory labour,’ ‘hireling or marketable labour’ and ‘free or associated labour.’”¹⁶ As to this progression, the primary focus of Senex was on the contemporary transition from “hireling” to “associated labor” and this was seen as the “natural” outcome of the economic forces which were precipitating the demise of the former. As Senex wrote (May 24, 1834, Letter IX, The Pioneer),

labour is at the present period in its transition between hireling labour — in which the life of a man is sold piecemeal, by the day or the week, at or below the market price, and associated labour — in which men will, and must, act together for the mutual benefit of the whole body of the association.

It was

a revolution silently going on, which is preparing us [the working class] to take our turn… in the affairs of the world; and we are watching its progress ready to seize upon every advantage it may offer us. Let it proceed quietly — we are not impatient — we know our turn is coming, and must come.

(June 28, 1834, Letter XIV)

Like later syndicalists, therefore, Senex saw human progress in terms of the abolition of the wages system and an end to the commodification of labor.

The transition from “hireling” to “associated” labor was ineluctable. The “system of associated labor is the natural and regular offspring of the times in which we live; it is the unavoidable result of the concurrence of circumstances which belong to the present state of civilization” (April 5, 1834, Letter III). This was so because the existing economic and institutional structures that characterized “hireling labor” were simply not equipped to cope with contemporary developments that were enhancing the productive power available to humanity. As Senex put it,

the plenty producible by the industry and ingenuity of man, acting by means of machinery, continually improving in creative power, has no assignable limit; but the profit derivable to individual capitalists, in the creation of suc...