9—
Theories of Exploitation in the Workers' Movements

All theory is grey unless it builds upon practical experience.
Fach-Zeitung: Organ des Niederrheinischen
Weber-Verbandes, July 16, 1899

If an analysis of the fabrication of labor as a commodity clarifies the installation of business practices—and thus people's engagement with culture as they come to terms with the commercial universe—it can also elucidate the other side of history: people's engagement with culture as they attempt to transcend that commercial universe. How did the fabrication of labor as a commodity influence workers' understanding of the fundamental sources of economic inequities? Did it guide their reception of formal political ideologies? Did the contrasting notions of labor as a ware that were lived in the humdrum routines of manufacture in Germany and Britain inspire contrasting dreams of the supercession of capitalism?

Historians of nineteenth-century labor and socialist movements have attributed an explanatory significance to culture in two fundamentally different ways. Following the example of E. P. Thompson, many investigators have assigned culture an enabling role as a creator of varying responses among workers. These inquirers associate culture with workers' creative agency. More recently, however, examiners such as Gareth Stedman Jones have assigned culture an explanatory role as a kind of restrictive structure, underscoring its function as an autonomous system of concepts that channel workers' insights and expression.^[1] Although both approaches have proven

[1] Culture , the set of collectively shared signs that both structure and create an experience of practice, has become an enigmatic term in social inquiry because it both constricts and broadens human conduct. The mystery stems not from conceptual incoherence but from the multiple effects of signs in social life. This study's examination of manufacturing institutions proceeded by showing that culture limited conduct by selecting the forms that practices on the factory shop floor assumed in economically similar environments. Yet the fictions of labor as a commodity also enlarged the scope of action, for they created multiple and equally viable principles for organizing the labor transaction in nations undergoing a generically similar, epochal process of commercialization. On the one hand, the intervention of culture gaveproducers and manufacturers principles for action apart from the exigencies of the immediate economic environment; on the other, it enmeshed these agents in a realm of meaningful practices that constrained their understanding of social relations.

their fertility, they are both demonstrably inadequate for the task of this chapter, that of explaining why workers in Britain and Germany developed contrasting ideologies of capitalist exploitation. Let us appraise the two prevailing views of culture to see how uncovering the cultural structure of the workplace offers a different means of explaining workers' adoption of specific political ideologies.

The Place of Culture in Labor Movements

As a pioneer investigator of workers' embrace of oppositional ideas, E. P. Thompson's writings express in pure form the tensions inherent in cultural analyses of workers' movements that underspecify culture's constitutive role in the labor process itself. In The Making of the English Working Class , skilled craftspeople, domestic weavers, field laborers, and the new textile operatives are described as having contrasting social experiences but making common cause by drawing upon the inherited discourses of the "free-born Englishman" and of radical republicanism to interpret their predicaments and to imagine alternatives. Their receptivity to political beliefs comes from their individual experiences of a more ruthless use of labor.^[2] But, given this exposure, what match between workers' social being and the political ideologies of the day permitted workers to take up as their own the ideals of cooperative manufacture and political reform that were initially formulated by prosperous artisans and middle-class radicals?

To cast the issue more concretely, does Thompson mean to tell us that given a different political legacy among the middle classes in England, workers in the early nineteenth century would not have acquired a shared class identity? Or, if some variety of class consciousness inevitably follows capitalist development (a vexing question for Thompson's argument), how did workers' experience of labor establish the range of ideas they could receive favorably? Thompson, as a man of letters, believed that incertitude suited his humanist goals.^[3] The commemoration of indeterminacy fulfills an hon-

[2] The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 258.

[3] The extraordinary moral tone of The Making resonates with Thompson's analytic insistence that political culture had to transcend workers' social existence; the tenor is one of transcendence. The working class fights as a kind of heroic agent that suffers worldly trials, triumphs over ordinary experience, and finally surpasses the world by leaving an imperishable memory of its deeds. The Making is emplotted as a "Romance," to borrow the sense for thatterm that Hayden White chose in Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

orable commitment to human self-making, but it scarcely offers a foundation for a program of research into the forces shaping the adoption of ideologies in workers' collective movements.

Thompson's inexactitude makes a virtue of necessity. It follows unavoidably from his perspective on the labor process. In conceptualizing the generation of work experience, he "humanizes" the point of production in a peculiar fashion. He views the workplace as a site of personal experience, not as a set of practices patterned by culture;^[4] he highlights the subjective side of productive relations, not their cultural structure.^[5] Given this foundation, either the development and endorsement of particular complexes of political ideas appears capricious, an historical miracle in which the common people transcend the limitations of their social existence; or, alternatively, if the historical process is explained by the circumstances of workers' productive life, it is reduced to a mechanical reflection of crude material distress and economic compulsion.

This latter choice, irreconcilable as it seems with the tenor of Thompson's work as a whole, commands the argument of many passages in The Making. For example, artisans' sympathetic reception of Paine's The Rights of Man fluctuated with their standard of living. "Jacobin ideas driven into weaving villages, the shops of the Nottingham framework-knitters and the Yorkshire croppers, the Lancashire cotton-mills," he says, "were propagated in every phase of rising prices and of hardship."^[6] In his account of the Luddite movement's vision of political upheaval and insurrectionary objectives,

[4] See discussion of Thompson above, Chapter One, at footnotes 47–48.

[5] Thompson's view of the labor process is aptly described as "experiential" rather than "cultural." The distinction is made by William Sewell, Jr., "How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson's Theory of Working-Class Formation," in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, editors, E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 67. Thompson equates culture with "consciousness" in "The Peculiarities of the English," in Ralph Miliband and John Saville, editors, The Socialist Register (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), p. 351. Although centered more often on the ignominious decline of the labor movement than on its heroic birth, "Alltagsgeschichte" shares this tendency to see culture either as something opposed to structure or as the subjective moment of structure but, in either case, as something that does not comprise a structure in its own right. See, illustratively, Alf Lüdtke, "Rekonstruktion von Alltagswirklichkeit—Entpolitisierung der Sozialgeschichte?" in Robert Berdahl et al., editors, Klassen und Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1982), pp. 330, 338–339.

[6] Op. cit., p. 185. Thompson also cites the Manchester historian Prentice: " 'A new instructor was busy amongst the masses—WANT' " (p. 142; cf. p. 184). Or, to cite another instance, the thinking of Thelwal, an interpreter of Jacobinism, appears bound by the artisan's economic interests (p. 160).

Thompson claims, "People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives upsetting a barrow of potatoes. In these conditions, it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if they had. "^[7] Contrary to his own intentions, Thompson resorts to these pictures of mechanical response when he seeks not only to describe but to explain workers' reception of new ideas.

In similar fashion, Patrick Joyce adopts reductionist explanations in spite of himself in his sensitive analyses of Victorian factories. He draws correspondences between workers' political visions and the objective features of work. For example, in Work, Society and Politics Joyce explains the decline of political radicalism in the textile districts after midcentury as the result of "the power of mechanisation to re-cast the social experience of the worker."^[8] The decline of workers' independent political movements, he asserts, mirrored the erosion of their autonomy in the labor process.^[9] The supposition that the formulation and acceptance of political ideologies reflects the conditions of production, rejected in his theory, is embraced in his history.^[10]

The institutions and manufacturing procedures of the workplace, for Joyce as for Thompson, become technological and economic givens, not because these investigators would assert that work obeys only economic and technical determinations, but insofar as these elements are the only ones they treat as systemic forces in the construction of workplace procedures.

[7] Ibid., p. 592. Consider also Thompson's reference to the pace of capital accumulation and to the stages of technical change in his closing eulogy to a distinguished artisanal culture (pp. 830–831).

[8] Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 80.

[9] Op. cit., ibid., pp. 81–82; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 88. Since the factory workers who occupied the same positions of dependency joined the burgeoning socialist movement in the quarter-century before the First World War, however, this structural explanation for political identities must be incomplete. No wonder another labor historian, Richard Price, adopted the same transition from the "formal" to the "real" subsumption of labor in the workplace to explain precisely the opposite outcome: the rise of labor militancy in the late 1880s. "The New Unionism and the Labour Process," in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Hans-Gerhard Husung, editors, The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 133–149.

[10] In Visions of the People , Joyce emphasizes in his methodological preface that the ability of language to constitute experience has dissolved "the old assurance of a formative link between social structure and culture." Yet in this recent work, too, the brute fact of mechanization is cited as a cause of workers' new feelings of insecurity and a constriction of their cultural horizons to the established capitalist order. Op. cit., pp. 9, 88. Analogously, see Joyce's inferences from the delegation of authority on the shop floor to populist accommodations to capitalism (p. 119).

Joyce's unwitting reductionism issues from the same source as Thompson's: it results from leaving in place an unreconstructed, implicitly economic view of the development of the factory labor process, which makes possible the explication of determinant connections between the labor process and the acceptance of ideas only by forcing ideas to reflect the economic aspects of work.^[11]

Gareth Stedman Jones arrived at an alternative understanding of culture and work by following Thompson's problematic to a different terminus. In the acclaimed essay "Rethinking Chartism," he argued that workers in early industrial Britain discovered their interests through the political language of Chartism, and thus historians ought not to envision social classes with prior economic interests turning to a political medium. Rather, workers' primary experiences in work were constituted from the start by an inherited political language.^[12] Yet this linguistic model inhibits explanation of the vitality and acceptance of insurgent ideas. What kept the framework of radical ideas intact in the first half of the nineteenth century despite the proliferation of diverse protest movements and despite great change in the organization of the labor movement? Why did British workers not evolve an alternative discourse of resistance shortly after 1842, if, as Stedman Jones says, the radicals' emphasis on Parliament's responsibility for economic

[11] Perhaps I do Thompson and Joyce an injustice here. Thompson in his methodological reflections remains too wary of abstractions to suppose that the "productive process" comprises a merely economic relation. In The Poverty of Theory , for example, he insists that economic transactions can also be examined as cultural practices. But few researchers follow their own prescriptions. Even in this methodological essay, Thompson restricts his illustrations of culture in production to ancient customs of exchange in the "moral economy" which industrialization broke apart (op. cit., p. 292) or to the socialization of the actors outside of production (p. 294). These very examples rest on implicit contrasts with modern, instrumentally determined practices at the point of production; in The Making , those contrasts become explicit. When Thompson contests the formula that steam power plus cotton mills equals a new working class, the variable he wants to include for a more balanced equation, inherited tradition, refers primarily to a culture that is rooted in community relations, relations outside of production. The logic of both political resistance movements and Methodism is that they allow people to express, outside of production, that cultural animation which is suppressed, and in Thompson's account, temporarily deactivated, inside the industrial labor process itself. The Making , op. cit., p. 446. Likewise, Joyce coins the phrase the "culture of the factory," but this culture is lodged primarily in expressive activities such as social parties and teas or in loyalties that are in some way the offspring of the necessities of work but that do not define the labor process itself. Indeed, culture grows out of the factory when people are not at work, when instead they gossip during breaks or sing "as and when the tasks to hand permitted." Visions , op. cit., pp. 131–132.

[12] Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 95. In the introduction to this set of essays, Jones expresses even more forcefully the assumption that identities are shaped in politics rather than through labor: "It is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place" (p. 22).

oppression rang increasingly false after that date? Were laborers and their spokespersons incapable of articulating more resonant interpretations of their social predicaments? To address these questions of change and persistence, Stedman Jones would have to consider the connections between political ideas and the workers' lived experience—a divide which brings one back to Thompson's starting point.

By deciphering the signifying processes embedded in the labor process, the present study offers an alternative perspective which bridges workers' experience of production and their reception of public discourse without resorting to economic reductionism. Workers' experience of production did not develop as the subjective side of economic and technological conditions, but emerged through an engagement with the cluster of cultural signs that defined material practices. The definitions of labor that were communicated in the execution of work offered a foundation for the receipt of economic philosophies and radical programs of change.

A Puzzle in the Workers' Reception of Ideas

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, workers and employers in both Britain and Germany believed they were witnessing a revolution in the labor movement. In Germany this decade was marked by a surge in union membership and by the widespread adoption of a Marxist discourse.^[13] In Britain many trade unions during this same period adopted the goal of developing a socialist society. Membership in all trade unions of the United Kingdom rose from 750,000 in 1888 to over two million in 1901. In the country's textile industry, union membership doubled.^[14] The endorsement of socialism, though confined to a minority of unions, and rise in membership represented a significant departure from the previous history of British labor.

The textile employers in Britain believed that the new ideology of the unions represented a momentous pullback from their previous support for the settled customs of industrial relations. The businessmen's newspaper

[13] Membership in the Social Democratic unions rose from 300,000 in 1890 to 2.5 million in 1913. For an overview, consult Mary Nolan, "Economic Crisis, State Policy, and Working-Class Formation in Germany, 1870–1900," in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolber, editors, Working-Class Formation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 378–393.

[14] H. A. Clagg, Allan Fox, and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 468.

the Textile Mercury took note of the changed atmosphere as early as 1890. This journal said, "The introduction of socialistic principles into English trades-unionism has completely transformed the character of the latter.  . . . It is now unrecognizable in its objects, aims, and the means it is using to attain them compared with the trades-unionism of only ten or fifteen years ago."^[15] In a column entitled "The Apotheosis of Labour," the journal's editors concluded in the fall of 1890 that "almost everything is being turned topsy-turvy."^[16]

During these "topsy-turvy" years of change, continuing up to the First World War, Marxist economic discourse found a ready audience among literate workers in Germany, whereas among workers in Britain it fell on unprepared and partially closed ears. Is it reasonable to conclude that the German workers and their avowed spokespersons, in contrast to their counterparts in Britain, were frustrated by their confrontations with the autocratic German state and found Marxism congenial because they preferred an uncompromising program of change? Professed approval of Marx's analysis of the capitalist production process was neither sufficient nor necessary for support of a strong agenda for social transformation. Although articulate members of the trade unions in Britain proved resistant to Marx's analysis of the extraction of surplus value from labor power, they nonetheless endorsed programs for a dramatic reordering that included the seizure of state power and collectivization of the means of production.^[17] Conversely, in Germany some members of workers' organizations who endorsed Marx's economic analyses shrank from attacks upon the state or from calls for the expropriation of capitalist enterprise. The Social Democrat Carl August Schramm offers a well-known example of the divergent political uses to which Marx's economic analysis could be put. Schramm, an early, accomplished initiate into Marx's analysis of the generation of surplus value, combated party members' strengthening endorsement during the 1880s of

[15] Textile Mercury , August 30, 1890, p. 141.

[16] Textile Mercury , September 27, 1890, p. 210. The members of the Bradford Textile Society also captured the mood of change. In 1895, in an editorial about "Trades Unionism," they remarked, "Everything seems to point out that a great change is about to take place in our commercial and industrial system." Journal of the Bradford Textile Society Volume I, Number 5 (February 1895).

[17] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth. The Burnley weavers' union rules in 1892 called for "socialisation of the means of production." Geoffrey Trodd, "Political Change and the Working Class in Blackburn and Burnley 1880–1914," Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, 1978, p. 341.

the necessity of political revolution.^[18] Likewise, in the 1890s the free trade unions helped disseminate Marx's economic doctrines but at the same time tried to moderate the influence of radicals in the Social Democratic party who were advocating forceful challenges to the political institutions of the old regime.^[19] These considerations remind us that Marx's economic analysis could be accepted or repudiated apart from any belief in the need for political revolution.^[20] Instead of serving as an index of radicalization, Marx's examination of the capitalist employment relation must be approached for what it is, a system of ideas that can be endorsed or discarded by workers or their avowed spokespersons for its perceived logic and plausibility.

In Marx's analysis of workers' exploitation in the capitalist system of production, as finally presented in Kapital , employers adhered to the principles of equitable market transactions. As with the purchase of any commodity, they paid living labor its full exchange value when they appropriated its use value. The degradation of labor did not occur because capitalists added interest and profit to the value of the labor embodied in the finished commodity before they disposed of the commodity in the market, or because capitalists used their power over dependent workers to subvert the operation of a market in labor power. Instead, employers used unpaid labor time at the point of production. If workers did not imagine they sold their labor in the form of "labor power," they could envision that the labor time they put into products for the employer was more than the labor time embodied in the products that they received in return, via their wage. But they could not conceive that employers exploited the difference between the exchange value and use value of labor time at the work site. The cultural constitution of factory practices encouraged members of the labor movement in Britain to focus on the unfair exchange of products in the market, as the histories both of the early socialist movement in Britain and of the reappearance of socialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century demonstrate. In Germany, by contrast, Marx's dissection of the extraction of surplus at the site of production enjoyed a magnified resonance.

[18] Hans-Josef Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1967), pp. 17–18. For background on Schramm's continued belief in working toward state aid for producer cooperatives, see Wolf-Ulrich Jorke, "Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte von Lassalles politischer Theorie in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung," diss., Bochum, 1973, pp. 17–18.

[19] Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1955), pp. 108 ff.

[20] Eduard Bernstein, Von der Sekte zur Partei (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1911), p. 23.

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Britain

The recreation of a socialist labor movement in Britain during the last two decades of the nineteenth century invented for a second time the explanation for the exploitation of labor that had developed in the heroic decades of the 1820s and 1830s. In the earlier era, radical political economy supported the rise of a popular conviction that workers could collectively shape their destinies. As a letter writer to the Co-operative Magazine in 1826 proclaimed, "Labourers are beginning to think for themselves. And turning their attention to that science, which treats of the production and distribution of wealth."^[21] Middle-class educators such as the temperate Francis Place grew alarmed at workers' independent reshaping of this science. Place included Thomas Hodgskin, whose essay Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital grew out of personal experience in the London trades, among those who had caused "incalculable" mischief.^[22] During this period political economy became a staple of the labor movement's discourse instead of an esoteric body of theorems.^[23]

The view of the labor transaction that prevailed among these early working-class representatives was that of labor being exchanged as it had already taken shape in an object. William Thompson emphasized this mode of conveyance when he wrote in Labour Rewarded in 1827, "It is not the differ-

[21] The Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald Volume I, Number 2 (February 1826), p. 64.

[22] The Making , op. cit., p. 778; quotation on p. 807. Hodgskin edited the Mechanics' Magazine before writing Labour Defended. Karl-Josef Burkard, Thomas Hodgskins Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Hannover: SOAK Verlag, 1980), pp. 8, 219. The first clear point of contact between the working-class movement and the labor economists is publication of a review of Hodgskin's Labour Defended in Trades Newspaper in 1825. See the copious documentation of the popular appreciation of Hodgskin in Noel Thompson, The People's Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 12–13. This exemplary study of the British economists' focus on the mechanisms of exchange provides the foundation for the following section.

[23] Jones, op. cit., pp. 114–115, 133–134 note. For other references to the importance of political economy for workers' formulations, see H. Dutton and J. E. King, "Ten Percent and No Surrender": The Preston Strike, 1853–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 55–56; T. W. Hutchison, On Revolutions and Progress in Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 59; Simon Dentith, "Political Economy, Fiction and the Language of Practical Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England," Social History Volume 8, Number 2 (May 1983), pp. 183–199; Max Goldstrom, "Popular Political Economy for the British Working Class Reader in the Nineteenth Century," in Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley, editors, Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 270.

ences of production in different laborers, but the complicated system of exchanges of those productions when made , that gives rise to  . . . frightful inequality of wealth."^[24] The "higgling of the market," not the subordination of labor in production, denied workers the full produce of their labor.^[25]

This view of the exchange of materialized labor did not arise from observers whose horizons were limited by the world of small craftshops. The press of the common people, which regularly surveyed and elaborated upon the ideas of Thompson, Hodgskin, and other economists, was perfectly cognizant of the new regimens and tactics of control deployed in the large textile mills. Popular writers in the industrial North formulated economic principles based on the conveyance of materialized labor as they studied the centralization of production under the eye of the mill owner. The Poor Man's Advocate , which covered problems in textile mills, drew an analogy between the consumer who bought finished cloth in a store and the mill owner who bought a quantity of labor from his workers.^[26]

The popular economists were capable of describing a difference between labor and its product when they discussed the manufacture of goods, but they did not theorize about the meaning of this difference for the wage contract. William Thompson, in An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth , drew a pregnant distinction between the products of labor and labor itself, defined as "that productive energy which called wealth into being."^[27] Seldom did British authors distinguish so carefully between the two as Thompson did.^[28] But in this work, printed in 1824, Thompson's very identification of the difference showed that in the end he did not imagine that under the regime of commercial liberalism surplus was appro-

[24] William Thompson, Labour Rewarded (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827), p. 12. Emphasis added. Thomas Hodgskin described the capitalist as someone who has "power over the produce of labor." Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966 [1827]), p. 245.

[25] W. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 12, 36.

[26] The Poor Man's Advocate , January 21, 1832, p. 1. The Operative , which catered to the interests of factory workers, also emphasized the market as the site of exploitation. See discussion of economics on February 3, 1839. We cannot deduce workers' understanding of the exchange of labor for a wage from the brute fact that they are inserted into large-scale industry, as one analyst has unfortunately assumed. Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 117.

[27] An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968 [1824]), p. 88.

[28] John Bray briefly refers to the sale of labor and products of labor but says both amount to the sale of "labour for labour." Then the example immediately following illustrates only the exchange of finished products. Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (Leeds: David Green, 1839), p. 48.

priated from the labor activity itself, only from labor's products. For example, in his chapter entitled "Labour Must Receive Its Full Equivalent," Thompson pondered the seizure of "labor itself":

Take away what labour has produced, or anticipate and seize on, as it were beforehand, what labor is about to produce: where is the difference in the operation? Where the difference in pernicious effects? If any, the difference would be in favor of seizing the products after production rather than anticipating them, because the relaxation of the producing industry is avoided where the products already exist, and the effect of discouragement would be only against future productions. But where the labour is compelled, the product itself to be seized upon is raised and completed with diminished energy.^[29]

Thompson equated the appropriation of the workers' labor capacity with reliance upon "compelled," slave labor, not the incentives of marketed wage labor.^[30] From his standpoint, employers under the new regime of capitalism sequestered, not labor itself, but its products.

With this appreciation of labor as a commodity in mind, the early British socialists formulated a coherent set of propositions that placed the capitalist in the role of a middleman. "Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them," wrote Thomas Hodgskin, "in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both."^[31] William Heighton defined the holders of capital in 1827 as those who "effect exchanges by proxy."^[32] The nomenclature middleman that denoted the capitalist also embraced such disparate groupings as small retailers, peddlers,

[29] Emphasis in original. An Inquiry , op. cit., p. 89.

[30] On William Thompson's periodization of history by the transition from compelled labor to labor organized by individual competition, see J. E. King, "Utopian or Scientific? A Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists," History of Political Economy Volume 15, Number 3 (1983), p. 358.

[31] Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1922 [1825]), p. 71. Likewise, the broadside "A Riddle" calls a capitalist a "rogue [who] steps in between to make the exchange" (Manchester Library Archives). The British workers moved beyond the ancient view that profit is simply the difference between purchase and sale prices, for in the liberal-capitalist order products appeared as the incarnation of quantified labor. Profit now emerged from labor appropriated from the worker. For a sophisticated commentary, see Burkard, op. cit., p. 58.

[32] William Heighton, An Address to the Members of Trade Societies and to the Working-Classes Generally (London: Co-Operative Society, 1827), p. 5, cited in N. Thompson, op. cit., p. 61. Italics in original.

merchants, and master manufacturers. The odious term drew boundaries between laborers and their exploiters based not on the ownership of capital per se but on a market position as an intermediary.^[33] "[Middlemen] get their living by buying your labour at one price and selling it at another ," the Poor Man's Guardian warned its readers. "This trade of 'buying cheap and selling dear,' is of all human pursuits the most anti-social."^[34] Producers equated the capitalist with the trader and imagined his metier not as the control of production but as the manipulation of exchange.^[35]

In the periodicals aimed at the new factory operatives, the workers' exploiters were reduced to the "landowner and money-monger," a pairing that ignored the use of capital at the point of production.^[36]The Operative said in 1839 that "all the tyranny and misery in this world are the work of landlords and profit-mongers  . . . that is to say, the man who lives by lending the use of land, which ought never to be individual property, and the man who

[33] N. Thompson, op. cit., p. 61. The Poor Man's Guardian referred in 1833 to the middle-class supporters of the Reform Bill as "middlemen." See Jones, op. cit., p. 105.

[34] Poor Man's Guardian , No. 80, December 15, 1832, p. 641. Emphasis in original. On the influence of this newspaper among workers, see Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History." Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, p. 470, and Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 293.

[35] The stress on the "defalcations of exchange" in the workers' press was overwhelming. As a writer for the Poor Man's Advocate expressed it, "The value of all commodities is the amount of human labour it has taken to procure them  . . . but the merchant or agent between buyer and seller, being able to conceal the real state of the transaction, contrives with scarcely any labour to charge  . . . one quarter above the value which he calls profit." January 21, 1832, p. 8. "Remember friends and brethren, that you and you alone produce all the real wealth of the country  . . . middlemen  . . . trick you out of the greater part of the wealth which you create." Poor Man's Guardian , No. 4 (1831), p. 25. Or, as John Bray said, it was "an inevitable condition of inequality of exchanges—of buying at one price and selling at another—that capitalists shall continue to be capitalists and working men be working men." Op. cit., pp. 48–49. The economy contained an "error," John Gray claimed, a "defective system of exchange." John Gray, The Social System (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1831), p. 23. Emphasis in original. See also Stedman Jones, op. cit., p. 119.

Employers reciprocated the workers' emphasis on the sphere of circulation. The textile manufacturers were slow to theorize the difference between profitable exchange as a merchant and the generation of returns through investment in plant and equipment. Sidney Pollard shows that during the formation of factory practice in Britain, textile managers rarely distinguished between capital and revenue or between fixed and circulating capital. Their accounting followed the logic of commercial rather than of industrial capitalism. "The rise of modern cost accounting," Pollard concluded, "dates from the 1880's only." "Capital Accounting in the Industrial Revolution," Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research Volume 15, Number 2 (November 1963), p. 79.

[36] The Operative , Nov. 4, 1838. "Aggregation of property into large masses" means "unjust preference given to the land-owner and money-monger that are the heaviest curses of the English Operative."

lives by the use of money, which ought never to be any thing more than a mere symbol of value."^[37] The journal's correspondent viewed money as a fraudulent token, for instead of allowing goods to exchange at their value in labor, it itself becomes the measure of value. The control of money leads to exploitation not because the owners invest in and control the production process but because it facilitates deceitful exchange.

Given this diagnosis, the corrective, too, lay in the marketplace. In Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy , published in 1839, Bray located the problem and its solution. "Inequality of exchanges, as being the cause of inequality of possessions, is the secret enemy that devours us," he wrote.^[38] The introduction of trading cooperatives would short-circuit the market, allowing goods to be exchanged according to the value of labor they contained. "The general equality of condition which would be induced by equal exchanges," Bray said, "is, to the capitalist and economist, the last and most dreaded of all remedies."^[39] Bray, like other authors, acknowledged that the ultimate goal was to secure workers' ownership of the means of production. "To free Labour from the dominion of Capital," he said, "it is necessary that the land and reproducible wealth of the country should be in possession of the working class."^[40] The establishment of equal exchanges represented a sufficient means for this end.^[41] Fair exchange would lead to an adequate reform of production, not the reform of production to the establishment of fair exchange.^[42]

The focus of the socialist economists on the distribution of wealth insofar as this impinged upon equitable market exchange made it all too easy for the purification of exchange to become not only the means but the goal of reform. John Gray, for example, said that once the system of commerce was purified of distortion and the labor embodied in goods determined prices, it

[37] The Operative , February 7, 1839.

[38] Bray, op. cit., p. 52. Bray also says that the infraction of the law of equal exchanges oppresses the working man more than accumulation of capital (p. 48).

[39] Ibid., p. 199. See his comments on p. 110 as well. Although Robert Owen lacked an economic theory to explain the exploitation of labor, he said that articles in his reformed communities would exchange "with reference to the amount of labour in each." Report to the County of Lanark of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (Glasgow: Wardlaw & Cunninghame, 1821), p. 21.

[40] Op. cit., p. 127.

[41] Association for the Dissemination of the Knowledge of the Principles of an Equitable Labour Exchange, Production the Cause of Demand (Birmingham: Radcliffe & Co., 1832), p. 5.

[42] Employers without large quantities of capital were seen as victims of market exchange just as much as wage laborers were. Submission in market exchange, not the position of authority conferred by the employment of labor power, marked class boundaries. Jones, op. cit., pp. 131–132.

was proper to sanction any inequalities of wealth that resulted.^[43] He endorsed "unrestricted competition between man and man," once prices had been cleansed of distortions.^[44] Likewise, William Thompson said that wherever the principle of "free interchange" of equivalents was respected, there property had been distributed in the most useful fashion.^[45] The socialist economists imagined that the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few may have resulted from, but did not necessarily cause, inequitable exchange.^[46]

The work of Thompson, Gray, and Hodgskin received considerable popular attention and endorsement as the labor movement matured in the 1830s. "When Marx was still in his teens," E. P. Thompson wrote in The Making , "the battle for the minds of English trade unionists, between a capitalist and a socialist political economy, had been (at least temporarily) won."^[47] With the decline of agitation after 1848, popular political economy lost its bite and its critical legacy was forgotten. The theories' internal logic may have accelerated and completed their eclipse. As Noel W. Thompson has remarked, a preoccupation with the mechanism of exchange, rather than with the power of capital to shape workers' productive lives, could easily give way to a limited, conservative focus on the proceeds of wage agreements negotiated in the labor market.^[48]

[43] John Gray, Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), p. 97.

[44] Ibid., p. 159. For Hodgskin's praise of a cleansed market, see N. Thompson, The Market and Its Critics , op. cit., pp. 71–73.

[45] An Inquiry , op. cit., p. 103. By "free" interchange Thompson did not necessarily mean market exchange.

Owen's doctrines are not analyzed in this chapter because they do not offer an economic theory of labor exploitation. Yet Owenite thinking, too, rested on the assumption that the inauguration of fair exchange and the subsequent prosperity of cooperative societies would be sufficient to eliminate disparities of wealth. See The Making , op. cit., p. 805, and N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 81.

[46] Bray, op. cit., p. 110.

[47] The Making , op. cit., p. 829. On the early influence of formal theories of labor's value in Bradford, see Jonathan Smith, "The Strike of 1825," in D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford (Bradford: Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), p. 75.

[48] N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 224. Sidney Pollard suggests that the theories of the early socialists were forgotten so completely because the process of industrialization made it increasingly unrealistic to imagine that workers could accumulate enough capital to replace the capitalists. But if this is granted, the question arises of why the socialists did not recast their economic solutions; once again, the answer may be found in their preoccupation with the market exchange of products. Sidney Pollard, "England: Der unrevolutionäre Pionier," in Jürgen Kocka, editor, Europäische Arbeiterbewegungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), p. 26.

The heritage of this critical political economy was never reappropriated by the labor movement as a native intellectual growth. The advocates for the socialist revival of the 1880s, including Beatrice Potter Webb, attempted to place the new movement in context by tracing the succession of prior socialist movements in the land. On the whole their surveys overlooked the early popular economists entirely; some, like H. M. Hyndman's The Historical Basis of Socialism in England , made passing reference to them in notes.^[49] Until nearly the end of the century, the labor organizers remained out of touch with early socialist economic theory from their own soil, regarding socialist economic conjectures as an alien import. Not until the issuance in 1899 of an English translation of Anton Menger's original German volume, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour , with H. S. Foxwell's extended preface about British socialist works, were the popular British economists recognized again in their country of origin.^[50]

The rescue occurred due to the combined and uneven development of theory across the European landscape. Among the leading economic theorists of the second half of the nineteenth century, Marx was almost alone in taking notice of the contributions of the early British economists. The prestige of Marx's ideas in Germany led economists there to reexamine the British philosophers of labor who had long been forgotten by the British themselves. When the Austrian scholar Anton Menger wrote his history of The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour , he set out to discredit Continental Marxists by showing that Marx had disguised the true magnitude of his debt to these early British predecessors.^[51] Menger asserted that many of Marx's consequential assertions, including those concerning the mechanisms by which surplus value was generated and appropriated, had been anticipated, sometimes in embryonic form, by earlier French and British socialists, and in particular by William Thompson.^[52]

[49] H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (London: Garland Publishing, 1984 [1883]), p. 120. But the perception of a new start for socialism can be seen in Hyndman's claim that his book England for All "was the first Socialist work that appeared up to 1881 in English." Henry Mayers Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911), p. 248. Sidney Webb, Socialism in Great Britain (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1890), refers to Marx and Engels but not to the early British socialists (pp. 19, 85).

[50] See H. S. Foxwell's introduction to Anton Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1962 [1899]), p. cii; Dona Torr, Tom Mann and His Times , Volume One (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), p. 183. The idea for this paragraph heavily relies upon the research of Noel Thompson in The People's Science , op. cit., p. 83.

[51] Menger, op. cit., p. cxv.

[52] Ibid., pp. 101–102.

The English translation of Menger's work about Marx earned broad attention. In this circuitous manner the British became aware of their own early socialists. These pioneering socialists were brought back from the dead by the writings of the dead, through Menger's excavations of the deceased Marx.^[53] The roundabout rediscovery left its trace in language. When Foxwell highlighted the similarities between Ricardo's theory and those of the early British socialist economists,^[54] he helped establish the appellation "Ricardian socialists" for the popular British economists, following Marx's categorization of economic history.^[55] As everyone knows, Marx's commentary and elaborations on Ricardo lauded him as the most important advocate of the labor theory of value on which the early British socialists seemed to build. The label "Ricardian socialists" became a permanent, though deceptive, term of reference.^[56] It was misleading insofar as the British socialist economists rarely alluded to Ricardo, but made frequent reference to Adam Smith.^[57] Their preoccupation with the process of exchange resonated more strongly with Smith's rich descriptions of commercial transactions than with Ricardo's abstract models of the costs of production.^[58] By looking at their early writers as "Ricardian socialists," the British rediscoverers viewed their heritage from the standpoint of Marx, who, more than the early Brit-

[53] See the earliest known reference to "Ricardian socialists" in N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 84 note 5. See also Beatrice Webb, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1891), p. 47; Foxwell in Menger, op. cit., pp. iii–iv. Engels placed even the Owenite movement among the Ricardian school. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), p. 20.

[54] Foxwell in Menger, op. cit., pp. xl–xlii.

[55] N. Thompson, The People's Science , op. cit., p. 84.

[56] Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 583.

[57] I am indebted to Noel Thompson for this observation. See "Ricardian Socialists/Smithian Socialists: What's in a Name," in his The People's Science , op. cit., Chapter Four. Esther Lowenthal was among the first to remark upon the discrepancy between appellation and content in The Ricardian Socialists (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972 [1911]), p. 103.

[58] King, op. cit., p. 346. Yet the British socialists could perhaps have found just as much support in Ricardo as in Smith for their view that exploitation occurred in the market. The notion that exploitation took place when exchanges did not properly balance the quantities of labor being traded rested on a comparison of the quantities of labor expended on the product—an analysis thoroughly consistent with Ricardo. Ricardo's theory also set up the exchange of equals for equals as a standard. That the early British socialists developed Smith's ideas more than Ricardo's has perhaps more to do with the possibilities of development opened up by these two founders' presentation than with their respective definitions of how labor determined values. Cf. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. xxv.

ish socialists themselves had done, proceeded by developing the problematic suggested by Ricardo's theory.^[59]

Whereas Marx overlooked what was distinctively German about his thinking by deriving his conclusions from English economic history, the later British socialists overlooked what was distinctively British about the thinking of the early socialists in their own land by looking at them through the legacy of Marx. In a sense, Marx was a more faithful successor to Ricardo than the early British socialists were, since only he rigorously pursued Ricardo's emphasis on the labor invested at the point of production as the ultimate determinant of value. It was by a process of cross-cultural development, in which thinkers in each country expressed their own life experience in how they appropriated concepts from another land, that the later British socialists came into contact with their native predecessors.

More specifically, by accepting Marx's view of himself as a successor to the heritage of British political economy, the British socialists at the end of the nineteenth century failed to appreciate how Marx's account of the extraction of surplus from labor power at the point of production diverged from the early British socialists' preoccupation with exchange in the marketplace. They therefore acted as though they were condemned to rebuild an edifice that had been erected by their forebears. They supposed that Marx, like themselves, believed that the market comprised the site of exploitation and that labor was transferred as if it were concretized in a ware.^[60] Foxwell said that after a half-century of neglect, the ideas of the original socialists survived because they "remained germinating in the minds of Marx and Engels."^[61]

If the popular political economy of the newly emergent socialism in Britain at the end of the century and that created near its beginning contained parallel concepts of labor, how are we to explain this family resemblance? The similarity cannot be explained by a continuity of intellectual tradition or by the inertia of ideas among a literate elite. Instead, it points to similarities in the social environments. In particular, the specification of labor as a commodity, reproduced in everyday practice on the shop floor, came to the fore in both British movements' understanding of capitalist

[59] Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 45.

[60] Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 161.

[61] Cited in Richard Pankhurst, William Thompson (London: Watts & Co., 1954), p. 217.

exploitation. What the British labor movement had forgotten about its past it was bound to repeat.^[62]

The rebirth of socialist movements in the textile towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire illustrates the popular footing of the movements and the distinguishing features of their understanding of wage labor. Yorkshire served as the home base of the Independent Labour Party, perhaps the most influential propagator of a renewed socialism. The organization was tied to the textile mills from the start, for the first group of workers in Yorkshire to propose the establishment of a union in order to run independent labor candidates in local and parliamentary elections was assembled during 1891 in the weaving town of Slaithwaite. The earliest meetings of this group, the predecessor of the Independent Labour Party, were attended largely by weavers.^[63] As its name suggested, the association began with the simple objective of breaking with the Liberal Party to secure autonomous representation for workers. Many of its elected committee members, however, were already convinced socialists, as were the speakers at the local labor clubs sponsored by the new organization.^[64] When the delegates from likeminded committees in other provinces assembled in Bradford in 1893 to found the Independent Labour Party as a national organization, they counted "socialism" and the communal ownership of production among their goals.^[65]

The ideals of this labor party emerged through grass-roots debate, not through the speculations of a few intellectuals. The independent labor movement in Yorkshire inspired the growth of an extensive network of

[62] The immobility of theory in Britain rests upon the continuity, not of ideas, but of practices. Ideology has no history in its own right.

[63] Archive of the Huddersfield Polytechnic Labour Collection, "Jubilee Souvenir: History of the Colne Valley Labour Party," p. 5. Textile workers also dominated the executive committee elected at the meeting. David Clark, Colne Valley: Radicalism to Socialism (London: Longman, 1981), p. 19.

[64] Clark, op. cit., p. 33.

[65] See the transcript of the debate at the founding meeting of the Independent Labour Party reprinted in Henry Pelling, editor, The Challenge of Socialism (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1968), pp. 187–189; James Hinton, Labour and Socialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), pp. 58, 75; Stanley Pierson, British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 37. Bradford's significance in the rise of this party can be gauged from its share of national membership dues. In 1895 Bradford provided one-sixth of the party's affiliation fees. J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, "The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford," International Review of Social History Volume 20, Part 3 (1975), p. 315. E. P. Thompson makes a strong case for the dynamic of local factors and for the contribution of Yorkshire to the development of the Independent Labour Party in "Homage to Tom Maguire," in Asa Briggs and John Saville, editors, Essays in Labour History (London: Macmillan & Co., 1960), p. 277.

neighborhood labor clubs, especially in textile towns.^[66] The clubs competed with taverns as places where workers could meet to talk after work. In them, workers were able to discuss socialist ideas. In 1892, twenty-three labor clubs, with about three thousand members, operated in Bradford alone. By 1895, the Independent Labour Party claimed thirty-five thousand members.^[67] Before the First World War, the Yorkshire textile districts provided the setting for some of the party's most significant electoral successes.^[68] By 1907 the party had managed to elect Labour M.P.'s from Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, and the Colne Valley, as well as representatives to municipal and county government in the region.^[69]

The textile unions were linked to the socialist campaigns not by geographic coincidence but by personnel. The leaders of the principal textile union in Yorkshire, the West Riding Power Loom Weavers' Association, also worked for the new labor party. Ben Turner, Allen Gee, and J. W. Downing, for example, worked for the committee for labor representation in Slaithwaite as early as 1891.^[70] The textile workers in Yorkshire adopted socialist ideas as their own during the 1890s.^[71] In Yeadon, the Factory Workers' Union, a purely local association whose membership consisted of weavers, dyers, and spinners, adopted the songbooks and message of the independent labor movement. The union's goal, the secretary said, was to help workers find their "social salvation."^[72] A correspondent to the Yorkshire Factory Times in 1914 assumed that the textile unions were vehicles for social trans-

[66] Ben Turner, About Myself 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930), p. 80.

[67] Hinton, op. cit., pp. 58, 60.

[68] Keith Laybourn, "The Attitude of the Yorkshire Trade Unions to the Economic and Social Problems of the Great Depression, 1873–1896," Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 1973, p. 451.

[69] Frank Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1958), p. 292; T. L. Jarman, Socialism in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), p. 89. On local representatives, see Turner, op. cit., p. 176, and Keith Laybourn, " 'The Defence of the Bottom Dog': The Independent Labour Party in Local Politics," in Wright and Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford , op. cit., p. 224. For George Garside's early election to the County Council in Slaithwaite in 1892, see Yorkshire Factory Times , February 26, 1904.

[70] Clark, op. cit., p. 23. Ben Turner also lists members of the early Socialist Club in Leeds who later became trade union leaders. Op. cit., p. 79. See also Robert Brian Perks, "The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1885–1914," Ph.D. diss., Huddersfield Polytechnic, 1985, p. 53.

[71] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth speech, p. 7; speech at Batley by Ben Turner, Yorkshire Factory Times , December 21, 1894, p. 8. In some towns of Lancashire, too, the organizers of the Independent Labour Party also worked for the local textile union. Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. C1P, born 1894, Preston, p. 20.

[72] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Headquarters, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 25, 1899.

formation, not just effective negotiation. "Organized working men," he said, "wish to use Trade Unionism as a means for ending the present conditions of society."^[73]

In Lancashire the admission of socialist ideas was more localized. They were perhaps received most enthusiastically in the Clitheroe district, which originally represented an outpost of liberalism in a large region captive to the Tory party. The district included the textile centers of Nelson, Burnley, and Colne. The quarterly report of the Nelson weavers for 1902 expressed the break that textile workers in this region had made with the bread-and-butter politics of conservative unions in other Lancashire districts. "Therefore, let us workers sink our little differences and go hand in hand and return representatives to Parliament and on all public bodies from our class," the Nelson union stated in the conclusion of its report, "and show the capitalist class that we are determined not to have them as our representatives any longer."^[74] To be sure, the textile workers in the unions of the Clitheroe district belonged to the United Textile Factory Workers' Association, one of Lancashire's ossified, conservative unions. At the same time, however, the local textile unions could affiliate themselves with a political party without receiving approval from the central office.^[75] The Nelson weavers attended the founding conference of the Labour Party in 1900. In 1902 the parliamentary constituency of Clitheroe elected the vice-president of the Weavers' Amalgamation as the first Labour M.P. in the north of England.^[76]

Blackburn represented another outpost of the socialist movement in Lancashire. Many weavers there were tied to the Social Democratic Federation, an avowedly Marxist league founded in 1881.^[77] If the best indicator of a movement's influence is the number of attempts to organize an

[73] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 1, 1914, p. 4. Similarly, see Yorkshire Factory Times , May 13, 1892, Oakworth.

[74] Bealey and Pelling, op. cit., p. 105.

[75] Town branches also elected socialist spokespersons: a member of the Social Democratic Federation served as vice-president of the Burnley Weavers' Association in 1895. Chushichi Tsuzuki, H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 99.

[76] Alan Fowler and Lesley Fowler, The History of the Nelson Weavers Association (Nelson: Burnley, Nelson, Rossendale & District Textile Workers Union, 1989), p. 16. For the weavers' support of an independent labor party in the conservative Preston district, see Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 154.

[77] In 1895 the Social Democratic Federation claimed 10,500 members in the United Kingdom. Hinton, op. cit., pp. 41, 60.

opposition, then the socialists in the textile unions were becoming a power with which to reckon. Textile workers in Blackburn who wanted to distinguish themselves from the socialists, who allegedly controlled the main textile union in town, founded a separate city union in 1912.^[78] Before the First World War, the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile regions provided the major base of support—the votes, the financing, and the ideas—for the emerging socialist groups.^[79]

The recreated socialist movement in Britain propagated what its members considered a novel, reinvigorated political economy. The socialist journals of the textile communities published regular columns, sometimes composed in simple language, that analyzed the origin of profit. The Bradford Socialist Vanguard even adopted the graces of dialect: in 1908 it told its readers, "Capital is nobbut stoored up labour."^[80] In the wool districts even the staple Yorkshire Factory Times recounted the lectures and debates over labor theories of value that were sponsored by the workers' clubs.^[81] The autobiographies of former textile workers describe workers' eager consumption of economic theory.^[82]

In the populist newspapers' rejuvenated discussions of the exploitation of labor, the portrayal of the capitalist evolved but did not depart from the essential form it had assumed in early British socialism. The capitalist became a financier who received a profit by charging interest on industrial investment or by coercing the worker to pay a rent for the use of the tools of production. The cause of the exploitation, the Blackburn Labour Journal said in 1900, is that "the capitalists permit you to use the means of production on certain terms."^[83] The workers paid a surcharge to use the means of production, but in this theory the capitalist did not occupy a special role as

[78] Blackburn Times , June 15, 1912.

[79] Deian Hopkin, "The Membership of the Independent Labour Party, 1904–1910," International Review of Social History Volume 20, Part Two (1975), p. 182; Bealey and Pelling, op. cit.; Pierson, op. cit., p. 46. For statistics on the geographic concentration of Labour's vote in municipal elections, see M. G. Sheppard and John L. Halstead, "Labour's Municipal Election Performance in Provincial England and Wales 1901–13," Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin Number 39 (Autumn 1979), p. 56. It may also be true, however, that among the textile labor force only a minority of workers supported socialist causes.

[80] Bradford Socialist Vanguard (December 1908).

[81] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 10, 1912; February 1, 1895, Bradford.

[82] Isaac Binns, From Village to Town (Batley: E. H. Purchas, n.d. [ca. 1882]). Sherwin Stephenson, "The Chronicles of a Shop Man," Bradford Library Archives, pp. 94, 197. For other references to popular beliefs about political economy, see R. V. Clements, "British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy 1850–1875," Economic History Review Volume XIV, Number 1 (August 1961), p. 102.

[83] Blackburn Labour Journal (June 1900).

the director of production.^[84] Although workers in their concrete complaints criticized their subordination to the mill owners, in their discourse of economic reform the capitalist's organization of work and his exercise of authority at the point of production did not appear as essential conditions for the extraction of profit.^[85] Instead, the surplus extracted by the capitalist was secured like a kind of rent: the capitalist, like the landowner, secured profit at a remove as a deduction from the product of the worker.^[86] The "explanation" for exploitation, the Blackburn Labour Journal said, is simple: "We allow a certain class to own all the land in the country. These landowners do not allow the land to be used unless a large share of what is produced is given up to them in the form of rent. The same remark applies to machinery. Unless a big profit can be made for the capitalists who own the machinery, they refuse to allow it to be used."^[87] By this reasoning, laborers who had no need of tools owned by another person were fortunate indeed, for even if these laborers were subordinated to an employer they could escape exploitation.^[88]

In the resuscitated socialist movement the capitalists were portrayed as usurious lenders, empowered by the unequal division of wealth to manipulate exchange relations in the market.^[89] In this respect, just as in the economic theories of early British socialism, so in those of the century's end the

[84] See, for example, the discussion at a meeting of workers in 1894, where the capitalist was portrayed as a usurious lender who bargains thus: "I will allow you to use these tools on condition that you keep me without working." Keighley ILP Journal , February 4, 1894. The formulation is not essentially changed from that presented by Adam Smith, who thought that the workers "stand in need" of the capitalist to "advance them the materials of their work, and their wages and maintenance till it be compleated." An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]), pp. 73–74.

[85] These British formulations contrast with those of the German literature, such as Kautsky's widely read popularization of Marx, which emphasized that "the means of production serve above all the goal of absorbing into themselves the labor power of the worker." Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), p. 121.

[86] The rich were those "who monopolise the land and capital, who thereby control labour and compel it to surrender to them its products, saving a bare pittance." The Labour Journal , October 14, 1892. Sometimes the analogy between the rent of the landowner and the interest paid to the capitalist allowed workers to conceive of the control of land as the original source of profit. The program of the Independent Labour Party in 1895 called for nationalization of land, not of industry.

[87] Blackburn Labour Journal (September 1898). Even the British Socialist Party judged that "agriculture is most important and most valuable of all industries." The Pioneer (February 1914), "Socialist Land Policy."

[88] Bradford Labour Echo , November 19, 1898.

[89] Philip Snowden, Socialism and Syndicalism (Baltimore: Warwick & York), p. 167.

capitalist could be likened to a middleman.^[90] The capitalist controlled the marketing of products by forcing laborers to use the means of production that he owned. The Burnley Gazette , in a column intended to explain why the attainment of higher wages represented an inadequate solution to workers' poverty, also exposed its understanding of exploitation. Socialism offers the only solution, it said, because a rise in wages does not "catch the profit-monger in the labour market."^[91] The Bradford Labour Echo , organ of the Bradford Independent Labour Party, told workers in 1898 that they were exploited because "all sorts of middle-men" cut workers out of the full value of the product.^[92] Robert Blatchford's Merrie England , published in 1894, one of the most widely distributed books that sought to revive the theoretic analysis of the exploitation of labor, succinctly identified the extraction of profit: "As a rule, profit is not made by the producer of an article, but by some other person commonly called 'the middleman' because he goes between the producer and the consumer; that is to say, he, the middleman, buys the article from the maker, and sells it to the user, at a profit." Blatchford went on to define all middlemen as capitalists.^[93]

Even the Social Democratic Federation, an organization which saw itself as the most loyal disseminator of Marxist ideas, supposed that the market was the site of exploitation. James L. Joynes, who translated into English Marx's Lohnarbeit und Kapital ("Wage Labour and Capital" ), also wrote "The Socialist Catechism," a sixteen-page pamphlet that served as perhaps the most influential introduction to socialist economic theory in Britain during the 1880s. In it Joynes argued that capitalism was distinctive because

[90] Allen Clarke's description of the operatives of Bolton in 1899 treated the source of profit as in "trade" rather than "manufacture." The workers, Clarke said, "think that the masters build factories and workshops not to make a living for themselves by trading but in order to find the people employment." Quoted in Joyce, Work, Society and Politics , op. cit., p. 90, emphasis added. Ben Turner said he did not condemn employers, only "the system under which employers in the district traded. " Yorkshire Factory Times , December 11, 1903, p. 6. Emphasis added.

[91] Burnley Gazette , August 5, 1893.

[92] Bradford Labour Echo , April 9, 1898. Sometimes the revived socialist movement supposed that the stabilization of wages at subsistence level represented, not the sale of labor (power) at the cost of its reproduction, but the remainder left to workers after miscellaneous middlemen completed their thievery. "Before getting his poor wages home, however, he [the worker] is systematically waylaid by robbers, each one taking various amounts till the last one, the leader, takes all he has left except just sufficient to keep him and his family at work." Bradford Labour Echo , May 9, 1896.

[93] Robert Blatchford, Merrie England: A Series of Letters to John Smith of Oldham—a Practical Working Man (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966 [1894]), pp. 82–83, 84.

exploitation arose from market forces rather than custom.^[94] Even the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, Hyndman, who was attempting to follow Marx's account of the generation of surplus value, tellingly misrepresented it in The Historical Basis of Socialism in England , published in 1883. To clarify the word Arbeitskraft , Hyndman introduced the clumsy translation "force of labour," which of course never acquired currency.^[95] Hyndman did not present the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor power or the fact that the capitalist paid the worker the full exchange value of his ware. Stripped of these ideas, the elaborate phrase "force of labour" served no function in his presentation. Instead, he emphasized that the capitalist was able to buy labor power, in contrast to machinery and raw materials, "on the cheap," due to the competition among workers for subsistence. As a result, the fact that the capitalist can earn a surplus from this "human merchandise" appears to result from overcompetition among workers, which prevents labor from fetching its fair "market price."^[96] Thus the leading British proponent of Marxist economics transformed the theory of exploitation into market cheating.^[97]

[94] Henry Collins, "The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation," in Asa Briggs and John Saville, editors, Essays in Labour History 1886–1923 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971), p. 52.

[95] Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism , op. cit., pp. 113, 114, 116.

[96] Ibid., pp. 119–122. "Everything else which is needed for the purposes of production—raw material, machinery, &c.—have been bought by the capitalist at their actual market value and paid for at their actual market price. It is from labour only, the labour-force of human beings compelled to compete against one another for a bare subsistence wage, that the actual employer derives his surplus value, and the merchant, &c., his profit" (pp. 119–120). The British Marxists, including Hyndman, retained a belief in the iron law of wages even when the writings by Marx available to them repudiated it. This follows from their interpretation of Marx as a theorist of market exploitation. In their understanding, the capitalist realizes a profit only if the competition among workers forces the price of labor down to subsistence, thus to below its real value. Their adherence to the iron law of wages results not from ignorance of Marx but from the internal logic of the market-based understanding of exploitation which they derived from Marx. For explicit reference to the "iron law of wages" and the logic behind its retention, see ibid., pp. 118–119. For evidence that the British Marxists retained a belief in this iron law after they most certainly must have known that Marx rejected it, see Collins, op. cit., pp. 52–53.

[97] In The Economics of Socialism , written a decade later, Hyndman renders Marx's theory more cogently. He emphasizes that the employer purchases labor power at its full exchange value. But again he fails to make a distinction between labor's value in use and in exchange. Instead, he reasons that unlimited competition among workers forces wages down to subsistence level, whereas workers produce more than they need for the reproduction of their labor power. Since the moment of the employer's exercise of authority to exploit the use value of labor at the point of production disappears from Hyndman's analysis, in his view the extraction of surplus depends upon the power of market forces to depress wages. The Economics of Socialism (London: The Twentieth Century Press, 1909), pp. 83, 97. In his memoirsHyndman again focuses on the market as the locus of exploitation: British workers would continue to live in poverty, he said, "as long as competition for mere subsistence ruled in the labour market.  . . . The dominant classes are no fools. They know perfectly well that if sweating were abolished and unemployment ceased to be, the whole capitalist system would be doomed." Henry Hyndman, Further Reminiscences (London: Macmillan & Co., 1912), p. 18.

The socialist press emphasized that the capitalist's purchase of labor was in essence like that of the home consumer's purchase of finished products. The only difference was that the capitalist used his ownership of the implements of production and his position in the market to devise an unfair exchange. "Every child who buys a pennyworth of nuts or toffee in a tuckshop is, in one and a true sense, an employer of labour," the Bradford Labour Echo claimed in 1898. "But, though every buyer, as such is, like this child, an employer of labor, he is not an interceptor of part of his employees' earnings, nor therefore an earner of 'employers' ' profits."^[98] The products the capitalists purchased at an unfairly depressed price they resold at an inflated one. The emphasis on the "seizure" of profits by controlling the price at which finished goods were sold in the market tallied with the view prevailing among British socialists that labor was transferred to the capitalist as it was concretized in a ware.^[99]

As in the original socialist movement, so in the second a significant body of workers looked upon the assurance of fair exchanges not as the result of socialism but as socialism's very goal. The Labour Journal of Bradford imagined that variations in individuals' work effort would lead to variations in their income under socialism. But unequal income would no longer result from unequal exchange. "The sum of socialism," it claimed in 1892, "is equal economic opportunities for all, and then the reward proportioned to the use individually made of such equal opportunities."^[100] Many socialists' vision of the future rested on the presumption that both the injuries of capitalism and the justice of the coming order rested on equitable transfers in the sphere of exchange.^[101]

[98] Bradford Labour Echo , November 26, 1898.

[99] The Bradford Labour Echo said that capitalists confiscate "the annual produce of the workers." Bradford Labour Echo , April 13, 1895. Correlatively, Ben Turner, an early convert to socialism and a leader of the Yorkshire textile unions, said that the profit was made on cloth, not labor. Turner, op. cit., p. 105.

[100] The Labour Journal , December 2, 1892, Bradford.

[101] The understanding of the labor transaction as the sale and resale of materialized labor, born in the British experience of commercialization, also informed the later elaborations of British academics. Richard H. Tawney exemplified it in his misinterpretation of Marx, imposing on him the British understanding of the exploitation of labor. Marx, he said, did not castigate the honest merchant. According to Tawney, Marx believed that "the unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitationof public necessities." Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: New American Library, 1954 [1926]), p. 38.

Economic Ideologies in the Workers' Movements of Germany

Workers' debates about political economy in Germany during the revolution of 1848–1849 did not inspire the formation of a group of thinkers so renowned as the so-called Ricardian socialists in Britain. Due perhaps to the legacy of corporate regulation in the urban crafts trades in Germany, the artisans who spearheaded the workers' movement there never expressed the degree of interest in formal theories of capitalist exploitation that their counterparts in the early British socialist movement did.^[102] When the labor periodicals which blossomed in the revolution analyzed the sources of workers' impoverishment, however, their portrayal of the labor transaction varied from the start from that of the British. The revolutionary press in Germany generally viewed the concentration of capital not as the result of ruinous exchange in the market but as its cause.^[103] It acknowledged that market forces reshaped the landscape, but market transactions themselves did not appear to it to comprise the site of exploitation.^[104] For example, the Cologne newspaper Freiheit, Arbeit declared in 1849 that the wealthy profited not just through trade but by "the administration of work" and by "guiding the manufacture" of products.^[105] It portrayed the subordination of labor in the workshop as a mechanism in its own right for extracting profit. In Die Verbrüderung the correspondent Oskar Stobek declared in 1850 that workers engaged in the workshops of superiors were exploited because they

[102] Only upon the reestablishment of political movements in the 1860s did urban artisans begin to adopt the discourse of liberal political economy. Friedrich Lenger, Zwischen Kleinbürgertum und Proletariat (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 195.

[103] P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 240–241.

[104] Arbeiter-Blatt , from the textile district of Lennep, edited by members of the local workers' association, portrayed the market as a medium that reflected circumstances disadvantageous to workers, not as the cause of unequal exchange. The newspaper cited wage-depressing factors in Germany, including the abundance of landless, dependent laborers and the stiffening competition that hand workers faced from domestic and foreign machine production. December 3, 1848. In these dire circumstances, the newspaper believed, society needed to protect workers' only property, their labor, from exploitation in the workplace. It did not focus on the moment of exchange itself. Das Arbeiter-Blatt , October 29, 1848.

[105] The wealthy controlled the "valorization" of "talent and labor power." "Materielle Noth," in Freiheit, Arbeit , February 11, 1849, pp. 36–37. For a discussion of workers' contributions to the content of this journal, see Michael Vester et al., editors, Gibt es einen "Wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus"? (Hannover: SOAK Verlag, 1979), p. 64.

were paid only for elapsed time on the premises, not for the value of the output.^[106]

When the German workers' press referred to commercial investment, it revealed some fundamental differences from the British. German writers offered a prescient distinction between money and capital. In 1850 the national organ of the German workers' associations asked, "By what do the people live, who claim that they pay taxes for support of workers? Simply by the circumstance that they use the labor power [Arbeitskraft ] of the worker to get the greatest possible use from their money and to elevate the money to the status of capital."^[107] In a word, money became capital when it employed labor in the production process.^[108] In Britain, by contrast, some writers in the same era made no distinction between money and capital,^[109] whereas others supposed that capital referred to any material holding, such as a house, without necessarily entailing an intervention in production.^[110] The definition of capital that prevailed in the German workers' press during the revolution emphasized its engagement with labor at the point of production, a necessary step for conceiving of the appropriation of surplus at this site. The convention of masters and business persons that met in Frankfurt during July and August, 1848, defined a capitalist not as a shady dealer in the realm of exchange but as a "producer who profiteers with labor power."^[111]

In Britain the emphasis on the realm of exchange as the locus of exploitation led spokespersons for workers to devote great attention to the use of money as a form of trickery. Reliance on the artificial symbols of pounds and pence, John Bray averred in Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy , allowed people to avoid exchanging equal quantities of labor for labor.^[112]

[106] Die Verbrüderung , December 5, 1850, p. 74.

[107] Die Verbrüderung , April 13, 1850, p. 114.

[108] "Grundzüge eines Systems, um Kapital zu sammeln," Arbeiter-Zeitung , February 22, 1863.

[109] The Operative , February 3, 1839.

[110] Bray, op. cit., pp. 140–141. John Gray said that the difference between money and capital is between the currency and physical items, including consumer goods. Gray, Lectures , op. cit., pp. 196–197.

[111] Deutscher Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress, Entwurf einer allgemeinen Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Ordnung für Deutschland: Berathen und beschlossen von dem Handwerker- und Gewerbe-Congress zu Frankfurt am Main im Juli und August 1848 (Hamburg, 1848), p. 5.

[112] Bray, op. cit., p. 153. In the 1830s leaflet "The Workings of Money Capital," an anonymous author explains that capital yields a profit because it "buys goods dishonestly obtained." Manchester Library Archives.

Workers believed they could eliminate exploitation by effecting their transactions in labor notes denoting time rather than resorting to currency, as their support for the ill-fated labor-exchange movement illustrated.^[113] German workers, by comparison, did not focus on the use of money per se as a contributor to exploitation, since they did not see the mechanism of exchange as the crucial arbiter of their fate.

The chronology of the development of socialist ideas in Germany nonetheless displays a basic parallelism with that of Britain: in both countries, an early socialist movement was extinguished in the first half of the nineteenth century and a new one born in the second half. During the repression of the 1850s the German states succeeded in dismantling most of the labor organizations, such as Stephan Born's German workers' association, which had introduced workers to socialist ideas during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849. When the German labor movement reemerged in the 1860s, the leaflets about the exploitation of labor with which workers were most likely to come into contact were those of Ferdinand Lassalle.^[114] In his autobiography August Bebel testified that, "Like almost all others who were socialists back then, I came to Marx by way of Lassalle. Lassalle's writings were in our hands long before we knew one writing of Marx and Engels."^[115]

Lassalle emphasized that the use value of a good regulated its distribution in precommercial society, whereas its exchange value regulated its distribution in capitalist society.^[116] Consequently, he could not seize upon the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor in the capitalist epoch to specify the extraction of surplus at the point of production, as Marx did. Unlike the early British socialists, Lassalle did not envision that the exploitation of labor occurred in the marketplace. He supposed

[113] The outlook of the labor exchange movement can be gleaned from the very title of William King's pamphlet: The Circulating Medium and the Present Mode of Exchange the Cause of Increasing Distress Amongst the Productive Classes: and an Effective Measure for Their Immediate and Permanent Relief Pointed Out in the Universal Establishment of Labour Banks, in Which All the Business of Life May Be Transacted Without Money (London: William Dent, 1832). For the statutes governing the exchange of labor time certificates at such an organization, see Equitable Labour Exchange, Rules and Regulations of the Equitable Labour Exchange, Gray's Inn Road, London: for the Purpose of Relieving the Productive Classes from Poverty, by Their Own Industry and for the Mutual Exchange of Labour for Equal Value of Labour (London: Equitable Labour Exchange, 1832).

[114] Jorke, op. cit., p. 10, 18; Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International 1864–1872 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 124.

[115] August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben , Part One (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1910), p. 131.

[116] Tatiana Grigorovici, Die Wertlehre bei Marx und Lassalle (Wien: Ignaz Brand & Co., 1910), pp. 63–64.

that the capitalist made a profit by controlling, like a feudal lord, "the will and acts" of workers under his authority.^[117] Lassalle and his followers, like British socialists, believed the capitalist employer made a profit by buying cheap and selling dear, but in addition they supposed that the employer's ability to do this depended upon his authority at the point of production.

In keeping with this outlook, Lassalle supposed that profit represented merely a deduction from the labor output. The Lassallians demanded that workers receive the full "return" of their labor, but they used the ambiguous term Ertrag , which did not refer clearly to either the product or the value of the work.^[118] In contrast to the early socialist movement in Britain, which had supposed that the workers' retention of the value of their labor through equal exchange would lead to the workers' acquisition of capital, the Lassallian movement made the acquisition of capital by the workers' cooperatives the necessary starting point for workers to receive the value of their labor.^[119] Lassalle's theory shows that even when the German labor movement lacked Marx's striking elucidation of the appropriation of surplus value in production, it did not focus upon unequal exchange in the product market as the locus of exploitation.

After the publication of Kapital , Lassalle's followers quickly adopted Marx's analysis of the capitalist employment relation, even though Marx had modified Lassalle's earlier presentation.^[120] The Social-Demokrat , organ of the Lassallians, succinctly identified Marx's innovation: the worker, this journal explained, "instead of being able to incarnate his labor into a ware,

[117] Lassalles Reden und Schriften , ed. Eduard Bernstein (Berlin: Verlag des 'Vorwärts,' 1893), Volume 3, p. 180 and, correlatively, p. 798.

[118] On the imprecision of the term Ertrag , see Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Moskau: Verlag für fremdsprachige Literatur, 1941), p. 20.

[119] Lassalle assumed that the production cooperatives he advocated would develop with the support of a socialist state, not simply through workers' frugality and the retention of labor's produce. Ulrich Engelhardt, "Nur vereinigt sind wir stark": Die Anfänge der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung 1862/63 bis 1869/70 , Volume One (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1977), p. 329.

[120] Hannes Skambraks, "Das Kapital" von Marx—Waffe im Klassenkampf (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977), p. 104; Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, reprinted in Rolf Dlubek and Hannes Skambraks, editors, "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: 1867 bis 1878 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), p. 180. Von Schweitzer deduced from Marx's analysis that even a "just" employer, who paid labor power its full value in the market, nonetheless appropriated surplus value from the worker. Therefore demands for market "justice" would not protect workers. Cora Stephan, "Genossen, wir dürfen uns nicht von der Geduld hinreissen lassen!" (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1977), p. 212. German analysts adopted Marx's appreciation of the sale of labor power even when they did not accept other portions of Marx's political agenda and diagnosis. Skambraks, op. cit., pp. 104, 106, 126–127, 142–143.

must consequently sell his labor power itself. The value of this labor power itself is determined not by the value that it creates and can create , but by the value required to produce and maintain it."^[121] The columns of the Social-Demokrat emphasized that the site of production, not the market, represented the locus of exploitation. In 1870 the journal said that "the exchange of commodities in proportion to the labor they contain does not at all rule out the exploitation of labor power by capital; rather, it provides the basis on which it [exploitation] can develop."^[122] After the appearance of Kapital , the Lassallian journal also highlighted the significance that could be attached to the locution Arbeitskraft even when the subject matter was not economic theory. For example, an article on commercial development said that labor had become a commodity, but then added a clarification: "To put it more exactly, labor power is a commodity."^[123] By comparison with British misperceptions of Marx, the ready absorption of Marx's analyses and swift revision of Lassalle's economic tenets in Germany suggests that Marx's theory resonated with German experience.^[124]

Of course, only a small minority of the members of the free unions and of the Social Democratic party in Germany concerned themselves with matters of economic theory. Even some of the organizations' top officials, whose time was taken up by party business, paid no attention to Marx's analysis.^[125] In the first decade after the publication of Kapital , party members treated as savants those able to expound the theory at length.^[126] But the creed did not remain occult. In subsequent decades workers interested in Marx's examinations could find abbreviated summaries of his analysis of the production process in popular tracts published by Johann Most, Carl August Schramm, and, after 1887, Karl

[121] Social-Demokrat , February 23, 1868, in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 180. Emphasis in original. Schweitzer's long reviews of Kapital in the Social-Demokrat pivoted on the difference between the exchange value and the use value of labor power. Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, "Das Werk von Karl Marx," Social-Demokrat , no. 25, February 26, 1868, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 181.

[122] Social-Demokrat , May 25, 1871, cited in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[123] Neuer Social-Demokrat (Berlin), July 10, 1874. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 80.

[124] Wilhelm Bracke, once a follower of Lassalle, keenly propagated Marx's concept of the sale and use of labor power. See Der Lassallesche Vorschlag , 1873, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 241.

[125] Morgan, op. cit., pp. 132–133; Stephan, op. cit., p. 202. But Stephan catalogues a lengthy roster of Social Democrats who did read Kapital soon after its appearance.

[126] Steinberg, op. cit., p. 17.

Kautsky.^[127] Unlike the popularizations of Marx published in Britain, those in Germany remained true to his distinctive conception of labor as a commodity and to his theorization of exploitation at the site of production.^[128] The records of the libraries of workers' associations and of party libraries around the turn of the century show that Kautsky's popularization of the new theory of exploitation, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren ("Karl Marx's Economic Theories") , was frequently borrowed.^[129] Over 40 percent of the textile and metal workers who responded to the survey of workers' attitudes initiated by Adolf Levenstein in 1907 reported that they read socialist and trade union literature, including several who said they had read Das Kapital or other economic writings by Marx in the original edition.^[130]

How well could workers comprehend Marx's prose? The libraries of the workers' associations and of the Social Democratic party lent many copies of Marx's Kapital , but clerks at the lending institutions claimed few readers succeeded in digesting the material.^[131] Not all workers were mystified by the thinker in the original, however. In her luminous autobiography, Ottilie Baader reports that Marx's Kapital was the first socialist book with which she came into contact as a sewing machine worker during the period of the anti-socialist laws. Baader said she studied it to great profit, first with family

[127] Ibid., pp. 17, 130. For a discussion of other influential popularizations of Kapital , see Rolf Dlubek, "Die Rolle des 'Kapitals' bei der Durchsetzung des Marxismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung," in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels Forschung , Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), p. 47. Members of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein, Lassalle's organization, wrote extensive reviews of Das Kapital for popular newspapers. Heinrich Leonard, Wilhelm Bracke: Leben und Wirken (Braunschweig: H. Rieke & Co., 1930), p. 16. The secondhand discussions of Kapital saved the book from the oblivion into which the low sales of the original would have cast it. On the original's marketing, see Steinberg, op. cit., p. 21 note.

[128] August Geib's pamphlet on the Normalarbeitstag also uses the term Arbeitskraft to distinguish between the use value and the exchange value of the workers' only commodity. Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., p. 211. See also the 1873 edition of Johann Most's Kapital und Arbeit: "Das Kapital" in einer handlichen Zusammenfassung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 27, reprinted in Dlubek and Skambraks, editors, op. cit., pp. 276–279. Although the 1873 edition captured the distinction between use and exchange values of labor, it contained other misrepresentations, which Marx corrected in the edition of 1876. Dlubek, op. cit., p. 27.

[129] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–139. On the influence of Kautsky's popularization of the first volume of Kapital , see Erich Matthias, "Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus," Marxismus-Studien , second series (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1957), p. 156, and Hans-Josef Steinberg's introduction to Karl Kautsky, Karl Marx' ökonomische Lehren (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), p. xiv.

[130] Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), pp. 393–403.

[131] Steinberg, op. cit., pp. 130–137.

members and later in reading groups of socialist women.^[132] Testimony such as hers, in conjunction with the pattern of library lendings, suggests that a significant minority of educated workers had a serious encounter with Marx's theory of exploitation in the capitalist labor process.^[133]

Workers did not absorb Marx's ideas only in solitude, through texts. Members of workers' associations discussed Kapital soon after its publication. In Magdeburg, the cooper Julis Bremer announced a lecture to the workers' education club in Magdeburg on Marx's Kapital just five months after the book's appearance. In the next three years, programs of the Social Democratic workers' association there included the work frequently enough that the local liberal newspaper, the Magdeburgische Zeitung , took fright at the "propositions" of Karl Marx that "were interpreted and demonstrated."^[134]

During the period of union expansion in the two decades before the First World War, the newspapers and conferences of the Social Democratic (or "free") textile unions faithfully adopted the Marxist theory of the extraction of surplus. Local branches held meetings for workers on such topics as "The Value of Labor Power."^[135] The journal of the German textile union, Der Textil-Arbeiter , used the general term labor to describe the factors necessary for production but referred to labor power in the context of the employment relation.^[136]Der Textil-Arbeiter also emphasized that workers were exploited separately as "producers" at work and as "consumers" in the

[132] Ottilie Baader, Ein steiniger Weg: Lebenserinnerungen einer Sozialistin (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1979 [1921]), pp. 23, 25, 36.

[133] Workers' letters to Marx upon reading Kapital are listed in Eike Kopf, "Die Ideen des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx werden zur materiellen Gewalt: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des 'Kapitals' in Deutschland bis 1872," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena , Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, Volume 17, Number 2 (1968), p. 150.

[134] Hans Bursian, "Über den Einfluss des 'Kapitals' von Karl Marx auf die Magdeburger Arbeiterbewegung, 1869–1871—Forschungsprobleme und Ergebnisse," Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung , Volume 10 (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1968), pp. 115, 117–118. In 1868 at the general conference of the ADAV the representatives heard a presentation of Marx's theory of surplus value and passed a resolution praising Marx's analysis of "the capitalist production process." Jutta Seidel, Wilhelm Bracke: Vom Lassalleaner zum Marxisten (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1966), pp. 40–42.

[135] Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 1, 1902, Adorf. For references to other unions' discussion of terms such as "the commodity of labor power," see Dlubek, op. cit., p. 41.

[136] Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 4, 1904, "Produktion." The "free" unions' newspapers referred to the extraction of unpaid labor time and described the profits of companies as "surplus value." Fach-Zeitung , July 16, 1899, Krefeld; Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 8, 1909, Bautzen.

market who paid taxes and higher prices due to tariffs.^[137] By comparison, the press of the British labor movement did not distinguish so carefully between these two modes of exploitation, but, rather, combined them under the general rubric of unfair exchange in the market.

The assumption that the worker transferred labor to the employer in the form of labor power shaped literate workers' descriptions of their productive activity. Der Textil-Arbeiter treated "labor power" as a detached thing which the capitalist tried to seize. For example, the newspaper enjoined its readers in 1901, "Above all, [your] labor power and [your] very selves must be protected from exploitation."^[138] The phrasing treated labor power as an entity apart from the concrete person and identified its use as the cause of exploitation. At a conference of workers from the jute textile industry in 1906, a representative complained that "the piece rates are arranged so that to achieve the pay of 1.6 marks, the labor power is fully absorbed [by the capitalist]."^[139] Labor power was seen as comprising a real substance which the employer "consumed." The choice of expression shows that even when textile workers did not engage in abstract discussions of political economy, they assumed that their struggles pivoted around the calibrated use of "labor power" in the production process.^[140]

The Practical Foundations for the Reception of Ideology

Where are we to turn for an explanation of the success of the dissemination and development of Marx's theory of exploitation in Germany, but its weakness in Britain? Could the difference in outcomes have resulted merely from

[137] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 26, 1901, p. 1.

[138] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 5, 1901. A representative to the textile workers' national conference in 1891 reported that some workers were shying away from the textile labor market but conveyed this by saying that workers were "witholding their commodity of labor power from the market." Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des ersten deutschen Textilarbeiter-Kongresses (Berlin: Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, n.d.), p. 46. For parallel expressions, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 23, 1909, Aachen. In their discussion of women's labor, the papers likewise objectified the "labor power" as a thing apart from its owner. The organ of the union of German workers' associations reduced female workers to "bearers of purchased labor power." Demokratisches Wochenblatt , January 2, 1869, p. 6. "Capital," said the Textil-Arbeiter , "has in the labor power of the woman found a choice object of exploitation [Ausbeutungsobjekt ]." Sept. 6, 1901.

[139] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, "Die Sklaven des Jute-Kapitals, Protokoll," Jutearbeiter-Konferenz Braunschweig, Oct. 7, 1906, pp. 8–9, Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Berlin.

[140] For an example of a metal worker referring specifically to the appropriation of "labor power," see Levenstein, op. cit., p. 108.

a difference in the supply and dissemination of ideas? Marx's initial volume of Kapital appeared in Germany in 1867, but did not appear in English until the journal To-day , under Hyndman's editorship, began to serialize it in 1885. Kapital lacked an English translation in one volume until the publication of Engels's edition in 1887.^[141] As is well known, Marx remained in contact with key intellectuals of the German labor movement during his long exile in Britain.^[142] Perhaps his ideas triumphed in Germany due to their more vigorous propagation by this intellectual elite, which was in place before the trade union movement took off in Germany. Is it possible that the difference in outcomes had little to do with the cultural horizon of the workers but resulted from differences in the trade union elites and publishing organizations responsible for diffusing ideas?

This line of reasoning does not match the circumstances of ideological development in either Britain or Germany. In Britain the failure of Marxist economic theory resulted, not from ignorance or rejection of Marx, but from misinterpretation. Marx was the single most important writer on economic theory for the revived socialist movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, so much so that opponents of the labor movement in Britain criticized its members for inviting "German" theory into the land.^[143] At his

[141] Tsuzuki, op. cit., p. 60. Apart from stray copies of pamphlets issued by the First International, none of Marx's works were available in English in full until James L. Joynes's edition of Wage-Labour and Capital (London: The Modern Press, 1886) appeared. On the introduction of translations of Marx's works, see also Torr, op. cit., p. 326; Collins, op. cit., p. 59.

[142] Georg Adler, Die Geschichte der ersten sozialpolitischen Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Sauer & Auvermann, 1966 [1885]), pp. 299–300. Yet Marx also had an extensive network of contacts with British trade unionists. See Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan & Co., 1965), especially pp. 93 ff.

[143] As Eric Hobsbawm has put it, "Marxism—or at all events some sort of simplified version of marxism—was the first kind of socialism to reach Britain during the revival of the 1880s, the one most persistently propagated by devoted pioneers at a thousand street corners, and the one most persistently and ubiquitously taught at a thousand classes run by socialist organizations, labour colleges or freelance lectures." E. J. Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement," in his Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 105. For an extensive list of sources of testimony by British socialists about their engagement with Marxian economic literature, consult Duncan Tanner, "Ideological Debate in Edwardian Labour Politics: Radicalism, Revisionism and Socialism," in Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, editors, Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 280. On the influence of professed Marxists in Yorkshire, see Tom Mann, Tom Mann's Memoirs (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923), pp. 39 ff., 129; for the role of other Marxists in Yorkshire see Bernard Barker, "Anatomy of Reformism: The Social and Political Ideas of the Labour Leadership in Yorkshire," International Review of Social History Volume 18, Part 1 (1973), p. 8, and Laybourn, op. cit., p. 234. For the availability ofMarxist economic theory in Britain generally, see Pierson, op. cit., pp. 28, 255; Eric Hobsbawm, editor, Labour's Turning Point 1880–1900 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1948), pp. 23, 41; Hinton, op. cit., p. 94; E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 332–333.

speech in Burnley in 1893, William Morris rebutted this attack upon the introduction of ideas from abroad, asserting, "It was said that Socialism was a German import. It was nothing the worse for that. And Socialism is English now."^[144] If, as Morris insisted, British workers gave socialist theory a native hue, much of the materials they used came from Germany. Some members of the Social Democratic Federation and founders of the Labour Party, such as the trade unionist Jem Macdonald, said they received the ideas of Kapital from European acquaintances, including German artisans. "When Das Kapital appeared in English," Macdonald later wrote," it was to me as a book that I had read over and over again."^[145] Tom Maguire, who said he had studied Marx intensively, organized for the Socialist League in Leeds after 1884. Many of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party in the textile districts of the north, including Margaret McMillan, an elected member of the Bradford school board, boasted that they had studied Kapital.^[146] Tom Mann used Wage Labour and Capital as his basic text for the socialist economics course he gave in Bolton in 1888.^[147] In Burnley, Lancashire, which had a long tradition of open-minded debate in workers' clubs, skeptical liberals pressed the socialists to demonstrate the feasibility of their blueprints for the future. The local socialists responded in 1894 that they believed, not in the discredited Owen, but in Marx.^[148] The letters from many Burnley workers published in the Burnley Gazette during the 1890s cite the descriptive portions of Marx's Kapital , though not segments defining the transmission of labor in the form of a commodity.^[149] In sum, Marxist economic analysis was both well-represented in Britain and, in predictable ways, misunderstood.^[150]

[144] Socialist and N. E. Lancashire Labour News , December 15, 1893, p. 5. For a similar comment from Tom Mann, see Trodd, op. cit., pp. 328–329.

[145] Torr, op. cit., p. 183. See also Collins and Abramsky, op. cit., p. 303; Hinton, op. cit., p. 53.

[146] Keighley ILP Journal , December 30, 1894. On McMillan's election and tenure, see Laybourn, op. cit., p. 226.

[147] Torr, op. cit., p. 253. But compare his understanding of workers' retention of "the full fruits of their labor" in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 1856–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 146 Eleanor Marx also spoke at socialist meetings in Bolton. Neil Duffield, "Bolton Socialist Club," Bolton People's History Volume 1 (March 1984), p. 3.

[148] Burnley Express and Advertiser , January 24, 1894.

[149] Burnley Gazette , e.g., August 5, 1893, and April 11, 1894.

[150] The work that faithfully presented Marx's theory of exploitation in Britain was written by Edward Aveling, translator of Kapital. See Edward Aveling, The Students' Marx: An Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx' "Capital" (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1907), p. 46.

Whereas the reborn English movement misinterpreted its chosen step-father, the German labor movement grew up in its early years an orphan. There is no evidence of a network of communication between Marx and the largest workers' movement of the revolution born in 1848, the Arbeiterverbrüderung ("Workers' Brotherhood").^[151] The members of workers' clubs in the 1860s had little acquaintance with Marx's early writings. In his autobiography, Bebel stressed the disconnection during this period between Marxist ideas and the workers' associations, for which Leipzig served as a traditional center:^[152] "That there were workers who were familiar with the Communist Manifesto , for instance, or who knew something about Marx's and Engels's activity during the revolutionary years in the Rhineland, of this I saw absolutely no indication at this time in Leipzig." In sum, the German labor movement after the repression of the 1850s did not begin with an established Marxist heritage.^[153] Marx had been sorely disappointed by the lack of response to his early Critique of Political Economy.^[154] His ideas did not gain an audience in the workers' movement until the publication of Kapital.^[155] Although the British workers' movements were exposed to Marxist ideas more than a decade later than their German counterparts were, the involvement, once it began, was intense. How, then, are we to explain the long-lasting divergences in Britain and in Germany in the interpretation of Marx's theory of exploitation?

If Marx's analysis of the exploitation of labor was widely distributed in Britain but systematically misrepresented, and if this analysis was transmitted more successfully to the German labor movement despite the absence of a standing Marxist tradition leading back to 1848, then the supply of ideas among intellectuals does not represent the critical variable for differentiating between the German and British outcomes. The differentiating circumstance is not the depth of engagement with Marx but the variations in

[151] Frolinde Balser, Sozial-Demokratie 1848/49–1863 , Volume One (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1962), pp. 211, 233.

[152] Adler, op. cit., p. 299. The founding congress of the General German Workers' Association took place in 1863 in Leipzig.

[153] Bebel, op. cit., pp. 49–50. For Bebel's assessment of the lack of continuity in socialist ideas between the 1848 revolution and the 1860s in the German labor movement at large, see August Bebel, Gewerkschafts-Bewegung und politische Parteien (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1900), p. 8.

[154] Stephan, op. cit., p. 199; Dlubek and Skambraks, op. cit., p. 34.

[155] The works of Marx, according to Bebel, were not known in the Social Democratic Party until the end of the 1860s. August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben , op. cit., pp. 131 ff.

response among those who came into contact with Marx's propositions. Intellectual elites may serve as the tentative formulators of an explicit system of ideology, but that ideology will be received sympathetically by workers and sustained from below only if it resonates with portions of the conduct of everyday practice. Lloyd Jones, a prominent member of the co-op movement, noted the limits on workers' readiness to take up economic theories. "The working man accepts such of these views as his experience in the world and workshops justify to him," Jones wrote in 1877. "Where his experience does not do so, he rejects them."^[156]

A comparison of the textile industries of Yorkshire with those of early industrializing regions of Germany is well suited for comparing the reception of ideologies, because it proceeds from structural parallels in the environment in which the textile unions acquired their economic philosophies before the First World War. The characteristics sometimes used to label the British labor movement—early craft unionization based on occupational exclusivity, and delayed affiliation with a political party—do not fit Yorkshire textiles. In Yorkshire the first unions for factory weavers and spinners did not emerge until 1881 in Huddersfield and until the 1890s in other districts.^[157] The emergence of unions in Yorkshire well after the completion of mechanization matched experience in Germany, where textile union membership expanded rapidly after 1890. As in Germany, trade unions in Yorkshire developed in tandem with an independent workers' party with which union organizers were affiliated.^[158] Still another feature of the textile associations in Yorkshire makes it parallel to the German case. The major union for textile workers in Yorkshire admitted all workers in the trade, not just those in select occupations.^[159] This practice resembled the industrywide

[156] Quoted in Clements, op. cit., pp. 93–104.

[157] H. A. Turner, Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 175–178. Local textile unions for factory workers founded earlier in the century disbanded shortly after the conclusion of the strike movements to which they owed their birth. E. E. Dodd, Bingley: A Yorkshire Town Through Nine Centuries (Bingley: T. Harrison & Sons, 1958), p. 164; Sheila Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions (London: Ernest Benn, 1977), pp. 86, 92. See also Chapter One, footnote 26.

[158] Even contemporaries noticed the parallels in the timing and political sponsorship of unionization between Yorkshire and Germany. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics , op. cit., pp. 76, 226.

[159] The Weavers' and Textile Workers' Association sponsored meetings for willeyers, fettlers, rag grinders, and packers. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 17, 1993, p. 5. In some towns, workers in dyeing, combing, and finishing shops maintained their own craft unions, however. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 8. These small societies did not form regional craft associations, but survived as local clubs. Laybourn, "The Attitude," op. cit., p. 140.

recruitment practiced by German unions.^[160] The example of Yorkshire shows that the boundaries of unionization and the legacy of past organizational development do not account for the differential reception of analyses of the exploitation of labor.

The reception of ideas depended upon something more profound than the environment for union growth. Upon the publication of Kapital , attention in Germany focused on Marx's analysis of labor as a commodity, and the ready absorption of a Marxist vocabulary into the expression of ordinary problems shows that Marxism resonated with German producers' everyday experience of micro-practices on the shop floor. For the workers, cultural practice led theory: they lived out the Marxist specification of labor on the shop floor before intellectuals presented those categories to them as a formal body of propositions. Workers without advanced education could grasp the importance of the distinction between labor and labor power, Marx claimed, and could thereby prove themselves sharper economists than vulgar analysts were.^[161] But in Britain, despite the contacts between British trade unionists and their German counterparts,^[162] and despite the availability of Marxist-inspired discourse from British intellectuals, the trade unions resanctified a theory of exploitation based on the transfer of materialized labor.

The lived experience of the transfer of "labor power" represented a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the adoption of the belief that the owner's extraction of unpaid labor time was intrinsic to the employment relation. On the eve of the First World War, about one-quarter of the textile workers in Germany who joined unions chose the Christian textile workers' union.^[163] The Christian (predominantly Catholic) associations did not seek

[160] In Germany only a few local societies, such as the relatively short-lived Weavers' Association of the Lower Rhine, centered in Krefeld, limited membership by textile occupation. On the exclusion of auxiliary cloth workers from that union, see Kreisarchiv Kempen, Stadt Lobberich, 1444, August 22, 1899. See also Chapter One, note 27.

[161] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke , Volume 6 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), p. 594 The article by Engels is entitled "Einleitung zu Karl Marx Lohnarbeit und Kapital , Ausgabe 1891."

[162] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 3, 1908; Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation, Official Report of the Yorkshire Textile Workers' Deputation: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the German Woollen Cloth Operatives (Batley: News Office, 1908).

[163] In 1910, the Christian textile workers' union counted more than 32,000 members and the "free" German textile workers' union more than 113,000 members. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1911), and Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," 1908–1910, Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Düsseldorf.

to overthrow the capitalist system; they simply sought better treatment and higher earnings for workers.^[164]

Despite the self-proclaimed limits of the Christian movement, however, their deliberations about economic affairs revealed the distinctive influence of German experience of labor as a commodity. The Christian unions did not simply vindicate the noble character of work or its social value. They advanced a crude labor theory of value and reasoned in terms of abstract labor time. "Money is the representation of human labor," the Christian textile newspaper concluded in an editorial on economic principles, "minted, tangible, metallicized human power."^[165] The Christian unions adopted the German notion of the sale of labor power to portray the workers' insertion into the capitalist economy.^[166] In an article entitled "Is Labor a Commodity?" their Textilarbeiter-Zeitung made explicit in 1900 the telling and characteristic German distinction: employers, it explained, "regard labor or, rather, labor power as a commodity."^[167] This journal also identified labor power as an entity "alienated" by the worker: "Conceiving of labor as merely a commodity, which the owner of the labor power sells," it explained, "makes the worker dependent on the purchase offer that the employer makes to him."^[168] Christians also referred to the owner's exploitation "of the [labor] power of the worker"—though not, of course, with Marx's conclusion that the exploitation of labor represented the ultimate source of profit.^[169]

[164] The flavor of the Christian movement can be appreciated from a speech a secretary, Johann Giesberts, gave before a meeting of nine hundred textile workers in Mönchengladbach in 1898. "The Christian workers demand only an adequate existence, and if one grants them this, then their will to labor and conscientiousness, of which the employer will have the use, will grow." HSTAD, Präsidialbüro 1272, p. 40.

[165] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 24, 1900.

[166] Workers, Der Christliche Textilarbeiter stated, "own just a single commodity, namely their labor power." December 16, 1899, Mörs. Of course, some Christian commentators insisted that labor could never truly become a commodity, but when they discussed its treatment as such, they defined it as the sale of labor power. See the discussion of this doctrine in Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 11, 1908. Even if Christian organizers accepted the labor contract as a worthy mechanism for regulating social relations, they threw a worried glance back at the feudal commitment of the whole individual, just as German economists had. For example, in its delineation of the sale of labor, the Christlicher Arbeiterfreund showed that it could take nothing for granted: "The personage [of the worker] with all its intellectual and physical capabilities," it concluded, "is the inviolable property of the worker." Christlicher Arbeiterfreund , May 27, 1898.

[167] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 30, 1900, emphasis added.

[168] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[169] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 28, 1900, Borken. The Christians' emphasis on the creative power of human labor nonetheless led them to radical critiques of the profit accruing to owners of capital. "The Christian unions are an enemy of the false economy based oncapital," said one leader at a textile union meeting in Rheine in 1904. Speech by Herr Pesch of Krefeld, cited in Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1116, February 1, 1904.

Similar worker demands emerged on the left bank of the Rhine, where Christian unions dominated most of the Catholic cities, as appeared in districts where Protestants and the socialist-affiliated "free" unions were ascendant: the same rationale for the payment of waiting time, the same contestation of the distribution of hours over the workday. In view of the pervasive differences between the experiences of Catholic and Protestant workers outside the workplace in the period before the First World War and between the intellectual roots of their leaders,^[170] the convergence in the underlying view of labor in the Christian and Social Democratic labor movements suggests the influence of something else their members shared in common: namely, the workers' everyday experience of the conveyance of "labor power" at the point of production.

In part, of course, the Catholic movement consciously distanced itself from the prevailing discourse of political economy in Germany, for both the established bourgeois economists and those of the Social Democratic movement accepted the commodification of everyday life and of labor as accomplished facts. Catholic intellectuals, by contrast, remained uncomfortable with these premises and developed an alternative discursive tradition based on the contributions to the social whole of organically related "estates." Yet when elite speakers for the Catholic labor unions reflected upon the essentials of the capitalist labor transaction, they, too, adopted the view that labor was sold in the form of labor power.^[171] Even when they rejected the world view of socialist and bourgeois economics, their social experience lent them much the same specification of labor as a commodity as circulated among their ideological opponents.

Practical Analyses of Exploitation

The contrasting forms of signifying practice in the workplace did not only support contrasts in the formal ideologies of exploitation; they correlated as

[170] Eric Dorn Brose, Christian Labor and the Politics of Frustration in Imperial Germany (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), Chapter One and pp. 146, 148; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 296–297.

[171] "Through the labor contract the entrepreneur receives likewise a certain sway over the person of the worker . .. over the expenditure of his physical and intellectual powers." Heinrich Brauns, "Die Notwendigkeit der Gewerkschaften," in his Katholische Sozialpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden von Heinrich Brauns , edited by Hubert Mockenhaupt (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976), p. 12.

well with differences in workers' impromptu articulation of complaints about exploitation on the shop floor. Contrasts in the workers' immediate apperception of exploitation appeared in weavers' responses to fines imposed for fabric that the employers alleged to be defective, one of the problems about which workers complained most frequently. The British workers analyzed the amounts of the fines assessed in terms of the market cost of repairing the defect in the finished product. "3d per yard is deducted for ends down," the Yorkshire Factory Times reported of one mill. By the newspaper's reckoning, this totaled "three times more than it costs to sew them in."^[172] In its account of a fine imposed on a woman weaver from Batley, the newspaper claimed that the cloth checker "had fined her 4s 6d for a damage that could be mended in three hours, and that would not cause the piece to be sold for any less in the market."^[173]

The British weavers viewed fining as a violation of the rules of fair exchange of finished products in the market. "I think it is a burning shame," wrote a correspondent for the Yorkshire Factory Times , "that employers cannot be satisfied with the profit they make at market out of the goods they manufacture without taking a portion of an employee's hard-earned money from him to further swell their coffers."^[174] Comments such as this rested on the idea that exchanges in the market, not labor alone, generated ordinary profits. The fine constituted a separate, unusual means of making a profit from labor. The Yorkshire Factory Times expressed a female weaver's view that fining comprised a kind of additional profit for the employer this way: "The masters smoke a tremendous lot of four-penny cigars, and the two piece wages [fines] last week were for cigars."^[175]

Given the British weavers' treatment of fining as a deviation from the rules of fair market exchange, the solutions they proposed ought not to occasion surprise. First, they insisted that textile workers on piece rates be treated as contractors who delivered a product. "They are piece workers," the Yorkshire Factory Times claimed, and therefore "by law" could not be

[172] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 31, 1890, Shipley.

[173] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 2, 1891, Batley. For other examples of such comparisons, see January 17, 1890, Halifax, and July 10, 1891.

[174] This writer contended that fining was "nothing better than second-hand pocket picking." Yorkshire Factory Times , April 29, 1892, Bingley. This reliance on reasoning about the sale of finished products in the market became evident in other contexts as well. British workers articulated the right of women workers to equal pay with men on the ground that the finished products were indistinguishable: "When a manufacturer sells a piece he does not tell the merchant that it has been woven by a woman." Yorkshire Factory Times , September 25, 1891, p. 4.

[175] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 4, 1890, Bingley.

fined simply for violating the mill's standards for cloth.^[176] By the workers' reasoning, if the employer wanted to fine them for bad cloth he had to prosecute them as he would a contractor who delivered a defective product. The British weavers' opposition to any form of fining for spoiled work led them to resist institutions that would regulate the fining system. For example, Parliament in 1896 passed a factory act that required employers to post a notice about all forms of fines to which employees at the site were subject. This legislation would have protected weavers by requiring employers to standardize the penalties imposed for each kind of defect. Yet the weavers' unions lobbied to have Parliament exempt textiles from the act's provisions—they preferred to suffer fining without safeguards than to recognize the legitimacy of the practice.^[177]

In contrast to the British weavers, who held up an ideal of the exchange of products in the market as a way of assessing the injustice of fines, German weavers included fines for purportedly flawed cloth in a list of more general abuses. They saw the imposition of fines as another expression of the owners' disposition over their labor. "Fines are always the order of the day," declared a union speaker at a shop meeting in Württemberg. "The workers at this firm are fined twice, for actually it is already a punishment if someone has to work at a plant with this kind of poor ventilation."^[178] This complainant drew a parallel between two grievances: just as submission to unhealthy air represented a kind of exploitation that resulted from the employers' domination of the production process, so did the payment of a fine. That is, German workers treated fines as just another strategy by which the owner could use his authority over the workplace to extract unpaid labor. They called the fines "pay deductions" (Lohnabzüge) , the phrase that referred to any lowering in the pay scale or in the amount workers actually earned.^[179]

[176] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 13, 1893.

[177] Cotton Factory Times , April 8, 1904, "'Reasonable' Fines." The M. P. from Darwen, speaking in 1896 for the textile workers, said, "The operatives wished to do away with fines altogether; and they objected to this Bill which recognises and regulated fines." See speech by John Rutherford in United Kingdom, Parliamentary Debates , Series Four, Volume 43, 1896, July 17—August 6, pp. 767–770.

[178] This is the union's report of the address. Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 4, 1911.

[179] See almost any issue of Der Textil-Arbeiter —for example, May 2, 1902, Ostritz; May 9, 1902, Rendsburg; May 16, 1902, Elsterberg. The widespread practice of offering workers a bonus for cloth of perfect quality, which could be withheld in its entirety for any faults, also discouraged German workers from adopting market-based criticisms like those of their British counterparts. Under the German bonus system, whether the piece had one fault or many, the worker suffered the same loss. The withholding of the gratuity, which represented a substan-tial loss, departed from the idea that the cloth had a determinant "market value" from which the fine constituted a deduction. Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 30, 1909, Bocholt; July 6, 1909, Oelsnitz; March 6, 1914, p. 79.

In contrast to the British workers' refusal to bargain over fines for allegedly spoiled work, German workers at some mills formed committees to negotiate with the owners on this issue.^[180] They also composed lists specifying how much weavers ought to be fined for each defect and included such charts among their strike demands. This difference between German and British reactions to fining cannot be dismissed by assuming that German textile workers were invariably more cooperative than their British counterparts. As we have seen, the German workers pressed ambitious demands concerning many facets of mill life.^[181] The example of fining shows that the contrasting "theories" of the labor transaction hidden in the disciplinary regime of German and British factories generated their counterpoints in

[180] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 31, 1911, Peilau-Eulengebirges; February 27, 1914, Langenbielau.

[181] British workers' attention to the sale of their labor as product in a market exchange showed up in another complaint as well. Table 2, above, Chapter 4, which compares the distribution of complaints from weavers, shows that British weavers distinguished themselves from their German counterparts by focusing on mispayments for delivered pieces. Nearly 5 percent of complaints (42) from the British sample for weavers concerned the deceptive measuring of fabric, making it the fourth most frequent complaint. This grievance arose under two conditions: when company clerks paid the weaver for a shorter length of cloth than the weaver actually manufactured, and when the weaver received credit for fewer picks per inch than he or she had executed. Under 2 percent of complaints (16) from the German sample concerned the mismeasurement of pieces, making it only the eleventh most frequent complaint. Yet the deception in those cases that came to light in Germany was egregious (Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1116, January 19, 1904, Rheine; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25029, p. 2, for 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 30, 1902, Elsterberg). Academic writers described the mismeasurement of cloth as a fact of life in Germany; they arrived at averages for the rate at which owners shortchanged weavers in whole districts. Karl Schmid, Die Entwicklung der Hofer Baumwoll-Industrie 1432–1913 (Leipzig: A. Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923), p. 76.

Whether this difference in the salience of mismeasuring resulted purely from workers' interpretations of similar settings or whether it was determined partly by the honesty of German employers, I am unable to say. The outcome, however, was consistent with the difference in the ways workers defined the commodity of labor in the two countries. Complaints about the false measurement of pieces originated in the era when handloom weavers sold their goods to putters-out. This grievance centered on whether the employer, as a kind of merchant, was obeying the rules of fair market exchange for finished goods. The Yorkshire Factory Times , in its appeals for workers to change factory conditions, placed a fair market at the center of its vision. It declared in 1891, "The textile industry in Yorkshire can be raised from commercial depravity, as at present, to commercial honesty." Yorkshire Factory Times , March 27, 1891, Pudsey. As with the theme of fining, so with measuring: the British textile workers formulated their responses by focusing on deviations from the ideal of equitable trades of products in the market.

workers' formulation of grievances: in each country, workers relied upon a corresponding theory of exploitation to criticize capitalist practice. When the concrete procedures of everyday manufacture "directly possess the naked and abstract form of the commodity," then workers are in immediate possession of economic theory.^[182]

The pervasive effect of the contrasting theories of the hiring of labor also emerged when German and British textile workers attempted to reach industrial bargains with their employers. In Lancashire representatives of the spinners' unions proposed that workers be paid according to piece-rate scales that would fluctuate to allow employers a stipulated percentage of return on their invested capital. For example, at a meeting in 1900 with the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, the operatives said they preferred that "wages be adjusted on a net margin allowing for the fluctuations in the prices of cotton, coal, etc."^[183] The workers suggested that negotiators agree on the average capital invested in a spinning factory per spindle, figure the cost of depreciation, grant the owners a shifting allowance for working capital, and then assign a rate of return. The "net margin" between all these sums and the proceeds from disposing of the finished product in the market would provide workers with their wages fund. The representatives of the employers acceded to the workers' idea, provided that owners receive at least a 5 percent rate of return. According to the workers' research, for yarn of standard fineness mill owners needed a profit on average of one farthing per pound of cotton spun in order to realize an annual return of over 5 percent on investment.^[184]

More important than the figures, perhaps, are the principles they illustrate. The conduct of the negotiations shows that both the workers and the employers conceived of the factory proprietor as an investor in the marketplace rather than as a manager of labor power.^[185] For if the selling prices of the finished product were far above the cost of production, the owners were not entitled to reap the benefit of efficiently converting the raw materials

[182] Georg Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in his History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 172.

[183] Goldsmiths' Library, University of London, Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, Report of Negotiations 1899–1900 , p. 16.

[184] The Leader , March 22, 1901, "Textile Tattle."

[185] Language itself could betray the understanding of profit as the reward of trade: "The manufacturer feels that if he lays out capital on improved machinery, or supplies extra good material, and thus enables his workpeople to produce more in a given time, he ought to get a trading profit." John Watts, "Essay on Strikes," British Association for the Advancement of Science: The Workman's Bane and Antidote (Manchester: A. Ireland, 1861), p. 7.

and labor power into a completed ware. Like bankers, they received only interest on investment. The workers, conversely, were not selling a resource, labor power, which had a fixed market value prior to being converted to a product. Rather, the operatives handed their labor over as if they were traders in products, who paid a rent on the mill, purchased supplies, and then delivered yarn at its current market appraisal. In the event, workers and employers could not reach agreement on the average capital invested per spindle and on the grade of yarn to take as a standard, but they did not fail for lack of effort. The spinning employers and their operatives sought for more than a dozen years to reach an accord on the "net margin" principle.^[186] To certify actual expenditures, mill owners offered to open their accounting books to the workers' inspection.^[187] Weavers, too, negotiated for piece rates by "net margin."^[188] The complications of putting the workers' "net margin" proposal into effect were so daunting that only well-established assumptions about the nature of the labor transaction could have kept employers and spinning operatives engaged with the idea for so long.

Although the "net margin" proposal legitimated the mill owners' rates of return, British workers in many industries were ready to let their wages fluctuate according to the selling price of their product because this index seemed to eliminate the most odious form of profit-taking, that appropriated by the "middleman" in the market for finished wares.^[189] In the coal trade, the miners at Newcastle declared as early as 1831 that they wanted to peg their earnings to product markets. "The Men and Boys are willing to abide the Risk of Fluctuations of the Coal Trade," their handbill declared.^[190] The miners' response showed, of course, that they saw their labor as a commodity and imagined the organization of work as a market relation. But their reaction did not entirely accept the commercial system, for it resisted

[186] Textile Mercury , January 15, 1910, p. 43. Card room workers were included in the plans. Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.

[187] Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, op. cit., p. 18. The negotiations failed in part because the employers themselves still lacked an adequate method for determining the cost of depreciation. M. W. Kirby, "The Lancashire Cotton Industry in the Inter-War Years," Business History (July 1974), p. 153.

[188] Nelson Chronicle , March 29, 1901, p. 4; Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.

[189] Sometimes the operative spinners seemed to view speculators in the product markets, not the employers, as the real exploiters. Mawdsley, the Lancashire spinners' leader, attacked the "middlemen bloodsuckers" who took the profit out of the cotton industry. Joyce, Visions of the People , op. cit., p. 120. Likewise, weavers sometimes blamed merchants, not employers, for low wages. Bradford Observer , January 25, 1894, Shipley.

[190] James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 115. The miners believed that unmanipulated trade in products would break the power of their employers.

the middleman predator. Near the turn of the century, the president of the miners' federation in Leicester endorsed sliding scales with a similar line of reasoning: "The giving away of value to middlemen," he said, "should not determine the rate of wages."^[191] In Germany the initiative for pegging wages to the selling prices of products came only after the First World War, and then not from workers but from employers, who adopted it to cope with the country's runaway inflation.^[192]

The Labor Process as an Anchor for Culture

The flow of ideas between German and British analysts of the exploitation of labor confirms the persistence of fundamental differences in the nationally prevalent concepts of labor. Cross-cultural exchange did not soften the contrasts in definitions of labor as a commodity, but, rather, demonstrated their rigidity. If a correspondence emerged in each country between the labor movement's concept of labor as a commodity and the definition of labor incorporated into manufacturing procedures, how can we ascertain that the production process served as the original source of these concepts? Is it not possible that the political and union movements acted as a precursory cradle of ideas that in turn shaped the institutionalization of factory practices?

In the case of Germany we can confirm that the conceptions of labor were lodged in the production process before they circulated in a trade union movement or in workers' political parties. The inscription of concepts of labor on the piece-rate scales, on the rules of employment, and on the measurement of time for factories was in place by the 1860s, before substantial numbers of workers had enrolled in the labor or political movements and, more particularly, before the dissemination of Marxist economic theory. The movements of artisanal workers that flowered during the revolution of 1848–1849 in Germany were suppressed and disabled in the 1850s.^[193] When the labor movement began to take shape again in the 1860s, it engaged a tiny segment of workers incapable of changing the face of mechanization. The process of industrialization, considered in terms of quantity of output, was at this time far from complete. In qualitative terms, however, the transformation was well under way, for the installation in the factory of the cultural

[191] Bradford Labour Echo , Jan. 9, 1897.

[192] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 23, 1920; March 10, 1922, p. 37.

[193] Adler, op. cit., pp. 297–298.

concept of labor that would govern production was in large measure accomplished.^[194]

In Britain the distinctive procedures by which textile factory employers received materialized labor—the accounting methods, techniques of remuneration, and factory layouts—coincided with the development of early socialism and the labor organizing of the 1820s and 1830s. In this instance we cannot exclude the possibility that the philosophies of commerce in the insurgent workers' movements contributed to consistencies in the shape of factory practice. But we have also seen that the stereotypical understanding of labor as a ware in Britain had been articulated by elite economists in the second half of the eighteenth century and had already been experienced in the practices of the handweavers.^[195] Theories of value and exchange in the original socialist movement of the first half of the nineteenth century replicated and sometimes actively drew upon this antecedent intellectual and industrial heritage. In the British case, then, the early labor movement may have served as a momentary transmitter of ideas put into practice on the factory shop floor, but not as their originator.

Even if the cultural formation of manufacture was established before the labor movements developed their own economic outlooks, another question remains. Once manufacturing procedures are in place, if workers inventively call upon the resources of their culture as a whole to construct their experience of production, there is no original source or ultimate center to that experience. By this reasoning, the discursive resources deployed in civic politics, religion, family networks, or other contexts may also intervene firsthand in workers' (and employers') understanding of life at the point of production. On these grounds, cultural analysts of labor who emphasize the role of discourse in constituting workers' experience of production have

[194] Similarly, the timing of the emergence of the German specification of labor as a commodity makes it implausible to view the state as its critical shaper. Even in Germany, where government supervision of the workplace became strongest, the state did not assume an active role in overseeing industrial relations for adult workers until after the crystallization of the distinctive German forms of work practice and of the correlative understanding of labor as a commodity in the German labor movement. For example, Prussia did not mandate inspections of factory sites until 1878. Günther Schulz effectively discloses the state's nonintervention on the shop floor in "Die betriebliche Lage der Arbeiter im Rheinland vom 19. bis zum beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert," Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter Jahrgang 50 (1986), p. 175.

[195] To the extent that the workers' movements of the 1820s drew upon a preceding ideology of British protest movements, it was that of a political radicalism which had much to say about the construction of political relations among citizens but very little to say about the construction of production relations between workers and employers. The practices of the factory system were structured by concepts of production more precise than those to be found in the political discourse of the eighteenth-century British radicals and republicans.

effected a decisive shift in the agenda that guides research in social history. Not only have they removed the institutions of the workplace from their pride of place as the original generator of workers' experience; they have discounted as tunnel vision the attempt to trace determinate connections between the structure of work and the development of workers' economic or political outlook.^[196] In so doing, they take two steps backward. By treating the dissection of the structure of political ideas as a self-sufficient enterprise, they return to old-fashioned intellectual history. But if we drop the supposition that the economic base dictates an ideological superstructure—resorting for the sake of exposition to this anachronistic vocabulary—the workplace can still play a central role in the generation of experience and in the reception of ideologies.^[197] We may grant to the signifying practices of the labor process (rather than to the economic and technological conditions of production) an unwavering influence upon the development of collective movements and political organizations.^[198]

Further, the uncanny stability in the understanding of the transmission of labor despite profound shifts in other aspects of public discourse indicates that this understanding was rooted in an immediate and unchanging experience, that is, in the exposure to labor's conveyance at the work site. The course of development in nineteenth-century German and British industry suggests that ideas which are incorporated into and reproduced through forms of manufacturing practice have greater permanence than those that float in the realm of civic politics. In Britain in particular the idioms of politics, religion, education, and domestic culture underwent significant change between the start of industrialization and 1914.^[199] Yet in cross-

[196] Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 27 note. "Marxists and anti-marxists alike are going to have to abandon their anachronistic obsession with the workplace and the shop-floor," Tony Judt has written, "with everything described in terms of its effect upon or as the result of work relations or work-related attitudes" (p. 114). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who emphasize the constitutive power of discourse, have put the conclusion in simple form: "There is no logical connection whatsoever between positions in the relations of production and the mentality of the producers." Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 84–85.

[197] My approach differs from that of labor historians of Britain who emphasize that radical political economy "revealed the fractured reality of social relations in production." The cultural shape of practice, not the structural features of the social organization of production, provided the template for workers' formulations of exploitation by "middlemen." Richard Price, "Structures of Subordination in Nineteenth-Century British Industry," in Pat Thane et al., editors, The Power of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 123.

[198] Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit., p. 77.

[199] For a sketch of religious fluidity, see Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1974), p. 283. Gareth Stedman Jones discusses changesin domestic and neighborhood culture, op. cit., pp. 217–218. The immobility of labor's specification as a commodity poses a challenge to alternative explanations of its foundation that would appeal to household or community structures subject to dramatic change.

national perspective the definition of labor as a commodity remained relatively fixed. It provided a stable point of reference that informed the diagnoses and prescriptions of the labor movement from the commencement of the nineteenth century and at its end. Upon the break-up of the early workers' movements in each country the distinctive appreciation of labor faded from the public sphere, only to resurface there, unchanged, because it had been preserved in the practices of production.

Ideas incarnated in a constellation of manufacturing techniques can be reproduced with less variance than ideas whose transmission depends principally upon discursive formulations. The definition of labor as a commodity was recreated day in, day out by a cluster of micro-procedures that did not require the producers to lend their attention to the meaning of labor in order to preserve its shape. The concept was received through experience rather than instruction; it was lived before it was turned to account. The specification of labor escaped those vagaries of constant reinterpretation and reappropriation to which verbal formulations are subject. Verbal formulations draw upon language's modulation of register, its interminable ability to inflect and ironize statements. These communicative resources discourage the stable transmission of concepts.^[200] Although the concepts of labor could be put into words for political and theoretic excursus, there was no need of words for their social reproduction. They survived through the arrangement of industrial practices and through the relative univocality of their material operation.^[201] Unlike the leading myths and narratives deployed in the realms of civic politics and religion, the manufacturing practices did not derive their power from their ability to act as a reservoir of multiple and potentially inconsistent meanings.

This chapter has not sought to explain workers' choices of conservative versus socialist parties. It does not account for marginal variation in rates of participation in the socialist movement by occupation or geographic region. Rather, with a cross-national perspective, it shows why ideologies of exploi-

[200] This comment draws upon Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59.

[201] A new generation of cognitive scientists have begun to show that concepts are reproduced through their employment in limited and concrete settings. The experimental evidence disqualifies the alternative view that culture is transmitted through the agents' deliberate, formal acquisition of a set of general principles that can be applied across contexts. Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 43.

tation were apt to take a certain shape among those workers who affiliated themselves with a socialist movement. In none of the domains outside work could practice have so vividly incarnated differing forms of labor as a commodity. As a cultural apparatus the workplace seemed to uphold, without perturbation, a specification of labor as a commodity despite tremendous change in workers' educational, religious, and electoral experiences.