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.