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Socialist ideas began to gain some currency in Britain and France during the 1830s, following the weakening of British laws prohibiting trade union organizations in the mid-1820s and the 1830 July Revolution in France.
In Britain, trade unions, or “workers’ combinations,” had been banned in 1799, just as they had been in France eight years earlier.
In both cases, the authorities were concerned about organized workers challenging the existing order and impeding the development of capitalism.
During the French Revolution, the sans-culottes in Paris had taken direct action against hoarders and speculators, demanding real equality and political power through the Parisian sections and districts.
Toward the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, English workers began direct action campaigns against employers who were introducing new methods of work and machinery to reduce wages by making many workers redundant.
Perhaps the most notorious direct action campaign in England was the Luddite movement from 1811 to 1816, during which English workers smashed textile machines, laid siege to mills, attacked their owners, and went on strike to protect their falling wages.
They were said to be led by the largely apocryphal “General” or “King” “Ned Ludd.”
The Luddites were not anarchists, but their revolt against capitalist industrialization provided an example of the direct action tactics and working-class self-organization later advocated by some anarchists.[73]
When the ban on trade unions was lifted in England in the mid-1820s, trade unions sprang up across country, despite stiff penalties still being attached to working-class direct action (machine-breaking remained a capital offense).
Around the same time, a new generation of writers took up the cause of the workers, advocating something very close to an anarchist form of socialism.
Drawing on the recently formulated “labor theory of value” in the emerging field of “political economy,” they expressed economic views that foreshadowed those of Proudhon and subsequent anarchists.
Thomas Hodgskin (1783–1869) argued that because labor was the ultimate source of economic value, the workers “should receive the whole product of their labour.”[74]
He advocated a kind of “market socialism,” by which workers would exchange the product of their labors “without any capitalist monopoly to skim off the surplus over their subsistence needs.”[75]
He put no faith in legislative reform, looking to the workers instead “to achieve their own salvation” through their nascent trade union organizations.[76]
William Thompson (1775–1833) also relied on a labor theory of value in support of a libertarian conception of socialism.
He argued that the workers should use their trade union organizations to invest in cooperative enterprises that would ultimately replace capitalism with egalitarian communities organized along the lines proposed by Robert Owen, utilizing modern technology to create an abundance of wealth to be enjoyed by all.
As with later anarchists, he regarded “government as the upholder of the old, bad system of private monopoly of the means of production,” and therefore looked “mainly to the workers to find means for their own emancipation.”[77]
He was an early advocate of workers’ self-management, arguing that the solution to capitalist exploitation was the creation of “a new social order in which the control of industry would pass into the workers’ hands.”[78]
In 1830, the reactionary Bourbon monarchy was overthrown in France, replaced by a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe, the “Citizen King.”
Workers who had supported the July Revolution soon came into conflict with the new regime, adopting direct action tactics similar to those used earlier in England.
Machines were smashed and workers struck for better working conditions and higher wages, leading to working-class uprisings in Lyon in 1831 and again in 1834.
There was an unsuccessful republican insurrection in Paris in 1832, which had significant working-class support.
Despite the July Revolution, the conditions of the French workers were continuing to deteriorate.
The failure of yet another “political” revolution to address the subordinate status and exploitation of working people later provided support for the view that only a “social revolution” could improve the situation of the working class.
The print worker Auguste Colin lamented in 1831 that the July Revolution had simply replaced the Bourbon monarchy with a “financial aristocracy” interested only in exploiting the workers’ labor.[79]
After the 1834 Lyon uprising was put down, French workers responded in fundamentally different ways.
Some looked to underground organizations to seize power, inspired by tales of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals.
Others advocated coordinated industrial action through mass-based trade unions, whereas others promoted the creation of workers’ associations to replace capitalism with a system of workers’ cooperatives, citing the ideas of Robert Owen in Britain.[80]
However, it was under Owen’s influence in Britain during the 1830s, not France, that the first mass-based trade union movement arose, which had the explicit goal of replacing capitalism with a form of socialism based on workers’ cooperative associations.
Following the July Revolution in France, agricultural workers in England, who were among the poorest and most exploited, had begun another direct action campaign to improve their living and working conditions.
Threshing machines that were putting them out of work were destroyed; stacks, crops, barns, and mills were burned; and farm and mill owners were threatened and sometimes attacked, as “riotous assemblies” demanding higher wages and reductions in tithes began to spread across southern England.
Industrial establishments and machinery were also attacked, such as iron foundries, paper mills, sawmills, and threshing machine factories.
The uprising lasted from around August 1830 into early 1831, becoming known as the “Swing Riots” because of the threatening letters sent out to landowners and manufacturers under the name of “Captain Swing.”[81]
The riots were eventually put down, with 19 men being executed, over 600 being imprisoned, and another 500 being “transported” to the British penal colonies in Australia.
Such harsh treatment was not enough to quell working-class discontent.
The idea of a general strike, albeit to secure political reforms, was put forward by William Benbow in 1831–1832, who called it a “Grand National Holiday.”[82]
Robert Owen tried organizing a “National Equitable Labour Exchange,” through which workers would directly exchange material produced by their own cooperative associations based on the amount of labor time required for its production, and worker-controlled producers’ cooperatives and cooperative stores spread across Britain.[83]
Then in 1833–1834, workers in the burgeoning trade union and cooperative movements united to create the “Grand National Consolidated Trades Union,” an “ambitious attempt to combine the entire force of labour for a direct onslaught on the capitalist system,” anticipating, albeit on a national scale, the International, at least as later conceived by Bakunin and the anarchists.[84]
British capitalists responded by locking out and blacklisting workers on a scale so vast that the Grand National Union was unable to mount effective resistance.
Some workers, such as the “Tolpuddle Martyrs,” were singled out for special persecution in order to make an example of them.
Six workingmen were arrested in March 1834 because they had formed an agricultural workers’ association to strike for better wages.
They were convicted of “administering unlawful oaths” and sentenced to seven years in an Australian penal colony.
Such prosecutions had the intended effect of intimidating many workers from participating in the new labor movement.
This combination of capitalist retaliation and government persecution resulted in the collapse of the Grand National Union movement “by the latter months of 1834.”[85]
By the mid-1830s, given the increasing capitalist exploitation, the failure of political reforms, the seeming impossibility of positive social change within existing institutions, and the role of the coercive government apparatus in maintaining massive disparities in wealth and power, conditions appeared ripe in both Britain and France for the emergence of anarchist movements.
However, in Britain, socialists formerly involved in the Owenite, cooperative, and Grand National Union movements turned their attention to political reform, convinced that the only way forward would be to win the vote for workingmen and then to change the laws for the benefit of working people through control of Parliament.
This led to the Chartist movement, lasting from around 1838 to 1848, which was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its demands.
At the beginnings of the Chartist movement, there was a radical left wing that “looked forward to open revolt, or at the least to some sort of ‘Grand National Holiday’ or General Strike, as the only possible way of enforcing the enfranchisement of the working classes or securing the economic changes they demanded,” but they did not call for the abolition of the state.[86]
After 1839, when a number of Chartist leaders were imprisoned on various grounds, the majority of the Chartists had lost any belief “in their power to wage a successful revolutionary war.”[87]
It would be another forty years before there were any glimmers of an anarchist movement in Britain.[88]
There was one English writer around this time who expressed ideas coming close to an anarchist position, whom Marx was later to accuse Proudhon of plagiarizing: John Francis Bray (1809–1897).
In 1839, he published Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedies, or the Age of Might and the Age of Right, in which he argued that socialism could not be achieved through political reform because the existing systems of government were themselves the product of the economic system.
He therefore argued that the workers should give priority instead to transforming the economic structures that were the true cause of their misery.
The means he proposed for doing this was the creation of workers’ “companies” that would exchange with each other, without any capitalist intermediaries, the goods they produced based on the amount of labor required to produce them—a form of “exchange without exploitation,” much like the “equivalent exchange” Proudhon was soon to advocate in France.
There would be individual property or ownership by the workers of what they produced and of what they received in exchange for it, but the means of production would be “common property,” to which everyone would have equal access.[89]
As with Hodgskin and Thompson before him, Bray was hostile “to government, which he regarded as an instrument for the protection of property against the rightful claims of the producers.”[90]
It was his conviction that “the present arrangement of society must be totally subverted, and supplanted by” a socialist system created and controlled by the workers themselves, much as the anarchists in the International were later to argue.[91]
However, unlike them, Bray never called himself an anarchist.
The first person to do so was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a year later, in his groundbreaking work, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
Proudhon, like Bray and unlike Marx, came from the working class.
His maternal grandfather had been a revolutionary during the French Revolution, and his family remained supporters of the republican cause.
His father was a cooper and then an unsuccessful small businessman, running a cottage brewery and tavern for a time.
After that, the family lived and worked on his maternal grandfather’s farm.
After his father lost a lawsuit, reducing the family to poverty, Proudhon had to quit school and find a trade.
He became a printer and a compositor.
By the age of twenty, he was working with Charles Fourier, reviewing with him the proofs for Fourier’s Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire.
In this book, Fourier presented a summation of his critique of existing society and his proposed alternative, a society based on the principles of “mutual association” and “passionate attraction,” in which people would live and work in “phalansteries” or agro-industrial communes.
People would rotate through a variety of jobs, on a daily basis, with each job providing an outlet for a particular talent or capacity.
In What is Property?, Proudhon criticized Fourier for advocating individual remuneration based on each worker’s contribution of capital, labor, and skill to production, because the source of economic value is not capital, or even superior skills, but the “collective force” of associated labor; in which case, according to Proudhon, there should be an “equality of wages” rather than wage differentials between workers.[92]
For Proudhon, “capital can be exchanged, but cannot be a source of income.”[93]
Property, in the form of capital, was “theft” because the capitalists asserted complete control over, or exclusive ownership of, things that they had not produced by their own labor, and which naturally existed (such as land, air, and water) or were produced by others (the workers), but which the capitalists had appropriated for their own benefit.
The workers’ access to the very means of production that they had created through their own collective labor was controlled by their capitalist employers, who then paid them only a portion of the economic value produced by the workers using those means of production, keeping the lion’s share for themselves.
During the 1830s, Proudhon’s life was typical of a skilled tradesman in France.
He tramped around the country looking for work, survived a cholera outbreak in Paris, and had trouble supporting himself by his own labor.
He saw firsthand, along with many other workers, how the 1830 July Revolution had failed to result in any benefit to the working class.
When he asked the mayor of Toulon for help in finding work, the mayor’s advice to him was “to go away” and quit bothering him.[94]
His initial involvement in socialist politics came when he was offered the editorship of a Fourierist paper, L’Impartial.
Although he insisted that the paper should be unabashedly republican, he foreshadowed his subsequent anarchist views by suggesting that the paper “invite the population to make themselves capable of managing their own affairs,” dispensing “with all ministerial and constitutional hierarchy.”
He resigned from the paper on his first day, after finding out that everything he wrote had to be reviewed and approved by the local prefect before it could be published.[95]
His antipathy towards authority increased when his brother was called up for military service and ended up committing suicide when his commanding officer tried to embroil him in an embezzlement scheme.
Proudhon’s family had already been financially ruined by lawsuits.
He had seen the indifference of the government to the plight of workers like himself and its special concern to censor any criticisms of its role in maintaining their impoverished and subordinate status.
No wonder that he later described the law as “spider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the Government.”[96]
For Proudhon, government was “but the reflection of society.”[97]
In a society based on private property (“theft”), where “by the necessity of things, property, riches, comfort, all go on one side, poverty on the other,” the very function of government is nothing other than “the defence of the rich against the poor.”[98]
Abolish capitalism, and there will be “no further need of government.”[99]
Authority and capitalism go hand in hand, such that “the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the abolition of the government of man by man are one and the same formula.”[100]
From Proudhon’s perspective then, socialism and anarchism were inseparable from each other.
You cannot have one without the other.
Thus, in What is Property?, after proclaiming that “property is theft,” Proudhon declared himself an anarchist.
He conceived of socialism in terms of “free association,” the “sole function [of which] is to maintain equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges.”[101]
Achieve “the economic Revolution,” Proudhon argued, and “the State must entirely disappear.”[102]
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