Ideas

by Peter Watson

  If we call the development of the Protestant ethic a religio-sociological phenomenon, the main political effect of the industrial revolution, especially in its early decades, was to widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and to transform the character of poverty, from rural and agrarian poverty to urban poverty. In the new cities–dirty, squalid, crowded–the divisions between employer and employed were sharpened and embittered and with this the nature of politics changed for close on two hundred years.

  As E. P. Thompson has shown, in his The Making of the English Working Class, the characteristic experience of the labouring population between 1790 and 1830 was a narrowing process, as their position declined and weakened in the world. The essence of the industrial revolution for the working class in England was the loss of common rights by the landless and the increasing poverty of many trades brought about by ‘the deliberate manipulation of employment to make it more precarious’.60 Before 1790 the English working classes existed in many disparate forms; the experience of oppression and the progressive loss of rights, which at first weakened them, eventually proved to be a major unifying and strengthening force which, again, helped to forge modern politics.

  On the other side of what was now a growing divide, and as a result of the material successes of the industrial revolution (i.e., ignoring the human cost), it was the manufacturing interest, together with its blood-brothers in trade and finance, who now became the dominant force behind government policy, taking over–for the first time in history–from the landed aristocracy. This was not just because the urban factory was so important but also because the traditional form of land tenure (involving feudal privileges and communal rights) was deliberately usurped by unlimited ownership of enclosed parcels. This radically transformed what was left of rural life. So two things were happening at once. The working classes were being both driven off the land and sucked into the cities, crowded and filthy and unsanitary. At the same time, there was a proliferation of the middle classes, made up of the increasingly-familiar professions–white-collar workers and engineers and the educational world–plus, another first, the new world of ‘services’–for example, hotels, restaurants, and all the facilities associated with travel, now that railways and iron ships were an accessible reality. This bourgeoisie, newly installed, was every bit as self-conscious as the proletariat. In fact, many of them defined themselves by their differences from the working class. This too was new.61

  And this division, which may be regarded as a defining characteristic of what became Victorian civilisation, produced new ideas in two crucial areas–in economics and in sociology.

  Until the industrial revolution, the prevailing economic orthodoxy, as we have seen, was mercantilism, an approach first undermined by the so-called physiocrats in France, whose motto was ‘laissez faire’ and whose leader, it will be recalled from the last chapter, was François Quesnay.62 Although their ideas were never adopted outside France, they did show themselves as aware of the importance of the circulation of goods and it was this notion that was taken up by Adam Smith, whose ideas were also introduced in the last chapter. In the context of this chapter, it is important to reiterate that Smith himself was aware of the degrading effects of the factory regime on the lives of the workers, whereas it was those who followed him who seem to have turned a deliberate blind eye. Smith believed that the worker’s situation could improve but only if society expanded, which could only happen in an atmosphere of laissez faire. He believed, argued, that the worker, no less than the manufacturer, should be left free to pursue his own self-interest. Man’s nature, he said, must be accepted for what it was, and so it was not beneath the dignity of man to ‘regard our own private happiness and interest…[as]…very laudable principles of action’.63 Smith, a religious man, understood that self-interest could go too far, and in The Wealth of Nations provided several examples of where this had happened and businesses had overplayed their hand and brought ruin on themselves.64

  In the short term, Smith’s book provided the employers of the industrial revolution with a neat theoretical underpinning for their behaviour but it was two other economists who added the twist which brought out the worst in the manufacturers. These men were Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus we have already considered. What we need to add here is that his conclusion–that whereas food production can only increase arithmetically, population can increase exponentially–was in the nineteenth century interpreted to mean that, in the medium-to-long term, the condition of the masses cannot be improved. This became a powerful case against providing public or private charity.

  David Ricardo was the son of a stockbroker who was Dutch-Jewish and who converted to Christianity when he married and was disinherited by his family. There has always been a suspicion that Ricardo’s personal circumstances hardened his heart and, certainly, his theories made him a voice for the ‘new ruling class in a new ruling order’.65 His main contribution to economic theory was that, if industry is to succeed, then the value created by labour must be greater than that paid out in wages. It followed, he said, that if wages were kept low, to a level ‘which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution’, then there would never be too great an accumulation of capital, nor a general over-production. As J.K. Galbraith reminds us, this became known as the Iron Law of Wages, and established ‘that those who worked were meant to be poor, and that any other state of affairs would threaten the whole edifice of industrial society’. Ricardo, known in Parliament, where he served, as the ‘oracle’, agreed with Adam Smith that an expanding economy would push up wages overall but this was the only concession he made to the poor.66 As a classic laissez-faire capitalist, who argued that any taxes curtailed the amount of capital available for investment, he was one of those who provoked Karl Marx.67

  Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism also needs consideration in this context because his idea of a ‘felicific calculus’, the overall aggregate of pleasure and pain, became identified with the maximisation of the production of goods, the most characteristic achievement of the new industrialism. The fundamental idea, ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, was soon amended to include the twist that, no matter how acute the hardship might be for a minority (in terms of unemployment, for example), it must be tolerated. Bentham went so far as to say that ‘one should steel oneself against compassion for the few–or action on their behalf–lest one damage the greater well-being of the many’.68

  Not everyone could harden their heart like Ricardo or Bentham. Robert Owen for one. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System he concluded that, while there were some 900,000 families in Britain involved in agriculture, there were well over a million in trade and manufacturing and this number was increasing dramatically. Owen did not need convincing that the long labouring shifts in factories took an appalling toll on the health and dignity of workers. In the factory, he said, ‘employment’ had become ‘merely a cash relationship regardless of moral responsibility’.69 This moral abdication was for him what mattered most. The poor man ‘sees all around him hurrying forward, at mail-coach speed, to acquire individual wealth…’70 ‘All are sedulously trained to buy cheap and sell dear; and to succeed in this art, the parties must be taught to acquire strong powers of deception; and thus a spirit is generated through every class of traders, destructive of that open, honest, sincerity, without which man cannot make others happy, nor enjoy happiness himself.’71

  Owen had started work at the age of ten, after he moved from Montgomeryshire, in Wales, where he had been born, to London. He managed to prosper and became a partner in a business in Manchester, later moving on to become a manager and partner at the New Lanark mills in Scotland. And it was there, over the next two decades, that he carried out his famous experiments at social reform within an industrial environment. He had been shocked when he had taken over at Lanark. ‘The workers lived in idleness and poverty, usu
ally in debt; they were often drunk and traded in stolen goods. They were used to lying and argument, and were united only in their vehement opposition to their employers.’72 The position of the children was worse even than in a Dickens novel. They were provided from Edinburgh workhouses and were forced to labour from six in the morning until seven in the evening. It was scarcely surprising that Owen found that ‘many of them became dwarfs in body and mind’.73

  His response was radical. To discourage theft and drunkenness, he set up a system of rewards and punishments. He raised the minimum age of children from six to ten and funded a village school where the younger children were taught to read and write ‘and enjoy themselves’.74 He improved housing, paved the streets, planted trees and created gardens. To his great satisfaction, he was able to show that his improvements not only eased life for the labourers, but actually helped increase their productivity. He then embarked on a campaign to do the same on a nation-wide basis.75

  This plan had three aims. First, Owen wanted free schools, state-funded, for all children between the ages of five and ten. Second, he campaigned for various Factory Acts to be passed, designed to limit the hours a person could work in any one day. He was successful insofar as a Factory Act was passed in 1819, though Owen himself did not feel it went anywhere near far enough. Finally, he campaigned for a national system of poor relief. He wasn’t advocating cash handouts. Rather, Owen proposed a series of co-operative villages, with roughly 1,200 individuals in each, with a ring of land surrounding it. Every village would have a school and provide for itself, causing the number of poor to fall as the village inhabitants evolved into profitable members of society.76 One or two villages of this kind were tried (Orbiston, nine miles east of Glasgow, for example), but, in the main, it has to be said, nothing much came of this latter idea. (Owen was a fervent critic of organised religion and this meant that he antagonised many potential benefactors.) But his two other main ideas did succeed, even if they did not fly as far or as fast or as high as he wanted: two out of three isn’t bad. To an extent, he did manage to restore a certain dignity to the labouring classes which he felt had been lost with the arrival of the factory city.77

  As a visit to Ironbridge, in Shropshire, England, will confirm even today, Britain was only semi-industrial in the eighteenth century. The first factories were built on (literally) greenfield sites, in the valleys of the countryside.78 It was only when the factories were transferred to the towns that the full horror of the industrial revolution became truly apparent, and it was not until the nineteenth century that industrialisation and the great divide between rich and poor that went with it combined to forge a self-conscious and bitter class of people who felt excluded from the vast fortunes being acquired by the industrialists. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the 1840s had been reached before pre-industrial traditions finally died out (in the form, for example, of such pastimes as wrestling matches, cock-fighting and bull-baiting; the 1840s also marked the end of the era when folksong remained the major musical idiom of industrial workers).79

  The important point, as several historians have observed, is that there was a marked deterioration in the conditions of the working class at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hobsbawm himself provides several vivid examples: between 1800 and 1840 there was a shortage of meat in London; out of 8.5 million Irishmen, close to a million literally starved to death in the famine of 1846–1847; the average wages of handloom weavers fell between 1805 and 1833 from 23 shillings a week to 6s 3d. The average height of the population–a good indication of nutrition–rose between 1780 and 1830, fell in the next thirty years, then rose again. The 1840s were known, even at the time, as the ‘Hungry Forties’. Riots, mostly related to food shortages, broke out in Britain in 1811–1813, 1815–1817, 1819, 1826, between 1829 and 1835, in 1838–1842, 1843–1844 and 1846–1848. Hobsbawm quotes a rioter in the Fens in 1816: ‘ “Here I am between Earth and Sky, so help me God. I would sooner lose my life than go home as I am. Bread I want and bread I will have…” In 1816, all over the eastern counties, in 1822 in East Anglia, in 1830 everywhere between Kent and Dorset, Somerset and Lincoln, in 1843–4 once again in the east Midlands and the eastern counties, the threshing machines were broken, the ricks burned at night, as men demanded a minimum of life.’80 To begin with, the vast bulk of these riots occurred so that the rioters could get their hands on food. Beginning about 1830, however, the form of unrest began to change and, eventually, there arose the concept of a general trades union which had in its armoury ‘the ultimate weapon, the general strike’ (otherwise known, not entirely ironically, as the ‘sacred month’). ‘But essentially, what held all these movements together, or revived them after their periodic defeat and disintegration, was the universal discontent of men who felt themselves hungry in a society reeking with wealth, enslaved in a country which prided itself on its freedom, seeking bread and hope, and receiving in return stones and despair.’81 This is not only present-day Marxist historians talking. One American passing through Manchester in 1845 confided as follows in a letter home: ‘Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society…Every day that I live I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in England.’82

  In 1845 Friedrich Engels was working in Manchester (he got to know Owen). He was employed there in the cotton trade but he could see what was going on around him and was disturbed enough by what he witnessed to make his own exposé of the new industrial Britain. The Condition of the Working Class in England, released in that year, described in despairing detail the ‘sheer misery and material squalor’ in which tens of thousands lived. But, vivid though his book was, Engels only set the scene. It was his friend and collaborator who was to take the world by storm.83

  Karl Marx was very moved by Engels’ book but, as J. K. Galbraith has observed, the truth is that Marx was probably a ‘natural revolutionary’ in any case. Obsessed by freedom all his life, the thrust of Marx’s lifetime achievement may be understood as an investigation and exposé ‘of how man’s inherent freedom has become hidden from him’. Born in Trier, in Germany, the son of a lawyer who was also an officer of the High Court, Marx was raised as a member of the local elite and his marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a local baron, underscored his social position.84 The change came for Marx after he went to Berlin to study under George Hegel. Hegel’s dominant idea was that all economic, social and political life is in constant flux. This was his famous theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Once one state of affairs has evolved, said Hegel, a second emerges to challenge it. This argument had more going for it then than it may do now, because at the time Marx was studying under Hegel the new industrialists had emerged and were challenging the power of the ancien régime, the old ruling landed classes.85 Change was the crucial concept here. Classical economics–in particular the system outlined by Ricardo–argued that the aim of economics was equilibrium, when the fundamental relationships in industrial society, between employer and worker, between land, capital and labour, never changed. Drawing a lesson from Hegel, Marx didn’t accept the conventional wisdom for one moment.

  Not that he derived all his views from Hegel and from Berlin. As with Ricardo, his own experiences were relevant too. After his time in the Prussian capital, Marx transferred to Cologne, to become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. This was (and it is an important fact) an organ of the new industrialists of the Ruhr valley, and to begin with he did a good job. But then, gradually at first, and in small ways, his paper began to support a set of policies that contravened the interests of many of his readers. For example, he published his support for the right of the locals to collect dead wood in the nearby forests. As in many countries around Europe, this was a traditional privilege, but the right had been recently removed because wood was needed for the new industries. As a result, any local who ventured into the forest was now guilty of trespass. Marx also argued for changes to the divorce laws, making the role of the chu
rch less important. This barrage of radical editorials was too much for the local authorities in Cologne, and Marx was dismissed. Now began a period of wandering. He went first to Paris, where his aim was to write for a German-language periodical distributed among German expatriates. The censors seized the first issue and the Prussians complained to the French that ‘harbouring Marx was an unfriendly act’.86 He moved on to Belgium, but the Prussians hounded him there. After other adventures and expulsions he ended up in Britain.

  By now of course he was a changed man and increasingly revolutionary. In Britain he collaborated with Engels on what J. K. Galbraith has called ‘the most celebrated–and energetically denounced–political pamphlet of all time’, The Communist Manifesto. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels called the state under capitalism ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, adding ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.’ They argued that industrial society was divided into ‘two great hostile camps’, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, fundamentally antagonistic.87 Warming to his theme, Marx embarked on his massive three-volume work, Capital. Engels edited the first volume and then, after Marx’s death in 1883, put together the last two volumes from notes and pieces of manuscript.