Socialism 101 Read online

  Founding Fathers Learn from Harrington

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  The American founding fathers studied Harrington’s ideas and many of them were incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, including the bicameral Congress, the indirect election of the president, and the separation of powers.

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  Harrington also deterred the development of an oligarchy through a strict division of power between the legislative and executive branches of government. Power was further separated in the legislature, which was made up of two houses with distinct responsibilities. The upper chamber, called the senate after the Roman legislature, was responsible for proposing and debating policy but had no power to enact law. The lower house was responsible for voting on the policies the upper house proposed, but it was not allowed to propose or debate policy. Representatives of the upper house were drawn from a “natural aristocracy” gifted with the “goods of the mind.” Representatives of the lower house were drawn from the people. Representatives of both houses were elected by indirect ballot and held their positions for fixed terms on a rotating basis. The electorate and pool from which representatives were chosen included all adult male property holders, with two exceptions.

  THE NATURAL RIGHTS OF MAN

  The son of an attorney who fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War, British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) is often considered the first philosopher of the Enlightenment. He studied the standard classics curriculum at Oxford but was more interested in the new ideas about the nature and origin of knowledge that were developed by the natural philosophers of the sixteenth century.

  In 1666 Locke found a patron: Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke and Shaftesbury shared numerous political positions, including support for constitutional monarchy, the Protestant succession, civil liberties, religious tolerance, and parliamentary rule. When his patron was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason in 1681, Locke followed him into exile in the Netherlands.

  Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government (1689) to explain his political ideas. In the first treatise he refutes the divine right of kings. In the second Locke argues that all men are born with certain natural rights, including the right to survive and the right to have the means to survive, with the corollary obligation not to harm others. Each society creates a government to protect those rights.

  Since government exists by the consent of the governed and not by the divine right of kings, citizens have the right to withdraw their consent if a government fails in its duty to protect their rights.

  THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKETPLACE

  One other figure should be considered important in the development of socialist thought—although oddly, he’s often identified with free-market capitalism. Considered the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith (1723–1790) was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1776 Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which he intended to be the first volume of a complete theory of society. The Wealth of Nations was the first major work of political economy.

  In this work Smith examined the market economy in detail for the first time. He overturned old ideas of wealth when he identified labor, not gold or land, as the true source of wealth. He demonstrated how the law of supply and demand regulates the prices of specific goods and examined how capital is accumulated and used. He took fascinating side excursions into the manufacture of pins, luxury goods produced under the Abbasid Caliphate (a major dynasty of the Islamic Empire), and statistics on the North Atlantic herring catch.

  At its heart The Wealth of Nations was an attack on the dominant economic theory of the time: mercantilism. Under mercantilism, governments created elaborate systems of regulations, tariffs, and monetary controls to protect their economies. Smith proposed a free market in which the “invisible hand” of the marketplace replaces government control and brings prosperity to all, coining the word capitalism to distinguish it from mercantilism.

  THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIALIST THOUGHT

  The political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laid the foundation for later socialist thought with their enquiries into the relationship between the one, the few, and the many. Questions of equality and inequality, the distribution of wealth, the basis for authority, and the rights of man (narrowly defined) were now part of the public discourse.

  THE RISE OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS

  A Revolution from Below

  Modern socialism has its roots in the mills and slums of the Industrial Revolution. The ability to make goods quickly and cheaply soared as manufacturers found more and more ways to use machines to extend the productivity of a single man. Many welcomed machines and the wealth they created as the embodiment of progress. Others were troubled by the conditions under which the new urban poor lived and worked. A few began to consider ways in which the fruits of this growth in productivity could be shared more equally.

  THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POPULATION EXPLOSION

  After a century of virtually no population growth, the countries of Western Europe experienced dramatic population increases between 1750 and 1800. Many countries doubled in size. In some countries the growth continued through the nineteenth century. The population of Great Britain, for instance, doubled between 1750 and 1800 and then tripled between 1800 and 1900.

  There were several reasons for the sudden increase. Medical advances and improved hygiene limited the devastation caused by epidemic diseases and plagues. The introduction of new food crops, most notably the potato, provided a better diet for the poor and reduced the incidence of famine. The combination of greater public order and fewer civil wars meant that life was less hazardous. The net result was a lower death rate and soaring population.

  The Agricultural Revolution

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  The Industrial Revolution was paralleled by an agricultural revolution in Great Britain. New horse-drawn machinery, better fodder crops, extensive land drainage projects, and scientific stockbreeding increased agricultural productivity. But improved farming had a social cost. Between 1760 and 1799 large landowners fenced in between 2 and 3 million acres of common land that small farmers had previously used for grazing.

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  The growing population, with a rising proportion of children to raise and older people to care for, put increased pressure on every aspect of society. Many peasants were no longer able to provide land for their children, who were forced to look for other ways to make their living. Small artisans in the cities suffered similar problems, unable to provide places for their children in their own workshops. The growth in population increased the demand for both food and manufactured goods and provided an abundance of cheap labor to produce them.

  WEAVING BECOMES A MODERN INDUSTRY

  The Industrial Revolution began in the English textile industry. Textiles had been an important part of the English economy for centuries. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, England’s fine wools were famous. Linen production was expanding into Ireland and Scotland. Only the cotton industry was small and backward, unable to compete with Indian calico and muslin on either quality or price.

  Weaving was a domestic industry in the first half of the eighteenth century. Except in Manchester, where self-employed weaver-artisans belonged to highly organized trade societies, most weavers were also farmers. In many households weaving was done in the seasons when there was little work to do on the farm. Often the entire family was involved.

  The first changes were small:

  • John Kay’s flying shuttle, introduced in the 1730s and widely adopted in the 1750s and 1760s, allowed the weaver to speed up.

  • Lewis Paul’s carding machine, patented in 1748, made it easier to prepare fibers for spinning.

  Both inventions intensified a supply problem that already existed: Spinners were the bottleneck in the system. It took three or four spinners to supply yarn for one weaver working a traditional loo
m. When the flying shuttle allowed a weaver to speed up, the yarn shortage became acute.

  James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, patented in 1770, solved the yarn supply problem. Family spinning wheels were quickly replaced by small jennies, which were relatively cheap to buy and simple enough for a child to operate. In its earliest form the jenny had eight spindles. By 1784 eighty spindles were common. By the end of the century the largest jennies allowed one man, helped by several children, to operate as many as 120 spindles at once.

  As spinning jennies grew bigger, spinning began to be moved into factories, but the new factory system did not replace the cottage-based textile industry immediately. At first families built extensions onto their cottages, where they could operate looms and jennies on a larger scale. Mill owners provided home-based spinners with raw cotton and handloom weavers with spun yarn. Because weavers could count on uninterrupted supplies of yarn, they could afford to weave full time instead of as a supplement to farming.

  THE BIRTH OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM

  The real change in the English weaving industry began in 1769, when Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, which improved both the speed and quality of thread spinning. Unlike the jenny, Arkwright’s water-powered spinning frame was designed to be a factory machine.

  A few years later Samuel Crompton’s mule combined the principles of the jenny and the water frame, producing a smoother, finer yarn that allowed English cotton to compete with Indian goods in terms of quality. In 1795 Arkwright’s patent was canceled, making the water frame available without restrictions for anyone who could afford the capital investment. That same year a steam engine was used to operate a spinning mill for the first time. Large-scale factory production was now feasible.

  Improvements in spinning technologies were followed by carding, scutching, and roving machines that replaced the tedious hand labor of preparing fibers for spinning. Each technical improvement moved the textile industry further away from the domestic system.

  The factory system was more than just a new way to organize work; it was a new way of life. Factories were dark, loud, and dangerous. The discipline and monotonous routine of the mill worker differed greatly from the workday of the farmer or hand weaver. Both agricultural workers and weavers often worked fourteen-hour days, but agricultural work was varied and seasonal, and independent weavers controlled their own schedules. In the factories the same fourteen hours included few breaks plus a long walk to and from home at the end of each day. Supervisors discouraged workers from song and chatter—both of which were hard to hear over the noise. As more women and children were hired, the fathers of families were thrown permanently out of work.

  Child Labor Laws

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  The Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the first child labor law in 1802. Aimed at “apprenticeship” of orphans in cotton mills, it had no enforcement provisions—and little effect. The use of child labor was largely unchecked until the Factory Act of 1833, which set the legal work age at nine and stipulated that children between nine and thirteen could work no more than nine hours a day.

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  THE GROWTH OF FACTORY TOWNS

  A New Landscape

  As long as the new spinning mills were powered by water, they were scattered throughout northern England, located wherever falling water was available. Many of these mills were in places so isolated that their owners had trouble attracting enough labor, so they employed groups of children from London orphanages as “apprentices.” With the introduction of steam power, it was possible to locate mills anywhere. Most were built near sources of coal and labor.

  The key industrial cities grew at an astonishing rate in the first half of the nineteenth century, fueled by the internal migration of displaced workers, artisans, and shopkeepers in search of opportunities. The most rapid growth occurred in factory cities, like Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, but port cities also grew as a result of expanded overseas trade. By 1850 more than half the British population lived in cities.

  “Dark Satanic Mills”

  The new cities were ugly to the nineteenth-century eye: hastily built and dark with the soot from burning coal. Contemporary observers were appalled by the impact of what poet William Blake described as the “dark Satanic mills” on the physical landscape. Critic John Ruskin foresaw an England “set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: that there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens.” Socialist artist William Morris feared that all would “end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap…[where] the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world.” It took a foreigner, that keen-eyed observer Alexis de Tocqueville, to equate the physical ugliness of the mill towns with their effect on the people who worked in them: “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world,” he wrote after a visit to Manchester. “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”

  THE POWER LOOM AND THE DECLINE OF WAGES

  Weavers’ wages, already driven down by the increase in weavers, took another hit when power looms were introduced on a large scale in the 1820s. Handlooms required skill to operate. Power looms did not.

  The Luddites

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  In 1811 and 1812 masked bands of displaced textile workers attacked mills and destroyed the machines that were threatening their livelihood, calling themselves Luddites, after a possibly mythical leader named Captain Ned Ludd. The bands were careful not to attack villagers or damage other property and often had tacit local support. The government responded by making machine breaking punishable by death.

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  Unskilled factory labor, mostly women and children, began to replace independent skilled weavers. Because there were few other jobs available, wages remained low even when the market for British textiles boomed. Between 1820 and 1845 the cotton industry’s production quadrupled; the wages it paid remained unchanged.

  A Second Wave of Industry

  The industrialization of Britain’s textile industry created a demand for tools, machines, and power that spurred the development of improvements in forging steel and mining coal. The original wooden machines were replaced with faster and more specialized machinery, built from metal by a nascent machine tool industry.

  Steam engines provided reliable and continuous power. First used for hauling coal from mines, the new technology was adapted to other industries as well. Soon steam engines were used in grain mills, sugar refineries, and the great British Potteries. The need for improved transportation led to the expansion of the canal system and the later development of roads and railways.

  THE CREATION OF THE URBAN WORKING CLASS

  The Industrial Revolution created a new class of urban poor as populations shifted from the countryside to the cities. The first generation that moved to the city often retained their rural roots, returning to their villages at harvest or for family celebrations. Over time ties to ancestral villages broke, and city dwellers saw themselves as substantially different from those who remained behind in the villages.

  The transition from the countryside to the city was often difficult. Living conditions in the cities were horrific for the poor. Cities were unable to handle the influx of new residents. Sewers were open in working-class districts, and water supplies were inadequate. Older cities paved the streets in the mid-eighteenth century, but in new cities the streets were often no better than rutted paths. Existing housing was divided and re-divided to create space; families often had only one room or shared a room with another family. New housing was equally cramped and often badly built.

  Small Business Owners

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  The Industrial Revolution also created a new class of wealthy manufacturers. A few were weavers and spinners who worked their way up from artisans to mill owners. Most started as small l
andowners or businessmen. They were a volatile element in a changing society: sometimes competing with wealthy landowners for power and status, sometimes joining with them to fight social change.

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  THE RISE OF WORKING-CLASS RADICALISM

  The working classes did not wait for middle-class reformers to come to their rescue. Instead, they began to call for reform at the end of the eighteenth century: appealing to Parliament for minimum wage laws, apprenticeship regulations, child labor laws, and other protections for laborers; forming early versions of trade unions; and going on strike.

  They soon came to the conclusion that the only way to effect real change was to reform the method of electing representatives to the House of Commons. As long as the landed classes (landowners who lived on rental income or on the produce from their land) controlled both houses of Parliament, there was no hope for reform.

  Working-class radicals formed organizations called corresponding societies, which were designed to allow reformers from all over the country to stay in touch with each other. The most famous of these was the London Corresponding Society, formed in 1792 by radical shoemaker Thomas Hardy. Similar societies existed in industrial towns throughout Great Britain. As long as the corresponding societies remained local, the government left them alone. In 1793 a Scottish reform group attempted to bring representatives of many reform organizations to a meeting in Scotland. The leaders were arrested, tried for sedition, and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation overseas to one of Britain’s penal colonies. A second attempt to organize a national reform meeting led to charges of high treason.