It is impossible to understand the present connection between the Labour Party and Socialism without some small acquaintance with the history of Labour’s attitude to Socialism in the past. That involves a retrospect of Trade Unionism. Up to 1825, anything in the nature of a Trade Union was rigorously suppressed by the Combination Laws, which, after considerable agitation, were repealed by the Acts 5 Geo. IV, 95 and 6 Geo. IV, 129. Although full freedom was not thereby secured for Trade Unions, yet for the first time the right of collective bargaining was recognized—a process of negotiation in course of which organizations of workmen could withhold their labour in order to secure the rates of wages or conditions of employment that they desired. As was naturally to be expected, this led to an increase in the number of Trade Unions and of their power. But fortune proved unkind. At the outset of their development there occurred the financial crash of 1825, which caused wholesale commercial ruin and widespread closing of works, reductions of wages and unemployment for the four or five years following, with continual strikes by way of resistance to wage reductions. The poverty and destitution of the working-classes as compared with the wealthier section of the community led to dissemination among the workers of revolutionary ideas, political and socialistic. One can read in the newspapers of the time, even as far back as 1829, familiar doctrines—that Labour is the only source of wealth—that the working-men are the support of the middle and upper classes, the nerves and soul of production, the foundation of the nation. From 1829, and particularly through the Chartist days of 1835-1842, the Trade Union movement which had previously concerned itself mainly in endeavouring to increase wages and improve conditions of employment, was actively associated with the middle classes in prosecuting revolutionary aims.
Labour’s Struggle for Political Power, 1825-1832
From 1829-32, the struggle swayed around the Reform Bill. Both Labour and the middle classes combined to regard the enactment of that measure as the opening of the door to social progress. Its failure to provide for universal manhood suffrage shattered the hopes of Labour. Revolution had for some time been whispered; a school of advanced Labour thought, when working out to its logical conclusion the theory that labour was the sole source of value, had evolved the doctrine of class-war.
Labour’s Alliance with Revolutionary Socialism, 1832-1842
Stung by disappointment through exclusion from the suffrage, organized Labour embraced these revolutionary doctrines, arrayed itself definitely against Parliamentary government, and insisted that the workers’ only hope of salvation lay in direct application against the community of their economic power. Robert Owen about that time was the leader of socialistic thought in this country, and Labour adopted and adapted certain parts of his policy as its official programme. Owen’s notion substantially was that the machinery of production should be owned not by the community, but by the particular section of workers who used it, and that the Trade Unions concerned in each industry should be transformed into national companies to carry on the trade. Profit-making and competition were to be eliminated. The labour of the miner, for example, would exchange on some time-basis with the labour of the agricultural labourer. One enthusiastic Owenite, William Benbow, elaborated the theory of the general strike as the means of enforcing the transfer of industries from the capitalists to the workers. This was the first official adoption by organized Labour in this country of socialistic conceptions. The movement, however, collapsed in 1834, and was succeeded by what is now known as Chartism. That term was at the time merely understood to mean democratic parliamentary reform, its immediate object being the conquest of political power, and its ulterior purposes, so far as organized Labour were concerned, were the establishment of communist colonies, the common ownership of land and of the means of production, social reform, democratic political organization, greater freedom for Trade Unions and improvement in wages and working conditions. There was thus a combination of mixed forces working indiscriminately for social reform, Trade Unionism and democratic parliamentary government. The dominant notion was to obtain parliamentary power which was thought a sufficient means to reform society, reorganize industry and purge the nation of every kind of social and industrial disorder. As is well known, there were two distinct parties in the Chartist movement, those who advocated physical force and those who confined their argument to moral suasion.
The year 1842 marks the culmination of Chartism and will be remembered as the year of the general strike in the North of England, and of the apparent imminence of a social revolt; but the collapse of the general strike and the repressive action of the government took, for the time being, all driving force out of the agitation. When times improved, and trade started to prosper, Chartism lost ground; the Trade Unions began to detach themselves from schemes of social revolution, and to make their immediate objective the improvement of the conditions of the workers in regard to wages and employment. Chartism continued as a political movement, with varying fortunes, up to the year 1849. What it achieved up to 1855 is thus summarized by Mr. Beer in Vol. II of his History of British Socialism, p. 190:
“After a desperate contest of thirty years’ duration, Chartism had come to an end. It had not been a struggle of a plebs for equal rights with the patriciate to spoliate and enslave other classes and nations, but a class-war aiming at the overthrow of the capitalist society and putting production, distribution, and exchange on a co-operative basis. The working-class was apparently defeated.
“Baffled and exhausted through erratic leadership, untold sacrifices, and want of proper mental munitions, they retired from the field of battle, bleeding and decimated, but little aware of the great results they had achieved. They only saw the shattered ideals and broken hopes that lay strewn on the long path they had been marching and counter-marching from 1825 to 1855, not knowing that it was from the wreckage and debris of those shattered ideals that the material was gathered for building and paving the road of social progress.
“The advance which Great Britain had made in those thirty years in social reform and democracy was enormous. The Chartist period witnessed the first real Factory Act (1833), the first mining law for the protection of child and female labour (1842), the Ten Hours’ Day (1847), the reduction of the newspaper stamp (1836), the Abolition of the Corn Laws (1846), the repeal of the Corresponding Acts (1846). It bequeathed to the working-classes the co-operative store and co-operative production, more successful trade unions, and international sentiments. It forced the thinking men of the nation to regard the Labour problem as a serious subject for investigation and discussion. Finally, it imbued the thinking portion of the working-class with the conviction that Liberalism must first do its work, before Labour could come into its own, both in the legislature and in the factory. In short, from the catastrophes of 1832, 1834, 1839, 1842 and 1848, the lesson emerged that the revolutionary policy of ‘all or nothing,’ of a sweeping triumph by one gigantic effort, of contempt for reform and of the supreme value of a total and radical subversion of the old order, were foredoomed to failure. The generation that succeeded Chartism went into Gladstone’s camp and refused to leave it either for the social Toryism of Benjamin Disraeli or for the social revolution of Karl Marx.”