Abstract
The third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century were a period of unprecedented social instability in which a vigorous and increasingly radical working-class movement confronted both the institutions and the ideology of the capitalist order. During the deep depression which followed the peace of 1815 there emerged a great popular movement for political reform, which was halted only temporarily by legal repression and military force. The ideals of democracy and working-class self-government survived Peterloo, and towards the end of the 1820s resurfaced in dozens of local political associations and unions, serviced by a hard-hitting and often illegal (because unstamped) weekly press. The trade unions continued to grow, despite many setbacks and in the face of criminalisation under both the Combination Acts (in force between 1799 and 1825) and the common law. More and more voices were heard urging the formation of a general union bringing together members of all trades and of none. Robert Owen preached socialism to an increasingly receptive audience, proclaiming the virtues of co-operation in place of competition. If his communistic colonies failed, his ideas found a home in the ‘labour exchanges’ or ‘bazaars’ of the early 1830s.
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Notes
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: a Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970);
N. Thompson, The People’s Science: the Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crises 1816–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
J. E. King, ‘“Perish Commerce!” Free Trade and Underconsumption in Early British Radical Economics’, Australian Economic Papers 20, 1981, pp. 235–57.
For the 1830s generally see J. T. Ward (ed.), Popular Movements, c. 1830–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1970); on the origins of Chartism,
D. Thompson, The Chartists (London: Temple Smith, 1984), chs 1–3.
Unless otherwise stated, biographical details are taken from M. F. Joliffe, ‘John Francis Bray’, International Review of Social History (first series), 4, 1939, pp. 1–36;
see also H. J. Carr, ‘A Critical Exposition of the Social and Economic Ideas of John Francis Bray, and an Estimation of His Influence Upon Karl Marx’, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of London, 1939.
The thesis is summarised in Carr, ‘John Francis Bray’, Economica n.s. 7, 1940, pp. 397–415.
E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Tramping Artisan’, Economic History Review n.s. 3, 1951, pp. 299–320.
From Bray’s notes in his own copy of Labour’s Wrongs, cited by M. F. Joliffe, ‘Fresh Light on John Francis Bray, Author of “Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy”’, Economic History (supplement to the Economic Journal) 3, 1939, p. 241.
J. F. C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1959), p. 70.
Yorkshireman, 2 February 1839 (review of Labour’s Wrongs), cited by Carr, op.cit., p. 80.
Harrison, op.cit., pp. 65–70. Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy has been reprinted twice (in facsimile editions with identical pagination): in 1931 by the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in 1968 by Augustus M. Kelley of New York.
Carr, op. cit., p. 86.
Harrison, op. cit., p. 75;
D. J. V. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 47–8.
Harrison, op. cit., p. 70; Northern Star, 20 May 1843.
M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, volume I (London: Bell, 1929), p. 244, n. 1.
King, ‘“Perish Commerce!” …’, op. cit.
See for example J. Campbell, An Examination of the Corn and Provision Laws from Their First Enactment (Manchester: Heywood, 1841).
H. I. Dutton and J. E. King, Ten Per Cent And No Surrender: the Preston Strike, 1853–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 45.
J. Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, volume II (New York: Harrap, 1947), pp. 961–2;
M. Ellison, Support For Secession (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972).
The Word (Princeton, Mass.) No. 2, June 1873, reprinted Joliffe, op. cit., p. 17.
Detroit Socialist, 12 January 1878, reprinted ibid., p. 20.
Carr, op. cit., pp. 267–94;
Joliffe, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
Paterson Labor Standard (New Jersey), 31 December 1892, reprinted in Joliffe, op. cit., pp. 30–1;
The Irish World, 10 June 1882, reprinted in ibid., pp. 21–3;
J. Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, volume III (New York: Viking Press, 1959), pp. 46–7, 232–3.
R. L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), p. 124.
H. S. Foxwell, ‘Introduction’ to A. Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. lxxvii.
Ibid., p. lxxii.
G. J. Holyoake, The History of Co-operation, volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906, p. 148);
see also T. R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
Menger, op. cit., pp. 61, 98n. There was apparently a cheap abridgement of Labour’s Wrongs in German, along with other Ricardian Socialist texts (J. Edwards, ‘John Francis Bray’, Socialist Review Nov.–Dec. 1916, p. 330). Edwards laments the neglect of Bray by English socialists and interprets his joint stock scheme as a forerunner of Guild Socialist ideas (ibid., p. 333).
Foxwell, op. cit., p. lxx.
Ibid., pp. lxvii–lxxi.
E. Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (Clifton, N. J.: Kelley, 1972 reprint of 1911 edn), p. 100.
Her discussion of Labour’s Wrongs is in ibid., pp. 84–98.
Ibid., p. 99.
J. A. Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954), p. 460, n. 24.
J. E. King, ‘Utopian or Scientific? A Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists’, History of Political Economy 15, 1983, pp. 345–73.
K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 60.
K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. 421–2 and 424–5. Compare the latter passage with that in Labour’s Wrongs, p. 156.
K. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 136; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 86n; Capital, volume I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 68n; and Theories of Surplus Value, volume III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972) pp. 319–25.
J. P. Henderson, ‘An English Communist, Mr. Bray [and] His Remarkable Work’, History of Political Economy 17, 1985, pp. 73–95.
F. Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1942), pp. 32–3.
And Marx did not read Hodgskin seriously until the early 1850s, several years after he had studied Bray in depth (Henderson, op. cit., pp. 75–6).
But it is not the case, at least for Bray, that ‘exploitation was located in the exchange process’ to the exclusion of concern with production (N. Thompson, op. cit., p. 106, n. 97).
‘The workmen have given the capitalist the labour of a whole year, in exchange for the value of only half a year’ (Labour’s Wrongs, p. 48; cf. ibid., pp. 37, 56, 153, and Henderson, op. cit., pp. 80–4).
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King, J.E. (1988). John Francis Bray (1809–1897). In: Economic Exiles. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07743-4_4
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