Chapter 2 Attempts at General Union
The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 marked an important turning-point in British labour history. It was the culmination of five years activity on behalf of general unionism, and its failure dealt a decisive blow to the goal of labour unity.
T. M. Parssinen and I. J. Prothero’s dismal view of the GNCTU’s place in labour history is highly disputable. It could equally be seen as the start of the process of self organisation of the working class, recently separated from a newly enfranchised bourgeoisie, as F. Engels did. The origins of the trade union movement can be traced back at least to the late eighteenth century. The trade clubs and societies founded then began to be seen as a potential threat by the ruling class. Fearful of revolution on the French model, Parliament passed the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which effectively banned trade unions outright. Despite this draconian legislation, - which J. L. and B. Hammond described as "the most unqualified surrender of the State to the discretion of a class in the history of England" - trade unions, as they began to be called, continued to exist, in illegal and underground fashion. In spite of the real possibility of severe legal penalty, a number of strikes occurred throughout the country at this time. These Acts were not repealed until 1824 and this repeal itself was quickly followed by the Trade Union Act of 1825 which served to allow only the existence of trade unions as legal entities, while putting legal obstacles in the way of all forms of industrial action. That said, the important victory was the ability to organise legally and openly. The power to combine without fear of prosecution allowed the strength of unity and ways were then found to begin to use that strength against the masters.
The traditional form of organisation was along trade lines, with such organisations as the Breech-Makers Benefit Society which Francis Place (later to become the Radical MP who steered the repeal of the Combination Act through Parliament) joined in the 1790s and described as "intended for the purpose of supporting the members in a strike for wages". E. P. Thompson argues that these organisations became politicised by the Combination Acts which "unwittingly brought the Jacobin tradition into association with the illegal unions". These politicised trade societies took the logical next step "[f]rom the trade union . . . to the trades union"; that is they sought to form general unions. The first of these general trades unions was formed in 1818 when Lancashire spinners engendered the first "General Union of the Trades" or "Philanthropic Society" (so named probably as legal cover), but it soon folded. The next attempt was led by John Doherty, also from the Lancashire cotton spinners. In 1830 he formed the ‘National Association for the Protection of Labour’ (NAPL) organising a federation of 150 trade unions, the NAPL lasted for two years. This was more a federation of existing trade unions than a general union, but it did pledge in its rules to support strikes against the reduction of pay.
The GNCTU was founded in February 1834. It can be argued that its origins lay in a synthesis of Owenism and traditional trade unionism. The germ of the Consolidated Union, was in the Owenite ‘Grand National Moral Union of the Productive Classes’ formed in October 1833. The impetus for the transformation of this organisation into an exclusively working class general union of a proto-syndicalist nature came from the long established and well organised London Tailors’ Union; while the original object of its formation was the support of the trades unionists of the long running Derby Lock-out.
The GNCTU is then but one in a series of "attempts at general union". However, there are significant and important differences between the GNCTU and earlier attempts. Firstly, the GNCTU was not intended as a federation of existing unions but as a consolidation. This consolidation was to include branches of newly organised workers as well as the already "regularly organised and united" trades which the NAPL had limited itself to by rule. The GNCTU official newspaper, The Pioneer, edited by the militant James Morrison, regularly featured accounts of new branches formed including the high praise of "Lodges of Industrious Females" and a regular "Women’s Page" encouraging women to organise and join the union. The structure and inclusive ethos of the GNCTU makes it appear much more like a modern general union. Secondly, the headquarters, unlike its northern based predecessors, were in London, closer and more threateningly visible to the seat of national government. Finally and most importantly its objects were explicitly political and stretched beyond the scope of industrial relations. These differences are what sets the GNCTU apart as the "turning-point in labour history" referred to in the lead quote.
The few months of the GNCTUs existence focused on the Derby dispute; the Tolpuddle Martyrs; and the strike of the London Tailors (which resulted in the general union’s collapse in August 1834). It will be argued that the Derby lock-out was the most important of these three key events, in opposition to W. H. Oliver’s opinion that the "chief significance" of " the strike [sic] of a smallish number of Derby silkweavers ... was to provide the occasion for the formation of the Consolidated Union." The huge expenditure of funds occasioned by the dispute; the disillusionment and sense of defeat engendered by the ignoble defeat of this star cause; and the resultant overcautious attitude of the leadership towards the tailors’ request for strike action, all point towards the importance of Derby in the history of the GNCTU.
The GNCTU was formed in a time of rapid and disconcerting change. As E. Hobsbawm says:
Early industrial Britain passed through a crisis, which reached its stage of greatest acuteness in the 1830s and 1840s. That it was not a ‘final’ crisis but merely one of growth, should not lead us to under estimate its seriousness . . . The most obvious evidence of this crisis is the high wind of social discontent which blew across Britain in successive gusts between the last years of the wars and the middle of the 1840s: Luddite and Radical, trade unionist and utopian socialist, Democratic and Chartist. At no other period in modern British history have the common people been so persistently, profoundly, and often desperately dissatisfied.
In this setting, the formation of the GNCTU can be seen as one of a series of expressions of the discontent of the emergent working class. This period of massive change all seemed to be to the detriment of the labouring classes and the improvement of the capitalist class. Contemporary accounts are full of the articulation of this opinion, and as a result this class based perspective cannot be written off as merely the partisan interpretation of Marxist historians - keen to identify the emergence of proletarian consciousness - such as Hobsbawm. It is also important to note that it was an interpretation which was favoured not only by early socialist economists such as J. Gray, W. Thompson and T. Hodgskin, influenced by the economics of D. Ricardo, but also by the representatives of the middle class in establishment newspapers such as The Derby and Chesterfield Reporter. In a report on the Derby lock-out it commented:
The two interests therefore of labour, - which is the origin of wealth, - and of capital, - which is the accumulation of labour, are fairly pitted against each other
However, the basis of class conflict was not only in the economic sphere. The passing of the first Reform Act of 1832 extended the franchise to the propertied bourgeoisie but damaged the political position of the working class. In assisting the middle class to obtain their representation in Parliament "the workers had been cannon fodder not allies". As J. Rule says:
The securing of the vote by the middle classes in 1832 meant that the vocabulary of political radicalism had become more and more the property of the working classes. In the language of radicalism as it had developed through the Eighteenth Century, the ‘people’ had always embraced the excluded and, as Dr Steadman Jones has put it: ‘in radical terms in 1832 the ‘people’ became the working classes’.
Following this split from its former middle class allies, the working class was encouraged to organise for itself. The culmination of this self organisation in the early 1830s was the GNCTU which - far from having merely the traditional role of "joint action among trades" as Parssinen and Prothero claim - had as its "great and ultimate object . . . the bringing about [of] A DIFFERENT ORDER OF THINGS". Clearly, Hutt’s upbeat description of the GNCTU as "the first great example of what we now call syndicalism, the belief that trade union action alone can overthrow capitalism" was based on firm foundations as evidenced by the political objectives of its rules. The ultimate single object of the overthrow of capitalism by the use of the general strike, and the inclusive, rather than trade based nature of combination, - with a view to organising future society along these lines, - look very similar to the later syndicalist unions’ aims and methods of organisation. That said, it would be wrong to portray the GNCTU as a straightforward precursor to the syndicalist ‘one big union’ ideas of Tom Mann and his comrades at the turn of the century, if only because the GNCTU was bound up in the ideas of Robert Owen.
Owen, (pictured above) significantly however, had much less influence within the GNCTU and previous attempts at general union than is now commonly believed. Indeed, if his ideas of the joint destiny of the enlightened sections of the "productive classes" had been accepted, the entirely working class GNCTU would not have been created. Owen, in fact, only joined the GNCTU some months after its formation, and then to support the Tolpuddle Martyrs and not the class war. His first act on wresting its leadership from the militant and working class Morrison was to reinvent the union as the ‘British and Foreign Consolidated Association of Industry, Humanity and Knowledge’, with the aim of putting
an end to the unnatural feelings of hatred and hostility which have arisen through the ignorance alone of both parties, between masters and operatives.
Effectively a return to an even more toothless Owenite version of his Grand Moral Union of the Productive Classes.
After this collapse of the first attempts at autonomous working class organisation, Engels argues that the working class took the next and in his view positive step towards political association, Chartism. Importantly, this did not mean the abandonment of revolutionary unionism as can be seen from the Plug strikes of 1842. However, working class organisation would not turn again to an exclusively trades union and anti-parliamentary social revolutionary agenda until the advent of syndicalism in the 1890s.
With the structure surrounding the events of 1834 set it is necessary in the next chapter to look more in detail at the events which occurred in the central dispute of Derby.
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