Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

Tristan believed in peacefully organizing workers of both sexes en masse. She took inspiration from the British Isles, where there had been two large-scale efforts to mobilize ordinary people: in Ireland, O’Connell’s Catholic Association; and on the British mainland, Chartism, the mass movement that, during her visit to England in 1839, had been preparing to petition Parliament for enactment of its Six Points, which included universal male suffrage and a secret ballot. At Dr. Johnson’s Tavern, off Fleet Street, Tristan attended a National Convention of Chartists. Among the attendees were Feargus O’Connor, a former Irish MP who edited the Northern Star newspaper; James Bronterre O’Brien, another radical journalist who hailed from the Emerald Isle; and William Lovett, a cofounder of the London Working Men’s Association. “O’Connor is a vigorous, fiery orator whose brilliance is inspiring,” Tristan wrote in her book on London. “O’Brien is remarkable for his sound reasoning, his lucidity, his calm manner and his profound knowledge of history.”44

France had nothing to compare to Chartism, but Tristan wasn’t discouraged. She visited artisanal workshops and corresponded with labor activists who were trying to organize workers on a smaller scale.45 Her interlocutors included Jacques Gosset, a Parisian blacksmith; Pierre Moreau, a locksmith from Auxerre; and Agricol Perdiguier, a carpenter from Avignon. Although Tristan’s roots were far from working class, her effort to reach across class and gender lines was sincere. She believed that workers had great potential and were merely lacking knowledge of their own collective strength. And she was convinced that it was her mission—a religiously ordained one—to be their guide and instructor.

To this end, Tristan started working on a short book, The Workers’ Union, which was eventually published in 1843. Despite the success of Promenades of London, which French critics hailed as an important work of social criticism, she had difficulty finding a publisher for a book aimed at workers. Eventually she decided to finance its publication herself and asked her friends and associates to contribute. Among those who agreed to make donations were Considérant, Sand, and Adolphe Blanqui, a brother of the jailed revolutionary.46 After raising more than fifteen hundred francs, Tristan personally carried her manuscript, which ran to about 125 pages, to the printer.

The book began: “TO ALL WORKERS, MEN AND WOMEN, Hear me!” During the past twenty-five years, Tristan noted, some of the most “intelligent and devoted men” in the country had carried out studies showing that “the working class is materially and morally in an intolerable condition of poverty and grief.”47 Despite these warnings, the government had refused to acknowledge this crisis or take any steps to alleviate it, so responsibility had fallen on the workers themselves. “Now the time has come to act, and it’s for you and you alone to do so in the interest of your own cause,” Tristan wrote. “For you, it’s a case of life … or death!… that horrible death that kills bit by bit: poverty and hunger!”48

But what were the workers to do? Tristan ruled out violence. “The action for you to take is not armed revolt, uprisings in the public square, burnings and pillage,” she said. “No because destruction instead of bettering your situation will make things worse. The uprisings in Lyon and Paris are good proofs.” She went on: “As for action on your part there is only one that is legal, legitimate, and avowable to God and mankind; it is the Universal Union of Men and Women Workers.”49 Alone, workers were weak, but together they had power, Tristan noted. “Well, then! Abandon your isolation: unite with each other! Union makes for strength. You have numbers on your side, and numbers are everything.”50

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In 1840s France, unlike in Britain, labor unions were illegal. Workers didn’t even have full freedom of movement: they were required to carry an internal passport (livret d’ouvriers) that stated their place of employment and certified they were free of debts. Despite this hostile environment to labor, there had been efforts during the 1830s to create workers’ associations, particularly in craft industries like printing and textiles, where cheap labor and new technology represented threats. But these initiatives were localized and largely confined to artisans. They didn’t advance the labor movement very far beyond the craft guilds that dated back to medieval times.

Tristan’s proposal was designed to overcome the historic divisions between workers of different trades and skill levels. Her union would be open to any worker, she explained, with each member contributing annual dues of two francs. In workplaces, the union would press for higher wages and better conditions. In the political realm, it would demand representation for workers in the French parliament. And in each community, it would establish a “Workers’ Union Palace”—a superhostel providing healthcare for injured workers, education for children, and shelter for the elderly and infirm.

A key element of Tristan’s proposal was its explicit class basis. If the workers overcame their internal divisions, she argued, they could organize themselves as a class, just as the bourgeoisie had done in 1789 when its members had “recognized equality of rights for everyone,” but “seized for themselves alone all the gains and advantages of this conquest.” The Universal Workers’ Union would redress this imbalance by organizing the working class and demanding a “RIGHT TO WORK,” Tristan said. The only property that the workers possessed was their arms, and “the free use and guarantee of that property must be recognized in principle (and also in reality).”51

This proposal for job guarantees wasn’t entirely novel. Other socialist writers had recognized the precariousness of employment as a central problem in an economy based on the profit motive. In 1840, the writer and future politician Louis Blanc had published a pamphlet, The Organization of Labor, in which he called on the French government to supplant the competitive private-enterprise economy, which he regarded as ruinous, with a nationwide system of workshops, “Ateliers Sociaux,” where workers would be guaranteed jobs and get to choose their own bosses. In Blanc’s vision, these publicly owned workshops would compete with capitalist firms—and eventually outcompete them because their employees would work harder in enterprises they controlled. Tristan’s full employment proposal was different. Rather than bringing in the government to create new worker-run firms, it relied on workers at existing businesses organizing themselves into a general union, and employers recognizing their right to work.

“But, someone is going to say again, what you demand for the working class is impossible,” Tristan acknowledged. Business owners would “simply not listen,” and “since those who manage the governmental machine are the owners of land and capital, it is evident that they will never consent to grant such rights to the working class.”52 This was where organizing the workers into a single class came in. “Notice what force a body united by the same interests can have,” Tristan wrote, again referencing the French bourgeoisie after the revolution. “Once this class IS CONSTITUTED it becomes so strong that it can appropriate every power in the land.”53

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The universalism of Tristan’s proposal distinguished it from other efforts to organize and unite the working class. Even in Britain, where Owen and his associates had tried to set up a national labor organization, the goal had been to create an umbrella group for different unions rather than to combine them into one. Tristan envisaged a single organization with a physical presence—the workers’ palaces—in every district of France. Another thing that made her proposal transformative was that her Universal Workers’ Union would admit female workers alongside males and recognize “the legal equality of men and women as being the only means of constituting the UNITY OF HUMANITY.”54

In a chapter titled “Why I Mention Women,” Tristan argued that organizing female workers was necessary to unite all workers and remedy past injustices. “Up to the present time, woman has counted for nothing in human societies,” she wrote. “What has been the result? That the priest, the legislator, and the philosopher have treated her as a real pariah. Women (half of humanity) have been left outside of the church, outside of the law, outside of humanity.”55 This was Tristan writing in the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Wheeler. And like those feminist pioneers, she supplemented her moral arguments with an appeal to the self-interest of male workers.

Lower-class women, Tristan wrote, had “so many irritations”—haughty husbands, greedy employers, unruly children—that they tended to be “brutal, mean, sometimes harsh,” which prompted their spouses to seek refuge in the local tavern.56 Addressing male workers directly, she said that the best way to remedy this situation was for them to ensure their wives and daughters received a “rational, solid education, suitable for developing all their good, natural bents.”57 If women were treated as equals and encouraged to fulfill their talents, “you would have for sisters, for lovers, for wives, for friends, educated women well brought up and whose everyday dealings could not be more agreeable for you.”58

This passage clearly reflected an acknowledgment on Tristan’s part that her proposals wouldn’t get anywhere without the support of male workers. But her main appeal to men was based on economics and the harsh logic of capitalism in the raw. In many trades, she pointed out, women were doing the same jobs as men but were getting paid half as much. Male workers tried to justify these pay differentials on the grounds that they were more productive, Tristan said, but this wasn’t true: in jobs demanding nimbleness and dexterity, such as spinning, women often produced more output than men. “What is happening?” she wrote. “The manufacturers, seeing the women laborers work more quickly and at half price, day by day dismiss men from their workshops and replace them with women. Consequently the man crosses his arms and dies of hunger on the pavement! That is what the heads of factories in England have done.”59

Right now, men were suffering the consequences of unrestricted competition, Tristan went on, but things wouldn’t end there. “Once started in this direction, women will be dismissed in order to replace them with twelve-year-old children. A saving of half the wages! Finally one gets to the point of using only seven- and eight-year-old children. Overlook one injustice and you are sure to get thousands more.”60 Tristan insisted that the only lasting solution to this problem was to create a union strong enough to protect all workers, male and female, guaranteeing full employment at livable wages for everybody. “It is on behalf of your own interest, men,” she declared; “it is for your betterment, you men; finally, it is for the universal well-being of all men and women that I enlist you to demand rights for women, and, while waiting, to acknowledge them at least in principle.”61 If workers heeded her call, then in twenty-five years, Tristan predicted, “ABSOLUTE EQUALITY for men and women” would be inscribed in the laws of France. “Sons of ’89,” she concluded, “that is the work that your fathers have bequeathed to you!”62

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The reaction to The Workers’ Union was mixed. Some labor activists resented being preached to by an upper-class woman. Other readers were more receptive but objected to Flora’s descriptions of some workers as drunkards. Perdiguier, the Avignon carpenter, accused her of claiming credit for an idea—a universal workers’ union—that others, himself included, had also put forward.63 An anonymous reviewer in The Workshop, a progressive publication, mocked Tristan in blatantly sexist terms: “O’Connell in skirts, who knows?… The Free Woman, the Woman-Messiah whose coming Enfantin the revealer announced to us.”64 From the far left, Étienne Cabet, a disciple of Blanqui, dismissed as naive Tristan’s notion of uniting the working class and attaining power peacefully.65

In other quarters, the reaction was more positive. In The Phalanx, Enfantin published an extract of The Workers’ Union and wrote a favorable notice.66 After Tristan distributed copies of her book to workshops throughout Paris, some workers and activists embraced it. They included the German exile Arnold Ruge, an associate of the young Karl Marx. Ruge attended a weekly get-together that Tristan held at her apartment on the Rue du Bac. He was surprised to meet ordinary workers who had read The Workers’ Union, and he was stirred by its author, noting that her “tall stature and the nobility of her features animated by the fire in her black eyes made her speech twice as impressive.”67

The uneven reception for The Workers’ Union wasn’t surprising. Tristan was a woman; she lacked the support of any political organization; and some of her ideas seemed impractical to many. The proposal to set up workers’ palaces nationwide wasn’t backed up with any proper cost estimates, and it was surely fanciful to suppose that individual contributions would provide enough money to finance them. At one of Tristan’s meetings, the labor activist André Saive, who had created a mutual aid society for hatmakers, pointed out that most workers were too poor to pay an annual subscription of two francs. “You still don’t know the workers very well, Madame,” Saive said. “The worker earns just what he is forced to spend to go on living.”68

Tristan wasn’t put off by these criticisms. In The Workers’ Union, she had acknowledged that her vision of mobilizing working-class men and women in a single organization was a genuinely grand one, and she had described it as divinely sanctioned. But merely “to write a book for the people is to throw a drop of water into the sea,” she wrote. She also said she had always known that once the book was published she would have “another duty to perform”: to go “from town to town, from one end of France to the other,” and speak to the workers directly. “I have decided that the moment has come to act, and that for whoever loves the workers and wishes to devote body and soul to their cause, there is a fine mission to fulfill,” she wrote. “One must follow the example set by the first apostles of Christ … God tells me that it will succeed. That is why I enter this new way with confidence.”69

Tristan was as good as her word. On April 12, 1844, she set off from Paris. Traveling by riverboats and horse-drawn carriages, she went southeast to Burgundy and Dijon, then on to Lyon and Provence, before moving northwest, through Languedoc, to Toulouse and Bordeaux. As she had during her trip to Peru, she traveled alone. At some stops, friends or distant associates put her up, but in many places she stayed in modest hotels. On arriving in a new town, she would speak with virtually anyone who would listen: workers’ groups, labor activists, local politicians, even factory owners and bishops.70

In a diary that Tristan kept during her trip, she described the challenges she faced. In some towns, she struggled to find anybody interested in what she was saying. In other places, she attracted large crowds. She was subjected to harassment by local policemen and judicial authorities who regarded her as a dangerous radical. She also suffered from exhaustion and illness. Her indomitable character and irreverent spirit kept her going. Toward the end of September, she set off from Toulouse to Bordeaux. In the town of Agen, she wrote ironically: “At last I have what I have long desired —The apparatus of the police and army—thirty men to break up one of our meetings!”71

That was Tristan’s final diary entry. By the time she reached Bordeaux, the city from which she had departed for Peru eleven years earlier, she was seriously ill, stricken by an ailment that might well have been typhoid. A well-meaning pair of teachers took her into their home, and a few of her friends managed to come and see her on her sickbed. On November 14, 1844, Tristan died at the age of forty-one. Her body, rather than being transported back to Paris, was buried locally in a Carthusian cemetery, with some local workers serving as pallbearers.

Posthumously, Tristan was hailed as a tribune of the women’s movement and the workers’ movement. In 1846 one of her admirers, the writer Alphonse Constant, who later used the pen name Éliphas Lévi, published a book of her writings titled Woman’s Emancipation; or, The Pariah’s Testament. A couple of years later, in the Bordeaux graveyard, a white marble column was erected, bearing the inscription: “TO THE MEMORY OF MADAME FLORA TRISTAN, AUTHOR OF THE WORKERS’ UNION. THE GRATEFUL WORKERS.”72

“One of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth”

Thomas Carlyle on Mammon and the Cash Nexus

William Thompson and Flora Tristan believed in progress. Even as they criticized a system that divided society into rival camps and denied workers the full product of their labors, they worked to create new forms of social organization that would allow humanity to take advantage of modern science and technology in order to build a more just world. But from the Lowlands of Scotland came a darker and more withering voice; a voice that portrayed industrial capitalism as a moral wasteland and excoriated laissezfaire economics but also expressed little faith in democratic or socialistic remedies; a voice that was deeply skeptical of mechanization, science, and many other aspects of modernity; a voice that venerated strongman autocrats and would be hailed as a forerunner of fascism. Yet this was also a voice that, in its own time, was hailed by Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many other prominent figures.

Thomas Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, a village about twenty miles from the town of Dumfries, on December 4, 1795. His parents, a stonemason and a homemaker, were pious and God-fearing Presbyterians who read the Bible to their nine children daily and hoped that Thomas, their eldest son, would become a minister. Roaming the rolling countryside around Ecclefechan, Carlyle developed a love of nature that would stay with him for life. After attending a fee-paying local high school, he studied mathematics and moral philosophy at Edinburgh University, and spent a couple of years as a schoolteacher. At some point, he realized there was a problem with his parents’ plans for him: although he still believed in God, he had lost his faith in the Christian church.1 He returned to Edinburgh, where he studied German and became enamored with German literature, especially Goethe, who was another nature lover. He decided to become a writer. To make ends meet, he translated German books and wrote explanatory entries for an encyclopedia. In 1827—by which time he had married a fellow Scot, Jane Baillie Welsh—he published his first piece in the prestigious Edinburgh Review. Its subject was Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, a German romantic novelist.

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A nervous bookworm who suffered from chronic indigestion and other disorders, including impotence, Carlyle didn’t have much firsthand knowledge of the industrial revolution, or of the world outside Scotland. He did have opinions, which he wasn’t shy about expressing. When, in 1829, The Edinburgh Review asked him to review three books about the current and future state of society, he handed in a piece that declared: “Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.”2 Headlined “Signs of the Times,” the article went on:

On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East … There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded!… We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.3

Of course, Carlyle wasn’t the first to remark on the wonders of steam and other technological advances. But he brought a fresh perspective to his observations. For now, he remarked, he would leave to the “Political Economists” the question of “how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses.” He would concentrate on how the “mechanical genius of our time” had diffused itself into the realms of the “internal and spiritual.” At the individual and collective level, he wrote, the mechanical pursuit of measurable progress and monetary gain had vanquished higher values. “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor, and in natural force of any kind.” In education, politics, and science these trends were entrenched. Even religion had been affected. “This is not a Religious age,” Carlyle remarked. “Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable.”4