Mutualism was the first well-organized industrial workers’ movement. And it grew largely from heresies prominent in the minds of, and material conditions faced by, radical textile workers.
There had been significant and well-organized peasant uprisings in the Middle Ages. John Ball, a heretical preacher, had inspired the English Peasants’ Revolt, led by Wat Tyler. Under the leadership of Jan Zizka— considered by some the best military leader of all time— the Taborites fought off military orders with well-armored knights, from wooden wagons from which they made some of the first military use of gunpowder. The German Peasants’ War was a countrywide conflict led by heretical, anti-feudal clergymen such as Thomas Muntzer. Peasant uprisings were quite common, and mutualism comes from that heritage. But these were not organized, industrial worker rebellions. Some may have been organized—such as the Stedinger in their peasant republic— but they were not organized by industrial workers.
Many of the peasants’ revolts and heresies also included weavers, a bunch whom have been particularly prone to exposure to “dangerous” ideas. The Cathars were known to have many weavers among them, as were the Hussites; and the Heresy of the Free Spirit was largely carried on by Beghards and Beguines who were also attached to the textiles industry. Many of the heresies common to the weavers were forms of gnosticism and pantheism, and may come from Hermetic sources shared in the Renaissance, Gnosticism coming from the East by way of groups such as the Bogomils, or from native pantheism coming out of Celtic Christianity as might be found in the philosopher-theologian John Scotus Eriugena, or in the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. These influences found themselves in the thought of the Waldensians and Stedinger—both called Luciferians by the Church—and coming out of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, led by the likely-alchemist and Hermeticist, William Aurifex. Many of these heresies, perhaps especially the Free Spirit, also owed their existence to natural philosophy and natural magic, such as the Greek physikoi, Hermeticism, or Celtic or Germanic paganism: the Free Spirit’s story begins with the heretical philosopher-theologian Amalric of Bena, a teacher of Aristotlean and neo-Platonic philosophy at the early University of Paris, and you’ve already heard of William’s Hermeticism. Anabaptism, which had centered on the rejection of infant baptism and the voluntary baptism of adults, had become an especially prominent belief system among proto-Protestants, and was behind many of the peasant revolts. Views such as biblical unitarianism—the antitrinitarian view that Jesus was not God incarnated— and universalism—the eschatological belief that everyone goes to Heaven— were being met with millenarian beliefs informed by people such as Joachim of Fiore that suggested that a new millennium would be brought about, making the holders of these beliefs particularly antsy to see an end to feudalism.
The weavers were not only prone to heresies such as natural philosophy and the Free Spirit, but were also affected by the enclosures, industrialization, and the throes of international trade. The Enclosure Acts robbed peasants of their traditional land. The invention of the power loom and the cotton gin put many workers out of work, took them from home, or otherwise reduced their wages drastically. Trade blockades along the Silk Road—where heresies were also passed along— would come about from various forces, primarily Middle Eastern and Mongolian. And middle-men merchants would act as local trade embargos themselves, controlling conditions faced even by Master Weavers in traditionally-organized guilds. Both the trade blockages and middle-men merchants affected the conditions of the textile industry and the labor market therein. All the while, peasants and artisans in the Middle Ages and into the early Modern era maintained a Christian sentiment centered around “just pricing,” based on the Golden Rule, and tended to prefer price-fixing to free pricing. The price for silk fluctuated according to the deals made along the Silk Road, successful smuggling events, and so on, disturbing the peasants’ and artisans’ peace, and offending their sensibilities. Silk was a prestigious commodity, necessary to the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy.
Heresy was popular with the weavers, and most of these heretics may be considered a part of the proto- or the Radical Reformation, which must be distinguished from the Moderate Reformation of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Proto- and Radical Reformation thought, as well as pagan natural philosophy and natural magic, would develop into the radical side of the Scientific Revolution by way of people such as Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus, both described as pantheists, and Bernardino Telesio, whose natural philosophy would influence the pantheist Tommaso Campanella (as well as Bruno). Heresies from the Radical Reformation would seem to form two main poles come the time of the Scientific Revolution. Most of the radical textile workers would come from, or coalesce toward, Freethought or Dissent, representing a range of religious and irreligious beliefs, from pantheism and deism to biblical unitarianism and atheism. The branch representing the more religious side of Anabaptism, Unitarianism, and radical Protestantism developed into various religious groups that would come to be known as Dissenters and Nonconformists. The other branch, more inclined to natural philosophy and natural magic, developed into the secular movement called Freethought. The division between these would become especially strong come the Great Awakening, but there was resonance between the groups even then, particularly among pantheistic radicals such as the Diggers and Ranters, and among particularly radical Nonconformist church-goers, such as radical elements among what would become the Unitarians and Universalists, as well as the Seekers, the Quakers, Congregationalists, and other Dissenters who might take interest in more naturalistic explanations for things. Together, and with slightly less radical Protestant Nonconformists such as the Methodists and the Baptists, the Dissenters and Freethinkers shared in the Radical Enlightenment desire to separate Church from State.
The heretical, dissenting, and freethinking weavers had become especially affected by the throes of international trade come industrialization. In particular, the power loom had put an end to cottage industries, wherein peasants produced textiles in their homes, and put them into mills and factories instead, or even forced them into unemployment. Those weavers who had been organized into guilds faced pressures of trade from merchants who controlled the flow of silk from China. And then the cotton gin, which would produce textiles with cotton sourced from slave labor, would become an impetus for textiles workers to become some of the first abolitionists, seeing slave labor as a means of driving down the price of their own labor (their wages). These kinds of issues in the textile industry would lead to many rebellions, to the cooperative and union movements, and to the abolition of chattel slavery.
In the Luddite rebellions, workers sabotaged the mills and factories. For these Luddites, industrialization had followed after the English Enclosure Acts, in which common lands used by peasants since time immemorial were privatized, forcing peasants into the factories and mills. Traditional producers and shopkeepers were forced out of business. Being forced from their homes or met with technological unemployment, and also regarding their traditional handicraft as worth preserving, many weavers followed the leadership of Ned Ludd, himself a weaver, whose name gives the movement its name.
The Radical War had been a week of political labor strikes by Scottish weavers seeking to reform the current state of their government. Inspired by Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and other Radical Enlightenment literature, and supported in part by a dissenting Prebyterian attitude favorable to individual judgements and debate, they had formed the Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government, and went about their labor strikes, which were suppressed. This had followed the Peterloo Massacre, which had involved the mass execution of weavers who had demanded parliamentary reforms by way of protest. Much of the unrest may be attributed to the effects of the cotton gin on the weavers. As a result, these weavers had begun organizing themselves into revolutionary secret societies.
In the United States, during the Second Great Awakening, the Come-Outers had formed for the sake of abolishing chattel slavery. Many of the Come-Outters were textile workers who were personally affected by the invention and widespread use of the cotton gin, which relied primarily on slave labor from the agrarian South. They were called Come-Outers because they refused to participate in any churches or government elections that were not opposed to slavery, and so “came out” from those institutions. Nonconformists led largely by anti-institutionalist William Lloyd Garrison, many of them opposed institutions altogether, while non-Garrisonian Come-Outters— such as William Henry Brisbane, James G. Birney, and Gerrit Smith— would split from their current Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist congregations to form completely new doctrines that fully opposed slavery. Some of the Come-Outers rejected money and started practicing Christian communism, while the anti-institutional nature of the Come-Outers shares in the individualism that is found in American mutualists such as Josiah Warren. The entire list of American individualist anarchists can be counted among the abolitionists, and some trace this to the Come-Outers (though it is likely that a strain of individualism existed beforehand, which was also responsible for transcendentalism). Abolitionism, individualist anarchism, and transcendentalism all had their headquarters in Boston.
The Canuts Rebellion involved weavers who had been organized into artisans’ guilds, but who were nonetheless being effectively reduced to wage workers by way of price-setting by merchants, who acted as middle men in trade. Master guildsmen, such as Pierre Charnier, were fed up, and so went about organizing a workers’ republic, reminiscent of the old guild system (minus the monarchy), and prefiguring the organization-style of the anarcho-syndicalists to some extent. These canuts, or “weavers,” were perhaps the first to be known as mutualists, although mutualism as a tradition can be identified before them, particularly in the porter cooperatives and artisans’ guilds of the Middle Ages, and among the actuaries and policy-holders of the early mutual insurance companies, such as those that followed the Great Fire of London and fires in Germany, or those taking the form of Friendly Societies, Mutual Benefit Societies, Building Societies, or etc. Fraternities such as Freemasonry, the Oddfellows, the Order of the Foresters, etc. come from this same tradition, as do all manner of mutual self-help organizations: labor unions, cooperatives, credit unions, congregational elements in churches, and etc. These themselves, and the democratic deliberation involved in their governance, come out of, if not give rise to, the development of civil society during the Radical Enlightenment. As the Moderate Enlightenment had been led by bourgeois Freemasonry to establish oligarchic republics, Pierre Charnier would style his Radical Enlightenment project of liberal industrial democracy “Freemasonry for workers.” The Canuts Rebellion would eventually inspire the Paris Commune.
Like the others, the Silesian Workers’ Uprising was a response by Silesian weavers to low wages. The Lowell Mill Girls were among the first unionists in the United States. The Welshman Robert Owen, the philanthropic textile mill owner, is known as the father of the modern cooperative movement, and was set on solving some of the problems that the textile workers were facing during industrialization.
As can be understood from the above— and when considered in comparison to the relative revolutionary idleness of other industries—, it was the weavers— prone to heresy, dissent, and freethinking, and facing unfavorable economic fluctuations— who represent the first industrial workers’ movement to establish a workers’ socialist republic. There were others among the productive classes who were also prone to assist the weavers, such as those involved in bookbinding, as well as very radical farmers, cobblers, brewers, and etc. Workers from basically all trades could be found to sympathize with the weavers and to lend a hand to establishing a democratic republic of industry. But it was the weavers who led the way, and I believe I have demonstrated the unique reasons they were incentivized to do so.
Along with heresy, religious dissent, and freethinking, coming out of the Radical Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the weavers had taken to a radical social vision coming out of the liberal, republican, and emerging socialist movements. Radical economists in the insurance industry, such as Nicholas Barbon, and more mainstream impacts such as those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would tend to push Anglo mutualists toward increasingly laissez-faire economic doctrines, apparently having an impact on continental mutualists such as Pierre Proudhon as well. Nonetheless, “just price” price-fixing sentiments and more traditional peasant economy such as communism did persist for some time, as in certain writings of early the Ricardian Socialists— fairly considered proto-mutualists, as Marx himself had done—, the early utopian socialists such as Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, and in the thought of William Godwin; and even the more laissez-faire approach of mutualists like Proudhon, Josiah Warren, and Benjamin Tucker are centered on the idea that a free market can bring about a just price, by making cost, or labor, the limit of prices. This cost principle of Josiah Warren, shared by the Ricardian Socialists and by Proudhon even if not by name, and promised as a result of free competition (which would become a staple of mutualism to come), had with early communism (such as the Taborites and Diggers) the goal of solving the labor problem, of the extraction of rent, interest, and profit from the efforts of the working class by idle members of society such as landlords, bankers, and bosses. And this goal was founded on values such as self-determination, reciprocity, mutual aid, and co-operation; and on sentiments such as frith and friendship, brotherhood or fraternity, solidarity, liberty, justice, fairness, and equality.
As well as being known as socialists, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, like many of the heretical weavers, have all been described as pantheists to varying extents, and the latter two have both been considered as originators of the term mutualism or as proto-mutualists. Richard Price, the actuary and major influence on mutual insurance practices, had been a Unitarian minister. Come the time of well-known mutualist thinkers such as Pierre Proudhon, and workers’ organizations styled after Freemasonry such as the Knights of Labor, the mutualists were still exhibiting heretical tendencies. Among them you would find Freemasons, Unitarians, Universalists, pantheists, atheists, agnostics, and even antitheists. Proudhon himself had been a Freemason and a Lucifer-praising misotheist, perhaps of a Marcionist or Manichean persuasion, and expressed post-Unitarian views on Christ. Josiah Warren’s grandfather had been the leader of the American Revolution, from the Saint Andrews Lodge of Freemasonry, and his burial services were held at a Unitarian church. Herbert Spencer had deist and agnostic tendencies. Joshua K. Ingalls had been a Christian Universalist preacher. William B. Greene had been a Christian Unitarian minister and a Freemason with a strong interest in Kabbalah. Benjamin Tucker was such a staunch atheist that he made sure to document at his death that he still did not believe in God. J. William Lloyd, a fellow traveler of mutualism and contributor to Tucker’s paper Liberty, had been a pantheist, writing poetry exploring the paradoxes of existence. Mutualism in Mexico, introduced by Plotino Rhodakanaty, first took the name neopanteismo, or “neo-pantheism.”
The lineage of mutualism, the first well-organized industrial workers’ movement, is clear and simple. Medieval heresy informed by native pantheism, pagan naturalism, Gnostic teachers, and Anabaptism inspired peasants and artisans to revolt when times got hard, and informed what would later become natural science. These heretics developed into Dissenters and Freethinkers who would take to a range of beliefs— from Baptism and Unitarianism to the pantheism of their predecessors and on as far as misotheism— but who were set on the abolition of chattel and wage slavery, proposing alternatives ranging from voluntary communism to the strictest of individualism. They were generally united in their desire to do away with privileges in the form of absentee property rights, rights in ownership over humans, and usury of every type, maintaining in a sense the age-old peasant ethic of “just price” that faced its biggest disruption with the Industrial Revolution.
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