Social Reform and Worker Cooperatives: Countering Economic Inequality

AbstractThis article points out the value guiding the argument for large government programs and the regulation of the private sector is a desire to socially and economically protect the working class. Without such an effort and value, the working class is poor and with such an effort the working class is correctly labled the "middle class and they become the heart and force of a democratic society.AcronymsGNCTU: Grand National Consolidated Trades UnionOBU: Operative Builders UnionsIntroductionThe industrial revolution that gathered momentum in Europe and the United States during the late eighteenth century created the historical context for the theoretical development of radical political economy. Utopians argued that private property was the source of existing inequalities but the framework of their thought, based upon conceptions of a pre-industrial society, is today remote. The extensive development of factory production and the social conditions that ensued - and the laissez faire interpretation of these events favored by conventional economists - created the conditions in which modern socialism was born. Nonetheless, the industrial revolution brought about unprecedented increases in productivity based on the development of factories and the widespread use of machinery. The major cost of these innovations was borne by those with the least amount of power in society - the working class - or, for all intents and purposes, the poor. In 1750 the working class in Europe, specifically England and the United States, lived near subsistence levels and the purchasing power of wages deteriorated during the second half of the eighteenth century, while the controversy among economic historians as to whether real wages rose between 1800 and 1850 suggests that any improvement was only slight (Deane, 1957; Lindert & Williamson, 1983). However, national income in England and the Unites States grew over this period, so that workers' relative living standards fell and the potential consumption they involuntarily sacrificed financed the investment required for industrialization. Had working-class incomes kept in step with national income, the average worker would have been approximately fifty per cent richer in 1840 than thirty years earlier (Kuznets, 1952; Lindstrom, 1983).Social CostsPrior to and during the Industrial Revolution, factory work replaced traditional occupations, typified by rural farming or guild status as an artisan in various crafts. This change resulted from the breakdown of the old feudal societies of Europe and the industrialization of those same economies do to mechanistic innovations in the means of production. Mechanization facilitated the division of labor, creating tasks that women and children could perform. Consequently whole families often worked to achieve subsistence and class stratification increased (Hooks, 2000). The conditions under which labor was performed were unregulated, dangerous, and involved long hours in dehumanizing conditions. Moreover, the growth of factory production stimulated urbanization in Europe and the United States. As a result, roads, water, sewage, waste management, public health, and provisions for open spaces failed to keep pace with urban migration, while housing was concentrated in crowded slums. The inevitable result was air and water pollution, epidemics of typhoid and cholera, and widespread respiratory and intestinal disease, with a consequent low expectation of life. In addition to these difficulties land used by villages, "commons," was confiscated by the rich for their capital expansion. In Capital, Marx discusses the expropriation of agricultural land from the poor who are dependent on that very land for their basic needs. Known as the Enclosure Movement, this policy was based on a measure initiated by the aristocracy and wealthy land owners in the 18th and 19th century England. The movement was aimed at confiscating land that was owned in common by a village, or at least available to the village for grazing animals and growing food. …