The pioneers from Rochdale

The Paul Richards column

In the second in an eight part series on Labour’s pioneers, Paul Richards looks at the founders of the co-op movement.

Co-operation has been a human trait for as long as there have been humans. The first tribes of human beings were communal and collaborative. The survival of each depended on the actions of all. The first application of this natural instinct within the individualistic, exploitative and Darwinian atmosphere of the Industrial Revolution was in the 1760s by weavers in Ayrshire and at corn mills in Kent and Woolwich. Welshman Robert Owen (1771-1858) devoted his life to developing co-operation, as a practical system in his various attempts at creating a co-operative community, notably at New Lanark in Scotland; and as a theory, in his A New View of Society, which argued that humans are shaped by their environments, and therefore decent homes, workplaces and public spaces would make decent human beings.

His Report to the County of Lanark set out his view that social relations were poisoned by competitionand greed resulting from capitalism. He called for ‘villages of cooperation’ which would cover the country as an alternative to the horrors of laissez-faire industrialisation. In Brighton, Dr William King (1786-1865) founded a co-operative store on Owenite lines and a newspaper, The Co-operator. Its slogan was ‘Knowledge and union are power. Power, directed by knowledge is happiness. Happiness is the end of creation.’ King believed that the answer to capitalism was for workers to accumulate capital themselves, and thus remove the need for capitalists. He also advocated workers’ education, improved health and diets.

Owenites were the backbone of the trade union movement in the 1820s and 1830s, both local trade unions and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and the attempt to unite the industrial workers around pay and conditions. In 1832 six agricultural labourers were arrested swearing an oath to form a ‘friendly society’ (a form of self-help union) in Tolpuddle in Dorset, and were deported to penal colonies in Australia. The Co-operative Congress met in Manchester, Liverpool and London in the 1830s, with delegates from local co-ops.

In Toad Lane, Rochdale, in 1844, a group of ‘pioneers’ banded together to start the first successful co-operative business. They started with twenty-eight. Today, there are 700 million members of co-operatives around the world. The Rochdale Pioneers were motivated by values, and by hunger. Their values reflected the cooperative ideals of Robert Owen, who had developed a theory of co-operation as the route to the liberation of humankind, and the creation of human fulfilment. This was the Hungry Forties, with unemployment and starvation across the industrial areas. In Ireland a million people starved to death when the potato crop failed. The shop opened just in time for Christmas 1849, selling just butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal and a few candles. They committed themselves to selling unadulterated food, at the correct weights. At a time when most food was filled with ingredients, from sawdust to chalk, to make it go further, and retailers routinely cheated their customers with false weights and measures, these were radical principles.

The Rochdale Pioneers were unemployed men, listed as weavers, tailers, cloggers, woolsorters, joiners and warehousemen, meeting in the local ‘Socialist Institute’, against a backdrop of Chartist campaigning and Owenism. They set out the laws and objects of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers:

The objects and plans of this Society are:

– to form arrangements for the pecuniary benefit and the improvement of the social and domestic conditions of its members, by raising a sufficient amount of capital in shares of one pound each, to bring into operation the following plans and arrangements.
– The establishment of a store for the sale of provisions and clothing etc.
– The building, purchasing, or erecting of a number of houses, in which those members desiring to assist each other in improving their domestic and social condition may reside.
– To commence, the manufacture of such articles as the society may determine upon, for the employment of such members as may be without employment, or who may be badly remunerated.
– That as soon as practicable, this society shall proceed to arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government, or in other words to establish a self supporting home-colony of united interests, or assist other societies in establishing such colonies.
– That for the promotion of sobriety a Temperance Hotel be opened in one of the society’s houses, as soon as convenient.

They asked for no state aid or charity. They did it for themselves. As the penultimate ‘object’ suggests, the pioneers’ ambition was for more than a shop selling foodstuffs, but for a ‘self-supporting home colony of united interests’. In other words – a new view of society.

In these simple ideas rest revolutionary sentiments: democratic control, equality for all members, self-help, freedom of expression and worship, education, and most famously the ‘divi’, whereby members of the co-op share the profits equally in the form of a dividend. The spread of the co-operative model around the world, and its application to everything from milk production to football clubs, proves that it taps into the best of human nature. The men from Rochdale pointed to a democratic, caring society, and their ideas should propel us into our own century.

Paul Richards’s latest book Labour’s Revival is out now.