2.1. The Poor Stockinger: "What Rough Beast?" :: 1.0 DRAFT ms. 2930 words

DRAFT section 2.1 ms. of chapter 2 “General Ludd & His Adversaries” of “What Rough Beast?: The World’s 21st-Century Political-Economy Polycrisis”…

The Place of the “Poor Stockinger”: You think it weird to start the narrative of a history of the world’s 21st-century political-economy polycrisis back in 1750, with the prosperous stockingers of the English Midlands.

But please bear with me.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

Radical English historian E.P. Thompson declared that he had written his The Making of the English Working Class in order to “rescue the poor stockinger… from the enormous condescension of history”. There were a lot of stockingers back in 1750: perhaps 40,000 out of the one million-strong adult male workforce of then-England. The stockinger’s work was intricate. It required substantial practice, a high level of manual dexterity, attention to detail, and an understanding of complex patterns and techniques. And back in 1750 the stockingers were not poor.

Not that they were among England’s rich, mind you. But back then the stockinger earned twice what a typical agricultural worker or an unskilled craft apprentice or journeyman earned. And In 1750 the English working class was by a substantial margin the most prosperous in the entire Old World. Figure stockinger typical earnings at 14 shillings per week. Back then, Robert Allen’s family respectability-consumption basket cost 12 shillings a week—meaning that a stockinger man plus some earnings from a spinster wife had a substantial financial cushion above what was needed for them to be respectable.

Note that as of 1750 the stockinger’s profession was new—only 150 years, six generations, old. William Lee in 1589 had invented the frame for the knitting of stockings: a series of needles fixed and arranged in the frame so that foot pedals and hand levers to control the movement of the needles and thread. The needles were fine, and required constant adjustment and maintenance to ensure smooth operation. The needles wove the stockings from yarn fed from bobbins. The stockinger needed to manage the tension and feed of the yarn to achieve consistency in the knit. Preparing the bobbins required skill and care. Setting up the stocking frame was a meticulous task. And, during the weaving, mistakes had to be corrected immediately to avoid defects.

Skilled work. Deserving of high wages, and of respect as people doing a skilled and valuable job well. The stockingers guarded their profession by asserting that women, children, and apprentices lacked the dexterity and experience to use the stocking-frame to do high-quality work. The stockingers were proud of the quality of their work.

The Stockinger’s Turn in the Barrel:: Technological innovation had been working for the stockinger from 1550 to 1750. It had created their profession, and had made the skills they acquired from working the machine valuable on the market. And skilled work that the market values and rewards brings respect and status: the sense that you are the kind of person who deserves to be prosperous.

The technological-organization competence of humanity as a whole grew by more than half from 1770 to 1870. And within the hot spot of human prosperity, the charmed circle of 300 or so miles around the port of Dover at the southeastern corner of the island of Great Britain (plus in its North American settler colonies and ex-colonies), technological-organizational competence had grown by a third every generation—a cumulative slightly more-than-doubling across the pre-1870 century.

But after 1750 technological innovation did not work for but against the stockinger. He was the first to take his turn in the barrel.

Market economies in eras of technological change are, as Joseph Schumpeter saw processes of creative-destruction. Hose–plain and fancy–was expensive and in high demand. Perhaps there was a better technology to make it more efficiently than with a machine that by 1789 was two-centuries old? There was. Jedediah Strutt developed the wide frame around 1776. It was much easier to use. It made more and wider fabrics.

Stockings had a different market configuration than was typical of cloth. Demand for cloth in general was highly elastic: drop the price by 50% via better technology, and the amount demanded more than doubles, so more demand money flows into the industry (even if not often to the same people). Demand for hosiery was not so elastic. More work per worker meant, necessarily and unambiguously, less money coming in, and thus fewer stockingers and downward pressure on the wages of those who remained. Plus it meant the cutting-of-corners: if you could get less for a stocking, perhaps you could lessen the pressure on your income by selling a cheaper and an inferior product.

General Ludd’s Army: The “poor stockinger” interpreted this process as, in E.P. Thompson’s words: “framework-knitting… being debased into a ‘dishonourable’ trade”. They saw themselves as being threatened by:

the least scrupulous hosiers… seeking to economise labour and cheapen production… [being] underpaid, as for work of coarser quality… [with] masters refus[ing] to… measure… the [thread] count…. [Plus] unscrupulous middlemen… “baghosiers”… persuading stockingers who were underemployed… to do work below the accepted rates…

But the:

most serious of all were the grievances as to “cut-ups” and “colting”….

Cut-up stockings… woven on a wide loom… then cut up into the required shape… [and] sewn at the seam… cheap… [but] they could be mass-produced….. The men, and many of the masters also, argued that the product was much inferior…. To the inexpert eye they resembled the real article, and therefore could undercut hose made “in a tradesmanlike manner”…. The poor quality of the “cut-ups” offended the craftsman’s pride in his work, and led to the products of the trade generally falling into disrepute….

“Colting”, or the employment of unskilled labour or of too many apprentices[, for] cheap techniques of production encouraged the influx of cheap and unskilled labour…

Plus “squaring”: using a machine that even an apprentice a woman, or an Irishman could use to align the fabric, rather than it being done by the hand and the eye of a proper and skilled craftsman.

Some of the great and good did think they ought to win their cases. Thompson quotes the middle-class radical Nottingham Review:

The machines, or frames… are not broken for being… new [inventions]… but in consequence of goods being wrought upon them which are of little worth, are deceptive to the eye, are disreputable to the trade, and therefore pregnant with the seeds of its destruction…

But the main judgment of the English power-brokers was that they were simply being uppity because of their former prosperity, luxury, and profusion. They were universally depraved to a degree “scarcely to be credited”. They needed to cease their licentious behavior, and work harder:

Among the men the discussion of politics, the destruction of game, or the dissipation of the ale houses was substituted for the duties of their occupation during the former part of the week, and in the remaining three or four days a sufficiency was earned for defraying the current expenses…

The market giveth; the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market. The stockingers had been able to earn enough to allow their families to live more than respectably on four (or even three!) days’ worth of work a week, and they had accepted that blessing. Now the wheel had turned, and they needed to buckle down.

The stockingers did not think that they should take this deterioration lying down.

E.P. Thompson says they had “a long history of both constitutional and violent defence of their conditions”. As the Framework-Knitters’ Company, the stockingers had gained a Charter from King Charles II Stuart in the third quarter of the 1600s. It gave them the power to, in Thompson’s words: “appoint deputies to examine goods, and to cut to pieces those badly or deceitfully manufactured”. They sought to assert these royally-granted powers to “break and destroy all manner of frames whatsoever that make the following spurious articles and all frames whatsoever that do not pay the regular price heretofore agreed to by the Masters and Workmen…” They sued for damages against the “colters” employing too many apprentices and unskilled. The jury ruled that they had a case, but the damages it allowed were only a slap on the employer’s wrist. They tried to use the anti-union Combination Acts to sue the employing hosiers for conspiring in restraint of trade to reduce wages, but the magistrates refused to hear them.

As Thompson sums up their situation: “the framework-knitters felt that every statute which might have afforded them protection was abrogated or ignored, while every attempt to enforce their ‘rights’ by trade union action was illegal.

And so the Luddites were born. Here is their song: “General Ludd’s Triumph”:

The guilty may fear but no vengeance he aims

At the honest man’s life or Estate,

His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames

And to those that old prices abate.

These Engines of mischief were sentenced to die

By unanimous vote of the Trade

And Ludd who can all opposition defy

Was the Grand executioner made….



He may censure great Ludd’s disrespect for the Laws

Who ne’er for a moment reflects

That foul Imposition alone was the cause

Which produced these unhappy effects.
Let the haughty no longer the humble oppress

Then shall Ludd sheath his conquering sword,

His grievances instantly meet with redress

Then peace will be quickly restored.



Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice

Nor e’er their assistance withdraw

Till full-fashioned work at the old fashioned price

Is established by Custom and Law.



Then the Trade when this arduous contest is o’er

Shall raise in full splendour its head,

And colting and cutting and squaring no more

Shall deprive honest workmen of bread.

Rights, Powers, & Deservings: The poor stockinger believed—the Luddites believed—that they had rights. They thought that they had rights to life and liberty, to speech and conscience, and to property and the pursuit of happiness. And they thought they had rights to honest judges who would vindicate those rights.

But they believed that they had more rights than that. The way Karl Polanyi put it was that they had rights that the land, their labor, and the flow of finance that produced economic stability not be treated as commodities—things to rise and fall in price and value and to be pushed hither and thither by the profit-maximizing logic of the market. They deserved a society that understood that the market that was made for man, not man for the market. Secondary to the Luddites, but important in general: the natural and built environment was not a source of profit, but was rather where they lived. More important to the Luddites, society owed them employment: the flow of finance that kept demand for stockings high and the stocking value-chain working should not be vulnerable to the decisions of rootless cosmopolite financiers hundreds or thousands of miles away that their occupation did not pass some market profit-maximization test. And most important: society owed them an economy in which their earnings were commensurate with their status as honest, respectable, skilled, and honorable craftsmen.

The stockingers had these rights. And they also had the right to enforce them: by petition, by protest, by political action; and, if those did not suffice, by riot and—the power-brokers of England feared—revolution: to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. And the Luddites did not consent to an England in which their property in their occupation was to be devalued and dishonored by colting, cutting, and squaring.

The power-brokers did fear revolution—a Luddite Jacquerie. They did deploy 12,000 soldiers to the Midlands against the Luddites in 1811-1813. This was a serious effort, deployment, and exercise of governmental power. But Frank Darvell, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson greatly overstate their case when they claim that this deployment “greatly exceeded in size the army which Wellington took into the [Iberian] Peninsula in 1808” to fight Napoleon. First, of all, in 1808 Arthur Wellesley was still plain Mr. Arthur Wellesley. (He would not be ennobled as Viscount Wellington of Talavera and of Wellington, and Baron Douro of Wellesley, until August 26, 1809). Second, Arthur Wellesley was then the junior one of five generals sent to Portugal and Spain. He was indeed sent in in command of the vanguard of 9,000 troops. But 6,000 more rapidly followed. And then 13,000 more. And, finally, the overall commander John Moore with an additional 15,000. The total was 43,000 committed in the year 1808—plus more later.

No, the British government did not commit more soldiers to suppress the Luddites than to fight Napoleon. Darvell, Hobsbawm, and Thompson want to suggest that the Luddites were at least the spectre of a Bolshevik coup. They want to suggest that the Regency government of the British Empire had the class war of the Luddites at least as much on its mind as the geopolitical war against Napoleon. That was simply not the case.

And note that that General Ludd’s army did not see itself as waging a class war against the rich. They call on the wise and the great for aid. They say that the honest rich have nothing to fear. It is the guilty, those who install the wide frames, the haughty—plus women, Irishmen, unskilled workers who dare to make stockings, and apprentices thinking to rise above their station. General Ludd’s army wanted to be treated as they deserved, not treated equally with those who ought to stay beneath them in the hierarchy of the great chain of being

Ever Since, History Rhymes: Why spend this time on the stockinger experience? Because it set the frame. It was the first time some group of people see their comfortable and stable place in the commercial market economy evaporate as technology rushes forward. They were the first group of people who found general technology-driven advancing prosperity turning on them, and experiencing the loss of position, place, income, and wealth as it was their turn on the barrel. Over and over again, the stockinger experience has rhymed down through history for three-hundred years now. For the Schumpeterian creative-destruction process is ongoing: a permanent feature since well before 1870 of Modern Economic Growth.

What Rough Beast?: The World’s 21st-Century Political-Economy Polycrisis

2. General Ludd & His Adversaries

2.1. The Poor Stockinger
2.2. Commercial Society
2.3. All Established Powers & Orders Are Steamed Away
2.4. Steampower Society
2.5. Industrial Research Laboratories & Modern Corporations
2.6. The 20th-Century Ride
2.7. The Fragility of Income, Wealth, & Status
2.8. American Exceptionalism
2.9. We Arrive at 1976

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