A Useable Past, vol. 1. Victorian Agitator, George Jacob Holyoake: Co-operation as “This New Order of Life.”

Abstract

The British Cooperative movement offers a curious case of utopianism in which Robert Owen’s program for total social and economic transformation (the creation of a “New Moral World”) finds its most durable, practical expression in a small shop founded by the “Rochdale Pioneers.” The success of the Rochdale model created a national, then international, movement (which is still with us today) that improved the lives of many working-class people, in multiple ways, in the period between 1860 and 1950. However, despite its undeniable success, the British Cooperative movement increasingly adapted to, rather than transformed, the social and economic order within which it operated: a case of utopia stalled or deferred.George Jacob Holyoake, the subject of Stephen Yeo’s study, was an important figure both within and beyond the Cooperative movement. He began his agitational career as an Owenite social missionary, served on the Executive Committee of the Chartist movement, and was a stalwart campaigner for secularism and free thought. As Yeo notes, Holyoake edited eighteen journals across his career (including a fifteen-year stint as editor of The Reasoner) and served on the executive committees of twenty-two progressive movements (30). Holyoake was an important advocate, activist, and thinker within the Cooperative movement. However, due to his suspicion of systematic modes of thought, he was not a theoretician. The term Yeo settles on to describe his career, “Victorian agitator,” seems appropriate for a man who titled his autobiography Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892).It is a tribute to Holyoake’s significance within the Cooperative movement that the first permanent headquarters of the Co-operative Union (built in 1911) bears his name. That building, Holyoake House, still stands on Hanover Street, Manchester. This volume is also concerned with Holyoake’s contemporary presence, particularly the question of whether those latent utopian energies (represented by both Holyoake and the wider Cooperative movement) might be revived in the present moment; in Stephen Yeo’s own words: “Could this idiosyncratic agitator, journalist and moralist be a resource for a journey of hope among today’s co-operators or—to use a word not used by Holyoake—for ‘co-operativism’?” (8). The allusion to the work of Raymond Williams signals Yeo’s basic political orientation, part of the British “New Left,” but in Yeo’s case rather skeptical of the Marxist tradition. Victorian Agitator is the first volume in a three-volume series entitled A History of Association, Co-operation and Education for Un-statist Socialism in 19th and 20th Century Britain. Admittedly, this is an unwieldy title, but it gives a flavor of the historical, political, and intellectual ground that the project seeks to cover.It is important to note from the outset that this is not a conventional “academic” study of Holyoake. This does not mean that this work is not well researched, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, for it is all of these things. Nor is it a biography of Holyoake or a study of his intellectual and political development, although it discusses all these things. Rather, it is driven by a single speculative yet practically focused question—What in Holyoake’s thought remains vital? Accordingly, Yeo’s treatment of Holyoake is strategic rather than totalizing. This is not a hagiography, not an attempt to install Holyoake as offering an answer to all of our problems. Yeo expresses a great deal of admiration, affection, and respect for his subject—and why shouldn’t he, given the nature of Holyoake’s commitments and achievements? However, Yeo never loses sight of the “presentist” aims of his study. As stated earlier, this is not a conventional academic study, and it is all the better for it. Indeed, it is the kind of book I wish more academics would write more often.Victorian Agitator is organized into two parts: the first part, “Life and Leading Ideas,” offers a brief overview of Holyoake’s career and intellectual development, effectively summarized by Yeo as “Owenism, but without the cult of Owen, from the mid-1830s onwards; an ambitious, inclusive secularism from the early 1850s; and the positive neutrality of the co-operative movement at its multi-faith best from the 1860s onwards” (170). Part 2, “A Useable Past?” is subdivided into three sections; the first argues for a view of cooperation as an “associational-socialist alternative to the Marxist revolutionary tradition of c.1848 to c.1959.” The second section explores cooperation as an “autonomous, ethical or moral ‘tradition’” (73), while the third considers the extent to which cooperation might be thought of as a religion as well as the utility of thinking about cooperation in this way.At first sight, the focus on religion seems odd given Holyoake’s long career as a campaigner for secularism. However, as Yeo points out, Holyoake himself regarded the religious/secular binary as simplistic (158) and was as critical of “dogmatic atheism” as he was of religious intolerance (64). More importantly, Yeo notes the continuing power of religious ideas in the twenty-first century, not only in the rise of various forms of fundamentalism (160–61) but also in the ways in which notions such as “the market,” “the economy,” and “competitiveness” have clearly become fetishes or objects of nonrational forms of “worship” (77). In response to this Yeo’s present-focused suggestion is “that it might appeal to young people … to articulate a ‘religion of co-operation’” with Holyoake as one of its prophets (77).Yeo recognizes that his suggestion involves redefining the notion of “religion” in such a way as to make it useful for cooperation. However, this seems to me to be both strategically and philosophically confused. What Yeo wants is not just an overarching philosophy (body of ideas) capable of giving an immanent (as opposed to transcendent) meaning to human existence. More ambitiously, he recognizes the need for a philosophy that can generate a set of ethical/moral principles (or values) by which human society might be regulated and which are capable of being practised every day. In effect, Yeo desires an integrated “social-politics” that through its daily practices is capable of continually closing the gap between the current social order and the transformed social order desired by the activist: in short, an everyday practice that avoids the pitfalls of postponement (in which all forms of justice reside “after the revolution”) but which also holds to the possibility of total social transformation—a micro-politics that is simultaneously a macro-politics.Yeo identifies a number of ways in which he feels cooperation or associationism meets this need. He demonstrates, for example, the ways in which the Cooperative movement offered an alternative to the Victorian trinity of individual, family, and nation, by proposing “member” as a genuinely universal identity (78). He charts Holyoake’s various attempts to define the movement’s key principles, reducing the fourteen principles of the Rochdale model to four: concord, economy, equity, and self-help; Yeo also notes that Derby cooperators also identified “participation and education” as their leading principles (138). Holyoake’s insistence on “difference or positive neutrality” might also be added to this list (157). As Yeo observes, for Owenites, “harmony was never the same as homogeneity,” which, he suggests, possibly explains the “affinity between late-nineteenth century Co-operative Societies and choirs” (38). Indeed, I would have welcomed a more extensive engagement with this aspect of Holyoake’s thought. For example, to what extent might Holyoake’s Hostile and generous toleration (a new theory of toleration) (1856) help us plot a course through some of the more intractable problems (both philosophical and organizational) raised by contemporary identity politics?These are important matters, but the extent to which a lens marked “religion” brings them into sharper focus in unclear. A more productive approach is suggested by Yeo’s engagement with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on the idea of a “moral tradition” (106). Yeo observes that in MacIntyre’s work “a philosophical, ethical or religious tradition is nothing less than a body of enquiry into ‘what practical rationality is and what justice is’” (110). As Yeo demonstrates in part 2B (114–57), a strong case can be made for considering cooperation as just such a tradition. Therefore, it is difficult to see what extra advantage accrues from identifying cooperation as a religion, unless “religion” is assumed to be of inherently greater value than a “tradition.”A rather more profitable area of debate concerns the relationship between principles and forms of organization (or between justice and practical rationality, to use MacIntyre’s terms). This is a perennial dilemma for any project of social transformation, which is given particular focus in the present moment by the competing claims of the “political party” and the “social movement” as the preferred organizational form. In this context, Holyoake, with a lifetime’s experience of political and social activism, constitutes an especially useful resource. As Yeo demonstrates, Holyoake was a splendid aphorist, and many of his maxims provide touchstones for practical action. For example, on the question of building unity Holyoake reminds us that “the solution of the problem of union can only be effected by narrowing the ground of profession, and widening that of action” (89). Similarly, Holyoake’s warning against “Paternal Despotism” and accompanying insistence on a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” approach to human liberation—“God preserve working men from the ‘Saviours of Society’”—remains as timely as ever (32). Of even greater value is Holyoake’s insistence on the agency possessed, both individually and collectively, by “ordinary” people. As Yeo observes, for Holyoake “Labour already has power: the power which belongs to making and doing,” and the challenge remains that of finding ways of harnessing this power to humanly productive ends (46). Equally prescient is Holyoake’s understanding of “social movements as forms of human creativity” (71).However, Yeo does not evade the problems faced by the Cooperative movement then and now. These include the difficulties of organizing cooperatively in the sphere of production as well as of distribution and avoiding the problem of becoming “working-class limiteds,” as well as questions of size and federation and the competing claims of representative and delegate democracy (144–47). Yeo records Holyoake’s general support for cooperative production as well as his efforts to ensure that the Cooperative movement did not degenerate into a commercial movement, but he has little to say on Holyoake’s ideas regarding organization and democracy (152–53).Ultimately, Victorian Agitator offers a fascinating and stimulating overview of Holyoake’s thought and its relevance to the contemporary world. For Holyoake, the Cooperative movement provided a means of building an alternative market within its capitalist counterpart and constructing a new form of state within the state. The vision is of complete social transformation achieved by simultaneously hollowing out the structures of the old, immoral, world and replacing them with a “positive moral and social culture” (90). Perhaps this might be described as a theory of “permanent reform” rather than “permanent revolution,” and Holyoake’s insistence on the identity of means and ends is certainly attractive. Yeo clearly regards cooperation as an “alternative to the Marxist revolutionary tradition” (73), not least because of Holyoake’s insistence not just on the possibility but on the necessity of peaceful social transformation. The interpellation of Marxism as an antagonist seems gratuitous and counterproductive here. I need no persuasion as to the desirability of peaceful transformation. However, I think that the likelihood of such change is far less certain.