In some cases the loom itself was hired by the weaver, in other cases he owned the loom, but had to hire the gearing or slays for pattern-weaving from the employer. Many weavers were in a perpetual state of indebtedness to the ‘putter-out’, working off their debts by instalments upon their work, and in a condition where they were incapable of refusing any wages however low.

When asked whether wages ought not to be left to find their own ‘level’, a Manchester silk-weaver replied that there was no similarity between ‘what is called capital and labour’:

Capital, I can make out to be nothing else but an accumulation of the products of labour…. Labour is always carried to market by those who have nothing else to keep or to sell, and who, therefore, must part with it immediately…. The labour which I… might perform this week, if I, in imitation of the capitalist, refuse to part with it… because an inadequate price is offered me for it, can I bottle it? can I lay it up in salt?… These two distinctions between the nature of labour and capital, (viz. that labour is always sold by the poor, and always bought by the rich, and that labour cannot by any possibility be stored, but must be every instant sold or every instant lost,) are sufficient to convince me that labour and capital can never with justice be subjected to the same laws…1

They offered a direct negative to the homilies of ‘supply-and-demand’.

‘There is the great mistake’ – weavers, who wove cloth when they themselves were in rags, were forcibly educated in the vitiating error of the orthodox political economy.

[...] From the late 1820s, the weavers brought forward three consistent proposals.

First, they proposed a tax on power-looms, to equalize conditions of competition, some part of which might be allocated towards the weavers’ relief. We should not forget that the hand-loom weaver was not only himself assessed for poor-rates, but paid a heavy burden in indirect taxation:

Their labour has been taken from them by the power-loom; their bread is taxed; their malt is taxed; their sugar, their tax, their soap, and almost every other thing they use or consume, is taxed. But the power-loom is not taxed –

so ran a letter from the Leeds stuff weavers in 1835.1 When we discuss the minutiae of finance we sometimes forget the crazy exploitive basis of taxation after the Wars, as well as its redistributive function – from the poor to the rich [...]

Next, they resented the effects upon family relationships of the factory system. Weaving had offered an employment to the whole family, even when spinning was withdrawn from the home. The young children winding bobbins, older children watching for faults, picking over the cloth, or helping to throw the shuttle in the broad-loom; adolescents working a second or third loom; the wife taking a turn at weaving in and among her domestic employments. The family was together, and however poor meals were, at least they could sit down at chosen times. A whole pattern of family and community life had grown up around the loom-shops; work did not prevent conversation or singing. The spinning-mills – which offered employment only for their children – and then the power-loom sheds, which generally employed only the wives or adolescents – were resisted until poverty broke down all defences. These places were held to be ‘immoral’ – places of sexual licence, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners.1 Witnesses before the Select Committee put now one, now another, objection to the front:

[...] The disparity between the wages of an engineer (26s. to 30s.) or carpenter (24s.) and the spademan (10s. to 15s.) or weaver (say 8s.) in 1832 is such that we cannot allow social conservatism alone to explain it. It suggests that it is the skilled trades which are exceptional, and that conditions in unskilled manual labour or in outwork industries, so far from being ‘specially unhappy’, were characteristic of a system designed by employers, legislators and ideologists to cheapen human labour in every way. And the fact that weaving became overstocked at a time when conditions were rapidly declining is eloquent confirmation. It was in the outwork industries, Marx wrote, that exploitation was most ‘shameless’, ‘because in these last resorts of the masses made “redundant” by Modern Industry and Agriculture, competition for work attains its maximum’.1