The Voice of Industry and American workers' response to Capitalist development, 1845-1848

Abstract

From 1845-1848 New England industrial workers bitterly condemned their position in the underbelly of America's burgeoning capitalist society. But historians have overlooked how powerfully these wage workers criticized industrial capitalism. The Voice of Industry, published from 1845-1848, offers a prism through which historians can understand how workers felt about the transition to capitalist relations. In the pages of the Voice of Industry workers challenged the domination the capitalist class held over them in the workplace, in the political arena, and through the media. According to American workers, industrial capitalism violated the unalienable rights guaranteed to all humans by the nation's Declaration of Independence. They argued industrial capitalism had ushered in a new form of slavery, wage slavery, which in their view, was not much different to chattel slavery in the South. Consequently, American wage laborers came to understand work in a capitalist system as fundamentally degrading and exploitative; they called for the demise of slavery "in all its forms" and worked to overthrow the ruling classes in both the North and South. For these workers, industrial capitalism did not fortify American ideals of freedom and democracy. Rather, in their eyes it represented the ultimate betrayal of the principles they held dear.

The Voice of Industry can be understood as a tocsin warning of the emergence of a new system of hierarchy and oppression which became the arena for class conflict the world over. Industrial capitalism, over the bitter denunciations of America industrial workers, prevailed as the truly radical force of the 19th century. While the voices of American working people, devastated by the advance of this system have been lost to history, the elements of bourgeois society they detested—inequality, social domination, and exploitation—remain. Careful examination of their struggle may help bring labor and working-class experience back to the center of conversations regarding political economy. An approach to history that may supplement existing work focused narrowly on examining the history of capitalism and slavery from a birds-eye-view.