Thomas Dunning

Thomas Joseph Dunning (12 January 1799 – 23 December 1873) was an English trade unionist.[1] He has been called "the authoritative voice of the Trades Union oligarchy".[2]

He was born on 12 January 1799 in Southwark, a son of Joseph Hill and Ann (Barber) Dunning.[3] He became a bookbinder. In 1820 he joined the London Consolidated Society of Journeyman Bookbinders and elected to its committee in the late 1830s. In the strike of 1839 he favoured, in contrast to the majority view, that a deal should be struck with the employers. He resigned from the committee but was part of negotiations of the final settlement. He then reorganised the Society into the London Consolidated Lodge of Journeyman Bookbinders, which briefly joined a national union (with Dunning as chief secretary) until London was forced to leave.[1]

Dunning supported the independence of the South in the American Civil War, and compared Abraham Lincoln to Xerxes.[4] He viewed laws such as the Master and Servant Act as putting industrial labour under "the old feudal notion of serfdom".[5] He argued that rural trade unionism was not a revolutionary threat: "...the landowners and farmers ought to rejoice that it has taken place, for it is of all others a circumstance which if successful, will give stability to their position and render impossible to them similar fate to that of the French nobility and farmers who were swept from the face of the earth for the same kind of oppression. To avert such a catastrophe, success must attend the movement of the agricultural labourers.".[6] He strongly criticised land nationalisation as not only economically inefficient but politically dangerous as it would create a government monopoly. The solution was to liberalise the market through the abolition of primogeniture and the laws of settlement and entail.[7]

Famous quote in Marx's Capital from Dunning: “Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” [8]

Notes

  1. 1 2 Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Dunning, Thomas Joseph (1799–1873)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 18 April 2010.
  2. ↑ Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists. Studies in Labour and Politics. 1861-1881 (Routledge, 1965), p. 233.
  3. ↑ Edward J. Davies, "The Origins of some Trade Unionists", Notes and Queries, 259(2014):570-73.
  4. ↑ E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform. Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 71, n. 244.
  5. ↑ Biagini, p. 148.
  6. ↑ Biagini, p. 60.
  7. ↑ Biagini, p. 189.
  8. ↑ ‘The Reminiscences of Thomas Dunning’, in David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism. Memoirs of Working Class Politicians. 1790-1885 (London: Europa Publications, 1977), p. 35-36.

Further reading

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