Last year's riots in London saw the burning down of 'Union Point', the symbolic heart of the English co-operative movement. One year on, Aaron Peters asks what the destruction of this building, provoked by the forces of mass consumption, reveals about the history of 'working class solidarity'.
Eighteenth-century dockers founded the first co-operative flour mills in Woolwich and Chatham, and the grain shortages of the Napoleonic wars helped to spread the idea. Forming a co-operative simply meant that the dockers each owned a share of the mill, and controlled it by an elected committee. The decisions, as well as the finances, were in the control of the consumers, and the middleman was left out.
Both as a method of undermining state power and of finding escape from the world of competition, the co-operative movement expanded from mills to shops. The surplus from such stores funded education and recreation. Women in particular pushed the co-operative movement forward. By 1914, the Women's Co-operative movement had 30,000 members. The English Co-operative Wholesale Society had sales amounting to £4.5 million in 1883.
By 1900, it was, taken as a whole, one of the larger companies in the world. The Socialist Co-operative Federation was running stores in Battersea, Chelsea and Tottenham; their supporters included William Morris who, at this time, as well as writing 'Socialism From The Root Up' and acting as treasurer of the Socialist League, penned 'The Dream of John Ball', his ode to the Peasant's Rising of 1381.
Alf Barnes MP thought the Great War had moved along co-operative societies everywhere, the war having, in his own words, 'burned down the painted transformation scenery of the pre-war political stage’. Economic and social relations had been thrown into the foreground of the political arena. Food prices were soaring in the post-war climate, with Co-operative Party members leading the way in taking the Conservative government head on. In the miners' strikes of the 1920s, co-operative societies up and down the country acted as the material and financial support for many strikers and their families, ultimately leading to over a million pounds of debt by the end of 1926 - debt owed by immiserated miners. A year before, the campaigning efforts of the Co-operative Party in politics had already fallen flat. Corporations holding the monopolies which were curbing co-operatively owned businesses' ability to thrive had been taken on - and soundly backed up in a Royal commission. Falling gold prices, the public were informed, were the reason for high bread prices, not monopolies.
However, as the Labour Representation Committee, building on the strike of '26, finally reached parliamentary victory in 1929, things were looking up for co-operative socialists and trade unionists alike. In celebration of the leaps and bounds the co-operative movement was taking, however crippled by debt, the head of the London Co-operative Society, Alf Barnes, oversaw the construction of a grand new headquarters for that organisation replete with a lavish co-operative department store in Tottenham, named 'Union Point'.
The construction of bravado was in vain. By 1933, the Labour Party, aware that the co-operative movement was weighing down its coat tails, introduced taxes on the bank's reserves. After the war, the Co-operative society slowly crumbled. While its newfound position as a bank gave it credibility to move into debt speculation, the retail arm dwindled. By the early 1960s, the London society faced an existential crisis. In the 1980s, the department stores closed down. By the early 1990s, the ground floor of the building was given over to the kind of monopolistic supply chains which the society had always railed against. Allied Carpets and Doors, and later Carpet Right, proudly blazoned their signage across Tottenham High Road.
In 2003, the upper floors of the building were bought out by the Metropolitan Housing Association, which had been founded in 1963 by the wife of the Governor of Jamaica to provide housing for the Windrush generation in Tottenham and Brixton. In 1988, it pioneered the new 'shared ownership’ schemes. The private finance schemes into which the housing associations had been thrust by Thatcher's administration were now put to the use of encouraging a further section of the working class into mortgage ownership. In 2009, the MHA became the National HomeBuy Agent, i.e. the overall manager of all shared ownership schemes - i.e. the national manager of 'social housing' debt.
On August 11th 2011, the Union Point building was burnt down. Thousands of residents of Tottenham and Edmonton charged through Tottenham High Street. Debt and deferred wages, combined with the lack of any state-resource to enforce austerity measures save for the single glorious mechanism of the police, were visited back upon the building which had for decades monitored the transformation of consumer co-operation into a mass consumer debt economy.
Did the Union Point building expect to be destroyed? The co-operative movement was a force of consumer ethics, running alongside the trade union movement, and running weakly. The co-operative movement proposed a mode of consumption based around working class identity and solidarity, counter-posed to a form of consumption which has come to be known simply as 'mass consumption', that is, consumption by the 'mass worker'. The conflict between different modes of consumption is tied up with methods of social reproduction in the destruction of this building. In 2011, this monument to working class consumption as a political act gave way to destructive technologies as old as - but no newer than - petroleum.
Source: Open Democracy
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