ABSTRACT
To early socialists, the wage system, based on the vagaries of an unregulated capitalistic market, constituted one of the main causes of labour exploitation. Following Robert Owen’s Report to the County of Lanark, Labour Exchanges tried in the years 1832–1834 to implement the “labour notes”, an alternative paper money based upon the value of skilled work. In January, contributors to the New Moral World like Thomas Hunt argued that socialists, who mostly hailed from urban areas, should hire agricultural workers to till the land of their communities due to their own lack of farming skills. This was anathema to veterans of the Labour Exchange movement like the Marylebone saddler Benjamin Warden, who likened the inequalities of the wage system to slavery. In February 1832, Warden opened the First Western Union Exchange Bank, which was the first Owenite bazaar to use labour notes, and he was later active in the Finsbury branch of the Association of All Classes of All Nations.
