ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s labour historians have reflected on what Friedrich Lenger called ‘the artisanal phase of the labour movement’. In the nineteenth century urban crafts underwent a gradual and partial transformation, which eroded income security and craft status. Cooperative production was considered the only way to guarantee workers the full product of their labour. The ‘associational socialism’ (Thomas Welskopp) of the early labour movement called for autonomous cooperatives combining independent craft producers. Such a relationship, and the idea of ‘an artisanal phase’, is rejected by others, such as Jacques Rancière and Iorwerth Prothero, however. In this chapter I will show that a division into two phases of the nineteenth-century labour movement can be discerned clearly and concretely in the case of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands and central to the development of the Dutch labour movement. From this case I can only support the conclusions by Lenger and others about the specific artisanal nature and programme of early labour movements.
