William Benbow, pamphleteer

 I wish William Benbow were better known. He published one of the world’s strangest pamphlets in London on Jan. 21, 1832.

The title “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes” doesn’t offer much promise that the pamphlet would whip readers up into a frenzy. But it was the catalyst for movement that became so troublesome that Benbow was tried for sedition and imprisoned.

Before turning to journalism, Benbow was a nonconformist preacher. The language of his argument is religious. The idea is revolution.

Benbow called for a national holiday that wasn’t really a holiday. It was a general strike.

It was to be a holy month — not a holy day. During this break, the laboring classes would meet and legislate a new order.

Our holy day is established to establish plenty, to abolish want, to render all men equal! In our holy day we shall legislature for all mankind; the constitution drawn up during our holiday shall place every human being on the same footing. Equal rights, equal liberties, equal employment, equal toil, equal respect, equal share of production: this is the object of our holy day day — of our sacred day — of our festival.”

If that line about “equal share of production” sounds like a Marxist plot, remember that Benbow’s pamphlet was published in 1832 — 16 years before Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.

Benbow starts with the history of festivals among the ancient people of Israel. The Sabbath was a weekly day of rest. And every seven years was a Year of Release, what today’s scholars call a sabbatical, an entire year of rest, when even the land was rested. And then there was the jubilee, every seventh sabbatical year, which was a kind of reset of society. Debts were canceled. Slaves were freed. Servitude contracts expired.

That’s what Benbow had in mind.

We affirm that the state of society in this country is such, that as long as it continues, heart-rending inequality must continue, producing wretchedness, crime, and slavery; — plunging not a few, but the immense majority of the people into those circumstances.

He said the British ruling classes, by deliberating and planning together, had brought about the happiness of the few. Just imagine a national congress, using the Grand National Holiday, in which laboring classes would meet to devise a plan to bring happiness to the many.

Up to this point, Benbow has asked us to imagine a utopia. But he thought the idea was within reach.

Every man must prepare for it, and assist his neighbor in preparing for it.

Each worker, however poor, must put aside a week’s provisions. Workers committees in each district should lay up provisions to feed everyone for the other three weeks. The wealth of the church parishes belonged to the Lord and could be used to sustain the Lord’s people in a righteous cause.

And remember: The cattle upon a thousand hills are the Lord’s.

The line comes from the 50^th Psalm, and the idea was that everything — all the natural resources — belong to the Lord and could be used to sustain the Lord’s people in a righteous cause.

Benbow said the nominal owners of those cattle on the hills would see the justice of the biblical idea immediately. The rich man who had the cattle would be glad to donate them to support the people in a righteous cause — if a committee of 100 workers approached him and asked nicely. And, if the rich man said no, a committee of 1,000 workers could approach the rich man and …

You can see where this is going — at least the British ruling classes thought they could.

It took seven years for the movement to become a serious threat. When it did, Benbow was sent to prison for two years. He later went to Australia.

Computers have reset buttons because complex systems sometimes get gridlocked and fail. Human societies are even more complex. The idea that they, too, should come with a reset button is an idea that should come up once a generation.