Primitive Accumulation

The history of England, the history of the successive waves of people who, after the departure of the armies of imperial Rome, went on to establish themselves in England: on an island geographically marginalized with the respect to the much more populous continent, has traditionally been presented as though it were self-contained, as though it were of a separate people with particular origins, organisations, languages and national costumes. It has been presented as a history of political isolation, which despite frequent interruptions, has supposedly left a definite mark on the policies followed by the Governments of England as evidenced by their preference for, when possible, colonising new lands rather than engaging in the interminable wars of the old continent. This isolationist view has been raised to the level of official ideology by the English ruling classes.

We find ourselves unable to condone this view of English history, which depends on half-truths, because England has never really been isolated. It has always absorbed the most important influences from Europe, and reciprocally, Europe has been obliged to draw the most progressive consequences from political-economic events in England.

England, as first of the great national states, was also the first to emerge from the tunnel of feudalism and to develop such thoroughly modern phenomena as mercantile capitalism, imperialism, the revolutionary taking of power by the bourgeoisie, and the large-scale development of industry. This in itself is enough to highlight, besides the fact that these phenomena were sooner or later exported to the rest of Europe, the role that this small country has played in the history of humanity. However, for us, marxist revolutionaries, England is of particular interest because it was there the modern proletariat first emerged, along with its first trade unions and first political parties. Marx drew the material for Capital from his studies of English history, and the lessons drawn from the historical experiences of the English proletariat remain to this day keystones of the political doctrine of communism.

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One of the most repugnant features of Victorian society was its complete hypocrisy. The official ideology of that era wished to present English history as a painless progression of auspicious events which were all designed to produce the maximum welfare both of the English, and of all the peoples with whom they came in contact; all due, but of course, to the wisdom and magnanimity of a succession of kings and queens. Thus was the status quo exalted, and the crimes of English imperialism justified.

In 1848 the venerated bourgeois historian Macaulay wrote: „It can easily be proved that, in our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries, been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges, and confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the day when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladministration, of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful wars, of the Pestilence and of the Fire, it was greater on the day of the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his Restoration. This progress, having continued during many ages, became at length, about the middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. In consequence partly of our geographical and partly of our moral position, we have, during several generations, been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry.
While every part of the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around us, our government has never been subverted by violence. During more than a hundred years there has been in our island no tumult of sufficient importance to be called an insurrection; nor has the law been once borne down either by popular fury or by regal tyranny.”

No wonder that Macaulay would have the title of Baron bestowed on him by a grateful ruling class.

But let us look briefly at what Macaulay omitted to mention. Between the Plantagenets and the Tudors was a century of struggles for the monarchy between the houses of Lancaster and York, known as the Wars of the Roses. „No hostile standard has been seen” means ignoring the invasions from Scotland, and considering them as a purely internal British affair. And if we are to take „our government has never been subverted by violence” to mean that no rebellion has succeeded in conquering power, then what about the English Civil War of 1644-8?

As our class interests are opposed to Macaulays, and as we don’t have any queens to keep happy, nor expect any nice sinecures from the class currently in power, we are in a position to study the events which wrought such huge changes in England by sticking to the facts, and to our tried and tested critical method, i.e. historical materialism. That said, we aren’t staking any claim to a patent of objectivity⎯a myth of decadent bourgeois historicism⎯rather we aim to counter the truth of a class defending its power, with the truth of a class which history has placed in the situation of needing to attack it; the one class which, through the revolutionary taking of power, can impress on human history the last, decisive push towards a society without exploiters and exploited. We refer of course to the proletariat.

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The Invasion of 1066 allowed the Norman adventurers, as ever in search of new prey, to get their hands on a country which, after the departure of the Roman legions, had for centuries pursued a course distinct from the rest of Europe. The 10th century had seen a significant concentration of power in the hands of central government, a concentration which, despite the continual highs and lows of the Danish invasions, would remain a feature of the English political structure. In Europe there was still nothing comparable to the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy. In England, notwithstanding the existence of the feudal estates, the country was divided into precisely defined shires, and the sheriffs who ruled over them were di nomina regia and owed allegiance to the king alone; the land was divided into units, the hundreds, for the purpose of land registration which allowed the central powers to count on a definite minimum income, as well as keeping the army directly dependent on the king; on the king depended, at least in theory, the fiscal system and the administration of justice.

The sheriffs, exercisers of the kings power at the local level, continually served to check the power of the feudal lords, and even if the sheriffs themselves could sometimes wield considerable power, they remained functionaries, and the post would never became hereditary.

The plantaganet dynasty therefore encountered a situation which was particularly favourable for the direct exercise of centralised power, and even if feudalism in its classical form was revived by the Normans, it never declined to the level existing at the time in France and Germany.

Even the Domesday book was essentially a reaffirmation of the right of the king to collect taxes directly from his subjects, of which at that time (1085) there were around a million and a half. If the appointment of feudal lords nevertheless continued, it was mainly in territories which had not been completely pacified, particularly the North and Wales.

In subsequent centuries, and despite foreign wars and famines, the economic situation in England improved considerably, and by the middle of the 1300s the population was around 4 million. Meanwhile, due to the extension of the monetary economy and continued Tax increases, a major social transformation was taking place: the commutation of goods and services into cash payments. The main impulse to this change came from the Lord rather than from the peasant, and it is calculated that in the first half of the 1300s around half of the feudal services had been commuted. It is important to note however that this didn’t signify immediate release from serfdom, since the lord, the serf’s owners, could still demand services instead of rent. Nevertheless, the legal status of the villain, who still remained in a state of intense subjection, was slowly improving.

This process was accelerated by the Black Death. In a few decades the population fell from 4 to 2 million people. Not until 1500 would the population be back to 4 million.

Land was often abandoned during this period, prices crashed, and in the countryside there was increasing anarchy. One of the first consequences was that the landed proprietors took on anyone they could find to work in the fields, and wages, for the first time in centuries, increased significantly (doubling and even trebling). Lower prices, restricted production and high salaries resulted in a fall in ground-rent. Land was no longer profitable for the landed proprietors⎯nobles, knights, high clergy, abbots etc.⎯and these sought to remedy the situation by selling off their land. Whilst this would increase the class of small landowners and contribute to the dissolution of feudalism, there was also the attempt (as exemplified by the Black Prince and his expeditions to hunt down runaway serfs) to go back to classical feudalism, a backward step which would merely provoke the rebellions which culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381.

One of the first reactions to these changes, was the promulgation by Parliament of the Statute of Labourers (1351) in which it was ordained that none could refuse to work for wages set at the 1347 level (that is pre-plague wages). This marked the first instance of state intervention in order to fix wages, an example which would be followed in other countries and in England and has continued ever since. But note that whilst salaries were fixed, prices were not.

Laws, if they are not backed up by a force at least equal to those against whom they are issued, are just so many scraps of paper. So even if branding was the penalty for transgressors (N.B. for those who received the wages, not those who paid it) the workers’ conditions saw a notable improvement. But that was not all. The increasingly favourable offers which the Workers were receiving made them aware of their economic weight in society, whilst the tenacity with which the proprietors sought to hold back these improvements highlighted how society was divided into horizontal strata; that is classes characterised by opposing interests. From this new state of affairs arose the first associations of workers, and these in particular, and not surprisingly, were attacked in all the statutes.

The power acquired by the subordinate classes became clearly visible in 1381 when London was occupied by thousands of insurgents rebelling against the famous Poll Tax which was in fact only the latest in a series of tax hikes. The rebellion was suppressed, but even so the readiness with which the insurgents had come together, the decision with which they had orchestrated their movements, and the programme of reform which they had advanced all serve as testimony to the fact that the social situation in England was taking giant strides into the modern world. Moreover, it is in this setting that Lollardism, ancestor of a long line of communistic heresies incubating on the continent since the crusades, spreads amongst the lowest levels of the clergy. The Lollards would survive as a marginalized force in English society for a long time to come, and a less revolutionary version of their doctrines would find great favour at the time of the first schism, and later on as Puritanism; a fact explained by the fact that aversion to the meddling of the Pope in English matters was already by this time a cause fully backed by the King and nobility. In the years which followed, Lollardism would come to be equated above all with a movement to secularise church property; a movement eagerly embraced by the nascent bourgeoisie with the catholic clergy trying in vain to suppress it.

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The 15th Century was the century of the Wars of the Roses and the battles between the Yorkers and Lancastrian dynasties. The final result of this civil strife which drenched England in blood was the instalment of a third dynasty, the Tudors, which would govern England throughout the 16th Century.

But other events of far greater import and duration were taking place during these centuries, the most important of which was the great agricultural revolution.

This is how Engels, (in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific – special introduction of 1892) sums up the process: „Fortunately for England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during the Wars of the Roses. Their successors, though mostly scions of the old families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value of money, and at once began to increase their rents by turning hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them by sheep. Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created fresh bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the same result. Consequently, ever since Henry VIII, the English „Aristocracy,” far from counteracting the development of industrial production, had, on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had always been a section of the great landowners willing, from economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading men of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie.”

The religious schism which occurred under Henry VIII reign was of small significance in theological terms (leaving aside the fundamental refusal of papal authority) since the differences between the churches were very subtle and superficial whilst the economic impact was very deep, in that it both accelerated the process of the formation of bourgeois landed property, and buried feudalism, of which the high prelates were an integral part. These changes marked the loss of the Church’s political and economic power for good. All that would remain would be a vestigial aversion towards Catholicism during the successive centuries caused by the rising bourgeoisie’s fear that there might be a reversal in the economic, and thus the political, process.

In Capital, in the section on primitive accumulation, Marx outlines the economic transformations occurring in England during this period: „In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. In the larger seigniorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer. The wage-labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage-labourers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, &c. In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterised by division of the soil amongst the greatest number of sub-feudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent-roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors. Although, therefore, the English land, after the Norman conquest, was distributed in gigantic baronies, one of which often included some 900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant properties, only here and there interspersed with great seigniorial domains. Such conditions, together with the prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his „Laudes legum Angliae”; but it excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour-market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers (…) Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it.
In insolent conflict with the king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers. Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his „Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles”, describes how the expropriation of small peasants is ruining the country. „What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. „If”, says Harrison, „the old records of euerie manour be sought (…) it will soon appear that in some manour seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk (…) that England was neuer less furnished with people than at present (…) Of cities and towns either utterly decayed or more than a quarter or half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of towns pulled down for sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them (…) I could say somewhat” The complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production. A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working-class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
(…) What the capitalist system demanded was (…) a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital.
(…) The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The states of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poor folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated. „Pauper ubique jacet” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England.
A system of assistance for the poor had to be instituted which in one form or another would become a permanent feature of English capitalism, and would in itself be enough to put to shame any claims made on behalf of a peaceful and progressive evolution of capitalism. It’s worth remembering that at the time proposals were made to reintroduce slavery in order to eliminate the plague of poverty.
The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this „free” proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as „voluntary” criminals and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed (…) Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.
It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist mode of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic relations, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the „natural laws of production”, i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to „regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working-day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.”

The process of expelling peasants from the land wasn’t however a smooth and continuous process; even the State was frequently involved in attempting to stem the tide of the enclosure movement with laws which were nevertheless entirely ineffective. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie during the 16th century drew strength from its own successful attempts to impose its will on the Executive. During the reign of Henry VIII alone 72,000 vagabonds were put to death, and there would be peasant rebellions under his successors. The most important of these rebellions occurred in 1549 in Norfolk, the so-called Kett rebellion. Before its defeat, this movement managed to organise a small army which inflicted a lot of damage on the King’s troops. The rebels’ demands were quite moderate, but certainly not inspired by Catholicism: the demands were for fair rents and, amongst other things, that priests should not be allowed to own land.

More revolts would follow during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), but these were all crushed either through the direct exercise of state power or by the local armies of the landed aristocracy.

Even in the towns the social situation was changing. The old gild system was starting to break down as the journeymen started to organise to obtain better conditions, and the masters to put obstacles in the way of their promotion to master. This scission in its turn brought about changes in the technical organisation of labour. Instead of everybody working in the traditional workshop, the master gave out work to be completed by the journeyman in his home, and a piecework rate was paid on the finished article. In the end, the master is transformed into a contractor who acquires raw materials, distributes them, and sells the finished product to merchants, or he may even cut out the merchant altogether and sell directly, even abroad. Thus on the one hand struggle between master-capitalist and labourers through strikes and lock-outs, and on the other rivalry between industrialists and merchants. The latter contest remains at a kind of Mexican stand-off, with considerable overlapping of roles, especially within the internal market, whilst the battle between labourers and contractors is resolved in favour of the contractors.

Thus the gild, at least understood as a free corporative association, slowly disappears. For its richest members is substituted the industrial and commercial companies in all their variety of forms and structures. By now the general framework is definitive: proprietors of cash and materials on the one hand, the workers on the other. Neither of these protagonists is particularly interested in production remaining in the towns. As far as the worker is concerned, the town is no longer a place where he is a freeman supported by an organisation. And the entrepreneur prefers to assemble a more easily supervisable workforce, away from the riotous environment of the city, in the provinces, which eventually become industrial centres. The workers are collected together in factories until even the distinction between autonomous workers engaged in piecework and day workers disappears as both become wage workers.

Parallel with these developments the State introduces increasingly comprehensive regulations to govern the relation between masters and workers. In agriculture and in industry, salaries and working conditions are fixed, but always in such a way as to protect the master from the worker rather than the other way around. The most serious consequence of this policy is the decline in real wages during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, with the resultant widespread poverty and, worse than poverty itself, the laws regulating assistance to the poor.

The development of merchant capital doesn’t conflict with landed capital. Both go hand in hand and are entirely bourgeois insofar as both seek to achieve that eternal aim of the bourgeoisie; the realization of profit. The strength of the navy, boosted by Henry VIII’s famous naval shipyards, and the loss of European possessions, along with the opening of the Atlantic routes, gave England a decisive push towards commerce, a move favoured by its advantageous geographical position. Opposed to begin with by other powers, mainly Spain, England had no qualms about using pirates to beat off the competition, with the most exalted of the corsairs licensed to plunder by Queen Elizabeth herself.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) marked a change of pace in England’s march towards ruling the waves. Having got rid of the irregulars (pirates and corsairs), commerce (and robbery) was regulated directly by the government by means of taxes and the granting of monopolies. All this had favourable repercussions on national industry, but still not to the extent that it was favoured in a decisive way. Power still remained in the hands of the capitalist landed proprietors and the big commercial companies.

The bourgeoisie was still prevented from exercising political power directly, power it felt entitled to because of the privileged economic power it had acquired. On the other hand, the absolute monarchy started to represent an obstacle to the freedom of commerce, due in part to the corruption and favouritisms that distinguished the Court. Finally the fear of a restoration of the catholic religion, with all the economic consequences that would have involved, constituted a permanent feature of the period before and after the revolution. The conflict, which for various reasons was placated under Elizabeth, came clearly to the fore under the first of the Stuarts.

The bourgeois movement of opposition to the Anglican church formed by the Puritans soon became one of opposition to the monarchy itself. Initially introduced by protestants returning from Holland after the persecutions of Bloody Mary, it sought converts above all amongst the middle classes. It was in fact a kind of Calvinism, «true religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time». The cities were puritan, as were the industrialised country districts; the economically active classes, the middle classes, were puritan; and Puritanism saw a steady progress in the course of the 17th century and identified ever more closely with the bourgeois interests.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels depicts the intimate connection between the Calvinist religion and capitalism as follows: „Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred articles of economic faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England.”

We will see later on how the English bourgeoisie didn’t hesitate to use Puritanism as a pliable instrument in order to adapt it to its changing requirements.

With the ascent to the throne of James 1 in 1603, Scotland and England are united under one crown. The English bourgeoisie now has at its disposition a large national state, a flourishing trade sustained by a powerful navy, an international position almost on a par with France and Spain, and last but not least, an ideology for which its adherents will fight to the death. Nothing remains but for it but to take the power which will allow it to structure society according to its needs, and to sweep away the last vestiges of feudalism. This historical task will be carried out in the course of the 17th century.

The Bourgeois Revolution

In English history, the 17th century was a crucial one insofar as it saw the ending of the Middle Ages. During the previous century, new commercial routes to the Far East had been opened up along with the „discovery” of new colonial possibilities in America, and in Europe itself there had been demographic growth accompanied by monetary inflation. Only Holland, the sole European country where the bourgeoisie has risen to power at that time, managed to overcome the crisis with ease, and indeed to emerge from it extremely prosperous. Its commercial predomination however would only last until its competitors in other countries, with richer natural resources and higher populations, had managed to throw off the chains of feudalism. Out of all the European powers it was England that would make the greatest leap forward, and lay the basis for it to become the first big industrialized imperialist power with a pre-eminent role in global policy and economy; a position it would maintain for three centuries.

The two enemy camps which faced each other at the start of the 17th century in England had been formed (as we saw in the last instalment) in the previous century on the back of what Marx called „primitive accumulation”.

The monarchy, secure in its control of political and military power but continually in search of new sources of finance, had the backing of the traditional big feudal nobility, which had been ridden with crises for some time, and the official clergy, whose power was waning in the countryside and whose spiritual authority was continually being undermined by the rise of mainly Calvinist „non-conformist” sects.

In what we will call the bourgeois camp there was, on the contrary, an assemblage of different strata and interests which were in a state of growth, and which were actively accumulating money and claiming the right to be able to spend it how they chose. There were the big merchants, ship owners (mainly Londoners) and bankers on the one hand, whilst on the other there was the landed gentry, i.e. the medium and big agrarian bourgeoisie which had arisen after the dissolution of the monasteries, and which whilst often emanating from the lesser nobility nevertheless displayed a purely bourgeois and commercial mentality.

«The only explanation M. Guizot is able to offer of what to him is a great puzzle, the puzzle of why the English Revolution was conservative in character, is that it was due to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas its conservatism is to be attributed to the permanent alliance between the bourgeoisie and the greater part of the big landlords, an alliance which essentially differentiates the English Revolution from the French – the revolution that abolished big landownership by parcellation. Unlike the French feudal landowners of 1789, this class of big landed proprietors, which had allied itself with the bourgeoisie and which, incidentally, had already risen under Henry VIII, was not antagonistic to but rather in complete accord with the conditions of life of the bourgeoisie. In actual fact their landed estates were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the other hand, the landed proprietors placed at the disposal of the industrial bourgeoisie the people necessary to operate its manufactories and, on the other, were in a position to develop agriculture in accordance with the state of industry and trade. Hence their common interests with the bourgeoisie; hence their alliance with it» (Marx, [Review of] Guizot, 1850).

Naturally, the dividing line between the factions that fought with each other during the 1640s wasn’t clear-cut, and there was no shortage of renegades switching from one side to the other. There was also a geographical division which resulted in the North and the west of England being more realist, whilst the South and East, and most of the ports (all zones engaged in commerce, manufacture or mining), along with London, were predominantly supporters of Parliament. But particular individuals aside, the class interests of the contending factions were those described above.

The troops, the cannon fodder of the revolution, were principally drawn from the countryside, where the majority of the population still resided. It should however be noted that amongst the parliamentarians, and this was the big power of the bourgeoisie, there were numerous sons of the minor peasantry, tenants, artisans, and the small and micro-bourgeoisie who, born from the collapse of feudalism, thought themselves to be defending their own future by struggling against the aristocracy.

«Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that Yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles 1 to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further – exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society» (Engels, Socialism; Utopian and Scientific).

In the 1600s, proletarians (labourers, workers, servants, the poor and other propertyless classes) only really constituted a class in the statistical sense, even though it is estimated that they represented around half the population. They didn’t therefore appear as a political force in the revolution, or only insofar as they exerted influence indirectly on the parties in struggle, who would make decisions based on their fears about the unrest which could follow if the economic situation became insupportable. There are in this period however (and even before) the first signs of workers’ associations, of mutual aid societies, of co-operatives, occurring mainly (the Cornish tin miners for instance) in those rare instances where there was significant concentration of workers.

The chronicle of the reigns of James 1 and Charles 1 is a continual trial of strength between the Crown, constrained to govern in a world that for any enterprise whatsoever required increasingly large sums of money, and those who possessed this wealth, the emerging middle classes, who before releasing the purse-strings sought recognition of their right to be involved in decisions about how the money would be spent. Hence parliament, which was increasingly coming to represent the moneyed classes, tended to increasingly arrogate to itself the power to make decisions in the realms of public spending, foreign relations, commerce, domestic politics, and religion in order to shape the country to its requirements.

Constantly short of money, the monarchy, which was one of the worst off in Europe, counted on irregular taxations, which in order to be exacted promptly required the support of parliament, that is the bourgeoisie. And it was the bourgeoisie’s reluctance to pay up which pushed the king towards governing without parliament, and therefore towards a growing despotism. James 1 reasserted the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, in other words, independent power for the Executive, but in practice managed to co-exist with parliament. Charles 1, however, wasn’t quite as astute: by means of arrests and arbitrary imprisonment he managed to impose the taxation he required without parliamentary consensus, and without parliament he attempted to reign. Even in religious matters despotism tried to defend the church of England against the „puritan” heresies, and the elimination of their priests, the raising of tithes, and the theological measures which tended to make Anglicanism much more similar to Catholicism had among other things the consequence of favouring puritan emigration to America (as in the famous Mayflower episode).

During the period 1629 to 1640 Parliament wasn’t convoked, and Charles 1 was constrained to enact a series of unpopular measures to raise money; measures which enraged the bourgeoisie even further but who, through lack of organisation with the exception perhaps of London, were unable to do anything about it. The regime hobbled along at this stage rather well (notwithstanding the fact that it was increasingly difficult to raise taxes from a bourgeoisie which judged them to be illegal) but it lived in such an unstable equilibrium that it needed just one more incident to tip the balance. That incident materialised in the war against Scotland, and Charles 1 was forced to convoke Parliament in 1640, then three weeks later he dissolved it (the short parliament) and then in November of the same year he was compelled to convoke it again (the Long Parliament).

This time, thanks to the uprisings in the countryside against the enclosures and mass demonstrations in London, the bourgeoisie managed to gain better representation in the Parliament and impose its first measures on the King: destruction of the bureaucratic apparatus, negation of the formation of an army controlled by the King, abolition of illegal taxation, and control over the church by Parliament.

The Irish revolt in 1641 caused the crisis to come to a head: the refusal of parliament to entrust an army to Charles 1 caused an internal split between the progressives and the realists, the latter representing the classes which had most to lose if the social order was overturned.

In London, a new wave of popular uprisings (merchants, artisans, apprentices) provided the Progressives with the courage to denounce the king in the „Grand Remonstrance”, an indictment which was approved by parliament and then published and distributed. The king tried to arrest the parliamentary leaders, but then fled with his followers to the north.

The Civil War had begun. The puritans, lacking a revolutionary programme, would nevertheless be the agents which unleashed the revolution: to defend their conquests in parliament they would have to defend them by force, until it became clear that the rising social-economic order which was taking shape was incompatible with the established order; to turn back would have been fatal, so they pressed on, lacking consciousness but backed up by the unstoppable weight of the gigantic economic forces which were gestating in society, and which were staking a claim to shape the world according to its needs. Cromwell himself confided in a friend that he didn’t know where it was all going, but it had to keep going forward.

Military operations commenced in the summer of 1642 after the two parties had managed to organise their armies. This was more difficult for parliament at the start since they lacked sufficient officers (nobles), but they had nevertheless an invincible weapon: money. Also, the ports and the Navy came over to the bourgeoisie almost immediately, which made it difficult for the king to receive assistance from abroad. After initial setbacks, parliament managed to equip itself with an army that was much more modern as well as strong numerically (the New Model Army). Trotski has described this phase of the revolution very well in Where is Britain Going?

«In the England of the 1640s we see a parliament based upon the most whimsical franchise, which at the same time regarded itself as the representative organ of the people.
The lower house represented the nation in that it represented the bourgeoisie and thereby the national wealth. In the reign of Charles I it was found, and not without amazement, that the House of Commons was three times richer than the House of Lords. The king now dissolved this parliament and now recalled it according to the pressure of financial need. Parliament created an army for its defence. The army gradually concentrated in its ranks all the most active, courageous and resolute elements. As a direct consequence of this, parliament capitulated to this army. We say: as a direct consequence of this. By this we mean that parliament capitulated not simply to armed force (it had not capitulated to the king’s army) but to Cromwell’s puritan army, which expressed the requirements of the revolution more boldly, more resolutely, and more consistently than did parliament.
The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic Church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents, and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie and small landed proprietors. The Levellers were the party of the left-wing of the bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place social determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called root and branch men or in the language of our day, radical, stood for a republic. The half-way position of the presbyterians fully corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie – between the nobility and the plebeians. The independents party which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion naturally displaced the presbyterians among the wakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and countryside that formed the main force of the revolution (…).
Any historical analogies demand the greatest caution especially when we are dealing with the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries; yet nonetheless one cannot help being struck by some distinct features that bring the regime and the character of Cromwell’s army and the character of the red Army close together. Admittedly, then everything was founded upon faith in predestination and upon a strict religious morality; now with us militant atheism reigns supreme. But running beneath the religious form of Puritanism there was the preaching of the historical mission of a new class, and the teaching on predestination was a religious approach to an historical pattern. Cromwell’s fighters felt themselves to be in the first place puritans and only in the second place soldiers, just as our fighters acknowledge themselves to be above all revolutionaries and communists and only then soldiers. But the points of divergence are even greater than the points of similarity. The Red Army formed by the party of the proletariat remains its armed organ. Cromwell’s army, which also embodied his party, became itself the decisive force».

Cromwell’s army wasn’t a confessional one however, and in fact within it there was far greater religious tolerance than in society at large. «The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies» Cromwell would say.

The officers, who often came from the poorest backgrounds, built their careers on their merits alone. The drilling and training was rigorous and an iron discipline prevailed, and the Ironsides would emerge as the diamond spearhead of Cromwell’s army, revolutionising cavalry warfare in the process.

In 1646, shortly before the end of the war, and after a run of brilliant victories which put Cromwell’s forces into an increasingly strong position (and during which providence always took the side of the heavier battalions) Cromwell himself returned to being a simple parliamentarian.

The Presbyterians, who represented the right-wing of the bourgeoisie and had been subjected to the will of the Left for many years, were victorious in parliament and happy with what had been achieved. For them it was now a question of getting back to business in a quiet environment, and this required amongst other things at least partial demobilisation of the army, which, as well as being costly, had become a breeding ground for extremists and sectarians.

But the niggardliness and arrogance with which this manoeuvre was attempted (they didn’t want to pay the soldiers their back pay) caused a widespread rebellion amongst the veterans who for four years had fought for the fat London merchants. First in the cavalry and then in the infantry divisions councils of deputies – known as „agitators” – were elected; a type of forerunner of the soviets.

Within these councils, the influence of the Levellers, a movement with a strong power base in the army, was a determining factor.

The Levellers were maybe the first real party of the modern epoch. By means of a number of eminent theoreticians and leaders (Lilburne, Walwyn, Winstanley etc.) it gave itself a democratic political programme which was so advanced that it wouldn’t have done badly as a programme of a bourgeois party of the 19th century.

The Levellers, who were the mouthpiece of the small and middle artisan and peasant bourgeoisie, unconsciously represented the truly revolutionary spirit of the Civil War. As well as contingent demands, the programme of the Levellers party included a number of other demands: universal suffrage, for all men who had reached their majority who were not „of servile condition” (revealing the class boundaries of this popular movement since „of servile condition” referred to all those dependent on an employer; wage-earners); local self-government; the most complete religious tolerance; freedom of speech, press and assembly; an end to the standing army and obligatory conscription; separation between Church and State; taxation related to earnings; and abolition of tithes, etc, etc.

Winstanley went even further and advocated the abolition of internal custom duties, universal education, state monopoly on foreign trade (one of the first measures taken by the Soviet Government in 1917), and even went so far as theorising a kind of socialist society.

Within the movement ideas and potentialities were unleashed which up until then had been repressed; there were theorisers of atheism (indicator of the extreme freedom of thought of the revolutionary years of 1642-1653); there were movements for the reappropriation of uncultivated and expropriated land, (the Diggers), an isolated example (of brief duration) of an organisation which proletarians could join; and most controversial of all perhaps were the warlike women who appeared on the political scene. This animated spirit resulting from the bourgeois revolution enjoyed a brief, exciting period, during which the group in power were forced to take notice of it; to the extent that in 1647 Cromwell himself sided with the rebel army, which at that time constituted an indomitable force.

Cromwell and his group of independents adopted an attitude during this period which whilst most suited to preventing the revolution from taking too radical a course, at the same time defended it from the internal forces of disintegration of the Presbyterians, who feared the revolution would go further than they liked and push them off the edge of the precipice.

Thus the movement in the army was channelled towards less subversive objectives, whilst at the same time allowing the agitators to capture the king without anyone batting an eyelid: Cromwell set himself at the head of the army in 1647 but didn’t hesitate to repress the troops’ most radical spokesmen; up to 1648 even Cromwell supported the king returning to the throne, but towards the end of the year he purged parliament and then conducted a ruthless campaign that ended with the beheading of Charles I, whereupon the war was resumed against the Realists and the Scottish.

The problem of the king having been resolved once and for all, and the break with the past having been accomplished (at least temporarily), it appeared evident to Cromwell that it was the Presbyterians who represented the bourgeois interest, and he effected a reconciliation with them in 1649 whilst at the same time, with another abrupt change of front, he arranged to settle accounts once and for all with the Levellers inside the army, who had started to accuse him of being a dictator. The arrests and executions of May ’49 were the signal to the big bourgeoisie that private property was safe, and that Cromwell could be considered their man.

With the country pacified, Cromwell dedicated himself to foreign affairs, that is, to the conquest of Ireland. This subject is too broad to discuss in depth here, but suffice to recall a letter Engels wrote to Marx in 1869: «things would have taken another turn in England but for the necessity for military rule in Ireland and the creation of a new aristocracy there»; and Marx «the English republic under Cromwell met shipwreck – in Ireland. Non bis in idem» (i.e. it won’t turn out the same in our revolution). Ireland was the first English colony, and its existence has always, in the history of England, had the effect of castrating all progressive movements, the democratic movement first and the proletarian movement second. «Irish history shows one how disastrous it is for a nation when it has subjugated another nation» wrote Engels to Marx; «The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland» wrote Marx to Engels. Later Engels would generalise «No people that oppresses another can itself be free».

In the homeland, only the Levellers (Walwyn) opposed military intervention and made the cause of independence for the Irish their own.

* * *

By 1653, Cromwell represented only the interests of the Presbyterian whilst the purged rump of the Long Parliament considered itself the depositary of the continuity of the puritan revolution; this dualism of power Cromwell quickly put to an end and ordered the soldiers to hunt down the members of parliament that intended to continue to exercise its functions. The booting out of the members of parliament (a fact we are not scandalised by because our respect for „freely elected” parliaments is no higher than Cromwell’s) finally revealed the true nature of the bourgeois revolution in England: it was the revolution of the merchant, financial and agro-capitalist sectors, who wanted it to go no further after it had served its purpose for them.

If it served their ends, absolutism was fine as well, be it under the form of monarchy or of personal dictatorship; the important thing was that their class was in a position to make the choices in the realm of political economy.

Cromwell became Lord Protector, and the five years which followed saw a military dictatorship govern the country in the name of the most strict conservatism in the church and the State; the radicals were purged from the key posts and in 1655, censorship was brought in

On the death of Cromwell it was clear to the big bourgeoisie that the wished for stability could only be maintained by another dictatorship, and Charles II, son of the beheaded monarch, was invited to return to the throne; even if the axe had worked for a while, his reign was the logical and painless continuation of the Protectorate.

Trotski, in his writing on Great Britain lingered around the subject of Cromwell, and his „Bonapartist semi-dictatorship”, and it is worth reporting both what he wrote on that „heavy military hammer on the anvil of civil war” in whose person „Luther joins hands with Robespierre”, and on the dictatorship in general: «If Lenin can be juxtaposed to anyone then it is not to Napoleon nor even less to Mussolini but to Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be with some justice said that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth century Cromwell.
The French bourgeoisie, having falsified the revolution, adopted it and, changing it into small coinage, put it into daily circulation. The British bourgeoisie has erased the very memory of the seventeenth-century revolution by dissolving its past in ’gradualness’. The advanced British workers will have to re-discover the English revolution and find within its ecclesiastical shell the mighty struggle of social forces. Cromwell was in no case a ’pioneer of labour’. But in the seventeenth-century drama, the British proletariat can find great precedents for revolutionary action. This is equally a national tradition, and a thoroughly legitimate one that is wholly in place in the arsenal of the working class. The proletarian movement has another great national tradition in Chartism. A familiarity with both these periods is vital to every conscious British worker. The clarification of the historical significance of the seventeenth-century revolution and the revolutionary content of Chartism is one of the most important obligations for British Marxists (…)
Cromwell’s task consisted of inflicting as shattering a blow as possible upon the absolutist monarchy, the court nobility and the semi-Catholic Church which had been adjusted to the needs of the monarchy and the nobility. For such a blow, Cromwell, the true representative of the new class, needed the forces and passions of the masses of the people. Under Cromwell’s leadership the revolution acquired all the breadth vital for it. In such cases as that of the Levellers, where it exceeded the demands of the regenerate bourgeois society, Cromwell ruthlessly put down the ’lunatics’. Once victorious, Cromwell began to construct a new state law that coupled biblical texts with the lances of the ’holy’ soldiers, under which the deciding word always belonged to the pikes. On 19th April 1653 Cromwell broke up the rump of the Long Parliament. In recognition of his historical mission the Puritan dictator saw dispersed members on the way with biblical denunciations; ’Thou drunkard!’ he cried to one; ’Thou adulterer!’ he reminded another. After this Cromwell forms a parliament out of the representatives of God-fearing people, that is, an essentially class parliament; the God-fearers were the middle class who completed the work of accumulation with the aid of a strict morality and set about the plunder of the whole world with the Holy Scriptures on their lips. But this cumbersome ’Barebone’s Parliament’ also hampered the dictator by depriving him of the necessary freedom of manoeuvre in a difficult domestic and international situation. At the end of 1653 Cromwell once again purged the House of Commons with the aid of soldiers. If the rump of the Long Parliament dispersed in April had been guilty of deviating to the right, towards deals with the Presbyterians – then Barebone’s Parliament was on a number of questions inclined to follow too closely along the straight road of Puritan virtue and thus made it difficult for Cromwell to establish a new social equilibrium. The revolutionary realist, Cromwell, was building a new society. Parliament does not form an end in itself, law does not form an end in itself and although Cromwell himself and his ’holy’ men regarded the fulfilment of divine behests to be ends in themselves these latter were merely the ideological material for the building of a bourgeois society».

Marxism considers that it is not individuals, however eminent or intelligent, who determine the course of history, but class and mass movements. It is these movements, often taking centuries to mature, which overturn, smash down, and reform social, political and economic conditions which had remained unchanged over long periods.

It is to the merit of marxism to have revealed the fundamental driving-force behind these upheavals, and our doctrine has always derided „leaders”, „generals” and „chiefs” and that ubiquitous group of so-called „men of destiny”; on the contrary, we have always held such people to be simply „puppets of history”, who are less capable in fact than any other mortal of making volitional acts and radical choices (in either direction); and the same goes even in regard to their own private lives.

Cromwell was certainly one such „puppet of history”, although he did have the additional merit of (always!) being conscious of it. He was never linked directly to any definite movement, or was a member of any particular religious sect; he didn’t claim to have written any sacred texts or have inspired any eternal doctrines, but rather to be doing the work to which he thought „providence” had called him.

Cromwell was an honest-to-goodness opportunist: when asked to make a choice between monarchy, aristocracy or democracy he replied „any of them can be good in itself, or for us, according to how providence directs it”. In effect, the reference to providence was in him the sign of a political change of front.

This was the secret of his victory, and with it the victory of the big bourgeoisie: not to tie ones hands with prescriptive formulas, but to manage the situation whilst keeping in mind a few minimum objectives, in order to create a society in which neither the lower classes, nor the aristocracy would be able to gain the upper hand. As opposed to the French Revolution, in England the two spirits of the revolution, the radical and reactionary, Robespierre and Napoleon, were fused in the continuity of the power of Cromwell; and the Restoration, even if it hung the Protector’s dead body from the gallows, didn’t modify the politics, or only insofar as it didn’t apply it so well.

There is no better epitaph for this servitor of the bourgeois State than one of his most famous sayings: „Nobody arrives so high as one who doesn’t know where he is going”.

The Revolution of 1642-1648 is considered by the classical philistine English historians as a strange phenomenon, which is difficult to reconcile with the supposed legalitarian propriety of the British people: it is therefore often contemptuously referred to as the „Great Rebellion”, and its importance is minimised with respect to the events of 1688-89, when the English bourgeoisie sacked the Stuarts and called on the Dutch House of Orange to take on the mantle of monarchy. For them this is the „Glorious Revolution”, which drove out a king who was inept and unpatriotic without blood being spilt. in fact, it was a case of the final touches being made to a bourgeois society which wouldn’t have existed but for the painful delivery of forty years before.

The „Glorious Revolution” brought the businessmen to power; who didn’t look kindly on the decline of prestige which was occurring under the Stuarts (who hadn’t managed to adjust to the fact of the monarchy’s loss of power). However the Stuarts hadn’t rolled back the conquests of the revolution: whether the abolition of feudal rights, the massive enclosures, the abolition of the monopolies and all the economic controls so hated by the bourgeoisie, a foreign policy which prioritised commercial interests, the loss of power of the bishops and a greater religious tolerance (compared with the rest of Europe) and an exceptional awakening of scientific and philosophical thought.

Even fiscal taxation (increased since the revolution to notable levels) had become permanent and progressive, and the old feudal obligations no longer existed. Some relatively extreme measures would naturally reappear (abolition of the monarchy and the upper house, which however henceforth counted for little), but English society in 1689 differed from that of 1660 above all by the definitive confirmation of parliamentary control (gentry and mercantile oligarchy) over a strong executive.

With a few, vigorous lines Marx would give a clear synthesis of the revolutionary process and its determinism: «Although M. Guizot never loses sight of the French Revolution, he does not even draw the simple conclusion that everywhere the transition from the absolute to the constitutional monarchy is effected only after severe struggle and after a republican form of government has been gone through, and even then the old dynasty, become useless, has to make room for a usurpatory collateral line. The most trivial common places are therefore the only information he can give us about the overthrow of the restored English monarchy. He does not even mention the direct causes of it: the fear of the new big landed proprietors created by the Reformation that catholicism might be re-established, in which event they would naturally have to restore all the lands of which they had robbed the Church – a proceeding in which seven-tenths of the entire area of England would have changed hands; the dread experienced by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie vis-à-vis Catholicism, which in no way suited their book; the nonchalance with which the Stuarts, to their own advantage and that of the court aristocracy, sold all English industry, and commerce as well, to the government of France, that is, of the only country which at that time dangerously, and in many respects successfully, competed with the English, etc.
M. Guizot does not consider it worthwhile mentioning that the wars against Louis XIV were purely trade wars to destroy French commerce and French sea power, that under William III the domination of the financial bourgeoisie received its first sanction by the establishment of the Bank and the institution of the national debt, and that the manufacturing bourgeoisie were given new impetus by the consistent application of a protective tariff system» (from A Review of Guizot’s book).

And quoting Marx again: «The victory of the bourgeoisie was therefore the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois over feudal property, of nationality over provinciality, of competition over the corporations, of division over primogeniture, of dominion of landed property over the domination of land over property, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil rights over feudal privileges» (from The Bourgeoisie and the Counterrevolution, 1848).

With the accession of William III another section of the bourgeoisie, the manufacturers, saw their dreams of power draw closer. This strata, still young, showed signs of a great future, along with its grand protagonist of that future, described by Engels as its „shadow”, the industrial proletariat.

Emergence of the Proletarian Movement (1780-1815)

In previous instalments of Origins and History of the English Working Class we have dealt with the various economic phases which affected England: the rise and decline of feudalism, landed and mercantile capital, and finally industrial capital. We saw that although the industrial phase begins in 1750 its wider social impact is not felt until around 1780, when there is a marked acceleration in the development and adoption of machinery for industrial use. This we can call the ’gestation’ phase as it fits well with the phases used by Marx and Engels: for whom capital up to 1825 was in its infancy, whilst the cyclical crises which began in that same year opened its youthful period which extended to 1848, in which year capital enters its mature phase.

 „This revolution through which British industry has passed is the foundation of every aspect of modern English life, the driving force behind all social development” (Engels, The Position of England, The Eighteenth Century.)

Further on in the same article he comments: „The democratic party originated at the same time as the industrial revolution. In 1769 J. Horne Tooke founded the Society of the Bill of Rights, in which, for the first time since the republic [of 1649-60], democratic principles were discussed again. As in France, the democrats were exclusively men with a philosophical education, but soon found that the upper and middle classes were opposed to them and only the working class lent a ready ear to their principles. Amongst the latter class they soon founded a party, which in 1794 was already fairly strong and yet still only strong enough to act by fits and starts. From 1797 to 1816 it disappeared from view; in the turbulent years from 1816 to 1823 it was again very active but then subsided once more into inactivity until the July revolution. From then on it has maintained its importance alongside the old parties and in making steady progress, as we shall later see.

The most important effect of the eighteenth century for England was the creation of the proletariat by the industrial revolution. The new industry demanded a constantly available mass of workers for the countless new branches of production, and moreover workers such as had previously not existed. Up to 1780 England had few proletarians, a fact which emerges inevitably from the social condition of the nation as described above. Industry concentrated work in factories and towns; it became impossible to combine manufacturing and agricultural activity, and the new working class was reduced to complete dependence on its labour. What had hitherto been the exception became the rule and spread gradually outside the towns too. Small-scale farming was ousted by the large tenant farmers and thus a new class of agricultural labourers was created. The population of the towns trebled and quadrupled and almost the whole of this increase consisted solely of workers. The expansion of mining likewise required a large number of new workers, and these too lived solely from their daily wage” (Engels, ibid. p. 487).
 

This democratic movement from 1769 to 1780 was controlled by John Wilkes and represented a combination of City magnates and artisans. It represented the „lower orders”, who had been stirred up by King George III’s attempts to dominate the government by placing his representatives in leading positions. Over the course of a number of disputes, the King’s influence would be rapidly diminished: there would be the loss of the 13 colonies and the resulting American Declaration of Independence, and a number of populist measures in London would consolidate the movement.

Early in 1780 Parliament passed a resolution „that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” Fear of what the King may do, particularly over the recruitment of catholic troops in Canada to fight the United States, increased the tension. If the monarchy started to undermine the anti-catholic legislation, for centuries in England the symbol of bourgeois democracy and national independence, it raised the spectre of monarchist absolutism (even if George III was in fact a bigoted protestant).

 The spark to ignite this explosive situation was provided by a certain Lord Gordon, an insignificant M.P., who perceiving a plot behind the attempt to promote him to the post of Admiral of Scotland, led a small mob into Parliament attacking Lords and Bishops. After leaving Parliament they went on to sack a couple of Catholic chapels. What became known as the Gordon Riots lasted for almost two weeks before they were suppressed. Many catholic areas were ransacked, followed by attacks on those in authority who were thought to support the law. Prisons were attacked and set on fire – the Tower was virtually the only prison in London left untouched. The sky at night was red with the fires of thirty-six separate conflagrations according to the Annual Register. Authority in London had broken down and it was Wilkes himself who forced a terrified Lord Mayor to give permission to raise volunteers to fight his erst-while supporters. With a small body of troops, Wilkes personally defended the Bank of England. This act meant he was finished as the leader of the radical opposition.

 The alliance that had formed around Wilkes split, with the merchants gravitating towards the new Tories whilst elements from the lower middle and working class went in a different direction. The reforms advocated by the Wilkes movement would be carried out by the Tory party under Pitt, which would increasingly limit the power of the monarchy. It would be some time before the passions of the „lower orders” would be aroused again, and unfortunately this would arise in the form of King and Country mobs against sympathisers of the French Revolution.

 It was in the 1790s that the democratic movement reappeared with a reform movement in Scotland and the founding of the London Corresponding Society. The reform movement in Scotland convened a Convention in Edinburgh in December 1792. Nine months of agitation and direct contact with revolutionary France (War was declared on 1st February, 1793) led to arrests, mock trials and transportation to Australia. A further Convention was called in October 1793 at which delegates from England, including the London Corresponding Society attended. The leaders, English and Scottish, were arrested, treated to the usual kind of justice and transported. Few survived this punishment, difficult even for the young delinquents with which His Majesty’s Government was starting to populate Australia.

 The continuing war with France, and the rejection by Parliament of the petitions for reform led to a weakening of the legal movement and conspiratorial organisations like the „United Scotsmen” arose. The State lost no time in preparing its internal front against the insurgents. It brought in German mercenaries, previously successfully used to put down mutinies, and also mounted troops issuing from the petty and middle bourgeoisie: the famous yeomen of old England. That these militarised bodies had specifically anti-worker functions is evidenced by what happened at Tranent in 1797 when a peaceful demonstration was cut to ribbons by cavalry. This repressive violence by the State was another factor that made England during the Industrial Revolution already a „modern” state, and in the vanguard of a world still struggling to emerge from the middle ages.

 The coup de grace was dealt to the United Scotsmen by spies and agent provocateurs, and the organisation dissolved in 1798.
 

London Corresponding Society

Elements which had formed the left-wing of the radical movement earlier now constituted the London Corresponding Society in 1792. Founded by a Scottish shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, it attracted intellectuals like John Thelwall (orator, poet and journalist) and former Wilkites like Horne Tooke. It was the first organisation of working people to start expressing their own interests as distinct from those of the bourgeoisie, and as such forms the preface of the history of the working class movement in Britain. Hardy was certainly the organisational spirit of the L.C.S., which was composed mainly of artisans and tradesmen (weavers, watchmakers, carpenters, shoemakers and cabinet-makers). It had at least three thousand members organised into „sections” of thirty people each, a weekly subscription and an internal democratic organisation with recallable delegates.

 Its core programme was the call for adult male suffrage, but it also hoped parliamentary measures would alleviate suffering for the less well-off. Its main activities were printing of pamphlets and the organising of meetings and discussions, and even if legalistic in its outlook, it thoroughly alarmed the Government. It was the agitation among the working population of London and the Midlands which led to the Government arresting three of its leaders, Hardy, Thelwall and Tooke. They were acquitted at their first trial in October, 1794, and the same happened when they were tried on other occasions.

 The L.C.S. enjoyed popularity for a few years, but internal and external changes, combined with its legalistic methods caused it to go into decline; the 1799 Corresponding Act dealt the final blow to a by now moribund organisation. 1799 was also the year of the first Combination Act, directed against any struggle with trade unionist objectives. It was just the latest of a series of laws enacted since 1793, the year of the declaration of War on France. Other laws forbade the administering of unlawful oaths as well as making all newspapers not registered with the Government illegal; which meant that publishers, printers and even casual possessors of unlicensed sheets could be punished.
 

Mutinies

The massive expansion of the fleet of the Royal Navy drew in many thousands of new sailors, mostly recruited against their will, either by local levies or by being seized by press gangs. In April and May, 1797, the fleet at Spithead mutinied twice against intolerable conditions; it was a strike against low wages, often two years in arrears, poor food and brutal treatment. The strike spread to the North fleet. The admiral, along with the most hated officers, were sent ashore by the strikers. Concessions were made, pardons given to the leaders, and the strike was over as far as the Spithead fleet was concerned.

 The North fleet though refused to accept the concessions and they elected a leader, Parker, who adopted the title of „Admiral”. A manifesto was issued and red flags were hung from many of the riggings. After a few days most of the fleet blockading Holland joined in the strike, which left the Government in control of only two warships. The striking warships blockaded London, interrupting trade and taking captives. The cutting of navigating buoys by officers loyal to the Government put the warships in danger as the ordinary seamen had no idea how to sail safely through shallow waters. With internal conflict breaking out, one by one the ships surrendered and the red flags, perhaps the first in the history of the workers’ movement, were lowered one by one. Some of the leaders escaped in small boats, but the leader, „Admiral” Parker, was hanged. These mutinies were the justification of the repressive legislation from 1797 to 1800.
 

Luddism

With the start of the new century, workers’ conditions declined rapidly because of the war, because of the increased application of machinery, and because of other economically unfavourable factors, above all in the textile trade where pay was more than halved between 1800 and 1818. The workers had two options, both of them dangerous: physical violence against the bosses and their businesses, by terrorising them and destroying their machines; or organisation along trade-union lines. The first major incidents of machine-breaking occurred in Somerset in 1802, with Luddism proper starting in Nottinghamshire in the Spring of 1811. The Luddites stayed active up to 1817 and achieved notable successes. Neither the transfer of 12,000 soldiers to Nottinghamshire – more troops than Wellington had under him in Spain – nor the passing of a law in 1812 which made destruction of machines an offence punishable by death (a law famously opposed by Lord Byron in the House of Lords) was able to halt the movement. And this was despite the law being applied, such as when 18 workmen were hanged at York in 1813. The bourgeoisie had their casualties as well, as in the case of the assassination of the hated Yorkshire entrepreneur, Horsfall, who had declared his wish to „spur his horse on until he was up to his saddle-straps in Luddite blood.” On several occasions, the textile districts were in a state of alarm for extended periods and marches and counter-marches by the army and armed Luddites took place. The authorities were unable to penetrate the secret organisation of the Luddites with their spies, and it was known that soldiers were fraternising with the Luddites instead of hunting them down.

 The period between 1799 and 1825 when union activity was outlawed was a time of rich experiences for the working class. The workers developed new tactics, combining illegal and legal methods, solidarity was strengthened, and their was a willingness to fight in the face of serious risks. Most importantly of all, the lesson was learned that the State, far from being neutral, is an instrument of the possessing class.

 The Combination Act failed in its aim of destroying the workers’ movement, but when it was finally repealed in 1824, there was nevertheless a huge explosion of union activity as it emerged from illegality.
 

First Trade Unions

The first associations of workers were trade clubs, and were composed of skilled workers. These were often composed of journeymen having completed an apprenticeship, artisans, and sometimes proletarianised members of the possessing classes. In the 18th century these clubs were very localised, often confined to one district or city. Only later would these clubs federate into trade-unions, a stage which would mark a significant step forward. But at the start of the 19th century these workers’ societies could still be characterised as confraternities, as brotherhoods: only members of the same trade were admitted often after complicated initiation ceremonies similar to those of masonry. The clubs would usually meet in pubs and there was generally a certain order to the proceedings; firstly there would be companionable beer drinking after a hard days work; apprentices would be initiated into full membership of the club; funds would be collected to be used in the eventuality of sickness or members’ funerals (the latter activities functioning as an excellent legal cover during a period when unions were illegal); and workers were found for employers who used the clubs for this purpose (a type of early labour exchange); finally, the clubs concerned themselves with matters pertaining to their particular craft (apprenticeship regulations, working conditions etc), and these latter activities often came to predominate, eventually transforming the clubs into bone fide trade unions. The clubs which, as we have seen, had more the characteristics of mutual aid societies, were initially not seen by the employers as particularly threatening, and were generally left alone. But when they started to join up at regional and national level, for reasons other than beer-drinking and arranging funerals, they became much more formidable and more likely to be repressed. It was generally allowed – subject to the uncertainty of eighteenth-century law and the capriciousness of its enforcement – that such unions were of doubtful legality. There were about forty Acts forbidding them in specific trades, and almost any judge would decide that a confederation of workmen to raise wages was illegal. But employers’ petitions to secure the regulation of wages by Parliament, or to enforce the wages decreed by justices under a Parliamentary Act, was another matter; and Parliament would for the most part receive without complaint petitions from these bodies.

The unions nevertheless continued to flourish at the end of the century because of the muddled nature of the repressive apparatus and the legal confusion which made the repression of the local struggles, whilst not impossible, often extremely late in the day; since it was little comfort to an employer if a worker was imprisoned, or given forced labour, once the damage was done. But in 1799, after a petition by master millwrights against a „combination of journeymen millwrights within the Metropolis and twenty-five miles around” a law was passed in 1799 to generally make all combinations of economic interests unlawful. This law was initiated by William Wilberforce, whose zeal for freeing slaves in America was equalled only by his enthusiasm for ensuring that workers in England were kept in their place.

Due to the Combination Act, and amendments in the following year, the period of 1800-1815 was generally a period of defeats for the early unions. Some industries were repressed more than others, particularly where the local magistrates were under the direct influence of the employers, such as the cotton trades and the mines in the North of England. The miners were a section undergoing continuous repression. In fact the Scottish miners were only released from bondage in 1755. About the conditions of cotton workers, Francis Place wrote: „the sufferings of persons employed in the cotton manufacture were beyond credibility; they were drawn into combinations, betrayed, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and monstrously severe punishments inflicted upon them; they were reduced to and kept in the most wretched state of existence.

It is therefore not surprising that in the second decade of the 19th century the North of England was a major arena of union battles. And it goes without saying that the Miners and cotton spinners were the leaders of this movement. These struggles would culminate in the great Lancashire strike of 1818, in which the textile workers fought not only for higher wages, but for factory legislation, and particularly for the regulation of female and child labour. From Lancashire the movement spread to Scotland, where the weavers, taught by their English brethren, formed trade organisations and entered with zest into the struggle. With the end of the war with France, renewed struggles were to break out on a much more extensive scale.

The Beginning of the 19th Century

Economy and subordinated classes

Before dealing with the class struggles that broke out in 1815 following the ending of the Napoleonic wars, it is worth briefly recalling the phase of development which capitalism had reached by this time. A clear synthesis of these aspects can be found in the introduction to the English edition of „Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”: „We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each labourer produces the complete articles; (2) manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle division of labour, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all; (3) modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of the labourer is limited to superintending and correcting the performances of the mechanical agent”.

Each one of these periods is the product of the one which came before, and they can be respectively identified in our narration with:(1) landed capital (2) mercantile capital (3) industrial capital. The stage we are concerned with here is the infancy of industrial capital, modern industrialism, when it still represented the highest development of the manufacturing period, which would eventually be eclipsed by the introduction of modern machinery. It is in the passage from one to the other that the modern proletariat was formed.

We’ll leave it to Engels to outline the essential features of this transition: „Whilst in France the hurricane of the Revolution swept over the land, in England a quieter, but not on that account less tremendous, revolution was going on. Steam and the new toolmaking machinery were transforming manufacture into modern industry, and then revolutionising the whole foundation of bourgeois society. The sluggish march of development of the manufacturing period into a veritable storm and stress period of production. With constantly increasing swiftness the splitting-up of society into large capitalists and non-possessing proletarians went on. Between these, instead of the former stable middle class, an unstable mass of artisans and small shop keepers, the most fluctuating portion of the population, now led to a precarious situation. The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production – the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses – the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung together into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed from day to day”.

Engel’s description mainly concerns mainly with what was happening in the towns affected by the growth of the industrial revolution. But in 1815, most Englishmen still worked on the land or in trades connected with agriculture. The next generation would see rapid changes, and by 1830 half the population were already working in the industrial sector. Large urban populations were gathering in the north-west of England, in South Wales, and between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. During the first thirty years of the century Birmingham and Sheffield doubled in size, and so did Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, and Glasgow. London, in 1815, above the million mark would number 1,274,000 five years later. The survivors of the 30,000 British men who fought in the battle of Waterloo returned to a country that was fast changing its very appearance, and whose wealth was rapidly increasing by reason of new methods of manufacture and transport. But still the factory areas were a small part of the whole, and most English towns were picturesque country towns, set in a countryside of unspoilt beauty. The villages, to which most of them came home, were still the main focus of life for most Englishmen, and had almost completed their eighteenth-century transformation. The countryside was now drained, ditched, hedged, and enclosed to an extent that would have amazed their grandfathers. Nearly all the old open fields had been enclosed; and the common and waste lands had been enclosed nearly as much as they were ever to be. This meant that agriculture had become more efficient. Improved methods of tilling, of rotation of crops, and of stock-breeding were becoming widespread, even if they were not yet universally adopted by farmers.

More of the land was now in the hands of wealthy men, who let it to tenant-farmers, whilst many of the smallholders had become landless, agricultural labourers or else had drifted into the new towns. Cottagers had in most cases lost their old common rights and had to be satisfied with a far more meagre diet. Recourse to traditional methods of relieving hunger, such as poaching, was officially countered by sentences of seven years transportation. Famine was a spectre which hovered daily over countless hearths.

For those with land the situation was less serious. With the ending of the war, the Corn Laws were passed which established a minimum price for cereals, and put restrictions on imports, thus providing temporary respite to the declining numbers of farmers with small and medium-sized holdings, both landowners and tenants. Still, the principal beneficiaries were the big landowners who promptly raised their rents, whilst those who belonged to the poor classes of city and countryside, workers and labourers, were the ones who suffered the most.

Despite this, and contrary to what one might expect, revolts in the countryside were prevented by the measure called the ’Speenhamland system’. By this measure, which was the latest development in a system of poor relief laws dating back to the Poor Laws of Elizabeth I, the poor would be kept alive, even if only just above starvation level, with local taxes raised at the Parish level. With this system in place, the richer farmers and manufacturers were able to cut wages and have the Parish rate payer subsidise the resulting lower wages from public funds. Not many years would pass though before the English proletariat would find out that things could get a lot worse than the Speenhamland system.
 

Political Unrest

Towards the end of the war, the state of unrest amongst the workers led to an explosion of meetings and demonstrations. The trade-union struggle fused with the struggle for parliamentary reform. Hunt and Cobbett fraternised with the trade union leaders, and the organised workmen formed the bulk of their audiences or readers. The female workers formed Female Reform Associations, at whose meetings not only the thoughts and utterances of Cobbett were repeated, but also the particular demands of the world of Labour found expression. On July 5, 1818, the Female Reform Association of Blackburn held a mass meeting of working people of both sexes, in which a woman was the chief speaker. The meeting carried the following characteristic resolution: ’By means of the improvement of machinery, the means of producing most articles of agriculture and manufacture have been increased in an astonishing degree; it necessarily follows that the industrious labourer ought to have a greater quantity of produce than he had previous to those improvements; instead of which, by means of taxation and restrictive laws he is reduced to wretchedness. Borough-mongering and tyranny must be exterminated. If this is not done, thousands of our countrymen must starve in the midst of plenty. No man can have a right to enjoy another man’s labour without his consent. And we do contemplate with horror the many placemen and pensioners, whilst at the same time we live in poverty, slavery, and misery. We protest against those unjust and unnatural regulations – the Corn Laws and the Combination Acts. We demand Universal Suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the ballot’.

A week later the men of Birmingham assembled in public meeting, and, as protest against borough-mongering and the restricted franchise, „elected” Major Cartwright and Sir Charles Wolseley to Parliament.

The culminating point of these demonstrations was Peterloo (August 16, 1819). Neither repression nor betrayal had managed to put a stop to the growth of the movement. In London, Birmingham and elsewhere great assemblies were held followed by preparations for a mass demonstration in Lancashire at St Peters Field near Manchester. In all the surrounding towns and villages, careful preparations were made. On August 16, groups with bands and banners, with many women amongst them, converged on the site of the demonstration in perfect order; the discipline being far more terrifying to the authorities than any previous disorder. As the orator was getting ready to speak a division of Hussars and the Manchester yeomanry launched their attack on the crowd. It seems that whilst the soldiers were restricted to obeying the orders received from their officers, the yeomanry, more directly representative of the bourgeoisie, hurled themselves against the unarmed crowd with exceptional ferocity: soon there would be 11 dead and around 400 wounded, and thus would the scene of this tragedy at St. Peters Field become known as Peterloo, after the battle of Waterloo.

Seeking to justify the massacre, the Government would say that the assembly was a riot and probable precursor to a revolution. The leaders were condemned to long prison sentences and the government would exploit the situation to pass the so-called Six Acts, raising the level of legalized repression to the maximum.

In Scotland, however, the agitation went on at an accelerating pace. English radicals from the South and trade union leaders from Lancashire and Yorkshire won the ear of the Scottish working men and trades-people, particularly of Paisley, Glasgow, and Carlisle, and formed unions in most of the manufacturing districts. „The devil seems to have come among us unchained”, wrote Sir Walter Scott at that time to one of his correspondents, „and bellowing for his prey. In Glasgow, Volunteers drill by day and the radicals by night, and nothing but positive military force keeps the people under”. The workmen had formed societies, and were led by the cleverest and most impertinent fellows, „bell-wethers in every form of mischief”. In March, 1820, a proclamation posted on the walls of many houses in the commercial and manufacturing centres, called upon the people to close their factories and workshops, and to desist from work until Universal Suffrage was granted. The proclamation, which the authorities considered as „highly seditious and treasonable”, was signed by „The Committee for Organisation of a Provisional Government”. Around 60,000 workers, many miners amongst them, stopped work. Both sides in the conflict thought that it marked the prelude to an armed insurrection, but no order to launch an insurrection was ever issued. Nevertheless, after having been tricked into taking premature action by the ever-present agent provocateur, a small detachment of strikers would launch an attack on a detachment of Hussars at Bonnymuir; the insurgents were defeated, many of them were wounded, and nineteen taken prisoner. Numerous arrests in other parts of the country soon put an end to the rising. Many were brought to trial for high treason and found guilty, and three suffered the death penalty.

The State would emerge victorious in these first battles against the workers. The proletariat still had a lot to learn about how to organize and fight, even if these early struggles were fought passionately and with admirable determination. The bourgeoisie on the other hand had learnt quickly to deploy its forces with maximum efficiency, astutely coordinating the use of police and agent provocateurs, the army, voluntary bodies (early forerunners of fascist squadrism) and anti-worker legislation.
 

The Radical Movement

With the quiet collapse of the London Corresponding Society it was a number of years before new ideologies and doctrines would concern themselves with the unfolding social changes. In 1805, Charles Hall’s book „Effects of Civilisation” was published, and although little known at the time, Spence and many Owenites seem to have been influenced by it.

Hall’s book is evidently based on personal observation of the effects of the industrial revolution in particular, and private property in general, but it also shows distinct traces of wide reading in economic and socialist literature, particularly Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Godwin. The author is a determined opponent of manufacture, trade, and commerce, and regards agriculture as the most useful and beneficial occupation. He elaborates the doctrine of the antagonistic interests between the capitalist and working class, a doctrine found in embryo in Adam Smith’s „Wealth of Nations”, but developed to a revolutionary stage by Hall, who was the first socialist to make a statistical attempt at demonstrating the enormous injustice of profit, which he regarded as a wholly illegitimate deduction from the produce of labour and the natural reward of labour. Hall’s position in the history of socialism is an intermediary one between natural law or ethical socialism and proletarian or revolutionary socialism. It is the first interpretation of the voice of rising labour.

This book points out that developing civilisation is leading on the one hand to the flourishing of science, knowledge, trade and manufacture while on the other, the large majority of the population is poor, or sinking into poverty, and therefore excluded from enjoying its advantages. The division of society into rich and poor is the most striking mark of civilisation. Industrialisation had provoked a spiritual and material worsening of the of the life of the poor: drawing them off the land meant there was a scarcity of agricultural produce which further depressed the condition of the poor.

His criticism of economists is that they usually look at the effects of production rather than its effects on the structure and welfare of society. He condemns the so-called contract of labour as a sham, since the poor have only the choice between starvation and slavery. The interests of Capital and Labour, of the non-producers and the producers, are absolutely opposed to each other. „The situation of the rich and the poor, like the algebraic terms plus and minus, are in direct opposition to, and destructive of each other”.

Hall showed with various precise calculations that 8/10ths of the population (those that work and produce) receive one-eighth of the wealth while those who don’t produce receive seven-eighths. In short, even at the beginning of the 19th century, a working man laboured seven days for the capitalist and one day for himself and his family.

Since, according to Hall, all these ills derived from an unequal distribution of the land, the solution would be nationalisation and redistribution of the land. But the real significance of his work is to be found in his criticism of the system of production. In old age, Hall would bear this out in a letter to Spence in which he admitted that his scheme was worth little since it left capital and wage labour untouched. The capitalist system was so complicated and injurious an arrangement that it could not be mended, but must be completely abolished.

Around 1812, there was a revival in the radical movement, notably with the rise of the Hampden Clubs. The first club was formed in that year in Westminster by rich reformers. While initially confined to the wealthy, increasing numbers of working people would join, abandoning sporadic revolts which had led to executions and oppressive laws in search of more legal methods. The demands for reforms were broadened out to embrace Universal Suffrage and the abolition of the Corn Laws and Combination Acts. But even if a large number of workers were taking part in this movement, it can’t really be considered an integral part of the proletarian movement as such.

Another sign of revival was the formation by Thomas Spence, a utopian socialist, of an association known later as the Spencean Philanthropists. This association, which included many former members of the L.C.S., was active in spreading their demands for a „revolution of property” which would involve restoring land to the people as the only means of relieving the distress caused by the war. With the people in possession of the land, they thought, this would lead to an increased need for industrial goods leading to an increase in production. The exploitation of the industrial workers was not however addressed by scheme, making it ultimately a utopian and unrealistic solution.

The Spenceans became very involved organising popular demonstrations for political and social reform. They were the organisers of the meetings at Spa Fields of November and December, 1816, which led to rioting and three members of the association being tried for high treason. These three were acquitted when the chief witness for the Crown was exposed as a spy during cross-examination. In March, 1817, Parliament passed an Act suppressing the Association because of its declared goal of confiscation and redistribution of land and the repudiation of the national debt. Along with this went the renewal of the Corresponding Act of 1799 prohibiting communication between political societies.

The only member of the society who remained active in politics was Arthur Thistlewood. After the Peterloo Massacre, he abandoned peaceful methods and turned to conspiratorial activities. With associates who would later be revealed as Government spies, he organised the Cato Street conspiracy to assassinate cabinet members as a prelude to insurrection. The plan would inevitably come to nothing and four of the leaders would be hung at Newgate on May 1st, 1820; a date which would later become significant in the workers’ calendar.

The end of this phase saw the transformation of utopian socialism into a movement for the reform of industrial capitalism and agitation for cooperativism; both intended as an alternative to the brutal effects of the new system of production. The main school was that led by Robert Owen, a subject we will treat it in greater depth later on.
 

First Unions of Industrial Workers

As noted earlier with regards to the trade clubs of workers engaged in manufacture composed mainly of skilled workers, that is artisans rather than workers in the modern sense of the word, the Government and employers had been unable to suppress them as they became such a necessary fact of English life at the end of the 17th century. But the new proletarians, that is the workers in industrial concerns who had nothing but their labour power (unlike the journeymen who possessed their tools), also now started to form associations to express their needs and demands. As these workers were unskilled, their associations accepted all those engaged in the process as wage-earners. Thus we see trade unions in the modern sense of the word being formed, even if they tended to lead a clandestine existence due to persecutions from the bourgeois power.

The early days of the trade-unions were particularly difficult times, and struggles often ended up in defeat. Their organizational weakness and the need for secrecy led them to drastic measures in order to protect the interests of their members. Engels, in his definitive book on the situation of the working class in England in 1844, makes the following observations:

„Secret coalitions had, it is true, previously existed but could never achieve great results. In Glasgow as Symons relates, a general strike of weavers had taken place in 1812, which was brought about by a secret association. It was repeated in 1822, and on this occasion vitriol was thrown into the faces of two working-men who had not join the association, and were therefore regarded by the members as traitors to their class. Both the assaulted lost the use of their eyes in consequence of the injury. So, too, in 1818, the association of Scottish miners was powerful enough to carry on a general strike. These associations required their members to take an oath of fidelity and secrecy, had regular lists, treasurers, book-keepers, and local branches. But the secrecy with which everything was conducted crippled their growth. When, on the other hand, the working-men received in 1824 the right to free association, these combinations were very soon spread over all England and attained great power”.

Referring further on to the activity and internal organisation of such unions he takes as an example the Glasgow weavers:

„It appears from the proceedings that the Cotton-Spinners Union, which existed here from the year 1816, possessed rare organisation and power. The members were bound by an oath to adhere to the decision of the majority, and had during every turnout a secret committee which was unknown to the mass of the members, and controlled the funds of the Union absolutely. This committee fixed a price upon the heads of knobsticks and obnoxious manufacturers and upon incendiarisms in mills. A mill was thus set on fire in which female knobsticks were employed in spinning in place of men…”

The struggle over wages and conditions in this period had all the hall-marks of a fierce guerrilla war. At the same time legal protection was indispensable, and in order to protect funds for the maintenance of working people against the costs of death, disablement and old age, unions took the form of Friendly and Burial Societies. Even if a proportion of these funds were genuinely used for the declared aims, a good part also served to fund strikes and agitations. Realising this, there were frequent attempts by the ruling class to withdraw this legal cover, as they considered that those who organised to protect themselves from their greed were dangerous revolutionaries, if not just plain criminals.

In 1818, following the strike in Lancashire, the first attempt was made to transcend the boundaries of factory and category of work and unite various unions in a more comprehensive General Union of Trades. The strikes in Lancashire in the cotton industry which had taken place earlier had set as their object the „equalisation” of wages, that is bringing up the rest of the factories and enterprises to those of the best paid. Asking for wages to have the same purchasing power as they had had in 1810 seemed a realizable objective since there had been an upturn in the economy in the intervening years. The largely unorganised spinning-jenny spinners were the first to go into action but they returned to work on the basis of a compromise. The power-loom workers were next (the first action by this new section of workers), and their strike was broken by importing scabs from Burton-on-Trent, which led to the use of troops, and consequent riots and arrests. Later in the same year there was a further waves of strikes (brickmakers, joiners, dyers) who had all their demands met without incurring resistance from the employers. Meanwhile, the hand-loom weavers were busy organizing a regional conference with the aim of uniting the forces of the different categories of workers. The initiative extended to the bordering counties, and received financial support from numerous craft associations, from London included.

Enthusiasm for the success of such joint struggles would lead to the first body aimed at bringing all categories of worker together: the General Union of Trades (or the Philanthropic Hercules as it was called for official purposes). Delegates were sent to London made contact with the workers in the shipyards, then the best organized in the city, who had expressed interest in the project.

But the initiative was before its time; it would flounder along with the great union struggles it inspired whilst the employers regained control of the situation (this was the period of the Peterloo massacre of August 1819).

The idea of a general Union was nevertheless kept going by the shipyard workers in London, which no doubt also provided the basis for the Metropolitan Trades Committee of 1831. In London another „Philanthropic Hercules” was established, along the same lines as the Manchester one, in 1819. At the same time a trade unionist newspaper, ’the Gorgon’, became an expression of this tendency and so set itself apart from all the radical papers of the time. In the years which followed, the best energies of the movement became concentrated on attempts at achieving factory reform via legislation, aided by the organising ability of Robert Owen and other politicians such as the elder Peel.
 

Utopian Reformism

We’ll rejoin Engels again at this point (from „Socialism: utopianism and Scientific”). During this period „there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer twenty-nine years old – a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man’s character is the product, on the one hand, of heredity, on the other, of the environment of the individual during the lifetime, and especially during his period of development. In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his favourite theory, and so bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it with success, as superintendent of more than five hundred men in a Manchester factory. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton mill at New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with success that made him a European reputation. A population, originally consisting of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralised, a population that gradually grew to 2,500, he turned into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor laws, charity, were unknown. And all this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by carefully bringing up the rising generation. He was the founder of infant schools, and introduced them first at New Lanark. At the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people thirteen or fourteen hours per day, in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his workers received their full wages all the time. And with all this the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors (…)

Owen’s Communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by Communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of costs of founding them, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. And in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working-out of details is managed with such a practical knowledge – ground plan, front and side and bird’s eye-views all included – that the Owen method of social reform once accepted, there is from the practical point of view little is to be said against the actual arrangement of details.”

But when Owen, from being a much acclaimed philanthropist, went on to theorize Communist utopias, he would discover for himself how the ruling class treats those who cast doubt on the very foundations of its existence.

„Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to working in their midst for thirty years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labour of women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trades Unions of England united in a single great trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communistic organisation of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labour bazaars for the exchange of the products of labour through the medium of labour-notes, whose unit was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon’s bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society.

The Utopian’s mode of thought has for a long time governed the socialist ideas of the nineteenth century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power(…)

Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more the definitive sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.”

Following the industrial proletariat’s initial attempts at organising and fighting, from legal organisations through to rebellion, they suffered a series of defeats suffered which induced many of the workers to pursue new methods of improving its living and working conditions. This was the period when Owen’s reformism would receive a major following.

Owenism was unable however to resolve the problems faced by the working class, and it would be unable to withstand the harrowing critique of capitalism in its vigorous, youthful phase. The cooperative movement would be undermined by Ricardian economics and the devastation it wrought on the utopian dreams of workers owning their own produce, and by the new trade cycles provoking class struggles which tore down the visions of social peace. English utopianism was largely finished off by capitalism’s expansion before it could be faced by the Marxist critique.
 

Trade Union Legality

Faced with a period of capitalist expansion and lacking the means of ending the terrible exploitation of this new mode of production, trade unionism seemed to be the only practical way forward for this period, as a means of class organisation. The craft unions gathered strength and vitality, even though bound by the need for secrecy, and convinced even the radicals that calling for the repeal of the Combination Acts was a necessary inclusion in their programme.

The 1824-25 protests would support the parliamentary action of Francis Place and the other radicals. Place and his Benthamite and economist supporters mostly held the view that the effect of this far-reaching legalization would be not to stimulate, but to discourage, Trade Union action; for as devout believers in the idea that wages were ruled by the inexorable laws of Political Economy, and that Trade Union action was powerless to effect them save within a narrowly restricted field, they held that freedom to combine would teach the workers the futility of kicking against the pricks, and induce them rather to collaborate with the employers in increasing the „wages fund” – which depended on the employers’ profits – than to wage a useless war against capitalism.

Place did not mean by this that working-class combinations would disappear; for he was a firm believer in the utility of small Trade Clubs of skilled journeymen for regulating the conditions of labour. What he did mean was that the broader more inclusive unions would disappear, and that workers would recognise the underlying community of interest between Capital and Labour.

Actually the repealing Act of 1824 was speedily followed by a great outburst of strikes. The Trade Clubs and Trade Unions, which had hitherto often disguised themselves as Friendly Societies in order to evade the ban on the law, came out into the open, with publicly issued codes of rules and public appeals for members; and almost at once there were strikes, or threats to strike, over a large part of the industrial districts.

This was in reality due not so much to the removal of the legal ban as to the economic situation. In 1824 the growth of trade was already reaching the dimensions of a great speculative boom, involving huge investment both at home and abroad, a rapid inflation of credit, and the making of great fortunes on the Stock Exchange and by industrial speculation.

As with Owen’s utopian scheme, the bourgeois reformists’ plans to conquer and make safe this new class were being shaken to pieces. It would take many decades before these ideas would begin to dominate the infamous aristocracy of labour. The 1820s was the decade in which the working class acquired the essential weapons in its struggle against the enemy, and the knowledge of who its enemy was. The second half of the decade would witness the biggest and hardest-fought strikes ever seen, and side by side with the union struggles „King Ludd” would reappear in the manufacturing centres, and „Captain Swing” would devastate the countryside by fire.

This was the working class which inspired Marx’s famous speech in April, 1856: „This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be contraverted. Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to be rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts. Or they may imagine that so signal a progress in industry wants to be completed by a signal a regress in politics. On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only needed to be mastered by new-fangled men – and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself… The English working men are the first-born sons of modern industry. They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution, which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world, which is as universal as capital-rule and wages-slavery. I know the heroic struggles of the English working class have gone through since the middle of the last century – struggles less glorious, because they are shrouded in obscurity, and burked by the middle-class historian” (Coll. Works, Vol. 14, p. 656).

The years that followed would be marked by the working class’s attempts to provide itself with its own political leadership, the subjective factor of the class struggle, the party.

Chartism: 1837-1847

On June 6, 1836 a group of London artisans and Operatives met for the purpose of forming London Working men into the nucleus of an independent Labour Party. This meeting was called by hardened veterans of class and radical struggles most of whom were Owenites by inspiration, and was in the wake of other similar attempts in the previous year. The working class was still smarting from the shock of the betrayal of the middle-classes at the time of the reform bill of 1832, for the latter, after having rallied the working classes to the cause of suffrage had promptly turned on their short-lived allies after having won their cause. That this was still the subject of much resentment is witnessed by an extract from an address which the newly constituted organization issued:

“There is at present a contest between the two great parties both in and out of parliament – between the agricultural and privileged classes on the one hand and the moneyed and commercial classes on the other. We have little to expect from either of them. There are persons among the moneyed classes who, to deceive their fellow men, have put on a cloak of reform; many boast of freedom while they help to enslave us, preach justice whilst they help to oppress us’. Towards the end of this address, it was noted: ’There are in the United Kingdom 6,023,752 males over 21 years of age, only 840,000 have a vote, and owing to the unequal state of representation about one-fifth of that number have the power of returning a majority of members”.

The association spread its influence rapidly, and branches were soon started all over England. For many in the other classes, the very fact that working men should be in an organization in which they were involved in all aspects of its work, was in itself a declaration of independence, for hitherto it was deemed necessary to have someone allegedly ‘more competent’ or ‘respectable’ to organize things, and to have some well-known political or parliamentary ‘lion’ as the speaker. Instead, the L.W.A. assumed that any member of the working classes has a store of wisdom about social science superior to the other classes.

In 1837 the London Working Mens Association, With the support of radicals, drew up a petition in Parliamentary form, embodying the following six points: (1) Equal representation (2) Universal Suffrage (3) Annual Parliaments (to make bribery more difficult) (4) No property qualifications for M.P’s (5) Vote by ballot (to protect the elector) (6) Payment to members (to enable workers to sit in parliament).

At it’s first public meeting, the association urged all those attempting reform to support only those candidates at the 1837 elections who would support the “People’s Charter” as the six points were now called. Women’s suffrage was however withdrawn, it being thought that it might prejudice the possibility of obtaining manhood suffrage. The Charter was to be backed by a petition to support the demands, and “missionaries” were sent out all over the country to advocate it, as a result, it was soon possible to report the foundation or affiliation of over a hundred societies in other parts of the land. The Birmingham Political Union soon signified its assent. This society had been active in fighting for the 1832 Reform Bill, and its support was to be a key factor in ensuring support for the charter in the Midlands, and enabling Chartist agitation to become far more widespread than otherwise might have occurred. The Charter, now drafted as a parliamentary bill was published on May 8, 1838.

Scottish trades now organized a big demonstration for May 21 in Glasgow, with more than seventy trades societies reported as having marched. The object was to cause the Scottish people to adopt and sign the national petition for the Charter. The Birmingham Political Union was reviving the idea of a General Strike and also putting the idea of “A National convention” back on the agenda, despite the controversial reception the idea had met with in 1833 with its overtones of the French revolution. This petition was to be presented to Parliament.

This became the signal for mass meetings all over the country. At Manchester 300,000 collected with banners of a threatening character. “Murder demands justice” was a motto inscribed under a picture of the Peterloo massacre. Another showed a banner with a hand grasping a dagger with a scroll, “O tyrants! Will you force us to this?” Demonstrations became military reviews with the workers marching in columns with bands and standard bearers to the places of assembly. but since demonstrations by day caused loss of wages and the authorities thwarted meetings in the local town halls, by the end of the year these became sensational nocturnal gatherings with torchlight processions.

Most commentators date the formal launch of the Chartist movement to a vast meeting at Newhall Hill, Birmingham, on 6 August 1838, where the ideas for a ‘national convention’ to present the charter to Parliament backed up by a petition, were formally ratified. From now on, in all parts delegates were elected for the coming congress, and there was fundraising in the form of collecting a “National Rent”, though these collections were considerably hampered by having to be raised at a town level so as not to fall foul of the legislation that prevented alliances between organizations.

But before describing the political events further, what was the context to Chartism and who were its main adherents ? It was a time of extreme hardship, for during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century there had been a population explosion that was to be exacerbated by the stock market crash in 1836 and the more extended crisis from 1837-42. This sent hosts of unemployed factory workers and handloom weavers to seek parish relief, whilst the measures of the harsh new Poor law were pushed through by the bourgeoisie, against the interests of the Landowners, in the new reformed parliament. Response to the new poor law was extremely fierce with the two leaders of the movement, Richard Oastler and the Rev. Stephens both proponents of violence in the fight against it. This movement set the stage for Chartism with its mass meetings and also its direct collaboration with Chartism.

Britain at this time had a highly diversified labour force, in some respects more varied than anytime before or since. In the 1830’s, cotton handloom weavers still outnumbered power-looms by five to two and were affected not only by increasing mechanization but also by a glutted labour market. This in part because the prosperity of many handloom weavers during the war years, had encouraged a steady flow of workers into the trade, enabled by the fact that weaving was one of the easiest trades to learn and could be learnt in a matter of weeks. Also, it was difficult for a male handloom weaver to move into the power-loom branch, as women and girls could work the new machines. In the woollen areas of Yorkshire, a similar massive movement to machine production was taking place.

Attempts to unionize on the part of the hand-loom weavers was a failure as they were both dispersed in their various workshops and working in a doomed industry. These dispossessed handloom weavers and outworkers, those in the decaying industries clearly affected by the growth of mechanization, were to represent an extremely militant element within Chartism. W.Cooke Taylor, in his tour of Industrial Lancashire found a reckless desperation among the handicraft workers of Padiham which was unequalled by anything he witnessed elsewhere. ‘We wait for the word to begin’, was openly stated by every handloom weaver or block printer he met there. But despite this militancy, all too often the weavers yearned for a machineless, pastoral past of gainful self-employment, as a result of which they were to bring a reactionary perspective to the struggle for the Charter.

The London Working Men’s Association with its membership representing shoemakers, printers, cabinet makers, tailors and coach builders, represented different interests. This group, along with the newly risen mechanics and engineers, formed an aristocracy of labour. They enjoyed a considerably higher standard of living than most workers, and were linked socially with small shop keepers and master manufacturers, who also engaged to some extent in Chartist activities. However, even the position of the skilled craftsman had been badly affected by the repeal in 1813 of the clauses in the Elizabethan statute of artificers which had insisted upon a seven years apprenticeship, and now unapprenticed and unskilled labourers entered the formerly protected crafts.

As far as union organization went, this was still in a very rudimentary stage and there were different demands from different sectors. The industrial worker was striving for subsistence against his employer, the ‘polished dandy who has been taught at great expense, at boarding schools and colleges, that he is not to work for his bread’. For them the contrast between the wage earner and the boss was far more stark than for the artisans. The artisans represented the labour aristocracy and their demands were that of maintaining the privileges of their trades, along with the masters, against unskilled labour and protecting their status and independence.

Both sectors though were concerned with the problem of entry into the trades, the artisans by protecting traditional apprenticeship arrangements, and the new factory working unions by “creating an ‘artificial’ apprenticeship system. At both ‘national’ conferences of the cotton spinners in 1829 and 1830, it was agreed that spinners were to be allowed only to train members of their families and poor relations of millowners. The Glasgow spinners went further and tried to prevent mobility by excluding those who had not started as a piecer in Glasgow”. (Popular Movements, c. 1830-1850, W.H. Fraser) In the words of William Lovett and Francis Place – both involved in the drawing up of the Charter and both involved in Union activity – the principal object of the unions was ‘to obtain a fair standard of wages’, an attitude effectively imprisoning workers within a corporatist framework. Bronterre O’Brien, the ‘school-master of Chartism’, informed his readers that:

“A fair day’s wage is a very captivating sort of phrase, but may be moulded into as many different meanings. Under present conditions there is no possibility of realising that demand. The combined power of capital, machinery, and competition must continually reduce the wages and prospects of working men to promote their interests by trades unions alone. Trades unions, at best, can only prevent the employers cutting down the wages of mechanics and artisans to the level of the agricultural labourer. The trade union is only in some degree efficacious in those branches of labour in which the personal skill of the mechanic stills plays an important part. Is there any hope that without an entire change of the system an operative will be able to command a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work? The thing is, in my opinion, impossible”.

We shall see dramatic confirmation however, during the ‘turn-out’ of 1842, of the working-classes ability to move beyond unionism, whilst within Trades organizations, and shed the corporatist framework in times of extreme hardship.

Owenism was the main influence through the years 1837-42, emerging from its decline after the failure of the General unions. A radical politician of the middle classes to whom this state of affairs was repugnant noted “Owenism, as those are aware who habitually watch the progress of opinion, is at present in one form or another the actual creed of a great portion of the working classes”. This was certainly the case with respect to virtually all the Chartist leaders, and if one traces the twists and turns of the various episodes of Chartism, it is possible to see ‘Utopian Socialism’ stamped over every facet of it from start to finish. Beer comments: “The masses of the working class who adhered to Chartism adopted the social criticism of Owenism, but they rejected his dogmas of salvation, which Owen considered precisely the most important part of the system and he regarded Chartism therefore as a retrograde step”. (History of British Socialism, vol.2, p.46.). There were, however, multifarious other approaches. O’Brien, himself influenced by Owen, was influenced by Bray and Hodgskin, the English economists who were amongst those laying a basis for the criticism of vulgar economy. Indeed, O’Brien was in contact with Hodgskin who approved of O’Brien’s practical application of his work. O’Brien was also an admirer of Buonarrotti, and translated his Conspiracy of Equals into English. He thought that

“with the Charter, national ownership of land, currency, and credit, people would soon discover what wonders of production, distribution, and exchange might be achieved by associated labour, in comparison with the exertions of isolated labour. Thence would gradually arise the true social state, or the realities of socialism, in contradistinction to the present dreams of it. And doubtless the ultimate consequences would be the universal prevalence of a state of society not essentially different from that contrived by Owen. But the idea of jumping at once from our present iniquitous and corrupt state of society into Owen’s social paradise, without any previous recognition of human rights and without establishing a single law or institution to rescue the people from their present brutalised condition of ignorance and vassalage, is a chimera”. (National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, Jan 30, 1847)

O’Brien was to exert a great influence on Julian Harney, who wished to emulate the french revolutionaries and who was later to form International organisations that laid the basis of the First International.

Another main influence was that of Irish groups like the ‘United Irishmen’ and the ‘Whiteboys’. These groups were mainly to exert their influence by way of Feargus O’Connor who was a member of both organizations. The latter was a conspiratorial organization formed by small-holders to resist the enlosures of the cattle-barons who were fencing off more and more land to graze the newly profitable cattle, and the former had been formed as an Irish Nationalist movement through an alliance of disgruntled colonists and members of the catholic population. O’Connor would set up a rival organization to the London Working Mens Association called the Great Northern Union. It was this organisation which would specifically define a set of attitudes for those who would identify themselves as ‘physical force’ Chartists. It resolved in its programme “That physical force shall be resorted to, if necessary, in order to secure the equality of the law and the blessings of those institutions which are the birthright of free men(…) the union should recognize no authority save that which emanates from the legitimate source of all honour, namely, from the people”. Harney and O’Connor worked closely together, with Harney eventually becoming editor of O’Connors newspaper in 1842.

The National Convention

To return to the earlier sequence of events, the National Convention that had been suggested earlier became a fact, which met for the first time in London on February 4, 1839. This became known as the ‘The General convention of the Industrial Classes of Great Britain’ and 56 delegates were elected, of whom 53 took up their mandate, with Lovett elected secretary.

In the first week £700 was collected, prominent orators were appointed as “missionaries” to the provinces to enlighten the masses, and a committee was appointed to negotiate with members of Parliament. On February 5,1839, one day after the setting up of the convention, Parliament opened with a Queens speech that gave clear hints of a threatening nature.The Convention’s reply indicated that armed resistance might be resorted to if need be. From now on, despite being down on numbers because of the “missionaries” and committtees, the convention sat without interruption until September 14, 1839. During this time only two things were really discussed: Free trade and “ulterior measures”.

The discussions on ‘free trade’ were effectively to define the Convention’s attitude towards the Anti-corn law league. This group was uncompromisingly gradualist, insisting that it was important to repeal the corn laws first and then fight for enfranchisement. Such ideas, issuing from an organization which was obviously being funded with much largesse by industrialists, was guaranteed not to be very inspiring to workers; it was not surprising that a motion recommending total opposition to and depreciation of the Anti-corn law league by O’Brien was carried unanimously. The issues were being debated everywhere and it was evident to many, that cheap corn would seem to indicate a future drop in wages. Anti-corn law meetings almost inevitably had Chartists there to heckle, and demand support of the Charter, sometimes resulting in open collisions.

The issue of “ulterior measures” was the consideration of what to do if the Charter was not accepted by Parliament. The differences consisted of a wide spectrum of emphases on varying degrees of peaceful, constitutional means through to physical force and outright insurrection. These differences fell broadly into what were known as the ‘physical force’ and ‘moral force’ parties. The degrees of inclination towards physical or moral force related undoubtedly to the differing degrees of prosperity to be found in different areas. Mathers comments:

“Chartism in Scotland leaned definitely towards moral force as there was an expansive boom in the metallurgical industries and also the poor law did not apply in Scotland. Also, the dirty and underpaid jobs were manned by Irish immigrants whose separate identity more often than not kept them out of Chartism altogether. Conversely, the Bradford district of West Riding where thousands of Woolcombers were being thrown out of work by the competition of combing machinery,was perhaps the most outstanding area of physical force in England in the spring of 1848”. (Historical Association pamphlet)

To begin with, the whole issue of “ulterior measures” was seen by the Convention as premature, but because of the insistence on its importance from the representatives of “physical force”, it was eventually agreed to set up a committee to consider the issue. This despite its seeming reasonableness, caused a polarization at both extremes. Harney, heavily influenced by the events of the French revolution, continued to advocate insurrection in any event. He was backed by Major Beniowski, a refugee from the Polish insurrection of 1831, who contributed articles to the ‘London Democrat’ on the worthlessness of the Convention, as well as on the Polish revolution, revolutionary tactics and strategy. The ‘moral force’ contingent and the right saw these activities as prejudicing the ‘moral’ credibility of the convention and a vote of censure was passed on Harney. However, this didn’t prevent a meeting being called at the ‘Crown and Anchor’ at which Frost, O’Connor, Harney and others called on the masses to prepare for the coming fight. Meanwhile, the government was preparing the armed forces and police to combat the growing tide of unrest. These ‘preparations’ eventually resulting in a call to arms from the Chartist leaders. The convention now moved to Birmingham, with the delegates arriving to a massive reception of workers on May 13. The Government sent in infantry and artillery ready for action. On the following day, the report of the committee of ulterior measures was published as a manifesto.

It was observed: “the mask of CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY is thrown for ever aside and the form of despotism stands hideously before us: for us it can no longer be disguised, THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND IS A DESPOTISM AND HER INDUSTRIOUS MILLIONS, SLAVES.(…) we have patiently yielded one infringement after the another till the last vestige of RIGHT has been lost in the MYSTICISM of legislation and the armed force of the country transferred to soldiers and policemen”. It was further proposed that a series of mass meetings be held to gauge the will of the people, where a number of proposals would be submitted as possible means to implement the Charter.

This list of proposals submitted, whether the people would be prepared at the request of the convention to: cause a run on the banks by converting money to gold; Support a rent and tax strike; a general strike; support only Chartist traders and whether they would arm to defend their rights. When the Convention reopened on July 1st, many of these measures were approved, along with an expressed need for a more efficient organization. On the left, Taylor arranged for a future insurrection by burying five brass cannons (hopefully some other comrades lent a hand!) There now followed more arrests and riots in Birmingham, eventually reaching a pitch where police were compelled to seek sanctuary in peoples houses – and in the stonemason’s union lodge! Still more riots ensued, resulting in the arrest of many Chartists.

On July 8 the convention resolved to return to London for the 2nd reading of the petition on July 12 in the House of Commons. The petition was defeated by 235 votes to 46, with all the radicals and freetraders voting for it.

Bolstered with the news of a strike of 25,000 miners caused by the arrest of leading Chartists, and having witnessed the power of the masses in Birmingham after suffering disappointment with Parliament once again, the preparations went ahead for a general strike. The Convention was seen as now potentially taking on a new role as a kind of central bureau, for most of the delegates shared the general conviction that a general strike would speedily lead to a general insurrection and civil war.

On July 16, a motion was carried, fixing the date for the strike, or ‘sacred month,’ on August 12. However, the subject was not off the agenda, and for days afterwards doubts were shared until eventually a motion of O’Brien’s was carried making the keeping of the general strike voluntary. The shopkeepers of England were nevertheless scared. They appealed for help to the government, which stepped up repressive measures until in August there were 130 Chartist leaders arrested. August 12 was to be disappointing. There were mass meetings in all the towns, with some rioting and disturbances, but little support from the trade-unions and no possibility of a unified general strike.

On August 26 the convention assembled, but with no immediate aim in view following the failure of the petition and general strike. On September 6, the convention dissolved. One of the last acts of the convention was a drafting of a “declaration of the constitutional rights of Britons” which was avidly read by most literate Chartists and was to be quoted on many occasions in defense trials.

The Newport Rebellion

In October 8, 1838, Lord John Russell delivered a speech at a banquet in Liverpool in which he actually backed the Chartist agitation saying:

“I think the people have a right to meet. If they have no grievances, common sense would speedily come to the rescue and put an end to these meetings. It is not from the unchecked declaration of public opinions that governments have anything to fear. There was fear when men were driven by force to secret combinations. There was fear, there was danger, and not in free discussion”.

This was the government’s policy and it was just such a combination had been formed by the left after the failure of the petition and the massive spate of arrests in the summer of 1839. This group formed around a fraction of five delegates from the adjourned convention and resolved to emancipate the working classes by means of an insurrection. A confession of one of the leaders, Zephaniah Williams, reveals a plan to overthrow the government and set up a republic. The secret conspiracy was organized in a cell system, after the manner of the United Irishmen and to this day little is still known about it. However it is known that there was a national conference at Heckmondwick, and lesser organizing conferences elsewhere. The country covered by Chartist agitation was divided into districts, in which the Chartists were classed in groups of 10, 100, and 1000 men with leaders and captains. With various areas seen by them as ripe for revolt, eventually the matter was decided by force of circumstances and a revolt broke out in Newport, Wales.

The miners and ironworkers of South Wales had been involved in a good many struggles since 1829 when the miners wages were cut. In 1831 the miners and ironworkers of Merthyr Tydfil wrecked the court of requests where the accounts of the debts they owed to the employers shops were kept, and they had been confronted and beaten back by soldiers with twenty-one workers killed and about seventy wounded. The employers went on to sack anyone who belonged to a trade union, and the workers retaliated by forming a secret group called the ‘Scotch cattle’ to beat up the managers of truck shops and workers who under- cut their wages. By 1839 the ‘Scotch cattle’ were Chartists.

The arrest and bad treatment of Henry Vincent in jail – the Chartist leader with the most influence in the West country and Wales – the prohibition of weapons, the forbidding of assemblies and harsh prison sentences on earlier rioters combined to create a mood of extreme militancy and the demand to set Vincent free by force. Instrumental in all this was John Frost, a draper, mayor, magistrate and justice of the peace who had been involved in the advocating of radical doctrines since 1817 and converted to Chartism on the arrival of Henry Vincent in Wales in 1838.

At the meeting at Heckmondwick, the forty delegates were informed of the intention of the Welsh to rise, and it was decided to aid the rebellion with an outbreak in the North. O’Connor was asked to lead the rebellion and agreed to do so. From this point, historians differ as to what occurred. It is evident that O’Connor having manoeuvred himself into this position of advantage, did everything in his power to stop the rebellion. He told the Welsh that the Northerners were not ready to rise and that the rising was a government plot, and he told the Northerners that the Welsh were not ready to rise. The Yorkshire men, however, decided to rise anyway, at which point their leader, Peter Bussey, was suddenly ‘taken ill’. His little boy was to blurt out the truth to a customer in his father’s beer shop a few days later. “Ah’ said the boy, ‘you could not find my father the other day, but I knew where he was all the time; he was up in the cock-loft behind the flour sacks”. On account of this, Bussey had to wind up his affairs and depart post-haste for America. Meanwhile, O’Connor thought it a timely opportunity to visit Ireland and did not return until the outbreak was over. Why? As stated by himself ’to persuade the electors of a single county – the county of Cork – to register their votes, so as to be prepared to return a Liberal member at an ensuing election, whenever that might occur’ (R.C. Gammage, ‘History of the Chartist Movement’). A far flung excuse indeed!

The Welsh then stood alone. Towards the end of October it was resolved by a committee including Frost to march on Newport with a column of a thousand men and release Vincent from prison. These men were mobilized, armed with muskets, pikes and clubs, then they marched on Newport on November 4. On arrival in Newport, and after minor skirmishes with the police, the columns advanced to the Westgate Hotel to confront the magistrate and demand the release of prisoners. This they did, unaware that the authorities were well prepared and that soldiers had been positioned in the hotel. The soldiers greeted the demands with musket shot and twenty Chartists lay dead with about fifty wounded. The insurrection was over. Numerous arrests followed with several of the leaders sentenced to death or transportation. Later in 1856 a complete amnesty was to be granted.

A strange post-script was that a meeting was arranged in London to discuss ways of rescuing Frost. O’Connor was elected to the committee at this meeting, but apparently never once attended any of it’s meetings. However he was at a secret meeting where it was decided to fix a date for an insurrection on 12th January if Frost was not released. This decision was approved and on that date risings took place at Sheffield and other places, which were denounced in O’Connor’s paper, The Northern Star. Such behaviour would not have surprised Marx, who summed O’Connor up thus:

“He is essentially conservative and feels a highly determined hatred not only for industrial progress but also for revolution. His ideas are patriarchal and petty bourgeois through and through. He unites in one person an inexhaustible number of contradictions, which find their fulfilment and harmony in a certain blunt ‘common sense’, and which enable him year in year out to write his interminable weekly letters in the ‘Northern star’, each successive letter in open conflict with the previous one.(…) But such people serve a useful purpose, in that the many ingrained prejudices which they embody and propagate disappear with them – with the result that the movement, once it has rid itself of these people, can free itself from these prejudices once and for all”. (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May-Oct. 1850)

By June 1840, 380 Chartist leaders in England and 62 in Wales had been arrested and either acquitted or sentenced. Out of the 442 arrested 425 belonged to the working class; textile operatives, metal workers and miners forming the main contingent. The speeches for the defence relied for the most part on an appeal to nature, whilst descriptions of the sufferings experienced by some of those accused gave an eloquent defense, on some occasions moving the audience to tears. The costs incurred in all these trials put a great strain on the financial resources of chartists and further, the Chartist press suffered from persecutions with eight publications closing down by 1840.

The National Charter Association

The experiences of the early years of Chartism had impressed the Chartist leaders that the problem to be faced was that of organization. A correspondence was entered into, including jailed Chartists, followed by a conference on July 20, 1840 in Manchester, which was to give birth to the National Chartist Association.

The object of the N.C.A. was the radical reform of the House of Commons and it contained all the previous demands of the Charter, but emphasized a form of organization which would be built up in tiers from the localities, culminating in an executive of seven members who would be paid for their work. Thus emerged a formal national organization despite the Corresponding Societies Act of 1799 which made it illegal for societies to have branches. The way the act was circumvented was by having local members appointing members to a general council, which in its turn, then appointed local officials and delegates. An address was issued accompanying the formation of the organization calling on all Chartists to join, and which emphasized its constitutional nature, its disapproval of conspiratorial organization and speaking for the diffusion of knowledge and temperance.

Many views emerged from the conference, and amidst the calls for temperance etc, Dr.M’Douall – who had been involved in the Newport insurrection – called for organization in the trade unions so that they would eventually form the basis of agitation. Up to the end of 1842, there were to be many such organizations, such as the Chartist Association of Hatters, of Joiners, of Stockingers etc, and his line of thinking was to pay off dramatically with the general strike or ‘turn out’ of 1842.

In 1841, Sir Robert Peel, making the most of the discontent in the country, forced a vote of censure on the Whig (liberal) government in order to force them to resign. This move was successful after which electoral policy became the main topic of debate amongst Chartists, and a host of different tactics and views emerged. The Northern Star recommended in one article “wherever by splitting with the Tories you can return your man, do so. Wherever by splitting with the Whigs you can return your man, do so”. On the same day though, in another article it recommended total lack of support for the Whigs. Extraordinary manoeuvrings and rationalizations occurred. One faction backed the liberals as they seemed to have more radical ideas. Other factions felt it better to back the Tories, as an open enemy was better than a false friend.

There was also another line of thought represented by O’Brien who believed in using the elections for agitation purposes. Chartist candidates could appear at the hustings and deliver speeches, and become unofficially elected candidates through a show of hands. These people could form the basis of the National council of the unrepresented people until the dissolution of Parliament. O’Brien believed that this was far better than getting lured onto the terrain of Bourgeois intrigue, and was different in that it became quite clear that the Chartist candidates were for the workers. His view was violently opposed to the most influential line of thought, represented by O’Connor who could wield his control through the Northern Star, with its nationwide network of correspondents, and who almost as a point of principle, defended the tactics of manoeuvring amongst the established parliamentary parties.

The liberals were defeated in the elections and this was largely popular with the working classes. The spin-off from this was the N.C.A. organizing another petition to present to parliament for the People’s Charter. This Charter, whilst similar to the first contained a number of other grievances included a demand for the repeal of the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. A Convention was formed, as in 1839, to present a petition to Parliament with 3,317,752 signatures, (as opposed to 1,280,000 in 1839), again the bill was defeated, with Macaulay, an M.P. explaining ‘that universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists… and was utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilization’. But soon things were to be taken out of the domain of electoral intrigue and petitions back into the more persuasive world of starvation and poverty. The next phase of Chartism was to consist of the Chartists involvement in a massive strike movement.

The General Strike of 1842

Towards the end of July, 1842, the workers of Ashton, Stalybridge, and Hyde following a number of wage reductions, called meetings in order to discuss their situation. The scene had been set by a series of miners strikes in Staffordshire in late July, which had brought the organized unemployed into the arena of political action. At a meeting of unemployed miners in Hanley a resolution was read, “that it is the opinion of the meeting that nothing but the People’s Charter can give us the power to have ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’”. Soon, in response to various cotton barons giving notice of massive wage reductions, the cotton workers were to come out as well. A meeting was announced in late July with aims echoing the unemployed colliers, and was ‘for the purpose of taking into consideration the propriety of stopping work until we obtain a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work… by order of the committee of factory operatives.’ A local Chartist and member of the N.C.A. executive was chairman of this meeting, who spoke for pursuing the aims of the charter whilst one Richard Pilling, a local Chartist leader and the man who was to lead the strike through many key phases of it’s development, moved the resolution to strike if the factory bosses should institute the wage cuts. More meetings took place and isolated strike actions causing some of the bosses to retract on the wage reductions.

However, at one factory, Bayley’s mills, the notice of a 25% wage cut was not to expire until the 5th August. On the 4th, the weavers and others employed by Bayleys went on strike. The next day, a workers committee met up with the management who told them that if they didn’t like the wage cut ‘they better play awhile – which would perhaps alter their resolution’. This retort was soon on everyone’s lips as an example of capitalist attitudes to wage demands. At a meeting two days later, on the 7th August came the first announcement of a general strike. “Tomorrow a meeting will take place at Stalybridge at 5 o’clock in the morning, when we will proceed from factory to factory, and all hands that will not willingly come out we will turn them out. And, friends, when we are out we will remain out until the Charter, which is the only guarantee you have for your wages, becomes the law of the land”. The bosses of Bayley’s mills scurried back to say they wouldn’t institute the wage cuts after all, but because of rumours that they were proposing a month long lock-out anyway, the general strike went ahead. By now the demands were demands of the working class as a whole.

On the 8th, the scheduled meeting took place and soon a huge procession formed, later splitting into two to cover more ground, which marched from factory to factory stopping work everywhere and initiating mass meetings along the way. On one of the banners was written the now famous injunction: «The men of Stalybridge will follow wherever danger points the way – They that perish by the sword are better than they that perish by hunger».

On August 9, having passed through Ashton and Oldham, the processions converged on Manchester. On entering the city, the procession broke into smaller groups that covered the Manchester factories publicising the strike and urging others to join, which most invariably did with little intimidation. Here they were confronted with troops and police and several pitch battles ensued. By the second day of the turn-out in Manchester everyone had downed tools, and soon the entire area around Manchester was turned out including railway men, mechanics, workers in manufacturing – everybody.

So was this a case of a ‘spontaneous’ reaction by the working class? A knee-jerk reaction? Almost all the bourgeois historians who have commented on the general strike of 1842 would have us believe so, but this is definitely not the case. The initial ‘turn-out’ was the subject of considerable deliberation, mass meetings, and a response to a series of attacks on the working class that had accelerated to the point where there was no option but to take drastic action, and when the strike movement reached Manchester, the organization of the strike was to take on an intensely organized form at local and central level, unifying strikers and the various trades through the means of a trades conference in close contact with the Chartist party; In other words precisely in the way that it seems most likely the revolutionary struggle will develop in the future – workers committees unified across trades in contact with the party of the working class. The background to the form of working class organization that was to emerge had already been set by the smiths of Manchester and South Lancashire, who, after the collapse of Owen’s Grand National Consolidated union, had continued the struggle to create a union that united five of the trades of mechanism – millwrights, engineers, iron moulders, smiths and mechanics. Prime mover in this attempt were the workers of Sharp, Roberts and Co. of Manchester who were at the time producing the most advanced machines in the world who were badly hit by the British protectionism that forbade the export of textile and some other machinery. These attempts produced a paper called the Trades Journal and an organization called the United Trades Association. At one of the many meetings involved in these moves, Alexander Hutchinson, an Owenite and Chartist Engineer and prime mover of these attempts at organisation declared:

“It is said that union is strength; and if one single society can do good, five can effect much more. You are all engaged upon the same work – often in the same workshops; your interests are all inseparably the same. Yet when the oppression comes, your employers do not reduce you all at the one time; it better serves their end to do so gradually and when one or two branches have been conquered, the rest become an easy prey. Instead of one shop or place having little disturbances, let it be general and by such a practice we shall avoid that ill feeling and contention I have mentioned”.

These attempts were not immediately successful – but important enough to warrant the interest of the local police, military and the Home Office – and out of their remnants would emerge the Amalgamated Society of Engineers ten years later to cover the engineers of Great Britain and Ireland.

From the first days that the strike movement reached Manchester, there were discernible efforts to establish a central strike leadership. To start with two main trades bodies met to discuss what to do – the striking power loom weavers ‘and various trades’, and the united mechanics around Hutchinson and workers from Sharp’s. Various resolutions were passed, virtually unanimously in favour of the strike and The Charter, and a resolution “that a general meeting of delegates from all the various trades of Manchester be held on Monday afternoon in the Carpenters’ Hall…”. Over the next two days there were meetings big and small to elect delegates for the main conference on The 15th May.

This conference was known as the Great Delegates Trades Conference and it met under the chairmanship of Alexander Hutchinson. At this conference it was decided: “that the delegates in public meeting assembled, do recommend to the various constituencies we represent, to adopt all legal means to carry into effect the People’s charter; and further we recommend that delegates be sent throught he whole country to endeavour to obtain the co-operation of the middle and working classes in carrying out the resolution of ceasing labour until the Charter becomes the law of the land”.

Along with this, a motion was passed emphasizing keeping the wages question to the fore and one which, after censuring of the employers declared, “We are also of the opinion that until class legislation is entirely destroyed and the principle of united labour established, the labourer will not be in a position to enjoy the full fruits of his labours”. The following day, a poster was printed in bold red type declaring amongst other things “to persevere in our exertions until we achieve the complete emancipation of our brethren of the working classes from the thraldom of monopoly and class legislation by the legal establishment of the people’s Charter. The trades of Britain carried the Reform Bill. The trades of Great Britain shall carry the Charter”.

The following morning the conference met again and elected an executive committee of twelve, plus the chairman. They called for local committees to organize and lead the strike, and to negotiate with the middle-class and shopkeepers, keeping them sweet with bills of credit, etc. This latter move of diplomacy towards the shopkeepers was not made gratuitously as meetings of shopkeepers had come out behind the workers. But they had also ‘tried to pour oil on troubled waters’, vacillating characteristically by sending delegations to meet the employers, after one such meeting they declared that they would withdraw their support of the workers ‘should the question turn to politics’.

The governent were not slow to see the significance of these conferences. On August 15th, Sir James Graham, Secretary of State for the Home Department wrote to Major-General Sir William Warre, Army Commander for the North, “It is quite clear that these delegates are the directing body; they form the link between the trade unions and the chartists, and a blow struck at this confederacy goes to the heart of the evil and cuts off it’s ramifications”. Four days later five of the principal delegates had been arrested, and the next day, Alexander Hutchinson and the principal officers of the conference were behind bars.

Meanwhile, the strike spread to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, the Potteries, and extended to Wales and Scotland, where the miners came out. In Middleton silk mills, cotton mills, dye houses and printworks were won to the turn-out. By the 12th, in Rochdale “the whole of the hands in the cotton and woollen mills and operatives of every description for miles around had ceased to work and business was at a complete standstill” and this city became an organizing centre for marches and processions and the extension of the turn-out.

By this point, the government was mustering it’s forces, at Ashton the workers response was to take over the railway station to prevent troop movements as a result of which the local authorities swore in some hundreds of special constables. Troops and police were moved hither and thither opening fire on several occasions with several workers killed and wounded in Preston on the 12th. But parts of the states repressive apparatus started to break down and many workers were hauled up before the magistrates for refusing to take oaths of allegiance to the crown as special constables, and those who were recruited were known to be notoriously unreliable. Furthermore, contingents involving war veterans, namely the Chelsea pensioners, were reported – after less than enthuisiastic ‘actions’ – by one of their organizers as ‘by no means to be relied upon, in such an emergency as the present’. (Jenkins, ‘the General Strike of 1842’, Lawrence and Wishart, p.199).

Another telltale sign of working class struggles is the breaking down of artificial polarities. 1842 was no exception, with a large number of women drawn into the strike, who fought with an equal tenacity and courage as the men, arming themselves in some instances with stones bludgeons and cutlasses (stuff hatpins!) After all, it was women and children who made up the bulk of the original industrial proletariat. At one factory where mass picketing was taking place the Guardian noted “the most active assailants being women, with their aprons full of stones’. And this was not an isolated incident. In another article, in early September, the same paper noted ’In the course of the afternoon, a meeting of female operatives was held at Ashton, when a resolution was passed to the effect that they neither go to work themselves, nor allow their husbands to do so, until they get their price as agreed upon” (Jenkins, p.217).

In some places factories were smashed to pieces and workers threatened with violence if they didn’t stop work, in others the strikers raked out the fires from beneath the boilers and knocked out their plugs. (from this one feature, bourgeois historians have contrived to sum up the whole of this period with one of their ‘pithy’ labels – to them this period was; ‘the plug plots’). Everywhere ‘committees of factory operatives’ and strike committees sprung up, in some case issuing permits to manufacturers to finish off half finished work or stock that risked being damaged. Everywhere ‘ordinary’ people showed their capacity for organisation and disciplined class action and it was notable in this respect, that plundering nowhere took place. The working class remained in control of the richest centre of the cotton industry for a whole week despite occasional conflicts with soldiers, and the workers of Manchester were to remain out for a full seven weeks.

What of ‘official’ Chartist involvement? A meeting in Manchester of the National Charter Association had been scheduled in March to discuss the dissent in the movement and to take part in a commemoration of the Peterloo massacre and had been set then for August 16th, the day after the grand delegates conference. This meeting had been proposed by none other than Alexander Hutchinson, and if this piece of information is combined with the fact that Dr. Peter Mcdouall – the chief proponent of union organization in the unions – had his stronghold in Lancashire and Cheshire and was involved in the Newport rising, it is tempting to think that the general strike had been hatched many months earlier. Indeed when the army arrested the delegates at the trades conference, papers were seized which disclosed an extensive conspiracy going back as far as July 1841 (Mick Jenkins, p.194). The presence of the National Charter Association conference transformed the strike by enabling it’s organization, which was far more national in scope, to be used in extending the strike and those Chartsits who favoured industrial action like Mcdouall, took the lead. At the conference it was resolved that “all officers of the association are called upon to aid and assist the peaceful extension of the strike”. Thomas Cooper, present at the conference described the delegates as fully believing that ‘the time had come for trying, successfully, to paralyse the government’.

Mick Jenkins in his excellent book on the strike of ’42, from which many of the keys facts pertaining to the strike are drawn, comments: “From the moment of this proclamation the strike became fully national. Across the country all units of the National Charter Association became pledged to organize support. Areas that had previously remained quiet, the Merthyr valley in south Wales, certain parts of Scotland, the Dorset and Somerset textile industry, now joined the strike” (Jenkins. op.cit.).

O’Connor, acknowledged head of the movement by virtually all Chartists by this time, having arrived at a position where strong leadership could have carried the day, and having said on numerous occasions that he was ready to conquer or to die, once again bowed out at the crucial juncture as he had done at the time of the Newport rising. His reasoning was that the entire strike movement had been engineered by the manufacturers in the interests of the Anti-Corn Law League, and whilst no doubt some employers wanted to close their factories because of the crisis, it was hardly relevant given the scale of the rebellion, but even several of the ‘physical force’ Chartists hung back on this occasion. Slowly the insurrection became a demand neither for higher wages, a demand for the Charter, or a workers insurrection. Slowly, oppressed by hunger, workers returned in dribs and drabs to the factories until the end of September, they were abandoned by both Chartist and union leaders, with O’Connor going to London to elaborate plans for agrarian reform and M’Douall taking to flight against the possibility of arrest.

There followed a wave of an estimated 1,500 arrests of trade unionists and Chartists aged from 15 years old to an old man of 101! To begin with sentences were severe, but as the months went by, they became less so as the likelihood of an insurrection subsided. Jenkins gives four reasons why the insurrection failed:

“The success of Graham’s unifying of the ruling class forces into an effective machine under his and his nominees’ leadership; the arrest of the turn-out leaders; the disbanding of the trades conference; and the ending and disbanding of the Chartist conference,. [these] were bound to have an profound effect on the turn-out and in great measure determined its outcome. Although the two main demands – for wage increases and for the Charter – remained the main demands, nevertheless it was inevitable with the failure to maintain a central leadership that the issue of wages would begin to dominate”.

So what was the balance sheet? In the domain of wages, concrete gains were undoubtedly made. In most instances the cuts to wages were not enforced and in some areas even wage increase occurred. Regulations were pushed through in 1844 and 1847 limiting the working day in factories and in 1843, a law was passed that enabled machinery to be exported bringing about a boom in engineering. But the bid for working class power failed and the Charter failed ‘to become the law of the land’. Engels, who moved to Manchester only two months after, could see why the fight for universal suffrage was so important and why the English ruling classes would not grant it for another seventy-six years. Writing from London in November 1842 he wrote: “… the middle class will never renounce its occupation of the House of Commons by agreeing to universal suffrage since it would immediately be outvoted by a large number of the unpropertied as an inevitable consequence of giving way on this point… In England’s present condition, ‘legal process’ and universal suffrage would inevitably result in revolution”. (Marx and Engels collected works, II, p.368-9). Twelve months later he wrote, “Democracy true enough is only a transitional stage, though not towards a new improved aristocracy, but towards real human freedom” (ibid,III, p.466) (our emphasis).

The fact that the perception of both Marx – which we will demonstrate later on – and Engels, was that universal suffage at the time was tantamount to revolution, is an instructive corrective to any notions of superiority we might feel as revolutionaries of the present day who, in England’s present condition reject parliament. But when we look back to this period, we should bear in mind how little adapted parliament was to the needs of the rising bourgeoisie; bear in mind that only fifty years before it was still in a struggle against the attempt of George III to restore the power of the monarchy; that it was yet struggling with the landed aristocracy. We can easily speculate how the yet protean, and unformed nature of Parliament might have been transformed by having a majority of representatives of a revolutionary and militant working class!

Once again, the working class was thrown back, in defeat, to the pursuit of reforms, and reconciliation with the middle-classes was back on the agenda, and a conference called by Joseph Sturge of ‘the complete suffrage Union’ to that end, was convened in December 1842. All strands of Chartist and radical thought were represented at this conference, but by the end of the conference the frail unity collapsed into it’s various components. First, Sturge and his followers left after his organizations ‘Bill of Rights’ had been voted against in favour of the Charter, and voted for their bill at a seperate conference, then Lovett, representing the London artisans, and his followers left. With Lovett gone, there remained from the original 400 delegates, only 37 to discuss a plan of organization to pursue the interests of the Charter. A further convention was proposed which eventually met in September 1843, with O’Connor attempting to form a shadow executive: ‘the London council of 13’ which he could control to his own, constantly vacillating ends. He would drop this in favour of his ‘land plan’.

During this slightly more prosperous period, Chartism continued its decline with organized membership falling to three or four thousand, whilst the trades turned to trade societies and Co-operative stores. It was a time of bitter infighting and slanging matches between various factions, and suspicion was cast from many quarters on the conduct of the executive of the N.C.A, and O’Connor’s use of the main Chartist organ,the Northern Star to pursue his own personality cult and as a mouthpiece for his wavering and contradictory views. R.C.Gammage, who was active in the Chartist movement at this time commented, “It is by no means a pleasant task to wade through the mass of treachery, falsehood and folly, that engrafted itself on one of the noblest movements that ever engaged the energies of man” (‘History of the Chartist Movement’, 1839-1854, reprinted by Merlin press, London, 1976, p.267).

Before moving on to the specifically political events, what of the economic movements lurking behind them? It is sufficient to paraphrase an article that Marx wrote in 1850. The years of 1843-5 were years of industrial and commercial prosperity giving rise to a large amount of speculation. This speculation was centred mainly around railways, giving rise in 1845 to 1,035 bills being put before parliament for the formation of railway companies, but it also affected cotton, with the opening up of the Chinese and East-Indian trade, and corn following the failure of the potatoe crop which hit Ireland worst, but also England and the continent. By April 1847, a combination of overproduction and bad harvests resulted in the collapse of all three and a credit crisis. Bankruptcies, unheralded in the history of commerce hit old and new firms alike, spreading from merchant houses to private bankers and joint stock companies.

“The panic which broke out in Paris after february, and swept across the whole continent together with the revolution was very similar in its course to the London panic of April 1847. Credit disappeared suddenly and business transactions came to a standstill; in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam everyone hurried to the bank to change notes for gold (…) At any rate, it is certain that the commercial crisis contributed far more to the revolution of 1848 than the revolution to the commercial crisis. Between March and May England enjoyed direct advantages from the revolution which supplied her with a great deal of continental capital. From this moment on the crisis can be regarded as over in England: There was an improvement in all branches of business and the new industrial cycle began with a decided movement towards prosperity. How little the continental revolution held back the industrial and commercial boom in England can be seen from the fact that the amount of cotton manufactured here rose from 475 million lb. in 1847 to 713 million lb.in 1848”. (Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung: May-October 1850)

In these years, harvests were good, and development in the railways slowed to a normal level of development. 

O’Connor’s Landplan: The Last Gasp of Utopianism

At the Birmingham conference of September ‘43, O’Connor introduced a scheme for placing the working class on the land, “with a view to their social redemption,(…); and it was one of the best schemes for dividing and breaking up the Chartist movement that could possibly have been invented by the genius or folly of man” Gammage, op.cit. p.248). This scheme was avowedly non-Socialist, and can be summed up in O’Connors own words “peasant proprietorship is the best basis of society”. This scheme was to dominate the working class movement for the next 7 or 8 years, indeed, to begin with, the name ’National Charter Association’ was taken over lock, stock and barrel by O’Connor in pursuance of his utopian dream, until on legal advice, the political side of the N.C.A. became separated. Eventually O’Connor founded the Chartist Co-operative Land Society in 1845.

The scheme was, baldly put, property speculation involving a long string of remortgages on country properties. Money was raised through initial subscriptions by Chartists who put up their money in the form of shares. These shareholders would then be balloted to obtain small holdings. Tantalized by the celebrated imagery of the country cottage and an idyllic peasant existence away from the cares of the squalid cholera ridden towns, 70,000 subscribers joined the scheme, forming 300 branches of the Land Society.

Thousands of Chartists from towns would be settled in the countryside as smallholders where they would earn their living as farmers. According to O’Connor, this would reduce competition for jobs in industry where wages would go up, and unemployment would be reduced. The first estate was bought in 1846 at Heronsgate near Watford, and – shades of the modern organic movement – spade culture would be emphasized as better than using those nasty mechanical ploughs. Later in the year a ballot was held to decide on the first 35 settlers. The settlement was modestly referred to as O’Connorville lest it’s creator be forgotten. Soon three other estates were purchased and 250 shareholders were lucky in the lottery. The last of the estates, Charterville, was mortgaged by O’Connor to raise money for other estates and when he could no longer meet the interest payments, all but 2 of the tenants were evicted by the money lenders in 1850.

In 1851 the National Land Company was ended by act of Parliament, by which time three-quarters of the original settlers had left anyway and subscribers had dwindled to nothing. Thus ended the land-plan six years after the last of Robert Owen’s schemes, Harmony Hall, perished in 1845 through mismanagement and lack of funds. The working class could no longer yearn for smallholdings in the countryside, and machinery was obviously now here to stay. Agriculture was becoming more and more mechanised and concentrated into larger holdings, and fewer and fewer country squires were left to preside over country festivals and keep the notions of a patriarchal past alive. For the working class there was no going back – only forward.

But The Land Scheme was by no means without it’s critics. O’Brien, through his paper the national reformer, ridiculed the Land-plan, maintaining that it bypassed the issue of taking political power on which all else hung. ‘The reformer’ counterposed smallholdings to the Nationalization of the land, and the gold standard to “the quarter or bushel of wheat, to be henceforward the recognised standard of value – its average price (measured by labour) to be the unit of account”, (National Reformer, Jan.16,1847). Similarly he backed equitable exchange and co-operative stores. One can see in these theoretical stirrings, the attempt to unmask capitalist economy by showing the basic source of wealth as labour. But as the working class movement would discover, a co-operative capitalist or even a national capitalist can exploit as well as sole proprietor or a joint-stock company. It would not be until Marx and Engels had unmasked the mysteries of accumulation that the working class movement would be able to realize it’s mission – to destroy market economy on an International scale, and with it, labour as a commodity. In the next article, we will examine the last phase of Chartism and how, out of it’s distintegration, its left wing started looking towards internationalism, and connected up with and formed early Communist organizations, but let us leave to Marx the job of summing up the difficult, confusing but ultimately hopeful and optimistic period:

“The continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English ‘Charter’. They overlook the fact that over two-thirds of French society are peasants and one-third townspeople, while in England more than two-thirds live in the towns and less than one-third in the countryside. In England the results of universal suffrage must be in the same ‘inverse’ proportion to its results in France as town and country are in the two empires. This explains the diametrically opposite character which the demand for universal suffage has assumed in France and England. In France it was a demand made by politial ideologues, one that every ‘educated’ person could share to a greater or lesser extent, depending on his convictions. In England it forms the broad boundary between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one hand and the classes of the people on the other. There it is regarded as a political question and here, as a social one. In England agitation for universal suffrage had gone through a period of historical development before it became the catchword of the masses. In France, it was ‘first’ introduced and ‘then’ started on its historical path. In France it was the practice of universal suffrage that failed, while in England it was its ideology. In the early decades of this century, universal suffrage of Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright and Cobbet still had an utterly indefinite idealistic character, which made it the pious wish of all sections of the population that did not belong directly to the ruling classes. For the bourgeoisie, it was really no more than an eccentric, generalized expression of what it had attained through the parliamentary reform of 1831. In England the demand for Universal suffrage did not assume its true, specific character even after 1838. Proof: Hume and O’Connell were amongst those who signed the Charter. In 1842 the last illusions were gone. At that time Lovett made a last but futile attempt to formulate universal suffrage as a ‘common’ demand of the so-called Radicals and the masses of the people. Since that day there has no longer been any doubt as to the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor as to its name. It is the ‘Charter’ of the classes of the people and implies the assumption of political power as a means of meeting their social requirements. That is why universal suffrage, a watchword of universal fraternization in the France of 1848, is taken as a war slogan in England. There the immediate content of the revolution was Universal suffrage; here, the immediate content of Universal Suffrage is the revolution. He who goes over the history of universal suffrage in England will see that it casts off its idealistic character as modern society with its endless contradictions develops here; contradictions born of industrial progress”. (Neue Oder-Zeitung, no. 261, June 8, 1855)

Karl Marx and the Chartists

In our last article on the history of the working-class in Britain, we looked at the social and economic backdrop to the rise of Chartism, and the failure of utopianism as it merged into bourgeois mutual-aid with the ‘land-plan’. We noted that the massive bid for power by the working class in 1842 suffered from the lack of a clear political programme, and the distinction of its aims from that of the middle-classes. We will now proceed to look at the last phase of Chartism, and show how such an organization and programme emerged out of the struggle for the working class to define itself and its aims, giving birth to an independent class view of the world – Scientific Communism and Dialectical Materialism.

To begin with, we will take up where we left off, and leave it to Engels to paint a picture of England in November 1847:

“The commercial crisis to which England finds itself exposed at the moment is, indeed, more severe than any of the preceding crises. Neither in 1837 nor in 1842 was the depression as universal as at the present time. All the branches of England’s vast industry have been paralysed at the break of its development; everywhere there is stagnation, everywhere one sees nothing but workers thrown out onto the pavement. It goes without saying that such a state of affairs gives rise to extreme anxiety among the workers who, exploited by the industrialists during the period of commercial prosperity, now find themselves dismissed en masse and abandoned to their fate. Consequently meetings of discontented workers are rapidly increasing”. (La réforme, Oct.23, 1847).

In the same paper, on November 22, he wrote about the elections that occurred in the summer of 1847, in the wake of the crisis in parliament that followed the victory of the free trade agitation:

“The opening of the recently elected Parliament that counts among its members distinguished representatives of the peoples party, [O’Connor was actually elected, with Robert Owen and Harney standing as candidates: ed] could not but produce extraordinary excitement in the ranks of the democracy. Everywhere the local Chartist associations are being reorganized. The number of meetings increases and the most diverse ways and means of taking action are being proposed and discussed. The Chartist executive has just assumed leadership of this movement, outlining in an address to the British democrats the plan of campaign which the party will follow during the present session: [he then quotes] In a few days, we are told, a meeting will be held which in the face of the people dares to call itself the assembly of the commons of England. In a few days this assembly, elected by only one class of society, will begin its iniquitous and odious work of strengthening the interests of this class, to the detriment of the people. The people must protest en masse at the very beginning against the exercise of the legislative functions usurped by this assembly”.

Engels comments further:

“The Fraternal Democrats, a society consisting of democrats from almost every nation in Europe, has also just joined, openly and unreservedly, in the agitation of the Chartists (…) the Fraternal Democrats have openly come out against any act of oppression, no matter who may attempt to commit it. Hence the democracy, both English and foreign, in so far as the latter are represented in London, have attached themselves to the Fraternal Democrats, declaring at the same time that they will not allow themselves to be exploited for the benefit of England’s free-trade manufacturers”.

We shall have cause to look at the activities of this organization later, but we comment for now that this organization was part of a broader network of organizations forming under the influence of the massive exile from revolutionary Europe. This ‘importation’ of revolutionary ideas was to play a major part in the ferment of the last Chartist mass mobilization, and well as determining the future course of the worker’s movement.

All that was needed was the news of the February revolution in France to really spark things off. Soon things were on the move again,

“meetings and demonstrations were held all over the country. None of the halls in London were large enough to hold the masses who wished to attend the meetings. Crowds assembled in the open air on Clerkenwell Green, Kennington Common, and in Trafalgar Square etc., to hear the Chartist leaders and to adopt their proposals. Serious breaches of the peace occurred in the provinces: in Glasgow the unemployed marched through the streets shouting ‘bread or revolution’; in Manchester crowds surrounded the workhouse and demanded the liberation of the inmates; in Bridgetown soldiers fired on the working-men and shot several of them”. (Max Beer, History of British Socialism, Vol.2, National Labour Press, p.166)

Another Chartist petition was planned and a convention in London, and it was decided that if the petition was rejected a National Assembly would be called – a virtual threat to take over power. Plans were laid for a massive demonstration on Kennington Common on April 10. The government meanwhile made counter-preparations. A contemporary account noted:

“The public offices at the West End, at Somerset House, and in the city, were profusely furnished with arms; and such places as the Bank of England were packed with troops and artillery, and strengthened with sandbag parapets on their wall, and timber barricading of their windows, each pierced with loop-holes for the fire of defensive musketry. In addition to the regular and military force, it is credibly estimated that at least 120,000 special constables were sworn and organized throughout the metropolis, for the stationary defence of their own districts, or as movable bodies to co-operate with the soldiery and police”. (Annual register, 1848)

Among these special constables were featured, none other than special guest stars, the worker’s favourite double-act, Louis Napoleon and William Gladstone.

The convention met on April 3 comprising Harney, Jones and O’Brien amongst them and weapons were stored. The government then issued a proclamation declaring the convention an illegally constituted body.

The crowd that attended the ‘monster’ demonstration was a lot smaller than anticipated, but this crowd, small though it was, was not allowed to cross the Thames to present the petition to Parliament. Finally it was presented, carried to parliament on a richly decorated wagon drawn by four horses, whilst behind them came on another wagon the committee of the National Charter Association. Instead of the five and half millions signatures claimed by O’Connor however, there were less than two million – including to the surprise of all, half a dozen by the Duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria.

The petition was inevitably rejected and the National Convention was reconvened as the National Assembly on May 1. This organization lasted for little more than a week, and was dissolved on May 13. However,

“The more determined Chartists went on with their preparations for rebellion. A National Guard was instituted as a result of a local Lancashire and Yorkshire Conference; three thousand were reported drilling at Wilsden under a black flag. At Bingley and Bradford there were strong detachments, the latter of which beat the police in a straight fight, killing one and wounding others, but retreated before the military. Similar events occurred at Ashton-under-Lyme and Liverpool; there is evidence of other armed Chartist forces at Leicester, Aberdeen and Glasgow (…) But the centre of the insurrection was London: Blackaby, the blacksmith who was Chartist chief in Croydon, arranged to hold as many police as possible by uproar in the suburbs, while M’Douall marched on Whit monday from Bishop Bonner’s Fields on to Whitehall. Blackaby carried out his part, but the secret was out and the exits from the Fields were heavily garrisoned. Rain fell without ceasing, and the Chartists were relieved to obey M’douall’s signal to go home (…) But they believed themselves to be 80,000 organized in London; they were in touch with the Irish revolutionaries, and were unwilling to go down without a fight. Cuffay, a mulatto appointed a Commissioner by the [Chartist] executive, took charge of the London area, and with six others (…) reorganized the revolt for August 15”. (The Common People, Cole and Postgate, UP, p.324)

Fireraisers were dispersed around London with sections dispersed to break up pavements for street barricades – tactics similar in many details to the recently successful revolution in France. The Chartists however had no opportunity to try their strength as the government was too well prepared; through an elaborate system of police spies they knew everything beforehand and the entire revolutionary executive was transported for life.

A reign of terror now swept over England from May to October in which ninety Chartist leaders were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. Jones, who we will meet later on, received the maximum term of two years, was deprived of pen and paper and put in solitary confinement.

Thus perished Chartism as a mass movement of the working class. The fact remained that the Chartist movement was still literally representing ‘the masses of the people’ and this meant that its aims, and thus its tactics became confused. These we can represent as 1) the bourgeoisie against the landed interest and aristocratic privilege (the radicals); 2) the artisans against the modern factory system (hand-loom weavers etc.) and 3) the rising industrial working-class (the left chartists). Within this complex network of different interests the latter more often than not took the initiative, but always with the reactionary aims of the other classes adulterating and obscuring the working classes vision. But the vision was becoming clearer, and amidst the calls for a separation from the middle-classes, the workers were forging an ideology that would serve them in the future. The factor missing was a clear understanding of what this new class’s best interests really were – even the members of the Communist League were almost exclusively artisans – and not only had the modern working-class to emerge as a class with separate interests against all other classes, but that possibility had to arise through the development of the modern forces of production. Even in the most generous estimation: let us say that the combination of mass-mobilization and insurrectionary agencies was just right, there was something missing.

In fact, beside, within, and influenced by the lessons of Chartism, the missing elements in the proletarian armoury were at that moment being forged within the working-class movement: a view of the working-classes condition that was to unlock the mysteries of bourgeois economy and the source of exploitation – the extraction of surplus value from the worker. From this would emerge the basis for a clear class programme and a class party with a clear and consistent view to their attainment. A party that would forge the forces of Blanquist insurrectionism and abstract democracy into a coherent dialectical whole on a class basis. This process we will now proceed to examine.

The Communist League

In the backward conditions of Germany in the 1840’s the curious situation arose that German skilled workers were numerically stronger outside Germany than within it, with 85,000 emigrant German workers in Paris alone, and other groups of comparable size in Brussels and London, whilst the small indigenous working class was concentrated among the cotton workers of the northern Rhineland. The political direction of the German working class thus assumed an international character from its inception, further pushed along this path by the prevailing police conditions in Germany. In such conditions arose from an earlier organization called ‘the Outlaw League’ – ‘the League of the Just’.

Of this organisation, Engels felt it safe to assert in his history of the Communist League, that it was “the first international workers movement of all time”. This secret society had been formed by German émigrés in Paris in 1836 and was closely connected with Blanquis ‘Société des Saisons’ and had suffered with it in the defeated insurrection of 1839. In 1840 the effective centre of gravity of this organization moved to London where the German Worker’s Educational Association was founded as a front for the League’s activities. Here, influenced by the mass organization of the Chartists (Engels introduced the Chartist leaders to the League), the English trade unions and Owenism, The League was to distance itself from the tactics of Blanquism and seek other methods to bring about the Communist goal.

Meanwhile, In Brussels, Marx started an organization called the ‘Communist Correspondence Committee’, with the aim of, as described in a letter to Proudhon,

“providing both a discussion of scientific questions and a critical appraisal of popular writings and socialist propaganda that can be conducted in Germany by these means. But the main aim of our correspondence will be to put German Socialists in touch with English and French socialists, to keep foreigners informed of the socialist movements that will develop in Germany and to inform the Germans in Germany of the progress of socialism in France and England. In this way differences of opinion will be brought to light and we shall obtain an exchange of ideas and impartial criticism”.

In May 1846, the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels started making concerted efforts to influence the ‘League of the Just’ as it had become apparent that out of all the multifarious left sects, this organization, both in terms of its numbers and its level of organization was the one to take most seriously. Marx was to write:

“We published at the same time a series of pamphlets, partly printed, partly lithographed, in which we subjected to merciless criticism the mixture of French-English socialism or communism and German philosophy, which at the time constituted the secret doctrine of the League. We established in its place the scientific understanding of the economic structure of bourgeois society as the only tenable theoretical foundation. We also explained in popular form that our task was not the fulfilment of some utopian system but the conscious participation in the historical process of the social revolution that was taking place before our eyes”.

At this time, Marx approached Julian Harney, a member of the League and left-wing Chartist to propose that he set up a communist correspondence bureau to liase with Brussels. Harney indicated that he felt Schapper, the effective leader of the League, would have to be consulted adding the latter was rather mistrustful of the ‘literary characters’ in Brussels. But eventually a meeting was agreed to in July 1846 in which it was proposed to iron out differences. But already Marx and Engels were getting a bit fed-up with aspects of the League, with Engels entertaining the idea of working on Harney seperately from ‘the Londoners’.

In November of that year, the League’s Central Committee moved to London, and with all the organizational reform which that implied, and with the Leagues now definite rejection of the utopianism of Cabet and Weitlng, it became open to ideas that would provide it with a sounder theoretical foundation.

Marx was now actively sought out and invited to join the League. Marx wrote later:

“Whatever objections we had against this proposal were met by Moll’s statement that the Central Committee planned to call together a Congress of the League in London. There the critical position we had taken would be adopted in a public manifesto as the doctrine of the League. Antiquated and dissident views could only be counteracted by our personal collaboration, but this was only possible if we joined the League”. (Letter to ‘Herr Vogt’, MEW xiv 439)

Marx, Engels and several other members of the Brussels group now decided to join.

The promised conference materialised in June 1847, attended by Engels and Wilhelm Wolff at which the ‘League of the Just’ was transformed into the Communist League. After the June congress Marx now turned the Brussels Correspondence Committee into a branch of the Communist League and set up a worker’s association along the lines of the League’s successful front organization in London. Here in Brussels he would work on the Deutsche-Brüsseller-Zeitung and within the ‘Democratic Association for the Unification of All Countries’. In these organizations he strove for a unification with intellectuals and petty-bourgeois elements in the hope of welding an alliance of proletarians and the bourgeoisie against feudalism, in contradistiction to the utopian view that saw the workers taking power in Germany despite the fact the modern working-class and productive forces were virtually non-existent. At the 2nd Conference of the League on September 30th, according to Engels “Marx (…) defended the new theory during fairly lengthy debates. All opposition and doubt was at last overcome and the new principles were unanimously accepted” (History of the League, MEW XXI 215 f).

In the new rules it was now clearly stated “the aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old, bourgeois society based on class antagonisms and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property” (quoted by Engels, On the History of the Communist League,MESW, p.440. L & W). At the end of the conference Marx and Engels were given the task of writing a manifesto to publicise the doctrines of the League.

Marx returned to Brussels and set about this task as well as lecturing to workers and involving himself in the Democratic Association, an organization which, in the words of Engels was “a sort of cartel of Brussels democrats”. On March the 12th, Marx wrote to Engels in Paris to say “The Central Committee [of the Communist league] has been set up here because Jones, Harney, Schapper, Bauer and Moll are here”. From this, we can deduce that the left-wing leadership of Chartism were now communists.

Whilst Marx continued to work in the Brussels Democratic Association, Harney and Jones continued however to work in the Fraternal Democrats, and it is to this latter organization that we will now turn.

The Fraternal Democrats as an organization was first proposed at a meeting in July 1845 as an international democratic association to liase between the English Chartists and continental refugees in England, of whom a significant proportion were political exiles and included members of the ‘League of the Just’. But it was also – in terms of continuity of some of its personnel – the direct offshoot from the earlier London Democratic Association formed in 1837 by Harney. This in turn had split from the London Working Men’s Association – the organization that had first drawn up and started propagating the Charter – because of differences of opinion over the issue of ‘physical force’. It was notable for attempting to provide the ‘physical force’ party with an ideological basis, derived mainly though Babeuf’s disciple Buonnorotti, whose book, the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ O’Brien translated into English.

Marx was present at this meeting to discuss the formation of the Fraternal Democrats, out of which emerged the formal constitution of the organization in September of the same year. Schapper now stepped in, and asked William Lovett, the old campaigner who had drawn up the original Charter, to write an appeal to Chartists to join the Fraternal Democrats. Harney, Jones and Cooper now joined with Harney giving the organization access to the columns of the Northern Star. This organization celebrated the European struggles and appealed to the English people to support and imitate them. We quote from The Principles and Rules of the Society of Fraternal Democrats:

“This society composed of natives of Great Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary and other countries (…) agree to adopt the following DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES: (…) we renounce, repudiate and condemn all political hereditary inequalities and distinctions of ‘caste’; consequently we regard kings, aristocracies, and classes monopolising political privileges in virtue of their possession of property, as usurpers and violators of the principle of human brotherhood. Governments elected by and responsible to the entire people is our political creed (…) We condemn the ‘National’ hatreds which have hitherto divided mankind, as both foolish and wicked; foolish, because no one can decide for himself the country he will be born in; and wicked, as proved by the feuds and bloody wars which have desolated the earth, in consequence of these national vanities”.

One of the first activities of the Fraternal Democrats was a response to the Oregon boundary question in 1846. Julian Harney, counter-posed the American Government’s way of dealing with the question by way of a militia bill with the slogan ‘no vote, no musket’, and hinting at revolutionary defeatism, he addressed the rulers who called upon the ‘impoverished unrepresented masses’ to fight for ‘their country’. He wrote in the Northern Star: “If you will monopolize all, fight for the country yourselves”. Later, in response to the revolt of the Portuguese junta against Donna Maria that was put down with the help of Britain, France and Spain, he said at an Fraternal Democrats meeting that: “People were beginning to understand that foreign as well as domestic questions do affect them; that a blow struck at liberty on the Tagu is an injury to the friends of freedom on the Thames”. Even more explicit was the line taken at the 2nd anniversary of the Polish Cracow rising: “Let the working men of Europe advance together and strike for their rights at one and the same time, and it will be seen that every tyrannical government and usurping class will have enough to do at home without attempting to assist other oppressors”.

Marx and Engels maintained permanent contact with this organization through the Brussels Correspondence Committee and especially with the proletarian nucleus which would join the Communist league in 1847. However they would criticise immature aspects of its ideology. In a letter from Engels to Marx at this time, Engels mentions: “the other day I sent Harney a mild attack on the peacefulness of the Fraternal Democrats. Besides, I wrote to him to keep up the correspondence with you people” (Paris, approx. Oct.23, 1846). After the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 the activity of the society declined and it finally disintegrated in 1853.

It was mainly through this organization however that Marx and Engels first forged links with the Chartists, especially Ernest Jones and Harney, both of whom worked on the Chartist Northern Star. This was the main Chartist paper to which Engels would transfer his allegiance from the Owenite ‘New Moral World’ in the light of the scientific Communism that he now adhered to. The first public statement of this view would appear to the English workers in the pages of the Northern Star on the 4 April 1846, entitled the ‘State of Germany’.

To deal in depth with Marx’s tactics and movements in the German revolution of 1848 are beyond the scope of this article, but it worth stopping a moment to consider the effect this article would have had on a working-class that was, to say the least, unaccustomed to the dialectical, scientific way of viewing events that was yet being forged in the hard school of working class experience. For in this article it was recommended that the German workers subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie until the day that the bourgeoisie held full power, and that only then could the working class fight the bourgeoise in a thorough going bid for power.

We would still maintain that this tactic was correct in the context of a classical bourgeois revolution, though Marx and Engels were the first to admit that they were mistaken on certain tactical points. In fact, the conclusions they drew from their mistakes were to precisely define Scientific Communism once and for all against the other currents that existed in the Communist league. We now take up again developments within that organization.

Marx’s experience as an active revolutionary in Germany had caused him to draw new conclusions about the immediate likelihood of revolution: “There can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at a time when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production (…) A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself” (Review: May-October 1850, Below, p.303 n.47).

This view was counter-posed to that of the Willich-Schapper faction of the League, within the context of the debate on ‘the position of the German proletariat in the coming revolution’ referred to in the Central Committee Meeting of September 15, 1850, from which the following quotes are drawn. (Revolutions of 1848, Pelican Press, ed: David Fernbach, p.339).

Schapper argued that the activities of communists only had meaning if the proletariat could come to power immediately, otherwise they might as well give up. Marx however now mentioned ‘fifteen, twenty or fifty years’ of class struggle as the time scale involved, for ‘the proletariat, if it should come to power, would not be able to implement proletarian measures immediately, but would have to implement petty-bourgeois ones’. Interestingly enough for those who have witnessed the workings of organic centralism as a communist form of organization in the 1970’s in Italy, he proposed the removal of the Central Committee to Cologne because ‘the minority of the central committee is in open rebellion against the majority’.

Also he condemned the national chauvinism which had “replaced the universal conception of the Manifesto, flattering the national sentiments of German artisans”, and the fact that “The will, rather than the actual conditions, was stressed as the chief factor of the revolution”, furthermore he noted with disgust, there was “total anarchy in the league” noting that the word ‘proletariat’ had been “reduced to a mere phrase, like the word ‘people’ was by the democrats. To make this phrase a reality one would have to declare the entire petty bourgeoisie to be proletarians, i.e. de facto represent the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat”. Marx suggested that both factions continue to work in the league and the party but within two separate sections, remarking however “we want to abolish the tension by abolishing all relations whatsoever” – perhaps displaying certain abiguity towards his own suggestion of remaining in the league with Schapper! Schapper was more definate saying “If you want to set up two districts, well and good. We’ll go alone and you’ll go alone. But then two leagues ought to be set up – one for those whose influence derives from their pens and the other for those who work in other ways. I don’t hold with the view that the bourgeoisie will come to power in Germany, and I am a fanatical enthusiast in this respect”.

The Communist league did split, with Marx and the scientific communists finding a definitive basis on which to part company with the representatives of Blanquis militant utopianism (to which afterwards Willich and Schapper openly adhered), which placed emphasis on the will (and by implication the possibility of ‘adapting’ it), the vanguard, and voluntarism, indeed in Schapper’s statement above, we can witness additionally that classic workerist attitude that has dogged all serious marxists, but we note also, by way of revenge, that in respect of the bourgeoisie attaining power in Germany… of course he was wrong – as no proletarian living there today will need pointing out!

Soon Schapper et all would end up hatching plots with petty bourgeois democrats that came to nothing. Marx meanwhile moved the Central Committee to Cologne where it continued to conduct propaganda work. In 1851, both groups were however ‘busted’ by the police, and after the conviction of the accused at the Cologne Communist Trial of October 1852, Marx had the League formally wound up.

By now though, there had already been taken the first initiatives towards forming a Communist international, for in 1850 the Central Committee of the League founded together with the Blanquists and the left Chartists, a secret international organization, the “World Society of Revolutionary Communists, based on the expectation of a revolutionary outbreak and pledging mutual support” (Fernbach, p.57). The first two articles of its constitution, signed by Adan and J.Vidil (blanquists), G. Julian Harney (Chartists), and Marx, Engels and August Willich (Communist league), specified:

“1. The aim of the association is the overthrow of all privileged classes and their subjugation to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will carry through the permanent revolution until the realization of communism, the ultimate form of organization of the human family. 2. Towards the realization of this goal the association will form a bond of solidarity between all tendencies of the revolutionary communist party, while, in accordance with the principle of republican brotherhood, it dispenses with all national restrictions”. (Marx-Engels-Werke, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1956-64, pp.553-4)

We can see here very specifically represented the idea of a a loose alliance of “all tendencies of the revolutionary communist party” and a grafting on to it of the aims of bourgeois republicanism. Suffice to say that immediately after their departure from the Communist League, Marx, Engels and Harney wrote to the Blanquist leaders to say that they had “long considered the association as de facto dissolved” and requested a meeting to burn the founding agreement!

Regrettably, all the Internationals would be dogged by a “Socialist federalism” of one sort or another and all would have their deaths sealed by precisely such federalism, so it is interesting, right at the very birth of the International workers movement to see alliances so categorically rejected – note well, even when the numbers involved were tiny – for even at this time, Marx had no truck with counting membership cards and United Fronts! Later on, tactical alliances would be on the cards again with the formation of the 1st International, which we examine in a later article, but the absolute clear break from all forms of bourgeois politics had been achieved in 1850 and things could never be quite the same again. As a footnote we apend an extract from a letter from Marx to Engels on April, 1856 to show that things are never quite so simple as the seem:

“I have had some more meetings with friend Schapper and have found him a very repentant sinner. The retirement in which he has lived for the last two years seems rather to have sharpened his mental powers. You will understand that in case of certain contingencies it may be good to have the man at hand, and still more out of Willich’s hands”. (Selected correspondance, Progress, p.85)

The Last Days of Chartism

After the dissolution of the Communist League, and convinced that a thorough understanding of the workings of bourgeois economy were an indispensable weapon for the working class, Marx returned to the economic studies which would eventually bear fruit as ‘Das Kapital’. Despite this monumental effort however, he continued to work with the left Chartists.

We will now proceed to trace Marx’s dealings with Julian Harney and Ernest Jones – the leaders of the Chartist left – within the decline of the Chartist movement.

Julian Harney after he was forced by O’Connor to resign from the Northern Star because of his espousal of republican causes, started his own paper, the Red Republican, in 1850. This was later renamed the Friend of the People, which in November published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto “of citizen Charles Marx and Frederic Engels”.

As already shown, Marx and Engels were to attempt a close collaboration with Harney, but it soon became apparent that the latter’s eclectic internationalism was poles apart from the, superficially similar, proletarian internationalism of Marx and Engels. This was particularly in evidence when he became involved in a banquet to fête the polish patriot Bem in February 1851, whilst in similar vein he threw open the pages of the Friends of the People to virtually any refugee group, all of whom could virtually guarantee their articles would be printed.

Marx would finally become totally estranged from Harney as the latter sided more and more with the Blanquists and Schapper against Marx’s own supporters. Soon Marx would have little good to say of Harney whom he would dub “citizen Hip Hip Hurray”.

Sadly, by January 1852, the old Chartist chief O’Connor, “the Lion of Freedom” was to be seen early in the morning wandering around Covent Garden “a huge, white headed vacuous-eyed man, looking at the fruits and flowers, occasionally taking up a flower, smelling it, and putting it down with a smile of infantile satisfaction”, whilst in the Commons “He threw the house into confusion, by accosting a large number of members, and shaking hands with everyone he met”. Eventually he was put into Dr. Tukes asylum where he would die in 1855.

Almost sadder still was the fate of his newspaper, the Northern Star, which in 1842, due to its dwindling readership, was put up for sale. First it was sold off to its printers for a hundred pounds, whereupon it immediately became a journal of the middle-class reformers. Suddenly, this paper around which the forces of Chartism had rallied for fifteen years was printing articles in which it proclaimed that the word Chartist was “offensive to both sight and taste”. Soon it was put up for sale again, with its two ex-editors Harney and Jones, both sacked by O’Connor – slugging it out between themselves, for the proprietorship of what was now in reality an empty shell. The insults and accusations of misappropriation of funds from both sides were to effect a split on the left of Chartism. Harney was successful in his bid for the paper which he promptly changed to the Star of Freedom, and then the Democratic Review. In a couple of years it was defunct. Meanwhile Jones changed the name of his journal Notes to the People to the Peoples Paper, this paper survived to 1858 and was to effectively replace the Northern Star as the mouthpiece of the working class movement in England.

“As Marx’s enthusiasm for Harney waned, so his relations with Ernest Jones, the other leader of the Chartist left, increased (…) Engels wrote to Marx on Jones’s death in 1869 that he had been ‘the only educated Englishman among the politicians who was, at bottom, completely on our side’. In the early 1850’s, Jones, unlike Harney, emphasized the doctrines of class struggle, the incompatibility of interests between capital and labour, and the necessity of the conquest of power by the working class – views which his association with Marx did much to reinforce. Indeed Marx came to regard Jones as ‘the most talented of the representatives of Chartism’ and approved of the tone of the ‘People’s Paper’, this he contrasted favourably with Harney’s criticism of Chartism as ‘a class movement’ which had not yet become ‘a general and national movement’”. (Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, p.261, David McLellan, Paladin).

Marx was to have certain bones of contention with Jones – notably his refusal to publish an English translation of the Eighteenth Brumaire, but he kept in close contact with him, attending his meetings and contributing to the People’s Paper on frequent occasions (though the number of printing errors made him reluctant to do so). Indeed it was in collaboration with Jones that Marx produced what he was later to say was his best work of criticism of the co-operative movement.

Apart from the Paper, Jones was to be involved in an important attempt to create an independent mass party of the working class, appropriately enough named “The Mass Movement”. This organization was formed under the impetus of a strike wave in 1843, and aimed to unite both the trade-unions and the non-organized workers, primarily with the aim of co-ordinating strikes in different regions of the country. The organization was to be headed by a “Labour Parliament” which would be summoned periodically, composed of delegates elected by meetings of non-organized workers and unions. This body met, for the first and last time, between March 6-18, 1854.

Marx attached great importance to this move as it signified the attempt to lead the working class out from the restricting framework of craft unionism. However, despite his expectations, craft unionism would prevail with the majority of the trade-union delegates against both political struggle and a mass organization.

Jones would eventually be a great disappointment to Marx as he gradually went back on one proletarian position after another. This began with his retraction of his criticism of the Co-operative movement, going so far as to actively recommend people to start them by 1854.

“In 1855, he [Marx] allowed Jones to persuade him to attend a committee meeting of the Chartist International Committee to prepare a banquet to celebrate the 1848 revolution. However ‘the idle chatter of the Frenchmen, the staring of the Germans and the gesticulations of the Spaniards’ impressed him merely as pure farce. He was a supercilious and silent observer at the banquet smoking excessively to compensate”. (McLellan, op.cit p.261)

This meeting was nevertheless important in that it was part of wider moves to create a Worker’s International as a response to the Crimean War, and was under the auspices of the International Association which was formed from the remnants of the Fraternal Democrats in 1854. This attempted to regroup the left across Europe and brought into loose affiliation the Commune Révolutionaire, the German Workers Association, the Chartists, and the Polish Socialists. The leading English members were Ernest Jones and George Holyoake, the Co-operator.

Meanwhile, in 1854, the “official” Chartist Executive of the National Chartist Association would finally cease to exist. This was the inevitable result of an organization that had degenerated to being merely an elaborate talking shop at which endless bureaucratic reorganizations, restructurings, elections, conventions and meetings – and liberal doses of character assassinations and personal scandals – served merely to disguise that the organization was now merely an empty shell with no real connection with the masses on whose behalf it claimed to be deliberating. Soon Chartist organizations of every shape and size were popping up like mushrooms everywhere e.g., the National Reform League, the National Regeneration League, the People’s Charter Union, the Social Reform League etc., almost all with the exclusive intention of watering down the Charter with such measures as limiting the vote to householders etc.

At one such conference in 1848 – the last one to take the name “Chartist” – Jones was also eventually to form an alliance with the hated middle-class reformers of yesteryear. In the People’s Paper of February 13 we are informed of Jones’s new policy: “He considered that they should meet the middle classes halfway and take what was offered (…) he had opposed one-sided middle-class movements, but he would not oppose middle-class movements which were any benefit to the working class (…) he now called upon them to unite with the middle classes for universal manhood Suffrage. Mr. Jones sat down amid loud and continued applause”.

Marx was to comment:

“The business with Jones is very nasty. He has held a meeting here and spoken entirely along the lines of the new alliance. After this affair one is really almost driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop in a new, viable form. And yet one cannot foresee what this new form will look like. It seems to me moreover that Jones’ new move, together with the former more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, are indeed connected with the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie”. (Engels to Marx in London, Oct.7,1858)

This conference was really the last gasp of Chartism and was the definitive ushering in of the age of the famous English Labour Aristocracy. But one can also trace a direct path from Chartism’s demise through to the foundation of the First International six years later. All the forces that Jones had been attempting to unite – the Co-operators, the unions and the left – would be precisely those elements which would be involved in the International. In fact, many members of the International Association, which was to wind up in 1859, would join the 1st International.

The failures of Chartism had helped to define Marxism and left a valuable legacy to the working class movement by counterpoising the mass organization of the working class to the Blanquist notions of elitist conspiracies.

And there is another legacy: from the Chartist movement’s inception to its final demise, there was one dilemma that was discussed and debated over and over again at all the Chartist conferences and meetings everywhere. A dilemma that shaped the movement at the most basic level. It was this: should the working classes form an alliance with the middle-classes to attain its aims… or should it resort to physical force.