Origins and History of the English Workers Movement (Pt. 6)

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.