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.