From: Adam Rose <Adam-AT-pmel.com> Subject: M-I: The English working class, 1830 - 1848. Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 16:25:02 -0000 This is all from memory. It is not intended to be controversial. But I wanted to fill people in on what happened in the years in England. Perhaps Charlie could provide us all with a reading list ! It would include Dorothy Thompson's "The Chartists" , a book on the 1842 General Strike by someone called Jenkins, I think, Saville's 1848, at least. I have a book at home on the North Eastern Coalfields - can't remember the author. Obviously this is an interpretation of history. My memory may be at fault on this or that detail - but I believe it can be shown that my interpretation does grow out of the real facts, and is not an alien imposition upon them. E.P.Thompson leaves us in 1830 with the Owenites. Whatever we can say about Owen himself, this was a socialist trade union movement, one which was opposed to the nuclear family, and tried to organize across the different trades. I do not know the precise reasons for the eventual decline of this movement, although I assume them to be the normal ones associated with such movements - as the first wave of militancy subsides, the socialist and general nature of the movement leaves socialists on the one hand and quite weak, sectional union organization on the other. Also, in some areas like the North Eastern Coalfields, trade based organisation seemed a very militant option for working class militants, since one trade dominated the area. In 1832, parliament accepted the Reform Act. This reformed the most rotten of the rotten borough's, where the local landowner controlled the few hundred electors to enable him to sell the seat in parliament to someone who would represent his interest. But it gave the vote only to property owners - in effect, only the middle class ( not even all the middle class ). In 1838, the Chartist movement started. This was organised around "The Charter". This consisted of five points. I can't remember them all - but the important ones were : universal suffrage, payment of MP's, and annual parliaments. In the context of the time, these demands were not merely radical and democratic, but proletarian and revolutionary. I do not believe this is a controversial point - everyone on all sides at the time understood the social content of the demands. The agitation for the Charter involved very little petitioning. From the beginning, the majority of the movement subscribed to the "physical force" wing of the movement - they understood that the ruling class would not voluntarily give up its power. A minority were "moral force" Chartists, and believed that persuasion would work. In 1838, there were huge battles against the new poor law and the associated work houses. In 1839, there was an aborted rising in Wales, centered on Mythyr Tydvil, I think. In 1842 there were what the ruling class has written off as "the Plug riots". This was in fact the first General Strike ever, and the first occurrence of the sort of working class organisation that the Russians later christened "Soviet". The ruling class just about managed to stay in control, by not attacking the movement until it petered out, and judiciously galloping units of troops around the North of England. It had the characteristic features of most rank + file workers rebellions : mass pickets ( who pulled the plugs out of the boilers - hence "plug riots" ) , battles with the army ( there was no viable police force in the North ) , mass meetings etc. The workers convention in Manchester had as its main demand the implementation of the Charter ie political revolution. As the strike wave subsided, the economic demands which had given rise to the movement ( reversing the wage cuts ) came back to the fore. 1848 was the year of revolution throughout Europe. Britain was no exception. Queen Victoria was ordered to go the Isle of Wight for her own safety. Hundreds of thousands of people converged on London. The movement in some ways was more advanced than that of 1842 - it was more "national" , simply by concentrating itself on London. But it did not have the strength of the 1842 movement Earnest Jones, a Marxist at the time, understood that insurrection based on the great demonstration was premature - quite like April 1917 in Russia. The ruling class, again by judicious use of mild repression and containment, rather than all out attack, maintained control. I think it is correct to argue that the defeat of the revolutionary tide in April in London was the turning point in the European revolutions. After April in London, the bourgeoisie gained control in France, the Irish rebellion fizzled out, and the German bourgeoisie played its infamous cowardly role. "Issues" : i) Working Class Political Organisation. Not only do we have the first soviet ever in Manchester in 1842, we also have the first mass working class party, the National Democratic Association, and a paper associated with its leader Feargus O'Connor, the first "Morning Star". This was a genuinely mass organisation, carrying on the tradition of the democratic clubs. Literate people read the Morning Star to the illiterate in taverns. While there were countless other papers in circulation, the Morning Star really was the paper of the movement, reflecting its ideology and spreading news from one part of Britain to the others. It was genuinely the scaffolding of the party. When Marx says "Communists do not set a party distinct from other parties" what he meant was "we are part of the Chartists movement, not a rival to it". ii) Ireland In Dorothy Thompson's book, she argued that it was commonly understood that Ireland freedom was part and parcel of the struggle in England. Irish workers were intimately involved in all levels of the movement. The leader of the NDA was called FERGUS OCONNOR, after all. But, she goes on to argue that the reason that there was not closer cooperation between the Chartists and the Young Ireland ers was that the Yound Irelanders were too right wing - they were the radical section of the bourgeoisie and as such hated the trade unions and workers as much as the English colonists. iii) Models of insurrection I personally believe that the NDA could more accurately be described as "centrist" in a loose sort of way. While the majority were "Physical force" chartists, they were really "Moral Force is possible, physical force if necessary". I believe most of the Chartist leaders saw the Great Demonstration in 1848 this was. I also believe that the left, the committed insurrectionists in the movement, never really understood the nature of working class revolution in contrast to radical democratic types of nsurrection, even though their explicit aim was working class power. So it took another 50 years to develop the theory of the Soviet. Adam. Adam Rose SWP Manchester Britain. ---------- --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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