Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 07:45:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Rob Schaap on E.P. Thompson's "Making of the Working Class in England"


E.P. THOMPSON'S LUDDITES AND THE WORKING CLASS OF TODAY 
 
by Rob Schaap 
 
 
No man is prejudiced in favour of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.  He 
is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is 
not so, the prejudice will be gone. 
 
Thomas  Paine   in  Rights of Man (1792) 
 
 
An Introduction by Way of Digression 
 
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) died in a world very much changed from 
that of his birth.  As Collins (1983: 19) points out, when Paine left for 
America in 1774, technological change was rampant in town and 
countryside alike.  Paine saw in this change a need and an opportunity 
to change social and political institutions.  Humans had evinced the 
power of their reason in the invention and production of life-
transforming machines.  For Paine, it followed that humans could and 
should also be the conscious inventors and producers of the institutions 
that enabled and constrained their lives.  In Thomas Paine, the 'Age of 
Reason' had produced the dialectical voice of its own transformation.  
The 'Age of Revolution' had come. 
 
For Paine, revolution was the expression of reason in a changing 
world.  That Paine saw the critique of institutions as an unceasing 
human need and responsibility is entirely consistent with his 
optimistic assertions of the dynamism of technological innovation.  He 
recognised the profundity of the relationship between innovation, 
technique and lived life.  In Rights of Man, he put it concisely: 
 
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, 
as the ages and generations which preceded it.  The vanity and 
presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and 
insolent of all tyrannies (in Collins 1983: 27). 
 
Arguably, liberalism has progressed little since Paine.  We recognise 
the unceasing change, the seemingly autonomous transformation of 
our lives; but we do not see in liberalism the relentlessly self-critical 
spirit of Thomas Paine.  Writing in 1969, Collins explained this 
critical and revolutionary zeal, its expression in the American 
Declaration of Independence, and its manifestation in contemporary 
working-class Britain, in terms of the profound social transformation 
that marked 'the industrial revolution': 
 
In the eighteenth century, even more than in the twentieth, men 
became revolutionary from force of circumstance rather than prior 
conviction (Collins 1983: 15). 
 
I contend that this claim is one that must be put to the test.  I infer 
>from Collins one or both of two daunting propositions: either that 
people's being today does not determine their thinking (which 
undermines a basic Marxian tenet and, interestingly, Collins's own 
explanation for the revolutionary age in general and Paine in 
particular), or that our being is sufficiently different from that of early 
proletarians to render comparisons spurious (giving rise to an 
important question: ie. how?).  Worth asking, in this light, is the 
question central to this paper:  Does E.P. Thompson's The Making of 
the English Working Class (published in 1963; 1984 edition cited 
here)  have anything to teach us about the history we're living today? 
 
 
 
E.P. Thompson on the 'Army of Redressers' 
 
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have 
lightened the day's toil of any human being. 
 
John Stuart Mill, quoted by Marx in Capital (1995: 229) 
 
Here Thompson discusses the fleeting, but singularly significant, 
phenomenon that was the Luddite movement of 1811 to 1817.  In 
introducing the Luddites, wreckers of power-looms and defenders of 
the custom of production, Thompson asks 
 
(t)o explain their actions, need we look any further than into the 
immediate economic and industrial grievances? (1984: 529) 
 
and proceeds to argue that we do. 
 
He begins by questioning the primary evidence thus: 
 
* Government responded by trying to isolate all manifestations of 
disaffection, characterising malcontents as pro-Bonapartist 
insurrectionists; 
 
* People were thus forced into secretive modes of association; 
 
* This required an unprecedented use of paid and intimidated spies 
and informers, from whom came much faked evidence and desperate 
fantasy; 
 
* Therefore, primary sources are to be treated with suspicion. 
 
Here Thompson mentions the much-used archives of Francis Place (of 
whom more later), a 'constitutionalist gradualist reformer' and no 
disinterested party himself.   'Well-placed' though Place was to collect 
information, he was not one to leave London (the Luddites were active 
in the midlands and the north) and not a man to be taken into the 
confidence of Luddite sympathisers (531).   
 
 
On the Cultural Context of the Struggle  
Thompson's point is thus made, the malcontents were not in the 
business of leaving accurate information lying about.  Theirs was  a 
necessarily dynamic and particularly autonomous culture,  
 
new institutions, new attitudes, new community-patterns, were 
emerging ... to resist ... intrusion.  The new solidarity was not only a 
solidarity with; it was also a solidarity against (531). 
 
While political radicalism per se (eg middle class Jacobinism) wilted 
before the onslaught of secret agents and capital punishment, what 
Thompson calls 'the industrial tradition' remained intact.  'Working 
Class culture (was) so opaque that ... it resisted all penetration' (540).  
As one magistrate reported in January 1812, 'almost every creature of 
the lower order both in town and country are on their side'. 
 
Thompson, who returns to the role of working class culture repeatedly 
throughout the story, makes a crucial point here.  Government agents 
were looking for the movement's control centre. There was no such 
thing. 
 
Jacobinism had become indigenous in working class communities at 
exactly the same time as it had lost any national centre as well as most 
middle-class support (544). 
 
Copies of Rights of Man were swapped and discussed in secret, in the 
workshops and the mills.  When the Jacobins and the Painites were 
forced back into their communities (after Despard's execution) their 
political programme gradually became differentiated according to local 
communal concerns.  Their focus became economic and industrial 
(545).  Food shortages got people marching, argues Thompson, not 
political rhetoric (545).  And if the community was for or against 
something, there was no point of entry for the authorities.  As one 
contemporary magistrate lamented 
 
the evils ... been introduced and cherished until they have become 
intimately incorporated with the state of society in this and other 
manufacturing districts (545). 
 
_________________________________________________________
_____________ 
Discussion 
 
I shall return to the notion of community later.  For now, let us 
consider the 'ideal type society' immanent in post-industrial logic today 
as a contrast with the society so empathically constructed by 
Thompson. 
 
Michel Foucault (1977) wrote of Jeremy Bentham's notion of the 
'panopticon' as a metaphor for modern life.  Security cameras in the 
streets, at work and at the football.  'Dataveillance' technologies 
abound and encryption is illegal.  If you have to use a 'smart card' to 
buy a copy of Rights of Man or Capital, somebody somewhere knows 
about it.  If you join a political party, somebody somewhere knows 
about it.  Foucault's whole idea here is that we know this and 
consequently monitor and inhibit our own actions.  Furthermore, in 
the panoptican, where the official can see you but you can't see 
him/her, you are alone.  You have your own cell.  You work there and 
you recuperate there.  The Count of Monte Christo communicated with 
fellow prisoners by banging on the wall with a brick.  But the official 
wasn't watching him ... 
 
Foucault claims for his amorphous and politically problematic 
definition of 'power' a logically concomitant possibility for resistance 
(1979).  His invocation of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish  
(1977) is not convincing, unsurprisingly, on just how one so 
imprisoned might resist.  Swapping revolutionary literature at work 
requires that people work together, and in substantial numbers.  
Remember too, that employers everywhere are testing governments by 
refusing union officials entry to work places.  Secret meetings can be 
called only when you know people enough to trust them.  If we don't 
meet them at work, we are ever less likely to meet them anywhere else.  
Daily recreation/recuperation occurs ever more in isolated, drained 
passivity before the television set/multimedia terminal (so does a good 
deal of shopping, sex and 'socialising').   
 
If Thompson's implication that material desperation is a significant 
condition for revolt is accepted, those of us in the west/north have 
some time to wait before a culturally entrenched revolutionary spirit 
can be expected.  Let us hope a culture remains for such a 
manifestation ... 
 
On the End of 'Paternalism' and the Genesis of Luddism 
With Pitt's Combination Acts (which banned trades unions in 1799) 
came, according to one informer 
 
a general spirit of disaffection ... in every class of artisan and 
mechanics by the late Bill ... which I am afraid has already caused 
more to combine than would have thought of such a measure but for 
the Bills (546). 
 
As a consequence, argues Thompson, any distinction between political 
disaffection and industrial organisation was untenable for the next 40 
years.  For Thompson, anyone drawn into unionism or a 'friendly 
society'  
 
will have quickly been driven toward an extreme Radicalism by the 
very conditions of their conflict with employers, magistrates, and an 
indifferent or punitive House of Commons (548) 
 
In short, Thompson sees the Combination Acts, the product of 
parliamentary 'anti-Jacobins and landowners' as an historical turning 
point.  No longer the trademark of the 'paternalistic tradition', whereby 
'compensatory protective clauses' would have been proffered (551).  A 
salient example of this tradition is the banning, by Edward VI, of the 
gig mill, which threatened the status and autonomy of skilled textile 
workers (572).  Furthermore, all legislation protective of unionists was 
simultaneously repealed (565).  The Acts could be applied to almost 
any combination, but it was upon combinations of outworkers and 
factory labour that the full weight of the new laws was most stringently 
exerted.  As Thompson says 
 
The larger the industrial unit or the greater the specialisation of skills 
involved, the sharper were the animosities between capital and labour, 
and the greater the likelihood of a common understanding among 
employers (552). 
 
and 
   
in the northern and Midlands manufacturing districts, in conditions 
where combination must either be widespread and militant or else 
ineffectual ... laws against combination (were) frequently in use, as an 
auxiliary to wage-cutting or victimisation (555). 
 
Secret societies (eg. Henson's framework knitters and the Society of 
Ironfounders) sprang up wherever industrial capitalism had taken 
hold.  The mood was revolutionary, and secrecy 'almost a mode of 
consciousness' (561).  What could no longer be gained through legal 
means would now be pursued through direct action.  In this milieu 
formed the Luddites.  
 
Luddism was confined to the high-status croppers in Yorkshire, and 
the Lancashire cotton weavers and Midlands framework-knitters, 
whose status was already in decline (570).  With the coming of the 
shearing frame, the cropper's skill, whence came his status and his 
earning power, was on the verge of irrelevance.  Since the gig-mill 
statute of Edward VI, the cropper had taken as his constitutional right 
protection against threats posed by technology (575).  His approach to 
technological innovation had been one of negotiation and gradualism, 
and in this he had been 'constitutionally' relevant, if not consistently 
satisfied.  The weaver had long assumed the same posture on 
controlling the influx of unskilled labour.   
 
The framework knitter, however, had come to rely on the merchant-
hosier for his equipment.  The stocking frame was too expensive to 
buy, and hosiers were gaining control over the supply, by rental, of 
these machines.  The relationship was thus weighted, with hosiers able 
to cut prices for outwork while raising rentals for stocking frames.  By 
the 1790s, framework knitters were becoming uncomfortably aware of 
a loss of autonomy.  New modes of alienation were ascending with a 
wholly new mode of production.  With the passing of their freedom of 
association, and concomitantly empowered employers/contractors 
refusing to negotiate, these artisans began nurturing a secretive hatred.   
Thompson proffers evidence to show that, while new technology was 
the focus of concern,  
 
general revulsion against the great employers who were breaking 
down working customs and disrupting a settled way of life 
 
provided its context (577).  In 1809 all 'paternalistic' legislation, from 
the gig-mill edict to limitations on unskilled labour, was repealed.  
Paternalism and the attendant 'ancient rights' of the worker were done, 
vanquished by the logic of the factory system and the political 
economic might of the proprietors.  To the activist, the new targets 
were initially the machinery that threatened the old exchange values 
and, after a while, the person of the worst opportunists.  By and large, 
'good' proprietors were initially left alone.  If being an opportunist 
could be shown to be unprofitable and dangerous, the rest of the 
nascent bourgeoisie would not be forced to match their fellows in 
impoverishing their workforce.   
 
_________________________________________________________
_____________ 
Discussion 
 
The post-industrial capitalist is as powerful today as the industrial 
capitalist was in 1809 (of which, much more later) and 'paternalistic' 
legislation and regulation is in retreat everywhere.  Industrial workers 
are losing status in the west, and nearly all workers are fully aware 
their security, their rights, their infrastructure, their wages, their 
working conditions, their social safety net, and the prospects of their 
children are in rapid decline.  Their claims to 'constitutional' or 
'ancient' rights are tempered by a mass-media-cultivated mystification 
of history.  Often, when such claims do surface, the rights they assert 
are socially divisive.  Implicitly or explicitly, there are not enough 
rights to go around, and the situation can only be corrected by the 
withdrawal of those rights from the usual scapegoats (women, 
foreigners etc) or some new ones (eg. public sector workers and 
institutions). 
 
The post-industrial corporate capitalist depends on more labour than 
ever.  There are still outworkers (sub contractors with modem 
computers) and employees (for whom there is ever less justification for 
synchronised and communal labour) - so there are fewer large factory 
floors in the west.  Capital exploits its deregulated mobility by 
avoiding tax and extant regulation in the west/north and extracting its 
industrial surplus in the east/south.  The large factory floors are there. 
 
The move, over recent years, to integrated corporatist unions (as in 
Australia) has distanced the aggregate of particular interests from 
those of senior union officials.  People are abandoning unions just 
when objective collective interests are most starkly apparent.  Where 
industrial unions of substantial enterprises do strike, police are 
routinely used to attack the pickets (the defeated UK miners' strike and 
Wapping print strike come to mind). 
 
Corporate Capitalists (those listed in the Fortune 1000) are relatively 
few, and their assault on taxation, regulation and public enterprise 
reflects a common interest which is manifest in a common strategy.  
Typically it is by way of party donation, peak lobby groups and 
transnational public relations firms - the Compton's Advertising 
international campaign for free enterprise in the mid- to late- 1970s 
comes to mind (see Carey 1987: 156-179). 
 
On the transforming role of technology, then and now, I offer these 
words, from Joseph Schumpeter (1954: 680-681): 
 
Long before the industrial revolution, people realized the obvious fact 
that machinery often displaces labour ... (G)overnments and writers 
worried about this and labour groups and citizens' guilds fought 
against machinery, the more so because immediate effects of this kind 
are concentrated in time and place, whereas the long-run effects on 
general wealth are much less visible in the short run and much less 
easy to trace to the machine. 
 
And 
 
(economists have had a preoccupation with) fighting the public's 
propensity to attend too exclusively to temporary phenomena (yet 
economists) attended too little to temporary phenomena themselves. 
 
Many contrast, but some significant comparisons ... 
 
 
On the Importance of Community 
That community support had much to do with occasions of Luddite 
action is repeatedly asserted: 
 
It is significant that Luddism broke out in those industries where the 
large employers had alienated public support by taking advantage of 
this period of economic extremity to introduce new practices or 
machine; whereas ... where the whole industry was partially paralysed, 
and the employers themselves had initiated demonstrations and 
petitions ... working-class discontent remained largely within 
'constitutional' forms (617). 
 
And 
 
the strength of the Luddites was in small industrial villages where 
every man was known to his neighbours and bound in the same close 
kinship-network.  The sanction of an oath would have been terrible 
enough to a superstitious-minded people; but the sanction of the 
community was even stronger ... to act the part of informer was a 
breach of the moral economy, entailing a sentence of outlawry from 
the community (637). 
 
And 
 
We have to imagine the solidarity of the community, the extreme 
isolation of the authorities.  It is this which elevated Cartwright and 
Robertson to the stature of heroes (638). 
 
Even when the Luddites in Yorkshire murdered a local mill owner 
called Horsfall, not a word got out for months.  A local reverend 
opined that none would dare turn in the killers (624).  It was at this 
point however, that passive sympathisers were lost to the cause, and 
the Luddites were moved to outright robbery for their resources. 
 
In his explanation for the Luddite phenomenon, Thompson allows for 
the significance of war, bad harvests and famine,  
 
People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives 
upsetting a barrow of potatoes.  In these conditions, it might appear 
more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if 
they had; and it would seem highly unlikely that such conditions 
would nourish a crop of gradualist constitutional reformers (647). 
 
but he goes further than that.  He is not to be accused of 'economism'. 
 
Luddism must be seen as arising at the crisis-point in the abrogation of 
paternalist legislation, and in the imposition of the political economy 
of laissez faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the 
working people. there was within (paternalist legislation) the shadowy 
image of a benevolent corporate state ... in which the journeyman were 
a recognised 'estate' ... The function of industry was to provide a 
livelihood for those employed in it; and practices or inventions 
evidently destructive of the good of 'the Trade' were reprehensible 
(594). 
 
Until 1809, the artisan could at least believe in his status and rights as 
the formally normative attitudes of the nation state.  Now they were 
not even that.  In 1814, the notion of a minimum wage disappeared 
>from the law.  Taken from the artisan had been his status and his 
rights, hence the 'army of redressers'. 
 
The gap in status between a 'servant', a hired wage-labourer subject to 
the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 
'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood 
rather than allow themselves top be pushed from one side to the other.  
And in the value system of the community, those who resisted 
degradation were in the right (599). 
 
A 'general theory of moral economy' had been subverted.  The 
Luddites were not blind technophobes. 
 
What was at issue was the 'freedom' of the capitalist to destroy the 
customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-
system, or by unrestricted competition, beating down wages, 
undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship 
(600). 
 
Unrestrained industrial capitalism, upon the occasion of its debut, had 
prompted highly organised violence from working communities so 
moved in the defence of their traditions.  Indeed, '(s)heer 
insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English 
history' (624)..  That said, Thompson sees as 'disregard(ful) (of) the 
whole weight of popular tradition' any claim that Luddism was  
 
a purely industrial movement, totally unconnected with politics, at a 
time when disaffected Irish were coming in hundreds into Lancashire, 
and when people celebrated the assassination of the Prime Minister 
(Perceval) with triumph in the streets' (631). 
 
And 
 
the connection  between framebreaking and political sedition was 
assumed on every side, since not only the framework-knitters but the 
'lower orders' generally shared complicity with the Luddites in their 
contest with hosiers, military, and magistrates (642). 
 
So, for Thompson, Luddism began in 1811 as 'a form of direct 'trade 
union' enforcement, endorsed by the working community'.  When it 
came 'it did not move into any vacuum'.  Already there were artisan 
unions, secret committees, and some Painite Radicals, with, in 
Lancashire at least, 'an ebullient Irish fringe' (651).  The Combination 
Acts moved the Luddites 'in an insurrectionary direction'.  'Small 
groups of democrats or Painites saw in Luddism a more general 
revolutionary opportunity' (Thompson presents contemporary letters to 
support this).  After a setback (the failed Rawfolds attack), the Luddite 
organisation 'shifted its emphasis to general revolutionary 
preparations' (643). 
 
(I)t is certain that Luddism was a movement without national 
leadership or centre, and with scarcely any national objectives beyond 
common distress and the desire to overturn the Government (655). 
 
For Thompson, the Luddites could be seen as a 'peasants' revolt' of 
industrial workers, identities forged in preindustrial capitalism at war 
with the industrial capitalism that threatened to dissolve those 
identities.  Pockets of 'Tom Painers' tried to harness their potential for 
wider purposes, but the Luddites were simply not up to it.  Their 
strengths lay in their communities and in their small well-organised 
battalions - not the stuff with which to lay siege to the capital! 
 
But they were more than this in their significance.  They manifested 'a 
working-class culture of greater independence and complexity than 
any known to the eighteenth century' (658).  They also helped to make 
clear the tendency of the state to collude with the new bourgeoisie: 
Politicians, the magistracy, the military and the new bourgeoisie had 
fallen into a mutual dependency before the challenge of an uncentred, 
culturally indigenous movement.   As it transpired, the state had an 
option open to it which capital, in isolation, did not have.  It could 
repeal the Combination Acts and revert to the paternalistic model, 
whereby the state assured the worker the constitutional right to a 
livelihood, however meagre. 
 
Place was a significant advocate for the 1824 repeal of the 
Combination Acts (Thompson makes a case for the frameworkers' 
Henson as prime mover).  When the Acts were finally repealed in 
1824, the country was promptly beset by strikes.  Employers convinced 
government to appoint a committee with an eye to renewed punitive 
measures, but in this they failed (564).  Place played a role here which 
may well be perceived as positive by left-leaning observers.  For his 
part, Thompson makes much of Place's motivation, which, he 
contends, was that of a bourgeois pragmatist.  Place had been all for 
repealing laws inhibiting the 'freedom' of capital in 1812, at the behest 
of the 'committee of the master-manufacturers', chaired by a leading 
engineering shop proprietor (565).  It was also Place who organised 
the sabotage of the Henson-authored bill.  To Thompson, Place was 
the classical economic rationalist.  It was the Combination Act that 
was the root of the trouble for Place, not any fancied material 
grievances (566).  'Men have been kept together for long periods only 
by the oppression of the laws' he wrote in 1825 (567).  As Thompson 
sums up: 'Place was a doctrinaire, who wished the Acts repealed 
because they offended against good political economy' (568). 
_________________________________________________________
___ 
Discussion 
 
There are few Cartwrights and Robertsons in the west today.  For 
reasons already discussed, every 'man' is not known to 'his' neighbours 
in much of the west/north today.  Some may consider the bleak picture 
I have been painting (some respite later) to be defeatist and informed 
by too romantic a view of the past - but that is what the seminar is for 
and that is how Thompson presents his object. 
 
Illegal collective activity requires a degree of trust less likely to be 
engendered today than in the villages of the old north.  Similarly 
'community sanction' is both less likely per se and less likely to 
intimidate.  Defining the 'moral economy' is today demonstrably a 
daunting challenge to dozens of much-published academics (those not 
seduced by the Thatcherite spectre of a 'society' of atomised utility 
maximisers, anyway - for here there is no moral dimension at all), yet 
Thompson invokes one necessarily accessible to all.   
 
The left urgently needs articulate public intellectuals and orators.   In 
my judgement,  Tony Benn in the UK and Jesse Jackson in the US  
moved thousands with the admirable, and crucial, ability to convey 
substance with style.  The direction these politicians later took is not at 
issue here; that no such voices find the public ear today is.  Just as 
Painism proved accessible to the textile workers of 1796, so can 
Marxism in 1996.  Then, of course, Paine spoke from the worker's 
own time.  And here lies the challenge for the left today.  If the left 
allows the proletariat to be atomised before it moves, an important 
Marxian tenet is let go.  In Marx's time, capitalism was physically 
uniting the proletariat, in ours, it is physically fragmenting it.   
 
Militating against this fragmentation, however, is the 
proletariatisation of women under post-industrial capitalism.  
Arguably, most women were not even proletarians under industrial 
capitalism.  On this reading, the proletariat has not yet become the 
revolutionary class because it has not yet become objectively united 
under capitalism.  But under post-industrial capitalism, many more 
women are sought as paid workers.  Whatever the arguments for a 
division of labour according to sex, they have waned with the decline 
of the status of masculinity in the post-industrial labour 'market', 
where intellectual and communicative talents are rapidly replacing the 
bicep as the worker's salient utility.  As the structural roles and 
grievances of men and women begin to approximate each other (as did 
those of the weavers and 'unskilled labour' at the end of the 19th 
century), a revolutionary class dynamic becomes more thinkable. 
 
***** 
 
Under the new mode of production of 1800, society was being divided 
along new lines.  Formerly disparate groupings were united by the 
realignment of interests that inevitably arose.  The industrial issues, 
initially represented as political by an opportunistic and 
uncomprehending government, had become political in fact.  The 
artisans were falling into the same niche as the unskilled labour from 
which they had so energetically differentiated themselves, and the 
political radicals were quick to integrate with a ready-made social 
disaffection.  As the parliament had aligned with the proprietors, so 
had the artisans aligned with unskilled labour, Jacobins and Painites. 
 
Crucial here is the question of alignment between the state and the 
factory proprietors.  That the Luddite challenge contributed to its 
practical necessity is clear at the level of the magistrate and the local 
mill owner.  But that Luddism alone should automatically manifest 
such an alignment at the level of Westminster is moot.  I contend that 
the bourgeoisie could not have been so politically powerful in the 
aristocratic milieu but for the significance of their unprecedented 
capacity to create wealth.   
 
By the time of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, it was clear 
that Britain's international advantage, its war effort, and its empire 
rested on the dynamic wealth of the newly industrialised system and 
the good graces of the period's nouveau riche.   The threat of a general 
European revolution (Hobsbawm 1995: 109), a nightmare that kept 
both aristocrat and bourgeois awake at nights, was very real at the 
time.  This theme is developed throughout Hobsbawm's The Age of 
Revolution..  The factory system, with its continually operational 
machinery and its optimal extraction of labour surplus, was becoming 
central both to Britain's strategic wellbeing and the life expectancy of 
the aristocracy.  Certainly, evident by the time of the 1832 Reform Act 
was 
 
the definitive defeat of the aristocrat by bourgeois power in Western 
Europe.  The ruling class of the next fifty years was to be the 'grande 
bourgeoisie' of bankers (and) big industrialists (Hobsbawm 1995: 111). 
 
By the turn of the century, then, industrial capital had developed to a 
point where it was politically dominant.  The state existed by the good 
grace of capital, and knew it.  That good grace was ensured because 
(a) the state had precisely what capital did not: the authority of 
tradition, a ready military and an apparent distance from private 
interests; and (b) the industrial capitalist of 1800 was himself 
generally British, and Britain and her lucrative empire were at war.  
Whatever the social tensions wrought by expanding industrial 
capitalism, the state ultimately had the wherewithal to put to rest. 
 
>From our point of view in 1996, both contrasts and comparisons come 
readily to mind.  Certainly in 'the west' (itself a category constructed 
by the industrial revolution), the new mode of capitalism has the state 
at its mercy.  As an institution or an organisation, the state machine 
has no interest in privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts.  No 
organisation lightly gives away its power, its status and its material 
resources - the currency of its very reproduction.  No, the state is 
paying its rent to its landlord, capital.  Its life diminishes daily because 
this rent amounts, over time, to its own dissolution.  But as any Labor 
voter in the west knows, one rushes to the polling booth with a will, 
just to ensure a slower death. 
 
And capital still needs the state.  But the individual capitalist is in a 
permanent state of competition.  S/he must extract all from the state 
just as s/he must extract all from labour.  I submit that, while the 
authority of tradition and the capacity for formal coercion still reside 
with the state, its capacity to put to rest a disaffected populace has been 
decimated by the process outlined above.  Galbraith (1992) and 
Luttwak (1996) are two bourgeois economists who recognise the 
historical fact that capitalism forestalls crises by reverting to 
'welfarism' in bad times.  'Welfarism' depends on revenues the state 
can no longer collect, an industrial presence it no longer has, and an 
industrial policy it can no longer enforce.  In short, capital is more 
powerful than ever, but corporate capitalists, taken as necessarily 
competitive individuals, can not help but continue destroying the locus 
of their legitimacy and the source of occasionally necessary 
prophylactic (or palliative) moderation.  The theoretical challenge for 
economic rationalists is a daunting one: What if the aggregate of 
rational decisions is not rational? 
 
Anyway, for Place, the solution to unrest was simple: Get rid of the 
Combination Acts and revert to the paternalism model.  As a Francis 
Place for our own time, let us anoint Edward Luttwak (1996: 31-38), 
of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: 
 
we are living in an era of what I call turbo-charged capitalism - 
namely, accelerated change - and this era has been brought about by 
the retreat of the state, by deregulation. 
 
I have recently been reading through the telecommunications bill that 
President Clinton signed in February, which essentially deregulates the 
telephone industry ... Until the telecommunications bill, Bell Atlantic 
was what is known as a regulated monopoly.  It had no competition.  It 
was not very efficient, but it was a good corporate citizen.  It provided 
stable employment ... This administration, by deregulating the 
telecommunications industry, has chosen to force Bell Atlantic into 
competition ... on the one hand (Mr Reich, US Secretary of labour is) 
criticising CEOs for their irresponsibility.  And on the other hand, 
you're telling Bell Atlantic: Stop being a good corporate citizen.  Stop 
being a reliable employer.  Become lean and mean. 
 
And, to sum up: 
 
when a country is as rich in GNP and as poor in social tranquility as 
the United States, it makes no sense to purchase more GNP, through 
deregulation and increased efficiency, at the expense of tranquility ... 
A society that is rich in GNP and poor in tranquility ought to be 
thinking of ways to impede change, to secure and stabilize, not ways to 
increase change for the sake of efficiency.  Turbo-charged capitalism 
will undoubtedly increase the GNP, and it will secure higher levels of 
employment.  But it will also destabilise society.  More structural 
change means that anybody who has a job is penalized whereas 
anybody who has a highly mobile set of skills is rewarded. 
 
Poor Mr Luttwak can buy a Rolls Royce but he can no longer find 
anywhere he dare park it.  That's pretty much the problem the mill 
owner had in 1812.  Poor Mr Luttwak does not live in a state with the 
resources to solve the problem.  The mill owner did. 
 
Concluding Notes 
 
Collins's assertion, that 'men became revolutionary from force of 
circumstance' is consistent with the materialist tenet that people's 
thinking is to be explained by people's being.  It is also consistent with 
much of Thompson's account.  But central to Thompson's account are: 
 
* a widely shared apprehension of history and concomitant rights; 
 
* a widely shared theory of moral economy; 
 
* close and impenetrable communities, within which secrets, oaths 
and knowledges were kept and expected to be kept; 
 
* a state with the capacity to mediate the excesses of a new and 
powerful capitalist mode of production. 
 
If Collins is also right when he claims that the period up to the 
Luddite uprisings was more revolutionary than our own, there might 
be some clues here as to why.   
 
 
 
 
'No man is an island': John Donne 
'Yes he is': Thatcher, Reagan, Douglas, Ciller, Howard et al. 
 
References 
 
Carey, Alex (1987).  'The Ideological Management Industry' in 
Wheelwright and Buckley (eds) Communications in the Media in 
Australia: 156-179. 
 
Collins, Henry (ed.) (1983).  Paine: Rights of Man. 
Harmondsworth: Penguin. 
 
Foucault, Michel (1977).  Discipline and Punish: the birth of the 
prison (translated by Sheridan).  London: Allen Lane. 
 
Foucault, Michel (1979).  Michel Foucault: power, truth, strategy 
(edited Morris and Patton).  Sydney: Feral Publishing. 
 
Galbraith, J.K. (1992).  The Culture of Contentment.  London: 
Penguin. 
 
Hobsbawm, Eric (1995).  The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848.   
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 
 
Luttwak, Edward (1996).  'America Still Works' in The National 
Times, August: 31-38. 
 
Marx, Karl (1995).  Capital  (D. McLellan ed.).  Oxford: OUP. 
 
Schumpeter, Joseph (1954).  History of Economic Analysis   
New York: OUP  
 
Thompson, E.P. (1984).  The Making of the English Working Class. 
Harmondsworth: Penguin 
 
 
 




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