From: Adam Rose <Adam-AT-pmel.com>
Subject: M-I: RE: The London hanged  - part II
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 14:50:32 -0000



Part II : The Pedagogy of the Gallows under
Mercantilism, 1720 - 1750

Chapter 4.
The Picaresque Proleteriat During the Robinocracy

Chapter 5
Socking, the Hogshead and Exise

Chapter 6
"Going Upon the Accompt": Highway Robbery under the
reigns of the Georges.

"The [Tory[ opposition coined a new word, "Robinocracy,
to characterize the regime of Robert Walpole. "The
Robinarch "rules by Money, the root of all evils, and
founds his iniquitous dominion in the corruption of
the people" " ".

"Both [ the two books under discussion] accept the Labour
Theory of value that had been developed in the previous
period 1690 - 1720, and both show that as money comes
to answer more things the labouring classes increases in
size. Indeed, it does so as a proleteriat [ ie not as plebian
small producers - ADR ] becaause its labour is increasingly
abstracted in the money form.

In Chapter 4, the concept of the picaresque proleterian
is introduced. [ I won't explain the literary origins of the
term picaresque - but again, Linebaugh uses the poetic
conceipt to show how his analysis grows out the real,
actual, social history ].

"The survival of such a person was an accomplishment".

Linebaugh gives example after example from the people
executed at Tyburn to explain what he means by picaresque.
The individual proleterians were flung from pillar to post, 
following the circulation of commodities around the world.
Individuals become apprentices, break its terms, get 
transported, become sailors, mutiny, fall in with a band
of "Maroons" ie runaway slaves, get to America, come
back again to London as sailors, and end their lives on
the gallows. The continuously mobile, flunctuating, multi
national and multi racial nature of the world proleteriat
is brought home to us - Irish, Black, English, Hugenot,
in London, Australia, Africa, and America. To talk of
the English working class in this period is very inaccurate :
more accurate is "the international proleteriat centered
on London". Physical survival "was an accomplishment" -
life was precarious however law abiding you might try
to be. Unfortunately I cannot prove the case by the
enumeration of typical examples, as Linebaugh does.

"What does proleterian mean ? The word appeared in English
in the 1660's shortly after the defeat of those very people who,
during the English Revolution, had opposed the greed and
ambition of the rising Moloch by their own antinomian 
theologies against the development of private property :
"Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power
of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy
democracy", Thomas Rainborough had said. [ Rosa
Luxembourg the same 250 years later : "Socialism or
Barbarism" - ADR ]. A word which at the end of the C19
had attained all the nobility of a class that would bring forth
the old society from the womb of the old, actually had its
origins in the counter revolution of a class that went to
Roman History to find a term adeqaute to express its
contempt ( and fear ) of those "lawless" or "loose and
disorderly" persons whom it had just vanquished. The
recourse to Classical history is significant because, in
this case, it suggests both a military confidence of a 
new imperial power, and an understanding that the basis
of this power depends, ultimately, on having ever new 
Labour to command . . . the appearance of "proleterian"
in the English vocabulary corresponds to the simultaneous
discovery of "the labour theory of value".

"The picaresque as a prose narrative with its episodic 
character, its individualist attention to the protagonist,
its structural resolution by accident, fate or fortune, was
ill-suited to showing the collective power of the proleterian.
. . . Still, it remains a valuable and symptomatic source of
evidence. The contradiction between the individualism of
picaresque PRESENTATION and the collectivism of the
proletarian EXPERIENCE is nowwhere more evident than
in the life of the sailor".

While this understanding of the relationship between 
individual and collective history grows out of the C18.
I think the methodology shows how to move from the
particular to the general and back again in our C20
society as well. From Engels' picture of like in the 1840's,
or the present day mobillity of Labour for instance within
and across the borders of the US, we can see the same
"freedom" of the proleteriat. Free from any connection
with the means of production, we get blown about in the
gusts of capital blowing from one place to another. But
the other side to this is that as a proleteriat, despite the
things that divide us, we have a common proleterian 
experience which cuts across divides of language and
race. This methodology also blows the pomo - individualist
approach to individual identity out of the water - our 
individual histories occur within and are part of a shared
experience.

Adam.

[ Chapers 5 + 6 will have to wait for the moment ].

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
Britain.




































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