iskrabronstein
13th May 2010, 04:52
From the Factory Floor to the Barricades
The eruption of France into full-blown social revolution in 1789 sent shockwaves throughout Europe, but the shock was felt most keenly in France’s cross-Channel neighbor. The next decade saw a harsh crackdown, led by Pitt the Younger, on the nascent stirrings of British labor organization – radicals of all stripes were detained and tried, sometimes on flimsy charges; the aristocracy of England sensed the shadow of the guillotine on their own necks and lashed out in blind, animal fear. This bout of political repression lasted for the duration of the desperate war to the death that Britain waged against Napoleon, and served to focus the energies of labor reformers – and the movement as a whole – on the more immediate goals of economic reform. E. P. Thompson describes the effect of the crackdown on populist forces in England:
Popular radicalism was not extinguished when the corresponding societies were broken up, Habeas Corpus suspended, and all “Jacobin” manifestations outlawed. It simply lost coherence. For years it was made inarticulate by censorship and intimidation. It lost its press, it lost its organized expression, it lost its own sense of direction. (Thompson, 1963)
Yet the flame of popular radicalism could not be so easily and eternally stamped out, and when the war against foreign foes was over, a new domestic war began – between the social interests struggling for economic reform, and the entrenched power interests that resisted it.
The initial struggle began in earnest after the passage of the Reform Act of 1832, which instituted sweeping electoral and political reforms that consolidated the power of the House of Commons and growing middle class, while still excluding much of the petit-bourgeoisie and working class that had aided in the push for reform. This betrayal sparked the Chartist movement, that called for universal suffrage and other reforms that would allow the working class more representation in government and social relations. Far from an organized party, the Chartists were an amalgamation of various labor organizations and social reformers of all political leanings, centered only around a modest declaration of limited political goals common to all. The inherent disorganization in such a disparate movement proved to be fatal to its political future. After multiple petitions to Parliament were rejected outright, the Chartists set up a short-lived opposition assembly – yet the lack of direct, organized political support left the body adrift, unable to constitute itself as a governing institution rather than simply a symbol of revolt. The workers’ parliament dissolved itself for lack of support in 1848 – in the year of European revolution, England was the bastion of the old order. Yet a young German had watched the struggle of the Chartists firsthand – and for Karl Marx, the lessons learned from the failures of the English proletariat would provide the basis for his own program of labor organization and working class revolution.
The Chartists were not the first, or even the most radical, of the populist movements that pushed for reform in early industrial Britain. The ancestors of the Chartist organized working class lay not in the development of a class-conscious proletariat through the economic necessity of industrial capitalism, but rather in the traditional peasant communities and utopian socialist movements that had preceded it. The development of light industry and small factories in Britain facilitated the growth of working-class communities, and placed them in close proximity to the peasantry – the initial spurts of labor organization were concentrated in skilled artisans and craftsmen, primarily textile workers and tradesmen. This class differentiation within the labor movement restricted the organizations to local aims and relatively apolitical platforms. Additionally, the political ideas within the populist wing of British politics varied greatly, ranging from anti-industrial direct action, as exemplified by the Luddites, to pro-capitalist reformism. As Craig Calhoun explains:
A great deal of the time, the radical politics of this period emphasized local rather than national issues or authorities. The democracy of the politics was, correspondingly, far more a matter of internal structure than external aim… The populists hoped that their movement would directly establish (or reestablish) the good social order by expanding to include all, or virtually all, of the population… It pushed toward an ideological “lowest common denominator” in order to avoid sectarian disputes. Even so, consensus was unlikely outside of close-knit communities where social pressure could be brought on dissident holdouts, and common circumstances and frequent social intercourse helped to promote agreement. (Calhoun, 1982)
In this early developmental stage of capitalism, the industrial proletariat was not a fully homogeneous class, as the classical Marxist interpretation would term it – it contained within the greater working class a large degree of social and economic heterogeneity. This difference in material conditions was expressed within the movement as differences in policy, and an inability to organize the entirety of the working class. In Britain, as in later efforts at labor organization, the first organizations were founded in the higher economic strata of the working class, representative of artisans and their journeyman workers. Many labor organizations began as attempts to protect the wages and benefits of skilled laborers from competition with workers willing to produce more for less. This was representative of the relative underdevelopment of the industrial proletariat; at this point in the history of the working class and of capitalism as a socioeconomic system, industry was neither intensive or advanced enough to concentrate the large numbers of workers needed to form a class-conscious revolutionary proletariat. This substantially predetermined the political program and revolutionary potential of the Chartist movement – and parallel effects were felt throughout the European revolutions of 1848, as revolutionary movements struggled to consolidate themselves and establish political platforms without compromising the various class interests that comprised them.
Yet this failure cannot be taken as a complete repudiation of the tactics of the early labor organizations and radical political movements in Britain and Europe at large. The foundations of modern capitalism had been laid, and progress had been made in the system’s construction – but the formation of class composition within the capitalist sytem was as yet undetermined and heterogeneous. The working class was simply not ready for a genuine revolution. Calhoun explains the difficulties facing the Chartist movement as such:
A political movement or trades organization which attempted to base itself exclusively on class loyalties which did not yet exist was doomed to failure or irrelevance. Conversely, the capitalist economic system had wrought widespread and deep interdependencies which were much more sensitive than such earlier market relations as had linked regions. This meant that any movement or organization which based itself exclusively on local bonds could not confront the deepest and most important of its enemies… Communities – often composed of workers – struggled against external threats to their existence or way of life. Class could overlap with this foundation but not escape it. (Calhoun)
Thus the programs of class solidarity and organization that would characterize Marxist political platforms for the next 150 years would seem to be inapplicable in this particular instance. Yet this too is part of the lesson of the failure of the Chartist movement – that the pre-existing economic base of a society, and the secondary development of class structures within that society, are what precondition the success or failure of any political uprising. The dispute over the relative importance of this principle would split Marxism in twain in the years to come, as Marx’s heirs fought to decide the tactical outlook of a revolutionary party in a society where the economic conditions of capitalism were developmental but the capitalist state too weak to advance them – and so split Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin and Martov, Social Democracy and Communism. The Mensheviks, adopting the orthodox Marxist position, argued that the role of a socialist party ought to be that of a loyal opposition within the bourgeois state, ameliorating the conditions of the workers throughout the development of capitalism until the proletariat was able to take power in a relatively peaceful revolution. The Bolsheviks, adopting the policy of Leon Trotsky in fact if not in name, argued that in such conditions a socialist party must necessarily take power in order to undertake industrial development under socialist management. This strategic dispute was the inheritance of early labor movements like Chartism, where organizers and workers were desirous only of reform, but were pushed by the material conditions of economic infrastructure and class antagonism toward violent confrontation – for which they were woefully unprepared.
As a consequence of the territorial dispersion of the early industrial proletariat, the development of socialist thought and labor organization in England closely mirrored similar developments in France. The majority of pre-Chartist labor movements were centered on the idea of communalism - the organization of ideal factory towns, self-sufficient and collectively governed, that would allow the benefits of modern economic productivity while retaining the traditional and community structures of English life. Prominent among this strain of utopian socialism in Britain were the followers of Robert Owen, who advocated communalist ideas similar to Proudhon, focusing on the strategy of developing flagship towns to prove the viability and superiority of socialist communities to capitalist development. These early attempts were sometimes relatively long lived, but not commercially competitive or organized enough on a national, political level to force substantial reform in labor policy. Their failure, and the mirrored failure of their Proudhonist cousins in France, was not ignored by other nascent socialist tendencies - future socialist movements would stress the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois state wholesale, arguing against the idea of socialism somehow outcompeting the superior resources and infrastructure of capitalist opponents.
Marx attacks the Owenite tactics at the Bolton collective, and Proudhon’s defense of such, in the Poverty of Philosophy. He argues that the Owenite practice of collectivizing industry, and then, because of the necessity of competition in a capitalist market, paying market level wages or lower did nothing to advance the cause of the organized working class. Moreover, many Owenites and capitalists alike were criticizing rank and file agitation for higher wages across the board, saying that any spike in wages would be simply evened out and eventually surpassed by an increased rate of inflation. Marx criticized these views sharply, arguing:
And we, as socialists, tell you that, apart from the money question, you will continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics?
The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals. The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.
In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination has not yet ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry. It has now reached such a stage, that the degree to which combination has developed in any country clearly marks the rank it occupies in the hierarchy of the world market… In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. (Marx, 1847)
Marx is essentially advancing the argument that any advance of workers’ power cannot be regarded simply, as the Owenites and Proudhonists did, as an economic tactic to win material economic gains. The development of class consciousness amongst the working class through association and combination, and their consequent agitation for increased wages and benefits cannot be seen by the bourgeoisie as anything other than a political challenge. This dual confrontation is the fundamental flaw in the collectivization strategies of Proudhon and Owen – and theory was borne out in fact, as many of the collectivized factories and farms faced embargoes of material by large concerns acting in concert with former owners of the properties. Marx saw clearly that the development of workers’ power, however peacefully it proceeded, would necessarily be seen by the ruling class as an attack on the very economic foundations of society – the beginning of a class war. The fury and terror of the French Revolution was not yet forgotten on England’s shores. A year after the publishing of the Poverty of Philosophy, in the great year of unsuccessful revolution - 1848, the Owenites would be too disorganized and too few to help their Chartist brethren, who marched off to fight and die on the barricades. Yet the delay caused by utopian socialist tactics proved fatal to the cause of the working class in England – having spent their time playing with model socialist villages where all were free to starve, rather than building sustainable political parties and representation in the labor organizations. The revolution marched to war without organized leadership. The movement was forced to constitute itself as a revolutionary force without an organization to take power or a program to administer government – and this lack of direction, a crucial failure of policy, was the root cause of the defeat of Chartism.
Yet in several crucial ways the development of the Chartist movement proved an important benchmark and model for further workers struggle. Because of the lack of organized, top-down political leadership, the labor organizations of England remade themselves into political organizations. The primary agitation for this politicization of the labor movement came from a varied group of political radicals, mostly Tories, who opposed the New Poor Law of 1838 – which instituted reforms in the workhouse and reform system, lowering the amount received by those on aid to less than that of the market wage, and mandating heavy difficult labor for those on relief. The character of the movement varied greatly even within different regions in England – in the North, which was experiencing a widespread economic depression, the agitation quickly became politically radical, arguing for universal suffrage and labor reform. This frenetic pace of agitation could not be sustained for long without a centralized and organized movement, and the early Chartist organizations in the north eventually restricted themselves to political agitation for universal suffrage rather than building organizational ties within the labor movement. (Ward, 1973) The economic policies of the movement were relatively heterogeneous, with many labor leaders allying with landed conservatives in favor of protectionist policies, to foster higher wages and employment domestically. Richard Oastler, a prominent Tory radical of the time, summed his position up succinctly – “Very well, then, my principle of education is this – to encourage home growth, home labour, home trade, and home consumption.” (Calhoun)
In London, the movement was more organized but far less radical in its initial stages. The governing committee of the major Chartist organization, the London Working Men’s Association, was composed of mostly artisans, tradesmen, and bourgeois radicals, and this lack of direct connection with the mass organizations of the working class would prove a detriment in their attempts at organization. As Ward explains:
The character of metropolitan Chartism was largely delineated by the founders of the LWMA. Artisans predominated – if not the top ranks of compositors, shipwrights, bookbinders and watchmakers, at least middling men like tailors, cabinet-makers, shoemakers and the like. The London poor – the labourers of all sorts and the ruined silk weavers of Spitalfields – had little contact with radicalism or with Chartism. Poverty was not a spur to political activity… The poor, in general, kept aloof from the activities of their “betters” among the working classes of a still largely pre-factory London. (Ward, 1973)
Yet despite their flaws, the Chartist organizations provided excellent examples for further advancement of the cause of the working class. Several members of the LWMA attempted to break through the prevailing Anglo-Irish antipathy and organize Irish workers and peasants as well – one of the first instances of attempts at international labor organizations. (Ward, 1973) In addition, many of the demonstrations in the Northern sections were organized and run by the workers’ organizations at the ground level, and members voted on union policy and negotiation decisions. It was not in any sense the beginnings of a workers’ government – but it was a beginning sign of workers’ self-government, the ability to organize as a class and fight for their collective interest.
It was, inevitably, the very lack of this class cohesion and political clarity that would be the downfall of the Chartist movement. Having limited themselves to a meager petition for reforms –staking all on a single throw of weighted dice! – the cause of the Chartists was severely deflated when the petition was rejected by Parliament. Their National Assembly, which was meeting at the time of the petition, was paralyzed – with some members arguing for the Assembly to constitute itself as a government and order a march on the House of Commons. This proposal was soundly rejected due to a lack of popular support for a rising – at the crucial moment of battle, the Chartists could count on no solid base of support – they represented no one’s interests wholly, and only a few segments of the population’s interests partially. Chartism had failed as a reform movement, and it had neither the stomach nor the spine to make a revolution.
Yet the idea of a workers’ national assembly as proposed by some Chartists lived on, gaining new currency from the example of the Paris Commune in 1871, which similarly arose as the result of a class coalition. Marx himself considered the Paris Commune the model of a proletarian dictatorship – democratically run from the ground up, the people in arms, direct representation in assembly and workplace. Yet the Paris Commune, like the Chartists, was crushed by the forces of the state for lack of national support. The lessons of failure throughout the nineteenth century were clearly displayed – no workers’ movement can come to power without embracing both political and economic goals in its platform and policy, and without a form of organized, national support. Only when these preconditions are met can a workers’ movement transform itself from an agitational apparatus struggling for reform into a revolutionary movement capable of governing. These lessons would be most clearly applied in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 where, rather than attempting to force the replacement of the legislature de jure – as the Chartists did – the revolutionary parties and organizations replaced the state apparatus de facto with their own organs of government. This was the final fruition of the Chartists’ struggle, beyond their immediate contributions to the cause of the English working class – the development in theory and practice of the principle of dual power, which would become the linchpin of revolutionary strategy for Marxists of every section throughout the 20th century.
The Chartist movement ran its race with irons on its ankles – handicapped by lack of political flexibility, by heterogeneity (and consequently weakness) of support among a small segment of the population, and by a failure to realize that engaging the state as a rival political force requires an apparatus capable of shouldering that burden. Yet their example and their struggle paved the way for further reclamation of workers’ rights in England, and contributed to the theory and political legacy of revolutionary socialism worldwide. Despite the inability of the Chartist movement to form lasting and broad-based organizations amongst the whole of the working class in England, their political legacy helped shape many of the labor reforms that would civilize English capitalism somewhat over the course of the next two hundred years. The mark that the Chartist movement left upon Marx and his heirs was similarly pronounced – when Marx began engaging again in radical politics, he argued against flagship socialist collectives and in favor of broad based, international workers organizations that encompassed both political and economic goals – in essence, the political basis of Marxism was formed as an answer to the failures of Chartist and Owenite socialist policy. And so, despite its failure as a revolutionary movement, the struggle of the Chartists was an immensely important demonstration of courage and strength on the part of the working class that paved the way for further development of trade unions and workers’ democracy in England and abroad. Their collective defense of the rights of the poor and working class are an example to the people of our own time and deserve commemoration as one of the fundamentally important social movements of modern history.
Bibliography
Calhoun, C. (1982). The Question of Class Struggle. Oxford: University of Chicago Press.
Marx, K. (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. Retrieved from Marxists Internet Archive: http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm
Prothero, I. (1979). Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth Century London. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Thompson, E. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Random House, Inc.
Ward, J. (1973). Chartism. Great Britain: Harper and Row Publishers Inc.
The eruption of France into full-blown social revolution in 1789 sent shockwaves throughout Europe, but the shock was felt most keenly in France’s cross-Channel neighbor. The next decade saw a harsh crackdown, led by Pitt the Younger, on the nascent stirrings of British labor organization – radicals of all stripes were detained and tried, sometimes on flimsy charges; the aristocracy of England sensed the shadow of the guillotine on their own necks and lashed out in blind, animal fear. This bout of political repression lasted for the duration of the desperate war to the death that Britain waged against Napoleon, and served to focus the energies of labor reformers – and the movement as a whole – on the more immediate goals of economic reform. E. P. Thompson describes the effect of the crackdown on populist forces in England:
Popular radicalism was not extinguished when the corresponding societies were broken up, Habeas Corpus suspended, and all “Jacobin” manifestations outlawed. It simply lost coherence. For years it was made inarticulate by censorship and intimidation. It lost its press, it lost its organized expression, it lost its own sense of direction. (Thompson, 1963)
Yet the flame of popular radicalism could not be so easily and eternally stamped out, and when the war against foreign foes was over, a new domestic war began – between the social interests struggling for economic reform, and the entrenched power interests that resisted it.
The initial struggle began in earnest after the passage of the Reform Act of 1832, which instituted sweeping electoral and political reforms that consolidated the power of the House of Commons and growing middle class, while still excluding much of the petit-bourgeoisie and working class that had aided in the push for reform. This betrayal sparked the Chartist movement, that called for universal suffrage and other reforms that would allow the working class more representation in government and social relations. Far from an organized party, the Chartists were an amalgamation of various labor organizations and social reformers of all political leanings, centered only around a modest declaration of limited political goals common to all. The inherent disorganization in such a disparate movement proved to be fatal to its political future. After multiple petitions to Parliament were rejected outright, the Chartists set up a short-lived opposition assembly – yet the lack of direct, organized political support left the body adrift, unable to constitute itself as a governing institution rather than simply a symbol of revolt. The workers’ parliament dissolved itself for lack of support in 1848 – in the year of European revolution, England was the bastion of the old order. Yet a young German had watched the struggle of the Chartists firsthand – and for Karl Marx, the lessons learned from the failures of the English proletariat would provide the basis for his own program of labor organization and working class revolution.
The Chartists were not the first, or even the most radical, of the populist movements that pushed for reform in early industrial Britain. The ancestors of the Chartist organized working class lay not in the development of a class-conscious proletariat through the economic necessity of industrial capitalism, but rather in the traditional peasant communities and utopian socialist movements that had preceded it. The development of light industry and small factories in Britain facilitated the growth of working-class communities, and placed them in close proximity to the peasantry – the initial spurts of labor organization were concentrated in skilled artisans and craftsmen, primarily textile workers and tradesmen. This class differentiation within the labor movement restricted the organizations to local aims and relatively apolitical platforms. Additionally, the political ideas within the populist wing of British politics varied greatly, ranging from anti-industrial direct action, as exemplified by the Luddites, to pro-capitalist reformism. As Craig Calhoun explains:
A great deal of the time, the radical politics of this period emphasized local rather than national issues or authorities. The democracy of the politics was, correspondingly, far more a matter of internal structure than external aim… The populists hoped that their movement would directly establish (or reestablish) the good social order by expanding to include all, or virtually all, of the population… It pushed toward an ideological “lowest common denominator” in order to avoid sectarian disputes. Even so, consensus was unlikely outside of close-knit communities where social pressure could be brought on dissident holdouts, and common circumstances and frequent social intercourse helped to promote agreement. (Calhoun, 1982)
In this early developmental stage of capitalism, the industrial proletariat was not a fully homogeneous class, as the classical Marxist interpretation would term it – it contained within the greater working class a large degree of social and economic heterogeneity. This difference in material conditions was expressed within the movement as differences in policy, and an inability to organize the entirety of the working class. In Britain, as in later efforts at labor organization, the first organizations were founded in the higher economic strata of the working class, representative of artisans and their journeyman workers. Many labor organizations began as attempts to protect the wages and benefits of skilled laborers from competition with workers willing to produce more for less. This was representative of the relative underdevelopment of the industrial proletariat; at this point in the history of the working class and of capitalism as a socioeconomic system, industry was neither intensive or advanced enough to concentrate the large numbers of workers needed to form a class-conscious revolutionary proletariat. This substantially predetermined the political program and revolutionary potential of the Chartist movement – and parallel effects were felt throughout the European revolutions of 1848, as revolutionary movements struggled to consolidate themselves and establish political platforms without compromising the various class interests that comprised them.
Yet this failure cannot be taken as a complete repudiation of the tactics of the early labor organizations and radical political movements in Britain and Europe at large. The foundations of modern capitalism had been laid, and progress had been made in the system’s construction – but the formation of class composition within the capitalist sytem was as yet undetermined and heterogeneous. The working class was simply not ready for a genuine revolution. Calhoun explains the difficulties facing the Chartist movement as such:
A political movement or trades organization which attempted to base itself exclusively on class loyalties which did not yet exist was doomed to failure or irrelevance. Conversely, the capitalist economic system had wrought widespread and deep interdependencies which were much more sensitive than such earlier market relations as had linked regions. This meant that any movement or organization which based itself exclusively on local bonds could not confront the deepest and most important of its enemies… Communities – often composed of workers – struggled against external threats to their existence or way of life. Class could overlap with this foundation but not escape it. (Calhoun)
Thus the programs of class solidarity and organization that would characterize Marxist political platforms for the next 150 years would seem to be inapplicable in this particular instance. Yet this too is part of the lesson of the failure of the Chartist movement – that the pre-existing economic base of a society, and the secondary development of class structures within that society, are what precondition the success or failure of any political uprising. The dispute over the relative importance of this principle would split Marxism in twain in the years to come, as Marx’s heirs fought to decide the tactical outlook of a revolutionary party in a society where the economic conditions of capitalism were developmental but the capitalist state too weak to advance them – and so split Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin and Martov, Social Democracy and Communism. The Mensheviks, adopting the orthodox Marxist position, argued that the role of a socialist party ought to be that of a loyal opposition within the bourgeois state, ameliorating the conditions of the workers throughout the development of capitalism until the proletariat was able to take power in a relatively peaceful revolution. The Bolsheviks, adopting the policy of Leon Trotsky in fact if not in name, argued that in such conditions a socialist party must necessarily take power in order to undertake industrial development under socialist management. This strategic dispute was the inheritance of early labor movements like Chartism, where organizers and workers were desirous only of reform, but were pushed by the material conditions of economic infrastructure and class antagonism toward violent confrontation – for which they were woefully unprepared.
As a consequence of the territorial dispersion of the early industrial proletariat, the development of socialist thought and labor organization in England closely mirrored similar developments in France. The majority of pre-Chartist labor movements were centered on the idea of communalism - the organization of ideal factory towns, self-sufficient and collectively governed, that would allow the benefits of modern economic productivity while retaining the traditional and community structures of English life. Prominent among this strain of utopian socialism in Britain were the followers of Robert Owen, who advocated communalist ideas similar to Proudhon, focusing on the strategy of developing flagship towns to prove the viability and superiority of socialist communities to capitalist development. These early attempts were sometimes relatively long lived, but not commercially competitive or organized enough on a national, political level to force substantial reform in labor policy. Their failure, and the mirrored failure of their Proudhonist cousins in France, was not ignored by other nascent socialist tendencies - future socialist movements would stress the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois state wholesale, arguing against the idea of socialism somehow outcompeting the superior resources and infrastructure of capitalist opponents.
Marx attacks the Owenite tactics at the Bolton collective, and Proudhon’s defense of such, in the Poverty of Philosophy. He argues that the Owenite practice of collectivizing industry, and then, because of the necessity of competition in a capitalist market, paying market level wages or lower did nothing to advance the cause of the organized working class. Moreover, many Owenites and capitalists alike were criticizing rank and file agitation for higher wages across the board, saying that any spike in wages would be simply evened out and eventually surpassed by an increased rate of inflation. Marx criticized these views sharply, arguing:
And we, as socialists, tell you that, apart from the money question, you will continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics?
The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals. The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.
In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination has not yet ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry. It has now reached such a stage, that the degree to which combination has developed in any country clearly marks the rank it occupies in the hierarchy of the world market… In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. (Marx, 1847)
Marx is essentially advancing the argument that any advance of workers’ power cannot be regarded simply, as the Owenites and Proudhonists did, as an economic tactic to win material economic gains. The development of class consciousness amongst the working class through association and combination, and their consequent agitation for increased wages and benefits cannot be seen by the bourgeoisie as anything other than a political challenge. This dual confrontation is the fundamental flaw in the collectivization strategies of Proudhon and Owen – and theory was borne out in fact, as many of the collectivized factories and farms faced embargoes of material by large concerns acting in concert with former owners of the properties. Marx saw clearly that the development of workers’ power, however peacefully it proceeded, would necessarily be seen by the ruling class as an attack on the very economic foundations of society – the beginning of a class war. The fury and terror of the French Revolution was not yet forgotten on England’s shores. A year after the publishing of the Poverty of Philosophy, in the great year of unsuccessful revolution - 1848, the Owenites would be too disorganized and too few to help their Chartist brethren, who marched off to fight and die on the barricades. Yet the delay caused by utopian socialist tactics proved fatal to the cause of the working class in England – having spent their time playing with model socialist villages where all were free to starve, rather than building sustainable political parties and representation in the labor organizations. The revolution marched to war without organized leadership. The movement was forced to constitute itself as a revolutionary force without an organization to take power or a program to administer government – and this lack of direction, a crucial failure of policy, was the root cause of the defeat of Chartism.
Yet in several crucial ways the development of the Chartist movement proved an important benchmark and model for further workers struggle. Because of the lack of organized, top-down political leadership, the labor organizations of England remade themselves into political organizations. The primary agitation for this politicization of the labor movement came from a varied group of political radicals, mostly Tories, who opposed the New Poor Law of 1838 – which instituted reforms in the workhouse and reform system, lowering the amount received by those on aid to less than that of the market wage, and mandating heavy difficult labor for those on relief. The character of the movement varied greatly even within different regions in England – in the North, which was experiencing a widespread economic depression, the agitation quickly became politically radical, arguing for universal suffrage and labor reform. This frenetic pace of agitation could not be sustained for long without a centralized and organized movement, and the early Chartist organizations in the north eventually restricted themselves to political agitation for universal suffrage rather than building organizational ties within the labor movement. (Ward, 1973) The economic policies of the movement were relatively heterogeneous, with many labor leaders allying with landed conservatives in favor of protectionist policies, to foster higher wages and employment domestically. Richard Oastler, a prominent Tory radical of the time, summed his position up succinctly – “Very well, then, my principle of education is this – to encourage home growth, home labour, home trade, and home consumption.” (Calhoun)
In London, the movement was more organized but far less radical in its initial stages. The governing committee of the major Chartist organization, the London Working Men’s Association, was composed of mostly artisans, tradesmen, and bourgeois radicals, and this lack of direct connection with the mass organizations of the working class would prove a detriment in their attempts at organization. As Ward explains:
The character of metropolitan Chartism was largely delineated by the founders of the LWMA. Artisans predominated – if not the top ranks of compositors, shipwrights, bookbinders and watchmakers, at least middling men like tailors, cabinet-makers, shoemakers and the like. The London poor – the labourers of all sorts and the ruined silk weavers of Spitalfields – had little contact with radicalism or with Chartism. Poverty was not a spur to political activity… The poor, in general, kept aloof from the activities of their “betters” among the working classes of a still largely pre-factory London. (Ward, 1973)
Yet despite their flaws, the Chartist organizations provided excellent examples for further advancement of the cause of the working class. Several members of the LWMA attempted to break through the prevailing Anglo-Irish antipathy and organize Irish workers and peasants as well – one of the first instances of attempts at international labor organizations. (Ward, 1973) In addition, many of the demonstrations in the Northern sections were organized and run by the workers’ organizations at the ground level, and members voted on union policy and negotiation decisions. It was not in any sense the beginnings of a workers’ government – but it was a beginning sign of workers’ self-government, the ability to organize as a class and fight for their collective interest.
It was, inevitably, the very lack of this class cohesion and political clarity that would be the downfall of the Chartist movement. Having limited themselves to a meager petition for reforms –staking all on a single throw of weighted dice! – the cause of the Chartists was severely deflated when the petition was rejected by Parliament. Their National Assembly, which was meeting at the time of the petition, was paralyzed – with some members arguing for the Assembly to constitute itself as a government and order a march on the House of Commons. This proposal was soundly rejected due to a lack of popular support for a rising – at the crucial moment of battle, the Chartists could count on no solid base of support – they represented no one’s interests wholly, and only a few segments of the population’s interests partially. Chartism had failed as a reform movement, and it had neither the stomach nor the spine to make a revolution.
Yet the idea of a workers’ national assembly as proposed by some Chartists lived on, gaining new currency from the example of the Paris Commune in 1871, which similarly arose as the result of a class coalition. Marx himself considered the Paris Commune the model of a proletarian dictatorship – democratically run from the ground up, the people in arms, direct representation in assembly and workplace. Yet the Paris Commune, like the Chartists, was crushed by the forces of the state for lack of national support. The lessons of failure throughout the nineteenth century were clearly displayed – no workers’ movement can come to power without embracing both political and economic goals in its platform and policy, and without a form of organized, national support. Only when these preconditions are met can a workers’ movement transform itself from an agitational apparatus struggling for reform into a revolutionary movement capable of governing. These lessons would be most clearly applied in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 where, rather than attempting to force the replacement of the legislature de jure – as the Chartists did – the revolutionary parties and organizations replaced the state apparatus de facto with their own organs of government. This was the final fruition of the Chartists’ struggle, beyond their immediate contributions to the cause of the English working class – the development in theory and practice of the principle of dual power, which would become the linchpin of revolutionary strategy for Marxists of every section throughout the 20th century.
The Chartist movement ran its race with irons on its ankles – handicapped by lack of political flexibility, by heterogeneity (and consequently weakness) of support among a small segment of the population, and by a failure to realize that engaging the state as a rival political force requires an apparatus capable of shouldering that burden. Yet their example and their struggle paved the way for further reclamation of workers’ rights in England, and contributed to the theory and political legacy of revolutionary socialism worldwide. Despite the inability of the Chartist movement to form lasting and broad-based organizations amongst the whole of the working class in England, their political legacy helped shape many of the labor reforms that would civilize English capitalism somewhat over the course of the next two hundred years. The mark that the Chartist movement left upon Marx and his heirs was similarly pronounced – when Marx began engaging again in radical politics, he argued against flagship socialist collectives and in favor of broad based, international workers organizations that encompassed both political and economic goals – in essence, the political basis of Marxism was formed as an answer to the failures of Chartist and Owenite socialist policy. And so, despite its failure as a revolutionary movement, the struggle of the Chartists was an immensely important demonstration of courage and strength on the part of the working class that paved the way for further development of trade unions and workers’ democracy in England and abroad. Their collective defense of the rights of the poor and working class are an example to the people of our own time and deserve commemoration as one of the fundamentally important social movements of modern history.
Bibliography
Calhoun, C. (1982). The Question of Class Struggle. Oxford: University of Chicago Press.
Marx, K. (1847). The Poverty of Philosophy. Retrieved from Marxists Internet Archive: http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm
Prothero, I. (1979). Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth Century London. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Thompson, E. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. Random House, Inc.
Ward, J. (1973). Chartism. Great Britain: Harper and Row Publishers Inc.