Two quotations: 1856 and 1955 (1955)

From the October 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the paradoxes of this century is that while a range of pleasures and diversions, unimagined by the wealthiest aristocrat a few generations ago, is now available to the ordinary man,, it gets more and more difficult to use them in the way pleasures should be used—impulsively. More and more of us possess beautiful new motor cats whose every line expresses the modern poetry of godlike, singing motion, of the marvellous escape from here, of the joyful ability to pierce the horizon-barrier and know the great earth. On some dreamlike Sunday afternoon, suddenly the whispering garden leaves and the bright innocent clouds invite us to rush, with the effortlessness of angels, out into the vast green landscape. And soon we are stuck behind an enormous thing with 84 wheels carrying a section of the Forth Bridge; we are hedged about by motor-cycle combinations containing identical families of one black-leather-coated man, one woman and one pale child; our dream dies among diesel fumes and brick suburbs.”—(Paul Jennings, Observer, 28/8/55).

“In our day, everything seems pregnant with its contrary; machinery, gifted with the wonderful-power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying life into a material force. The antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.”— (“ Karl Marx, April 1856.)

Society and Morals. Part VII. The Morals of Capitalism. (Continued). (1918)

From the May 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part VII.

The Age of Cant.

Summing up the “morality of capitalism,” what is the distinctive feature by which it is distinguished from that of other class-divided societies ? It is undeniably that hypocritical taint which pervades it through and through, and which is seen in the glaring contrast which is presented between the moral theory professed and the actual moral reality practised. This moral hypocrisy is the inevitable outcome of the social relations immanent in capitalism. It results from the antagonisms which exist in the system; partly from that engendered in the competitive struggle between individuals and groups of individuals, but primarily from that antagonism which exists between the interests of the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and of the proletariat on the other.

Every activity of the bourgeoisie in its own interest must be undertaken professedly in the interests of the workers, or, more correctly, of “society as a whole.” For the “unity of society” and of its interests is a cardinal dogma, in which the very existence of classes is often denied. “Democracy, Liberty, and Humanity” have been the watchwords of bourgeois society, but words only, for in their name more horrible and sickening atrocities have been perpetrated than in any previous period in history. Thus, human life is held in this “most humanitarian age” to be sacred, yet witness the widespread equanimity with, which the slow starvation of thousands and the mental and physical deformation of millions are endured, and even the fervid glee with which the international capitalist class and their dupes beheld the bloody murder of 20,000 workers after the Commune of Paris, and which to-day greets the slaughter of millions on the battle-fields of Europe.

The worship of “democratic” and “humanitarian” phrases has led to the ludicrous situation that everyone professes to admire the rule “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you,” and for the most part to be guided by it, and yet the social system which these same people uphold makes the practice of this rule absolutely impossible. Did, indeed, anyone actually attempt to abide by this principle he would certainly come into such violent conflict with existing conceptions and institutions as to be branded an Utopian and a madman, and most likely he would be punished with imprisonment.

There is hypocrisy and deceit everywhere, from the lying and trickery of trades and the cant about the “honour of our public men” to the veneer of religious orthodoxy and the “love” that in conventional belief cements the economic contract we call “marriage.” Verily, our time has rightly been called “the Age of Cant.”

———————————–

Part VIII. The outlook of the proletariat. 

Owing to the fact that capitalist society rests upon the exploitation of the wage-earners by the owners of capital, it is rendered possible to generate a system of morality radically different from the bourgeois ethics we have been considering, namely, a system which conforms to the interest of the exploited class—the proletariat.

At the same time we have seen also, that an essential part of the superstructure of capitalism consists of institutions which effectively prevent the majority of the workers from recognising their real social status, make them contented with the system they are born into, and secure their acceptance of the bourgeois moral code. The formulation of a proletarian moral code and its acceptance by the working class is, therefore, a slow and difficult process, obstructed at every point by practically all the institutions of the social environment.

Only by gradual and uneven stages can the proletariat in the mass really assimilate a class ethic of their own. Thus to-day, for example, but a small minority have already reached this position, although many are fairly class-conscious and considerably ahead of the main body of the workers, who as yet only possess a faint glimmering of their class interests, whilst on the other side a backward section, growing, however, continually smaller, have not even achieved this state, but embrace in its entirety the capitalistic outlook.

The mental evolution of the proletariat is a subject so vast that here our survey must be practically confined to working-class development in England.

The Early Working-Class Movement.

The earliest independent organisations formed by the modern working class aimed at regulating the conditions of working, such as raising or maintaining the standard of wages or shortening the working day. In several of the more advanced industries such “trade clubs” had already been formed quite early in the eighteenth century. They were, at first, small and local. Working men of a common craft, living in a common locality, gathered together for the protection of their common interests. Though they were concerned with minor and immediate grievances, seeking only to palliate the, to them, evil effects of evolving capitalism, yet their very existence is evidence of the fact that, even in the pre-machine period of capitalism many workers were beginning to realise that their interests and those of their employers were by no means identical. While they acquiesced in the general nature of the system of production prevailing and considered it, on the whole, to be right and just, yet many things which their capitalist employers regarded as perfectly justifiable and reasonable they held to be wrong and unfair.

Their classification of “good” and “bad” employers still lingers in the minds of their latter-day trade-union descendants. In many respects their economic principles and morality were conservative and even reactionary, for they strove energetically to retain their old-established skill or craftsmanship against the tendency which the employers favoured of sub-dividing the labour process—a means of increasing profits and the domination of the capitalist over the labourer, but also a means of increasing the fertility of human energy, and therefore directly in the line of human progress.

Then came the “industrial revolution” with its ensuing horrors—the dawn of the “machine age” was at hand. In the many revolts against the terrible oppression of the factory system reactionary ideas were still, at first, the prevailing feature. Blindly, the outraged workers struck at the lifeless mechanisms which were the immediate cause of their degradation.

Violent machine-breaking riots occurred, the workers regarding the machines themselves, and not so much their capitalist owners, as the enemy to be combated. Strikes now became frequent, and trade combinations among the workers multiplied to such an extent as to seriously alarm the ruling classes and awaken them to retaliation through the State machine.

Combinations of workmen had never been legal bodies, but they had been more or less tolerated prior to the coming of the machine. But now their rapid progress in numbers and militancy brought forth the severe Anti-Combination Acts of 1799-1800. Savage persecution of workmen followed and unions were relentlessly suppressed. But, nevertheless, these organisations, made inevitable by capitalist exploitation, continued to exist in secret, and in the underground warfare against the em­ploying class, some recognition of the class antagonism inherent in capitalist society must have been forced upon many of the workers.

At length, however, after over twenty years of terrible persecution, the dominant classes seemed to have realised the futility and even worse of forcible suppression, and the unions were granted some measure of legal sanction. Immediately trade unions sprang up everywhere in greater abundance than ever before, for, in the intervening period, capitalist production had advanced exceedingly and machinery had now invaded almost every branch of industry. Consequently more oppression occurred, but to no real purpose.

Now, however, the far-sighted among the bourgeoisie were coming to see that these organisations were unavoidable, and although an evil were a necessary one. If they could not be killed they could, perhaps, be conciliated. How this view was justified we shall see later.

Many various experiments in industrial organisation were made by the workers in the succeeding decade or two, principally through the efforts of enthusiastic Utopians like Robert Owen. The social ideals of such men were high indeed, but the vast majority of the workers remained uninfluenced by them. They were in the unions because they thereby hoped, just as their predecessors had done, to ameliorate their immediate grievances, to obtain higher wages, shorter hours, and better conditions of employ­ment.

Eventually, after many experimental failures, trade unionism settled down into that general form which prevailed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. One advance was made, however. The unions for the most part ceased to be mere local associations and tended more and more to become national in their scope—a development made possible and necessary by the great progress in communication achieved through the introduction of railways. It is, perhaps, needless to add that as capitalist production gradually took root all over the world there spread along with it its necessary accompaniment, trade unionism.

Meanwhile the final struggle of the industrial capitalists for political power had had the effect of turning the workers’ attention also to the field of politics as a means whereby they might obtain relief from their intense impoverishment and distress.

Though the “industrial revolution” had considerably enhanced the wealth, numbers, and influence of the manufacturing bourgeoisie, this class remained, for a long period afterwards, excluded from direct political representation. Whilst insignificant country districts often had separate representatives, large and now vastly important and thickly populated industrial towns like Birmingham and Manchester were without independent representation under the existing constitution. Parliament, accordingly, continued to be dominated by the aristocratic landlords, vestigial remains of the now dead feudal system.

The manufacturers and their “intellectual” allies demanded political reform and strove, by incessant agitation, to draw the working class to the support of the reform movement. Among the discontented workers such propaganda fell upon fertile soil. Huge demonstrations were held all over the country and eventually, after many years of obstinate resistance and brutal repression, the government, fearful of civil war, reluctantly conceded the Reform Bill of 1832.

This Act, while it partly remedied the anomalies in the representation of the industrial centres and extended the vote to the wealthier strata of the capitalists, left the proletariat still without the franchise. Great disappointment and resentment was aroused in the workers by this betrayal, and within three years an association of working men drew up their own political programme—the “People’s Charter.” This was soon adopted by the majority of the politically active workers who became known as Chartists.

The enactment of the Charter was to establish political democracy by a thorough revision of the electoral system, and the Charter was thus the logical outcome of the political ideals of the bourgeoisie. But there can be no doubt that, to the masses of working men who gave their support to Chartism, political reform was but a means to an end—the alleviation of their miserable poverty, slavery, and degradation. This is shown by the vigorous activity of the Chartists on behalf of the Ten Hours Bill and other factory legislation, and by their loyal support of the industrial movement of the workers which was apparent in every strike. In such activities they were met by the bitter opposition of those self-styled “friends of the people,” the free-trade factory capitalists.

During their existence of about twelve years the Chartists accomplished a great amount of agitation and educational work, several widely-read newspapers being published in support of the movement. Adherents to the party multiplied rapidly, especially in the great northern centres of industry. The growth of the agitation made it hated and feared by the ruling classes both aristocratic and bourgeois, and many of its members were victimised by the employers and imprisoned by the authorities.

The Chartists, however, proved too weak to carry their point. Dissensions had grown in their ranks, and among the mass of their supporters, who were but loosely organised, many were side-tracked by the bourgeois agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Parliament scornfully rejected the petition for the Charter, and in the suppression of the minor insurrections and disturbances which followed, the Chartists found themselves “confronted with a highly developed military administration, with barracks ranged through the industrial districts, and with a newly organised and well drilled police force.” (Green’s “Short History,” p. 859.) Open revolt seemed futile.

Furthermore, the factory acts had removed many of the more pressing grievances of the workers, and a revival of trade relieved the unemployment situation. The bulk of the workers became politically apathetic ; the vigour of Chartism declined and, after a time, the movement collapsed and disappeared.

On the continent of Europe events, similar to those in England were taking place. There the bourgeoisie, striving to win political supremacy, also allied themselves with the proletariat, and in 1848 broke out in revolt. When, however, the workers at the first success put forward demands on their own account, the bourgeoisie immediately became anxious about “law and order.” In Germany they joined hands with their political enemies, the nobility, in suppressing the rising of the workers, and in France, after constituting themselves the ruling power, the industrial bourgeoisie crushed the proletarian rebels with great violence and bloodshed.

The Reconciliation : Its Causes and Consequences.

These early manifestations of a widespread spirit of revolt on the part of the proletariat took place, it must be remembered, before the days of “State education.” The marvellously complex organisations by which the workers were in later times to be impregnated with a bourgeois ideology had not yet been fully evolved. Masses of the workers were still unable to read or write, especially in the earlier period. What little reading and learning was possessed among them, here and there, was gleaned mainly through the agency of trade clubs or similar organisations, in connection with which small libraries were sometimes maintained and study classes held.

That capitalist tradition, including the dogmas regarding abstinence and directive ability, so respected by and ingrained in the bulk of the workers in after years, and which so largely holds them in its grip to-day, was, at that time, only in its formative period. The vast array of intellectual retainers of every type to-day in the pay of the bourgeoisie, was then much less numerous and not nearly so well organised, for the wealth and influence of the industrial capitalists was, at that time, comparatively small. Neither had they that undisputed control of the political machine which they were later to hold. Moreover, they themselves, in their revolutionary struggle with the nobility, had, in their criticisms of hereditary privilege, done much to discredit and undermine respect for established institutions and authority. When they had risen to complete supremacy the bourgeoisie were sorely in need of a working-class narcotic to occupy the place left by that which they had helped to undermine.

At length it was realised by the bolder and wiser elements of the bourgeoisie that an officially controlled educational system would not only give to the workers that technical instruction made more and more necessary by scientific commerce and production, but would also make possible the systematic and more efficient inculcation into the absorbant minds of the proletarian children the servile code of ethics which it had once been the exclusive business of the Church to foster. We have seen in our previous section the outcome of this idea. Still it seems hardly likely that the bourgeoisie could have seen what a valuable instrument in the service of class rule they were forging when the first timid “educational” schemes were put forward.

At all events, the fact cannot be gainsaid that with the gradual elaboration and extension of compulsory capitalistic education and, side by side with this the marvellous growth in cheapness, size, and circulation of the bourgeois Press (the greatest agent of mental perversion the world has ever seen), the earliest rumblings of revolt among the workers died down considerably. Engels has admirably shown that a religious revival fostered by the bourgeoisie also played its part in this process. Capitalism now seemed to have reached a comparatively stable and smooth-running condition as far as the workers were concerned, fulfilling all the desires of its profit-worshipping devotees.

Particularly was this conservatism of the workers manifested in England, where there operated more directly economic causes to this end. After the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 the capitalists of England entered upon their period of economic world supremacy. Out of the enormous and steadily increasing stream of profits the employers could well afford to conciliate the workers with sops in the shape of somewhat higher wages and with social reforms which eliminated many of the minor grievances of the workers. It paid to do this rather than risk a disturbance and a break in the continuity of their wonderful prosperity by unnecessary industrial strife twixt employer and employed.

After the workers had become docile the bourgeoisie could with safety satisfy that popular desire for the franchise which revived again and again, and this they did in succeeding stages. As Engels says, “parliamentary government is a capital school for teaching respect for tradition,” and besides, the vote completed the argument of the bourgeoisie that the workers were “free.” Did they not elect their chosen representatives to rule them ? Was not “democracy” now a reality ? Thus, apparently, were the capitalists made more secure than ever.

In this long period of working-class quiescence, which started about 1850 and began to end towards the close of the century, trade unionism persisted but took on a form so distinctly bourgeois as to become in itself and its results a powerful “bulwark of capitalism.” Politically the workers for the most part supported the bourgeois Liberal and Tory parties.

Whatever revolutionary sentiment had existed in the earlier movement now almost entirely disappeared. The view that the respective interests of the capitalists and the workers were necessarily antagonistic, which had been taught by many of the advanced Chartists, was now discredited. The workers generally held that the capitalists as a class were useful, necessary, even benevolent, earning the well-deserved profits of abstinence and ability, whatever grievances the workers had were thought to be due either to the greed of exceptionally bad and unjust employers or to unfor­tunate misunderstandings on the part of the capitalists or their workpeople ; this was the justification for trade unions.

The unions had for their motto “Defence, not Defiance,” and “A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work.” Strikes were discouraged ; the new policy in dealing with disputes was one of arbitration based on compromise and mutual good-will. These tactics, of course, transferred the field of action from the mass of the organised workers to their officials and representatives, who met the employers or their agents in conference.

The growth in size of the unions, together with their anti-strike policy, enabled the accumulation of very considerable reserve funds, which were spent mainly in friendly benefits. These factors also tended to enhance the prestige and power of the prominent officials, who now became a full-time salaried staff, virtually, though not avowedly, dominating the policy and activities of their organisations.

R.W Housley

(To be Continued.)

Marx: the Man and his Work - Part 2 (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

Marx and the 1st International

Marx associated himself with working-class organizations although they were not Socialist in character. In his day as today, very few workers had a Socialist policy.

The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) was founded at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London, on 28th September 1864. It was not the work of one individual, and it was not “a small body with a large head”. It was neither “an insignificant shadow” nor “a terrible menace”, as it was described by various sections of the press of the period. The First International was a transitional form of the working-class struggle for better conditions, and it was as necessary as it was transitional.

In the capitalist mode of production, an embodied contradiction both produces and destroys modern states. It intensifies all national antagonisms to the utmost and at the same time it creates all nations in its own image. So long as the capitalist mode of production exists these contradictions are insoluble, and therefore the brotherhood of man about which we have heard from the apologists for capitalism has had no existence. While large-scale industry preaches freedom and peace between nations, it also has turned the world into an armed camp as never before in history. However, with the disappearance of capitalist production its contradiction will vanish also.

Early in the history of the working-class movement a tendency towards internationalism made itself felt. This is a vital condition for the very existence of the workers’ struggle for emancipation. The workers possess no magic wand in this respect any more than in any other — there is no level and easy path. The modern working class has to fight its battles under conditions created by historical development. It cannot overcome these conditions by any short cut but can triumph over them only by understanding, in the sense that to understand is to overcome.

This understanding was made more difficult owing to the circumstances of Marx’s time. The beginnings of the working-class movement coincided with, crossed and recrossed, the beginnings of a number of national states which were founded as a result of the capitalist mode of production. By drawing lessons from the struggles of the different sections of the International with their capitalist governments, Marx hoped to win various groups to his point of view and mould them into an international Socialist party. On the General Council of the International, and at its international conferences, he worked hard to realize his hopes.

Marx’s chief rôle in the First International began after it was organized. He soon became the guiding spirit of it. To him fell the task of presenting the inaugural address. It must be admitted that this address contained many compromises and concessions. Marx himself in a letter to Engels, dated 4th November 1864, in which he deals with the formation of the International, states:

  I was obliged to insert two phrases about “duty” and “right” into the Preamble to the Statutes, ditto “truth, morality and justice”, but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.

The address opens by recording the fact that in the years from 1848 to 1864 the poverty of the working class did not diminish, although this period had been one of unparalleled industrial development and commercial growth. It proves its point by comparing the statistics published in the official Blue Book concerning the poverty of the English working class with the official figures used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, in a Budget speech to show “the intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” which had taken place in the same period but had been “entirely confined to the classes of property”. The address exposed this contradiction of English conditions because England was the leading country of European trade and industry, but it pointed out that similar conditions existed on a somewhat smaller scale in, making allowances for local differences, all the continental countries where large-scale industry was beginning to develop.

All over the world this “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” was “entirely confined to the classes of property”, with the one exception perhaps that a small section of the workers as in England were receiving somewhat higher wages, though even this improvement was cancelled out by the general increase in prices.

   Everywhere the great mass of the working class sank into ever deeper misery to the same extent as the upper class rose in the social scale. In all the countries of Europe it is now an irrefutable fact, undeniable for every unprejudiced enquirer and denied only by those who have an interest in awakening deceptive hopes in others, that neither the perfection of machinery nor the application of science to industry and agriculture, neither the resources and artifices of communication, neither the conquests of new markets nor free trade, or all these things combined can succeed in abolishing the misery of the working class, and that on the contrary, every new development of the creative power of labour is calculated on the false bases of existing conditions to intensify the social antagonisms and aggravate the social conflict. During this intoxicating period economic progress, starvation raised itself almost to the level of a social institution in the capital of the British Empire. The period is characterised in the annals of history by accelerated return, the extended compass and the deadly effects of the social pest known as industrial and commercial crises.

The address then went on to look at the defeat of the working-class movement in 1850, and came to the conclusion that this period had its compensating characteristics. Two facts were stressed, first of all the legal enactment of the ten-hour day with its effects on the English working class. The struggle for the legal limitation of the working day had been a direct intervention in the conflict between the blind forces of the law of supply and demand, which summed up capitalist-class political economy, and production regulated by social welfare as represented by the working class.

  And therefore the Ten-Hour Bill was not only a great practical success, but also a victory of a principle; for the first time the political economy of the bourgeoisie was defeated by the political economy of the working class.

After a reference to the co-operative movement of the period, and the revival of the working-class movements in England, France, Germany and Italy and their efforts to reorganize politically, the address continues:

  They possess an element of success — numbers. But numbers are weighty in the scales only when they are united in an organization and led towards a conscious aim.

Past experience had shown that to ignore the fraternity which should exist between the workers of different countries and spur them on to stand together in all the struggles for their emancipation, always resulted in a general failure of all their unrelated efforts. This consideration had moved the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall to found the International Workingmen’s Association. The address concluded with the words: “Workers of the world, unite!”

The provisional rules, for which Marx was responsible, may be summed up as follows. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. The struggle for the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for the establishment of new class privileges, but the abolition of class rule altogether. The economic subjection of the worker to those who have appropriated the tools of labour, i.e. the source of life, results in servitude in all its forms: social misery, intellectual atrophy and political dependence. The economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great aim for which all political movement must serve as a means.

The conference of the International held at The Hague in 1872 concluded with a public meeting at which Marx in the course of his speech said:

  One day the working class must hold political power in its hands in order to establish a new organization of labour. It must overthrow the old political system which maintains the old institutions in being, unless it wishes, like the old Christians, who despised and neglected such action, to renounce “the Kingdom of the World”.

We now know that the First International was bound to collapse, due to the conditions which gave rise to it and the conflicts which arose within it. Marx from this period concentrated on his literary work. He suffered several personal losses. In December 1881 his wife died, and this was followed by the death of his eldest daughter. Engels tells us he never recovered from these losses, and they aggravated a condition of poor health from which he suffered for some time. On the fourteenth of March 1883 he died quietly in his chair.

Bob Ambridge

Heyday, Mayday (2017)

Book Review from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Heyday: the 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age', by Ben Wilson. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99)

This history covers the period from 1851 to 1862, from the Great Exhibition in London to the early part of the American Civil War. Britain was at the height of its power at this time, producing 70 percent of the world’s steel in 1851, for instance, and the book’s original hardback edition was subtitled ‘Britain and the making of the modern world’. But there were challenges to this pre-eminence, mainly from Germany and the USA.

One of the themes is technological progress, from the development of the telegraph to the growth of railways, and how this related to the expansion of production, the emergence of a global market and the rapid dissemination of news and other information. The discovery of gold, in California and Australia, resulted in massive population movements, appalling consequences for native peoples and enormous riches (though usually not for those who dug the gold). The gold rush also led to the development of faster ships and an international market for grain and other goods, as there was little agriculture in the areas where the gold was to be found.

Behind all this, however, was slavery, and the dependence of much of the industrialised world on cotton grown in the American south. Over a billion pounds of raw cotton was shipped from ports such as New Orleans to the mills of Lancashire, and arguments over the future of slavery and the possible secession of the slave states resulted in much uncertainty. When the Civil War cut off supplies, the production of cotton on a mass scale spread to countries such as Egypt and India, where the price of cotton rose so much that local manufacturers could no longer afford to purchase it as a raw material.

The other commodity that exerted a global influence was opium, which Wilson claims ‘dictated geopolitics’. Britain had already gone to war with China to enforce its own terms on the opium trade, and this continued with the shelling of Guangzhou in 1856 and the military occupation of Beijing in 1860. Hong Kong had become ‘one of the key hubs of global trade and finance’. Lord Palmerston won a big parliamentary majority in the so-called Chinese Election of 1857, as British electors backed his bellicose policies in the Far East. ‘Free’trade was one of the rallying cries of nineteenth-century capitalism, but it was generally imposed and maintained at the point of a gun.

The 1840s had been a period of economic depression and food shortages, but the 1850s were seen as a decade of boom. Yet in 1857 there was a global financial crash, with bumper grain harvests leading to a big drop in prices, and a realisation that plenty of bank loans would not be repaid. A New York-based bank failed, and many businesses collapsed.

Wilson gives a vivid picture of all these developments and more, including the Crimean War, Russian expansion in the Far East, the Indian Rebellion, and events in Japan. Capitalism expanded on the way to becoming a truly global system, but hundreds of millions of people suffered from poverty and war while this was happening.  

Paul Bennett

Marx the journalist (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the first two years of his exile in England Marx actively involved himself in German refugee politics. He was still a member of the central committee of the Communist League and was in contact with the League's members who had stayed in Germany. His English contact was Harney whom he met again at a banquet organised by the Society of Fraternal Democrats at the end of 1849. In April 1850 Harney, for the Fraternal Democrats, together with Marx. Engels and Willich for the German Communist League and Adam and Vidil for the French Blanquists signed a declaration setting up a “Universal League of Revolutionary Communists" committed to “the overthrow of all privileged classes, their subjection to the dictatorship of the proletariat under which the revolution shall be maintained sine die until the communist society, the final organisation of the human family, has been realised". In June Harney started to publish his own paper The Red Republican, in whose November issue was published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto, identifying Marx and Engels as its authors.

Throughout 1850 Marx and Engels contributed a regular column to the Revue of the Neue Rheinische Z'eitung which was published in Hamburg. Among the things they commented on was the political scene in Britain, such as the death of Sir Robert Peel and the prospects of the Chartist movement, but the bulk of the material they sent on Britain concerned the economic situation there. Some time in the autumn of 1850 Marx came to the conclusion that there was a direct connection between economic crises and revolution. He read through the back numbers of the economist and a volume of Thomas Tooke’s History of Prices which had just been published to try to understand the economic crisis of 1847 which had preceded the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. The result was the detailed account of the course of this crisis which appeared in the Revue.

Marx's position about there being a direct link between crises and revolution led him to a further conclusion: that in the then period of prosperity there was no immediate prospect of revolution; the revolutionary wave sparked off by the 1847 crisis was over and it was pointless to continue to try to provoke an immediate revolutionary uprising. This was a revision of the view Marx had expressed as recently as April 1850 in the statement he had signed with the Blanquists and Harney and it led to a split in the Communist League. It also led Marx to break with Harney who, as a romantic revolutionary, sympathised with those, including Marx’s opponents in the Communist League, who wanted to continue plotting a more or less immediate insurrection. When Harney's position became known, Engels at Marx's request immediately stopped contributing articles to his paper, which had in the meantime changed its name to The Friend of the People. Their other pre-1848 contact, Ernest Jones, was released from prison in 1850 and was soon involved in an acrimonious dispute with Harney over the use of the title of O'Connor’s paper The Northern Star, which ceased publication in 1852. Marx and Engels took Jones's side in this dispute and in 1851 Engels was contributing instead to Jones's Notes to the People which later became The People's Paper.

The split in the Communist League occurred at a meeting of its central committee held on 15 September 1850. According to the Minutes. Marx explained his opposition to the policy of plotting immediate insurrection on the grounds that workers must be told that "if you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war", by which he meant many years of intense class struggle, certainly involving occasional violent confrontations with the state, rather than "civil war" in what has become the literal sense. This was to remain Marx's view for the rest of his life and represented a return to the pattern for the evolution of working class political consciousnss which he had outlined, on the basis of experience of the English Chartist movement, before the bourgeois-revolutionary interlude of 1848-9. He first acted on this when he participated, through Jones's People's Paper, in the English working class movement between 1852 and 1856.

But Marx's immediate concern was to earn a living. If he can be said to have had a profession it was journalism. He had been the editor of a democratic newspaper in Germany in 1842-43 and again in 1848-9. It was as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that he had met in 1848 an American journalist. Charles Dana, who was touring Europe. Dana was the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, one of America's leading newspapers. It had been founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley and took up a generally democratic position on the issues of the day. Three years later Dana, who was anxious to increase the paper's circulation among the German immigrants (and refugees) who had come to America after the final failure of the German bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1849. wrote to Marx asking him to contribute a scries of articles on this revolution. Marx gladly accepted this offer but. although it was submitted in Marx's name, this series — later published as Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany — was in fact written by Engels, partly because Marx had not yet acquired the confidence to write directly in English. Dana was very pleased with the contributions Marx had sent him and Marx became the regular London and European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune for the next ten years. The first article written by Marx — an introductory article on the political parties in Britain in the context of the then impending General Election appeared on 21 August 1852. The last article appeared in March 1862. Marx's first articles were written in German and translated into English by Engels — indeed, Engels throughout this whole period continued to write articles in Marx’s name — but later Marx began to write in English himself; which explains the peculiar grammar and vocabulary of some of the earlier articles.

The sub-editors of the New York Daily Tribune felt free to alter the articles as they considered appropriate. Marx eventually objected to this, since not all of the changes were of a purely editorial nature. One of the sub-editors was pro-Russian and often toned down the anti-Russia views expressed by Marx in his articles on the Eastern Question and the Crimean War. As a result of Marx’s protests, it was agreed that his articles should no longer be published with his signature. The last article signed by Marx (though ironically in fact mainly written by Engels!) was “Prospect in France and England" which appeared on 27 April 1855. Even before that date, Dana had used some of Marx’s articles as unsigned editorials.

Marx was a conscientious journalist who always read up a subject before writing an article on it. But his main source of information was inevitably the London daily and weekly papers. Apart of course from The Times, the main dailies Marx relied on were the Daily News, The Globe, The Morning Advertiser, The Morning Chronicle, The Morning Herald and The Morning Post. Marx also occasionally, through his contact with Engels who was living there, used the Manchester Guardian. Marx gives a useful run-down on the London dailies and their polities in an article published in Die Presse of Vienna on 31 December 1861. The article describes the press scene at that time rather than in the early and middle 1850s, when Marx did most of his writing for the New York Daily Tribune, but it had not changed all that much during this period. As to weeklies, Marx relied on The Economist, The Leader, and Jones's People's Paper.

But Marx also did some direct reporting himself, especially for the articles he wrote in 1855 for the Neue Oder Zeitung. He attended political meetings and rallies in London and was present in the Visitors’ Gallery for some of the debates in the House of Commons which he reported.

Marx came to be the London correspondent of the Neue Oder Zeitung through Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). whose cousin. Max Friedlander (1829-1872). became one of the paper’s owners at the end of 1854. This paper had been published under this name since 1849 in Breslau on the river Oder (now Wroclau in present-day Poland) and, like the New York Daily Tribune, took up a generally pro-democratic position, though Marx had not agreed with the line it had taken during the German revolution when it had attacked workers’ organisations and “socialists". Marx contributed articles, some again written by Engels, some translations or German versions of articles he had sent to the New York Daily Tribune, throughout 1855. Marx's last article appeared on 8 October and the paper ceased publication soon afterwards. Marx seems to have felt freer to express his pro-working class position in the Neue Oder Zeitung than in the New York Daily Tribune, though this position is evident in the latter too, even if not so pronounced.

When collected together Marx’s articles do indeed provide an analysis of British politics and society in the 1850s by the same journalistic pen which wrote the much more widely known analyses of French politics over a shorter period, in the Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

The other paper for which Marx regularly wrote paid articles was Die Presse in 1861 and 1862. This was the leading liberal daily published in Vienna, indeed one of the leading papers in the Austrian Empire. Marx had had opportunities to write for it earlier than 1861, but had turned them down on political grounds. The contact was again Lassalle's cousin, Max Friedlander, who had in the meantime become the paper's editor. In 1861 and 1862 Marx contributed a number of articles to Die Presse, a large number of them dealing with the American Civil War. especially about relations between Britain and the United States but also covering other subjects.

Marx's work as a paid journalist came to an end with the publication of his last article in Die Presse on 4 December 1862.

Adam Buick

An Echo from the Crimean War (1940)

Editorial from the April 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Great Britain has entered upon war in defence of a great principle. She seeks no advantages for herself, except the inestimable advantage of peace. She desires no increase of territory—no augmentation of power. She has no ambitious objects of any kind to serve. She stretches forth her hand for the maintenance of law and order, and in defence of the morality of nations. In the great federation of the European States, one that is puffed up with pride, vain-gloriousness, and lust of dominion, cannot be allowed to destroy the liberty and independence even of the meanest, without peril to them all. The rulers of this nation, impressed with a full sense of their responsibilities, exhausted negotiation before they resorted to war. . . .  As long as there was the remotest chance that the dictates of reason and justice would prevail over the headlong passions of the disturber of the world, they refrained from any appeal to the sword."

It may be asked what bearing the Crimean War can have on the problems of the present day. Why worry about events that happened eighty-six years ago? The question is partly answered by pointing out that the words quoted above appeared in the Illustrated London News of April 29th, 1854, when Britain and France were at war with Russia in defence of Turkey, because they were unwilling to see Russia dominant in the Balkans. There is in this a lesson for the very large number of people who, accepting war with reluctance, are yet hopeful that this time there really will be a settlement of European rivalries which will make further wars impossible. Curiously enough, among them are the present editors of the Illustrated London News, for in their issue of February 17th, 1940, is an article

urging the need to avoid the mistakes of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919: —

  If you want a good, lasting peace, prepare for it while the war is still in progress; otherwise the cessation of hostilities may find you with no definite plan, or—worse still—a plan that will inevitably lead to another conflict.

If those who think on these lines would pause to read the Illustrated London News of 1854 they might come to see that there is not the slightest chance of gaining lasting peace by any means short of establishing Socialism.

The parallels with the speeches and writings of the present war are remarkable. In the issue of April 29th, 1854, the Czar, like Hitler to-day, is denounced for “proved falsehood," “ hypocritical pretence of religion" and for breaking his pledged word that he had no further territorial demands: “In defiance of his solemn promise that his aggression should be confined to the occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia; in defiance of the word and faith of a 'gentleman'—which there is no word in the Russian language to express—he attacked in the most treacherous manner, and with an overwhelming force, a portion of the Turkish fleet that lay quietly, and suspecting no evil, in the harbour of Sinope."

In October, 1854, the war was gathering momentum, and its aims were being discussed:—

   It is no longer a matter of Turkish independence that is in dispute. . . . It is the equilibrium of a continent that has to be restored. — (Illustrated London News, October 28th, 1854.)

In the same issue there was the same lamentation that marks the current Labour and Liberal Press, about missed opportunities of calling a halt to aggression when it first began: “The proper time for resistance to the aggression of Russia was when the Czarina Catherine II and Frederick the Great of Prussia concocted and carried out their scheme" (i.e., the partition of Poland).

This brought the Illustrated London News to their plea that Poland must be reconstituted as an independent nation in order to serve as a barrier to the Russian advance into the Balkans: —

   . . .  she would be prevented from playing the desperate game by the existence of Poland, protected as it would be by the public law of Europe, and by the armies of every State which now or hereafter may become a party to the Anti-Russian alliance.—(Illustrated London News, October 28th, 1854.)

There was one difference. Russia, not Prussia, was then the chief offender, but Prussia and Austria were Russia's “accomplices and 'comrogues.' "

   Were Russia forced to release her grip of that ill-gotten possession, Austria and Prussia might be well content to relinquish theirs. To Prussia the Allies owe nothing. The Prussian King is the agent and friend of the Czar and will, sooner or later, share the Czar’s fate, whatever it may happen to be. . . . . The day may come when the long-suffering people of that country . . . will take to themselves another Sovereign.

With these and other arguments with which we are fed to-day the Illustrated London News of 1854 carved up the map of Europe in the self-appointed task of planning peace and a better world. So also their successors of to-day. In the issue of February 17th, 1940, one contributor quotes with approval the statement by Mr. Arthur Bryant: “However signally we defeat our enemy in the field, we shall never achieve our end of freeing Europe from the periodic effects of his violence and aggression until we have learnt to understand their causes."

Mr. Bryant believes that he has found those causes in German history—“ one that dates back far beyond 1914," but which includes as an important phase the treatment of Germany after the last war.

On another page of the Illustrated London News (February 17th, 1940) Mr. Bryant shows how little he has really learned of the causes of war; for after a lengthy and wholly inaccurate exposition of Socialism he finds that “the problem of the age, if we could but see it, is to remove the grave faults in the present operation of the capitalist system without subjecting our people to despotic forms of life and work . . ."

In short he wants to keep the economic system whose inevitable result will be more Crimeas, more Franco-Prussian wars, more Great Wars to end war, and more writers hopefully planning new capitalist worlds amidst the war-shattered ruins of the old one.

Marx on Britain (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

See also Britain as Marx's political model

The Three articles—or rather the two articles and an extract from a third—which we publish here for the first time in English translation, were written by Marx in 1855 for the Neue Oder-Zeitung. After he came to live in Britain in 1849 Marx earned his living as the European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune to which he regularly contributed articles during the ten years 1851 to 1861. In 1855 Lassalle found him an additional job as the London correspondent of the Neue Oder-Zeitung which provided Marx with a supplementary income until the paper ceased publication at the end of the year.

Most of the articles Marx wrote at this time, both for the NYDT and for the NOZ, were about the Crimean War. As Marx mistakenly gave support to the British-French-Turkish side in this war, these articles make very embarrassing reading today. The three articles we have selected for publication, however, are more acceptable since they concern the situation of the working class and the struggle for universal suffrage and a shorter working week. As will be seen, Marx was particularly hostile to the industrial capitalists and to the Manchester School, the Parliamentary and Financial Reformers, the Peace Society and the Radical politicians like Joseph Hume, Richard Cobden and John Bright who expressed their interests.

We have added some footnotes to explain a number of historical references.

THE COMMERCIAL CRISIS

The Economist of London writes of the present commercial and industrial crisis: 

  Whatever may be falling off in the export of other articles, there is none in machinery. The value of 1854 exceeds the value in 1853. Other countries, therefore are now taking into use our machinery. We have no longer any advantage of this kind over them. France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and the United States are all now great manufacturing countries; and some of them have advantages over us. We have a race to run and we cannot succeed if we tie our legs. Formerly they were tied for the advantage of the landlords, or the advantage of some classes of manufacturers, and very [illegible] work we made of it, as increasing poor rates and perennial disturbances testified.
  Nations, as well as individuals, look very foolish jumping in sacks, and get many a fall. Having got rid of the restrictions for landlords and the restriction for the master manufacturer, we must now walk in the workman’s manacles. Experience has satisfied every person that the restrictions imposed for the benefit of the master manufacturers injured them; and by and by the factory workers will find out that the restrictions imposed for their benefit will injure them. It is to be hoped, however, that they will find out before the countries before mentioned have made such progress as to supercede England in their own and third markets and have reduced the factory hands to destitution. (Economist, No. 594, 13 January 1855.)

Mr. Wilson, editor of the Economist and office boy at the Treasury of the anointed and oily man called Gladstone, apostle of freedom and careerist in one and the same person, who denies in one column of his journal the need for a State in general and demonstrates in the next the absolute necessity of the Coalition Ministry [1] in particular, this Mr. Wilson begins his homily with a deliberate falsification. The export statistics for 1854 contain in fact two headings for the export of machines. The first refers to railway engines and show in 1853 exports were £443,259 against £525,707 in 1854, which does indeed give an increase of £82,448. But the second, which refers to all other machines used in factories, records £1,368,027 for 1853 as against £1,271,503 in 1854, a reduction of £96,524. For the two headings taken together there is thus a deficit of £14,076. This detail is typical of the Manchester School. They believe that the present time is favourable for the abolition of the restriction existing in favour of factory workers, i.e., the legal restriction on the working time of young people below 18, of women and of children under 12. To achieve so elevated an aim, a few figures can well be falsified.

But, if we believe the Manchester Examiner, the special organ of the Quaker Bright, as well as the reports coming from the industrial regions, foreign markets, those traditional outlets for the surplus of our factories, are creaking under the weight of our overproduction and overspeculation. If we have reached such a congestion of the world market in spite of the opening up of two fabulous new markets, in Australia and California, in spite of the electric telegraph which has transformed the whole of Europe into an immense trading exchange, in spite of the railways and steamships which have infinitely extended communications, and so trade, how much time would the crisis have waited before coming if the employers had been authorised to operate 18 hours a day instead of 11?

The question is too simple for us to need to give the answer. But relatively quicker breaking out of the crisis would not have been the only difference. A whole generation of workers would have lost 50 per cent of their physical strength, intellectual development and ability to live. This same Manchester School, which replies to our scruples “Should this torment torment us, since it increases our pleasure?”[2], weeps and wails, with sentimental lamentations, about the sacrifice of human lives which the war against Russia, every war, costs! In a few days we will hear Mr. Cobden protest in Leeds against this mutual slaughter of Christians. And, in a few weeks, we will hear him in Parliament protest against the restrictions which prevent human lives being consumed too quickly in the factories. But, of all heroic gestures, only one seems justified to him: Herod's massacre of the innocents.

We agree with the Manchester School that the need for a legal limit on the daily working day in no way indicates a high degree of social development. But, in our view, the fault lies not in the laws, but in the state of affairs which makes them necessary.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 20 January 1855.)

[1] Britain was then governed by a Coalition between the Whigs and the “Peelites”, or pro-Free Trade lories, one of whom, Gladstone, was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[2] A line from a poem by Goethe.

DEATH OF HUME

The death of Hume has deprived the House of Commons of its father. His long parliamentary career was the exact barometer of the bourgeois Radical party which was at its height in 1831. A kind of Warwick or maker of MPs in the first years of the reformed House, he was, eight  [1] years later, along with Daniel O’Connell and Feargus O’Connor, one of the authors of the People’s Charter which still today constitutes the political programme of the Chartists and which basically amounts to a demand for universal suffrage and the conditions for putting it into practice in Britain. The split which soon occurred between the workers and the bourgeois agitators found Hume on the side of the latter. At the time of the Russell Ministry, he drew up a “little Charter”, which was adopted as a programme by those called the “parliamentary and financial reformers”.

In place of the six points of the People’s Charter, it only contained three points, replacing the demand for universal suffrage with a demand merely for a wider franchise. Finally, in 1852, Hume announced a new programme, in which he gave up his little Charter and only demanded one point: election by ballot. In short, Hume was the classic representative of the opposition called “independent” which Cobbett characterised excellently and definitively as the “safety valve” of the old system. In his old age he had a veritable mania for putting down motions and then withdrawing them, on a sign from Ministers, just before the doors closed. He employed his talents, as everyone knows, “to save public money”. All the Ministers allowed him to fight against the small expenses so that the big expenses passed all the more completely.

(First published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 28 February 1855.)

[1] The Charter was in fact drawn up in 1838, which is six. not eight years after the election of the first Parliament on the basis of the 1832 Reform Act.

CONFLICT BETWEEN WORKERS AND CAPITALISTS

In a previous correspondence we stated “the conflict between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie will begin again at the same time as the conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy reaches its climax”. [1] Tangible proof of this statement was provided at a big meeting held last Friday in the London Tavern. Before giving a report of this meeting, [2] we will say a few words on the skirmishes which have taken place recently, outside and inside Parliament, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Just recently the Manchester factory owners have organised meetings at which they decided to launch a campaign for the abolition of the official Factory Inspectors, on the grounds that these inspectors have not confined themselves to seeing that the legal working day is observed but have had the effrontery to insist that the safety measures laid down by Parliament for avoiding accidents and death to workers from machinery are effectively enforced in the factories. The Factory Inspector for South Lancashire, the famous Leonard Horner, has attracted their particular hostility because in his latest report he strongly called for a safety measure to be legally enforced whose absence, according to the naive admission of one factory owner, naturally a member of the Peace Society, “only cost last year the lives of five workers”.

That is what happened outside Parliament. The House of Commons rejected, on Second Reading, Sir John Halford’s Bill to make illegal “stoppage of wages”. It is thus that are called the deductions made from nominal wages, either because the worker has infringed some regulation laid down by the employer or because, in industries where the modern system has not yet been introduced, he has to pay a rent for the hire of the looms, etc.

This latter is especially the case in Nottingham in the hosiery industry. Sir John Halford showed that in many cases the worker instead of being paid by the contractor is forced to pay him money. So many deductions are made on various pretexts from the nominal wage that in the end the worker has to pay more than is due to him from the capitalist. The worker thus becomes the debtor of his employer who then obliges him to renew his contract on more and more unfavourable terms, to such an extent that he has become, in the full meaning of the word, a real serf, without however, like other serfs, having his material existence guaranteed.

While it rejected on Second Reading Sir John Halford’s Bill to end this abuse, the House of Commons did not even consider the Bill proposed by Cobbett, the son of the great English pamphleteer. This Bill aimed 1. to replace the 1850 10 ½-hours Act by the 1847 10 hours Act; 2. to make really effective the legal limitation of the working day in the factories by the compulsory stopping of the machines at the end of each legal working day.

(Final part of an article first published in German in the Neue Oder-Zeitung, 22 March 1855. The title is ours.)

[1] In an article "The British Constitution" that appeared in the NOZ on 6 March 1855. English translation in Pelican Marx Surveys from Exile, pp. 281-4.

[2] This report was published in the NOZ on 24 March 1855. English translation in Marx-Engels Articles on Britain, pp. 227-30.

Marx and the workers' movement (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx was not just a passive commentator on the British political scene in the 1850s. He was also a participant in the Chartist movement, at least until 1856, and in the campaign waged by David Urquhart (1805-1877) against what the latter saw as "the Russian menace".

After its failure in February 1848 and the repression which followed, Chartism was never again a mass movement. The National Charter Association, and its Executive, did however survive as an organisation, though many former Chartist leaders got involved in other movements. Fergus O'Connor, who had been elected MP for Nottingham in 1847 (the only Chartist ever to be elected as such) lost his seat in the 1852 election. He was later declared insane and died in a mental asylum in 1855 (Marx's generous obituary of him appeared in the Neue Oder Zeitung (NOZ) on 15 September).

Bronterre O'Brien formed a separate organisation in which emphasis was put on the social changes to be made once the Charter had given the working class political power, such as the nationalisation of land and the railways and the establishment of a single State bank. The O'Brienites became in fact a distinct sect within the British working class movement which survived into the 1880s, whose members Marx was to meet later during his second period of participation in the working class movement in Britain between 1864 and 1872.

Others campaigned to repeal the so-called "taxes on knowledge" — the stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements which artificially raised the price of newspapers to a level beyond which many workers could afford. Others, such as Harney, supported Urquhart's anti-Russia campaign. The Chartist Executive split in 1852 on the question of whether or not to co-operate with the middle class Radicals to achieve the aims of the Charter. Those who, grouped around Ernest Jones, wanted Chartism to continue to be a working class movement hostile to the capitalist middle class set up their own organisation.

Of the Chartist leaders in 1848 it was thus Jones who emerged as the champion of militant Chartism in the 1850s. He had been released from his two-year prison term for sedition at the end of 1850 and in 1851 started his own paper, Notes to the People, which the following year became a weekly called The People's Paper. Marx, who was in close touch with Jones, contributed articles to this paper from 1852 to 1856.

In the 1852 General Election, as Marx reported in the New York Daily Tribune (NYDT), Chartists put up a number of candidates, including Jones at Halifax. He polled — and this was not reported by Marx — a mere 37 votes, a confirmation that the vast majority of workers were excluded from the vote, but also of the decline of Chartism since 1847, in the same constituency, Jones had polled 280 votes. But the Chartist movement had always had its ups and downs, corresponding with periods of depression and prosperity.

The early 1850s were a period of prosperity, though not of working class inactivity. The widescale emigration of the period temporarily put the working class in a stronger bargaining position. Successful strikes for higher wages became more and more frequent. The culminating point of this strike movement was the year 1853. Jones decided that the time was ripe for a Chartist campaign in the industrial districts of England and in June left London for the North to address a number of mass meetings, a speaking tour given good coverage by Marx in the NYDT.

While Jones was in the North one of the biggest industrial disputes of the 1850s was brewing: the lock-out of the Preston cotton workers. Preston was one of the three main centres of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, the other two being Ashton and Stockport. In the summer of 1853 the cotton spinners of Stockport went on strike for a 10 per cent wage increase — which they won, thanks to financial aid from other groups of workers. In the autumn the cotton spinners of Preston, joined by the weavers, made a similar demand on their employers.The employers' answer was a general lock-out and by October 18,000 workers in Preston were without work or wages.

Once again a solidarity campaign was launched by the trade unions to raise money from other sections of the working class. Ernest Jones joined and played a prominent part in this campaign. he suggested the calling of a "Labour Parliament", to be composed of delegates from workers and trade unions in the Lancashire area. In November a Chartist meeting in Manchester voted for the calling of such a congress, referring to the need for "a united and mass movement of the working classes, based on a national organisation, and guided by one directing body" (quoted by Marx in NYDT, 12 December 1853). The Labour Parliament did not in fact meet until March 1854, by which time the Preston workers were well on the way to defeat. Marx was elected an honorary delegate and, unable to attend, sent a fine statement of his faith in the capacity of the working class to emancipate itself, which was published in the People's Paper.

Marx covered extensively the 1853 strike wave for the NYDT, describing his series of articles on the subject as his "history of strikes" (letter to Engels, 30 September 1853). Basing himself on an analysis of economic trends, he had said right from the start that the Preston workers were likely to fail as they had left their demand for a wage increase too late. They should have demanded it earlier in 1853 or in 1852 as there were signs, even in September and October 1853, of a downturn in activity. Under these circumstances, Marx argued, the employers were likely to welcome a stoppage of work while they cleared the surplus stocks that were building up.

This may well have been one of the employers' considerations, but they probably did not expect that the workers would put up such a fight before being finally defeated. The lock-out had begun in October 1853. By March 1854, when the Labour Parliament met, the Preston workers had still refused to give in. The employers then resorted to employing blacklegs, both men and women, from the agricultural districts of Ireland. The workers naturally opposed this and the employers had a number of their leaders arrested for "molesting and obstructing" the blacklegs. The workers held out for another month or so before going back in May without the wage increase they had originally demanded, though the charges against their arrested leaders were not proceeded with. This was a defeat for the working class, but the Preston workers' determination and the support they had from other workers, which had allowed them to hold out for seven months, must have had some effect on the employers, making them think twice before again taking on the cotton workers in this way.

Marx, as we have noted, did not really expect this and other strikes to succeed in view of the changed economic situation. This is not to say that he was not in favour of the strikes taking place. Far from it. The workers had to test the situation. As Marx said, in a comment which shows the extent to which he had grasped trade union tactics:

Under certain circumstances, there is for the workingman no other means of ascertaining whether he is or not paid to the actual value of his labour, but to strike or to threaten to do so" (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

Further, if workers did not fight to maintain their living standards they would be reduced to the level of slaves, incapable of emancipating themselves. Criticising those socialists and others who opposed strikes Marx wrote:

I am, on the very contrary, convinced that the alternative rise and fall of wages, and the continual conflicts between masters and men resulting therefrom, are, in the present organisation of industry, the indispensable means of holding up the spirit of the labouring classes, of combining them into one great association against the encroachments of the ruling class, and of preventing them from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production. In a state of society founded upon the antagonism of classes, if we want to prevent slavery in fact as well as in name, we must accept war. In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their political consequences. Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles, with the ups and downs of wages resulting from them, as with the constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those variations in wages and profits, the working classes of Great Britain would be a heartbroken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome. We must not forget that strikes and combinations among the serfs were the hot-beds of the mediaeval communes, and that those communes have been in their turn, the source of life of the now ruling bourgeoisie (NYDT, 14 July 1853).

This, of course, is the same perspective of a political movement — here described as "one great association" — of the working class developing out of trade union struggles that Marx had learnt from the experience of the pre-1848 Chartist movement and had expressed both in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx, it was this that was the importance of the 1853 strike wave. Even if the strikes failed economically, they would have helped raise the political consciousness of the workers:

. . .  should, as I suppose, the depression prove lasting, the work people will soon get the worst of it, and have to struggle — very unsuccessfully — against reduction. But then their activity will soon be carried over to the political field, and the new organisation of trades, gained in strikes, will be of immense value to them (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

and,

I have repeatedly stated that the turn-outs of the men, by beginning at too late an epoch, when the opportunities afforded by the unprecedented prosperity were already vanishing away, could not prove successful in an economical point of view, or as far as their immediate end was concerned. But they have done their work. They have revolutionized the industrial proletariat, and, stirred up by dear food and cheap labour, the political consequences will show themselves in due time (NYDT, 16 December 1853).

Marx was a little over-optimistic here. There was to be no Chartist revival. After the defeat of the Preston workers, the Labour Parliament quietly disappeared. Jones returned to London. An important factor in this ebbing of working class activity was the fact that since March 1854 Britain had been at war with Russia in the Crimea (a war which, incidentally, both Jones and Marx urged the workers to support). The war dragged on for two years and it was only in 1855 that Jones relaunched agitation for the traditional Chartist demand for the reform of Parliament to achieve an effective universal male suffrage. Marx once again let his enthusiasm carry him away, declaring in the NOZ of 6 March 1855:

A few months more, and the crisis in the manufacturing districts will reach the 1842 level, if not surpass it. But as soon as its effect is generally felt by the working classes, the political movement, which among these classes has been more or less drowsing for the past six years and has retained only the cadres for new agitation, will begin again.

In June Marx attended a mass meeting in Hyde Park to protest against proposals before Parliament to tighten up the law on Sunday opening and drinking. It was obviously the first time that he had ever seen a meeting of this size and he was so carried away that he reported for the NOZ (28 June) that "the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park". In fact of course it was nothing of the sort and over the next few years even the Chartist "cadres", faced with the passivity of the working class, began to to become disillusioned and demoralised.

Marx continued his collaboration with Jones and the People's Paper during 1856. In April he made one of the speeches at a dinner held to mark the fifth anniversary of the paper's first issue, his first public speech in English. Once again he expressed his confidence in the ability of the working class to take humanity on to the next stage in social evolution.

1857 was an election year and Jones was, as on previous occasions, a candidate, this time in Nottingham, O'Connor's old constituency. This was the election Palmerston had called to get a vote of confidence for his administration and in which the Radicals suffered a serious reverse.

Jones' paper was now in financial difficulties and the working class appeared to be completely apathetic; there were no strike waves, nor political discontent. This led Jones to reconsider his whole strategy and to drop his opposition to collaboration with the middle class Radicals to achieve democratic reforms. In fact he went so far as to be prepared to give up all the demands of the Charter except universal suffrage, thus ceasing in effect to be a Chartist. The deal he hoped to make with the middle class radicals was their accepting universal suffrage in return for the Chartists (whom Jones presumed to speak for) giving up the demand for secret ballots. This deal was to be made at a Chartist-Radical conference which Jones was planning to call. When Jones made this proposal in November 1857 Marx broke with him; thus the article on the "Divine Right of the Hohenzollern" which had appeared on 13 December1856 turned out to be the last article marx wrote for the People's Paper.

Jones' Conference took part in London in February 1858, but did not result in much. Jones was disowned by other Chartists, including Bronterre O'Brien, who proclaimed their loyalty to all six points of the original Charter. Financial difficulties forced Jones to sell the People's Paper to a Radical newspaper group later that year and it thus appeared as a separate publication. Jones resumed his profession as a barrister, though he was again a candidate in Nottingham in the 1859 election.

The question of co-operation with the Radicals had been a controversial issue within the Radical movement right from the start, from the time of the first Chartist Convention in 1839. This was because the working class and the capitalist class did in fact have an interest in the extension of the franchise, the former to gain a weapon they could use later to achieve their own emancipation, the latter to weaken the political power and privileges of the landlord class. Not even Marx was opposed on principle to a co-operation between the working class and the capitalist middle class to achieve the democratisation of the British political system. What Marx was opposed to was the working class giving up its political autonomy and becoming just the tail-end of the middle class Radicals.

Marx always accepted that the Radicals had a role to play in the fight for political democracy in Britain. Indeed he was very interested in the conditions which might lead them to fight for this in a determined way. He described the Radicals as "the party of the self-conscious bourgeoisie: (NYDT, 25 August 1852), by which he meant the class-conscious section of the bourgeoisie, the section which realised that there was a conflict of interest between their class and the landlord class which could only be settled when the latter had been deprived of its power and privileges. Thus John Bright stated in a speech quoted by Marx in another NYDT article that "everything the country has gained since the revolution of 1688 . . . has been gained in a manly contest of the industrial and commercial classes against the aristocratic and and privileged classes of the country" (NYDT, 23 February 1853). This was the sort of talk from the capitalist middle class that Marx liked to hear. He wanted their "manly contest" against the landlord class to be successful, so as to create the conditions for a straight fight between the capitalist class and the working class, in which the newly-won vote would be a weapon in the hands of the workers.

So the question at issue between him and Jones was not over whether or not there should be an alliance between the working class and the capitalist class to achieve the Charter (effective universal suffrage) but over how this alliance should arise. Marx wanted, if you like, the middle class to ally itself to the working class rather than the working class to ally itself to the middle class.

In 1850 Marx and Engels had written:

Despite this split and the emergence of more extreme demands, the Chartists, remembering the circumstances under which the Corn Laws were repealed, still suspect that in the next crisis they will once again have to form an alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie, the Financial Reformers, and that they will have to help them defeat their enemies, forcing concessions from them in their turn. This will certainly be the position of the Chartists in the next crisis (Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, May-October 1850).

This conclusion was based at that time on their experience of the abortive German bourgeois revolution and the roles the middle class and the working class had played in it. But greater familiarity with the English political scene did not lead Marx to alter this view. In one of a series of articles he wrote for the People's Paper analysing Gladstone's 1853 budget, he discussed what might happen if Gladstone's proposal to bring taxes on income from landed property into line with those on other incomes was rejected by the landed interest in Parliament:

If, however, the country party once more obtain the upper hand, the middle class cannot get rid of them without remodelling the rotten oligarchic parliament and then it is no longer in their power to agitate for a limited reform, but they must go the whole length of the people's demands. The people, of course, can never without abandoning their principles and their interests, join and appeal to the middle class but for the bourgeoisie, it would not be the first time that they are forced to throw themselves on the shoulders of the people (PP, 30 April 1853).

Marx felt, in other words, that the working class should concentrate on building up its own strong, independent political movement, which the capitalist middle class would then be obliged to offer concessions to, in order to win its support for the struggle against the landlord class. Jones had once favoured this policy too, and Marx had supported him for doing so, but Jones was now proposing to go to the middle class party — the Radicals — offering them concessions in return for working class support. For Marx, such a policy meant the working class "abandoning both their principles and their interests" and he severely criticised it.

Marx, it should be added, was equally critical of the capitalist middle class for not waging thoroughly enough the "manly contest . . . against the aristocratic and privileged classes of the country" of which Bright had spoken. He noted how they accepted aristocratic government as long as it pursued policies in their own economic interest and were only prepared to struggle against it when it departed from this tacit understanding by bringing in some measure to benefit the landlords at the expense of the capitalists. This led Marx to favour what the French call la politique du pire, to support the worst alternative, in this case to prefer a reactionary aristocratic government defending the privileges of the landlord class to an aristocratic government which pursued capitalist class policies. Only in this way, Marx suggested, could the middle class be goaded into taking action to end the political privileges of the landlord class, so clearing the way for the working class to use the resulting political democracy in its own interest, against the capitalist class.

Thus, in the same article on Gladstone's budget in the People's Paper, immediately preceding the passage we have already quoted, Marx wrote that the defeat of Gladstone's proposal to equalise taxes on landed and other incomes

would certainly promote the interests of the people. One thing is clear: as long as an aristocratic coalition does the work required from them by the manufacturing and trading class, the latter will neither make any political effort themselves, nor allow the working class to carry their own political movement (PP, 30 April 1853)

Marx was deluding himself if he really thought that a reactionary government, whether under Palmerston or the Tories, would lead to a "revolutionary" situation. Certainly Palmerston's victory in 1857 did goad the radicals into insisting more forcefully on the need for an extension of the franchise; but how wrong Marx's assessment was can be seen from the fact that Lord Palmerston's personal opposition to reform delayed, without inciting any serious popular discontent, any move in this direction till after his death in 1865 and that the Second Reform Act, when it came in 1867, was passed under a Tory government.

The 1850s ended with another lock-out that assumed national importance. For some years trade unions in the building industry had been agitating for a reduction in their working day from 10 to 9 hours. In the summer of 1859 one employer dismissed a trade unionist for having taken part in a delegation to him to put forward this demand. His fellow workers naturally responded by going on strike. The London building employers decided to use the occasion to try to break the power of the building trades' unions. They locked out their workers, saying that they would only re-employ those who agreed to sign a "document" repudiating trade unionism. Other trade unions throughout the country rallied round the building workers and the dispute continued for six months. It was finally settled in February 1860 in a draw: the workers dropped their demand for a 9-hour day and the employers withdrew "the document".

A direct result of the builder's lock-out and the solidarity movement around it was the creation of the London Trades Council in May 1860, at a meeting called by the builders' strike committee. Trades Councils, which already existed in some other towns and cities, were committees formed by delegates from the various trade unions in a particular area. They were mainly concerned with trade union matters, but also provided an opportunity for trade unionists to discuss broader political questions. Some of those who were prominent in the London Trades Council were very much interested in politics, not just matters of immediate concern to workers such as the law on trade unions or the extension of the franchise, but also in foreign questions like the American Civil War and the campaign for Italian unity. It was this new generation of working-class militants who were to replace Jones as Marx's contacts when he resumed participation in the working-class movement in Britain in 1864.

Adam Buick