Cooking the Books: Manchesterism (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Until Andy Burnham, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, re-coined the word, ‘Manchesterism’ meant the economic doctrine of the Manchester and district cotton mill owners who favoured a policy of complete tariff-free trade and opposed state interference in industry, as expressed by Richard Cobden, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s. In England they were known as the Manchester School. On the continent their doctrine was called manchesterisme in French and Manchesterismus in German. It wasn’t that popular there as the local factory owners realised what was behind it — that their British rivals wanted wider access to continental markets for their cheaper goods.

Engels lived and worked in Manchester for over twenty years and was well aware of the views of the Manchester School, if only from socialising with them. Writing in English he used ‘Manchester School’, but in German he used the word ‘Manchesterismus’ as in a note he wrote about a May Day meeting in London in 1890 where he refers to new trade union members wanting ‘no more to do with the Manchesterism of the old Trade Unions’ (‘4 May’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27).

When he re-coined the term, Burnham may not have been aware of its previous use and meaning, but others were and asked him if there was any connection. PoliticsHome (15 April) recorded:

‘Asked whether he identifies more with Richard Cobden or Friedrich Engels, he chooses Cobden, the Mancunian Radical and free-trader.’

There is not in fact that much in common between Burnham’s and Cobden’s Manchesterism. Cobden was a free marketeer while Burnham has defined it as ‘business-friendly socialism’. It is, however, revealing that when asked to choose between a capitalist free-marketeer and an opponent of capitalism in all its forms, Burnham identified more with the former.

What Cobden and Burnham have in common is that they both support capitalism. ‘Business-friendly socialism’ is an oxymoron but if you understand ‘socialism’ to mean Labourism then it becomes, like a ‘round circle’, a pleonasm. Starmer and Reeves expressed it more directly when they said that Labour was ‘the party of business’.

Insofar as Burnham’s Manchesterism is more than a populist slogan which sets workers in the North against workers in London and the South East, it seems to mean giving regional authorities more freedom to raise money locally and to attract capitalist investment to their region. In other words, a mere change in the political superstructure in the hope that it will stimulate ‘growth’. But what drives growth is the pursuit, and accumulation as new capital, of profits. If the prospect of a profit is not good, then investment won’t take place, whatever the political arrangements.

But what sort of investment? These days British capitalism lives not so much by producing surplus value directly in industry as by capturing, through selling financial and legal services, surplus value produced elsewhere in the world. Under Burnham, Manchester has been able to divert some of this from London to Manchester, but not everywhere will be able to do this.

The other type of capitalist investment that regional authorities can seek is ‘property development’. In fact the two businesspeople that the Times’s Economics Editor, Meerhen Khan, interviewed (25 June) who had found Burnham ‘business friendly’ were both in the property business. One said that ‘all the evidence suggests that he’s incredibly pro-business’ and that ‘his comments on the excesses of neo-liberalism were also a critique of its social impact on communities in post-industrial cities like Manchester rather than an outright rejection of market capitalism’.

So says a Labour-friendly capitalist.

50 Years Ago: The Liberal Party's Record (1975)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Freedom ! Liberty ! ! Read their record. The only liberty they have known is the liberty to exploit labour. Have we omitted anything from their rotten record? We have—piles of evidence. We have even omitted to mention they were a capitalist party. Is it necessary to add this now? Why, in their earlier days they were capitalism, as distinct from the Tory landed interest. The plague spots of Sheffield, Ancoats, Lanark, Cradley ; the industrial wens of the Black Country, the Potteries, the chemical districts, the mining areas; these are the heritage of the Liberal Party. A generation or so ago they re-christened Liberty. They called it by a French name—laissez faire—let alone. That was their idea of liberty, “Let us alone.” The slogan of the Manchester school : Starve, sweat, bludgeon, oppress and exploit, but let us alone. Men were stunted, crippled and crushed; women brutalised in mines and factories; children taken from workhouses and “apprenticed” to industrial exploiters; but—laissez faire; let us alone.

. . . We visualise real freedom as belonging to a time when the whole people have free access to Mother Earth; when the whole people are free from the incubus of a parasitic class ; when the whole people socially own their means of living; when development shall be free from the shackle of selling, and production free from the necessity of profit. Freedom will then lose its capital letter. It would be the normal, not the sum of a few piffling, fraudulent reforms.

[From an article "The Mockery of 'Freedom' " by W. T. Hopley, in the Socialist Standard, March 1925.]

The Mockery of “Freedom”. (1925)

From the March 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent General Election was not entirely devoid of colour. Apart from the favours that varying schools of opinion adopted, there were the miniature cascades of leaflets in blue, yellow, green, orange, and other colours, which descended through our letter-boxes each day. Among them was one of a delightful lemon-yellow, bearing the leaded caption, “The Road to Freedom.” It informed us with Spartan brevity that Great Britain was the freest country in the world. We were spared the encumbrance of definitions or comparisons, but were brought up against realities at once by the poser : “How did we get this freedom? ” Then followed the answer: “We got it almost entirely through the work done by the Liberal Party.”

You recognise the style, of course. Apart from the little word “almost,” there is a refreshing sweep about a statement like that, which convinces everyone—except those who know the facts.

“But the facts are given overleaf!” Are they? Pray let us examine them. The pamphlet says :—

    “Here are the four main stages by which we have obtained political freedom. (1) The Reform Act of 1832—passed by a Liberal Government; (2) The Reform Act of 1867—first introduced by Gladstone, 1866; finally passed 1867, when Disraeli was Prime Minister, and when Conservatives were in office, but passed by the Liberal Members who were still in a majority in the House of Commons. (3) The Reform Act of 1884—passed by a Liberal Government; (4) The Reform Act of 1918—the first steps were taken by Mr. Asquith in 1916, and the Act was passed when Mr. Lloyd George was Prime Minister of a Coalition Government. The Liberal Party also secured secrecy for the act of voting by passing the Ballot Act in 1872.”

Now we will call some more evidence. We shall perhaps appreciate how useful a little word like “almost” can be. In the interests of space we shall have to condense, but the authorities given can be consulted at any public library.

No. 1. The Reform Bill of 1832 left the working class almost entirely out of the franchise; it broke down the monopoly which the aristocratic and landed classes had enjoyed, and admitted the middle class to a share of the law-making. This was all the more exasperating (to the workers) because the excitement and agitation for the Reform Bill were in great measure that of working men.—(Justin McCarthy : Short History of Our Own Times, p. 17.)

No. 2. The Reform Bill of 1867. The £10 Borough Franchise was passed by the Tories in 1867 and was opposed by the Liberals. Gladstone’s solicitude for the working class having the franchise may be gauged by his attitude towards the £6 Franchise proposed in 1866. Writing to Mr. Horsfall, Manchester, on Aug. 8th that year, he said : “I do not agree with the demand either for manhood or household suffrage.”—(Mr. Gladstone: A Study, by L. J. Jennings, p. 245.)

The same work, on p. 22, records Mr. Gladstone as uttering the following :

  “Changes that effect sudden and extensive transfer of power are attended by great temptations to the weakness of human nature; and however high our opinion may be of the labouring classes, or of any other class of the community, I do not believe that it would be right to place such a temptation within the reach of any of them.”

From 1832 to 1867 the Liberals had a majority in most of the nine Parliaments of that period, but although repeatedly pledged to give the workers a share in the franchise they broke their promises time after time. —(History of Our Own Times.)

No. 3. The Reform Act of 1884 did little more than extend the franchise given to householders, etc., in 1867, from the boroughs to the counties.—(Any Encyclopaedia.)

No. 4. The Reform Act of 1918. This is a gem : “The first steps were taken by Mr. Asquith in 1916,” says the pamphlet; about the same time as he was conferring the inestimable “liberty” of conscription upon us, we presume. No details are given, but surely credit should have been claimed for giving the vote to Service men. Much was made of this colossal advance, at the time, but there appears to have been a conspiracy of silence on the point since. The reason may be that, as so few of them could use it then, self-bestowed bouquets were quite safely in order, whereas now it is somewhat dubious as to whether it exists at all.

  “It dates from March of this year, when the Admiralty decided to fall into line with the War Office, and to withdraw from the Navy, as had already been done early in 1922, from the Army, the privileges accorded originally during the 1918 election …. and to revert to the pre-war rule in this respect.”—“Daily News,” 24/10/24.

But as the whole Act was passed by the Coalition Government, the credit must be diluted under the “almost” clause. The remainder of the pamphlet claims credit for the benefits and liberties conferred upon the workers by Education and Industrial Freedom, i.e., freedom of combination. The following facts may be helpful in assessing the value of the Liberal Party’s efforts in those directions.

The anti-combination laws evolved during the 56 years of Whig rule, 1714 to 1770, were consolidated by the Tories in 1799. In 1824 Francis Place and Joseph Hume pushed through an Act permitting combination. In 1825 the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, and Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, obtained the repeal of the Act, declaring they were quite unaware such an Act had been passed.—(Footnote, p. 94, Webb’s History of T.U.).

In 1830 the Whigs took the name of Liberals, and Lord Melbourne appointed two Commissioners to enquire into the standing of Trade Unions. These in their report advised such repressive measures that the Government dared not bring them before Parliament. It was the Liberals who prosecuted the Lancashire miners (1832) for threatening to strike; the Southwark Shoemakers (1832) for picketing; the Bermondsey Tanners (1834) for leaving their work unfinished ; who were guilty of the blackest crime on record against Trade Unionism when they sentenced six Dorchester labourers to seven years’ transportation to Tasmania for the appalling offence of forming a Trade Union, the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers.—(Sydney Webb’s History of T.U.)

  “After a good deal of opposition on the part of the Whig Ministry of that day, backed as it was by the major portion of the manufacturing classes, and after much delay, the men were ‘pardoned,’ and ordered to be liberated. But …. the men had been hastened out of the country, and …. literally sold as slaves at £1 per head ; and even when they were pardoned, some of them did not hear of their pardon until years afterwards. . . . ”—(Geo. Howell’s “Conflicts of Capital and Labour.”)

Yes ! The Liberals have ever been great lovers of liberty. The bitterest opponents of the Factory Acts were Liberals. The venomous persecutors of the Chartists were Liberals. The deadliest enemies of combination on the part of the workers were Liberals. When, in 1869, Frederick Harrison drew up a Bill legalising Trade Unions, the Liberal Government opposed it. They passed one themselves in 1871, and shortly afterwards seven women were sent to prison for shouting “Bah” after a blackleg in South Wales, and some London gas-workers were sent to prison for preparing to strike. This under Gladstone.—(History of Trade Unionism.)

The draft of the Ballot Act of 1871 contained a clause authorising payment of election expenses. Rejected by a large Liberal majority.—(History of Our Own Times.)

For several years Mr. Plimsoll had urged the Liberals to pass an Act to prevent the sending of rotten ships to sea for the sake of the insurance, whereby numbers of sailors were deliberately murdered. On one occasion when he pointed out several Liberal shipowners guilty of this practice, he was thrown out of the House of Commons. The first Bill introducing the load line, called the Plimsoll Line, was passed by the Tories in 1875.—(History of Our Own Times.)

When Bradlaugh was returned for Northampton and declined to take the oath in their form, the liberty-loving Liberals refused to let him sit; on one occasion employing ten policemen to throw him out.— Gladstone period, 1884-1886 (History of Our Own Times). It was the Liberal Asquith who had the troops despatched to Featherstone in 1893, resulting in the killing of two innocent people and the maiming of others.

But need we go on? More recent history you already know. D.O.R.A., of blessed memory. National Registration (precursor of Conscription in spite of explicit denials at the time), the brutal suppression of conscience and opinion during the war; these, and more, were the work of the Liberals.

Freedom ! Liberty ! ! Read their record. The only liberty they have known is the liberty to exploit labour. Have we omitted anything from their rotten record? We have—piles of evidence. We have even omitted to mention they were a capitalist party. Is it necessary to add this now? Why, in their earlier days they were capitalism, as distinct from the Tory landed interest. The plague spots of Sheffield, Ancoats, Lanark, Cradley ; the industrial wens of the Black Country, the Potteries, the chemical districts, the mining areas; these are the heritage of the Liberal Party. A generation or so ago they re-christened Liberty. They called it by a French name—laissez faire—let alone. That was their idea of liberty, “Let us alone.” The slogan of the Manchester school : Starve, sweat, bludgeon, oppress and exploit, but let us alone. Men were stunted, crippled and crushed; women brutalised in mines and factories; children taken from workhouses and “apprenticed” to industrial exploiters; but—laissez faire; let us alone.

Fortunately, there are other conceptions of Liberty; other conceptions of Freedom. For us they are not mere mellifluous phrases to which are offered high-sounding apostrophies at election times. To us they are not thin abstractions floating gossamer-like over a sea of blatherspite. We visualise real freedom as belonging to a time when the whole people have free access to Mother Earth; when the whole people are free from the incubus of a parasitic class ; when the whole people socially own their means of living; when development shall be free from the shackle of selling, and production free from the necessity of profit. Freedom will then lose its capital letter. It would be the normal, not the sum of a few piffling, fraudulent reforms.

It remains but to remind you : “who would be free, himself must strike the blow.” Put not your trust in people of any party who are going to get freedom for you. Join with us in the Socialist Party and get it for yourselves.

W. T. Hopley

Neo-Liberalism: Old Religion Repackaged (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s not neo-liberalism that’s to blame – it’s capitalism

In Marx’s day the doctrine that the government should not interfere in the operation of the capitalist economy was known as ‘Manchesterism’ after the city in the north of England where capitalist industry was then most developed and whose capitalists wanted to be free to pursue profits as they thought fit.

Its advocates preached ‘free trade’ (the abolition of tariffs on imported goods and bounties on exported goods) and letting market forces operate freely. They even opposed laws against adulteration and to limit the hours of work of those they employed. Also known as ‘economic liberalism’, it had roots in the eighteenth century in French manufacturers and merchants who told the royal bureaucracy to leave them alone and let them get on with their business (‘laissez faire’) and in Adam Smith’s curious theory that behind market forces was some ‘invisible hand’ ensuring that these operated for the common good.

However, a practical problem soon arose over industries and services which all capitalist businesses had to make use of, such as transport (roads, canals, railways) and communications (post, telegraph). Capitalists did not want these to be in the hands of any one group of their number who would thereby be in a position to hold the rest of them to ransom and charge monopoly prices. This was why in Britain, as early as 1844, a Railways Act contained a clause providing, if need be, for state ownership, so-called ‘nationalisation.’ In Europe railways had been in the hands of the state almost from the beginning because of their strategic importance for transporting troops in times of war. In the event Britain settled for price regulation by the government, which was also a violation of laissez faire.

Economic liberalism never caught on in its entirety outside Britain as ‘free trade’ was seen, not without justification, by rival capitalists in other countries as a means of giving British capitalists a competitive advantage. They demanded that their governments ‘protect’ them from such competition through tariffs on imported British goods. Beyond that, however, they embraced the doctrine that governments should not interfere with their pursuit of profits.

Enter Keynes

Between the two world wars of the last century even Britain abandoned free trade and the gold standard. An era of government-created fiat money opened up, in which governments had to pursue an interventionist policy to manage their currency. With the financial crash of 1929 and the big slump in production that followed, governments also came under pressure to intervene in the capitalist economy to try to get it expanding again. ‘Public works’ programmes were initiated, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the USA and Hitler’s rearmament in Germany. In his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Income the British economist John Maynard Keynes provided a theoretical justification for such ad-hoc schemes. He argued that left to itself – laissez faire – capitalism would not necessarily recover from a slump of its own accord, as economists had preached till then, but that government intervention, in the form of a tax policy to stimulate demand was required. In the event of a boom, this could be prevented from ending in a slump, as booms had previously always done, by the government pursing the opposite policy of using taxes to discourage consumption. Thanks to government intervention, steady capitalist expansion could be engineered.

Naturally this theory, especially stimulating demand in a slump by redistributing purchasing power from the rich to the non-rich, was acclaimed by reformists as a justification for the reforms they already favoured. Those that had still regarded themselves as in the Marxist tradition abandoned Marx for Keynes.

Keynesianism was not consciously pursued as a government policy till the beginning of the Second World War. When that war was not followed by a slump, as the end of the First World War had been, but by a 25-year period of capitalist expansion with only minor ‘recessions,’ many open supporters of capitalism hailed Keynes for having saved capitalism.

But this was an illusion. Put to the test when the post-war boom came to an end in the 1970s, Keynesian policies resulted in what was called ‘stagflation’ – a rise in the general price level while the economy remained stagnant. The post-war boom had been caused by other factors such as reconstruction and the spontaneous expansion of internal and world markets.

Exit Keynes

The end of the post-war boom led to what was called a ‘fiscal crisis of the capitalist state’. Governments depend for what they spend on levying taxes, which ultimately fall on capitalist profits, and on borrowing money from those who have it. With less profit being made, there was less to tax and less to borrow. Government had no alternative but to cut their spending rather than increasing it as Keynes had advocated they should do to get out of a slump. Another economic theory was required to replace Keynesianism and justify this.

The new theory, popularised by the American economist Milton Friedman, called itself ‘monetarism’ as it advocated a tight monetary policy, i.e. cutting government spending, and letting market forces revive the capitalist economy by restoring profitability of its own accord as asset prices and real wages fell. This was not really a new theory but a revival of pre-Keynesian economic liberalism.

There is some justification, then, for calling this replacement policy ‘neo-liberalism.’ What is not justified is seeing its application as a free choice on the part the part of governments. It was something imposed on them by the workings of the capitalist economy, given the situation it was in. Governments had no choice but to apply it. In other words, capitalism was the cause, with neo-liberalism merely the political and ideological justification.

What the capitalist conditions imposed was that governments should cut their spending or, rather, cut taxing profits with the result that they had less to spend. With less to spend, ‘austerity’ was the order of the day in all countries irrespective of the political colour of their government. It was not just Reagan and Thatcher in the USA and Britain but also Mitterrand in France. Public services were cut back. ‘Welfare’ and ‘benefits’ were slashed, especially for those who for one reason or another were not able to find a job. Since the economists preached that there was a so-called ‘natural rate of unemployment,’ which could be as high as 6 percent, millions of already poor people had their standard of living reduced even further. Other reforms enacted during the post-war boom were whittled away or rolled back.

To reduce their borrowing, governments sold off state assets to private capitalist firms, who were granted the right to make profits from them in return for themselves raising the capital to finance them.

As a policy of trying to ensure steady sustained capitalist development, neo-liberalism has been just as much a failure as Keynesianism was, as spectacularly shown by the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. What this showed is that, no matter what policy governments adopt, capitalism goes relentlessly on its way, repeatedly going through the boom/slump cycle that it has done since the 1820s. The fact is that governments do not – cannot – control the way the capitalist economy works. It is the other way round. It is the operation of capitalism that constrains what governments do; all they can do is little more than react to what capitalism throws at them. There is a sense in which they do have a choice. They could choose to try to defy what capitalism’s economic forces dictate but, if they do, they will make matters worse. As Marx pointed out with regard to banking legislation, while governments cannot make things better, they can make things worse:

  ‘Ignorant and confused banking laws, such as those of 1844-5, may intensify the monetary crisis. But no bank legislation can abolish crises themselves’ (Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 30, Penguin Books edition, p. 621).

This warning is apt because left-wing populists are calling for neo-liberalism to be replaced by government intervention to spend money to end austerity and get capitalism expanding again – a revival of Keynes’s discredited idea that could be called ‘neo-Keynesianism.’ As Marxists know, both from the past experience of such attempts and from a knowledge of how capitalism works, this is doomed to fail and would make things worse.

It is not neo-liberalism that is the problem, but capitalism. It is not a change of policy that is required, but a change of socio-economic system.

Adam Buick

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.